14302 results for "History"

Politics on trial: five famous trials of the 20th century

Kunstler, William M.
William Kunstler, the most celebrated defense lawyer of his time, reflects on five famous cases in which ordinary citizens were targeted for their political views or the color of their skin, including Sacco and Vanzetti (Italian immigrants accused of murder), and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg (communists executed for espionage). Kunstler also considers legal challenges to compulsory prayers in schools and the ban on teaching evolution. The Introduction by Michael Ratner highlights current threats to political rights. -------------- "As long as someone controls your history, the truth shall remain just a mystery."--Ben Harper Radical History is a new series from Ocean Press seeking to restore our collective memory of events, struggles and people erased from conventional (and conservative) histories and media. These mini-anthologies include eyewitness accounts and historic, forgotten or ignored documents as well as new essays, chronologies and further reading suggestions. This series is designed to appeal to a new generation of political activists.
Ocean Press 2003 128 pages

Social issues, geopolitics, and Judaica

Cahnman, Werner J.
This volume brings together thirty-four essays and ar- ticles by Werner J. Cahnman representing four decades (1940-1980) of work by an extraordinary, multidisciplinary scholar. Cahnman's work encompasses the experiences of a German Jewish refugee, an economist turned sociologist, and a scholar of Judaism. Part 1 contains personal and autobiographical writings and includes analyses of the cultural ambiguities of Jewish assimilation in Germany and Austria. Part 2 is devoted to sociological essays ranging from a critical assessment of Gunnar Myrdal's landmark study of the problems of race and democracy, An American Dilemma , to a probing look at the stigma of obesity, based on empirical research, a subject very much in the news today and that shows Cahnman ahead of his time. Part 3 offers some of Cahnman's most perceptive essays dealing with geopolitical themes. Included are theoretically based writings that help to clarify the methods and concepts of geopolitics, marking the intellectual beginnings of the global approach to world affairs. Here Cahnman broached the possibility of a united Europe (1944), realized sixty years later in the formation of the European Union. The twelve essays of Part 4 return to Cahnman's ever-present concern with Jews and Judaism. They present a wide-ranging historical-sociological view, from the Jews of Vienna in the 1930s to the American scene in the 1960s, to the still-unresolved problematics of Arab-Israeli relations, with Cahnman arguing for coexistence and a two-state solution for Jews and Arabs. The volume, carefully selected and assembled by the editors, presents for the first time essays representing the full range of Werner Cahnman's scholarship and thought. It will be of interest to students of sociology, history, political science, and Judaic studies.
Transaction Publishers 2007 387 pages

Best-selling Jewish porn films: new poems

Koestenbaum, Wayne
"Hotel Theory" is two books in one: a meditation on the meaning of hotels, and a dime novel ("Hotel Women") featuring Lana Turner and Liberace. Typical of Wayne Koestenbaum' s invigoratingly inventive style, the two books - one fiction, one nonfiction - run concurrently, in twin columns, and the articles " a, " " an, " and " the" never appear. The nonfiction ruminations on hotels are divided into eight dossiers, composed of short takes on the presence of hotels in the author' s dreams as well as in literature, film, and history. Guest stars include everyone from Oscar Wilde to Marilyn Monroe. "Hotel Theory" gives (divided) voice to an aesthetic of hyperaesthesia, of yearning. It is an oblique manifesto, the place where writing disappears. A new mode of theorizing - in fiction, in fragment, through quotation and palimpsest - arises in this dazzling work.
Turtle Point 2006 128 pages

More unfinished business

Plaut, W. Gunther
More Unfinished Business is a companion to the first volume of Rabbi Plaut?s 1981 memoir, Unfinished Business, offering readers his reflections on the unfolding of his life and work, and of events that touched him, during the past two decades. In some of these events ? for instance, in the case of his report on refugee policy and his role in shaping the direction of the Reform movement in Judaism, his reach has touched the lives of many thousands of people. This is a book of doings and musings rather than a detailed analysis of events. Rabbi Plaut considers how the events and issues he was involved with forced him to confront and reassess his life?s work, his religious, institutional, and political commitments. To understand this process, the reader is invited to consider something of the private man behind the events. It is this effort to reveal himself as a person, rather than as an actor in history, that gives added meaning to his reminiscences and his discussion of his concerns, involvements, and disappointments ? wrestling with prayer, the future of Judaism, ageing and mortality, parting with material possessions, even his passion for tennis. Rabbi Plaut is an exceptional writer and story-teller. This is a remarkable book by a remarkable man.
University of Toronto Press 1997-11-05 306 pages

