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Book The Pale of Settlement

    Book Details:
  • Author : Margot Singer
  • Publisher : University of Georgia Press
  • Release : 2010-04-15
  • ISBN : 082033586X
  • Pages : 232 pages

Download or read book The Pale of Settlement written by Margot Singer and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2010-04-15 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In settings from Jerusalem to Manhattan, from the archaeological ruins of the Galilee to Kathmandu, The Pale of Settlement gives us characters who struggle to piece together the history and myths of their family’s past. This collection of linked short stories takes its title from the name of the western border region of the Russian empire within which Jews were required to live during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Susan, the stories’ main character, is a woman trapped in her own border region between youth and adulthood, familial roots in the Middle East and a typical American existence, the pull of Jewish tradition and the independence of a secular life. In “Helicopter Days,” Susan discovers that the Israeli cousin she grew up with has joined a mysterious cult. “Lila’s Story” braids Susan’s memories of her grandmother—a German Jew arriving in Palestine to escape the Holocaust—with the story of her own affair with a married man and an invented narrative of her grandmother’s life. In “Borderland,” while trekking in Nepal, Susan meets an Israeli soldier who carries with him the terrible burden of his experience as a border guard in the Gaza Strip. And in the haunting title story, bedtime tales are set against acts of terrorism and memories of a love beyond reach. The stories of The Pale of Settlement explore the borderland between Israelis and American Jews, emigrants and expatriates, and vanished homelands and the dangerous world in which we live today.

Book The Jewish Dark Continent

    Book Details:
  • Author : Nathaniel Deutsch
  • Publisher : Harvard University Press
  • Release : 2011-11-29
  • ISBN : 0674062647
  • Pages : 385 pages

Download or read book The Jewish Dark Continent written by Nathaniel Deutsch and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2011-11-29 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the turn of the twentieth century, over forty percent of the world’s Jews lived within the Russian Empire, almost all in the Pale of Settlement. From the Baltic to the Black Sea, the Jews of the Pale created a distinctive way of life little known beyond its borders. This led the historian Simon Dubnow to label the territory a Jewish “Dark Continent.” Just before World War I, a socialist revolutionary and aspiring ethnographer named An-sky pledged to explore the Pale. He dreamed of leading an ethnographic expedition that would produce an archive—what he called an Oral Torah of the common people rather than the rabbinic elite—which would preserve Jewish traditions and transform them into the seeds of a modern Jewish culture. Between 1912 and 1914, An-sky and his team collected jokes, recorded songs, took thousands of photographs, and created a massive ethnographic questionnaire. Consisting of 2,087 questions in Yiddish—exploring the gamut of Jewish folk beliefs and traditions, from everyday activities to spiritual exercises to marital intimacies—the Jewish Ethnographic Program constitutes an invaluable portrait of Eastern European Jewish life on the brink of destruction. Nathaniel Deutsch offers the first complete translation of the questionnaire, as well as the riveting story of An-sky’s almost messianic efforts to create a Jewish ethnography in an era of revolutionary change. An-sky’s project was halted by World War I, and within a few years the Pale of Settlement would no longer exist. These survey questions revive and reveal shtetl life in all its wonder and complexity.

Book The Enemy at His Pleasure

Download or read book The Enemy at His Pleasure written by S. Ansky and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2004-04 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In daily accounts, Ansky details his struggles: to raise funds; to lobby and bribe at the czar's court; and to procure and transport food, medicine, and money to the ravaged Jewish towns, which, in the course of the war, were conquered and reconquered by Cossacks, Germans, Polish mercenaries, and Russian revolutionaries. Ansky depicts scenes of devastation - convoys of refugees, towns looted and burned to the ground, villagers taken hostage and raped, prey to all comers. Speaking to maids and ministers, farmers and recruits, doctors and profiteers, Ansky hears and sees it all, as the czar's army disintegrates and the winds of revolution sweep across the land."--BOOK JACKET.

