Shaping Losses explores how traumatic loss affects identity and how those who are shaped by loss give shape, in turn, to the empty place where something--relationships, family, culture--was and is no longer. Taking the example of the decimation of European Jewry during the Nazi era, Shaping Losses confronts the problem of transforming trauma into cultural memory. This eloquent volume examines how memoirs, films, photographs, art, and literature, as well as family conversations and personal remembrances, embody the impulse to preserve what is destroyed. The contributors -- all distinguished women scholars, most of them survivors or daughters of survivors--examine classic memorializations such as Claude Lanzmann's film Shoah and Roman Vishniac's photographs of prewar Jews as well as several less-well-known works. They also address ways in which children of survivors of the Holocaust--and of other catastrophic traumas--struggle with inherited or vicarious memory, striving to come to terms with losses that centrally define them although they experience them only indirectly. Shaping Losses considers the limitations of Holocaust representations and testimonies that capture shards of the experience but are necessarily selective and reductive. Contributors discuss artistic efforts to "preserve the rawness" of memory, to resist redemptive closure in Holocaust narratives and public memorials, and to prevent the Holocaust from being sealed in "the cold storage of history." The authors probe the nature of memory and of trauma, studying the use of language within and outside a traumatic context such as Auschwitz and pinpointing the qualities that make traumatic memory ineffable, untransmittable, and perhaps unreliable. Within the "haunted terrain of traumatized memory" that all Holocaust testimonies inhabit, the impulse to give form to emptiness--to shape loss--emerges as a necessary betrayal, a vital effort to bridge the gap between history and memory.

France is the only Western European nation home to substantial numbers of survivors of the World War I and World War II genocides. In the Aftermath of Genocide offers a unique comparison of the country’s Armenian and Jewish survivor communities. By demonstrating how—in spite of significant differences between these two populations—striking similarities emerge in the ways each responded to genocide, Maud S. Mandel illuminates the impact of the nation-state on ethnic and religious minorities in twentieth-century Europe and provides a valuable theoretical framework for considering issues of transnational identity. Investigating each community’s response to its violent past, Mandel reflects on how shifts in ethnic, religious, and national affiliations were influenced by that group’s recent history. The book examines these issues in the context of France’s long commitment to a politics of integration and homogenization—a politics geared toward the establishment of equal rights and legal status for all citizens, but not toward the accommodation of cultural diversity. In the Aftermath of Genocide reveals that Armenian and Jewish survivors rarely sought to shed the obvious symbols of their ethnic and religious identities. Mandel shows that following the 1915 genocide and the Holocaust, these communities, if anything, seemed increasingly willing to mobilize in their own self-defense and thereby call attention to their distinctiveness. Most Armenian and Jewish survivors were neither prepared to give up their minority status nor willing to migrate to their national homelands of Armenia and Israel. In the Aftermath of Genocide suggests that the consolidation of the nation-state system in twentieth-century Europe led survivors of genocide to fashion identities for themselves as ethnic minorities despite the dangers implicit in that status.

This centennial edition of Philip Foner's documentary study presents this first-hand material to a new generation.

In Sparks Amidst the Ashes, Byron Sherwin demonstrates how the unprecedented works of intellect and spirit produced during the Jewish "Golden Age" in Poland can provide contemporary Jews with the spiritual and intellectual resources required to ensure Jewish continuity in the present and future. Sherwin introduces us to the vast range of mystical speculation, evocative stories, talmudic dialectics, theological ideas, and social realities that were muted by the destruction of Polish Jewry during the Holocaust. Sherwin critiques the tendency among contemporary Jews to disregard the precious legacy bequeathed by Polish Jewry, and presents a plan for re-creating contemporary Jewish life that draws from the wisdom of the spiritual maestros and from the rich communal experience characteristic of Jewish life in pre-World War II Poland. Sherwin concludes with a controversial proposal for the future of Polish-Jewish relations.

