The temple of culture

Sinopse

"From Matthew Arnold's time to our own, the experience of assimilating Jews and the idiom of "culture" have been fundamentally interwined with each other. This book studies the unexpected parallels and ironic reversals between a cultural dispensation that had ambivalent responses to Jews and Jews who became exponents of that very tradition." "Concluding with a look at the culture wars of our own times, this study suggests that they might best be read as the culmination of a process in which Jews become embattled defenders of a tradition that responded with such profound ambivalence to the people just like them - and so stage a melancholy triumph over it."--Jacket.