Tuvia Rubner, winner of Israel Prize for Poetry (2008), is a Hebrew poet who lost his family in the Holocaust. He turned his personal trauma into a broad world view that engages with Western culture, his poetry highlighting correspondences with paintings by Chagall, Breughel, Holbein, Turner and Rembrandt. Death and loss are molding experiences in this poet's world. Paint and sculpture masterpieces are signalled as masks, as Ambassadors of Death. Rubner's poems enable us to examine the tradition of various forms of artistic representation, while addressing the experience of art in a century when God 'hid his face' from the fate of European Jewry. And as Shahar Bram discovers and elaborates, herein lies an exquisite example of the use of ekphrasis -- Rubner using his poetic language medium to explain and process the meaning and messages inherent in a select group of paintings and sculptures of cultural significance. This important book contributes to the interdisciplinary theory of "word and image", and the history of the relationships between "sister arts". The result is not only a unique perspective of traditional Western art form as reflected in the eyes of a Hebrew survivor of twentieth-century Holocaust atrocities, but, in the words of Ruskin, it is "the expression of one soul [one artistic form] talking to another". The result is a profound understanding of the central principles of word and image art forms. Konrad-Adenauer Prize for Literature 2012

Since 1945, the Jewish population in Germany has grown steadily and there has been a flourishing of "Jewish" culture in Germany. Does this development mean that Jews are playing a significant role in German social life or that the German-Jewish relationship, often referred to as a kind of symbiosis, has re-emerged? The essays in this book cover the changes in German society since 1945 in Jewish communities, literature, theater, film, architecture, and other areas including an examination of the resurgence of anti-Semitism in Austria.

"Beyond the Border" sets the lives and work of Huguenot goldsmiths in the context of the different societies in which they lived and worked. Distinguished international scholars explore the contributions of individual goldsmiths drawing on new research. Michele Bimbenet Privat examines the lives and work of Huguenot goldsmiths in France during times of tolerance of the Protestant religion in the 16th and 17th centuries. She explains how protestant craftsmen dominated regional centres but found establishing a presence in the metropolis more challenging. The influence of the Louis XIV style was greater on the leading Dutch goldsmiths in the late 17th and 18th centuries. In contrast to London, first generation Huguenot goldsmiths played only a minor role in their adopted cities of The Hague and Amsterdam. Those who settled in Berlin and Kassel, often from Metz in Northern France, made a greater impact through the purity of style in which they continued to work in the 18th century. Those who settled in the English speaking world benefited from ambitious patronage from noble and professional clients. Goldsmiths who settled in the American colonies had more in common stylistically with those who worked in Dublin and Cork. First generation Huguenot goldsmiths in London set the pace for the next generation which produced in Paul de Lamerie one of the most successful craft businesses of his generation. "Beyond the Border" explores the transatlantic links between the Huguenot goldsmiths who settled in Europe and America.

First Order: Zeraim / Tractate Peah and Demay is the second volume in the edition of the Jerusalem Talmud, a basic work in Jewish Patristic. It presents basic Jewish texts on the organization of private and public charity, and on the modalities of coexistence of the ritually observant and the non-observant. This part of the Jerusalem Talmud has almost no counterpart in the Babylonian Talmud. Its study is prerequisite for an understanding of the relevant rules of Jewish tradition.

This comprehensive study of Jewish women in Imperial Germany (1871-1918) addresses the complex interrelationships of ethnicity, sex, and class. It examines the changing lives and roles of women who were part of an urbanizing, economically mobile, but socially spurned minority group, and also looks at their relationship with the rest of society. The author identifies German-Jewish women's `double burden' as females - discriminated against in both German and Jewish traditions - and as Jews - objects of the increasing anti-Semitism of their era. She also points out the ambiguous, often contradictory role that Jewish women played: they were powerful agents of acculturation, encouraging their families to adapt outwardly to German customs and norms, and also determined upholders of tradition, maintaining family rituals, kin networks, and Jewish communal organizations.

