Social groups: religious groups and communities Books

Book SynopsisGod's Beauty Parlor opens the Bible to the contested body of critical commentary on sex and sexuality known as queer theory and to masculinity studies. The author pursues the themes of homoeroticism, masculinity, beauty, and violence through such texts as the Song of Songs, the Gospels, the Letter to the Romans, and the Book of Revelation.Trade Review"Too often the debate about the Bible and homosexuality is reduced to a dull episode of Crossfire. On the right, the Book of Romans condemns queers! On the left, the Book of Romans celebrates queers! In four essays Moore queers the debate for both sides, discussing the gay iconography of Jesus, the Song of Solomon, and the masculinity of the apostles as well as his own travels through the study of the good book. Deftly combining easy humor with academic theory, Moore turns up the disco music and hangs a mirror ball over the debate." -- Out Magazine"For well over a decade Stephen D. Moore has served as a powerful advocate for the intercourse between biblical interpretation and contemporary critical theories. His latest book, God's Beauty Parlor, shares many of the characteristics that Moore's readers have come to expect from his work: a solid if often irreverent grounding in biblical scholarship; a penetrating awareness of the possible implications of utilizing those methods and theories as resources for reading the Bible; and a prose style that is engaging, frequently humorous, and clear but seldom simplistic." -- Ken Stone * Chicago Theological Seminary *Table of ContentsCONTENTS PART I: 1 2 PART II: 3 4

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Book SynopsisThe author examines the work of key figures in the early history of Jewish literature through the prism of their allusions to classical Jewish texts, focusing on the highly complex strategies the maskilim employed to achieve their potential and ideological goals.Trade Review"This fascinating new study of modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature is not only an excellent academic piece of work, but an accessible and compelling read." -- The Jerusalem Post"The book not only offers an overview of the early poetic, linguistic, and social challenges of Yiddish and Hebrew literature; it invites the reader to examine the varied contexts of the Jewish Enlightenment as a means of better understanding Modern Jewish Culture." -- Hebrew Studies"Dauber has produced a first-rate book, at once interesting and eminently readable, and both historians and students of Jewish literature will learn much. Given that this is a first book from a young scholar, Antonio's Devils is a most impressive offering, one that would elicit from his maskilic protagonists the hope that he produce books without limit." -- SHOFAR"Dauber's textual exegesis is often very instructive."Jewish HistoryTable of ContentsContents @toc4:Acknowledgments iii Note on Orthography iii List of Abbreviations iii @toc1:Part One Setting the Stage @toc2:1. Antonio's Devil: Shylock, Allusion, and the Birth of Modern Jewish Literature 000 2. Allusion in a Jewish Key: Literary Theory and the Study of Haskala Literature 000 3. Historical Background 000 @toc3:I. The early Prussian Haskala (to the mid-1780s): Moses Mendelssohn II. Toward the 1790s: Radicalization, assimilation, and Wolfssohn III. Early 19th century Galicia: Joseph Perl @toc1:Part Two Prussia @toc2:4. Moses Mendelssohn 000 @toc3:I. Introduction II. Biographical and social notes III. The early years: the Philosophical Writings and Kohelet Musar IV. Brief notes on the middle years V. Jerusalem VI. Conclusion @toc2:5. Aaron Halle-Wolfssohn 000 @toc3:I. Introduction II. Wolfssohn's life and work III.Wolfssohn's new theater and writing in Yiddish IV. Laykhtzin un fremelay: a theoretical and textual introduction V. The characters VI. Conclusion @toc1:Part Three Galicia @toc2:6. Joseph Perl: Between Hebrew and Yiddish 000 @toc3:I. Introduction II. Perl: A brief biography III. Perl's literary work: details and Jewish influences IV. Hasidic literature and Perl's Hasidic parodies V. Rabbi Nachman's Sipurei Maasiyot and Perl's parodic Tales and Letters VI. Perl's Tales and Letters: The frame letters VII. Perl's Tales and Letters: The "completion" of "The Tale of the Loss of the Princess" VIII. Perl's own parodic tale: "The Tale of the Loss of the Prince" @toc2:7. Joseph Perl: Megale Temirin 000 @toc3:I. Introduction: The Shivkhei HaBesht II. Formal and historical details: the making of Megale Temirin III. Megale Temirin: the anti-Shivkhei HaBesht IV. Style: textual citation in Megale Temirin V. Hebrew and Yiddish versions of Megale Temirin VI. The battle of the books: dueling canons VII. The texts themselves: referentiality and transferability VIII. The texts themselves: non-transferred material IX: The texts themselves: transferred material VIII. Conclusion @toc1:Part Four Coda @toc2:Conclusion and Further Directions for Study 000 @toc4:Bibliography 000 Index 000 Library of Congress Subject Headings for this publication: Jewish literature History and criticism, Haskalah, Jewish authors Biography, Pearl, Joseph

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Book SynopsisThis is a work of unprecedented scope that traces the origins of Jewish autobiographical writing from the early-modern period to the early twentieth century.Trade Review"This is one of the most ambitious and accomplished first books I have read in some time. Marcus Moseley correctly assesses the importance of the emergence of the autobiography as a prime--though neglected--cultural index of the modernization of the Jews of Eastern Europe, and he conducts a thorough investigation of the presuppositions and implications of this assessment. . . . Throughout, one is aware of the presence of a guiding critical intelligence of a high order. . . . The book is illuminating for the reader interested in either Jewish studies or modern cultural history." -- Arnold Band * University of California, Los Angeles *"Marcus Moseley's Being for Myself Alone is truly engrossing. The erudition, the astonishing range of material examined and the unusual intensity of the argument combine to make the reading of this book a rare intellectual pleasure. At one level, it is novelistic, introducing us to a remarkable number of fascinating and often bizarre individuals; while at another, it is an extended and highly sophisticated scholarly essay on the theory of autobiography. What a rewarding work this is for anybody interested in the history and culture of the Jews over the last few centuries, particularly in Eastern Europe." -- Jonathan Frankel * Hebrew University of Jerusalem *Table of ContentsCONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS... 1. AUTOBIOGRAPHY: THE ELUSIVE SUBJECT...7 Generic Dilemmas...7 Rousseau's Confessions as Autobiographical Paradigm ...11 The "Children of Jean Jacques" in Jewish Eastern Europe...19 In and Around the Self: The Critical Discourse...24 2. INTERTEXTUAL RELATIONS: JEWISH AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL ENCOUNTERS...58 Autobiography as "Text"/Autobiography as "Discourse"...58 Symptoms of Transition: The Crystallization of Autobiographical Discourse...62 Cross-Cultural Fashionings of the Sel...66 Arrested Development: The Constitution of a Jewish Autobiographical Field...70 III. AUTOBIOGRAPHY AS READING...100 The "Tradition Model for the Study of Jewish Autobiography...100 Sephardic Origins I: Valley and Vision: Abraham Yagel's Gei hizzayon...114 Sephardic Origins II: "Un coup de des n'abolira jamais le hasard": Yehudah Aryeh Modena's Hayyei yehudah...135 Early-Modern Autobiography in Ashkenaz I: Scrolls of Lamentation and Lament...179 Early Modern Autobiography in Ashkenaz II: The Memoirs of Gluckel of Hameln...187 The Function of the First Person in Pre-Modern Jewish Narrative: An Overview...208 IV. PRE-MODERN JEWISH AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND THE RADICAL HERMENEUTICS OF MICHAH YOSEF BERDICHEVSKY...283 Worlds within Worlds...283 The Voice of the Individual and the Burden of Inheritance: Berdichevsky's Autobiographical Counter-Tradition...301 The Crystallization of an Autobiographical Hermeneutic...307 Michah Yosef Berdichevsky Before the Speculum of Bin Gorion: The Collected Works as Encylopaedia...347 From Re-Collection to Recollection: The Great Memory of Bin-Gorion...354 Miriam: The Summing Up...361 V. JEWISH AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL WRITING AT THE TIME OF ROUSSEAU...413 Synchronicities...413 Jacob Emden's Megillat sefer...415 Nathan of Nemirov's Yemei maharnat...438 VI. DOMESTICATING ROUSSEAU: MORDECHAI AARON GUENZBERG'S AVIEZER...473 "I am not the father of this book, rather its mother, for in pain did I bear it"...473 The Conception of the Child...484 Generation and Gender: Discourses on Power...492 Autobiographies in Dialogue: From Aviezer to Hatt'ot ne'urim...506 VII. RAMIFICATIONS OF THE SELF: CULTURAL LANDSCAPES OF JEWISH AUTOBIOGRAPHY...531 Autobiography against Autobiography: Traditionalist Versions of the Self...531 The Semiotics of Autobiographical Behaviour...565 Buried Autobiographies...574 Summons to Autobiography/Response...589 Matrices of the Jewish Autobiographical Self...596 "Time present and time past/Are both perhaps present in time future,/And time future contained in time past."...610 Notes to Chapter XX BIBLIOGRAPHY...656 Index

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Book SynopsisSing, Stranger is a comprehensive historical anthology of a century of American poetry written in Yiddish and now translated into English for the first time. This anthology reveals both an amazing achievement of Jewish creative work and an important body of American poetry.Trade Review"This latest work of Benjamin and Barbara Harshav, truly the doyens of the field of Yiddish poetry in translation, is an important achievement. Many anthologies have tended to give relatively furtive glimpses of a poet's creation, or suggestive hints of the flavours of his or her poetry. Both the impressive, but not cumbersome, size of this anthology and its historical and geographic focus allow for making more than such fleeting acquaintances. The strength of the work, the thing that makes it of such moment, is the heterogeneous and fluid notion of Americanness which is at the heart of the project."—Modern Language Review"This anthology consists of excellent English translations of the Yiddish poetry of major American Yiddish writers... highly recommended reading for all."—Association of Jewish Libraries NewsletterTable of Contents@fmct:Contents @toc4:A Note on Transcriptions iii Preface iii @toc1:Prelude 000 @toc1:Part One: Proletarian Poets 000 @toc2: Morris Rosenfeld(18621923) 000 Dovid Edelshtat(18661892) 000 Yoysef Bovshover(18731915) 000 @toc1:Part Two: The Lyrical Turn 000 @toc2: Yehoash (18721927) 000 Mani Leyb (18831953) 000 Y. Rolnik (18791955) 000 Ruven Ayzland (18841955) 000 B. Vladek (18861938) 000 Zisho Landoy (18891937) 000 Avrom Reyzen (18761953) 000 @toc1:Part Three: Symbolism and Expressionism 000 @toc2: H. Leyvik (18881962) 000 Moyshe-Layb Halpern (18861932) 000 Berish Vaynshteyn (19051967) 000 @toc1:Part Four: Introspectivism 000 @toc2:A. L'yeles (18891966) 000 Jacob Glatshteyn (18961971) 000 J. L. Teller (19121972) 000 Ruven Ludvig (18951926) 000 B. Alquit (n.d.) 000 @toc1:Part Five: On the Left 000 @toc2:Moyshe Nadir (18851943) 000 Menke Katz (19061991) 000 @toc1:Part Six: Narrative Poetry 000 @toc2: I. Y. Shvarts (18851971) 000 @toc1:Part Seven: Women Poets 000 @toc2:Anna Margolin (18871952) 000 Tsilya Drapkin (18881956) 000 Malka Heifetz-Tussman (18961987) 000 @toc1:Songs by Yiddish Poets 000 @toc4:Glossary 000

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Book SynopsisFor more than three decades, Talal Asad has been engaged in a distinctive critical exploration of the conceptual assumptions that govern the West's knowledgesespecially its disciplinary and disciplining knowledgesof the non-Western world. The essays that make up this volume treat diverse aspects of this remarkable body of work. Among them: the relationship between colonial power and academic knowledge; the historical shifts giving shape to the complexly interrelated categories of the secular and the religious, and the significance of these shifts in the emergence of modern Europe; and aspects of human embodiment, including some of the various ways that pain, emotion, embodied aptitude, and the senses connect with and structure cultural practices. While the specific themes and arguments addressed by the individual contributors range widely, the essays cohere in a shared orientation of both critical engagement and productive extension. Note that this is not a festschrift, nor a celebrTrade Review"The nine essays in this powerful book offer students and mentors alike a window into a theoretical and practical arena that is all too regularly ignored today by pundits and exploitative "studies" on Islam and religion in general."—American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences"While centrally about secularization, this volume is much more than that. Asad's work and the essays engaging him here offer nothing short of an anthropology of the modern. Many issues are broached, leaving the reader with a dazzling array of issues to explore. This is interdisciplinary engagement at its best. An invaluable text for scholars and students working across the social sciences."—Victoria Hattam, New School for Social ResearchTable of Contents@fmct:Contents @toc2:1 Introduction: The Anthropological Skepticism of Talal Asad @tocca:David Scott and Charles Hirschkind 000 @toc2:2 Secularization Revisited: A Reply to Talal Asad @tocca:Jose Casanova 000 @toc2:3 What is an "Authorizing Discourse"? @tocca:Steven C. Caton 000 @toc2:4 Fasting for Laden: The Politics of Secularization in Contemporary India @tocca:Partha Chatterjee 000 @toc2:5 Europe: A Minor Tradition @tocca:William E. Connolly 000 @toc2:6 Secularism and the Argument from Nature @tocca:Veena Das 000 @toc2:7 On General and Divine Economy: Talal Asad's Genealogy of the Secular and Emmanuel Levinas's Critique of Capitalism, Colonialism, and Money @tocca:Hent de Vries 000 @toc2:8 The Tragic Sensibility of Talal Asad @tocca:David Scott 000 @toc2:9 The Grammar of Redemption @tocca:George Shulman 000 @toc2:10 Subjects and Agents in the history of Imperialism and Resistance @tocca:Jon E. Wilson 000 @toc2:11 Responses @tocca:Talal Asad 000 @toc4:Appendix: The Trouble of Thinking: An Interview with Talal Asad @tocca:David Scott 000 @toc4:Talal Asad: A Bibliography @tocca:Zainab Saleh 000 @toc4:Notes 000 Contributors 000 Index 000

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Book SynopsisThis book presents a set of critical engagements by writers from a variety of disciplines with the work of noted anthropologist Talal Asad.Trade Review"The nine essays in this powerful book offer students and mentors alike a window into a theoretical and practical arena that is all too regularly ignored today by pundits and exploitative "studies" on Islam and religion in general."—American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences"While centrally about secularization, this volume is much more than that. Asad's work and the essays engaging him here offer nothing short of an anthropology of the modern. Many issues are broached, leaving the reader with a dazzling array of issues to explore. This is interdisciplinary engagement at its best. An invaluable text for scholars and students working across the social sciences."—Victoria Hattam, New School for Social Research

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Book SynopsisThis book is about the social history of the Arab Jews—Jews living in Arab countries—against the backdrop of Zionist nationalism.Trade Review"...this is a brave, fascinating, excellent book that will mark an important turning point in the study of Jews from Arab and Islamic countries and their relationship to the Jewish state." -- xMiddle East Journal"Shenhav provides an erudite account of how the history of the Arab Jews complicates the presuppositions undergirding teleological and state-centered Zionist historiography... Because his approach does not subscribe to a simple dichotomisation between secular and religious interpretations of national identity, Shenhav's recognition of the elastic nexus of religion, nationalism and ethnicity may contribute a valuable framework for future reflections on the role of religion in conflict and peace-building." -- Nations and Nationalisms"The cultural conflict faced by Jews, functioning under what might be considered a common ideology—Zionism—is deftly analyzed." -- Association of Jewish Libraries NewsletterTable of Contents@fmct:Contents @toc4:Acknowledgments iii @toc2:History Begins at Home 000 @toc2:1 The "Discovery" of the Arab Jews 000 @toc2:2 Encounter in Abadan: Colonialism, Eurocentrism, and Jewish Orientalism 000 @toc2:3 How Did the Arab Jews Become Religious and Zionist? 000 @toc2:4 What Do the Arab Jews and the Palestinians Have in Common? Population Exchange, the Right of Return, and the Politics of Reparations 000 @toc2:5 The Arab Jews and Zionist Historical Memory 000 @toc2:Beyond Methodological Zionism 000 @toc4:Notes 000 Select Bibliography 000 Index 000

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Book SynopsisThe Belated Witness examines major works by Art Spiegelman, Cynthia Ozick, Christa Wolf, and Paul Celan, focusing specifically on the unsettling configuration of birth-as-death trauma around which these texts are organized.Trade Review"The Belated Witness is a remarkable book and a stunning accomplishment. This beautiful, finely wrought, and impeccably argued text makes a vital and refreshing contribution to existing scholarship in a number of fields: Holocaust literary studies, contemporary German literature, psychoanalytic literary criticism, and literary theory, more generally. Timely, profound, thoughtful, and ambitious in scope, it could very well become an instant classic of literary criticism."—Elissa Marder, Emory University"The book's importance lies not only in its insights into particular texts, but in its redefinition of testimony and our responses to it. This is an outstanding work." -- Marianne Hirsch * Columbia University *Table of Contents@fmct:Contents @toc4:Acknowledgments iii @toc2:1. Introduction 1 2. Necessary Stains: The Bleeding of History in Spiegelman's maus I 000 3. The Vanishing Point: Spiegelman's maus II 000 4. Writing Anxiety: Christa Wolf's Patterns of Childhood and the Throat of the Witness 000 5. Toward an Addressable You: Ozick's The Shawl and the Mouth of the Witness 000 6. Silent Wine: Celan and the Poetics of Belatedness 000 @toc4:Notes 000 Works Cited 000 Index 000

