Ivan Jablonka's grandparents' lives ended long before his began: although Matès and Idesa Jablonka were his family, they were perfect strangers. When he set out to uncover their story, Jablonka had little to work with. Neither of them was the least bit famous, and they left little behind except their two orphaned children, a handful of letters, and a passport. Persecuted as communists in Poland, as refugees in France, and then as Jews under the Vichy regime, Matès and Idesa lived their short lives underground. They were overcome by the tragedies of the twentieth century: Stalinism, the mounting dangers in Europe during the 1930s, the Second World War, and the destruction of European Jews. Jablonka's challenge was, as a historian, to rigorously distance himself and yet, as family, to invest himself completely in their story. Imagined oppositions collapsed - between scholarly research and personal commitment, between established facts and the passion of the one recording them, between history and the art of storytelling. To write this book, Jablonka traveled to three continents; met the handful of survivors of his grandparents' era, their descendants, and some of his far-flung cousins; and investigated twenty different archives. And in the process, he reflected on his own family and his responsibilities to his father, the orphaned son, and to his own children and the family wounds they all inherited. A History of the Grandparents I Never Had cannot bring Matès and Idesa to life, but Jablonka succeeds in bringing them, as he soberly puts it, to light. The result is a gripping story, a profound reflection, and an absolutely extraordinary history.

This is the first book to explore the effect of genetic research on the Lemba Judaising community of Southern Africa and the phenomenon of Israelite identity. The science of genetics as relayed by the media is perceived by laymen as being irreproachably objective 'hard science': its disinterested 'scientific' findings appear immensely impressive and may therefore act as a powerful catalyst for change. In this case, an oral tradition cherished by many of the Lemba that they are of Jewish origin appears to be supported by recent DNA testing, which has deeply affected the narrative and religious identity of the group and the way the tribe is perceived in the Western world. International in appeal, this topical text brings together cutting-edge research on the social, cultural and ethical implications of genetics and the study of Judaising movements across the world. This book will be of interest to researchers and students of Jewish history, genetic anthropology, race and ethnicity studies, and religious and cultural studies.

Jacob Lipschitz was only fourteen when he had to endure the harsh realities of World War II and the horror of the Holocaust. He lost his parents to Treblinka extermination camp, and wandered the streets of the starving Warsaw Ghetto with some friends, sneaking in and out of the guarded walls, searching for any food to support his life, eventually joining Jewish fighters underground. During this desperate time, he must elude a revengeful Nazi solidier who had a personal vendetta against him and unceasingly hunts him. Jacob told his harrowing experience to Nobel nominee Shlomo Kalo when they were university students. His intelligence and resourcefulness would help him survive, showing the astonishing strength, perseverance, and spirit that many in Jewish history have exhibited. However, Jacob's choice as a young man is unexpected and this is one of the highlights of the book. Forevermore skillfully brings to life three masterful tales of loyalty, subjugation, and strength in human history, which also include the fateful encounters between Jewish nobleman Zabir Ben Bata and Muhammad, and of Rabbi Aaron and his Polish allies who betrayed him and his community during the Cossack rebellion. Forevermore was praised by the media, recommended by Israeli Ministry of Education and also by Shimon Peres: "An original style of writing and a look at events from an interesting perspective!." Scroll up and order your copy of Forevermore today!

The Gypsy Madonna: what is her secret? Mischa knows what it is to be abandoned. His German father disappeared at the end of the war, leaving him and his mother to endure the hatred and contempt of all the French villagers, the two of them against the world. And his surrogate father vanishes too, with no word of explanation. Mischa bears these scars into manhood. Only when his mother dies, revealing the existence of a priceless masterpiece, does he go on the trail of his own history. He makes a pilgrimage into the past, to that French village of his childhood, and there he uncovers the secret of the Gypsy Madonna.

