Unlike the Sephardim, who accepted the concept of taqiyya and the practice of marranism to cope with forced conversions under Islam, the Ashkenazim, especially the Jewish communities of Germanophone Central Europe, developed an uncompromising rejection of Christian baptism. Instead of marranism and deception under Islam, the Ashkenazim, in the persecutions of the Crusades and after, developed a strong sense of martyrdom and detested baptism, whether forced or voluntary, as ritual and spiritual defilement and pollution. The small number of Jewish converts to Christianity were not so much sinners but apostates (meshummadim or the vertilgten). Given this Ashkenazi tradition, it is not surprising that converts were marginalized in Jewish historiography and scholarship. Nevertheless, as Carlebach argues persuasively in this book, they played a significant role in Jewish–Christian relations in early modern Germany; and given the fact that conversions rose rapidly in the late eighteenth century, it is all the more important to understand the prehistory of Jewish conversion and integration in Germany after Emancipation.

This volume is an ambitious and wide-ranging (perhaps too wide-ranging) study of the interrelationship between medicine and German-speaking Jews throughout the ages. In essence it deals with two separate but intertwined issues: German-speaking Jews in the medical profession and the use of medical discourse to analyze and evaluate the Jewish people. The book covers a wide area both chronologically and geographically. “German Jews” is interpreted very broadly and includes a number of East European figures who either wrote in German or were trained in German universities. Although the bulk of the volume (Chaps. 4–7) deals with the period from around 1870 to the beginning of World War I, the first three chapters “begin at the beginning” (the Middle Ages) and carry the story up to the late eighteenth century.

The author, an Israeli folklorist who teaches at the University of Haifa, has had the excellent idea of scrutinizing the various “legends of origin” of Polish Jewry. She makes use of works by Hebrew and Yiddish authors, published in modern times but based on folk material of considerable antiquity, and of materials collected by ethnographers of pre-Holocaust Jewish Eastern Europe and by researchers in Israel. Her linguistic skills are admirable (she discusses material in German and Polish as well as both Jewish languages), and her book, while it does not altogether avoid professional jargon, is definitely accessible to the nonspecialist.

The first thing a reader should know about this book is that it was written from Jerusalem. No Jewish city in history, certainly no diaspora city, can hope to compete with Jerusalem. Looking down from Jerusalem, New York looks decidedly grim. As Lederhendler notes with admirable brevity, the “events of May–June 1967 threw into relief the apparent gulf between Israelis (who could fend for themselves) and Jews (who could not)” (190). Diaspora condemns Jews to mere ethnic existence, to life as one group among others. In the 1960s New York Jews recognized “that Diaspora life had become existentially problematic” (190). They faced “cultural despair,” decline of community, and a loss of nerve that challenged their earlier, “utopian” optimism about urban life, its freedom, and its Jewish possibilities (87).

Jerusalem is an ancient venue that has been not only a symbol of peace and a focus of religious belief but also a city of dispute. For centuries, indeed millennia, it has been a magnet for conflict between diverse groups with divergent religious interests and others with competing political and/or national claims. It is sacred to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam and claimed as a national capitol by both Israelis and Palestinian Arabs. Since the mid-1950s it has been a central issue of the Arab–Israeli conflict that emerged to be even more problematic after the Six Day War of 1967, in which Israel gained full control over the entire city that had been divided between it and the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan in the first Arab–Israeli war of 1948–1949. In recent years it has became the ultimate issue among the final settlement stumbling blocks for an Israeli–Palestinian peace. It has served as a pretext for Osama bin Laden and as a concern for Muslim regimes as diverse as Iran and Saudi Arabia because of Jewish control over Muslim holy places, in this instance the third holiest site in Islam, after Mecca and Medina.

Alfonso de la Torre (ca.1417–60), a person of somewhat obscure background, wrote Visión delectable de la filosofía artes liberales, metafísica y filosofía moral (or Visión deleytable as Girón-Negrón insists) ca. 1440 at the urging of the prior of Navarre, who was close to the crown prince Carlos de Viana. An unusual philosophical work for a Christian author, it does not conform to standard Scholastic doctrine, but is clearly dependent to a very great extent on the Guide for the Perplexed (Moreh nevukhim) of Maimonides. As such, the work, and this detailed analysis of it, is of particular interest to students of Jewish philosophy. At the outset, let it be said that Girón-Negrón has done a thorough and brilliant job in this book, a revision of his doctoral dissertation. He was aided by Jewish advisors in understanding and translating Hebrew texts, but one assumes that, as is the case with many Spanish scholars, his knowledge of Arabic is his own. He also has done an extensive amount of reading in secondary Jewish literature. (There are some errors, nevertheless; e.g., the philosopher Abraham Bivagch, not “Bibago,” did not engage in a “philosophical discussion” with Juan II of Aragón; rather, it was with an unnamed Christian “sage,” and it was a polemical debate, not a philosophical discussion.)

