German rabbis of the sixteenth century, as Eric Zimmer remarks in his introduction, were not for the most part very distinguished; they published relatively little, and only one of them (H?ayyim ben Bezalel) achieved even moderate fame. Nevertheless, Zimmer has lavished his attention on these forgotten figures—David of Fulda, Abraham Stang Dülken, Isaac Ginzberg, and others—and his thirty years of patient research of manuscript sources (some of which he publishes here) have culminated in this book. The book is less than a complete survey of the topic, and still shows some signs of having been published initially as separate articles and studies. Zimmer presents a series of snapshots, grouped around the theme of conflict; these German rabbis, distinguished or not, did not lack for quarrels.

Salamone Rossi (c. 1570–c. 1630) is a fascinating but enigmatic figure. The man who epitomizes the Jewish participation in the Italian Renaissance left only a few meager footprints in history. We know of Rossi only from his thirteen surviving publications and from the appearance of his name in the Mantuan archives. He was all but forgotten until 1876, when Samuel Naumbourg, Chief Cantor of Paris, published a modern edition of fifty-two of Rossi's compositions. For yet another hundred years Rossi would remain for the most part hidden in the shadows. Not until the past four decades has Rossi's music been extensively and seriously published, performed, recorded, and studied.

Given the centrality of education for all programs to transform Jewish society and ready the Jews for civic integration in Europe, the disproportionate use modernizing Jews actually made of non-Jewish education, and the particular zeal of German Jews for Bildung, Keith Pickus' book treats an important theme: the identity of Jewish students in German universities. It sets out to explore how young adults constructed a sense of self when loosed from familial moorings and grouped with non-Jewish peers in an era of unprecedented openness as well as continu- ing hostility, an important question in itself that is also significant because the university-educated elite were disproportionately likely to lead or speak for the German Jewish community in its main defense organization (the Central Verein, led overwhelmingly by men trained in law) in the rabbinate, in welfare institutions and in political groups.

Henry Abramson has chosen an appropriately ambiguous title for his study of the short-lived alliance between Ukrainian and Jewish nationalists, a rapprochement which owed both its hopeful beginning and its violent end to the fate of Ukrainian independence in the crucible of war and revolution that brought down the tsarist empire. Revising the pogrom paradigm prevalent in much of the scholarship on Ukrainian-Jewish relations, Abramson argues that following the fall of the Romanovs leaders of Jewish parties justifiably invested their hopes for civic and political emancipation in the autonomous regional government of the Ukrainian Rada, formed in 1917 under the liberal auspices of Russia's newly established Provisional Government. Ironically, the dream died a brutal death in the course of its own realization. The Russian withdrawal under the terms of the treaty of Brest-Litovsk opened a window of opportunity for the fulfillment of Ukrainian national aspirations. The ensuing period between the German withdrawal and the defeat of the Ukrainian National Republic by the Bolsheviks saw the transfer of power to a conservative regime, increasingly beleaguered by the chaos of Civil War, socio-economic dislocation, and the excesses of local Cossack rule. In the duration of the short and troubled existence of the Republic, its new government, headed by Symon Petliura, a man whose name still carries its association with Ukrainian anti-semitism, proved unable to exercise effective control over the violence raging throughout the former Pale of Settlement.

In this balanced and careful study, Vicki Caron examines the evolution of French policy toward central European Jewish refugees between 1933 and 1942 from three interrelated perspectives: governmental policy, public opinion, and Jewish organizational responses. For each of these themes, Professor Caron offers a comprehensive analysis and important new insights on the connections between policies and attitudes at the end of Third Republic and during the first two years of the Vichy regime, 1940–1942.

First published in October, 1991, the Nation of Islam's anonymously authored The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews has spawned a veritable cottage industry of scholarship addressing its central claim that Jewish merchants “dominated” the Atlantic slave trade.1. See, for example, David Brion Davis, “Jews in the Slave Trade,” Culturefront, 1 (Fall, 1992): 42–45; Davis, “The Slave Trade and the Jews,” New York Review, 41 (December 22, 1994): 14–16; Seymour Drescher, “The Role of Jews in the Transatlantic Slave Trade,” Immigrants and Minorities, 12 (1993): 113–125; Harold Brackman, Ministry of Lies: The Truth Behind The Nation of Islam's “The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews” (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1994); Saul S. Friedman, Jews and the American Slave Trade (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1998). One can only wonder whether, someday soon, there may be an essay or book refuting the Farrakhanites' tract for every Jew who ever traded a slave.

This volume is a collection of ten studies previously published by the author. Its theme is the “unfolding communal life of American Jews—the way Jews transplanted, changed and invented their social institutions and ideologies and created over time an impressive organizational culture” (p. 9). Each chapter, originally conceived as an independent article, has substantial depth and a richness of historical detail. The volume is unified by a sustained, if prismatic, attention to two topics. The first is the internal (that is, Jewish communal) and external (that is, civic and American) politics of twentieth-century American Jews. The second is what the author calls their “public culture.” By public culture he refers to the large public events such as mass rallies, funerals, parades, and pageants that marked American Jewish life, particularly in New York, in the first half of the twentieth century. Public culture provided an expressive metier for socialist or Zionist politics. It gave expression to the collective identities of Jewish subgroups or, on occasion, to the entire community. The treatment of public culture is reminiscent of George Mosse's work on the role of public rituals in European and Jewish nationalism.

