Social groups: religious groups and communities Books

Book SynopsisAt last recovered in this enriching annotated edition, this important but neglected work of American modernism offers a unique poetic encounter with the Jewish communities in New York’s Lower East Side. Long forgotten on account of her gender and left-wing politics, Lola Ridge is finally being rediscovered and read alongside such celebrated contemporaries as Hart Crane, William Carlos Williams, and Marianne Moore—all of whom knew her and admired her work. In her time Ridge was considered one of America’s leading poets, but after her death in 1941 she and her work effectively disappeared for the next seventy-five years. Her book The Ghetto and Other Poems, is a key work of American modernism, yet it has long, and unjustly, been neglected. When it was first published in 1918—in an abbreviated version in The New Republic, then in full by B. W. Huebsch five months later—The Ghetto and Other Poems was a literary sensation. The poet Alfred Kreymbourg, in a Poetry Magazine review, praised “The Ghetto” for its “sheer passion, deadly accuracy of versatile images, beauty, richness, and incisiveness of epithet, unfolding of adventures, portraiture of emotion and thought, pageantry of pushcarts—the whole lifting, falling, stumbling, mounting to a broad, symphonic rhythm.” Louis Untermeyer, writing in The New York Evening Post, found “The Ghetto” “at once personal in its piercing sympathy and epical in its sweep. It is studded with images that are surprising and yet never strained or irrelevant; it glows with a color that is barbaric, exotic, and as local as Grand Street.” The long title poem is a detailed and sympathetic account of life in the Jewish Ghetto of New York’s Lower East Side, with particular emphasis on the struggles and resilience of women. The subsequent section, “Manhattan Lights,” delves further into city life and immigrant experience, illuminating life in the Bowery. Other poems stem from Ridge’s lifelong support of the American labor movement, and from her own experience as an immigrant. This critical edition seeks to recover the attention The Ghetto, and Other Poems, and in particular the title poem, lost after Ridge’s death. The poems in the volume are as aesthetically strong as they are historically revealing. Their language combines strength and directness with startling metaphors, and their form embraces both panoramic sweep and lyrical intensity. Expertly edited and annotated by Lawrence Kramer, this first modern edition to reproduce the full 1918 publication of The Ghetto and Other Stories offers all the background and context needed for a rich, informed reading of Lola Ridge’s masterpiece.Table of ContentsIntroduction | xi The Ghetto To the American People | 3 The Ghetto | 5 Manhattan Lights Manhattan | 35 Broadway | 37 Flotsam | 39 Spring | 43 Bowery Afternoon | 45 Promenade | 46 The Fog | 48 Faces | 49 Labor Debris | 55 Dedication | 56 The Song of Iron | 57 Frank Little at Calvary | 63 Spires | 68 The Legion of Iron | 69 Fuel | 71 A Toast | 72 Accidentals “The Everlasting Return” | 77 Palestine | 81 The Song | 82 To the Others | 83 Babel | 84 The Fiddler | 85 Dawn Wind | 86 North Wind | 88 The Destroyer | 89 Lullaby | 90 The Foundling | 92 The Woman with Jewels | 93 Submerged | 95 Art and Life | 96 Brooklyn Bridge | 97 Dreams | 98 The Fire | 99 A Memory | 100 The Edge | 101 The Garden | 103 Under-Song | 105 A Worn Rose | 107 Iron Wine | 108 Dispossessed | 109 The Star | 111 The Tidings | 112 Appendix: The New Republic Version of “The Ghetto” | 115 References | 133

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Book SynopsisAt last recovered in this enriching annotated edition, this important but neglected work of American modernism offers a unique poetic encounter with the Jewish communities in New York’s Lower East Side. Long forgotten on account of her gender and left-wing politics, Lola Ridge is finally being rediscovered and read alongside such celebrated contemporaries as Hart Crane, William Carlos Williams, and Marianne Moore—all of whom knew her and admired her work. In her time Ridge was considered one of America’s leading poets, but after her death in 1941 she and her work effectively disappeared for the next seventy-five years. Her book The Ghetto and Other Poems, is a key work of American modernism, yet it has long, and unjustly, been neglected. When it was first published in 1918—in an abbreviated version in The New Republic, then in full by B. W. Huebsch five months later—The Ghetto and Other Poems was a literary sensation. The poet Alfred Kreymbourg, in a Poetry Magazine review, praised “The Ghetto” for its “sheer passion, deadly accuracy of versatile images, beauty, richness, and incisiveness of epithet, unfolding of adventures, portraiture of emotion and thought, pageantry of pushcarts—the whole lifting, falling, stumbling, mounting to a broad, symphonic rhythm.” Louis Untermeyer, writing in The New York Evening Post, found “The Ghetto” “at once personal in its piercing sympathy and epical in its sweep. It is studded with images that are surprising and yet never strained or irrelevant; it glows with a color that is barbaric, exotic, and as local as Grand Street.” The long title poem is a detailed and sympathetic account of life in the Jewish Ghetto of New York’s Lower East Side, with particular emphasis on the struggles and resilience of women. The subsequent section, “Manhattan Lights,” delves further into city life and immigrant experience, illuminating life in the Bowery. Other poems stem from Ridge’s lifelong support of the American labor movement, and from her own experience as an immigrant. This critical edition seeks to recover the attention The Ghetto, and Other Poems, and in particular the title poem, lost after Ridge’s death. The poems in the volume are as aesthetically strong as they are historically revealing. Their language combines strength and directness with startling metaphors, and their form embraces both panoramic sweep and lyrical intensity. Expertly edited and annotated by Lawrence Kramer, this first modern edition to reproduce the full 1918 publication of The Ghetto and Other Stories offers all the background and context needed for a rich, informed reading of Lola Ridge’s masterpiece.Table of ContentsIntroduction | xi The Ghetto To the American People | 3 The Ghetto | 5 Manhattan Lights Manhattan | 35 Broadway | 37 Flotsam | 39 Spring | 43 Bowery Afternoon | 45 Promenade | 46 The Fog | 48 Faces | 49 Labor Debris | 55 Dedication | 56 The Song of Iron | 57 Frank Little at Calvary | 63 Spires | 68 The Legion of Iron | 69 Fuel | 71 A Toast | 72 Accidentals “The Everlasting Return” | 77 Palestine | 81 The Song | 82 To the Others | 83 Babel | 84 The Fiddler | 85 Dawn Wind | 86 North Wind | 88 The Destroyer | 89 Lullaby | 90 The Foundling | 92 The Woman with Jewels | 93 Submerged | 95 Art and Life | 96 Brooklyn Bridge | 97 Dreams | 98 The Fire | 99 A Memory | 100 The Edge | 101 The Garden | 103 Under-Song | 105 A Worn Rose | 107 Iron Wine | 108 Dispossessed | 109 The Star | 111 The Tidings | 112 Appendix: The New Republic Version of “The Ghetto” | 115 References | 133

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Book SynopsisThis original new work is the fascinating result of sociologist and documentary filmmaker Agnès De Féo’s ten-year exploration of the phenomenon of niqab wearing. It is at once a groundbreaking study and a series of compelling first-person accounts from French and Francophone women who wear or have worn the niqab in France’s Salafi communities. With the backdrop of the French government’s 2010 ban on full facial veiling in public spaces, which itself has shaped the phenomenon, De Féo draws on her subjects’ own words to show their agency, working against the clichés that often underlie public views of the niqab—that it is purely the result of masculine pressure, for example, or extreme religiosity or nationalism, or the submissive desire to disappear. Instead, she shows, the niqab is multivalent: women wear it for reasons that range from religious piety to the desire to rebel against mainstream society, family, or the rule of law. The reasons are complex, overdetermined, contradictory, or even inconsistent, but they are the women’s own. Despite being worn only by a small minority of Muslim women, the Islamic garment has nonetheless been a major source of intense political, religious, and cultural debate in France. Searching to understand, rather than speculate, De Féo chose to approach the people who wear the niqab, and to make them, rather the veil itself, the subject of her research. Her unprecedented study, based on more than 200 interviews, reveals the many factors—social, political, geopolitical, and psychological—underpinning a personal choice that is not always as religious as it seems. The book ends with sixteen captivating interviews giving voice to stories rarely heard. With finesse and discernment, the author debunks the myths surrounding the wearing of the niqab, and sheds light on a practice subject to misunderstanding and prejudice, offering the reader unique insight. Challenging our preconceived notions and stereotypes about women who wear any form of Islamic apparel, but particularly the niqab, The Niqab in France introduces a group of women each with her own life story, her own share of personal struggles, aspirations, and desires, and her own claim to a certain place in society. This work received support for excellence in publication and translation from Albertine Translation, a program created by Villa Albertine.Table of ContentsPreface to the English-Language Edition | vii A Note on Terminology | xi PART I Introduction | 3 The Sociology of Niqab Wearers | 17 The Niqab and the Other | 35 A Reaction to the Ban | 49 Conclusion | 65 PART II 16 Portraits of Women Wearing the Niqab | 71 Earlier Wearers (Before 2009), | 71 Neo-Niqab Wearers (After 2009), | 101 The Niqab: Refuting Common Ideas | 155 Acknowledgments | 163 Notes | 165 Selected Bibliography and Filmography | 171