The murder of a third of Europe's Jews by the Nazis is unquestionably the worst catastrophe in the history of contemporary Judaism and a formative event in the history of Zionism and the State of Israel. Understandably, therefore, the Shoah, written about, analyzed, and given various political interpretations, has shaped public discourse in the history of the State of Israel. The key element of Shoah in the Israeli context is victimhood and as such it has become a source of shame, shrouded in silence and subordinated to the dominant discourse which, resulting from the construction of a "new Hebrew" active subjectivity, taught the postwar generation of Israelis to reject diaspora Jewry and its alleged passivity in the face of catastrophe. This book is the culmination of years of preoccupation with the meaning of the Shoah for the author, an Israeli woman with a "split subjectivity: - that of a daughter of a family of Shoah survivors, and that of a daughter of the first Israeli-born generation; the culmination of her need to break the silence about the Shoah in a society which constructed itself as the Israeli antithesis to diaspora Jewry, and to excavate a "truth" from underneath the mountain of Zionist nation-building myths. These myths, the author argues, not only had deep implication for the formation of her generation but also a profound impact on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Moreover, they are shot through with images of the "masculine" Israeli, constrasted with those of the weak, passive, non-virile Jewish "Other" of the diaspora. This book offers the first gendered analysis of Israeli society and the Shoah. The author employs personal narratives of nine Israeli daughters of Shoah survivors, writers and film makers, and a feminist re-reading of official and unofficial Israeli and Zionist discourses to explore the ways in which the

Modern Jews tend to relate to the past through “history,” which relies on empirical demonstration and rational thought, rather than through “memory,” which relies on the non-rational architectures of mythology. By now “history” has surpassed “memory” as a means of relating to the past—a development that falls short in building identity and creates disconnection between Jews and their collective history. Kurtzer seeks to mend this breach. Drawing on key classical texts, he shows that “history” and “memory” are not exclusive and that the perceived dissonance between them can be healed by a selective reclamation of the past and a translation of that past into purposefulness.

How was the re-emerging Jewish religious practice after 1945 shaped by traditions before the Shoah? To what extent was it influenced by new inspirations through migration and new cultural contacts? By analysing objects like prayer books, musical instruments, Torah scrolls, audio documents and prayer rooms, this volume shows how the post-war communities created new Jewish musical, architectural and artistic forms while abiding by the tradition. This peer-reviewed volume presents contributions to the conference "Jewish communities in Germany in Transition", held in July 2021, as well as the results of a related research project carried out by two university institutions and two museums: the Bet Tfila - Research Unit for Jewish Architecture (Technische Universität Braunschweig), the European Center for Jewish Music (Hanover University for Music, Drama and Media), the Braunschweigisches Landesmuseum, and the Jewish Museum Augsburg Swabia. For the first time, post war synagogues in Germany and their objects were researched on a broad and interdisciplinary basis - regarding history of architecture, art history of their furniture and ritual objects as well as liturgy and musicology. The project was funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) during the years 2018 to 2021 in its funding line "The Language of Objects".

