Reviews

1. "The Chosen Body demonstrates that passionate scholarship is not an oxymoron . . . . [This] is a great ethnography of how societies shape bodies, but its importance as a work of moral testimony may be even greater."—Canadian Journal of Sociology Online 
2. "The Chosen Body is thought-provoking and has far-reaching importance and relevance for all students of human behavior."—The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 
3. "The study of the body as an indicator of cultural difference began with the rise of modern anthropology at the turn of the twentieth century. At that point, anthropologists such as Arnold van Gennep and Franz Boas showed how the body presented universals of human evolutionary or cultural development. What is true about the body in any given society, they argued, is true of all bodies—at least potentially. Foucault's arguments have much the same thrust. If power exists, then it deforms the body in similar ways in all societies, at least after a certain point in history. Post-Foucauldian scholars, however, have made exactly the opposite argument. They argue more and more that the very specifics of a culture (however defined) deform the idea or representation of the body in ways particular to that society, without, in general, any ability to extrapolate from these particulars any general rule of the body". - Sander L. Gilman; From: Modern Judaism, Volume 24, Number 1, February 2004 
4.  "Anthropological interest in Jewish bodies has historic roots in anthropometric measures used in German science between World Wars I and II to prove Jewish biological inferiority. Historian Sander Gilman, in The Jew's Body, traces efforts of pre-Nazi German science centuries back, referring, for example, to a medieval European physicians' correlation of Jews coming out of Africa black skinned due to syphilis, a condition shared with other Africans [1991:100]. Many sorts of "others" have been interested in scrutinizing Jewish bodies." - Ilsa M. Glazer; From: Anthropological Quarterly, Volume 76, Number 2, Spring 2003 
5. "In the past two decades the study of Zionism and the State of Israel has undergone important changes. For decades Israeli academics relied almost exclusively on diplomatic and political history, and on positivist sociological tools in their study of Israel and the Yishuv. Recent scholarship, however, has brought to the forefront of Israeli academia a host of new methodologies and theoretical constructs, such as post-structuralism, gender studies, and post-colonialism, which have dramatically broadened the critical scope of the field". - Eran Kaplan (University of Cincinnati), Published on H-Judaic (February, 2002)