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Częstochowa was the home of the eighth largest Jewish community in Poland. After 1765, when there were 75 Jews in Czestochowa, the community grew steadily. With emancipation in 1862, many Jews migrated to Czestochowa and contributed to its industrial and commercial growth. In 1935, there were 27,162 Jews out of a total population of 127,504. When the Nazis deported Jews to Częstochowa to work in its munition factories, the Jewish population exceeded 50,000. Almost all perished in Treblinka. Anti-Jewish feeling was spurred on by the Church and Fascist groups that organized boycotts of Jewish stores and incited pogroms intended to drive the Jews out of the city. The Jewish labor movement fou...
Noah Prylucki (1882-1941), a leading Jewish cultural and political figure in pre-Holocaust Eastern Europe, was a proponent of Yiddishism, a movement that promoted secular Yiddish culture as the basis for Jewish collective identity in the twentieth century. Prylucki's dramatic path - from russified Zionist raised in a Ukrainian shtetl, to Diaspora nationalist parliamentarian in metropolitan Warsaw, to professor of Yiddish in Soviet Lithuania - uniquely reflects the dilemmas and competing options facing the Jews of this era as life in Eastern Europe underwent radical transformation. Using hitherto unexplored archival sources, memoirs, interviews, and materials from the vibrant interwar Jewish and Polish presses, Kalman Weiser investigates the rise and fall of Yiddishism and of Prylucki's political party, the Folkists, in the post-World War One era. Jewish People, Yiddish Nation reveals the life of a remarkable individual and the fortunes of a major cultural movement that has long been obscured.
The anthology is a ubiquitous presence in Jewish literature--arguably its oldest literary genre, going back to the Bible itself, and including nearly all the canonical texts of Judaism: the Mishnah, the Talmud, classical midrash, and the prayerbook. In the Middle Ages, the anthology became the primary medium in Jewish culture for recording stories, poems, and interpretations of classical texts. In modernity, the genre is transformed into a decisive instrument for cultural retrieval and re-creation, especially in works of the Zionist project and in modern Yiddish and Hebrew literature. No less importantly, the anthology has played an indispensable role in the creation of significant fields of...
The Bible has played a critical role in the story of Judaism, modernity, and identity. Penny Schine Gold examines the arena of children's education and the role of the Bible in the reshaping of Jewish identity, especially in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s, when a second generation of Eastern European Jews engaged the task of Americanizing Jewish culture, religion, and institutions. Professional Jewish educators based in the Reform movement undertook a multifaceted agenda for the Bible in America: to modernize it, harmonize it with American values, and move it to the center of the religious school curriculum. Through public schooling, the children of Jewish immigrants brought Americ...
Hanna Wechsler's journey began in a small town in Poland and took her to Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Auschwitz, Germany, Israel, and, eventually, the United States. Her story and that of her family is one of courage and determination. Emerging from World War II, the darkest period in recent history, her family resolved to create life anew. In her book, In Spite of It All, Hanna tells the story of their rebirth, hoping that all readers, young and old alike, will see that in the face of adversity, one can persevere and prevail.
This volume contains the first broad selection of essays made available in English by Ber Borochov, one of the leading intellectuals of the early Zionist movement. Borochov founded the Labor Zionist party in 1906, and was the pillar of the Israeli Labor party from whose ranks arose such figures as David Ben-Gurion and Itzhak Ben-Tsvi. He is best remembered for his ability to synthesize socialism and nationalism.Borochov argues that early Marxist theory failed to understand the causes of nationalism and views it only as a temporary phenomenon. Borochov tried to synthesize socialism with Jewish nationalism. Zionism was a movement necessary to free oppressed Eastern European Jews and permit them to further socialist ideals in their own nation-state. The dilemma is that socialist internationalism requires national culture to be of no further value once a socialist victory occurs in a country. Borochov's essays provide an important, if largely unknown perspective on these questions.
Yiddish Literature Under Surveillance: The Case of Soviet Ukraine gives a broad view on Soviet Jewish literary life, and on the repression suffered by Yiddish writers under Stalinist rule. It moves from the paradigm of writing almost exclusively about the most prominent authors, whose execution in Moscow on August 12, 1952 is tragically known as "The Night of Murdered Poets." Instead, the narrative is built as a group biography of five writers whose literary home was in Kyiv, the capital of Soviet Ukraine from 1934 to 1991. Those authors are as follows: Avrom Abchuk (arrested and executed in 1937), Chaim Gildin (arrested in 1940; died in a camp in 1943), Itsik Kipnis (arrested in 1949; relea...
"Defining the Yiddish Nation examines the evolution of Yiddish folklore and the pioneering work of three important folklore circles in independent Poland: the Warsaw group led by Noyekh Prilutski, the S. Ansky Vilne Jewish Historical-Ethnographic Society, and the YIVO Ethnographic Commission. Much more than a study of one particular folklore tradition, however, Defining the Yiddish Nation reveals how the work of the Yiddish folklorists sought to connect Jewish identity with the past, while simultaneously contributing to an autonomous Jewish national culture that would help reshape the present and create a future."--BOOK JACKET.
Children have occupied a prominent place in Yiddish literature since early modern times, but children’s literature as a genre has its beginnings in the early 20th century. Its emergence reflected the desire of Jewish intellectuals to introduce modern forms of education, and promote ideological agendas, both in Eastern Europe and in immigrant communities elsewhere. Before the Second World War, a number of publishing houses and periodicals in Europe and the Americas specialized in stories, novels and poems for various age groups. Prominent authors such as Yankev Glatshteyn, Der Nister, Joseph Opatoshu, Leyb Kvitko, made original contributions to the genre, while artists, such as Marc Chagall, El Lissitzky and Yisakhar Ber Rybak, also took an active part. In the Soviet Union, meanwhile, children’s literature provided an opportunity to escape strong ideological pressure. Yiddish children’s literature is still being produced today, both for secular and strongly Orthodox communities. This volume is a pioneering collective study not only of children’s literature but of the role played by children in literature.
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...