This absorbing biography chronicles the life and work of one of the most important entertainers of the twentieth century. Eddie Cantor (1892–1964) starred in theater, film, radio, and television. His immense popularity across a variety of media, his pride in his Jewish heritage, and his engagement with pressing political issues distinguished him from other headliners of his era. Paying equal attention to Cantor’s humor and politics, Weinstein documents his significance as a performer, philanthropist, and activist. Many show business figures quietly shed their Jewish backgrounds or did not call attention to the fact that they were Jewish. Cantor was different. He addressed the vital issues of his times, including acculturation, national identity, and antisemitism. He was especially forceful in opposing Nazism and paid a price for this activism in 1939, when a sponsor cancelled the actor’s radio program. In this carefully researched book, Weinstein uncovers sketches and routines filled with Jewish phrases, allusions, jokes, songs, and stories. Cantor frequently did not mark this material as “Jewish,” relying instead on attentive audiences to interpret his coded performances. Illustrated with thirty photographs, The Eddie Cantor Story examines the evolution, impact, and legacy of Cantor’s performance style. His music and comedy not only shaped the history of popular entertainment, but also provide a foundation for ongoing efforts to redefine Jewish culture and build community in contemporary America.

Although recent scholarship has examined gender issues in Judaism with regard to texts, rituals, and the rabbinate, there has been no full-length examination of the education of Jewish children in day schools. Drawing on studies in education, social science, and psychology, as well as personal interviews, the authors show how traditional (mainly Orthodox) day school education continues to re-inscribe gender inequities and socialize students into unhealthy gender identities and relationships. They address pedagogy, school practices, curricula, and textbooks, as along with single-sex versus coed schooling, dress codes, sex education, Jewish rituals, and gender hierarchies in educational leadership. Drawing a stark picture of the many ways both girls and boys are molded into gender identities, the authors offer concrete resources and suggestions for transforming educational practice.

In this book, based on lectures delivered at the Historical Society of Israel, the famed historian G. W. Bowersock presents a searching examination of political developments in the Arabian Peninsula on the eve of the rise of Islam. Recounting the growth of Christian Ethiopia and the conflict with Jewish Arabia, he describes the fall of Jerusalem at the hands of a late resurgent Sassanian (Persian) Empire. He concludes by underscoring the importance of the Byzantine Empire’s defeat of the Sassanian forces, which destabilized the region and thus provided the opportunity for the rise and military success of Islam in the seventh century. Using close readings of surviving texts, Bowersock sheds new light on the complex causal relationships among the Byzantine, Ethiopian, Persian, and emerging Islamic forces.

The life of an unconscious, terminally ill father is prolonged by his stubborn daughters over the advice of doctors. Parents of a permanently unconscious child deny the hopelessness of her condition for seven years until faced with having to care for her at home. A woman’s wish to die but still receive treatment for pain is at first not accepted by her doctor. These are a few of the scenarios described in this emotionally engaging and thought-provoking book. Physicians, philosophers, theologians, and a legal expert recount a dozen revealing stories about how moral decisions are made in modern hospitals. As the question of medical treatment moves from what is possible to what is proper, more and more people will face the issues raised in this book, whether as patients, relatives, or practitioners.

