Autobiography of this notable peace campaigner, focusing on his political and social activities. Discusses his work to foster peace in the Middle East and his involvement with many organisations working in the interests of peace and social justice, such as the Jewish Council to Combat Fascism and Anti-Semitism. Gives an account of his interactions with many political leaders and also provides a record of post-war left-wing political movements in Australia. Includes index. The author is the founder of the journal 'Paths to Peace'.

Examines the political aspects of the rescue of Ethiopian Jewry in the 1980s-90s, focusing on the factors at work in the U.S. and in Israel. In the 1970s, Israel was reluctant to accept Ethiopian refugees, but changed its policy due to a large extent to a group of Jewish activists in the U.S. who prodded Israel to take action. The American Association for Ethiopian Jews (AAEJ) was founded in 1974 and became the principal American organization advocating on behalf of the Beta Israel. Relates the suffering of Ethiopian Jews, which is attributed to a combination of discrimination, hostility on the part of local Christians, and the Jews being caught in a crossfire between the government and the rebels. Jews were persecuted for attempting to flee the country in order to reach Israel. Ch. 10 (177-188), "The Holocaust Analogy", discusses how the AAEJ compared the situation of Jews in Ethiopia with that of Jews facing the Holocaust in order to stir Israel and America to action.

The Universal Jew analyzes literary images of the Jewish nation and the Jewish national subject at Zionism’s formative moment. In a series of original readings of late nineteenth-century texts—from George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda to Theodor Herzl’s Altneuland to the bildungsromane of Russian Hebrew and Yiddish writers—Mikhal Dekel demonstrates the aesthetic and political function of literary works in the making of early Zionist consciousness. More than half a century before the foundation of the State of Israel and prior to the establishment of the Zionist political movement, Zionism emerges as an imaginary concept in literary texts that create, facilitate, and naturalize the transition from Jewish-minority to Jewish-majority culture. The transition occurs, Dekel argues, mainly through the invention of male literary characters and narrators who come to represent "exemplary" persons or "man in general" for the emergent, still unformed national community. Such prototypical characters transform the symbol of the Jew from a racially or religiously defined minority subject to a "post-Jewish," particularuniversal, and fundamentally liberal majority subject. The Universal Jew situates the "Zionist moment" horizontally, within the various intellectual currents that make up the turn of the twentieth century: the discourse on modernity, the crisis in liberalism, Nietzsche’s critique of the Enlightenment, psychoanalysis, early feminism, and fin de siècle interrogation of sexual identities. The book examines the symbolic roles that Jews are assigned within these discourses and traces the ways in which Jewish literary citizens are shaped, both out of and in response to them. Beginning with an analysis of George Eliot’s construction of the character Deronda and its reception in Zionist circles, the Universal Jew ends with the self-fashioning of male citizens in fin de siècle and post-statehood Hebrew works, through the aesthetics oftragedy. Throughout her readings, Dekel analyzes the political meaning of these nascent images of citizens, uncovering in particular the gendered arrangements out of which they are born.

The relationship of the Seminary and its chancellor to the Conservative Movement has long been a subject of debate, if not a source of tension, among the national organizations of the movement as well as its rank and file. This is no less true today than it was eighty years ago. In order for one to understand the nature of JTS and the movement today, it seems necessary to understand the source(s) of this issue and the efforts from inside and outside the Seminary to grapple with it. To what extent is the JTS-Conservative Movement relationship particular to JTS or similar to that of other seminaries and the religious movement with which they are connected? This is the question that the author, Michael B. Greenbaum, seeks to answer within this study.

