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.

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'.

This series of essays by the late Hal Draper looks at the Middle East conflict from what was long a unique point of view. Unlike traditional Zionism whose slogan "a land without people for a people without a land" made clear its intentions with regard to the Palestinians and unlike Arab nationalists who denied Israel's right to exist; Draper argued that only a binational state that recognized the rights of both people offered a way out

“A moving act of absolution . . . . This strong novel about a girl who is debased but never destroyed pushes the reader to a new level of understanding of the things people do—and the things that are done to them.”— Washington Post Book World She has hair of ginger and lovely green eyes, and she has just been transported with her family from Terezín to Auschwitz. In short order, her father commits suicide, and her mother and younger brother are dispatched to the gas chambers, but fifteen-year-old Hanka Kauderzová is still alive. Faced with the choice of certain death in the camp or working in a German military brothel, she chooses a chance at life. Passing for an Aryan, Hanka spends her days in the brothel cold, hungry, fearful, and ashamed. She is sustained only by her loathing of the men who visit her and by a fierce, indomitable will to live. This devastatingly beautiful novel explores and delineates the impossible choices one sometimes has to make in life, when the fabric of the world is rent asunder. Soaring beyond the nightmare, it leaves the reader with a transcendent sense of hope. Skyhorse Publishing, as well as our Arcade, Yucca, and Good Books imprints, are proud to publish a broad range of books for readers interested in fiction—novels, novellas, political and medical thrillers, comedy, satire, historical fiction, romance, erotic and love stories, mystery, classic literature, folklore and mythology, literary classics including Shakespeare, Dumas, Wilde, Cather, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.

"Mary Stuart's execution remains an entirely unacceptable crime morally (...) However, it is equally difficult to deny that the destruction of Mary Stuart was a prudent course of action from a public policy standpoint. Because, regrettably, in politics, the determining issue is not the correctness of a legislation, but its success." Stefan Zweig was enchanted with Mary Stuart, whose life he perceived as immensely paradoxical and from whom he perceived a "inexhaustible attraction of mystery." Thus, he investigated the queen of Scotland and Elizabeth I's fierce rival through the lens of a novelistic biography. Zweig is the undisputed master of this genre: he meticulously details the tumultuous life of this amazing woman, who culminated on the scaffold. Biography Stefan Zweig (1881-1942) was born into a Jewish commercial family in Vienna. He created poetry, stories, plays, and essays, all of which were burned by the Nazis in 1933. He resided in Salzburg from 1919 until 1934, then moved to England and then to Brazil in 1941. His epic works, like his historical miniatures and biographical works, made him famous. He deliberately put up his life in Petrópolis, Brazil, on February 23, 1942.

A biography of Edwin Montagu, British Secretary of State for India in 1917-22. Conservative Party opposition to his policies was accompanied by more or less openly expressed antisemitism (see the index). Ch. 23 (pp. 422-449), "Zionism: The Balfour Declaration, " traces the debate among British Jewry over the government's support for a Jewish state in Palestine. Montagu, like most of the Jewish establishment, attempted to prevent adoption of the Declaration, fearing that it would lead to perceptions that Jews were not loyal citizens in the countries of their residence and thus fuel antisemitism.

"A breathtaking historical novel that recreates the intimate milieu around Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm from 1907 through the 1930s, a period of great human suffering and destruction and also of enormous freedom and creativity, a time when the remnants and artifices of the old word still mattered, and yet when art and the social sciences were pirouetting with successive revolutions in thought and style. Set in a time when many men in the upper classes in Europe were gay, but could not be so publicly, Jews Queers Germans revolves around three men: Prince Philipp von Eulenburg, Kaiser Wilhelm II's closest friend, who becomes the subject of a notorious 1907 trial for homosexuality; Magnus Hirschfeld, a famed, Jewish sexologist who gives testimony at the trial; and Count Harry Kessler, a leading proponent of modernism, and the keeper of a famous set of diaries which lay out in intimate detail the major social, artistic and political events of the day and allude as well to his own homosexuality. The central theme here is the gay life of a very upper crust intellectual milieu that had a real impact on the major political upheavals that would shape the modern world forever after"--

Deals extensively with the "Jewish question" in postwar Europe. The vanquishing of Nazism in 1945 did not put an end to antisemitism: the late 1940s saw anti-Jewish outbursts in various countries, and the treatment of the Jewish DPs also contained an element of antisemitism. Although Jews are disappearing in Europe, "the Jewish question" has not gone away. It has persisted in different national and ideological contexts, both in the USSR and its satellites (Czechoslovakia, Poland, etc.) and in liberal Western Europe. The establishment of the State of Israel added new motives for the "Jewish problem", and in the 1970s-80s it exposed Jews in the diaspora to "anti-Zionist" terrorism. The political upheaval in Central and Eastern Europe in 1989-91 fueled antisemitism and caused the mass emigration of Jews from these countries. Discusses, also, the impact of the Holocaust on postwar Jewish consciousness and on attitudes toward Jews, as well as efforts of the Christian Churches to improve their stance toward the Jews.

