On April 7, 2020, Yale University Press published The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, Volume 8: Crisis and Creativity between World Wars, 1918–1939, edited by Todd M. Endelman and Zvi Gitelman. “This volume is intended to introduce readers to a world that they did not know existed. We stress the richness of the writing and reflection throughout the Jewish world,” explains Endelman.
“Our selection of materials in many languages—many of which were translated for this volume—and in many subject areas helps the reader and viewer recreate the issues, personalities and divergent views of that time,” continued Gitelman.
“Rapid, dramatic change characterized the short twenty-year interval between the two world wars (1918–1939),” write Endelman and Gitelman. “In Europe, economic crises after 1929, strident nationalist movements and militant radical parties, political polarization and the erosion of liberalism, and the slide from democratic to authoritarian norms undermined Jewish hopes for stability and security, especially in the new states that emerged in Eastern and Central Europe. In West European societies and in North America, the challenges were less dire,” they observe, “but daunting nonetheless. However, despite the economic downturn of the 1930s, Western Jews (both native born and immigrants) continued to move into the middle class. In the United States, the Jewish community emerged as a significant influence in American and world Jewish politics. In Palestine, then under British control, the Jewish population grew rapidly, becoming more ideological and secular. If the less than 10 percent of European Jews who lived in Western democracies in the 1930s felt a sense of unease, then in Poland, Romania, Hungary, and Germany there was a palpable feeling of impending trouble, if not catastrophe.
“Indeed, the interwar years saw an explosion of Jewish creativity everywhere, not just in the Yishuv (the Jewish community in the Land of Israel). Regardless of the language in which they worked, groups of Jews embraced modernist trends in literature and art, produced middle-brow literature for popular consumption, and cultivated traditional forms of religious scholarship. With gusto and in large numbers, they engaged in social and political commentary, historical research, and literary criticism. They painted, sculpted, and photographed, wrote poetry and philosophy, made movies, danced, and composed music. It would be difficult to identify another twenty-year period in any era of Jewish history in which Jewish cultural life was so effervescent. Undoubtedly, the many crises and challenges that confronted them during these years stimulated and stoked this outburst of creativity, in large part because the political, social, and economic issues of the day were so urgent. Jews were both consumers of and contributors to the rich general intellectual ferment of these years.”
Organized by genre, Crisis and Creativity between World Wars showcases Jewish social, political and cultural thought, scholarship and innovation in religious thought, and visual culture, fiction, drama, and poetry. Gorgeously illustrated, this volume of The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization will be cherished by anyone interested in the global story of Jewish culture and civilization.
“The Posen Library challenges the primacy of religion as the dominant mode of Jewish life and culture over the centuries,” explains Editor-in-Chief Deborah Dash Moore. “It is a somewhat controversial way of approaching the Jewish past and Jewish culture and civilization. The Posen Library explicitly contends that how Jews earned a living, related to each other in community, and decorated their homes is as worthy of understanding as how Jews wrote commentary on Torah.”