Book Beyond the Pale

    Book Details:
  • Author : Benjamin Nathans
  • Publisher : Univ of California Press
  • Release : 2004-04-29
  • ISBN : 9780520242326
  • Pages : 452 pages

Download or read book Beyond the Pale written by Benjamin Nathans and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2004-04-29 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A surprising number of Jews lived, literally and figuratively, 'beyond the Pale' of Jewish Settlement in tsarist Russia during the half-century before the Revolution of 1917. This text reinterprets the history of the Russian-Jewish encounter, using long-closed Russian archives and other sources.

Book A Forgotten Land

Download or read book A Forgotten Land written by Lisa Cooper and published by Urim Publications. This book was released on 2013-02-01 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on recorded conversations Lisa Cooper’s father had with his mother, Pearl, about her early life in Ukraine, A Forgotten Land is the story of one Jewish family in the Russian Empire in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, set within the wider context of pogroms, World War I, the Russian Revolution, and civil war. The book weaves personal tragedy and the little-known history of the period together as Pearl finds her comfortable family life shattered first by the early death of her mother and later by the Bolshevik Revolution and all that follows.

Book The Representation of External Threats

Download or read book The Representation of External Threats written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2019-03-27 with total page 482 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Representation of External Threats, Eberhard Crailsheim and María Dolores Elizalde present a collection of articles that trace the phenomenon of external threats over three continents and four oceans, offering new perspectives on their development, social construction, and representation.

Book Living Beyond the Pale

    Book Details:
  • Author : Richard Fil? k
  • Publisher : Central European University Press
  • Release : 2012-01-01
  • ISBN : 6155225133
  • Pages : 256 pages

Download or read book Living Beyond the Pale written by Richard Fil? k and published by Central European University Press. This book was released on 2012-01-01 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We find Roma settlements on the outskirts of villages, separated from the majority population by roads, railways or other barriers, disconnected from water pipelines and sewage treatment. Why are some people (or groups) better off than others when it comes to the distribution of environmental benefits? In order to understand the present situation and identify ways to address the impacts of these inequalities we must understand the past and mechanisms related to the differentiated treatment. The situation and discrimination of the Roma ethnic minority in Slovakia is examined from the perspective of environmental conditions and injustice. There is no simple answer as to why there is environmental injustice. Environmental conditions in Roma settlements are just one of the indicators of failures of policies addressing the problem of poverty and social exclusion in marginalized groups, structural discrimination, and internal Roma problems. Environmental injustice is not an outcome of the "historical determination" of the Roma population to live in environmentally problematic places.

Book Jewish Materialism

    Book Details:
  • Author : Eliyahu Stern
  • Publisher : Yale University Press
  • Release : 2018-03-20
  • ISBN : 0300235585
  • Pages : 315 pages

Download or read book Jewish Materialism written by Eliyahu Stern and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2018-03-20 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A paradigm-shifting account of the modern Jewish experience, from one of the most creative young historians of his generation To understand the organizing framework of modern Judaism, Eliyahu Stern believes that we should look deeper and farther than the Holocaust, the establishment of the State of Israel, and the influence and affluence of American Jewry. Against the revolutionary backdrop of mid-nineteenth-century Europe, Stern unearths the path that led a group of rabbis, scientists, communal leaders, and political upstarts to reconstruct the core tenets of Judaism and join the vanguard of twentieth-century revolutionary politics. In the face of dire poverty and rampant anti-Semitism, they mobilized Judaism for projects directed at ensuring the fair and equal distribution of resources in society. Their program drew as much from the universalism of Karl Marx and Charles Darwin as from the messianism and utopianism of biblical and Kabbalistic works. Once described as a religion consisting of rituals, reason, and rabbinics, Judaism was now also rooted in land, labor, and bodies. Exhaustively researched, this original, revisionist account challenges our standard narratives of nationalism, secularization, and de-Judaization.

