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At which moments and in which ways did Jews play a central role in the development of American capitalism? Many popular writers address the intersection of Jews and capitalism, but few scholars, perhaps fearing this question's anti-Semitic overtones, have pondered it openly.Chosen Capitalrepresents the first historical collection devoted to this question in its analysis of the ways in which Jews in North America shaped andwere shapedby America's particular system of capitalism. Jews fundamentally molded aspects of the economy during the century when American capital was being redefined by industrialization, war, migration, and the emergence of the United States as a superpower.Surveying such diverse topics as Jews' participation in the real estate industry, the liquor industry, and the scrap metal industry, as well as Jewish political groups and unions bent on reforming American capital, such as the American Labor Party and the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union, contributors to this volume provide a new prism through which to view the Jewish encounter with America. The volume also lays bare how American capitalism reshaped Judaism itself by encouraging the mass manufacturing and distribution of foods like matzah and the transformation of synagogue cantors into recording stars. These essays force us to rethink not only the role Jews played in American economic development but also how capitalism has shaped Jewish life and Judaism over the course of the twentieth century. Contributors: Marni Davis, Georgia State University Phyllis Dillon, independent documentary producer, textile conservator, museum curator Andrew Dolkart, Columbia University Andrew Godley, Henley Business School, University of Reading Jonathan Karp, executive director, American Jewish Historical Society Daniel Katz, Empire State College, State University of New York Ira Katznelson, Columbia University David S. Koffman, New York University Eli Lederhendler, Hebrew University, Jerusalem Jonathan Z. S. Pollack, University of Wisconsin-Madison Jonathan D. Sarma, Brandeis University Jeffrey Shandler, Rutgers University Daniel Soyer, Fordham University

Michael Eisenberg is the co-founder and general partner ofAleph, a Tel Aviv-based venture capital firm, and the author of, most recently, The Tree of Life and Prosperity. hile the topic of this publication is the impact and implications of wealth on the American Orthodox community, in a larger sense it is about materialist culture in the age of abundance.1 It is an examination on wealth and of wealth and an exploration of the positive and negative implications of such. [...]this conversation could be had in any community, religious or otherwise. [...]at a deeper level we are inquiring about who we are as a people. The metaphorical diet of \"bread with salt\" is, perhaps, the realistic state of a monastic few committed solely to Torah, and 1 use monastic purposely in light of its etymology. Even a well-heeled community, or the collective political influence of larger American Jewish interests, does not have the levers of power or policymaking capacity of a nation.

InSocialism of Fools, Michele Battini focuses on the critical moment during the Enlightenment in which anti-Jewish stereotypes morphed into a sophisticated, modern social anti-Semitism. He recovers the potent anti-Jewish, anticapitalist propaganda that cemented the idea of a Jewish conspiracy in the European mind and connects it to the atrocities that characterized the Jewish experience in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Beginning in the eighteenth century, counter-Enlightenment intellectuals and intransigent Catholic writers singled out Jews for conspiring to exploit self-sustaining markets and the liberal state. These ideas spread among socialist and labor movements in the nineteenth century and intensified during the Long Depression of the 1870s. Anti-Jewish anticapitalism then migrated to the Habsburg Empire with the Christian Social Party; to Germany with the Anti-Semitic Leagues; to France with the nationalist movements; and to Italy, where Revolutionary Syndicalists made anti-Jewish anticapitalism the basis of an alliance with the nationalists. Exemplified best in theProtocols of the Elders of Zion, the infamous document that \"leaked\" Jewish plans to conquer the world, the Jewish-conspiracy myth inverts reality and creates a perverse relationship to historical and judicial truth. Isolating the intellectual roots of this phenomenon and its contemporary resonances, Battini shows us why, so many decades after the Holocaust, Jewish people continue to be a powerful political target.

To this point, the anthropology of Christianity has largely failed to develop. When anthropologists study Christians, they do not see themselves as contributing to a broad comparative enterprise in the way those studying other world religions do. A close reading of the Comaroffs’Of Revelation and Revolutionillustrates the ways in which anthropologists sideline Christianity and leads to a discussion of reasons the anthropology of Christianity has languished. While it is possible to locate the cause in part in the culture of anthropology, with its emphasis on difference, problems also exist at the theoretical level. Most anthropological theories emphasize cultural continuity as opposed to discontinuity and change. This emphasis becomes problematic where Christianity is concerned, because many kinds of Christianity stress radical change and expect it to occur. Confronted by people claiming that radical Christian change has occurred in their lives, anthropologists become suspicious and often explain away the Christian elements of their cultures. Christian assertions about change are hard for anthropologists to credit because anthropological and Christian models of change are based on different models of time and belief. Unless anthropologists reconsider their nearly exclusive commitment to continuity thinking and the models of time and belief that ground it, the anthropology of Christianity will continue to face handicaps to its development.

Trying to argue that Judaism is inimical to Christianity is not only an act of tremendous intellectual dishonesty; it's also a time-honored political ruse to rob communities of faith of their true values and supply them instead with incendiary ones designed to further nefarious partisan goals. Observing young people huddling around noxious figures, it's tempting for those of us with a bit of gray in our hair to wag our tongues and bellow at the youth to simmer down and toughen up. There has been a steep rise in the number of high school students who take advantage of the Americans with Disabilities Act and petition to gain more time on their exams. [...]we must also show them enormous love, show that we care about their very real predicaments, and that we have communal and spiritual resources to offer rather than empty pep talks about bootstraps and hustle.

