Customer Reviews

The Jew in the Modern World: A Documentary History

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4 star:		(2)
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You needn't read this book cover to cover. The book is a series of articles starting in the 1600's and progressing to recent times. Gives perspectives of people "dealing" with the Jews and perspectives of Jewish people. An article by the commandant of Auschwitz is followed by an article from a prisoner. Both will stay with me forever.

This book is a collection of articles and excerpts from many of the main sources of Jewish History from the 1700's until present. The articles are grouped by topic. The topics start with emancipation and end off with Zionism and the Holocaust. Each article has a nice mini-biography at the end telling who the author of the article was ( or is ), and includes explanatory notes for those who aren't familiar with that era of Jewish History. The editors were quite even handed and give all sides space in their book, the only group over represented is converted Jews. After all less than .25% of all Jews converted in the 1800's. My only complaint is that they neglected two subjects. One, the Tshuva movement of the 70's to present and also the Shas phenamana of the 80's and 90's.

This is an excellent supplementary reader for a Jewish studies course at the undergraduate upper division or graduate level. It contains a wealth of translated documents from the European Jewish experience in the modern period. It covers both the Western and Eastern European experience, and is an excellent source for studying the encounter of Judaism with modernity, particularly the haskalah and Hasidism.

With little knowledge about Jewish modern history, from the late 1700's, I've learned about the thinking of the Jews of this period. Through letters and documents, both from Jews and non-Jews, this book gives us an interesting insight into the minds of the people across Europe during these turbulent times. I used this book in a class I took and it is both informative and interesting.

A resource guide that makes sense of it all, for the rest of us.
Well done!

Great view of Jewish History. Enjoyed the viewpoint of the author and recommend it as a part of your library.

The work contains essential documents of Jewish history from 1700 to 1948. The question of its political balance is however a real one, and I felt perhaps wrongly a ' tilt left'. It seems to me too there was too scanty coverage of Zionism.

This is a great resource. I highly recommend this book. Anyone with an interest in modern Jewish history should have this book in their library.