The seminal medieval history of the Second Commonwealth period of ancient Jewish history. Sepher Yosippon was written in Hebrew by a medieval historian and noted by modern scholars for its eloquent style. This is the first known chronicle of Jewish history and legend-from Adam to the destruction of the Second Temple-since the canonical histories written by Flavius Josephus in Greek and later translated by Christian scholars into Latin. Sepher Yosippon has been cited and referred to by scholars, poets, and authors as the authentic source for ancient Israel for over a millennium, until overshadowed by the twentiethcentury Hebrew translations of Josephus. It is based on Pseudo Hegesippus's fourth-century anti-Jewish summary of Josephus's Jewish War. However, the anonymous author (a.k.a. Joseph ben Gurion Hacohen) also consulted with the Latin versions of Josephus's works available to him. At the same time, he included a wealth of Second Temple literature as well as Roman and Christian sources. This book contains Steven Bowman's translation of the complete text of David Flusser's standard Hebrew edition of Sepher Yosippon, which includes the later medieval interpolations referring to Jesus. The present English edition also contains the translator's introduction as well as a preface by the fifteenth-century publisher of the book. The anonymous author of this text remains unique for his approach to history, his use of sources, and his almost secular attitude, which challenges the modern picture of medieval Jews living in a religious age. In his influential novel, A Guest for the Night, the Nobel Laureate author Shmuel Yosef Agnon emphasized the importance of Sepher Yosippon as a valuable reading to understand human nature. Bowman's translation of Flusser's notes, as well as his own scholarship, offers a well-wrought story for scholars and students interested in Jewish legend and history in the medieval period, Jewish studies, medieval literature, and folklore studies.

In this analysis of the life of Arnost Frischer, an influential Jewish nationalist activist, Jan Lanicek reflects upon how the Jewish community in Czechoslovakia dealt with the challenges that arose from their volatile relationship with the state authorities in the first half of the 20th century. The Jews in the Bohemian Lands experienced several political regimes in the period from 1918 to the late 1940s: the Habsburg Empire, the first democratic Czechoslovak republic, the post-Munich authoritarian Czecho-Slovak republic, the Nazi regime, renewed Czechoslovak democracy and the Communist regime. Frischer's involvement in local and central politics affords us invaluable insights into the relations and negotiations between the Jewish activists and these diverse political authorities in the Bohemian Lands. Vital coverage is also given to the relatively under-researched subject of the Jewish responses to the Nazi persecution and the attempts of the exiled Jewish leadership to alleviate the plight of the Jews in occupied Europe. The case study of Frischer and Czechoslovakia provides an important paradigm for understanding modern Jewish politics in Europe in the first half of the 20th century, making this a book of great significance to all students and scholars interested in Jewish history and Modern European history.

Born into poverty in Russian Poland in 1911, Zosa Szajkowski (Shy-KOV-ski) was a self-made man who managed to make a life for himself as an intellectual, first as a journalist in 1930s Paris, and then, after a harrowing escape to New York in 1941, as a scholar. Although he never taught at a university or even earned a PhD, Szajkowski became one of the world's foremost experts on the history of the Jews in modern France, publishing in Yiddish, English, and Hebrew. His work opened up new ways of thinking about Jewish emancipation, economic and social modernization, and the rise of modern anti-Semitism. But beneath Szajkowski's scholarly success lay a shameful secret. In the aftermath of the Holocaust, the scholar stole tens of thousands of archival documents related to French Jewish history from public archives and private synagogue collections in France and moved them, illicitly, to New York. There, he used them as the basis for his pathbreaking articles. Eventually, he sold them, piecemeal, to American and Israeli research libraries, where they still remain today. Why did this respectable historian become an archive thief? And why did librarians in the United States and Israel buy these materials from him, turning a blind eye to the signs of ownership they bore? These are the questions that motivate this gripping tale. Throughout, it is clear that all involved-perpetrator, victims, and buyers-saw what Szajkowski was doing through the prism of the Holocaust. The buyers shared a desire to save these precious remnants of the European Jewish past, left behind on a continent where six million Jews had just been killed by the Nazis and their collaborators. The scholars who read Szajkowski's studies, based largely on the documents he had stolen, saw the treasures as offering an unparalleled window into the history that led to that catastrophe. And the Jewish caretakers of many of the institutions Szajkowski robbed in France saw the losses as a sign of their difficulties reconstructing their community after the Holocaust, when the balance of power in the Jewish world was shifting away from Europe to new centers in America and Israel. Based on painstaking research, Lisa Leff reconstructs Szajkowski's story in all its ambiguity by taking us backstage at the archives, revealing the powerful ideological, economic and scientific forces that made Holocaust-era Jewish scholars care more deeply than ever before about preserving the remnants of their past.

