University of Maryland Joseph and Rebecca Meyerhoff Program and Center for Jewish Studies Home

This edited volume examines the most pressing social and political issues confronting Israel from a multidisciplinary perspective, focusing on the breakdown of social solidarity and the inability to formulate consensus.

The contributors – encompassing political scientists, historians, communication researchers, sociologists, economists, and educators – focus on specific topics that serve as exemplary cases of various trends of consensus and polarization. These trends are examined in the context of ideological, religious, economic, national, and ethnic cleavages. In addition, this volume analyzes how political actors’ preference for “non-decision” on various issues has resulted in the maintenance of a status quo, with cleavages or conflicts being neither mitigated nor polarized. Together, this collection of articles paints a picture of Israel as a state racked by increasing polarization along ideological and religious lines. It is argued that this difficulty in determining a consensual definition of the state threatens to destroy social solidarity in Israel altogether, a climate in which “the center cannot hold.”

This book is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the major internal threats to Israel’s self-definition as a Jewish-democratic state and will also appeal to sociologists and political scientists interested in global polarization trends.

This book begins with an audacious question: Has there ever been a better home for Jews than Canada? By certain measures, Canada might be the most socially welcoming, economically secure, and religiously tolerant country for Jews in the diaspora, past or present. No Better Home? takes this question seriously, while also exploring the many contested meanings of the idea of "home."

Contributors to the volume include leading scholars of Canadian Jewish life as well as eminent Jewish scholars writing about Canada for the first time. The essays compare Canadian Jewish life with the quality of life experienced by Jews in other countries, examine Jewish and non-Jewish interactions in Canada, analyse specific historical moments and literary texts, reflect deeply personal histories, and widen the conversation about the quality and timbre of the Canadian Jewish experience. No Better Home? foregrounds Canadian Jewish life and ponders all that the Canadian experience has to teach about Jewish modernity.

Co-edited by Vardit Lightstone, Post-Doc fellow for Jewish Studies

University of Toronto Press

This section was inspired by the 2021 book No Better Home? Jews, Canada, and the Sense of Belonging, edited by David S. Koffman. The book is a collection of eighteen schol-arly essays that explore topics relating to home, diaspora, and belonging within the context of Canadian Jewry. Wanting to further unpack some of the themes the book raised, we asked two groups of select scholars to read and reflect on ways these topics are manifested in their own research and fields of expertise. The first group is made of six scholars who specialize in the study of other minority groups in Canada, the other group  consists  of  five scholars  of  Jewish  diaspora  communities  in  other  countries. 

Vardit Lightstone, Post-Doc fellow for Jewish Studies

Canadian Jewish Studies/ Etudes juives canadiennes vo. 36: Fall 2023