Fearing an imminent Nazi invasion, the British government interned 28,000 men and women of enemy nationality living in Britain in the spring of 1940. Most were Jewish refugees who, having fled Nazi persecution, were appalled to find themselves imprisoned as potential Nazi spies. Using oral histories, unpublished letters and memoirs, artifacts and newspapers from the camps, and government documents, " We Built Up Our Lives" tells the compelling story of sixty-three of these internees. It is a seldom-told part of the history of World War II and the Holocaust and a classic tale of human courage and resilience.

"We Built Up Our Lives" describes the survival mechanisms relied upon by the Jewish refugees. Although the internees, imprisoned in Britain, the Isle of Man, Canada, and Australia, were adequately housed and fed and rarely mistreated, they were cut off from family, friends, school, and work--everything that had given meaning to their lives. Resisting boredom, anger, and despair, the internees made the best of a bad situation by creating education, culture, and community within the camps. Before and after as well as during the internment--in Nazi Germany and in Britain--educational resources and social networks were essential to the refugees' efforts to build up their lives. Equally important were personal qualities of courage, ingenuity, assertiveness, and resilience.

This book studies the Jewish community of Champagne from the fifth century to the expulsion of 1306. It documents the growth and decline of the community, examines its interrelationships with the larger Christian culture, and presents a model for the study of other communities. The economic and political consolidation of the county, coupled with the development of Jewish self-government and a system of education in Talmudic law, were important factors in the growth of Champagne's Jewish community. The subsequent decline of the community in the mid-13th century was also attributable to economic and political factors, as well as a growing church influence. The Jews of Medieval France: The Community of Champagne also offers an in-depth analysis of women's place in the Jewish and gentile worlds of medieval France. Details and comparisons of women's status within the family and in business, and examples of attitudes toward women in literature and law are all thoroughly integrated into the text.

Jewish Languages from A to Z provides an engaging and enjoyable overview of the rich variety of languages spoken and written by Jews over the past three thousand years. The book covers more than 50 different languages and language varieties. These include not only well-known Jewish languages like Hebrew, Yiddish, and Ladino, but also more exotic languages like Chinese, Esperanto, Malayalam, and Zulu, all of which have a fascinating Jewish story to be told. Each chapter presents the special features of the language variety in question, a discussion of the history of the associated Jewish community, and some examples of literature and other texts produced in it. The book thus takes readers on a stimulating voyage around the Jewish world, from ancient Babylonia to 21st-century New York, via such diverse locations as Tajikistan, South Africa, and the Caribbean. The chapters are accompanied by numerous full-colour photographs of the literary treasures produced by Jewish language-speaking communities, from ancient stone inscriptions to medieval illuminated manuscripts to contemporary novels and newspapers. This comprehensive survey of Jewish languages is designed to be accessible to all readers with an interest in languages or history, regardless of their background-no prior knowledge of linguistics or Jewish history is assumed.

Follow the soul treks of Jews lost and found.
Be inspired to connect with Judaism in new ways.

No two people take the same journey . Yet the telling of each story can ease the footsteps of those who follow . It is my hope that these] tales will offer you camaraderie, a guidepost here and there, and, most of all, the heart and strength to pursue your own path. from the Introduction

What draws Jews back to their religious roots? What drives them away? What obstacles must they overcome to find their way home?

Paula Amann candidly probes these questions and more as she explores how secular and nominal Jews are blazing their own trails toward a vibrant, twenty-first-century Judaism. With the ear of a journalist and the heart of a seeker, Amann weaves a tapestry of human stories of alienation, connection, spiritual detours, and unexpected portals into a life of faith. The people you meet in this engaging book will throw a fresh light on Jewish thought and practice. And their tales of personal transformation might just renew your relationship with Judaism or send you off on your own Jewish journey.

