The Nazis needed oil. The Arabs wanted the Jews and British out of Iraq. The Mufti of Jerusalem forged a far-ranging alliance with Hitler resulting in the June 1941 Farhud, a Nazi-style pogrom in Baghdad that set the stage for the devastation and expulsion of the Iraqi Jews and ultimately almost a million Jews across the Arab world. The Farhud was the beginning of what became a broad Nazi-Arab alliance in the Holocaust. --publisher.

An award-winning historian presents an emotional history of Jewish refugees biding their time in Portugal as they attempt to escape Nazi Europe. This riveting book describes the experience of Jewish refugees as they fled Hitler to live in limbo in Portugal until they could reach safer havens abroad. Drawing attention not only to the social and physical upheavals of refugee life, Kaplan highlights their feelings as they fled their homes and histories while begging strangers for kindness. An emotional history of fleeing, this book probes how specific locations touched refugees' inner lives, including the borders they nervously crossed or the overcrowded transatlantic ships that signaled their liberation

Exile, Statelessness, and Migration explores the intertwined lives, careers, and writings of a group of prominent Jewish intellectuals during the mid-twentieth century―in particular, Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Isaiah Berlin, Albert Hirschman, and Judith Shklar, as well as Hans Kelsen, Emmanuel Levinas, Gershom Scholem, and Leo Strauss. Informed by their Jewish identity and experiences of being outsiders, these thinkers produced one of the most brilliant and effervescent intellectual movements of modernity. Political philosopher Seyla Benhabib's starting point is that these thinkers faced migration, statelessness, and exile because of their Jewish origins, even if they did not take positions on specifically Jewish issues personally. The sense of belonging and not belonging, of being ?eternally half-other,? led them to confront essential questions: What does it mean for the individual to be an equal citizen and to wish to retain one's ethnic, cultural, and religious differences, or perhaps even to rid oneself of these differences altogether in modernity? Benhabib isolates four themes in their works: dilemmas of belonging and difference; exile, political voice, and loyalty; legality and legitimacy; and pluralism and the problem of judgment. Surveying the work of influential intellectuals, Exile, Statelessness, and Migration recovers the valuable plurality of their Jewish voices and develops their universal insights in the face of the crises of this new century.

This wide ranging bibliography comprises primary and secondary works on native Chinese Jews in traditional China, most notably the Jewish community of Kaifeng. It also includes the early knowledge and writings by Chinese about Jews and Judaism, as well as the early writings by Jews about China. The author concentrates on primary sources and original contributions, giving subheadings and short annotations for the main items and indicating his judgement of their value.

The lives of Raymond Aron and Charles de Gaulle intersected at significant moments in twentieth-century history, though they differed on many issues during World War II and over the subsequent decades. Aron, for example, distinguished between the attitude and responsibility of the Vichy government and the French Nazi collaborators in Paris, unlike de Gaulle, who regarded anyone who obeyed Marshal Petain as a traitor. In the postwar period, Aron differed from de Gaulle on a number of issues, including Algeria. But the strongest direct criticism by Aron of de Gaulle's language and policy resulted after a 1967 press conference, where he referred to Jews as "an elite people, self-assured and domineering." This comment led Aron to write DeGaulle, Israel and the Jews. Aron saw de Gaulle conflating the issues of Israel and that of French Jews, and the question of Israeli policy in 1967 and other times. He stressed the right of individuals to be, at the same time, French and Jewish, and raised the question of whether de Gaulle intended to deliver a message to the Jews in the Diaspora or simply wanted to attack those in Israel. While Aron did not accuse de Gaulle of anti-Semitism, he felt that for the first time in postwar Europe, a leader had used language that lent respectability to anti-Semitism and made it legitimate. De Gaulle, Israel and the Jews, translated from the French by John Sturrock and graced with a new introductory essay by Michael Curtis, allows us the opportunity to raise questions about de Gaulle and his policy in the Middle East. Was he anti-Semitic? What were his real attitudes and policies toward Israel, and how did they relate to his policies on the Middle East and on international affairs? This is a volume of contemporary relevance for students of political science, Middle East affairs, and international policy.