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Book SynopsisThis is the first comprehensive new study of the Greek Jewish experience during World War II to be published in sixty years.Trade Review"Professor Bowman has, in meticulous detail, provided the English-language reader the most comprehensive and up-to-date narrative of this otherwise little-known Jewish community in southeastern Europe . . . Bowman's treatment of Salonika Zionists and efforts to get Jews into mandatory Palestine makes interesting reading . . . This book will certainly be the standard resource on the subject, at least for the foreseeable future." -- Sanford R. Silverburg * Association of Jewish Libraries (AJL) Newsletter *"The Agony of Greek Jews is a welcome addition to the scholarship on Greek Jewry. Bowman's contribution to the understanding of each individual community's fate during the Holocaust and Greek Civil War is invaluable." -- Katerina Lagos * California State University, Sacramento, East European Jewish Affairs *"Despite the nearly total obliteration of Greek Jewry in World War II, the Holocaust in Greece has been virtually ignored in historical literature in the English language. Bowmans volume, based on decades of research and deep familiarity with the region, its complexities, and its personalities, is an important corrective to this great gap." -- Jane Gerber * CUNY Graduate Center *"Bowman's excellent readable book utilizes the latest documentary research, including records from foreign archives only now being made public. The newly released documents confirm the horrors of a story only partially known, shedding light on a tragic episode in a remote part of the German occupation of Europe. The rich fabric of Jewish culture in Greece has never fully recovered . . . Highly recommended." -- E. N. Borza * Choice *"Few books have been written in English on the Shoah of Greek Jews. Steven Bowman's book is original because it looks at the experience of Greek Jews during World War II, not in isolation as in many other accounts, but in the context of the war in Greece . . . The Agony of Greek Jews is a book rich in information." -- Rosine Nussenblatt * Sephardic Horizons *"The Agony of Greek Jews documents with meticulous attention to detail and a laudable ambition for breadth of coverage the stories of Jewish communities scattered across the territory of modern Greece at a time of rapid, often destabilizing, and eventually catastrophic change . . . The Agony of Greek Jews is as much an impressive historical register of Jewish survival in Greece against the odds as it is a uniquely detailed archive of memory for all those who perished in the Nazi camps or lost their lives while fighting against the brutal occupying forces." -- Aristotle Kallis * H-Judaic *Table of ContentsContents @toc4:Preface xx Acknowledgments xx Abbreviations xx @toc2:Introduction 1 1. The Jews of Greece to World War I 000 2. Germans and Jews in Greece 000 3. In Victory and Defeat 000 4. Vernichtungsorganisation 000 5. Chronicle of the Deportations 000 6. Abnormal Deaths in a Foreign Land 000 7. How A a Remnant Survived 000 8. Freedom or Death 000 9. Relief and Rescue 000 10. Bitter Homecoming 000 Afterword 000 @toc4:Appendix: Numbers 000 Notes 000 Index 000

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Book SynopsisThe first comprehensive, comparative study of women poets in Yiddish, A Question of Tradition shows the important role that women Yiddish poets played in the creation of Jewish literary tradition.Trade Review"This book is a hugely valuable resource for anyone interested in Yiddish poetry, literature, and women's writing. Readers unable to access the texts in Yiddish will be please that Hellerstein's English translations are presented alongside the poetic explications . . . Hellerstein's complex book brings new considerations to the study of tradition with regard to women poets writing in Yiddish. It also whets the appetite for the publication of more collections and critical appraisals to reveal the still large number of Yiddish women writers, including poets, who remain unknown and unrepresented." -- Helen Beer * Modern Language Review *"Hellerstein used the Korman anthology as the starting point for a twenty-five-year project. The result is A Question of Tradition: Women Poets in Yiddish, 1586-1987— a book that is impressively wide-ranging and just as impressively deep . . . Her new book is a close look at eighteen poets, with special attention directed toward the many different ways these women wrote about the experience of being female. Training a gender-studies lens on poems that span four centuries, Hellerstein helps us achieve an intimate understanding of a wide variety of work." -- Ellen Cassedy * Jewish Currents *"Aside from the alluring treasury of poems this book holds, it is also a magnum opus unto itself. Author Kathryn Hellerstein . . . worked on it for about 25 years. So it is not surprising that she writes with such powerful authority about poems that seem to be gushing with life . . . Hellerstein has provided a new perspective on the female poets who contributed to Jewish literary tradition, creating a trove of stunning poetry as they did." -- Elizabeth Martins * Philadephia Inquirer *"This is a serious book for serious students of Yiddish poetry . . . Each chapter champions a different aspect of the journey, from the devotional to the secular . . . This is an erudite contribution to the 'Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture' series . . . Summing Up: Recommended." -- S. Gittleman * CHOICE *"Women's Yiddish poetry finally gets its scholarly due from Kathryn Hellerstein, long-time champion of the female Yiddish poetic voice, in her comprehensive and accessible account, A Question of Tradition: Women Poets in Yiddish, 1586–1987 . . . Hellerstein's book is comprehensive, supplying the biographical details of six important poets' lives in one volume for the first time. Letters she quotes are revealing. . . . [Hellerstein's] book provides an amplitude to the discussion of these women that was previously denied them. The translations, accurate in meaning and still with the effortlessness of poetic language, capture the urgency of their voices. And Hellerstein's book lays to rest any question of tradition; it is there: inflected by prayer as the book's framework suggests, but also colored by difficult lives and a confidence born of their survival." -- Alyssa Quint * Cleaver Magazine *"Each poet's work is explored exhaustively, along with bibliographic essays that trace the publishing history of each poet's work, as well as notes, a thorough bibliography, and an index. Highly recommended for academic collections and collections concentrating on Yiddish." -- Beth Dwoskin * Association of Jewish Libraries Newsletter *"This work is the crowning synthesis of more than twenty years of study of Yiddish women poets. It makes important 20th century Yiddish women poets available in translation, in some cases for the first time." -- Jan Schwarz * Lund University *"This is the untold story of women poets across generations and continents, who gave voice to their womanhood and sexuality, outrage and desire, amusements and commitments, even as they engaged a sometimes forgiving, sometimes indifferent and sometimes vengeful God. Kathryn Hellerstein guides us through this fascinating story with precision, patience, empathy and consummate grace." -- David G. Roskies * Jewish Theological Seminary and The Hebrew University of Jerusalem *"A Question of Tradition is an important book and an impressive contribution to the field of Yiddish studies. Kathryn Hellerstein writes beautifully. Her sensitive and illuminating readings of the poetry of a select group of Yiddish women poets makes a strong case for a tradition of women's poetry in Yiddish. Impressively researched and argued, Hellerstein's discussions range from the work of relatively obscure early poets like Toybe Pan to the well-known Kadya Molodovsky. In the process she delineates a female literary tradition in Yiddish literature that has long been obscured and neglected. This book will make an invaluable contribution, not only to the field of Yiddish Studies but to Women's Studies as well." -- Goldie Morgentaler * University of Lethbridge *Table of ContentsIntroduction 1. The Idea of a Literary Tradition 2. Old Poems in a Modern Anthology 3. Revolution, Prayers, and Sisterhood in Interwar Poland 4. The Folk and the Book: Miriam Ulinover and Roza Yakubovitsh 5. The Art of Sex: Celia Dropkin and Anna Margolin 6. Prayer-Poems against History: Kadya Molodowsky and Malka Heifetz Tussman Conclusion

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Book SynopsisThis book considers some of the most famous Yiddish writers in America, the controversies their works aroused—in Yiddish and English—during the Holocaust, and the ways in which reading them contributes to a revision of American Jewish cultural development.Trade Review"Discovering Exile is a vital, compact study of a formative moment in American Jewish culture when writers in both English and Yiddish began to confront the holocaust and its implications. Probing politics of representation, Norich uncovers the crucial role of Yiddish in American Jewish culture and American literary modernism." -- Tony Michels * AJS *"In Discovering Exile, Anita Norich restores a significant part of Jewish American cultural and literary history that had been supplanted by a prevailing myth of what she calls "gradual dissipation," the notion that Yiddish culture was somehow divided and displaced by English and thereby split from its Yiddish roots. Instead, she shows how Yiddish and English speaking worlds of the thirties, forties, and beyond drew on each other for inspiration. In rehistoricizing the living, breathing American Jewish life of these decades, Norich also gives us back an era long lost to historians who made the Holocaust the central and therefore over-determining event of the twentieth century. The result is a first-rate literary history of a largely overlooked world." -- James E. Young * University of Massachusetts, Amherst *"In her fascinating study of this traditional view/assumption, Norich examines the premises of historical and cultural pressures that determined Jewish fate from the optimistic 18th-centruy Enlightenment to its violent end in the concentration-camp universe Including helpful notes and an extensive bibliography, this thought-provoking study will reward a broad audience with fresh insights and better understanding." -- CHOICETable of ContentsCONTENTS Acknowledgments xxx Introduction 1 1. Cultural Questions, Jewish Answers 000 2. "Good Night, World:" Yankev Glatshteyn's Ambivalent Rejection 000 3. Sholem Asch and the Christian Question 000 4. From the Politics of Culture to the Culture of Mourning 000 Epilogue 000 Appendix 1. Selected News Review in Contemporary Jewish Record 000 Appendix 2. Translation of Rachel Auerbach's "Amol iz geven a meylekh" [Once There Was a King] 000 Notes 000 Bibliography 000 Index

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Book SynopsisGermans into Jews turns to an often overlooked and misunderstood period of German and Jewish historythe years between the world wars. It has been assumed that the Jewish community in Germany was in decline during the Weimar Republic. But, Sharon Gillerman demonstrates that Weimar Jews sought to rejuvenate and reconfigure their community as a means both of strengthening the German nation and of creating a more expansive and autonomous Jewish entity within the German state. These ambitious projects to increase fertility, expand welfare, and strengthen the family transcended the ideological and religious divisions that have traditionally characterized Jewish communal life. Integrating Jewish history, German history, gender history, and social history, this book highlights the experimental and contingent nature of efforts by Weimar Jews to reassert a new Jewish particularism while simultaneously reinforcing their commitment to Germanness.Trade Review"Gillerman's book uncovers in fascinating manner the extent to which the renaissance of Jewish cultures overlapped with equally decisive social welfare activities to rejuvenate the body of the Jewish community." -- Nils H. Roemer * American Historical Review *"[Gillerman's] detailed work does justice to its subject by unraveling the complexities of newly arising Jewish identities, their challenges, the debates in the Jewish community, and the contradictions, as well as options available to Weimar Jews. With this work, Gillerman has done justice to a crucial topic of German and Jewish history; her choice to focus on social welfare policy was a clever one." -- Dani Kranz * German Studies Review *"Recommended for university and German Jewish collections." -- Ellen Share * AJL *"Sharon Gillerman has produced a stunning analysis of a dimension of Jewish history that is little-known and deserves recognition: the attempt by Jews to re-image, reconfigure, energize and rejuvenate themselves as a component of the greater German body politic, and as a community in its own right, in the Weimar Republic. She succeeds brilliantly in integrating Jewish history into German history, women's history, and social history; this may be the advent of the next generation of history." -- Michael Berkowitz * University College London *"Gillerman's sophisticated analysis of the 'Jewish social body' in Weimar Germany joins an increasing number of works that treat German history as it was (not as a stepping-stone to the collapse of liberalism and the rise of National Socialism), and the history of German Jewry apart from the Holocaust. Specifically, the author presents the interesting story of how Jewish social workers during Weimar worked to revitalize the country's Jewish community after the Great War by transforming individuals' health, facilitating reproduction and child care, and rehabilitating endangered youth . . . Recommended." -- J. D. Smith * Choice *

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Book SynopsisThis book examines a group of multicultural Jewish poets, Algerian Sadia Lévy, Argentine Juan Gelman, and Israeli Margalit Matitiahu, to address the issue of multilingualism within a context of minor languages and literatures, nationalism, and diaspora.Trade Review"A splendid work that will be a fascinating read for all those who are interested in Jewish literatures and languages and in poetology." -- Lazar Fleishman * Stanford University. *"The close readings that the author provides make the work of these three poets accessible to anyone interested in multilingual, transnational poetry and in the Jewish literary repertoire...Homeless Tongues therefore does more than expand specific canons (of Jewish literatures, of world literatures, and of literatures, to use Rebecca Walkowitz's terms, that are "born translated"). The book ultimately shows that linguistic diversity is good for people and good for democracy, which also is what makes Homeless Tongues so significant and timely in the current political climate." -- Tabea Alexa Linhard * Shofar: Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies *"In this book, Monique Balbuena rescues three Sephardi poets from near oblivion. Significant on their own, together they challenge the usual canons of Jewish literature and the general consensus on Jewish languages, as well as the standard theories of minority literatures." -- Nancy E. Berg * Washington University *"Monique Balbuena shifts between theoretical arguments and a meticulous analysis of poems by the three authors, providing us a deep reading of the texts. At the same time, she places the poems in a changing context, using interpretive tools from literary theory. The author's contribution is an original and ambitious one: it allows us to see relationships that aren't always evident and it offers new insight into 20th-century Jewish literary history." -- Elisa Martín Ortega * Sefarad *"Homeless Tongues has opened a new path for Sephardic scholarship....Homeless Tongues takes a crucial step forward in assigning value to contemporary Sephardic literature....Balbuena also provides a much needed summary of the field of Jewish Spanish, Sephardic studies, and contemporary Sephardic culture in general. The reference section of the monograph—almost as large as her lengthy chapters—provides a veritable gold mine for future scholarship." -- Judith K. Lang Hilgartner * Studies in Contemporary Jewry *"The great strength of this volume lies in its expert close readings, which in their unusual length and detail offer a rare opportunity for a reader to become intimate with unfamiliar sources....Balbuena's analysis of Sephardic, in general, and Ladino, in particular, poetic production addresses a major gap in research on Jewish literature. The perspectives elaborated in this book are valuable for any scholar of minor languages or literatures, and they will be particularly useful to those interested in the increasingly vital field of Sephardic studies." -- Harry Eli Kashdan * Symposium *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction chapter abstractThis introduction first introduces poet Clarisse Nicoïdski as a Sephardic poet who shifts languages and genres when she moves from French to Ladino, and prose to poetry, when confronting the death of her mother, her people and her culture. Then the introduction briefly presents Deleuze and Guattari's formula for "minor literatures" and the counter-arguments this book presents to it. The text then proceeds discussing basic concepts that are central to the book and to the poets here discussed: genres of Sephardic poetry, the Judeo-Spanish language, its development and its many names, multilingualism and Jewish langauges, and Diaspora. 1Minor Literatures and Major Laments: Reading Sadia Lévy chapter abstractThis chapter presents Sadia Lévy, an Algerian poet who attempted to inscribe himself in the gallery of French Symbolists while writing in a French enriched by infusions of Hebrew and Judeo-Spanish, activating biblical and Kabbalistic genres in his poems. Lévy allows us to look at the development of modernism from a different angle, and serves as an example that will prompt changes in Jewish historical narrative, destabilizing certain views of Jewish culture, more specifically about Sephardi and North African Jews. Writing in French in colonial Algeria, Lévy makes us rethink the boundaries that define a French and a Francophone author. Having written one of the first Maghrebi novels in French, his precedence has gone unrecognized because as a Jew, he is considered French—an ideological exclusionary act that misses his ambivalent position and does not recognize that the privilege of his French citizenship is more artificial than ever. 2At the Crossroads: Greece, Israel and Spain in Margalit Matitiahu's Hebrew-Ladino Poetry chapter abstractChapter 2, on Israeli contemporary poet Margalit Matitiahu, focuses on her bilingual Hebrew-Ladino books—especially her first volumes, Kurtijio Kemado and Alegrika. It discusses the critical reception of her work within Hebrew and Ladino literatures and, observing that her readers and critics are for the most part still divided across linguistic borders, offers a reading of two poems in both their Hebrew and Ladino versions, with attention to the specificities of the languages and their respective audiences, and observing the poet's strategies of self-translation. This chapter also brings to the foreground the politics of Jewish languages and questions the concepts of diasporic and nationalist identities, pointing to a critique of the nation and the attempted creation of a homogenizing national subject. It also touches upon the place of the Shoah in Sephardic memory and identity. 3Archaeology of the Language/Archaeology of the Self: Juan Gelman's Journey to Ladino chapter abstractChapter 3, about Argentine Ashkenazi poet Juan Gelman, destabilizes notions of fixed identity and breaks down dichotomic divisions of ethnic origins as it traces Gelman's gradual rewriting of himself as a Sephardic Jew at the very moment when he most identifies as a Jew. It reads Gelman's bilingual Ladino-Spanish collection Dibaxu as the culmination of his rewritings of Spanish canonical authors. It focuses on the "process of self-Sephardization," initially triggered by Gelman's historical condition as a political exile, and then fed by his translation and rewriting of canonical medieval Spanish Hebrew poets. He proceeds in a linguistic "excavation" of the many layers in the Spanish language, and writes himself as a Sephardic Jew. In opposition to an oppressive regime with which his language is associated, Gelman makes a deterritorializing move and radically assumes a new language: the Jewish, exilic and minor Ladino. Conclusion: Wither chapter abstractThe conclusion revisits the main arguments of the book and discusses new developments and possibilities for the creative production in Ladino. It seeks to turn the focus from the atmosphere of death that surrounds the language to an acknowledgement, or even celebration, of Sephardim as present-day, creative, living Jews.

