front cover of Jewish Country Houses
Jewish Country Houses
Juliet Carey
Brandeis University Press, 2024
An exploration of the world of Jewish country houses, their architecture and collections, and the lives of the extraordinary men and women who created, transformed, and shaped them.
 
Country houses are powerful symbols of national identity, evoking the glamorous world of the landowning aristocracy. Jewish country houses—properties that were owned, built, or renewed by Jews—tell a more complex story of prejudice and integration, difference and connection. Many had spectacular art collections and gardens. Some were stages for lavish entertaining, while others inspired the European avant-garde. A few are now museums of international importance, many more are hidden treasures, and all were beloved homes that bear witness to the remarkable achievements of newly emancipated Jews across Europe—and to a dream of belonging that mostly came to a brutal end with the Holocaust.
 
Lavishly illustrated with historical images and a new body of work by the celebrated photographer Hélène Binet, this book is the first to tell the story of Jewish country houses, from the playful historicism of the National Trust’s Waddesdon Manor in Buckinghamshire to the modernist masterpiece that is the Villa Tugendhat in the Czech city of Brno—and across the pond to the United States, where American Jews infused the European country house tradition with their own distinctive concerns and experiences. This book emerges from a four-year research project funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council that aims to establish Jewish country houses as a focus for research, a site of European memory, and a significant aspect of European Jewish heritage and material culture.
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The Heller Social Impact Case Collection
Reimagining Capitalism through Case-Based Learning
Carole Carlson
Brandeis University Press, 2023
A pathbreaking collection of case studies that spotlights the corporate sector’s societal obligations.
 
At a time of deep and pervasive global challenges, future CEOs and administrators need to apply management principles to social impact cases. Today, top business schools across the country are meeting the moment, teaching courses about socially responsible investing and debating ways companies can stem the effects of climate change.
 
The case studies collected here are an invaluable resource for today’s students and tomorrow’s leaders. Chapters address an array of business sectors, including consumer goods, finance, health care, higher education, manufacturing, nongovernmental organizations, social services, and transportation. A teacher’s guide is available online to educators.
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CASE 2.1 Brenna Schneider at 99Degrees
Carole Carlson
Brandeis University Press, 2024
This case descibes the journey of a social entrepreneur as she establishes a new venture in the garment manufacturing business. It explores how she chose to become an entrepreneur, how she utilized her ecosystem to establish her venture and the choices and challenges she faced creating and financing a new venture. At the end she is faced with strategic decisions about how to grow the venture and its impact. This case provides an excellent illustration of the challenges faced by early stage entrepreneurs, as well as the value of using a hypothesis driven approach to evolving a new venture.
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One Planet, Many Worlds
The Climate Parallax
Dipesh Chakrabarty
Brandeis University Press, 2023
A historian offers a unique look at the pandemic, climate change, and the human versus nonhuman.
 
Climate change represents a deep conundrum for humans. It is difficult for humans to give up the unequal and yet accelerating pursuit of a good life based on an insatiable appetite for energy sourced mainly from fossil fuel. But the same pursuit, scientists insist, damages the geobiological system that supports the existence of interrelated forms of life, including ours, on this planet. The planet, seen thus, is one. The global sway of financial and extractive capital connects humans technologically, but they remain divided along multiple axes of inequality. Their worlds are many and their politics still global rather than planetary. In the narrative presented here, Chakrabarty continues to explore the temporal and intellectual fault lines that mark the collapse of the global and the planetary in human history.
 
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Holocaust Mothers and Daughters
Family, History, and Trauma
Federica K. Clementi
Brandeis University Press, 2013
In this brave and original work, Federica Clementi focuses on the mother-daughter bond as depicted in six works by women who experienced the Holocaust, sometimes with their mothers, sometimes not. The daughters’ memoirs, which record the “all-too-human” qualities of those who were persecuted and murdered by the Nazis, show that the Holocaust cannot be used to neatly segregate lives into the categories of before and after. Clementi’s discussions of differences in social status, along with the persistence of antisemitism and patriarchal structures, support this point strongly, demonstrating the tenacity of trauma—individual, familial, and collective—among Jews in twentieth-century Europe.
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French and Germans, Germans and French
A Personal Interpretation of France under Two Occupations, 1914–1918/1940–1944
Richard Cobb
Brandeis University Press, 2018
The noted historian Richard Cobb presents an engaging synthesis of research, combined with highly original observations and analyses of the war years in France. The reader is given access to a unique private chronicle of the relations between occupants and occupés, which provides the “I was there” understanding that is a hallmark of Cobb’s well-known ability to humanize history. The author characterizes this work as “an essay in interpretation and imagination, an evocation drawing heavily on literary, or semi-literary, sources and even on autobiography, rather than a straight piece of history. The book is about people, individuals, rather than about institutions and administration.” A recognized classic is now back in print.
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Don Isaac Abravanel
An Intellectual Biography
Cedric Cohen-Skalli
Brandeis University Press, 2020

