Miriam Bodian, Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation: Conversos and Community in Early Modern Amsterdam (Indiana University Press, 1997)

Bodian's book makes abundantly clear that twentieth-century America isn't the first time- space where people have had to figure out how and whether to be Jewish.

Claudine Fabre-Vassas, The Singular Beast: Jews, Christians, and the Pig (Columbia University Press, 1997)

This rich and dense study shows the complex role of Jews and Jewishness in the traditional European Catholic imaginary.

Barbara Myerhoff, Stories as Equipment for Living: Last Talks and Tales (University of Michigan Press, 2007)

This volume is a portrait of a dying Jewish ethnographer who was fully alive to those she met, and who makes them live for the reader in turn.