"This collection views Russian music through the Greek triad of 'the Good, the True, and the Beautiful' to investigate how the idea of 'nation' embeds itself in the public discourse about music and other arts with results at times invigorating, at times corrupting. In our divided, post-Cold War, and now post-9/11 world, Russian music, formerly a quiet corner on the margins of musicology, has become a site of noisy contention. Richard Taruskin assesses the political and cultural stakes that attach to it in the era of Pussy Riot and renewed international tensions, before turning to individual cases from the nineteenth century to the present. Much of the volume is devoted to the resolutely cosmopolitan but inveterately Russian Igor Stravinsky, one of the major forces in the music of the twentieth century and subject of particular interest to composers and music theorists all over the world. Taruskin here revisits him for the first time since the 1990s, when everything changed for Russia and its cultural products. Other essays are devoted to the cultural and social policies of the Soviet Union and their effect on the music produced there as those policies swung away from Communist internationalism to traditional Russian nationalism; to the musicians of the Russian postrevolutionary diaspora; and to the tension between the compelling artistic quality of works such as Stravinsky's Sacre du Printemps or Prokofieff's Zdravitsa and the antihumanistic or totalitarian messages they convey. Russian Music at Home and Abroad addresses these concerns in a personal and critical way, characteristically demonstrating Taruskin's authority and ability to bring living history out of the shadows." -- Provided by publisher.

Each of the 52 volumes in the World Almanac Library of the States is filled with the most up-to-date information, including the latest Census results. Full-color photos bring to life the story of each state, as well as the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and other outlying areas. In addition to an in-depth factual profile of each state in the form of a state Almanac, each book offers fascinating and lively discussions of the state's history, people, geography, government, economy, culture, and lifestyles. Each title also includes a section on notable people, a calendar of events, and enough primary source documents, time lines, maps, and other tools to make this unquestionably the best young adult reference material on the United States of America available anywhere.

The Greek and Jewish diasporas are the most significant diasporas of Western civilisation. "Homelands and Diasporas" is the first book to explore the similarities and differences between these two experiences. In the process it sheds fascinating light on their fundamental importance for both Greek and Jewish societies. The authors examine Greek and Jewish diasporas throughout history, from classical and Biblical times to the present, and all over the world - in Greece, the Balkans, Turkey, Russia, the Near and Middle East, Spain and the US. They analyse the very nature of diaspora, examining both the Greek concept of noble expansion and the Jewish idea of enforced exile, and analyse community structures as well as social and religious networks, combining Scriptural analysis with cultural and political history. Diaspora is a difficult and emotive concept but "Homelands and Diasporas" offers a balanced and perceptive guide to the connected histories of these two peoples away from their homelands.

This original study examines different incarnations of the Pyrenees, beginning with the assumptions of 18th-century geologists, who treated the mountains like a laboratory, and romantic 19th-century tourists and habitués of the spa resorts, who went in search of the picturesque and the sublime. The book analyses the individual visions of the heroic Pyrenees which in turn fascinated 19th-century mountaineers and the racing cyclists of the early Tour de France. Martyn Lyons also investigates the role of the Pyrenees during the Second World War as an escape route from Nazi-occupied France, when for thousands of refugees these dangerous borderlands became 'the mountains of liberty', and considers the place of the Pyrenees in recent times right up to the present day. Drawing on travel writing, press reports and scientific texts in several languages, The Pyrenees in the Modern Era explores both the French and Spanish sides of the Pyrenees to provide a nuanced historical understanding of the cultural construction of one of Europe's most prominent border regions. This book will be of great interest to scholars and students of Europe's cultural history in a transnational context.