"Renowned historian, essayist, and journalist David A. Bell has long made France and its history the subject of his scholarly gaze and the object of his enduring affection. Shadows of Revolution : Reflections on France, Past and Present gathers together his writing, composed over a period of more than 25 years, into a single volume. As the title of this collection suggests, Bell views much of French history through the lens of the Revolutionary era. Within a space of a dozen years, from Bastille to Bonaparte, the country experimented with and experienced every form of governance, creating in the process, as Bell puts it, 'the most intense political laboratory the world had ever known.' The Revolution remains the country's defining era, delineating its sense of identity and overshadowing the events that followed it. Yet another, Bell argues, is the Vichy period and World War Two--France's dark night of the soul--with whose legacies the country continues to contend. These two moments of violent and transformative upheaval may dominate French history, but as this collection and Bell's observational powers reveal, the full range of topics involving France is endlessly rich and diverse. Divided into eight sections, it connects France's education to its national identity, the Enlightenment to the Revolution and human rights, Napoleon to Victor Hugo, and nineteenth-century anti-Semitism to such recent events such as the riots of 2006, the Arab Spring, and the Charlie Hebdo tragedy. Shadows of Revolution embodies and reflects the endlessly fascinating and entertaining complexity of French history, and shows the ways in which it has shaped world history" ; "David Bell wrote the essays in this collection over the course of more than fifteen years, each in response to a new book or political event and published in the New Republic, New York Review of Books, or London Review of Books. Their common thread is France and French history, of which Bell is one of the world's acknowledged experts. Shadows of Revolution is divided into seven sections: The Longue Duree; From the Old Regime to the Revolution; The Revolution; Napoleon Bonaparte; The Nineteenth Century; Vichy; and Parallels : Past and Present. Bell argues that so much of French (and European) history revolves around and returns to the French Revolution of 1789 to 1799. So much happened in so short a time that Chateaubriand later claimed that many centuries had crammed themselves into a single quarter-century. Bell's other main focus is World War Two and the French Vichy regime. He has followed the long and painful process by which the French have come to terms with their collaboration with Nazi Germany, including the creation of monuments to the Holocaust, exhibitions devoted to Vichy and the fate of the French Jews, and the speech that President Jacques Chirac gave in 1995, finally recognizing French responsibility for the deportation of Jews to the death camps. In its way, each of the essays in this collection--Bell's first book of the kind--reflects upon the ways that political and cultural patterns first set in the age of the Revolution continue to resonate, not just in France, but throughout the world"

This book explores the commonly-perceived paradigmatic conflict between the 'Ricardo School' and the contemporary French economics of Jean-Baptiste Say. It will interest all serious historians of economic thought and will find a place on the bookshelves of many economists across the world

"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"--

"As a writer he was the disengaged onlooker who understood how his presence altered a place or a situation." This is how the Independent described Laurie Lee in their 1997 obituary of the much-loved author. In A Thousand Laurie Lees , another poet, Adam Horovitz, explores not only how the Slad Valley informed the man and his writing, but also how the valley itself was affected by its association with such an international figure, and how it has retained its particular identity since its description in Cider with Rosie . Shortly after Laurie Lee's death in 1997, a handful of locals dressed up as Lee and cycled right through the heart of Cider with Rosie country, stopping off at all the pubs on the way. They called their journey "The Night of a Thousand Laurie Lees." Slad valley man Horovitz draws on memoir, myth, and literature inspired by the valley and his walks through the Slad landscape, charting what has changed and what remains, from badger setts to "Notting Hill in Wellies," to celebrate the man and the landscape that made him.

In the heady days of the Cold War, when the Bomb loomed large in the ruminations of Washington's wise men, policy intellectuals flocked to the home of Albert and Roberta Wohlstetter to discuss deterrence and doomsday. The Cold World They Made takes a fresh look at the original power couple of strategic studies. Seeking to unravel the complex tapestry of the Wohlstetters' world and worldview, Ron Robin reveals fascinating insights into an unlikely husband-and-wife pair who, at the height of the most dangerous military standoff in history, gained access to the deepest corridors of American power. The author of such classic Cold War treatises as "The Delicate Balance of Terror," Albert Wohlstetter is remembered for advocating an aggressive brinksmanship that stood in stark contrast with what he saw as weak and indecisive policies of Soviet containment. Yet Albert's ideas built crucially on insights gleaned from his wife. Robin makes a strong case for the Wohlstetters as a team of intellectual equals, showing how Roberta's scholarship was foundational to what became known as the Wohlstetter Doctrine. Together at RAND Corporation, Albert and Roberta crafted a mesmerizing vision of the Soviet threat, theorizing ways for the United States to emerge victorious in a thermonuclear exchange. Far from dwindling into irrelevance after the Cold War, the torch of the Wohlstetters' intellectual legacy was kept alive by well-placed disciples in George W. Bush's administration. Through their ideological heirs, the Wohlstetters' signature combination of brilliance and hubris continues to shape American policies.--

