In the autumn of 1917, the British government established three batallions of infantry for the reception of non-nationalized Russian Jews. Known colloquially as the Jewish Legion, the batallions served in Egypt and Palestine, before their eventual disbandment in the late spring of 1921. By drawing on the testimonies of over 600 veterans, this unique unit is analyzed from within its political and social context, providing fresh insights into Anglo-Jewish relations during the early twentieth century.

"One of the less discussed achievements of the women's movement is the option to reject the patronymic naming system, i.e. the convention of women replacing their own family names by their husbands' names when they get married. This book offers an analysis of Israeli women's naming practices while tracing vocabularies of nationalism, orientalism and individualism in women's accounts. Such vocabularies are claimed to reinforce the local dominance of familism rendering women's sense of belonging, ambivalent. The book is an account of women's agency and positioning operating within ethnic stratification structures, showing how the achievements of the women's movement require continuous organized protection"--Provided by publisher.

An unputdownable tale of one man's quest to recover his family's property, plundered by the Nazis. Menachem Kaiser's brilliantly told story is set in motion when the author takes up his Holocaust-survivor grandfather's former battle to reclaim the family's property in Sosnowiec, Poland. Here, he meets a Polish lawyer known as 'The Killer' who agrees to take his case and becomes involved with a band of Silesian treasure-seekers, all the while piecing together his family's complex history. Propelled by rich, original research, Kaiser immerses readers in profound questions that reach far beyond his personal quest. What does it mean to seize your own legacy? Can reclaimed property repair rifts among the living? Plunder is both a deeply immersive adventure story and an irreverent, daring interrogation of inheritance - material, spiritual, familial, and emotional.

Kurt and Sonja Messerschmidt met in Nazi Berlin, married in the Theresienstadt ghetto, and survived Auschwitz. In this book, they tell their intertwined stories in their own words. The text directly expresses their experiences, reactions, and emotions. The reader moves with them through the stages of their Holocaust journeys: persecution in Berlin, deportation to Theresienstadt and then to Auschwitz, slave labor, liberation, reunion, and finally emigration to the US. Kurt and Sonja saw the death of Jews every day for two years, but they never stopped creating their own lives. The spoken words of these survivors create a uniquely direct relationship with the reader, as if this couple were telling their story in their living room.

The series Beihefte zur Zeitschrift fur die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft (BZAW) covers all areas of research into the Old Testament, focusing on the Hebrew Bible, its early and later forms in Ancient Judaism, as well as its branching into many neighboring cultures of the Ancient Near East and the Greco-Roman world.

In this illuminating volume, Dan Cohn-Sherbok traces the development of Jewish history from ancient times to the present day. Generously illustrated with over 100 maps and 24 black-and-white illustrations, the atlas details the central developments of the Jewish heritage. It is the first extensive, up-to-date atlas of Jewish history designed for students and the general reader. It is ideally suited for those taking courses in Jewish or Biblical Studies, serving as a handy reference guide as well as a textbook.

The Zionist Masquerade is a new history of the birth of the Anglo-Zionist alliance during the Great War - a critical chapter in the history of the Zionist-Palestinian conflict. James Renton argues that the Balfour Declaration was the result of a wider phenomenon of British propaganda policies during World War I that were driven by mistaken conceptions of ethnicity, ethnic power and nationalism. From this vantage point, Renton contends that while a number of Zionist activists played a crucial role in the making of the Balfour Declaration, the end result was not the great Zionist victory that has been widely assumed. Although the Declaration came to be the basis for the British Mandate for Palestine, which made a Jewish State possible thirty years later, this was far from being the original intention of the British Government. The primary purpose of Britain's wartime support for Zionism was to secure Jewish backing for the war effort. The unintended consequences of this policy, however, were to be explosive and far-reaching.

