"Los Angeles is a city that runs from its own past" explains historian and Bison Archives owner Marc Wanamaker. Many of Hollywood's legendary sets and props, mansions, theaters, restaurants, nightclubs, hotels, and even the studios and the films they produced are now either gone or have been redeveloped, repurposed, or remade beyond recognition. Even more disarmingly, the physical ephemera associated with such items is often MIA as well. Photographs, files, maps, documents, menus, production paperwork, records, manuscripts, everything from matchbooks to movie magazines and entire movie backlots have now been lost in the backwash of dubious progress, short-sighted corporate mindsets, and civic indifference. Fortunately, for the last fifty years, in the very epicenter of Hollywood, thanks to Wanamaker, there has existed a haven where over 70,000 of these items, physically or photographically, have been collected and protected. These artifacts tell the story of Hollywood's glorious past, as well as its uncertain future as the hub of filmmaking in America"--

2012 National Jewish Book Award Winner JEWISH JOCKS: AN UNORTHODOX HALL OF FAME is a timeless collection of biographical musings, sociological riffs about assimilation, first-person reflections, and, above all, great writing on some of the most influential and unexpected pioneers in the world of sports. Featuring work by today's preeminent writers, these essays explore significant Jewish athletes, coaches, broadcasters, trainers, and even team owners (in the finite universe of Jewish Jocks, they count!). Contributors include some of today's most celebrated writers covering a vast assortment of topics, including David Remnick on the biggest mouth in sports, Howard Cosell; Jonathan Safran Foer on the prodigious and pugnacious Bobby Fischer; Man Booker Prize-winner Howard Jacobson writing elegantly on Marty Reisman, America's greatest ping-pong player and the sport's ultimate showman. Deborah Lipstadt examines the continuing legacy of the Munich Massacre, the fortieth anniversary of which coincided with the 2012 London Olympics. Jane Leavy reveals why Sandy Koufax agreed to attend her daughter's bat mitzvah. And we learn how Don Lerman single-handedly thrust competitive eating into the public eye with three pounds of butter and 120 jalapeño peppers. These essays are supplemented by a cover design and illustrations throughout by Mark Ulriksen. From settlement houses to stadiums and everywhere in between, JEWISH JOCKS features men and women who do not always fit the standard athletic mold. Rather, they utilized talents long prized by a people of the book (and a people of commerce) to game these games to their advantage, in turn forcing the rest of the world to either copy their methods-or be left in their dust.

This book tells the story of the Dönme, the descendents of Jews who resided in the Ottoman Empire and converted to Islam along with their messiah, Rabbi Shabbatai Tzevi, in the seventeenth century. For two centuries following their conversion, the Dönme were accepted as Muslims, and by the end of the nineteenth century rose to the top of Salonikan society. The Dönme helped transform Salonika into a cosmopolitan city, promoting the newest innovation in trade and finance, urban reform, and modern education. They eventually became the driving force behind the 1908 revolution that led to the overthrow of the Ottoman sultan and the establishment of a secular republic. To their proponents, the Dönme are enlightened secularists and Turkish nationalists who fought against the dark forces of superstition and religious obscurantism. To their opponents, they were simply crypto-Jews engaged in a plot to dissolve the Islamic empire. Both points of view assume the Dönme were anti-religious, whether couched as critique or praise. But it is time that we take these religious people seriously on their own terms. In the Ottoman Empire, the Dönme promoted morality, ethics, spirituality, and a syncretistic religion that reflected their origins at the intersection of Jewish Kabbalah and Islamic Sufism. This is the first book to tell their story, from their origins to their near total dissolution as they became secular Turks in the mid-twentieth century.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

Ancient Khotan: Plates of Photographs, Plans, Antiques and Mss., with a Map of the Territory of Khotan from Original Surveys

On August 10, 1938, Lucy S. Dawidowicz set sail from New York to Vilna, Poland, to study at the Yiddish Scientific Institute (YIVO). For a year, while she studied the Jewish past, she immersed herself in Vilna's present, getting to know the Jewish rich and poor, witnessing Poland's brutal anti-Semitism. Then she was forced to flee Vilna, just a week before German tanks and troops rumbled into Poland and eventually destroyed this citadel of East European Jewish culture forever. After the war Lucy Dawidowicz again sailed to Europe -- this time to work with Jewish survivors and to identify the remnants of the precious YIVO library of Vilna.

Venice for Lovers is a memorable collaboration by two fine stylists who have fashioned their own personal homages to Venice, one with a novella, the other with a personal essay. Every year for all the thirty they have been married, Begley and Muhlstein have escaped to Venice to write. In her contribution to the book, Muhlstein charmingly describes how she and her husband dine at the same restaurant every night for years on end, and how becoming friends with restaurateurs has been an unsurpassed means of getting to know the city and its inhabitants, far from the tourists in San Marco Square. In his short novella, Begley writes a story of falling in love with--and in--Venice. His twenty-year-old protagonist, enamored with an older, far worldlier woman of twenty-seven, is lured by her to the City of Water, only to be unceremoniously dumped and left to fend for himself after a brief rendezvous. But he discovers a lasting love for Venice itself--not an uncommon romance, as Begley's brilliant literary essay on the city's place within world literature demonstrates: Henry James, Marcel Proust, and Thomas Mann were all illustrious predecessors.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