The treaties concluded with defeated countries after the First World War created a new order in Europe, known as the Versailles system. The consequences for Central Europe were acute: the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy ceased to exist, but could the new dispensation provide prosperity and security for the Danubian region? Did the successor states depend for their survival on the Great Powers or the untried League of Nations, or could they combine in a novel form of regional integration? Professor Magdaám's work, based on pioneering research in European and American archives, addresses this intricate set of problems. She looks at how the uneven application of self-determination, and the legacies of old European diplomacy and traditional power politics, deprived the 'lands between' of a settlement which could enjoy consensus. This is a study of states with overlapping claims to territory, rival designs for achieving economic prosperity, and, crucially, different interpretations of their past history. By examining the inception, the troubled life and the tragic unravelling of the Versailles system, these sixteen papers help us understand the dynamics that shaped this region between the world wars.

Overview: The name Erasmus of Rotterdam conjures up a golden age of scholarly integrity and the disinterested pursuit of knowledge, when learning could command public admiration without the need for authorial self-promotion. Lisa Jardine, however, shows that Erasmus self-consciously created his own reputation as the central figure of the European intellectual world. Erasmus himself--the historical as opposed to the figural individual--was a brilliant, maverick innovator, who achieved little formal academic recognition in his own lifetime. What Jardine offers here is not only a fascinating study of Erasmus but also a bold account of a key moment in Western history, a time when it first became possible to believe in the existence of something that could be designated "European thought."--

Music and religion have, throughout history, walked hand in hand. In the rites and rituals of small tribal religions, great world religions, and more recent New-Age and neo-heathen movements, different kinds of music have been used to celebrate the gods, express belief and help believers get in contact with the divine. This innovative book focuses on how mainstream and counter-cultural groups use religion and music to negotiate the challenges of modernisation and globalisation in the European context: a region under-explored by existing literature on the subject. With its internal ethnic diversity, ever-expanding borders and increasing differentiation, Europe has undergone massive dislocation in recent years. The authors show that, in the midst of such change, rock, pop and dance music may in their various forms be used by their practitioners as resources for new kinds of spiritual and religious identification, even as these forms are used as symbols of the deficiencies of secular society. Focusing on Christianity, Judaism, Islam and New Religious Movements, the book explores such topics as Norwegian Black Metal and Neo-paganism, contemporary Jewish Music in the UK, the French hip hop scene, the musical thinking of Muslim convert Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam and European dance music culture. It offers an ideal introduction to leading-edge thinking at the exciting interface of 'music and religion'.

A master historian offers an eloquent and personal auto-history of his life and his ideas Twenty years ago, John Lukacs paused to set down the history of his own thoughts and beliefs in Confessions of an Original Sinner, an adroit blend of autobiography and personal philosophy. Now, in Last Rites, he continues and expands his reflections, this time integrating his conception of history and human knowledge with private memories of his wives and loves, and enhancing the book with footnotes from his idiosyncratic diaries. The resulting volume is fascinating and delightful--an auto-history by a passionate, authentic, brilliant, and witty man. Lukacs begins with a concise rendering of a historical understanding of our world (essential reading for any historian), then follows with trenchant observations on his life in the United States, commentary on his native Hungary and the new meanings it took for him after 1989, and deeply personal portraits of his three wives, about whom he has not written before. He includes also a chapter on his formative memories of May and June 1940 and of Winston Churchill, a subject in some of Lukacs's later studies. Last Rites is a richly layered summation combined with a set of extraordinary observations--an original book only John Lukacs could have written. Praise for Confessions of an Original Sinner: "[Lukacs] is an often witty and always fascinating--even entertaining--writer."--Washington Post