Don Isaac Abravanel (1437–1508) was one of the great inventors of Jewish modernity. A merchant, banker, and court financier, a scholar versed in both Jewish and Christian writings, a preacher and exegete, a prominent political actor in royal entourages and Jewish communities, Abravanel was one of the greatest leaders and thinkers of Iberian Jewry in the aftermath of the expulsion of 1492. This book, the first new intellectual biography of Abravanel in twenty years, depicts his life in three cultural milieus—Portugal, Castile, and post-expulsion Italy—and analyzes his major literary accomplishments in each period. Abravanel was a traditionalist with innovative ideas, a man with one foot in the Middle Ages and the other in the Renaissance. An erudite scholar, author of a monumental exegetical opus that is still studied today, and an avid book collector, he was a transitional figure, defined by an age of contradictions. Yet, it is these very contradictions that make him such an important personality for understanding the dawn of Jewish modernity.

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Year Zero of the Arab-Israeli Conflict 1929
Hillel Cohen
Brandeis University Press, 2015
In late summer 1929, a countrywide outbreak of Arab-Jewish-British violence transformed the political landscape of Palestine forever. In contrast with those who point to the wars of 1948 and 1967, historian Hillel Cohen marks these bloody events as year zero of the Arab-Israeli conflict that persists today. The murderous violence inflicted on Jews caused a fractious—and now traumatized—community of Zionists, non-Zionists, Ashkenazim, and Mizrachim to coalesce around a unified national consciousness arrayed against an implacable Arab enemy. While the Jews unified, Arabs came to grasp the national essence of the conflict, realizing that Jews of all stripes viewed the land as belonging to the Jewish people. Through memory and historiography, in a manner both associative and highly calculated, Cohen traces the horrific events of August 23 to September 1 in painstaking detail. He extends his geographic and chronological reach and uses a non-linear reconstruction of events to call for a thorough reconsideration of cause and effect. Sifting through Arab and Hebrew sources—many rarely, if ever, examined before—Cohen reflects on the attitudes and perceptions of Jews and Arabs who experienced the events and, most significantly, on the memories they bequeathed to later generations. The result is a multifaceted and revealing examination of a formative series of episodes that will intrigue historians, political scientists, and others interested in understanding the essence—and the very beginning—of what has been an intractable conflict.
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Through the Sands of Time
A History of the Jewish Community of St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands
Judah M. Cohen
Brandeis University Press, 2012
In 1796, the Jews of St. Thomas founded the first Jewish congregation on this Caribbean island. By 1803, new arrivals from England, France, and the neighboring islands of St. Eustatius and Curaçao increased the original number from a handful of congregants to twenty-two families. Their small synagogue was destroyed by fires and rebuilt several times. The congregation numbered sixty-four families by the time the present synagogue was erected in 1833. It is by now the oldest synagogue in continuous use under the American flag. The congregation was also among the first to receive copies of the new West London Reform liturgy when it came out in 1841 and the first in this hemisphere to hold a Jewish confirmation ceremony, two years later. In addition, the St. Thomas Synagogue has produced its own unique religious literature relating to hurricanes! While the synagogue has served for over 200 years as a central religious and social gathering place, the Jews of St. Thomas have been highly mobile members of a progressive, cosmopolitan society that at times rivaled any in the world. As an accepted part of the larger community, members were accomplished, model citizens in a highly tolerant Danish colonial society. Jews took positions in government, served as auctioneers, participated in the local Masonic lodges, and represented other countries as consuls in St. Thomas. As traders in a mercantile culture, the Jews contributed to the activity of one of the world’s busiest harbors and played a crucial role in St. Thomas’s nineteenth-century rise to prominence in the northern Caribbean.
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Not Bad for Delancey Street
The Rise of Billy Rose
Mark Cohen
Brandeis University Press, 2018
He was amazing. “A little man with a Napoleonic penchant for the colossal and magnificent, Billy Rose is the country’s No. 1 purveyor of mass entertainment,” Life magazine announced in 1936. The Times reported that with 1,400 people on his payroll, Rose ran a larger organization than any other producer in America. “He's clever, clever, clever,” said Rose's first wife, the legendary Fanny Brice. “He's a smart little goose.” Not Bad for Delancey Street: The Rise of Billy Rose is the first biography in fifty years of the producer, World’s Fair impresario, songwriter, nightclub and theater owner, syndicated columnist, art collector, tough guy, and philanthropist, and the first to tell the whole story of Rose’s life. He combined a love for his thrilling and lucrative American moment with sometimes grandiose plans to aid his fellow Jews. He was an exaggerated exemplar of the American Jewish experience that predominated after World War II: secular, intermarried, bent on financial success, in love with Israel, and wedded to America. The life of Billy Rose was set against the great events of the twentieth century, including the Depression, when Rose became rich entertaining millions; the Nazi war on the Jews, which Rose combated through theatrical pageants that urged the American government to act; the postwar American boom, which Rose harnessed to attain extraordinary wealth; and the birth of Israel, where Rose staked his claim to immortality. Mark Cohen tells the unlikely but true story, based on exhaustive research, of Rose’s single-handed rescue in 1939 of an Austrian Jewish refugee stranded in Fascist Italy, an event about which Rose never spoke but which surfaced fifty years later as the nucleus of Saul Bellow’s short novel The Bellarosa Connection.
