Ordinary Jews Research Articles

Wolf Gruner, Resisters. How Ordinary Jews Fought Persecution in Hitler’s Germany. London, Yale University Press 2023

Wolf Gruner, Resisters. How Ordinary Jews Fought Persecution in Hitler’s Germany. London, Yale University Press 2023

The Hebrew Bible in Ancient Jewish Education

After the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple and the end of the sacrificial service in 70 CE rabbis made Torah study and observance the basis of Jewish identity. Since no organised Jewish school system existed in Roman Palestine, only a very small proportion of the mostly male Jewish population would have been able to read, and few people had access to Torah scrolls. Rabbinic Torah experts set themselves up as intermediaries and advisers who helped ordinary people solve their daily life problems. In late antiquity, when urban rabbis served as role models and synagogues required Torah readers, Torah-reading skills may have slightly increased. At that time, rabbis’ Scripture-based public sermons and the depiction of biblical scenes on synagogue mosaic floors familiarised ordinary Jews, including women, with biblical rules and narratives. Rabbinic study and discussion would have largely depended on memorization of the biblical text rather than access to written scrolls. This phenomenon led to a creative use of the Bible, which enabled innovation, change, and adaptation to new circumstances.

Privacy, Literacy, and Gender in Early Modern Jewish Letters from Prague (1619)

How private were Jewish letters in the early modern period? This article discusses Jewish epistolary culture and notions of privacy by examining an extraordinary cache of Jewish letters that were mostly written on a single day— 22 November 1619—in a single city, Prague, and sent to a single destination, Vienna. The letters never arrived and ended up in the archives where they were preserved for posterity. These letters allow us a glimpse into the lives of ordinary Jews in politically tumultuous times in which privacy and confidentiality could never be taken for granted. This article pays particular attention to gendered communication and privacy. It has been argued that in epistolary culture women are afforded a voice and speak for themselves. The evidence suggests that collaborative forms of writing that involved more than one writer were still common in early seventeenth-century Jewish correspondence, indicating zones of “privileged confidentiality” within larger family networks.

Ghost Citizens: Jewish Return to a Postwar City [Dom, którego nie było: powroty ocalałych do powojennego miasta

Ghost Citizens: Jewish Return to a Postwar City [Dom, którego nie było: powroty ocalałych do powojennego miasta

РАУЛЬ ВАЛЛЕНБЕРГ – РЯТІВНИК ЄВРЕЇВ БУДАПЕШТУ В РОКИ ГОЛОКОСТУ

The article is devoted to the rescue of Hungarian Jews who were doomed to deportation and extermination during the Nazi occupation of the country. The methodology is based on the use of interdisciplinary approaches at the intersection of world history, psychology, ethics, as well as theoretical and conceptual developments of researchers of Raoul Wallenberg’s biography. The scientific novelty of the article lies in the fact that for the first time in Ukrainian historiography, the figure of Raoul Wallenberg is considered as the savior of Hungarian Jewry. During the Nazi occupation of Hungary, two ghettos were created in Budapest for privileged and ordinary Jews. In the «International Ghetto» lived those persons who were under the protection of diplomatic missions of neutral countries. The rest of the Jews were gathered in the «Great Ghetto». The saving mission of R. Wallenberg consisted in the fact that he issued Swedish documents and transferred people to the «International Ghetto», where access to the Nazis and Nilashists was prohibited. During the «death marches» organized by A. Eichmann’s team, the Swedish diplomat led out of the columns and removed from the trains those Jews who received «protective documents» (passports, certificates), and also wrote down the names of those who asked for help and rescue. In total, R. Wallenberg managed to issue 4,500 «protection documents» and save Jews from both ghettos, i.e. more than 100,000 people, from deportation. The story of a man who gave up his own comfort and well-being in order to save unfamiliar Hungarian Jews rightfully remains indicative for the current generation, as it proves that humanity, compassion, and helping the needy do not have a statute of limitations, but can manifest themselves unexpectedly, unexpectedly, not only for those around them, but also for himself. For Wallenberg, these qualities became defining, because he spared no effort, no time, no money to protect people. He used every opportunity to save those condemned to deportation and death. The young man did not leave Budapest during the siege of Soviet troops and stayed in the city until the last. After all, he understood his rescue mission and tried to save the lives of as many Jews as possible.