The defense industry has, to some people’s surprise, the broadest and most sustained set of ethics programs of any sector of American business today. Lockheed Martin, which specializes in a host of high-technology products and services for the federal government, has dramatically escalated its formal ethics and business conduct program since the mega-corporation was formed through a merger in 1995. The Ethics and Business Conduct Division employs 65 “ethics officers” in sites around the United States, and it requires the firm’s 130,000-plus employees to devote at least one hour per year to consideration of the ethical issues of the business, at a cost of millions of dollars per year. Daniel Terris spent two years researching Lockheed Martin materials and interviewing its ethics officers and ordinary employees to develop this rich case study of the ethics program at this powerful global corporation. This study begins with a survey of American attitudes toward ethics in business over the past century, raising the question of whether ethics can be genuinely built into the modern mega-corporation. Terris then develops a portrait of Lockheed Martin—its history and the nature of its far-flung businesses—turning at last to its ethics program, which was created following a series of bribery, overcharging, and corruption scandals in the 1970s and 1980s. By 1996, Lockheed Martin had in place some dull, preachy ethics programs designed to provide basic information on telling right from wrong in business practice. But then-CEO Norm Augustine wanted to liven things up, so he turned to an unlikely source of inspiration: the irreverent Dilbert comic strip. The company came up with a board game that resembled Clue, but used Dilbert characters to explore ethical case studies drawn from real-life Lockheed Martin incidents. Terris examines the success of the board game, as well as subsequent efforts including special workshops, a film festival, and biennial ethics surveys to engage employees in broad-based discussions of ethics at work. Although Terris applauds Lockheed Martin’s ethics program as “gloriously democratic” in its focus on the responsibility of every worker for the ethical dimensions of his or her actions, he is concerned that the broad-based focus tends to divert attention from the ethical responsibilities of senior management and the moral complexities of collective decision-making. While he admires the ambitious scope of the program, he notes that the corporation’s definition of “ethics” focuses on individual behavior rather than on the impact of the corporation’s broader policies on local, national, and global communities. The ultimate effect of such programs may be to create more ethical business practices—but, ironically, at the expense of the public good.

Why do we read? Drawing from a series of lectures delivered at the Historical Society of Israel in 2005, Brian Stock presents a model for relating ascetic and aesthetic principles in Western reading practices. He begins by establishing the primacy of the ethical objective in the ascetic approach to literature in Western classical thought from Plato to Augustine. This is understood in contrast to the aesthetic appreciation of literature that finds pleasure in the reading of the text in and of itself. Examples of this long-standing tension as displayed in a literary topos, first outlined in these lectures, which describes “scenes of reading,” are found in the works of Peter Abelard, Dante, and Virginia Woolf, among others. But, as this original and often surprising work shows, the distinction between the ascetic and aesthetic impulse in reading, while necessary, is often misleading. As he writes, “All Western reading, it would appear, has an ethical component, and the value placed on this component does not change much over time.” Tracing the ascetic component of reading from Late Antiquity through the Renaissance and beyond, to Coleridge and Schopenhauer, Stock reveals the ascetic or ethical as a constant with the aesthetic serving as opposition, parallel force, and handmaiden, underscoring the historical consistency of the reading experience through the ages and across various media.

This book makes accessible—for the first time in English—declassified archival documents from the former Soviet Union, rabbinic sources, and previously untranslated memoirs, illuminating everyday Jewish life as the site of interaction and negotiation among and between neighbors, society, and the Russian state, from the beginning of the nineteenth century to World War I. Focusing on religion, family, health, sexuality, work, and politics, these documents provide an intimate portrait of the rich diversity of Jewish life. By personalizing collective experience through individual life stories—reflecting not only the typical but also the extraordinary—the sources reveal the tensions and ruptures in a vanished society. An introductory survey of Russian Jewish history from the Polish partitions (1772–1795) to World War I combines with prefatory remarks, textual annotations, and a bibliography of suggested readings to provide a new perspective on the history of the Jews of Russia.

In this wide-ranging consideration of intellectual diasporas, historian Peter Burke questions what distinctive contribution to knowledge exiles and expatriates have made. The answer may be summed up in one word: deprovincialization. Historically, the encounter between scholars from different cultures was an education for both parties, exposing them to research opportunities and alternative ways of thinking. Deprovincialization was in part the result of mediation, as many émigrés informed people in their “hostland” about the culture of the native land, and vice versa. The detachment of the exiles, who sometimes viewed both homeland and hostland through foreign eyes, allowed them to notice what scholars in both countries had missed. Yet at the same time, the engagement between two styles of thought, one associated with the exiles and the other with their hosts, sometimes resulted in creative hybridization, for example, between German theory and Anglo-American empiricism. This timely appraisal is brimming with anecdotes and fascinating findings about the intellectual assets that exiles and immigrants bring to their new country, even in the shadow of personal loss.