On November 10, 1975, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution declaring Zionism a form of racism. The move shocked millions, especially in the United States- the country largely responsible for founding the UN. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the American Ambassador to the UN, denounced this attack on Israel as an anti-Semitic assault on democracy and stood up to the Soviet-backed alliance of Communist dictatorships and Third World autocracies that supported the resolution. His eloquent stand brought him celebrity in the U.S., but ultimately shortened his tenure at the UN by alienating American allies, adversaries, and much of the foreign policy establishment-including Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Nevertheless, Moynihan's moment was a turning point: a harbinger of a shift in American culture and politics that would culminate in the Reagan Revolution. Moynihan paved the way for a more muscular, idealistic, neoconservative foreign policy and for a new style of defiant "cowboy" diplomacy. In this book, Gil Troy argues that America's idea of itself-still torn, in the mid-'70s, between post-Vietnam and -Watergate defeatism and a growing sense of optimism-changed with Moynihan, altering both the left and the right in ways that continue to play out in the 21st century. Much of the rhetoric of this era survives in domestic foreign policy debates and the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestine, suggesting that Moynihan's struggle has much to reveal about American politics and its position on the world stage.

In this first and only biography of light-heavyweight champion and boxing legend Joe Choynski, author Chris LaForce chronicles the life and career of a pioneer of the gloved era of pugilism. Joe Choynski was one of the greatest, most courageous, brilliant, and respected Jewish boxers in history. Born in San Francisco, California in 1868, Joe Choynski fought nearly all of the greatest heavyweights of that division s first Golden Age, despite weighing less than 170 pounds. He was one of the few who did not draw the color line. Included is a complete account of Joe s professional fights. Come follow Choynski s boxing career in such legendary matches as the battle on the Sacramento River barge with Gentleman Jim Corbett, his war with Bob Fitzsimmons, the classic brawls with Sailor Tom Sharkey, knockout of future heavyweight champion Jack Johnson, and his 20-round draw with soon-to-be heavyweight king Jim Jeffries. This book features over 180 photographs, many of them rare and published here, for the first time, anywhere The book includes a Foreword by Herbert G. Goldman, former Managing Editor of Ring magazine and Editor-in-Chief of Boxing Illustrated, and a testimonial by renowned boxing historian, Tracy Callis. Chris LaForce has been a member of IBRO (the International Boxing Research Organization) since 1984. He has written several articles for the IBRO newsletter, and is a contributing writer for the Cyber Boxing Zone, Western States Jewish History and other historical societies.

After World War II, Ernst Ludwig Ehrlich (1921-2007) published works in English and German by eminent Israeli scholars, in this way introducing them to a wider audience in Europe and North America. The series he founded for that purpose, Studia Judaica, continues to offer a platform for scholarly studies and editions that cover all eras in the history of the Jewish religion.

The Mind of the Holocaust Perpetrator in Fiction and Nonfiction examines texts that portray the inner experience of Holocaust perpetrators and thus transform them from archetypes of evil into complex psychological and moral subjects. Employing relevant methodological tools of narrative theory, Erin McGlothlin analyzes these unsettling depictions, which manifest a certain tension regarding the ethics of representation and identification. Such works, she asserts, endeavor to make transparent the mindset of their violent subjects, yet at the same time they also invariably contrive to obfuscate in part its disquieting character. The Mind of the Holocaust Perpetrator in Fiction and Nonfiction contains two parts. The first focuses on portraits of real-life perpetrators in nonfictional interviews and analyses from the 1960s and 1970s. These works provide a nuanced perspective on the mentality of the people who implemented the Holocaust via the interventional role of the interviewer or interpreter in the perpetrators' performances of self-disclosure. In part two, McGlothlin investigates more recent fictional texts that imagine the perspective of their invented perpetrator-narrators. Such works draw readers directly into the perpetrator's experience and at the same time impede their access to the perpetrator's consciousness by retarding their affective connection. Demonstrating that recent fiction featuring perpetrators as narrators employs strategies derived from earlier nonfictional portrayals, McGlothlin establishes not only a historical connection between these two groups of texts, whereby nonfictional engagement with real-life perpetrators gradually gives way to fictional exploration, but also a structural and aesthetic one. The book bespeaks new modes of engagement with ethically fraught questions raised by our increasing willingness to consider the events of the Holocaust from the perspective of the perpetrator. Students, scholars, and readers of Holocaust studies and literary criticism will appreciate this closer look at a historically taboo topic.

