Jews and Urban Life

Leonard J. Greenspoon

• Publisher: Purdue University Press
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN:
  9781612499024
  9781612499017
• eBook ISBN:
  9781612499031
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Jewish History
• Index: Social Sciences

Jews and Urban Life recognizes that throughout their long history, Jews have often inhabited cities. The reality of this urban experience ranged from ghetto restrictions to robust participation in a range of civic and social activities. Essays in this collection present relevant examples from within the Jewish community itself, moving historically from the biblical period to the modern-day State of Israel. Taking a comparative approach while recognizing the particulars of individual instances, authors examine these phenomena from a wide variety of approaches, genres, and media. Interdisciplinary and accessibly written, the articles display a multitude of instances throughout history showing the range of Jewish life in urban settings.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Editor’s Introduction
• Contributors
• Jews in Ancient Civic Life
• Urbanizing Jews: Agriculture, Slave Codes, and the Byzantine Empire
• Vienna’s Jewish Community, 1819–1826: Glimpses from Beethoven’s Conversation Books at the Dawn of a New Era
• A Tale of Two Cities: Jewish Creativity in Venice and Prague
• The Cosmopolitan Jewish City: A Typology
• The Social Role of Small Jewish Cultural Centers: The Case of Cluj-Napoca, Romania
• Jewish Urbanization and the Midsize City: The Case of Kaunas, Lithuania
• Kyiv as a Center of Soviet Jewish Culture in the 1920s–1930s
• The Yiddish Press in Cleveland
• Jews Create Towns: An Examination of the Impact of Joseph Sondheimer on the Creation of Muskogee, Oklahoma
• Rescuing that Modest Mansion: The Contributions of Urban Jews to American Historic Preservation
• Comicus the Cosmopolite: Diasporic Cosmopolitics and the Promise of the City in Mel Brooks’s History of the World, Part I
• City in the Garden, Garden in the City: Clarence Stein, Moshe Safdie, and the Design of Urban Reform