This is a compelling, meticulously argued, subtle, and literate book on an important subject—although the question of what that subject is remains oddly open. Gary Weissman interprets a number of authoritative and popular representations of the Holocaust (principally those by Elie Wiesel, Lawrence Langer, Stephen Spielberg, and Claude Lanzmann) as evidence of their—and presumably their audiences'—post-Holocaust “efforts to experience the Holocaust” and somehow to recapture that horrific reality in feeling. These efforts, Weissman shows in a measured discussion that contrasts with the high-pitched register of much Holocaust writing, encounter what he sees as fundamental difficulties—and not only because of Primo Levi's chilling reminder that if direct experience is a requirement for authenticity, the only true witnesses of the Holocaust are not those who survived but those who died. The difficulties he identifies vary in the works discussed, and his book's concluding chapter, in which he ends up questioning the warrant for any “fantasies of witnessing,” provides only a brief conspectus. He thus leaves his readers to make their own way back to the Holocaust from the post-Holocaust—from which, when the survivors are gone, everyone will set out.

Several years ago I had the good fortune to meet Iris Parush, and I asked how she, a scholar of Hebrew literature known best for her interest in canon formation, turned to the topic of women readers in Eastern Europe. She explained that it was her work on the writer and critic David Frischmann that piqued her interest in the topic. The emotional and contradictory rhetoric of this refined thinker led Parush to embark on an enormous and important research project.

In the Early Modern period, the Jewish people did not develop theater arts comparable to that of other cultures. One reason often given to explain this absence of theatrical tradition is the virulent denunciations of theater by the rabbis, who likened it to idolatry and heresy, and condemned it as being incompatible with monotheism. The biblical injunction (Ps.1:1): “Blessed is the man that sits not in the seat of the scornful” has often been cited as condemning the theater, interpreting the Hebrew word leẓim, not as mocking or impious, but as buffoon or jester, and by extension, actor. Ahuva Belkin attempts to explain this cultural fact while at the same time challenging the argument that Jews did not create any theatrical tradition. From the Middle Ages on, Ashkenazi society produced many forms of popular entertainment, the most accomplished of which was the Purim-shpil. Belkin's work, which makes use of the pioneering studies of Yiddish theater by B. Gorin, Y. Shatsky, I. Shipper, and Ch. Shmeruk, offers much new and original material.

This important study of Franz Rosenzweig is among the first book-length forays into the silence surrounding Martin Heidegger in modern Jewish thought. In seeking to establish an elective affinity between these two thinkers, Gordon subverts the firewall established by Karl Löwith between Rosenzweig's passion for eternity and Heidegger's focus on the pure temporality of human existence (Dasein). In doing so, he bucks the link in contemporary Jewish philosophy between Rosenzweig and Levinas, in which an ethics based on a good beyond Being upends ontology as first philosophy. In Gordon's reading, eternity is to the Jewish people as Dasein is to Being. Jewish existence, understood ontologically, not metaphysically, assumes the uncanny, ungrounded, and self-sustaining character of Heideggerian authenticity. Ontologically radical, eternity thus becomes like time, a this-worldly framework, constituting the ultimate horizon of redemption.

For too long, scholars have denied that “Jewish political thought” constitutes a viable field of study. Without a sovereign state, scholars argue, Jews lacked occasion to debate the questions of power, obligation, and authority that preoccupy Western political theorists. The Jewish Political Tradition offers a devastating rebuttal to this argument, for it reconstructs a continuous and vibrant tradition of Jewish political thought. Edited jointly by Michael Walzer, an eminent political theorist, and Israeli scholars associated with the Shalom Hartman Institute, this ambitious anthology (two of four volumes have now been published) pairs pri-mary texts spanning Jewish history with commentary by contemporary scholars. Uncovering political reflection in genres previously ghettoized as legalistic or theological (e.g. Midrash, responsa, biblical exegesis), the editors open up an exciting field for research. But The Jewish Political Tradition is not merely of scholarly interest. Inviting readers “to join the arguments of the texts, to interpret and evaluate, to revise or reject, the claims made by their authors,” the editors insist that the tradition remains a vital resource for contemporary Jews (8). Indeed, the project makes an audacious (and salutary) contribution to Israeli debates: Against advocates of a state ruled by halakhah, the editors contend that traditional Jewish texts sanction toleration, pluralism, and the secularization of politics.

Marianne R. Sanua offers a balanced examination of a largely unexplored topic, the Jewish Greek subsystem that developed on American college campuses in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and thrived until the closure, merger, or reorientation of many of these organizations in the 1960s and early 1970s. One of the first studies to take the Greek system seriously and recognize it for the social and cultural force it was during its heyday in the early part of the twentieth century, Sanua's book provides readers with rare access to the aspirations, concerns, and ideals of a large segment—estimated between one fourth and one third—of the American Jewish college-going population of this time period.

Israel, and before that the idea of a Jewish state in the traditional homeland, has long captured the imagination of many, if not always most, American Jews. The close connection between Jews in Israel and the United States intensified as the events of the last century unfolded, especially the Holocaust, the struggle for Israel's independence, and then the unending effort to safeguard that independence and ensure security. The 1967 Six-Day War, the run-up to which conjured up images of another calamity, had a profound effect in the Diaspora, driving home the reality of Israel's precarious security and the state's central importance in modern Jewish life. That watershed produced a relatively short-lived period when it seemed that American Jews were united in their support for Israel. But, since 1977, that “sacred unity” has been called into question as sharp divisions have appeared—exacerbated by controversial Israeli government decisions and the pressures of the peace process since 1991.