Social groups: religious groups and communities Books

Book SynopsisWithin the broad contours of Islamic traditions, Muslims are enjoined to fast during the month of Ramadan, they are invited to a disciplined practice of prayer, and they are offered the Quran as the divine revelation in the most beautiful verbal form. But what happens if Muslims choose not to fast, or give up prayer, or if the Quran's beauty seems inaccessible? When Muslims do not take up the path of piety, what happens to their relationships with more devout Muslims who are neighbors, friends, and kin? Between Muslims provides an ethnographic account of Iraqi Kurdish Muslims who turn away from devotional piety yet remain intimately engaged with Islamic traditions and with other Muslims. Andrew Bush offers a new way to understand religious difference in Islam, rejecting simple stereotypes about ethnic or sectarian identities. Integrating textual analysis of poetry, sermons, and Islamic history into accounts of everyday life in Iraqi Kurdistan, Between Muslims illuminates the interplay of attraction and aversion to Islam among ordinary Muslims.Trade Review"A finely nuanced study about the impossibility of sequestering what is religious from what is not. In exemplary fashion, Andrew Bush shows us how the categories with which we work—religion, atheism, or secularism—are insufficient to understand the simultaneously sacred and profane world of everyday life."—Faisal Devji, Oxford University"Andrew Bush has written a remarkable book that makes highly original contributions to the anthropology of religion as well as Kurdish studies. There is no other book quite like this. Approaching Kurdish society through its poetics, he has grasped important insights into the ambiguities of everyday ethics underlying the social reality of contemporary Kurdistan."—Martin van Bruinessen, Utrecht University"Written with a scholar's rigor and a poet's grace, Between Muslims depicts textures of Islamic tradition rarely discussed in the literature. Fiercely independent in its approach to theorizing Muslim life, this deeply-layered monograph is a must-read for scholars in anthropology, religious studies, and beyond."—Noah Salomon, Carleton College"A refreshing departure from the focus on nationalist identity in studies of Iraqi Kurdistan, Between Muslims is a beautifully written and original work on the dynamics of Islamic traditions. Andrew Bush subtly explores how 'fractures of difference' are lived in everyday intimate relationships."—Sara Pursley, New York University"[G]roundbreaking and innovative... Between Muslims holds up as an accessible and eloquent account of social dynamics in contemporary Iraqi Kurdistan."—Edith Szanto, Journal of the American Academy of Religion"A nuanced reflection on how Muslims inhabit lukewarm attitudes toward piety in contexts suffused with piety. [Between Muslims] is also an elegant exploration of Kurdish poetry and the ways it animates contemporary Kurds' self-expression."—Susan MacDougall, Ethnos"Between Muslims is a major contribution to scholarshipon the importance of multiple ways of being Islamic."—Jeremy F. Walton, Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association"This beautifully written book explores a number of contradictions among those who have 'turned away from piety' and yet do not renounce Islam, but seek to know the 'beloved' in Iraqi Kurdistan. Through an insightful analysis of mystical poetry, Bush additionally demonstrates how the pious and those who have turned away from piety negotiate desire, understand apostasy, and relate to each other across different ranges of piety through patience and acts of 'holding back.'"—The Association of Middle East Anthropology Book Award Committee"The unique positionality of his subjects allows Bush to offer a valuable modus vivendi to the great 'text vs. lived experience' debate in the academy: his approach necessarily requires an engagement with text, but not as objects which naturally unfold according to their own purposes (as is often the case in our deliberations about Islam) but rather as objects continuously transformed in the process of being made meaningful to an individual's experience of the world, which itself cannot be extricated from its relationship with others. This refreshinglyunmodern emphasis on relationality (instead of isolated self-determining subjects) permeates the entirety of his study, focused as it is on the life-worlds that emergebetweenMuslims."—Rushain Abbasi, MarginaliaTable of ContentsIntroduction: Fieldwork in Kurdistan: Islamic Traditions, Ordinary Relationships, and a Paradox 1. Quran and Zoroaster: Attraction and Authority in Muslim Ethics 2. Christians, Kafirs, and Nationalists in Kurdish Poetry 3. Mystical Desire, Ordinary Desire: Love, Friendship, and Kinship 4. Separating Faith and Kufir in an Islamic Society 5. Pleasure Beyond Piety: Religious Difference in Domestic Space Epilogue: "Dear Reader!"

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Book SynopsisMemoirs of Jewish life in the east European shtetl often recall the hekdesh (town poorhouse) and its residents: beggars, madmen and madwomen, disabled people, and poor orphans. Stepchildren of the Shtetl tells the story of these marginalized figures from the dawn of modernity to the eve of the Holocaust. Combining archival research with analysis of literary, cultural, and religious texts, Natan M. Meir recovers the lived experience of Jewish society's outcasts and reveals the central role that they came to play in the drama of modernization. Those on the margins were often made to bear the burden of the nation as a whole, whether as scapegoats in moments of crisis or as symbols of degeneration, ripe for transformation by reformers, philanthropists, and nationalists. Shining a light into the darkest corners of Jewish society in eastern Europe—from the often squalid poorhouse of the shtetl to the slums and insane asylums of Warsaw and Odessa, from the conscription of poor orphans during the reign of Nicholas I to the cholera wedding, a magical ritual in which an epidemic was halted by marrying outcasts to each other in the town cemetery—Stepchildren of the Shtetl reconsiders the place of the lowliest members of an already stigmatized minority. Trade Review"In this pioneering book, Natan M. Meir illuminates the lives of those on the margins of an already marginalized people—the Jews of Eastern Europe. Drawing on a remarkable range of sources, he revolutionizes our understanding of the shtetl by shedding light on the beggars, orphans, and others who dwelled in its shadows."—Nathaniel Deutsch, author of Inventing America's 'Worst' Family: Eugenics, Islam, and the Fall and Rise of the Tribe of Ishmael"In Stepchildren of the Shtetl, Natan M. Meir connects everyday social experience to questions of political culture writ large, describing how the 'marginal' in Jewish society often came to serve as a figure for East European Jewry as a whole. An original and desperately needed book."—Hillel J. Kieval, author of Languages of Community: The Jewish Experience in the Czech Lands"This outstanding book offers us a glimpse at the underbelly of a Jewish community rarely studied from this vantage point. Meir tackles an elusive topic with analytic skill, keen sensitivity, and clear, accessible prose."—Steven J. Zipperstein, author of Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History"A book on the treatment of marginals in literature, history, and folklore smacks of brilliance....Meir has spotlighted a central aspect of Jewish life. His method of blending past images with present-day ideological concerns undoubtedly enlivens scholarship and offers a productive example for the profession."—Brian Horowitz, H-Judaic"Meir's study of the poor, disabled, and mad in Jewish Eastern Europe is a landmark achievement, a book that establishes a neglected field.Healso makes a signal contribution to the field of disability history that will be of interest far beyond Jewish studies. Each chapter reveals historical gems. Highly recommended."—D. Biale, CHOICE"Natan Meir's Stepchildren of the Shtetl is a remarkable work. Drawing from Hebrew, Yiddish, Russian, Ukrainian, and Polish sources, equally anchored in the deep recesses of the Jewish past and the latest innovations in disability and gender studies, Meir has given us as much of a glimpse into the margins of east European Jewry as possible. And he links what he finds to the larger story of the Jews at this juncture: the tortuous and ambivalent entry of a historically Othered people into a modernizing region of Europe that often continued to see its Jews as marginal."—Jarrod Tanny, Association for Jewish Studies Review"[Stepchildren of the Shtetl] provides a number of important insights regarding the lives of marginal Jews. Vitally, it includes Jewish and non-Jewish attitudes to liminal members of the Jewish community, and the concept of Jews as a racial and biological 'other' in and of themselves. Moreover, Meir engages with a range of important topics concerning Disability-Jewish history of the era, including but not limited to institutionalization, philanthropy, communal care and charity, media representation, religious, folk and supernatural beliefs, and socioeconomic and political uplift of marginalized people."—Samuel Brady, Jewish Historical StudiesTable of ContentsIntroduction 1. Jewish Marginal People in Premodern Europe 2. Blind Beggars and Orphan Recruits: The Russian State, the Kahal, and Marginal Jews in the Early Nineteenth Century 3. A Pile of Dust and Rubble": Poorhouses, Real and Imaginary 4. The Cholera Wedding 5. A "Republic of Beggars"? Charity, Jewish Backwardness, and the Specter of the Jewish Idler 6. Madness and the Mad: From Family Burden to National Affliction 7. "We Singing Jews, We Jews Possessed": The Jewish Outcast as National Icon Epilogue Conclusion: Jewish Intersectionality at the European Fin-de-Siècle

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Book SynopsisFive centuries after the forced conversion of Spanish and Portuguese Jews to Catholicism, stories of these conversos' descendants uncovering long-hidden Jewish roots have come to light and taken hold of the literary and popular imagination. This seemingly remote history has inspired a wave of contemporary writing involving hidden artifacts, familial whispers and secrets, and clandestine Jewish ritual practices pointing to a past that had been presumed dead and buried. The Converso's Return explores the cultural politics and literary impact of this reawakened interest in converso and crypto-Jewish history, ancestry, and identity, and asks what this fascination with lost-and-found heritage can tell us about how we relate to and make use of the past. Dalia Kandiyoti offers nuanced interpretations of contemporary fictional and autobiographical texts about crypto-Jews in Cuba, Mexico, New Mexico, Spain, France, the Ottoman Empire, and Turkey. These works not only imagine what might be missing from the historical archive but also suggest an alternative historical consciousness that underscores uncommon convergences of and solidarities within Sephardi, Christian, Muslim, converso, and Sabbatean histories. Steeped in diaspora, Sephardi, transamerican, Iberian, and world literature studies, The Converso's Return illuminates how the converso narrative can enrich our understanding of history, genealogy, and collective memory.Trade Review"Dalia Kandiyoti lucidly traces the history and memory of crypto-Jewishness across historical periods, languages, and nations. Theoretically sophisticated, historically rigorous, and superbly written, The Converso's Return is a stimulating read for anyone interested in how literature makes it possible to reimagine a past fraught with contradictions, absences, and silences." -- Tabea Alexa Linhard * author of Jewish Spain: A Mediterranean History *"Embedded in a sophisticated theoretical framework and a wide range of historical reference, The Converso's Return brilliantly explores and confronts questions of memory's use and representation. In creating a new literary map based on seemingly disparate texts that actually belong together, Dalia Kandiyoti is ever vigilant to the political implications of all forms of return." -- Ammiel Alcalay * author of After Jews and Arabs *

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Book SynopsisFive centuries after the forced conversion of Spanish and Portuguese Jews to Catholicism, stories of these conversos' descendants uncovering long-hidden Jewish roots have come to light and taken hold of the literary and popular imagination. This seemingly remote history has inspired a wave of contemporary writing involving hidden artifacts, familial whispers and secrets, and clandestine Jewish ritual practices pointing to a past that had been presumed dead and buried. The Converso's Return explores the cultural politics and literary impact of this reawakened interest in converso and crypto-Jewish history, ancestry, and identity, and asks what this fascination with lost-and-found heritage can tell us about how we relate to and make use of the past. Dalia Kandiyoti offers nuanced interpretations of contemporary fictional and autobiographical texts about crypto-Jews in Cuba, Mexico, New Mexico, Spain, France, the Ottoman Empire, and Turkey. These works not only imagine what might be missing from the historical archive but also suggest an alternative historical consciousness that underscores uncommon convergences of and solidarities within Sephardi, Christian, Muslim, converso, and Sabbatean histories. Steeped in diaspora, Sephardi, transamerican, Iberian, and world literature studies, The Converso's Return illuminates how the converso narrative can enrich our understanding of history, genealogy, and collective memory.Trade Review"Dalia Kandiyoti lucidly traces the history and memory of crypto-Jewishness across historical periods, languages, and nations. Theoretically sophisticated, historically rigorous, and superbly written, The Converso's Return is a stimulating read for anyone interested in how literature makes it possible to reimagine a past fraught with contradictions, absences, and silences." -- Tabea Alexa Linhard * author of Jewish Spain: A Mediterranean History *"Embedded in a sophisticated theoretical framework and a wide range of historical reference, The Converso's Return brilliantly explores and confronts questions of memory's use and representation. In creating a new literary map based on seemingly disparate texts that actually belong together, Dalia Kandiyoti is ever vigilant to the political implications of all forms of return." -- Ammiel Alcalay * author of After Jews and Arabs *

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Book SynopsisThe inside story of political protest in Saudi Arabia—on the ground, in the suburbs, and in the face of increasing state repression. Graveyard of Clerics takes up two global phenomena intimately linked in Saudi Arabia: urban sprawl and religious activism. Saudi suburbia emerged after World War II as citizens fled crowded inner cities. Developed to encourage a society of docile, isolated citizens, suburbs instead opened new spaces for political action. Religious activists in particular turned homes, schools, mosques, and summer camps into resources for mobilization. With the support of suburban grassroots networks, activists won local elections and found opportunities to protest government actions—until they faced a new wave of repression under the current Saudi leadership. Pascal Menoret spent four years in Saudi Arabia in the places where today's Islamic activism first emerged. With this book, he tells the stories of the people actively countering the Saudi state and highlights how people can organize and protest even amid increasingly intense police repression. This book changes the way we look at religious activism in Saudi Arabia. It also offers a cautionary tale: the ongoing repression by Saudi elites—achieved often with the complicity of the international community—is shutting down grassroots political movements with significant consequences for the country and the world.Trade 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 SynopsisMemoirs of Jewish life in the east European shtetl often recall the hekdesh (town poorhouse) and its residents: beggars, madmen and madwomen, disabled people, and poor orphans. Stepchildren of the Shtetl tells the story of these marginalized figures from the dawn of modernity to the eve of the Holocaust. Combining archival research with analysis of literary, cultural, and religious texts, Natan M. Meir recovers the lived experience of Jewish society's outcasts and reveals the central role that they came to play in the drama of modernization. Those on the margins were often made to bear the burden of the nation as a whole, whether as scapegoats in moments of crisis or as symbols of degeneration, ripe for transformation by reformers, philanthropists, and nationalists. Shining a light into the darkest corners of Jewish society in eastern Europe—from the often squalid poorhouse of the shtetl to the slums and insane asylums of Warsaw and Odessa, from the conscription of poor orphans during the reign of Nicholas I to the cholera wedding, a magical ritual in which an epidemic was halted by marrying outcasts to each other in the town cemetery—Stepchildren of the Shtetl reconsiders the place of the lowliest members of an already stigmatized minority. Trade Review"In this pioneering book, Natan M. Meir illuminates the lives of those on the margins of an already marginalized people—the Jews of Eastern Europe. Drawing on a remarkable range of sources, he revolutionizes our understanding of the shtetl by shedding light on the beggars, orphans, and others who dwelled in its shadows."—Nathaniel Deutsch, author of Inventing America's 'Worst' Family: Eugenics, Islam, and the Fall and Rise of the Tribe of Ishmael"In Stepchildren of the Shtetl, Natan M. Meir connects everyday social experience to questions of political culture writ large, describing how the 'marginal' in Jewish society often came to serve as a figure for East European Jewry as a whole. An original and desperately needed book."—Hillel J. Kieval, author of Languages of Community: The Jewish Experience in the Czech Lands"This outstanding book offers us a glimpse at the underbelly of a Jewish community rarely studied from this vantage point. Meir tackles an elusive topic with analytic skill, keen sensitivity, and clear, accessible prose."—Steven J. Zipperstein, author of Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History"A book on the treatment of marginals in literature, history, and folklore smacks of brilliance....Meir has spotlighted a central aspect of Jewish life. His method of blending past images with present-day ideological concerns undoubtedly enlivens scholarship and offers a productive example for the profession."—Brian Horowitz, H-Judaic"Meir's study of the poor, disabled, and mad in Jewish Eastern Europe is a landmark achievement, a book that establishes a neglected field.Healso makes a signal contribution to the field of disability history that will be of interest far beyond Jewish studies. Each chapter reveals historical gems. Highly recommended."—D. Biale, CHOICE"Natan Meir's Stepchildren of the Shtetl is a remarkable work. Drawing from Hebrew, Yiddish, Russian, Ukrainian, and Polish sources, equally anchored in the deep recesses of the Jewish past and the latest innovations in disability and gender studies, Meir has given us as much of a glimpse into the margins of east European Jewry as possible. And he links what he finds to the larger story of the Jews at this juncture: the tortuous and ambivalent entry of a historically Othered people into a modernizing region of Europe that often continued to see its Jews as marginal."—Jarrod Tanny, Association for Jewish Studies Review"[Stepchildren of the Shtetl] provides a number of important insights regarding the lives of marginal Jews. Vitally, it includes Jewish and non-Jewish attitudes to liminal members of the Jewish community, and the concept of Jews as a racial and biological 'other' in and of themselves. Moreover, Meir engages with a range of important topics concerning Disability-Jewish history of the era, including but not limited to institutionalization, philanthropy, communal care and charity, media representation, religious, folk and supernatural beliefs, and socioeconomic and political uplift of marginalized people."—Samuel Brady, Jewish Historical StudiesTable of ContentsIntroduction 1. Jewish Marginal People in Premodern Europe 2. Blind Beggars and Orphan Recruits: The Russian State, the Kahal, and Marginal Jews in the Early Nineteenth Century 3. A Pile of Dust and Rubble": Poorhouses, Real and Imaginary 4. The Cholera Wedding 5. A "Republic of Beggars"? Charity, Jewish Backwardness, and the Specter of the Jewish Idler 6. Madness and the Mad: From Family Burden to National Affliction 7. "We Singing Jews, We Jews Possessed": The Jewish Outcast as National Icon Epilogue Conclusion: Jewish Intersectionality at the European Fin-de-Siècle

