Overlooked by historians for over half a century following her death, Ernestine L. Rose (1810 1892) was one of the foremost orators and social reformers of her era. A fearless human rights activist, she fought for racial equality, women's rights, freethought and religious freedom, and she can be considered a forerunner of twentieth-century activists in civil rights and the women's movement. Rose was a pioneer in many movements, articulating the notion that all Americans are endowed with natural rights guaranteed by the Declaration of Independence and by the Constitution. Her passion was to see everyone women and men, regardless of race, religion or ethnic origin possessing the civil rights promised by American democracy. Unlike other nineteenth-century female reformers such as Lucy Stone, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Ernestine Rose was the only non-Christian, foreign-born woman. For this reason, she did not entirely fit in and she felt tensions within the women's rights and abolitionist circles, as nativism and anti-Semitism worsened in the United States. Rose's outspoken opinions put her at odds with the religious zeal of the American public as well as that of many reformers. A visionary leader, she crisscrossed two continents to fight for change, seeking to raise public awareness of international issues and of social movements in Europe and in the United States. The topic of this book is highly relevant to current struggles for racial justice and for preserving and strengthening democracy in the United States. Rose's words are as pertinent today as they were during her lifetime. This book offers a new understanding of Ernestine Rose's important contributions to American democracy.

Los Angeles is a city of borders and lines, from the freeways that transect its neighborhoods to streets like Pico Boulevard that slash across the city from the ocean to the heart of downtown, creating both ethnic enclaves and pathways for interracial connection. Examining neighborhoods in east, south central, and west L.A.-and their imaginative representation by Chicana, African American, and Jewish American writers-this book investigates the moral and political implications of negotiating space. The Border and the Line takes up the central conceit of "the neighbor" to consider how the geography of racial identification and interracial encounters are represented and even made possible by literary language. Dean J. Franco probes how race is formed and transformed in literature and in everyday life, in the works of Helena Maria Viramontes, Paul Beatty, James Baldwin, and the writers of the Watts Writers Workshop. Exploring metaphor and metonymy, as well as economic and political circumstance, Franco identifies the potential for reconciliation in the figure of the neighbor, an identity that is grounded by geographical boundaries and which invites their crossing.

The book presents new approaches on such essential issues as ghettoization, antisemitism, the Inquisition, the history of conversion and Jewish-Christian relations / This book sheds light on the autonomous culture of the Jews in Italy, focusing on case studies of intellectual and cultural life using a micro-historical perspective / This book will appeal to students and scholars alike studying and researching Jewish History, Early Modern Italy, Early Modern Jewish and Italian culture, and Early Modern society.

When the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia in 1939, Vera Schiff and her family were sent to Theresienstadt. Touted as the "model ghetto" for propaganda purposes, as well as to deceive Red Cross inspectors, it was in fact a holding camp for famous Jews--in case the world was to inquire. For the rest, however, it was the last stop on the way to the gas chambers. Those "lucky" enough to remain faced slave labor, starvation and disease. Shiff's intimate narrative of endurance recounts her family's three years in Theresienstadt, the challenges of life under postwar communism, and her escape to the nascent and turbulent state of Israel.

By integrating evidence of the form and function of religiosities in contexts of mobility and migration, this volume reconstructs mobility-informed aspects of civic and household religiosities in Israel and its world. Readers will find a robust theoretical framework for studying cultures of mobility and religiosities in the ancient past, as well as a fresh understanding of the scope and texture of mobility-informed religious identities that composed broader Yahwistic religious heritage. This book will be of use to both specialists and informed readers interested in the history of mobilities and migrations in the ancient Near East, as well as those interested in the development of Yahwism in its biblical and extra-biblical forms.

Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan has translated Sefer Yetzirah, the oldest and most mysterious of all kabbalistic texts, and now brings its theoretical, meditative, and magical implications to light. He expounds on the dynamics of the spiritual domain, the worlds of the Sefirot, souls, and angels. When properly understood, Sefer Yetzirah becomes the instruction manual for a very special type of meditation meant to strengthen concentration and to aid the development of telekinetic and telepathic powers. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Fundamentals of Jewish Conflict Resolution offers an in-depth presentation of traditional Jewish approaches to interpersonal conflict resolution. It examines the underlying principles, prescriptive rules, and guidelines that are found in the Jewish tradition for the prevention, amelioration, and resolution of interpersonal conflicts, without the assistance of any type of third-party intermediary. Among the topics discussed are the obligations of pursuing peace and refraining from destructive conflict, Rabbinic perspectives on what constitutes constructive/destructive conflict, judging people favorably and countering negative judgmental biases, resolving conflict through dialogue, asking and granting forgiveness, and anger management. This work also includes detailed summaries of contemporary approaches to interpersonal conflict resolution, theories and research on apologies and forgiveness, and methods of anger management.

