356 books match the query 'Jewish Studies' and 12 start with o

cover of Objects of Remembrance: A Memoir of American Opportunities and Viennese Dreams

Objects of Remembrance

A Memoir of American Opportunities and Viennese Dreams

Monroe E. Price

Central European University Press, 2009

This is a memoir about the power of American assimilation and opportunity in the face of persisting refugee realities. Like Isaac Bashevis Singer, Monroe Price recounts the continuing impact of European identities as families, cast from their homes by the rise of Hitler and the Third Reich, struggle to find their way in a new and challenging environment.

In a series of reflections, Price, who was born to a Jewish family in Vienna in 1938 and left when he was seven months old, seeks to create the Vienna of his infancy, including Jewish life, anti-Semitism, the Anschluss, and Kristallnacht (during which his father was arrested). He shifts to scenes of American socialization in the places he moved with his parents:: Macon, Georgia, Cincinnati, Ohio, and the experience of New York City. Through these reflections, Price illuminates ideas about family, religion, friends and schooling as well as deeply personal issues such as home, food and intimacy.

Price’s memoir weaves complicated strands—his Viennese origins, campaigns to distribute Jewish refugees away from New York City, the special qualities of Midwestern Ohio life in the 1950s—and the contrasting patterns of adjustment by different generations in his family in the American landscape. As he traces the particular path of his own life, Price reveals a more universal story of adjustment, and the relationship between a marginal community and the drama of American citizenship.

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cover of Observing America’s Jews

Observing America’s Jews

Marshall Sklare

Brandeis University Press, 1993

Collected essays by a preeminent authority on American Jewish history.
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cover of Observing America’s Jews

Observing America’s Jews

Marshall Sklare

University Press of New England, 2006

Collected essays by a preeminent authority on American Jewish history.
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cover of On the Arab-Jew, Palestine, and Other Displacements: Selected Writings of Ella Shohat

On the Arab-Jew, Palestine, and Other Displacements

Selected Writings of Ella Shohat

Ella Shohat

Pluto Press, 2017

*Winner of the MEMO Palestine Book Awards 2017*

Spanning several decades, Ella Shohat's work has introduced conceptual frameworks that fundamentally challenged conventional understandings of Palestine, Zionism and the Middle East, focusing on the pivotal figure of the Arab-Jew. This book gathers together her most influential political essays, interviews, speeches, testimonies and memoirs, as well as previously unpublished material.

Defying the binarist and Eurocentric Arab-versus-Jew rendering of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, Shohat's work has dared to engage with the deeper historical and cultural questions swirling around colonialism, Orientalism and nationalism. Shohat's paradigm-shifting work unpacks such fraught issues as the anomalies of the national/colonial in Zionist discourse; the narrating of Jewish pasts in Muslim spaces; the links and distinctions between the dispossession of the Nakba and the dislocation of Arab-Jews; the traumatic memories triggered by partition and border-crossing; the echoes within Islamophobia of the anti-Semitic figure of 'the Jew'; and the efforts to imagine a possible future inter-communal 'convivencia'.

Shohat's transdisciplinary perspective illuminates the cultural politics in and around the Middle East. Juxtaposing texts of various genres written in divergent contexts, the book offers a vivid sense of the author's intellectual journey.
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cover of On the Edge of the Abyss: The Jewish Unconscious before Freud

On the Edge of the Abyss

The Jewish Unconscious before Freud

Clémence Boulouque

University of Chicago Press, 2025

A history of the unconscious in public discourse before Freud and its significance for Jewish emancipation.
 