The biblical prohibition of images sets Judaism apart, together with Islam, from all other religious systems. This book attempts to explain the reasons for the prohibition - as well as its limits - and then shows how influential it has been in determining aspects of Jewish thinking in relation to such key concepts as holiness, symbolism, mediation between man and God, aesthetics and the role of memory in religion. Why is music the one art to which Judaism is hospitable? Is Judaism a religion of the ear rather than the eye? What is the real issue at stake in the age-old debate between Jerusalem and Athens? How do these issues relate to the iconoclastic movements in Byzantine Christianity and the Reformation? Lionel Kochan makes clear that to the prohibition of the graven image there is more than meets the eye.

This book is the original zionist classic by Theodor Herzl. The book is about the start of a Jewish state, and played a big role in Israel becoming a state. It is an important text for those studying the history of Israel and Theodor Herzl is undoubtedly the most important author modern Jewish studies. This is also an interesting read for those studying other religions, as Israel plays such a central role to most of the major religions of the world.

This book explores the memory of the Romanian Holocaust through transnational representations strongly rooted in a Romanian past of anti-Semitism, genocide, and violence. The essays in this volume discuss survivor testimonial accounts, letters, journals, and drawings, as well as literature and films in an effort to break the silence imposed by the Communist regime and debunk the denials of the Holocaust in Romania. What the survivors, writers (Paul Celan, Aharon Applefeld, Elie Wiesel, Norman Manea), artists, and film directors (Radu Mihaileanu, Radu Gabrea) present in this volume have in common is not just their Romanian heritage and their complicated relationship with Romania, but also an intense preoccupation with the memory of the Holocaust.

This is an unusual narrative in that it successfully combines subjectivity -- how an English person was led by a sequence of educational developments, personal encounters and historical constraints to become the founder of the German-Jewish Centre at the University of Sussex; and objectivity -- a book that introduces English and American readers to an important and evolving field of historical and cultural studies through intellectual autobiography. It documents the formative experiences of a scholar who was to become a pioneering teacher and researcher in the field of German culture and politics. The aim is to relate the shaping of self to the drift of history in a period of radical social change, extending from the refugee crisis caused by Hitler's seizure of power through the ordeals of the Second World War to post-war reconstruction, and the transformation of Britain into a modern multicultural society. The focus is on the formative role of institutions: vicarage childhood, Anglican schooling, Cambridge and other university environments -- especially the new map of learning at Sussex University in the 1960s. The 'Torch' in the title alludes to the transmission of a radical intellectual tradition and to a specific commitment to the study of Die Fackel, the satirical journal edited by Karl Kraus in Vienna from 1899 to 1936. From this emerged the innovative agenda developed by the Centre for German-Jewish Studies.

Revolutionary Visions examines recent cinematic depictions of Jewish involvement in 1960s and 1970s revolutionary movements in Latin America. In order to explore the topic, the book bridges critical theory on religion, politics, and hegemony from regional Latin American, national, and global perspectives. Placing these theories in dialogue with recent films, the author asks the following questions: How did revolutionary commitment change Jewish community and families in twentieth-century Latin America? How did Jews contribute to revolutionary causes, and what is the place of Jews in the legacies of revolutionary movements? How is film used to project self-representations of Jewish communities in the national project for a mainstream audience? Jewish involvement in revolutionary movements is rife with contradictions. On the one hand, it was a natural progression of patterns of political participation, based on the ideological affinities shared between socialist movements and Marxist revolutionary politics. On the other hand, involvement in revolutionary politics would also upset the status quo of Jewish communities because of the extreme nature of revolutionary practices (e.g., guerrilla warfare), revolutionary groups' alignment with Palestine, and the assimilation into non-Jewish culture that revolutionary involvement often entailed. These contradictions between Jewish self-identification and revolutionary activity continue to confound cultural understandings of the points of contact between identities and political affinities. In this way, Revolutionary Visions contributes to timely debates within cultural studies surrounding identities and politics.

Sicker sheds new light on the political circumstances surrounding the emergence of Rabbinic Judaism and Christianity. He places the 300-year history of Judaea from the Hasmoneans to Bar Kokhba, 167 B.C.E.-135 C.E. in the context of Roman history and Judaea's geostrategic role in Rome's geopolitics in the Middle East.