Karel van der Toorn. Becoming Diaspora Jews: Behind the Story of Elephantine

Karel van der Toorn. <i>Becoming Diaspora Jews: Behind the Story of Elephantine</i>

Ordinary Jews: Choice and Survival during the Holocaust

Ordinary Jews: Choice and Survival during the Holocaust

Evgeny Finkel, Ordinary Jews. Choice and Survival During the Holocaust

Evgeny Finkel, Ordinary Jews. Choice and Survival During the Holocaust

Karen B. Stern. Writing on the Wall: Graffiti and the Forgotten Jews of Antiquity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018. 312 pp.

Reviewed by: Writing on the Wall: Graffiti and the Forgotten Jews of Antiquity by Karen B. Stern Mika Ahuvia Karen B. Stern. Writing on the Wall: Graffiti and the Forgotten Jews of Antiquity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018. 312 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009419000114 Karen Stern opens a window onto the life of ordinary Jews in the late antique Mediterranean world using an abundant and neglected corpus: graffiti written in Jewish dialects or accompanied by Jewish symbols. Stern demonstrates how [End Page 199] Jews participated in graffiti making in a variety of regions, in an array of public and private places that will dazzle those scholars used to literary sources, which are abstracted from the grittiness of daily life. Stern highlights that surviving legal writings tend to reify differences between Jews, Christians, and others, while graffiti shows Jews sharing worship practices, sporting fandom, and other ritual behavior with inhabitants all over the Mediterranean world. At the same time, as Stern often acknowledges, analyzing the abundance of extant ancient graffiti is rendered difficult by the brevity of graffiti themselves and the fact that ancient sources rarely comment on graffiti. Stern organizes her research thematically into three chapters: the graffiti of devotional spaces, mortuary graffiti, and graffiti in civic spaces. Each of her chapters lays out the evidence with minimal speculation on her part, forcing the reader to try and make sense of the data on their own before she offers her measured and limited hypotheses about the meaning of the extant graffiti at the end of each chapter. In her introduction, Stern guides readers to relinquish their modern understanding of graffiti as a deviant practice, noting that for the ancients it was considered "desirable, even normal" to inscribe one's name on the wall of a synagogue, for example (1). She acknowledges that graffiti is not an emic term but defines graffiti as "always of unofficial character" (quoting Angelos Chaniotis) and finds the capaciousness of this category useful for the many kinds of evidence it amasses for the study of ancient Jewish life (15). Stern places her work in the intellectual trajectory of French theorist Michel de Certeau and German microhistorians. Her intervention is to challenge the "the hegemony of rabbinical texts" for the interpretation of Jewish life; she upholds an approach that centers the archaeological evidence of graffiti in situ "and uses local and regional analogues (often produced by non-Jews) to interpret them—outside of literary texts and outside of twenty-first-century expectations" (8). Rather than reading the rabbis into graffiti, she argues that the data of graffiti have something important to teach us about the rabbis themselves as well as about nonrabbinic Jews. Her first chapter, "Carving Devotion," examines graffiti as a mode of prayer in synagogues, in sacred spaces of other religious communities, at pilgrimage sites, and in open outdoor shrines. As she points out, graffiti reveals "that ancient Jews prayed in a variety of built and natural environments," sometimes alongside other Jews and sometimes alongside others (39). Often the graffiti of devotion, as she terms it, consists only of "I am" and people's names or other very brief statements. She suggests, following Joseph Naveh, that these signature graffiti are "a type of petition, permanently documented in plaster or stone" (51). Literate people encountering this graffiti would read it aloud, reviving the petition, somewhat in the way that we cannot help but read signs or graffiti we encounter as we walk through the world. The relationship between composers of graffiti and later reciters brings to my mind the statement attributed to Rabbi Shimon bar Yoḥai: "When a student quotes his teacher in this world his lips move in the grave" (B. Yevamot 97a). If the sages were rabbinizing a common idea, it would bear out Stern's assertion that nonrabbinic evidence can illuminate rabbinic texts. [End Page 200] In the chapter on mortuary graffiti, Stern revisits the cemetery of Beth-Sheʿarim. This chapter primarily focuses on a couple of short graffiti texts and the many images found inscribed on the walls there. Many graffiti images are challenging to make sense of: ships, representations of human figures, human figures with weapons, abecedaries, animals...