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Book SynopsisThere are few instances of a contemporary Western European society more firmly welded to religion than Ireland is to Catholicism. For much of the twentieth century, to be considered a good Irish citizen was to be seen as a good and observant Catholic. Today, the opposite may increasingly be the case. The Irish Catholic Church, once a spiritual institution beyond question, is not only losing influence and relevance; in the eyes of many, it has become something utterly desacralized. In this book, Hugh Turpin offers an innovative and in-depth account of the nature and emergence of "ex-Catholicism"—a new model of the good, and secular, Irish person that is being rapidly adopted in Irish society. Using rich quantitative and qualitative research methods, Turpin explains the emergence and character of religious rejection in the Republic. He examines how numerous factors—including economic growth, social liberalization, attenuated domestic religious socialization, the institutional scandals and moral collapse of the Church, and the Church's lingering influence in social institutions and laws—have interacted to produce a rapid growth in ex-Catholicism. By tracing the frictions within and between practicing Catholics, cultural Catholics, and ex-Catholics in a period of profound cultural change and moral reckoning, Turpin shows how deeply the meanings of being religious or non-religious have changed in the country once described as "Holy Catholic Ireland."Trade Review"Turpin weaves regression models together with detailed accounts of individual and institutional agency, and with turns of phrase both humorous and profound, to produce our most holistic account of secularization to date. An interdisciplinary gem of a book."—Jonathan Lanman, Queen's University, Belfast"This is not only the best, most insightful book on the situation of religion and secularization in contemporary Ireland—it is one of the best, most insightful books written on secularization in general that I have read in a long time. Sharp, engaging, informative, thoughtful, and fascinating—this book is a must for anyone wanting to understand the evaporation of religion in the Western world."—Phil Zuckerman, Pitzer College"Turpin tells the fascinating story of what ordinary people think and feel about the disintegration of Catholic hegemony in Ireland. The book is enthralling: deeply researched, full of insights and exceptionally well written, it deserves all the praise and prizes that will come its way, if there is any justice in this world."—David Voas, University College London"Prior to Turpin's research, there had been no systematic, in-depth studies of those who could be classified as nones in the Republic of Ireland.Unholy Catholic Irelandis a first and important step in what I hope and anticipate will become a topic of further research – by Turpin and by other scholars. Based on both qualitative and quantitative research, it lays a strong foundation for future studies."—Gladys Ganiel, Slugger O'Toole"This study is to be warmly welcomed. It is written beautifully and makes a significant contribution to the field of the study of Irish Catholicism—and its rejection. Believers and non-believers alike will learn much from Turpin's findings, which invite us to reconsider the complexities of Irish religion and irreligion anew."—Salvador Ryan, The Irish Independent"Unholy Catholic Ireland brings a fresh and rich analysis to the study of Irish Catholicism, especially in the wake of decades of scandals. As such, it will appeal to students of Catholicism but especially, and more generally, those interested in better understanding religious change. And its methodological approach—combining the 'deep' insight of ethnographic work with the 'wide' analysis of social surveys—will serve as a guidepost for social scientists studying secularizing processes in other societies."—Brian Conway, Contemporary Sociology"Hugh Turpin provides the most comprehensive description and analysis of this conundrum [at the heart of Catholic Ireland]. This is an innovative, insightful, well-written book."—Tom Inglis, Journal of Contemporary ReligionTable of ContentsIntroduction 1. Secularization, the Desacralization of the Church, and the Emergence of Ethno-Catholic "Nones" 2. "Hostages of Catholicism": Quantifying the Nature and Scale of the Rejection of the Church 3. "For Emergency Use Only": The Waning of Religious Socialization 4. "A Load of Shite": Hidden Cultures of Catholic Unbelief 5. "This Is Our Rising": Secularization as a Second Struggle for "Irish Freedom" 6. "Awakening from Conscription": Ex-Catholicism as Anti-Nostalgic Moralized Authenticity 7. "Blessed Are Those Who Are Persecuted Because of Righteousness": Coping with a Spoiled Religious Identity Epilogue: "Anyone Else Not Bothered?"

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Book SynopsisDances and balls appear throughout world literature as venues for young people to meet, flirt, and form relationships, as any reader of Pride and Prejudice, War and Peace, or Romeo and Juliet can attest. The popularity of social dance transcends class, gender, ethnic, and national boundaries. In the context of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Jewish culture, dance offers crucial insights into debates about emancipation and acculturation. While traditional Jewish law prohibits men and women from dancing together, Jewish mixed-sex dancing was understood as the very sign of modernity––and the ultimate boundary transgression. Writers of modern Jewish literature deployed dance scenes as a charged and complex arena for understanding the limits of acculturation, the dangers of ethnic mixing, and the implications of shifting gender norms and marriage patterns, while simultaneously entertaining their readers. In this pioneering study, Sonia Gollance examines the specific literary qualities of dance scenes, while also paying close attention to the broader social implications of Jewish engagement with dance. Combining cultural history with literary analysis and drawing connections to contemporary representations of Jewish social dance, Gollance illustrates how mixed-sex dancing functions as a flexible metaphor for the concerns of Jewish communities in the face of cultural transitions.Trade Review"It Could Lead to Dancing is a fascinating exploration of the role of dance in literary representations of Jewish modernization and secularization. With sources from memoirs to dance history, focusing primarily on German and Yiddish fiction, this wonderful, immensely learned, and original book will attract interest among literary scholars and beyond." —Naomi Seidman, University of Toronto"Extensively researched and deftly written, Sonia Gollance's rich study guides us through a nuanced cultural history of Jewish mixed-sex dancing from the long nineteenth century into the present day. It Could Lead to Dancing confirms the importance of the Jewish perspective in literary dance studies, casting light on the dance floor as a site where social comportment reflected the political pursuits of acculturation, emancipation, and female empowerment." —Lucia Ruprecht, Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge"What is arguably the most important aspect of Gollance's book... is its tackling one of the most well-known, yet little examined, topics of Jewish culture—the place of mixed-sex dancing in Jewish life, where mixed-sex dancing relates to social or vernacular dancing between men and women. ... what she aims to prove, and does so very effectively, is that tracing the existence of mixed-sex dancing... is not only about witnessing changing ideas of sexuality but how Jews addressed the radical transformations arising from modernity during the period spanning from the Enlightenment to World War II... These shifts relate to gender roles, secularization, debates about Jewish emancipation, urbanization, migration, and war."—Naomi Jackson, In geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies"The mixed-sex dance scene, as Gollance successfully argues, is not only a plot device but an aesthetic choice. As such, It Could Lead to Dancing guides readers through a history of dance as both a cultural-historical subject and literary practice that will enhance the work of scholars and Jewish dance activists alike."—Sunny S. Yudkoff, Monatshefte"Gollance... offers an extensive, fascinating exploration of Jewish mixed-sex dancing... A well-written and fun read. Essential."—K. J. Wetmore Jr., CHOICE"Like the dance floor, 'a liminal space that eludes all kinds of boundaries,' Gollance... uncovers a field of cultural production that crosses and exposes linguistic and social borders (12). It is a contested field that renders new perspectives on the animating tensions of Jewish modernity."—Matthew Johnson, German Studies Review"Gollance presents a thorough exploration of the dynamics of mixed-sex dancing and draws compelling parallels to broader social and cultural circumstances surrounding Jews.... Through her nuanced writing, Gollance describes how Jews at times found acceptance from non-Jews in dance contexts, but the acceptance was often temporary or partial."—Rabbanit Dalia Davis, Contemporary Jewry"Sonia Gollance's It could Lead to Dancing: Mixed-Sex Dancing and Jewish Modernity is a thoroughly researched and engaging study of the role of mixed-sex dancing in modern Jewish life. Gollance mines a wide range of literary resources—novels, memoirs, short stories, plays and poems, in Yiddish, German, Hebrew and English, in the modern period (1780-1940) and beyond."—National Jewish Book Awards Judges"Gollance excels at interweaving a tremendous amount of research. It Could Lead to Dancing covers multiple centuries, geographic locations, venues, and languages. Indeed, each facet of this interdisciplinary topic is complex, and Gollance selected highly relevant case studies that reveal her material's nuance and scope. Gollance is in thorough command of her subject. It is an impressive feat.... Gollance illuminates complex material and a complex history in a clear, engaging, and compelling way."—Susan Funkenstein, Central European HistoryTable of ContentsIntroduction: The Space of the Dance Floor 1. The Choreography of Acculturation 2. How Jews Learned to Dance 3. The Tavern: Jewish Participation in Rural Leisure Culture 4. The Ballroom: Questions of Admission and Exclusion 5. The Wedding: Celebratory Ritual and Social Enforcement 6. The Dance Hall: Commercial Leisure Culture and American Sexual Mores Epilogue: "What Comes from Men and Women Dancing"

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Book SynopsisAmong the Jewish writers who emigrated from Eastern Europe to France in the 1910s and 1920s, a number chose to switch from writing in their languages of origin to writing primarily in French, a language that represented both a literary center and the promises of French universalism. But under the Nazi occupation of France from 1940 to 1944, these Jewish émigré writers—among them Irène Némirovsky, Benjamin Fondane, Romain Gary, Jean Malaquais, and Elsa Triolet—continued to write in their adopted language, even as the Vichy regime and Nazi occupiers denied their French identity through xenophobic and antisemitic laws. In this book, Julia Elsky argues that these writers reexamined both their Jewishness and their place as authors in France through the language in which they wrote. The group of authors Elsky considers depicted key moments in the war from their perspective as Jewish émigrés, including the June 1940 civilian flight from Paris, life in the occupied and southern zones, the roundups and internment camps, and the Resistance in France and in London. Writing in French, they expressed multiple cultural, religious, and linguistic identities, challenging the boundaries between center and periphery, between French and foreign, even when their sense of belonging was being violently denied.Trade Review"In this fine book, Elsky discusses five Jewish writers who explored the possibilities of writing in a 'Jewish voice' in French and grappled with issues of Jewish belonging during Vichy. Written in a clear and graceful style and based on original archival research, Writing Occupation will be of interest not only to historians and scholars of French literature, but to all those concerned by the fate of Jews in France, before and after the Second World War."—Susan Rubin Suleiman, author of The Némirovsky Question: The Life, Death, and Legacy of a Jewish Writer in Twentieth-Century France"Jews are the quintessential people not only of the book, but of multiple languages. Living in several worlds simultaneously, language becomes 'a province without a nation,' as Julia Elsky writes in this book. Her brilliant and highly original study of Jewish exiles living in France during World War II shows us that multilingualism demonstrates the porousness of national boundaries and serves as a crucial vehicle for exploring the multifaceted complexities of Jewish identity."—Susannah Heschel, author of The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany"Writing Occupation is a welcome addition to a growing body of literature focused on the rich hybrid culture created by immigrant and first-generation Jews in early twentieth-century France. Julia Elsky's nuanced and perceptive book draws important parallels between immigrant Jewish and postcolonial francophone writers and will be of great interest to historians and literary scholars alike."—Nadia Malinovich, author of French and Jewish: Culture and the Politics of Identity in Early Twentieth-Century France"Elsky demonstrates that the writers in her corpus destabilize the binaries of centre/periphery, native/non-native, outsider/insider, and major literature/minor literature. She also highlights the simultaneous universalism and particularism marking these writers' work, and the plurality of their identities stemming from their multilingualism, sense of belonging to multiple countries, political allegiances, and (dis)engagement with Judaism."—Helena Duffy, French Studies"Elsky's study of these Jewish Émigré Voices in Wartime France will be read with pleasure by researchers, instructors, and students, for the rich knowledge and insights it offers. One of its most refreshing aspects lies in her insistence on analyzing writers, texts, and contexts in all their complexity, firmly resisting ready-made labels, categorical judgments, and predetermined theories and ideologies. While the facts never 'speak for themselves,' they do prove stubbornly important and indispensable, particularly when they are so coherently and judiciously incorporated into specific readings and comparative assessments, as is the case here."—Nathan Bracher, H-France"Julia Elsky has provided a model of Jewish studies scholarship in Writing Occupation. Working at the intersection of history, literary studies, and Holocaust studies, the book articulates innovative questions about language, identity, and the Second World War in France. Clearly written with thorough analysis that engages with key themes, the book underlines the complexities of multilingualism in writing and in lives. It also raises potential future avenues of exploration including analysis of gendered voices and further examinations of the ways in which language plays a role in identity."—Shannon Fogg, H-Judaic"This book is an excellent contribution to the recent growth in French Jewish studies... Beyond its specific French and Jewish framework, Writing Occupation also contributes more broadly to the ways we think about multilingualism, French belonging, the language 'choices' of literary figures, and the various roles that language plays within the broad spectrum of migratory experiences. This book ought to also be commended for the balance it strikes between history and literary analysis. Elsky paints a vivid historical picture that is punctuated by excellent close readings of texts, which only make the arguments in this book that much more convincing."—Nick Underwood, Association for Jewish Studies Review"Elsky's insightful study of an underexplored 'Jewish Francophonie' increases our understanding of the complexity of foreign-born Jews' experiences in France during the Occupation. Her analysis of how these writers grappled with the problem of articulating their experiences fits well into current research on the relationship between language and identity."—Daphne McConnell and Richard Francis Crane, Holocaust and Genocide StudiesTable of ContentsIntroduction: Jewish Émigré Writers and the French Language 1. A Jewish Poetics of Exile: Benjamin Fondane's Exodus 2. Accents in Jean Malaquais's Carrefour Marseille 3. European Language and the Resistance: Romain Gary's Heteroglossia 4. Buried Language: Elsa Triolet's Bilingualism 5. Displacing Stereotypes: Irène Némirovsky in the Occupied Zone Epilogue: Memory, Language, and Jewish Francophonie

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Book SynopsisWild Visionary reconsiders Maurice Sendak's life and work in the context of his experience as a Jewish gay man. Maurice (Moishe) Bernard Sendak (1928–2012) was a fierce, romantic, and shockingly funny truth seeker who intervened in modern literature and culture. Raising the stakes of children's books, Sendak painted childhood with the dark realism and wild imagination of his own sensitive "inner child," drawing on the queer and Yiddish sensibilities that shaped his singular voice. Interweaving literary biography and cultural history, Golan Y. Moskowitz follows Sendak from his parents' Brooklyn home to spaces of creative growth and artistic vision—from neighborhood movie palaces to Hell's Kitchen, Greenwich Village, Fire Island, and the Connecticut country home he shared with Eugene Glynn, his partner of more than fifty years. Further, he analyzes Sendak's investment in the figure of the endangered child in symbolic relation to collective touchstones that impacted the artist's perspective—the Great Depression, the Holocaust, and the AIDS crisis. Through a deep exploration of Sendak's picture books, interviews, and previously unstudied personal correspondence, Wild Visionary offers a sensitive portrait of the most beloved and enchanting picture-book artist of our time.Trade Review"Golan Y. Moskowitz's thorough study of Maurice Sendak's life and work unveils the struggles that led him to 'queer' his children's books. Moskowitz captures the essential forces behind his artwork, showing how Sendak was just as politically radical as he was emotionally provocative." -- Jack Zipes * University of Minnesota *"Easily the best study of Sendak to appear; deeply researched and utterly engaging. Moskowitz brings rich new context to Sendak's life, showing how the artist's historically sidelined queer and Jewish identity inspired his work. Even the notoriously cranky Sendak would have liked it." -- Kenneth Kidd * University of Florida *"This revelatory exploration of Maurice Sendak's life opens up vistas not only on creativity, queerness, and the Jewish-American immigrant experience but also, and most powerfully, on childhood. Moskowitz is a deft guide to the wild places of Sendak's imagination, where generations of children recognized something startling and true about themselves." -- Naomi Seidman * University of Toronto *"Moskowitz has reclaimed Sendak as one of great gay writers and artists of the 20th century... Astutely analyzing drafts of Sendak's narratives, and the progressive stages of his illustrations, Moskowitz demonstrates the sometimes subtle, but often quite overt, ways in which Sendak blurred gender lines and celebrates queer relationships." -- Raymond-jean Frontain * The Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide *"InWild Visionary, Moskowitz presents a sensitive and discerning depiction of the life and work of Maurice Sendak, and the ways in which his story offers insights into broader tensions: between what children, and people more generally, see and need, and what the world thinks they see and need; between the worlds of cultural production and the various, often unseen forces that manage both to stifle and reward freedom and creativity." -- Tahneer Oksman * In Geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies *"This evocative...book captures Sendak's commitment to radical honesty from the inside out and challenges us to follow the threads of Jewishness, queerness, and other diversities of identity as they have shaped, and continue to shape, art and life and everything in between In Sendak's words, let the wild rumpus begin!" -- Noam Sienna * Journal of Jewish Identities *"Moskowitz persuasively grounds Sendak's creative output in his Jewish and queer identities, offering important insights into the links between sexual, ethnic, and cultural experiences of difference, the universal queerness of childhood, and the ways in which intergenerational trauma informs Jewish and immigrant identities in American culture." -- Gregg Drinkwater * Association for Jewish Studies Review *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction: Introduction: From Limbo to Childhood chapter abstractThis chapter introduces the book's approach of situating a cultural giant within several intersecting histories and minority discourses, as well as analyzing the artist's work as an embodied testament to a complex historical and cultural experience. Contextualizing Sendak's sensitive but convoluted subjectivity within histories of modern childhood, Jewish American acculturation, and enduring affiliations between queer difference and children's literature, it offers a roadmap for the book and orients the project within broader studies of childhood, Jewishness, queerness, and affect. One: Where the Wild Things Acculturate: Roots and Wings in Interwar Brooklyn chapter abstractChapter 1 situates Sendak's artistic vision within intertwined histories of immigrant acculturation and the emergence of modern childhood. Early twentieth-century immigrants' children were in some ways socialized out of their own families of origin. Sendak was born into a zeitgeist of speed and mobility in a culture that celebrated mechanical innovation, youth, capitalism, and superhero fantasies. Popular consumerism exploded alongside the solidification of child psychology, surges in global antisemitism, and rising anxieties about fascism. Social commentators envisioned minorities and cityscapes as potentially threatening to the American child's healthy development. Sendak grew up sensitive to his parents' anxieties as Jewish immigrants and mesmerized by gritty urban spectacles and mass media. His youth clashed with dominant conceptions of childhood as a time of rose-colored, protected innocence. His creative work would instead convey the culturally fraught separation anxieties experienced between immigrant parents and American children in the interwar urban landscape. Two: Love in a Dangerous Landscape: Queer Kinship and Survival chapter abstractFocusing on the years of World War II, Chapter 2 examines Sendak's creative notions of kinship in dialogue with literature of Jewish families in contexts of migration, collective mourning, and survival. Sendak spent the war years as a young adolescent, aware that his relatives were being murdered in Nazi-occupied Poland. Tumultuous, but tight-knit relationships within his mourning family elucidate the almost divine significance his work would attribute to ruptured parent-child boundaries, creative sibling bonds, and queer yearnings. His work took elements characteristic, if stereotypic, of twentieth-century Yiddish-speaking Jewish families and transformed them into nursery rhyme and fairy tale archetypes. Sendak's childhood location within a milieu repeatedly targeted for violent destruction and shrouded in traumatic losses reverberates in his work. His mythical and cosmic fusions convey feelings about growing up with precarious identifications and emotional investment in familial pasts that he did not directly experience. Three: Surviving the American Dream: Early Childhood as Queer Lens at Midcentury chapter abstractIn the immediate postwar years, the young Sendak continued to negotiate competing realities. The dominant "American Dream" idealized childhood innocence, heterosexual marriage, and the suburban nuclear family; his parents' Jewish Brooklyn community mourned destroyed communities of origin; and his own relocation to Manhattan offered fraught realms of discreet exploration as a gay man. This chapter examines how the artist preserved his sense of self apart from a mainstream culture that devalued ethnically and sexually atypical people. Sendak's beginnings as an illustrator and picture-book artist reflect an unassimilable subjectivity that separated him from dominant social meanings and encouraged his investment in excavating his early childhood self. With the help of queer and Jewish mentors, including picture-book author Ruth Krauss and a gay Jewish therapist named Bertram Slaff, Sendak solidified his creative vision and began to subvert the limitations of the American Dream with queer and ethnically marginal elements. Four: "Milk in the Batter" and Controversy in the Making: "Camp," Stigma, and Public Spotlight in the Era of Social Liberation chapter abstractFocusing on the 1960s and 1970s, Chapter 4 connects Sendak's use of child's play to the challenges and triumphs of excluded and stigmatized outsiders. Sendak participated in a tradition historically employed by insider-outsider minorities, including Jews and queer people, whose difference could be selectively hidden in order "to pass." This chapter examines Sendak's relationship to costume, to the dramatic arts, and to spaces of social liberation, including Fire Island, as well as his use of child's play, theatricality, and "Camp" sensibilities in correspondences and picture books to work through feelings of queer shame and social incoherence. It reads his creative process in dialogue with sociological writing on the creativity of stigmatized individuals, queer theories of time and space, and psychoanalytic writings on the "creative personality." Sendak harnessed a stigmatized subjectivity to create messages that spoke to those disenchanted with the homogenous, middle-class ideals of midcentury America. Five: Inside Out: Processing the AIDS Crisis and Holocaust Memory Through the Romantic Child chapter abstractChapter 5 focuses on Sendak's life and work in the years following his move to Ridgefield, Connecticut, in 1972, exploring how notions of "inside"' and "outside" intensified in his creative vision. As late twentieth-century Jews became, generally speaking, more enfranchised in middle-class America and were increasingly essentialized as complacent beneficiaries of "White privilege," anxiety about the need to preserve Jewish distinctiveness increased. Meanwhile, America institutionalized Holocaust memory and became more comfortable with Old World nostalgia. Mainstream culture in the 1980s also retreated from social liberation movements, empowering homophobia and social conservatism. Considering these contextual shifts, this chapter studies the aging Sendak's creative handling of boundary violations and "unnatural," death-infused relations, including visual mergers of the Holocaust with the AIDS crisis. It asks how he reconciled a political calling he felt during that crisis, which took many of his loved ones, with an impulse to turn inward. Conclusion: Conclusion: A Garden on the Edge of the World chapter abstractThis section reflects broadly on social and cultural influences that shaped Sendak's art, as well as on his legacy as a critic of collectively imposed simplifications of childhood. It connects the concerns of his art to contemporary creative representations of childhood, as well as to enduring social inequities. Childhood continues to operate as a cultural site contributing to definitions of deviance, as well as to the inclusion and exclusion of various minority populations, including Black Americans. Sendak celebrated the sensitivity, ferocity, and playful liminality of childhood, cultivating his own "inner child" as a position from which to articulate the complexity of a displaced queer subjectivity in a displaced immigrant family unit, as well as the dangers of puritanism and social coercion in the public sphere.

