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The Institute of Jewish Studies, founded in 1954 by the late Alexander Altmann, is dedicated to the promotion of all aspects of scholarship in Jewish Studies and related fields. Its programmes include public lectures, seminars, and annual conferences. All lectures and conferences are open to the general public. Jewish history has been extensively studied from social, political, religious, and intellectual perspectives, but the history of Jewish consumption and leisure has largely been ignored. The hitherto neglect of scholarship on Jewish consumer culture arises from the tendency within Jewish studies to chronicle the production of high culture and entrepreneurship. Yet consumerism played a central role in Jewish life. This volume is the first of its kind to deal with the topic of Jewish consumer culture. It gives new insights on Jewish belongings and longings and provides multiple readings of Jewish consumer culture as a vehicle of integration and identity in modern times
Homeland, Exile, Imagined Homelands are features of the modern experience and relate to the cultural and historical dilemmas of loss, nostalgia, utopia, travel, longing, and are central for Jews and others. This book is an exploration into a world of boundary crossings and of desired places and alternate identities, into a world of adopted kin and invented allegiances.
Diaries, testimonies and memoirs of the Holocaust often include at least as much on the family as on the individual. Victims of the Nazi regime experienced oppression and made decisions embedded within families. Even after the war, sole survivors often described their losses and rebuilt their lives with a distinct focus on family. Yet this perspective is lacking in academic analyses. In this work, scholars from the United States, Israel, and across Europe bring a variety of backgrounds and disciplines to their study of the Holocaust and its aftermath from the family perspective. Drawing on research from Belarus to Great Britain, and examining both Jewish and Romani families, they demonstrate the importance of recognizing how people continued to function within family units—broadly defined—throughout the war and afterward.
The book investigates and compares the role of artistic and academic refugees from National Socialism acting as "cultural mediators" or "agents of knowledge" between their origin and host societies. By doing so, it locates itself at the intersection of the recently emerging field of the history of knowledge, transnational history, migration, exile, as well as cultural transfer studies. The case studies provided in this volume are of global scope, focusing on routes of escape and migration to Iceland, Italy, the Near East, Portugal and Shanghai, and South-, Central-, and North America. The chapters examine the hybrid ways refugees envisaged, managed, organized, and subsequently mediated their...
This volume explores the global transformations of contemporary Jewishness, which give renewed meaning to identity, tradition, and politics in our post secular world.
The Jewish family has been the subject of much admiration and analysis, criticism and myth-making, not just but especially in modern times. As a field of inquiry, its place is at the intersection – or in the shadow – of the great topics in Jewish Studies and its contributing disciplines. Among them are the modernization and privatization of Judaism and Jewish life;integration and distinctiveness of Jews as individuals and as a group;gender roles and education. These and related questions have been the focus of modern Jewish family research, which took shape as a discipline in the 1910s. This issue of PaRDeS traces the origins of academic Jewish family research and takes stock of its deve...
The Yiddish Theater Stage as a Temporary Home takes us through the fascinating life and career of the most important comic duo in Yiddish Theater, Shimen Dzigan and Isroel Shumacher. Spanning over the course of half a century – from the beginning of their work at the Ararat avant-garde Yiddish theater in Łodz, Poland to their Warsaw theatre – they produced bold, groundbreaking political satire. The book further discusses their wanderings through the Soviet Union during the Second World War and their attempt to revive Jewish culture in Poland after the Holocaust. It finally describes their time in Israel, first as guest performers and later as permanent residents. Despite the restrictions on Yiddish actors in Israel, the duo insisted on performing in their language and succeeded in translating the new Israeli reality into unique and timely satire. In the 1950s, they voiced a unique – among the Hebrew stages – political and cultural critique. Dzigan continued to perform on his own and with other Israeli artists until his death in 1980.
A little over 100 years ago, the first production of An-sky’s The Dybbuk, a play about the possession of a young woman by a dislocated spirit, opened in Warsaw. In the century that followed, The Dybbuk became a theatrical conduit for a wide range of discourses about Jews, belonging, and modernity. This timeless Yiddish play about spiritual possession beyond the grave would go on to exert a remarkable and unforgettable impact on modern theater, film, literature, music, and culture. The Dybbuk Century collects essays from an interdisciplinary group of scholars who explore the play’s original Yiddish and Hebrew productions and offer critical reflections on the play’s enduring influence. The collection will appeal to scholars, students, and theater practitioners, as well as general readers.
The unifying thread of the interdisciplinary volume Jewish and Non-Jewish Spaces in the Urban Context is the fact that Jewish spaces are almost always generated in relation to non-Jewish spaces; they determine and influence each other. This general phenomenon will be scrutinized and put to the test again and again in a varied collection of articles by international experienced researchers as well as junior scholars using various urban contexts and discourses as data. From the viewpoints of different temporal and regional research traditions and disciplines the contributors deal with the question of how Jewish and non-Jewish spaces are imagined, constructed, negotiated and intertwined. All ex...