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Book SynopsisAn illuminating story of a Sufi community that sought the revelation of God. In the Afghan highlands of the sixteenth century, the messianic community known as the Roshaniyya not only desired to find God’s word and to abide by it but also attempted to practice God’s word and to develop techniques of language intended to render their own tongues as the organs of continuous revelation. As their critics would contend, however, the Roshaniyya attempted to make language do something that language should not do—infuse the semiotic with the divine. Their story thus ends in a tower of skulls, the proliferation of heresiographies that detailed the sins of the Roshaniyya, and new formations of “Afghan” identity. In Singing with the Mountains, William E. B. Sherman finds something extraordinary about the Roshaniyya, not least because the first known literary use of vernacular Pashto occurs in an eclectic, Roshani imitation of the Qur’an. The story of the Roshaniyya exemplifies a religious culture of linguistic experimentation. In the example of the Roshaniyya, we discover a set of questions and anxieties about the capacities of language that pervaded Sufi orders, imperial courts, groups of wandering ascetics, and scholastic networks throughout Central and South Asia. In telling this tale, Sherman asks the following questions: How can we make language shimmer with divine truth? How can letters grant sovereign power and form new “ethnic” identities and ways of belonging? How can rhyme bend our conceptions of time so that the prophetic past comes to inhabit the now of our collective moment? By analyzing the ways in which the Roshaniyya answered these types of questions—and the ways in which their answers were eventually rejected as heresies—this book offers new insight into the imaginations of religious actors in the late medieval and early modern Persianate worlds.Table of ContentsPreface: First Words | vii Acknowledgments | xi Mountains and Messiahs: An Introduction | 1 1 Bayazid’s Doubles: Hagiography and History in the Messianic Community | 29 2 The Dhikr of the Wretch: Text, Practice, and the Roshani Self | 62 3 Revelation through Repetition: The Roshaniyya Write the Word of God | 90 4 Vernacular Apocalypse: Poetic and Polemical Emergences of Pashto Literature | 118 5 The Vanguard of Disbelief: Afghan Ethnicity and Temporality after the Roshaniyya | 151 Ishmael’s Daydream: A Conclusion | 180 A Note on Sources | 189 Notes | 193 Bibliography | 227 Index | 253

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Book SynopsisAn illuminating story of a Sufi community that sought the revelation of God. In the Afghan highlands of the sixteenth century, the messianic community known as the Roshaniyya not only desired to find God’s word and to abide by it but also attempted to practice God’s word and to develop techniques of language intended to render their own tongues as the organs of continuous revelation. As their critics would contend, however, the Roshaniyya attempted to make language do something that language should not do—infuse the semiotic with the divine. Their story thus ends in a tower of skulls, the proliferation of heresiographies that detailed the sins of the Roshaniyya, and new formations of “Afghan” identity. In Singing with the Mountains, William E. B. Sherman finds something extraordinary about the Roshaniyya, not least because the first known literary use of vernacular Pashto occurs in an eclectic, Roshani imitation of the Qur’an. The story of the Roshaniyya exemplifies a religious culture of linguistic experimentation. In the example of the Roshaniyya, we discover a set of questions and anxieties about the capacities of language that pervaded Sufi orders, imperial courts, groups of wandering ascetics, and scholastic networks throughout Central and South Asia. In telling this tale, Sherman asks the following questions: How can we make language shimmer with divine truth? How can letters grant sovereign power and form new “ethnic” identities and ways of belonging? How can rhyme bend our conceptions of time so that the prophetic past comes to inhabit the now of our collective moment? By analyzing the ways in which the Roshaniyya answered these types of questions—and the ways in which their answers were eventually rejected as heresies—this book offers new insight into the imaginations of religious actors in the late medieval and early modern Persianate worlds.Table of ContentsPreface: First Words | vii Acknowledgments | xi Mountains and Messiahs: An Introduction | 1 1 Bayazid’s Doubles: Hagiography and History in the Messianic Community | 29 2 The Dhikr of the Wretch: Text, Practice, and the Roshani Self | 62 3 Revelation through Repetition: The Roshaniyya Write the Word of God | 90 4 Vernacular Apocalypse: Poetic and Polemical Emergences of Pashto Literature | 118 5 The Vanguard of Disbelief: Afghan Ethnicity and Temporality after the Roshaniyya | 151 Ishmael’s Daydream: A Conclusion | 180 A Note on Sources | 189 Notes | 193 Bibliography | 227 Index | 253

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Book SynopsisA Knight at the Opera examines the remarkable and unknown role that the medieval legend (and Wagner opera) Tannhäuser played in Jewish cultural life in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The book analyzes how three of the greatest Jewish thinkers of that era, Heinrich Heine, Theodor Herzl, and I. L. Peretz, used this central myth of Germany to strengthen Jewish culture and to attack anti-Semitism. Readers will see how Tannhäuser evolves from a medieval knight to Peretz's pious Jewish scholar in the Land of Israel. The book also discusses how the founder of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, was so inspired by Wagner's opera that he wrote The Jewish State while attending performances of it. A Knight at the Opera uses Tannhäuser as a way to examine the changing relationship between Jews and the broader world during the advent of the modern era, and to question if any art, even that of a prominent anti-Semite, should be considered taboo.

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Book SynopsisThis volume presents papers delivered at the 24th Annual Klutznick Harris Symposium, held at Creighton University in October 2011. The contributors look at all aspects of the intimate relationship between Jews and clothing, through case studies from ancient, medieval, recent, and contemporary history. Papers explore topics ranging from Jewish leadership in the textile industry, through the art of fashion in nineteenth-century Vienna, to the use of clothing as a badge of ethnic identity, in both secular and religious contexts.Table of Contents Contents: Shmattas in the North, Shmattas in the South: The Civil War and the Birth of the American Clothing Industry (Adam Mendelsohn) Weimar Jewish Chic from Wigs to Furs: Jewish Women and Fashion in 1920s Germany (Kerry Wallach) Jewish Photographers and the Body in the Weimar Republic (Nils Roemer) Female Tallitot: Creating American Jewish Women’s Religious Experience through Fashion (Rachel Gordan) Clothes and the Weaving of American Jewish Comedy (Ted Merwin) The Jewish Badge in Renaissance Italy: The Iconic O, the Yellow Hat, and the Paradoxes of Distinctive Sign Legislation (Flora Cassen) How a Rabbi Should Be Dressed: The Question of Cassock and Clerical Clothing among Italian Rabbis from the Renaissance to Contemporary Times (Asher Salah) The “Disinherited” Priesthood: A Look into Biblical Israel’s Unshod Priest (Christine Palmer) Costume and Identity in the Dura Europos Synagogue Paintings (Steven Fine) < Picturing Vienna’s New Woman: Madame d’Ora meets Ella Zwieback-Zirner (Lisa Silverman) Aboriginal Yarmulkes, Ambivalent Attire, and Ironies of Contemporary Jewish Identity (Eric Silverman) Fashioning Jews on the Screen: The Impact of Dress on Crafting the Jewish Image in Film and Television (Brian Amkraut)

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Book SynopsisAuthor of more than thirteen books and several volumes of poetry, screenwriter, and director, Edith Bruck is one of the leading literary voices in Italy, attracting increasing attention in the English-speaking world not least for her powerful Holocaust testimony, which is often compared with the work of her contemporaries Primo Levi and Giorgio Bassani. Born in Hungary in 1932, she was deported with her family to the concentration camps of Auschwitz, Dachau, Christianstadt, Landsberg, and Bergen-Belsen, where she lost both her parents and a brother. After the war, she traveled widely until 1954 when she settled in Rome. She has lived there ever since. This important new study is motivated by a desire to better understand and situate Bruck's art as well as to advance (and, when necessary, to revise) the critical discourse on her considerable and eclectic body of work. As such, it underscores and analyzes the intermedial nature of her contributions to contemporary Italian culture, which should no longer be understood merely in terms of her willingness to revisit the subject of the Holocaust on the printed page or the silver screen. It also includes previously unpublished interviews with the author. The book will be of broad interest to scholars and students of Jewish (especially Holocaust) studies, Italian literature, film studies, women's studies, and postcolonial culture."This is the first comprehensive scholarly analysis of the work produced by a main contemporary author of Italian Holocaust literature, focused on Bruck's overall artistic production (novels, poetry, film, and TV productions). It will offer scholars and students alike a new interpretive perspective and a valuable source of reference for their studies." Gabriella Romani, Seton Hall University.

