Zionism—the Israeli national constitutive myth that powerfully shapes that country's politics, society, and culture—is currently under attack from Israeli social scientists. An academic–political stream known as post-Zionism is reexamining and questioning nearly all of Israeli society's “sacred cows” as it exposes the coercive, silencing, and exclusionary force of the Zionist master narrative and its contribution to intense conflicts and cultural and social distortions. This is the context in which the book at hand should be read. It critically examines the Zionist ethos from a cultural anthropological perspective, and explores the cultural mediums through which the Zionist narrative passes as it undergoes a process of fragmentation through simulation.

Our Lives are but Stories is a welcome and appealing addition to the small but valuable corpus of studies of Jewish women whose ethnic heritages, as much as their Judaism, shape their life experiences and their narratives telling of those experiences. Joining books such as Lisa Gilad's Ginger and Salt: Yemeni Jewish Women in an Israeli Town (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1989); Jael Silliman's Jewish Portraits, Indian Frames: Women's Narratives from a Diaspora of Hope (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2001); Joelle Bahloul's Le Culte de la Table Dressée: Rites et Traditions de la Table Juive Algérienne (Paris: A. M. Métailié: Diffusion, Presses universitaires de France, 1983); Rachel Simon's Change Within Tradition Among Jewish Women in Libya (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1992); and my own Women As Ritual Experts: The Religious Lives of Elderly Jewish Women in Jerusalem (New York: Oxford University Press 1992), Schely-Newman's Our Lives are but Stories makes a substantial contribution to the study of Jewish women of Asia and North Africa.

The scope of research devoted to the entrance of European Jews into the modern civic realm has expanded steadily in the last two decades. Historians have turned their attention to communities formerly considered only marginally important because of their small size, their location at the periphery of Europe's most significant political and cultural developments, or their failure to correspond to the models of emancipation and enlightenment derived from the historical experience of French and German Jews. This new direction in Jewish historical writing has generated an ever-increasing body of social–historical data and is marked by a growing emphasis on regional factors, particularly urban–rural differences, and a new appreciation for class and gender as categories of analysis. The result—a more highly nuanced picture of modernization—has firmly discredited the dominant Germanocentric perspective favored by previous generations of historians. Now, thanks to the publication of Lois Dubin's outstanding book, The Port Jews of Habsburg Trieste, our understanding of the forces that shaped modern Jewish society and culture has been advanced appreciably. Dubin has succeeded in producing a balanced reassessment of much of the conventional thinking about periodization, modernization, and the role of Haskalah and Emancipation.

In Beyond Auschwitz, Michael Morgan has in effect woven together two different kinds of narratives. The first narrative is utterly ordinary; thankfully, the second is utterly extraordinary.

Comparative analysis, especially in the field of religious studies, is widely recognized as among the most difficult of intellectual tasks. How does one do justice to the complexity of both subjects? How does one set the terms of the comparison in a way that accurately captures both similarities and differences? How does one place those similarities and differences in a broader context so that their significance comes to the fore? And how does one present both halves of the comparison in a way that will be equally accessible to readers presumed to be familiar with only one or the other? These challenges are still more formidable when the subjects being compared are “Jewish bioethics” and “Catholic bioethics,” each of which draws on a long ethical tradition, encompasses a wide range of views, and continues to evolve.

Many of the pioneers and settlers who came to America held the Bible in their right hands and were strongly inspired by this “Good Book.” They believed they had come to the “New Promised Land,” and consequently gave Biblical names to the new towns and villages, as well as to their children. It was, therefore, almost natural that the remote land in the east, known as the Holy Land, Palestine, the Promised Land, or The Land of Israel, had, and probably still has, a very special place in American culture and society.

Jewish music study is a loosely unified field that brings together strands from several scholarly traditions. Researchers trained in historical musicology typically use document study, note analysis, and contemporary aesthetic writings to examine how questions of “Jewishness” manifest themselves in the works of selected composers. Ethnomusicologists frequently utilize ethnographic fieldwork methods developed for studying musical practices of Jewish communities within a broad cultural and symbolic system. Jewish music researchers in Israel commonly focus on comparative cultural projects intended to illuminate stylistic or song-based pathways of transmission from one age or culture to the next. Cultural theorists tend to situate music as a medium for negotiating the borders between Jews and other groups. And with the lay public in mind, specialists and nonspecialists alike have generated numerous popular textbooks claiming to cover “Jewish music.” Each of these disciplines asks different questions about the nature of sound within Jewish contexts; yet central to all is the question of how the sound itself reflects concepts of Jewish life—providing researchers with a richly evocative common ground for substantive and interdisciplinary study.

Itzik Gottesman's Defining the Yiddish Nation will be indispensable to anyone interested in the collection of Jewish ethnographic materials. Focusing on the early twentieth century in Poland, Gottesman discusses the underlying ideology, the methodology, and the practice of folklore study.

In the preface to The Hope Fulfilled, a history of the Zionist movement from the 1880s to 1948, Leslie Stein writes that, unlike other voluminous publications that have dealt with the history of modern Israel, he has attempted to provide a concise description of the events that led to the founding of the State of Israel. Focusing primarily on the political, military, and diplomatic aspects of Zionist history, this 275-page (sans glossary and index) volume is indeed a succinct yet thorough description that gives the student of Zionist history a sound introduction to the origins and history of the movement.

The books under review deal with two towns in Galicia, territory that was part of the Habsburg Empire from 1772 until 1918. The first town, Brzezany, is located today in the Ukraine; the second, Jaśliska, a small town, is now in Poland. Despite different starting points, both books attempt to solve the riddle of the past and present relations between Jews and their neighbors, relations that are noted for their ambivalence and complexity.

Think of the intensity and notoriety of Sylvia Plath in the English-speaking world, and multiply it several times: that is Yona Wallach for the Hebrew-speaking world today. The most passionate and flamboyant figure in postwar literary Israel, Wallach was born on a small farming village in 1944, lived there most of her life until her death of breast cancer in 1985, and after her death has become a cultural legend. In life Wallach experimented with sex, drugs, and madness (she checked herself into a mental hospital in 1964 and remained for three months, deliberately exploring what the subconscious yielded), was a compelling live performer of her poems, and was typically surrounded by worshipful younger writers. In her art she was yet more experimental. Her poetry combines mysticism, sexuality, an ecstatic love of nature and a correspondingly powerful mistrust of society and its conventions, a fascination with language and the breakdown of language, an insistence on the validity of freedom and will. Steeped in biblical allusions, mythology, fairy tales, and kabbalistic imagery, she often twists and turns her sources with playful or violent irony. Her lexicon swerves through extremes of exaltation and crudeness. Her verse sometimes is traditionally rhymed, more often unpredictably and jazzily ragged, her imagery is often surreal, her narratives elliptic, her syntax fractured—yet thrillingly readable.

Abstract available in the PDF.