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Regional Jewish history at its best.

 

This book is an anthology of essays designed to introduce readers to key issues in this growing field of scholarship and to encourage further study. Divided into five sections--“Jews and Judaism,” “Small Town Life,” “Business and Governance,” “Interaction,” and “Identity”--the essays cover a broad geographical and chronological span and address a variety of topics, including economics, politics, roles of women, ethnicity, and race. This organizational structure enhances the volume’s historical treatment of regional Jewish history and lends itself to cross-disciplinary study in fields such as cultural studies, religious studies, and political science.

         

 

 

Enacted nearly fifty years ago, the Civil Rights Act codified a new vision for American society by formally ending segregation and banning race and gender discrimination in the workplace. But how much change did the legislation actually produce? As employers responded to the law, did new and more subtle forms of inequality emerge in the workplace? In an insightful analysis that combines history with a rigorous empirical analysis of newly available data, Documenting Desegregation offers the most comprehensive account to date of what has happened to equal opportunity in America—and what needs to be done in order to achieve a truly integrated workforce. Weaving strands of history, cognitive psychology, and demography, Documenting Desgregation provides a compelling exploration of the ways legislation can affect employer behavior and produce change. Authors Kevin Stainback and Donald Tomaskovic-Devey use a remarkable historical record—data from more than six million workplaces collected by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) since 1966—to present a sobering portrait of race and gender in the American workplace. Progress has been decidedly uneven: black men, black women, and white women have prospered in firms that rely on educational credentials when hiring, though white women have advanced more quickly. And white men have hardly fallen behind—they now hold more managerial positions than they did in 1964. The authors argue that the Civil Rights Act's equal opportunity clauses have been most effective when accompanied by social movements demanding changes. EEOC data show that African American men made rapid gains in the 1960s at the height of the Civil Rights movement. Similarly, white women gained access to more professional and managerial jobs in the 1970s as regulators and policymakers began to enact and enforce gender discrimination laws. By the 1980s, however, racial desegregation had stalled, reflecting the dimmed status of the Civil Rights agenda. Racial and gender employment segregation remain high today, and, alarmingly, many firms, particularly in high-wage industries, seem to be moving in the wrong direction and have shown signs of resegregating since the 1980s. To counter this worrying trend, the authors propose new methods to increase diversity by changing industry norms, holding human resources managers to account, and exerting renewed government pressure on large corporations to make equal employment opportunity a national priority. At a time of high unemployment and rising inequality, Documenting Desegregation provides an incisive re-examination of America's tortured pursuit of equal employment opportunity. This important new book will be an indispensable guide for those seeking to understand where America stands in fulfilling its promise of a workplace free from discrimination.

In Dolor y Alegría (Sorrow and Joy), fifteen mothers, grandmothers, and great grandmothers in the Mexican city of Cuernavaca speak about the dramatic effects that urbanization and rapid social change have had on their lives.  Sarah LeVine deftly combines these autobiographical vignettes with ethnographic material, survey findings, and her own observations.  The result is a vivid picture of contrast and continuity.

While many earlier publications have focused on the poor of Latin America who live at the margins of urban life, Dolor y Alegría explores the experiences of ordinary working and lower-middle class women, most of them transplants from villages and small towns to a densely populated city neighborhood.  In their early years, many experienced family disruption, emotional deprivation, and economic hardship; but steadily increasing educational opportunities, improved health care, and easily available contraception have significantly altered how the younger women relate to their families and the larger society.

Today’s Mexican schoolgirl, LeVine shows, is encouraged to apply herself to her studies for her own benefit, and the longer she remains in school, the greater the self-confidence she will carry with her into the world of work and later into marriage and motherhood.  Hard economic times have forced many married women into the workplace where their sense of personal efficacy is enhanced; at the same time, in the domestic sphere, their earnings allow them greater negotiating power with husbands and male relatives.  Changes are not confined to the younger generation.  Older women are enjoying better health and living longer; but with adult children either less able or willing to accept responsibility for aged parents than they were in the past, anxiety runs high and family relations are often strained.

