Welcome to a wiki maintained by Todd Presner, author of the book, Muscular Judaism: The Jewish Body and the Politics of Regeneration (London/New York: Routledge Press, 2007).  The author is the copyright owner of all the material on this site.

About the Book:

For centuries, the stereotype of Jews as physically weak and racially inferior

persisted across Europe. Zionist thinkers sought to turn this stereotype on

its head at the end of the nineteenth century by creating a popular counter

image: the muscular Jew. By emulating their ancestral war heroes (such as

Bar Kochba and the Maccabees) and participating in all aspects of the

contemporaneous European body reform movement, Jews could cultivate

discipline, agility, and strength—the very ideals that would help turn them

into a healthy, physically fit, nationally minded, and militarily strong people.

In this interdisciplinary history of the Jewish body, Presner probes the

complex cultural and intellectual origins of the “muscle Jew.” He argues that

the Jewish body was radically reconfigured at the end of the nineteenth and

early part of the twentieth century in light of modern European discourses

of regeneration. Traversing sports history, medical literature, popular culture,

aesthetics, gender studies, colonialism, and military history, Presner weaves

together the story of the regeneration of the Jewish body.

Richly illustrated with rare archival material, Muscular Judaism will

appeal to scholars and students of Jewish Studies as well as anyone interested

in modern European history, gender studies, and histories of the body.

A hard-cover, printed version of this book can be purchased directly from the publisher.  Click here for more information. 

About the author (Email: presner@ucla.edu):

Todd Presner is Associate Professor of Germanic Languages and Jewish Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.  His areas of research include German-Jewish intellectual and cultural history, digital humanities, and new media studies.  In addition to Muscular Judaism, he is also the author of Mobile Modernity: Germans, Jews, Trains (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).  He is the director of "Hypermedia Berlin," a digital mapping project that was recently awarded a "Digital Innovation" fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies.   

Scholarship in the 21st Century:

The material form of scholarship in the humanities has begun to change radically over the past decade: Books--as printed and bound artifacts--are no longer the sole means of producing and disseminating knowledge. More and more, the production of knowledge has become collaborative, as new forms of scholarly participation have emerged. One need only think of blogs or wikis to see the ease in which information can be now be disseminated; one need only think of Youtube or Wikipedia to understand the possibilities of new collaborative platforms for producing, sharing, exchanging, and remixing cultural material. But book publishers have barely begun to imagine the possibilities, often refusing to publish scholarship because of the "limited market" or locking away the knowledge to a few privileged institutions that can afford exorbitantly expensive books. What would happen, I wondered, if I created a social network for commenting on and critiquing the ideas in the book? But more than that: What if anyone could interact with both the ideas and the author in an on-going dialogue and debate? What if the ideas in the book represented a starting point (not a final product) that would evolve over time as countless many people added to, enriched, and even resisted the arguments that I set forth? What if the book gave rise to an organic, collaborative site for knowledge production? What would it be like for students to comment on the text -- very much in line with the Jewish tradition of commentary -- and interact with one another and the author in unforeseeable ways?

Indeed, these are the kind of vital questions being asked by scholars affiliated with the Institute for the Future of the Book. Academic institutions and publishers now exist in a world in which the book is no longer the exclusive medium for producing, disseminating, and evaluating knowledge. To learn more about scholarly publishing in the age of new media, please visit the report on "University Publishing in a Digital Age."

This site represents the beginning of a social network for knowledge production. Over the next few weeks, I will develop a "commentpress" blogging engine that allows people to comment on the arguments in the book and engage the author in on-going discussion and dialogue.  Stay tuned!  For now, you can download the book by clicking on the files below:

Download pdf file of part 1 here

Download pdf file of part 2 here

Download pdf file of part 3 here

Upon downloading these files ("the work"), the copyright owner grants you the non-exclusive right to use the work for non-profit educational purposes. 

My only request:

If you download the pdf, please have your local library purchase a copy of the book from Routledge.  The contact information is above.  Thanks!