Confronting the Nation
Jewish and Western Nationalism

George L. Mosse (Author)

9780299346447

Paperback / softback, published 16 January 2024

240 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.3 cm, 0.14 kg

“Penetrating scholarly essays . . . [demonstrate] an easy mastery of cultural and political history.”—Publishers Weekly “Confronting the Nation is quintessential George Mosse: passionate, articulate, and wide-ranging.”—SHOFAR

“Brings together many of the most convincing arguments of his oeuvre. Mosse is at his best in describing the modes of national self-display.”—Journal of Jewish Studies

Confronting the Nation brings together twelve of celebrated historian George L. Mosse’s most important essays to explore competing forms of European nationalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Mosse coins the term “civic religion” to describe how nationalism, especially in Germany and France, simultaneously inspired and disciplined the populace through the use of rituals and symbols. The definition of citizenship shaped by this nationalism, however, frequently excluded Jews, who were stereotyped as outsiders who sought to undermine the national community. With keen attention to liberal forms of nationalism, Mosse examines the clash of aspirational visions of an inclusive nation against cultural registers of nativist political ideologies. 

Mosse considers a broad range of topics, from Nazi book burnings to Americans’ search for unifying national symbols during the Great Depression, exploring how the development of particular modes of art, architecture, and mass movements served nationalist agendas by dictating who was included in the image of the nation. These essays retain their significance today in their examination of the cultural and social implications of contemporary nationalism. A new critical introduction by Shulamit Volkov, professor emerita of history at Tel Aviv University, situates Mosse’s analysis within its historiographical context.

• Acknowledgments
• A Critical Introduction by Shulamit Volkov
• Introduction: Confronting the Nation
• Part I: The Nation Displays Itself
• 1. National Anthems: The Nation Militant
• 2. National Self-Representation during the 1930s in Europe and the United States
• 3. Community in the Thought of Nationalism, Fascism, and the Radical Right
• 4. Political Style and Political Theory: Totalitarian Democracy Revisited
• 5. Fascism and the French Revolution
• 6. The Political Culture of Italian Futurism
• 7. Bookburning and Betrayal by the German Intellectuals
  
• Part II: The Jews and the Modern Nation
• 8. The Jews and the Civic Religion of Nationalism
• 9. Jewish Emancipation: Between Bildung and Respectability
• 10. German Jews and Liberalism in Retrospect
• 11. Max Nordau: Liberalism and the New Jew
• 12. Gershom Scholem as a German Jew
• Notes
• Index