Topics include: Swerving In and Out of Other Faiths Traditions That Chafe The Arts as a Portal Healing Body and Soul Making a Jewish Life That Works And Many Others

Historians have long noted that Jews often appear at the storm center of European history. Nowhere is this more true than when dealing with the tumultuous years between the Nazi seizure of power in Germany on January 30, 1933 and the proclamation of the State of Israel on May 14, 1948. Yet, the events of Jewish history must also be viewed within the broader contexts of European, American, and global history. Spanning sixteen years of destruction and rebirth, A World in Turmoil is the first book of its kind, an integrated chronology which attempts to provide the researcher with clear and concise data describing the events as they unfolded. From the murder pits of Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe, to the battlefields in all the major theatres of operation, to the home fronts of all the major and minor combatants, A World in Turmoil covers a broad spectrum of events. Although major events throughout the world are noted, the volume concentrates on events in Europe, the Middle East, and the Americas. While the volume deals primarily with politics, significant social and intellectual trends are woven into the chronology. Augmented by an introductory essay and postscript to help place events in their historical context, by a bibliography, and by name, place, and subject indexes, the volume provides scholars and researchers alike a basic reference tool on sixteen of the most important years in modern history.

This book deals with the relations of the Jewish Agency and the State of Israel with the Lebanese Maronites in the period 1920-1984. It is essentially a study of the evolution of Israeli policy towards and the minority alliance with the Maronites. The central argument of the book is that Israel has pursued an active policy of intervention in the domestic politics of Lebanon through the alliance, and thus the book challenges the view of Israel as 'a nation that dwells alone'.

This is an augmented edition of a superb volume by one of the foremost analysts of European institutions and ideas. Here the late Erich Kahler turns his attention to the special character of the Jewish people, formed uniquely through the interaction of internal and external circumstances in which past and present merge.

The chapters in this book deal with persistent problems of Jewish identity. Kahler claims these can be fully understood only by awareness of the close interconnection between the singular ethnic nature and the unique social structure of the Jewish people. He discusses the Jews in Europe, specifically the historical implications of a strict tribal ritual that yet permitted the widest spiritual scope.

The second half of the book concerns anti-Semitism, in relation to Jews and Germans. How did the German people, seemingly so congenial to the Jews, develop a murderous revulsion against them, ending a long and fruitful symbiosis? Kahler sees this as a parallel to the parricidal rejection of the Jews by the Christian church. His argument is deepened in an added chapter, new to this volume, on the major forms and features of anti-Judaism, 'in which the earlier theme of the universal and the specific are seen as central not only to the inner history of Judaism but also to the specific interaction of Jews and Gentiles throughout social history.

This handbook addresses how the Jewish American community emerged from obscurity to play a role in behind-the-scenes power politics and finally appeared center stage. Jewish Americans and Political Participation explores the rise of the Jewish people from hardscrabble immigrants to the highest echelons of political power. The book provides an overview of American Jewish life, including the impact of immigration, domestic antisemitism, the Holocaust, and U.S-Israel relations. A chapter is devoted to protest politics, covering such events as President Grant's Order #11 (expulsion edict), tenants and shirtwaist-makers strikes, the 1943 rabbis march on Washington, and Jewish responses to the Rosenberg case. The book also covers participation in social movements such as abolition, Jewish defense organizations, and the New Left. A chapter is devoted to Jewish participation in electoral politics, from Jewish interest in early socialism to Jewish advisers and the emergence of Jewish conservatism. There are also biographies of Jewish American officials and political officeholders. Provides an overview of Jewish Americans in office, including Leopold Morse, the first Jew elected to Congress, in 1876; a review of Jewish members of Congress in the postwar era; and the role of Jewish American women in Congress Contains excerpts from key legislation impacting Jewish political participation, including Ulysses S. Grant's 1862 directive to expel all Jews from the Kentucky-Tennessee-Mississippi region and the 1974 Jackson Amendment, which pressured the Soviet Union to permit the emigration of its Jewish citizens

In Hiding tells the story of a Jewish family of four when a Dutch couple offered to hide them from Nazi atrocities during the Second World War. The couple agreed that they would hide this family for a large sum of money, thinking that the war would soon end. When it appeared that the war would last much longer than first anticipated, the hostess threatened and physically and mentally abused the foursome. In Hiding relates the cruelty that this family had to endure not from the Nazis directly, but from their own neighbours during more than two years of persecution.