Dolor y Alegría takes a close look at the efforts of three generations of Mexican women to redefine themselves in both family and workplace; it shows that today’s young woman has very different expectations of herself and others from those that her grandmother or even her mother had.

In Domestic Economies, Susanna Rosenbaum examines how two groups of women—Mexican and Central American domestic workers and the predominantly white, middle-class women who employ them—seek to achieve the "American Dream." By juxtaposing their understandings and experiences, she illustrates how immigrant and native-born women strive to reach that ideal, how each group is indispensable to the other's quest, and what a vital role reproductive labor plays in this pursuit. Through in-depth ethnographic research with these women at work, at home, and in the urban spaces of Los Angeles, Rosenbaum positions domestic service as an intimate relationship that reveals two versions of female personhood. Throughout, Rosenbaum underscores the extent to which the ideology of the American Dream is racialized and gendered, exposing how the struggle for personal worth and social recognition is shaped at the intersection of motherhood and paid employment.

Mexican Americans make up the largest minority in Idaho, yet they seemingly live in a different world from the dominant Anglo population, and because of pervasive stereotypes and exclusive policies, their participation in the community's social, economic, and political life is continually impeded.

This unique ethnographic study of a small Idaho community with a large Hispanic population examines many dimensions of the impact race relations have on everyday life for rural Mexican Americans.

Most Americans would never willingly revisit their high school experiences; the nation’s school systems reflect the broader society’s hierarchical emphasis on race, class, and gender. While schools purport to provide equal opportunities for all students, this rarely happens in actuality—particularly for girls. 

In Downed by Friendly Fire, Signithia Fordham unmasks and examines female-centered bullying in schools, arguing that it is essential to unmask female aggression, bullying, and competition, all of which directly relate to the structural violence embedded in the racialized and gendered social order. For two and a half years, Fordham conducted field research at “Underground Railroad High School,” a suburban high school in upstate New York. Through a series of composite student profiles, she examines the girls’ relationships to academic achievement, social competition, and aggression toward one another. Fordham argues that girls academically “compete to lose,” which only perpetuates their subordination through the misrecognition of their own competitive behaviors. She goes further to expand the meaning of violence to include what is seen as normal, including suffering, humiliation, and social and economic abuse. 

Using the concept “symbolic violence,” Fordham theorizes the psychological and social damage suffered especially by black girls in schools. The five narratives in Downed by Friendly Fire ultimately highlight the pain and suffering this violence produces as well as the ways in which it promotes inequality, exclusion, and marginalization among girls. 

At least 200,000 people have died in Mexico’s so-called drug war, and the worst suffering has been in Ciudad Juárez, across the border from El Paso, Texas. How did it get so bad? After three decades studying that question, Howard Campbell doesn’t believe there is any one answer. Misguided policies, corruption, criminality, and the borderland economy are all factors. But none of these reasons explain how violence in downtown Juárez has become heartbreakingly “normal.”

A rigorous yet moving account, Downtown Juárez is informed by the sex workers, addicts, hustlers, bar owners, human smugglers, migrants, and down-and-out workers struggling to survive in an underworld where horrifying abuses have come to seem like the natural way of things. Even as Juárez’s elite northeast section thrives on the profits of multinational corporations, and law-abiding citizens across the city mobilize against crime and official malfeasance, downtown’s cantinas, barrios, and brothels are tyrannized by misery.

Campbell’s is a chilling perspective, suggesting that, over time, violent acts feed off each other, losing their connection to any specific cause. Downtown Juárez documents this banality of evil—and confronts it—with the stories of those most affected.

Rómulo Gallegos is best known for being Venezuela’s first democratically elected president. But in his native land he is equally famous as a writer responsible for one of Venezuela’s literary treasures, the novel Doña Barbara. Published in 1929 and all but forgotten by Anglophone readers, Doña Barbara is one of the first examples of magical realism, laying the groundwork for later authors such as Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa.

