Jewish Engagement Research Articles

Between Active Matter and Letters: Kabbalah, Natural Knowledge, and Jewish How-To Books in Early Modern East-Central Europe

Abstract This essay focuses on Jewish practical kabbalistic books of recipes that were produced in early modern East-Central Europe. These handwritten sources document the Jewish engagement with practical forms of expertise, which were informed by the theoretical foundations of kabbalistic knowledge. Through two case studies, the article highlights Jewish vernacular ideas about nature and matter, and the techniques used to transform these ideas into practical things during the early modern period. It also explores the phenomenon of recording these ideas and methods in the form of practical kabbalistic books of recipes, which serve as a prime example of practical episteme. In so doing, the article sheds light on the significance of kabbalistic theosophy and practical kabbalistic traditions, particularly those developed in East-Central Europe, in the broader history of Western European knowledge production.

The Jewish Reception of the Ars Notoria: Preliminary Insights into a Recent Discovery

Recent advancements in studying the Ars Notoria, notably through Julian Véronèse’s critical edition, have provided insights into its manuscripts and various interpretations. This progress sets the stage for exploring a less examined area: the Jewish reception of the Ars Notoria, a topic ripe for investigation in the current scholarly landscape. This article explores the Jewish engagement with this Christian text, particularly through its Hebrew translation Melekhet Muskelet, as well as a notable discovery that links the Ars Notoria’s notae to the Kabbalistic ten sefirot. This connection suggests an early Jewish interest in this Christian magical text. The study, using textual and visual analysis, offers insights into the interplay between medieval Jewish Kabbalah and Christian magical texts, underscoring the need to reevaluate their mutual influences during the 13th and 14th centuries.

Religious and Non-religious Forms of Hospitality: Muslim and Jewish Engagement in Welcoming Newcomers in Britain

Religious and Non-religious Forms of Hospitality: Muslim and Jewish Engagement in Welcoming Newcomers in Britain

Social Science and Consensus in Estimates of the US Jewish Population: Response to Sasson and DellaPergola

In response to Isaac Sasson and Sergio DellaPergola’s commentaries on our assessment of the validity of the Pew Research Center's 2020 estimate of 7.5 million US Jewish adults and children (Tighe et al. 2022), we address key points of agreement and contention in the validity of the estimate; in particular, how the Jewish population is identified and defined. We argue that Pew’s definition of the Jewish population is consistent with major studies of American Jewry, from NJPS 1990 to recent local Jewish community studies. Applying a consistent definition that includes the growing group of “Jews of no religion” with one Jewish parent, as Pew Research Center does, allows for a faithful comparison across national and local studies and a more accurate understanding of levels of Jewish engagement and expressions of Jewish identity.

Tongue Ties or Fragments Transformed: Making Sense of Similarities and Differences between the Five Largest English-Speaking Jewish Communities

The subjects of Jewish identity and Jewish communal vitality, and how they may be conceptualized and measured, are the topics of lively debate among scholars of contemporary Jewry (DellaPergola 2015, 2020; Kosmin 2022; Pew Research Center 2021; Phillips 2022). Complicating matters, there appears to be a disconnect between the broadly accepted claim that comparative analysis yields richer understanding of Jewish communities (Cooperman 2016; Weinfeld 2020) and the reality that the preponderance of that research focuses on discrete communities. This paper examines the five largest English-speaking Jewish communities in the diaspora: the United States of America (US) (population 6,000,000–7,600,000), Canada (population 393,500), the United Kingdom (UK) (population 292,000), Australia (population 118,000), and South Africa (population 52,000) (DellaPergola 2022). A comparison of the five communities’ levels of Jewish engagement, and the identification of factors shaping these differences, are the main objectives of this paper. The paper first outlines conceptual and methodological issues involved in the study of contemporary Jewry; hierarchical linear modeling is proposed as the suitable statistical approach for this analysis, and ethnocultural and religious capital are promoted as suitable measures for studying Jewish engagement. Secondly, a contextualizing historical and sociodemographic overview of the five communities is presented, highlighting attributes which the communities have in common, and those which differentiate them. Statistical methods are then utilized to develop measures of Jewish capital, and to identify explanatory factors shaping the differences between these five communities in these measures of Jewish capital. To further the research agenda of communal and transnational research, this paper concludes by identifying questions that are unique to the individual communities studied, with a brief exploration of subjects that Jewish communities often neglect to examine and are encouraged to consider. This paper demonstrates the merits of comparative analysis and highlights practical and conceptual implications for future Jewish communal research.

