Denise Gigante's "Book Madness"

Denise Gigante is the Sadie Dernham Patek Professor in the Humanities at Stanford University. She is the author of The Keats Brothers: The Life of John and George and Taste: A Literary History.

Gigante applied the Page 99 Test to her new book, Book Madness: A Story of Book Collectors in America, and reported the following:

If you open to page 99 of Book Madness, you’ll see at the top of the page a beautiful softtone engraving of the Croton Fountain bubbling up in the center of what used to be City Hall Park across from the Astor Hotel in downtown Manhattan. The exuberance of the water is spectacular, rising up to five times the height of the few couples milling about it the American belated Regency clothing style of 1845. The fountain is no longer there, the hotel is no longer there, and the park is no longer what it was. It’s a snapshot of a moment in time when a certain group of people—protagonists and actors in this book—had great aspirations for amplifying the cultural grandeur of the new country on classical European standards.

The paragraph of page 99 begins, “Truth be told, Strong did not know the number of square feet of the home rising up behind him, but he was going for rhythm rather than accuracy, keeping Coleridge’s iambic dimeter (“So twice five miles”) with his “So x square feet.” It is an analysis of a poem on the previous page by George Templeton Strong, a well-known diarist and bibliomaniac who chronicled the life of the city in the 1840s and beyond. Strong was having a new house built on Greenwich Street, which he celebrates in a playful spoof of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem “Kubla Khan,” which describes a magical pleasure dome with caves of ice rising up before an inspired poet.

Money from John Jacob Astor, then the richest man in America who built the most spectacular hotel in the New World (behind the fountain), was used by another bibliomaniac in this story to build the Astor Library, the forerunner of the New York Public (formed through a merger of the Astor and Lenox Libraries in 1895). The wealthy bibliomaniac James Lenox was the top book collector in America. I would say that page 99 includes a number of interconnected threads, delivering a lot of American cultural history in the form of (on this page) a poetry analysis. I would say the Page 99 Test works, for the form of the book is what I am calling an associational literary history—an experiment in historical narrative and the story of American book love, passion, madness.

Learn more about Book Madness at the Yale University Press website.

My Book, The Movie: The Keats Brothers.

The Page 99 Test: The Keats Brothers.

--Marshal Zeringue

Abigail Perkiss's "Hurricane Sandy on New Jersey's Forgotten Shore"

Abigail Perkiss is an Associate Professor of History at Kean University in Union, NJ and co-editor of the Oral History Review. Her new book, Hurricane Sandy on New Jersey’s Forgotten Shore, draws on a collection of oral history interviews that she and her students collected between 2013 and 2016 to tell the story of Hurricane Sandy and its aftermath on New Jersey’s Bayshore. These interviews, individually and collectively, offer a portrait of a devastating storm, and of the network of relationships as victims, volunteers, and state and federal agencies came together to rebuild in its wake.

Perkiss applied the Page 99 Test to Hurricane Sandy on New Jersey’s Forgotten Shore and reported the following:

From page 99:

In many critical ways, this project was highly particularized; it was born out of a unique combination of circumstances, relationships, and personnel, and it was supported by a variety of institutions at every step of the development process. The early and continued commitment from [a variety of stakeholders] led to the creation of an important community oral history project and, no less significant, the development of a new and emerging group of oral and public historians, trained and practiced in oral history and digital humanities methods. This distinctive set of resources came together to create the possibility for meaningful oral history work where the whole was much greater than the sum of its individual parts.

At the same time, this project reveals the potential that arises when institutions come together to pool their financial, experiential, and temporal resources toward a collective end. Oral and public history work is built on collaboration, creativity, and adaptability in the face of limited time and personnel and increasingly diminishing financial support. Staring Out to Sea [the title of the oral history project] offers a model for the ways in which individual agencies and organizations can come together to support the development of new and innovative projects that serve the interests of both public historians and the communities with which they work. Taken to scale, this project offers the framework for ongoing, sustainability oral history work at all levels of the profession.