"Defying the binary and Eurocentric view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Ella Shohat's work, as a whole, dares to engage the deeper historical and cultural questions swirling around colonialism, Orientalism, and nationalism. Spanning several decades, Shohat's work has introduced conceptual frameworks that have fundamentally challenged the conventional understandings of Arabs and Jews, Palestine, Zionism, and the Middle East. Collected now in a single volume, this book gathers together some of her most influential political essays, interviews, speeches, testimonies, and memoirs for the first time"--

"Defying the binary and Eurocentric view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Ella Shohat's work, as a whole, dares to engage the deeper historical and cultural questions swirling around colonialism, Orientalism, and nationalism. Spanning several decades, Shohat's work has introduced conceptual frameworks that have fundamentally challenged the conventional understandings of Arabs and Jews, Palestine, Zionism, and the Middle East. Collected now in a single volume, this book gathers together some of her most influential political essays, interviews, speeches, testimonies, and memoirs for the first time"--

In this wide-ranging exploration of the economic roots of antisemitism, Hillel Levine trace the position of Jews from the end of the sixteenth century to the demise of the Polish state in 1795. Levine explains why Poland was not able to to modernize its backward social, economic, and political system at a time when Western European countries were rapidly evolving, and he shows that Jews were blames for this failure to modernize, furling an economic antisemitism that contributed to the Holocaust and is with us still.

This lively ethnography traces a fraught three months in the life of a Jewish congregation stubbornly persisting on the Lower East Side, and affords a candid, lucid and intimate introduction to contemporary synagogue practice. In these pages Jonathan Boyarin invites us to share the intimate life of the Stanton Street Shul, one of the last remaining Jewish congregations on New York's historic Lower East Side. This narrow building, wedged into a lot designed for an old-law tenement, is full of clamorous voices the generations of the dead, who somehow contrive to make their presence known, and the newer generation, keeping the building and its memories alive and making themselves Jews in the process. Through the eyes of Boyarin, at once a member of the congregation and a bemused anthropologist, the book follows this congregation of "year-round Jews" through the course of a summer during which its future must once again be decided. The Lower East Side, famous as the jumping off point for millions of Jewish and other immigrants to America, has recently become the hip playground of twenty-something immigrants to the city from elsewhere in America and from abroad. Few imagine that Jewish life there has stubbornly continued through this history of decline and regeneration. Coming inside with Boyarin, we see the congregation's life as a combination of quiet heroism, ironic humor, disputes for the sake of Heaven and perhaps otherwise, and above all the ongoing search for ways to connect with Jewish ancestors while remaining true to oneself in the present. Mornings at the Stanton Street Shul illustrates in poignant and humorous ways the changes in a historic neighborhood facing the challenges of gentrification. It offers readers with no prior knowledge of Judaism and synagogue life a portrait that is at once intimate and intelligible. Most important, perhaps, it shows the congregation's members to be anything but a monochromatic set of uniform "believers" but rather a gathering of vibrant, imperfect, indisputably down-to-earth individuals coming together to make a community.

Text: English, German

Founded in 1794 as a frontier city on the Black Sea, Odessa soon grew to be one of Russia's busiest seaports. Settlers of all nationalities went there to seek their fortune, among them Jews who came to form one of the largest, wealthiest, and most culturally fertile Jewish communities in Europe. This history of Jewish Odessa traces the rise of that community from its foundation in 1794 to the pogroms of 1881 that erupted after the assassination of Alexander II. Zipperstein emphasizes Jewish acculturation: changes in behavior, attitude, and ideology as reflected in schools, synagogues, newspapers, and other institutions of the period. The patterns set then affected the community's cultural development well into the second decade of the twentieth century. More a modern metropolis than any other Russian city with a significant Jewish population, Odessa offers a window into the diversity of Russian Jewish experience.

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.