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The newest volume of the annual Studies in Contemporary Jewry series features essays on the varied and often controversial ways Communism and Jewish history interacted during the 20th century. The volume's contents examine the relationship between Jews and the Communist movement in Poland, Russia, America, Britain, France, the Islamic world, and Germany.
Despair and disaster had taken their toll on the survivors of the Holocaust. Many of them were ready to give up on God, yet others sought the sustenance of Orthodox Judaism to nourish them after all their losses. To keep whatever spark of Jewish spirit was alive in the hearts of the refugees, to make it glow and burst into flame, the men and women of the Vaad Hatzala Rescue Committee worked long and hard. This is the story of a special breed of people, led by Rabbi Nathan Baruch. They dedicated themselves to a thankless task at the request of the greatest rabbinical leaders of the 20th century, and prevailed in their mission despite the lack of funds, the lack of people, the hostility of local populations and other Jewish organizations, and the chaos in Europe at the end of the war. What follows is the story of their battle for Jewish souls.
During the 1930s and the war years, the mood of American Christians toward refugees - Jews as well as other Christians who were victims of the Holocaust - was generally apathetic. After 1947 though, church leaders showed sustained interest in the issue when they learned that eighty percent of the displaced persons (DPs) were not Jews but European Christians running away from communism. America's Fair Share is the first serious research focusing on the extraordinary period of organized mass immigration and resettlement that took place in the postwar years. Haim Genizi compares the activities of the major sectarian relief agencies and examines in detail their help to hundreds of thousands of D...
In the early 1920s, English-Canadians were captivated by the urban campaigns of faith healing evangelists. Crowds squeezed into local arenas to witness the afflicted, "slain in the spirit," casting away braces and crutches. Professional faith healers, although denounced by critics as promoting mass hypnotism, gained notoriety and followers in their call for people to choose "the Lord for the Body." In his innovative work, James Opp explores the cultural practice of Protestant faith healing in Canada from its Victorian roots as an informal network of women sharing testimonies to its culmination in the organized professional campaigns of the twentieth century. Framing the phenomenon of divine ...
Joaquim Marques de Araújo ardently defended the Portuguese Inquisition for fifty years, only to find himself sidelined and forgotten. In Defence of the Faith offers an insightful examination of one man's career as a comissário of the Portuguese Inquisition in Pernambuco, Brazil, from 1770 to 1820. James Wadsworth argues that as legal extensions of the inquisitors in Lisbon, the comissários played a role far superior to what their small numbers might suggest. They were not the psychopaths, fanatics, or secret network of spies so common in the popular imagination. Rather, they were the linchpins in the inquisitional system that policed the orthodoxy of the Catholic flock and qualified candi...
"From 1884 to 1911, over 1.5 million working-class Canadians attended approximately 800 revival meetings held by celebrity American evangelists. Revival in the City traces the development of American revivalism, the support of the daily press "image makers," and working class acceptance of a populist form of conservative evangelicalism in Canada. Eric Crouse argues that by 1911, despite the endorsement of the masses and the press, protestant leaders, were less willing to work together to champion modern revivalism that embraced orthodox theology and popular culture strategies."--BOOK JACKET.
The Canada-Israel Nexus is a comparative political history of two settler nations, their colonial past, their relations with the indigenous peoples on whose territories they created and imposed new states, and their close linkages to former and current imperial powers. The battle for justice in the Middle East involves treachery, terrorism, exile, apostasy, and, yes, conspiracy. It is the stuff of legend, of which Canada, Israel, and their relationship is a crucial part. The conflict of interests and rights between the colonizer and the colonized is central to this narrative, as is the relationship between Jews and the state in history, and how that relationship was transformed by the creati...
Recent years have witnessed a revival of interest in holy figures in Canada. From the reputations of popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI as prolific saint-makers to the canonization of two figures associated with Canada - Brother André Bessette in 2010 and Kateri Tekakwitha in 2012 - saints are suddenly in the news and a topic of conversation. In Becoming Holy in Early Canada, Timothy Pearson explores the roots of sanctity in Canada to discover why reputations for holiness developed in the early colonial period and how saints were made in the local and immediate contexts of everyday life. Pearson weaves together the histories of well-known figures such as Marie de l'Incarnation with those o...
This fascinating book has two aims. The first is to draw attention to the existence of a persisting and virtually unrecognised tradition of 'philosemitism' which manifested itself in Britain and elsewhere in the English-speaking world during every significant international outbreak of antisemitism during the century after 1840. The second is to offer a typology of philosemitism, distinguishing between varieties of support for the Jewish people.
Impelled by economic deprivation at home and spiritual ambition abroad, nineteenth-century Irish clerics and laypeople reshaped the many sites where they came to pray, preach, teach, trade, and settle. So decisive was the role of religion in the worlds of Irish settlement that it helped to create a "Greater Ireland" that encompassed the entire English-speaking world and beyond. Rejecting the popular notion that the Irish were passive victims of imperial oppression, Religion and Greater Ireland demonstrates how religion opened up a vast world to exploit. The religious free market of the United States and the British Empire provided an opportunity and a level playing-field in which the Irish c...