"Every day," writes Rabbi Meir Kahane, "the Arabs of Israel move closer to becoming a majority. Are we [Israel] committed to national suicide? Should we allow demography, geography, and democracy to push Israel closer to the abyss? According to Rabbi Kahane, Israel can only be sustained by a permanent Jewish majority and a small, insignificant, and placid Arab minority. But the Arab population continues to grown quantitatively and qualitatively. They feel no ties for a state that breathes Jewishness. They mockingly accept moneys from the National Insurance Institute for medical services, tuition, and social welfre; yet they pay little or no tax. Even worse, they openly vow to destroy the Jewish state - not with bullets or bombs, but with the democratic vote. Is there a solution? Rabbi Kahane insists, "Yes." In this explosive manifesto Rabbi Kahane sets forth the only plan to save Israel. Israeli Arabs would be given the options of accepting noncitizenship, leaving willingly with compensation, or being forcibly expelled without compensation. Controversial? Yes. Could the Arabs be convinced to leave? "We will not come to the Arabs to request, argue, or convince," says Kahane. "For Jews and Arabs in Israel there is only one answer - separation. Jews in their land, Arabs in theirs. Separation. Only separation." They Must Go was written in 1980 while Rabbi Meir Kahane was jailed in Ramle Prison by the Israeli government under an unprecedented administrative detention order that imprisoned him without a trial, without his being informed of any specific charge, and without opportunity to know or to question any alleged evidence or witness. His crime: his philosophy concerning the danger that exists to the state of Israel by the very presence of its large and growing Arab population. Rabbi Kahane's ideas were suppressed, twisted, defamed, and subjected to emotional and hysterical diatribes by people who were too frightened to consider them intelligently or to debate them intellectually. Is there a time bomb ticking away relentlessly in the Holy Land? Can Arabs and Jews ultimately coexist in a Jewish-Zionist state? Rabbi Kahane's only answer: "They Must Go."

Do young people today find meaning in the Holocaust? That's the question that prompted a writing project across North America, Italy, and Australia asking young people to share their ideas about this time in history. Some students wrote short stories. Some discussed the impact of books they had read and wrote about the messages that they understood from these books. Several interviewed survivors and recorded their impressions. Many talked about how they have tried to make sense of this history in the world in which they now live. Others created works of art. Children wrote from their hearts with sensitivity, thoughtfulness, and great insight. Their teachers saw this opportunity as a gift, and it proves to all that young people can make a meaningful connection to the Holocaust. Their contributions give hope for a more peaceful and tolerant future.

The music of clarinetists Naftule Brandwein and Dave Tarras is iconic of American klezmer music. Their legacy has had an enduring impact on the development of the popular world music genre. Since the 1970s, klezmer music has become one of the most popular world music genres, at the same time influencing musical styles as diverse as indie rock, avant-garde jazz, and contemporary art music. Klezmer is the celebratory instrumental music that developed in the Jewish communities of eastern Europe over the course of centuries and was performed especially at weddings. Brought to North America in the immigration wave in the late nineteenth century, klezmer thrived and developed in the Yiddish-speaking communities of New York and other cities during the period 1880-1950. No two musicians represent New York klezmer more than clarinetists Naftule Brandwein (1884-1963)and Dave Tarras (1897-1989). Born in eastern Europe to respected klezmer families, both musicians had successful careers as performers and recording artists in New York. Their legacy has had an enduring impact and helped to spurthe revival of klezmer since the 1970s. Using their iconic recordings as a case study, New York Klezmer in the Early Twentieth Century looks at the inner workings of klezmer dance music, from its compositional aspects to the minutiae of style. Making use of historical and ethnographic sources, the book places the music within a larger social and cultural context stretching from eastern Europe of the nineteenth century to the United Statesof the present. JOEL E. RUBIN is Associate Professor of Music at the University of Virginia and an acclaimed performer of traditional klezmer music.

As armed battle rages in the Warsaw ghetto during the week preceding Easter of 1943, Jan Malecki, a Polish architect and cold, indecisive leftist, reluctantly takes in his Jewish old flame, Irena Lilien. Irena was a wealthy, bewitching beauty, but is now an embittered homeless fugitive with forged Aryan papers. Jan's pious and pregnant wife, Anna, is kind if condescending to Irena, and Jan's brother identifies with the Jewish insurgents. But Irena is informed on by the neighbor's acidly anti-Semitic wife.

