Description
Book SynopsisTrade ReviewJewish Responses to Modernity is a model of the scholarly enterprise at its best: highly readable, engaged, informed and informative. Eli Lederhendler's nuanced focus on language and the semiotics of social and political transformations within modern Jewish culture are equally illuminating about the Old World and the New. -- Anita Norich,University of Michigan
With the support of unfamiliar documents and books, Lederhendler skillfully investigates the interplay of culture and politics in the shaping of modern Jewish nationalism, the developement of new sources of Jewish authority, and the confrontation of Jews with various forms of government. Americanization as he redefines it emerges from this study as one of the most creative and significant Jewish responses to modernity--no simple matter of `assimilation,' but a symbiotic adjustment that confirms the rich freedom of America in the process of testing it. -- Ruth R. Wisse,Harvard University, author of If I Am Not For Myself: The Liberal Betrayal of the Jews
