Abstract: The fifth part of Rabbi Khalifa Ben-Malka's Kaf naki (Clean Hand), Meshovah niẓaḥat (Triumphant Response) portrays a series of interreligious disputations that he conducted with Christian colleagues in Agadir during the first half of the eighteenth century. A study of Meshovah niẓaḥat reveals that, while these debates represent a direct continuation of medieval interreligious polemic, occasionally the traditional arguments took on a new garb—for example, those proofs relying on the era's geographic or scientific discoveries. Ben-Malka was well-versed in the intricacies of theological debate and was familiar with the most sophisticated tools the medieval polemical tradition had to offer, as well as with post-medieval Jewish anti-Christian literature. His writing opens a window onto eighteenth-century Jewish-Moroccan intellectual history while simultaneously raising a number of questions. Further study will be necessary to paint a fuller and more diverse picture.

Abstract: In this article, I reexamine the historiography of the economic restratification of western Jewish communities in the modern period (roughly the eighteenth through twentieth centuries). While I acknowledge the possible influence of values and attitudes rooted in Jewish culture and tradition, I express skepticism about their explanatory power across broad historical eras. I emphasize, rather, the cumulative impact of three broad, interrelated social and political currents: the removal of barriers to Jewish economic activity both before and during the age of emancipation; the concentration of Jews in petty commerce on the eve of modernization and their familiarity with the workings of the marketplace; and the revolution of consumption patterns among broad swathes of the population. I argue that historians have not sufficiently recognized the impact of the latter. The diffusion of the ability and the desire to acquire new consumer goods created unprecedented commercial opportunities of which Jews were well-positioned to take advantage.

Abstract: During the early twentieth century, suicide among Jewish immigrants in the United States was hardly uncommon. The American Yiddish press regularly reported on suicide cases, and Jewish public figures acknowledged the phenomenon's frequency. Uncovering this forgotten chapter in American Jewish history and drawing on immigrants' letters, reports from the Yiddish press, burial records, and autobiographies, this article explores patterns of despair and self-violence among eastern European Jewish immigrants and their reflections in the American Jewish press, specifically in Yiddish. It traces expressions of immigrant suffering and identifies patterns of cultural failure to revisit the emotional and cultural dynamics of east European Jewish immigration to the United States in the age of mass migration. By focusing on marginal cases in American Jewish history, this article highlights a broad cultural spectrum of immigrant experiences.

Abstract: In this article, I examine a curious chapter in the history of modern Jewish culture: the 1914 Berlin meeting of Zionist musician Avraham Zvi Idelsohn with the philosopher Hermann Cohen. A shared belief in the redemptive power of aesthetics and the unique character of Jewish music briefly drew the two men together. Each saw in sound an unparalleled means by which to recalibrate Jewish difference in relation to Western civilization. Each identified music as the key to large-scale cultural and emotional Jewish renewal in the face of European modernity. Yet their ensuing argument revealed not only the political fissures in European Jewry but also the deeper philosophical contradictions within each man's respective theories and, more broadly, the unstable relationship between aesthetics and affect in modern Jewish culture.

Abstract: In this article, I examine a curious chapter in the history of modern Jewish culture: the 1914 Berlin meeting of Zionist musician Avraham Zvi Idelsohn with the philosopher Hermann Cohen. A shared belief in the redemptive power of aesthetics and the unique character of Jewish music briefly drew the two men together. Each saw in sound an unparalleled means by which to recalibrate Jewish difference in relation to Western civilization. Each identified music as the key to large-scale cultural and emotional Jewish renewal in the face of European modernity. Yet their ensuing argument revealed not only the political fissures in European Jewry but also the deeper philosophical contradictions within each man's respective theories and, more broadly, the unstable relationship between aesthetics and affect in modern Jewish culture.

Abstract: During the years of the Nazi regime, well over 1,000 European Jewish youths migrated to the United States in organized unaccompanied child migration schemes. These youths left an abundant, and largely untapped, trove of sources in which they constructed narratives of their lives and emotions to their parents in letters, to their social workers in their various interactions, and to themselves in their diaries. Though refugee youths undeniably felt a range of emotions, in this article I suggest that emotional expression tells us less about the emotional inner lives of youths than the attempt to exert and subvert control and power in a topsy-turvy world. By drawing attention to the language of emotions, their inherent power dynamics, and the potential gulf between emotions and experience, this article opens a conversation about our capacity to document children's agency and to study emotions to explain decision-making and experience.

Abstract: Early twentieth-century Palestine was a noisy place. Urban streets echoed with the cries of hawkers, the songs of nationalists, and the whistles of trains announcing their arrival. Conversations in Arabic, Turkish, Yiddish, English, Ladino, French, Hebrew, and other languages reverberated in the soundscape. In this article, I explore how Palestine's residents made sense of what they heard, focusing on one type of sound in particular: Hebrew-language accents. Building on the work of sensory historians, and focusing on Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews, I investigate the following questions: How did Palestine's residents use accents to mark identity, belonging, and exclusion? What were the stakes of sounding different? And what did it mean to sound "native"?

Abstract: This article draws attention to the distortions and falsehoods that appear in the 1976 Jewish Social Studies article "Political Antisemitism in Minnesota during the Great Depression" by Hyman Berman. It identifies and corrects the many errors on two of its pages. In addition, the role of Berman's article in a student movement at the University of Minnesota to remove names on four campus buildings of administrators who engaged in racist and antisemitic policies is explored. Berman's work was both a catalyst for an exhibition about this period, which inspired the movement, and then when its flagrant errors were brought to light, was used to try to discredit it. The consequences of Berman's misconduct had consequences more than forty years after its publication.

Abstract: During the early twentieth century, suicide among Jewish immigrants in the United States was hardly uncommon. The American Yiddish press regularly reported on suicide cases, and Jewish public figures acknowledged the phenomenon's frequency. Uncovering this forgotten chapter in American Jewish history and drawing on immigrants' letters, reports from the Yiddish press, burial records, and autobiographies, this article explores patterns of despair and self-violence among eastern European Jewish immigrants and their reflections in the American Jewish press, specifically in Yiddish. It traces expressions of immigrant suffering and identifies patterns of cultural failure to revisit the emotional and cultural dynamics of east European Jewish immigration to the United States in the age of mass migration. By focusing on marginal cases in American Jewish history, this article highlights a broad cultural spectrum of immigrant experiences.

Abstract: For two decades, from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s, Israeli soccer players participated in Asian leagues and associations. During this period, they achieved much and celebrated significant athletic victories. But at the same time, they were met with hostility and boycotts and excluded from entire tournaments, until August 1976, when the Asian Football Confederation (AFC) officially expelled the Israeli Football Association (IFA) from its ranks. From the outset, the national team's activities in Asia elicited intense discussions about Israel's membership in the AFC that went far beyond the weighing of practical and athletic issues. By tracing these debates as they raged in the Israeli press, in this article I demonstrate that the question of the IFA's regional affiliation was a platform for deeper deliberations about the country's very place on the Asian continent. The highly ambivalent attitudes that emerged, I argue, reflected deep insecurities about the Jewish state's geo-cultural belonging and self-perception that are best understood against the backdrop of Israeli political realities of the 1960s and 70s and in the context of early twentieth-century debates about the orientation of the Zionist movement.