A collection of seventeen essays on pre-modern Hebrew poetry in honor of Wout van Bekkum. The articles in this volume all seek to examine how the religious, cultural, and social context in which the poet functioned impacted on and is visible, either explicitly or more elliptically, in their poetical oeuvre. For this purposes a broad understanding of "world" has been accepted, including both the natural world and the constructed one (society, culture, language) as well as the spiritual and emotional world. History, a pillar of the man-made constructed world, has been used to determine the boundaries: from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages, and-in instances where the topic connects to older traditions-to Early Modern Judaism, i.e. pre-modern Hebrew (and Aramaic) poetry. The articles in this volume, in the breadth of their temporal and spatial range and their multiplicity of approaches and methodologies, highlight the richness of contemporary scholarship on Hebrew poetry. The volume invites the reader to engage with this astonishing body of poetry, while providing a glimpse into the world of the paytanim, and the cultures and societies from which they drew their ininspiration and to which they made such important contributions.

The Jewish Labor Movement was a radical subculture that flourished within the trade union and political movements in the United States in the early part of the twentieth century. Jewish immigrant activists--socialists, communists, anarchists, and labor Zionists--adapted aspects of the traditions with which they were raised in order to express the politics of social transformation. In doing so, they created a folk ideology which reflected their dual ethnic/class identity. This book explores that folk ideology, through an analysis of interviews with participants in the Jewish Labor Movement as well as through a survey of the voluminous literature written about that movement.

A synthesis of political ideology and ethnic tradition was carefully crafted by secular working-class Jewish immigrant radicals who rediscovered and reformulated elements of Jewish traditions as vehicles for political organizing. Commonly held symbols of their cultural identity--the Yiddish language, rituals such as the Passover seder, remembered narratives of the Eastern European "shtetl," and biblical imagery--served as powerful tools in forging political solidarity among fellow Jewish workers and activists within the Jewish Labor Movement.

The Number One International Bestseller. The heartbreaking, inspiring true story of a girl sent to Auschwitz who survived the evil Dr Josef Mengele's pseudo-medical experiments. With a foreword by His Holiness Pope Francis. Lidia Maksymowicz was just three years old when she arrived in Auschwitz-Birkenau with her mother, grandparents and foster brother. They were from Belarus, their 'crime' that they supported the partisan resistance to Nazi occupation. Once there, Lidia was picked by Mengele for his experiments and sent to the children's block. It was here that she survived eighteen months of hell. Injected with infectious diseases, desperately malnourished, she came close to death. Her mother - who risked her life to secretly visit Lidia - was her only tie to humanity. By the time Birkenau was liberated her family had disappeared. Even her mother was presumed dead. Lidia was adopted by a woman from the nearby town of Oswiecim. Too traumatised to feel emotion, she was not an easy child to care for but she came to love her adoptive mother and her new home. Then, in 1962, she discovered that her birth parents were still alive. They lived in the USSR - and they wanted her back. Lidia was faced with an agonising choice . . . The Little Girl Who Could Not Cry is powerful, moving and ultimately hopeful, as Lidia comes to terms with the past and finds the strength to share her story - even making headlines when she meets Pope Francis, who kisses her tattoo. Above all she refuses to hate those who hurt her so badly, saying, 'Hate only brings more hate. Love, on the other hand, has the power to redeem.'

For three decades after the Second World War, the 'Butcher of the Balkans' lived an idyllic life with his family in a Los Angeles suburb. Andrija Artukovic was a senior member of the Ustasha, a Croatian fascist and nationalist movement, and was responsible for the brutal murders of hundreds of thousands of men, women and children. Wanted in Yugoslavia to stand trial for war crimes, he had illegally entered and claimed political asylum in the United States - and his powerful supporters sought to keep him there. Meanwhile, just 10 miles away, David Whitelaw lived with his mother, Judith, who fled Germany in 1938. Seventy-six of her relatives were killed in the Holocaust. When David learned Artukovic was living comfortably nearby, he vowed to ensure his deportation to stand trial as a war criminal. But when a firebomb, thrown with the sole intention of causing fear, saw the young man sent to jail, a battle began for his own freedom, while the war criminal remained at large. A true David versus Goliath battle, The Fierce is the story of the teenager who helped take down the worst mass murderer and war criminal in America.