Drawing on a wide range of documentary and oral sources, including interviews with refugees, this book explores the responses in Manchester to those threatened by the rise of Fascism in Europe. By exploring the responses of particular segments of Manchester society, from Jewish communal organisations and the Zionist movement to the Christian churches, pacifist organisations and private charities, it offers a critical analysis of the factors which facilitated and limited the work of rescue and their effect on the lives of the seven or eight thousand refugees - Spanish, Italian, German, Austrian and Czech - who arrived in Manchester between 1933 and 1940. -- .

Through a qualitative analysis and broad historical contextualization of personal interviews, The New Zionists shows how American Jewish "Millennials" who are not religiously orthodox approach Israel and Zionism as galvanizing solutions to the thinning of American Jewish identity, and (re)root themselves through "Israeliness"-an unselfconscious and largely secular expression of national kinship and solidarity, as well as of personal and communal purpose, that American Judaism scarcely provides.

Trouble in the Tribe explores the increasingly contentious place of Israel in the American Jewish community. In a fundamental shift, growing numbers of American Jews have become less willing to unquestioningly support Israel and more willing to publicly criticize its government. More than ever before, American Jews are arguing about Israeli policies, and many, especially younger ones, are becoming uncomfortable with Israel's treatment of Palestinians. Dov Waxman argues that Israel is fast becoming a source of disunity for American Jewry, and that a new era of American Jewish conflict over Israel is replacing the old era of solidarity. Drawing on a wealth of in-depth interviews with American Jewish leaders and activists, Waxman shows why Israel has become such a divisive issue among American Jews. He delves into the American Jewish debate about Israel, examining the impact that the conflict over Israel is having on Jewish communities, national Jewish organizations, and on the pro-Israel lobby. Waxman sets this conflict in the context of broader cultural, political, institutional, and demographic changes happening in the American Jewish community. He offers a nuanced and balanced account of how this conflict over Israel has developed and what it means for the future of American Jewish politics. Israel used to bring American Jews together. Now it is driving them apart. Trouble in the Tribe explains why.

'''Who am I?' and 'Who are we?' are the existential, foundational questions in our lives. In our modern world, there is no construct more influential than 'identity' - whether as individuals or as groups. The concept of group identity is the focal point of a research group named "A Question of Identity" at the Mandel Scholion Interdisciplinary Research Center in the Humanities at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The papers collected in this volume represent the proceedings of a January 2017 conference organized by the research group which dealt with identity formation in six contextual settings: Ethno-religious identities in light of the archaeological record; Second Temple period textual records on Diaspora Judaism; Jews and Christians in Sasanian Persia; minorities in the Persian achaemenid period; Inter-ethnic dialogue in pre-1948 Palestine; and redefinitions of Christian Identity in the Early Modern period.

This book provides a social and cultural history of Jewish art in Nazi Germany, with a focus on the Jewish artists, art critics, and audiences in Nazi Bavaria. From the time of its conceptualization in the autumn of 1933 until its final curtain call in November 1938, the Jewish Cultural League in Bavaria sustained three departments: music, visual arts, and adult education. The Bavarian example steps outside the highly professional cultural milieu of Jewish Berlin, and instead looks at relatively unknown efforts of Bavarian Jewish artists as they used art to define what it now meant, to them, to be Jewish under Nazism. Insightful and engaging, this book is ideal for advanced undergraduate students, graduate students, and scholars interested in social and cultural histories of Jews in Germany.

..". a well-researched historical anthropological case study ... One of its major value has to doe with a successful integration of economic history into anthropological interpretation." . Focaal

"This study gives a more nuanced picture of the stereotypical views of Polish attitudes towards Jews, which cannot be reduced to a simple form of anti-Semitism." . L'Homme

In Poland and elsewhere there has been a noticeable increase of interest in various aspects of the Polish-Jewish past which can be explained, the author argues, in terms of a broader intellectual need to explore the "blank spots" of Poland's national history. This quest begins and ends with Polish anti-Semitism and the Shoah, during which most of Europe's Jews were annihilated on Polish soil, but also focuses on the events of 1946-1968, the years of pogroms, anti-Semitic campaigns, and mass emigration of the Jews from Poland. All these became main issues of public reflection in Poland after a silence for almost forty years and led to the widespread view that Polish-Jewish relations are irredeemably poisoned by anti-Semitism.