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Book SynopsisZalkind Hourwitz lived during one of the most pivotal periods in history. A Polish Jew born in 1752, Hourwitz moved to France in 1774 and entered the intellectual and political life of ancien régime Paris. Frances Malino provides a vivid description of this compelling and exotic figure who fits none of the traditional portraits of eighteenth-century Jews. An investigation of his experiences in the French capital during this period challenges our previous understanding of Jewish emancipation, provides an additional perspective on revolutionary Paris (from that of both Jew and foreigner) and adds another dimension to the historiography of the French Revolution.Trade Review"Malino's book is a splendid piece of work, well-researched and richly annotated." American Historical ReviewTable of ContentsIntroduction. 1. Political Beginnings. 2. The Apologies des Juifs. 3. A Revolutionary Jewish Voice. 4. The Frustrations of Emancipation. 5. Revolutionary Illusions. 6. A Would-Be Ideologue. 7. In Retreat. Conclusion.

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Book SynopsisThis book provides an introduction to Judaism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries for all students of Judaism and world religions, and covers major movements that have been developed. Written by a leading teacher and researcher, each chapter features a clear and authoritative introduction to its subject, accompanied by a reading by a specialist in the particlular field.Trade Review"This volume, however, is superb.....this volume is sufficiently thought-provoking to be on every Jewish studies student's table." Times Educational Supplement "Neusner's new book is a pleasure to read. The reader can enjoy observing a penetrating analytical mind at work on the phenomena of modern judaism, developing a way of looking at its historical and social problems that will make sense to the beginning student, even if he or she is not Jewish, and still have validity for the seasoned historian of religion and culture." William Nichols, Judaism "It is certainly an important book which should be debated and become required reading for students of contemporary Judaism." Graham Harvey, Reviews in Religion and TheologyTable of ContentsAcknowledgements. Letter to the Student. Introduction: What do we mean by "Judaism" And By "Modern Times"?.Part I: The Nineteenth Century: .1. The Challenge of the Secular Age: Segregation or Integration and Three Integrationist Judaisms.2. Reform Judaism.3. Orthodox Judaism.4. Conservative Judaism.Part II: The Twentieth Century:. 5. The Challenge of the "Post-Christian" Century and the Response of Three "Post-Christian" Judaisms. 6. Zionism.7. Jewish Socialism and Yiddishism.8. American Judaism of Holocaust and Redemption. Epilogue.9. What do we learn about religion from Judaism in Modern Times?.Index.

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Book SynopsisA century ago, New Yorkers, hungry for mountain air, good food, and a Jewish environment combined with an American way of leisure, began to develop a resort area unique in the world. By the 1950s, this summer Eden of bungalow colonies, summer camps, and over 900 hotels had attracted over a million people a year. This was the Jewish Catskills of Sullivan and Ulster Counties. Born to a small hotel-owning family who worked for decades in hotels after losing their own, Phil Brown tells a story of the many elements of this magical environment. His own waiter's tales, his mother's culinary exploits as a chef, and his father's jobs as maitre d' and coffee shop operator offer a backdrop to the vital life of Catskills summers. Catskill Culture recounts the life of guests, staff, resort owners,entertainers, and local residents through the author's memories and archival research and the memories of 120 others. The Catskills resorts shaped American Jewish culture, enabling Jews to become more American while at the same time introducing the American public to immigrant Jewish culture. Catskills entertainment provided the nation with a rich supply of comedians, musicians, and singers. Legions of young men and women used the Catskills as a springboard to successful careers and marriages. A decline for the resort area beginning in the 1970s has led to many changes. Today most of the hotels and bungalow colonies are gone or in ruins, while other communities, notably those of the Hasidim, have appeared. The author includes an appendix listing over 900 hotels he has been able to document and invites readers to contact him with additional entries.Trade Review"With an insider's love and knowledge and a sociologist's objectivity, Phil Brown has written a book that avoids the sentimentality and condescension that have marred many of its predecessors. Interviews with former employees, owners and guests provide priceless insights into the culture of the Mountains. Brown's own voice is so warm, rich and good natured you will feel as if you are in the care of the most gracious of hosts as you experience life at the great-and not so great-Jewish resorts of the past." -Eileen Pollack, Director of Creative Writing, University of Michigan, and author of The Rabbi in the Attic and Other Stories "A powerful blend of personal memoir, sociological study, and historical ethnography, Catskill Culture recalls the life of Jewish Catskill mountain resort culture from its early years before World War II through its heyday in the postwar era and its subsequent decline in recent decades. Phil Brown's engaging and eminently readable account is shot through with nostalgic ambivalence for the world of work that produced the leisure industry known as 'the borscht belt'... An insightful exploration of the workplace culture of the Catskills resorts, the book speaks to all who have ever visited the mountains or heard stories about them as well as to students of contemporary ethnicity and culture." -Deborah Dash Moore, Professor of Religion, Vassar College, and author of To the Golden Cities: Pursuing the American Jewish Dream in Miami and L.A. "With part autobiography, part ethnography, Brown takes us back, nostalgically, to the halcyon days of this resort community. Remarkably, he depicts the area with such vivid illustrations that he brings alive the emotions, sentiments, and good will for which the Catskills were known. A labor of love...Mazel Tov, Phil!" -Contemporary Sociology "Using photographs and interviews, [Brown] takes a nostalgic look at the Borscht Belt and its decline...A pleasant read." -Library Journal "Because of his fond experience, Brown's ethnography is much warmer, more personal than most. It is a documentary of assimilation and a return to one's roots." -Publishers Weekly "One of the virtues of Phil Brown's unapologetically nostalgic memoir of growing up and working in the legendary Catskill Mountains-as busboy, cook, waiter, musician and all around 'mountain rat'-is that his particular nostalgia is profoundly earned. Indeed, he is deeply in touch with the vanished Jewish world of his parents who labored for their entire lives in the mountains. Brown offers an insider's-a native ethnographer's-account of this region and the astonishing Jewish culture it spawned." -American Jewish History "Whether you remember the summers in the Catskills, or heard nostalgic tales about this bygone era, this book is worth reading." -Lifestyles Magazine in Buffalo, NY "Part memoir, part history, part sociology: Catskill Culture is basically an engagingly-written jog down Memory Lane augmented by anecdotes..." -The Journal of American Ethnic HistoryTable of ContentsAcknowledgments 1. Returning to the Catskills 2. How the Jewish Catskills Started 3. Kuchalayns and Bungalow Colonies 4. Hotel Life 5. Entertainment 6. "Mountain Rats": The More Skilled Workers and Other Veterans 7. Young Workers: Waiters, Busboys, Counselors, Bellhops, and Others 8. Guests 9. Resort Religion and Yiddishkeit 10. Decline, Present, and Future 11. What Made It So Special? Appendix: Hotels of the Catskills Notes Bibliography Index Photographs