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Book Synopsis Islam and Nation presents a fascinating study of the genesis, growth and decline of nationalism in the Indonesian province of Aceh.Trade Review"Islam and Nation provides a detailed account of the struggle and conflict in Aceh that draws from the views and perspectives of a wide spectrum of actors who have been involved, including political leaders, rebels and non-governmental organizations. Together with a masterly command of the existing literature, this wide array of sources allows Aspinall successfully to piece together narratives behind the conflict in Aceh 'from the perspective of the participants' . . . Written with elegant style, Islam and Nation makes a significant contribution to our understanding of why the separatist struggle in Aceh lasted as long as it did, and how it eventually managed to find the resolution that it did. Aspinall's book is scholarship of the highest order, and is likely to remain the reference point for subsequent reflections on the conflict in Aceh for years to come." -- Dr. Joseph Chinyong Liow * South East Asia Research *"An outstanding pioneer work, Islam and Nation will surely stand as an invitation to scholars both in Aceh and beyond to examine the conflict from other perspectives." -- Leena Avonius * Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies *"This book tells the story of Aceh's armed nationalist movement with unprecedented authority, thoroughness and clarity. It will be the standard account of the Aceh rebellion for a long time to come." -- Anthony Reid * National University of Singapore, author of Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450–1680 *

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Book SynopsisWhile Islamic politics pose a challenge to capitalism in some parts of the world, they have actually advanced capitalism and democracy in Turkey. This work looks closely at this transition in Turkey, and examines why this shift has not taken place in Egypt and Iran.Trade Review"Cihan Tuğal's Passive Revolution provides a rich and detailed account of the transformations of the Islamist movement in Turkey over the last three decades. It presents a sophisticated and original conceptual framework that guides the analysis of these transformations... Passive Revolution is an excellent contribution to the study of counterhegemonic projects and the alternative paths they follow. It brings the study of radicalization and deradicalization of Islamist activism into the broader eld of political sociology and demonstrates the unique contributions that critical ethnographic methods make to the study of politics." -- Salwa Ismail * University of London, American Journal of Sociology *"With breathtaking access to religious activists—even some revolutionaries—and demonstrations of how the now-dominant party mobilized the urban poor on behalf of a neo-liberal, capitalist project, Tuğal accomplishes a rare feat. Nobody will mistake this with any other work on contemporary Islamic movements." -- Charles Kurzman * University of North Carolina *"Tuğal has thus written an ambitious study that seeks to reconstruct the theoretical understanding of Islamism ... Highly recommended." -- A. Paczynska"Tuğal's fresh look at the shifting relations between radical and mainstream Islamists, Kurds, and rigid secularists in Turkey provides an alternative look at Islamic politics. Undertaken at the right time and in the right place, this nuanced account of the multi-faceted struggles of the absorption of radical Islamists into the capitalist system will definitely lead to exciting, constructive debates." -- Berna Turam

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Book SynopsisThis book brings to light the first Jewish fiction in French and reveals how the first generation of Jews born as French citizens used fiction as a laboratory for experimenting with modern forms of Jewish identity.Trade Review"Samuels's illuminating new book embarks on an innovative project to inscribe nineteenth-century French Jewish fiction within the context of modern literary history . . . Inventing the Israelite encompasses a significant contribution to Jewish studies and French literary history. Additionally, Samuels's easy flowing prose and inviting style make for an enjoyable read."—Sayeeda H. Mamoon, French Review "Sur un corpus considérable et peu connu, Inventing the Israelite éclair avec une grande subtilité la situation des juifs français avant l'affaire Dreyfus à partir d'oeuvres de fiction envisagées pour le "travail culturel" qu'ells accomplissent."—Judith Lyon-Caen, Revue d'Histoire du XIXe siècle "Samuels's book opens a new area of research by introducing readers to largely unknown authors and texts. Scholars as well as nonacademic readers interested in the history of the Jews in France are indebted to him for his painstaking archival work and for his astute interpretations, presented in an engaging and eminently readable style."—Michal Peled Ginsburg, Modern Language Quarterly "In this brilliantly researched and wonderfully written book, Maurice Samuels helps us rediscover a by-and-large forgotten chapter in French (literary) history, which is that of narratives written by Jewish authors in the nineteenth century . . . [This is] an excellent volume that I recommend most enthusiastically to any scholar of nineteenth-century French narrative."—Lawrence R. Schehr, French Forum "Samuels's work is a model for how historical and literary scholarship can be combined to open up new insights into the French past. Samuels has read deeply in both disciplines, writes with energy and without jargon, and is consistently fair minded and generous in his judgments. His literary training allows him to trace with precision the ways in which Jewish authors used fashionable genres drawn from romanticism, idealism, and realism to reflect on their relationship to France. Historians of religion can gain a deeper sense of the centrality of practice in Jewish life, which Samuels's authors treat at length, even while they remain reticent on the substance of their beliefs. Because the stories analyzed by Samuels deal so often with conflicts involving romance, marriage, and family life they add emotional depth to our understanding of the tangled visions of a French-Jewish identity that were available in the nineteenth century. Samuels has written a fascinating case study in the formation of national identity, which deserves a wide audience among scholars of modern Europe."—Thomas Kselman, Journal of Modern History "Samuels's work is beautifully crafted, and speaks to the power of literary analysis in historical enquiry. His book is a welcome challenge to the narrative that has faulted French Jews for their naïve trust in emancipation and their rush to assimilate. Samuels also makes a strong case for the notion that French Jews followed a distinct trajectory in the nineteenth century. For all these reasons, this volume is an important addition to the historiography of French Jewry."—Julie Kalman, American Historical Review "Providing a major contribution to understanding of French identity, Jewish identity in France, French literary studies, and Jewish studies, this is an extremely important book."—S. Whidden, Choice "In this pathbreaking book, Maurice Samuels brings to light an almost totally unknown area of fiction in France, that of Jewish writers in the mid-nineteenth century. Samuels puts to use his considerable talents both as a historian and as a literary analyst in showing how post-emancipation Jewish writers struggled with minority issues of assimilation and modernity as they adapted the dominant literary trends of their time. Inventing the Israelite will become a classic, in French as in Jewish studies."—Susan Rubin Suleiman, Harvard University "In his impressive new book, Samuels discovers some of Proust's unknown progenitors. In their novels, they tried, like Proust did later on, to solve the crucial contradictions of French Jewish identity—between nostalgia and regeneration, tradition and modernity, religion and nationalism. Studying this moving literature, Samuels is able to cast new light on those Jewish dilemmas through which a minority tried to 'imagine' its identity within the French nation. At a crossroad between French studies and Jewish history, this is a very innovative book."—Pierre Birnbaum, Professor Emeritus, University of Paris "Inventing the Israelite is a model study that enables us to understand the complexity of the Jewish 'situation' within French society. Samuels challenges worn-out stereotypes that Jews were obliged to give up their particularities in order to adhere to the constraints and demands of French universalism. He allows us to examine a more balanced view of Jewish identities and illustrates in a most provocative way how literature provides a means of representing what is Jewish. This book will be of major importance for all those interested in the cultural, intellectual and literary history of Europe."—Lawrence D. Kritzman, Dartmouth College

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Book Synopsis Dreaming of Michelangelo is the first book-length study to explore the intellectual and cultural affinities between modern Judaism, Italy, and the life and work of Michelangelo Buonarroti.Trade Review"Biemann breaks ground on the new interest in Jewish aesthetics in the context of German Jewish culture and German aesthetic thought . . . Dreaming of Michelangelo recommends itself as a go-to book in the field of modern Jewish Studies as it relates to art, German Jewish culture, and Jewish philosophical aesthetics." -- Zachary Braiterman * Images: Journal of Jewish Art & Visual Culture *"Asher Biemann's Dreaming of Michelangelo: Jewish Variations on a Modern Theme engages the intellectual history of the modern Jewish experience in late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century Europe . . . [T]hrough a study of the German-Jewish experience of Italy, Dreaming of Michelangelo provides a powerful and compelling example of how an engagement with aesthetics can and should be the work of twenty-first-century Jewish thought." -- Benjamin E. Sax * Partial Answers *"Biemann takes the reader into the vibrant intellectual worlds of the generations of Jews in the German-speaking orbit for whom the encounter with Michelangelo, with Italy, and with classical art proved constitutive of their experience of modernity and sometimes Jewishness as well." -- Jonathan Hess * University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill *"Dreaming of Michelangelo is a masterpiece of original scholarship . . . Enhanced with extensive notes and a comprehensive index, Dreaming of Michelangelo is a very highly recommended addition to academic library Judaic Studies reference collections and supplemental reading lists." -- James A. Cox * The Midwest Book Review *"Asher Biemann presents a very creative and productive lens for re-examining the entry into modernity by Western European Jews." -- Richard Block * University of Washington *"Dreaming of Michelangelo obliges the reader to rethink the important questions of the relationship between Deutschtum and Judentum, Judaism and Hellenism, Jewish criticism of idolatry, Jewith ethics, and religion." -- Irene Kajon * University of Rome *"Beautifully written and richly textured with readings of original sources, this meditation depicts the encounter of the Jewish imagination with Italy and Michelangelo—unrequited lover, sculptor of living form, painter of humanity's original image, and desired other of Jewish cultural Eros . . . Biemann's analysis of the German-Jewish affinity for Italy and Michelangelo through the dynamic of cultural eroticism deepens our understanding of Jewish selfhood during these crucial years and reveals to us how German-Jewish love and dreaming are not mere forms of escapism or fantasy but rather the means for self-creation and even self-empowerment." -- Jennifer Hansen-Glucklich * German History *"[The Jewish/Modern Michelangelo] provides the subject of this thoughtful, dense, and extended essay. Its main focus, modern Jewish thinkers and writers, is viewed through a very specific, possibly surprising lens: Michelangelo and Renaissance Italy . . . This stimulating and pensive book is not merely a tenure document or converted dissertation but rather a different kind of scholarly engagement with both elements of its equation, Michelangelo as well as Moses." -- Larry Silver * H-Net *

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Book SynopsisThis book proposes that the idea of the Jews in European cultures has little to do with actual Jews, but rather is derived from the conception of Jews as Christianity''s paradigmatic Other, eternally reenacting their morally ambiguous New Testament role as the Christ-bearing and -killing chosen people of God. Through new readings of canonical Russian literary texts by Gogol, Turgenev, Chekhov, Babel, and others, the author argues that these European writersChristian, secular, and Jewishbased their representation of Jews on the Christian exegetical tradition of anti-Judaism. Indeed, Livak disputes the classification of some Jewish writers as belonging to Jewish literature, arguing that such an approach obscures these writers'' debt to European literary traditions and their ambivalence about their Jewishness. This work seeks to move the study of Russian literature, and Russian-Jewish literature in particular, down a new path. It will stir up controversy around Christian-Jewish Trade Review"[T]here is a profound lack of research concerning [...] the presence of Jewish components in Russian culture. This vacuum begs the question whether Jewish-Russian cultural contacts can be considered a dialogue at all [...]. This is the key question in Leonid Livak's book The Jewish Persona in the European Imagination: A Case of Russian Literature . . . Livak offers fascinating interpretations of Anton Chekhov's stories 'Tina' and 'Skripka Rotshil'da' . . . [T]he examples of Jewish themes in Russian literature per se are quite scare, and most of them have found their way into this book." -- Rafi Tsirkin-Sadan * Studies in Contemporary Jewry Vol. 27: Social Scientific Study of Jewry *"The Jewish Persona in the European Imagination presents an original, carefully researched, and cogently argued study of stultifying and persistent influence of a clichéd image of Jewish people dating back to Christian theology and folklore and found throughout Russian literature . . . Livak's study is enormously thought-provoking, and exemplary in its high scholarly standards." -- Jeremy Hicks * Modern Language Review *"This is an outstanding book, one that may force many readers, as it did me, to rethink matters they had thought safely settled . . . I will repeat: I consider this book a major scholarly contribution. Livak has adduced and integrated an immense amount of literary material. His analyses are intelligent and acute, his judgments sound and well grounded. An impressive job." -- Hugh McLean * Slavic and East European Journal *"The bibliography of primary and secondary sources is quite useful. The Jewish Persona should be of special interest to those wishing to explore the role that the image of Jews—or 'the jews'—might play in the psycho-sexual biography of non-Jewish writers." -- Gary Rosenshield * The Russian Review *"The Jewish Persona in the European Imagination contributes a new understanding both of familiar Russian literary texts and less familiar East Slavic religious and folkloric texts. Livak's theory is powerfully explanatory and will excite controversy and debate." -- Gabriella Safran * Stanford University *

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Book SynopsisMusic from a Speeding Train explores the uniquely Jewish space created by Jewish authors working within the limitations of the Soviet cultural system. It situates Russian- and Yiddish- language authors in the same literary universeone in which modernism, revolution, socialist realism, violence, and catastrophe join traditional Jewish texts to provide the framework for literary creativity. These writers represented, attacked, reformed, and mourned Jewish life in the pre-revolutionary shtetl as they created new forms of Jewish culture. The book emphasizes the Soviet Jewish response to World War II and the Nazi destruction of the Jews, disputing the claim that Jews in Soviet Russia did not and could not react to the killings of Jews. It reveals a largely unknown body of Jewish literature beginning as early as 1942 that responds to the mass killings. By exploring works through the early twenty-first century, the book reveals a complex, emotionally rich, and intensely vibraTrade Review"I recommend this book not only to all readers of Jewish, Yiddish, and Russian-Jewish literature, but to all scholars and students of Soviet and post-Soviet literature, whether written by Jews or not. Murav convinces us solidly that Jewish culture was firmly integrated into Soviet culture throughout and beyond the latter's historical purview, and we must look at both together in order to fully understand either." -- Judith Deutsch Kornblatt * Slavic and East European Journal *"This cogent book demonstrates viability and resilience of Jewish literature in Russia from the late 19th century to the current day. This is a truly admirable book, marked by keen understanding, insight, and particular sympathy, if not love, for the Jewish people. . . Highly recommended." -- V. D. Barooshian * Choice *"Murav has written an unusually rich and engaging book, which will be a must for experts on twentieth-century literatures—Jewish, Soviet, and European. Partially, its success is secured by the extraordinary quality of the forgotten texts that she presents to the reader in her lucid, though necessarily abridged, renderings . . . Murav's rendering of this vanished melody [from a speeding train] is remarkably clear." -- Alexander Etkind * The Russian Review *"By carefully reading something close to the entirety of the Russian-Jewish and Yiddish literature published in the last century and considering it on its own terms, Murav has changed the ways in which literary scholars and historians will think about the Soviet Jewish experience." -- Gabriella Safran * Slavic Review *"This pioneering book offers an illuminating interpretation of Soviet Jewish culture, treating this complex phenomenon from a refreshingly new literary perspective. It is the first literary study to cover the entire Soviet period and deal equally expertly with Yiddish and Russian texts." -- Mikhail Krutikov * University of Michigan *

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Book SynopsisSome sixty-five years after 750,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homeland, the popular conception of Palestinian refugees still emphasizes their fierce commitment to exercising their right of return. Exile has come to seem a kind of historical amber, preserving refugees in a way of life that ended abruptly with the catastrophe of 1948 and their campsinhabited now for four generationsas mere zones of waiting. While reducing refugees to symbols of steadfast single-mindedness has been politically expedient to both sides of the Arab-Israeli conflict it comes at a tremendous cost for refugees themselves, overlooking their individual memories and aspirations and obscuring their collective culture in exile.Refugees of the Revolution is an evocative and provocative examination of everyday life in Shatila, a refugee camp in Beirut. Challenging common assumptions about Palestinian identity and nationalist politics, Diana Allan provides an immersive account of caTrade Review"[This] book provides a compelling testimony of the day-to-day struggles in Shatila . . . Allan's carefully crafted ethnography avoids reducing the camp to the prevailing sense of hopelessness and despair that has been constitutive for the Palestinian experience and instead delivers a thought-provoking, self-critical reflection on the paradoxes and limits of camp research." -- Monika Halkort * Journal of Palestine Studies *"Allan's book is the key for anyone who wants to understand one of the most dramatic strands of sixty-plus years of Palestinian dispossession." -- Victoria Brittain * The Political Quarterly *"Diana Allan has finally produced the book on Palestinian refugees in Lebanon that should have been written twenty-plus years ago . . . Brilliantly employing a phenomenological approach, Allan richly portrays the complexities and the frustratingly intricate negotiations among refugees, and between them and Palestinian power sectors as well as Lebanese national institutions, to secure services and meet personal obligations . . . Allan's meticulous research and insightful observations combine with her articulate writing style to produce extraordinary clarity. She brings to life the constant horrors and dilemmas of Palestinian refugee life in Lebanon by providing the contexts and allowing refugees to speak for themselves. . . . Refugees of the Revolution is a groundbreaking book that should be read by all serious scholars of Palestinian studies and solidarity activists who can draw from its pages fresh thinking in how to support Palestinian rights." -- Elaine C. Hagopian * Race and Class *"Overall, Refugees of the Revolution is a compelling contribution to the fields of Palestine and refugee studies, and an exemplar for political-economic studies of subaltern groups." -- Rana B. Khoury * Journal of Refugee Studies *"Diana Allan, a British anthropologist and activist, has written an important, provocative, and compelling account . . . This is an honest and provocative book that demands close reading and clear understanding of what the author describes and writes about. Allan is a very careful and introspective writer, acutely aware of every word she writes. She understands how easily these words can be misconstrued and misinterpreted. A compassionate sympathizer with the Palestinian predicament, she nevertheless places her duty as an ethnographer and anthropologist above her personal commitments as an activist . . . [R]ichly researched, amply annotated, and theoretically grounded . . . This book should be read by anyone interested in the question of Palestine and the Palestinian people, especially by politicians and diplomats who debate and negotiate the future of the Palestinians as refugees, as a people, and as a nation." -- Bassam Abed * H-Net *"Anthropologist Allan's first major publication is a breakthrough study of life in Shatila, the Palestinian refugee camp in Beirut. The book provides powerful insight into notions of nation, exile, homeland, and return through a detailed and provoking study that forces readers to reassess notions about what it means to be a Palestinian refugee." -- The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs"In this intriguing study, anthropologist Allan provides a fascinating study of Palestinian identity in exile . . . Identity, Allan therefore argues, lies in the local, wherein emotions and cognitions of sociability mark felt experiences of embodied practices. Allan's methodology of 'ethnographies of the particular' underlines this everyday aspect of lived experiences and, in many ways, identifies the book's major contribution to anthropology and Middle Eastern studies . . . Highly recommended." -- B. Rahimi * CHOICE *"Diana Allan's ethnographic study provides insight into the day-to-day struggles of the residents of the Shatila Palestinian refugee camp in southern Beirut. Through her direct experience in the camp and extensive interactions with the refugees, Allan applies a phenomenological lens to create a collection of narratives based on qualitative research. Refugees of the Revolution weaves stories of the pragmatic survival of Shatila's refugees, to highlight the wider implications of marginalization. Allan's work provides a well-grounded insight into the interdisciplinary effects of refugee life without imposing policy." -- Middle East Journal"This beautifully written ethnography provides a powerful account of the Palestinian refugee experience in Lebanon. Basing her analysis in the complexities of refugee lives, rather than on received frameworks, Diana Allan has produced a work whose ethnographic richness is matched by its theoretical acumen. Refugees of the Revolution should be read by anyone interested in structural poverty or long-term displacement." -- Ilana Feldman * George Washington University *"In an ethnography marked by analytical subtlety, empathy, and political courage, Diana Allan raises questions around the way that activists and researchers working in Palestinian refugee camps focus on the national past, neglecting everyday poverty, survival economies, hopes for the future, individual memories. Her careful attention to the words and lives of Shatila people has produced a study that makes us think again." -- Rosemary Sayigh * author of The Palestinians: From Peasants to Revolutionaries *"With intelligence and compassion, Diana Allan has captured the experience of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon today. An outstanding book, and an important reminder that there can be no just settlement of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict that overlooks the rights of refugees." -- Eugene Rogan * author of The Arabs: A History *"The presumed primacy of economic deprivation over nationalist ideology is among the hottest topics not only in contemporary Palestine studies but also in much of the anthropology of social suffering. For that, and for its excellent ethnographic quality, Allan's timely book has been among the most debated novel works in the field since its release." -- Leonardo Schiocchet * American Anthropologist *"By combining ethnographic observations with quotations from informal interactions and formal narrative interviews, [Allan] reveals that daily life in the camp constitutes a struggle that is economic and existential, as well as political." -- Helen Taylor * Refuge *