Book Becoming Soviet Jews

    Book Details:
  • Author : Elissa Bemporad
  • Publisher : Indiana University Press
  • Release : 2013-04-29
  • ISBN : 0253008271
  • Pages : 293 pages

Download or read book Becoming Soviet Jews written by Elissa Bemporad and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2013-04-29 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An “endlessly rewarding” contribution to the study of Jewish life in the Soviet Union: “Fascinating . . . nuanced and respectful of human limitations” (Slavic Review). Minsk, the present capital of Belarus, was a heavily Jewish city in the decades between the world wars. Recasting our understanding of Soviet Jewish history, Becoming Soviet Jews demonstrates that pre-revolutionary forms of Jewish life in Minsk maintained continuity through the often violent social changes enforced by the communist project. Using Minsk as a case study of the Sovietization of Jews in the former Pale of Settlement, Elissa Bemporad reveals the ways in which many Jews acculturated to Soviet society in the 1920s and 1930s while remaining committed to older patterns of Jewish identity, such as Yiddish culture and education, attachment to the traditions of the Jewish workers’ Bund, circumcision, and kosher slaughter. This pioneering study also illuminates the reshaping of gender relations on the Jewish street and explores Jewish everyday life and identity during the years of the Great Terror. “Highly readable and brimming with novel facts and insights . . . [A] rich and engaging portrayal of a previously overlooked period and place.” —H-Judaic

Book Photographing the Jewish Nation

Download or read book Photographing the Jewish Nation written by Eugene M. Avrutin and published by UPNE. This book was released on 2009 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over 170 amazing photographs of Jewish life in the Pale of Settlement, from S. An-sky's ethnographic expeditions

Book Human Geographies Within the Pale of Settlement

Download or read book Human Geographies Within the Pale of Settlement written by Robert E. Mitchell and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-09-15 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study suggests how traditional language-rich narrative histories of the Pale of Settlement can benefit from drawing on the large vocabularies, questions, theories and analytical methods of human geography, economics and the social sciences for an understanding of how Jewish communities responded to multiple disruptions during the nineteenth century. Moving from the ecological level of systems of settlements and variations among individual ones down to the immediate built environment, the book explores how both physical and human space influenced responses to everyday lives and emigration to America.

Book In the Midst of Civilized Europe

Download or read book In the Midst of Civilized Europe written by Jeffrey Veidlinger and published by Metropolitan Books. This book was released on 2021-10-26 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD * SHORTLISTED FOR THE LIONEL GELBER PRIZE “The mass killings of Jews from 1918 to 1921 are a bridge between local pogroms and the extermination of the Holocaust. No history of that Jewish catastrophe comes close to the virtuosity of research, clarity of prose, and power of analysis of this extraordinary book. As the horror of events yields to empathetic understanding, the reader is grateful to Veidlinger for reminding us what history can do.” —Timothy Snyder, author of Bloodlands Between 1918 and 1921, over a hundred thousand Jews were murdered in Ukraine by peasants, townsmen, and soldiers who blamed the Jews for the turmoil of the Russian Revolution. In hundreds of separate incidents, ordinary people robbed their Jewish neighbors with impunity, burned down their houses, ripped apart their Torah scrolls, sexually assaulted them, and killed them. Largely forgotten today, these pogroms—ethnic riots—dominated headlines and international affairs in their time. Aid workers warned that six million Jews were in danger of complete extermination. Twenty years later, these dire predictions would come true. Drawing upon long-neglected archival materials, including thousands of newly discovered witness testimonies, trial records, and official orders, acclaimed historian Jeffrey Veidlinger shows for the first time how this wave of genocidal violence created the conditions for the Holocaust. Through stories of survivors, perpetrators, aid workers, and governmental officials, he explains how so many different groups of people came to the same conclusion: that killing Jews was an acceptable response to their various problems. In riveting prose, In the Midst of Civilized Europe repositions the pogroms as a defining moment of the twentieth century.