Following the epic struggle between two cousins for an estate in Venezuela, Doña Barbara is an examination of the conflict between town and country, violence and intellect, male and female. Doña Barbara is a beautiful and mysterious woman—rumored to be a witch—with a ferocious power over men. When her cousin Santos Luzardo returns to the plains in order to reclaim his land and cattle, he reluctantly faces off against Doña Barbara, and their battle becomes simultaneously one of violence and seduction. All of the action is set against the stunning backdrop of the Venezuelan prairie, described in loving detail. Gallegos’s plains are filled with dangerous ranchers, intrepid cowboys, and damsels in distress, all broadly and vividly drawn. A masterful novel with an important role in the inception of magical realism, Doña Barbara is a suspenseful tale that blends fantasy, adventure, and romance.

Hailed as “the Bovary of the llano” by Larry McMurtry in his new foreword to this book, Doña Barbarais a magnetic and memorable heroine, who has inspired numerous adaptations on the big and small screens, including a recent television show that aired on Telemundo.

Ubiquitous illegal lotteries known as policy flourished in Chicago’s Black community during the overlapping waves of the Great Migration. Policy “queens” owned stakes in lucrative operations while women writers and clerks canvased the neighborhood, passed out winnings, and kept the books.

Elizabeth Schroeder Schlabach examines the complexities of Black women’s work in policy gambling. Policy provided Black women with a livelihood for themselves and their families. At the same time, navigating gender expectations, aggressive policing, and other hazards of the infromal economy led them to refashion ideas about Black womanhood and respectability. Policy earnings also funded above-board enterprises ranging from neighborhood businesses to philanthropic institutions, and Schlabach delves into the various ways Black women straddled the illegal policy business and reputable community involvement.

Vivid and revealing, Dream Books and Gamblers tells the stories of Black women in the underground economy and how they used their work to balance the demands of living and laboring in Black Chicago.

In the 1933 publication The Masters and the Slaves, Brazilian scholar and novelist Gilberto Freyre challenged the racist ideas of his day by defending the “African contribution” to Brazil’s culture. In so doing, he proposed that Brazil was relatively free of most forms of racial prejudice and could best be understood as a “racial democracy.” Over time this view has grown into the popular myth that racism in Brazil is very mild or nonexistent.

This myth contrasts starkly with the realities of a pernicious racial inequality that permeates every aspect of Brazilian life. To study the grip of this myth on African Brazilians’ views of themselves and their nation, Robin E. Sheriff spent twenty months in a primarily black shantytown in Rio de Janeiro, studying the inhabitants’s views of race and racism. How, she asks, do poor African Brazilians experience and interpret racism in a country where its very existence tends to be publicly denied? How is racism talked about privately in the family and publicly in the community—or is it talked about at all?

Sheriff’s analysis is particularly important because most Brazilians live in urban settings, and her examination of their views of race and racism sheds light on common but underarticulated racial attitudes. This book is the first to demonstrate that urban African Brazilians do not subscribe to the racial democracy myth and recognize racism as a central factor shaping their lives.

In the American media, Russian mail-order brides are often portrayed either as docile victims or as gold diggers in search of money and green cards. Rarely are they allowed to speak for themselves. Until now. In Dreaming of a Mail-Order Husband, six Russian women who are in search of or have already found U.S. husbands via listings on the Internet tell their stories. Ericka Johnson, an American researcher of gender and technology, interviewed these women and others. The women, in their twenties and thirties, describe how they placed listings on the Internet and what they think about their contacts with Western men. They discuss their expectations about marriage in the United States and their reasons for wishing to emigrate. Their differing backgrounds, economic situations, and educational levels belie homogeneous characterizations of Russian mail-order brides.

Each chapter presents one woman’s story and then links it to a discussion of gender roles, the mail-order bride industry, and the severe economic and social constraints of life in Russia. The transitional economy has often left people, after a month’s work, either unpaid or paid unexpectedly with a supply of sunflower oil or toilet paper. Women over twenty-three are considered virtually unmarriageable in Russian society. Russia has a large population of women who are single, divorced, or widowed, who would like to be married yet feel that they have no chance finding a Russian husband. Grim realities such as these motivate women to seek better lives abroad. For many of those seeking a mail-order husband, children or parents play significant roles in the search for better lives, and they play a role in Johnson’s account as well. In addition to her research in the former Soviet Union, Johnson conducted interviews in the United States, and she shares the insights—about dating, marriage, and cross-cultural communication—of a Russian-American married couple who met via the Internet.

