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The historical involvement of Jews in the political Left is well known, but far less attention has been paid to the political and ideological factors which attracted Jews to the Left. After the Holocaust and the creation of Israel many lost their faith in universalistic solutions, yet lingering links between Jews and the Left continue to exist.
Scraping sounds awake you from your sleep. Something putrid is moving underneath the bed, with razor talons only a thin mattress away from tearing you to shreds. Cringing with disbelief, in a panic you suddenly flee from the bedroom and down the stairs, screaming. In the living room, your corner vision catches a pair of glowing eyes shifting across the large picture window, and when you turn to look they are...still there, only now joined with a drooling maw of fangs. As your heart races to the point of bursting from your chest, you flatten yourself against the wall trying praying to remain unseen until a ghostly, disembodied voice whispers your name from down the hallway. It sounds like a child, but you and your wife have no children. Your wife? Oh, God, where is she? There, in the kitchen she stands, smiling. At last, a piece of sanity from this insane night, and you rush to your loving mate. Behind her back she holds a gleaming butcher knife, waiting to return your embrace. In one swift stoke, her hand arcs down, and you... Turn the page onto the next chapter, nervously anticipating what new horror awaits you this evening.
Sex, Violence, and the Avant-Garde examines the French anarchist movement between the wars from a socio-cultural perspective, considering the relationship between anarchism and the artistic avant-garde and surrealism, political violence and terrorism, sexuality and sexual politics, and gender roles.
This timely new monograph takes as its starting point the provocative contention that Holocaust film scholarship has been marginalized academically despite the crucial role Holocaust film has played in fostering international awareness of the Nazi genocide and scholarly understandings of cinematic power. The book suggests political and economic motivations for this seeming paradox, the ideological parameters of which are evident in debates and controversies over Holocaust films themselves, and around Holocaust culture in general. Lending particular attention to four exemplary Holocaust “art” films (Korczak [Poland, 1990], The Quarrel [Canada, 1990], Entre Nous [France, 1983], and Balagan [Germany, 1994]), this book breaks disciplinary ground by drawing critical connections between public and scholarly debates over Holocaust representation, and the often sophisticated cinematic structures lending aesthetic shape to them in today’s global arena.
A lively intellectual history that explores how prominent midcentury public intellectuals approached Zionism and then the State of Israel itself and its conflicts with the Arab world In this lively intellectual history of the political Left, cultural critic Susie Linfield investigates how eight prominent twentieth-century intellectuals struggled with the philosophy of Zionism, and then with Israel and its conflicts with the Arab world. Constructed as a series of interrelated portraits that combine the personal and the political, the book includes philosophers, historians, journalists, and activists such as Hannah Arendt, Arthur Koestler, I. F. Stone, and Noam Chomsky. In their engagement wit...
In the years between the two world wars, the Jewish community of Poland—the largest in Europe—was the cultural heart of the Jewish diaspora. The Jewish Workers’ Bund, which had a socialist, secularist, Yiddishist, and anti-Zionist orientation, won a series of important electoral battles in Poland on the eve of the Second World War and became a major political party. Many earlier works on the politics of Polish Jewry have suggested that Bundist victories were ephemeral or attributable to outside forces. Jack Jacobs, however, argues convincingly that the electoral success of the Bund was linked to the long-term efforts of the constellation of cultural, educational, and other movements re...
This groundbreaking comparative study rediscovers the socialists of Russia’s borderlands, upending conventional interpretations of working-class politics and the Russian Revolution. Researched in eight languages, Revolutionary Social Democracy challenges long-held assumptions by scholars and activists about the dynamics of revolutionary change.
Explores the idea of the nation among internationalist thinkers, suggesting that major figures associated with international labor organizations never underestimated the attraction of nationalism. Each chapter begins with a discussion of main issues that framed the international labor movement's concern with the nation in different periods, then analyzes the ideas of major thinkers who stand for the main trends at each point. Coverage includes the International Working Men's Association of the mid-19th century, the apogee of the Second International between 1895 and the onset of WWI, the Third International, the Comintern--1919-43, and the influence of Stalin and Lenin. Paper edition (unseen), $17.95. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
This ground-breaking history of the General Jewish Labour Bund in migration investigates how the organisation transformed itself from a revolutionary protagonist in early twentieth-century Russia to a socialist institution of secular Jewish life and yidishkayt for Jews in North and South America. By following thousands of activists’ paths from the shtetls of Eastern Europe to the working-class Yiddish neighbourhoods of New York and Buenos Aires, Frank Wolff traces the networks that connected these revolutionaries on both sides of the Atlantic, resulting in a richly detailed social history of this seminal transnational movement. This book was first published in 2014 as Neue Welten in der Neuen Welt: Die transnationale Geschichte des Allgemeinen Jüdischen Arbeiterbundes, 1897–1947 by Böhlau Verlag, Köln, ISBN 978-3412222116.