Hurricane Sandy on New Jersey’s Forgotten Shore is a slim volume; page 99 comes in the appendices – specifically, from an essay about the origins story of a longitudinal oral history project in which my students at Kean University and I conducted more than seventy interviews, documenting the uneven relief and recovery efforts after Hurricane Sandy collided with the New Jersey coastline in 2012.

On its face, page 99 is ancillary to the essence of Hurricane Sandy on New Jersey’s Forgotten Shore. The book chronicles the story of Sandy and its aftermath along the 115 miles of coastline, from Sandy Hook at the lip of the Atlantic Ocean to South Amboy at the mouth of the Raritan Bay: New Jersey’s Bayshore.

At the same, page 99 reveals the very foundation on which this book was built. The oral histories my students and I collected between 2013 and 2016 form the narrative backbone of Hurricane Sandy on New Jersey’s Forgotten Shore. These interviews reveal intimate window into the human impact of a devastating storm and the intended and unintended consequences of long-term policy decisions that created the conditions for such destruction.

The experience of Sandy for those who make their lives on the Bayshore offer insight into how we prepare for, survive, and respond to disaster. These experience at once lay bare the human toll of disaster and the human capacity for resilience. Collette Kennedy, who moved to Keyport just weeks before Sandy hit, was so looking forward to celebrating her first Halloween in her new home. Linda Gonzalez penned poems by candlelight as rain and wind beat down on her beloved Union Beach, knowing that those might be the last moments of relative calm that she would experience for months. James Butler erected a washed-up plastic Christmas tree at the corner of Jersey Avenue and Shore Road and became a national icon representing “Jersey Strong.” And Mary Jane and Roger Michalak, married forty-seven years, realized that they wouldn’t be able to raise themselves through a hole in their attic and instead sat down on their bed together, waiting for the water to wash over them. These voices, individually and collectively, offer a portrait of a devastating storm and of the network of relationships as suvivors, volunteers, and state and federal agencies came together afterward to rebuild.

Visit Abigail Perkiss's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Shannon K. O'Neil's "The Globalization Myth"

Shannon K. O'Neil is the Vice President of Studies and Nelson and David Rockefeller senior fellow for Latin America Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. She is an expert on Latin America, global trade, U.S.-Mexico relations, corruption, democracy, and immigration.

O'Neil applied the Page 99 Test to her new book, The Globalization Myth: Why Regions Matter, and reported the following:

Page 99 of The Globalization Myth: Why Regions Matter lays out how the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, deepened economic ties between the United States, Canada, and Mexico by promoting investment, leveling the legal playing field between domestic and international companies, and setting up new legal pathways to navigate commercial disputes. The page also details NAFTA’s limits, and how it failed to strip away regulations, rules, licenses, and other barriers that hold back North American regional supply chains.

This gets at the crux of the book’s argument, that while North America’s economies have integrated with each other during this latest round of globalization, they have not done so as deeply and significantly as Asia and Europe. This has given Asia- and Europe-based companies and nations an economic edge over the United States and North America.

So why do regional ties matter? Because regional supply chains both enable businesses to create high-quality and affordable products that can compete globally, and they are more likely to protect and create jobs at home.

By divvying up production across countries with different skill sets, wage rates, and access to money within North America, companies are better able to win customers at home and abroad. And when orders rise, so do jobs along the supply chain.

And while we call them global supply chains, manufacturing is far more likely to be done regionally. When factories open in China, Vietnam, Poland, or Romania, they turn to parts makers nearer by. U.S. suppliers don’t get any extra orders. When plants open in Mexico and Canada, they buy more inputs from the United States to feed into their assembly lines than from anywhere else in the world. Indeed, for every Mexican import to the United States, on average 40 percent of the value of that product was made in the U.S. For Canadian products, that number is 25 percent. For goods coming in from China, just 4 percent of the inputs are U.S.-made.

U.S.-based companies and their workers are facing a regionalized global marketplace where their competitors are taking advantage of the economies of scale, product specialization, and market access that regional manufacturing provides. To thrive, the United States needs to emulate this strategy and economically embrace its neighbors too.