If this is the case, how is it possible then, the author asks, that Jews still play an important role in the cultural expressions and the consciousness of the Polish people? To find an answer, she explored Polish-Jewish relations in a small Galacian town from the early 19th century to the end of World War II. Detailed analysis of archival materials as well as interviews with Polish inhabitants of this town and Jewish survivors living elsewhere reveal a pattern of Polish-Jewish interdependence that has led to a far more complex picture than is generally assumed.

Rosa Lehmann studied Polish-Jewish and Polish-Ukranian relations as a research fellow at the Amsterdam School for Social Science Research (University of Amsterdam) and is currently carrying out research on twentieth-century Dutch Jewry at the Menasseh Ben Israel Institute in Amsterdam."

Advances in genetics are renewing controversies over inherited characteristics, and the discourse around science and technological innovations has taken on racial overtones, such as attributing inherited physiological traits to certain ethnic groups or using DNA testing to determine biological links with ethnic ancestry. This book contributes to the discussion by opening up previously locked concepts of the relation between the terms color, race, and "Jews", and by engaging with globalism, multiculturalism, hybridity, and diaspora. The contributors-leading scholars in anthropology, sociology, history, literature, and cultural studies-discuss how it is not merely a question of whether Jews are acknowledged to be interracial, but how to address academic and social discourses that continue to place Jews and others in a race/color category.

This volume takes a fresh view of the role representations of the past play in the construction of Jewish identity. Its central theme is that the study of how Jews construct the past can help in interpreting how they understand the nature of their Jewishness. The individual chapters illuminate the ways in which Jews responded to and made use of the past. If Jews choices of what to include, emphasize, omit, and invent in their representation of the past is a fundamental variable, then this volume contributes to the creation of a more nuanced approach to the construction of the histories of Jews and their thought.

The Nazis' persecution of the Jews during the Holocaust included the creation of prisoner hierarchies that forced victims to cooperate with their persecutors. Many in the camps and ghettos came to hold so-called "privileged" positions, and their behavior has often been judged as self-serving and harmful to fellow inmates. Such controversial figures constitute an intrinsically important, frequently misunderstood, and often taboo aspect of the Holocaust. Drawing on Primo Levi's concept of the "grey zone," this study analyzes the passing of moral judgment on "privileged" Jews as represented by writers, such as Raul Hilberg, and in films, including Claude Lanzmann's Shoah and Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List. Negotiating the problems and potentialities of "representing the unrepresentable," this book engages with issues that are fundamental to present-day attempts to understand the Holocaust and deeply relevant to reflections on human nature.

Jews are typically viewed as urban dwellers. However there was a considerable Jewish presence in villages from the very beginning of their settlement in Eastern Europe in the 12th century, up until the Holocaust. The presence of a large Jewish population in villages was, in fact, one of the most distinctive features of East European Jewry. The colourful personality of Jewish leaseholders of the production and sale of alcoholic beverages was often depicted in Polish, Russian and Jewish literature of the 19th century, but the real knowledge about the East European rural Jews beyond the stereotypical view is still at large. The book presents the results of a systematic survey, the first of its kind, on the rural Jews in the Minsk Guberniya, from its establishment as a major administrative unit within the Russian Empire in 1793, to the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. The present study is based mainly on systematic sources, which produced, for the first time, a full picture of Jewish settlement in the countryside in one particular region of the Russian Empire.

Fifty Key Jewish Thinkers is a panoramic survey of over 2,000 years of Jewish thought, religious and secular, ancient and modern. Now in its second edition, this essential reference guide contains new introductions to the lives and works of such thinkers as: Hannah Arendt, Immanuel Levinas, Judith Plaskow, Sigmund Freud, and Walter Benjamin.

Also including fully updated guides to further reading on figures from the middle ages through to the twenty-first century, historical maps and a chronology placing the thinkers in context, this is an essential and affordable one-volume reference to a rich and complex tradition.