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Book SynopsisA sobering critique of the renowned Jewish writer and philosopher WieselTrade Review"Mark Chmiel offers a bold and much-needed analysis of the moral pretensions of one of our country's most prominent public intellectuals. His thoughtful and measured examination of Elie Wiesel's ideas and actions reaches beyond the subject of this book into the heart of what is moral behavior in a troubled world." --Howard Zinn "In this courageous book, Mark Chmiel details the ambiguity of Elie Wiesel's moral witness. On the one hand, he has been a powerful voice calling the Western world to account for the Holocaust and intervening in other social tragedies. On the other hand, he has been consistently unwilling to respond to the plight of the Palestinians, victims of the Jewish state. In conclusion Chmiel calls those concerned with a consistent moral witness today to pay particular attention to the politically disregarded victims, whose victimization exposes the imperialism of the dominant powers." --Rosemary Radford Ruether, author of Christianity and the Making of the Modern Family "Chmiel offers the first serious critique of this modern-day Jewish prophet's life and work." --Publishers WeeklyTable of ContentsPreface Acknowledgments 1. The Jewish Remembrancer: A Political Reading Themes of a Life The Political Economy of Worthy and Unworthy Victims 2. The Impassioned Advocate: Jewish Solidarity Respecting the Dead Defending the Survivors Mobilizing for Russian Jewry 3. The Cosmopolitan Witness: Global Solidarity A Final Solution in Paraguay Southeast Asian Refugees Central America in the 1980s 4. The Diaspora Apologist: Israel and the Fate of Palestine The Mystical Triumph of 1967 Confrontations and Disputations From the 1982 Lebanon Invasion to the "Peace Process" 5. The Worthy Victim: Moral Authority and State Power The Carter Administration and Sacred Memory The Reagan Years Bosnia, Kosovo, and Clinton 6. The Unfinished Project of Solidarity: If We Remain Silent Dangerous Remembrance From Bystanders to Resisters A Preferential Option for Unworthy Victims Notes Index

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Book SynopsisFresh articles about a much neglected genre, fiction from and about the Jewish ghetto. Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries ghetto fiction played an important part in the expression of a particularly German-Jewish quest for identity. The volume Ghetto Writing takes the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the publication of Leopold Kompert's collection of ghetto stories Aus dem Ghetto (1848) to fill a gap and give testimony to an important genre that has been unduly silenced in the literary histories of the post-war period. The volume presents some 15 articles by scholars from Scandinavia, Germany, Great Britain, and Ireland whose contributions offer new analyses of ghetto writing by well known authors such as Heinrich Heine and Joseph Roth, andcompletely new material on forgotten ghetto writers who deserve to be rediscovered, such as Alexander Granach. The articles cover various types of ghetto writing, ranging from ghetto fiction in the tradition of Leopold Kompert and Karl Emil Franzos, to diaries, travelogues, autobiography, and even contemporary German HipHop and Rap lyrics.Trade ReviewA scintillating glimpse of a literary treasure trove.' CANADIAN JEWISH NEWS 'Should be of much use to those who study or teach German-Jewish literary and cultural relations.' GERMAN QUARTERLY ' The publication is of interest as in introduction into the material not only for the Germanist but also for the layperson.' ASCHKENAS 'The great breadth of this collection of essays makes it especially valuable.' GERMANISTIK 'This volume is bound to be of great interest to anyone interested in the works that chronicle the journey of the Yiddish speakers of Central and Eastern Europe from medieval ghettos to the attempted assimilation into the German cultural world. * SHOFAR *Table of ContentsThe Frankfurt Judengasse in Eyewitness Accounts from the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Century - Eoin Bourke Enlightened and Romantic Views of the Ghetto: David Frieländer versus Heinrich Heine - Ritchie Robertson Reclaiming the Location: Leopold Kompert's Ghetto Fiction in Post-Colonial Perspective - Florian Krobb German Versus Jargon: Language and Jewish Identity in German Ghetto Writing - Gabriele Glasenapp Eastern Jews and the Sociology of Nationalism - Chris Thornhill Pogroms in Literary Representation - Joachim Beug Philo-Simetic Tendencies in Wilhelm Jensen's Historical Novel Die Juden von Cölln - Joerg Thunecke Views from fin-de-Siécle Vienna: Zionist Images of Eastern Jews in Herzl's Die Welt - Paul E. Kerry The Construction of the Eastern Jewry in Joseph Roth's Juden auf Wanderschaft - David Horrocks From Ghetto to Nation: Hofmannsthal's Poetics of Assimilation - Michael Kane Persecution, Exile, and the Mental Ghetto in Henry William Katz's Novel Die Fischmanns - Ena Pedersen The Shtetl's Curiosity and Style: Alexander Granach's Autobiographical Novel Da ghet ein Mensch - Michael Schmidt Edgar Hilsenrath's Poetics of Insignificance and the Tradition of Humour in German-Jewish Ghetto Writing - Anne Fuchs "Beyond the Jewish Ghetto: The Ghetto in Modern Punk and Rap Culture" by Frank Möbus and Martin B. Münch

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Book SynopsisFeatures a special section on the Hungarian German Jewish writer and theater director George Tabori and a Forum section on the 2016 film A German Life. Nexus is the official publication of the biennial German Jewish Studies Workshop, which was inaugurated at Duke University in 2009 and is now held at the University of Notre Dame. Together, Nexus and the Workshop constitute the first ongoing forum in North America for German Jewish studies. Nexus publishes innovative research in German Jewish Studies, introducing new directions, analyzing the development and definition of the field, and considering its place vis-à-vis both German Studies and Jewish Studies. Additionally, it examines issues of pedagogy and programming at the undergraduate, graduate, and community levels. Nexus 4 features a special section on the Hungarian German Jewish writer and theater director George Tabori; edited by Martin Kagel, this section includes both new documentary material and a number of trenchant scholarly articles. Additionally, the volume includes a Forum section (edited by Brad Prager) on the 2016 documentary film A German Life, an exploration of Kafka and childhood (Ritchie Robertson), and a provocative reassessment of Schindler's List (Eva Revesz). Contributors: Tobias Boes, Antje Diedrich, Norbert Otto Eke, Martin Kagel, Jennifer M. Kapczynski, Brad Prager, Eva Revesz, Ritchie Robertson, Robert Skloot, Kerstin Steitz, Donna Stonecipher, Lena Tabori, StanleyWalden, Valerie Weinstein. William Collins Donahue is the John J. Cavanaugh Professor of the Humanities at the University of Notre Dame, where he chairs the Department of German and Russian. Martha B. Helfer is Professor of German and an affiliate member of the Department of Jewish Studies at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. Special section editor Martin Kagel is A. G. Steer Professor of German at the University of Georgia.Table of ContentsIntroduction - William Collins Donahue and Martha B. Helfer Kafka, Childhood, and History - Ritchie Robertson The Black, White, and Gray Zones of Schindler's List: Steven Spielberg with Primo Levi - Eva Revesz NEXUS FORUM on A GERMAN LIFE Perspectives on A German Life - Brad Prager No False Remorse: A Workshop with Florian Weigensamer, Director of A German Life (2016) Only Skin Deep - Tobias Boes A Brunhilde for Our Time: Eliding the Questions in A German Life - William Collins Donahue Hitler's Helpmates - Jennifer M. Kapczynski Zooming in on Moral Guilt: A German Life as an Artistic Public Trial - Kerstin Steitz Framing the Beldame in A German Life and Blind Spot - Valerie Weinstein SPECIAL SECTION on GEORGE TABORI Introduction - Martin Kagel Waiting for The Cannibals: George Tabori's Post-Holocaust Play - William Collins Donahue "Sacrifice is the test for loyalty, Goldberg." Sacrifice and the Passion of Christ in George Tabori's Comedy The Goldberg-Variations - Norbert Otto Eke "Empathy for the Entire Spectrum of Selves and Others": George Tabori's Humanism - Antje Diedrich A Triple Act of Translation: George Tabori and Brecht on Brecht - Donna Stonecipher My War Story: Tabori, Brecht, and Vietnam - Robert Skloot My Life with George - Lena Tabori Some Observations by an American Acting in the German Theater (1984) - Stanley Walden

