Jewish encounters

"The story of the Jews in twentieth-century Russia as told through the strange history of the Soviet solution to the Jewish question. In 1929, the Soviet Union declared the area of Birobidzhan a homeland for Jews. In the late 1920s and early 1932, tens of thousands of Jews moved to Birobidzhan, chased from the shtetl by poverty, hunger, and fear. Birobidzhan was written about breathlessly by a small group of intellectuals who envisioned a home built by Jews for Jews--a place where Jews worked the land and where Yiddish would become the common language of a post-oppression Jewish culture. The short period of state-building ended in the late 1930s with arrests and purges of the Communist Party and cultural elite. After the Second World War, Birobidzhan, now called the "Jewish Autonomous Region," received a new influx of Jews. These were the dispossessed from what had once been the Pale, and most of them had lost families in the Holocaust. They had no one and no place to return to. Once again, in the late 1940s, a wave of arrests swept through Birobidzhan, frightening the Jews into silence and making them invisible. WHERE THE JEWS AREN'T is the story of the dream of Birobidzhan--and how it became a nightmare. In Masha Gessen's haunting and haunted account, Birobidzhan becomes the cracked and crooked mirror that allows us to see the story of the history of absence and silence that is the story of Jews in twentieth-century Russia"--

A dandy, a best-selling novelist, and a man of political and sexual intrigue, Benjamin Disraeli was one of the most captivating figures of the nineteenth century. His flirtation with proto-Zionism, his ideas about power and empire, and his fantasies about the Middle East remain prophetically relevant today. How a man who was born a Jew--and who remained in the eyes of his countrymen a member of a despised minority--managed to become prime minister of England seems even today nothing short of miraculous.In this compelling biography, renowned poet and critic Adam Kirsch looks at Disraeli as a novelist as well as a statesman, recognizing that the outsider Jew who became one of the world's most powerful men was his own greatest character. Though baptized by his father at the age of twelve, Disraeli was seen--and saw himself--as a Jew. But her created an idea of Jewishness to rival the British notion of aristocracy.Disraeli was a figure of fascinating contradictions: an archconservative who benefited from England's liberal attitudes, a baptized Christian who saw Jewishness as a matter of racial superiority, a perennial outsider who dreamed of glory for England, which, in the words of one contemporary, became for Disraeli "the Israel of his imagination."From the Hardcover edition.

As might be expected from this fiercely provocative writer, David Mamet's interest in anti-Semitism is not limited to the modern face of an ancient hatred but encompasses as well the ways in which many Jews have themselves internalized that hatred. Using the metaphor of the Wicked Son at the Passover seder--the child who asks, "What does this story mean to you?"--Mamet confronts what he sees as an insidious predilection among some Jews to seek truth and meaning anywhere--in other religions, in political movements, in mindless entertainment--but in Judaism itself. At the same time, he explores the ways in which the Jewish tradition has long been and still remains the Wicked Son in the eyes of the world. Written with the searing honesty and verbal brilliance that is the hallmark of Mamet's work, The Wicked Son is a scathing look at one of the most destructive and tenacious forces in contemporary life, a powerfully thought-provoking and important book.From the Hardcover edition.