JACOB NEUSNER

STRANGER AT HOME

“The Holocaust,” Zionism, and American Judaism

Wipf and Stock Publishers

EUGENE, OREGON

Jacob Neusner, the author of sixty scholarly works, fourteen textbooks, thirteen collections of essays, and the editor of five other books, is University Professor and Ungerlieder Distinguished Scholar of Judaic Studies at Brown University.

To Yosef Gorni and the faculty of the Chaim Rosenberg School of Jewish Studies at Tel Aviv University and the senior administration of the Tel Aviv University.

Wipf and Stock Publishers

199 West 8th Avenue, Suite 3

Eugene, Oregon 97401

Stranger at Home

“The Holocaust,” Zionism, and American Judaism

By Neusner, Jacob

Copyright© 1981 by Neusner, Jacob

ISBN: 1-59244-362-1

Publication date 9/26/2003

Previously published by The University of Chicago Press, 1981

Contents

Acknowledgments

Preface

Prologue

Introduction

1. Stranger at Home: An American Jew Confronts the State of Israel

Part One

The Problematic of Judaism in America

Identity, Self-Hatred, and the Crisis of Community

Introduction

2. Freedom’s Challenge to Judaism

3. Sacred and Secular, Archaic and Modern: The Crisis of Modernity

4. Assimilation and Self-Hatred in Modern Jewish Life

Part Two

Response to Freedom I

The Place of “The Holocaust” in American Judaism

Introduction

5. The Implications of “The Holocaust”

6. How the Extermination of European Jewry Became “The Holocaust”

7. Jubilee in Tübingen

Part Three

Response to Freedom II

The Place of Zionism in American Judaism

Introduction

8. Are We in Exile?

9. A New Heaven and a New Earth

10. From Sentimentality to Ideology: The Tasks of Zionism in American Judaism

Part Four

Toward a Theory of Zionism for American Judaism

Introduction

11. A Zionism of Jewish Peoplehood

12. The Spiritual Center? The Uses of the Circle-Metaphor

13. Israel and Yavneh: The Perspective of Time

Part Five

Summing Up

Zionism, “The Jewish Problem,” and Judaism

Introduction

14. Judaism and the Zionist Problem

15. Zionism and “The Jewish Problem”

Glossary

Index

Acknowledgments

Mrs. Lois Atwood, the administrator of the Department of Religious Studies at Brown University, helped me prepare this book in two ways. First, she read the numerous essays which were candidates for inclusion and both helped to eliminate some and also showed me how to order others. Second, she read the book with an eye toward avoiding those usages deemed by us to be “sexist,” which, in less enlightened days, were routine in my writing. While it is probable that even after her careful review and mine as well, unwanted formulations may remain, we have done our best to address a single world of men and women, and so to find language appropriate for that chosen frame of discourse.

My graduate student, Mr. Alan Peck, joined in this same labor and also helped in many ways in the planning and execution of this book.

Finally, I wish to acknowledge with deep gratitude the stimulation to review my writings of a thoughtful, not-scholarly, character ...