Poetics & Polemics, 1980-2005 brings together in one volume a wide-ranging selection of essays and commentaries by one of the most significant poets, critics, and translators working with American and international poetry today. Jerome Rothenberg's work spans a period of over forty years and nearly one hundred books, and though perhaps best known as a poet, his critical and theoretical contributions to the fields of innovative, experimental poetry have become equally important facets of his work. Rothenberg's earliest critical writings concerned themselves with ethnopoetics and the poetics of performance. In the last twenty years his critical thinking has evolved to encompass more explicitly issues of modernism, postmodernism, and the avant-garde, as well as meditations on the nature of the book and writing. This volume extends and elaborates all of those interests, allowing for the first time a comprehensive glimpse of the full trajectory of his thinking. In the first section, "Poetics and Polemics," Rothenberg's essays address a range of issues with which he's become closely associated, among them the anthology as a critical and polemical tool; the intersection of poetry with art, performance, and politics, in both contemporary and traditional practice; the poetics of Jewish mysticism as a traditional form of conceptual and language poetry; and the universality of poetic discourse, particularly as seen in tribal poetry or in poetic traditions long separated from the Western literary mainstream. In "A Gallery of Poets" is Rothenberg's lively explorations of the work of other poets, as they relate to his own work, to avant-garde poetry in general, and to the poetic traditions that concern him the most. Finally, in "Dialogues and Interviews" are Rothenberg's unbridled meditations and musings on what he calls "the life of poetry" outside the bounds of book and binding, class and category, a dynamic force at the center of all that we call human.

"Scriptural Vitality challenges the view that the Persian and Hellenistic periods constitute a time of decay, a period of 'late Judaism', languishing between an original, vibrant Judaism and the birth of Christianity. Instead, Hindy Najman argues that the Second Temple period was one of untethered creativity and poetic imagination, of dynamism exemplified through philosophical translation, poetic composition, and a convergence of ancient Mediterranean cultures that gave birth to hermeneutic innovation. Building on Nietzsche's critique of classical philology and drawing on new ways of reading the Dead Sea Scrolls, the author carries out a radical rethinking of biblical studies. Instead of seeking to reconstruct the original text and to find its original author or at least the original context of its production, Najman celebrates textual pluriformity and transformation, tracing ways in which texts and meanings proliferated within interpretive communities through new performances and fresh articulations of the past. Engaging with thinkers such as Friedrich Schlegel and Peter Szondi, whom biblicists have rarely considered, biblical philology is reimagined as the forward-moving study of the poetic processes by which Jewish communities re-created their past and revitalized their present. The Second Temple period emerges as a golden age of creativity, whose traces may still be discerned in Judaism and Christianity today." --

Identity Papers argues that contemporary Jewish American literature revises our understanding of Jewishness and Jewish difference. Moving beyond the reductive labeling of texts and authors as “too Jewish” or “not Jewish enough,” and focusing instead on narratives that portray Jewish regeneration through feminist Orthodoxy, queerness, off-whiteness, and intermarriage, Helene Meyers resists a lachrymose view of contemporary Jewish American life. She argues that such gendered, sexed, and raced debates about Jewish identity become opportunities rather than crises, signs of creative potential rather than symptoms of assimilation and deracination. Thus, feminist debates within Orthodoxy are allied to Jewish continuity by Rebecca Goldstein, Allegra Goodman, and Tova Mirvis; the geography of Jewish identity is racialized by Alfred Uhry, Tony Kushner, and Philip Roth; and the works of Jyl Lynn Felman, Judith Katz, Lev Raphael, and Michael Lowenthal queer the Jewish family as they reveal homophobia to be an abomination. Even as Identity Papers expands Jewish literary horizons and offers much-needed alternatives to the culture wars between liberal and traditional Jews, it argues that Jewish difference productively troubles dominant narratives of feminist, queer, and whiteness studies. Meyers demonstrates that the evolving Jewish American literary renaissance is anything but provincial; rather, it is engaged with categories of difference central to contemporary academic discourses and our national life.