Into the universe of technical images

Flusser, Vilém
"Poised between hope and despair for a humanity facing an urgent communication crisis, this work by Vilém Flusser forecasts either the first truly human, infinitely creative society in history or a society of unbearable, oppressive sameness, locked in a pattern it cannot change. First published in German in 1985 and now available in English for the first time, Into the Universe of Technical Images outlines the history of communication technology as a process of increasing abstraction. Flusser charts how communication evolved from direct interaction with the world to mediation through various technologies. The invention of writing marked one significant shift; the invention of photography marked another, heralding the current age of the technical image. The automation of the processing of technical images carries both promise and threat: the promise of freeing humans to play and invent and the threat for networks of automation to proceed independently of humans."--Publisher
University of Minnesota Press 2011 192 pages

Overexposed: perverting perversions

Lotringer, Sylvère
A report on the administration of deviant desire in specialized clinics that documents the way our postmodern society exposes sexuality to the point of overexposure. Do you ever get aroused by your patient's fantasies? Do you discover through them something about your own sexuality? –About my sexuality? You are exposed to a lot of fantasies. –Oh yes. Quite frankly, I think it has a satiation effect on me. I've been a sex researcher for ten years, and sometimes I get fed up with it, you know. I talk to people about sex all day long, and it does get to be a drag. –from Overexposed The most perverse perversions are not always those one would expect. Originally conceived as an American update to Foucault's History of Sexuality, Overexposed is even more outrageous and thought-provoking today than it was twenty years ago when first published by a commercial publisher. By a strange reversal, rather than being punished, deviant desire now is administrated in specialized clinics under medical supervision. Sexual excess is being turned into a "boredom therapy" claiming to rid patients of their own desires by forcing them to indulge them past the point of satiety. But are perversions still perverse when they are vindicated unconditionally? At once clinical, bewildering, and deeply poignant, Overexposed shows how science can pervert itself by identifying too closely with its object. This insider's exposition of controversial cognitive behavioral methods (carried out with instruments straight out of A Clockwork Orange–penile transducer? pupillometer?) is a hallucinatory document on the manner in which our postmodern society exposes sexuality to the point of overexposure–in order to exterminate it.
Semiotext(e) 2007 213 pages

The shtetl: new evaluations

Katz, Steven T.
Dating from the sixteenth century, there were hundreds of shtetls—Jewish settlements—in Eastern Europe that were home to a large and compact population that differed from their gentile, mostly peasant neighbors in religion, occupation, language, and culture. The shtetls were different in important respects from previous types of Jewish settlements in the Diaspora in that Jews had rarely formed a majority in the towns in which they lived. This was not true of the shtetl, where Jews sometimes comprised 80% or more of the population. While the shtetl began to decline during the course of the nineteenth century, it was the Holocaust which finally destroyed it. During the last thirty years the shtetl has attracted a growing amount of scholarly attention, though gross generalizations and romanticized nostalgia continue to affect how the topic is treated. This volume takes a new look at this most important facet of East European Jewish life. It helps to correct the notion that the shtetl was an entirely Jewish world and shows the ways in which the Jews of the shtetl interacted both with their co-religionists and with their gentile neighbors. The volume includes chapters on the history of the shtetl, its myths and realities, politics, gender dynamics, how the shtetl has been (mis)represented in literature, and the changes brought about by World War I and the Holocaust, among others. Contributors: Samuel Kassow, Gershon David Hundert, Immanuel Etkes, Nehemia Polen, Henry Abramson, Konrad Zielinski, Jeremy Dauber, Israel Bartel, Naomi Seidman, Mikhail Krutikov, Arnold J. Band, Katarzyna Wieclawska, Yehunda Bauer, and Elie Wiesel. This is the first book published in the Elie Wiesel Center for Judaic Studies Series .
New York University Press 2009 328 pages

