This book is a moving testimony to a world that no longer exists. It recreates the richness of life in a Jewish shtetl before the German invasion without sentimentality. It documents the savage destruction of this Jewish world with the aid of documents, photographs, and family memoirs, and includes stories of extraordinary bravery and survival. - Dr Joanna Newman, Executive Director, London Jewish Cultural Centre --- Jack Kagan was born in Novogrudok, when it was a town in inter-war Poland. He was there when it became part of the Soviet Union in 1939, and when the German army marched in, in 1941. ... This book is a remarkable and lasting memorial to four hundred years of Jewish life, edited with devotion. - Sir Martin Gilbert, Honorary Fellow, Merton College, Oxford --- This book ... is a tribute of love from a citizen to his native town. It is a valuable document which brings greater understanding to the terrible course of events that brought so much misery and suffering to the J

Anglo-Jewry since 1066: Place, locality and memory is a study of the history and memory of Anglo-Jewry from medieval times to the present and is the first to explore the construction of identities, both Jewish and non-Jewish, in relation to the concept of place. The introductory chapters provide a theoretical overview focusing on the nature of local studies then moves into a chronological frame, starting with medieval Winchester, moving to early modern Portsmouth and then chapters covering the evolution of Anglo-Jewry from emancipation to the twentieth century. Emphasis is placed on the impact on identities resulting from the complex relationship between migration (including transmigration) and settlement of minority groups. Drawing upon a wide range of approaches, including history, cultural and literary studies, geography, Jewish and ethnic and racial studies, Kushner uses extensive sources including novels, poems, art, travel literature, autobiographical writing, official documentation, newspapers and census data. This book will appeal to scholars interested in Jewish studies and British history -- .

Ze'ev Jawitz (1847-1924) was one of the foremost intellectuals of the First Aliyah and a leader of the religious faction within the Hibbat Zion movement. During his life he experienced the transition from living in the Diaspora to settling in the homeland, and he faced complex problems along with rare opportunities. Jawitz sought to adapt Orthodox Judaism to the changing reality in the Land of Israel by blending it with the nascent Jewish nationalism. He engaged in most facets of the Hebrew culture of his time, including history, literature, philosophy, biblical exegesis, linguistics, opinion writing, and even politics. He did all this out of an understanding that a people returning to its land needs a broad culture and cannot remain confined to the limits of halakha (Jewish law). This biography is based on rich archival material, most of which has never before been published. It moves along two axes: historically, it follows Jawitz's life through the places where he lived - Warsaw, Yehud, Zikhron Yaakov, Jerusalem, Vilna, Berlin, Antwerp and London; and intellectually, it analyzes Jawitz's literary and philosophical work against the backdrop of his time.

This work, the fruit of intense research work spanning several years, examines the first serious attempt by the descendants of the Sephardim-the Jews expelled from Spain in 1492-to "return to Sepharad" more than three decades after the abolition of the Inquisition. At the beginning of the nineteenth century a trend towards historical revisionism, backed by Liberals, whose influence was pivotal at the Cortes de Cadiz (the national assembly convened to assert Spanish sovereignty, introduce reform, and establish a modern Spanish nation), combined with economic factors, culminated in the abolition of the Inquisition in 1834. This paved the way, ideologically, for the freedom of worship to be proclaimed in Spain on the heels of La Septembrina, or La Gloriosa, the September Revolution of 1868 in which Queen Isabel II was deposed. European Sephardic Jews, galvanized by their perception of a tolerant Spain, decided to undertake a major project to initiate negotiations with the Spanish state.

The story of a doctor's family torn apart by Soviet politics, persecution, and the Jewish struggle for freedom during the Cold War. Available now for the first time in English, Doctor Levitin is a modern classic in Jewish literature. A major work of late twentieth-century Russian and Jewish literature since its first publication in Israel in 1986, it has also seen three subsequent Russian editions. It is the first in David Shrayer-Petrov's trilogy of novels about the struggle of Soviet Jews and the destinies of refuseniks. In addition to being the first novel available in English that depicts the experience of the Jewish exodus from the former USSR, Doctor Levitin is presented in an excellent translation that has been overseen and edited by the author's son, the bilingual scholar Maxim D. Shrayer. Doctor Levitin is a panoramic novel that portrays the Soviet Union during the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the USSR invaded Afghanistan and Soviet Jews fought for their right to emigrate. Doctor Herbert Levitin, the novel's protagonist, is a professor of medicine in Moscow whose non-Jewish wife, Tatyana, comes from the Russian peasantry. Shrayer-Petrov documents with anatomical precision the mutually unbreachable contradictions of the Levitins' mixed marriage, which becomes an allegory of Jewish-Russian history. Doctor Levitin's Jewishness evolves over the course of the novel, becoming a spiritual mission. The antisemitism of the Soviet regime forces the quiet intellectual and his family to seek emigration. Denied permission to leave, the family of Doctor Levitin is forced into the existence of refuseniks and outcasts, which inexorably leads to their destruction and a final act of defiance and revenge on the Soviet system. A significant contribution to the works of translated literature available in English, David Shrayer-Petrov's Doctor Levitin is ideal for any reader of fiction and literature. It will hold particular interest for those who study Jewish or Russian literature, culture, and history and Cold War politics.

