Jewish Memory And the Cosmopolitan Order

Natan Sznaider offers a highly original account of Jewish memory and politics before and after the Holocaust. It seeks to recover an aspect of Jewish identity that has been almost completely lost today - namely, that throughout much of their history Jews were both a nation and cosmopolitan, they lived in a constant tension between particularism and universalism. And it is precisely this tension, which Sznaider seeks to capture in his innovative conception of ‘rooted cosmopolitanism', that is increasingly the destiny of all peoples today.

The book pays special attention to Jewish intellectuals who played an important role in advancing universal ideas out of their particular identities. The central figure in this respect is Hannah Arendt and her concern to build a better world out of the ashes of the Jewish catastrophe. The book demonstrates how particular Jewish affairs are connected to current concerns about cosmopolitan politics like human rights, genocide, international law and politics. Jewish identity and universalist human rights were born together, developed together and are still fundamentally connected.

This book will appeal both to readers interested in Jewish history and memory and to anyone concerned with current debates about citizenship and cosmopolitanism in the modern world.

About the Author

NATAN SZNAIDER is Professor of Sociology at the Academic College in Tel Aviv-Jaffa.

Features

This book weaves together an original argument about cosmopolitanism, and a plea for what the author calls 'rooted cosmopolitanism', with an historical argument about Jewish memory in relation to the Holocaust.
The book is unusual in that it tells the intellectual history of several important, but recently neglected, thinkers and their work on Jewish national memory and politics in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, including Hannah Arendt, Rafael Lemkin, and Hersh Lauterpacht.
The author is a well-known sociologist who has worked closely with Ulrich Beck and has published several books on the Holocaust and cosmopolitanism.

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