Visit Shannon K. O'Neil's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Devoney Looser's "Sister Novelists"

Devoney Looser is Regents Professor of English at Arizona State University and the author or editor of nine books on literature by women, including The Making of Jane Austen. Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, Salon, The Washington Post, and Entertainment Weekly, and she’s had the pleasure of talking about Austen on CNN. Looser, who has played roller derby as Stone Cold Jane Austen, is a Guggenheim Fellow and a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar. She lives in Phoenix, Arizona, with her husband and two sons.

She applied the Page 99 Test to her new book, Sister Novelists: The Trailblazing Porter Sisters, Who Paved the Way for Austen and the Brontës, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Sister Novelists: The Trailblazing Porter Sisters, Who Paved the Way for Austen and the Brontës puts the reader in the middle of a chapter titled, “Gone Theatrical Mad: Maria’s Plays, Jane’s New Romance, and the Enchanting Kembles (1801).” It’s about Jane Porter (the older sister) and Anna Maria Porter (the younger, who went by Maria) coming of age as writers among dazzling London actors, including the famous Kemble family, especially youngest brother Charles, with whom Jane was about to fall in love. The Porter sisters were being pulled into the Kembles’ dizzying love triangles, along with their brother, the newly famous artist, Robert “Bob” Ker Porter. The figure who’s described at length here is Maria Theresa de Camp, a gorgeous actress in her mid-20s, known to the public as Miss De Camp.

Page 99:

Everyone knew the painful reasons why she [Miss De Camp] was thought worldly. It was the subject of salacious, open gossip. Part of her reputation, and part of the [Kemble] family’s objection to her as a wife for Charles [Kemble], must be laid at the feet of his brother, John Philip Kemble, who’d sexually assaulted Miss De Camp five years earlier, in 1795. She’d forcibly resisted him. There were witnesses. Some said Charles himself pulled his older brother off the actress. Others said it was Miss De Camp’s brother who did. The evidence of his crime must have been incontrovertible, because John Philip Kemble took the rare step of issuing a public apology, carried in the newspapers. Sadly, and predictably, the fashionable world found it a matter of comic mirth and moved on to the next scandal.

After the attack, Miss De Camp remained in the acting company, and Charles fell in love. But faced with the family’s objections to his marrying her, he couldn’t merely defy their wishes. There were promises made and perhaps threats. Anyone could see that if Charles went against his powerful elder siblings it would mean the end of his London theater career and Miss De Camp’s, too. The Kembles succeeded in pulling the couple apart. By the time the Porters were keeping company with Charles, there was no longer talk of him marrying Miss De Camp. The two actors still worked together, and although there was continued contact and tension, offstage they’d officially separated.

Miss De Camp’s response was to throw herself in the path of other men, including Robert Ker Porter. Maria wrote to Jane, in December 1800, “Bob sups with Miss de Camp on Sunday. I think she sets her cap at him. She wants to give C. K. a celebrated rival.” A desire to get closer to the newly famous and dashing Robert may be what led Miss De Camp to seek out Maria’s friendship, too. She’d written to Robert, hoping to solicit the honor of his sister’s acquaintance. After such a letter, Maria couldn’t refuse to meet her without making Miss De Camp her enemy. Yet the Porter family was concerned that this would prove yet another frowned-upon social connection for Maria among their morally upright friends, especially Mrs. Crespigny.

It was decided that Maria would accompany Robert to a party at the De Camp sisters’ home on Tottenham Court Road. There Maria found Miss De Camp to be an excellent, attentive host, both fascinating and good natured. She watched the actress flirt with her brother but was unable to tell whether she was... [99 to 100] really charmed with him or if she were a practiced coquette offstage, too.