"The work is primarily the story of a company. It traces the Deutsche Bank's evolution into a big bank, its positioning as a foreign trade and 'industrial' bank, and also its big international financing projects in East Asia, the Ottoman Empire and America, with all their foreign policy implications during the German Empire. It describes the bank's situation and business policy from the period of high inflation after the First World War to the world economic and banking crisis at the end of the Weimar Republic. The company's activities under the National Socialist dictatorship and the treatment of Jewish staff and customers are looked at in the same detail as banking business during the Second World War. The book documents the splitting-up of the bank and its reamalgamation after 1945 under Allied occupation policy and its emergence as today's international financial conglomerate. Furthermore, it portrays the leading bank managers, the changes in staff as well as the new directions in organizational structure, and shows the company's position in the banking landscape at different points in time."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

When the beautiful Jessica Pruitt arrives in Venice to star in a film based on The Merchant of Venice, she is preoccupied: she has recently lost custody of her daughter, and as an older actress she is increasingly aware of the difficulty of landing leading roles. One day, as she wanders through an old Jewish ghetto, Jessica is magically transported to sixteenth-century Venice where she finds herself the heroine of "Will" Shakespeare's play. Immediately attracted to the younger playwright, Jessica enters into an intensely passionate love affair that defies time and place. Reading group guide included.

"Revisionist approach to a status of apostates in medieval European rabbinic thought. View this in full screen In Brothers from Afar: Rabbinic Approaches to Apostasy and Reversion in Medieval Europe, Ephraim Kanarfogel challenges a long-held view that those who had apostatized and later returned to the Jewish community in northern medieval Europe were encouraged to resume their places without the need for special ceremony or act that verified their reversion. Kanarfogel's evidence suggests that from the late twelfth century onward, leading rabbinic authorities held that returning apostates had to undergo ritual immersion and other rites of contrition. He also argues that the shift in rabbinic positions during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was fundamentally a response to changing Christian perceptions of Jews and was not simply an internal halakhic or rabbinic development. Brothers from Afar is divided into seven chapters. Kanarfogel begins the book with Rashi (1040-1105), the pre-eminent European rabbinic authority, who favored an approach which sought to smooth the return of penitent apostates. He then goes on to explain that although Jacob Katz, a leading Jewish social historian, maintains that this more lenient approach held sway in Ashkenazic society, a series of manuscript passages indicate that Rashi's view was challenged in several significant ways by northern French Tosafists in the mid-twelfth century. German Tosafists mandated immersion for a returning apostate as a means of atonement, akin to the procedure required of a new convert. In addition, several prominent tosafists sought to downgrade the status of apostates from Judaisim who did not return, in both marital and economic issues, well beyond the place assigned to them by Rashi and others who supported his approach. Although these mandates were formulated along textual and juridical lines, considerations of how to protect the Jewish communities from the inroads of increased anti-Judaism and the outright hatred expressed for the Jews as unrivaled enemies of Christianity, played a large role. Indeed, medieval Christian sources that describe how Jews dealt with those who relapsed from Christianity to Judaism are based not only on popular practices and culture but also reflect concepts and practices that had the approbation of the rabbinic elite in northern Europe. Brothers from Afar belongs in the library of every scholar of Jewish and medieval studies"--

Dina Z, a Jewish-American filmmaker is seeking to document the lives of people who dwell on ancient holy ground and to discover how that history affects them. She falls in love with a Palestinian activist and sees him and his people in ways that were not available to her before the ancient story of Dinah and Shechem was revived through their meeting. This novel is a republication of Deena Metzger's 1989 novel, originally published by Viking.. This novel is a republication of Deena Metzger's 1989 novel. The original motivation for the novel was to investigate the Biblical story from Genesis, the story of Jacob and Leah's daughter who is loved and ravished by a "heathen," and whose brothers avenge her honor by slaying him on his wedding night. This story, which is somehow still unacknowledged, is of the ancient core of the intergenerational conflict remaining very much in our collective DNA, the story which has not been mourned, for which amends have not been made. Metzger is hoping to see if the retelling of it in a new way, the reliving of it, even if only in the creative imagination, could offer healing to the terrible history which was (which is) once again exploding in violence.