Pluralism and social conflict: a social analysis of the communist world

Brucan, Silviu
This pioneering study focuses on an area of Soviet and socialist studies until now largely neglected in the literature: social change. The author contends that while most standard analyses of communist regimes purport to be about social change, they are in fact analyzing economic and political developments rather than transformation in the class structure of society. Because economic and political factors are the least stable, Brucan argues, they are therefore the least explanatory and predictive factors if we are to understand long term trends in the evolution of socialism. Brucan instead explores the social forces at work in the Soviet Union, China, and Eastern Europe--classes, professional groups, and so on--tracing the evolution of class and class policy from the time of the 1917 revolution through the present leadership of Gorbachev. Students of international affairs and sociology will find in Brucan's work important new insights into the likely future direction of the world's major communist societies. Beginning with a detailed historical analysis of class and class policy in the East, Brucan examines issues such as forced collectivization, the new working class, wage policy, the state take-over, and Khruschev's openings. Turning to a discussion of the relationship between social structure and the scientific-technological revolution, the author shows that communist regimes in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and China have demonstrated a deliberate and systematic pattern of overvaluation of manual work and undervaluation of scientific and technical work--explaining their lack of preparation for rapid scientific and technical change. Brucan relates the historical analysis of social change to questions about whether reforms in the East can be achieved, arguing that no analysis of the East's economic and political history can be fully understood without considering social structure. In the final section, the author addresses the current period of perestroika, suggesting that Gorbachev's real challenge will be to dislodge the current social structure that was consolidated in the late 1970s. He concludes that a new class alignment in socialism has led to a crisis of the communist party itself.
Praeger 1990-08-28 186 pages

Aspects of Judaism: selected essays

Daiches, Salis
Addressed to Jews and non-Jews alike, though aware that these two reader groups were likelyn to approach the book with very different presuppositions, Daiches sets out to define Judaism in relation to philosophy, to explain Kant's philosophy through the superiority of halakhah, defend a biblically based Jewish interpretation of history, and champion Judaism as a religion of freedom guaranteed by halakhah (Jewish law).
Routledge 2018 252 pages

Divergent Jewish cultures: Israel and America

Edmund S. Morgan,Professor S Ilan Troen
Two creative centres of Jewish life rose to prominence in the twentieth century, one in Israel and the other in the United States. Although Israeli and American Jews share kinship and history drawn from their Eastern European roots, they have developed divergent cultures from their common origins, often seeming more like distant cousins than close relatives. This book explores why this is so, examining how two communities that constitute eighty percent of the world's Jewish population have created separate identities and cultures. Using examples from literature, art, history, and politics, leading Israeli and American scholars focus on the political, social, and memory cultures of their two communities, considering in particular the American-Jewish challenge to diaspora consciousness and the Israeli struggle to forge a secular, national Jewish identity. At the same time, they seek to understand how a sense of mutual responsibility and fate animates American and Israeli Jews who reside in distant places, speak different languages, and live within different political and social worlds.
Yale University Press 2001 358 pages

A Quebec Jew: from Bloc Québécois MP to Jewish activist

Marceau, Richard
"Tearing down stereotypes about Jews, Richard Marceau tells us about himself, using his own story to convey Jewish history and culture. He draws an original portrait of the State of Israel, the role it plays in today's Jewish identity, and helps us discover Quebec's Jewish community. Denouncing prejudices and intellectual dishonesty, identifying himself as a pro-Palestinian Zionist, Richard Marceau calls for a respectful dialogue, promoting both the legitimacy of the Jewish State of Israel and the creation of an independent Palestinian state."--Pub. desc.
Éditions du Marais 2011 311 pages