Masterfully written and passionately argued, Canada's Army: Waging War and Keeping the Peace traces the full three hundred-year history of the Canadian army, from its origins in New France, through the Conquest, the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812, Confederation, militia reform, the South African War, the two world wars, the Korean War, and postwar peacekeeping and peacemaking. Covering the major conflicts in depth, and exploring battles, tactics, and weapons, J.L. Granatstein also offers a rich analysis of the political context for the battles and events that shaped our understanding of the nation's army, not least the fluctuations of Canadian defence spending and methods of raising military manpower. Granatstein pays particular homage to the foot soldier, interweaving personal anecdotes into the history. At once a vivid and impeccably researched history, this major work by one of Canada's leading historians is also a passionate argument for military professionalism, beginning with the recognition that the soldier belongs to a self-regulating and exclusive organization quite distinct from civil society but nevertheless responsible to civil authority. Canadian disinterest in defence was manifested in popular support for a volunteer (but always untrained) militia. It is the historical and continued opposition to a professional army, Granatstein argues, that contributed to the extensive loss of life in the First and Second World Wars. Canada has traditionally undervalued its army in times of peace, but has repeatedly committed its army to war and other military operations, expecting every citizen to be a superb soldier. And, while the army has been able to achieve in times of conflict the professionalism needed by a modern army, this has come only with time and at a high price in the lives of Canadian soldiers. At the start of the twenty-first century, after forty years of cutbacks in budgets and personnel, the Canadian army continues in the same long tradition of unpreparedness. Pointing to the inevitable continuation of armed conflict around the world, Canada's Army makes a compelling case for Canada's need for professional armed forces with a simple but incontrovertible truth: "the equation is and has always been very simple: you pay now in dollars for competent soldiers or you pay later in dollars and your sons and daughters."

Seeks the origins of later Christian anti-Judaism in Gnosticism and Pauline theology. Describes Gnostic anti-Judaism as directed primarily against the Jewish God and his law, rather than against the Jewish people who are their blind servants. Judaism for the Gnostics is more contemptible than dangerous, since its power is only in this world, to which the Gnostics attached no importance. Suggests that their hostility was aroused by Judaism's claim to equate its God with the higher God of Hellenistic thought. Paul took over much of the Gnostic two-power scheme, including the view of the Jews as blind servants of the Law. Argues that his own anti-Judaism did not go beyond that of the Gnostics. But in seeing the Crucifixion as central to salvation, and in singling out the Jews for a special role in salvation history, he added to the Gnostic two-power theology elements that later took shape as the Christian view of the Jews as Christ-killers and instruments of Satan.

Analyzes poetry by four Americans, none of whom directly experienced the Holocaust. For these poets, writing becomes a moral obligation as commemoration, catharsis, atonement, history, insistence on human sensitivities, resistance to brutalization, indifference, and flight from consequences. Plath attempts to work herself out of her private turmoil by using the Holocaust as a metaphor for this pain. While God and the Holocaust are equally impenetrable and unfathomable, Plath's recourse is to be found in Christian symbolism. Heyen, whose parents emigrated from Germany in 1928, leaving behind members of the family who became Nazis, felt driven to confront history as part of his own background. Stern, who grew up in the safety of America, must expiate this guilt by envisaging and transposing himself into the victims. When Rothenberg visited Poland, he realized that his parents' native town was only 15 miles from Treblinka, where nearly all of his relatives were murdered. The silence of the death camp created for him "a vacuum in which the dead are free to speak". States that if Adorno's proposition - "to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric" - were to be taken literally, it would undermine the validity of this endeavor. But poets from time immemorial did not permit their world to collapse because of catastrophe and calamity. Includes an introductory chapter addressing the issue raised by Adorno, as well as a survey and interpretation of the components of the Holocaust genre.

Whether viewed as a brave crusader or a power-mad villain, Oliver Cromwell (1599--1658) is irrefutably a key figure in one of the most troubled periods of British history. By examining his performance as a military commander in the widest sense, this intriguing volume offers a new perspective on an intensely religious man who used both soldiering and politics to achieve his underlying goals, as well as insight into the world in which he lived. Whether viewed as a brave crusader or a power-mad villain, Oliver Cromwell (1599--1658) is irrefutably a key figure in one of the most troubled periods of British history. By examining his performance as a military commander in the widest sense, this intriguing volume offers a new perspective on an intensely religious man who used both soldiering and politics to achieve his underlying goals, as well as insight into the world in which he lived.

