From the Kingdom of David to the Oslo Accords, Ruth Wisse offers a radical new way to think about the Jewish relationship to power. Traditional Jews believed that upholding the covenant with God constituted a treaty with the most powerful force in the universe; this later transformed itself into a belief that, unburdened by a military, Jews could pursue their religious mission on a purely moral plain. Wisse, an eminent professor of comparative literature at Harvard, demonstrates how Jewish political weakness both increased Jewish vulnerability to scapegoating and violence, and unwittingly goaded power-seeking nations to cast Jews as perpetual targets. Although she sees hope in the State of Israel, Wisse questions the way the strategies of the Diaspora continue to drive the Jewish state, echoing Abba Eban's observation that Israel was the only nation to win a war and then sue for peace. And then she draws a persuasive parallel to the United States today, as it struggles to figure out how a liberal democracy can face off against enemies who view Western morality as weakness. This deeply provocative book is sure to stir debate both inside and outside the Jewish world. Wisse's narrative offers a compelling argument that is rich with history and bristling with contemporary urgency.

Examines the events of the Holocaust within the context of World War II and Germany's economic and political history, while highlighting the main figures of the time.

InTheEnd of Economic Man, long recognized as a cornerstone work, Peter F.Drucker explains and interprets fascism and Nazism as fundamentalrevolutions. In some ways, this book anticipated by more than a decade theexistentialism that came to dominate the European political mood in thepostwar period. Drucker provides a special addition to the massive literatureon existentialism and alienation since World War II. TheEnd of EconomicManis a social and political effort to explain the subjective consequences ofthe social upheavals caused by warfare.

In the immediate aftermath of World War II, more than a quarter million Jewish survivors of the Holocaust lived among their defeated persecutors in the chaotic society of Allied-occupied Germany. Jews, Germans, and Allies draws upon the wealth of diary and memoir literature by the people who lived through postwar reconstruction to trace the conflicting ways Jews and Germans defined their own victimization and survival, comprehended the trauma of war and genocide, and struggled to rebuild their lives. In gripping and unforgettable detail, Atina Grossmann describes Berlin in the days following Germany's surrender--the mass rape of German women by the Red Army, the liberated slave laborers and homecoming soldiers, returning political exiles, Jews emerging from hiding, and ethnic German refugees fleeing the East. She chronicles the hunger, disease, and homelessness, the fraternization with Allied occupiers, and the complexities of navigating a world where the commonplace mingled with the horrific. Grossmann untangles the stories of Jewish survivors inside and outside the displaced-persons camps of the American zone as they built families and reconstructed identities while awaiting emigration to Palestine or the United States. She examines how Germans and Jews interacted and competed for Allied favor, benefits, and victim status, and how they sought to restore normality--in work, in their relationships, and in their everyday encounters. Jews, Germans, and Allies shows how Jews were integral participants in postwar Germany and bridges the divide that still exists today between German history and Jewish studies.

Hitchens has written a great deal of bracing good sense on politics & literature in the past decades. Much of it has been collected between the covers of this well-packed book. Since these pieces originally appeared in journals as wide-ranging as the TLS, Grand Street, Harper's, Mother Jones, The Nation & Spectator, only the most avid admirer would be likely to have come across them all. In addition to the predictable, eloquent Reagan-bashing, there are thoughtful essays on Paul Scott & his Raj Quartet, the contradictions of George Orwell, the Brideshead phenomenon, that very independent-minded Israeli Professor Israel Shahak, Conor Cruise O'Brien, even something as up-to-date as a perceptive review of Bonfire of the Vanities. Hitchens writes clearly, from a well-stocked mind, & is free of the cant that affects many political journalists. Why the kinds of views that he & his very kindred spirit Alexander Cockburn express so well never receive an airing on TV, where they'd reach a much wider audience, remains a source of shame to a supposedly free medium. In any case, book & magazine readers can feel fortunate that publishers suffer no such self-imposed restraints. -- Publishers Weekly

Germany's changing historical memory of World War II and its aftermath, as reflected in the official and public remembrance of the German war dead, exposes an unresolved tension between a discourse of guilt and a discourse of national suffering and victimization. In Germany, under the auspices of the Allied occupation, remembrance honored the victims of the Nazis and those who had fought against the regime. After the partition of Germany, a new culture emerged, memorializing the civilian dead and fallen German soldiers. Despite the fierce ideological rivalry between East and West Germany, however, certain similarities existed. The political leaderships who shaped these cultures ceased to confront their citizens with the question of guilt and instead depicted the German people as victims. In Guilt, Suffering, and Memory —whose Israeli edition was awarded the Jacob Bahat Prize for best original book—Gilad Margalit discusses the official remembrance ceremonies for the German war dead, the memorials erected to commemorate them, the public discussions of these disparate cultures, and their treatment in postwar German literature and film.