In the past three decades several scholarly books were written about Moroccan Jewry highlighting the impact of modernization during the nineteenth century until the inauguration of the colonial era. These studies concentrate on modern secular education propagated by the Alliance Israelite Universelle (AIU hereafter), the Anglo-Jewish Association, European consular schools, and the Alliance Française. They focus on French and other European acculturation, Muslim-Jewish relations, and social stratification.1. Among these studies see: Michel Abitbol, Témoins et acteurs: les Corcos et l'histoire du Maroc contemporain (Jerusalem: Institut Ben-Zvi, 1977); Pierre Guillen, L'Allemagne et le Maroc de 1870 à 1905. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1967); Michael M. Laskier, The Alliance Israelite Universelle and the Jewish Communities of Morocco: 1862–1962 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983); Jean-Louis Miege, Le Maroc et l'europe: 1830–1894, 3 vols. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1961–3); Daniel J. Schroeter, Merchants of Essaouira (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Reeva S. Simon, Michael M. Laskier, Sara Reguer (eds.), The Jews of the Middle East and North Africa: The Modern Period (New York: Columbia University Press [forthcoming]). Most of these books mention briefly the oeuvre of the Franciscan Catholic and British or American Protestant missions. Few delve into the activities, agenda, and caliber of activists who managed their affairs,2. One of the rare exceptions is Jean-Louis Miege's “Les missions protestantes au Maroc, 1875–1905,” Hesperis, 42 (1955): 153–186. dismissing these as marginal in the overall daily picture of Jewish communal life.

Moshe Pelli, one of the major scholars of Hebrew Haskalah (Enlightenment) literature in our time and one of the major contributors to Hebrew culture in America, presents in this book the fruits of his twenty-five years of study of the major genres in this literature. Previously published articles have been rewritten by Pelli for this book.

Hayyim Nahman Bialik (1873–1934) is widely regarded—especially in Israel—as the national poet of the Jewish people. Bialik's poems express not only his own deeply conflicted emotions but also the ambivalence of a generation of Jews caught between the breakdown of traditional Jewish life and the call of a new Jewish world whose outlines could be but dimly perceived.

In this slim yet analytically sophisticated volume, Kartun-Blum, professor of Hebrew literature at Hebrew University, seeks to elucidate the “noisy existence” of the modern Hebrew poet who is forced to contend with the echoes of traditional texts and the multiple, diachronic registers of the revived Hebrew language. The work consists of three chapters, the first of which, “The Prophet's Tongue in Our Cheek,” serves as an introduction to the use made of the Bible in modern Hebrew poetry. Building on this framework, in the second and longest section of the book, she engages the motif of the Binding of Isaac, and in the last chapter she offers a reading of a poem by Yona Wallach. In her analysis, she incorporates the insights to be gleaned from the perspectives of intertextuality, deconstruction, and feminist criticism. This book is based on the Efroymson Lectures delivered by the author at Hebrew Union College in 1995, although the core of the thesis developed in the chapter on the Binding of Isaac motif appeared in Prooftexts (September 1988).

Agnon studies are still with us. The great modern Hebrew prose writer has been gone for nearly three decades, but new studies in Hebrew and even in English have made it seem as if he were still in our midst. They continue to increase our understanding of his life and his oeuvre, obviously, but the immediacy of this Nobel prize laureate for his particular culture strikes me as unique among western literary figures. Speaking only of English, in this decade alone, Anne Golomb Hoffman and Nitzah Ben Dov have published full-length monographs, and scores of articles have appeared on subjects ranging from biography to intertextual exploration, and from language to folklore sources. All this is on top of an even more plentiful supply of materials from the '70s and '80s (some Israeli scholars, like Shaked, have even published in English), which followed on the heels of Arnold Band's indispensable Nostalgia and Nightmare. One has to assume that Dan Laor's comprehensive Agnon biography, Hayyei Agnon—which has just been published—will be translated into English and share its plentiful light with the purely English-speaking scholarly community. Laor's biography was not completed when Stephen Katz published The Centrifugal Novel, although several articles containing material intended for the eventual biography appeared over recent years.

Kremer's recent book is an important contribution to the growing body of scholarship devoted to literary responses to the Holocaust. Women's Holocaust Writing joins studies such as Edward Alexander's The Resonance of Dust: Essays on Holocaust Literature, Lawrence Langer's The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination, Alvin Rosenfeld's A Double Dying: Reflections on Holocaust Literature, Alan Berger's Crisis and Covenant: The Holocaust in American Jewish Fiction, his more recent Children of Job: American Second-Generation Witnesses to the Holocaust, Sarah Horowitz's Voicing the Void, and Kremer's previous study Witness through the Imagination: Jewish-American Holocaust Literature.