'In the contemporary British context, ?heritage? is a highly politicized and contentious term', Tony Kusher writes in his introduction to this edited collection of essays on the subject of Jewish heritage, thus setting the tone for a book as much interested in the preservation as it is the understanding of this culture.

This book provides a more theoretical framework for the pursuit of Jewish historiography and heritage preservation in Britain. The essays collected here look both to the past and to the future, discussing the nature of the Jewish heritage that has already been produced and looking toward possibilities of future development. Kushner has collected a wide range of subjects from social history to architecture to the question of Jewish women.

This book will be of interest to students of social history and ethnic studies, particularly Jewish history in London and Manchester. It will be also of some use to those interested in architecture.

Part 1 of the latest volume in "The Jewish Law Annual" comprises a symposium on parent and child, examining such issues as parental authority and the contrast between the Bible and Rabbinic law. Part 2 covers current legal thought on religious freedom in the United States as well as contemporary developments in Jewish laws in Israel. Part 3 is a major survey of recently published titles, organized according to major legal categories.

The notion of "self" and "other" and its representation in artwork and literature is an important theme in current cultural sciences as well as in our everyday life in contemporary Western societies. Moreover, the concept of "self" and "other" and its imaginary dichotomy is gaining more and more political impact in a world of resurfacing ideology-ridden conflicts. The essays deal with Jewish reality in contemporary Germany and its reflection in movies from the special point of view of cultural sciences, political sciences, and religious studies. This anthology presents challengingly new insights into topics rarely covered, such as youth culture or humor, and finally discusses the images of Jewish life as realities still to be constructed.

This book is the first to deal with the impact on the Jews of the area of the sovietization of Eastern Poland. Polish resentment at alleged Jewish collaboration with the Soviets between 1939 and 1941 affected the development of Polish-Jewish relations under Nazi rule and in the USSR. The role of these conflicts both in the Anders army and in the Communist-led Kosciuszko division and 1st Polish Army is investigated, as well as the part played by Jews in the communist-dominated regime in Poland after 1944.

Scholarly literature on Jesus has often attempted to relate his miracles to their Jewish context, but that context has not been surveyed in its own right. The present study supplies that lack by examining both the ideas on miracle in Second Temple literature (including Josephus, Philo, the Dead Sea Scrolls, Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha) and the evidence for contemporary Jewish miracle workers. The penultimate chapter explores insights from cultural anthropology to round out the picture obtained from the literary evidence, and the study concludes that Jesus is distinctive as a miracle-worker in his Jewish context while nevertheless fitting into it.

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.

Amidst the growing forums of kinky Jews, orthodox drag queens, and Jewish geisha girls, we find today's sexy Jewess in a host of reflexive plays with sexed-up self-display. A social phantasm with real legs, she moves boldly between neo-burlesque striptease, comedy television, ballet movies, and progressive porn to construct the 21st Century Jewish American woman through charisma and comic craft, in-your-face antics, and offensive charm. Her image redresses longstanding stereotypes of the hag, the Jewish mother, and Jewish American princess that have demeaned the Jewish woman as overly demanding, inappropriate, and unattractive across the 20th century, even as Jews assimilated into the American mainstream. But why does "sexy" work to update tropes of the Jewish woman? And how does sex link to humor in order for this update to work? Entangling questions of sexiness to race, gender, and class, The Case of the Sexy Jewess frames an embodied joke-work genre that is most often, but not always meant to be funny. In a contemporary period after the thrusts of assimilation and women's liberation movements, performances usher in new versions of old scripts with ranging consequences. At the core is the recuperative performance of identity through impersonation, and the question of its radical or conservative potential. Appropriating, re-appropriating, and mis-appropriating identity material within and beyond their midst, Sexy Jewess artists play up the failed logic of representation by mocking identity categories altogether. They act as comic chameleons, morphing between margin and center in countless number of charged caricatures. Embodying ethnic and gender positions as always already on the edge while ever more in the middle, contemporary Jewish female performers extend a comic tradition in new contexts, mobilizing progressive discourses from positions of newfound race and gender privilege.