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Magyar, Stars & Stripes strikingly recounts a Hungarian Jewish family's history of love, affection, persecution, and injustice. It tells about their close kinship and heart-wrenching experiences in labor and concentration camps. The book chronicles Alexander Taub's life-from a playful childhood to a young adulthood shattered within a labor camp in Schachendorf, Austria. Every day is a new battle to survive amid countless bodies. He makes a daring escape and finds compassion in people who offer food and clothing. Rebuilding the ashes of his family, Taub takes us on an extraordinary journey to Manhattan, where he and surviving family members eventually become successful entrepreneurs. He uses street smarts and intuition to make his fortune but still remains an enigmatic figure building a brick wall to contend with the great losses in his life. While giving historical accounts and sufficient background information of these different periods, the author often transcribes verbatim his grandfather's broken English to illustrate the man's unique style and humorous outlook on life. This incredibly witty and courageous story of perseverance will greatly appeal to the reader's emotions.
Today many Germans remain nostalgic about "classic" film comedies created during the 1930s, viewing them as a part of the Nazi era that was not tainted with antisemitism. In Antisemitism in Film Comedy in Nazi Germany, Valerie Weinstein scrutinizes these comic productions and demonstrates that film comedy, despite its innocent appearance, was a critical component in the effort to separate "Jews" from "Germans" physically, economically, and artistically. Weinstein highlights how the German propaganda ministry used directives, pre- and post-production censorship, financial incentives, and influence over film critics and their judgments to replace Jewish "wit" with a slower, simpler, and more d...
Hollywood’s live-action superhero films currently dominate the worldwide box-office, with the characters enjoying more notoriety through their feature film and television depictions than they have ever before. This book argues that this immense popularity reveals deep cultural concerns about politics, gender, ethnicity, patriotism and consumerism after the events of 9/11. Superheroes have long been agents of hegemony, fighting for abstract ideals of justice while overall perpetuating the American status quo. Yet at the same time, the book explores how the genre has also been utilized to question and critique these dominant cultural assumptions.
From the critical and commercial fanfare his films generate, it is largely understood that Yorgos Lanthimos is one of the more interesting filmmakers to have emerged out of the new century. A markedly transnational filmmaker, between Dogtooth and The Favourite Lanthimos has managed to traverse the gap between the art-house and mainstream while not once sacrificing his unique style and worldview. His films, while often difficult, showcase his talents as a filmmaker, collaborator, and commentator on the human condition. Accompanied by a trademark acerbic wit, Lanthimos's films take aim at humanity's more contemptible and absurd designs as he explores a thematic preoccupation with, among other ...
A Brief History of Comic Book Movies traces the meteoric rise of the hybrid art form of the comic book film. These films trace their origins back to the early 1940s, when the first Batman and Superman serials were made. The serials, and later television shows in the 1950s and 60s, were for the most part designed for children. But today, with the continuing rise of Comic-Con, they seem to be more a part of the mainstream than ever, appealing to adults as well as younger fans. This book examines comic book movies from the past and present, exploring how these films shaped American culture from the post-World War II era to the present day, and how they adapted to the changing tastes and mores of succeeding generations.
"You were the crown of your tree and you held your head high among your branches. Your sprouts reciprocated the care they got from you with joy. But you left us so young, dried out before it was your time, you left your sprouts to the mercy of the wind..." "I took his notebook and gazed at it. Its cover was cracked and the pages inside yellowed with age...all I could do was stare at my father's handwriting. Some entries were written in blue or black ink...I was trying to imagine my father - such a quiet man - having a secret gift...which he had never shared with anyone..." The poems and letters in his notebook were dated from 1940 to 1946; the years my father had spent in Palestine after esc...
Surviving the Holocaust is a compelling sociological account of two brothers who survived the Holocaust in Nazi-occupied Poland. One brother, the author’s father, endured several concentration camps, including the infamous camp at Auschwitz, as well as a horrific winter death march; while the other brother, the author’s uncle, survived outside the camps by passing as a Catholic among anti-Semitic Poles, including a group of anti-Nazi Polish Partisans, eventually becoming an officer in the Soviet army. As an exemplary "theorized life history," Surviving the Holocaust applies concepts from life course theory to interpret the trajectories of the brothers’ lives, enhancing this approach wi...
Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801-1887) was a German physicist, psychologist, and philosopher, best known to historians of science as the founder of psychophysics, the experimental study of the relation between mental and physical processes. Michael Heidelberger's exhaustive exploration of Fechner's writings, in relation to current issues in the field, successfully reestablishes Fechner's place in the history and philosophy of science.
In this unique study of the myth-making process across two centuries, Comini examines the contradictory imagery of Beethoven in contemporary verbal accounts, and in some 200 paintings, prints, sculptures, and monuments.
During the mid-19th century, the works of Arthur Schopenhauer and Richard Wagner sparked an impulse toward German cultural renewal and social change that drew on religious myth, metaphysics, and spiritualism. The only problem was that their works were deeply antisemitic and entangled with claims that Jews were incapable of creating compassionate art. By looking at the works of Jewish composers and writers who contributed to a lively and robust biblical theatre in fin de siècle Vienna, Caroline A. Kita shows how they reimagined myths of the Old Testament to offer new aesthetic and ethical views of compassion. These Jewish artists, including Gustav Mahler, Siegfried Lipiner, Richard Beer-Hofmann, Stefan Zweig, and Arnold Schoenberg, reimagined biblical stories through the lens of the modern Jewish subject to plead for justice and compassion toward the Jewish community. By tracing responses to antisemitic discourses of compassion, Kita reflects on the explicitly and increasingly troubled political and social dynamics at the end of the Habsburg Empire.