I think the Page 99 Test works well! The page gives the reader a taste of the colorful social circle into which the Porter sisters were plunged as they came of age as published writers in their early 20s. This page telegraphs the social dangers and personal intrigues they’d face. The sisters were trying to maintain polite reputations as single women and public figures in a world that was very unforgiving about anything that smacked of female worldliness, including not only flirting and partying but acting and authorship. In subsequent pages, the charismatic Miss De Camp wraps Robert, Jane, and Maria around her little finger. That was also characteristic. They sisters were repeatedly manipulated by powerful people who took advantage of their naivete, loyalty, and generosity of spirit. They became global celebrities whose pioneering historical novels sold more than a million copies in the US alone before 1840, yet who never owned a home of their own. I hope readers will want to learn more about the Porter sisters’ fascinating, once-celebrated, and long-forgotten lives and careers, in this first biography devoted to them. Its material is drawn from thousands of their surviving, unpublished letters, which I’ve been working on for almost twenty years. I’m eager to share the Porters’ funny, heartbreaking, and moving stories about writing and striving in women’s lives.

Visit Devoney Looser's website and the Sister Novelists website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Phyllis Vine's "Fighting for Recovery"

After a successful twenty-year career teaching college-level history (University of Michigan, Union College, and Sarah Lawrence College) Phyllis Vine resigned her tenure at Sarah Lawrence College and undertook journalism training (at Columbia University's J School). Informed by a masters degree in Public Health (from Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health), she became a full time writer and editor of a website hosting opinions and reader contributions about behavioral health, while aggregating news and information about mental illnesses. MIWatch.org (now defunct) enabled some of the earliest conversations introducing recovery-oriented initiatives into the larger community. Partly due to her family's experience of mental illness in every generation, and partly because she taught the history of health care to graduate students studying health advocacy, writing about mental health is a natural byproduct of her life's journey.

In addition to three previous books, Vine's work has appeared in peer-reviewed journals as diverse as the History of Education Quarterly, American Journal of Orthpsychiatry, to chapters in specialized volumes such as Research in Community and Mental Health. Later, her investigative reporting appeared in City Limits, The Nation and Extra!

Vine applied the Page 99 Test to her new book, Fighting for Recovery: An Activists' History of Mental Health Reform, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Fighting for Recovery drops the reader into First Lady Rosalynn Carter’s publicity campaign to make mental health reform a national priority. This is the fifth of the background chapters setting the stage for understanding the passions driving reform. Chapter Five, A First Lady’s Law, portrays Carter’s 1978 appearance on Good Morning America. It is timed to the release of a report from the President’s Commission on Mental Health which carries a consequential price-tag of $500 million. Page 99 explains footage recorded the day prior, when an ABC film crew tracked Carter’s visit to the Green Door. It was a community program for discharged patients “honing skills for independent living and employment.” Rosalynn Carter engages with former patients who are shopping at the local grocery, preparing a meal, and discussing difficulties finding jobs. This footage sets the scene for the interview (on the next page) where she reacts to an interviewer’s stigma about mental illness, and graciously puts him on a path to a better understanding about the needs of discharged patients who, she says, can live outside of a hospital with proper supports.

The Page 99 Test confirms what readers can expect. Throughout the book, activists challenge fictions and notable larger-than-life personalities command the moment; there are specific examples of former patients building a life in the community, and there is backlash. In the midst of all of this, long before the public comprehends illnesses which were fraught with misunderstanding and are largely feared, state hospitals were closing. Fighting for Recovery reveals how activists of all stripes – disability rights lawyers, former patients with lived experience, politicians, families, researchers – fought a war of medical and popular opinion to set a course for a recovery movement. Although the field was crowded, this narrative is inspired by the grassroots activists whose recovery from mental illness included creating networks for building programs with person-centered choice, autonomy, and self-help. Each chapter of Fighting for Recovery brackets something unique, such as a conflict, a situation, or an individual -- Rosalynn Carter is one of many – accruing results with initiatives pointing toward recovery. Today we recognize these in the advocacy training of peer services, or among non-medical first responders whose crisis intervention techniques include diversion from jail or hospital. Beginning with the mandate to close hospitals nearly 70 years ago, campaigns for recovery continue, and the final chapters of Fighting for Recovery reveal how the strategies and programs continue to warrant attention.