"In the post-Nuremberg era two of the most important developments in international criminal law are the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR). Created through UN Security Council resolutions, with specific mandates to prosecute those responsible for serious violations of international humanitarian law, the ICTY and the ICTR played crucial roles in the development of international criminal law. Through a series of chapters written by leading authorities in the field, this book addresses the history of the ICTY and the ICTR, and the important aspects of the tribunals' accomplishments. From examining the groundwork laid by the ICTY and the ICTR for greater international attention to crimes against humanity to the establishment of the International Criminal Courts, this volume provides a comprehensive overview of the impact and lasting roles of these tribunals"

"The Nazi Holocaust & the Exile of Yiddish is a history of the Algemeyne Entsiklopedye (General Encyclopedia, Berlin, Paris, & New York, 1932-1966), the only attempt to publish a comprehensive encyclopedia of universal knowledge in the Yiddish language. In the decade after World War I, the potential for Yiddish was seemingly limitless.The global number of speakers of Yiddish was estimated at between nine and ten million, with major communities in Poland, the Soviet Union, and the United States. But by the early 1930s, as Jews were becoming invested in their host states, a dramatic rise in antisemitism from the political right threatened their new status. Extreme nationalists sought to undo Jewish participation in civic life, limit Jewish migration and settlement, and contain - or even purge - Jews' political, economic, cultural, and racial influence. This combination of factors led many within the Yiddishist camp both to reassert their commitment to the language and to a distinct Jewish national identity, increasing the urgency for the Entsiklopedye's architects to embark upon their project. Uncertainty over the Jewish future began to be reflected in the Entsiklopedye itself. The volumes of 1936 and 1937 contain otherwise out-of-place monograph-length entries on the specifically Jewish topics of "Antisemitism" and "Land of Israel," presaging a shift away from general subjects and toward more specifically Jewish content. In September 1939, the German invasion of Poland cut the Entsiklopedye off from its major source of readers and trapped many of its contributors who were based there. Just as the second Yidn volume was being sent to subscribers in Spring 1940, Germany invaded France. Making matters even worse, the copies of the second Yidn volume were sent to the United States, and but most copies were lost at sea. A few volumes that had been sent via the regular mail arrived safely in New York, however. The encyclopedia's editors themselves fled and, after making a harrowing escape via Spain and Portugal, arrived in New York by late summer / early autumn 1940. With the end of World War II and as the enormity of the Nazi Holocaust was becoming understood, the editors decided that the Entsiklopedye should continue. The post-war Yidn volumes contain descriptive essays on Jewish life on the eve of the Holocaust, a study of Jewish life in the Americas, and the last two volumes (1964 and 1966) are historical overviews of the Holocaust. By the release of the final volume in 1966, few of the original editors of The Algemeyne Entsiklopedye were still alive. Many of the great Jewish scholars who contributed to the project had also passed. In the Foreword, the administrator of the Entsiklopedye Iser Goldberg outlined the task of future Jewish scholarship as one of creating a new corpus of work dedicated to the Holocaust. He declared that this project that once was to guide millions of Yiddish readers into the modern world was now dedicated to "the thousands of readers and subscribers in Jewish communities" with the much more modest goal of making "an important contribution to the growing khurbn [Holocaust] literature." By bringing this neglected and unique work of Jewish scholarship back into studies of modern Jewish history, Trachtenberg makes a significant contribution to current historiographical debates on the content and boundaries of Jewish knowledge in the tumultuous middle decades of the twentieth-century. In large measure because of the lack of researchers able to work in the Yiddish language, the significance and history of the Algemeyne Entsiklopedye has been overlooked, despite the fact that it was one of the great (and few) collaborative projects involving the twentieth century's most influential Jewish scholars. This monograph will inform recent scholarly discussions on the function of Yiddish before, during, and after World War II, on the extent to which Eastern European Jews turned away from Diaspora Nationalism on the eve of war, and to what degree Jews in the United States were "silent" in the decades following the Nazi Holocaust"--

Whereas the whole concept of Jewish theology is often considered alien to Judaism, this book should contribute to the understanding of the meaning of a truly Jewish theology through these examples.