When Sigmund Freud published his theory of the unconscious, in 1899, he popularized an idea that had fascinated generations of Jewish philosophers before him. In this book, Clémence Boulouque charts the development of the pre-Freudian unconscious from subcultural inquiry to dominant discourse during the long nineteenth century. Although Freud’s scientific notion differed from Schelling’s mythical description of the abyss from which creation springs, its resonance with older ideas was celebrated as an opportunity to express specifically Jewish contributions to modernity. Indeed, Boulouque shows that the pre-Freudian unconscious emerged from conversations in Jewish mysticism about otherness and coexistence. In the hopeful years before World War I, Boulouque argues, such reflections offered the possibility of emancipation not only to Jews but to all.
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cover of On the Edge of the Holocaust: The Shoah in Latin American Literature and Culture

On the Edge of the Holocaust

The Shoah in Latin American Literature and Culture

Edna Aizenberg

Brandeis University Press, 2015

In this bold study, Edna Aizenberg offers a much-needed corrective to both Latin American literary scholarship and popular assumptions that the whole of Latin America served as a Nazi refuge both during and after World War II. Analyzing the treatment of the Shoah by five leading figures in Argentine, Brazilian, and Chilean writing—Alberto Gerchunoff, Clarice Lispector, Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriela Mistral, and Joao Guimaraes Rosa—Aizenberg illuminates how Latin American intellectuals engaged with the horrific information that reached them regarding the Holocaust, including the sympathy and collaboration of their own governments with the Nazis. Aizenberg emphasizes how—through fiction, journalism, and activism—these five culture-makers opposed and fought fascism. At the same time, her readings of individual texts confront shopworn clichés about Latin American writing and literature, suggesting deeper and richer dimensions to many canonical works. This interdisciplinary book fills critical gaps in both Holocaust and Latin American studies, and will be of great interest to scholars and students in both fields.
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cover of Once They Had a Country: Two Teenage Refugees in the Second World War

Once They Had a Country

Two Teenage Refugees in the Second World War

Muriel R. Gillick

University of Alabama Press, 2010

A powerful true story of survival, displacement, and hope in a world at war.

Muriel Gillick draws from a remarkable set of primary source materials, including letters, telegrams, and police records to relate the story of two teenage refugees during World War II. Once They Had a Country conveys well what it was like to establish a new life in a foreign country—over and over again and in constant fear for one’s life. The work tells of the extraordinary experiences of the author’s parents in Europe and demonstrates how citizens and the governments of Belgium, France, Switzerland, Brazil, America, China, and postwar Germany treated refugees. This story also reveals the origins of the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, the basis of contemporary international law affecting refugees in many countries today.

In addition to the dramatic human story it tells, this work brings the plight of refugees home to the reader—and with over 8 million refugees worldwide today, the subject of how individuals and nation states respond to these individuals is indeed timely.

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cover of One People, One Blood: Ethiopian-Israelis and the Return to Judaism

One People, One Blood

Ethiopian-Israelis and the Return to Judaism

Seeman, Don

Rutgers University Press, 2010

"Little by little, an egg will come to walk upon its own leg." Ethiopian-Israelis fondly quote this bit of Amharic folk wisdom, reflecting upon the slow, difficult history that allowed them to fulfill their destiny far from the Horn of Africa where they were born.

But today, along with those Ethiopians who have been recognized as Jews by the State of Israel, many who are called "Feres Mura," the descendants of Ethiopian Jews whose families converted to Christianity but have now reasserted their Jewish identity, still await full acceptance in Israel. Since the 1990s, they have sought homecoming through Israel's "Law of Return," but have been met with reticence and suspicion on a variety of fronts. One People, One Blood expertly documents this tenuous relationship and the challenges facing the Feres Mura.

Distilling more than ten years of ethnographic research, Don Seeman depicts the rich culture of the group, as well as their social and cultural vulnerability, and addresses the problems that arise when immigration officials, religious leaders, or academic scholars try to determine the legitimacy of Jewish identity or Jewish religious experience.

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cover of Open Your Hand: Teaching as a Jew, Teaching as an American

Open Your Hand

Teaching as a Jew, Teaching as an American

Ilana M. Blumberg

Rutgers University Press, 2019

Fifteen years into a successful career as a college professor, Ilana Blumberg encounters a crisis in the classroom that sends her back to the most basic questions about education and prompts a life-changing journey that ultimately takes her from East Lansing to Tel Aviv.  As she explores how civic and religious commitments shape the culture of her humanities classrooms, Blumberg argues that there is no education without ethics. When we know what sort of society we seek to build, our teaching practices follow.
 
