Search results

What is the relationship between social protest movements in the State of Israel, violence in Gaza, and the possibility of an Israeli attack on Iran? Why did the mass social protests in the State of Israel of summer 2011 ultimately fail? Wrapped in the Flag of Israel discusses social protest movements from the 2003 Single Mothers' March led by Mizrahi Vicky Knafo, to the "Tahrir is Here" Israeli mass protests of summer 2011. Equating bureaucratic entanglements with pain - what, arguably, can be...

Most books on Nazi Germany focus on the war years. Much less is known about the preceding years although these give important clues with regard to the events after November 1938, which culminated in the Holocaust. This book is based on eyewitness accounts chosen from the many memoirs that Harvard University received in 1940 after it had sent out a call to German-Jewish refugees to describe their experiences before and after 1933. These invaluable documents became part of the Harvard archives w...

Israel has made a unique contribution to the nuclear age. It has created a special "bargain" with the bomb. Israel is the only nuclear-armed state that does not acknowledge its possession of the bomb, even though its existence is a common knowledge throughout the world. It only says that it will not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons to the Middle East. The bomb is Israel's collective ineffable--the nation's last great taboo. This bargain has a name: in Hebrew, it is called amimut, or opa...

In the uneasily shared history of Jews and blacks in America, the struggle for civil rights in the South may be the least understood episode. Fight against Fear is the first book to focus on Jews and African Americans in that remarkable place and time. Mindful of both communities' precarious and contradictory standings in the South, Clive Webb tells a complex story of resistance and complicity, conviction and apathy. Webb begins by ranging over the experiences of southern Jews up to the eve of t...

In the first in-depth exploration of the relationship between Jews and magnates in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, M. J. Rosman shows the influence of the Jews on economic, social, and political life in the Polish, Ukrainian, and Belorussian territories, and offers new perspectives on their relations with magnates. Rosman focuses on two major questions: What were the principal spheres of interaction between the Jews and the nobility? What was the significance of this interaction for both par...

African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem are often dismissed as a fringe cult, but John L. Jackson questions what "fringe" means when cultural practices of every stripe circulate freely on the Internet. He reveals how race, religion, and ethnographic representation must be understood anew in the 21st century lest we reenact past errors.

In this tribute to Steven T. Katz on the occasion of his seventieth birthday, Michael Zank and Ingrid Anderson present sixteen original essays written by senior and junior scholars in comparative religion, philosophy of religion, modern Judaism, and theology after the Holocaust, fields of inquiry where Steven Katz made major contributions over the course of his distinguished scholarly career. The authors of this volume, specialists in Jewish history, especially the modern experience, and Jewish...

As European politics, society, economy and religion underwent epoch-making changes between 1400 and 1600, the treatment of Europe's Jews by the non-Jewish majority was, then as in later periods, a symptom of social problems and tensions in the Continent as a whole.Through a broad-ranging collection of documents, John Edwards sets out to present a vivid picture of the Jewish presence in European life during this vital and turbulent period. Subjects covered include the Jews' own economic presence...

Prior to the late fifteenth century, Jews had flourished on the Iberian Peninsula for hundreds of years. Marked by harmonic and cooperative coexistence alongside Christians and Muslims, this remarkable period was a golden age for Iberian Jews, with significant and culturally diverse advances in sciences, arts and government. That era came to a tragic and often violent end in 1492 when the Spanish monarchs issued a decree that forced all Sephardic Jews to convert or be expelled; Portugal followed...

Between 1905 and 1930, more than one hundred thousand Jews left Central and Eastern Europe to settle permanently in Argentina. This book explores how these Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazi immigrants helped to create a new urban strain of the Argentine national identity. Like other immigrants, Jews embraced Buenos Aires and Argentina while keeping ethnic identities-they spoke and produced new literary works in their native Yiddish and continued Jewish cultural traditions brought from Europe, from food...

Between 1920 and 1922, hundreds of members of the Hashomer Hatzair youth movement left the defunct Habsburg Monarchy and sailed to Palestine, where a small group of members of the movement established Upper Bitania, one of the communities that laid the foundation for Israel's kibbutz movement. Their social experiment lasted only eight months, but it gave birth to a powerful myth among Jewish youth which combined a story about a heroic Zionist deed, based on the trope of tragedy, with a model for...