Acculturation and Its Discontents: The Italian Jewish Experience Between Exclusion and Inclusion

by David N. Myers, Peter Hanns Reill (Editor), Massimo Ciavolella (Editor)

Exploring the fascinating cross-cultural influences between Jews and Christians in Italy from the Renaissance to the twentieth century, Acculturation and Its Discontents assembles essays by leading historians, literary scholars, and musicologists to present a well-rounded history of Italian Jewry. The contributors offer rich portraits of the many vibrant forms of cultural and artistic expression that Italian Jews contributed to, but this volume also pays close attention to the ways in which Italian Jews - both freely and under pressure - creatively adapted to the social, cultural, and legal norms of the surrounding society. Tracing both the triumphs and tragedies of Jewish communities within Italy over a broad span of time, Acculturation and Its Discontents challenges conventional assumptions about assimilation and state intervention and, in the process, charts the complex process of cultural exchange that left such a distinctive imprint not only on Italian Jewry, but also on Italian society itself. This collection of rigorous and thought-provoking essays makes a major contribution to both the history of Italian culture and the cultural influence and significance of European Jews.

224 pages, Hardcover

First published October 25, 2008

About the author

David N. Myers received his A.B. from Yale College in 1982, and undertook graduate studies at Tel-Aviv and Harvard Universities before completing his doctorate at Columbia in 1991. He has written extensively in the fields of modern Jewish intellectual and cultural history, with a particular interest in the history of Jewish historiography. He has authored Re-Inventing the Jewish Past: European Jewish Intellectuals and the Zionist Return to History (Oxford: 1995) and Resisting History: Historicism and its Discontents in German-Jewish Thought (Princeton, 2003). Myers has edited five books, including The Jewish Past Revisited and Enlightenment and Diaspora: The Armenian and Jewish Cases.

At present, Myers is working on books on the Diaspora Hebraist thinker Simon Rawidowicz and (together with Nomi Stolzenberg) the Satmar Hasidic community of Kiryas Yoel, New York. He is also actively involved in a major project on the history of Jews in Los Angeles. Myers has taught at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales and the Russian State University for the Humanities, and visited at the Institute for Advanced Studies (Jerusalem) and the Center for Advanced Judaic Studies (Philadelphia). Since 2003, he has served as co-editor of the Jewish Quarterly Review. At UCLA, Myers teaches courses in ancient, medieval, and modern Jewish history.