Winner of the 2013 National Jewish Book Award, Anthologies and Collections The year 1929 represents a major turning point in interwar Jewish society, proving to be a year when Jews, regardless of where they lived, saw themselves affected by developments that took place around the world, as the crises endured by other Jews became part of the transnational Jewish consciousness. In the United States, the stock market crash brought lasting economic, social, and ideological changes to the Jewish community and limited its ability to support humanitarian and nationalist projects in other countries. In Palestine, the anti-Jewish riots in Hebron and other towns underscored the vulnerability of the Zionist enterprise and ignited heated discussions among various Jewish political groups about the wisdom of establishing a Jewish state on its historical site. At the same time, in the Soviet Union, the consolidation of power in the hands of Stalin created a much more dogmatic climate in the international Communist movement, including its Jewish branches. Featuring a sparkling array of scholars of Jewish history, 1929 surveys the Jewish world in one year offering clear examples of the transnational connections which linked Jews to each other—from politics, diplomacy, and philanthropy to literature, culture, and the fate of Yiddish—regardless of where they lived. Taken together, the essays in 1929 argue that, whether American, Soviet, German, Polish, or Palestinian, Jews throughout the world lived in a global context.

This reference book by well-known Reconstruction expert Trefousse will be of great use to scholars and general readers. Pithy, readable articles, spanning the years 1862-96, reflect current scholarship on the period and thus focus heavily on race relations, the freed slaves, and restoration of the states. There are entries on court cases, terms (blacks, labor, etc.), organziations, states, laws, miscellaneous events, and major individuals. . . . As the only reference work of its type, it should find widespread applicability in libraries of any size. Library Journal This new reference book reflects the latest scholarship regarding the Reconstruction of the American South following the Civil War. In the past four decades, the guidelines set forth by William D. Dunning and his students, which portrayed the period as a time of horror for suffering Southerners over whom radicals, scalawags, and carpetbaggers rode roughshod, has been amended. Since World War II, the appearance of revised versions of the period, as well as favorable biographies of such major figures as Charles Sumner, Thaddeus Stevens, Benjamin F. Wade, Edwin M. Stanton, and George W. Julian, have transformed the historiography of Reconstruction. While many unresolved issues still remain, the field has benefited greatly from this reassessment. Hence, this outstanding single-volume reference, containing the most recent thinking on the period, will be of great help to scholars and the general public. No other reference focusing exclusively on Reconstruction exists. The dictionary stresses race relations, emancipation, the main participants in the struggle, and the restoration of the Southern states into the Union. Those states involved in some way or other in the process, including the border commonwealths, will be found here, as are the major Supreme Court decisions handed down during Reconstruction. Readable articles at each entry convey the principle information in an economical style and are followed in each case by a listing of the latest available literature, principally monographs and books rather than articles, in order to facilitate further research. Covering a time period from 1862 to 1896, the dictionary focuses on matters pertaining to the integration of freedmen and the restoration of the states. The preface and chronology of events preceed the conveniently organized dictionary section, which contains entries whose lengths vary depending on the relative importance of the concept or personality treated. Generally, the importance of individuals in reference to Reconstruction, rather than their general significance, has determined their inclusion. Each entry is followed by its own bibliography. The volume closes with a select bibliography and index. This outstanding reference belongs in every college and university library as well as in public libraries, and is eminently suitable for courses dealing with the Civil War and Reconstruction and for Civil War Roundtables. Civil War buffs and historians interested in nineteenth-century America will refer to it again and again.

“I have read all of Daniel Aaron’s books, and admired them, but in The Americanist I believe he has composed an intellectual and social memoir for which he will be remembered. His self-portrait is marked by personal tact and admirable restraint: he is and is not its subject. The Americanist is a vision of otherness: literary and academic friends and acquaintances, here and abroad. Eloquently phrased and free of nostalgia, it catches a lost world that yet engendered much of our own.” —Harold Bloom “ The Americanist is the absorbing intellectual autobiography of Daniel Aaron, who is the leading proponent and practitioner of American Studies. Written with grace and wit, it skillfully blends Daniel Aaron’s personal story with the history of the field he has done so much to create. This is a first-rate book by a first-rate scholar.” —David Herbert Donald, Professor Emeritus, Harvard University The Americanist is author and critic Daniel Aaron’s anthem to nearly a century of public and private life in America and abroad. Aaron, who is widely regarded as one of the founders of American Studies, graduated from the University of Michigan, received his Ph.D. from Harvard, and taught for over three decades each at Smith College and Harvard. Aaron writes with unsentimental nostalgia about his childhood in Los Angeles and Chicago and his later academic career, which took him around the globe, often in the role of America’s accidental yet impartial critic. When Walt Whitman, whom Aaron frequently cites as a touchstone, wrote, “I am large, I contain multitudes,” he could have been describing Daniel Aaron—the consummate erudite and Renaissance individual whose allegiance to the truth always outweighs mere partisan loyalty. Not only should Aaron’s book stand as a resplendent and summative work from one of the finest thinkers of the last hundred years, it also succeeds on its own as a first-rate piece of literature, on a par with the writings of any of its subjects. The Americanist is a veritable Who’s Who of twentieth-century writers Aaron interviewed, interacted with, or otherwise encountered throughout his life: Ralph Ellison, Robert Frost, Lillian Hellman, Richard Hofstadter, Alfred Kazin, Sinclair Lewis, Malcolm Muggeridge, John Crowe Ransom, Upton Sinclair, Edmund Wilson, Leonard Woolf, and W. B. Yeats, to name only a few. Aaron’s frank and personal observations of these literary lights make for lively reading. As well, scattered throughout The Americanist are illuminating portraits of American presidents living and passed—miniature masterworks of astute political observation that offer dazzlingly fresh approaches to well-trod subjects.

