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Israel Zangwill (1864–1926) was the best-known Jewish anglophone writer and public intellectual during his lifetime. There has been a contemporary resurgence of interest in Zangwill's life and work in Britain, France, America and Israel, which will be discussed in the introduction and is illustrated by the articles in the special issue. I focus on the legacies of Zangwill both locally and globally. At the heart of the introduction is the way that Zangwill's legacy varies in different national cultures. It explores how Zangwill reuses the idea of the ghetto from the German tradition of ghetto literature; radicalises Herzl's political Zionism in the form of Jewish territorialism; and refashions President Roosevelt's idea of the melting-pot for popular consumption.

This article explores Israel Zangwill's posthumous presence in Israeli culture, as reflected in various media and discursive arenas: press coverage of his death and Yahrzeits; trends in the translation, publication and staging of his works; the inauguration of streets bearing his name; and references to his views and legacy in various political debates. Demonstrating how the tensions and contradictions so typical of Zangwill's persona were interpreted by cultural commentators or appropriated by opposing political camps, the first part of the article traces and contextualises Zangwill's gradual disappearance from the Israeli cultural mainstream. The second part then moves on to consider Zangwill's unexpected comeback in 2021, when a musical production of The King of Schnorrers , adapted by Nati Brooks, was staged in Tel Aviv. While the renewed interest in Zangwill's work is rooted specifically in the playwright's Anglo-Jewish background, the production employs Zangwill's 1790s Jewish London to consider ethnic tensions in present-day Israel.

This article discusses Israel Zangwill's play The Melting Pot (1908) and Horace M. Kallen's essay ‘Democracy versus the Melting Pot’ (1915) as two different visions of future Jewish inclusion. Zangwill's play and Kallen's response reflect social changes at the time, and both visions consider Jewish history exemplary for the world-to-come. Both show how conceptions of Jewishness were turned into universalist teleologies, but of different kinds. Zangwill's play opened in Washington at the height of immigration, urbanisation and social change, and it swiftly exemplified a vision of the American nation in the making, emphasising concepts of amalgamation more than old historical identities. In opposition, Kallen's response in 1915 emphasised historical identities and rejected the metal melting metaphors, replacing them with a Darwin-inspired spontaneous ‘symphony’. Zangwill and Kallen both imagined the future world as profoundly shaped by Jewishness, albeit with different consequences.

This article examines Israel Zangwill's 1908 play The Melting-Pot as a document in American immigration history, and the role of its most contested tropes – interfaith marriage and the melting-pot itself – in his efforts to rescue suffering Jews of Europe. Through close readings of the play and with reference to other works by Zangwill in the early twentieth century, the article looks at the play as a pragmatic work in a time of international upheaval and American nativism. A discussion of the play's reception by critics and audiences indicates that what was most controversial at the time of its production was not necessarily what Zangwill was most desirous to convey. But a look at its varied meanings over time reveals the persistence of the melting-pot metaphor in discussions of immigration, identity, ethnicity and nationhood, especially in the American imaginary.

This article charts the historical and literary origins of the schnorrer, a Yiddish term for ‘proud beggar’ and a character of Eastern European Jewish culture. It aims to shed light on the schnorrer's entrance as a protagonist in British popular literature in the work of Israel Zangwill, and to show its originality. To do so, it focuses mainly on the novella The King of Schnorrers (1894), in which the schnorrer holds the leading role, and on Children of the Ghetto (1892), in which the schnorrer is a secondary and yet essential character. By locating the schnorrer outside of the Ashkenazi ethno-social context, Zangwill carries out a refashioning of this figure and grounds him in a wider social and literary lineage. He turns him into a literary character who challenges Western capitalist societies, thanks to a multi-layered identity, conflicting contexts and plural literary genres.

Israel Zangwill's diverse and changing political outlooks and activities have often led to scholarly confusion as to how to understand his contributions to Jewish politics. The efforts of Zionist historians, such as Benzion Netanyahu, have reduced the nuances of Zangwill's various political endeavours to a purely Zionist narrative. Departing from the premise that an intellectual-biographical lens offers the best approach to make sense of the seeming inconsistencies that appear during an individual's lifetime, this article employs a deep reading of some of Zangwill's political writings and correspondence. I identify and explore three inter-related thematic frameworks in which the Anglo-Jewish writer has been often understood most reductively: his changing position vis-à-vis Zionism; his engagement with issues of race and indigeneity in both a Western and a colonial/imperial context; and his presumed advocacy of the transfer of Arab Palestinians.