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Book SynopsisWild Visionary reconsiders Maurice Sendak's life and work in the context of his experience as a Jewish gay man. Maurice (Moishe) Bernard Sendak (1928–2012) was a fierce, romantic, and shockingly funny truth seeker who intervened in modern literature and culture. Raising the stakes of children's books, Sendak painted childhood with the dark realism and wild imagination of his own sensitive "inner child," drawing on the queer and Yiddish sensibilities that shaped his singular voice. Interweaving literary biography and cultural history, Golan Y. Moskowitz follows Sendak from his parents' Brooklyn home to spaces of creative growth and artistic vision—from neighborhood movie palaces to Hell's Kitchen, Greenwich Village, Fire Island, and the Connecticut country home he shared with Eugene Glynn, his partner of more than fifty years. Further, he analyzes Sendak's investment in the figure of the endangered child in symbolic relation to collective touchstones that impacted the artist's perspective—the Great Depression, the Holocaust, and the AIDS crisis. Through a deep exploration of Sendak's picture books, interviews, and previously unstudied personal correspondence, Wild Visionary offers a sensitive portrait of the most beloved and enchanting picture-book artist of our time.Trade Review"Golan Y. Moskowitz's thorough study of Maurice Sendak's life and work unveils the struggles that led him to 'queer' his children's books. Moskowitz captures the essential forces behind his artwork, showing how Sendak was just as politically radical as he was emotionally provocative." -- Jack Zipes * University of Minnesota *"Easily the best study of Sendak to appear; deeply researched and utterly engaging. Moskowitz brings rich new context to Sendak's life, showing how the artist's historically sidelined queer and Jewish identity inspired his work. Even the notoriously cranky Sendak would have liked it." -- Kenneth Kidd * University of Florida *"This revelatory exploration of Maurice Sendak's life opens up vistas not only on creativity, queerness, and the Jewish-American immigrant experience but also, and most powerfully, on childhood. Moskowitz is a deft guide to the wild places of Sendak's imagination, where generations of children recognized something startling and true about themselves." -- Naomi Seidman * University of Toronto *"Moskowitz has reclaimed Sendak as one of great gay writers and artists of the 20th century... Astutely analyzing drafts of Sendak's narratives, and the progressive stages of his illustrations, Moskowitz demonstrates the sometimes subtle, but often quite overt, ways in which Sendak blurred gender lines and celebrates queer relationships." -- Raymond-jean Frontain * The Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide *"InWild Visionary, Moskowitz presents a sensitive and discerning depiction of the life and work of Maurice Sendak, and the ways in which his story offers insights into broader tensions: between what children, and people more generally, see and need, and what the world thinks they see and need; between the worlds of cultural production and the various, often unseen forces that manage both to stifle and reward freedom and creativity." -- Tahneer Oksman * In Geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies *"This evocative...book captures Sendak's commitment to radical honesty from the inside out and challenges us to follow the threads of Jewishness, queerness, and other diversities of identity as they have shaped, and continue to shape, art and life and everything in between In Sendak's words, let the wild rumpus begin!" -- Noam Sienna * Journal of Jewish Identities *"Moskowitz persuasively grounds Sendak's creative output in his Jewish and queer identities, offering important insights into the links between sexual, ethnic, and cultural experiences of difference, the universal queerness of childhood, and the ways in which intergenerational trauma informs Jewish and immigrant identities in American culture." -- Gregg Drinkwater * Association for Jewish Studies Review *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction: Introduction: From Limbo to Childhood chapter abstractThis chapter introduces the book's approach of situating a cultural giant within several intersecting histories and minority discourses, as well as analyzing the artist's work as an embodied testament to a complex historical and cultural experience. Contextualizing Sendak's sensitive but convoluted subjectivity within histories of modern childhood, Jewish American acculturation, and enduring affiliations between queer difference and children's literature, it offers a roadmap for the book and orients the project within broader studies of childhood, Jewishness, queerness, and affect. One: Where the Wild Things Acculturate: Roots and Wings in Interwar Brooklyn chapter abstractChapter 1 situates Sendak's artistic vision within intertwined histories of immigrant acculturation and the emergence of modern childhood. Early twentieth-century immigrants' children were in some ways socialized out of their own families of origin. Sendak was born into a zeitgeist of speed and mobility in a culture that celebrated mechanical innovation, youth, capitalism, and superhero fantasies. Popular consumerism exploded alongside the solidification of child psychology, surges in global antisemitism, and rising anxieties about fascism. Social commentators envisioned minorities and cityscapes as potentially threatening to the American child's healthy development. Sendak grew up sensitive to his parents' anxieties as Jewish immigrants and mesmerized by gritty urban spectacles and mass media. His youth clashed with dominant conceptions of childhood as a time of rose-colored, protected innocence. His creative work would instead convey the culturally fraught separation anxieties experienced between immigrant parents and American children in the interwar urban landscape. Two: Love in a Dangerous Landscape: Queer Kinship and Survival chapter abstractFocusing on the years of World War II, Chapter 2 examines Sendak's creative notions of kinship in dialogue with literature of Jewish families in contexts of migration, collective mourning, and survival. Sendak spent the war years as a young adolescent, aware that his relatives were being murdered in Nazi-occupied Poland. Tumultuous, but tight-knit relationships within his mourning family elucidate the almost divine significance his work would attribute to ruptured parent-child boundaries, creative sibling bonds, and queer yearnings. His work took elements characteristic, if stereotypic, of twentieth-century Yiddish-speaking Jewish families and transformed them into nursery rhyme and fairy tale archetypes. Sendak's childhood location within a milieu repeatedly targeted for violent destruction and shrouded in traumatic losses reverberates in his work. His mythical and cosmic fusions convey feelings about growing up with precarious identifications and emotional investment in familial pasts that he did not directly experience. Three: Surviving the American Dream: Early Childhood as Queer Lens at Midcentury chapter abstractIn the immediate postwar years, the young Sendak continued to negotiate competing realities. The dominant "American Dream" idealized childhood innocence, heterosexual marriage, and the suburban nuclear family; his parents' Jewish Brooklyn community mourned destroyed communities of origin; and his own relocation to Manhattan offered fraught realms of discreet exploration as a gay man. This chapter examines how the artist preserved his sense of self apart from a mainstream culture that devalued ethnically and sexually atypical people. Sendak's beginnings as an illustrator and picture-book artist reflect an unassimilable subjectivity that separated him from dominant social meanings and encouraged his investment in excavating his early childhood self. With the help of queer and Jewish mentors, including picture-book author Ruth Krauss and a gay Jewish therapist named Bertram Slaff, Sendak solidified his creative vision and began to subvert the limitations of the American Dream with queer and ethnically marginal elements. Four: "Milk in the Batter" and Controversy in the Making: "Camp," Stigma, and Public Spotlight in the Era of Social Liberation chapter abstractFocusing on the 1960s and 1970s, Chapter 4 connects Sendak's use of child's play to the challenges and triumphs of excluded and stigmatized outsiders. Sendak participated in a tradition historically employed by insider-outsider minorities, including Jews and queer people, whose difference could be selectively hidden in order "to pass." This chapter examines Sendak's relationship to costume, to the dramatic arts, and to spaces of social liberation, including Fire Island, as well as his use of child's play, theatricality, and "Camp" sensibilities in correspondences and picture books to work through feelings of queer shame and social incoherence. It reads his creative process in dialogue with sociological writing on the creativity of stigmatized individuals, queer theories of time and space, and psychoanalytic writings on the "creative personality." Sendak harnessed a stigmatized subjectivity to create messages that spoke to those disenchanted with the homogenous, middle-class ideals of midcentury America. Five: Inside Out: Processing the AIDS Crisis and Holocaust Memory Through the Romantic Child chapter abstractChapter 5 focuses on Sendak's life and work in the years following his move to Ridgefield, Connecticut, in 1972, exploring how notions of "inside"' and "outside" intensified in his creative vision. As late twentieth-century Jews became, generally speaking, more enfranchised in middle-class America and were increasingly essentialized as complacent beneficiaries of "White privilege," anxiety about the need to preserve Jewish distinctiveness increased. Meanwhile, America institutionalized Holocaust memory and became more comfortable with Old World nostalgia. Mainstream culture in the 1980s also retreated from social liberation movements, empowering homophobia and social conservatism. Considering these contextual shifts, this chapter studies the aging Sendak's creative handling of boundary violations and "unnatural," death-infused relations, including visual mergers of the Holocaust with the AIDS crisis. It asks how he reconciled a political calling he felt during that crisis, which took many of his loved ones, with an impulse to turn inward. Conclusion: Conclusion: A Garden on the Edge of the World chapter abstractThis section reflects broadly on social and cultural influences that shaped Sendak's art, as well as on his legacy as a critic of collectively imposed simplifications of childhood. It connects the concerns of his art to contemporary creative representations of childhood, as well as to enduring social inequities. Childhood continues to operate as a cultural site contributing to definitions of deviance, as well as to the inclusion and exclusion of various minority populations, including Black Americans. Sendak celebrated the sensitivity, ferocity, and playful liminality of childhood, cultivating his own "inner child" as a position from which to articulate the complexity of a displaced queer subjectivity in a displaced immigrant family unit, as well as the dangers of puritanism and social coercion in the public sphere.

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Book SynopsisWithin the broad contours of Islamic traditions, Muslims are enjoined to fast during the month of Ramadan, they are invited to a disciplined practice of prayer, and they are offered the Quran as the divine revelation in the most beautiful verbal form. But what happens if Muslims choose not to fast, or give up prayer, or if the Quran's beauty seems inaccessible? When Muslims do not take up the path of piety, what happens to their relationships with more devout Muslims who are neighbors, friends, and kin? Between Muslims provides an ethnographic account of Iraqi Kurdish Muslims who turn away from devotional piety yet remain intimately engaged with Islamic traditions and with other Muslims. Andrew Bush offers a new way to understand religious difference in Islam, rejecting simple stereotypes about ethnic or sectarian identities. Integrating textual analysis of poetry, sermons, and Islamic history into accounts of everyday life in Iraqi Kurdistan, Between Muslims illuminates the interplay of attraction and aversion to Islam among ordinary Muslims.Trade Review"A finely nuanced study about the impossibility of sequestering what is religious from what is not. In exemplary fashion, Andrew Bush shows us how the categories with which we work—religion, atheism, or secularism—are insufficient to understand the simultaneously sacred and profane world of everyday life."—Faisal Devji, Oxford University"Andrew Bush has written a remarkable book that makes highly original contributions to the anthropology of religion as well as Kurdish studies. There is no other book quite like this. Approaching Kurdish society through its poetics, he has grasped important insights into the ambiguities of everyday ethics underlying the social reality of contemporary Kurdistan."—Martin van Bruinessen, Utrecht University"Written with a scholar's rigor and a poet's grace, Between Muslims depicts textures of Islamic tradition rarely discussed in the literature. Fiercely independent in its approach to theorizing Muslim life, this deeply-layered monograph is a must-read for scholars in anthropology, religious studies, and beyond."—Noah Salomon, Carleton College"A refreshing departure from the focus on nationalist identity in studies of Iraqi Kurdistan, Between Muslims is a beautifully written and original work on the dynamics of Islamic traditions. Andrew Bush subtly explores how 'fractures of difference' are lived in everyday intimate relationships."—Sara Pursley, New York University"[G]roundbreaking and innovative... Between Muslims holds up as an accessible and eloquent account of social dynamics in contemporary Iraqi Kurdistan."—Edith Szanto, Journal of the American Academy of Religion"A nuanced reflection on how Muslims inhabit lukewarm attitudes toward piety in contexts suffused with piety. [Between Muslims] is also an elegant exploration of Kurdish poetry and the ways it animates contemporary Kurds' self-expression."—Susan MacDougall, Ethnos"Between Muslims is a major contribution to scholarshipon the importance of multiple ways of being Islamic."—Jeremy F. Walton, Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association"This beautifully written book explores a number of contradictions among those who have 'turned away from piety' and yet do not renounce Islam, but seek to know the 'beloved' in Iraqi Kurdistan. Through an insightful analysis of mystical poetry, Bush additionally demonstrates how the pious and those who have turned away from piety negotiate desire, understand apostasy, and relate to each other across different ranges of piety through patience and acts of 'holding back.'"—The Association of Middle East Anthropology Book Award Committee"The unique positionality of his subjects allows Bush to offer a valuable modus vivendi to the great 'text vs. lived experience' debate in the academy: his approach necessarily requires an engagement with text, but not as objects which naturally unfold according to their own purposes (as is often the case in our deliberations about Islam) but rather as objects continuously transformed in the process of being made meaningful to an individual's experience of the world, which itself cannot be extricated from its relationship with others. This refreshinglyunmodern emphasis on relationality (instead of isolated self-determining subjects) permeates the entirety of his study, focused as it is on the life-worlds that emergebetweenMuslims."—Rushain Abbasi, MarginaliaTable of ContentsIntroduction: Fieldwork in Kurdistan: Islamic Traditions, Ordinary Relationships, and a Paradox 1. Quran and Zoroaster: Attraction and Authority in Muslim Ethics 2. Christians, Kafirs, and Nationalists in Kurdish Poetry 3. Mystical Desire, Ordinary Desire: Love, Friendship, and Kinship 4. Separating Faith and Kufir in an Islamic Society 5. Pleasure Beyond Piety: Religious Difference in Domestic Space Epilogue: "Dear Reader!"