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Book SynopsisNew essays from the Duke German Jewish Studies Workshop, the first and only ongoing forum for German Jewish Studies in North America. Nexus is the official publication of the biennial German Jewish Studies Workshop at Duke University, the first ongoing forum in North America for German Jewish studies. It publishes innovative research in German Jewish Studies and serves as a venue for introducing new directions in the field, analyzing the development and definition of the field itself, and considering the place of German Jewish Studies within the disciplines of both German Studiesand Jewish Studies. Additionally, it examines issues of pedagogy and programming at the undergraduate, graduate, and community levels. The contributions are organized in three sections according to their approach to German JewishStudies: theoretical and philosophical, literary-historical, or approaches that focus on the Jew(s) in today's Germany. Contributors: Nicola Behrmann, Juliette Brungs, Katja Garloff, Sander L. Gilman, Jeffrey A. Grossman, Jennifer Hansen-Glucklich, Michael G. Levine, Elizabeth Loentz, Agnes C. Mueller, Todd Samuel Presner, Lisa Silverman, David Suchoff. William C. Donahue is Professor in German, in Jewish Studies, and in the Programin Literature at Duke University, where he is also a member of the Jewish Studies Executive Committee and Chair of the Department of Germanic Languages and Literature. Martha B. Helfer is Professor and Chair of the Department of German, Russian, and Eastern European Languages and Literatures and an affiliate member of the Department of Jewish Studies at Rutgers University.Trade ReviewWhat is most impressive about a number of these essays is that the argument their authors develop with reference to specific texts could be appropriated for other texts offering similarly new insights. . . . Nexus . . . promises to contribute new and exciting perspectives to our understanding of German-Jewish philosophy, literature, and culture. * MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW *[A] welcome new series . . . [that] can be expected to become a platform for important research and debates on German Jewish literary and cultural studies. . . . [T]his is a series to which both readers and libraries would be well advised to subscribe. * RITCHIE ROBERTSON, JOURNAL OF EUROPEAN STUDIES *Table of ContentsIntroduction - William Collins Donahue and Martha B. Helfer German-Jewish Studies in the Digital Age: Remarks on Discipline, Method, and Media - Todd Samuel Presner Beyond Antisemitism: A Critical Approach to German Jewish Cultural History - Lisa Silverman Unrequited Love: On the Rhetoric of a Trope from Moritz Goldstein to Hannah Arendt - Katja Garloff Happiness and Unhappiness as a "Jewish Question" - Sander L. Gilman Auerbach, Heine and the Question of Bildung in German and German Jewish Culture - Jeffrey A. Grossman The Literary Double Life of Clementine Krämer: German-Jewish Activist and Bavarian "Heimat" and Dialect Writer - Elizabeth Loentz Franz Kafka, Hebrew Writer: The Vaudeville of Linguistic Origins - David Suchoff Words at War: Hugo Ball and Walter Benjamin on Language and History - Nicola Behrmann The Inability to Love? Jews and Germans in Works by Günter Grass and Martin Walser - Agnes Mueller Written into the Body: Introducing the Performance Video Art of Tanya Ury - Juliette Brungs Disfigured Memory: The Reshaping of Holocaust Symbols in Yad Vashem and the Jewish Museum in Berlin - Jennifer Hansen-Glücklich New Subject Positions in Recent German-Jewish Film - Michael G. Levine

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Book SynopsisSecond volume of the biennial publication of the Duke German Jewish Studies Workshop, making available important new research and considering the definition and development of the field of German Jewish Studies. Nexus is the official publication of the biennial German Jewish Studies Workshop at Duke University, the first ongoing forum in North America for German Jewish studies. It publishes innovative research in German Jewish Studies and serves as a venue for introducing new directions in the field, analyzing the development and definition of the field itself, and considering the place of German Jewish Studies within the disciplines of both German Studiesand Jewish Studies. Additionally, it examines issues of pedagogy and programming at the undergraduate, graduate, and community levels. The second volume of Nexus presents a special forum section on the controversial German Jewish religious historian Hans-Joachim Schoeps (1909-80), including contributions by Julius H. Schoeps, Hans J. Hillerbrand, Eric M. Meyers, Laura Lieber, Noah B. Strote, and Paul Reitter, as well as cutting-edge essays thathighlight important new developments in the field of German Jewish Studies. Contributors: Nick Block, Abigail Gillman, Anton Hieke, Hans J. Hillerbrand, Martin Kagel, Richard S. Levy, Laura Lieber, Eric M. Meyers, Andrea Reiter, Paul Reitter, Julius H. Schoeps, Noah B. Strote, Karina von Tippelskirch. William C. Donahue is Bishop-MacDermott Family Professor of Germanic Languages & Literature, and Professor, Program in Literature andJewish Studies, Duke University. Martha B. Helfer is Professor of German and an affiliate member of the Department of Jewish Studies at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey.Trade Review[A] welcome new series [that] responds to the present state of German Jewish studies . . . with a combination of theoretical reflections and cultural case studies . . . . This series can be expected to become a platform for important research and debates on German Jewish literary and cultural studies . . . . [T]his is a series to which both readers and libraries would be well advised to subscribe. -- Ritchie Robertson * JOURNAL OF EUROPEAN STUDIES *Table of ContentsIntroduction Introduction to the Nexus Forum: A Most Unwanted Man: Hans-Joachim Schoeps Jew, Prussian, German: The Adventuresome Story of Hans-Joachim Schoeps Hans-Joachim Schoeps: Contrarian Scholar The Meyerowitz Family from Königsberg: Contemporaries of Hans-Joachim Schoeps From the Margins: A Response to Schoeps on Schoeps A Conservative Christian Welcome: A Response to Julius Schoeps Facing His Nazi Past? A Response to Schoeps on Schoeps Setting the Record Straight Regarding The Protocols of the Elders of Zion: A Fool's Errand? A Discussion of the "German" Dimension of Reform Judaism in Select Congregations in Three American Southern States, 1860-1880 Weimar on Broadway: Fritz Kortner and Dorothy Thompson's Refugee Play Another Sun If I forget thee, O Jerusalem: The Jewish Exilic Mind in Else Lasker-Schüler's IchundIch "Seit ein Gespräch wir sind und hören können von einander": Martin Buber's Message to Postwar Germany Hungerkünstler: George Tabori Directs Kafka in Bremen (1977) Performing the Jew in Austria after Waldheim: Robert Menasse's Die Vertreibung aus der Hölle

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Book SynopsisBiennial volume of new and innovative essays on German Jewish Studies, featuring forum sections on Heinrich Heine and Karl Kraus. Nexus is the official publication of the biennial German Jewish Studies Workshop, which was inaugurated at Duke University in 2009 and is now held at the University of Notre Dame. Together, Nexus and the Workshop constitute the first ongoing forum in North America for German Jewish Studies. Nexus publishes innovative research in German Jewish Studies, introducing new directions, analyzing the development and definition of the field, and considering its place vis-à-vis both German Studies and Jewish Studies. Additionally, it examines issues of pedagogy and programming at the undergraduate, graduate, and community levels. Nexus 3 features special forum sections on Heinrich Heine and Karl Kraus. Renowned Heine scholar Jeffrey Sammons offers a magisterial critical retrospective on this towering "German Jewish" author, followed by a response from Ritchie Robertson, while the deanof Kraus scholarship, Edward Timms, reflects on the challenges and rewards of translating German Jewish dialect into English. Paul Reitter provides a thoughtful response. Contributors: Angela Botelho, Jay Geller, Abigail Gillman, Jeffrey A. Grossman, Leo Lensing, Georg Mein, Paul Reitter, Ritchie Robertson, Jeffrey L. Sammons, Egon Schwarz, Edward Timms, Liliane Weissberg, Emma Woelk. William Collins Donahue is the John J. CavanaughProfessor of the Humanities at the University of Notre Dame, where he chairs the Department of German and Russian. Martha B. Helfer is Professor of German and an affiliate member of the Department of Jewish Studies at Rutgers, TheState University of New Jersey.Table of ContentsIntroduction - William Collins Donahue and Martha B. Helfer "Ein weites Feld": Ein Wort zu deutsch-jüdischen Studien anläßlich der Verleihung des ersten Egon Schwarz Prize for the Best Essay in German Jewish Studies - Egon Schwarz "An Open Field": A Word about German Jewish Studies on the Occasion of the Presentation of the first Egon Schwarz Prize for the Best Essay in German Jewish Studies - Egon Schwarz Laudatio for Abigail Gillman's Prize-Winning Nexus Essay: "Martin Buber's Message to Postwar Germany" - Martha B. Helfer Heinrich Heine in Modern German History, by an Eyewitness - Jeffery L. Sammons Jeffrey Sammons, Heine, and Me: Some Autobiographical Reflections - Ritchie Robertson Heine's Disparate Legacies: A Response to Jeffrey Sammons - Jeffrey A. Grossman My Debt to Heine and Sammons - Abigail Gillman Die letzten Tage der Menschheit as a German-Jewish Tragicomedy, and the Challenge to Translators - Edward Timms Edward Timms's "Die letzten Tage der Menschheit as a German-Jewish Tragicomedy and the Challenge to Translators": A Response - Paul Reitter Kraus the Mouse? Kafka's Late Reading of Die Fackel and the Vagaries of Literary History - Leo Lensing The Parable of the Rings: Sigmund Freud Reads Lessing - Liliane Weissberg The Poetics of the Polis: Remarks on the Latency of the Literary in Hannah Arendt's Concept of Public Space - Georg Mein The Marrano in Modernity: The Case of Karl Gutzkow - Angela Botelho German Jews Dogged by Destiny: Werewolves and Other Were-Canids in the Works of Heinrich Heine and Curt Siodmak - Jay Geller Authenticity, Distance, and the East German Volksstück: Yiddish in Thomas Christoph Harlan's Ich Selbst und Kein Engel - Emma Woelk

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Book SynopsisA new evaluation of one of the most significant Holocaust poets, Nelly Sachs (1891-1970), offering the first sustained critical analysis of Sachs's largely unanalyzed pre-war poetry and prose. Nelly Sachs (1891-1970) has long been regarded as one of the most significant Holocaust poets. Her conception of language and words as a landscape has been understood by scholars and critics as an exilic ersatz Heimat for the lost German homeland of a displaced poet. This reading, however, is based entirely on her postwar poems. Such an isolated approach to her complex body of work is increasingly historically problematic; it is also at odds with Sachs's generally cyclical poetic process. In "The Space of Words," Jennifer Hoyer offers the first sustained critical analysis of Sachs's largely unanalyzed prewar poetry and prose, as well as the first analysis that examines structural and thematic ties between the prewar works and the Nobel Prize-winning postwar poetry. Through close readings of both Sachs's prewar and postwar works, Hoyer reveals a diasporic rather than exilic conception of the landscape of language, a position of constant wandering rather than static longing for return. This diasporic poetics promotes the intellectual and linguistic power of the wanderer and opens new insights into Sachs's essentialsignificance as a Holocaust poet and a twentieth-century German-Jewish writer wary of the link of literary language to geopolitics and the narrative of nations. Jennifer M. Hoyer is Assistant Professor of German at theUniversity of Arkansas.Trade ReviewJennifer M. Hoyer's book takes a long-needed fresh look at [Sachs's] works and public persona . . . . [It] draw[s] on fascinating Jewish discourses of space and language. It places Sachs provocatively in proximity to 'countermonument artists' such as Art Spiegelman and far from the image of a non-intellectual writer of memorializing monuments. . . . One of the merits and innovations of Hoyer's study is the analysis of two whole cycles of poems, 'Flügel der Prophetie' . . . and 'Dein Leib im Rauch durch die Luft' . . . . Few previous critics have seen the desirability of a cyclical reading of Sachs's poems; even fewer have attempted such a reading. There is much to be learnt from Hoyer's cyclical readings . . . . [I]nteresting, innovative, and noteworthy . . . . [W]ill provoke discussion and debate for scholars of Jewish Studies and of German Literature . . . . * MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW *Hard, wearying, detailed academic toil has clearly gone into producing this book... The result is more than admirable, and fascinating. There is too little space to even begin with the details, but through them the richness of Sachs' work is clear. * MANCHESTER REVIEW OF BOOKS *Table of Contents"An Stelle von Heimat": An Introduction Biography of the Poet:: "a frail woman must do it" Wandering and Words, Wandering in Words Sach's Merlin the Sorcerer: Reconfiguring the Myth as Plural Poetic Space after the Abyss Israel Is Not Only Land: Diasporic Poetry Relearning to Listen: Sachs's Poem Cycle "Dein Leib im Rauch durch die Luft" Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisA re-examination of the social processes behind religious conversions in the Ancient and Early Middle Ages. This volume explores religious conversion in late antique and early medieval Europe at a time when the utility of the concept is vigorously debated. Though conversion was commonly represented by ancient and early medieval writersas singular and personally momentous mental events, contributors to this volume find gradual and incomplete social processes lurking behind their words. A mixture of examples and approaches will both encourage a deepening of specialist knowledge and spark new thinking across a variety of sub-fields. The historical settings treated here stretch from the Roman Hellenism of Justin Martyr in the second century to the ninth-century programs of religious and moral correction by resourceful Carolingian reformers. Baptismal orations, funerary inscriptions, Christian narratives about the conversion of stage-performers, a bronze statue of Constantine, early Byzantine ethnographic writings, and re-located relics are among the book's imaginative points of entry. This focused collection of essays by leading scholars, and the afterword by Neil McLynn, should ignite conversations among students of religious conversion andrelated processes of cultural interaction, diffusion, and change both in the historical sub-fields of Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages and well beyond. This book is one of two collections of essays on religious conversion drawn from the activities of the Shelby Cullum Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University between 1999 and 2001. The other volume, Conversion: Old Worlds and New, is also published by the Universityof Rochester Press. Contributors: Susan Elm, Anthony Grafton, Richard Lim, Rebecca Lyman, Michael Maas, Neil McLynn, Kenneth Mills, Eric Rebillard, Julia M. H. Smith, Raymond Van Dam.Trade ReviewOffer[s] key insights into the study of religious conversion across various 'subfields of history'. . . impressive contributions to the reassessment of the role of religion in history. * COMITATUS *Table of ContentsInscriptions and Conversions: Gregory of Nazianzus on Baptism - Susanna Elm The Politics of Passing: Justin Martyr's Conversion as a Problem of "Hellenization" - Rebecca Lyman Conversion and Burial in the Late Roman Empire - Eric Rebillard Converting the Un-Christianizable: The Baptism of Stage Performers in Late Antiquity - Richard Lim The Many Conversions of the Emperor Constantine - Raymond Van Dam "Delivered from Their Ancient Customs": Christianity and the Question of Cultural Change in Early Byzantine Ethnography - Michael Maas "Emending Evil Ways and Praising God's Omnipotence": Einhard and the Uses of Roman Martyrs - Julia M. H. Smith Seeing and Believing: Aspects of Conversion from Antoninus Pius to Louis the Pious - Neil McLynn

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Book SynopsisArguably, no historical thinker has had as varied and fractious a reception within modern Judaism as Baruch (Benedict) Spinoza (1632–77), the seventeenth-century philosopher, pioneering biblical critic, and Jewish heretic from Amsterdam. Revered in many circles as the patron saint of secular Jewishness, he has also been branded as the worst traitor to the Jewish people in modern times. Jewish philosophy has cast Spinoza as marking a turning point between the old and the new, as a radicalizer of the medieval tradition and table setter for the modern. He has served as a perennial landmark and point of reference in the construction of modern Jewish identity. This volume brings together excerpts from central works in the Jewish response to Spinoza. True to the diversity of Spinoza's Jewish reception, it features a mix of genres, from philosophical criticism to historical fiction, from tributes to diary entries, providing the reader with a sense of the overall historical development of Spinoza's posthumous legacy.

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Book SynopsisBorn in a small river town in the largely Muslim province of Sandzak, Munevera Hadzisehovic grew up in an area sandwiched between the Orthodox Christian regions of Montenegro and Serbia, cut off from other Muslims in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Her story takes her from the rural culture of the early 1930s through the massacres of World War II and the repression of the early communist regime to the dissolution of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. It sheds light on the history of Yugoslavia from the interwar kingdom to the break-up of the socialist state. Hadzisehovic paints a picture not only of her own life, but also of the lives of other Muslims, especially women, in an era and an area of great change. Readers are given a loving yet accurate portrait of Muslim customs pertaining to the household, gardens, food and dating - in short, of everyday life. She writes from the inside out, starting with her emotions and experiences, then moving outward to the facts that concern those interested in this region: the role of the Ustashe, Chetniks and Germans in World War II; the attitude of Serb-dominated Yugoslavia toward Muslims; and the tragic state of ethnic relations that led to war again in the 1990s. Some of Hadzisehovic's experiences and many of her views may be controversial. She speaks of Muslim women's reluctance to give up the veil, the disapproval of mixed marriages and the problems between Serb and Croat nationals. Her benign view of Italian occupation is in stark contrast to her depiction of bloodthirsty Chetnik irregulars. Her analysis of Belgrade's Muslims suggests that class differences were just as important as religious affiliation. In this personal story, Hadzisehovic mourns the loss of two worlds - the orderly Muslim world of her childhood and the secular, multi-ethnic world of communist Yugoslavia.

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Book SynopsisThis book tells a story, a story about America’s spiritual capital. Spiritual capital is the fund of beliefs, examples, and commitments that are transmitted from generation to generation through a religious tradition, and which attach people to the transcendent source of fulfillment and happiness. America has created the greatest civilization the world has ever know, and it has done this because of its spiritual capital, the values and beliefs by which individual Americans have interpreted and transformed the world. The Judeo-Christian heritage has historically served as the spiritual capital of America. It is not only the spiritual quest of modernity, but that quest has evolved into globalization, and America, because of its spiritual capital, has been able to provide leadership for that quest. The larger thesis is that America is by virtue of its specific spiritual capital heritage not only the beneficiary of its advantages but also the leading exemplar of the spiritual quest of modernity. It is because is engaged in a spiritual quest that it can exercise world leadership as opposed to domination and oppression. The authors examine the extent to which economic development, growth, and entrepreneurship depend on spiritual capital. They argue that there is a symbiotic relation between America’s spiritual capital and our political institutions and freedoms. The argument here is that the substantive spiritual vision supports the political and economic procedural norms of a free society. Like any form of capital, spiritual capital may lie dormant or be wasted, it may be used productively, it may be augmented, and it may be diminished or eroded. In the final chapter, we point out how the heritage is under assault from a variety of sources and what happens when scientific, technological, economic, and political institutions are detached from their spiritual roots. The result is a natural progression from governmental bureaucratic centralization to secularism to reductive materialism and ultimately to a social-collectivist conception of human welfare. Within the story there is an argument, namely, that these achievements will not be sustained without that heritage, and for all of the above reasons the heritage needs to be reaffirmed. The authors argue that the future of modernity, globalization, and America depend on the extent to which there is a reaffirmation of America’s spiritual capital.

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Book SynopsisThe history of the South Philadelphia Hebrew Association's basketball team and the legends it spawnedTrade Review"[A]n extremely well-researched book, one that captures in detail a bygone era, and belongs on the bookshelf of anyone with an interest in basketball history." — Providence Journal"Douglas Stark has made a valuable contribution in bringing back to life a vibrant era in early basketball history. His portraits of the players, their fans, and such memorable figures as team founder Eddie Gottlieb and announcer Dave Zinkoff will entertain and instruct lovers of not only basketball but also American urban history." —Lee Lowenfish, author of Branch Rickey: Baseball's Ferocious GentlemanTable of ContentsPreface1. On the Road2. A Jewish Game3. A New League, a New Team4. Prospect Hall and the Vissies5. Shikey6. Howard the Red7. Saturday Night SPHAS' Habit8. The Darlings of Philadelphia9. Rosenberg to the Rescue10. Basketball and War11. The Influx of New York Players12. Losing Home Court13. The End of the Line14. Playing it StraightEpilogue: Memories Live OnAcknowledgmentsAppendix A: Game-by-Game Standings for the SPHAS, American Basketball LeagueAppendix B: Year-by-Year Standings for the SPHASAppendix C: SPHAS Versus other Philadelphia Professional TeamsAll-Time SPHAS RosterBibliography

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Book SynopsisThe religion of Islam and the mainstream Muslim majority have been conflated with the beliefs and actions of an extremist minority. The result was reflected in a USA Today/Gallup Poll which found substantial minorities of Americans admitting to negative feelings or prejudice against Muslims.The vital missing piece among the many voices weighing in on this question is the actual views of Muslim publics.Who Speaks for Islam? is about this silenced majority. It is the product of a mammoth research study undertaken over six years by the Gallup Organization. Gallup conducted tens of thousands of hour-long face to face interviews with residents of more than 35 predominantly Muslim nations. In totality we surveyed a sample representing over 90% of the world’s 1.3 billion Muslims, making this the largest, most comprehensive study of contemporary Muslims ever done.

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Book SynopsisOsama bin Laden's words carry a great deal of weight in the West. When he speaks, or allegedly speaks, we listen. But what about the words of other key leaders in the Al-Qa'ida terrorist network? We can learn how to conduct the war on terrorism more successfully when we study their own manuals, written for their followers.

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Book SynopsisTerrorist organizations have been able to market mass murder under hysteria's banner of alleged martyrdom. But when it comes to understanding Islamic suicide terrorism in particular, there is much more to it than martyrdom.

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Book SynopsisA multilingual, transnational literary tradition, Jewish American writing has long explored questions of personal identity and national boundaries. These questions can engage students in literature, writing, or religion; at Jewish, Christian, or secular schools; in or outside the United States.This volume takes an expansive view of Jewish American literature, beginning with writing from the earliest colonies in the Americas and continuing to contemporary Soviet-born authors in the United States, including works that engage deeply with religious concepts and others that embrace assimilation. It invites readers to rethink the nature of American multiculturalism, suggests pairings of Jewish American texts with other ethnic American literatures, and examines the workings of whiteness and privilege.Contributors offer varied perspectives on classic texts such as Yekl, Bread Givers, and Goodbye, Columbus, along with approaches to interdisciplinary topics including humor, graphic novels, and musical theater. The volume concludes with an extensive resources section.Trade ReviewThis volume extends the field of Jewish American literature well beyond its current boundaries and invites teachers and scholars to discover a wealth of pedagogical strategies and new texts.""--Donald Weber, Mount Holyoke College

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Book SynopsisFrom its founding in 1901 through the second half of the twentieth century, the Fort Worth section of the National Council of Jewish Women fostered the integration of its members into the social and cultural fabric of the greater community. Along the way, it championed important social causes, including an Americanization school for immigrants and literacy initiatives. But by 1999, facing declining membership and - according to some - decreased relevance to the lives of Jewish women, the Council's national and local leaders found themselves confronting the end of the group's existence.Hollace Ava Weiner has mined the records of this organization at both the local and national levels, interviewed surviving members, and examined Fort Worth newspapers and other local historical documents. Her lively and careful study reveals that the Fort Worth Council of Jewish Women was, in fact, so successful that it prepared the way for its own obsolescence. By century's end, the members and the times had changed more rapidly than the Council.While ""Jewish ""Junior League"""" focuses on a particular organization in a particular city, it simultaneously serves as a case study for the exploration of important themes of women's and Jewish history throughout the twentieth century.Trade ReviewIn Hollace Weiner's capable hands, the history of the 'rise and demise' of the Fort Worth Council of Jewish Women becomes a cautionary tale that anyone interested in women's organizations should read and ponder. A refershing and untraditional institutional history, Jewish 'Junior League' makes a major league contribution to Jewish women's studies. - Jonathan D. Sarna, Joseph H. & Belle R. Braun Professor of American Jewish History, Brandeis University

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Book SynopsisWith more than 400 photographs, extensive interviews with the descendants of pioneer Jewish Texan families, and reproductions of rare historical documents, Natalie Ornish's Pioneer Jewish Texans quickly became a classic following its original release in 1989. This new Texas A&M University Press edition presents Ornish's meticulous research and her fascinating historical vignettes for a new generation of readers and historians. She chronicles Jewish buccaneers with Jean Lafitte at Galveston; she tells of Jewish patriots who fought at the Alamo and at virtually every major engagement in the war for Texan independence; she traces the careers of immigrants with names like Marcus, Sanger, and Gordon, who arrived on the Texas frontier with little more than the packs on their backs and went on to build great mercantile empires. Cattle barons, wildcatters, diplomats, physicians, financiers, artists, and humanitarians are among the other notable Jewish pioneers and pathfinders described in this carefully researched and exhaustively documented book. Filling a substantial void in Texana and Texas history, the Texas A&M University Press edition of Natalie Ornish's Pioneer Jewish Texans brings back into circulation this treasure trove of information on a rich and often overlooked vein of the multifaceted story of the Lone Star State.

