AJS Review-The Journal of the Association for Jewish Studies最新文献

{"title":"From a Conception of Territorial Jurisdiction to an Extraterritorial Jurisdiction: Uncovering a Tannaitic Legal Transition","authors":"Benjamin Porat","doi":"10.1353/ajs.2023.a911526","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ajs.2023.a911526","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: A legal system may limit its jurisdiction, so that its laws apply exclusively within its territorial borders. In an alternate conception, a legal system may opt to apply its laws extraterritorially, so that its subjects are bound to them in any place they find themselves. The theoretical foundations of these two conceptions of law are profoundly distinct. Using this jurisprudential framework, this article explores anew the transition from the biblical (pentateuchal) conception of law to the conception of law found in the writings of the early rabbis. It then examines whether this legal difference corresponds with a parallel theological transition. Revealing the possible relationships between these two transitions makes clear that theology and law are intertwined.","PeriodicalId":54106,"journal":{"name":"AJS Review-The Journal of the Association for Jewish Studies","volume":"21 12","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135454733","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Holocaust and the Exile of Yiddish: A History of the Algemeyne Entsiklopedye by Barry Trachtenberg (review)","authors":"Mark L. Smith","doi":"10.1353/ajs.2023.a911553","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ajs.2023.a911553","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: The Holocaust and the Exile of Yiddish: A History of the Algemeyne Entsiklopedye by Barry Trachtenberg Mark L. Smith Barry Trachtenberg. The Holocaust and the Exile of Yiddish: A History of the Algemeyne Entsiklopedye. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2022. 293 pp. With this book, Barry Trachtenberg has achieved an enviable success in the fields of Yiddish and Holocaust studies. It will now be impossible to speak of the Yiddish encyclopedia without citing Trachtenberg’s comprehensive history, just as it is impossible to speak of YIVO without citing Cecile Kuznitz, or of Emanuel Ringelblum’s Oyneg Shabes Archive without citing Samuel Kassow. After two tantalizing articles and a dozen lectures over the past decade and a half, Trachtenberg has delivered a masterful treatment of the history of the Yiddish encyclopedia. [End Page 495] If he had written nothing more than his first introductory article in 2006,1 we would have the basic facts about the first and only encyclopedia to be published in Yiddish. Di algemeyne entsiklopedye (The general encyclopedia) was founded in Berlin in 1930 by leading Yiddishist scholars closely associated with YIVO, issued its first volumes in Paris from 1934 to 1940, and came to completion in New York from 1942 to 1966, as its creators relocated urgently to each of these centers of Yiddish culture. We would, likewise, know that its original goal of offering modernizing education to the prewar Yiddish-reading public—with ten alphabetical volumes of general knowledge, plus one devoted to Jewish topics—was ultimately transformed into a memorial project that ceased publishing general topics after five volumes (covering alef and most of beys) and produced seven volumes on Jewish topics (concluding with two on the Holocaust). But Trachtenberg has not spent the past sixteen years merely reading deeper in the Yiddish encyclopedia. He has attacked the underlying question: how best to recover and interpret a nearly forty-year story that moves, like the Yiddish lullaby “Ofyn pripetchik,” from starting to learn the alphabet at alef to discovering the many tears that lie within, when all that remains of the melody is a set of finely printed volumes. If Trachtenberg’s original article was a work of textual analysis, of cultural anthropology in which the encyclopedia was his chief source for reconstructing the conditions that created it, his book now reverses the process. He has mined archives across Jerusalem, New York, Amsterdam, Southampton, Cape Town, Boston, and Washington, to uncover correspondence, personal papers, financial records, speeches, advertisements, and press accounts. He has researched the biographies of the participants and the social, economic, and cultural circumstances of each of the centers in which they worked. He has accomplished his task by writing two books in one, intertwined page by page. One is a historical work that, if it barely touched on the encyclopedia, would itself be a not","PeriodicalId":54106,"journal":{"name":"AJS Review-The Journal of the Association for Jewish Studies","volume":"24 6","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135454875","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"International Jewish Humanitarianism in the Age of the Great War by Jaclyn Granick (review)","authors":"Sara Halpern","doi":"10.1353/ajs.2023.a911544","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ajs.2023.a911544","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: International Jewish Humanitarianism in the Age of the Great War by Jaclyn Granick Sara Halpern Jaclyn Granick. International Jewish Humanitarianism in the Age of the Great War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. 