This essay experiments with the supposition that Christianity's seven deadly sins can be seen to constellate the affective dynamism at the heart of capitalist forms. Through a close reading of two terms used by Marx to index greed— Habsucht and Heißhunger —the essay tracks their performance as figurations that inhere sedimented histories, active contradictions, and filaments of alternative futurities.

This article focuses on the impact of religious institutions on entrepreneurship. We find clear evidence that different religious institutions have a significantly different impact on the tendency to become an entrepreneur. Our article makes important contributions to the research of both religion and entrepreneurship. First, it proposes empirical evidence in which the country's main religion significantly affects its level of entrepreneurship at the macro level. Second, it adds to our theoretical understanding of the mechanisms that characterize the effects of religion on entrepreneurship. We suggest that macro effects of religion as part of the country's culture and institutions affect the country's level of entrepreneurship beyond the direct effects of religion on the behavior of the religion's members in the society.

Many of us have a sense of unease about current trends in global capitalism (GC) and global society. Inequalities and conflict seem endemic; much‐vaunted technological innovations seem unable to deliver structural change and development in many parts of the world; and ideological conflicts may be more intense than during the cold war. The central point of debate in this book is to identify and evaluate the moral challenges of what contributors refer to as ’responsible global capitalism (RGC)’. How can we develop a global economic architecture that is economically efficient, morally acceptable, geographically inclusive, and sustainable over time? If global capitalism––arguably the most efficient wealth‐creation system currently known to man––is to be both economically viable and socially acceptable, each of its four constituent institutions (markets, governments, supra‐national agencies and civil society) must not only be technically and administratively competent but also be buttressed and challenged by a strong ethical ethos. In this book, leading thinkers in international business and ethics (including academics, politicians and moralists) identify the pressing economic and moral issues that global capitalism must answer. Recognizing that solutions will not come from any one quarter, and that any serious discussion of a just and equitable system must embrace questions of ethics and faith, the book approaches the issues from a range of different disciplines and forums. It is arranged in three parts. Part I (5 chapters) presents the analytical framework underlying the volume's main themes. Part II (5 chapters) concentrates on the challenges, opportunities, and dilemmas posed by global capitalism. Part III (6 chapters) considers how the global society might better organize itself, and its constituent institutions to respond to the challenges of global capitalism in a way that helps embrace an agreed set of core values, while accepting the need for a degree of cultural diversity and tolerance in respect of the interpretation of these and the identification and practice of non‐core values.

This article makes the counterintuitive argument that the millennia-old approach of Jewish law to regulating surveillance, protecting communications, and governing collection and use of information offers important frameworks for protecting privacy in an age of big data and pervasive surveillance. The modern approach to privacy has not succeeded. Notions of individual “rights to be let alone” and “informational self-determination” offer little defense against rampant data collection and aggregation. The substantive promise of a “fundamental human right” of privacy has largely been reduced to illusory procedural safeguards of “notice” and “consent”—manipulable protections by which individuals “agree” to privacy terms with little understanding of the bargain and little power to opt out. Judaism, on the other hand, views privacy as a societal obligation and employs categorical behavioral and architectural mandates that bind all of society's members. It limits waiver of these rules and rejects both technological capacity and the related notion of “expectations” as determinants of privacy's content. It assumes the absence of anonymity and does not depend on the confidentiality of information or behavior, whether knowledge is later used or shared, or whether the privacy subject can show concrete personal harm. When certain types of sensitive information are publicly known or cannot help but be visible, Jewish law still provides rules against their use. Jewish law offers a language that can guide policy debates. It suggests a move from individual control over information as the mechanism for shaping privacy's meaning and enforcement, to a regime of substantive obligations—personal and organizational—to protect privacy. It recognizes the interconnected nature of human interests and comprehends the totality of the harm that pervasive surveillance wreaks on individuals and social relations. It offers a conceptual basis for extending traditional privacy protections to online spaces and new data uses. And it provides a language of dignity that recognizes unequal bargaining power, rejects the aggregation and use of information to create confining personal narratives and judgments, and demands equal protection for all humans.

Antisemitism has been found on both the extreme left and right among political elites. However, at the mass public level, limited research suggests right-wing antisemitism, but not much left-wing antisemitism. This paper challenges that research, at least for the U.S., offering an alternative theory. The theory argues that the lowest levels of antisemitism will be found among mainstream liberals and conservatives. Ideological moderates will exhibit higher rates of antisemitism, while those lacking an ideological orientation will show still higher antisemitic rates. Extremists of the right and left may be more antisemitic than mainstream conservatives and liberals, but the inability of standard ideological self-placement questions to distinguish extreme ideologues from the very conservative/liberal makes it difficult to test the extremism hypothesis. Numerous items measuring attitudes towards Jews in the U.S. across five major surveys finds overwhelming support for the mainstream philosemitism theory. The conclusion puts the findings into perspective and offers suggestions regarding future research.