Irish Questions and Jewish Questions

Aidan Beatty has held fellowships at Concordia University and Trinity College Dublin and now teaches at Wayne State University. His first book, Masculinity and Power in Irish Nationalism, was awarded the American Conference for Irish Studies' Prize for Best Book in History and Social Sciences.Dan O'Brien is currently an Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow at University College Dublin. He holds a PhD from University College Cork.

The Irish and the Jews are two of the classic outliers of modern Europe. Both struggled withtheir lack of formal political sovereignty in the nineteenth-century. SimultaneouslyEuropean and not European, both endured a bifurcated status, perceived as racially inferior andyet also seen as a natural part of the European landscape. Both sought to deal with theirsubaltern status through nationalism; both had a tangled, ambiguous, and sometimes violentrelationship with Britain and the British Empire; and both sought to revive ancient languages aspart of their drive to create a new identity. The career of Irish politician Robert Briscoe and thetravails of Leopold Bloom are just two examples of the delicate balancing of Irish and Jewishidentities in the first half of the twentieth century.Irish Questions and Jewish Questions explores these shared histories, covering severalcenturies of the Jewish experience in Ireland, as well as events in Israel-Palestine and NorthAmerica. The authors examine the leading figures of both national movements to reveal howeach had an active interest in the successes, and failures, of the other. Bringing togetherleading and emerging scholars from the fields of Irish studies and Jewish studies, this volumecaptures the most recent scholarship on their comparative history with nuanceand remarkable insight.