Contents

Acknowledgements

List of Contributors

Robert M. Seltzer: Scholar and Teacher

Introduction: Jewish Identities in the Modern Period

Part 1 Jewish Life and Modern Questions in Russia and Eastern Europe

Language Acquisition as a Criterion of Modernization among East Central European Jews: The Case of Dov Ber Birkenthal of Bolechów

Mikhah Yosef Berdichevsky and Shimon Dubnow: A Distant Regard and Appreciation

Saul Borovoi’s Survival: An Odessa Tale about a Jewish Historian in Soviet Times

Defying Authority in the Pale: The Making of Soviet Jewish Rituals and the Emergence of Folk Legitimacy

Part 2 Jewish Thought and Questions of Identity

Pride and Pedigree: The Development of the Myth of Sephardic Aristocratic Lineage

Joshua Hezekiah Decordova and a Rabbinic Counter-Enlightenment from Colonial Jamaica

Merchant Colonies: Resettlement in Italy, France, Holland, and England, 1550–1700

From Combat to Convergence: The Relationship between Heinrich Graetz and Abraham Geiger

Kaplan and Personality

How Much Eastern Europe in American Jewish Thought? The Case of Jacob B. Agus

Diaspora, Jewishness, and Difference in Isaiah Berlin’s Thought

Martin Buber and the Impact of World War I on the Prague Zionists Shmuel H. Bergman, Robert Weltsch, and Hans Kohn

The Rise and Fall of a Jewish Vision in the Life and Thought of Hans Kohn

Part 3 Jewish Religion and Politics in America

How the Bible Expelled Religion from the American Schoolroom: The Causes and Consequences of Bible Wars in Nineteenth-Century American Schools

Lay and Rabbinic Conflict in Mid-Nineteenth Century American Jewry

An International Solution for an International Problem: The JDC and the AJC in the 1930s

Stephen S. Wise and Golda Meir: Zionism, Israel, and American Power in the Twentieth Century

“We Must Build Anew”: Ideological Perspectives of the First Generation of Students to Attend Stephen S. Wise’s Jewish Institute of Religion

A Judaism for Moderns: Reflections on Contemporary Challenges

Writings of Robert M. Seltzer

Index