The Description of Syntax in Medieval Hebrew Grammars

Abstract: The study of Hebrew grammar by medieval Jewish scholars concentrates on phonological and morphological issues with much lower attention paid to Hebrew syntax. While the majority of medieval Hebrew grammars only contain scattered incidental remarks on topics related to the latter, some discuss syntactical themes at greater length. This paper examines the work of the four medieval grammarians who probably paid the most attention to Hebrew syntax – Abū Alfaraj Hārūn, Yonah ibn Janāḥ, Profiat Duran, and Abraham Debalmes. Surveying the relevant passages, it explores the primary issues they address and the insights they offer, hereby revealing with the nature and scope of medieval Jewish engagement with Hebrew syntax.

Unwelcome Guests: A History of Access to American Higher Education by Harold S. Weschler and Steven J. Diner (review)

Reviewed by: Unwelcome Guests: A History of Access to American Higher Education by Harold S. Weschler and Steven J. Diner Shira Kohn (bio) Unwelcome Guests: A History of Access to American Higher Education. By Harold S. Weschler and Steven J. Diner. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021. xi + 211 pp. In 2016, the Pew Research Center reported that, globally, Jews were the most educated religious community when it came to years of formal schooling. Certainly in the United States, American Jews have demonstrated long-term investment in both secular and religious educational institutions, and scholars in fields ranging from history to sociology to religious studies have published extensively on the priority generations of American Jews placed on participating in the country's increasingly diverse educational landscape. This engagement is perhaps both most notable and fraught when it comes to higher education, given that more than half of America's Jews claim undergraduate degrees, double the national average as of the publication of the Pew study. This recent volume by the late Harold Weschler, co-written by his friend and colleague Steven Diner after Weschler's untimely passing in 2017, helps contextualize the Pew results and places American Jewish engagement with higher education within the broader realm of nineteenth and twentieth-century access to the country's colleges and universities, ultimately providing an incredibly useful reference for both scholars and lay readers curious about how Jews came to be visible minorities on campuses and the ways in which their experiences mirrored and diverged from other ethnic and religious minorities at the time. To be clear, this book does not focus on the Jewish admissions experience, but rather on how different ethnic and religious communities in America approached that process and how exclusion and access functioned in shaping subsequent waves of entering classes of undergraduates. Yet it becomes apparent early on that Jews often served as a litmus test for the level of tolerance for ethnic and religious diversity at various types of higher education institutions, whether parochial, private, or public, reflecting administrative debates over whom would be able to best exhibit the academic aptitude and, frequently, presumed social behaviors with which a given school wanted to be associated. Other than the first chapter of the volume, which examines the African American experience in the admissions process throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to underscore the ways in which race functioned as the foundational category for deciding enrollment criteria, Jews appear consistently throughout the study as aspiring applicants to a variety of institutions, from land grant public universities to the country's multiple urban commuter campuses. Because so many institutions rejected Black applicants outright or admitted minimal candidates regardless [End Page 420] of their credentials, Jews became a, if not the, visible minority seeking socioeconomic mobility through undergraduate education in regions throughout the country, though unsurprisingly concentrated in areas and institutions in which the very debates and decisions around access were hotly contested. Weschler and Diner provide invaluable statistics about enrollment throughout the volume, highlighting the degree to which young Jews applied to college in numbers far surpassing their proportional presence in the American population. The book traces, though does not explicitly draw connections to, how intertwined Jewish migration and residency patterns mirrored the proliferation of institutions of higher education. Those spatial realities shaped application volume, albeit not acceptance rates, at private colleges and universities (most prominently Harvard and Columbia) which at times limited Jewish enrollment in the interwar decades of the twentieth century into the postwar era due to concerns over Jewish "over-enrollment" on their campuses. While most other minorities, whether white Catholics or immigrant communities like Puerto Ricans, also faced limitations on their ability to gain acceptance to institutions of higher education, their smaller application numbers seldom drew the eyes and concerns of evaluators in ways that the growing numbers of Jewish students did. In a welcome but too brief chapter on the student experience for those fortunate enough to gain admission to higher education, the authors explore how Jews and other minorities experienced continued discrimination in areas such as collegiate athletics, residence halls, and social outlets like Greek life. These expressions of prejudice continue to stem from...