Ordinary Jews: Choice and Survival during the HolocaustEvgeny Finkel

Ordinary Jews: Choice and Survival during the HolocaustEvgeny Finkel

Ethan B. Katz. The Burdens of Brotherhood: Jews and Muslims from North Africa to France.

Ethan B. Katz’s excellent, meticulously researched monograph The Burdens of Brotherhood: Jews and Muslims from North Africa to France traces the political, social, and cultural relationships between Jews and Muslims in France—as a trans-Mediterranean space—from World War I through the early decades of the twenty-first century. It is an intricate analysis of the way the ebb and flow of these relationships shaped the contradictions and lost and attained potential of ethnic harmony and national allegiance. Katz eschews the binary analyses of Muslim versus Jew, racist versus nonracist, colonial versus anticolonial, dear to some scholars, to demonstrate that at any given moment in the chronological trajectory, equating the political, cultural, and social complexity of Jewish-Muslim relations to such binaries is not just reductionist, it is analytically unsophisticated. The book is divided into seven chapters, arranged more or less chronologically, each dealing with a defining moment in the Muslim-Jewish relationship. Katz’s innovation is to examine the lived interactions of ordinary Jews and Muslims, which, he argues, have been lost in the currents of contemporary events. The overarching disruptions that have shaped the lives of these ordinary players and reset their relationships were largely the result of four wars: the two world wars, the Algerian War of Independence, and the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. As Katz points out, French history has inscribed Jews into the republic and Muslims into the empire, but by examining the intricate associations of Jews with (and in) the colonies, Katz suggests that imperial projects were as important in shaping the identities of French Jews as was the republic (8). By examining separate urban spaces, namely Paris, Marseille, and Strasbourg, he shows that the local politics and demographic and geographic differences have created disparities in the Jewish-Muslim relations of each city.

Analyzing Jewish Behavior during the Holocaust

Analyzing Jewish Behavior during the Holocaust David Engel (bio) Evgeny Finkel’s Ordinary Jews is an important book for two reasons. First, it offers one of the few sustained efforts to analyze how Jews in different places behaved in response to Nazi rule instead of simply describing how they experienced it. Most Jewish-centered narratives about the Holocaust have been descriptive and evocative in nature: they have concentrated upon “giving voice” to victims’ perceptions, to elucidating their plight, or to tracing the evolution of their behavior. Ordinary Jews does these things, to be sure, but it also notices aggregate patterns of behavior that varied from community to community, and it tries to account for them using methods and insights from the social sciences. Among other things, the book’s analytical thrust contributes to the study of one of the central problems with which scholars of the Holocaust are grappling today: explaining the wide variation in outcomes of the final solution over space. This is the second reason why Ordinary Jews is an important book. By identifying collective patterns of Jewish behavior that also vary over space, it invites the question of the extent to which those patterns may have affected differences in survival rates from place to place. Debates about that question—which can also be stated as, “To what extent did Jews under Nazi rule affect their personal and collective fates by their own actions?”—have a long history, but until now they have not been informed by much systematic analysis of available data. The author appears to regard it as axiomatic that “the actions of people targeted by mass murder impact the outcomes of the violence.”1 The findings presented in Ordinary Jews do not demonstrate that proposition conclusively. Nevertheless, those findings do suggest that an attempt to map more fully the two sets of variations and to [End Page 183] explore possible correlations between them may eventually help scholars understand how victim behavior and outcomes are related. For example, in Kraków in May 1945, 4,262 Jewish survivors registered with the provincial office of the Central Committee of Jews in Poland.2 That number amounted to about 9 percent of the city’s Jewish population according to the 1921 census.3 By contrast, in the same month only 189 Jewish survivors registered in Białystok, or less than half of 1 percent of the 1921 Jewish population.4 Of course, those figures do not necessarily show that Jews in Kraków were 18 times more likely to survive than were Jews in Białystok. But they do call for explanation, and the possibility that the differences in the distribution of Jewish survival strategies between the two cities that the author has noted contributed in some measure to the difference between them surely ought to be considered in the effort to find one. We are, however, still a long way from being able to make any generalizations in the matter, or even to offer any plausible hypotheses. For one thing, it is far from obvious that the particular combination of significantly greater compliance, marginally greater resistance, and significantly lower evasion in Białystok than in Kraków that the author has highlighted should have manifested itself in any difference in survival rate. We can easily think of numerous other factors that also merit consideration. Some have less to do with the German pursuit of the final solution than with the postwar environment. But other factors are anchored squarely in the conditions of Nazi rule, including the timing of ghetto establishment and liquidation in relation to the overall progress of the war effort; the timing and pace of Aktionen; the identity of the various local Nazi authorities and the relations between them; the strategic importance the Germans attached to particular locations; the proximity of labor camps; the availability of food; and the sources of supply. Still others were functions of the topography of the surrounding region, the density of nearby village settlement, or proximity to political borders. And others involved not the behavior of Jews under Nazi impact but demographic, socioeconomic, and historical conditions independent of any the Nazis imposed: age distribution (which [End Page 184] helped determine...

