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Collects leading scholars' insight on the plays, production, music, audiences, and political and aesthetic concerns of modern Yiddish theater. While Yiddish theater is best known as popular entertainment, it has been shaped by its creators' responses to changing social and political conditions. Inventing the Modern Yiddish Stage: Essays in Drama, Performance, and Show Business showcases the diversity of modern Yiddish theater by focusing on the relentless and far-ranging capacity of its performers, producers, critics, and audiences for self-invention. Editors Joel Berkowitz and Barbara Henry have assembled essays from leading scholars that trace the roots of modern Yiddish drama and performa...
Splendor, Decline, and Rediscovery of Yiddish in Latin America presents Yiddish culture as it developed in an area seldom associated with the language. Yet several countries—Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, Mexico and Uruguay—became centers for Yiddish literature, journalism, political activism, theater, and music. Chapters by historians, linguists, and literary critics explore the flourishing of Yiddish there in the early 20th century, its retraction in the 1960’s, and contemporary endeavors to rescue this marginalized legacy. Topics discussed in the volume include the literary figures of the “Jewish gaucho” and the peddler, the regional Yiddish press, the communal struggle against traffi...
Honorable Mention, 2019 Distinguished Book Award, given by the Sex & Gender Section of the American Sociological Association Honorable Mention, 2019 Marysa Navarro Book Prize, given by the New England Council of Latin American Studies (NECLAS) A profound reflection on state violence and women’s survival In the 1970s and early 80s, military and security forces in Argentina hunted down, tortured, imprisoned, and in many cases, murdered political activists, student organizers, labor unionists, leftist guerrillas, and other people branded “subversives.” This period was characterized by massive human rights violations, including forced disappearances committed in the name of national securi...
Winner of an Honorable Mention in the Latin American Jewish Studies Association (LAJSA) 2017 Book Award competition for an outstanding book on a Latin American Jewish topic in the social sciences or humanities published in English, Spanish, or Portuguese. Landscapes of Memory and Impunity chronicles the aftermath of the most significant terrorist attack in Argentina’s history—the 1994 AMIA bombing that killed eighty-five people, wounded hundreds, and destroyed the primary Jewish mutual aid society. This volume, edited by Annette H. Levine and Natasha Zaretsky, presents the first comprehensive, multidisciplinary work about this decisive turning point in Jewish Argentine history—examining the ongoing impact of this violence and the impunity that followed. Chapters explore political protest movements, musical performance, literature, and acts of commemoration. They emphasize the intersecting themes of memory, narrative and representation, Jewish belonging, citizenship, and justice—critical fault lines that frame Jewish life after the AMIA attack, while also resonating with historical struggles for pluralism in Argentina.
This book examines how German-speaking Jews living in Berlin make sense and make use of their multilingual repertoire. With a focus on lexical variation, the book demonstrates how speakers integrate Yiddish and Hebrew elements into German for indexing belonging and for positioning themselves within the Jewish community. Linguistic choices are shaped by language ideologies (e.g., authenticity, prescriptivism, nostalgia). Speakers translanguage when using their multilingual repertoire, but do so in a diglossic way, using elements from different languages for specific domains.
Winner of the 2020 National Jewish Book Award in Education and Jewish Identity Each summer, tens of thousands of American Jews attend residential camps, where they may see Hebrew signs, sing and dance to Hebrew songs, and hear a camp-specific hybrid language register called Camp Hebraized English, as in: “Let’s hear some ruach (spirit) in this chadar ochel (dining hall)!” Using historical and sociolinguistic methods, this book explains how camp directors and staff came to infuse Hebrew in creative ways and how their rationales and practices have evolved from the early 20th century to today. Some Jewish leaders worry that Camp Hebraized English impedes Hebrew acquisition, while others recognize its power to strengthen campers’ bonds with Israel, Judaism, and the Jewish people. Hebrew Infusion explores these conflicting ideologies, showing how hybrid language can serve a formative role in fostering religious, diasporic communities. The insightful analysis and engaging descriptions of camp life will appeal to anyone interested in language, education, or American Jewish culture.
To forget after Auschwitz is considered barbaric. Baer and Sznaider question this assumption not only in regard to the Holocaust but to other political crimes as well. The duties of memory surrounding the Holocaust have spread around the globe and interacted with other narratives of victimization that demand equal treatment. Are there crimes that must be forgotten and others that should be remembered? In this book the authors examine the effects of a globalized Holocaust culture on the ways in which individuals and groups understand the moral and political significance of their respective histories of extreme political violence. Do such transnational memories facilitate or hamper the task of...
Between 1905 and 1930, more than one hundred thousand Jews left Central and Eastern Europe to settle permanently in Argentina. This book explores how these Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazi immigrants helped to create a new urban strain of the Argentine national identity. Like other immigrants, Jews embraced Buenos Aires and Argentina while keeping ethnic identities—they spoke and produced new literary works in their native Yiddish and continued Jewish cultural traditions brought from Europe, from foodways to holidays. The author examines a variety of sources including Yiddish poems and songs, police records, and advertisements to focus on the intersection and shifting boundaries of ethnic and na...
Mozambique has been hailed as a success story by political analysts as well as by the international community of donors, who have supported the juridical reform of the state which has been ongoing since the end of the civil war and transition from Socialism in the mid 1990s. The present book by anthropologist Juan Obarrio reveals a very different picture. The work is an ethnographic study of transformations of the state in Mozambique over a span of thirty-five years: from Portuguese colonialism, through Afro-Marxism, civil war, and the current neoliberal democratic transition. It examines the ongoing construction of a complex juridical and political field of forces in which several competing...