Offering a radical critique of contemporary Israeli and diaspora fiction by major writers of the generation after Amos Oz and Philip Roth, this book asks searching questions about identity formation in Jewish spaces in the twenty-first century and posits global, transnational identities instead of the bipolar Israel/diaspora model. The chapters put into conversation major authors such as Jonathan Safran Foer, Nicole Krauss, Michael Chabon, and Nathan Englander with their Israeli counterparts Zeruya Shalev, Eshkol Nevo, and Etgar Keret and shows that they share common themes and concerns. Read through a postmodern lens, their preoccupation with failed marriage and failed ideals brings to the fore the crises of home, nation, historical destiny, and collective memory in contemporary secular Jewish culture. At times provocative, at others iconoclastic, this innovative study must be read by anyone concerned with Jewish culture and identity today, whether scholars, students, or the general reader.

Forty contributors from six countries and three continents interpret one of Judaism's favorite prayers and the difficulty of naming the unnameable.One of the oldest and most beloved prayers known even to Jews who rarely attend synagogue is Avinu Malkenu ("Our Father, Our King"), a liturgical staple for the entire High Holy Day period. "Our Father, Our King" has resonance also for Christians, whose Lord's Prayer begins "Our Father."Despite its popularity, however, Avinu Malkenu causes great debate because of the difficulties in thinking of God as father and king. Americans no longer relate positively to images of royalty; victims of parental abuse note the problem of assuming a benevolent father; and feminists have long objected to masculine language for God. These issues are just the tip of a larger linguistic and spiritual iceberg: How do we name God altogether, without recourse to imagery that defies belief?

This book is about the experiences of Jewish children who were members of armed partisan groups in Eastern Europe during World War II and the Holocaust. It describes and analyze the role of children as activists, agents, and decision makers in a situation of extraordinary danger and stress. The children in this book were hunted like prey and ran for their lives. They survived by fleeing into the forest and swamps of Eastern Europe and joining anti-German partisan groups. The vast majority of these children were teenagers between ages 11 and 18, although some were younger. They were, by any definition, child soldiers, and that is the reason they lived to tell their tales. The book will be of interest to general and academic audiences. There is also great interest in children and childhood across disciplines of history and the social sciences. It is likely to spark considerable debate and interest, since its argument runs counter to the generally accepted wisdom that child soldiers must first and foremost be seen as victims of their recruiters. The argument of this book is that time, place, and context play a key role in our understanding of children's involvement in war and that in some contexts children under arms must be seen as exercising an inherent right of self-defense.

Today's highly fraught historical moment brings a resurgence of antisemitism. Antisemitic incidents of all kinds are on the rise across the world, including hate speech, the spread of neo-Nazi graffiti and other forms of verbal and written threats, the defacement of synagogues and Jewish cemeteries, and acts of murderous terror. Contending with Antisemitism in a Rapidly Changing Political Climate is an edited collection of 18 essays that address antisemitism in its new and resurgent forms. Against a backdrop of concerning political developments such as rising nationalism and illiberalism on the right, new forms of intolerance and anti-liberal movements on the left, and militant deeds and demands by Islamic extremists, the contributors to this timely and necessary volume seek to better understand and effectively contend with today's antisemitism.

In the late nineteenth century, a group of radical Jewish youths from Odessa attempted to create an agricultural commune on the Oregon frontier, and in so doing developed from assimilated revolutionaries to American Jews. Theodore Friedgut relates the story of these youths and their creation, with special notice paid to the human encounters within the commune, the members' encounters with America in acquiring land and equipment-and, importantly, their encounters with their neighbors, themselves immigrant farmers on the American frontier. Among the volume's central sources is the memoir of Israel Mandelkern, which is here published for the first time. This study addresses hitherto neglected aspects of Jewish life in Russia and of the life of one of the more than a hundred Jewish agricultural colonies, and helps us understand the factors that influenced the young colony members in their transition toward becoming Americans. This is a microcosm of the experience of multitudes of immigrants.

In the field of Holocaust Studies, there has been a great deal written in English about poets such as Paul Celan, but Dan Pagis's body of work remains largely undiscovered. By analyzing the Holocaust poetry of Dan Pagis and correlating it to his biography through the identifying tropes of Pagis's literature, this book seeks to reveal that the speakers of Pagis' poems embody a resistance to traditional historical, temporal, and structural narratives while also outlining the scarring effects of trauma continually revisited through poetic engagement. Beyond this, the secondary aim of this book is to bring Pagis's work to light for an audience that solely reads and speaks English.