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Book SynopsisThe Taliban made piety a business of the state, and thereby intervened in the daily lives and social interactions of Afghan women. Pious Peripheries examines women's resistance through groundbreaking fieldwork at a women's shelter in Kabul, home to runaway wives, daughters, mothers, and sisters of the Taliban. Whether running to seek marriage or divorce, enduring or escaping abuse, or even accused of singing sexually explicit songs in public, "promiscuous" women challenge the status quo—and once marked as promiscuous, women have few resources. This book provides a window into the everyday struggles of Afghan women as they develop new ways to challenge historical patriarchal practices. Sonia Ahsan-Tirmizi explores how women negotiate gendered power mechanisms, notably those of Islam and Pashtunwali. Sometimes defined as an honor code, Pashtunwali is a discursive and material practice that women embody through praying, fasting, oral and written poetry, and participation in rituals of hospitality and refuge. In taking ownership of Pashtunwali and Islamic knowledge, in both textual and oral forms, women create a new supportive community, finding friendship and solidarity in the margins of Afghan society. So doing, these women redefine the meanings of equality, honor, piety, and promiscuity in Afghanistan.Trade Review"Pious Peripheries brings the reader into a diverse and opinionated world of Afghan women thrown together only because they all refused to abide by gendered social norms. Sonia Ahsan's willingness to step aside and allow these remarkable women to speak for themselves is a tremendous strength." -- Thomas Barfield * Boston University *"The extraordinary achievement of Pious Peripheries lies in Sonia Ahsan-Tirmizi's astute explanation of how Afghan women exercise agency despite their subjugation to often brutal male authority. In this stunning ethnography, she skillfully shows how courageous women navigate the dynamics of piety and promiscuity to achieve seemingly inaccessible freedoms." -- Michael Herzfeld * Harvard University *"Pious Peripheries offers a compelling challenge to the idea that Afghan women need 'saving.' Via a highly original and intrepid ethnography, Sonia Ahsan-Tirmizi reveals how, from the margins of Afghan society, a community of formidable women is fashioning their own distinctive claims about Islam, Pashtun identity, sexuality, and the state." -- Robert D. Crews * Stanford University *"Sonia Ahsan-Tirmizi's Pious Peripheries disrupts conventional categories of piety and secularism to bring to light the immense resourcefulness of Afghan women living at society's margins. Erudite and deeply empathic, with lucid vignettes that will stick in your memory, this is a must-read for anyone interested in feminism, Islam, and the tormented history of Afghanistan." -- Julie Billaud * Graduate Institute for International and Development Studies *"Boldly and poetically defying patriarchy, the runaway women of Pious Peripheries become the surprising harbingers of an emancipatory politics in war-torn Afghanistan. Immortalized by Sonia Ahsan-Tirmizi's brave and soulfully crafted ethnography, these women's nomadic existence shatters myopic notions of religious identity and expands our sense of where reworlding comes from." -- João Biehl * Princeton University *"For practicing traditionally male-ascribed roles of hospitality, refuge, guest hosting, justice, friendship, love, and courage, Ahsan describes the women (through the Pashto poetic tradition of landay) as using their agentive action to reimagine what is legitimate and authorized and what could be. Most important, these women demonstrate that promiscuity is not the opposite of piety or morality but the potential basis for constructing new and different worlds for women. Recommended." -- B. Tavakolian * CHOICE *"Pious Peripheries is the model of engaged scholarship based on ethnographic research among marginalized groups... The diverse experiences of these runaway women reveal the confluence of concerns about subtle feminist and religious expressions and their yearning to reinvent a new sense of belonging inside the shelter system." -- Joseph Tse-Hei Lee * Acta Via Serica *

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Book SynopsisLess and less Christian demographically, America is now home to an ever-larger number of people who say they identify with no religion at all. These non-Christians have increasingly been demanding their full participation in public life, bringing their arguments all the way to the Supreme Court. The law is on their side, but that doesn't mean that their attempts are not met with suspicion or outright hostility. In Our Non-Christian Nation, Jay Wexler travels the country to engage the non-Christians who have called on us to maintain our ideals of inclusivity and diversity. With his characteristic sympathy and humor, he introduces us to the Summum and their Seven Aphorisms, a Wiccan priestess who would deck her City Hall with a pagan holiday wreath, and other determined champions of free religious expression. As Wexler reminds us, anyone who cares about pluralism, equality, and fairness should support a public square filled with a variety of religious and nonreligious voices. The stakes are nothing short of long-term social peace.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 SynopsisAround the beginning of the twentieth century, Jewish writers and artists across Europe began depicting fellow Jews as savages or "primitive" tribesmen. Primitivism—the European appreciation of and fascination with so-called "primitive," non-Western peoples who were also subjugated and denigrated—was a powerful artistic critique of the modern world and was adopted by Jewish writers and artists to explore the urgent questions surrounding their own identity and status in Europe as insiders and outsiders. Jewish primitivism found expression in a variety of forms in Yiddish, Hebrew, and German literature, photography, and graphic art, including in the work of figures such as Franz Kafka, Y.L. Peretz, S. An-sky, Uri Zvi Greenberg, Else Lasker-Schüler, and Moï Ver. In Jewish Primitivism, Samuel J. Spinner argues that these and other Jewish modernists developed a distinct primitivist aesthetic that, by locating the savage present within Europe, challenged the idea of the threatening savage other from outside Europe on which much primitivism relied: in Jewish primitivism, the savage is already there. This book offers a new assessment of modern Jewish art and literature and shows how Jewish primitivism troubles the boundary between observer and observed, cultured and "primitive," colonizer and colonized.Trade Review"In this revelatory book, Samuel J. Spinner uncovers the paradoxical primitivist yearnings motivating a generation of Jewish visual artists and writers in Yiddish, German, and Hebrew. What happens when Jewish artists and writers see other Jews as the 'savage' other, as though Picasso's African masks had been carved by his own cousins?" —Gabriella Safran, Stanford University"Jewish Primitivism demonstrates that we cannot understand modern Jewish literature without looking at visual culture. In Samuel J. Spinner's engaging account, looking becomes both a methodological intervention and a narrative focal point. Rejecting parochial analysis, he shows that Jewish primitivism encompasses myriad versions of Jewish modernism and enables a rich analysis of its significance." —Na'ama Rokem, University of Chicago"Jewish Primitivism makes a compelling and truly fresh argument for placing the phenomenon of modernist primitivism practiced by Jewish writers and artists at the center of our attempts to understand the paradoxical position of Jews and Jewish art in 20th-century Europe, and consequently the crises of nation and nationalism—for Jews and non-Jews—that underwrite the upheavals and cataclysms of the period."—Madeleine Cohen, Los Angeles Review of Books"One of the many strengths of Jewish Primitivism is that it raises a diverse set of considerations. Spinner's illuminating study is essential reading for those interested in modernist primitivism, in Yiddish and German Jewish literatures, in the encounter of German Jews with east European Jews, and in Jewish modernism in general."—Ido Ben Harush, H-Judaic"This work is provocative in a good way.... [Jewish Primitivism] includes important discussions of sexism in the Jewish primitivism movement and of how the artists—both Jews and non-Jews—engaged with Orientalism. Recommended."—R. Shapiro, CHOICE"Spinner offers a very compelling—and often moving—account of this aesthetic mode, a study whose value the extensiveness of this review is meant to convey."—Jeffrey A. Grossman, In Geveb"Samuel Spinner's lucidly written new book,Jewish Primitivism, is an exciting new addition to a growing body of scholarship that has aimed to deprovincialize Eastern European Jewish literature through the lens of European literary modernism."—Allison Schacther, Hebrew Studies"Boldly taking on a loaded and fraught category of cultural and literary analysis, Samuel J. Spinner's Jewish Primitivism offers an entirely new model of conducting multilingual comparative analysis.Spinner opens multiple meanings of primitivism: it formed and informed elitist and classist distinctions of the civilized and the uncivilized and found extension in institutions, practices, ideologies of orientalism, and conceptual correlates of exoticism. Spinner also reinvigorates critical scrutiny of primitivism as a concept to tell a hitherto untold story of Jewish modernism, within and beyond the fault lines and permutations of the trilingualism of Hebrew, Yiddish, and German. He undoes and reassembles the central underpinnings of Jewish identities through language, literature, and lived culture. Jewish Primitivism is a model of print cultural studies that acknowledges the coexistence of the written and spoken, of print and oral, of classic and folk."—selection committee for the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Studies in the Germanic Languages and LiteraturesTable of ContentsIntroduction 1. The Beginnings of Jewish Primitivism: Folklorism and Peretz 2. The Plausibility of Jewish Primitivism 3. The Possibility of Jewish Primitivism: Kafka 4. The Politics of Jewish Primitivism: Else Lasker-Schüler and Uri Zvi Grinberg 5. The Aesthetics of Jewish Primitivism I: Der Nister's Literary Abstraction 6. The Aesthetics of Jewish Primitivism II: Avant-Garde Photography and the Shtetl Conclusion

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Book SynopsisThe Oldest Guard tells the story of Zionist settler memory in and around the private Jewish agricultural colonies (moshavot) established in late nineteenth-century Ottoman Palestine. Though they grew into the backbone of lucrative citrus and wine industries of mandate Palestine and Israel, absorbed tens of thousands of Jewish immigrants, and became known as the "first wave" (First Aliyah) of Zionist settlement, these communities have been regarded—and disregarded—in the history of Zionism as sites of conservatism, lack of ideology, and resistance to Labor Zionist politics. Treating the "First Aliyah" as a symbol created and deployed only in retrospect, Liora R. Halperin offers a richly textured portrait of commemorative practices between the 1920s and the 1960s. Drawing connections to memory practices in other settler societies, The Oldest Guard demonstrates how private agriculturalists and their advocates in the Zionist center and on the right celebrated and forged the "First Aliyah" past, revealing the centrality of settlement to Zionist collective memory and the politics of Zionist settler "firstness."Trade Review"In this extremely important work on Israeli national memory and periodization, Liora Halperin offers new ways to think about early Jewish settlement in Ottoman Palestine. Halperin's insightful reading of the first Aliyah colonies unpacks the complex relationship between Ashkenazim, Mizrahim, and Palestinians in the modern state of Israel: a state whose perceptions of its past were, and are, in a constant state of flux." —Orit Bashkin, University of Chicago"The Oldest Guard casts new light on not only Israeli history but also key issues in the history of nationalism and colonialism, such as tensions between local and statist identifications, concepts of 'firstness' in national narratives, and settler-colonial memory." —Derek Penslar, Harvard University"Halperin's book is a unique history of Zionist memory in that it does not limit its approach to actors from particular Zionist movements or institutions. The book while nominally focused on the 'First Aliyah' generation is about much more: Labor Zionism, Revisionist Zionism, Palestinian agriculturalists, Holocaust survivor and Mizrahi immigrants to the State of Israel after its establishment, and even the history of continued settlement up until today. The book will serve as a fantastic resource for advanced undergraduate and graduate students in Jewish Studies and Middle East Studies."—Ryan Zohar, Association of Jewish Libraries News and Reviews"Through descriptions of Purim parades, local museums, and the life of Avraham Shapira, an iconic figure in the First Aliya, Halperin does a brilliant job keeping the reader connected throughout... [The Oldest Guard: Forging the Zionist Settler Path] provides a nuanced image of how perceptions of historical figures shift and transform over time as new generations gain power in shaping the narrative."—Louis A. Fishman, Israel Studies Review"It is this public image [of 'the First Aliya']—and its contradictions—which is the subject of Liora Halperin's excellent book, on the Zionist settler memory culture."—Yair Wallach, Quest: Issues in Contemporary Jewish HistoryTable of Contents0. Introduction: Mother of the Colonies 1. Private Farmers and the Origins of "First Aliyah" Claims-Making 2. Arab Labor and the Rhetoric of Hierarchical Coexistence in Mandate Palestine 3. The Old Guard on Display 4. The Colony and the Village: Constructions of Coexistence after the Nakba 5. Jewish Immigrants and the Politics of Settler "First Ones," 1948–1967 Conclusion: Thinking about the First Aliyah after 1967

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Book SynopsisThe Oldest Guard tells the story of Zionist settler memory in and around the private Jewish agricultural colonies (moshavot) established in late nineteenth-century Ottoman Palestine. Though they grew into the backbone of lucrative citrus and wine industries of mandate Palestine and Israel, absorbed tens of thousands of Jewish immigrants, and became known as the "first wave" (First Aliyah) of Zionist settlement, these communities have been regarded—and disregarded—in the history of Zionism as sites of conservatism, lack of ideology, and resistance to Labor Zionist politics. Treating the "First Aliyah" as a symbol created and deployed only in retrospect, Liora R. Halperin offers a richly textured portrait of commemorative practices between the 1920s and the 1960s. Drawing connections to memory practices in other settler societies, The Oldest Guard demonstrates how private agriculturalists and their advocates in the Zionist center and on the right celebrated and forged the "First Aliyah" past, revealing the centrality of settlement to Zionist collective memory and the politics of Zionist settler "firstness."Trade Review"In this extremely important work on Israeli national memory and periodization, Liora Halperin offers new ways to think about early Jewish settlement in Ottoman Palestine. Halperin's insightful reading of the first Aliyah colonies unpacks the complex relationship between Ashkenazim, Mizrahim, and Palestinians in the modern state of Israel: a state whose perceptions of its past were, and are, in a constant state of flux." —Orit Bashkin, University of Chicago"The Oldest Guard casts new light on not only Israeli history but also key issues in the history of nationalism and colonialism, such as tensions between local and statist identifications, concepts of 'firstness' in national narratives, and settler-colonial memory." —Derek Penslar, Harvard University"Halperin's book is a unique history of Zionist memory in that it does not limit its approach to actors from particular Zionist movements or institutions. The book while nominally focused on the 'First Aliyah' generation is about much more: Labor Zionism, Revisionist Zionism, Palestinian agriculturalists, Holocaust survivor and Mizrahi immigrants to the State of Israel after its establishment, and even the history of continued settlement up until today. The book will serve as a fantastic resource for advanced undergraduate and graduate students in Jewish Studies and Middle East Studies."—Ryan Zohar, Association of Jewish Libraries News and Reviews"Through descriptions of Purim parades, local museums, and the life of Avraham Shapira, an iconic figure in the First Aliya, Halperin does a brilliant job keeping the reader connected throughout... [The Oldest Guard: Forging the Zionist Settler Path] provides a nuanced image of how perceptions of historical figures shift and transform over time as new generations gain power in shaping the narrative."—Louis A. Fishman, Israel Studies Review"It is this public image [of 'the First Aliya']—and its contradictions—which is the subject of Liora Halperin's excellent book, on the Zionist settler memory culture."—Yair Wallach, Quest: Issues in Contemporary Jewish HistoryTable of Contents0. Introduction: Mother of the Colonies 1. Private Farmers and the Origins of "First Aliyah" Claims-Making 2. Arab Labor and the Rhetoric of Hierarchical Coexistence in Mandate Palestine 3. The Old Guard on Display 4. The Colony and the Village: Constructions of Coexistence after the Nakba 5. Jewish Immigrants and the Politics of Settler "First Ones," 1948–1967 Conclusion: Thinking about the First Aliyah after 1967

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Book SynopsisOn Salafism offers a compelling new understanding of this phenomenon, both its development and contemporary manifestations. Salafism became associated with fundamentalism when the 9/11 Commission used it to explain the terror attacks and has since been connected with the violence of the so-called Islamic State. With this book, Azmi Bishara critically deconstructs claims of continuity between early Islam and modern militancy and makes a counterargument: Salafism is a wholly modern construct informed by specific sociopolitical contexts. Bishara offers a sophisticated account of various movements—such as Wahabbism and Hanbalism—frequently collapsed into simplistic understandings of Salafism. He distinguishes reformist from regressive Salafism, and examines patterns of modernization in the development of contemporary Islamic political movements and associations. In deconstructing the assumptions of linear continuity between traditional and contemporary movements, Bishara details various divergences in both doctrine and context of modern Salafisms, plural. On Salafism is a crucial read for those interested in Islamism, jihadism, and Middle East politics and history.Trade Review"On Salafism is a timely, erudite account of the genealogy of Salafism, covering a broad chronological and geographical scope. Azmi Bishara provides important correctives to recent scholarly approaches to Salafism, and forcefully demonstrates that modern articulations of Salafism are facets of ideological projects, not natural culminations of classical Islamic traditions." —Ahmad Dallal, American University in Cairo"On Salafism covers a subject too often the source of deep misunderstanding. Drawing on comprehensive social science research, Azmi Bishara develops a fully documented history that stuns."—François Burgat, French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS)"On Salafism unpacks the histories and meanings attributed to the term Salafism as invoked today.... This is a book for those interested in Islamic history, political movements, and theological debate. Recommended."—J. Alkorani, CHOICETable of ContentsChapter 1: What Is Salafism? Chapter 2: On Apostasy Chapter 3: Religious Associations and Political Movements Chapter 4: Wahhabism in Context Conclusion

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Book SynopsisThe Philosophical Pathos of Susan Taubes offers a detailed analysis of an extraordinary figure in the twentieth-century history of Jewish thought, Western philosophy, and the study of religion. Drawing on close readings of Susan Taubes's writings, including her correspondence with Jacob Taubes, scholarly essays, literary compositions, and poems, Elliot R. Wolfson plumbs the depths of the tragic sensibility that shaped her worldview, hovering between the poles of nihilism and hope. By placing Susan Taubes in dialogue with a host of other seminal thinkers, Wolfson illumines how she presciently explored the hypernomian status of Jewish ritual and belief after the Holocaust; the theopolitical challenges of Zionism and the dangers of ethnonationalism; the antitheological theology and gnostic repercussions of Heideggerian thought; the mystical atheism and apophaticism of tragedy in Simone Weil; and the understanding of poetry as the means to face the faceless and to confront the silence of death in the temporal overcoming of time through time. Wolfson delves into the abyss that molded Susan Taubes's mytheological thinking, making a powerful case for the continued relevance of her work to the study of philosophy and religion today.Trade Review"This fascinating book discloses a brilliant portrait of 'a forlorn being,' as Susan Taubes called herself. In letting us eavesdrop on her astonishing thinking, Wolfson writes with a poetic lucidity—and a passion—worthy of his subject."—Vivian Liska, University of Antwerp"Immersing himself in Susan Taubes's texts, Wolfson makes a major contribution to contemporary Jewish thought. Rich, philosophical, and poetic, this book masterfully embeds Susan Taubes's work in a broad network of historical and contemporary thinkers."—Elad Lapidot, University of LilleTable of ContentsIntroduction: Memory and Heeding the Murmuring of the Israelites 1. Ghosts of Judaism and the Serpent Devouring Its Own Tale 2. Zionism and the Sacramental Danger of Nationalism 3. Gnosis and the Covert Theology of Antitheology: Heidegger, Apocalypticism, and Gnosticism 4. Tragedy, Mystical Atheism, and the Apophaticism of Simone Weil 5. Facing the Faceless: Poetic Truth, Temporal Oblivion, and the Silence of Death

