 | How Jewish is Jewish History? With great vigour and from the vantage point of long experience of writing and teaching Jewish history, Moshe Rosman treats the key questions that postmodernism raises for the writing of Jewish history. What is the relationship between Jewish culture and history and those of the non-Jews among whom Jews live? Can we-in the light of postmodernist thought-speak of a continuous, coherent Jewish People, with a distinct culture and history? What in fact is Jewish cultural history, and how can it be written? How does gender transform the Jewish historical narrative? How does Jewish history fit into the multicultural paradigm? Has Jewish history entered a postmodern phase? How can Jewish history utilize the methodologies of other disciplines to accomplish its task? All these are questions that Jewish historians need to think about if their work is to be taken seriously by mainstream historians and intellectuals, or indeed by educated Jews interested in understanding their own cultural and historical past. While engaging with the questions raised by postmodernists, the author adopts a critical stance towards their work. Moshe Rosman is Professor of Jewish History at Bar Ilan University in Israel. He has been a Fulbright scholar, an IREX fellow, a fellow of the Center for Advanced Judaic Studies of the University of Pennsylvania, winner of the National Jewish Book Award in History (1996), the Zalman Shazar Prize (2000), the Jerzy Milewski Award (2000), and visiting professor at the University of Michigan and at Solomon University in Kiev. Professor Rosman has conducted extensive archival research in eastern Europe and specializes in integrating Jewish, Polish, and other sources. His previous books include The Lords' Jews: Jews and Magnates in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and Founder of Hasidism: A Quest for the Historical Ba'al Shem Tov. |