The nine essays gathered here pursue the provocative implications of Toni Morrison's claim that no early American writer was more important than Poe in shaping a concept of "American Africanism," an image of racialized blackness destined to haunt the Euro-American imagination. As contributors to this volume reveal, Poe's response to the "shadow" of blackness--like his participation in the cultural construction of whiteness--was both problematic and revealing. Born in Boston but raised mostly in Richmond, surrounded by the practices of slaveholding culture, Poe seems to have shared notions of racial hierarchy and Anglo-Saxon supremacy pervasive on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line. That he promulgated racist stereotypes in depicting black servants--his Jupiters and Pompeys--cannot be denied; that he complicated these stereotypes with veiled, subversive implications, however, gives his fiction peculiar relevance to the task of historicizing racial attitudes in antebellum culture. Was Poe an unabashed proslavery apologist, a careerist who avoided racial politics, a "gradualist" who hoped slavery would just disappear, or an ideological chameleon? Were Poe's views on race extreme or unusual? Overtly, in tales such as "The Gold-Bug," "The Journal of Julius Rodman," and The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, and covertly in such works as "The Black Cat" and "Hop-Frog," Poe alternately caricatured and demonized the racial Other, yet he often endowed such figures with shrewdness and resourcefulness, at times portraying their defiance as inevitable and even understandable. In Romancing the Shadow, leading interpreters of nineteenth-century American literature and culture debate Poe's role in inventing the African of the white imagination. Their readings represent an array of positions, and while they reflect some consensus about Poe's investment in racialized types and tropes, they also testify to the surprising ways that race embedded itself in his work--and the diverse conclusions that can be drawn therefrom.

"Nationalism, often the scourge, always the basis of modern world politics, is spreading. In a way, all nations are willed into being. But a simple declaration, such as Grouvelle's, is not enough. As historian Liah Greenfeld shows in her new book, a sense of nation--nationalism--is the product of the complex distillation of ideas and beliefs, and the struggles over them. Greenfeld takes the reader on an intellectual journey through the origins of the concept "nation" and how national consciousness has changed over the centuries. From its emergence in sixteenth century England, nationalism has been behind nearly every significant development in world affairs over succeeding centuries, including the American and French revolutions of the late eighteenth centuries and the authoritarian communism and fascism of the twentieth century. Now it has arrived as a mass phenomenon in China as well as gaining new life in the United States and much of Europe in the guise of populism"--

"'A truly revolutionary idea.... Clear, tight, disciplined, beautifully structured, and brilliantly reasoned.'--Ayn Rand. Self-sacrifice, oriental mysticism, racial 'truth,' the public good, doing one's duty -- these are among the seductive catchphrases that circulated in pre-Nazi Germany. Objectivist author and philosopher Leonard Peikoff was Ayn Rand's long-time associate. In The Cause of Hitler's Germany -- previously published in The Ominous Parallels -- Peikoff demonstrates how unreason and collectivism led the seemingly civilized German society to become a Nazi regime"--

Leo Stein (1872-1947) was an influential art collector and critic. It has been Stein's ironic fate to be referred to as "Gertrude's brother," ironic as for many years he was her mentor and counsellor. Appreciation: Painting, Poetry and Prose is a model of lucidity, wisdom and classical simplicity. It ranges over a wide field of thought and criticism. Leo Stein's judgements on art and literature are crisp, perceptive and original. His approach to his subject is casual, anecdotal and, though often sharp and biting, finally mellow. Reading this book is like that rare experience of listening, enchanted, for an evening to a great conversationalist, a man informed and urbane, witty and wise.

Vittorin, a young Austrian officer, has just been released from a Russian POW camp toward the end of the Great War. In Vienna his family, his girlfriend, and his old job await him, but Vittorin can't think of settling down until he has settled the score with the sadistic camp commander, Staff Captain Selukov. Private obsession and political turmoil mix as Perutz leads his hero on a manhunt into the thick of the Russian civil war. In and out of prison, starving in the gutters of Moscow, thrown into revolutionary battle, Vittorin pursues his elusive quarry across postwar Europe. At each turn, he encounters only Fate's joker, until, back in Vienna, Fate plays him the biggest joke of all

A follow-up to Leo Melamed on the Markets , this book covers the developments in the futures markets since 1992 and discusses their transition through the digital age. The author, a recognized founder of financial futures, details the global issues confronting the futures market. You’ll learn how financial markets have allowed investors to manage generalized risks to both reduce exposure or enhance value to capture increased profits. Additionally, you'll discover trends, technology, and products that have shaped the world of futures and options, and what the future holds.

At the turn of the 20th century, the Jewish population density in some streets on New York's east side was greater than Calcutta's slums. Today, American Jews are the wealthiest and best-educated ethnic or religious community in the USA. This is a study of the transformation of a community.

Brand new

In House of Hoppen , Kelly Hoppen, MBE takes a look back over her stellar career, which began when, as a sixteen-year-old full of drive and ideas, she was commissioned to design the kitchen of a family friend. Packed with previously unseen imagery and letters from Kelly's personal and professional archives, the book charts the course of her career and celebrates some of the many highlights. Fascinating insights into some of Kelly's favourite projects, including the most recent and some of her own homes, give an overview of the ways in which her design approach has both remained consistent and evolved over the decades. They also reveal the fundamental factors that Kelly believes make a home the comfortable, welcoming haven we need it to be. Key themes and design signatures that underpin her work are examined in detail and Kelly also showcases her 'classic' touches - such as her favourite chair designs, lights, wall treatments, cushion style and colour: taupe. House of Hoppen features a rich mix of imagery, from unseen archive material, including personal photographs and letters, to illustrations by contemporary artists, to interior photography by acclaimed photographers such as Tom Stewart, Bill Batten, Vincent Knapp, Mel Yates and Simon Upton.