Richard I. Cohen has contributed greatly over the last decade and a half to the study of the relationship between Jewish art and society.See, for example, two books that he edited or co-edited: Art and Its Uses: The Visual Image and Modern Jewish Society (Studies in Contemporary Jewry: An Annual, Vol. VI) (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990) and From Court Jews to the Rothschilds: Art, Patronage, and Power 1600–1800 (Munich: Prestel, 1996). His most recent book, Jewish Icons: Art and Society in Modern Europe, is a thoughtful, well-written, and original account of how Jews interacted with the non-Jewish world through art. This text is not a seamless narrative. Rather, Cohen rightly has organized it as separate essays, fragments of a history of the relationship of Jews to modern art. The book's greatest strengths lie in its interdisciplinary approach, its exploration of little-known objects, and its examination of a broad range of Jewish art patrons. Organized chronologically, the book begins with a chapter on early modern Christian images of Jewish rituals. The second chapter explores Jewish ceremonial objects, and subsequent chapters examine portraits of rabbis, nostalgic images of the ghetto, the history of Jewish art collections, and representations of Jewish homelessness and hopelessness. The word “icon” in the title appears in two contexts. On the one hand, it refers to portraits of rabbis, which had a hagiographical function.Cohen's third chapter is entitled “Rabbi as Icon.” On the other hand, it refers to David Roskies' description of Samuel Hirszenberg's Exile (1904) as “the first icon of Jewish suffering” (p. 234).

“What is it that must precede the conveying of history? Must there not be the declaration of a double passion, an eros for the past and an ardor for the others in whose name there is a felt urgency to speak?” asks Edith Wyschogrod. She continues: “to be a historian . . . is to accept the destiny of the spurned lover—to write, photograph, film, televise, archive, and simulate the past not merely as its memory bank but as binding oneself by a promise to the dead to tell the truth about the past” (p. xi). By positing the responsibility of the historian peremptorily as a “promise,” thus implying a binding obligation to others, Wyschogrod tilts her discussion of the writing of history away from the cognitive realm and toward “postmodern” ethics. Her intricate reflections are marked by an overwhelming consciousness of the uniqueness of our age, in which the historian must breast the cumulative moral impact of the experiences of organized “scientific” murder and genocide and the staggering and disconcerting manipulation of information made possible by hyperreality; as well as the radical philosophical questioning of the communicative possibilities of language and skepticism about the nature of historical truth.

In this book, based upon his Lancaster-Yarnton Lectures in 1996, David Novak argues that natural law has always played a central role in Jewish thought and discourse. He also argues that natural law ought to be seen in a positive light; in other words, this is a work of constructive theology as much as it is a survey of the influence of natural law in Jewish intellectual history. Its “historical” side shows itself in Novak's interpretations of various biblical narratives; the stories of Cain and Abel, Abraham and Sodom, and Abraham and Abimelech are coherent only if we recognize that the characters share a conception of a universally valid moral law based upon reason rather than revelation. In addition, the long record of investigation by Jewish thinkers into the reasons for the particular commandments (ta‘amei ha-miṣvot) suggests both that Jews have sought to explain the substantive content of revelation in rational terms and that, in Novak's words, “more often than not the rules cannot be cogently applied unless we have some understanding of what these rules intend” (p. 64).

Until the late 1920s, the subject of Latin American Jewry was not of great interest to Jewish scholars. It only burst forth with the beginning of the persecution of the Jews in Nazi Germany, especially in the years when they were forced to seek a refuge in any country willing to give them a life-saving visa. During this period, guides, leaflets, and books about all the Latin American countries were published, providing information about their histories and the presence of Jews. There was also some discussion, naturally, of the expectations for immigrants to remake their lives.

This is a welcome corrective to the many recent polemical and scholarly—but tendentious—studies of black-Jewish relations that portray Jews as differing little from other whites. As Seth Forman indicates, many of these studies bear the imprint of the Black Power movement, whose influence mounted in the late 1960s. Seeking to undermine the integrationist civil rights coalition in which Jews occupied a leading role, the writers of these works severely minimized or denied any special Jewish empathy for the African-American cause. David L. Lewis claims that Jewish involvement in the civil rights movement was motivated by self-interest rather than by heightened sensitivity rooted in a memory of antisemitic persecution. Jews allegedly “us[ed] Blacks as surrogates” (p. 12) to eliminate discrimination against Jews, blacks deriving little benefit from the alliance. Harold Cruse similarly portrayed Jews in the civil rights movement as opportunistic, as a privileged group that had not suffered in the United States and therefore had nothing in common with African Americans. According to Forman, Taylor Branch even cites Israel's refusal to grant citizenship to members of Ben-Ami Carter's “Black Hebrew” sect as evidence that Jews have been “perpetrators of racial hate” (p. 14). But Branch ignores the invalidity of the sect's claim to be Jewish as well as its virulently antisemitic and anti-white theology.