An Invitation to Belong: Challenging the Systemic Exclusion of Palestinians as Present Absentees

This essay takes as its starting place the “present absentee” status of Palestinians in U.S. and Jewish discourse and engagement with Israel/Palestine. Ethnographic fieldwork in Jewish American communities demonstrates practices that reiterate a dynamic of Jewish belonging against the presence of Palestinian absence. The essay explores different initiatives to challenge this systemic exclusion of Palestinians, including public programs that amplify Palestinian voices and normalize hearing Palestinians as experts in their own lives and an experimental study group with Jewish American leaders that centers Palestinian perspectives in an effort to cultivate radical empathy. Insights gained in these initiatives point to the importance of articulating fuller visions of community and belonging in engagement with Israel/Palestine.

The Lulav: Early Modern Polemical Ethnographies and the Art of Fencing

In recent years, scholars have devoted a great deal of attention to the history of scholarship in general and, more specifically, to the emergence of critical historical and anthropological literature from and within ecclesiastical scholarship. However, few studies have discussed the Jewish figures who took part in this process. This paper analyzes the role played by historiographical and ethnographical writing in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Italian Jewish–Christian polemics. Tracing various Christian polemical ethnographical depictions of the Jewish rite of shaking the lulav (sacramental palm leaves used by Jews during the festival of Sukkot), it discusses the variety of ways in which Jewish scholars responded to these depictions or circumvented them. These responses reflect the Jewish scholars’ familiarity with prevailing contemporary scholarship and the key role of translation and cultural transfers in their own attempts to create parallel works. Furthermore, this paper presents new Jewish polemical manuscript material within the relevant contexts, examines Jewish attempts to compose polemical and apologetic ethnographies, and argues that Jewish engagement with critical scholarship began earlier than scholars of this period usually suggest

Poetry, satire, and self in the post-constitutional Iranian-Jewish periodical Ha-Hayyim

ABSTRACT The Iranian-Jewish newspaper Ha-Hayyim represented a high point of Jewish engagement with the wider public sphere in the late Qajar period. Its modernizing agenda saw it and its editor Shemuel Hayyim become subjects of controversy as Jews debated their political future in Iran. This article examines four poems featured in Ha-Hayyim as a means of illuminating a period of Jewish literary creativity mostly neglected by scholarship. The paper explores the poems as literary and historical texts and outlines the writers’ employment of modern literary techniques, comparing them with contemporary Iranian writing in Persian and Hebrew. Jewish literary engagement with Persian literature represents an important linguistic and political self-assertion in a dynamic cultural environment. The article pursues the poems’ overlapping treatment of Zionism and constitutionalism, examining how the two ideologies informed each other, and argues for a literary optic to the well-documented antagonism between Hayyim and his political rivals.

The Quest for the “Charity Dish”: Interpretation in the Hebrew Arthurian Translation Melekh Artus (1279, Northern Italy)

Abstract This article analyzes Melekh Artus (King Arthur), a unique Hebrew translation of sections from the old French prose Merlin and mort Artu in the Lancelot-Grail cycle. Written in a single fragment from 1279 in northern Italy, this translation proves close Jewish engagement with old French texts. Through satirical biblical references and subtle critique of his material, the author reframes the Arthurian narrative to promote universal morals. Rather than Judaize the Arthurian canon and its Christian characters, he validates them as viable models for his Jewish audience.

How Race Travels: Navigating Global Blackness in J. Ida Jiggetts’s Study of Afro-Asian Israeli Jewry

This article explores the intellectual history of Black scholar (John) Ida Jiggetts in her study of Yemenite Jewish integration efforts in Israel in the 1950s. I begin with a critical look into the scholarship that heavily influenced her: Zionist ethnography and anthropology. Jewish engagement in these fields, then dominated by race scientists, constructed Afro-Asian Jewry as a Black foil meant to highlight the normative whiteness of European Jews. The article then moves on to Jiggetts’s travel memoir, Israel to Me, in which she details her observations on intra-Jewish race relations, how she struggled to navigate race in Hebrew, and how her experiences in Israel pushed her to reflect on her own perceptions of race. Enacting a form of racial diplomacy, Jiggetts shaped Black American perspectives on Israel in the twentieth century as one Black community looked to another as a means of understanding the global color line. Navigating shifting interpellations of her own Blackness while observing the racialization of Mizrahi Israelis, her reflections on race in Israel shed light on the transnational process of racecraft for those who share the experience of the color line.

