Description
Book SynopsisThis interdisciplinary collection draws on work in law, anthropology, history, sociology, literature and popular culture to consider contemporary and historical responses to the question: "Who and what is Jewish?"
Trade Review"An outstanding collection of essays . . . both scholarly and highly readable . . . It is a quintessential work of Jewish scholarship - the questions are hard and the answers complex, open-ended, and mid-wives of future questions."
-- Riv-Ellen Prell * Lilith *
"This highly readable co-edited volume . . . . is highly compatible with a critical approach to the study of identity and identity making, a perspective that is increasingly finding its way into the study of identity and identity making scholarship."
-- Debra Kaufman * H-Judaic *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction | Who and What Is Jewish?: Controversies and Comparative Perspectives on the Boundaries of Jewish Identity / Susan A. Glenn and Naomi B. Sokoloff
1. Are Genes Jewish?: Conceptual Ambiguities in the New Genetic Age / Susan Martha Kahn
2. Who Is a Jew?: Categories, Boundaries, Communities, and Citizenship Law in Israel / Gad Barzilai
3. Jewish Character?: Stereotype and Identity in Fiction from Israel / Aharon Appelfeld and Sayed Kashua
Naomi B. Sokoloff
4. “Funny, You Don’t Look Jewish”: Visual Stereotypes and the Making of Modern Jewish Identity / Susan A. Glenn
5. Blame, Boundaries, and Birthrights: Jewish Intermarriage in Midcentury America / Lila Corwin Berman
6. Boundary Maintenance and Jewish Identity: Comparative and Historical Perspectives / Calvin Goldscheider
7. Good Bad Jews: Converts, Conversion, and Boundary Redrawing in Modern Russian Jewry, Notes toward a New Category / Shulamit S. Magnus
8. “Jewish Like an Adjective”: Confronting Jewish Identities in Contemporary Poland / Erica Lehrer
9. Conversos, Marranos, and Crypto-Latinos: The Jewish Question in the American Southwest (and What It Can Tell Us about Race and Ethnicity) / Jonathan Freedman
10. The Contested Logics of Jewish Identity / Laada Bilaniuk
Bibliography
Contributors
Index
