Jewish Emancipation, Citizenship, and Belonging

additional resources

Theoretical Frameworks

  • Wendy Brown, “Rights and Identity in Late Modernity: Revisiting the ‘Jewish Question,’” in Identities, Politics, and Rights, ed. Austin Sarat and Thomas R. Kearns (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 85–130.

  • Andreas Fahrmeir, Citizenship: The Rise and Fall of a Modern Concept (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 9–55.

  • Ayelet Shachar, “Introduction: Citizenship and the ‘Right to Have Rights,’” Citizenship Studies 18, no. 2–3 (2014): 114–24.

  • Michael Walzer, “Membership,” in Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 31–63.

  • Nira Yuval-Davis, The Politics of Belonging: Intersectional Contestations (London: Sage Publications, 2011).

Jewish Emancipation in Western Europe

  • Leora Batnitzky, How Judaism Became a Religion: An Introduction to Modern Jewish Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011).

  • Lois C. Dubin, “Jewish Women, Marriage Law, and Emancipation: A Civil Divorce in Late-Eighteenth Century Trieste,” Jewish Social Studies 13, no. 2 (2007): 65–92.

  • Mitchell B. Hart, ed. Jews and Race: Writings on Identity and Difference, 1880–1940 (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2011).

  • Derek J. Penslar, Jews and the Military: A History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013).

  • Maurice Samuels, The Right to Difference: French Universalism and the Jews (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2016).

  • David Sorkin, Jewish Emancipation: A History Across Five Centuries (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019).

  • Adam Sutcliffe, “Toleration, Integration, Regeneration, and Reform: Rethinking the Roots and Routes of ‘Jewish Emancipation,’” in The Cambridge History of Judaism, Volume 7: The Early Modern World, 1500–1815, ed. Jonathan Karp and Adam Sutcliffe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 1058–88.

Jews, Empires, and Nations

  • Eugene M. Avrutin, Jews and the Imperial State: Identification Politics in Tsarist Russia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010).

  • Rogers Brubaker, “Aftermaths of Empire and the Unmixing of Peoples: Historical and Comparative Perspectives,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 18, no. 2 (1995): 189–218.

  • Michelle U. Campos, “Between ‘Beloved Ottomania’ and ‘The Land of Israel’: The Struggle over Ottomanism and Zionism among Palestine’s Sephardi Jews, 1908–13,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 37, no. 4 (2005): 461–83.

  • Julia Phillips Cohen, Becoming Ottomans: Sephardi Jews and Imperial Citizenship in the Modern Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

  • Jacob Daniels, The Jews of Edirne: The End of Ottoman Europe and the Arrival of Borders (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2025).

  • Jonathan Frankel, “The Paradox of Modern Jewish Politics,” in Jews and the Modern State, ed. Ezra Mendelsohn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 3–28.

  • Zvi Gitelman, A Century of Ambivalence: The Jews of Russia and the Soviet Union, 1881 to the Present, 2nd ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001).

  • Jessica M. Marglin, The Shamama Case: Contesting Citizenship across the Modern Mediterranean (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2022).

  • Devi Mays, Forging Ties, Forging Passports: Migration and the Modern Sephardi Diaspora (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2020).

  • Devin E. Naar, Jewish Salonica: Between the Ottoman Empire and Modern Greece (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016).

  • Marsha L. Rozenblit and Jonathan Karp, eds., World War I and the Jews: Conflict and Transformation in Europe, the Middle East, and America (New York: Berghahn Books, 2017).

  • Joshua Schreier, Arabs of the Jewish Faith: The Civilizing Mission in Colonial Algeria (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010).

The Politics of Papers: Stateless Jews

  • Tobias Brinkmann, Between Borders: The Great Jewish Migration from Eastern Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024).

  • Mikkel Flohr, “Beyond the Nation State: Rereading Hannah Arendt’s ‘We Refugees’ Eighty Years Later,” New Political Science 46, no. 1 (2024): 6–20.

  • Libby Garland, After They Closed the Gates: Jewish Illegal Immigration, 1921–1965 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014).

  • James Loeffler and Moria Paz, eds., The Law of Strangers: Jewish Lawyers and International Law in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).

  • Noora A. Lori, “Statelessness, ‘In-Between’ Statuses, and Precarious Citizenship,” in The Oxford Handbook of Citizenship, ed. Ayelet Shachar, Rainer Bauböck, Irene Bloemraad, and Maarten Vink (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 743–66.

  •  Zainab Saleh, Political Undesirables: Citizenship, Denaturalization, and Reclamation in Iraq (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2025).

  • Mira L. Siegelberg, Statelessness: A Modern History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020).

  • John Torpey, The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship, and the State (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

  • Claire Zalc, Denaturalized: How Thousands Lost Their Citizenship and Lives in Vichy France (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2020).

The Law of Return and Jewish Belonging in Israel

  • Daphne Barak-Erez, “What Does It Mean for a State to Be Jewish?,” in The Cambridge Companion to Judaism and Law, ed. Christine Hayes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 365–85.

  • Eliezer Ben-Rafael, ed., Jewish Identities: Fifty Intellectuals Answer Ben-Gurion (Leiden: Brill, 2002).

  • Asaf Elia-Shalev, Israel’s Black Panthers: The Radicals Who Punctured a Nation’s Founding Myth (Oakland: University of California Press, 2024).

  • Sayed Kashua, Native: Dispatches from an Israeli-Palestinian Life (New York: Grove Press, 2016).

  • David N. Myers, Between Jew and Arab: The Lost Voice of Simon Rawidowicz (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2009).

  • Simon Rabinovitch, ed., Defining Israel: The Jewish State, Democracy, and the Law (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 2018).

  • Shira Robinson, Citizen Strangers: Palestinians and the Birth of Israel’s Liberal Settler State (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013).

  • Bryan K. Roby, “Not All Who Ascend Remain: Afro-Asian Jewish Returnees from Israel,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 54, no. 2 (2022): 260–81.

  •  Sarah S. Willen, Fighting for Dignity: Migrant Lives at Israel’s Margins (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019).