This book presents original studies of how a cultural concept of Jewishness and a coherent Jewish history came to make sense in the experiences of people entangled in different historical situations. Instead of searching for the inconsistencies, discontinuities, or ruptures of dominant grand historical narratives of Jewish cultural history, this book unfolds situations and events, where Jewishness and a coherent Jewish history became useful, meaningful, and acted upon as a site of causal explanations. Inspired by classical American pragmatism and more recent French pragmatism, we present a new perspective on Jewish cultural history in which the experiences, problems, and actions of people are at the center of reconstructions of historical causalities and projections of future horizons. The book shows how boundaries between Jewish and non-Jewish are not a priori given but are instead repeatedly experienced in a variety of situations and then acted upon as matters of facts. In different ways and on different scales, these studies show how people's experiences of Jewishness perpetually probe, test, and shape the boundaries between what is Jewish and non-Jewish, and that these boundaries shape the spatiotemporal linkages that we call history.

The Routledge Handbook of Religion, Mass Atrocity, and Genocide explores the many and sometimes complicated ways in which religion, faith, doctrine, and practice intersect in societies where mass atrocity and genocide occur. This volume is intended as an entry point to questions about mass atrocity and genocide that are asked by and of people of faith and is an outstanding reference source to the key topics, historical events, and heated debates in this subject area. The 39 contributions to the handbook, by a team of international contributors, span five continents and cover four millennia. Each explores the intersection of religion, faith, and mainly state-sponsored mass atrocity and genocide, and draws from a variety of disciplines. This volume is divided into six core sections: Genocide in Antiquity and Holy Wars The Genocide of Indigenous Peoples Religion and the State The Role of Religion during Genocide Post Genocide Considerations Memory Culture Within these sections central issues, historical events, debates, and problems are examined, including the Crusades; Jihad and ISIS, colonialism, the Holocaust, desecration of ritual objects, politics of religion, Shinto nationalism, attacks on Rohingya Muslims; the Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, responses to genocide; gender-based atrocities, ritualcide in Cambodia, burial sites and mass graves, transitional justice, forgiveness, documenting genocide, survivor memory narratives, post-conflict healing and memorialization. The Routledge Handbook of Religion and Genocide is essential reading for students and researchers with an interest in religion and genocide, religion and violence, and religion and politics. It will be of great interest to students of theology, philosophy, genocide studies, narrative studies, history, and international relations and those in related fields, such as cultural studies, area studies, sociology, and anthropology.

A critical examination of Zionism and its internal resistance by Israeli Jews, this book employs a unique perspective on Israel/Palestine by eschewing presenting identities as concrete and, rather, examining their creation through discourse.

First ever volume on Holocaust in Thessaloniki in English, utilizing new sources and interpretation schemes Thessaloniki was for centuries one of the most prominent Jewish communities in the world, which lost more than 90% of its population during the Holocaust Book will be a great contribution to the local efforts underway to reconcile Thessaloniki with its Jewish past and honor the victims of the Holocaust An ambitious Holocaust Memorial Museum, with the backing of several governments and institutions, is schedule to open in the city by 2021.

A growing number of Jews identify themselves as secular or "somewhat secular." Is this expansive definition of Jewishness a new phenomenon? What are its roots? What are its implications for the Jewish community, its institutions, and its future? In reflecting on secular forms of Jewishness, the contributors to this book explore the sources of Jewish secularism and its articulation in Jewish thought, belief, literature, and culture. Included in this book are several personal accounts of Jewish journeys, as well as analyses of the extent of the division between secular Jews and others in the Jewish community. In sum, Jewish Secularity: The Search for Roots and the Challenges of Relevant Meaning provides an overview of a profound development in the evolving history of Jewish life in America.