Questions of Choice: The Soviet Case and the Absence of Gender Identity in &lt;em&gt;Ordinary Jews&lt;/em&gt;

Questions of Choice: The Soviet Case and the Absence of Gender Identity in &lt;em&gt;Ordinary Jews&lt;/em&gt;

Choice and Survival Across Approaches and Disciplines

Choice and Survival Across Approaches and Disciplines Evgeny Finkel (bio) Ordinary Jews: Choice and Survival during the Holocaust builds upon the insights, theories, and approaches of social sciences, history, and Jewish studies to analyze how Jews chose their survival strategies during the Holocaust. More specifically, the book tries to understand what caused the different patterns of behavior adopted by the Holocaust’s Jewish victims in three important, but understudied communities—Minsk (USSR), Kraków (Poland), and Białystok (Poland 1922–1939, USSR 1939–1941). The book’s main argument is that the survival strategies adopted by the Jews in these three ghettos were shaped by the political regimes under which the Jews lived before the Holocaust. To demonstrate the impact of pre-Holocaust regimes, the book centers on the impact of different state policies that either promoted or discouraged the Jews’ integration into the non-Jewish society as well as patterns of state repression. I am very grateful to the participants of this book forum for their thoughtful reviews and excellent comments. Representing different disciplines and research agendas, the reviewers highlighted various strengths and weaknesses of the book. The main goal of Ordinary Jews was to initiate an analytically driven conversation about the overlooked topic of Jewish behavior during the Holocaust, and I could not have hoped for better interlocutors. Unfortunately, in this short response I am unable to fully address all the points raised by the reviewers. Instead, I will discuss a number of key concerns and questions. DID CHOICE AFFECT SURVIVAL? Several reviewers, most notably David Engel, Jeffrey Kopstein, Andrew Sloin, and Samuel Kassow, raise an important question about the [End Page 239] relationship between choice and survival. “Choice and Survival during the Holocaust” is the book’s subtitle, but did different behavioral strategies affect survival rates? “After all, no matter what [the Jews] did, the vast majority died,” notes Kopstein. Sloin puts things even more pointedly by asking “at what point, in the face of absolutely systemic and totalizing violence, choice becomes conflated with chance”? Does focusing on the victims’ choices and behavioral strategies help us to better understand not only how the Holocaust unfolded, but also who was more likely to survive? I believe that the answer to this question is a qualified “yes.” A more fruitful approach to thinking about the impact of choice and behavior on survival is not to ask which strategy made survival more likely, but rather, which strategy made death even slightly less certain? Indeed, no matter what the Jews in the ghettos I studied did, the vast majority died. Yet some strategies, most notably compliance, made death not simply a very likely, but virtually an inevitable outcome. Cooperation with the Germans and serving in public roles, such as on Jewish Councils, also made survival extremely unlikely. Evasion, on the other hand, gave many Jews at least some chance to live to fight another day. This chance was not high as the deck was heavily stacked against survival, but it was nonetheless higher than zero. Accidentally, the same was true for resistance. The main reason for why we know so much about various Jewish resistance groups is because many resisters did survive to tell their stories. When discussing Jewish survival rates in Nazi-occupied Poland and the USSR, what we should focus on are odds ratios, not absolute numbers. When compared to zero or close to zero odds of survival, even a 1 percent chance is a significant improvement. Can these odds be calculated to prove once and for all that Jewish strategies and behaviors do help to explain not only the process of genocide, but also outcomes? Unfortunately, not with the data we currently have and not in this particular empirical context. This kind of quantitative approach might be theoretically possible for smaller units, such as small towns or families, not middle-sized ghettos like the ones I study. Yet even if the data were available, chance and luck would heavily bias any potential conclusions a scholar might reach. Furthermore, as David [End Page 240] Engel rightly points out, the strategies I put forward in the book are “rather blunt instrument[s] for analysis.” To be analytically useful for fine...