In vivid classroom scenes from kindergarten through middle school to the university level, Blumberg conveys the drama of intellectual discovery as she offers novice and experienced teachers a pedagogy of writing, speaking, reading, and thinking that she links clearly to the moral and personal development of her students.
 
Writing as an observant Jew and as an American, Blumberg does not shy away from the difficult challenge of balancing identities in the twenty-first century: how to remain true to a community of origin while being a national and global citizen. As she negotiates questions of faith and citizenship in the wide range of classrooms she traverses, Blumberg reminds us that teaching - and learning - are nothing short of a moral art, and that the future of our society depends on it.
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cover of Oriental Neighbors: Middle Eastern Jews and Arabs in Mandatory Palestine

Oriental Neighbors

Middle Eastern Jews and Arabs in Mandatory Palestine

Abigail Jacobson and Moshe Naor

Brandeis University Press, 2016

Focusing on Oriental Jews and their relations with their Arab neighbors in Mandatory Palestine, this book analyzes the meaning of the hybrid Arab-Jewish identity that existed among Oriental Jews, and discusses their unique role as political, social, and cultural mediators between Jews and Arabs. Integrating Mandatory Palestine and its inhabitants into the contemporary Semitic-Levantine surroundings, Oriental Neighbors illuminates broad areas of cooperation and coexistence, which coincided with conflict and friction, between Oriental and Sephardi Jews and their Arab neighbors. The book brings the Oriental Jewish community to the fore, examines its role in the Zionist nation-building process, and studies its diverse and complex links with the Arab community in Palestine.
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cover of Orientalism and the Jews

Orientalism and the Jews

Edited by Ivan Davidson Kalmar and Derek Penslar

Brandeis University Press, 2004

At the turn of the twenty-first century, in spite of growing globalization there remains in the world a split between the West and the rest. The manner in which this split has been imagined and represented in Western civilization has been the subject of intense cross-disciplinary scrutiny, much of it under the rubric of “orientalism.” This debate, sparked by the 1978 publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism identifies the “Orient” as the Islamic world and to a lesser extent Hindu India. “Orientalism” signifies the way the West imagined this terrain. Going beyond Said’s framework, in their introduction to the volume, Kalmar and Penslar argue that orientalism is based on the Christian West’s attempts to understand and manage its relations with both of its monotheistic Others—Muslims and Jews. According to the editors, Jews have almost always been present whenever occidentals talked about or imagined the East; and the Western image of the Muslim Orient has been formed and continues to be formed in inextricable conjunction with Western perceptions of the Jewish people. Bringing together essays by an array of international scholars in a wide range of disciplines, Orientalism and the Jews demonstrates that, since the Middle Ages, Jews have been seen in the Western world as both occidental and oriental. Jews formed the model for medieval depictions of Muslim warriors. Representations of biblical Jews in early modern Europe provided essential sustenance for Western fictions about the Muslim world. And many of the Western protagonists of imperialism “discovered” real or imaginary Jews wherever their expeditions took them. Today orientalist attitudes by Israelis target not only Arabs but also the mizrahi (“oriental”) Israelis with roots in the Arab world as Others.
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cover of Out of the Frame: The Struggle for Academic Freedom in Israel

Out of the Frame

The Struggle for Academic Freedom in Israel

Ilan Pappe

Pluto Press, 2010

Even before he wrote his bestselling book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, historian Ilan Pappe was a controversial figure in Israel. In Out of the Frame, he gives a full account of his break with mainstream Israeli scholarship and its consequences.

Here he traces his journey of discovery from the whispers of Palestinian classmates to his realisation that the 'enemy's' narrative of the events of 1948 was correct. After completing his thesis at Oxford University in the early 1980s, he returned to Palestine determined to protect the memory of the Nakbah. For the first time he gives the details of the formidable opposition he faced in Israel, including death threats fed by the media, denunciations by the Knesset and calls for him to be sacked from his post at Haifa university.

This revealing work, written with dignity and humour, highlights Israel's difficulty in facing up to its past and forging a peaceful, inclusive future in Palestine.

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