Grammars of Classical Arabic in Judaeo-Arabic

Abstract This article presents an overview of medieval Classical Arabic grammars written in Judaeo-Arabic that are preserved in the Cairo Genizah and the Firkovich Collections. Unlike Jewish grammarians’ application of the Arabic theoretical model to describing Biblical Hebrew, Arabic grammars transliterated into Hebrew characters bear clear evidence of Jewish engagement with the Arabic grammatical tradition for its own sake. In addition, such manuscripts furnish new material on the history of the Arabic grammatical tradition by preserving otherwise unknown texts. The article discusses individual grammars of Classical Arabic in Judaeo-Arabic and tries to answer more general questions on this little known area of Jewish intellectual activity. An analysis of the corpus suggests that Jews who copied and used these texts were less interested in the intricacies of abstract theory than in attaining a solid knowledge of Classical Arabic. Court scribes appear to have been among those interested in the study of Classical Arabic grammar.

Ambivalent Appropriation: Engagement with Apollo in Jewish and Christian Texts and Material Culture

This article considers ancient Jewish and Christian engagement with Apollo traditions in texts and material objects from the second century BCE to the sixth century CE. I track a shared strategy in which both Jews and Christians adopt imagery or tropes that surround Apollo, but either (1) reassign them to their god or Jesus, or (2) relocate them within spaces devoted to the worship of their god. In light of Roman imperial use of Apollo traditions, I draw on postcolonial theory to suggest that we might label this recurrent transformative strategy “ambivalent appropriation.” Persistent ambivalent appropriation of Apollo traditions by ancient Jews and Christians counters ancient narratives about Apollo’s prophecy at Delphi declining and/or ceasing, thereby challenging any notion of a twilight for Delphic prophecy.

Retilting the Playing Field: Emerging Assumptions About How to Engage Jewish Teens Today

ABSTRACT This paper is a first effort to systematically document programmatic interventions in five of the ten communities participating in The Jewish Teen Education & Engagement Funder Collaborative, a joint philanthropic effort launched in 2013. The paper identifies patterns and trends reflected in the programmatic choices made by each community. It then makes explicit five assumptions that underpin these choices and reflects on what they imply for further teen education and engagement efforts. These assumptions, as elaborated in the paper, are identified as: (1) “every body counts;” (2) “breaking down the silos;” (3) “integrating curation and innovation;” (4) “tapping Israel;” and (5) “searching for blue ocean.”

Babies and Bathwater

Babies and Bathwater Harriet Hartman (bio) Let me begin by expressing my admiration for the passion and coherence with which Berman, Rosenblatt, and Stahl present their argument, and how they have addressed many of the criticisms of the first publication of this argument, to strengthen its impact even more.1 I do take issue with some of the steps and assumptions in the argument, as I will detail below. At the same time, I do believe that, in the end, I agree with many of the conclusions that must be drawn from its implications and their implicit call to action. Let me begin with some disclaimers. I am a woman. Not only that, but I am a woman who, both in collaboration with and independently of my husband, Moshe Hartman, z"l, has engaged in the same kind of fertility and intermarriage quantitative analyses of the NJPS and the ensuing PEW surveys that Berman, Rosenblatt, and Stahl critique.2 In footnote thirty-four of their current article, Berman, Rosenblatt, and Stahl mention our work, perhaps with some puzzlement and uncertainty about what to conclude from the fact that our analysis was not tied to the communal policy discourses directly. While both my husband and I were very concerned about Jewish continuity broadly (and not only specifically in terms of fertility and intermarriage implications—but not excluding them either), we saw our roles as social scientists to produce the knowledge and let someone else use it as they saw fit. Parenthetically, that kept some "shalom bayit" (household peace) since I doubt that the two of us would have agreed on the same policy recommendations, coming as we did from different religious, national, and gendered backgrounds. So why do I bring it up now? Because I also have come to understand how for all of us, our personal and professional narratives are intertwined, and that it behooves us to weigh that interaction when [End Page 235] we interpret research directions, interpretations, and conclusions. I fully embraced Debra Kaufman's guest-edited special issue of Contemporary Jewry, "Demographers on Demography: The Place of Narrative in Jewish Identity Research"3 on the role of narrative in demography. And that is how I understood Lila Corwin Berman's Speaking of Jews, as well both the current and the earlier essay by Berman, Rosenblatt, and Stahl referred to above.4 All science is driven by some agenda, and the more we are aware of it, the better we are able to fill in the broader picture with either more appropriate data or more appropriate interpretations. So, I applaud this exposé. But I am also concerned about where it's going. I am concerned because it threatens to throw out the baby with the bathwater, so to speak (and I'm sorry if the metaphor makes someone cringe, but it's apt). I agree that fertility and intermarriage should not constitute the sole or overriding communal approaches to the problematic of Jewish continuity, nor the sole endeavors of social science as it seeks to reveal the truth of a thriving community. But population size is related to fertility, and population vitality is related to population size, as well as morbidity and mortality. Population dynamics contribute to the numbers, energy, and resources of a population and need to be given due attention. We do need data, and careful interpretation of it, to reveal how intermarriage is related to traditional—and non-traditional—practices of Judaism, as well as how this relationship is changing over time.5 The national surveys have received appropriate criticism for adhering too closely to traditional religious measures of Jewish engagement (such as keeping kosher, lighting Shabbat candles, fasting on Yom Kippur); we also have data that incorporates less traditional measures, but maybe not enough of it, both qualitatively and quantitatively. And here the bias toward quantitative measures comes under appropriate fire. But it isn't a bias borne out by the wealth of social science published in Contemporary Jewry, the primary venue for scholarly publications in the social science of Jewry, as I discuss below. [End Page 236] Some of you may be aware that Contemporary Jewry responded to the revelations of Steven M...