418 pp. My step-grandfather, who directed the JDC’s (American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee) Jerusalem office, once told me: “The JDC went to help the Jews in Europe during World War I and then it was going to get out of business. Then there were crises in the 1920s, so the JDC stayed to solve those and then it’d get out of business. That didn’t happen. It’s been a hundred years and it’s still in business!” His words echo Jaclyn Granick’s meticulous research in her International Jewish Humanitarianism in the Age of the Great War. This book chronicles how American Jewish organizations, the JDC especially, expanded and transformed their philanthropic work overseas between 1914 and 1929. In contrast to non-sectarian American counterparts such as the American Relief Association (ARA) and American Red Cross, American Jewish organizations’ ethnic and religious ties to Jewish beneficiaries in east central Europe, the Soviet Union, and Palestine complicated their departure after 1921. They lingered via philanthropy, credit lending, loans, and advising in social and medical welfare. Granick argues that their leaders regarded American Progressive values and practices as superior to Western European ideas of solving the “Jewish question” in those regions. This proposition also worked as both complementary and antithetical to Zionism, which Granick tenaciously illustrates. Conversely, Jewish participation in social and economic welfare widens the interpretation of “humanitarianism” beyond Christian and nonsectarian frameworks in the United States and Western Europe. The book’s chapter structures betray seemingly infinite moving parts in the planning and execution of humanitarian work as American Jews sought to import social scientific expertise and formalize relationships with surviving Jewish communities and organizations. The targeted population numbered seven million, making their “scale, ambition, modern sophistication, and institutional insurance” [End Page 476] (26) unprecedented in the history of Jewish institutions. With rich evidence from twenty archives and five languages in four countries and an impressive synthesis of national studies, Granick argues that American Jewish humanitarian concerns for Jews in Europe and Palestine as an institution occurred “a full generation earlier” than acknowledged (20). American Jews engaged with the State Department and multiple Jewish and international financial networks to assist Jewish victims of the Great War for the first time. The introduction of Progressivism and rehabilitation as a path to self-sufficiency marked a clear departure from the European path in the historiography of Jewish solidarity and participation in imperialism. Yet it did not mean that American Jewis","PeriodicalId":54106,"journal":{"name":"AJS Review-The Journal of the Association for Jewish Studies","volume":"23 11","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135454882","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"“To Sing on Shabbat, Night and Day, Each Person at Their Table”: On the Formation of the Custom of Singing Shabbat Zemirot in Medieval Europe","authors":"Albert Evan Kohn","doi":"10.1353/ajs.2023.a911523","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ajs.2023.a911523","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: This essay traces the development of the custom of singing table songs known as Shabbat zemirot during Shabbat meals in medieval Europe. Though a popular custom, its medieval formation has yet to receive scholarly attention. Informal Shabbat table singing was likely common for centuries, yet the earliest extant instructions to sing specific songs were written in thirteenth-century northern France and appeared shortly thereafter in Ashkenaz and Italy. The many manuscripts containing Shabbat zemirot reveal the custom's spread, growth, and popularity in these regions. Though preserved in writing, Shabbat zemirot and their tunes were primarily disseminated orally by families singing within their homes. Such orality encouraged flexibility and diversity in how the custom was performed. Once the songs were printed in the sixteenth century, a more rigid construction of the practice and its repertoire took shape. Included as appendices are lists of manuscripts containing Shabbat zemirot and tables of the most common songs.","PeriodicalId":54106,"journal":{"name":"AJS Review-The Journal of the Association for Jewish Studies","volume":"23 7","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135454885","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Death Wish in the Hebrew Bible: Rhetorical Strategies for Survival by Hanne Løland Levinson (review)","authors":"Amy Kalmanofsky","doi":"10.1353/ajs.2023.a911531","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ajs.2023.a911531","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: The Death Wish in the Hebrew Bible: Rhetorical Strategies for Survival by Hanne Løland Levinson Amy Kalmanofsky Hanne Løland Levinson. The Death Wish in the Hebrew Bible: Rhetorical Strategies for Survival. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. 275 pp. Most of us have used some version of “kill me now” to apply rhetorical punch to an expression of dislike or frustration. We intentionally employ hyperbolic speech to make clear our distaste and objections. When we hear others use such expressions, especially those for whom we are responsible, we must assess how seriously we should take these statements. Similarly, when we encounter biblical characters who express death wishes, we should consider how literally to interpret them. Despite its morbid topic, Hanne Løland Levinson offers a fascinating, accessible, and even enjoyable analysis of biblical death-wish texts. In The Death Wish in the Hebrew Bible: Rhetorical Strategies for Survival, Løland Levinson examines the rhetorical intent of biblical texts within which characters express their desire to die or to be dead, a difference Løland Levinson explicates in her study. By placing these death-wish texts in conversation with each other, Løland Levinson discovers a variety of reasons characters express the desire to die or