Description: Facing the dizzying array of changes commonly referred to as "modernity, " Jews in nineteenth-century Eastern Europe and early twentieth-century America reflected the crises and opportunities of the modern world most eloquently in their speech, their culture, and their literature. Relying on those spoken and written words as "eyewitnesses, " Eli Lederhendler illustrates how the self-perceptions of Jews evolved, both in the Old World and among immigrants to America. He focuses on a wide range of subjects to provide an overview of this clash between old and new and to reveal ways in which cultural conflicts were reconciled. How, for instance, was messianic language adapted to serve nationalistic goals? What did America signify to Jewish thinkers at the turn of the century? What do Jewish "user's guides" to the New World tell us about Jewish secular culture and its perspective on sex, love, marriage, etiquette, and health? More generally, what do Jewish letters and literature tell us about how communities adapt to radically new environments? Jewish Responses to Modernity highlights the manner in which codes and symbols are passed from one generation to the next, reinforcing a group's sense of self and helping to define its relations with others, demonstrating yet again the importance of language as a vehicle for minority-group self-expression in the past and in the present.
Brief description: Eli Lederhendler is Senior Lecturer at the Institute of Contemporary Jewry of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is the author of The Road to Modern Jewish Politics, which won a National Jewish Book Award in 1990.
Review Quotes: "Jewish 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