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Book SynopsisSet in a Palestinian camp in Lebanon, Refugees of the Revolution is both an ethnography of everyday life and a provocative critique of nationalism, exploring how material realities and evolving solidarity networks are reconstituting identity and political belonging in exile.Trade Review"[This] book provides a compelling testimony of the day-to-day struggles in Shatila . . . Allan's carefully crafted ethnography avoids reducing the camp to the prevailing sense of hopelessness and despair that has been constitutive for the Palestinian experience and instead delivers a thought-provoking, self-critical reflection on the paradoxes and limits of camp research." -- Monika Halkort * Journal of Palestine Studies *"Allan's book is the key for anyone who wants to understand one of the most dramatic strands of sixty-plus years of Palestinian dispossession." -- Victoria Brittain * The Political Quarterly *"Diana Allan has finally produced the book on Palestinian refugees in Lebanon that should have been written twenty-plus years ago . . . Brilliantly employing a phenomenological approach, Allan richly portrays the complexities and the frustratingly intricate negotiations among refugees, and between them and Palestinian power sectors as well as Lebanese national institutions, to secure services and meet personal obligations . . . Allan's meticulous research and insightful observations combine with her articulate writing style to produce extraordinary clarity. She brings to life the constant horrors and dilemmas of Palestinian refugee life in Lebanon by providing the contexts and allowing refugees to speak for themselves. . . . Refugees of the Revolution is a groundbreaking book that should be read by all serious scholars of Palestinian studies and solidarity activists who can draw from its pages fresh thinking in how to support Palestinian rights." -- Elaine C. Hagopian * Race and Class *"Overall, Refugees of the Revolution is a compelling contribution to the fields of Palestine and refugee studies, and an exemplar for political-economic studies of subaltern groups." -- Rana B. Khoury * Journal of Refugee Studies *"Diana Allan, a British anthropologist and activist, has written an important, provocative, and compelling account . . . This is an honest and provocative book that demands close reading and clear understanding of what the author describes and writes about. Allan is a very careful and introspective writer, acutely aware of every word she writes. She understands how easily these words can be misconstrued and misinterpreted. A compassionate sympathizer with the Palestinian predicament, she nevertheless places her duty as an ethnographer and anthropologist above her personal commitments as an activist . . . [R]ichly researched, amply annotated, and theoretically grounded . . . This book should be read by anyone interested in the question of Palestine and the Palestinian people, especially by politicians and diplomats who debate and negotiate the future of the Palestinians as refugees, as a people, and as a nation." -- Bassam Abed * H-Net *"Anthropologist Allan's first major publication is a breakthrough study of life in Shatila, the Palestinian refugee camp in Beirut. The book provides powerful insight into notions of nation, exile, homeland, and return through a detailed and provoking study that forces readers to reassess notions about what it means to be a Palestinian refugee." -- The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs"In this intriguing study, anthropologist Allan provides a fascinating study of Palestinian identity in exile . . . Identity, Allan therefore argues, lies in the local, wherein emotions and cognitions of sociability mark felt experiences of embodied practices. Allan's methodology of 'ethnographies of the particular' underlines this everyday aspect of lived experiences and, in many ways, identifies the book's major contribution to anthropology and Middle Eastern studies . . . Highly recommended." -- B. Rahimi * CHOICE *"Diana Allan's ethnographic study provides insight into the day-to-day struggles of the residents of the Shatila Palestinian refugee camp in southern Beirut. Through her direct experience in the camp and extensive interactions with the refugees, Allan applies a phenomenological lens to create a collection of narratives based on qualitative research. Refugees of the Revolution weaves stories of the pragmatic survival of Shatila's refugees, to highlight the wider implications of marginalization. Allan's work provides a well-grounded insight into the interdisciplinary effects of refugee life without imposing policy." -- Middle East Journal"This beautifully written ethnography provides a powerful account of the Palestinian refugee experience in Lebanon. Basing her analysis in the complexities of refugee lives, rather than on received frameworks, Diana Allan has produced a work whose ethnographic richness is matched by its theoretical acumen. Refugees of the Revolution should be read by anyone interested in structural poverty or long-term displacement." -- Ilana Feldman * George Washington University *"In an ethnography marked by analytical subtlety, empathy, and political courage, Diana Allan raises questions around the way that activists and researchers working in Palestinian refugee camps focus on the national past, neglecting everyday poverty, survival economies, hopes for the future, individual memories. Her careful attention to the words and lives of Shatila people has produced a study that makes us think again." -- Rosemary Sayigh * author of The Palestinians: From Peasants to Revolutionaries *"With intelligence and compassion, Diana Allan has captured the experience of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon today. An outstanding book, and an important reminder that there can be no just settlement of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict that overlooks the rights of refugees." -- Eugene Rogan * author of The Arabs: A History *"The presumed primacy of economic deprivation over nationalist ideology is among the hottest topics not only in contemporary Palestine studies but also in much of the anthropology of social suffering. For that, and for its excellent ethnographic quality, Allan's timely book has been among the most debated novel works in the field since its release." -- Leonardo Schiocchet * American Anthropologist *"By combining ethnographic observations with quotations from informal interactions and formal narrative interviews, [Allan] reveals that daily life in the camp constitutes a struggle that is economic and existential, as well as political." -- Helen Taylor * Refuge *

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Book SynopsisArguing that the Sephardic experience played a much more vital role in the development of modern nationalism and literary history than has been generally acknowledged, this book demonstrates how modern writers from Europe, the Americas, North Africa, Israel, and India have used Sephardic history to explore the role and status of minorities and dissidents.Trade Review"One might not have imagined that the fate of the Jews banished in 1492 from Spain (in Hebrew, Sepharad) could yield such abundant material for the artistic imagination, yet this volume [] is proof precisely to the contrary . . . Sephardism functions in the end as a symbol for the modern condition, and so this "Postscript" by Halevi-Wise brings us around full circle to the original aim of the study: to show that 'Sephardic history has played a key role in shaping our world'." -- Alejandro Medina * Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Literatures *"A review such as this can only hint at the abundance of rewarding analysis that went into each of the articles presented here. Each of them can stand on its own merits as valid independent scholarship. Happily, the fact that they have been brought together here by the commonality of the Sephardic theme adds further weight to their perspectives." -- Ralph Taric * Sephardic Horizons *"This book offers a fresh and creative take on the ways that modern authors have imagined Sephardic Jews or employed the trope of Sepharad in order to advance various political, moral, or literary projects. Sephardism's geographical and thematic range and its unique approach will make the theme of Sepharad relevant to a wide-ranging group of scholars not otherwise engaged in Sephardic or even Jewish Studies—a true feat." -- Julia Phillips Cohen * Vanderbilt University *"Sephardism: Spanish Jewish History & the Modern Literary Imagination is a tour-de-force in the study of Jews as 'other' in the modern literary consciousness. So much time has been spent in the West studying the image of Ashkenaz in both Western Jewish and non-Jewish letters that the constant presence of Sepharad has been underestimated or ignored. The double Jewish other—Oriental, mysterious, more authentic, representing the utopian moment when Jews, Muslims and Christians lived symbiotically together—comes to be the gold standard by which Jews and non-Jews come to imagine both Jewish modernity and Jewish history, even today. An important addition to every library." -- Sander L. Gilman * Emory University *

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Book SynopsisYehuda Amichai (19242000) was the foremost Israeli poet of the twentieth century and an internationally influential literary figure whose poetry has been translated into some 40 languages. Hitherto, no comprehensive literary study of Amichai''s poetry has appeared in English. This long-awaited book seeks to fill the gap.Widely considered one of the greatest poets of our time and the most important Jewish poet since Paul Celan, Amichai is beloved by readers the world over. Beneath the carefully crafted and accessible surface of Amichai''s poetry lies a profound, complex, and often revolutionary poetic vision that deliberately disrupts traditional literary boundaries and distinctions. Chana Kronfeld focuses on the stylistic implications of Amichai''s poetic philosophy and on what she describes as his acerbic critique of ideology. She rescues Amichai''s poetry from complacent appropriations, showing in the process how his work obliges us to rethink major issues in literary studiTrade Review"I am not exaggerating when I say that this is a book a whole generation—on two continents—has been waiting for. It is the only study of its kind in English, and it resolves and transcends decades of controversy and misguided readings of Amichai's poetry in Israel and elsewhere." -- Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi * Hebrew University of Jerusalem *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction: "Be an Other's, Be an Other": A Personal Perspective chapter abstractA biography of Yehuda Amichai and the arc of his life in poetry is interwoven with a discussion of autobiography and its role in lending Amichai's avant-garde lyric a deceptively simple impression. 1Beyond Appropriation: Reclaiming the Revolutionary Amichai chapter abstractThis chapter traces Amichai's reception and appropriation as a "national poet" of official celebrations in Israel and as a poet of simple religiosity in the Jewish American synagogue. Arguing that revolutionary poetry is too "dangerous" to be left alone to do its work, the chapter interrogates these misreadings not as mistakes that should be corrected but as informative expressions of hegemonic processes of canon formation. By contrast, the chapter illustrates the wrath with which early critics received his work, labeling it revolutionary and heretical – all this in an attempt to restore our ability to perceive these features in Amichai's poetry even today, despite its massive cooptation. The chapter also critiques the over-emphasis on thematics in literary studies, theorizing from Amichai's work a model for the politics of poetic form. 2"In the Narrow Between": Amichai's Poetic System chapter abstractSimplicity and accessibility are for Amichai serious ethical principles, guidelines for a poetic effect that are part of the fabric of everyday life, not just the mark of "a playful poet" writing "easy" verse who has "no worldview," as some scholars have argued, mistaking his egalitarian imperative for a lack of philosophical gravitas. Poetic philosophy is revealed in the process to be a feature of stylistics as of thematics. Chapter Two outlines the major principles that underlie Amichai's poetic philosophy, focusing on the state of "in-between-ness" as the privileged yet endangered site of the poetic subjects-cum-ordinary human beings. This sets the stage for an array of systematic correlations between liminality as the governing feature of Amichai's poetic worldview and many of his signature rhetorical practices discussed throughout the book, such as juxtaposition, intertextuality and metaphor, which map two domains together without ignoring their distinctness. 3"I Want to Mix Up the Bible": Intertextuality, Agency, and the Poetics of Radical Allusion chapter abstractFamous for his iconoclastic allusions to sacred texts, Amichai is able to subject these sources to irreverent rewritings without producing a hermetic poetry. His intertextual collage co-exists with lucidity and readerly accessibility. The chapter retheorizes intertextuality through Amichai's rhetorical practice to call into question contemporary Western theories in the field. Using Amichai's unique combination of Jewish and matrilineal notions of literary tradition and (inter)textual exegesis, the chapter engages critically with Harold Bloom's model of "the anxiety of influence," and its bourgeois-individualist, male-Oedipal struggle between "strong poets;" it also critiques the poststructuralist view of intertextuality as "an anonymous tissue of citations" through Amichai's insistence on a historically inflected human agent as central to any process of recycling a culture's texts. This agency, though censored and limited, offers a possibility of resisting interpellation by the act of changing the words of its subjugating command, in Judith Butler's terms. 4Celebrating Mediation: The Poet as Translator chapter abstractAmichai sees the work of translation as a model for the poet's own in-between-ness, as well as for the translator/poet's inescapable secondariness. That the poet, like the translator, plays an immanently mediational position is a source of comfort rather than anxiety. This view of the poet's role sheds new light on contemporary theories of translation as cultural negotiation and their focus on asymmetrical power relations between source and target language. Amichai's poems about translation are read as celebrating the imperfect "recycling of words," describing translation as the epitome of all intertextuality, and ultimately of the creative process itself. Through Amichai's ecology of language, the chapter interrogates the ideological blind spots behind the numerous mistranslations that Amichai has been subjected to, not in order to advocate some correct rendition, but rather to suggest the ways in which they express what Gayatri Spivak has termed "the politics of translation." 5Living on the Hyphen: The Necessary Metaphor chapter abstractMetaphor embodies Amichai's principle of "in-between-ness" and has a significance within his poetic system that far exceeds the rhetorical. Chapter Five focuses on metaphor as the central marker of liminality, the hyphen of survival and resistance: it must never erase that hyphen, the marker of the disparate domains which it brings together (hence his preference for simile), even while it strives to make the gap between these domains productive of meaning. The ways Amichai's metaphors resist the erasure of difference critiques the vestiges of poststructuralist views, and offer an alternative model based on a historicized, context-sensitive reworking of prototype semantics. Amichai's images, while as novel and surprising as those of any 17th-century metaphysical poet, nevertheless strike us as completely "right," as visually and experientially familiar, because of their perceptually primary basis and the extensive and rigorous mapping they provide for the distant source and target domains. 6Double Agency: Amichai and the Problematics of Generational Literary Historiography chapter abstractAmichai extols the poet's freedom to oscillate between generational trends and poetic styles, while cherishing his outsider role and calling into question the underlying assumptions behind the generational model itself. His self-description as an inter-generational "double-agent" has presented a real problem for normative Hebrew literary historiography, with its teleological, unidirectional notions of a literary lineage, and has occasioned an impassioned debate. This literally subversive statement also articulates Amichai's post-Marxist critique of teleological historicism, his aversion to chronological order; and his preference for a simultaneous representation of personal and collective temporalities either as a fragmentary "archeology of the self" or as a fault-line geology. The chapter explores Amichai's resistance to the normative historiographic narrative of Hebrew literature, as well his refusal to reject his literary predecessors, a rejection prescribed in the manifestos of the self-proclaimed leader of the Statehood Generation, Natan Zach.

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Book SynopsisThe book explores the drama of the Hebrew poetry coping with the violence of the Holocaust and the Israel-Arab war.Trade Review"An important work by a brilliant scholar, Suddenly, the Sight of War is an important contribution to understanding the poetic responses to World War II in Hebrew poetry." -- Vered K. Shemtov * Stanford University *"Suddenly, the Sight of War is an erudite research that proposes an original reading of Hebrew poetry at a time of deep cultural and political reshaping....Suddenly, the Sight of War takes the reader on a poetic voyage that deeply helps understanding the impact that the Second World War and 1948 had on the formation of Israeli culture and confirms Hannan Hever as one of the most authoritative and original scholars of modern Hebrew literature." -- Dario Miccoli * Quest. Issues in Contemporary Jewish History *Table of ContentsContents and Abstracts1Part I: Hebrew Symbolist Poetry During World War II chapter abstractThe first part focuses on the struggle of the poets of the Hebrew symbolist school in Eretz-Israel to represent the violence perpetrated against Jews in Europe at the beginning of World War II. The overruling aesthetic approach of Hebrew symbolism transforms during the war into a national commitment, favoring the national symbol of the living-dead as a discursive tool. Nathan Alterman's Joy of the Poor, the most important book of poetry of the period, established itself as an ideological and poetic source of influence for many Hebrew literary works of the literary generation of the 1940s. 2Part II: Historical Analogy and National Allegory During the Holocaust chapter abstractThis part focuses on the surprising manner in which Nathan Alterman dealt with the Holocaust in his book The Poems of the Plagues of Egypt (1944). The fact that Alterman fully internalized the annihilation of the Jewish people in Europe created a revolution in his patterns of poetic representation. By writing The Poems of the Plagues of Egypt Alterman changed his poetics dramatically—from one dominated by the symbol to one dominated by allegory. 3Part III: Symbols of Death in the National War for Independence chapter abstractDuring World War II and right after, there was a noticeable effort by some members of the symbolist school led by Avraham Shlonsky to return to what had been the dominant nationalist symbolism. Influenced by a labor-movement culture, these writers and other artists produced images of national sovereignty during the war and in its wake. This part of the book includes a detailed discussion of the political and literary relationships between war reportage and war poetry, as well as an analysis of women's war poetry and the way it uses representations of the human body to subvert the hegemonic literary representations of the war.

