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Nationalism’s global resurgence has upended societies. With the rise of the Polish nationalist Law and Justice (PiS) party, and American Jewry’s swift reaction to its law punishing people who allege Polish complicity in Holocaust crimes, both sides have revived old stereotypes. Stark-Blumenthal argues that American Jews’ disgust with Polish nationalism ought to be checked by America’s centuries-old embrace of white supremacy. Poles and Jews: A Call for Myth Reconstruction confronts both the anti-Polonism deeply embedded in the American Jewish community and Poland’s enduring relationship with antisemitism. Armed with two decades of research and in-depth interviews with scholars, community leaders, and laity in Poland and the U.S., Stark-Blumenthal dispels myths and considers new approaches to this relationship.
An analysis of how findings in behavioral economics challenge fundamental assumptions of medical ethics, integrating the latest research in both fields. Bioethicists have long argued for rational persuasion to help patients with medical decisions. But the findings of behavioral economics—popularized in Thaler and Sunstein’s Nudge and other books—show that arguments depending on rational thinking are unlikely to be successful and even that the idea of purely rational persuasion may be a fiction. In Good Ethics and Bad Choices, Jennifer Blumenthal-Barby examines how behavioral economics challenges some of the most fundamental tenets of medical ethics. She not only integrates the latest r...
A filmography of Blacks in the film industry
The director of the famed Bodleian Libraries at Oxford narrates the global history of the willful destruction—and surprising survival—of recorded knowledge over the past three millennia. Libraries and archives have been attacked since ancient times but have been especially threatened in the modern era. Today the knowledge they safeguard faces purposeful destruction and willful neglect; deprived of funding, libraries are fighting for their very existence. Burning the Books recounts the history that brought us to this point. Richard Ovenden describes the deliberate destruction of knowledge held in libraries and archives from ancient Alexandria to contemporary Sarajevo, from smashed Assyria...
On October 10, 1941, the Jewish population of the Belarusian village of Krucha was rounded up and shot. This atrocity was not the routine work of the SS but was committed by a regular German army unit acting on its own initiative. Marching into Darkness is a bone-chilling exposé of the ordinary footsoldiers who participated in the Final Solution on a daily basis. Although scholars have exploded the myth that the Wehrmacht played no significant part in the Holocaust, a concrete picture of its involvement has been lacking. Marching into Darkness reveals in detail how the army willingly fulfilled its role as an agent of murder on a massive scale. Waitman Wade Beorn unearths forced labor, sexua...
Poles and Jews: A Call for Myth Reconstruction confronts the anti-Polonism deeply embedded among American Jews and Poland's enduring relationship with antisemitism. With two decades of research and in-depth interviews with scholars, community leaders, and laity in Poland and the U.S., Stark-Blumenthal dispels myths, and approaches this relationship anew.
Not long ago, Republicans could take pride in their party’s tradition of environmental leadership. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the GOP helped to create the Environmental Protection Agency, extend the Clean Air Act, and protect endangered species. Today, as Republicans denounce climate change as a “hoax” and seek to dismantle the environmental regulatory state they worked to build, we are left to wonder: What happened? In The Republican Reversal, James Morton Turner and Andrew C. Isenberg show that the party’s transformation began in the late 1970s, with the emergence of a new alliance of pro-business, libertarian, and anti-federalist voters. This coalition came about through a...
In the heady days of the Cold War, when the Bomb loomed large in the ruminations of Washington’s wise men, policy intellectuals flocked to the home of Albert and Roberta Wohlstetter to discuss deterrence and doomsday. The Cold World They Made takes a fresh look at the original power couple of strategic studies. Seeking to unravel the complex tapestry of the Wohlstetters’ world and worldview, Ron Robin reveals fascinating insights into an unlikely husband-and-wife pair who, at the height of the most dangerous military standoff in history, gained access to the deepest corridors of American power. The author of such classic Cold War treatises as “The Delicate Balance of Terror,” Albert ...
William Miller details our anxious relation to basic life processes; eating, excreting, fornicating, decaying, and dying. But disgust pushes beyond the flesh to vivify the larger social order with the idiom it commandeers from the sights, smells, tastes, feels, and sounds of fleshly physicality. Disgust and contempt, Miller argues, play crucial political roles in creating and maintaining social hierarchy. Democracy depends less on respect for persons than on an equal distribution of contempt. Disgust, however, signals dangerous division.
From the seventeenth century to the early years of the twentieth, the population of Martha’s Vineyard manifested an extremely high rate of profound hereditary deafness. In stark contrast to the experience of most deaf people in our own society, the Vineyarders who were born deaf were so thoroughly integrated into the daily life of the community that they were not seen—and did not see themselves—as handicapped or as a group apart. Deaf people were included in all aspects of life, such as town politics, jobs, church affairs, and social life. How was this possible? On the Vineyard, hearing and deaf islanders alike grew up speaking sign language. This unique sociolinguistic adaptation meant that the usual barriers to communication between the hearing and the deaf, which so isolate many deaf people today, did not exist.