            Ganesh Sitaraman, who has provided a foreword for this centennial edition, suggests that Lippmann’s classic still has much to say to twenty-first-century progressives. The underlying solutions for our time, he believes, are similar to those of Lippman’s era. Sitaraman contends that American society can regain mastery over drift by reforming finance and reducing inequality, by rethinking the relationship between corporations and workers, and by embracing changes in social life.

Have the last two decades produced a New York composed of two separate and unequal cities? As the contributors to Dual City reveal, the complexity of inequality in New York defies simple distinctions between black and white, the Yuppies and the homeless. The city's changing economic structure has intersected with an increasingly diversified population, providing upward mobility for some groups while isolating others. As race, gender, ethnicity, and class become ever more critical components of the postindustrial city, the New York experience illuminates not just one great city, or indeed all large cities, but the forces affecting most of the globe. "The authors constitute an impressive assemblage of seasoned scholars, representing a wide array of pertinent disciplines. Their product is a pioneering volume in the social sciences and urban studies...the 20-page bibliography is a major research tool on its own." —Choice

Atop a scenic bluff overlooking the Mississippi River and downtown Dubuque there once lay a graveyard dating to the 1830s, the earliest days of American settlement in Iowa. Though many local residents knew the property had once been a Catholic burial ground, they believed the graves had been moved to a new cemetery in the late nineteenth century in response to overcrowding and changing burial customs. But in 2007, when a developer broke ground for a new condominium complex here, the heavy machinery unearthed human bones. Clearly, some of Dubuque’s early settlers still rested there—in fact, more than anyone expected. For the next four years, staff with the Burials Program of the University of Iowa Office of the State Archaeologist excavated the site so that development could proceed.

The excavation fieldwork was just the beginning. Once the digging was done each summer, skeletal biologist Robin M. Lillie and archaeologist Jennifer E. Mack still faced the enormous task of teasing out life histories from fragile bones, disintegrating artifacts, and the decaying wooden coffins the families had chosen for the deceased. Poring over scant documents and sifting through old newspapers, they pieced together the story of the cemetery and its residents, a story often surprising and poignant. Weaving together science, history, and local mythology, the tale of the Third Street Cemetery provides a fascinating glimpse into Dubuque’s early years, the hardships its settlers endured, and the difficulties they did not survive.

While they worked, Lillie and Mack also grappled with the legal and ethical obligations of the living to the dead. These issues are increasingly urgent as more and more of America’s unmarked (and marked) cemeteries are removed in the name of progress. Fans of forensic crime shows and novels will find here a real-world example of what can be learned from the fragments left in time’s wake.

In a bold departure from previous scholarship, Le’Trice D. Donaldson locates the often overlooked era between the Civil War and the end of World War I as the beginning of black soldiers’ involvement in the long struggle for civil rights. Donaldson traces the evolution of these soldiers as they used their military service to challenge white notions of an African American second-class citizenry and forged a new identity as freedom fighters willing to demand the rights of full citizenship and manhood.

Through extensive research, Donaldson not only illuminates this evolution but also interrogates the association between masculinity and citizenship and the ways in which performing manhood through military service influenced how these men struggled for racial uplift. Following the Buffalo soldier units and two regular army infantry units from the frontier and the Mexican border to Mexico, Cuba, and the Philippines, Donaldson investigates how these locations and the wars therein provide windows into how the soldiers’ struggles influenced black life and status within the United States.

Continuing to probe the idea of what it meant to be a military race man—a man concerned with the uplift of the black race who followed the philosophy of progress—Donaldson contrasts the histories of officers Henry Flipper and Charles Young, two soldiers who saw their roles and responsibilities as black military officers very differently.

Duty beyond the Battlefield demonstrates that from the 1870s to 1920s military race men laid the foundation for the “New Negro” movement and the rise of Black Nationalism that influenced the future leaders of the twentieth century Civil Rights movement.