Foreword by the Series Editors
 

Acknowledgments
 

A Note on Orthography

 

Introduction
 

Owning the Word
 

Jews, Jew, the Jews, the Jew, Jewish, Jewess
 

Outline of This Book

 

1 Terms of Debate
 

First Jews
 

A Jew Outward or a Jew Inward?
 

Jews, Women, Slaves
 

From Ethnos to Ethnicity/Race and Religion

 

2 State of the (Jew[ish]) Question
 

Vos Macht a Yid?
 

Jew in Jewish Studies
 

Thinking (with) Jew(s)

 

3 In a New Key: New Jews
 

Zionism’s New Jew and the Birth of the Genomic Jew
 

New Jews in a New Europe
 

New Jews: A View from the New World

 

Notes

Index

This book offers a wide-ranging exploration of the key word Jew—charting the past meanings, present usages, and possible futures of a term that lies not only at the heart of Jewish experience, but at the core of how Western civilization has imagined the Other. Tracing the word’s evolution, Cynthia M. Baker also interrogates the contested categories of “ethnicity,” “race,” and “religion,” while providing a glimpse of what Jew is coming to mean in an era of Internet cultures, genetic sequencing, and uncertain identities.