Prophets of the Past: Interpreters of Jewish History pdf

Michael Brenner is the Seymour and Lillian Abensohn Chair in Israel Studies and Director of AU’s Center for Israel Studies. He received his PhD at Columbia University and taught previously at Indiana and Brandeis Universities. Since 1997 he has been Professor of Jewish History and Culture at the Ludwig-Maximilians University of Munich. He had visiting appointments at numerous universities, including Haifa, Paris, Budapest, Vienna, Stanford, Berkeley, and Johns Hopkins. Professor Brenner is an elected fellow of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, the American Academy for Jewish Research and the Accademia Nazionale Virgiliana in Mantua. He is the International President of the Leo Baeck Institute for the Study of German-Jewish History and serves on many academic boards, including the Jewish Museum of Berlin, the Israel Institute, the Center for European Studies of the University of Haifa and is board chair of the Franz Rosenzweig Research Center of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. His nine books have been translated into ten languages and include In Search of Israel: The History of an Idea; A Short History of the Jews; Prophets of the Past: Interpreters of Jewish History; Zionism: A Brief History; The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany, After the Holocaust: Rebuilding Jewish Lives in Postwar Germany and his forthcoming In Hitler’s Munich: Jews, Antisemitism, and the Rise of Nazism. He is co-author of the four-volume German-Jewish History in Modern Times, for which he was awarded a National Jewish Book Award, and editor of nineteen books. Professor Brenner was awarded with the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 2014. In 2020 he was the firsr recipient of the Salo W. and Jeannette M. Baron Award for Scholarly Excellence in Research on the Jewish Experience. Michael Brenner publishes widely in international media, including the Washington Post, the Times of Israel, and the Spiegel. His voice is heard frequently on PBS and international radio and TV stations.

Prophets of the Past: Interpreters of Jewish History pdf by Michael Brenner

Prophets of the Past is the first book to examine in depth how modern Jewish historians have interpreted Jewish history. Michael Brenner reveals that perhaps no other national or religious group has used their shared history for so many different ideological and political purposes as the Jews. He deftly traces the master narratives of Jewish history from the beginnings of the scholarly study of Jews and Judaism in nineteenth-century Germany; to eastern European approaches by Simon Dubnow, the interwar school of Polish-Jewish historians, and the short-lived efforts of Soviet-Jewish historians; to the work of British and American scholars such as Cecil Roth and Salo Baron; and to Zionist and post-Zionist interpretations of Jewish history. He also unravels the distortions of Jewish history writing, including antisemitic Nazi research into the "Jewish question," the Soviet portrayal of Jewish history as class struggle, and Orthodox Jewish interpretations of history as divinely inspired.History proved to be a uniquely powerful weapon for modern Jewish scholars during a period when they had no nation or army to fight for their ideological and political objectives, whether the goal was Jewish emancipation, diasporic autonomy, or the creation of a Jewish state. As Brenner demonstrates in this illuminating and incisive book, these historians often found legitimacy for these struggles in the Jewish past.