Raider, Mark A.

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Raider, Mark A.

PERSONAL: Married Miriam B. Roth (a scholar and educator); children: three. Education: University of California, Santa Cruz, B.A.; Brandeis University, Ph.D.

ADDRESSES: Office— Department of Judaic Studies, University of Cincinnati, 50 McMicken, Cincinnati, OH 45221-0169.

CAREER: Historian, scholar, educator, writer, and editor. University at Albany, State University of New York, faculty member, c. 1995-2005; University of Cincinnati, McMicken College of Arts and Sciences, Cincinnati, OH, Jewish Foundation Endowed Chair of the Department of Judaic Studies, c. 2006—.

WRITINGS

(Editor, with Jonathan D. Sarna and Ronald W. Zweig) Abba Hillel Silver and American Zionism, Frank Cass (Portland, OR), 1997.

The Emergence of American Zionism, New York University Press (New York, NY), 1998.

(And annotator, with wife, Miriam B. Raider-Roth) The Plough Woman: Records of the Pioneer Women of Palestine: A Critical Edition, Brandeis University Press (Waltham, MA), 2002.

(Editor, with Shulamit Reinharz) American Jewish Women and the Zionist Enterprise, Brandeis University Press (Waltham, MA), 2005.

SIDELIGHTS: Mark A. Raider is a scholar of Judaic history and author of The Emergence of American Zionism, which focuses on the early twentieth-century labor Zionism movement in America. “Utilizing previously untapped archival sources, Raider describes how a handful of East European socialist-Zionist ideologues, transplanted to America’s shores by Czar-ist oppression, sought to import their version of Zionism to their new homeland,” wrote Rafael Medoff in American Jewish History. In his book, Raider focuses on the rise of the Zionist labor movement and its eventual waning in the late 1920s and on through the 1930s. Medoff noted: “Mark Raider has authored an engaging and provocative history of the emergence of Labor Zionism in the United States.”

Raider is also editor with Shulamit Reinharz of American Jewish Women and the Zionist Enterprise, a collection of essays culled from the proceedings of a 1999 conference at Brandeis University called “Untold Stories: American Jewish Women in the Yishuv and Early State of Israel.” The various essays, written by a variety of Jewish scholars and political activists, focuses on Zionism, American Jewish women, and the Yishuv, a term that used to refer to the Zionist movement and the Jewish residents of Palestine before the state of Israel was established. Sonja P. Wentling, writing in American Jewish History, commented that the book “provides a multifaceted account of American Jewish women’s understanding of the Zionist idea, and how they advanced as well as sustained the Zionist agenda.” In her review in Nashim: A Journal of Jewish Women’s Studies and Gender Issues, Pamela S. Nadell wrote: “By bringing all these [essays] together in a single volume, [the editors] dramatically convey the range and depth of American women’s Zionist involvements, commitments, and activities.”

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES

PERIODICALS

American Jewish History, September, 1998, Rafael Medoff, review of The Emergence of American Zionism, p. 367; September, 2004, Sonja P. Wentling, review of American Jewish Women and the Zionist Enterprise, p. 386.

Israel Studies, spring, 2006, Donna Robinson Divine, review of American Jewish Women and the Zionist Enterprise, p. 204.

Nashim: A Journal of Jewish Women’s Studies and Gender Issues, fall, 2005, Pamela S. Nadell, review of American Jewish Women and the Zionist Enterprise, p. 250.