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Geneviève Zubrzycki, a distinguished comparative-historical and cultural sociologist who studies national identity, religion, and collective memory, has written a fascinating and insightful book, based on a decade of participant observation and interviews in multiple Polish cities and towns, about an astonishing Jewish revival in Poland since the early 2000s. This revival takes various forms: the organizing of Jewish festivals in cities and towns throughout Poland since the mid-2000s, the "popularity of klezmer music," the "proliferation of Judaica bookstores and Jewish-style restaurants," the creation of "new museums, memorials, and memory spaces," the development of "Jewish and Holocaust studies programs in universities," the publication of books and articles on Jewish topics, and even a "modest but steady number of conversions to Judaism" (p. 8).
Text in English

This essay is part of a symposium on Modernity and the Jews in Western Social Thought (University of Chicago Press, 2017) and responds to comments on the book by Angel Adams Parham, Joseph Gerteis, Peter Kivisto, and Fuyuki Kurasawa. As all these commentators recognize, the history of social theory at its best involves more than conserving, inculcating, and consecrating the sociological canon or even remaking the canon through the addition of previously neglected authors. The history of social theory also allows scholars to address fundamental questions in the sociology of knowledge, the comparative investigation of different kinds of alterity, and the study of social solidarity and belonging. This essay reflects on how best to address these questions and suggests ways that new research in the history of social thought can build upon and extend existing scholarship.

This article identifies two different patterns in how Karl Marx, in collaboration with Friedrich Engels, portrayed the relationship between the Jews and modern capitalism. The early Marx described modern economic life as domination by a Jewish spirit that is internalized by non-Jews and objectified in economic institutions. The Jews did not drop out of Marx's mature work, as is sometimes supposed, but there was a major shift in how he linked European Jewry to capitalist development. The mature Marx, it is argued, substituted a new narrative in which the Jews, after contributing to the creation of modern capitalism, were then superseded. In addition, the article seeks to explain these patterns: it argues that assumptions about the Jews originally derived from Christian theology but subsequently secularized and transposed to economic life formed part of the cultural toolkit with which Marx and other classical German social thinkers constructed their understanding of modern capitalism.

The relationship between European sociology and European anti-Semitism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is investigated through a case study of one sociologist, Émile Durkheim, in a single country, France. Reactionary and radical forms of anti-Semitism are distinguished and contrasted to Durkheim's sociological perspective. Durkheim's remarks about the Jews directly addressed anti-Semitic claims about them, their role in French society, and their relationship to modernity. At the same time, Durkheim was engaged in a reinterpretation of the French Revolution and its legacies that indirectly challenged other tenets of French anti-Semitism. In sum, Durkheim's work contains direct and indirect responses to reactionary and radical forms of anti-Semitism, and together these responses form a coherent alternative vision of the relationship between modernity and the Jews.

When I moved to Madison in 2001 to take a job as an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin, I knew embarrassingly little about my newly adopted state's historical significance. Judging from their wisecracks about the sociology of cows, neither did my friends in New York. I soon learned about Wisconsin's prominent role in many of America's social advances, from "Fighting Bob" LaFollette's opposition to powerful railroad trusts, to pioneering contributions to social insurance, to the nation's first law for public-employee bargaining in 1959, to the turbulent campus protests against the Vietnam War in the 1960s. Little did I know that a decade after my arrival, Wisconsin would once again become "ground zero," as some commentators now call it, in America's ongoing struggle between democratic progress and reaction.

Emile Durkheim's "Antisémitisme et crise sociale," written in 1899 during the Dreyfus Affair in France, is introduced. The introduction summarizes the principal contributions that "Antisémitisme et crise sociale" makes to the sociology of anti-Semitism, relates those contributions to Durkheim's broader theoretical assumptions and concerns, situates his analysis of anti-Semitism in its social and historical context, contrasts it to other analyses of anti-Semitism (Marxist and Zionist) that were prominent in Durkheim's time, indicates some of the revisions and additions that a fuller and more complete Durkheimian theory of anti-Semitism would entail, and highlights the significance of Durkheim's ideas for the contemporary study of ethnic and racial antagonism. While noting the limitations of Durkheim's analysis, the introduction concludes that "Antisémitisme et crise sociale" has sadly regained its relevance in the light of a revival of anti-Semitism at the turn of the millennium.