Suchergebnisse

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

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.