"If history is narrative, than Ezra-Nehemiah is only partly history. Well over half of Ezra-Nehemiah is not a narrative but rather a patchwork of cited texts that are frequently intervening in the story. The capacity of citations in Ezra-Nehemiah to offend the historiographical, aesthetic, and theological sensibilities of scholars in the last century invites us to renew the question of what citation accomplishes in this context. In this book, I label the citation style in Ezra-Nehemiah, "archival historiography." I argue that the act of citation in Ezra-Nehemiah forms an alternative site of archiving in Ezra-Nehemiah and this hybrid literary form prioritizes the assembly and organization of documents over the production of a seamless narrative. I begin this argument by comparing this literary form with archival institutions and practices across the landscape of the ancient Near East, contending that Ezra-Nehemiah adapts the symbolic power of these ancient collections. I then identify the role of the imperial archive within the narrative of Ezra-Nehemiah, where it surfaces as an axial and ambivalent source of political power. By reviewing the cited documents in Ezra-Nehemiah, this book argues that the act of citation is not, as has been commonly argued, solely or even primarily in the business of authorizing this account or symbolizing the fulfillment of prophetic promises. Rather, citation in Ezra-Nehemiah is aimed at reestablishing a community by organizing memory into retrievable texts. Archival historiography thus constitutes an essential act of communal recovery. Creating an archive within the pages of Ezra-Nehemiah represents the cultural vitality of the Judean community after the losses of exile and while living in the long shadow of imperial rule." --

How do people link the past to the present, marking continuity in the face of the fundamental discontinuities of history? A Time to Gather argues that historical records took on potent value in modern Jewish life as both sources of history and anchors of memory because archives presented oneway of transmitting Jewish culture and history from one generation to another as well as making claims of access to an "authentic" Jewish culture. Indeed, both before the Holocaust and in its aftermath, Jewish leaders around the world felt a shared imperative to muster the forces and resources ofJewish life and culture. It was a "time to gather," a feverish era of collecting and conflict in which archive making was both a response to the ruptures of modernity and a mechanism for communities to express their cultural hegemony.Jason Lustig explores these themes across the arc of the twentieth century by excavating three distinctive archival traditions, that of the Cairo Genizah (and its transfer to Cambridge in the 1890s), folkloristic efforts like those of YIVO, and the Gesamtarchiv der deutschen Juden (Central or TotalArchive of the German Jews) formed in Berlin in 1905. Lustig presents archive-making as an organizing principle of twentieth-century Jewish culture, as a metaphor of great power and broad symbolic meaning with the dispersion and gathering of documents falling in the context of the Jews' longdiasporic history. In this light, creating archives was just as much about the future as it was about the past.

Explains how Cairo came to have its important Genizah archive, how Cambridge developed its interests in Hebraica, and how a number of colourful figures brought about the connection between the two centres. Also shows the importance of the Genizah material for Jewish cultural history.

A survey of Jewish women’s history from biblical times to the twenty-first century.

"Commemorating the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the American Jewish Archives and the tenth anniversary of Gary P. Zola as its Director, New Essays in American Jewish History includes twenty-two new articles representing the best in modern American and Jewish scholarship. More than a celebration, New Essays serves as a scholarly benchmark in the growing field of American Jewish studies." --Amazon.com.

"A Time to Gather: Archives and the Control of Jewish Culture examines Jewish archives in Germany, the United States, and Israel/Palestine and argues that historical records took on potent value in modern Jewish life as both sources of history and anchors of memory, precisely because archives presented one way of transmitting Jewish culture and history from one generation to another. Creating archives was one means for Jews to take control of their history, especially after the Holocaust when efforts at archive restitution removed looted archives from the hands of perpetrators. Such efforts also raised complex questions of who could actually "own" this history. This book contends that twentieth-century Jewish archival efforts served as a proxy for wide-ranging struggles over the meaning and control of Jewish culture: Whether in Israel's claims to be a successor to European Jewry, the reality of American Jewry's rising prominence, or the question of the continued vitality of Jewish life in Germany after the Holocaust, gathering archives was a means to assert dominance over Jewish culture by making claims of ties to the past and constituting a kind of "birth certificate" or legitimization of communal life. A Time to Gather presents archive-making as a metaphor with the dispersion and gathering of documents falling in the context of the Jews' long diasporic history. In the end, a rising urgency of archival memory in Jewish life and the importance of history's traces meant archives were powerful but contested symbols of control of the past, present, and future"--