Visit Phyllis Vine's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Alexander J. Field's "The Economic Consequences of U.S. Mobilization for the Second World War"

Alexander J. Field is the Michel and Mary Orradre Professor of Economics at Santa Clara University. He is the author of A Great Leap Forward: 1930s Depression and U.S. Economic Growth and served as Executive Director of the Economic History Association from 2004 to 2012.

Field applied the Page 99 Test to his new book, The Economic Consequences of U.S. Mobilization for the Second World War, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my book contains a statistical table which documents the respective performance of synthetic rubber plants producing butadiene from different feedstocks. Butadiene was needed along with styrene to produce synthetic rubber, a task forced upon the United States by the Japanese conquest of Singapore and the cutoff of 95 percent of U.S supplies of natural rubber. Suffice it to say that looking only at this page would give readers a very incomplete sense of what they can expect in the book. To be sure, some tables, but a great deal more, written, at least according to the blurbers, in a way that makes often technical material accessible to the general reader. The intent of the book is to overturn a view of the economic consequences of the war shared by economists, many historians, and the general public.

Aside from the claims that mobilization closed the negative output gap still prevailing in December 1941, and that the U.S. produced an enormous amount between 1941 and 1945 (both true), the conventional wisdom focuses heavily on learning by doing making military durables: Kaiser’s Liberty ships and Ford’s B-24 plant (Willow Run) often figure prominently in these narratives. Many argue that the learning resulted in big increases in industrial productivity across the war years with persisting benefits that helped lay the supply side foundation for the golden age of U.S. economic growth (1948-73).

These latter claims are, at best, misleading. They reflect the degree to which a celebratory imperative, along with wartime efforts at persuasion, have clouded our vision. We have lost sight of the chaos and waste involved in mobilization, the competitive expediting and endemic shortages and producer hoarding that contributed to production intermittency, idle capital, and priorities unemployment. All of this was aggravated by supply shocks visited on the country by the Japanese (see synthetic rubber) and the Germans, whose U-boats almost completely cut off tanker deliveries of petroleum and petroleum products to the Eastern seaboard.

The simple arithmetic is this: military (and total output) went up, but combined inputs went up more, which is to say productivity declined. The sudden, radical and ultimately temporary changes in the product fix caused both output and output per unit input (productivity) to plummet during transition periods as manufacturers shifted from making goods in which they were experienced to those in which they were not. Eventual gains from learning were a partial and temporary counterbalance; most of the goods were never made again after the war. The central empirical finding is that industrial productivity declined dramatically between 1941 and 1945, and grew anemically thereafter, compared to what had been true during the interwar period. Manufacturing productivity was lower in 1948 than it had been in 1941. The broader argument is that the supply side foundations, not just for production success during the war, but also for the golden age, were already largely in place by 1941, a thesis initially advanced in my 2011 book, A Great Leap Forward: 1930s Depression and U.S. Economic Growth.

Learn more about The Economic Consequences of U.S. Mobilization for the Second World War at the Yale University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: A Great Leap Forward.

--Marshal Zeringue

Thomas Suddendorf, Jonathan Redshaw, & Adam Bulley's "The Invention of Tomorrow"

Thomas Suddendorf is a professor in the School of Psychology at the University of Queensland, Australia. He is the author of the critically acclaimed book The Gap: The Science Of What Separates Us From Other Animals. Suddendorf is an award-winning researcher who pioneered the study of “mental time travel.” His work has been featured in leading scientific journals including Science and Trends in Cognitive Sciences and in popular outlets including Scientific American and New Scientist.

Jonathan Redshaw is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Queensland. He has published extensively on the development and evolution of mental time travel, focusing on how children and animals think about uncertain future events. He was named a 2021 Rising Star by the Association for Psychological Science.

Adam Bulley is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Sydney and at Harvard University, where he researches the cognitive science of foresight and decision-making. He has won numerous honors and awards for his research and teaching.