"The theme of this book involves the Holocaust [...]. Itzkoff's main concern is to understand and explain this event in the context of Jewish history and the unfolding meaning of Western civilizational experience"--Front flap.

Focusing on the cultural invention of Zionism, Michael Berkowitz explores how and why the Jewish nationalist movement was embraced by assimilated Jews of Western Europe before World War I. He pays special attention to the symbolism, artistic representations, and mythology that attracted European Jews to Zionism, which coexisted equally with the nationalisms of their home countries. The book was originally published in 1993.

First Published in 1992. Perhaps two-thirds of present-day British Jewry can trace their origin to lands which now form part of the Soviet Union and which, 80 years ago, belonged to the Empire of the Tsars. Little research has been done to set the Jewish immigration into the context of Anglo-Russian relations and to assess the political and diplomatic implications of the domestic Jewish factor.] It is hoped that the present book will go some way to filling that gap. The work is offered as a contribution not only to Jewish history, but also to the history of Anglo-Soviet relations. Its appearance is timely, coinciding with radical changes taking place within Russia and the Soviet Union today which may well mark a turning point in their political history.

Presents the history of the early modern Jewish experience. Ranging from Krakow and Venice to Amsterdam and Smyrna, this title examines the historical and cultural factors unique to Jewish communities throughout Europe, and how these distinctions played out amidst the rest of society.

incl. illust. - Eginhard of Franconia ibn Khordadhbeh Judah Haleli Rabbi Petachia Rabbi Jacob Ven Rabbi R.N. Ha Cohen David Azulai and other travellers

Hans Kohn's classic work provides a comprehensive overview of the history of Western civilization in the Near East. From ancient Greece to the Islamic Golden Age, Kohn examines the ways in which Western culture has been both shaped and influenced by the Near East. 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. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

Out of the ashes of the Nazi concentration camps came an extraordinary love story which caught the public's imagination at the end of World War II. This autobiography tells how the author survived the camps and met her husband, a sergeant working for British intelligence, when he arrived to round up the SS guards for interrogation. Norman Turgel, then a young man, was among the first to enter the camp on April 15, 1945, and like so many battle-hardened soldiers, was deeply shocked and angered by the human suffering and degradation he witnessed. Yet it was here, in the midst of the living evidence of the most terrible suffering that man has ever inflicted on his fellow human beings, that he fell in love at first sight. Gena, a young Polish Jewish inmate of the camp, who had experienced indescribable loss, hardship, and deprivation, was to survive and find happiness against all odds. This is Gena's story: the autobiography of a woman whose strength of spirit enabled her to keep her mother alive and thereby save herself. When Gena married Norman in Germany in October 1945 in a wedding dress made of British parachute silk, the British Army Rabbi proclaimed their love a symbol of hope after so much death. But, Gena still lights a candle in memory of her three brothers and two sisters who died in the Holocaust. And, while her own story has a happy ending, she can never forget.

"Franz Baermann Steiner (1909-52) provided the vital link between the intellectual culture of central Europe and the Oxford Institute of Anthropology in its post-Second World War years. This book demonstrates his quiet influence within anthropology, which has extended from Mary Douglas to David Graeber, and how his remarkable poetry reflected profoundly on the slavery and murder of the Shoah, an event which he escaped from. Steiner's concerns including inter-disciplinarity, genre, refugees and exile, colonialism and violence, and the sources of European anthropology speak to contemporary concerns more directly now than at any time since his early death"--

Uses popular literary material - sermons, novels, journals, etc. - to show the growth of a German-Jewish ideology and subculture in the first half of the 19th century. Argues that this subculture was the response of the Jewish minority to partial political emancipation and social integration. It was partial since Jews could not deny their religious and national identity, and German society was not willing to accept them even if they did so. Although designed to foster integration, the German-Jewish subculture encouraged the growth of a new identity, and thus greater separatism.

This book is the first to examine closely the interaction between Jewish culture, medicine, and science during Europe's age of 'scientific revolution'. Most students of Jewish history have treated the period from the late sixteenth to the late eighteenth centuries as a mere extension of the Jewish Middle Ages, a time when the Jewish world was cut off from intellectual developments in the Christian world. The eminent scholar David Ruderman here argues, however, that during this era Jewish culture and society became increasingly aware of medical and scientific advances, and that a new Jewish scientific discourse evolved that had significant repercussions for Jewish religious concerns.

"'The economic history of European jews' attempts to make sense of the economic foundations of Jewish life in the different parts of late antique and early medieval Europe. In the first part Michael Toch describes the demographic arc, decline, subsequent rise, and spatial distribution of Jewish populations. This data is then broadened to include the range of economic activities. The second part analyses the actual share of Jews in different branches of the economy. This includes the idea of their pioneer role and the notion of an intercontinental network of Jewish commerce, the phenomenon of Jews in agriculture and entrepreneurship, gender roles and the household mode of production, and the difficult subject of the significance of minority status for economic activity, among others"--provided by publisher.