In this pathbreaking study of responses to the Holocaust in wartime and postwar Polish literature, Rachel Feldhay Brenner explores seven writers' compulsive need to share their traumatic experience of witness with the world. The Holocaust put the ideological convictions of Kornel Filipowicz, Józef Mackiewicz, Tadeusz Borowski, Zofia Kossak, Leopold Buczkowski, Jerzy Andrzejewski, and Stefan Otwinowski to the ultimate test. Tragically, witnessing the horror of the Holocaust implied complicity with the perpetrator and produced an existential crisis that these writers, who were all exempted from the genocide thanks to their non-Jewish identities, struggled to resolve in literary form. Polish Literature and the Holocaust: Eyewitness Testimonies,1942-1947 is a particularly timely book in view of the continuing debates about the attitudes of Poles toward the Jews during the war. The literary voices from the past that Brenner examines posit questions that are as pertinent now as they were then. And so, while this book speaks to readers who are interested in literary responses to the Holocaust, it also illuminates the universal issue of the responsibility of witnesses toward the victims of any atrocity--Provided by publisher.

Sefer Zerubbabel, the Book of Zerubbabel, is a Hebrew apocalyptic work composed during the wars between the Byzantine and Persian empires in the early decades of the seventh century of this era, shortly before the Muslim conquest of the Middle East. Himmelfarb places Sefer Zerubbael's narrative in the context of Christian tradition and contemporary Byzantine culture on the one hand and earlier Jewish eschatological traditions on the other. The impact of the Christian messianic narrative can be seen in Sefer Zerubbabel's depiction of the messiah son of David in terms of Isaiah's suffering servant and in the death and resurrection of the messiah son of Joseph, while contemporary Byzantine ideas about the Virgin as the patron and protector of Constantinople help to make sense of Sefer Zerubbabel's otherwise startling depiction of the mother of the messiah as a warrior defending Jerusalem. Sefer Zerubbabel also shows many points of contact with traditions about the messiah in rabbinic literature, but, the author argues, it is not dependent on the rabbinic formulation of those traditions. Rather, both the rabbis and Sefer Zerubbabel drew on popular traditions, which they reshaped for their own purposes. The rabbis tend to play down messianic hopes while Sefer Zerubbabel embraces them more enthusiastically. Thus reading Sefer Zerubbabel and rabbinic literature side by side allows us to recover some elements of the popular Jewish messianism of the early centuries of the Christian era. The book concludes by considering Sefer Zerubbabel's impact on a corpus of Jewish eschatological texts from the centuries after the rise of Islam.--

The dynamics and achievements of organized Jewish rescue in the modern period are assessed in this volume, which includes essays and case studies. These studies illuminate and evaluate the efforts of Jews to defend and preserve communities separated by vast distances and diverse cultural and political systems.

In this book Darko Suvin discerns the shape of an emerging post-Individualist drama which may be to our age what the theatre of Shakespeare and Ibsen was to theirs. Suvin establishes the principles of composition of a crucial group of modern plays. He examines some major attempts and failures to replace Ibsen's "Individualist" theatre with this new "Collectivist" drama. Two particularly important and original contributions to the subject are Suvin's chapters on the Happenings in the USA and on the Paris Commune Theatre Law. The book focuses on the work of Brecht, both because of the importance of his plays and because of what Professor Suvin sees as Brecht's central position today in any cultural critique that refuses to despair.