No Way Renee The Second Half of My Notorious Life

Renee Richards
In 1975, at the age of forty, Richard Raskind, a renowned eye surgeon and highly ranked amateur tennis player, "died," and Renée Richards was "born," in what was to become the most public and highly scrutinized sex reassignment to date. It was not until Renée Richards was discovered playing in an amateur tennis tournament that the world took notice. Extensive media coverage and criticism thrust Renée reluctantly into the spotlight, sparking an intense public debate over her private life. Now, at seventy-two, Richards looks back and speaks frankly about all aspects of her complicated and often notorious life in this eye-opening, thought-provoking memoir. Richards' honest and compelling narrative explores the dichotomy between the successful life she lived as Dr. Richard Raskind, who seemed to have everything (devoted friends, a beautiful wife and son, a stellar record of academic and professional achievement, and outstanding athletic ability), and a secret life of struggle with a drive that could not be suppressed, even by years of psychotherapy and the force of a considerable will. Richards takes readers through her difficult decision to undergo surgery and the complex mixture of relief and continued frustration that came with the realization of her new identity. Discussing life after her transformation, Richards candidly relates the details, trials, and pleasures of her romantic life as well as fascinating stories about her tennis career, including her experiences as Martina Navratilova's coach. She also provides an intimate account of her difficult but rewarding relationship with her rebellious son: runaway teenager, high-stakes Vegas gambler, karate champion, and entrepreneur. She describes the deterioration of a once-loving marriage and the challenges of reclaiming her place at the forefront of her demanding medical specialty. Having lived as a woman almost as long as she lived as a man, Richards draws on a personal history that illuminates thirty years of remarkable change in society's attitude toward gender issues. Her absorbing and inspiring story, at once heartbreaking and uplifting, is a testimony to how far we have progressed in our ability to discuss and accept sexuality in all its iterations, as well as a reminder of how far we still must travel.
Simon & Schuster 2008-11-12 320 pages

Raymond Klibansky: a life in philosophy

Klibansky, Raymond,Leroux, Georges
Born in Paris in 1905 to a German-Jewish family from Frankfurt and dying a century later in Montreal, Raymond Klibansky lived a life indelibly coloured by the history of the twentieth century. His thought shaped and was shaped by intellectual currents both European and American, and his scholarly work entailed an intellectual reckoning with tradition that was unique in its scope and ambition, long before talk of academic interdisciplinarity. Klibansky, a student of Karl Jaspers and Ernst Cassirer, was educated in the liberal milieu of the Weimar Republic. Forced to emigrate from Germany in 1933, Klibansky spent the war years in London, where he participated in the British war effort. Working in the tradition established by Aby Warburg and the Warburg Library, he completed with Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl the German text of Saturn and Melancholy. The book's cast metal type was reclaimed for the war effort before it could be printed, but it was eventually published in English in 1964 and has deeply influenced understandings of the interrelations between humanities disciplines ever since. After the war Klibansky came to McGill University, where he enjoyed a brilliant career as a scholar of platonic studies and the history of ideas, mainly in the works of Locke and Hume. Over twelve chapters, each devoted to questions that were dear to Klibansky during his long life, Georges Leroux presents dialogues with his mentor selected from decades of conversation, exploring themes including philosophical traditions, melancholy, tolerance, peace, and the role of philosophy in international relations. Scholarship, interlinked with the events of a turbulent century, is at the centre of these fascinating conversations between student and teacher. A richly illustrated autobiography through dialogue, Raymond Klibanskyis a portrait of a heroic figure in twentieth-century philosophy, a model for a younger generation who can find in his scholarship an admirable example of virtue in the service of peace.
McGill-Queen's University Press 2024-12-15 296 pages

Islam in China: a critical bibliography

Israeli, Raphael
Islam has permeated Chinese civilization as a religion and lifestyle for centuries. This volume offers a summary of key developments concerning scholarship on Islam in China and presents a record of research on this topic. The first part of the book is a narrative introduction to the history of Islam in China, the coexistence of Chinese and Muslim cultures, and contemporary issues. The second part of the work is a listing of more than four hundred sources of information on the topic. Entries are grouped in ten categories, and each entry includes a descriptive annotation. An appendix lists journals devoted to research in this field, and the volume concludes with author, title, and subject indexes.
Greenwood Press 1994 172 pages

