Center for Jewish Studies

Barbara Epstein is a professor in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she teaches on the history of social movements and theory relevant to social change. Her books include Political Protest and Cultural Revolution: Nonviolent Direct Action in the 1970s and the 1980s (Univ. of California Press) and The Minsk Ghetto, 1941-1943: Jewish Resistance and Soviet Internationalism (Univ. of California Press). Between the 1970s and 1990s, Prof. Epstein was a member of the editorial collective of Socialist Revolution, later renamed Socialist Review. She is currently at work on a study of socialist-humanist thought and politics after World War II.

Moishe Postone is a professor of History at the University of Chicago. He is author of Time, Labor and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory (Cambridge Univ. Press), History and Heteronomy (The University of Tokyo Center for Philosophy), and co-editor (with Eric Santner) of Catastrophe and Meaning: The Holocaust and the Twentieth Century (Univ. of Chicago Press), among many other books and articles.

Mitchell Cohen is a professor of Political Science at Baruch College and the Graduate School of the City University of New York. His books include Zion and State: Nation, Class, and the Shaping of Modern Israel (Columbia Univ. Press), The Wager of Lucien Goldmann: Tragedy, Dialectics, and the Hidden God (Princeton Univ. Press), and as co-editor, Princeton Readings in Political Thought (Princeton Univ. Press). In addition to scholarly journals, Prof. Cohen as written for The New York Times Sunday Book Review, the Times Literary Supplement, and The New Republic. From 1991 to 2009, he co-edited Dissent magazine.

In recent decades, sympathy toward Israel among Leftists in Europe and the United States has given way to hostility. Perceived in its early years as a vital experiment in socialist democracy, Israel is now typically viewed by radicals and even many progressives as a colonialist power. What explains this shift in opinion? Does it reflect larger changes in the politics of the Left or, rather, changes in Israel? Does hostility toward Israel and Zionism have ramifications beyond the Left itself? These questions framed a day-long symposium on April 19, 2012, at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. This symposium was sponsored by the Mosse/Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies, with additional support from the Harvey Goldberg Center.

During the nineteenth century the majority of masskilim (Jewish intellectuals) in Germany appreciated only the “enlightened” aspects of Jewish religion. Mysticism was for them an obscure, retarded deviation from Judaism. When, where, how, and why did the rehabilitation of Jewish mysticism take place? This lecture will try to answer these questions. It will show that research of Jewish mysticism did not begin with Martin Buber and Gershom Scholem, and it was not connected with Zionism. A positive change of attitude toward Kabbala, Sabbetaianism, and Hassidism was a process which was taking place in Russia during the last third of the nineteenth century. It was carried out by Jewish scholars and writers of literature who were influenced by Russian modern mystical trends, which at that period were spreading in Russia and in other European countries.

Jay Michaelson argues that the “God vs. gay” divide is a pernicious myth and that religious people should favor gay rights because of religion, not despite it. As both a gay rights activist and religion scholar, Michaelson is uniquely positioned to tackle the contentious “God vs. Gay” divide. The author underscores that the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament both emphasize the importance of love, compassion, and equality. From this starting point, Michaelson offers a progressive take on gay rights—arguing that the moral principles in these texts favor acceptance of gays and lesbians, outweighing the handful of ambiguous verses so often cited by conservatives. In arguing that politically and spiritually the God/gay split must end, this book will stimulate a long-overdue dialogue on an urgent issue.

At the turn of the twentieth century, over forty percent of the world’s Jews lived within the Russian Empire, almost all in the Pale of Settlement. From the Baltic to the Black Sea, the Jews of the Pale created a distinctive way of life little known beyond its borders, leading historian Simon Dubnow to label the territory a Jewish “Dark Continent.” Just before World War I, the author, revolutionary, and ethnographer known as An-sky led an ethnographic expedition into the Pale, producing an archive of what he called the Oral Torah of the common people rather than the rabbinic elite, consisting of thousands of jokes, tales, songs, incantations, and other cultural traditions. An-sky also created a massive ethnographic questionnaire—The Jewish Ethnographic Program—consisting of 2,087 questions in Yiddish exploring Jewish life and death in the Pale. In his talk, Nathaniel Deutsch discusses his forthcoming book, which explores An-sky’s almost messianic efforts to create a distinctively Jewish ethnography in an era of revolutionary change and contains the first-ever translation of The Jewish Ethnographic Program.

On December 17, 1862, as the Civil War entered its second winter, General Ulysses S. Grant issued General Orders #11, expelling “Jews as a class” from his war zone. It remains the most notorious anti-Jewish official order in American history. The order came back to haunt Grant in 1868 when he ran for president. Never before had Jews been so widely noticed in a presidential contest, and never before had they been confronted so publicly with the question of how to balance their “American” and “Jewish” interests. During his two terms in the White House, the memory of the “obnoxious order” shaped Grant’s relationship with the American Jewish community. Surprisingly, he did more for Jews than any other president to his time. How this happened, and why, sheds new light on one of our most enigmatic presidents, on the Jews of his day, and on America itself.