This article explores ageing in the short, comic fiction of the Anglo-Jewish New Humourist writer Israel Zangwill. In a range of short stories, which reflect on the ways in which fin-de-siècle culture tends to align later life with decline and diminishment, Zangwill reveals the paradoxes of ageing by playing with such assumptions. These texts subvert conventional views on ageing, challenge the binary opposition of youth and old age, and critique the physiology of ageing through intergenerational difference and familial relations. The article argues that Zangwill’s texts emphasize the capacity for ageing — as a subjective experience, social identity, and means of elucidating the variable self through time — to be understood as a site of resistance or mode of subversion. In particular, his story ‘An Odd Life’ establishes creative ways to conceptualize age, as ageing is experienced by the protagonist outside the constraints of temporal realism. Willy Streetside’s anachronistic ageing — as he can be seen as simultaneously a child, in midlife, and an elderly man — manifests through a queerly asynchronous temporality, which operates beyond the expectations of reproductive futurism. Through this protagonist in particular, Zangwill establishes an alternative, non-normative model of age.

Not in the Heavenstraces the rise of Jewish secularism through the visionary writers and thinkers who led its development. Spanning the rich history of Judaism from the Bible to today, David Biale shows how the secular tradition these visionaries created is a uniquely Jewish one, and how the emergence of Jewish secularism was not merely a response to modernity but arose from forces long at play within Judaism itself. Biale explores how ancient Hebrew books like Job, Song of Songs, and Esther downplay or even exclude God altogether, and how Spinoza, inspired by medieval Jewish philosophy, recast the biblical God in the role of nature and stripped the Torah of its revelatory status to instead read scripture as a historical and cultural text. Biale examines the influential Jewish thinkers who followed in Spinoza's secularizing footsteps, such as Salomon Maimon, Heinrich Heine, Sigmund Freud, and Albert Einstein. He tells the stories of those who also took their cues from medieval Jewish mysticism in their revolts against tradition, including Hayim Nahman Bialik, Gershom Scholem, and Franz Kafka. And he looks at Zionists like David Ben-Gurion and other secular political thinkers who recast Israel and the Bible in modern terms of race, nationalism, and the state. Not in the Heavensdemonstrates how these many Jewish paths to secularism were dependent, in complex and paradoxical ways, on the very religious traditions they were rejecting, and examines the legacy and meaning of Jewish secularism today.

Children of the Ghetto : Zangwill’s title announced his intention to explore how the Ghetto experience had shaped new English residents who came from Eastern Europe and Russia. Instead of the “Pale of Settlement,” the term for the residence of the Jews in Eastern Europe and Russia, he turned to Italian Jewish history and the Venetian/Italian language to designate what the Jews had become in their long European exile. In Zangwill’s view, the Ghetto was the defining space of modern Jewish life and — not exactly a promised land — generated the psychological drive in the Jews to imagine alternative modern Jewish spaces. The gates of the Ghetto are not easily forgotten: internalized, the Jewish space of the Venice and Rome Ghettos becomes in modern times a psychological force, and even we might say, a central trope in the discourse of modern Jewish experience. The institutionalized practices of the English, “especially regarding matters of education, language, and the poor, prompt the immigrant Ashkenazim” to be, in Zangwill’s phrasing, “their own Ghetto gates.” Like their Italian Ghetto forebears, these immigrant Ashkenazim in England must forge their identities out of an either/or situation. Zangwill, novelist, social critic, and ethnographer devised in Children of the Ghetto a cultural turnabout of the European stigmatized Jewish stereotype.

Fiction writer, playwright, and political activist for whom Jewish identity, if not ritual strictness, remained central, Israel Zangwill used the term ghetto in his early work as shorthand for a Jewish traditionalism that could be viewed as either nurturing or confining as Jews entered modern life; in his 1898 Dreamers of the Ghetto , the ghetto of Venice signified both. Later, however, Zangwill looked beyond the ghetto to other sites and cities of Italy as inspiration for a wider philosophy. In Italian Fantasies (1910), Zangwill used the genre of the travel essay to develop ideas about art, religion, and society that grounded culture in the experienced life of place. At the same time, he sought to solidify his credentials as a significant figure in European thought, a Jewish commentator who was also cosmopolitan and modern, heir to a Victorian legacy of social critique.