Diversity and Child Development: Essential Readings offers students an essential perspective on diversity and equality in childhood studies. The anthology features a selection of carefully curated articles that introduce readers to theories, definitions, and a variety of techniques that can be applied in diverse settings. Additionally, the text provides numerous studies that help students appreciate and understand the diversity in different social categories in terms of race, ethnic background, class, sexual orientation, language, religions, exceptions, and disabilities. The book is divided into four units. In Units I and II, readings address human development, diversity in childhood settings, and underscore the importance of recognizing, respecting, and helping individuals build positive and healthy identities in terms of their race and ethnicity in the early childhood classroom. Unit III discusses how recognition and acceptance of a child's disabilities and specific needs are essential for successful teaching, the learning process, and the overall performance outcome. The readings in Unit IV focus on cultural sustainability, tolerance, and respecting diversity amount immigrant children and their families. Gathering critical literature within the discipline, Diversity and Child Development is an ideal text for courses in early childhood development and early childhood education.

Beginning in 1609, Jesuit missionaries established missions (reductions) among sedentary and non-sedentary native populations in the larger region defined as the Province of Paraguay (Rio de la Plata region, eastern Bolivia). One consequence of resettlement on the missions was exposure to highly contagious old world crowd diseases such as smallpox and measles. Epidemics that occurred about once a generation killed thousands. Despite severe mortality crises such as epidemics, warfare, and famine, the native populations living on the missions recovered. An analysis of the effects of epidemics and demographic patterns shows that the native populations living on the Paraguay and Chiquitos missions survived and retained a unique ethnic identity. A comparative approach that considers demographic patterns among other mission populations place the case study of the Paraguay and Chiquitos missions into context, and show how patterns on the Paraguay and Chiquitos missions differed from other mission populations. The findings challenge generally held assumptions about Native American historical demography.

In Gin, Jesus, and Jim Crow, Brendan J. J. Payne reveals how prohibition helped realign the racial and religious order in the South by linking restrictions on alcohol with political preaching and the disfranchisement of Black voters. While both sides invoked Christianity, prohibitionists redefined churches' doctrines, practices, and political engagement. White prohibitionists initially courted Black voters in the 1880s but soon dismissed them as hopelessly wet and sought to disfranchise them, stoking fears of drunken Black men defiling white women in their efforts to reframe alcohol restriction as a means of racial control. Later, as the alcohol industry grew desperate, it turned to Black voters, many of whom joined the brewers to preserve their voting rights and maintain personal liberties. Tracking southern debates about alcohol from the 1880s through the 1930s, Payne shows that prohibition only retreated from the region once the racial and religious order it helped enshrine had been secured.

From the abolition era to the Civil Rights movement to the age of Obama, the promise of perfectibility and improvement resonates in the story of American democracy. But what exactly does racial "progress" mean, and how do we recognize and achieve it? Untimely Democracy: The Politics of Progress After Slavery uncovers a surprising answer to this question in the writings of American authors and activists, both black and white. Conventional narratives of democracy stretching from Thomas Jefferson's America to our own posit a purposeful break between past and present as the key to the viability of this political form-the only way to ensure its continual development. But for Pauline E. Hopkins, Frederick Douglass, Stephen Crane, W. E. B. Du Bois, Charles W. Chesnutt, Sutton E. Griggs, Callie House, and the other figures examined in this book, the campaign to secure liberty and equality for all citizens proceeds most potently when it refuses the precepts of progressive time. Placing these authors' post-Civil War writings into dialogue with debates about racial optimism and pessimism, tracts on progress, and accounts of ex-slave pension activism, and extending their insights into our contemporary period, Laski recovers late-nineteenth-century literature as a vibrant site for doing political theory. Untimely Democracy ultimately shows how one of the bleakest periods in American racial history provided fertile terrain for a radical reconstruction of our most fundamental assumptions about this political system. Offering resources for moments when the march of progress seems to stutter and even stop, this book invites us to reconsider just what democracy can make possible.

Israel Celebrates is about the intersection where Israeli inventiveness and Jewish tradition meet: the holidays. It employs the anthropological history of four Jewish holidays as celebrated in Israel in order to track the naturalization of Jewish rituals, myths, and symbols in Israeli culture throughout "the long twentieth century" of Zionism and on to the present, and to demonstrate how a new strand of Judaism developed in Israel from the grassroots. But could this grassroots Israeli culture develop into a shared symbolic space for both Jews and Arabs? By probing the political implications of the minutiae of life, the book argues that this popular culture might come to define Jewish identity in Israel of the 21st century.

The Pacific Northwest was one of the most populated regions for Native Americans before the coming of the white man. By the mid-1800s, measles and smallpox decimated the Indian population, and the remaining tribes were forced to give up their ancestral lands. This book tells the story of these tribes' fight for survival.

In 2006, millions of Latinos mobilized in opposition to H.R. 4437, an immigration proposal pending before the US Congress. In her new book, Heather Silber Mohamed suggests that these unprecedented protests marked a turning point for the Latino population-a point that is even more salient ten years later as the issue of immigration roils the politics of the 2016 presidential election. In The New Americans? Silber Mohamed explores the complexities of the Latino community, particularly as it is united and divided by the increasingly pressing questions of immigration.