Suddendorf applied the Page 99 Test to their new book, The Invention of Tomorrow: A Natural History of Foresight, and reported the following:

Page 99 is part of a chapter on the question of whether or not other animals are stuck in the present. It shows how many species do in fact form expectations, for instance, about what actions are likely to lead to what rewards. But it also points to limits: “although prediction and expectations are essential to associative learning, this does not necessarily entail that animals are aware of causal relationships. Nor does it imply that they ponder remote future events. A delay of only minutes typically makes the learning of associations between events impossible…”

This time the Page 99 Test fails. I do not think that reading this page is going to give readers a good idea about the rest of the book. While the question of what capacities humans and animals share was central to my previous book (The Gap – The Science of What Separates Us From Other Animals), it is only a small part of this new book.

In The Invention of Tomorrow—A Natural History of Foresight Jonathan Redshaw, Adam Bulley and I examine the human capacity to think about the future; where it comes from, how it works and how it makes us who we are. Our minds work like time machines, allowing us to re-experience past events and imagine potential futures. With such mental time travel, we can prepare for opportunities and threats well in advance, and can set out to shape the future to our own design.

But clearly we are not clairvoyants. Much of what comes to pass we do not anticipate, and much of what we anticipate does not come to pass. And even when we foresee what is coming, we often act imprudently. When waking up with a terrible hangover, have you ever sworn never to touch a drop again—only to find yourself beer in hand before long? Have you ever ordered a greasy hamburger or an extra-large sundae despite knowing you would regret it? And then duly regretted it?

The book shows how the emergence of foresight led to a radical transformation of our ancestors from unremarkable primates confined to the tropics of Africa to creatures that hold the destiny of an entire planet in their hands. But the book is not simply an ode to our successes of prediction (or a lament for our failures). While humans have a remarkable capacity to traverse the spans of ages in the mind’s eye, perhaps our greatest powers come from a humbler source. We understand we can’t know for sure what the future holds, and realize we’d better do something about it. Paradoxically, much of the power of foresight derives from our very awareness of its limits.

It's high time to find out more about these mental time machines of ours – we may need them more than ever to navigate through our current era and secure a better future.

Visit Thomas Suddendorf's website.

The Page 99 Test: The Gap: The Science of What Separates Us from Other Animals by Thomas Suddendorf.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jordan E. Taylor's "Misinformation Nation"

Jordan E. Taylor is an editor and historian of American media and politics.

He applied the Page 99 Test to his new book, Misinformation Nation: Foreign News and the Politics of Truth in Revolutionary America, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Misinformation Nation: Foreign News and the Politics of Truth in Revolutionary America describes how a growing demand for news, created by the Age of Revolutions, fueled the global growth of the periodical press in North America in the late eighteenth century. The way that historians of the early United States often think about this story is that as American politics finally started to get interesting in the 1780s and 1790s, with the birth of a republican government, the number of newspapers in the country grew. But this page makes the point that if you look at the growth of newspapers in the U.S. alongside the growth of the press in Canada, the British empire, and the French empire, this expansion of the periodical press starts to look like more of a global phenomenon than a national one. The result was that American newspapers (which were better positioned to organize and interpret the tidal wave of detailed news produced by the Age of Revolutions) drew far more information from a globally expansive mix of sources than ever before.

Someone opening Misinformation Nation to page 99 would get a fair idea of what the book is about. The relationship between global revolutionary politics and newspapers, which this page focuses on, is certainly at the core of my study. Moreover, this page makes a point that’s crucial to my book’s subsequent chapters: while colonial British Americans mostly got their news from Britain before the American Revolution, after U.S. independence Americans gathered news from all over the world. However, this page doesn’t get at why this is important. As subsequent chapters show, the fact that Americans started gathering news from around the world meant that their experience of the world started to become more plural and fragmented. It became possible to gather news that suited and reinforced your existing political and ideological commitments, creating something like the information polarization of contemporary America.

Opening my book to page 99 for this test, I was slightly annoyed to realize that it was contained in chapter four. Don’t get me wrong: chapter four is important. The book wouldn’t make sense without chapter four, as it describes the impact of American independence on the flow of information into North America. But chapter four was the hardest to write in an interesting way, because it is so heavily focused on explaining how information flowed, rather than why that mattered. Page 99 and the pages surrounding it provide a pivot point in the book. This chapter wraps up the first half and provides essential context for what comes next, but it doesn’t focus on the historical claims that really excited me as I was writing. Writing this chapter felt like setting chess pieces up for an attack. But in a work of history that’s 224 pages long, some of those pages are necessary. Like the Age of Revolutions I was writing about on page 99, not every moment can be about the capture of the king.