There has been extensive research into the impact of the Holocaust on the children of survivors who immigrated to the US and Israel. But very little work in this space has looked at children whose parents fled Nazi persecution before the Holocaust. Even less attention has been paid to those who ended up in Britain from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Hungary. What was the impact on this second generation? How have the lives of these ordinary people been shaped by their parents' dislocation? Using a series of interviews with members of the second generation, Breaking the Silence is a qualitative, interdisciplinary exploration how their lives were shaped by their parents escape from persecution. It offers an insight into how the exile and fear of persecution of the parents and the deaths/murder of unknown relatives has left this generation both bereft of memories and haunted by the past.

The Arc of the Covenant studies the social, cultural, and political factors that contributed to exceptional Jewish educational success in St. Paul, Minnesota in the latter half of the twentieth century. The book draws on archival sources, interviews with principal figures, and wide-ranging research on Jewish education and community dynamics to elucidate the story's intriguing improbabilities. Why such success in a midsize, midcentury, midwestern river town with a relatively small Jewish population of limited resources? How did it happen, and how have circumstances changed in recent years? The answers are to be found at the intersection of broad historical forces and local circumstances. Though focused on a particular place and time, the implications reach far beyond St. Paul, then and now, making Arc of the Covenant a timely resource for current Jewish educational planners, along with educators in other communities dedicated to the transmission of a sacred heritage.

There has been extensive research into the impact of the Holocaust on the children of survivors who immigrated to the US and Israel. But very little work in this space has looked at children whose parents fled Nazi persecution before the Holocaust. Even less attention has been paid to those who ended up in Britain from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Hungary. What was the impact on this second generation? How have the lives of these ordinary people been shaped by their parents' dislocation? Using a series of interviews with members of the second generation, Breaking the Silence is a qualitative, interdisciplinary exploration how their lives were shaped by their parents escape from persecution. It offers an insight into how the exile and fear of persecution of the parents and the deaths/murder of unknown relatives has left this generation both bereft of memories and haunted by the past.

This book is a groundbreaking study of one of the greatest science fiction writers, the Polish master Stanislaw Lem. It offers a new direction in research on his oeuvre and corrects several errors commonly appearing in his biographies. The author painstakingly recreates the context of Lem's early life and his traumatic experiences during the Second World War due to his Jewish background, and then traces these through original and brilliant readings of his fiction and non-fiction. She considers language, worldbuilding, themes, motifs and characterization as well as many buried allusions to the Holocaust in Lem's published and archival work, and uses these fragments to capture a different side of Lem than previously known. The book discusses various issues concerning the writer's life, such as his upbringing in a Jewish, Zionist-minded family, the extensive relations between the Lem family and the elite of Lviv at that time, details of the Lem family killed during the German occupation and attempts to reconstruct what happened to Lem's parents and to the writer himself after escaping the ghetto. Part of the Studies in Global Genre Fiction series, this English translation of the Polish original, which has already been considered a milestone in Lem studies, offers a fresh perspective on the writer and his work. It will be an important intervention for scholars and researchers of Jewish studies, Holocaust literature, science fiction studies, English literature, world war studies, minority studies, popular culture, history and cultural studies.

Stories abound of immigrant Jews on the outside looking in, clambering up the ladder of social mobility, successfully assimilating and integrating into their new worlds. But this book is not about the success stories. It's a paean to the bunglers, the blockheads, and the just plain weird-Jews who were flung from small, impoverished eastern European towns into the urban shtetls of New York and Warsaw, where, as they say in Yiddish, their bread landed butter side down in the dirt. These marginal Jews may have found their way into the history books far less frequently than their more socially upstanding neighbors, but there's one place you can find them in force: in the Yiddish newspapers that had their heyday from the 1880s to the 1930s. Disaster, misery, and misfortune: you will find no better chronicle of the daily ignominies of urban Jewish life than in the pages of the Yiddish press. An underground history of downwardly mobile Jews, Bad Rabbi exposes the seamy underbelly of pre-WWII New York and Warsaw, the two major centers of Yiddish culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With true stories plucked from the pages of the Yiddish papers, Eddy Portnoy introduces us to the drunks, thieves, murderers, wrestlers, poets, and beauty queens whose misadventures were immortalized in print. There's the Polish rabbi blackmailed by an American widow, mass brawls at weddings and funerals, a psychic who specialized in locating missing husbands, and violent gangs of Jewish mothers on the prowl-in short, not quite the Jews you'd expect. One part Isaac Bashevis Singer, one part Jerry Springer, this irreverent, unvarnished, and frequently hilarious compendium of stories provides a window into an unknown Yiddish world that was.

