To capture some of the spirit of gathering together in the AJS exhibit hall, we offer this virtual space, showcasing our new authors, award-winning books, and highlights from the last year of Jewish Studies at SUP.
Meet our New Authors
Announcing new books, published in the last year. We’re offering 30% off these and other recent SUP Jewish Studies titles with discount code S21XAJS-FM through our virtual exhibit ».
Around the beginning of the twentieth century, Jewish writers and artists across Europe began depicting fellow Jews as savages or "primitive" tribesmen. Primitivism—the European appreciation of and fascination with so-called "primitive," non-Western peoples who were also subjugated and denigrated—was a powerful artistic critique of the modern world and was adopted by Jewish writers and artists to explore the urgent questions surrounding their own identity and status in Europe as insiders and outsiders. Jewish primitivism found expression in a variety of forms in Yiddish, Hebrew, and German literature, photography, and graphic art, including in the work of figures such as Franz Kafka, Y.L. Peretz, S. An-sky, Uri Zvi Greenberg, Else Lasker-Schüler, and Moï Ver.
In Jewish Primitivism », Samuel J. Spinner argues that these and other Jewish modernists developed a distinct primitivist aesthetic that, by locating the savage present within Europe, challenged the idea of the threatening savage other from outside Europe on which much primitivism relied: in Jewish primitivism, the savage is already there. This book offers a new assessment of modern Jewish art and literature and shows how Jewish primitivism troubles the boundary between observer and observed, cultured and "primitive," colonizer and colonized.
Dances and balls appear throughout world literature as venues for young people to meet, flirt, and form relationships, as any reader of Pride and Prejudice, War and Peace, or Romeo and Juliet can attest. The popularity of social dance transcends class, gender, ethnic, and national boundaries. In the context of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Jewish culture, dance offers crucial insights into debates about emancipation and acculturation. While traditional Jewish law prohibits men and women from dancing together, Jewish mixed-sex dancing was understood as the very sign of modernity––and the ultimate boundary transgression.
Writers of modern Jewish literature deployed dance scenes as a charged and complex arena for understanding the limits of acculturation, the dangers of ethnic mixing, and the implications of shifting gender norms and marriage patterns, while simultaneously entertaining their readers. In It Could Lead to Dancing », Sonia Gollance examines the specific literary qualities of dance scenes, while also paying close attention to the broader social implications of Jewish engagement with dance. Combining cultural history with literary analysis and drawing connections to contemporary representations of Jewish social dance, Gollance illustrates how mixed-sex dancing functions as a flexible metaphor for the concerns of Jewish communities in the face of cultural transitions.
The Oldest Guard » tells the story of Zionist settler memory in and around the private Jewish agricultural colonies (moshavot) established in late nineteenth-century Ottoman Palestine. Though they grew into the backbone of lucrative citrus and wine industries of mandate Palestine and Israel, absorbed tens of thousands of Jewish immigrants, and became known as the "first wave" (First Aliyah) of Zionist settlement, these communities have been regarded—and disregarded—in the history of Zionism as sites of conservatism, lack of ideology, and resistance to Labor Zionist politics.
Treating the "First Aliyah" as a symbol created and deployed only in retrospect, Liora R. Halperin offers a richly textured portrait of commemorative practices between the 1920s and the 1960s. Drawing connections to memory practices in other settler societies, The Oldest Guard demonstrates how private agriculturalists and their advocates in the Zionist center and on the right celebrated and forged the "First Aliyah" past, revealing the centrality of settlement to Zionist collective memory and the politics of Zionist settler "firstness."
Recent Award Winners
The Jews of the Ottoman Izmir »
DINA DANON
- Finalist in the 2020 National Jewish Book Awards, Sephardic Culture category, sponsored by the Jewish Book Council.
Dear Palestine: A Social History of the 1948 War »
SHAY HAZKANI
- Longlisted for the 2021 Cundill History Prize, sponsored by McGill University, Cundill Foundation.
The Converso’s Return: Conversion and Sephardi History in Contemporary Literature and Culture »
DALIA KANDIYOTI
- Finalist in the 2020 National Jewish Book Awards, Sephardic Culture category, sponsored by the Jewish Book Council.
Forging Ties, Forging Passports: Migration and the Modern Sephardi Diaspora »
DEVI MAYS
- Winner of the 2020 National Jewish Book Awards, Sephardic Culture category, sponsored by the Jewish Book Council.
- Winner of the 2021 Dorothy Rosenberg Prize, sponsored by the American Historical Association (AHA).
- Winner of the 2021 Jordan Schnitzer Prize in the category of Modern Jewish History and Culture: Africa, Americas, Asia, and Oceania; sponsored by the Association of Jewish Studies (AJS).
Stepchildren of the Shtetl: The Destitute, Disabled, and Mad of Jewish Eastern Europe, 1800-1939 »
NATAN M. MEIR
- Finalist in the 2020 National Jewish Book Awards (History category), sponsored by the Jewish Book Council.
- Honorable Mention in the 2021 DHA Outstanding Book Award, sponsored by the Disability History Association (DHA).
- Winner of the 2021 Choice Award for Outstanding Academic Title, sponsored by the American Library Association.
AJS Resources
For the Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture series, contact Margo Irvin, Acquisitions Editor, at [email protected].
For the Stanford Studies in Jewish Mysticism series, contact Caroline McKusick, Associate Editor, at [email protected].
We welcome inquiries from prospective authors.
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