Boomers, Millennials—Gen Xers!—and Post-nostalgic American Judaism: A Response to Arnold Eisen’s Sklare Address

In Rethinking Modern Judaism, Arnold Eisen applied five categories of analysis to account for patterns of Jewish observance and non-observance over two centuries. This response applies the same categories to address issues raised in Eisen’s Sklare Award address regarding the Jewish practices of American Jewish millennials. It evaluates the continued validity of Eisen’s categories of analysis, arguing that four of the five still hold. As for the fifth, nostalgia, it suggests that the power of nostalgia to compel American Jewish engagement in Jewish practice may be waning. This response introduces the notion of “post-nostalgic American Judaism,” identifies some of its sources, and frames questions about its possible consequences.

Tim Grady. A Deadly Legacy: German Jews and the Great War. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017. 304 pp.

Reviewed by: A Deadly Legacy: German Jews and the Great War by Tim Grady Jessica Cooperman Tim Grady. A Deadly Legacy: German Jews and the Great War. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017. 304 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009419000266 In A Deadly Legacy: German Jews and the Great War, Tim Grady offers a powerful study of the lives of German Jews during the First World War and raises important questions about how scholars situate the actions and attitudes of members of minority populations within larger national contexts. Grady places the experiences of German Jewish soldiers and citizens firmly within the [End Page 232] context of German culture, and he reaches conclusions that are both compelling and unsettling. Looking backward through the lens of the Holocaust, we may be most inclined to see the ways that the violence and destruction of the First World War led to the rise of Nazism and the total exclusion of Jews from German society. Grady demonstrates, however, that during World War I German Jews were active participants in the wartime culture that ultimately turned against them. They were, Grady argues, "co-constitutive" in shaping German wartime culture. Their Jewishness may have colored some of their experiences, and ultimately determined their fate in Germany, but Grady convincingly shows that it did not overshadow their deeply held commitments to kaiser and country, or to the wartime cultural norms that Jews and other Germans helped to construct during World War I. Grady identifies seven main aspects of the German war effort: war enthusiasm, total war, a culture of destruction, cases made for annexation and territorial expansion, the denigration of both internal and external minorities, divisions at home and among the troops, and the infamous "stab in the back" myth as means of explaining Germany's seemingly inexplicable defeat. Grady explores Jewish engagement with each of these aspects of wartime German culture, persuasively describing how German Jews bought into both the promise of 1914 and the violent and destructive path on which World War I set their country. In chapter 1, Grady explores the forces that led Germany to enter the war and describes the somewhat tenuous position of Jews in prewar German society, where they were enfranchised citizens but still on the margins of many German institutions, particularly the military. For all Germans, but perhaps especially for Jews, the war seemed to offer a chance to create a stronger and more united national future. Following Kaiser Wilhelm II's announcement of a "civic truce," in which differences of religion and political conviction would be set aside so that the country could unite in national defense, the vast majority of German Jews fully embraced the war. They did so, Grady argues, both as Germans supporting their country and as Jews imagining that this civic truce would establish their value and valor as German citizens and soldiers while simultaneously positioning them as the liberators of east European Jews oppressed by the antisemitic regime of the Russian tsar. The first weeks of the war did not disappoint, as Grady shows in chapter 2. Jews and other Germans embraced war enthusiasm and rushed to volunteer for military service in order to hasten Germany's triumph and the establishment of a new German-controlled Mitteleuropa. Chapters 3 through 6 explore different aspects of the culture of total war, German superiority, and destruction that took hold as the war ground on in 1915 and 1916. In each of these chapters, Grady focuses on the roles that both average and influential German Jews played in shaping this culture. In highlighting the work done by Jewish shipping magnate Albert Ballin, industrialist Walther Rathenau, and others to bring food production, industry, labor, and chemical research into the service of an ever more deadly war effort; the promotion of German annexation and colonization projects in eastern Europe; the exploitation of defeated civilian populations as laborers; the celebration of death and brutality; suspicion of domestic and foreign Others; and highly [End Page 233] racialized depictions of prisoners of war, Grady makes it clear that Jews were active participants in all aspects of Germany's war. At times, as when the Jewish Committee for the East proposed that Yiddish...

