“Intersectionality,” a concept coined and developed by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, examines how our various identities change in meaning and valence when placed in dynamic relation with one another. Instead of exploring identity traits like “race,” “gender,” “religion,” and so on in isolation, an intersectional approach asks what these various characteristics “do” to one another in combination. I suggest that an intersectional approach—asking “what does Whiteness do to Jewishness?”—can help illuminate elements of the Jewish experience that would otherwise remain obscure. The core claim is that Whiteness and Jewishness in combination function in ways that are not necessarily grasped if one atomizes the identities and holds them apart. What Whiteness “does” to Jewishness is act as an accelerant for certain forms of antisemitic marginalization even as it ratifies a racialized hierarchy within the Jewish community. Absent an intersectional vantage, many political projects and controversies surrounding Jewish equality will be systematically misunderstood.

In a paper entitled, “Newer Emphases in Jewish History,” published in 1963, Salo Baron wrote: “All my life I have been struggling against the hitherto dominant “lachrymose conception of Jewish history” … because I have felt that an overemphasis on Jewish sufferings distorted the total picture of the Jewish historic evolution….” Indeed, if one was to choose a single idea that encapsulated the legacy of Baron, perhaps the pre-eminent Jewish historian of the twentieth century, it would probably be this: Jewish history is not to be seen simply as a series of persecutions, which determined its nature and its course, but rather as a process of ongoing engagement between the Jews and their surroundings.

This article proposes a new set of critical historical practices, with the aim of constructing Jewishness into an interpretive historical mode. Jewish history is most commonly understood as the history of the Jewish people and its territories. In setting this as the foundation of Jewish history, scholars have allowed empirical evaluation of the Jewishness of a person or place to precede analysis. Two basic approaches, clearly foundational and tied to personalist and nationalist conceptions of Jewishness, have guided the field of Jewish history: the conjunctive and contingent. A third method—termed here a critical constructive approach—offers a nonfoundational vision for freeing Jewishness and Jewish history from tests of individual, group, or nationalist verifiability and, instead, reconceiving Jewishness as a structuring mode that can affect how a broad range of subjects have operated within history.

This article discusses the ways scholars have outlined the process of Jewish adaptation (or lack of it) from their Christian surroundings in northern Europe during the High Middle Ages. Using the example of penitential fasting, the first two sections of the article describe medieval Jewish practices and some of the approaches that have been used to explain the similarity between medieval Jewish and contemporary Christian customs. The last two sections of the article suggest that in addition to looking for texts that connect between Jewish and Christian thought and beliefs behind these customs, it is useful to examine what medieval Jews and Christians saw of each other's customs living in close urban quarters. Finally, the article suggests that when shaping medieval Jewish and Christian identity, the differences emphasized in shared everyday actions and visible practice were no less important than theological distinctions. As part of the discussion throughout the article, the terminology used by scholars to describe the process of Jewish appropriation from the local surroundings is described, focusing on terms such as “influence” and “inward acculturation,” as well as “appropriation.”

על פי ההלכה, אישה נשואה שקיימה יחסי מין עם גבר אחר ("זינתה תחת בעלה") אסורה על בעלה, אלא אם יחסים אלה היו בכפייה, דהיינו האישה נאנסה בידי הבועל. יחד עם זאת, השאלה כיצד יוגדר אונס בגינו תותר אישה לבעלה ומהן הנסיבות בהן יוכר המעשה המיני כאונס נתונה למחלוקות עמוקות.

This article considers the role of the individual during crises in humanism and the ethical responsibility with which the individual is charged in such times of moral calamity. In a narrow sense, the article explores Emmanuel Lévinas's “Nameless” (“Sans nom”), an essay that appears in his book Proper Names, and proposes viewing it as his personal reading in honor of his unique, unaccounted-for teacher Monsieur Chouchani. From a broader philosophical perspective, the article attempts to consider the meaning of ethics and the assumption of responsibility in times when doing so appears to offer no benefit and hold no significance whatsoever. From an educational perspective, it endeavors to better understand the ethical role of the teacher in both tranquil and tempestuous times. And finally, it also offers another profound observation of what Lévinas's article refers to as the “Jewish condition,” not in a national historical sense but as a model of crisis-oriented ethical challenge.

The controversy surrounding Hannah Arendt's reportage on the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem and the subsequent book cannot be underestimated. For Arendt personally, the trial was the decisive event in the second half of her life and amounted to nothing less than a second exile. On the world stage, it marked not only a critical turning point in international consciousness of the Holocaust, but also both initiated and reflected a critical shift in intra-Jewish representations and expression. Arendt's book could in fact be considered as a master text for Judaic studies in the second half of the twentieth century. To mention two of many possible consequences, the controversy may be seen as a pivot point from which the culture of the public intellectuals of New York argued itself out of the spotlight, as well as a primary catalyst for two of the most significant works on the Holocaust penned by women: Lucy Davidowicz's The War against the Jews (1975) and Leni Yahil's The Holocaust (1987).

This study is an attempt to reconstruct the intellectual life of the Crimean Jewish communities (both Rabbanite and Karaite) from the Middle Ages to early modern times in their wide cultural context. The article is based on manuscripts related to Solkhat, the regional capital of the Golden Horde, and Genoese (and early Ottoman) Kaffa, which can shed light on the spiritual life of their Jewish communities. These manuscripts provide us with a perspective on the areas of interests, patterns of knowledge, and modes of study prevalent in these Jewish communities. They offer evidence for the contents of Jewish libraries and the span of Crimean Jews’ intellectual contacts with their Jewish and non-Jewish cultural environments.