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Book SynopsisDespite its pervasive reputation as a place of religious extremes and war, Afghanistan has a complex and varied religious landscape where elements from a broad spectrum of religious belief vie for a place in society. It is also one of the birthplaces of a widely practiced variant of Islam: Sufism. Contemporary analysts suggest that Sufism is on the decline due to war and the ideological hardening that results from societies in conflict. However, in Sufi Civilities, Annika Schmeding argues that this is far from a truthful depiction. Members of Sufi communities have worked as resistance fighters, aid workers, business people, actors, professors, and daily workers in creative and ingenious ways to keep and renew their networks of community support. Based on long-term ethnographic field research among multiple Sufi communities in different urban areas of Afghanistan, the book examines navigational strategies employed by Sufi leaders over the past four decades to weather periods of instability and persecution, showing how they adapted to changing conditions in novel ways that crafted Sufism as a force in the civil sphere. This book offers a rare on-the-ground view into how Sufi leaders react to moments of transition within a highly insecure environment, and how humanity shines through the darkness during times of turmoil.Trade Review"An engaging, compelling, and beautifully-written ethnography that traverses the heterogeneous Sufi sociosphere of contemporary Afghanistan. Schmeding documents, in arresting detail and acute sensitivity, the dexterity of Sufi adepts in creating and maintaining civil communities amidst violence and ruptures. At once profound, riveting, and timely, the book is a vital contribution to the study of religion and civil society."—Ismail Fajrie Alatas, New York University"Sufi Civilities opens the door to a marvelous world of faith that lies hidden in plain sight. Schmeding's path breaking ethnographic account of diverse Sufi communities in contemporary Afghanistan is both new and exciting. Over the past half century they have outlasted every radical political regime that failed to appreciate just how deeply Sufism is embedded in Afghanistan's Islamic culture."—Thomas Barfield, Boston University"Afghan Sufis have been hidden from view by attention to mujahidin, Taliban, and al-Qaida. Through astute anthropological observation, Annika Schmeding shows how Sufis became important players in the contests for religious authority that emerged from the cultural whirligig of a NATO-supported Islamic Republic. This is a major contribution to the study of modern Afghanistan."—Nile Green, University of California, Los Angeles

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Book SynopsisA photograph with faint writing on the back. A traveling chess set. A silver pin. In her new memoir, noted scholar and author Susan Rubin Suleiman uses such everyday objects and the memories they evoke to tell the story of her early life as a Holocaust refugee and American immigrant. In this coming-of-age story that probes the intergenerational complexities of immigrant families and the inevitability of loss, Susan looks to her own life as an example of how historical events shape our private lives. After the Nazis marched into Hungary in 1944, five-year old Susan learned to call herself by a Christian name, hiding with false papers in Budapest with her parents. While her relatives in the provinces would be among the 450,000 Hungarian Jews deported to Auschwitz, Susan's close family survived and even thrived in the years following the war. But when the Communist Party took over Hungary, Susan and her parents emigrated to Chicago by way of Vienna, Paris, Haiti, and New York. In her adult life as a prominent feminist professor, she rarely allowed herself to think about these chapters of her past—but eventually, when she had children of her own, she found herself called back to Budapest, unlocking memories that would change the direction of her scholarship and career. At the center of this richly textured memoir is a little girl who grows up happy despite the traumas of her early years, surrounded by a loving family. As a teenager in the 1950s, she is determined to become "100% American," until a post-college year in Paris leads her to realize that her European roots and Americanness can coexist. At once an intellectual autobiography and a reflection on the nature of memory, identity, and home, Daughter of History invites us to consider how the objects that underpin our lives become gateways to our past.Trade Review"A memoir of heart and soul, of ideas and intimations. On page after page, it reminds us that we think with the objects we love and we love the objects we think with. Compelling, sophisticated, accessible—it's a gift."—Sherry Turkle, MIT Professor, author of Reclaiming Conversation and The Empathy Diaries: A Memoir"Memoir writing, for Susan Rubin Suleiman, is a process of reconciliation. Daughter of History is a compelling journey reconciling intimate memories with the violent history of the twentieth century. The resilience that enables survival is everywhere visible in this story of a vivid writer and groundbreaking scholar who has turned her sharp analytic lens on her own life."—Marianne Hirsch, author of The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust"In exquisitely detailing not only what she can remember but what she can't—including, at one point, her own name—Susan Rubin Suleiman limns history's mark on even her ability to feel. And yet that's not the whole of her story: equally moving is the restorative power of literature. This is marvelous, riveting reading—courageous, insightful and inspiring."—Gish Jen, author of Thank You, Mr. Nixon and The Resisters"Using photographs as the spur to memory, Susan Rubin Suleiman takes us on a journey of 'unforgetting.' Like Proust, she is in search of lost time, and in this beautifully written and psychologically wise book, she tells the story of how she became American. Sentences trail her from the farm outside Budapest where she is left at age 5 while Nazis round up Jews in the city to the high school outside Chicago where she is dropped by a girl she had thought her best friend: If I don't get used to this, I'll die, If you don't want me, I'll do without you, along with her mother's admonition don't look as if you didn't belong here. She is history's fortunate daughter and this is a tale of survival. I read it straight through and then it stayed with me, this remarkable study of what she calls 'history's axe'—because here, in a voice so intimate it is as though she is speaking to a close friend, Suleiman reconnects past and present."—Carol Gilligan, author of In a Different Voice and co-author of Why Does Patriarchy Persist?"Written with insight and vivid detail, Suleiman's memoir encourages us all to consider how the relationship between our personal past and the times and events in which we live helps shape us into who we are now."—Abby Remer, Martha's Vineyard Times"Daughter of History: Traces of an Immigrant Girlhood is an absorbing sequential narrative of [Suleiman's] life. It too uses photographs, which serve as catalysts to trigger memories from childhood."—Eva Fogelman, Moment Magazine"This is a very interesting book which is very readable and its description of life in Hungary during the Holocaust and the long way to real freedom is an important addition to the works that explain the very difficult post Holocaust life of survivors. This title is recommended for every library as it is informative and a pleasure to read."—Michlean Lowy Amir, Association of Jewish Libraries ReviewsTable of ContentsContents and Abstracts

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Book SynopsisWorld War II produced a fundamental shift in modern racial discourse. In the postwar period, racism was situated for the first time at the center of international political life, and race's status as conceptual common sense and a justification for colonial rule was challenged with new intensity. In response to this crisis of race, the UN and UNESCO initiated a project of racial reeducation. This global antiracist campaign was framed by the persecution of Europe's Jews and anchored by UNESCO's epochal 1950 Statement on Race, which redefined the race concept and canonized the midcentury liberal antiracist consensus that continues to shape our present. In this book, Sonali Thakkar tells the story of how UNESCO's race project directly influenced anticolonial thought and made Jewish difference and the Holocaust enduring preoccupations for anticolonial and postcolonial writers. Drawing on UNESCO's rich archival resources and shifting between the scientific, social scientific, literary, and cultural, Thakkar offers new readings of a varied collection of texts from the postcolonial, Jewish, and Black diasporic traditions. Anticolonial thought and postcolonial literature critically recast liberal scientific antiracism, Thakkar argues, and the concepts central to this new moral economy were the medium for postcolonialism's engagement with Jewishness. By recovering these connections, she shows how the midcentury crisis of racial meaning shaped the kinds of solidarities between racialized subjects that are thinkable today.Trade Review"The Reeducation of Raceis a brilliant and original study of liberalism, racial formation, and anticolonial thought. Ambitious, wide-ranging, and provocative, the book brings together fields of study too often siloed, anchored by a virtuoso reading of the UNESCO Statement on Race. Thakkar's confident and lucid voice rethinks race and plasticity forever."—Yogita Goyal, University of California, Los Angeles"Through the unlikely lens of post-World War II UNESCO, this book provides real and really new insight into the attempt to recover a liberal postwar order after the racial horror of World War II, and into the limitations of institutional antiracism in those same years. It will be a landmark contribution to the current effort to articulate the politics of Jewishness with both Black and anticolonial theory. We will be reading it carefully in the years to come."—Jonathan Boyarin, Cornell University"Sonali Thakkar's brilliant first book begins as a mystery of sorts. When and why did the word 'equality' get swapped out of the 1950 UNESCO Statement on Race, to be replaced by 'educability, plasticity'? Answering that question sheds important light on how the colonialist legacy tainted the liberal anti-racism of the postwar period."—John Plotz, Public BooksTable of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction: The Reeducation of Race 1. Rupture and Renewal 2. The Racial Residuum 3. Culture and Conversion 4. Reeducation as Repair Coda: The Waning Consensus Notes Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisThe Afterlife of Ottoman Europe examines how Bosnian Muslims navigated the Ottoman and Habsburg domains following the Habsburg occupation of Bosnia Herzegovina after the 1878 Berlin Congress. Prominent members of the Ottoman imperial polity, Bosnian Muslims became minority subjects of Austria-Hungary, developing a relationship with the new authorities in Vienna while transforming their interactions with Istanbul and the rest of the Muslim world. Leyla Amzi-Erdoğdular explores the enduring influence of the Ottoman Empire during this period—an influence perpetuated by the efforts of the imperial state from afar, and by its former subjects in Bosnia Herzegovina negotiating their new geopolitical reality. Muslims' endeavors to maintain their prominence and shape their organizations and institutions influenced imperial considerations and policies on occupation, sovereignty, minorities, and migration. This book introduces Ottoman archival sources and draws on Ottoman and Eastern European historiographies to reframe the study of Habsburg Bosnia Herzegovina within broader intellectual and political trends at the turn of the twentieth century. Tracing transregional connections, imperial continuities, and multilayered allegiances, The Afterlife of Ottoman Europe bridges Ottoman, Islamic, Middle Eastern, and Balkan studies. Amzi-Erdoğdular tells the story of Muslims who redefined their place and influence in both empires and the modern world, and argues for the inclusion of Islamic intellectual history within the history of Bosnia Herzegovina and Eastern Europe.Trade Review"Crossing over multiple intellectual networks and travel routes, Leyla Amzi-Erdogdular opens an expansive view of the emerging debates between the late Ottoman and Habsburg empires. Taking us through Sarajevo, Istanbul, Vienna, and many surprising stops along the way, her outstanding analysis contributes insights about overlapping allegiances and transimperial notions of sovereignty that will resonate with scholars well beyond Balkan history."—Edin Hajdarpasic, Loyola University Chicago"Never before has a study of the Habsburg period in Bosnia Herzegovina placed Bosnian Muslim agency and loyalties to both the Habsburg and Ottoman empires at the center of its analysis. Centering Ottoman sources, this pathbreaking work shows that Bosnia did not 'stop being Ottoman' in 1878. Under Habsburg rule, Bosnian Muslims continued to appeal to Ottoman authority and developed a form of Muslim modernity that outlasted both empires."—Maureen Healy, Lewis & Clark College"Few works have been able to scrutinize empire's influence on the modern world with the rigor, focus and brilliance displayed in this remarkable monograph. Offering a thoroughly researched case study of the afterlife of Ottoman Bosnia, it provides a model for how to think about the lasting effects of the old empires and will prove indispensable not only to historians of the Balkans, but to anyone interested in modern Europe and its relationship to the world around it."—Mark Mazower, Columbia UniversityTable of ContentsIntroduction 1. Diplomacies of Separation 2. Migration: Those Who Left 3. Hijra: Views and Debates on Migration 4. Competing Empires 5. Negotiating Imperial Ties: Mobilization and Politics 6. Allegiances and Final Separation Epilogue: Alternative Muslim Modernities

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Book SynopsisAfter the trauma of mass violence and massive population movements around the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947, both new nation states faced the enormous challenge of creating new national narratives, symbols, and histories, as well as a new framework for their political life. While leadership in India claimed the anti-colonial movement, Gandhi, and a civilizational legacy in the subcontinent, the new political elite in Pakistan were faced with a more complex task: to carve out a separate and distinct Muslim history and political tradition from a millennium long history of cultural and religious interaction, mixing, and coexistence. Drawing on a rich archive of diverse sources, Ali Qasmi traces the complex development of ideas of citizenship and national belonging in the postcolonial Muslim state, offering a nuanced and sweeping history of the country's formative period. Qasmi paints a rich picture of the long, arduous, and often conflict-ridden process of writing a democratic constitution of Pakistan, while simultaneously narrating the invention of a range of new rituals of state—such as the exact color of the flag, the precise date of birth of the national poet of Pakistan, and the observation of Eid as a "national festival"—providing an illuminating analysis of the practices of being Pakistani, and a new portrait of Muslim history in the subcontinent.Trade Review"Complementing the burgeoning scholarly literature on citizenship, Qasmi's insightful and erudite book foregrounds Pakistan's efforts to frame a conception of citizenship through a range of symbolic trappings of national sovereignty such as the anthem, archives, flag, museums and much more. Based on extensive research in the infamously inaccessible national archives, he demonstrates the myriad contestations that continue to shape conceptions of citizenship in post-colonial Pakistan. Notable in this regard is his revealing study of the reasons for the perennial controversy between the state and the ulema over moon sighting to mark the end of the Muslim month of fasting. A must read for students, scholars and anyone interested in the evolution of citizenship in South Asia, this is an especially welcome addition to the historical scholarship on Pakistan."—Ayesha Jalal, Tufts University"Embedding important legal and political decisions about the meaning of sovereignty within the lively debates in civil society that prompted, shaped, and defined them, Qasmi has written one of the liveliest cultural and conceptual histories of Pakistan to date."—Faisal Devji, University of Oxford"Combining theory with empirical 'hard evidence', ...Qaum, Mulk, Sultanatrepresents a veritable game changer in terms of bringing Pakistani developments to bear on wider global theoretical debates, and in the process relocating Pakistan to the heart—rather than languishing on the side-lines—of such discussions."—Sarah Ansari, Bloomsbury PakistanTable of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction 1. Noah's Ark? The Making of Pakistan as a Homeland for Muslim Nationals 2. Quilting Islam: Pakistan as an Islamic Republic 3. Making the State National: Symbols, Flag, and Anthem 4. Over the Moon:Ulema, State, and Authority in Pakistan 5. Scripting the National Time and Space: Archive, Calendar, Roads, and Museums Postscript: A New Beginning - My Fellow Countrymen Notes Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisAfter the trauma of mass violence and massive population movements around the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947, both new nation states faced the enormous challenge of creating new national narratives, symbols, and histories, as well as a new framework for their political life. While leadership in India claimed the anti-colonial movement, Gandhi, and a civilizational legacy in the subcontinent, the new political elite in Pakistan were faced with a more complex task: to carve out a separate and distinct Muslim history and political tradition from a millennium long history of cultural and religious interaction, mixing, and coexistence. Drawing on a rich archive of diverse sources, Ali Qasmi traces the complex development of ideas of citizenship and national belonging in the postcolonial Muslim state, offering a nuanced and sweeping history of the country's formative period. Qasmi paints a rich picture of the long, arduous, and often conflict-ridden process of writing a democratic constitution of Pakistan, while simultaneously narrating the invention of a range of new rituals of state—such as the exact color of the flag, the precise date of birth of the national poet of Pakistan, and the observation of Eid as a "national festival"—providing an illuminating analysis of the practices of being Pakistani, and a new portrait of Muslim history in the subcontinent.Trade Review"Complementing the burgeoning scholarly literature on citizenship, Qasmi's insightful and erudite book foregrounds Pakistan's efforts to frame a conception of citizenship through a range of symbolic trappings of national sovereignty such as the anthem, archives, flag, museums and much more. Based on extensive research in the infamously inaccessible national archives, he demonstrates the myriad contestations that continue to shape conceptions of citizenship in post-colonial Pakistan. Notable in this regard is his revealing study of the reasons for the perennial controversy between the state and the ulema over moon sighting to mark the end of the Muslim month of fasting. A must read for students, scholars and anyone interested in the evolution of citizenship in South Asia, this is an especially welcome addition to the historical scholarship on Pakistan."—Ayesha Jalal, Tufts University"Embedding important legal and political decisions about the meaning of sovereignty within the lively debates in civil society that prompted, shaped, and defined them, Qasmi has written one of the liveliest cultural and conceptual histories of Pakistan to date."—Faisal Devji, University of Oxford"Combining theory with empirical 'hard evidence', ...Qaum, Mulk, Sultanatrepresents a veritable game changer in terms of bringing Pakistani developments to bear on wider global theoretical debates, and in the process relocating Pakistan to the heart—rather than languishing on the side-lines—of such discussions."—Sarah Ansari, Bloomsbury PakistanTable of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction 1. Noah's Ark? The Making of Pakistan as a Homeland for Muslim Nationals 2. Quilting Islam: Pakistan as an Islamic Republic 3. Making the State National: Symbols, Flag, and Anthem 4. Over the Moon:Ulema, State, and Authority in Pakistan 5. Scripting the National Time and Space: Archive, Calendar, Roads, and Museums Postscript: A New Beginning - My Fellow Countrymen Notes Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisNew York, Washington, Madrid, London and now Paris Ð the list of Western cities targeted by radical Islamic terrorists waging global jihad continues to grow. Does this extreme violence committed in the name of Islam point to a fundamental enmity between the Muslim faith and the West? In this compelling essay, leading scholar of Islam Tamara Sonn argues that whilst the West has many enemies among Muslims, it is politics not religion that informs their grievances. The longer these demands remain frustrated, the more violence has escalated and recruitment to groups like Islamic State has increased. Far from quelling the spread of Islamic extremism, Western military intervention has helped to turn nationalist movements into radical terrorist groups with international agendas. Islam, Sonn concludes, is not the problem, just as war is not the solution.Trade Review“It is no surprise that this lucid and insightful treatment of such a fraught topic should come from none other than Tamara Sonn, one of the leading scholars of Islam today. The author subjects some of the most pervasive stereotypes of Muslims current today - especially their alleged proclivity for violence - to trenchant analysis and confronts lurid depictions of Islam with sober facts. The result is a highly accessible and valuable study that compellingly undermines the all-too-common view that ‘Islam’ and ‘the West’ are at war with one another.” Asma Afsaruddin, Indiana University "Tamara Sonn's new book dispels the myths that portray Islam as inherently violent and antagonistic toward the West. She offers a compelling response and an essential antidote to the crude caricatures of Islam that pervade our post-9/11 world." Todd Green, Luther College, author of The Fear of Islam: An Introduction to Islamophobia in the West “Sonn’s excellent analysis introduces the reader to the voices of mainstream Muslims who speak out against terrorism; voices that tend to be drowned in the public discourse. Sonn convincingly argues that common grievances among Muslims should not be confused with common religious beliefs. This incisive little book is a reminder that politics, and not religion, is the cause of grievances that leads some to engage in terrorism.” Nelly Lahoud, Institute for Strategic Studies-Middle East “A concise but remarkably comprehensive analysis of a major element in contemporary global affairs - the relations between Islam and the West. Sonn’s thorough knowledge of both mainstream and extremist Muslim thought and movements gives a depth to this study that goes well beyond the usual coverage of this significant subject.” John O. Voll, Professor Emeritus of Islamic History, Georgetown University “Policymakers, government leaders, media pundits, terrorism experts and terrorists alike, as well as militant Muslim and Christian preachers continue to speak of a ‘clash of civilizations’ between Islam and the West or the Islamic threat. In Is Islam and Enemy of the West? Tamara Sonn, a distinguished expert on Islam and Muslim politics, addresses these concerns head-on in a major book that combines an impressive range of scholarship with an accessible and engaging style.” John L. Esposito, University Professor, Georgetown University and author of Unholy War: Terror in the Name of Islam and The Future of Islam. “Tamara Sonn’s new book, Is Islam an Enemy of the West?, deserves a wide readership - and particularly by those with influence but little knowledge of Islam. If the old saw that the truth will set you free has any resonance, readers will find an example of it here.” Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to secretary of state Colin Powell and professor of government and public policy"Sonn's book has many virtues. Writing clearly and effectively, Sonn shows her impressive knowledge about Islam and politics. This book will help policymakers as well as ordinary citizens to break their misunderstanding about Islam....Overall, this book offers a very timely and important contribution to understanding the current status of Islam in the West. Given rising intolerance and misunderstanding toward Islam around the world, I highly recommend this book."H-Net Reviews

