Jews in the Japanese Mind - Hardcover

Goodman, David G.; Miyazawa, Masanori

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0029124824 ISBN 13: 9780029124826

Publisher: Free Press, 1994

Synopsis

Examines modern Japanese antisemitism, and discusses the seeming admiration of the Japanese for the worst anti-Jewish stereotypes

About this title

About the Author:

David G. Goodman is professor of Japanese literature at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Review:

An enlightening and thorough examination of Japanese notions of the Jews. . . . Jews in the Japanese Mind is not a book about Jews. It is a book about being different, about not being Japanese, about the vast array of people with whom Japan still struggles to come to terms. (The New York Times)

This is a riveting study of one of the most surprising phenomena in the history of the Jews. Based on extensive and scrupulous scholarship, Goodman and Miyazawa have revealed how the mythological Jew can play a central role in a culture that has no Jews. This strange obsession reveals fascinating and often frightening dimensions of modern Japan. (David Biale, Center for Jewish Studies, Graduate Theological Union)

By studying antisemitism and its reverse, philosemitism, Goodman and Miyazawa show that Japanese ideas about Jews stem directly from Japan's modern cultural experience. This unique study is an absorbing essay on relativism and universalism in the contemporary life of the mind in Japan. (Tom Havens, University of California, Berkeley)

A serious, thoroughly researched scholarly work that not just explains the superficial side of Japan's bizarre fascination with "Jewish" themes, but presents a balanced historical survey of Japan's encounter with Judaism from the end of the Tokugawa period to the establishment of a Jewish Cultural Center in Tokyo [in 1994]. (The Instrumentalist)

About this edition

• Publisher: Free Press
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0029124824
• ISBN 13: 9780029124826
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 360