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Even as a fourth-generation Jewish Texan, S. L. Wisenberg has always felt the ghost of Europe dogging her steps, making her feel uneasy in her body and in the world. At age six, she's sure that she hears Nazis at her bedroom window and knows that after they take her away, she'll die without her asthma meds. In her late twenties, she infiltrates sorority rush at her alma mater, curious about whether she'll get a bid now. Later in life, she makes her first and only trip to the mikvah while healing from a breast biopsy (benign this time), prompting an exploration of misogyny, shame, and woman-fear in rabbinical tradition. With wit, verve, blood, scars, and a solid dose of self-deprecation, Wisenberg wanders across the expanse of continents and combs through history books and family records in her search for home and meaning. Her travels take her from Selma, Alabama, where her Eastern European Jewish ancestors once settled, to Vienna, where she tours Freud's home and figures out what women really want, and she visits Auschwitz, which—disappointingly—leaves no emotional mark.

A seminal text in Jewish thought accessible to English readers for the first time. The diagnosis of Jewish self-hatred has become almost commonplace in contemporary cultural and political debates, but the concept's origins are not widely appreciated. In its modern form, it received its earliest and fullest expression in Theodor Lessing's 1930 book Der jüdische Selbsthaß. Written on the eve of Hitler's ascent to power, Lessing's hotly contested work has been variously read as a defense of the Weimar Republic, a platform for anti-Weimar sentiments, an attack on psychoanalysis, an inspirational personal guide, and a Zionist broadside. “The truthful translation by Peter Appelbaum, including Lessing's own footnotes, manages to make this book more readable than the German original. Two essays by Sander Gilman and Paul Reitter provide context and the wisdom of hindsight.”—Frank Mecklenburg, Leo Baeck Institute From the forward by Sander Gilman: Theodor Lessing's (1872–1933) Jewish Self-Hatred (1930) is the classic study of the pitfalls (rather than the complexities) of acculturation. Growing out of his own experience as a middle-class, urban, marginally religious Jew in Imperial and then Weimar Germany, he used this study to reject the social integration of the Jews into Germany society, which had been his own experience, by tracking its most radical cases…. Lessing's case studies reflect the idea that assimilation (the radical end of acculturation) is by definition a doomed project, at least for Jews (no matter how defined) in the age of political antisemitism.

What makes a person Jewish? Why do some people feel they have physically inherited the memories of their ancestors? Is there any way to think about race without reducing it to racism or to physical differences?These questions are at the heart of Racial Fever: Freud and the Jewish Question. In his final book, Moses and Monotheism, Freud hinted at the complexities of Jewishness and insisted that Moses was really an Egyptian. Slavet moves far beyond debates about how Freud felt about Judaism; instead, she explores what he wrote about Jewishness: what it is, how it is transmitted, and how it has survived. Freud's Moses emerges as the culmination of his work on transference, telepathy, and intergenerational transmission, and on the relationships between memory and its rivals: history, heredity, and fantasy. Writing on the eve of the Holocaust, Freud proposed that Jewishness is constituted by the inheritance of ancestral memories; thus, regardless of any attempts to repress, suppress, or repudiate Jewishness, Jews will remain Jewish and Judaism will survive, for better and for worse.

There are literally hundreds if not thousands of books written about Judaism and Jews, but this book is unlike any previously published. It focuses on the topic of'circumventing custom'with special emphasis on the ingenious ways Orthodox (and other) Jews have devised to avoid breaking the extensive list of activities forbidden on the Sabbath. After examining the sources of Sabbath observance as set forth in the Old Testament, the New Testament, and rabbinical writings, some of the most salient forms of circumvention are described. These include: riding a special Shabbat elevator, unscrewing the lightbulb in the refrigerator, constructing an eruv (a space extending one's domicile so that objects may be carried outside the home), and relying on the services of the so-called'Shabbes Goy,'among others. Dundes respectfully analyzes such facets of Jewish characteristics as an undue concern with purity, and a long-established tradition of indulging in nit-picking and argumentation. The resultant picture of Jewish character is drawn from an unusual mixture of religious written texts and oral tradition (jokes and proverbs). The sources range from ancient Israel to works from the twenty-first century. In many ways, it is an authentic and striking Jewish self-portrait that is painted for the very first time in this fascinating volume.

The author examines the varieties of religious and secular salvation that have recently appeared in Israel as evidence for Israelis'willingness to embrace private salvation in the face of immense cultural upheavals. Drawing on interviews, field observations, clinical data, and media reports collected over ten years, he surveys four roads to private salvation: the return to Judaism, new religions (sects or cults), psychotherapy movements such as est, and occultism. These dramatic forms of conversion are unique to Israeli society within the last decade, and Beit-Hallahmi provides a social history and social psychology of this transformation.

يقول الكتاب أن مما لا شك فيه أنه مهما برقت في سماء الصراع العربي الإسرائيلي بعض بوارق معاهدات السلام فإن مؤشرات الأحداث بالنسبة للصراع العربي الإسرائيلي ما زالت تؤكد على أن أطماع الصهيونية ونوايا الإمبريالية الإسرائيلية ا لمدعومة من الإمبريالية الأمريكية في ا لمنطقة العربية تشير إلى أن هذا السلام الواهي يحمل في طيات دمغته ا لمائية احتمالات تجدد الصدام والحروب في أية لحظة ومن هنا فان ا لمعرفة العلمية بالواقع الإسرائيلي وبالإنسان الإسرائيلي تصبح مطلبا ومسؤولية تقع على عاتق ذلك النفر من العلماء والباحثين العرب الذين يهتمون بدراسة هذا الواقع وذلك الإنسان ومما لاشك فيه أيضا أن مهمة ا لمشتغلين بالدراسات الإسرائيلية عامة والمتخصصين فى الدراسات العبرية في مصر بصفة خاصة هي تقديم المعرفة الصحيحة ا لمبينة على أسس علمية بواقع الإنسان الإسرائيلي في إطار صحيح من المعرفة والتفسير والتنبؤ.