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Book SynopsisMemories of Absence explores the contemporary perceptions of Moroccan Jews in the minds of Moroccan Muslims.Trade Review"Memories of Absence makes a much-needed contribution to the scholarship on Middle Eastern and North African Jewries. Moreover, Boum writes his setting so vividly that the reader can picture herself sitting at the cafe in Akka fending off flies and listening to the Hajj Muhammad's tales along with him. Further, he skillfully employs his arguments while never letting it subsume them." -- Elizabeth Berk * Social Anthropology *"Groundbreaking . . . The book navigates truthfully and openly between the deception of nostalgia and the duty to confront reality, with complicated issues of identity, anti-Semitism, and a memory at play . . . At times, I felt like I was reading a novel; it seemed the only way to tell this story, counter to historical/archival accounts, which never serve biological memory, but rather disturb it." -- Sami Shalom Chetrit * Journal of Palestine Studies *"Aomar Boum's Memories of Absence: How Muslims Remember Jews in Morocco contributes admirably to the growing scholarship on the enduring significance of Jewish historical presence in North Africa . . . The circumscribed ethnographic scope of the book provides a window onto a broadly conceived notion of memory and wide-angled attention to its carriers . . . Scholars interested in the current state of affairs in the ethnography and historiography of Jewish North Africa will find many of the major themes addressed in this book." -- Oren Kosansky * Review of Middle East Studies *"By focusing on memories and views of regular Moroccan Muslim men, whether they knew Jews or not, this book is an important contribution to the study of Jewish-Muslim relations from a Muslim point of view." -- Rachel Simon * Princeton University *"Based on fieldwork conducted in southern Morocco buttressed by extensive archival research that includes previously unknown documents, this work makes important contributions to several fields, including Moroccan history, legal anthropology, and Jewish studies. Scholars in the interdisciplinary collective memory field will find this an essential text, and those interrogating the development of racism and anti-Semitism will find Boum's conclusions sobering . . . In sum, this is a beautifully written book that contributes to multiple scholarly fields. It presents a society whose collective memory is fractured by generational divides. The absence of Jews in contemporary Morocco has led to a disconnect between the generations, the oldest of whom remember friends and neighbors and create museums in their memory, the youngest of whom have reduced Jews to caricatures stripped of any long-standing tie to Morocco. For these young Moroccans, the idea that Jews could be indigenous Moroccans is now an alien concept. Boum underscores the role of everyday interaction in preventing the propagation of long-standing animosity." -- Andrea Smith * H-SAE *"Nothing short of extraordinary, Memories of Absence is theoretically sophisticated, empirically rich, and infinitely sensitive to its subjects. A necessary and wonderful work for all invested in Muslim-Jewish relations, the cultures of North Africa, and the shaping of trans-generational memory in the contemporary world." -- Sarah Abrevaya Stein, University of California * Los Angeles *"Aomar Boum says something truly new about the Moroccan Jewish past. He does not shy away from asking—and answering—hard questions about what local, regional, and national identities actually consist of, who they encompass and why, their internal contradictions, and their changing meanings. This is a highly original and important contribution." -- Emily Gottreich, University of California * Berkeley *"In Memories of Absence, Aomar Boum empathetically traces the intimate—if often fraught—relations between Muslims and Jews across the southern oases of Morocco from the eighteenth century to the mass departure for Israel in the early 1960s. Boum assembles a unique archive of documents from threatened personal collections of letters and manuscripts to portray a lost social world of legal syncretism and community cohabitation. Masterfully weaving together fields of sociolinguistics, semiotics, ethnohistory, and anthropology into an eminently readable narrative, Boum reveals the various afterlives of Moroccan Jewish culture in ongoing museum projects, national festivals, and state-level politics. Memories of Absence thus makes a substantial contribution to study of the social life of memory." -- Paul Silverstein * Reed College *"Aomar Boum's impressive work not only fills a gap in the historical understanding of Jews in Morocco, but also challenges the traditional dominant perception of Jews; it restores their crucial historical role in building the Moroccan nation. This book helps transform the current ideas on Moroccan Jews and reorganizes existing knowledge in the study of the Jewish diaspora." -- Chouki El Hamel * American Historical Review *

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Book SynopsisTrade Review"The results of this analysis are truly extraordinary, and I do not hesitate to say that they have a potential for transforming our views of early modern (western) culture and the specific role played by literary texts and literary communication." -- Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht * Stanford University *

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Book SynopsisS.Y. Agnon was the greatest Hebrew writer of the twentieth century, and the only Hebrew writer to receive the Nobel Prize for literature. He devoted the last years of his life to writing a massive cycle of stories about Buczacz, the Galician town (now in Ukraine) in which he grew up. Yet when these stories were collected and published three years after Agnon''s death, few took notice. Years passed before the brilliance and audacity of Agnon''s late project could be appreciated. The Parable and Its Lesson is one of the major stories from this work. Set shortly after the massacres of hundreds of Jewish communities in the Ukraine in 1648, it tells the tale of a journey into the Netherworld taken by a rabbi and his young assistant. What the rabbi finds in his infernal journey is a series of troubling theological contradictions that bear on divine justice. Agnon''s story gives us a fascinating window onto a community in the throes of mourning its losses and reconstituting iTrade Review"James Diamond's fluid translation and helpful comments enable English speakers to enjoy and experience Agnon at his best. Alan Mints with his introduction and illuminating Essay on The Parable and Its Lesson explains many hidden details and a connection to the Holocaust. The Parable and Its Lesson is a most welcome addition to all literature lovers. It should be part of all academic libraries, as well as public libraries, and high school collections."—Nira G. Wolfe, Association of Jewish Libraries"Agnon is perhaps the greatest brooding presence in Israel's angst-filled literary stable, and richly deserves first-rate translation. The pairing of Mintz and Diamond is splendid, and they've managed to open up Agnon to a new generation of readers."—Steven Zipperstein, Daniel E. Koshland Professor in Jewish Culture and History, Stanford University"The time has finally come to introduce readers, scholars, and students to the work of 'late Agnon,' which is both unfamiliar and misunderstood. One could not hope for a better introduction than this volume. It will make one of Agnon's unknown masterpieces accessible to readers, and will expand our knowledge and understanding both of Agnon's writing and of literary responses to the Holocaust."—Shachar Pinsker, Associate Professor of Hebrew Literature and Culture, University of Michigan"[A] must-have for those interested in Hebrew literature, Agnon, Holocaust literature, and Jewish cultural history. One wants now to read the other 149 stories. Mintz and Diamond accomplished their purpose."—Katherine Brown Downey, Religious Studies Review

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Book SynopsisTrade Review"James Diamond's fluid translation and helpful comments enable English speakers to enjoy and experience Agnon at his best. Alan Mints with his introduction and illuminating Essay on The Parable and Its Lesson explains many hidden details and a connection to the Holocaust. The Parable and Its Lesson is a most welcome addition to all literature lovers. It should be part of all academic libraries, as well as public libraries, and high school collections."—Nira G. Wolfe, Association of Jewish Libraries"Agnon is perhaps the greatest brooding presence in Israel's angst-filled literary stable, and richly deserves first-rate translation. The pairing of Mintz and Diamond is splendid, and they've managed to open up Agnon to a new generation of readers."—Steven Zipperstein, Daniel E. Koshland Professor in Jewish Culture and History, Stanford University"The time has finally come to introduce readers, scholars, and students to the work of 'late Agnon,' which is both unfamiliar and misunderstood. One could not hope for a better introduction than this volume. It will make one of Agnon's unknown masterpieces accessible to readers, and will expand our knowledge and understanding both of Agnon's writing and of literary responses to the Holocaust."—Shachar Pinsker, Associate Professor of Hebrew Literature and Culture, University of Michigan"[A] must-have for those interested in Hebrew literature, Agnon, Holocaust literature, and Jewish cultural history. One wants now to read the other 149 stories. Mintz and Diamond accomplished their purpose."—Katherine Brown Downey, Religious Studies Review

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Book SynopsisTrade Review"Rein's book is a brilliant illustration of how to approach ethnicity outside conventional historiography [...] by favoring a perspective that takes into account the interplay between minority formation and nation-building . . . His research on Jewish Argentines and sports as a space of acculturation and ethnic differentiation is a welcome contribution tot he cultural and social history of Argentina's so -called 'melting pot', but is also constitutes a methodological template for further inquiries into the development of majority-minority relations in Latin America." -- Victor Armony * Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies *"Rein's new book is an important contribution to both the study of ethnicity in Latin America and the growing research on sport . . . A fascinating first step in what, hopefully, will become a much larger historiography that touches on ethnicity, sport, and neighborhood/urban identities." -- M. L. Nouwen * Choice *"[This book] serves as an invitation to cultural and social historians, and to fans of football everywhere, to further explore the significance and representation of Club Atlético Atlanta in terms of a more complex understanding of Jewish integration into Latin America and of a Latin America integrally composed of Jews." -- Dalia Wassner * H-Judaic *"The book is path breaking in singular and plural ways, from redefining the approach to Latin American Jewish history to rethinking the nature of life in the barrios of Buenos Aires vis-à-vis popular culture, sports and ethnicity. It is a history that encompasses the Argentine pathway from immigration society to populism and beyond." -- Federico Finchelstein * New School for Social Research *"This innovative study brings together Rein's commanding knowledge of Jewish immigration with a passion for the history of football. The result is a well-researched and nuanced examination of the football Club Atlético Atlanta and the neighborhood from which it emerged, Villa Crespo. In the end, Rein transcends his focus on this civic association to illuminate the role of ethnicity, national identity, and popular culture in twentieth century Argentina." -- Brenda J. Elsey * Hofstra University *"Rein's book about the Jewish role in Argentinean football provides the reader with a detailed and multifaceted approach to the interrelation between culture, society, immigration, minorities and sports as it focuses on ethnicity and sports in immigrant societies." -- Moshe Zimmermann * Studies in Contemporary Jewry *

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Book SynopsisTrade Review"Focused on the Bosnian jihad and the wider world, both in that era and since, The Universal Enemy is original, authoritative, and broad in significance. This remarkable achievement is anchored in Darryl Li's unique combination of skills and sensibilities, which are at once ethnographic, lawyerly, and linguistic."—Brinkley Messick, Columbia University"In this deeply original book, Darryl Li paints a vivid portrait of jihadist universalism and its mobilization both for and against imperial power. Thought-provoking and beautifully written, The Universal Enemy raises important questions about the legalities, conduct, and effects of global violence in all its forms."—Lauren Benton, Vanderbilt University"A fascinating and highly readable account of jihad from the perspective of Islamic fighters. The Universal Enemy shows brilliantly that jihad is not a uniform terrorist movement but includes a wide variety of actors, motivations, and ideologies inspired by religion and the aspiration for universality, parallel to other ideologies such as human rights."—Sally Engle Merry, New York University"Darryl Li offers superb insight into a figure that shapes so much law and policy but is little understood—the 'universal enemy,' the foreign Muslim fighter. Telling the stories of these mujahids, their motivations and aspirations, with exceptional empathy and detail, he challenges much of what we think we know. The Universal Enemy offers a new and compelling way of understanding universalism and violence, empire and solidarity."—Anthony Anghie, National University of Singapore and University of Utah"[This book] stingingly criticizes the field of 'jihadism' as an academic discipline connected to the national security state....Li lets his subjects speak for themselves and casts few judgments. The picture that emerges is a morally complex one."—Murtaza Hussain, The Intercept"The Universal Enemy is extraordinary in combining many of the techniques of social science with a sophisticated knowledge of Islamic doctrines and controversies—except that, rather than assuming that religious texts are simply vectors for ideology, he focuses on how they are actually produced and used....[Li] seems to have read everything relevant to his topic and to anticipate many possible counter-arguments."—Jonathan Benthall, Times Literary Supplement"The Universal Enemy is a critical and welcome addition to our debates around radicalisation, Islamism and transnational politics."—Usman Butt, The New Arab"Li is a gifted writer and storyteller, and his research has amazing breadth....[He] should be commended for a finely crafted plunge into international jihad."—John Waterbury, Foreign Affairs"[Li] effectively confronts the demonization of jihadists in the aftermath of 9/11, particularly in the US....The author's linguistic skills and the depth of the interviews are impressive, and the case selection is intriguing. Recommended."—A. T. Kuru, CHOICE"[A] provocative and deeply researched new book....The Universal Enemy is the product of difficult and meticulous data collection. I expect that it will be cited as a standard-setting work of qualitative empirical research on political violence."—Mara Revkin, Lawfare"This important book offers many insights for scholars and students of political thought, anthropology, and law. Li's breadth and acumen in navigating these different fields of study is impressive....[The Universal Enemy] offers a vital contribution to the literature on jihad and universalism, and will undoubtedly furnish its readers with critical tools to approach both with fresh perspectives."—Pınar Kemerli, Political Theory"As an original study of transregional mobility and political belonging, Li's anthropological take on international law and history of empire upsets common assumptions about the politics of identity and solidarity in the context of contemporary warfare....[A] work of breathtaking reach and intrigue, The Universal Enemy explores how political identities form and collide through claims of belonging to a project larger than oneself."—Anna Simone Reumert, MERIP"The Universal Enemy is a timely intervention into political as well as scholarly debates....The story of the Bosnian Jihad continues to influence a wide range of seemingly incommensurable projects and seems to pre-figure aspects of current debates about the nature of rights and the limits of legitimate coercion. Li's ambition in trying to theorize these complexly interwoven threads together should be commended."—Geoff Hughes, Political Theology"[At] once a methodology, an ethics, and a praxis....[The Universal Enemy] presents a challenge not only to the scholarly and policy expertise produced about 'terrorism' and 'jihad,' but also to the very practice of academic and political 'theorizing' about them in the first place.."—C. Heike Schotten, Contemporary Political Theory"This is an important and singular book, one that can be recommended to anyone interested in jihad, Bosnia, the GWOT, race and difference in Europe, or universalism... The Universal Enemy succeeds in illuminating these lived projects and enmeshments and making clear why, and how, they matter for us all."—Nadia El-Shaarawi, International Journal of Middle East StudiesTable of ContentsIntroduction 1. Migrations 2. Locations 3. Authorities 4. Groundings Interlude: Exchanging Arabs 5. Non-Alignment 6. Peacekeeping 7. The Global War on Terror

