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This book offers a wide-ranging exploration of the key word Jew—charting the past meanings, present usages, and possible futures of a term that lies not only at the heart of Jewish experience, but at the core of how Western civilization has imagined the Other. Tracing the word’s evolution, Cynthia M. Baker also interrogates the contested categories of “ethnicity,” “race,” and “religion,” while providing a glimpse of what Jew is coming to mean in an era of Internet cultures, genetic sequencing, and uncertain identities.
List of contents
Foreword by the Series Editors
Acknowledgments
A Note on Orthography
Introduction
Owning the Word
Jews, Jew, the Jews, the Jew, Jewish, Jewess
Outline of This Book
1 Terms of Debate
First Jews
A Jew Outward or a Jew Inward?
Jews, Women, Slaves
From Ethnos to Ethnicity/Race and Religion
2 State of the (Jew[ish]) Question
Vos Macht a Yid?
Jew in Jewish Studies
Thinking (with) Jew(s)
3 In a New Key: New Jews
Zionism’s New Jew and the Birth of the Genomic Jew
New Jews in a New Europe
New Jews: A View from the New World
Notes
Index
About the author
CYNTHIA M. BAKER is a professor and the chair of religious studies at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine. She is the author of Rebuilding the House of Israel: Architectures of Gender in Jewish Antiquity.
Summary
For millennia, Jew has signified the consummate Other, a persistent fly in the ointment of Western civilization's grand narratives and cultural projects. Only very recently, however, has Jew been reclaimed as a term of self-identification and pride. With these insights as a point of departure, this book offers a wide-ranging exploration of this key word.