to be dead. Death wishes can reflect a character’s genuine desire to die. They can also express a character’s pain and are used as a negotiation tactic for altering their life’s circumstances. In the introductory first chapter, Løland Levinson presents the criteria for identifying death-wish texts and her methodology for analyzing them. Formulated in direct speech, generally addressed to someone in the second person, whether human or divine, death wishes frequently appear as conditional statements that can be direct appeals to die or be killed, or as indirect statements that question a character’s life’s worth. The dialogical element of death-wish texts is critical to Løland Levinson, who employs conversation analysis, the systematic analysis of talk in everyday interactions, in her case studies of these texts. Chapter 2 considers the death wish as a negotiation strategy in which the weaker party in the negotiation ups the stakes of the negotiation by uttering a death wish. Rachel in Genesis 30 and Moses in Numbers 11 provide Løland Levinson with convincing examples of characters who bargain with their lives. Rachel wants sons and Moses wants help managing the rebellious Israelites. In Løland Levinson’s reading, both characters express existential distress, but they do so to alter their circumstances. Their strategy works. Rachel has a son and Moses gets help with the appointment of the seventy elders. Chapter 3 examines death wishes that communicate anger and despair. The prophets Elijah and Jonah do not negotiate with their lives, as Moses and Rachel do. Instead, these prophets express a genuine desire to die. According to Løland Levinson, Elijah wishes to di","PeriodicalId":54106,"journal":{"name":"AJS Review-The Journal of the Association for Jewish Studies","volume":"23 6","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135454886","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Revoicing the Forbidden: The Yishuv, Yiddish Films, and Hebrew Dubbing","authors":"Edna Nahshon","doi":"10.1353/ajs.2023.a911525","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ajs.2023.a911525","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: This essay focuses on the compulsory Hebrew-language dubbing of Yiddish sound films during 1930s and 1940s in Mandatory Palestine (1920–1948). The term “dub” is a shortened version of the word “double” and denotes the practice of supplanting a film’s original language with another, mostly (though not exclusively) for translation purposes. Hebrew dubbing was a practical compromise that made it possible for Yiddish films to be screened in Palestine, albeit not in their original tongue. This was an arrangement that bridged the gap between the rigid ideological language restrictions commanded by the Hebraist leadership of the Yishuv, and the general population’s desire to enjoy films that represented a culture beloved by many. The topic of enforced dubbing, standing at the intersection of national language policy and popular entertainment, showcases the tension between the ideal of total Hebraization and the consumption of foreign-language cultural products.","PeriodicalId":54106,"journal":{"name":"AJS Review-The Journal of the Association for Jewish Studies","volume":"21 10","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135454735","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"In This Land: Jewish Life and Legal Culture in Late Medieval Provence by Pinchas Roth (review)","authors":"Rachel Furst","doi":"10.1353/ajs.2023.a911535","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ajs.2023.a911535","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: In This Land: Jewish Life and Legal Culture in Late Medieval Provence by Pinchas Roth Rachel Furst Pinchas Roth. In This Land: Jewish Life and Legal Culture in Late Medieval Provence. Toronto: PIMS, 2021. 168 pp. The Jews of medieval Provence, positioned between the venerable settlements of Ashkenaz to the north and Sepharad to the south, have long drawn the attention of historians, thanks, in part, to the region’s rich municipal archives. Noted for their participation in local commerce and crafts and celebrated for their achievements in philosophy, linguistics, and the natural sciences, Provençal Jews have been hailed as purveyors of an idiosyncratic hybrid culture that bound together communities from three distinct political realms. In his recently published monograph, Pinchas Roth breaks new ground by highlighting this society’s engagement with and contributions to rabbinic scholarship, a field that has received far less attention than its economic foundations or more secular academic pursuits. Yet the real achievement [End Page 454] of this carefully crafted volume is methodological. Capitalizing on the author’s remarkable command of rabbinic literature from across medieval Europe, it pushes the boundaries of how halakhic sources can and should be read by historians, setting new standards in the study of both Jewish history and legal history at large. The book’s title, In This Land, echoes a rabbinic moniker for the region that stretched along the Mediterranean coast of southern France from Narbonne to Marseille. Through a close reading of rabbinic texts, Roth demonstrates that the Jews who lived in this area had a clear sense of group identity that defied the region’s political incoherence, an identity that expressed itself in the distinctiveness of their religious traditions, as well as in linguistic and cultural terms. Waves of English and especially French Jewish émigrés who arrived in Provence following expulsions at the turn of the fourteenth century challenged many of these local norms, believing their own to be superior. Yet rabbinic discourse reveals that Provençal Jews held their ground, resulting in what