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In The Grace of Misery. Joseph Roth and the Politics of Exile 1919–1939 Ilse Josepha Lazaroms offers an account of the life and intellectual legacy of Joseph Roth, one of interwar Europe's most critical and modern writers.
Before Hungary’s transition from communism to democracy, local dissidents and like-minded intellectuals, activists, and academics from the West influenced each other and inspired the fight for human rights and civil liberties in Eastern Europe. Hungarian dissidents provided Westerners with a new purpose and legitimized their public interventions in a bipolar world order. The Making of Dissidents demonstrates how Hungary’s Western friends shaped public perceptions and institutionalized their advocacy long before the peaceful revolutions of 1989. But liberalism failed to take root in Hungary, and Victoria Harms explores how many former dissidents retreated and Westerners shifted their attention elsewhere during the 1990s, paving the way for nationalism and democratic backsliding.
This book provides a rigorous social historical study of Eastern and East Central European Jewry with a specific focus on women. It demonstrates that only through the experiences of women can one fully understand key phenomena such as the momentous changes occurring in Jewish education, conversion waves, postwar relief efforts, anti-Jewish violence, Soviet productivization projects, and, more broadly, the acculturation that animated Jewish modernization. Rather than present a scenario in which secularism simply displaces traditionalism, the chapters in this book suggest a mutually transformative secularist-traditionalist encounter within which Jewish women were both prominent and instrumental. Chapter “'To Write? What's This Torture For?' Bronia Baum's Manuscripts as Testimony to the Formation of a Write, Activist, and Journalist" is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license via link.springer.com.
This book examines the legacy of philosophical idealism in twentieth century British historical and political thought. It demonstrates that the absolute idealism of the nineteenth century was radically transformed by R.G. Collingwood, Michael Oakeshott, and Benedetto Croce. These new idealists developed a new philosophy of history with an emphasis on the study of human agency, and historicist humanism. This study unearths the impact of the new idealism on the thought of a group of prominent revisionist historians in the welfare state period, focusing on E.H. Carr, Isaiah Berlin, G.R. Elton, Peter Laslett, and George Kitson Clark. It shows that these historians used the new idealism to restate the nature of history and to revise modern English history against the backdrop of the intellectual, social and political problems of the welfare state period, thus making new idealist revisionism a key tradition in early postwar historiography.
Whether victorious or not, Central European states faced fundamental challenges after the First World War as they struggled to contain ongoing violence and forge peaceful societies. This collection explores the various forms of violence these nations confronted during this period, which effectively transformed the region into a laboratory for state-building. Employing a bottom-up approach to understanding everyday life, these studies trace the contours of individual and mass violence in the interwar era while illuminating their effects upon politics, intellectual developments, and the arts.
Catastrophe and Utopia studies the biographical trajectories, intellectual agendas, and major accomplishments of select Jewish intellectuals during the age of Nazism, and the partly simultaneous, partly subsequent period of incipient Stalinization. By focusing on the relatively underexplored region of Central and Eastern Europe – which was the primary centre of Jewish life prior to the Holocaust, served as the main setting of the Nazi genocide, but also had notable communities of survivors – the volume offers significant contributions to a European Jewish intellectual history of the twentieth century. Approaching specific historical experiences in their diverse local contexts, the twelve...
The Quest for Redemption: Central European Jewish Thought in Joseph Roth's Works by Rares Piloiu fills an important gap in Roth scholarship, placing Roth's major works of fiction for the first time in the context of a generational interest in religious redemption among the Jewish intellectuals of Central Europe. In it, Piloiu argues that Roth's challenging, often contradictory and ambivalent literary output is the result of an attempt to recast moral, political, and historical realities of an empirically observable world in a new, religiously transfigured reality through the medium of literature. This diegetic recasting of phenomenological encounters with the real is an expression of Roth's ...
Conceiving Agency: Reproductive Authority among Haredi Women explores the ways Haredi Jewish women make decisions about their reproductive lives. Although they must contend with interference from doctors, rabbis, and the Israeli government, Haredi women find space for—and insist on—autonomy from them when they make decisions regarding the use of contraceptives, prenatal testing, fetal ultrasounds, and other reproductive practices. Drawing on their experiences of pregnancy, knowledge of cultural norms of reproduction, and theological beliefs, Raucher shows that Haredi women assert that they are in the best position to make decisions about reproduction. Conceiving Agency puts forward a new view of Haredi women acting in ways that challenge male authority and the structural hierarchies of their conservative religious tradition. Raucher asserts that Haredi women's reproductive agency is a demonstration of women's commitment to Haredi life and culture as well as an indication of how they define religious ethics.
The first conceptual history of the development and evolution of the image of Jews and Jewish participation in modern German-speaking cosmopolitanist thought
What does the practical work of writing contribute to historical writing? What does it mean for historical knowledge that it is, inescapably, written? Henning Truper explores quotidian practices of writing as constituting the working life of a historian, the Belgian mediaevalist Francois Louis Ganshof (1895-1980). The argument draws on a large variety of texts and writing situations, so as to discuss, across the fault lines of twentieth-century historiography, shifting patterns of methodological discourse; procedures of historicisation; the making of scholarly sociability in writing practice; and finally the actual writing of historical text. Ganshof the historian, whether as author, reader, teacher, student, polemic, diplomat, witness, or mere voice on the radio, remained bound to paperwork, an ensemble of small-scale routines and makeshift solutions that ultimately lacked a central steering agency. The nexus between historical knowledge and paperwork was indissoluble.