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Book SynopsisNew York, Washington, Madrid, London and now Paris Ð the list of Western cities targeted by radical Islamic terrorists waging global jihad continues to grow. Does this extreme violence committed in the name of Islam point to a fundamental enmity between the Muslim faith and the West? In this compelling essay, leading scholar of Islam Tamara Sonn argues that whilst the West has many enemies among Muslims, it is politics not religion that informs their grievances. The longer these demands remain frustrated, the more violence has escalated and recruitment to groups like Islamic State has increased. Far from quelling the spread of Islamic extremism, Western military intervention has helped to turn nationalist movements into radical terrorist groups with international agendas. Islam, Sonn concludes, is not the problem, just as war is not the solution.Trade Review“It is no surprise that this lucid and insightful treatment of such a fraught topic should come from none other than Tamara Sonn, one of the leading scholars of Islam today. The author subjects some of the most pervasive stereotypes of Muslims current today - especially their alleged proclivity for violence - to trenchant analysis and confronts lurid depictions of Islam with sober facts. The result is a highly accessible and valuable study that compellingly undermines the all-too-common view that ‘Islam’ and ‘the West’ are at war with one another.” Asma Afsaruddin, Indiana University "Tamara Sonn's new book dispels the myths that portray Islam as inherently violent and antagonistic toward the West. She offers a compelling response and an essential antidote to the crude caricatures of Islam that pervade our post-9/11 world." Todd Green, Luther College, author of The Fear of Islam: An Introduction to Islamophobia in the West “Sonn’s excellent analysis introduces the reader to the voices of mainstream Muslims who speak out against terrorism; voices that tend to be drowned in the public discourse. Sonn convincingly argues that common grievances among Muslims should not be confused with common religious beliefs. This incisive little book is a reminder that politics, and not religion, is the cause of grievances that leads some to engage in terrorism.” Nelly Lahoud, Institute for Strategic Studies-Middle East “A concise but remarkably comprehensive analysis of a major element in contemporary global affairs - the relations between Islam and the West. Sonn’s thorough knowledge of both mainstream and extremist Muslim thought and movements gives a depth to this study that goes well beyond the usual coverage of this significant subject.” John O. Voll, Professor Emeritus of Islamic History, Georgetown University “Policymakers, government leaders, media pundits, terrorism experts and terrorists alike, as well as militant Muslim and Christian preachers continue to speak of a ‘clash of civilizations’ between Islam and the West or the Islamic threat. In Is Islam and Enemy of the West? Tamara Sonn, a distinguished expert on Islam and Muslim politics, addresses these concerns head-on in a major book that combines an impressive range of scholarship with an accessible and engaging style.” John L. Esposito, University Professor, Georgetown University and author of Unholy War: Terror in the Name of Islam and The Future of Islam. “Tamara Sonn’s new book, Is Islam an Enemy of the West?, deserves a wide readership - and particularly by those with influence but little knowledge of Islam. If the old saw that the truth will set you free has any resonance, readers will find an example of it here.” Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to secretary of state Colin Powell and professor of government and public policy"Sonn's book has many virtues. Writing clearly and effectively, Sonn shows her impressive knowledge about Islam and politics. This book will help policymakers as well as ordinary citizens to break their misunderstanding about Islam....Overall, this book offers a very timely and important contribution to understanding the current status of Islam in the West. Given rising intolerance and misunderstanding toward Islam around the world, I highly recommend this book."H-Net Reviews

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Book SynopsisAdonis� influence on Arabic literature has been likened to that of T. S. Eliot in the English-speaking world. Yet alongside this spearheading of a modernist literary revolution, the secular Syrian-born poet is also renowned for his persistent and staunch attacks on despotism across the Arab world. In these conversations with the psychoanalyst Houria Abdelouahed, Adonis brings into sharp relief the latest wave of violence and war to engulf Arabic countries, tracing the cause of ongoing tensions back to the beginnings of Islam itself. Since the death of the prophet Muhammad, Islam has been used as a political and economic weapon, exploiting and reinforcing tribal divisions to aid the pursuit of power. Adonis argues that recent events in the Middle East – from the failures of the Arab Spring to the rise of ISIS and the bloody war in his native Syria – attest to the destructive effects of an Islamic worldview that prohibits any notion of plurality and breeds violence. If there is to be any hope of peace or progress in the Arab world, it is therefore imperative that these mentalities are overcome. In their place, Adonis urges a new spirit of enquiry, embodied in the freedoms to interrogate the past and to question cultural norms. Adonis� penetrating analysis comes at a critical time, offering an alternative path to the cycle of violence that plagues the Arab world today. Trade Review�Today�s most daring and provocative Arab poet.� Edward Said �The Arab world's greatest living poet.� New York Times �Faith is like love, Adonis tells us; it falls within personal experience. Violence and Islam explores a multiplicity of modern interpretations that give rise to forms of faith and forms of barbarity. Adonis, in his powerful secular voice, here again proves why he is one of the most important literary figures of our times.' V.S. NaipaulTable of ContentsForeword A Spring without Swallows The Necessity of Rereading: History and Identity Rethinking the Fundamentals What does the foundational text say? Women and the windings of the Text Beyond Economic and Geopolitical Interests: The Drives The West: Passionately, Madly Art, Myth, Religion Poetry between Language and Precept Beyond Al-Kit b How to Conclude? A Last Word Against essentialism The notion of progress in the Islamic conception of man and the world Glossary Notes

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Book SynopsisThere is widespread concern today about the “radicalization” of young muslim men, and the deprived areas of Western cities are believed to have become breeding grounds of home-grown extremism. But how do young Muslims growing up in the cities of the West really live? This book takes us beyond the rhetoric and into the housing estates on the outskirts of Paris to meet Adama, Radouane, Hassan, Tarik, Marley, and a shadowy figure whose name suddenly and brutally became known to the world at the time of the Charlie Hebdo shootings: Amédy Coulibaly. Seeing Amédy through the eyes of close friends and other young Muslim men in the neighbourhoods where they grew up, Fabien Truong uncovers a network of competing loyalties and maps the road these youths take to resolve the conflicts they face: becoming Muslim. For these young men, Islam stands, often alone, as a resource, a gateway – as if it were the last route to “escape” without betrayal and to “fight” in a meaningful and noble way. Becoming Muslim does not necessarily lead to the radicalized “other”. It is more like a long-distance race, a powerful reconversion of the self that allows for introspection and change. But it can also lead to a belligerent presentation of the self that transforms a dead-end into a call to arms.Trade Review"Truong vividly describes the lives of young men from immigrant backgrounds in the Paris banlieue, charting their trajectories from dropping out of school towards crime and then prison. This is an extremely valuable book, rich in ethnographic detail and very well written: I was irresistibly drawn in to this world of kickbacks, payoffs and unsettlingly deep resentment against the whole of French society."—David Lehmann, University of Cambridge, UK "Truong take us deep inside the personal world of six immigrant young men from France's disreputable urban periphery. He shows how they navigate the promises and demands of the school, the street economy, the prison and the police, and why they are attracted (or not) by Islam as a 'floating political imaginary.' An insightful and urgent contribution to the analysis of the social fabrication of terrorists that punctures the sonorous but empty notion of 'radicalization.'"—Loïc Wacquant, University of California, Berkeley "It is not a clash of civilizations that Fabien Truong vividly describes but a collapse of communities, as young men in transitional stages of their life search for significance in the West's Muslim diaspora. If you want to understand how most overcome feelings of rootlessness and despair and how a few become jihadis, read this book."—Scott Atran, CNRS, Paris, and University of Oxford "... an excellent ethnography of Muslim masculinity."—Times Higher Education "... a thoughtful, well-crafted ethnography that humanizes the faceless, amorphous 'Muslim youth' of the French banlieues."—Los Angeles Review of Books "Radicalized Loyalties is an outstanding study of the social worlds of immigrant young men living in the urban periphery of Paris.... The book will be of great interest to scholars within the cross-disciplinary field of (counter)terrorism studies as well as to social scientists and anthropologists interested in state-margin relationships, Islam, the secular state, and the administration of the urban periphery in the West."EthnosTable of ContentsNote to the Reader Acknowledgements Introduction: The call of the ground Friday the 13th Behind absurdity, the social world The magic of "radicalization" A bad religion for "bad seeds"? Finding Allah at street-level Chapter 1: Common histories Making a home in public housing: a French history "Boys will be boys" Conflicting loyalties, recognition of debts "A white fence-post in a dark forest" Rebels without a cause, or a cause without rebels? Chapter 2: On the margins of the city Imprints of school The incompleteness of le business Common criminals Masculine machines Police, death, and hatred: a political trinity Chapter 3: Reconversions Being or becoming Muslim? The "community" illusion The Koran: reading and sharing In the here and now: getting better Beyond the here and now: being the best The value of reconversion and the reconversion of values Chapter 4: War and Peace Turning thirty: the verdict Toward a sociology of inner peace Kif-kif Desires for Syria: going off to war, over there "I am Amédy": at war, over here Epilogue Notes Index

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Book SynopsisSecrecy and Esoteric Writing in Kabbalistic Literature examines the strategies of esoteric writing that Kabbalists have used to conceal secrets in their writings, such that casual readers will only understand the surface meaning of their texts while those with greater insight will grasp the internal meaning. In addition to a broad description of esoteric writing throughout the long literary history of Kabbalah, this work analyzes kabbalistic secrecy in light of contemporary theories of secrecy. It also presents case studies of esoteric writing in the work of four of the first kabbalistic authors—Abraham ben David, Isaac the Blind, Ezra ben Solomon, and Asher ben David—and thereby helps recast our understanding of the earliest stages of kabbalistic literary history. The book will interest scholars in Jewish mysticism and Jewish philosophy, as well as those working in medieval Jewish history. Throughout, Jonathan V. Dauber has endeavored to write an accessible work that does not require extensive prior knowledge of kabbalistic thought. Accordingly, it finds points of contact between scholars of various religious traditions.Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Note on Translations of Biblical Verses Introduction. The Writing of Secrets Chapter 1. Secrets and Secretism Chapter 2. A Typology of Esoteric Writing in Kabbalistic Literature Chapter 3. Abraham ben David as an Esoteric Writer Chapter 4. Isaac the Blind’s Literary Legacy Chapter 5. Ezra ben Solomon of Gerona as an Esoteric Writer Chapter 6. Esotericism and Divine Unity in R. Asher ben David Conclusion Appendix 1 Appendix 2 Appendix 3 Notes Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisA wave of plague swept the cities of northern Italy in 1630–31, ravaging Christian and Jewish communities alike. In Writing Plague Susan L. Einbinder explores the Hebrew texts that lay witness to the event. These Jewish sources on the Great Italian Plague have never been treated together as a group, Einbinder observes, but they can contribute to a bigger picture of this major outbreak and how it affected people, institutions, and beliefs; how individuals and institutions responded; and how they did or did not try to remember and memorialize it. High self-consciousness characterizes many of the authorial voices, and the sophisticated and deliberate ways these authors represented themselves reveal a complex process of self-fashioning that equally contours the representation and meaning of plague. Conversely, it is under the strain of plague that conventions of self-fashioning come to the fore. In the end, what proves most striking is how quickly these accounts retreated into obscurity. Why was this plague, which was among the most documented of all outbreaks since the Black Death of the fourteenth century, ultimately consigned to silence in Jewish memory? Did the memory take shape outside the written or material remains that we typically consult, in ephemeral forms that were lost over time? How much were the official genres of commemoration responsible for the erosion of historical particularity? How much did these conventionalized forms of mourning help individuals find language for private experience? And how, conversely, was private experience reconfigured to signify public grief? Throughout Writing Plague, Einbinder unearths and analyzes a cluster of little-known texts, reading them as much for the things about which they remain silent as for the things they seem openly to express. It is a compelling hybrid work of literary criticism and historical reflection about premodern constructions of self and community.Trade Review"With its close readings and reconstructions that are at once imaginative and provocatively tempting, [Writing Plague] operates as a master class in literary sensitivity and literary interpretation in historical context. The final product is a book is written with a sensibility that is informed by sophisticated self-consciousness, drawn from insights from the social sciences but in a manner of the author’s own originality. Einbinder muses on the very mechanisms and media through which we come to grips with epidemic events, pushing back against the absolute claims of narrative in favor of a panoply of ways of writing, thinking, and experiencing plague. In Einbinder’s hands and through her eyes, the texts come to life with empathy and in their fullness, opening up windows into the collective and personal experiences of plague, and onto plague as an occasion to understand the very values that made up a selection of early modern selves." * The Marginalia Review of Books *

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Book SynopsisJewish Blues presents a broad cultural, social, and intellectual history of the color blue in Jewish life between the sixteenth and twenty-first centuries. Bridging diverse domains such as religious law, mysticism, eschatology, as well as clothing and literature, this book contends that, by way of a protracted process, the color blue has constituted a means through which Jews have understood themselves. In ancient Jewish texts, the term for blue, tekhelet, denotes a dye that serves Jewish ritual purposes. Since medieval times, however, Jews gradually ceased to use tekhelet in their ritual life. In the nineteenth century, however, interest in restoring ancient dyes increased among European scholars. In the Jewish case, rabbis and scientists attempted to reproduce the ancient tekhelet dye. The resulting dyes were gradually accepted in the ritual life of many Orthodox Jews. In addition to being a dye playing a role in Jewish ritual, blue features prominently in the Jewish mystical tradition, in Jewish magic and popular custom, and in Jewish eschatology. Blue is also representative of the Zionist movement, and it is the only chromatic color in the national flag of the State of Israel. Through the study of the changing roles and meanings attributed to the color blue in Judaism, Jewish Blues sheds new light on the power of a visual symbol in shaping the imagination of Jews throughout history. The use of the color blue continues to reflect pressing issues for Jews in our present era, as it has become a symbol of Jewish modernity.Trade Review"Gadi Sagiv’s Jewish Blues masterfully unravels the history of tekhelet, a biblically mandated blue pigment that was lost in antiquity, discussed by legalists, exegetes, and mystics for millennia, and rediscovered with messianic verve in recent decades. Sagiv has created a deeply polychrome and compelling narrative that stretches the blue thread of Jewish tradition to the very heart of contemporary culture studies." * Steven Fine, Yeshiva University *

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Book SynopsisIf politics is about the state, can a stateless people be political? Until recently, scholars were fiercely divided regarding whether Jews engaged in politics, displayed political wisdom, or penned works of political thought over the two millennia when there was no Jewish state. But over the past few decades, the field of Jewish political thought has begun to examine the ways in which Jewish individuals and communal organizations behaved politically even in diaspora. The King Is in the Field centers writing from leading scholars that serves as an introduction to this exciting field, providing critical resources for anyone interested in thinking about politics both within and beyond the state. From kabbalistic theology to economic philanthropy, from race and nationalism in the U.S. to Israeli legal discourse and feminist activism, this key study of Jewish political thought holds the promise to reorient the field of political thought as a whole by expanding conceptions of what counts as “political.” In a world in which statelessness now applies to 100 million individuals, this volume illuminates ways to understand how diaspora Jewish political thought functioned in adopted homelands. This approach allows the book to offer questions and analysis that add depth and breadth to academic studies of Jewish politics while simultaneously offering a blueprint for future volumes interrogating political action through multiple diasporas. Contributors: Samuel Hayim Brody, Lihi Ben Shitrit, Julie E. Cooper, Arye Edrei, Meirav Jones, Rebecca Kobrin, Vincent Lloyd, Menachem Lorberbaum, Shaul Magid, Assaf Tamari, Irene Tucker, Philipp Von Wussow, Michael Walzer.Trade Review"The essays in this important volume develop a broad and diverse array of Jewish political thinking in the Jewish past and present. Anyone interested in modern Jewish politics, and indeed in modern Judaism, will learn much from this book." * Leora F. Batnitzky, author of How Judaism Became a Religion: An Introduction to Modern Jewish Thought *

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Book SynopsisSpanning the fields of literature, history, philosophy, and theology, Unsettling Jewish Knowledge adopts a fresh approach to the study of Jewish thought and culture. By creatively foregrounding the role of emotions, senses, and the imagination in Jewish experience, the book invites readers to consider what it means for Jewish identity and experience to be constituted outside the frameworks of reasoned thought and inquiry. The collection’s eight essays offer innovative and provocative approaches to a diverse array of topics including modern Jewish-Christian relations, the book of Isaiah, contemporary Jewish fiction, and philosophical meditations on Jewish law. Their bold interpretations of Jewish texts and histories are centered on questions of faith, loss, prejudice, and enchantment—and the darker implications of these questions. The book’s essays also illuminate the importance of desire as a key motivating force in the pursuit of knowledge. Weaving together insights from several disciplines, Unsettling Jewish Knowledge challenges us to grapple with the unexpected, the unconventional, and the uncomfortable aspects of Jewish experience and its representations. Contributors: Anne C. Dailey, John Efron, Yael S. Feldman, Galit Hasan-Rokem, Martin Kavka, Lital Levy, Shaul Magid, Eva Mroczek, Paul E. Nahme, Eli Schonfeld, Shira Stav.Trade Review"What happens when Jewish studies attends to desire—the longing embedded in the texts, the practices, the people, the communities we study but also the love that fuels the Jewish studies scholar’s own passionate critical engagement? What is unsettled here are both the ways of doing scholarship, and the strangely hopeful possibilities that being unsettled can produce." * Laura Levitt, author of The Objects That Remain *"This is a groundbreaking collection of essays. The first of its kind, this superb book will ‘unsettle’ its readers in profound ways, inspiring them to seek new modes of academic inquiry." * Ilana Pardes, author of Ruth: A Migrant’s Tale *

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Book SynopsisEnvisioned as a tribe of ruddy-faced, redheaded, red-bearded Jewish warriors, bedecked in red attire who purportedly resided in isolation at the fringes of the known world, the Red Jews are a legendary people who populated a shared Jewish-Christian imagination. But in fact the red variant of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel is a singular invention of late medieval vernacular culture in Germany. This idiosyncratic figure, together with the peculiar term “Red Jews,” existed solely in German and Yiddish, the German-Jewish vernacular. These two language communities assessed the Red Jews differently and contested their significance, which is to say, they viewed them in different shades of red. The voyage of the Red Jews through the Jewish and Christian imagination, from their medieval Christian nascence, through early modern Old Yiddish literature, to modern Yiddish culture in Eastern Europe, Palestine, and America, is the story of this book. By studying this vernacular icon, Rebekka Voß contributes to our understanding of the formation of minority awareness and the construction of Ashkenazic Jewish identity through visual cultural encounters. She also spotlights the vitality of vernacular culture by demonstrating how the premodern motif of the Red Jews informed modern Yiddish literature, and how the stereotype of Jewish red hair found its way into Jewish social critiques, political thought, and arts through the present day. Sons of Saviors is a story about power: the Yiddish reappropriation of the Red Jews subverted the Christian color symbolism by adjusting the focus on redness from a negative stereotype into a proud badge of self-assertion. The book also includes in an appendix the full text of a significant Yiddish tale featuring the Red Jews.