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Overweight Sensation
The Life and Comedy of Allan Sherman
Mark Cohen
Brandeis University Press, 2013
Allan Sherman was the Larry David, the Adam Sandler, the Sacha Baron Cohen of 1963. He led Jewish humor and sensibilities out of ethnic enclaves and into the American mainstream with explosively funny parodies of classic songs that won Sherman extraordinary success and acclaim across the board, from Harpo Marx to President Kennedy. In Overweight Sensation, Mark Cohen argues persuasively for Sherman’s legacy as a touchstone of postwar humor and a turning point in Jewish American cultural history. With exclusive access to Allan Sherman’s estate, Cohen has written the first biography of the manic, bacchanalian, and hugely creative artist who sold three million albums in just twelve months, yet died in obscurity a decade later at the age of forty-nine. Comprehensive, dramatic, stylish, and tragic, Overweight Sensation is destined to become the definitive Sherman biography.
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Jacob H. Schiff
A Study in American Jewish Leadership
Naomi W. Cohen
Brandeis University Press, 1999
The life of Jacob Schiff (1847 - 1920), banker, financier, and leader of the American Jewish community from 1880 to 1920, is in many ways the quintessential story of an immigrant's success in America. Born in Frankfurt in 1847, Schiff worked in several financial firms in Germany and the US before accepting a position at the New York banking firm of Kuhn, Loeb & Company in 1875 and settling for good in America. Part of a wealthy and powerful German Jewish circle that included the Warburgs and Rothschilds, Schiff played a central role in shaping American and European Jewish history. From his base on Wall Street, he was the foremost Jewish leader in what became known as the "Schiff era," grappling with all major issues and problems of the day, including the plight of Russian Jews under the czar, American and international anti-Semitism, care of needy Jewish immigrants, and the rise of Zionism. Based on a broad range of primary sources, Naomi W. Cohen's study emphasizes the role Schiff played as the preeminent leader of American Jewry at the turn of the century.
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Physics
Structure and Meaning
Leon N. Cooper
Brandeis University Press, 1992
Physics explores the scientific view of the world as it has developed from the earliest theories of Aristotle, Euclid, and Newton to modern theories, such as Einstein’s relativity and quantum mechanics. The classic text’s chief distinction is its time-proven ability to overcome anxieties about science by arousing interest in imaginative ideas. Those curious about physics but lacking science and mathematics backgrounds will find well-told history and countless stimulating examples. The historical approach enables students to examine philosophical questions from many viewpoints and ot see how current theory evolved. Physics has been thoroughly tested and refined by several decades of classroom teaching. A new prologue covers the years since the original 1968 edition. Chapter source notes, review problems, questions and answers, and mathematical appendices are included for those wishing to pursue topics further. The material is supplemented with clear line drawings, illustrations, graphs, charts, and tables.
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Ethics at the Bedside
Charles M. Culver
Brandeis University Press, 1993
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.
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front cover of CASE 5.3 The Interfaith Worker Rights Council Call Center
CASE 5.3 The Interfaith Worker Rights Council Call Center
Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld
Brandeis University Press, 2024
This case presents multiple operations challenges in a non-profit social services setting, with a focus on immigrant worker rights. The case inlcudes paid staff, volunteers, and executive leadership facing breakdowns in services to clients, legislators, advicates, and others. This is an excellent case for applying process-floew analysis in a social impact setting.
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front cover of CASE 7.2 The Unit-BasedTeam Meeting
CASE 7.2 The Unit-BasedTeam Meeting
Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld
Brandeis University Press, 2024
This simulation puts studens in front-line health care roles navigating typical issues faced in a team-based work system. The facilitator role illustrates the imporance of facilitation (even with a student new to the role). Confidential role information for the five roles brings students to the meeting with both common and competing interests. This is an excellent case for illustrating the front-line dynamics in a high performance worksystem, as well as the value of employee voice.
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