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Book SynopsisIraq was the first postcolonial state recognized as legally sovereign by the League of Nations amid the twentieth-century wave of decolonization movements. It also emerged as an early laboratory of development projects designed by Iraqi intellectuals, British colonial officials, American modernization theorists, and postwar international agencies. Familiar Futures considers how such projectsfrom the country''s creation under British mandate rule in 1920 through the 1958 revolution to the first Ba''th coup in 1963reshaped Iraqi everyday habits, desires, and familial relations in the name of a developed future.Sara Pursley investigates how Western and Iraqi policymakers promoted changes in schooling, land ownership, and family law to better differentiate Iraq''s citizens by class, sex, and age. Peasants were resettled on isolated family farms; rural boys received education limited to training in agricultural skills; girls were required to take home economics courses; andTrade Review"Familiar Futures is an extraordinary book, at once theoretically informed and empirically rich. Sara Pursley offers an original and compelling reading of the relationship between decolonization and modernity in Iraq that considers time, economic development, political sovereignty, psychology, education, and the importance of gender in the articulation of national identity. It is an example of critical history at its best." -- Joan W. Scott * Institute for Advanced Study *"Familiar Futures marks an important examination of the intellectual underpinnings of the development projects shaped by Iraqi nationalists, revolutionaries, and intellectuals. Sara Pursley offers an original reading of modern Iraqi history and a thoughtful meditation on time and selfhood." -- Dina Rizk Khoury * George Washington University *"Addressing the generative tension between modernity as a transformative promise of the future and as a repetition of the same, Familiar Futures explores sovereignty and subject formation in twentieth-century Iraq as inextricably linked to temporality, gender, and sexuality. In this brilliant work of imaginative scholarship and interdisciplinary theorization, Sara Pursley pushes us to rethink the history of the modern Middle East and the postcolonial predicament more broadly." -- Omnia El Shakry, University of California * Davis *"Familiar Futures seems destined to approach the hallmark of intellectual distinction to which so many historians aspire––to say something so interesting and important that it captures the attention of readers who might otherwise have no particular reason to care about the narratives and details so central to our own fields."––Kevin Jones, Arab Studies Journal"Sara Pursley's excellent book is full of insights and in-depth reflections....Familiar Futures will be highly influential as a critique of concepts of modernity in modern Middle Eastern societies." -- Peter Wien * Middle East Journal *"The first pages [of Familiar Futures] set the scene for the main questions of the book: the relationship between revolutionary time and gendered time, the intensified investment in girls' and women's lives, how economic development and the gendered social reform came to trump all other visions of the good life, and how the Iraqi territorial state came to infiltrate the intimate lives of Iraqi subjects and to mold their experience of citizenship. The answers to these questions, Pursley offers, have everything to do with particular modern temporal sensibilities that came to dictate Iraqi citizens' orientation to the future." -- Samera Esmeir * Modern Intellectual History *"Through an expert weaving of social theory and social history, including close readings of works by Iraqi intellectuals written in Arabic, Pursley demonstrates how family and gender reform initiatives served to institutionalize the 'disciplinary and biopolitical power' of the state over its national subjects." -- Brandon Wolfe-Hunnicutt * International Journal of Middle East Studies *"In a Koselleckian tradition, Pursley not only offers us a tantalizing critique of modernization and modernity, but also challenges us to rethink the boundaries between history, historiography and theory: an opportunity to reflect on the positioning of the history of Iraq within interdisciplinary theories." -- Sara Farhan * Review of Middle East Studies *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction: Iraqi Futures and the Age of Development chapter abstractThis chapter introduces the central concepts of the book. Modern Iraqi futures were familiar because they were produced through reforms of familial and other intimate practices, imagined to already be somebody else's past or present, and paradoxically reproductive of existing forms of unevenness. They were also disrupted by other imaginaries of the future, which might be familiar because they were drawn from Islamic discursive traditions or were near or close futures that might be realizable because they have some connection to the present. These last discourses stood outside, and sometimes against, the modern political and conjugal imaginary of reproductive futurism, in which the figure of the child embodies the nation's yearned-for but congenitally receding future. The chapter also looks at how Iraq was an overdetermined space for the coming together of three previously distinct conceptions of development in the interwar period: the economic, the national, and the psychobiological. 1Sovereignty, Violence, and the Dual Mandate chapter abstractThis chapter looks at British practices in governing Iraq in the occupation and mandate eras (1914<->32). While British officials often invoked discourses emphasizing the psychological underdevelopment and sexual nondifferentiation of Iraqi subjects, this did not lead to their support for the expansion of modern biopolitical or disciplinary institutions in Iraq. British governance was primarily necropolitical, relying on violent punitive techniques such as hanging, whipping, corvée labor, bombing or burning down villages, and cutting off water and food to rebellious towns. The chapter traces how these practices were implicated in the production of Iraq as a bounded territorial space over which post-Ottoman sovereignty could be asserted and economic development, as the extraction of resources, carried out. The use of corporeal violence in mandate Iraq, while hardly exceptional in the history of the British empire, was shaped by new technologies of rule and explained through emerging narratives of developmental psychology. 2Determining a Self chapter abstractIraqi nationalist elites in the 1920s and 1930s called for the expansion of disciplinary and biopolitical techniques, in opposition to British policy. This chapter explores education and the military as key domains in which these struggles played out, mainly in this period over the bodies and minds of male youth, and engages with the writings of the Arab nationalist and "father of Iraqi education" Sati al-Husri. In contrast to usual scholarly concerns with the (Arabist or Iraqist) content of nationalist narratives prevalent in Iraq's schools and military, the chapter explores these institutions as temporal-spatial regimes that worked to make a sovereign Iraqi future familiar even while temporally deferring it. An emerging Arabist and statist discourse envisioned precocious demands for Iraq's independence as symptoms of backwardness, not progress, and accused those making such demands of being both less modern and less Iraqi than those working toward a deferred sovereignty. 3The Gendering of School Time chapter abstractThis chapter explores how the curriculum and pedagogies implemented in the 1920s were challenged in the 1930s by a new generation of education officials, many of whom were educated in the United States. Influenced by American conceptual vocabularies of pragmatism and adapted education, the new educators criticized the unified school curriculum implemented by al-Husri's ministry, calling for a "differentiated curriculum" governed by the urban-rural difference and the male-female difference. From 1932 to 1958, often in response to the advice of US and global development organizations, the Iraqi school system was increasingly differentiated by sex, with more and more of the school time of female students devoted to mandatory home economics education. The chapter proposes that this peculiarity makes Iraq a productive context for examining pedagogies of domesticity in the late interwar and postwar periods. 4Generational Time and the Marriage Crisis chapter abstractIn the years around World War II, Iraqi officials were increasingly concerned that a crisis was brewing in the form of a generation of educated youth who were taking up leftist ideologies. This chapter explores how generational affiliations produced largely by the expansion of public schooling—often in combination with extended family ties along intragenerational lines, that is, between siblings and cousins—worked to foster political mobilization within the underground but hugely popular Iraqi Communist Party (ICP). The widespread sense of generational crisis was expressed in three more specific crises prominent in public discourse during these years: the crisis of adolescence, the crisis of girls' education, and the marriage crisis. Efforts to intervene in and stabilize the stage of adolescence drew on new, globally circulating psychological theories as well as on specific forms of postwar economic development expertise. Conceptions of modern sexual difference and desire were central to these interventions. 5The Family Farm and the Peculiar Futurist Perspective of Development chapter abstractThe chapter examines efforts to reform rural families on the Dujayla Land Settlement Project, one of the world's first programs attracting the new international organizations founded after 1945 to launch the global "age of development." The idea was to create a class of small "family" farmers by distributing land to some of the landless poor. Yet the isolated family farm model used to design the settlement, which was based on US Cold War modernization and agrarian reform theory, contributed to ecological and social catastrophe. The nuclear family type, while failing to take hold as a widespread social reality in rural Iraq, had significant effects on rural lives. By working as a standardized grid for development operations, this model altered agricultural practices and thus the land, while making certain kinds of "family" relationships legible so that they could be worked on by techniques of governmentality and development. 6Revolutionary Time and Wasted Time chapter abstractAfter the 1958 revolution, state officials and political party leaders stressed the need to combat "stagnation" in the economy and the bodies of laborers. The word used for this condition was jumud, "a frozen state." Many agreed on the need to "suspend" or "to freeze" various kinds of political mobilization in the present. Sexual difference was crucial to both parts of this process: the conquering of economic stagnation or jumud and the enforcement of political stagnation or tajmid. The chapter focuses on a controversy over a communist women's rural literacy project, which critics saw as violating the tacit terms of the alliance between the state and middle-class feminists. The project was not believed to propagate techniques for the policing of families in the name of the child's and the nation's future, but to be a symptom of social promiscuity threatening the political order. 7Law and the Post-Revolutionary Self chapter abstractThis chapter examines the 1959 Personal Status Law, Iraq's first unified national family code under the control of the state. It argues that the law's drive to make marriage more stable, while simultaneously making the conjugal home less permeable to strangers, discloses the use of a reproductive-futurist reasoning to create a properly modern and timeless domestic sphere. The chapter explores responses to the law from communists, Bathists, liberals, and Sunni and Shii ulama'. It considers a Shii juristic critique by the mujtahid Muhammad Bahr al-Ulum, who argued that the law only appeared to promote progressive change, while actually replacing the temporally and spatially dynamic Islamic systems of jurisprudence with legal stasis. This critique suggests a key difference between the modern state's tendency to produce a static space and earlier Islamic understandings of "the state," or al-dawla, as cyclical and thus ever-changing. Epilogue: Postcolonial Heterotemporalitiess chapter abstractThe epilogue explores a famous work by the artist Jawad Salim, Nusb al-Hurriyya, or the Monument to Freedom, which still stands in Baghdad's Liberation Square. The work has usually been read as a linear-historical narrative of the Iraqi nationalist movement and the 1958 revolution it produced. Engaging with a rich tradition of Arabic language art criticism on the monument, the chapter shows how this work also evokes multiple and heterogeneous conceptions of time, often drawn from the Islamic discursive tradition, that can be read as subversive of contemporary developmentalist reasoning. For example, Islamic cyclical imaginaries of time do not work against promises of radical historical change in the monument but on the contrary give such promises more imaginative purchase than they typically achieve in linear modernization narratives, with their tendency to open onto a singular and static future.

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Book SynopsisMemories of Absence explores the contemporary perceptions of Moroccan Jews in the minds of Moroccan Muslims.Trade Review"Memories of Absence makes a much-needed contribution to the scholarship on Middle Eastern and North African Jewries. Moreover, Boum writes his setting so vividly that the reader can picture herself sitting at the cafe in Akka fending off flies and listening to the Hajj Muhammad's tales along with him. Further, he skillfully employs his arguments while never letting it subsume them." -- Elizabeth Berk * Social Anthropology *"Groundbreaking . . . The book navigates truthfully and openly between the deception of nostalgia and the duty to confront reality, with complicated issues of identity, anti-Semitism, and a memory at play . . . At times, I felt like I was reading a novel; it seemed the only way to tell this story, counter to historical/archival accounts, which never serve biological memory, but rather disturb it." -- Sami Shalom Chetrit * Journal of Palestine Studies *"Aomar Boum's Memories of Absence: How Muslims Remember Jews in Morocco contributes admirably to the growing scholarship on the enduring significance of Jewish historical presence in North Africa . . . The circumscribed ethnographic scope of the book provides a window onto a broadly conceived notion of memory and wide-angled attention to its carriers . . . Scholars interested in the current state of affairs in the ethnography and historiography of Jewish North Africa will find many of the major themes addressed in this book." -- Oren Kosansky * Review of Middle East Studies *"By focusing on memories and views of regular Moroccan Muslim men, whether they knew Jews or not, this book is an important contribution to the study of Jewish-Muslim relations from a Muslim point of view." -- Rachel Simon * Princeton University *"Based on fieldwork conducted in southern Morocco buttressed by extensive archival research that includes previously unknown documents, this work makes important contributions to several fields, including Moroccan history, legal anthropology, and Jewish studies. Scholars in the interdisciplinary collective memory field will find this an essential text, and those interrogating the development of racism and anti-Semitism will find Boum's conclusions sobering . . . In sum, this is a beautifully written book that contributes to multiple scholarly fields. It presents a society whose collective memory is fractured by generational divides. The absence of Jews in contemporary Morocco has led to a disconnect between the generations, the oldest of whom remember friends and neighbors and create museums in their memory, the youngest of whom have reduced Jews to caricatures stripped of any long-standing tie to Morocco. For these young Moroccans, the idea that Jews could be indigenous Moroccans is now an alien concept. Boum underscores the role of everyday interaction in preventing the propagation of long-standing animosity." -- Andrea Smith * H-SAE *"Nothing short of extraordinary, Memories of Absence is theoretically sophisticated, empirically rich, and infinitely sensitive to its subjects. A necessary and wonderful work for all invested in Muslim-Jewish relations, the cultures of North Africa, and the shaping of trans-generational memory in the contemporary world." -- Sarah Abrevaya Stein, University of California * Los Angeles *"Aomar Boum says something truly new about the Moroccan Jewish past. He does not shy away from asking—and answering—hard questions about what local, regional, and national identities actually consist of, who they encompass and why, their internal contradictions, and their changing meanings. This is a highly original and important contribution." -- Emily Gottreich, University of California * Berkeley *"In Memories of Absence, Aomar Boum empathetically traces the intimate—if often fraught—relations between Muslims and Jews across the southern oases of Morocco from the eighteenth century to the mass departure for Israel in the early 1960s. Boum assembles a unique archive of documents from threatened personal collections of letters and manuscripts to portray a lost social world of legal syncretism and community cohabitation. Masterfully weaving together fields of sociolinguistics, semiotics, ethnohistory, and anthropology into an eminently readable narrative, Boum reveals the various afterlives of Moroccan Jewish culture in ongoing museum projects, national festivals, and state-level politics. Memories of Absence thus makes a substantial contribution to study of the social life of memory." -- Paul Silverstein * Reed College *"Aomar Boum's impressive work not only fills a gap in the historical understanding of Jews in Morocco, but also challenges the traditional dominant perception of Jews; it restores their crucial historical role in building the Moroccan nation. This book helps transform the current ideas on Moroccan Jews and reorganizes existing knowledge in the study of the Jewish diaspora." -- Chouki El Hamel * American Historical Review *

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Book Synopsis[Multiple options] Nothing visible is worth watching. It's in the hidden parts of the city where everything can be seen. Just playing, or acting out? The answer falls on where you stand: above board or underground. Many Iranians by law are forced to act their parts...so then why is theater so dangerous? Theater is a threat when reality is contained.Trade Review"Last Scene Underground offers a thought-provoking and powerful story about our collective attempts to re-imagine the world. Writing with an inspiring combination of creativity and criticality, Roxanne Varzi has crafted an exceptionally memorable portrait of Iran, bringing both Tehran and its young people to life." -- John L. Jackson, Jr. * University of Pennsylvania *"Literary romance and ethnography are joined in perfect dialogue in Last Scene Underground. Roxanne Varzi has written a rare, powerful book that is both a whirlwind story of how it feels to be young and idealistic during the time of the Green Movement, and a pointed reckoning with the state of censorship in Iran today." -- Nahid Rachlin * author of Persian Girls *"Amazing and wonderful! Roxanne Varzi brings together her own Iranian heritage, excellent ethnographic research, and deep insights—all in a gripping read. In opening a new genre, the ethnographic novel, Varzi conveys the emotions, desires, creativity, and frustrations of so many young people in Iran." -- Mary Elaine Hegland * author of Days of Revolution: Political Unrest in an Iranian Village *"Varzi plays the role of what the anthropologist Renato Rosaldo has called a positioned observer, trying to make sense of life long after the ethnographer's duty of detailed description has been completed. Clifford Geertz has described creative ethnographers such as Varzi as novelists manqué, and she captures what I elsewhere have theorized as ethnographic surfeit. This surfeit is what remains after an ethnographer has paid dues to the science of empirical social knowledge. What is left is not quite hard data, but nonetheless an invaluable remainder of insight, affect, conversation, and emotion; an entire sensorium, which even if the ethnographer wants to, will not let her go." -- Ather Zia * 3:AM Magazine *"This beautifully written book captures the predicament of every Iranian artist who is conflicted between one's own creative imagination, personal and social responsibilities, and political reality." * Shirin Neshat *

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Book Synopsis[Multiple options] Nothing visible is worth watching. It's in the hidden parts of the city where everything can be seen. Just playing, or acting out? The answer falls on where you stand: above board or underground. Many Iranians by law are forced to act their parts...so then why is theater so dangerous? Theater is a threat when reality is contained.Trade Review"Last Scene Underground offers a thought-provoking and powerful story about our collective attempts to re-imagine the world. Writing with an inspiring combination of creativity and criticality, Roxanne Varzi has crafted an exceptionally memorable portrait of Iran, bringing both Tehran and its young people to life." -- John L. Jackson, Jr. * University of Pennsylvania *"Literary romance and ethnography are joined in perfect dialogue in Last Scene Underground. Roxanne Varzi has written a rare, powerful book that is both a whirlwind story of how it feels to be young and idealistic during the time of the Green Movement, and a pointed reckoning with the state of censorship in Iran today." -- Nahid Rachlin * author of Persian Girls *"Amazing and wonderful! Roxanne Varzi brings together her own Iranian heritage, excellent ethnographic research, and deep insights—all in a gripping read. In opening a new genre, the ethnographic novel, Varzi conveys the emotions, desires, creativity, and frustrations of so many young people in Iran." -- Mary Elaine Hegland * author of Days of Revolution: Political Unrest in an Iranian Village *"Varzi plays the role of what the anthropologist Renato Rosaldo has called a positioned observer, trying to make sense of life long after the ethnographer's duty of detailed description has been completed. Clifford Geertz has described creative ethnographers such as Varzi as novelists manqué, and she captures what I elsewhere have theorized as ethnographic surfeit. This surfeit is what remains after an ethnographer has paid dues to the science of empirical social knowledge. What is left is not quite hard data, but nonetheless an invaluable remainder of insight, affect, conversation, and emotion; an entire sensorium, which even if the ethnographer wants to, will not let her go." -- Ather Zia * 3:AM Magazine *"This beautifully written book captures the predicament of every Iranian artist who is conflicted between one's own creative imagination, personal and social responsibilities, and political reality." * Shirin Neshat *

