The Shtetl: New Evaluations (Elie Wiesel Center for Judaic Studies Series)

by Steven T. Katz

View the Table of Contents. Read the Introduction.

"This important and comprehensive collection provides a fascinating re-evaluation of one of the main locations of Jewish life in Eastern Europe down to the Holocaust and beyond."—Antony Polonsky, Albert Abramson Professor of Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and Brandeis University

"The contributors help lift the veil of nostalgia that has long obscured the history of small town East European Jewish life. They contest the literary conception of the hermetically sealed, monolithic shtetl, and describe a more integrated and varied Jewish-Christian (and Jewish-Jewish) dynamic that seems much more true to life. This collection constitutes an important step beyond the older, diachronic understanding of Jewish history." —Glenn Dynner, author of Men of The Hasidic Conquest of Polish Jewish Society

Dating from the sixteenth century, there were hundreds of shtetls—Jewish settlements—in Eastern Europe that were home to a large and compact population that differed from their gentile, mostly peasant neighbors in religion, occupation, language, and culture. The shtetls were different in important respects from previous types of Jewish settlements in the Diaspora in that Jews had rarely formed a majority in the towns in which they lived. This was not true of the shtetl, where Jews sometimes comprised 80% or more of the population. While the shtetl began to decline during the course of the nineteenth century, it was the Holocaust which finally destroyed it.

During the last thirty years the shtetl has attracted a growing amount of scholarly attention, though gross generalizations and romanticized nostalgia continue to affect how the topic is treated. This volume takes a new look at this most important facet of East European Jewish life. It helps to correct the notion that the shtetl was an entirely Jewish world and shows the ways in which the Jews of the shtetl interacted both with their co-religionists and with their gentile neighbors. The volume includes chapters on the history of the shtetl, its myths and realities, politics, gender dynamics, how the shtetl has been (mis)represented in literature, and the changes brought about by World War I and the Holocaust, among others.

Samuel Kassow, Gershon David Hundert, Immanuel Etkes, Nehemia Polen, Henry Abramson, Konrad Zielinski, Jeremy Dauber, Israel Bartel, Naomi Seidman, Mikhail Krutikov, Arnold J. Band, Katarzyna Wieclawska, Yehunda Bauer, and Elie Wiesel.

This is the first book published in the Elie Wiesel Center for Judaic Studies Series.

Paperback

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

Steven Theodore Katz is an American philosopher and scholar. He is the director of the Elie Wiesel Center for Judaic Studies at Boston University in Massachusetts, United States, where he holds the Alvin J. and Shirley Slater Chair in Jewish and Holocaust Studies.

Reviews

[Mike Goldstein · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some really interesting entries. Some impossibly dry. Learned about 19th-century demographics and wet dreams.

[Garth · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was pretty dry but I learned some interesting things. Some chapters are more about Ashkenazi Jewry generally than the shtetl specifically.