Visit Jordan E. Taylor's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Stuart Z. Charmé's "Authentically Jewish"

Stuart Zane Charmé is a professor of religion at Rutgers University–Camden in New Jersey. He is the author of two books on Sartrean existentialism, Meaning and Myth in the Study of Lives and Vulgarity and Authenticity: A Sartrean Approach, as well as numerous articles on questions of Jewish identity and authenticity.

Charmé applied the Page 99 Test to his new book, Authentically Jewish: Identity, Culture, and the Struggle for Recognition, and reported the following:

On page 99, I discuss the case of Shabbatai Zevi, a 17th century Jewish mystic who became widely accepted by Jews around the world as the Messiah. Shabbatai eventually appeared before the Ottoman Sultan and asked him to step down so that Shabbatai could begin his messianic rule. He was promptly arrested, jailed, and given a choice of either death or conversion to Islam. He chose to convert and thereby created the paradoxical situation of an alleged Jewish messiah who was now a Muslim. Most of his followers remained within Judaism and struggled to understand the meaning of Shabbatai’s messianic mission, though they were rejected and persecuted by rabbinic authorities, who saw Shabbatai as a false messiah.

I include the story of Shabbatai Zevi as a contrast to the case of the most famous false messiah in Jewish history—Jesus. In each case, and others that I discuss, there are questions about whether the followers of such figures can be considered authentically Jewish. In the contemporary world, “messianic Jews” claim to be Jewish in every respect, except that they also believe that Jesus is the messiah. Since it’s obvious that Jesus and his original followers were all Jews, present-day messianic Jews want to know why their claims of Jewish authenticity are rejected by almost all mainstream Jews. For mainstream Jews, it’s just as obvious that someone who believes that Jesus is the messiah cannot be a Jew, though Jews who practice Hindu yoga or Buddhist meditation are not such a big problem. Nor does anyone question the Jewish authenticity of the Hasidic Jews who believe that the Lubavitch rebbe was the messiah.

The example on page 99 of Shabbatai Zevi, who died over 500 years ago, is a bit of an outlier in my book, since the rest of the book is mostly concerned with controversies about who and what is authentically within contemporary Jewish life. This includes tensions between Orthodox and non-Orthodox Jews, Zionist and diaspora Jews, and questions about what to do with the thousands of people in Africa, Asia, and elsewhere who claim not only to be Jews but also to be direct descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel. Nonetheless, the example of Shabbatai includes seeds of other controversies about Jewish authenticity that will ripen in later centuries

Learn more about Authentically Jewish at the Rutgers University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ron Eyerman's "The Making of White American Identity"

Ron Eyerman is Professor of Sociology at Yale University.

He applied the Page 99 Test to his new book, The Making of White American Identity, and reported the following:

Page 99 of The Making of White American Identity is part of a chapter that concerns the role of groups and organizations in the representation and transmission of white identity and white supremacy from one generation to the next. Specifically, the page discusses the rise of neo-Nazism in the United States and how it evolved from a foreign-based pressure group representing German national interests in the American political system to a sub-cultural network connecting right-wing extremists across the country and around the world. This page indeed reflects one of the main themes of the book, namely, how white identity emerged and evolved historically in the United States from the colonial period to the present day. In addition to organizations and groups, like the KKK and the neo-Nazi subculture, white identification and white supremacy are represented and transmitted more subtly through popular culture, in mass media like film and music and in literature and art. The book contains chapters that illustrate this in much detail, especially in music, film and literature. The film “Birth of a Nation” and the film and novel “Gone with the Wind” are two prime examples, as is the country music genre. The point is to show that current manifestations of white ‘grievance’ do not emerge from nowhere, but are rooted in and mobilized through long-standing American traditions.

Learn more about The Making of White American Identity at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue