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In the early 1930s in Berlin, Germany, a group of leading Eastern European Jewish intellectuals embarked upon a project to transform the lives of millions of Yiddish-speaking Jews around the world. Their goal was to publish a popular and comprehensive Yiddish language encyclopedia of general knowledge that would serve as a bridge to the modern world and as a guide to help its readers navigate their way within it. However, soon after the Algemeyne entsiklopedye (General Encyclopedia) was announced, Hitler’s rise to power forced its editors to flee to Paris. The scope and mission of the project repeatedly changed before its final volumes were published in New York City in 1966. The Holocaust...
At the beginning of the twentieth century, Yiddish was widely viewed, even by many of its speakers, as a corrupt form of German that Jews had to abandon if they hoped to engage in serious intellectual, cultural, or political work. Yet by 1917 it was the dominant language of the Russian Jewish press, a medium for modern literary criticism, a vehicle for science and learning, and the foundation of an ideology of Jewish liberation. The Revolutionary Roots of Modern Yiddish, 1903–1917 investigates how this change in status occurred and focuses on the three major figures responsible for its transformation. Barry Trachtenberg reveals how, following the model set by other nationalist movements th...
The United States and the Nazi Holocaust is an invaluable synthesis of United States policies and attitudes towards the Nazi persecution of European Jewry from 1933 right up to the modern day. The book, which includes 20 illustrations, weaves together a vast body of scholarly literature to bring students of the Holocaust a balanced, readable overview of this complex and often controversial topic. It demonstrates that the United States' response to the rise of Nazism, the refugee crisis it provoked, the Holocaust itself, and its aftermath were-and remain to this day-intricately linked to the ever-shifting racial, economic, and social status of American Jewry. Using a broad chronological frame...
In the early 1930s in Berlin, Germany, a group of leading Eastern European Jewish intellectuals embarked upon a project to transform the lives of millions of Yiddish-speaking Jews around the world. Their goal was to publish a popular and comprehensive Yiddish language encyclopedia of general knowledge that would serve as a bridge to the modern world and as a guide to help its readers navigate their way within it. However, soon after the Algemeyne entsiklopedye (General Encyclopedia) was announced, Hitler's rise to power forced its editors to flee to Paris. The scope and mission of the project repeatedly changed before its final volumes were published in New York City in 1966. The Holocaust &...
Reprocessed with the latest computer technology, George Haas' superb photography evokes the sense of place that is Los Angeles' famously artificial landscape, most of which, given three weeks without watering, would dry up and blow away. This cutting-edge art photography in the grand tradition of both American documentary and landscape photography reprocessed with 21st century photography.
Violence and Public Memory assesses the relationship between these two subjects by examining their interconnections in varied case studies across the United States, South America, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Those responsible for the violence discussed in this volume are varied, and the political ideologies and structures range from apartheid to fascism to homophobia to military dictatorships but also democracy. Racism and state terrorism have played central roles in many of the case studies examined in this book, and multiple chapters also engage with the recent rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. The sites and history represented in this volume address a range of issues, incl...
In this multidisciplinary volume, leading historians provide new understanding of a time that sent shockwaves through Jewish communities in and beyond the Russian Empire and transformed the way Jews thought about the politics of ethnic and national identity.
The sea and maritime spaces have long been neglected in the field of Jewish studies despite their relevance in the context of Jewish religious texts and historical narratives. The images of Noah’s arche, king Salomon’s maritime activities or the miracle of the parting of the Red Sea immediately come into mind, however, only illustrate a few aspects of Jewish maritime activities. Consequently, the relations of Jews and the sea has to be seen in a much broader spatial and temporal framework in order to understand the overall importance of maritime spaces in Jewish history and culture. Almost sixty years after Samuel Tolkowsky’s pivotal study on maritime Jewish history and culture and the...
For Herman Melville, the instability of democracy held tremendous creative potential. Examining the centrality of political thought to Melville's oeuvre, Jennifer Greiman argues that Melville's densely figurative aesthetics give form to a radical reimagining of democratic foundations, relations, and ways of being—modeling how we can think democracy in political theory today. Across Melville's five decades of writing, from his early Pacific novels to his late poetry, Greiman identifies a literary formalism that is radically political and carries the project of democratic theory in new directions. Recovering Melville's readings in political philosophy and aesthetics, Greiman shows how he eng...
The Tragedy of a Generation is the story of a failed ideal: an autonomous Jewish nation in Europe. It traces the origins of two influential strains of Jewish thought—Yiddishism and Diaspora Nationalism—and documents the waning hopes and painful reassessments of their leading representatives against the rising tide of Nazism and the Holocaust.