The book deals with the formative years of Israel's evolving symbolic landscape (1904-1967). It covers the stories of a few dozen Jews who passed away in the Diaspora and later their remains were taken to be buried for the second time (and sometimes for the third) in Israel. These were Zionists and politicians, writers and poets, heroes and public activists whose common denominator was that they all passed away in the Diaspora, far and detached from the national homeland that they fought for before their tragic death. Only later, in an act of repair, their coffins were sent to be buried in the "sacred" Zionist soil, in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv or Dgania. These graves became pilgrimage sites and contributed to the design of Israel's landscape. The book examines how and why such great effort was made to bring their remains to Israel for reinterment, and how the funerals and graves of the public figures became state symbols and national instruments for establishing Israeli sovereignty over the land.

Henry Mandel (1920-2015), a crewman aboard the Jewish Illegal Immigrant ship Abril/Ben Hecht, a prisoner in Acre fortress and a volunteer for the Israeli Army during the 1948 Arab - Israeli War, was an Orthodox Jew whose reminiscences provide a uniquely illuminating perspective on the creation of the Jewish state. Mandel smuggled in electric batteries to prisoners planning an escape from Acre Prison. After being released, Mandel helped set-up a secret bazooka shell plant in New York which was reassembled in Israel with his assistance as a foreign volunteer. Personal narratives of the Ben Hecht crew are complemented by editorial historical analysis.

This book presents the development of a theological reading strategy in conversation with contemporary hermeneutical theories. Using that as a model, Gen 1-11 is read as a unified text refracted through the prism of textuality from a canonical approach.

From the early national period to the present day, American Jews have devised an expanding array of educational frameworks for the Jewish education and enculturation of successive generations. Concomitantly, Jewish education, once viewed as a family responsibility in the United States, has come to be seen as a matter of community concern. "And you Shall Teach Them Diligently": A Concise History of Jewish Education in the United States, 1776-2000 examines the trend toward communal responsibility for Jewish education and sxplores in historical context the origins and growth of such institutions as Jewish day schools, Talmud Torah programs, congregational supplementary schools, early childhood education centers, residential summer camps, Jewish community centers, bureaus of Jewish Education, youth groups, Jewish studies courses at universities, campus-based programs for Jewish college students, adult education, Israel experience programs, colleges of Jewish studies, and rabbinical seminaries. This book provides essential background for understanding contemporary Jewish educational realities and more effectively addressing twenty-first century needs.

In the midst of an age of prejudice, John Selden's immense, neglected rabbinical works contain magnificent Hebrew scholarship that respects, to an extent remarkable for the times, the self-understanding of Judaism. Scholars celebrated for their own broad and deep learning gladly conceded Selden's superiority and conferred on him titles such as "the glory of the English nation" (Hugo Grotius), "Monarch in letters" (Ben Jonson), "the chief of learned men reputed in this land" (John Milton). Although scholars have examined Selden (1584-1654) as a political theorist, legal and constitutional historian, and parliamentarian, Renaissance England's Chief Rabbi is the first book-length study of his rabbinic and especially talmudic publications, which take up most of the six folio volumes of his complete works and constitute his most mature scholarship. It traces the cultural influence of these works on some early modern British poets and intellectuals, including Jonson, Milton, Andrew Marvell, James Harrington, Henry Stubbe, Nathanael Culverwel, Thomas Hobbes, and Isaac Newton. It also explores some of the post-biblical Hebraic ideas that served as the foundation of Selden's own thought, including his identification of natural law with a set of universal divine laws of perpetual obligation pronounced by God to our first parents in paradise and after the flood to the children of Noah. Selden's discovery in the Talmud and in Maimonides' Mishneh Torah of shared moral rules in the natural, pre-civil state of humankind provides a basis for relationships among human beings anywhere in the world. The history of the religious toleration of Jews in England is incomplete without acknowledgment of theimpact of Selden's uncommonly generous Hebrew scholarship.

A challenging look at two great Jewish philosophers, and what their thinking means to our understanding of God, truth, revelation and reason.