The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. xii, 329 pp. @T2first: During the past three decades, several major scholarly studies and personal accounts of Egyptian Jewry have been published in Europe, Israel, and the United States.The most noted scholarly publications include Jacob M. Landau, Jews in Nineteenth Century Egypt (New York: New York University Press, 1969); Gudrun Kramer, The Jews in Modern Egypt, 1914–1952 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1989); Michael M. Laskier, The Jews of Egypt, 1920–1970: In the Midst of Zionism, Anti-Semitism and the Middle East Conflict (New York: New York University Press, 1992); Yoram Meital, 'Atarim yehudiyim be-Miṣrayim (Jerusalem: The Ben-Zvi Institute, 1995); Zvi Zohar, Tradition and Change: Halachic Response of Middle Eastern Rabbis to Legal and Technological Changes [Egypt and Syria, 1880–1920]. [Hebrew] (Jerusalem: The Ben-Zvi Institute, 1993); and Yosef Algamil, Pirqei Tuvia ben Simḥa Levi Babovitch: 'Aḥaron ḥakhmei ha-kara'im be-Miṣrayim, 2 vols. (Ramlah: Center for Karaite Jewry, 1998). Some of the best personal accounts are Maurice Mizrahi, L'Egypte et ses Juifs: Le Temps revolu, xixe–xxe siècles (Geneva: Imprimerie Avenir, 1977); Yitzhaq Gormezano-Goren, Blanche [Hebrew] (Tel-Aviv: Am Oved, 1987); Jacqueline Kahanoff Mi-mizrah. shemesh (Tel-Aviv: Yariv Hadar, 1978); Ronit Matalon, Zeh ‘im ha-panim 'eleynu (Tel-Aviv: Am Oved, 1995); Rachel Maccabi, Mitzrayim sheli (Tel-Aviv: Sifriyat ha-Poalim, 1968); and André Aciman, Out of Egypt (New York: Farrar Strauss Giroux, 1994). Joel Beinin's book is the product of several years of research in Israel, Egypt, France, and the United States, in which he consulted not only books but also newspaper articles in English, French, Arabic, and Hebrew, as well as archives, among them the YIVO Institute records; the Haganah, Ha-Shomer ha-Tsa‘ir, and the Central Zionist archives (Israel); the Jamie Lehmann Memorial Collection of Yeshiva University (containing the records of the Cairo community); and the U.S. National Archives. He also interviewed Egyptian Jews and non-Jews.

Paula Hyman's The Jews of Modern France is the first volume in a new series on Jewish commuities edited by David Sorkin. Hyman has written a superb interpretative history. Incorporating classical texts as well as recent monographs in French, English, and Hebrew, she calls attention to the major issues, tensions, and socioeconomic developments in French Jewish history from 1789 to 1989 without either sacrificing their complexity or losing the reader in an overabundance of detail.

One of the lesser-studied aspects of modern Jewish history is the margin that thinly separates the origin from the destination of the great migrations of Eastern European Jews to America. The experience of Jews in the New World has been well documented, and increasing numbers of studies of turn-of-the-twentieth-century Russian Jewish history have appeared. Most of these works, however, treated the mass movement of Jews as either a concluding chapter of Jewish life in the Pale of Settlement or as a completely new beginning: the Jewish experience in the United States and Canada. Steven Cassedy's To the Other Shore examines the generations on the seam of the great migrations—the people who formed the bridge between the shtetl and the sweatshops, translating, with varying levels of success, Russian Jewish culture into American English.

Jewish Continuity in America is a collection of articles written by Abraham Karp over the course of his scholarly career. The earliest essay in the collection was published in 1955 on Jacob Joseph, who was appointed chief rabbi of New York in the late nineteenth century. The most recent previously published essays are an account of Isaac Leeser, traditionalist religious leader and Jewish journalist, and an overview of the synagogue in America, both published in 1987. In addition, there are two new essays, one on Congregation Beth Israel of Rochester, New York, and a second on what Karp calls the “tripartite” division of the American Jewish community. Because the book is a collection of articles, it could have perhaps been more accurately entitled “Studies in Nineteenth-Century American Jewish History” or “Essays on Rabbis and Synagogues in Nineteenth-Century American Judaism.”

Anyone who was personally privileged to meet the late J. H. Hertz, as was this reviewer from time to time in his student days, could not fail to be conscious of being in the presence of greatness. Short in natural height, he was a man of impressive stature. A commanding personality, he was easily the most outstanding individual ever to occupy the exalted position of chief rabbi of the British Empire (1913–46). He was courageous, energetic, eloquent, and determined, and he left an indelible impression on English-speaking Jewry. He bequeathed enduring, living monuments in the form of his Book of Jewish Thought (1917), his Commentary on the Torah and Haftorahs (1929–36), and his Commentary on the Prayer Book (1942–45), apart from numerous essays and addresses. As the Torah writes of Moses, “his hands were steady until the setting of the sun” (Exod. 17:12).

Pamela Nadell begins her history of “women who would have, if they could have, become rabbis” (p. x) with an acknowledgment “that uncovering women's history remains a political enterprise” (p. 13). Surprised to discover so many predecessors to today's female rabbis, Nadell enthusiastically traces the repetitive and discouraging history of arguments and efforts by diverse women to enter the rabbinate.

Four years ago, when I first read Bonnie Morris' Lubavitcher Women in America, the book was in manuscript form and I was directing a women's studies program at a regional university in Kentucky. As a Jewish feminist educator, I was asked by SUNY Press to review the book and make a recommendation about publication. The ultra-Orthodox represent a closed community: difficult to observe from the outside and rarely reported on from the inside, and I was fascinated by Morris' study of Lubavitcher women's postwar contributions to the spiritual life and growth of their Hasidic community. Along with another reviewer, I recommended publication, and the book came out in late 1998. Just under two years later, I again read Lubavitcher Women in America for the purpose of writing this review. What has changed is not my high regard for this skilled examination of the impact of American feminism on the lives and roles of women within this particular Hasidic community. Rather, it is my proximity to ultra-Orthodoxy.

This article describes a little noticed process among the Jews of the Middle East and North Africa, in which an initially open response to modernity was replaced among some religious leaders by marked opposition to it. The result is a more nuanced view of the cultural/spiritual lives of these important communities.