However, because of the unique character of its religion and culture, which bred an intense nationalism unknown elsewhere in the ancient world, Judaea turned out to be a weak link holding the Roman Empire in the east together. As such, it became a factor of some importance in the protracted struggle of Rome and Parthia for hegemony in southwest Asia. Judaea thus took on a political and strategic significance that was grossly disproportionate to its size and made its subjugation and domination an imperative of Roman foreign policy for two centuries, from Pompeius to Hadrian. In effect, the history of the period may be viewed as the story of the conflict between Roman imperialism and Judaean nationalism. A fresh look at ancient Middle Eastern and Roman history that will be invaluable for students and scholars of ancient history, post-biblical Jewish history and of Christian origins.

This important volume in onomastics, the study of names, presents a listing of Yiddish first names in the modern period: 1750 to the present day. Yiddish Given Names: A Lexicon resumes, collects, documents, and corrects the available body of research on Yiddish given names. It aims to establish the modern corpus and give the origins of the names therein. Rella Israly Cohn has amassed and preserved a number of names that have become extremely rare, almost to the point of disappearing, and correctly identified their sources using a number of works both commonly available and difficult to find. The book begins with preliminary material that orients the reader, explains technical terms and classifications, and describes the evolution of Yiddish names throughout their history. Following is the lexicon itself, which is comprised of over 250 names with variant forms and alphabetized according to the English transliteration. Each entry relates the Yiddish name to its source language, shows a source form, and gives the attestations of the name in its various forms in the earliest written works. Concluding with several appendixes that offer additional information and assist in reference and accessibility, this significant work will serve scholars in onomastics, linguistics, and Yiddish and will be of interest to both scholars and laypersons researching their family history or the cultural legacy of the Jewish community worldwide.

Issues of continuity, survival, and identity have generated apparently unending debates throughout the Jewish world for centuries. While similar issues arise in all Jewish communities, there are significant differences between them. This collection was designed to highlight differences as well as similarities by devoting a chapter to each of seven countries: Argentina, Australia, Canada, France, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States. In four communities-those in Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States-debates about continuity are mainly concerned with the loss of Jewish identity through assimilation. In Argentina and South Africa, the main issue is with physical survival in the face of chaotic social conditions. In France, although the situation is less dire, the community feels threatened by the rise of xenophobic political movements and the hostility of Arab groups. Apart from external factors, all the contributors review debates over the relative importance of religion and ethnic identity, and the contrasting positions taken by religious leaders and secularists. While the study offers no clear-cut answers, it does aim to broaden the debate by exposing national differences.

Psychoanalysis has always grappled with its Jewish origins, sometimes celebrating them and sometimes trying to escape or deny them. Through exploration of Freud's Jewish identity, the fate of psychoanalysis in Germany under the Nazis, and psychoanalytic theories of anti-Semitism, this book examines the significance of the Jewish connection with psychoanalysis and what that can tell us about political and psychological resistance, anti-Semitism and racism.

Is there really such a thing as Jewish music? And how does it survive as a practice of worship and cultural expression even in the face of the many brutal aesthetic and political challenges of modernity? In Jewish Music and Modernity, Philip V. Bohlman imparts these questions with a new light that transforms the very historiography of Jewish culture in modernity.
Based on decades of fieldwork and archival study throughout the world, Bohlman intensively examines the many ways in which music has historically borne witness to the confrontation between modern Jews and the world around them. Weaving a historical narrative that spans from the end of the Middle Ages to the Holocaust, he moves through the vast confluence of musical styles and repertories. From the sacred and to the secular, from folk to popular music, and in the many languages in which it was written and performed, he accounts for areas of Jewish music that have rarely been considered before. Jewish music, argues Bohlman, both survived in isolation and transformed the nations in which it lived. When Jews and Jewish musicians entered modernity, authenticity became an ideal to be supplanted by the reality of complex traditions. Klezmer music emerged in rural communities cohabited by Jews and Roma; Jewish cabaret resulted from the collaborations of migrant Jews and non-Jews to the nineteenth-century metropoles of Berlin and Budapest, Prague and Vienna; cantors and composers experimented with new sounds. The modernist impulse from Felix Mendelssohn to Gustav Pick to Arnold Schoenberg and beyond became possible because of the ways music juxtaposed aesthetic and cultural differences.
Jewish Music and Modernity demonstrateshow borders between repertories are crossed and the sound of modernity is enriched by the movement of music and musicians from the peripheries to the center of modern culture. Bohlman ultimately challenges readers to experience the modern confrontation of self and other anew.