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Book SynopsisThe Hebrew word zimzum originally means “contraction,” “withdrawal,” “retreat,” “limitation,” and “concentration.” In Kabbalah, zimzum is a term for God’s self-limitation, done before creating the world to create the world. Jewish mystic Isaac Luria coined this term in Galilee in the sixteenth century, positing that the God who was “Ein-Sof,” unlimited and omnipresent before creation, must concentrate himself in the zimzum and withdraw in order to make room for the creation of the world in God’s own center. At the same time, God also limits his infinite omnipotence to allow the finite world to arise. Without the zimzum there is no creation, making zimzum one of the basic concepts of Judaism. The Lurianic doctrine of the zimzum has been considered an intellectual showpiece of the Kabbalah and of Jewish philosophy. The teaching of the zimzum has appeared in the Kabbalistic literature across Central and Eastern Europe, perhaps most famously in Hasidic literature up to the present day and in philosopher and historian Gershom Scholem’s epoch-making research on Jewish mysticism. The Zimzum has fascinated Jewish and Christian theologians, philosophers, and writers like no other Kabbalistic teaching. This can be seen across the philosophy and cultural history of the twentieth century as it gained prominence among such diverse authors and artists as Franz Rosenzweig, Hans Jonas, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Harold Bloom, Barnett Newman, and Anselm Kiefer. This book follows the traces of the zimzum across the Jewish and Christian intellectual history of Europe and North America over more than four centuries, where Judaism and Christianity, theosophy and philosophy, divine and human, mysticism and literature, Kabbalah and the arts encounter, mix, and cross-fertilize the interpretations and appropriations of this doctrine of God’s self-entanglement and limitation.Trade Review"The shining translation by Corey Twitchell, working closely with the author, allows a vital work to have a new and expanded audience. Bravo! A book for every library—in Jewish studies and well beyond." * Sander L. Gilman, author of Are Racists Crazy? How Prejudice, Racism, and Antisemitism Became Markers of Insanity *"Christoph Schulte’s Zimzum: God and the Origin of the World surveys the major interpretations of the notion of divine contraction in Jewish mysticism, in the developments triggered by its reverberations in German philosophy, and in modern scholarship." * Moshe Idel, Hebrew University, Jerusalem *"This brilliant book, tracing the origins and later transformations of the notion of zimzum—from Luria to contemporary arts—is a necessary read for all interested in the intellectual history of Western modernity." * Agata Bielik-Robson, University of Nottingham *

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Book SynopsisSince 2000, more than twenty countries around the world have held elections in which parties that espouse a political agenda based on an Islamic worldview have competed for legislative seats. Islamist Parties and Political Normalization in the Muslim World examines the impact these parties have had on the political process in two different areas of the world with large Muslim populations: the Middle East and Asia. The book's contributors examine major cases of Islamist party evolution and participation in democratic and semidemocratic systems in Turkey, Morocco, Yemen, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Bangladesh. Collectively they articulate a theoretical framework to understand the strategic behavior of Islamist parties, including the characteristics that distinguish them from other types of political parties, how they relate to other parties as potential competitors or collaborators, how ties to broader Islamist movements may affect party behavior in elections, and how participation in an electoral system can affect the behavior and ideology of an Islamist party over time. Through this framework, the contributors observe a general tendency in Islamist politics. Although Islamist parties represent diverse interests and behaviors that are tied to their particular domestic contexts, through repeated elections they often come to operate less as antiestablishment parties and more in line with the political norms of the regimes in which they compete. While a few parties have deliberately chosen to remain on the fringes of their political system, most have found significant political rewards in changing their messages and behavior to attract more centrist voters. As the impact of the Arab Spring continues to be felt, Islamist Parties and Political Normalization in the Muslim World offers a nuanced and timely perspective of Islamist politics in broader global context. Contributors: Wenling Chan, Julie Chernov Hwang, Joseph Chinyong Liow, Driss Maghraoui, Quinn Mecham, Ali Riaz, Murat Somer, Stacey Philbrick Yadav, Saloua Zerhouni.Trade Review"[T]his pioneering volume, which is clear and accessible in both argument and style, should prove highly illuminating for students of Islamist and comparative politics, as well as for politicians and non-expert readers." * Political Studies Review *"A superb book that offers balanced, nuanced, evidence-based thoughtful analysis at both the case study and comparative levels." * R. William Liddle, Ohio State University *"This empirically rich and level-headed approach to Islamist politics combines a broad theoretical and analytical framework with deep knowledge of particular cases in and beyond the Arab world." * Nathan J. Brown, George Washington University *

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Book SynopsisThe United States is Israel's closest ally in the world. The fact is undeniable, and undeniably controversial, not least because it so often inspires conspiracy theorizing among those who refuse to believe that the special relationship serves America's strategic interests or places the United States on the side of Israel's enduring conflict with the Palestinians. Some point to the nefarious influence of a powerful "Israel lobby" within the halls of Congress. Others detect the hand of evangelical Protestants who fervently support Israel for their own theological reasons. The underlying assumption of all such accounts is that America's support for Israel must flow from a mixture of collusion, manipulation, and ideologically driven foolishness. Samuel Goldman proposes another explanation. The political culture of the United States, he argues, has been marked from the very beginning by a Christian theology that views the American nation as deeply implicated in the historical fate of biblical Israel. God's Country is the first book to tell the complete story of Christian Zionism in American political and religious thought from the Puritans to 9/11. It identifies three sources of American Christian support for a Jewish state: covenant, or the idea of an ongoing relationship between God and the Jewish people; prophecy, or biblical predictions of return to The Promised Land; and cultural affinity, based on shared values and similar institutions. Combining original research with insights from the work of historians of American religion, Goldman crafts a provocative narrative that chronicles Americans' attachment to the State of Israel.Trade Review"This study of the history of pro- and anti-Israel ideas among American Christians from the Colonial period to the present day challenges the stereotypes that often distort discussions of Christian Zionism and offers useful observations about one of the most important political forces in American life." * Foreign Affairs *"Significant and surprising. . . . [God's Country] not only traces the 200 years of scriptural interpretation and evangelical exhortation connecting Adams and Pence but also delves into 200 years of prior British Protestantism that shaped the outlook of the Revolutionary generation." * Commentary *"[A]n ambitious book . . . a highly readable overview of American Christian thought about Israel from the time of the Puritans to the modern period." * Journal of Church and State *"Goldman's book could not be more timely. If you want to understand how the Christian right, once known as anti-Semitic, can now be pro-Zionist, this is the book for you." * Alan Wolfe, Boston College *"God's Country tracks four centuries of a Bible-reading people's thoughts about the people of the Bible. Samuel Goldman tells a fascinating, surprising story." * Richard Brookhiser, author of Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln *"A serious and substantial contribution to U.S. intellectual history. Samuel Goldman's careful reading of the relationship between American Protestants and a biblically grounded Zionism not only provides expert understanding of the deeply religious foundation of American Exceptionalism but also forces a reconsideration of the intellectual terrain." * Raymond Haberski, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis *"Drawing from an extensive body of literature that spans several disciplines, Samuel Goldman's God's Country describes the religious and political phenomenon of American Christian Zionism in ways that are accessible to scholars, students, and general readers alike. The book is the best overview we have of this complex and timely topic." * Michael Lienesch, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill *

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Book SynopsisPerhaps an unlikely subject for an ethnographic case study, the Metropolitan Community Church of Toronto in Canada is a large predominantly LGBT church with a robust, and at times fraught, history of advocacy. While the church is often riddled with fault lines and contradictions, its queer and faith-based emphasis on shared vulnerability leads it to engage in radical solidarity with asylum-seekers, pointing to the work of affect in radical, coalition politics. A House of Prayer for All People maps the affective dimensions of the politics of citizenship at this church. For nearly three years, David K. Seitz regularly attended services at MCCT. He paid special attention to how community and citizenship are formed in a primarily queer Christian organization, focusing on four contemporary struggles: debates on race and gender in religious leadership, activism around police–minority relations, outreach to LGBT Christians transnationally, and advocacy for asylum seekers. Engaging in debates in cultural geography, queer of color critique, psychoanalysis, and affect theory, A House of Prayer for All People stages innovative, reparative encounters with citizenship and religion. Building on queer theory’s rich history of “subjectless” critique, Seitz calls for an “improper” queer citizenship—one that refuses liberal identity politics or national territory as the ethical horizon for sympathy, solidarity, rights, redistribution, or intimacy. Improper queer citizenship, he suggests, depends not only on “good politics” but also on people’s capacity for empathy, integration, and repair.Trade Review"A House of Prayer for All People complicates the common narrative about the seemingly natural and insurmountable divide between LGBT people and religion. Through an examination of the Metropolitan Community Church in Toronto and its Pastor, The Rev, Brent Hawkes, Seitz elegantly engages with questions of sexual orientation, race, gender, religion as they are intertwined with social justice activism and the nature of citizenship. Drawing his narrative across local, national and transnational sites, Seitz build a nuanced and complex conceptual framing in order to ‘repair’ religion and religious spaces for queer people. In doing so he strives to open a space for more capacious (yet precarious) possibilities beyond contemporary identity politics."—Catherine J. Nash, Brock University"David Seitz’s rendition of the politics of refuge within faith community in Toronto is challenging, insightful, empirically rich, and conceptually bold. Seitz offers ‘improper queer citizenship’ as a messy, unfinished political project. His analysis is essential reading that grows more pressing with each passing day."—Alison Mountz, author of Seeking Asylum "This a good book for bad times. It models a generous and nuanced mode of critique and thus will be excellent for teaching undergraduate and graduate students. It is critical without being debilitating, putting queer, psychoanalytic, antiracist and postcolonial theory to the service of practical politics and emancipatory aspirations. That these politics are messy is precisely Seitz’s point."—Geraldine Pratt, University of British Columbia "In this book, Seitz beautifully gets at the diffuse nature of power and makes a strong case for the need for constant vigilance and rethinking within queer politics and scholarship. He challenges the notion that there are ‘good’ or ‘bad’ queer objects and easily identifiable queer heroes and victims. Further, he traverses the historical and the contemporary in compelling ways, and weaves together an analysis that impressively crosses scales, taking the reader from the body and the building (of the church) to the nation and the globe in ways that give us a rich evocation of the problematics and promises of the city of Toronto. A House of Prayer for All People is, in short, a useful work of queer auto critique."—Natalie Oswin, McGill University "To take an intimate space of a church seriously as a site of social change requires an understanding of its limitations, in this case particularly with regards to racism and ethnocentrism; humility and playfulness in what we consider to be appropriate subjects within a queer radical frame; and openness to the surprising radical possibilities of unexpected places. I particularly enjoyed reading Seitz’s description of this life-affirming, though problematic, space."—Farhang Rouhani, University of Mary Washington"First-rate work . . . for far too long, the shadow of a puritanical, misunderstood, and ultimately false form of Christianity has overshadowed our scholarship in gender and sexuality studies. This book provides a helpful and eloquent correction."—Reading Religion"Seitz weaves together issues of citizenship, religion, queer identity and politics in an empirically rich, nuanced and complex study that will be of interest to queer scholars, migration scholars and those who refuse the notion that religion and sexuality must always be diametrically opposed."—Emotion, Space and Society"This book provides a solid description of activists who know the importance of recognizing and critiquing institutional and structural problems."—Mobilization"It is critical without being debilitating, putting queer, psychoanalytic, antiracist, and postcolonial theory in service of practical politics and emancipatory aspirations. That these politics are messy is precisely Seitz’s point."—Society and Space"Seitz’s major contribution to queer geographic literature in this book is not only his merging of geographic and queer theories, but also his willingness to dive into the realm of faith and spirituality... Few geographers are inclined to tackle faith, religion, and/or spirituality in their work beyond using spiritual affiliations as ethnographic descriptors. A House of Prayer for All People certainly takes on this call."—Antipode"A House of Prayer deserves to be taught widely across a range of classes from queer studies to religion/secularism and globalism, from comparative examinations of ethnography to religion and citizenship, from critical considerations of humanitarianism to courses on religion and media."—Religious Studies Review Table of ContentsContentsIntroduction. Repairing Bad Objects: Improper Citizenship in Queer Church 1. Too Diverse? Race, Gender, and Affect in Church2. Pastor–Diva–Citizen: Reverend Dr. Brent Hawkes, Homonormative Melancholia, and the Limits of Celebrity 3. “Why Are You Doing This?” Desiring Queer Global Citizenship4. From Identity to Precarity: Asylum, State Violence, and Alternative Horizons for Improper CitizenshipConclusion: Loving an Unfinished WorldAcknowledgmentsNotesBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisHow apparently positive representations of Muslims in U.S. media cast Muslims as a racial population Portrayals of Muslims as the beneficiaries of liberal values have contributed to the racialization of Muslims as a risky population since the September 11 attacks. These discourses, which hold up some Muslims as worthy of tolerance or sympathy, reinforce an unstable good Muslim/bad Muslim binary where any Muslim might be moved from one side to the other. In Tolerance and Risk, Mitra Rastegar explores these discourses as a component of the racialization of Muslims—where Muslims are portrayed as a highly diverse population that nevertheless is seen to contain within it a threat that requires constant vigilance.Tolerance and Risk brings together several case studies to examine the interrelation of representations of Muslims abroad and in the United States. These include human-interest stories and opinion polls of Muslim Americans, media representations of education activist Malala Yousafzai, LGBTQ activist discourses, local New York controversies surrounding Muslim-led public projects, and social media discourses of the Syrian refugee crisis. Tolerance and Risk demonstrates how representations of tolerable or sympathetic Muslims produce them as a population with distinct characteristics, capacities, and risks, and circulate standards by which the trustworthiness or threat of individual Muslims must be assessed.Tolerance and Risk examines the ways that discourses of liberal rights, including feminist and LGBTQ rights discourses, are mobilized to racialize Muslims as uncivilized, even as they garner sympathy and identification with some Muslims. Trade Review"Through a brilliant analysis, Mitra Rastegar illuminates how the same standards that deem some Muslims worthy of tolerance can then be used against them. This is an urgently necessary book that will change our understanding of how inclusion operates in liberal societies."—Evelyn Alsultany, author of Arabs and Muslims in the Media: Race and Representation after 9/11Table of ContentsContentsIntroduction: Tolerance and Anti-Muslim Racism1. News Stories, Police Profiles, and Opinion Polls: Muslims as a Population of Risk2. From Reading Lolita to Reading Malala: Sympathy and Empowering Muslim Women3. “Iran, Stop Killing Gays”: Queer Identifications and Secular Distinctions4.Defamed and Defended: The Precarity of the “Moderate” Muslim Americans5. “Muslims Worth Saving”: The Syrian Refugee Crisis and HumanitarianismConclusionAcknowledgmentsNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisHow apparently positive representations of Muslims in U.S. media cast Muslims as a racial population Portrayals of Muslims as the beneficiaries of liberal values have contributed to the racialization of Muslims as a risky population since the September 11 attacks. These discourses, which hold up some Muslims as worthy of tolerance or sympathy, reinforce an unstable good Muslim/bad Muslim binary where any Muslim might be moved from one side to the other. In Tolerance and Risk, Mitra Rastegar explores these discourses as a component of the racialization of Muslims—where Muslims are portrayed as a highly diverse population that nevertheless is seen to contain within it a threat that requires constant vigilance.Tolerance and Risk brings together several case studies to examine the interrelation of representations of Muslims abroad and in the United States. These include human-interest stories and opinion polls of Muslim Americans, media representations of education activist Malala Yousafzai, LGBTQ activist discourses, local New York controversies surrounding Muslim-led public projects, and social media discourses of the Syrian refugee crisis. Tolerance and Risk demonstrates how representations of tolerable or sympathetic Muslims produce them as a population with distinct characteristics, capacities, and risks, and circulate standards by which the trustworthiness or threat of individual Muslims must be assessed.Tolerance and Risk examines the ways that discourses of liberal rights, including feminist and LGBTQ rights discourses, are mobilized to racialize Muslims as uncivilized, even as they garner sympathy and identification with some Muslims. Trade Review"Through a brilliant analysis, Mitra Rastegar illuminates how the same standards that deem some Muslims worthy of tolerance can then be used against them. This is an urgently necessary book that will change our understanding of how inclusion operates in liberal societies."—Evelyn Alsultany, author of Arabs and Muslims in the Media: Race and Representation after 9/11Table of ContentsContentsIntroduction: Tolerance and Anti-Muslim Racism1. News Stories, Police Profiles, and Opinion Polls: Muslims as a Population of Risk2. From Reading Lolita to Reading Malala: Sympathy and Empowering Muslim Women3. “Iran, Stop Killing Gays”: Queer Identifications and Secular Distinctions4.Defamed and Defended: The Precarity of the “Moderate” Muslim Americans5. “Muslims Worth Saving”: The Syrian Refugee Crisis and HumanitarianismConclusionAcknowledgmentsNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisThe first major qualitative study of “countering violent extremism” in key U.S. cities Suspect Communities is a powerful reassessment of the U.S. government’s “countering violent extremism” (CVE) program that has arisen in major cities across the United States since 2011. Drawing on an interpretive qualitative study, it examines how the concept behind CVEaimed at combating homegrown terrorism by engaging Muslim community members, teachers, and religious leaders in monitoring and reporting on young peoplehas been operationalized through the everyday work of CVE actors, from high-level national security workers to local community members, with significant penalties for the communities themselves.Nicole Nguyen argues that studying CVE provides insight into how the drive to bring liberal reforms to contemporary security regimes through “community-driven” and “ideologically ecumenical” programming has in fact further institutionalized anti-Muslim racism in the United States. She forcefully contends that the U.S. security state has designed CVE to legitimize and shore up support for the very institutions that historically have criminalized, demonized, and dehumanized communities of color, while appearing to learn from and attenuate past practices of coercive policing, racial profiling, and political exclusion. By undertaking this analysis, Suspect Communities offers a vital window into the inner workings of the U.S. security state and the devastating impact of CVE on local communities. Trade Review"Suspect Communities is a detailed account of ‘countering violent extremism' policies within the United States, bringing together the current state of play and existing research in a well-rounded analysis. It will be useful for scholars and activists alike."—Arun Kundnani, author of The Muslims Are Coming!: Islamophobia, Extremism, and the Domestic War on Terror"Nicole Nguyen’s innovative research reveals important nuances and context around the white supremacist racism embedded within so-called counterterrorism policy. She provides powerful critiques of ‘countering violent extremism’ programs, their precursors from the ‘War on Terror,’ and their successors in the ‘Muslim Ban’ era. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in counterterrorism policy."—Erik Love, author of Islamophobia and Racism in America

