New Books in the Jewish Culture and Contexts Series Spotlight Jewish life in the Muslim World

There is a growing and evolving field of research focused on Jews living in the Islamic world, from South Asia to North Africa and beyond, and from the Middle Ages to the present. Since last year, the Jewish Culture and Contexts series (JCC), which is published by Penn Press in collaboration with the Katz Center, has published four books breaking new ground on this scholarly frontier. These studies spotlight Jewish communities at different places and times throughout Islamic history, illuminating them with a diverse array of written and material sources.

"Reading Bialik in Tehran"

The state of a nation’s press—its health or repression, its distance from or intimacy with organs of power—is a reliable bellwether of modernity. Newspapers routinely function as self-professed diagnosticians of culture and antidotes to its ills, even as they are themselves inescapably symptoms. In Daniel Amir’s essay in the summer issue of JQR, he looks at the explosion of press activity in Iran following the Allied occupation in 1941.

Category
Jewish Quarterly Review

On “The Most Anti-Zionist Text”

There is a good deal of heated discussion today about what is and isn’t anti-Zionism. Much of it surrounds the question of whether harsh forms of criticism of the state of Israel can be deemed antisemitic. What is rarely recalled in those debates is that one of the most prominent anti-Zionists of the twentieth century was a Jew, Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum (1887–1979), the founding Satmar Rebbe, who formulated a detailed theological rationale for his opposition to the state of Israel.

Category
Jewish Quarterly Review