Roth dubs a “precocious multiculturalism” (26) that foreshadowed events precipitated by the mass eastward emigration of Jews from Spain and Portugal two centuries later. The book’s introduction familiarizes the reader with responsa, the genre of rabbinic writing that serves as the primary source material for this study. Here the author spells out the challenges of working with these often-arcane records of legal correspondence. At the same time, he argues for their potential to expose aspects of the internal lives and everyday realities of medieval Jews that other types of sources render opaque. This approach moves beyond classic halakhic history, which has concentrated either on rabbinic biographies or on the economic, social, and religious forces that impacted halakhic decision-making in different eras. Chapter 1 int","PeriodicalId":54106,"journal":{"name":"AJS Review-The Journal of the Association for Jewish Studies","volume":"39 10","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135454803","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Towards the Mystical Experience of Modernity: The Making of Rav Kook, 1865–1904 by Yehudah Mirsky (review)","authors":"Hanoch Ben Pazi","doi":"10.1353/ajs.2023.a911539","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ajs.2023.a911539","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Towards the Mystical Experience of Modernity: The Making of Rav Kook, 1865–1904 by Yehudah Mirsky Hanoch Ben Pazi Yehudah Mirsky. Towards the Mystical Experience of Modernity: The Making of Rav Kook, 1865–1904. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2021. 392 pp. I would like to consider this book from two different perspectives: the first, from an academic point of view, and the second, from a cultural perspective. It is not immediately clear which of these perspectives is more important, and, in fact, this suggests that both perspectives should be considered alongside one another, as they work in parallel. Rabbi Avraham Yiẓḥak ha-Cohen Kook was one of the prominent figures of the rabbinate and Zionist thought in the twentieth century. His name and reputation became iconic in Israeli society, and his theology was instructive in the formation of Israeli Religious Zionist thought. However, his teachings are neither studied nor familiar in Jewish circles outside of Israel. Yehudah Mirsky rejuvenates Jewish discourse about Rav Kook’s writings, and resituates his theology on the global philosophical landscape, through a new perspective on the search for the idea of mystical experience. The unique thought of Rav Kook has preoccupied Israeli research for about forty years, whether in terms of its historical context, its political context, or the kabbalistic tradition. Despite Rav Kook’s significance in these fields and his role as the chief rabbi of ʾEreẓ Yisraʾel, he only reached his special status as forerunner of Religious Zionist thought through the development of Israeli right-wing politics. In the years after the Six-Day War, Rav Kook’s later writings came to characterize his persona and thought. His books began to be viewed as part of the classic literature of Religious Zionists, who found in them spiritual inspiration as well as a strong religious authority upon which to build their national Zionist concept. As a result, the entire engagement with Rav Kook referred to his writings after his immigration to Israel in 1904, regarding the Zionist movement, Zionist struggles, and the theological meaning of Zionist history. The writings of his youth have all but disappeared from research and are conspicuously missing from the classic bookshelves of his writings. Mirsky’s book, which is the result of in-depth and comprehensive research, reveals hitherto unknown information and conclusions on the early period of Rav Kook’s life. This includes the author’s close examination of the period of Rav Kook’s life in Ziemel (Ziemelis, Lithuania) as well as of his first rabbinate in Boisk (Bauska, Latvia). Mirsky succeeds in doing what many have tried and failed to do. Instead of seeking out the hidden roots of Rav Kook’s [End Page 465] thinking, he dares his readers to honestly engage with the literature and thought of these different eras of his life and their historical and conceptual context. By reflecting on and analyzing Kook’s eastern European perio","PeriodicalId":54106,"journal":{"name":"AJS Review-The Journal of the Association for Jewish Studies","volume":"22 11","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135454893","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Screen Shots: State Violence on Camera in Israel and Palestine by Rebecca L. Stein (review)","authors":"Joel Stokes","doi":"10.1353/ajs.2023.a911554","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ajs.2023.a911554","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Screen Shots: State Violence on Camera in Israel and Palestine by Rebecca L. Stein Joel Stokes Rebecca L. Stein. Screen Shots: State Violence on Camera in Israel and Palestine. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2021. 