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Book SynopsisA lively look at four major Jewish celebrities of early 1960s America, who together made their mark on both American culture and Jewish identity

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Book SynopsisThe long-awaited sequel to the classic Hebrew language textbook, this book is intended for intermediate and advanced students

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Book SynopsisAn astonishing analysis of Jewish mother-daughter relations before, during, and after the Shoah as described in daughters' memoirs

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Book SynopsisAn astonishing analysis of Jewish mother-daughter relations before, during, and after the Shoah as described in daughters' memoirs

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Book SynopsisBrings together key writings by one of the most distinguished and renowned Jewish historians of our time

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Book SynopsisA fresh and lively assessment of the pleasures and hardships of daily life in Israel during the 1950s

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Book SynopsisIntriguing biography of Eliezer Grynbaum, the communist Jewish Kapo whose controversy-ridden story spans Europe and Israel

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Book SynopsisExplores local incidents of antisemitism and antisemitic violence across Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries

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Book SynopsisIntriguing biography of Eliezer Grynbaum, the communist Jewish Kapo whose controversy-ridden story spans Europe and Israel

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Book SynopsisAn elegantly designed volume of new English and Hebrew prayers and reflections for the High Holidays from a contemporary American poet

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Book SynopsisEssays in honor of the scholarly work and institutional leadership of Jehuda Reinharz, focusing on the role of the individual in history

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Book SynopsisThose who anticipated the demise of religion and the advent of a peaceful, secularized global village have seen the last two decades confound their predictions. René Girard’s mimetic theory is a key to understanding the new challenges posed by our world of resurgent violence and pluralistic cultures and traditions.Girard sought to explain how the Judeo-Christian narrative exposes a founding murder at the origin of human civilization and demystifies the bloody sacrifices of archaic religions. Meanwhile, his book Sacrifice, a reading of conflict and sacrificial resolution in the Vedic Brahmanas, suggests that mimetic theory’s insights also resonate with several non-Western religious and spiritual traditions.This volume collects engagements with Girard by scholars of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism and situates them within contemporary theology, philosophy, and religious studies.

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Book SynopsisRefuge Must Be Given details the evolution of Eleanor Roosevelt from someone who harbored negative impressions of Jews to become a leading Gentile champion of Israel in the United States. The book explores, for the first time, Roosevelt's partnership with the Quaker leader Clarence Pickett in seeking to admit more refugees into the United States, and her relationship with Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles, who was sympathetic to the victims of Nazi persecution yet defended a visa process that failed both Jewish and non-Jewish refugees.After the war, as a member of the American delegation to the United Nations, Eleanor Roosevelt slowly came to the conclusion that the partition of Palestine was the only solution both for the Jews in the displaced persons camps in Europe, and for the conflict between the Arabs and the Jews. When Israel became a state, she became deeply involved in supporting the work of Youth Aliyah and Hadassah, its American sponsor, in bringing Jewish refugee children to Israel and training them to become productive citizens. Her devotion to Israel reflected some of her deepest beliefs about education, citizenship, and community building. Her excitement about Israel's accomplishments and her cultural biases, however, blinded her to the impact of Israel's founding on the Arabs. Visiting the new nation four times and advocating on Israel's behalf created a warm bond not only between her and the people of Israel, but between her and the American Jewish community.Table of Contents Introduction 1. A Cautious Response to Nazi Germany 2. Partnering with Clarence Pickett 3. Responding to the Threat of War and the Nazi Assault on the Jews 4. Antisemitism and The Moral Basis of Democracy 5. The Wagner-Rogers Bill 6. The United States Committee for the Care of European Children 7. The Emergency Rescue Committee, Sumner Welles, and theObstacles to Rescue 8. Continuing the Fight on Behalf of Visa Applicants 9. Combating Anti-Immigrant Sentiment and Antisemitismon the Home Front 10. A Failed Attempt at Rescue 11. Responding to News of the Extermination Camps, 1942–45 12. A March to a Better Life 13. The Postwar Refugee Crisis and the Future of Palestine 14. Committing to the Establishment of a Jewish State 15. Visiting Israel as World Patron of Youth Aliyah 16. Immigrant Children and the Task of Cultural Integration 17. American Policy toward Israel in the 1950s 18. A Special Bond with Israel Conclusion Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisThe Trump presidency has resulted in a fundamentally disruptive moment in this nation's political culture. Not only were there different policy options and directions, but the cultural artifacts of politics changed because of how this president dramatically challenged the existing norms of political behavior and action. As we have shifted from a period of American liberalism to a time of political populism, deep fissures are dividing Americans in general and Jews in particular.The Impact of the Presidency of Donald Trump on American Jewry and Israel unpacks President Donald Trump's distinctive and unique relationship with the American Jewish community and the State of Israel. Addressing the various dimensions of his personal and political connections with Jews and Israel, this publication is designed to provide an assessment of how the Trump presidency has influenced and altered American Jewish political behavior. Writers from different backgrounds and political orientations bring a broad range of perspectives designed to examine various aspects of this presidency, including Trump's particular impact on Israel-US relations, his special connection with Orthodox Jews, and his complex and uneven relationship with Jewish Republicans.For liberal American Jews, these four years represented a fundamental revolution, overturning and challenging much that a generation of activists had fought to achieve and protect. For Trump's supporters, it afforded them an opportunity to advance their priorities, while joining the forty-fifth president in changing the American political landscape. The ""Trump effect"" will extend well beyond his four-year tenure, creating an environment that has fomented the politics of hate and exposed a deeply embedded presence of anti-Semitism. How Americans understand this moment in time and the ways society will adapt can be reflected through the prism of the Jewish encounter with Trumpism that this volume seeks to explore.Table of Contents FOREWORD EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION Consonance or Dissonance: American Jewry in a Post-Trump Era, by Gary Phillip Zola Donald Trump and the Jews: Bad for America, Bad for the Jews, Wonderful for the Netanyahu-Led Government of Israel and Potentially Dangerous to Israel's Future, by Michael Berenbaum Trump: Friend Extraordinaire to Israel and the Jewish People, by Morton A. Klein and Elizabeth A. Berney, Esq. The Jewish Community and Younger Generations: Challenges, Opportunities, and Long-Term Impacts of the Trump Era, by Adam Basciano and Shanie Reichman The American Jewish Community: A Divergence of Political Perspectives, by Saba Soomekh Orthodox Jews and Trump, by Gilbert N. Kahn Seeing Mar-A-Lago from Jerusalem: Perceptions of President Trump in Israel, by Ehud Eiran How the Jewish Press Saw, by Rob Eshman Why Donald Trump's Vision Repelled American Jews, by Mark Mellman They Said It Couldn't Be Done: Historic Achievements of President Donald Trump, by Matthew Brooks and Shari Hillman Trump and the Jews: What Did We Learn?, by Dan Schnur Reflections on Donald Trump's Presidency and American Jewry, by Steven F. Windmueller ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS ABOUT THE USC CASDEN INSTITUTE

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Book SynopsisTransleithanian Paradise: A History of the Budapest Jewish Community, 1738–1938 traces the rise of Budapest Jewry from a marginal Ashkenazic community at the beginning of the eighteenth century into one of the largest and most vibrant Jewish communities in the world by the beginning of the twentieth century. This was symptomatic of the rise of the city of Budapest from three towns on the margins of Europe into a major European metropolis.Focusing on a broad array of Jewish communal institutions, including synagogues, schools, charitable institutions, women's associations, and the Jewish hospital, this book explores the mixed impact of urban life on Jewish identity and community. On the one hand, the anonymity of living in a big city facilitated disaffection and drift from the Jewish community. On the other hand, the concentration of several hundred thousand Jews in a compact urban space created a constituency that supported and invigorated a diverse range of Jewish communal organizations and activities. Transleithanian Paradise contrasts how this mixed impact played out in two very different Jewish neighborhoods. Terézváros was an older neighborhood that housed most of the lower income, more traditional, immigrant Jews. Lipótváros, by contrast, was a newer neighborhood where upwardly mobile and more acculturated Jews lived. By tracing the development of these two very distinct communities, this book shows how Budapest became one of the most diverse and lively Jewish cities in the world.Table of Contents List of Tables Preface Part I. Beginnings, 1738–1838 1. Introduction: Budapest as a Laboratory of Urban Jewish Identity 2. The Óbuda Kehilla and the Magnate-Jewish Symbiosis 3. Terézváros and the Pest Jewish Community Part II. Coming of Age, 1838–1873 4. Washing Away the Ancien Régime : The Great Flood and the Rebranding of Budapest, 1838–1873 5. A Model Neolog Community: From Nordau's Pest to Herzl's Budapest 6. The Pest Jewish Women's Association: A Cautious Path to the Mainstream 7. The Other Side of Budapest Jewry: Orthodox and Lower-Income Jews Part III. After Trianon 8. Paradise Waning: War, Revolution, and the New Budapest, 1914–1938 9. 1938 and Beyond Notes Bibliography Index

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