In recent years there has been much interest in the place of Kadya Molodowsky in the canon of Yiddish literature. At the same time, the translation of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Yiddish literature has become an imperative—fueled by the Holocaust, the quality and quantity of writing that occurred prior to and even after it, and a heightened awareness of many women writers heretofore underrepresented in translation. Nor can one ignore the tremendous fluctuations in the perceived viability and legitimacy of Yiddish, as either a language or a literary vehicle, that have taken place and are still taking place into the twenty-first century. Into this tumultuous set of circumstances, Molodowsky's poetry has been reborn by virtue of an extensive translation.

David Patterson's Along the Edge of Annihilation: The Collapse and Recovery of Life in the Holocaust Diary adds to the ever-growing collection of analyses of Holocaust literature by focussing specifically on diaries. Two obvious goals of a study such as this would be to give the diarists a voice (or, to put it another way, to give readers an introduction to a variety of diaries) and to develop a theory about the place of diaries in Holocaust literature. In the first matter, Patterson bases his study on more than fifty diaries written during the Holocaust by Jewish victims. The reader need only consult the primary sources in the bibliography for a listing of diaries available to be read in their entirety. (I will say more about this later.)

It has been a quarter century since the last collections of Yiddish plays were published in America: Joseph Landis' Great Jewish Plays and David Lifson's Epic and Folk Plays of the Yiddish Theater. As Sandrow informs us in the “Appendixes,” translations of a few individual plays are found in scholarly journals or mostly out-of-print books. For this reason alone, the beautiful new volume from Syracuse is a welcome arrival. Another reason is Sandrow's insightful introductions to the five plays featured: Jacob Gordin, God, Man, and Devil; Peretz Hirshbein, Green Fields; H. Levick, Shop; David Pinsky, The Treasure; and Osip Dimov, Bronx Express. Her remarks touch on the works' stage history detailing who played what role, and how the plays fared on various European and American stages.

If good scholarship is supposed to be disciplined, detached, and objective, the study of the Holocaust has taught us that mental, emotional, and physical reactions—even when experienced from a temporal and spatial distance, and consciously or not—condition our conceptualized or poetic responses to the Shoah. This unarticulated psychic involvement in our recent past is perhaps the place that generates intellectual, political, ideological, and imaginative expressions. Moreover, this location signifies the meeting point of ethics and aesthetics that makes any verbal or visual attempt to convey the unspeakable and unimaginable possible, while at the same time being the very site that causes the collapse of the boundaries between objective and subjective response. How can it be otherwise? The impact of this recognition is such that even general literary, cultural, and philosophic writing, mostly influenced by Holocaust studies, has begun to consider ethics as an analytic category.1. See, for example, Howard Marchitello, ed. What Happens to History: The Renewal of Ethics in Contemporary Thought (New York and London: Routledge, 2001). Daniel Schwarz's Imagining the Holocaust is positioned at the core of this ethical-aesthetic matrix.

Allison Coudert is not the first historian to underscore the importance of the seventeenth century as a critical moment in the history of Jewish-Christian relations in Western civilization. Scholars engaged in Spinoza's thought have focused for some time now on the rich converso culture of Amsterdam and its mediating role between Judaism and Christianity.1. I refer here generally to the many volumes edited and written by Richard Popkin, Yosef Kaplan, David Katz, E. G. E. Van der Wall, and many others. More recently, the messiahship of Shabbetai Zevi and the crisis his apostasy precipitated in the Jewish world have been scrutinized within the broader context of Jewish-Christian interactions.2. See, for example, the work of Yosef Kaplan, Jacob Barnai, and Elishevah Carlebach. Coudert is the first, however, to study closely the circle of Christian thinkers and their fascination with the Kabbalah at the court of Sulzbach, especially Francis Mercury Van Helmont, the son of a famous Paracelsian physician, and his close colleague, Christian Knorr von Rosenroth, the compiler of the greatest Latin collection of Kabbalist writings ever published, the Kabbala denudata.

For half a century the Buber-Scholem debate over the essence of Hasidic teachings and literature defined the parameters of scholarly discussion of Hasidism. A new generation of scholars has taken the discussion of Hasidism in new and fruitful directions in recent years. One result of this new research has been an interest in making the theological literature of Hasidism available to English readers. This volume is a welcome addition to this growing body of literature. Relying only on Hasidic stories instead of the theological writings of Hasidism, particularly as they were selected and edited by Martin Buber, has led to a distorted and reductionist understanding of Hasidism and its place in the Jewish mystical tradition. The theologically and intellectually sophisticated aspects of Hasidism were not taken into account in popular descriptions of the movement. On the contrary, Hasidism was seen as an anti-intellectual populist folk movement and even a break with the rabbinic tradition in some respects. Correcting this misconception and acquainting the reader with the intellectual and spiritual foundations of Hasidism is a primary goal for Norman Lamm, the editor of this volume.

While each of these three books is about Jewish ethics, they take very different approaches to the topic, serve different purposes, and speak to different audiences. If nothing else, they—and a number of other books about Jewish ethics published in recent years—collectively demonstrate that Jews are paying serious attention not only to the theological, legal, historical, social, and cultural aspects of Jewish identity, but also to the Jewish tradition's moral import.