Twentieth Century Jews (Forging Identity in the Land of Promise and in the Promised Land)

This extensively-researched collection of essays lucidly explores how members of the ever-beleaguered Jewish people grappled with their identities during the past century in the United States and in Eretz Israel, the new centers of Jewry’s long historical experience. With the pivotal 1903 Kishinev pogrom setting the stage, the author proceeds to examine how the Land of Promise across the Atlantic exerted different influences on Abraham Selmanovitz, Felix Frankfurter, the founders of the American Council for Judaism, and Arthur Hays Sulzberger. Professor Penkower then shows how the prospect of nationalism in the biblical Promised Land engendered other tensions and transformations, ranging from the plight of Hayim Nahman Bialik, to rivalry within the Orthodox Jewish camp, to on-going strife between the political Left and Right over the nature of the emerging Jewish state.