This book places the city of Hartford, Connecticut within the larger contexts of American social, urban, ethnic, and Jewish Histroy by comparing its unique Histroy to those of New England and other American Jewish communities

Ancient biblical Judaism ascribed magical and supernatural properties to blood. Both Rabbinic Judaism and Christianity inherited this attitude toward blood, and adopted, each in its own way, symbolic and spiritualized rituals connected with blood. Throughout the centuries, Judaism and Christianity borrowed beliefs and rituals from one another. Argues that the blood libel emerged as a negative by-product of an increase in popular eucharistic piety. Encouragement for this accusation was provided by the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, which approved the doctrine of transubstantiation and heightened popular interest in blood, especially Christian blood. The alleged Jewish consumption of Christian blood seemed to prove the dogma of transubstantiation in popular consciousness. In the 19th century the blood libel emerged again in Europe, devoid of its theological underpinning but supplemented with a belief in blood as the bearer of heredity, and hence of the ethnic and racial traits of the person. Academic authorities, from August Rohling to the Nazi Erich Bischof, tried to prove the truth of the blood libel and created the theory of blood - i.e. racial pollution. It was in such a form that blood mysticism was picked up by the Nazis. The revival of the blood libel in the 19th century provoked a wave of literature refuting the accusation. Paradoxically, while Jews were vigorously rejecting the claim that human blood played a role in their rituals, some of them adopted the blood language of modern nationalism, a belief in the nation-making "Jewish blood".

Never before available in English, Judgment is a work of startling power by David Bergelson, the most celebrated Yiddish prose writer of his era. Originally published in 1929 and set in 1920 during the Russian civil war, Judgment traces the death of the shtetl and the birth of the “new, harsher world” created by the 1917 revolution. Jews and non-Jews smuggle people, goods, and anti-Bolshevik literature back and forth across the new political border. Filipov acts as the arbiter of "judgment" to prisoners in a Bolshevik outpost, who include Spivak, a counterrevolutionary; Lemberger, a pious and wealthy Jew; a seductive woman referred to as "the blonde"; and a memorable cast of smugglers and criminals. Ordinary people, depicted in a grotesque and modernist style—comparable to Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry —confront the overwhelming forces of history, whose ultimate outcome remains unknown.

At the turn of the twenty-first century, in spite of growing globalization there remains in the world a split between the West and the rest. The manner in which this split has been imagined and represented in Western civilization has been the subject of intense cross-disciplinary scrutiny, much of it under the rubric of “orientalism.” This debate, sparked by the 1978 publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism identifies the “Orient” as the Islamic world and to a lesser extent Hindu India. “Orientalism” signifies the way the West imagined this terrain. Going beyond Said’s framework, in their introduction to the volume, Kalmar and Penslar argue that orientalism is based on the Christian West’s attempts to understand and manage its relations with both of its monotheistic Others—Muslims and Jews. According to the editors, Jews have almost always been present whenever occidentals talked about or imagined the East; and the Western image of the Muslim Orient has been formed and continues to be formed in inextricable conjunction with Western perceptions of the Jewish people. Bringing together essays by an array of international scholars in a wide range of disciplines, Orientalism and the Jews demonstrates that, since the Middle Ages, Jews have been seen in the Western world as both occidental and oriental. Jews formed the model for medieval depictions of Muslim warriors. Representations of biblical Jews in early modern Europe provided essential sustenance for Western fictions about the Muslim world. And many of the Western protagonists of imperialism “discovered” real or imaginary Jews wherever their expeditions took them. Today orientalist attitudes by Israelis target not only Arabs but also the mizrahi (“oriental”) Israelis with roots in the Arab world as Others.