Cosmopolitanisms and the Jews

Abstract

Cosmopolitanisms and the Jews adds significantly to contemporary scholarship on cosmopolitanism by making the experience of Jews central to the discussion, as it traces the evolution of Jewish cosmopolitanism over the last two centuries. The book sets out from an exploration of the nature and cultural-political implications of the shifting perceptions of Jewish mobility and fluidity around 1800, when modern cosmopolitanist discourse arose. Through a series of case studies, the authors analyze the historical and discursive junctures that mark the central paradigm shifts in the Jewish self-image, from the Wandering Jew to the rootless parasite, the cosmopolitan, and the socialist internationalist. Chapters analyze the tensions and dualisms in the constructed relationship between cosmopolitanism and the Jews at particular historical junctures between 1800 and the present, and probe into the relationship between earlier anti-Semitic discourses on Jewish cosmopolitanism and Stalinist rhetoric.

Diasporic and Cross-Cultural Identities in Pakistani Film Khuda Ke Liye (In the Name of God)

“…It was used by the Jews, denoting their worldwide dispersion outside their country, the Area of Israel. In Hebrew, it means 'Golah' or 'Galut', significance "Exile" (Gelbin, 2017). Since the Jews rejected incorporating and getting encountered with repression, they shifted out of Israel (Comay, 1981;Silverburg, 2020).…”

The future of the stranger: Jewish exemplarity and the social imagination

“…Conceptions of Jewish exemplarity were developed as early as the 1780s, in the earliest stage of the Haskalah , the Jewish Enlightenment, and they may well have reached their zenith with American pragmatist sociology’s concept of the marginal man in the 1920s and 1930s. Recently, the perspective of Jewish exemplarity has been revisited and renewed in the context of new perspectives on globalization and cosmopolitanism (Gelbin, 2015, 2017; Gilman, 2016; Slezkine, 2004). While it is well established that Simmel’s stranger was a direct inspiration for Robert Park, Everett Stonequist, and others, it is less clear what preceded Simmel’s variation of Jewish exemplarity (Goldberg, 2012, 2017).…”