234 pp. Rebecca Stein’s 2001 Screen Shots is an ethnography of the camera. The book charts the relationship and respective agency between the camera, its bearer, and the photographic subject(s), set against the often violently and politically contested spaces of Israel-Palestine. While Stein’s source material is now several years old (collected since 2010), this book is as much a glimpse into the future of the Israeli-Palestinian context as its recent (2000 to present) history. Interviews with employees of Israeli NGO B’tselem, numerous Palestinian activists, Israel [End Page 497] Defense Forces (IDF) officials, and Jewish settlers in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) create a rich ethnographic narrative that grapples with the realities of the ever-more complicated ethical and legal frameworks of violent footage. Stein’s writing is lucid; presenting the reader with a well-constructed and considered argument. Despite the book’s quality and readability, it is not, however, a text for Israel-Palestine studies beginners. For educators, supplementary texts on Israel’s occupation over Palestinians such as Saree Makdisi’s Palestine Inside Out (2008) and Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine (2020) are advisable. The need for additional material is compounded by Stein’s mini-malist introductory outline of related literature. This is not a criticism but worth noting. As a researcher/educator working in Israel-Palestine, I found that Stein’s work evidences extensive ethnographic research potential. In chapter 1, Stein begins her thesis framing the camera as an agent caught between being a tool for change or further conflict, alluding to later discussion regarding Israeli and Palestinian claims of legitimacy and authenticity. In doing so, Stein sets out for the reader the human stakes in the study context, most poignantly how possession of mobile phones (and therefore portable cameras) in Gaza between 2008–2009 made Palestinian civilians “legitimate” targets for aggression under IDF policy. Although detailed and well written, Stein’s early analysis can at times be repetitive, and could be sharpened. The introductory chapter brings the reader’s attention to the second of many photographs included in the book, notably that of Elor Azaria on the cover of Makor rishon magazine as “Man of the Year.” Here is as good of a place as any to note that, given the content of the book, Stein’s use of pictures throughout is refreshing in that it does not seek to entertain images for a shock factor. Stein’s interpretation of photographs is sophisticated, considered, and multifaceted. This is a strength of Stein’s work that should not be overlooked. In the second chapter, Stein continues to follow the work of B’tselem","PeriodicalId":54106,"journal":{"name":"AJS Review-The Journal of the Association for Jewish Studies","volume":"22 5","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135454898","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Authentically Jewish: Identity, Culture, and the Struggle for Recognition by Stuart Z. Charmé (review)","authors":"Ken Koltun-Fromm","doi":"10.1353/ajs.2023.a911547","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ajs.2023.a911547","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Authentically Jewish: Identity, Culture, and the Struggle for Recognition by Stuart Z. Charmé Ken Koltun-Fromm Stuart Z. Charmé. Authentically Jewish: Identity, Culture, and the Struggle for Recognition. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2022. 301 pp. The title to Stuart Charmé’s thoughtful book Authentically Jewish reads as provocation: What could “authentically Jewish” plausibly mean? Who commands the authority to decide what counts as authentic? And how do we recognize others as authentically or, even worse, inauthentically Jewish? If readers hold these skeptical questions in mind even before turning the first page, then the title has done its work, for Charmé believes these are precisely the rhetorical stances we should take toward the question of Jewish authenticity. Nowhere does Charmé decide matters of authenticity as he traces through a litany of modern Jewish texts and communities; instead he offers a framework for how to think well about claims to authenticity and the judgments we make about others who seek recognition for their Jewish practices. If some regard the notion of authenticity as an outdated and problematic term, Charmé appeals to a more nuanced, self-critical concept of authenticity that recognizes its cultural and political force. He draws upon his expertise in Sartrean existentialist philosophy to offer a thesis seeking to upend essentialist claims to authenticity by replacing them with nonessentialist, dynamic ones: “An authentically Jewish sense of self is always to some degree unstable and [End Page 483] unsettled. . . . Only in this way is it possible to transform an essentialist kind of genetic and cultural authenticity rooted only in the past into an existentialist one based on continually reaffirming the meaning of being a part of this group” (157). This “active dynamic sense of self” (157) is “a fluid process” (214) that requires “the forms of recognition that these constructions receive from others” (215). And so the subtitle to this work: claims to authenticity are (1) constructed out of fluid, nonfoundational identities and cultures, and (2) such claims seek out recognition from cultural authorities. Those who maintain essentialist views of authenticity—they all assume, Charmé argues, “some underlying core or solid foundation” (14)—will not be convinced by any of this. But for those struggling for recognition from outside or from within contemporary Jewry, Charmé’s text might read as a helpful scholarly approach that defends progressive models of authenticity. Essentialist claims arrive in two general forms: historical accounts that focus on “roots and origins” determined to be “old and uncorrupted” (11), and expressivist notions that “reflect or express something about their unique, innermost selves” (12). Both make claims to purity in some form that are decidedly nonfluid. These kinds of claims are generally taken up by “those who have successfully gained power and authority” in the Jew","PeriodicalId":54106,"journal":{"name":"AJS Review-The Journal of the Association for Jewish Studies","volume":"24 3","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135454878","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}