Questions of Choice: The Soviet Case and the Absence of Gender Identity in Ordinary Jews

Questions of Choice: The Soviet Case and the Absence of Gender Identity in Ordinary Jews

At the Intersection of Political Science and Social History

At the Intersection of Political Science and Social History Anna Cichopek-Gajraj (bio) In his important book Ordinary Jews: Choice and Survival during the Holocaust, Evgeny Finkel shifts the analytical focus from the behavior of perpetrators to that of their victims. He asks why did “individual Jews choose particular behavioral strategies, and why does the distribution of these strategies vary across localities?”1 Building on existing historiography, Finkel proposes the following revised typology of victim strategies: (a) cooperation and collaboration, (b) coping and compliance, (c) evasion, and (d) resistance. He then uses nearly 500 Holocaust survivor testimonies to test this typology across three ghettos in Minsk, Białystok, and Kraków. He arrives at several important conclusions. He argues that the factors that shaped the Jewish victims’ choices were “the patterns and contents of their political activism, the type and intensity of the repression they experienced, the degree of their integration into non-Jewish society, and the ethnic composition of their social networks.”2 More specifically, “Jews who were politically active before World War II were substantially more likely to choose cooperation, public collaboration, or resistance than those who were not.”3 He further shows that “compliance was the strategy of a tiny minority; the majority’s choices fell between coping and evasion. … [P]eople who were more integrated into non-Jewish society were more likely to choose evasion. Those who occupied a predominantly Jewish social milieu and had Jewish support networks were more likely to opt for coping.”4 More broadly, Finkel argues that Jewish behavior was primarily shaped by one crucial variable: “pre-Holocaust political regimes,” especially “states’ policies that promoted or discouraged the Jews’ integration into non-Jewish society and patterns of state repression of independent political activism.”5 The role of the state in forging or hindering Jewish assimilation and political activism has long been the subject of Jewish [End Page 214] studies, especially in the European and East European context. What is novel about Finkel’s work is his comparative analysis of three cities under different regimes (the Hapsburg and Russian empires, the prewar Polish Republic, and Soviet rule), which enables him to make a highly focused study of the impact of the state on the behavior of the selected populations. However, when he tries to extrapolate his findings from the three cities to the more than 1,100 ghettos in the USSR and the east and “rest” of Poland, his analysis comes up short. He offers a simplified model (based on a limited quantitative analysis of the Jewish uprisings and electoral politics), which does not account for local particularities or “potential alternative explanations,” as the author himself admits.6 In his quest for a pattern “beyond the three ghettos,” Finkel loses his greatest strength: his extraordinary attention to local context. His brilliance lies in an interdisciplinary approach in which he successfully marries historical analyses of the local with social-scientific methodological rigor and extensive qualitative data for the three cities under study. Indeed, his book exemplifies the best traditions of interdisciplinary research and shows beyond any doubt the value of speaking across disciplines in our attempt to understand society in times of mass violence. Trained in political science, Finkel also shows comfort in social and oral historical methodologies. In his words, his analysis is an attempt to “bridge historical studies of the Holocaust and the social science literature on mass violence.”7 His writing demonstrates a sensibility in both fields. When he admits that his patterns are inevitably generalized—but with as much fine-grain as possible—he addresses a potential critique from historians who are notoriously suspicious of the typologies and structures of social science seen as generalizations that often obscure context, difference, and change. His claim of the importance of context (the prewar conditions) is obviously addressed to political scientists, since no historian would dispute that “[t]he past—both of people and their communities—must be taken seriously if we want to know how and why they [survivors] chose particular behaviors.”8 To effectively bridge both disciplines, Finkel uses a rigorous comparative approach. His comparison of Minsk, Białystok, and Kraków [End Page 215] is masterful. In my own work...