Jews in the Americas, 1776–1826

Jews in the Americas, 1776–1826

A Deadly Legacy: German Jews and the Great War by Tim Grady

Reviewed by: A Deadly Legacy: German Jews and the Great War by Tim Grady Jessica Cooperman Tim Grady. A Deadly Legacy: German Jews and the Great War. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017. 304 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009419000266 In A Deadly Legacy: German Jews and the Great War, Tim Grady offers a powerful study of the lives of German Jews during the First World War and raises important questions about how scholars situate the actions and attitudes of members of minority populations within larger national contexts. Grady places the experiences of German Jewish soldiers and citizens firmly within the [End Page 232] context of German culture, and he reaches conclusions that are both compelling and unsettling. Looking backward through the lens of the Holocaust, we may be most inclined to see the ways that the violence and destruction of the First World War led to the rise of Nazism and the total exclusion of Jews from German society. Grady demonstrates, however, that during World War I German Jews were active participants in the wartime culture that ultimately turned against them. They were, Grady argues, "co-constitutive" in shaping German wartime culture. Their Jewishness may have colored some of their experiences, and ultimately determined their fate in Germany, but Grady convincingly shows that it did not overshadow their deeply held commitments to kaiser and country, or to the wartime cultural norms that Jews and other Germans helped to construct during World War I. Grady identifies seven main aspects of the German war effort: war enthusiasm, total war, a culture of destruction, cases made for annexation and territorial expansion, the denigration of both internal and external minorities, divisions at home and among the troops, and the infamous "stab in the back" myth as means of explaining Germany's seemingly inexplicable defeat. Grady explores Jewish engagement with each of these aspects of wartime German culture, persuasively describing how German Jews bought into both the promise of 1914 and the violent and destructive path on which World War I set their country. In chapter 1, Grady explores the forces that led Germany to enter the war and describes the somewhat tenuous position of Jews in prewar German society, where they were enfranchised citizens but still on the margins of many German institutions, particularly the military. For all Germans, but perhaps especially for Jews, the war seemed to offer a chance to create a stronger and more united national future. Following Kaiser Wilhelm II's announcement of a "civic truce," in which differences of religion and political conviction would be set aside so that the country could unite in national defense, the vast majority of German Jews fully embraced the war. They did so, Grady argues, both as Germans supporting their country and as Jews imagining that this civic truce would establish their value and valor as German citizens and soldiers while simultaneously positioning them as the liberators of east European Jews oppressed by the antisemitic regime of the Russian tsar. The first weeks of the war did not disappoint, as Grady shows in chapter 2. Jews and other Germans embraced war enthusiasm and rushed to volunteer for military service in order to hasten Germany's triumph and the establishment of a new German-controlled Mitteleuropa. Chapters 3 through 6 explore different aspects of the culture of total war, German superiority, and destruction that took hold as the war ground on in 1915 and 1916. In each of these chapters, Grady focuses on the roles that both average and influential German Jews played in shaping this culture. In highlighting the work done by Jewish shipping magnate Albert Ballin, industrialist Walther Rathenau, and others to bring food production, industry, labor, and chemical research into the service of an ever more deadly war effort; the promotion of German annexation and colonization projects in eastern Europe; the exploitation of defeated civilian populations as laborers; the celebration of death and brutality; suspicion of domestic and foreign Others; and highly [End Page 233] racialized depictions of prisoners of war, Grady makes it clear that Jews were active participants in all aspects of Germany's war. At times, as when the Jewish Committee for the East proposed that Yiddish...