A Life Rewound Memoirs of a Freelance Producer and Director

Peter Morley
Peter Morley's memoirs span a remarkable career, in which he has garnered twelve international programme awards and an OBE for services to television, and offer a unique insight into the changing face of television. With over 200 credits to his name, he started, aged sixteen, as a rewind-boy in the projection box of London's Dominion Theatre - having left Hitler's Germany in 1933. Wartime service in a tank, which took him from France to Belgium, Holland, and finally Berlin, was followed by a steady rise from film editing to writing and directing documentary films. In 1955, as ITV was about to go on the air, Morley took the plunge and joined Associated-Rediffusion as a freelance television director/producer, responsible for a wide-ranging mix of programmes. By 1959, with fifty programmes to his name, he embarked on ITV's first opera, a live studio production of The Turn of the Screw. Sir Kenneth Clark, Chairman of the Arts Council, wrote: 'As a work of art I think it is the best thing the medium has ever produced.' Morley's sixty-minute documentaries for ITV soon became a regular feature. They included Tyranny - The Years of Adolf Hitler, which contained interviews with Hitler's sister, his adjutant, pilot and chauffeur. In 1960 he produced This Week, ITV's long running weekly current affairs programme, winning his first BAFTA. The controversial documentary Black Marries White - The Last Barrier marked a new impressionistic style of programme-making, the documentary LSO - The Music Men similarly dispensed with narration, and his live five-hour broadcast of The State Funeral of Sir Winston Churchill was awarded the Cannes Grand Prix. Peter Morley's fascination for historical subjects yielded a host of different programmes - including his twelve-part The Life and Times of Lord Mountbatten, for the BBC the thirteen-part The Mighty Continent - A History of Europe in the 20th Century, and for Yorkshire Television the four-part Women of Courage, featuring remarkable women who shared an instinctive compulsion to fight the Nazis. Peter Morley's memorable Kitty - Return to Auschwitz is described by many as 'a television classic', and received five international awards. A founding trustee of BAFTA, Peter Morley is renowned as a film-maker par excellence - and a key figure in the history of television. Bank House Books is proud to publish his memoirs.
Bank House Books 2010 208 pages

Light of my eye

Jacques, Paula
In Light of My Eye, Paula Jacques, born in Egypt, recreates the vanished world of cosmopolitan Cairo with remembered affection and amusing dialogue. Her novel depicts the turbulent waning days of its once thriving Jewish community, during the strange and ominous time between the collapse of the Egyptian monarchy and Nasser's rise to power. At its center are the pre-adolescent Mona Castro and her family, whose lives and destinies the author evokes in a series of scenes that veer between poignancy and wit. Mona's coming of age is marked by her youthful rebellion against her domineering mother, Becky; the illness of the beloved family patriarch, Joucky; and her half-innocent dalliance with an older man, a refugee from eastern Europe. The surrounding ensemble of relatives, whose family gatherings attempt to cope with a history that will overwhelm them, shifts the focus from Mona' s tale to a chronicle of a proud, doomed family.
Holmes & Meier 2009-03-18 260 pages

Reflections in a smoking mirror: poems of Mexico & Belize

Pines, Paul
Poetry. Infused with an eerily adept understanding of Latin American history and culture dating from the 15th century to modern times, their collective duende, REFLECTIONS IN A SMOKING MIRROR will come to stand as a monumental work and as a companion piece to the epic Gabriel García Márquez novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. This collection of poems takes on the true power of myth--Wayne Atherton. REFLECTIONS IN A SMOKING MIRROR tells the story of the fall of an ancient, vibrant civilization to Spain's conquistadors under Cortez. Pines's language is intelligent and refreshing, his ideas provocative, his images striking, and his narrative--however tragic--dramatically thrilling. This book is a smoking mirror--Maurice Kenny.
Dos Madres Press Inc 2011 87 pages

Kolberg

Heyse, Paul
"Kolberg: Historisches Schauspiel in FÃ1/4nf Akten" by Paul Heyse is a compelling historical drama presented with notes by R. H. Allpress. Set against the backdrop of the Siege of Kolberg in 1807, this play explores themes of patriotism, resistance, and the human spirit in times of war. Heyse, a Nobel laureate in Literature, masterfully crafts a narrative that brings to life the historical events and the characters who shaped them. This edition offers advanced text with detailed notes, making it an invaluable resource for students and scholars of German literature and history. The play's enduring themes and historical significance ensure its continued relevance and appeal. Discover the power of Heyse's dramatic storytelling in "Kolberg." 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.
Hutson Street Press 2025-05-22 148 pages