Book Beyond the Pale

    Book Details:
  • Author : Elana Dykewomon
  • Publisher : Open Road Media
  • Release : 2013-06-18
  • ISBN : 1480434221
  • Pages : 488 pages

Download or read book Beyond the Pale written by Elana Dykewomon and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2013-06-18 with total page 488 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Lambda Literary Award: “A page-turner that brings to life turn-of-the-century New York’s Lower East Side.” —Library Journal Born in a Russian-Jewish settlement, Gutke Gurvich is a midwife who immigrates to New York’s Lower East Side with her partner, a woman passing as a man. Their story crosses with that of Chava Meyer, a girl who was attended by Gutke at her birth and was later orphaned during the Kishinev pogrom of 1903. Chava has come to America with the family of her cousin Rose, and the two girls begin working at fourteen. As they live through the oppression and tragedies of their time, Chava and Rose grow to become lovers—and search for a community they can truly call their own. Set in Russia and New York during the early twentieth century and touching on the hallmarks of the Progressive Era—the Women’s Trade Union League, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire of 1911, anarchist and socialist movements, women’s suffrage, anti-Semitism—Elana Dykewomon’s Beyond the Pale is a richly detailed and moving story, offering a glimpse into a world that is often overlooked. “A wonderful novel.” —Sarah Waters

Book Pogroms

    Book Details:
  • Author : John Doyle Klier
  • Publisher : Cambridge University Press
  • Release : 2004-02-12
  • ISBN : 9780521528511
  • Pages : 420 pages

Download or read book Pogroms written by John Doyle Klier and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2004-02-12 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Distinguished scholars of Russian Jewish history reflect on the pogroms in Tsarist and revolutionary Russia.

Book The Story of a Life

Download or read book The Story of a Life written by Anna Pavolovna Vygodskaia and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2012-04-15 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anna Pavlovna Vygodskaia's autobiography, originally published in 1938, is a rare and fascinating historical account of Jewish childhood and young adult life in Tsarist Russia. At a time when the vast majority of Jews resided in small market towns in the Pale of Settlement, Vygodskaia liberated herself from that world and embraced the day-to-day rhythms, educational activities, and new intellectual opportunities in the imperial capital of St. Petersburg. Her story offers a unique glimpse of Jewish daily life that is rarely documented in public sources—of neighborly interactions, children's games and household rituals, love affairs and emotional outbursts, clothing customs, and leisure time. Most first-person narratives of this kind reconstruct an isolated and self-contained Jewish world, but The Story of a Life uniquely describes the unprecedented social opportunities, as well as the many political and personal challenges, that young Jewish women and men experienced in the Russia of the 1870s and 1880s. In addition to their artful translation, Eugene M. Avrutin and Robert H. Greene thoroughly explicate this historical context in their introduction.

Book Where the Jews Aren t

    Book Details:
  • Author : Masha Gessen
  • Publisher : Schocken
  • Release : 2016-08-23
  • ISBN : 0805242465
  • Pages : 193 pages

Download or read book Where the Jews Aren t written by Masha Gessen and published by Schocken. This book was released on 2016-08-23 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the acclaimed author of The Man Without a Face, the previously untold story of the Jews in twentieth-century Russia that reveals the complex, strange, and heart-wrenching truth behind the familiar narrative that begins with pogroms and ends with emigration. In 1929, the Soviet government set aside a sparsely populated area in the Soviet Far East for settlement by Jews. The place was called Birobidzhan.The idea of an autonomous Jewish region was championed by Jewish Communists, Yiddishists, and intellectuals, who envisioned a haven of post-oppression Jewish culture. By the mid-1930s tens of thousands of Soviet Jews, as well as about a thousand Jews from abroad, had moved there. The state-building ended quickly, in the late 1930s, with arrests and purges instigated by Stalin. But after the Second World War, Birobidzhan received another influx of Jews—those who had been dispossessed by the war. In the late 1940s a second wave of arrests and imprisonments swept through the area, traumatizing Birobidzhan’s Jews into silence and effectively shutting down most of the Jewish cultural enterprises that had been created. Where the Jews Aren’t is a haunting account of the dream of Birobidzhan—and how it became the cracked and crooked mirror in which we can see the true story of the Jews in twentieth-century Russia. (Part of the Jewish Encounters series)

Book Carved Memories

Download or read book Carved Memories written by David Noevich Goberman and published by New York : Rizzoli. This book was released on 2000 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Published to accompany an exhibition organized by The Brooklyn Museum of Art, this book is an essential contribution to the history of Jewish art and culture."--BOOK JACKET.