On the last Jews in Iraq and Iraqi national identity: a look at two recent Iraqi novels

ABSTRACTAfter 2003, Iraqi literature, particularly the novel, rediscovered the now extinct Jewish community in Iraq. The Jews were the first major community in Iraq to be completely erased. Writing about the Jews served to underline the pluralism of Iraqi society in the past and to admonish against a similar fate awaiting other small communities in Iraq today. This article will focus on two recent Iraqi novels, written by two of Iraq’s prominent novelists, in which Jews are at the centre of the narratives: ‘Ali Badr’s “Haris al-Tabagh” (The Guardian of the Tobacco Shop), 2008 and Khdair al-Zaydi’s “Atlas ‘Azran al-Baghdadi” (‘Azran al-Baghdadi’s Atlas), 2015a. These are not only ordinary Jews, they are the last Jews of Iraq and Baghdad. As such, I will argue, they are doomed by the writers to serve as symbols for something exceeding their lives (and deaths) as individuals or Jews. The novels thus are more about Iraqi national identity after 2003 than about the last Jews. By choosing “the last of the Jews” as a protagonist the authors signal a pessimistic end to the illusion of sustaining a version of a pluralistic and accommodating Iraqi national identity.

After Genocide: How Ordinary Jews Face the Holocaust by Sue Lieberman (review)

After Genocide: How Ordinary Jews Face the Holocaust by Sue Lieberman (review)

The golden age shtetl: a new history of Jewish life in East Europe

Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern. The Golden Age Shtetl A New History of Jewish Life in East Europe. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2014. 431 pp. Map. Photographs. Index. $25.00, cloth.The centerpiece character of this fascinating book is the shtetl, the East European market town m private possession of Polish magnates, inhabited mostly by Jews. Dining its golden age-between the partitions of the Polish Commonwealth by Russia, Prussia, and Austria at the end of the eighteenth century and the coming of the Russian Imperial industrial age m the 1840s-the shtetl revealed its potential through economic prosperity. Its dwellers showed a great deal of ingenuity in adapting themselves to their new life in the Russian Empire. Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtem's compelling reconstruction of the shtetl brings life to tales of Jewish wives defending their families, tavern keepers and their trade, and international smugglers, among others; in short, Jews in ordinary and extraordinary circumstances (p. 7). The focus of the book is on three provinces of the Pale of Jewish Settlement in Russia-Podillia, Volhynia, and Kyiv-all of winch are now in contemporary central Ukraine. Tins region stood out for its dense Jewish population, its large number of markets and annual fairs, and peculiar religious traditions, which gave rise to Hasidism, a movement of religious enthusiasm. The Russian administration, the Polish nobility, and the Jews were key actors of the political triangle within winch the golden age shtetl came into existence.The book is organized topically, around case studies. In each chapter, a cultural study of shtetl life is placed in the unfolding broader imperial context. The first chapters focus more on the beginning of the golden age of the shtetl, while later chapters deal primarily with the shtetl of the 1820s and 1830s. The introduction and the first chapter lay a foundation for the book and tell the stoiy of how the shtetl came into Russia, what it brought with it, and what changes the new political environment triggered within it. Petrovsky- Shtem masterfully narrates numerous stories of ordinary Jews within themes of trade, crime, justice, family, smuggling, printing enterprise, and other subjects in the remaining nine chapters. The book's concluding chapter provides a general insight on how the golden age shtetl declined.The phenomenon of the shtetl in its prime was not only about Jewish life; it is the Russian Empire's important junction at its periphery. …

