On Modern Jewish Politics.

On Modern Jewish Politics. By Ezra Mendelsohn (New York, Oxford University Press, 1993) 168 pp. $39-95 cloth $14.95 paper

The title notwithstanding, this book is chiefly a study of Jewish political movements in Poland and the United States in the 1920s and 1930s. Mendelsohn, a historian, is the author of several notable works on Eastern European Jewish politics. But in this work he moves out of the conventional boundaries of history into typologies, empirical generalizations, and the comparative method. His touch is light and subtle, for he is keenly aware of the strictly heuristic value of these approaches, and of the messy uniqueness of concrete historical life. These …