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This original and thought-provoking study offers a fresh perspective on Zionism by exploring Hebrew culture’s ambivalent attitude toward modern sports. Drawing on extensive archival sources and contemporary literary theories, it focuses on Zionism’s surprising anxiety toward sports during the interwar heyday of “muscular Judaism,” revealing an unusual society in which athletes failed to attain national pride and distinction. Addressing themes such as the body, language, space, immigration, internationalism, amateurism, gender, and militarization, Embodying the Revolution presents an innovative reading of Jewish life in Mandate Palestine, linking the marginalization of sports to the meaning and experience of the Zionist Revolution. Idels' compelling interpretation of the appeal of sports, selfhood, and the compromises inherent in radical aspirations—narrated from the periphery of the interwar global rise of sports—challenges contemporary assumptions that dismiss ideology as an elitist myth.

Explores questions of identity and belonging through the lens of Canadian cultural production

What does it mean to be at home? In a critical engagement with notions of territory, identity, racial difference, separatism, multiculturalism, and homelessness, this book delves into the question of what it means to belong—in particular, what it means to be at home in Canada. Ephemeral Territories weaves together many narratives and representations of Canadian identity—from political philosophy and cultural theory to art and films such as Srinivas Krishna’s Lulu, Clement Virgo’s Rude, and Charles Biname’s Eldorado—to develop and complicate familiar views of identity and selfhood.

Canadian identity has historically been linked to a dual notion of culture traceable to the French and English strains of Canada’s colonial past. Erin Manning subverts this binary through readings that shift our attention from nationalist constructions of identity and territory to a more radical and pluralizing understanding of the political. As she brings together issues specific to Canada (such as Quebec separatism and Canadian landscape painting) and concerns that are more transnational (such as globalization and immigration), Manning emphasizes the truly cross-cultural nature of the problems of racism, gender discrimination, and homelessness. Thus this impassioned reading of Canadian texts also makes an important contribution to philosophical, cultural, and political discourses across the globe.

This collected volume offers an original perspective on the Baltic region by examining the intricate relationships between its diverse ethnic groups from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Rather than focusing solely on national narratives or comparisons of historical development, the book analyzes ethnic relations through the lenses of identity, governance, empire, and violence. The nearly constant redrawing of geographic borders and boundaries among communities during this period destabilized fixed identities, generating novel, hybrid ways of self-identification along with a hardening of oppositions. Innovative forms of coexistence came with violent, sometimes genocidal conflicts. The contributors explore topics such as evolving senses of belonging, the impact of imperial and Soviet rule, instances of cooperation and conflict, and the legacies of historical trauma. By incorporating new sources and interdisciplinary approaches, they update traditional understandings of nations and nationalism in the Baltic region and provide insights relevant to similar regions.