This book traces the historical phenomenon of "the Jew as Legitimation." Contributors discuss how Jews have been used, through time, to validate non-Jewish beliefs. The volume dissects the dilemmas and challenges this pattern has presented to Jews. Throughout history, Jews and Judaism have served to legitimize the beliefs of Gentiles. Jews functioned as Augustine's witnesses to the truth of Christianity, as Christian Kabbalist's source for Protestant truths, as an argument for the enlightened claim for tolerance, as the focus of modern Christian Zionist reverence, and as a weapon of contemporary right wing populism against fears of Islamization. This volume challenges understandings of Jewish-Gentile relations, offering a counter-perspective to discourses of antisemitism and philosemitism.

The natural world has been "humanized": even areas thought to be wilderness bear the marks of human impact. But this human impact is not simply physical. At the emergence of the environmental movement, the focus was on human effects on "nature." More recently, however, the complexity of the term "nature" has led to fruitful debates and the recognition of how human individuals and cultures interpret their environments. This book furthers the dialogue on religion, ethics, and the environment by exploring three interrelated concepts: to recreate, to replace, and to restore. Through interdisciplinary dialogue the authors illuminate certain unique dimensions at the crossroads between finding value, creating value, and reflecting on one's place in the world. Each of these terms has diverse religious, ethical, and scientific connotations. Each converges on the ways in which humans both think about and act upon their surroundings. And each radically questions the damaging conceptual divisions between nature and culture, human and environment, and scientific explanation and religious/ethical understanding. This book self-consciously reflects on the intersections of environmental philosophy, environmental theology, and religion and ecology, stressing the importance of how place interprets us and how we interpret place. In addition to its contribution to environmental philosophy, this work is a unique volume in its serious engagement with theology and religious studies on the issues of ecological restoration and the meaning of place.

This book is a groundbreaking study of one of the greatest science fiction writers, the Polish master Stanislaw Lem. It offers a new direction in research on his oeuvre and corrects several errors commonly appearing in his biographies. The author painstakingly recreates the context of Lem's early life and his traumatic experiences during the Second World War due to his Jewish background, and then traces these through original and brilliant readings of his fiction and non-fiction. She considers language, worldbuilding, themes, motifs and characterization as well as many buried allusions to the Holocaust in Lem's published and archival work, and uses these fragments to capture a different side of Lem than previously known. The book discusses various issues concerning the writer's life, such as his upbringing in a Jewish, Zionist-minded family, the extensive relations between the Lem family and the elite of Lviv at that time, details of the Lem family killed during the German occupation and attempts to reconstruct what happened to Lem's parents and to the writer himself after escaping the ghetto. Part of the Studies in Global Genre Fiction series, this English translation of the Polish original, which has already been considered a milestone in Lem studies, offers a fresh perspective on the writer and his work. It will be an important intervention for scholars and researchers of Jewish studies, Holocaust literature, science fiction studies, English literature, world war studies, minority studies, popular culture, history and cultural studies.

First collection in English by this esteemed scholar of the Protocols Contains groundbreaking research on origins of this pernicious antisemitic conspiracy theory Shows baleful influence of this notorious forgery into the present day

Shoah and Torah systematically takes up the task of reading the Shoah through the lens of the Torah and the Torah through the lens of the Shoah.The investigation rests upon (1) the metaphysical standing that the Nazis ascribed to the Torah, (2) the obliteration of the Torah in the extermination of the Jews, (3) the significance of the Torah for an understanding of the Shoah, and (4) the significance of the Shoah for an understanding of the Torah.The basis for the inquiry lies not in the content of a certain belief but in the categories of a certain mode of thought. Distinct from all other studies, this book is grounded in the categories of Jewish thought and Judaism-the categories of creation, revelation, and redemption-that the Nazis sought to obliterate in the Shoah.Thus, the investigation is itself a response to the Nazi project of the extermination of the Jews and the millennial testimony of the Jews to the Torah.

Between 2015 and 2020 the Labour Party was riven by allegations that the party had tolerated antisemitism. For the Labour right, and some in the media, the fact that such allegations could be made was proof of a moral collapse under Jeremy Corbyn's leadership. Sections of the left, meanwhile, sought to resist the accusations by claiming that the numbers of people accused of racism were few, that the allegations were an orchestrated attack, and that those found guilty were excluded from the party. This important book by one of Britain's leading historians of anti- fascism gives a more detailed account than any yet published of what went wrong in Labour. Renton rejects those on the right who sought to exploit the issue for factional advantage. He also criticises those of his comrades on the left who were ignorant about what most British Jews think and demonstrated a willingness to antagonise them. This book will appeal to anyone who cares about antisemitism or left- wing politics.