In addition to producing much other literature, Marxist economist Perlo (1912-99) wrote more than 3,000 People vs. Profits columns over 39 years for the Communist Party paper People's Weekly World . Survivors and colleagues reprint a selection based on their portrayal of conditions at the time. Presumably a second volume will consider foreign matters. Annotation (c) Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

The cause celebre of the 19th century, the Dreyfus Affair destabilized French society (1894-1906) and reverberated across the world. Its repercussions continue to this day. A deliberate miscarriage of justice, the public degradation of an innocent Jewish officer and his incarceration on Devil's Island, espionage, intrigue, media pressure, vehement antisemitism and political skulduggery--all these elements, based on historical records, are contained in George R. Whyte's trilogy of plays which also focuses on Emile Zola's letter to the President of France, J'Accuse, arguably history's most famous plea for human rights.

For more than twenty years, Winona LaDuke has impressed people around the world with her oratory and debate skills and as an advocate for Native American rights, champion of women’s and children’s issues, protector of the environment, and as a leading voice of the Green Party. A charismatic and inspiring speaker and writer, LaDuke possesses a stirring passion that comes through in the 30 speeches, articles, and fiction excerpts compiled in The Winona LaDuke Reader. This is the first collection of the many political speeches and "think-pieces" that she has written for magazines such as Sierra, Smithsonian’s American Indian, and more.

"The Tashkent-born Russian-American literary critic, editor, essayist, and journalist Vladislav Davidzon has been covering post-Soviet Ukraine for the past ten years, a tumultuous time for that country and the surrounding world. The 2014 "Revolution of Dignity" heralded a tremendous transformation of Ukrainian politics and society that has continued to ripple and reverberate throughout the world. These unprecedented events also wrought a remarkable cultural revolution in Ukraine itself. In late 2015, a year and a half after the 2014 Revolution swept away the presidency of the Moscow-leaning kleptocratic President Viktor Yanukovich, Davidzon and his wife founded a literary journal, The Odessa Review, focusing on newly emergent trends in film, literature, painting, design, and fashion. The journal became an East European cultural institution, publishing outstanding writers in the region and beyond. From his vantage point as a journalist and editor, Davidzon came to observe events and know many of the leading figures in Ukrainian politics and culture, and to write about them for a Western audience. Davidzon later found himself in the center of world events as he became a United States government witness in the Ukraine scandal that shook the presidency of Donald Trump. This eagerly anticipated debut tells the real story of what happened in Ukraine from the keen and resilient perspective of an observer at its center"-- Provided by publisher.

Final Edition is a one-issue-only political magazine written by people who are aesthetes and literary writers and edited by Wallace Shawn, who seriously believes that part of our national problem is that the people who run the country have a crude and minimal imaginative life and are too little acquainted with the quartets of Beethoven. The issue consists of five pieces: "Before the Election—Fragments from a Diary 2004" by Wallace Shawn The diarist broods on the analogy between the addiction to pornography and nationalistic obsessions, and he wonders whether a collection of people who vote in a kind of sleepwalking ignorance can ever be called a democracy. "Invitation to a Degraded World" by Jonathan Schell In this essay, Schell meditates on the comic book/disaster movie view of life, in which bin Laden and George Bush are both immersed, and discusses the "standing army" stationed in all of our homes, the media. "The Webern Variations" by Mark Strand Strand’s hauntingly delicious poem explores what is most poignantly beautiful, while exploring the themes of darkness, descent, decline, and nothingness. Wallace Shawn Interviews Noam Chomsky For those with no acquaintance with Chomsky, this could make a wonderful introduction, while offering surprising insights to those who know him well. Chomsky is electric with vitality, wit, and rage as he ranges ferociously across the present and ancient worlds, giving his thoughts on the development of the internet, the 2004 election, and the God of the Bible. In an odd way, the interview highlights the inspirational and optimistic quality of this enormously angry man. "The Twilight of the Superheroes" by Deborah Eisenberg In this brooding, passionate, and brilliant short story, Deborah Eisenberg paints a brutally honest portrait of New York City today and of our lives today, wherever we live. Through observing the lives of some sophisticated residents of the great metropolis, we encounter truths which are both poetic and deeply political.