Felix Gilbert begins this book of memoirs by describing his peaceful and protected childhood in Germany before the First World War. That war, and the revolutionary events that followed it, strongly influenced his choice of profession; he studied history at Heidelberg, Munich, and the University of Berlin. He gives a firsthand account of the intellectually stimulating and politically restless atmosphere in 1920s Berlin. During the first six months of 1933, when the Nazi takeover occurred in Germany, Mr. Gilbert was at work in the archives in Italy. There he received letters from relations and friends in Germany; published here, these letters convey the impact of Nazism on the daily lives of these people. In other chapters of the book Mr. Gilbert, who served as a member of the OSS, vividly describes wartime London, liberated Paris, and occupied Germany. These memoirs end with an account of a mission to Berlin which, for Mr. Gilbert, was also a search for what remained of a world that once had been.

Five hundred years ago Jews living in Spain were given a Stark choice: be baptized or leave the country. the expulsion of the Sephardim - the term for Spain's Jews - was a turning point in the history of the Iberian Peninsula and one o the greatest upheavals in jeFive hundred years ago Jews living in Spain were given a stark choice: be baptized or leave the country. The expulsion of the Sephardim--the term for Spain's Jews--was a turning point in the history of the Iberian Peninsula and one of the greatest upheavals in Jewish history since the Diaspora.The Middle Ages was a time of uneasy co-operation between Christians and Jews, but in the 14th century a rising tide of religious fanaticism and anti-Semitism gradually engulfed Spain, leading to horrific massacres in 1391. Then, in March 1492, came the edict of the Catholic Monarchs, giving the Jews three months to leave. The converts who stayed faced bitter prejudice--hounded by the Inquisition, their descendants penalized for centuries--as the Spanish Crown tried to impose Catholic uniformity.Those who fled the persecution had to struggle to re-establish their communities elsewhere in Europe, the Ottoman empire and Morocco. Outstanding individuals such as Baruch Spinoza--the most important philosopher of the Dutch Golden Age--and Joseph Nasi--the financier-favorite of Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent--exemplify the achievements of the Sephardi exiles. Whether in Amsterdam, Istanbul or London, they seized the opportunities offered by a new world of empires and discovery.Published to mark the quincentenary of the Sephardi exodus, here at last is a complete and objective account of these traumatic events. Professor Elie Kedourie has gathered an international team of experts who piece together all aspects of the moving story: conditions in Spain leading up to 1492; the decree itself, and its consequences for Spanish Jewry; the experiences of the exiles and their contributions towards economic and intellectual life in their new countries. Professor Kedourie himself provides a stimulating and up-to-date assessment of the whole tragic episode--whose historic repercussions continue to this day.wish hostory since the diaspora. published to mark the quincentenary of the sephardi exodus, here is a complete and objective account of these traumatic events

Critically examines the history of rock and roll movies, from ABBA, to Zachariah--which feature rock musicians or portray aspects of the rock music world

The end of the Cold War is reverberating far beyond its European theatre--in the killing fields of Afghanistan, Indochina, Central America, Southern Africa & the Horn of Africa. For some of these people, peace has come already; for others it is in sight. But beyond peacemaking lie the delicate challenges of peacekeeping & huge tasks of political, social, & economic reconstruction--& construction--in some of the world's poorest areas. The roots of these wars were deeply embedded in indigenous strife & history, but the superpowers--by adding their own ideological & strategic agenda--intensified the bloodshed. The results of the conflicts are appalling: nearly 3 million dead (2.5 million of them civilians); 16 million refugees; battered people, towns, & transport; a generation of unschooled youth & unskilled adults; countrysides planted with explosives; & teeming cities lacking in jobs & essential services. In this, the sixteenth volume in ODC's U.S.-Third World Policy Perspective series, the authors provide valuable timely analysis of the differing problems of polity & economy confronting the governments of these devastated countries. In short, Cyrus R. Vance calls it "a stimulating & provocative book."