Michael Stanislawski

"This Very Short Introduction discloses a history of Zionism from the origins of modern Jewish nationalism in the 1870's to the present. Michael Stanislawski provides a lucid and detached analysis of Zionism, focusing on its internal intellectual and ideological developments and divides"--

A Very Short Introduction

Zionism

Autobiographical Jews examines the nature of autobiographical writing by Jews from antiquity to the present, and the ways in which such writings can legitimately be used as sources for Jewish history. Drawing on current literary theory, which questions the very nature of autobiographical writing and its relationship to what we normally designate as the truth, and, to a lesser extent, the new cognitive neurosciences, Michael Stanislawski analyzes a number of crucial and complex autobiographical texts written by Jews through the ages. Stanislawski considers The Life by first-century historian Josephus; compares the early modern autobiographies of Asher of Reichshofen (Book of Memories) and Glikl of Hameln (Memoirs); analyzes the radically different autobiographies of two Russian Jewish writers, the Hebrew Enlightenment author Moshe Leib Lilienblum and the famous Russian poet Osip Mandelstam; and looks at two autobiographies written out of utter despair in the midst and in the wake of World War II, Stefan Zweig�s The World of Yesterday and Sarah Kofman�s Rue Ordener, Rue Labat. These writers� attempts to portray their private and public struggles, anxieties, successes, and failures are expressions of a basic drive for selfhood which is both timeless and time-bound, universal and culturally specific. The challenge is to attempt to unravel the conscious from the unconscious distortions in these texts and to regard them as artifacts of individuals� quests to make sense of their lives, first and foremost for themselves and then, if possible, for their readers.

Essays in Jewish Self-Fashioning

Autobiographical Jews

How could a Jew kill a Jew for religious and political reasons? Many people asked this question after an Orthodox Jew assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Itshak Rabin in 1995. But historian Michael Stanislawski couldn't forget it, and he decided to find out everything he could about an obscure and much earlier event that was uncannily similar to Rabin's murder: the 1848 killing--by an Orthodox Jew--of the Reform rabbi of Lemberg (now L'viv, Ukraine). Eventually, Stanislawski concluded that this was the first murder of a Jewish leader by a Jew since antiquity, a prelude to twentieth-century assassinations of Jews by Jews, and a turning point in Jewish history. Based on records unavailable for decades, A Murder in Lemberg is the first book about this fascinating case. On September 6, 1848, Abraham Ber Pilpel entered the kitchen of Rabbi Abraham Kohn and his family and poured arsenic in the soup that was being prepared for their dinner. Within hours, the rabbi and his infant daughter were dead. Was Kohn's murder part of a conservative Jewish backlash to Jewish reform and liberalization in a year of European revolution? Or was he killed simply because he threatened taxes that enriched Lemberg's Orthodox leaders? Vividly recreating the dramatic story of the murder, the trial that followed, and the political and religious fallout of both, Stanislawski tries to answer these questions and others. In the process, he reveals the surprising diversity of Jewish life in mid-nineteenth-century eastern Europe. Far from being uniformly Orthodox, as is often assumed, there was a struggle between Orthodox and Reform Jews that was so intense that it might have led to murder.

Politics, Religion, and Violence in Modern Jewish History

A Murder in Lemberg

Nathan J Miller Professor of Jewish History Michael Stanislawski

Arthur C. Danto

Jewish Museum (New York, N.Y.)

Harriet F. Senie

Louise Nevelson

Gabriel de Guzman

Presents a catalog of an exhibition showcasing the works of the American sculptor and artist.

Constructing a Legend

The Sculpture of Louise Nevelson

"Stanislawski shows that each of these three [Nordau, Lilien, and Jabotinsky] came to Zionism out of engagement with the larger issues that preoccupied intellectuals and artists at the turn of the century and that the adoption of Jewish nationalism was by no means a foregone conclusion or an inevitable trajectory. The chapters are written in a lively and accessible style."--David Biale, author of Eros and the Jews "Stanislawski has literally rewritten the early history of Zionism. . . . [His] discovery and masterly use of Nordau's correspondence with Olga Novikova and his treatment of Jabotinsky's youthful journalistic sallies are models of lucid and absorbing historical analysis."--Derek. J. Penslar, author of Shylock's Children

Michael Stanislawski

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