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Book SynopsisThe first major qualitative study of “countering violent extremism” in key U.S. cities Suspect Communities is a powerful reassessment of the U.S. government’s “countering violent extremism” (CVE) program that has arisen in major cities across the United States since 2011. Drawing on an interpretive qualitative study, it examines how the concept behind CVEaimed at combating homegrown terrorism by engaging Muslim community members, teachers, and religious leaders in monitoring and reporting on young peoplehas been operationalized through the everyday work of CVE actors, from high-level national security workers to local community members, with significant penalties for the communities themselves.Nicole Nguyen argues that studying CVE provides insight into how the drive to bring liberal reforms to contemporary security regimes through “community-driven” and “ideologically ecumenical” programming has in fact further institutionalized anti-Muslim racism in the United States. She forcefully contends that the U.S. security state has designed CVE to legitimize and shore up support for the very institutions that historically have criminalized, demonized, and dehumanized communities of color, while appearing to learn from and attenuate past practices of coercive policing, racial profiling, and political exclusion. By undertaking this analysis, Suspect Communities offers a vital window into the inner workings of the U.S. security state and the devastating impact of CVE on local communities. Trade Review"Suspect Communities is a detailed account of ‘countering violent extremism' policies within the United States, bringing together the current state of play and existing research in a well-rounded analysis. It will be useful for scholars and activists alike."—Arun Kundnani, author of The Muslims Are Coming!: Islamophobia, Extremism, and the Domestic War on Terror"Nicole Nguyen’s innovative research reveals important nuances and context around the white supremacist racism embedded within so-called counterterrorism policy. She provides powerful critiques of ‘countering violent extremism’ programs, their precursors from the ‘War on Terror,’ and their successors in the ‘Muslim Ban’ era. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in counterterrorism policy."—Erik Love, author of Islamophobia and Racism in America

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Book SynopsisHow perceptions of Mormonism from 1830 to the present reveal the exclusionary, racialized practices of the U.S. nation-state Are Mormons really so weird? Are they potentially queer? These questions occupy the heart of this powerful rethinking of Mormonism and its place in U.S. history, culture, and politics. K. Mohrman argues that Mormon peculiarity is not inherent to the Latter-day Saint faith tradition, as is often assumed, but rather a potent expression of U.S. exceptionalism. Exceptionally Queer scrutinizes the history of Mormonism starting with its inception in the early 1830s and continuing to the present. Drawing on a wide range of historical texts and moments—from nineteenth-century battles over Mormon plural marriage; to the LDS Church’s emphases on “individual responsibility” and “family values”; to mainstream media’s coverage of the LDS Church’s racist exclusion of Black priesthood holders, its Native assimilation programs, and vehement opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment; and to much more recent legal and cultural battles over same-sex marriage and on-screen Mormon polygamy—Exceptionally Queer evaluates how Mormonism has been used to motivate and rationalize the biased, exclusionary, and colonialist policies and practices of the U.S. nation-state.Mohrman explains that debates over Mormonism both drew on and shaped racial discourses and, in so doing, delineated the boundaries of whiteness and national belonging, largely through the consolidation of (hetero)normative ideas of sex, marriage, family, and economy. Ultimately, the author shows how discussions of Mormonism in this country have been and continue to be central to ideas of what it means to be American. Trade Review "K. Mohrman upends normative, contemporary understandings of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in relationship to race, queerness, and American nationalism. Beautifully written and thoroughly researched, Exceptionally Queer traces how Mormon peculiarity is critical to understanding U.S. nationalism. Whether framed as marginal and a threat to all that America holds dear or being represented as hyper-American nationalists, Mohrman demonstrates that Mormonism is a critical part of the national imaginary and the political discourse that, due to its peculiarity, has not been fully explored until now."—Hōkūlani K. Aikau, author of A Chosen People, a Promised Land: Mormonism and Race in Hawai‘i "K. Mohrman’s Exceptionally Queer brings much-needed theorizing to the question of Mormon peculiarity. Often discussed as both strange and hypernormal, Latter-day Saints occupy a puzzling place in the American consciousness. The brilliant analysis in this book links Mormonism’s peculiarity and its Americanness to larger issues of American nationalism, imperialism, and racial formation. Scholars of U.S. history, race, sexuality, queer studies, and, of course, Mormonism have much to gain from the powerful lens this book casts on the project of American exceptionalism."—Taylor Petrey, author of Tabernacles of Clay: Sexuality and Gender in Modern Mormonism "Mohrman’s evidence and arguments are provocative, engaging, and expand the possibilites for Mormon studies to enter into broader interdisciplinary conversations. Exceptionally Queer cannot—and should not—be ignored. "—Juvenile Instructor Table of ContentsIntroduction: Peculiar, Exceptional, QueerPart I. Making Mormonism Peculiar1. Becoming Peculiar, 1830–18522. A Peculiar Race with Peculiar Institutions, 1847–18743. The Problems of (Mormon) Empire, 1874–1896Part II. Exceptionally Normal4. Resignifying Mormon Peculiarity, 1890–19455. A Thoroughly American Institution, 1936–19626. Making Mormon Peculiarity Colorblind, 1960–1982Part III. Regulatory Queer Varieties of Mormon Peculiarity7. Polygamy, or The Racial Politics of Marriage as FreedomCoda: What Mormonism Can Tell Us about Critical TheoryAcknowledgmentsNotesBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisHow perceptions of Mormonism from 1830 to the present reveal the exclusionary, racialized practices of the U.S. nation-state Are Mormons really so weird? Are they potentially queer? These questions occupy the heart of this powerful rethinking of Mormonism and its place in U.S. history, culture, and politics. K. Mohrman argues that Mormon peculiarity is not inherent to the Latter-day Saint faith tradition, as is often assumed, but rather a potent expression of U.S. exceptionalism. Exceptionally Queer scrutinizes the history of Mormonism starting with its inception in the early 1830s and continuing to the present. Drawing on a wide range of historical texts and moments—from nineteenth-century battles over Mormon plural marriage; to the LDS Church’s emphases on “individual responsibility” and “family values”; to mainstream media’s coverage of the LDS Church’s racist exclusion of Black priesthood holders, its Native assimilation programs, and vehement opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment; and to much more recent legal and cultural battles over same-sex marriage and on-screen Mormon polygamy—Exceptionally Queer evaluates how Mormonism has been used to motivate and rationalize the biased, exclusionary, and colonialist policies and practices of the U.S. nation-state.Mohrman explains that debates over Mormonism both drew on and shaped racial discourses and, in so doing, delineated the boundaries of whiteness and national belonging, largely through the consolidation of (hetero)normative ideas of sex, marriage, family, and economy. Ultimately, the author shows how discussions of Mormonism in this country have been and continue to be central to ideas of what it means to be American. Trade Review "K. Mohrman upends normative, contemporary understandings of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in relationship to race, queerness, and American nationalism. Beautifully written and thoroughly researched, Exceptionally Queer traces how Mormon peculiarity is critical to understanding U.S. nationalism. Whether framed as marginal and a threat to all that America holds dear or being represented as hyper-American nationalists, Mohrman demonstrates that Mormonism is a critical part of the national imaginary and the political discourse that, due to its peculiarity, has not been fully explored until now."—Hōkūlani K. Aikau, author of A Chosen People, a Promised Land: Mormonism and Race in Hawai‘i "K. Mohrman’s Exceptionally Queer brings much-needed theorizing to the question of Mormon peculiarity. Often discussed as both strange and hypernormal, Latter-day Saints occupy a puzzling place in the American consciousness. The brilliant analysis in this book links Mormonism’s peculiarity and its Americanness to larger issues of American nationalism, imperialism, and racial formation. Scholars of U.S. history, race, sexuality, queer studies, and, of course, Mormonism have much to gain from the powerful lens this book casts on the project of American exceptionalism."—Taylor Petrey, author of Tabernacles of Clay: Sexuality and Gender in Modern Mormonism "Mohrman’s evidence and arguments are provocative, engaging, and expand the possibilites for Mormon studies to enter into broader interdisciplinary conversations. Exceptionally Queer cannot—and should not—be ignored. "—Juvenile Instructor Table of ContentsIntroduction: Peculiar, Exceptional, QueerPart I. Making Mormonism Peculiar1. Becoming Peculiar, 1830–18522. A Peculiar Race with Peculiar Institutions, 1847–18743. The Problems of (Mormon) Empire, 1874–1896Part II. Exceptionally Normal4. Resignifying Mormon Peculiarity, 1890–19455. A Thoroughly American Institution, 1936–19626. Making Mormon Peculiarity Colorblind, 1960–1982Part III. Regulatory Queer Varieties of Mormon Peculiarity7. Polygamy, or The Racial Politics of Marriage as FreedomCoda: What Mormonism Can Tell Us about Critical TheoryAcknowledgmentsNotesBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisHow Western nations have consolidated their whiteness through the figure of the Muslim in the post-9/11 world While much has been written about post-9/11 anti-Muslim racism (often termed Islamophobia), insufficient attention has been given to how anti-Muslim racism operates through law and is a vital part of law’s protection of whiteness. This book fills this gap while also providing a unique new global perspective on white supremacy. Sherene H. Razack, a leading critical race and feminist scholar, takes an innovative approach by situating law within media discourses and historical and contemporary realities. We may think of law as logical, but, argues Razack, its logic breaks down when the subject is Muslim. Tracing how white subjects and majority-white nations in the post-9/11 era have consolidated their whiteness through the figure of the Muslim, Razack examines four sites of anti-Muslim racism: efforts by American evangelical Christians to ban Islam in the school curriculum; Canadian and European bans on Muslim women’s clothing; racial science and the sentencing of Muslims as terrorists; and American national memory of the torture of Muslims during wars and occupations. Arguing that nothing has to make sense when the subject is Muslim, she maintains that these legal and cultural sites reveal the dread, phobia, hysteria, and desire that mark the encounter between Muslims and the West. Through the prism of racism, Nothing Has to Make Sense argues that the figure of the Muslim reveals a world divided between the deserving and the disposable, where people of European origin are the former and all others are confined in various ways to regimes of disposability. Emerging from critical race theory, and bridging with Islamophobia/critical religious studies, it demonstrates that anti-Muslim racism is a revelatory window into the operation of white supremacy as a global force. Trade Review"Boldly and elegantly, Sherene H. Razack lays bare the affective, legal, and material worlds that protect white supremacy and anti-Muslim racism. Theoretically rigorous while highly accessible, Nothing Has to Make Sense is one of the most urgent books on anti-Muslim racism of our times and a must read for anyone looking for an unflinching analysis of race, class, gender, sexuality, and empire."—Nadine Naber, University of Illinois Chicago"This is an essential text on race and racisms today, as well as the shifting language of white supremacy in Europe and North America, and their impact globally. We cannot understand the Global North without this timely and persuasive analysis of anti-Muslim affect as the link between Christianity, whiteness, and the colonial phantasms lurking in law and racial sciences. This is a crucial book for our times."—Inderpal Grewal, Yale UniversityTable of ContentsContentsIntroduction: Anti-Muslim Racism, Whiteness, White Supremacy, and Law1. “A New Phase of a Very Old War”: Islam and White Conservative Christian Aggrievement2. “I Can Never Tell If You’re Responding to My Smile”: Desiring Muslim Women3. “Terrorism in Their Genes”: Racial Science and the Muslim Terrorist4. “We Didn’t Kill ’em, We Didn’t Cut Their Heads Off”: Torture and the Making of American InnocenceConclusion: Arriving as MuslimAcknowledgmentsNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisHow Western nations have consolidated their whiteness through the figure of the Muslim in the post-9/11 world While much has been written about post-9/11 anti-Muslim racism (often termed Islamophobia), insufficient attention has been given to how anti-Muslim racism operates through law and is a vital part of law’s protection of whiteness. This book fills this gap while also providing a unique new global perspective on white supremacy. Sherene H. Razack, a leading critical race and feminist scholar, takes an innovative approach by situating law within media discourses and historical and contemporary realities. We may think of law as logical, but, argues Razack, its logic breaks down when the subject is Muslim. Tracing how white subjects and majority-white nations in the post-9/11 era have consolidated their whiteness through the figure of the Muslim, Razack examines four sites of anti-Muslim racism: efforts by American evangelical Christians to ban Islam in the school curriculum; Canadian and European bans on Muslim women’s clothing; racial science and the sentencing of Muslims as terrorists; and American national memory of the torture of Muslims during wars and occupations. Arguing that nothing has to make sense when the subject is Muslim, she maintains that these legal and cultural sites reveal the dread, phobia, hysteria, and desire that mark the encounter between Muslims and the West. Through the prism of racism, Nothing Has to Make Sense argues that the figure of the Muslim reveals a world divided between the deserving and the disposable, where people of European origin are the former and all others are confined in various ways to regimes of disposability. Emerging from critical race theory, and bridging with Islamophobia/critical religious studies, it demonstrates that anti-Muslim racism is a revelatory window into the operation of white supremacy as a global force. Trade Review"Boldly and elegantly, Sherene H. Razack lays bare the affective, legal, and material worlds that protect white supremacy and anti-Muslim racism. Theoretically rigorous while highly accessible, Nothing Has to Make Sense is one of the most urgent books on anti-Muslim racism of our times and a must read for anyone looking for an unflinching analysis of race, class, gender, sexuality, and empire."—Nadine Naber, University of Illinois Chicago"This is an essential text on race and racisms today, as well as the shifting language of white supremacy in Europe and North America, and their impact globally. We cannot understand the Global North without this timely and persuasive analysis of anti-Muslim affect as the link between Christianity, whiteness, and the colonial phantasms lurking in law and racial sciences. This is a crucial book for our times."—Inderpal Grewal, Yale UniversityTable of ContentsContentsIntroduction: Anti-Muslim Racism, Whiteness, White Supremacy, and Law1. “A New Phase of a Very Old War”: Islam and White Conservative Christian Aggrievement2. “I Can Never Tell If You’re Responding to My Smile”: Desiring Muslim Women3. “Terrorism in Their Genes”: Racial Science and the Muslim Terrorist4. “We Didn’t Kill ’em, We Didn’t Cut Their Heads Off”: Torture and the Making of American InnocenceConclusion: Arriving as MuslimAcknowledgmentsNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisThis thought-provoking collection offers a multi-disciplinary approach on the subject of humour, Muslims, and Islam. Beginning with theoretical perspectives and scriptural guidance on permissible and restricted humour, the volume presents a variety of case studies about Muslim comedic practices in various cultural, political, and religious contexts. This unprecedented scholarship sheds new light on common misconceptions about humour and laughter in Islam and deftly tackles sensitive themes from blasphemy to freedom of speech. Chapter 9 is available Open Access via OAPEN under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.Table of ContentsIntroduction - Bernard Schweizer and Lina Molokotos-Liederman PART I Theoretical Perspectives on Islam and Humour 1 Ridicule in the Qur’an: The Missing Link in Islamic Humour Studies - Mostafa Abedinifard 2 Laughter in the Discursive Tradition? Emotions of Muḥammad as the Topic of a Pious Arabic-English Reader - Georg Leube 3 Humour in Islamic Literature and Muslim Practices: Virtue or Vice? - Walid Ghali PART II Muslim Humour Practices in Islamicate Societies: Textual Media 4 Using/Abusing the Qur’an in Jocular Literature: Blasphemy, Qur’anophilia, or Familiarity? - Yasmin Amin 5 A 'Stupid Lur' Mocks Allah and Mullah: Sociocultural Implications of the Luri Jokes Cycle - Fatemeh Nasr Esfahani PART III Muslim Humour Practices in Islamicate Societies: Visual Media and Performance 6 Al- Bernameg: How Bassem Youssef Ridiculed Religious Fundamentalists and Survived the ‘Defamation of Religion’ Charge - Moutaz Alkheder 7 Arab Cartoonists and Religion: The Interdependence of Transgression and Taboo - Chourouq Nasri 8 Hizbullah’s Humour: Political Satire, Comedy, and Revolutionary Theatre - Joseph Alagha 9 ‘Putting the Fun Back into Fundamentalism’: Toying with Islam and Extremism in Comedy - Mona Abdel-Fadil PART IV Muslim Comedy in North America 10 Queering Islam in Performance: Gender and Sexuality in American Muslim Women’s Stand-up Comedy - Jaclyn A. Michael 11 Comedy as Social Commentary in Little Mosque on the Prairie: Decoding Humour in the First ‘Muslim Sitcom’ - Jay Friesen Conclusion - Bernard Schweizer and Lina Molokotos-Liederman Bibliography on Islam and Humour

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