The inaugural volume, Volume 10: 1973–2005, was published November 20, 2012. Edited by Deborah Dash Moore and Nurith Gertz, it is a richly illustrated guide to the momentous contemporary period. “This exciting first volume brings Jewish culture alive,” says Yale University Press Director John Donatich. “It beautifully showcases the depth and breadth of creative output from this crucial time in Jewish history.”
The wide-ranging selections in Volume 10—more than 800 in total—are drawn from literature, poetry, memoir, children’s literature, intellectual culture, popular culture, and religion. Among the hundreds of noted figures from the world of letters are Aharon Appelfeld, Saul Bellow, Judy Blume, E. L. Doctorow, Jonathan Safran Foer, Rebecca Goldstein, Bernard Malamud, David Mamet, Amos Oz, Cynthia Ozick, Adrienne Rich, Philip Roth, Wendy Wasserstein, and A. B. Yehoshua. From the visual arts, Judy Chicago, Frank Gehry, Daniel Libeskind, and Louise Nevelson are among the many figures represented. From popular culture, the book includes comics, travel guides, and cookbooks, with selections from writers and artists such as Ralph Bakshi and Mimi Sheraton. For their influential role in defining intellectual or religious culture, Shlomo Carlebach, Jacques Derrida, Alan Dershowitz, Thomas L. Friedman, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Susannah Heschel, Harold Kushner, Susan Sontag, Adin Steinsaltz, Avi Weiss, and Elie Wiesel are among those included.
Some works were selected for being representative, illuminating, or unusual. Others were chosen for being intriguing, influential, or simply excellent. “The range and particulars of the selections in The Posen Library will assuredly give rise to much questioning about what makes Jewish culture Jewish, and what makes Jewish culture,” says Deborah Dash Moore. “Editing Volume 10 brought many surprises,” adds Nurith Gertz. “The chronological order by genre coincidentally highlighted the themes that have dominated Jewish expression since 1973: Israel, the Holocaust, the fall of communism, plurality, women’s expressions, assimilation, and reconciling old and new modes of Jewish life throughout the world.”
In the coming years, Yale University Press will publish the remaining nine encyclopedic volumes of The Posen Library, each covering a crucial period in Jewish history. The animating idea behind the project is to demonstrate the incredible richness, complexity, and diversity of Jewish culture, from biblical times to the present. More than 120 internationally recognized scholars have been involved with the series, making it the most ambitious anthological project ever attempted by Jewish studies scholars. Jews and Words, a companion volume by acclaimed novelist Amos Oz and his daughter, historian Fania Oz-Salzberger, will be published simultaneously with the inaugural volume to celebrate the series launch.
A feast of Jewish culture, in 10 volumes.
Readers seeking primary texts, documents, images, and artifacts constituting Jewish culture and civilization will not be disappointed. More important, they might even be inspired.
The importance of the Posen Library lies not merely in the realm of Jewish culture and spirit, but in the sphere of Israeli national identity, which nurtures and strengthens Jewish communities in the diaspora. This Library challenges the statement by some Orthodox Jews that "there is no Israel but in its Torah”—that religion is the singular core of Jewish identity. Against this notion, the anthology places piety in its rightful context as only one part of a rich, multigenerational Jewish culture, which has decisively secular elements, and which is authorized not by rabbis but by every Jew who loves it and draws sustenance from it.
Deborah Dash Moore
Deborah Dash Moore is Frederick G. L. Huetwell Professor of History and director of the Jean and Samuel Frankel Center for Judaic Studies, University of Michigan. She is co-editor of Volume 10: 1973-2005 of The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization.
Nurith Gertz
Nurith Gertz is professor emerita of Hebrew Literature and Film, the Open University of Israel, and head of the Department of Culture Creation and Production, Sapir College. She is co-editor of Volume 10: 1973-2005 of The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization.
James E. Young
James E. Young, Founding Editor in Chief of The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, is Distinguished University Professor of English and Judaic studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is the author of four books dealing with Holocaust memorials, narratives, and images in contemporary art and architecture, including The Texture of Memory, which won a National Jewish Book Award. He was a member of the design juries that chose the National 9/11 Memorial in New York City and Germany’s national Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin.