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Book SynopsisIn recent years, members of minority religions and atheists have rightly taken advantage of Supreme Court decisions that open up government funding, institutions, and property to participate in public life alongside the Christian majority. Jay Wexler argues for the importance of this movement and travels around the country to meet some of the people on its front line.Trade Review"Timely, trenchant, and tremendously engaging, Our Non-Christian Nation is essential reading for anyone interested in understanding the contemporary battles over religion's role in our national politics and culture." -- Phil Zuckerman * author of Living the Secular Life *"In this brilliantly erudite and hugely entertaining romp through recent religious and legal history, Jay Wexler shows why, as our country becomes more religiously diverse, non-Christians need to get their voices heard and Christians need to help repair the wall between church and state. A marvelous read." -- Michael Shermer * Skeptic magazine *"What would it mean to take seriously the idea of religious diversity in the public sphere? Jay Wexler tells the stories of Wiccans, Muslims, and other religious and non-religious groups outside the mainstream who show what existing constitutional doctrine means in practice. The picture he paints provokes us to think differently about what that doctrine should be." -- Mark Tushnet * Harvard Law School *"In this fine book, Jay Wexler urges humanists, atheists, Satanists, and members of minority religious traditions to take advantage of a fascinating new phenomenon: the opening of public space to a variety of beliefs and institutions. His compelling account of 'belief' in public life will be of interest to the deeply religious as well as those who cringe at the very thought of religion. I highly recommend it." -- Anthony B. Pinn * author of Humanism: Essays on Race, Religion and Cultural Production *"A zesty, opinionated assessment of how non-Christians should actually behave....With curiosity and openness, Wexler performs the action that he advocates: that is, making heard a 'cacophony' of voices in public life so that different viewpoints get brought to the fore." -- Dan Friedman * Los Angeles Review of Books *"A fascinating read, and a wonderfully hopeful one...For anyone who feels marginalized as a pagan, nonbeliever, or just not a Christian, it's a manifesto for effective and often hilarious resistance." -- Houston Chronicle"Wexler...has made a timely, at times funny, and compelling piece of reportage looking at a variety of religious groups, as well as a strong argument for the importance of a pluralistic society." -- The Boston Globe"[T]his book was written for the general public, which often struggles to understand the jurisprudence surrounding religious freedom. Even professors of religious studies often need help in this area....Wexler's writing makes this book ideal for getting undergraduates interested in these issues." -- Joseph Laycock * Journal of the American Academy of Religion *"[An] artfully presented, quite accessible, guide to major legal issues faced by minority faiths in America...recommended for all interested in such topics." -- James T. Richardson * Nova Religio *"Wexler's greatest strength is his ability to describe current case law in readily digestible terms, making his work an ideal resource for undergraduates interested in religion and American politics. . .[T]his work can serve as an ideal entry point into important classroom conversations regarding the place of religions, especially minorities, in American law, as well as how both public and legal discourses have shaped the role of religion in American life." -- Savannah Finver * Religious Studies Review *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction chapter abstractThis chapter presents the main themes, issues, and arguments of the book. After an opening vignette describing the efforts of the Satanic Temple to erect a veterans monument in a small Minnesota town, the chapter introduces the First Amendment, particularly the Establishment Clause and the concept of separation of church and state as set out by the Supreme Court. It traces demographic changes in the country's religious makeup that have rendered the nation far less Christian and more secular than at previous times in its history. After a discussion of the issue of defining religion, the chapter sets forth the book's primary argument—namely, that a religiously diverse public square is preferable to one dominated by Christianity. One: Mummies, Monuments, and Monotheism: Religious Displays as Government Speech chapter abstractThis chapter discusses the constitutional doctrine of government speech under the First Amendment as it relates to the erection of religious monuments on public property. It does so, first, by describing and evaluating cases concerning the constitutionality of various Ten Commandments monuments under the Establishment Clause, and particularly the case of Van Orden v. Perry, which upheld such a monument on the grounds of the Texas Capitol. The chapter goes on to discuss the ultimately unsuccessful efforts of the small religious group known as the Summum, located in Salt Lake City, to have a Utah town erect a monument to its "Seven Aphorisms" in a park next to the community's Ten Commandments monument. The author's trip to visit the Summum and understand its mummification practices is described. Two: Pagans, Pentacles, and Pluralism: Religious Displays in the Public Forum chapter abstractThis chapter contrasts the government speech doctrine discussed in chapter 1 with the more minority-friendly First Amendment free speech doctrine known as the designated public forum. Under this doctrine, if the government designates a part of its property for private speech, including religious speech, it may not exclude speech on the basis of the viewpoint that is expressed by that speech. After explaining the doctrine, the chapter describes the successful efforts of Pagans and Wiccans, under the leadership of Wiccan priestess Selena Fox and through litigation brought by Americans United for Separation of Church and State, to get the Department of Veterans Affairs to allow Pagans buried in national cemeteries to have pentacles displayed on their headstones. The chapter also describes the author's visit to Fox's Circle Sanctuary in Wisconsin to participate in a Veterans Day event. Three: Secularism, Statehouses, and School Boards: Prayers and Invocations before Government Bodies chapter abstractThis chapter investigates the historical practice of prayer-giving before legislatures and other government bodies, as well as the Supreme Court's treatment of the practice in, most recently, the case of Town of Greece v. Galloway. Under the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, the Court has held that legislative prayer and other religious invocations before government bodies are constitutional so long as the government has a policy of antidiscrimination—i.e., it will not discriminate on the basis of religion when inviting or allowing people to pray before meetings. The chapter investigates specifically the invocation given before the monthly town meeting of the Town of Greece (New York) by an Atheist who had previously sued the town unsuccessfully. The author's trip to witness this invocation is described. Four: The Satanic Temple: Taking It to a Whole 'Nother Level chapter abstractThis chapter takes an in-depth look at the key player in the phenomenon described in the book, namely the Satanic Temple. The chapter provides a brief history of Satanism, including a discussion of the Romantic Satanists, a literary movement in the eighteenth century that was the first to recover the symbol of Satan as a positive figure. The chapter also discusses the rise of the Church of Satan in the Bay Area in the 1960s, as well as the so-called Satanic Panic of the 1980s, in which people were wrongly accused of crimes committed in the name of Satan. The chapter then relates the history and doctrine of the Satanic Temple and describes its efforts to give legislative invocations and place monuments on public property (including its nine-foot-tall bronze monument to Baphomet). Five: Muslims, Money, and Middle Schools: Government Funding of Religion chapter abstractThis chapter investigates the issue of government funding of religion. After a brief foray into the Establishment Clause in this area, including a discussion of the important voucher school case Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, the chapter describes how some minority religious groups such as the Unification Church and the Church of Scientology have received public funding for their programs. The chapter also relates how Christian legislators in several states have objected to the inclusion of Islamic schools in their proposed voucher programs and then investigates these Islamic schools through the author's trip to the Al-Iman School in North Carolina. Six: Atheists, the Antichrist, and After-School Clubs: Religious Activities in the Public Schools chapter abstractThis chapter concerns the activities of religious groups in the public schools, one of the most controversial issues in church-state law, given the importance of these schools to the formation of future citizens. At the outset, the chapter explains the First Amendment law governing this area, including cases about teaching alternatives to evolution in the biology curriculum. Next, the chapter examines a series of cases in which the Supreme Court has held that if public schools open their facilities to after-school clubs, they may not exclude religious clubs, such as Good News Clubs, from using those facilities. After laying out the law, the chapter then examines efforts by Atheists, the Satanic Temple, and others to distribute religious literature and to start their own after-school clubs in the public schools. Conclusion: Conclusion chapter abstractThe concluding chapter begins with a brief recap of the four key descriptive points that the book has advanced and then proceeds to argue that the movement to increase minority participation in American public life is one that should be celebrated and continued. Specifically, the chapter argues that a religiously cacophonous public square is preferable to an entirely Christian one because it is more consistent with American ideals of free expression and diversity of ideas as enshrined in the First Amendment, because it may promote a more educated citizenry with regard to religion, and because this improved education may result in greater social peace. The chapter also considers potential counter-arguments and pitfalls of encouraging an increased role for religion in the public square, including the possibility that anti-liberal or parody organizations will seek to participate in public life.

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Book SynopsisTrade Review"Once again, Naomi Seidman has given us a beautifully written book that is equally illuminating about traditional texts and contemporary performances. The Marriage Plot is a foundational work for anyone interested in Jewish literary and cultural studies, in questions about gender and translation, and in understanding how Jews 'fell in love with love' in the mid-19th century." -- Anita Norich * University of Michigan *"Naomi Seidman has written a provocative and important study that deftly theorizes Jewish secular modernity through the lens of sexuality. Moving beyond the paradigms of queer and postcolonial studies, The Marriage Plot locates a changing sexual world that articulated its own sexual and gender norms through an erotic recovery of Jewish tradition. In her lively and insightful readings of the modern Jewish canon, Seidman shows that the secularization of Jewish cultural life was far from a straightforward narrative of sexual progress and liberation for men and women." -- Allison Schachter * Vanderbilt University *"Seidman is a nimble, curious, omnivorous reader, with whom it is a pleasure to spend time. She moves freely among Hebrew and Yiddish texts and is well-versed in social history. We are prepared to extend credit to her big ideas because we trust the quality of her exegesis of small examples. She uses critical theory rather than being used by it, and she always writes with a clarity that signals a genuine desire to communicate with her readers. She is, moreover, among the small number of scholars who are happy to acknowledge that their original insights have been built upon the research of others.The Marriage Plot joins a growing number of literary, historical, and philosophical investigations of our post-secular age. It is, in many senses, the story of all of us." -- Alan Mintz * Jewish Review of Books *"In Naomi Seidman's The Marriage Plot Or, How Jews Fell in Love with Love, and with Literature it is this problematic relationship between literature and life, between novels and autobiography, that gives new purchase on the modernisation of Jewish culture, first in eastern Europe during the Haskalah (the Jewish Enlightenment of the nineteenth century) and later in America...[T]he story she fashions cannot help but extend beyond the generic concerns of its model, implicating short stories, psychoanalytic case studies, plays, and stand-up comedy to produce as rich a literary history of the Jews as there has ever been." -- Marc Mierowsky * The Cambridge Quarterly *"[T]he most daring innovation of Naomi Seidman's The Marriage Plot: Or, How Jews Fell in Love with Love, and with Literature is its ardent determination to recuperate romantic love, to demonstrate its centrality to the Jewish literary tradition as we have come to understand it today. This she does in a marvelously detailed and convincing fashion." -- Naomi Taub * H-Judaic *"It is a valuable study for all those interested in the intersection of Jewish Studies, Literary Studies, and Gender Studies. Seidman, an expert in Jewish literature, meticulously analyzes a wide selection of texts in order to discover patterns characteristic for the development of Jewish romantic life in the 19th and 20th century... Seidman's book has a strong critical value, as she questions common assumptions about a linear development of the emancipation of love." -- Irad Ben Isaak * Kult_Online *"In this remarkable work, Seidman illustrates how the Haskalah, the so-called Jewish Enlightenment, led European Jews into modernity by engineering a sexual revolution through the composition of a literature that appropriated the European romantic model and retooled it to transform the Jewish bourgeois family radically....It is one of the strengths of this book that the romantic feelings and revolutionary spirit The Marriage Plot deals with are mirrored in Seidman's elegant and passionate writing style." -- F. K. Clementi * CLIO: A Journal of Literature, History, and the Philosophy of History *"The Marriage Plot takes up modern Jewish literature across language (Hebrew, Yiddish, English) and genre (novel, short story, theater, film). On this broad canvas, Seidman shows not just how poetry transmutes love but how love first changes Jewish life and culture—and how Jewish cultural productions then change American and European ideas of love." -- Joshua Logan Wall * American Literature *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction: Plotting Jewish Marriage chapter abstractThe introduction describes the ways that East European Jews simultaneously encountered European literary genres and new models of marriage, romance, sexual practices and gender roles in the middle of the nineteenth century. Because novels were so closely associated with romantic love, these had a particular effect on their traditional but modernizing readers. The introduction also distinguishes the approach of the book from other trends in Jewish Studies, particularly Queer Studies approaches to the study of Jewish gender. 1A Sentimental Education chapter abstractThis chapter traces the nineteenth-century beginnings of modern Hebrew and Yiddish romantic literature and its connection with emerging trends in organizing marriage and sexuality in nineteenth-century East Europe. The chapter analyzes the immense impression made by the first Hebrew novel, Mapu's 1853 The Love of Zion, in the realm of Jewish sexuality, questioning the power of literature to transform lives. The chapter ends by discussing the debates that arose toward the end of the nineteenth century, which focused on the mismatch between European literary conventions and Jewish social realities, and on the question of what constitutes the particularity of Jewish sex and marital arrangements. 2Matchmaking and Modernity chapter abstractThis chapter analyzes the role of arranged marriage in Jewish literature through the figure of the marriage broker, first as the enemy of true love and then, in later works, as its enabler or even mystical embodiment. Nineteenth-century memoirs decry the intrusions and deceptions of matchmakers, and urge the replacement of arranged marriage with romantic choice. While Jewish literature in some sense served as this replacement—with the author "arranging" matches between characters—literary works also rescued and even invented the matchmaker. In Sholem Aleichem's Menachem Mendl, the matchmaker is given Yiddish literary voice, while in Bernard Malamud's The Magic Barrel, the matchmaker finds a place in modern America, and Jewish American literature, as a recognizable "type," and a figure of erotic fascination in his own right. 3Pride and Pedigree chapter abstractThis chapter presents a genealogy of lineage in Jewish marriage, another aspect of traditional marital negotiations derided in Haskalah polemic. Pedigree finds a surprising afterlife even in those literary works that champion erotic attraction in the construction of a marriage partnership. At first performing the conservative-bourgeois function of maintaining class boundaries in a post-traditional society that ostensibly espouses the class-neutral ideology of romantic love, pedigree takes on a far wider range of meanings in modern Jewish literature. Along with the mystical eroticism that links romance with intergenerational ties, lineage has a long afterlife in the realist novel, both narrating the generational disruptions of modernity and serving as narrative cure. In the late twentieth century, the literary tracing of lineage reemerges in Tony Kushner's Angels in America, finding genealogical expression for even the post-genealogical phenomenon of queer kinship in the era of AIDS. 4The Choreography of Courtship chapter abstractThis chapter describes the role of literature in constructing a modern Jewish ideology of heterosexual romance through its articulation of new notions of romantic time, on the one hand, and gender complementarity, on the other. While traditional marriages had collapsed the time between puberty and marriage, attraction and consummation (while expanding the historical perspective of a match by including ancestors in the arrangements), the novel introduced new romantic temporalities in the rhythms of sexual maturation, attraction, and (deliciously delayed) consummation. These models of romance depended on strictly delineated gender roles, which the novel served to map and inculcate. Twentieth-century Jewish cultural productions form a counter-discourse to the gender complementarity on which European romance rested, featuring cross-dressed, anti-romantic heroines who resist and denaturalize European gender conventions. And in Erica Jong, readers encountered a full-fledged (Jewish) argument against the erotic tempos set out in literary romance. 5In-laws and Outlaws chapter abstractThis chapter follows the process of "nuclearization," in which the move to romantic, companionate marriage reduced the role of parents and extended family in the construction of modern family. Reading Sholem Aleichem's Tevye the Dairyman not through its usual focus—the move from arranged marriage to romantic love—but rather through what this move entails—the end of the system whereby marriage is produced by and produces broad kinship networks, this chapter argues that the stories reproduce in submerged form the traditional practices whereby a father-in-law chooses a groom for his daughter. In the final section of the chapter, I explore the "aunt-niece" relationship in Grace Paley's story "Goodbye and Good Luck," which presents the persistence and cultural productivity of alternative models of kinship at the margins of Jewish American literature and society. 6Sex and Segregation chapter abstractexplores the structure of sexual segregation through its literary expressions. Among the evils of traditional Jewish society denounced by the Haskalah was the strictness of its sexual segregation, which left no room for social interaction or erotic discovery between the sexes. In the twentieth century, however, writers discovered erotic pleasures in what earlier generations had seen as repressive social structures. S.Y. Agnon, in "The Tale of the Scribe," Sholem Asch, in God of Vengeance, and Dvora Baron, in "Fedke," stage love affairs within sexually segregated spaces, while Singer's "Yentl, the Yeshiva Boy" makes an explicit case for the superiority of romances that proceed through the (homosocial and agonistic) camaraderie of Torah learning over those conducted according to Western conventions. Afterword: After Marriage chapter abstractThe epilogue, which touches on the work of Freud, Philip Roth, and Erica Jong, argues that Jewish writers played a crucial role in the twentieth-century desublimation of Eros, stripping the "erotic sublime" of its mystification and grounding sexuality in the "natural" bodily realities that characterize many varieties of Jewish sexual discourse. For the sublime notion of the "soul mate," Freud, Roth and Jong suggest that sexual partners are easily interchanged—an ideology that, in its "conservative" form, also underpins arranged marriage. While Jewish sexual modernity begins with the adoption of European literary conventions, by the end of the twentieth century, modern Jewish culture had come to play a critical role (in both senses) in European sexual discourse. In the sexual ideologies expressed in twentieth-century Hebrew, Yiddish and Jewish American literature, the modern religion of romantic love met first its most profound challenge and ultimately its heretical overthrow.

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Book SynopsisTrade Review"A distinguished ethnographer, Pascal Menoret excavates the Islamic Awakening in Saudi Arabia with great empathy and understanding. Once again, he demonstrates his ability to penetrate a world often associated with radicalism, bigotry, intolerance and violence, bringing us face to face with the men of the movement, and their rise and demise in the Saudi state." -- Madawi al-Rasheed * London School of Economics, author of Salman's Legacy: The Dilemmas of a New Era in Saudi Arabia *"Pascal Menoret is an intrepid field researcher who gained unique access to communities in Saudi Arabia either closed to or ignored by other Western scholars. His insights into how the physical geography of Riyadh has shaped the development of its various social mobilizations are provocative and enlightening. This book is a fascinating read." -- F. Gregory Gause III * Texas A&M University, author of The International Relations of the Persian Gulf *"There is no doubt that this study will be invaluable to anyone interested in Middle East studies with a focus on Islamic activism, youth recruitment and mobilization, spatial politics and the intersection of urban planning, activism, and state repression. This original work is a much-needed intervention that advocates for the urgency and need for activism that 'may resurface when the conditions are ripe'" -- Jonas Elbousty * International Journal of Middle East Studies *Table of ContentsContents and Abstracts1Part I: The Islamic Awakening chapter abstractThe Islamic Awakening is a political movement created in schools, colleges, and mosques by educators, preachers, and clerics. This part looks at how everyday Saudis become activists, and what type of repression they encounter when organizing and protesting in public. 2Part II: Saudi Suburbia chapter abstractThe Islamic Awakening emerged in the sprawling landscape of the Saudi suburbs, created in the 1960s and 1970s by princes and developers with the help of European urban planners. This part looks at the making of Saudi suburbia and examines the victory of Islamic Awakening candidates in the municipal elections of 2005. 3Part III: Awareness Groups and Summer Camps chapter abstractThe electoral victory of 2005 was the result of the mobilization of myriads of Islamic Awakening groups in local mosques, schools, and summer camps. This part analyzes the everyday structures of the Awakening: a high school Islamic group and the annual summer camps of the movement. It looks at how political repression targets everyday Islamic activism. 4Part IV: Leaving Islamic Activism Behind chapter abstractAs a result of the increased crackdown on Islamic movements, young activists have either tried to reform the Islamic Awakening from within or taken their distances with the movement. This part looks at the consequences of repression on individual mobilization, and analyzes the current state of the Islamic movement in Saudi Arabia.

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Book SynopsisTwo Covenants serves to expand the definition of the American South by focusing on the contributions of Jews to the culture. While concerned with established concepts such as ethnicity and region, McGraw raises many questions that illustrate the complexity of southern Jewishness and also considers literary representations.