Folklore and History

Folklore and History Chava Weissler (bio) As a folklorist, I study the expressive culture—rituals, prayers, music, and crafts—of ordinary people (in my case, ordinary Jews), rather than the intellectual or artistic creations of cultural elites—rabbis, philosophers, and classical composers. In practice, of course, these are not distinct categories, and I have often found that my most productive material comes from those who mediate between religious elites and “ordinary Jews.” Throughout my career, I have moved back and forth between ethnographic and historical research. My dissertation research was an ethnographic study of the havurah movement, groups of Jews who come together for fellowship, study, and prayer. I followed this with a historical study of the piety of eighteenth-century Central and Eastern European Jewish women. My present project, once again based in ethnography, is a study of the Jewish Renewal movement in North America. My study focuses on the organization now called ALEPH: Alliance for Jewish Renewal, with forty-four affiliated communities, primarily in North America, and administrative offices in Philadelphia. It has its roots in the teachings of Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, a former Lubavitch Hasid and emissary of the Lubavitcher rebbe. Reb Zalman, as he is called, is still the “rebbe” of the Jewish Renewal movement. More specifically, I seek to understand the varieties of Judaism created in this movement through a study of the expressive culture of participants in ALEPH—their rituals, art, dance, and worship—as well as their writings. Members of ALEPH often quote the words of Rabbi David Wolfe-Blank, describing their movement as “Hasidism meets feminism.” I am particularly interested in the way women and feminism figure in Jewish Renewal. I’ll address each of the discussion questions in turn. 1. How does the history we choose to engage with shape the ethno-graphic tale we tell, and what type of historical consciousness do we bring to the work? While Jewish Renewal can be described as a “neo-Hasidic” movement, it can also be understood as part of the contemporary drive toward varieties of religion that stress intense experience and “spiritual practice.” Indeed, Jewish Renewal can be set into both of these historical frameworks: the history of Kabbalah and Hasidism and the history of American religion. [End Page 9] What difference does it make if I tell this as a Jewish tale or as an American tale? The study of Jewish Renewal started out for me very much as a Jewish story. I got interested in the topic because of my previous research on Jewish women’s piety in eighteenth-century Europe; I discovered kabbalistic motifs in writings for and by women. Especially in the 1980s and 1990s, when I was doing this research, scholars thought of Kabbalah as an elite mysticism, exclusively the province of learned Jewish men. I was among a cohort of scholars asking whether women and non-learned men could know Kabbalah, and how they learned it. In the course of that research, I encountered a literature in Yiddish that popularized Kabbalah. Although women were still excluded from learned circles of Kabbalah study (and the inner circles of the emergent Hasidic movement), they read and used this literature in the vernacular to gain some knowledge of kabbalistic ideas and symbols, and to use these as a resource to shape their own prayers and practices.1 Searching for a new research topic after I completed that study, I looked around, saw news about the pop star Madonna and her interest in the Kabbalah Centre,2 as well as other varieties of popular Kabbalah, with a whole literature in the vernacular—English, in this case—explicating Kabbalistic ideas. Jewish Renewal, which draws on Hasidism and Kabbalah, intrigued me as a site to investigate what I came to call contemporary, “vernacular Kabbalah.” What are the questions that emerge from this approach? First, they suggest a traditional “philological” methodology: What are the textual sources used by members of Jewish Renewal, and how are they interpreted or changed? How do contemporary works about Kabbalah and Hasidism in English compare with the earlier Yiddish works? Further, who has access to kabbalitic materials and concepts, how do they have access, and who has the...