Moses Maimonides (11381204) is Jewish historys greatest exponent of a rational, philosophically sound Judaism. He strove to reconcile the teachings of the Bible and rabbinic tradition with the principles of Aristotelian philosophy, arguing that religion and philosophy ultimately must arrive at the same truth. Baruch Spinoza (163277) is Jewish historys most illustrious heretic. He believed that truth could be attained through reason alone, and that philosophy and religion were separate domains that could not be reconciled. His critique of the Bible and its teachings caused an intellectual and spiritual upheaval whose effects are still felt today.

Rabbi Marc D. Angel discusses major themes in the writings of Maimonides and Spinoza to show us how modern people can deal with religion in an intellectually honest and meaningful way. From Maimonides, we gain insight on how to harmonize traditional religious belief with the dictates of reason. From Spinoza, we gain insight into the intellectual challenges which must be met by modern believers.

..".the book as a whole...is written with the enthusiasm and eye to detail which have made Hamerow's many books near-classics." . German Studies Review

Theodore Hamerow, a prominent historian, was born in Warsaw in 1920 and spent his childhood in Poland and Germany. His parents were members of the best-known Yiddish theater ensemble, the Vilna Company. They were part of an important movement in the Jewish community of Eastern Europe which sought, during the half century before World War II, to create a secular Jewish culture, the vehicle of which would be the Yiddish language.

Combining the skills of an experienced historian with the talents of a natural writer, the author not only brings this exciting part of Jewish culture to life but also deals with ethnic relations and ethnic tensions in the region and addresses the broad political and cultural issues of a society on the verge of destruction. Thus a vivid image emerges that captures the feel and atmosphere of a world that has vanished forever."

This study breaks new ground in describing how various linguistic and pragmatic mechanisms affect both the form of the narrative clause and the arrangement of the grammatical elements. The various possible forms that a narrative clause can take are classified in terms of their 'topic-comment' and 'focus-presupposition', and it is argued that the way in which these are articulated dictates the word order in the clause. The outcome of the study demonstrates that the traditional binary distinction between foreground and background, based purely on verb forms, is inadequate. A new model is offered showing how foregrounding is achieved by exploiting cognitive structures or by using specific evaluative devices.>

Jewish Partisans of the Soviet Union during World War II compiled by Jack Nusan Porter with the assistance of Yehuda Merin, is a classic compilation of original Russian and Jewish sources on the anti-Nazi resistance in Eastern Europe. After thirty years, Dr. Porter has compressed two volumes into one, added a new preface, an updated bibliography and filmography, over 100 new photos plus 12 new maps. This new volume is essential for scholars, teachers, and students of the Shoah, Russian history, and World War II.

Continuing its distinguished tradition of focusing on central political, sociological, and cultural issues of Jewish life in the last century, Volume XXVI of the annual Studies in Contemporary Jewry examines the visual revolution that has overtaken Jewish cultural life in the twentieth century onwards, with special attention given to the evolution of Jewish museums. Bringing together leading curators and scholars, Visualizing and Exhibiting Jewish Space and History treats various forms of Jewish representation in museums in Europe and the United States before the Second World War and inquires into the nature and proliferation of Jewish museums following the Holocaust and the fall of Communism in Western and Eastern Europe. In addition, a pair of essays dedicated to six exhibitions that took place in Israel in 2008 to mark six decades of Israeli art raises significant issues on the relationship between art and gender, and art and politics. An introductory essay highlights the dramatic transformation in the appreciation of the visual in Jewish culture. The scope of the symposium offers one of the first scholarly attempts to treat this theme in several countries.
Also featured in this volume are a provocative essay on the nature of antisemitism in twentieth-century English society; review essays on Jewish fundamentalism and recent works on the subject of the Holocaust in occupied Soviet territories; and reviews of new titles in Jewish Studies..

A powerful account, by Israeli peace activist Miko Peled, of his transformation from a young man who'd grown up in the heart of Israel's elite and served proudly in its military into a fearless advocate of nonviolent struggle and equal rights for all Palestinians and Israelis.

His journey is mirrored in many ways the transformation his father, a much-decorated Israeli general, had undergone three decades earlier. Alice Walker contributed a foreword to the first edition in which she wrote, "There are few books on the Israel/Palestine issue that seem as hopeful to me as this one."

In the new Epilogue he takes readers to South Africa, East Asia, several European countries, and the West Bank, Gaza, and Israel itself.