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Book SynopsisAn emotionally powerful, poetic Yiddish novel, available in English for the first time, that expands our understanding of Holocaust literature and testimony. Flames from the Earth is an autobiographical novel written by Isaiah Spiegel, one of the most revered Yiddish authors to survive the Holocaust.Table of Contents Translator's Introduction List of Books by Isaiah Spiegel Flames from the Earth Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 ​Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18​ Translator's Afterword Acknowledgments Notes

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Book SynopsisTaking the reader into the heart of one of the fastest-growing religious movements in North America, Sabina Magliocco reveals how the disciplines of anthropology and folklore were fundamental to the early development of Neo-Paganism and the revival of witchcraft. Magliocco examines the roots that this religious movement has in a Western spiritual tradition of mysticism disavowed by the Enlightenment. She explores, too, how modern Pagans and Witches are imaginatively reclaiming discarded practices and beliefs to create religions more in keeping with their personal experience of the world as sacred and filled with meaning. Neo-Pagan religions focus on experience, rather than belief, and many contemporary practitioners have had mystical experiences. They seek a context that normalizes them and creates in them new spiritual dimensions that involve change in ordinary consciousness.Magliocco analyzes magical practices and rituals of Neo-Paganism as art forms that reanimate the cosmoTrade Review"Magliocco impressively corrals the diverse writings and experiences of U.S. neo-pagans into this highly readable and deeply researched ethnographic study. . . . Highly recommended." * Choice *Table of ContentsIntroduction: The Ethnography of Magic and the Magic of Ethnography PART I. ROOTS AND BRANCHES Chapter 1. The Study of Folklore and the Reclamation of Paganism Chapter 2. Boundaries and Borders: Imagining Community PART II. RELIGIONS OF EXPERIENCE Chapter 3. Making Magic: Training the Imagination Chapter 4. Ritual: Between the Worlds Chapter 5. "The Juice of Ritual": Pathways to Ecstasy PART III. BEYOND EXPERIENCE: RELIGION AND IDENTITY Chapter 6. The Romance of Subdominance: Creating Oppositional Culture Chapter 7. "The Heart Is the Only Nation": Neo-Paganism, Ethnic Identity and the Construction of Authenticity Notes Bibliography Index Acknowledgments

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Book SynopsisHow are martyrs made, and how do the memories of martyrs express, nourish, and mold the ideals of the community? Sanctifying the Name of God wrestles with these questions against the background of the massacres of Jews in the Rhineland during the outbreak of the First Crusade. Marking the first extensive wave of anti-Jewish violence in medieval Christian Europe, these Persecutions of 1096 exerted a profound influence on the course of European Jewish history.When the crusaders demanded that Jews choose between Christianity and death, many opted for baptism. Many others, however, chose to die as Jews rather than to live as Christians, and of these, many actually inflicted death upon themselves and their loved ones. Stories of their self-sacrifice ushered the Jewish ideal of martyrdom—kiddush ha-Shem, the sanctification of God''s holy name—into a new phase, conditioning the collective memory and mindset of Ashkenazic Jewry for centuries to come, during the HolTrade Review"A major contribution to the study of medieval Jewish history." * Robert Chazan, New York University *"This is an important book, beautifully written and cogently argued. Some of Cohen's readings are daring indeed and will surely arouse dissent. Long live debate!" * American Historical Review *"The sufferings of the Rhineland Jews in 1096 were commemorated in three Hebrew narratives, which Professor Jeremy Cohen reexamines in this beautifully written book. . . . The cumulative effect of Cohen's analysis is overwhelming." * Catholic Historical Review *"The slaughter of the Jews in the Rhineland in 1096 is one of the better-known events of the First Crusade. Cohen analyzes the texts of the Jewish accounts of these massacres in light of the martyrdom tradition of Masada, well-known at that time, and the contemporary Christian cult of self-sacrifice. . . . Recommended." * Choice *"Cohen's fresh reading of the chronicles opens up a new vista to these complicated sources." * Journal of Jewish Studies *"This is a beautifully written and thought-out work that raises valuable questions and draws unprecedented attention to important features of these texts; it is sure to provoke fruitful discussion" * Journal of Religion *Table of ContentsPreface List of Abbreviations for Primary Sources Introduction: The Persecutions of 1096 PART I. PROBLEMS AND SOLUTIONS 1. To Sanctify the Name of God 2. The First Crusade and Its Historians 3. Points of Departure PART II. MARTYRS OF 1096 4. Last Supper at Xanten 5. Master Isaac the Parnas 6. Mistress Rachel of Mainz 7. Kalonymos in Limbo 8. The Rape of Sarit Afterword Notes Bibliography of Secondary Sources Index

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Book SynopsisIn September 1791, two years after the Revolution, French Jews were granted full rights of citizenship. Scholarship has traditionally focused on this turning point of emancipation while often overlooking much of what came before. In Rites and Passages, Jay R. Berkovitz argues that no serious treatment of Jewish emancipation can ignore the cultural history of the Jews during the ancien régime. It was during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that several lasting paradigms emerged within the Jewish community—including the distinction between rural and urban communities, the formation of a strong lay leadership, heightened divisions between popular and elite religion, and the strain between local and regional identities. Each of these developments reflected the growing tension between tradition and modernity before the tumultuous events of the French Revolution.Rites and Passages emphasizes the resilience of religious tradition during Trade Review"Although the French National Assembly granted Jews citizenship in 1791, this magisterial book argues that the meanings of this revolutionary watershed must be understood through much longer-running discussions and complex variations among French Jews. . . . This detailed volume . . . should interest a wide range of scholars in religious and civic history." * Choice *"A formidable achievement that deserves to be read by all historians of modern Jewry and of the French Revolution. Berkovitz has laid out a fertile path for future exploration, and scholars will no doubt be indebted to him for many years to come." * Jewish History *"A rich work of scholarship that tells with great erudition the unique story of French Jewish modernization." * Journal of Religion *"A remarkable achievement. . . . Berkovitz has produced an erudite and persuasive work and a model of interdisciplinary scholarship. A major contribution to the study of European Jewry, Rites and Passages is equally relevant to the study of French history, cultural history, and the relationship between religion and modernity." * Ronald Schechter, H-France Review *Table of ContentsIntroduction PART I. LEADERSHIP, COMMUNITY, AND RITUAL IN THE ANCIEN RÉGIME 1. Communal Authority and Leadership 2. Secularization, Consumption, and Communal Controls 3. Ritual and Religious Culture in Alsace-Lorraine PART II. REVOLUTION, RÉGÉNÉRATION, AND EMANCIPATION 4. The Ordeal of Citizenship, 1782-1799 5. Religion, State, and Community: The Impact of Napoleonic Reform 6. The "Jewish Question" During the Bourbon Restoration PART III. TRANSFORMATIONS IN JEWISH SELF-UNDERSTANDING 7. Scholarship and Identity: La Science de Judaïsme 8. Rabbinic Authority and Ritual Reform 9. Patrie et Religion: The Social and Religious Implications of Civic Equality Conclusion Abbreviations Notes Bibliography Index Acknowledgments

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Book SynopsisBarbara Fuchs examines the paradoxes in the construction of Spain in relation to its Moorish heritage through an analysis of Spanish literature, costume, language, architecture, and chivalric practices from 1492 to 1609.Trade Review"Fuchs has drawn from a wide array of sources to produce a rich, well-researched, and absorbing book that crosses disciplinary boundaries. Exotic Nation is a first-rate contribution to the field of early modern studies." * Sixteenth Century Journal *"Barbara Fuchs gives us a lively and illuminating look into the many ways in which Moorishness remained a vivid presence in early modern Spanish culture. Theoretically sophisticated, but rooted in the careful examination of the texts of quotidian life, Exotic Nation takes the reader beyond Orientalism into a profound rethinking of the relationship of early modern Spain to other European nations and of the role of Jewish, African, and Moorish elements in Spain's own self-construction. Essential reading for anyone interested in the ways in which excluded others can become central to a nation's most profound understandings and representations of itself in the everyday domains of architecture, popular literature, dress, and festivity, Exotic Nation is a beautifully written and lucidly argued book on a topic of great importance." * Jean E. Howard, Columbia University *"Fuchs admirably achieves her ambitious dual goal: to elucidate the paradoxical uses of Moorishness in the early modern construction of Spanish national identity, both internally, by Spaniards themselves, and externally, by other Europeans. Her thesis that Spain's Moorishness is both quotidian and exotic is quite dazzling. Exotic Nation will have a major impact on studies of early modern Spain." * Barbara Weissberger, author of Isabel Rules: Constructing Queenship, Wielding Power *Table of Contents1. The Quotidian and the Exotic 2. In Memory of Moors: History, Maurophilia, and the Built Vernacular 3. The Moorish Fashion 4. Playing the Moor 5. The Spanish Race Postscript Moorish Commonplaces Notes Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisThere emerged in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries a new Jewish elite, notes Moshe Idel, no longer made up of prophets, priests, kings, or rabbis but of intellectuals and academicians working in secular universities or writing for an audience not defined by any one set of religious beliefs. In Old Worlds, New Mirrors Idel turns his gaze on figures as diverse as Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida, Franz Kafka and Franz Rosenzweig, Arnaldo Momigliano and Paul Celan, Abraham Heschel and George Steiner to reflect on their relationships to Judaism in a cosmopolitan, mostly European, context.Idel—himself one of the world''s most eminent scholars of Jewish mysticism—focuses in particular on the mystical aspects of his subjects'' writings. Avoiding all attempts to discern anything like a single essence of Judaism in their works, he nevertheless maintains a sustained effort to illumine especially the Kabbalistic and Hasidic strains of thought these figures woulTrade Review"A brilliant and often illuminating exposition and critique of the role that Jewish mysticism has played in much of twentieth-century Western thought. Idel uncovers the many ways in which external sources, rather than traditional texts and practices, have informed accounts of Jewish mysticism." * Jewish Review of Books *Table of ContentsPreface Introduction I. INTELLECTUAL CONCEPTUALIZATIONS OF JUDAISM 1. Arnaldo Momigliano and Gershom Scholem on Jewish History and Tradition 2. Eric Voegelin's Israel and Revelation 3. George Steiner: A Prophet of Abstraction II. SCHOLEM'S CONCEPTUALIZATIONS OF KABBALAH 4. The Function of Symbols in Gershom Scholem 5. Hieroglyphs, Mysteries, Keys: Scholem Between Molitor and Kafka 6. Subversive Catalysts: Gnosticism and Messianism in Scholem's View of Jewish Mysticism III. KABBALAH IN SOME TWENTIETH-CENTURY THINKERS 7. Franz Rosenzweig and Kabbalah 8. Abraham Abulafia, Gershom Scholem, and Walter Benjamin on Language 9. Jacques Derrida and Kabbalistic Sources 10. Paul Celan's "Psalm": A Revelation Toward Naught IV. UNDERSTANDING HASIDISM 11. Martin Buber and Gershom Scholem on Hasidism 12. Abraham Heschel on Mysticism and Hasidism 13. White Letters: From R. Levi Isaac of Berdichev to Postmodern Hermeneutics List of Abbreviations and Sources Notes Index

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Book SynopsisIn Becoming the People of the Talmud, Talya Fishman examines ways in which circumstances of transmission have shaped the cultural meaning of Jewish traditions. Although the Talmud''s preeminence in Jewish study and its determining role in Jewish practice are generally taken for granted, Fishman contends that these roles were not solidified until the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries. The inscription of Talmud—which Sefardi Jews understand to have occurred quite early, and Ashkenazi Jews only later—precipitated these developments. The encounter with Oral Torah as a written corpus was transformative for both subcultures, and it shaped the roles that Talmud came to play in Jewish life.What were the historical circumstances that led to the inscription of Oral Torah in medieval Europe? How did this body of ancient rabbinic traditions, replete with legal controversies and nonlegal material, come to be construed as a reference work and prescriptive guide toTrade Review"A vital addition to any Jewish studies library in America." * Jewish Book World *"Talya Fishman's ambitious new study . . . indicates the sweep of the issues that are a significant part of Jewish cultural history from late antiquity through the High Middle Ages." * American Historical Review *"For every historian of intellectual history of the (Christian) High Middle Ages the book is a must." * Journal of Transcultural Medieval Studies *"An indispensable study, whose exemplary exposition of Jewish attitudes toward oral, written, and legal matters may well spark comparisons with other cultures, for Fishman has brilliantly shown that words can produce meaning through their epistemological categorization as oral or written, a categorization that itself remains undetermined by their actual mediatic support." * Law and History Review *"Becoming the People of the Talmud offers a unique and highly original contribution to our understanding of Jewish culture in the Middle Ages. The book indubitably places Talya Fishman in the vanguard of scholarly research." * Israel J. Yuval, Hebrew University of Jerusalem *Table of ContentsIntroduction Chapter 1. The Place of Oral Matters in Geonic Culture Chapter 2. Oral Matters among Jews of Qayrawan and al-Andalus: Framing Sefarad Chapter 3. Framing Ashkenaz: Cultural Landmarks of Medieval Northern European Societies Chapter 4. Textualization of North European Rabbinic Culture: The Changing Role of Talmud Chapter 5. Medieval Responses to the Textualization of Rabbinic Culture Chapter 6. Rhineland Pietism and the Textualization of Rabbinic Culture in Medieval Northern Europe Epilogue Glossary Abbreviations Notes Bibliography Index Acknowledgments

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Book SynopsisStephen J. Shoemaker investigates contradictory traditions about the end of Muhammad's life in the Islamic and non-Islamic sources of the seventh and eighth centuries.Trade Review"[Shoemaker] develops [previous ideas] substantially, discusses them in the light of recent publications, and also offers highly instructive parallels with the situation in (and scholarship on) early Christianity. . . . [He] has done a very good job of highlighting the issues and giving them sophisticated and thorough discussion, and [The Death of a Prophet] is a worthwhile addition to the fast-expanding body of material on Islamic origins." * Journal of the American Oriental Society *"A work of utmost importance, and one that has profound implications for our understanding of how Islam began." * Fred Donner, University of Chicago *Table of ContentsIntroduction Chapter 1. "A Prophet Has Appeared, Coming with the Saracens": Muhammad's Leadership during the Conquest of Palestine According to Seventh- and Eighth-Century Sources Chapter 2. The End of Muhammad's Life in Early Islamic Memory: The Witness of the Sira Tradition Chapter 3. The Beginnings of Islam and the End of Days: Muhammad as Eschatological Prophet Chapter 4. From Believers to Muslims, from Jerusalem to the Hijaz: Confessional Identity and Sacred Geography in Early Islam Conclusion: Jesus and Muhammad, the Apostle and the Apostles Notes Bibliography Index Acknowledgments

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Book SynopsisTrade Review"This fascinating and unique book is the result of Devaka Premawardhana'sjourney of nearly one year to explore the local response to the recent arrivalof Pentecostal churches in northern Mozambique . . . [A] rich and inspiring book, which should be read by anyone interested in African Studies and anthropology of Christianity." * African Studies Review *"Who would have thought that a book set in the middle of what is considered a quite remote location even in Mozambique-the Makhuwa area of Niassa Province-could so eloquently address important concerns relating to Pentecostalism and the enigma of change in Africa, in anthropology, and more generally? This gem of a book executes such a challenging task in highly original ways . . . [B]eautifully and compellingly written . . . Premawardhana has written a book that should-and will-have a broad impact." * Journal of Religion in Africa *"Literatures tied to themes of migration, refugees, religious conversion, and phenomenology are all brought to bear expertly. Analysis of the fluidity of rural Mozambicans' relationship to Pentecostal churches and teachings is enriched with sparing application of well-chosen theories. The author accomplishes this with nuance, and utmost respect for the human experiences that command his attention." * International Journal of African Historical Studies *"Beautifully and brilliantly written . . . an existential ethnography of the Makhuwa people of Northern Mozambique, a meditation on colonialism, globalization, modernity and the nature of Pentecostalism, a critique of cultural theory, and a fascinating narrative of 'snakebites and elephant invasions, chronic illnesses and recurring wars, disputes within families and conflicts with the state.'" * Nova Religio *"This book, no doubt, adds new, unique, and refreshing insight to the ever-growing research and publications on Pentecostalism. Not only does it examine Pentecostalism in a place where it had not been studied extensively, it does so by means of time-tested anthropological methods and theoretical frameworks. This unique approach and the vivid and enthralling narrative style make this book a must-read." * Journal of World Christianity *""Faith in Flux reminds us how intensive fieldwork and rich ethnography are not only what define anthropology but also what anthropologists draw on to challenge theoretical assumptions and make their voices heard in scholarly debates . . . Faith in Flux should be recommended not only to scholars of Christianity and Africanists but also to undergraduate and graduate students of anthropology."" * Anthropological Quarterly *"Premawardhana's book is a pleasure to read, as he seamlessly weaves the theoretical discussion into his intriguing vignettes. He discusses his own presence and reception with the people among whom he lived in a way that established credible ethnographic authority. Whether the reader is interested in constructions of conversion, Christianity and cultural adaptation, or the impact of transnational Pentecostalism in local communities, Premawardhana's work provides a valuable and detailed case study." * Pneuma *"Faith in Flux brilliantly realizes the potential of ethnography not only to illuminate other lifeworlds but to offer incisive critiques of current theoretical assumptions in religious studies and the social sciences. In lucid and enthralling prose, Devaka Premawardhana takes us deep into the world of the Makhuwa, offering new ways in which global Christianity, tradition, mobility, conversion, and social change may be understood." * Michael Jackson, author of How Lifeworlds Work: Emotionality, Sociality, and the Ambiguity of Being *"Faith in Flux is a beautifully written and theoretically novel book that focuses on a geographical area that has been severely neglected in the anthropological record. Devaka Premawardhana amply illustrates the idea that radical renewal is neither foreign to traditional societies nor necessarily a byproduct of globalization, modernization, or Pentecostal conversion." * Ilana van Wyk, University of Cape Town *"Intersecting the study of Pentecostalism, modernity, and globalization with insights from existential anthropology, especially bodily dispositions toward mobility, Faith in Flux is a book that will no doubt lead anthropologists of Christianity to view their own work in a new light. Devaka Premawardhana challenges scholars to rethink the idea of religious conversion as a profound rupture with the past." * Sonia Silva, Skidmore College *Table of ContentsIntroduction PART I. Othama—To Move Chapter 1. A Fugitive People Chapter 2. Between the River and the Road PART II. Ohiya ni Ovolowa—To Leave and to Enter Chapter 3. Border Crossings Chapter 4. Two Feet In, Two Feet Out PART III. Okhalano—To Be With Chapter 5. A Religion of Her Own? Chapter 6. Moved by the Spirit Conclusion Notes Works Cited Index Acknowledgments

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