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Scholars in the humanities have become increasingly interested in questions of how space is produced and perceived—and they have found that this consideration of human geography greatly enriches our understanding of cultural history. This “spatial turn” equally has the potential to revolutionize Jewish Studies, complicating familiar notions of Jews as “people of the Book,” displaced persons with only a common religious tradition and history to unite them. Space and Place in Jewish Studies embraces these exciting critical developments by investigating what “space” has meant within Jewish culture and tradition—and how notions of “Jewish space,” diaspora, and home continue to resonate within contemporary discourse, bringing space to the foreground as a practical and analytical category. Barbara Mann takes us on a journey from medieval Levantine trade routes to the Eastern European shtetl to the streets of contemporary New York, introducing readers to the variety of ways in which Jews have historically formed communities and created a sense of place for themselves. Combining cutting-edge theory with rabbinics, anthropology, and literary analysis, Mann offers a fresh take on the Jewish experience.
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.
A major history of the shtetl's golden age The shtetl was home to two-thirds of East Europe's Jews in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, yet it has long been one of the most neglected and misunderstood chapters of the Jewish experience. This book provides the first grassroots social, economic, and cultural history of the shtetl. Challenging popular misconceptions of the shtetl as an isolated, ramshackle Jewish village stricken by poverty and pogroms, Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern argues that, in its heyday from the 1790s to the 1840s, the shtetl was a thriving Jewish community as vibrant as any in Europe. Petrovsky-Shtern brings this golden age to life, looking at dozens of shtetls and drawing on a wealth of never-before-used archival material. Illustrated throughout with rare archival photographs and artwork, this nuanced history casts the shtetl in an altogether new light, revealing how its golden age continues to shape the collective memory of the Jewish people today.
For years, All For The Boss has remained a beloved classic for teenagers and adults. Now, young readers can enjoy this special edition of the biography of R' Yaakov Yosef Herman zt"l, Torah pioneer in America. Each chapter relates a story, and with large, clear type and detailed illustrations, younger children will love reading about Jewish life in early 20th century New York. The story of R' Yaakov Yosef's life, devotion to Torah, and his love for fellow Jews is told with affection, humor, and awe by his daughter. Share this inspiring book with a young reader in your life today!
"If the Coen brothers ever ventured beyond the United States for their films, they would find ample material in this novel." --The New York Times Book Review "Occasionally a book comes along so fresh, strange, and original that it seems peerless, utterly unprecedented. This is one of those books." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review) **Winner of the 2021 Wingate Literary Prize** **Finalist for the 2021 National Jewish Book Awards, "Book Club Award"** An irresistible, picaresque tale of two Jewish sisters in late-nineteenth-century Russia, The Slaughterman’s Daughter is filled with “boundless imagination and a vibrant style” (David Grossman). With her reputation as a vilde chaya (wild animal), Fanny Keismann isn’t like the other women in her shtetl in the Pale of Settlement—certainly not her obedient and anxiety-ridden sister, Mende, whose “philosopher” of a husband, Zvi-Meir, has run off to Minsk, abandoning her and their two children. As a young girl, Fanny felt an inexorable pull toward her father’s profession of ritual slaughterer and, under his reluctant guidance, became a master with a knife. And though she long ago gave up that unsuitable profession—she’s now the wife of a cheesemaker and a mother of five—Fanny still keeps the knife tied to her right leg. Which might come in handy when, heedless of the dangers facing a Jewish woman traveling alone in czarist Russia, she sets off to track down Zvi-Meir and bring him home, with the help of the mute and mysterious ferryman Zizek Breshov, an ex-soldier with his own sensational past. Yaniv Iczkovits spins a family drama into a far-reaching comedy of errors that will pit the czar’s army against the Russian secret police and threaten the very foundations of the Russian Empire. The Slaughterman’s Daughter is a rollicking and unforgettable work of fiction.
On Burning Ground is the tale of one desperate and brilliant man's ultimate choice: at the eve of the Nazi purging of Poland, to disguise his Jewish origin and pose first as a Christian, then to join the Nazi SS. Living in constant fear, Michael Skakun's father, Joseph, not only assumed a dangerous array of identities in order to survive, but subsequently compromised his very spirit. On Burning Ground is a brave and revelatory tale of a son's father who risked it all, and through his amazing odyssey, was keenly aware of the price of such deceits.
If you're reading this it's because you want to learn about the now extinct Jewish village of Zhetl, known today as Dyatlovo, Belarus. Unfortunately, you can't read it in Yiddish. Sixty-Five years after this Zhetl Yizkor book was originally published, I am honored to make it available to the English-speaking world. Why do you care about Zhetl? If you're like me, it's probably because your parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, uncles, aunts or cousins were born and lived in Zhetl. A few of them survived, all of them tried to, but most of them were savagely murdered during humanity's lowest point in modern history: the Holocaust of World War II. If you're like me, you've heard bits and pieces of your family's Zhetl's stories over the years. Some of them get repeated to the point where you no longer hear them. Then one day you wake up and want to know more. You want to ask the questions which your youthful self didn't have the time, nor interest, to ask. But alas, our Zhetl is gone. Therein lies the wisdom of our dear Zhetl relatives. They knew this day would come. We all owe a debt of gratitude to all the authors who made the time to tell their stories, as painful as it was. To Baruch Kaplinski (z"l) for editing the original 1957 version and to Mordecai (Motl) Dunetz (z"l), for passionately gathering and editing materials from former Zhetl residents and survivors the world over for nearly a decade in order to drive the project through to its completion.
New from Bradt is The Holocaust: Europe’s Sites, Museums and Memorials, a unique travel guidebook to European locations that tell the story of the greatest crime ever perpetrated – the Nazi genocide of 6 million Jews and other persecuted groups. In recent years countries once reluctant to delve into the dark corners of their past have begun to document the history of the Holocaust and its aftermath. Europe has many new ground-breaking museums and memorials that tell us as much about the present as they do the past. Chapters are dedicated to each country or region occupied by Nazi Germany, plus nations like the UK and neutral Sweden, which played a vital role both before and after the Holocaust. Organised around city hubs in each country, this Bradt guide helps visitors explore numerous destinations, whether infamous, well known or comparatively unexpected. This is much, much more than a guide to notorious sites such as Auschwitz-Birkenau, Buchenwald or Dachau. You can take a walking tour in Vienna, to view the new wall of names. Or visit the Memorial des Martyrs de la Deportation in Paris, Anne Frank House in Amsterdam or the Jewish Museum in Ferrara. And you can learn how babies were smuggled out of the Kovno ghetto in potato sacks in Lithuania or read about Bavaria’s Kloster Indersdorf, a remarkable children’s home that cared for survivors. Written by a journalist and travel writer specialising in Jewish history, Bradt’s The Holocaust: Europe’s Sites, Museums and Memorials provides the traveller with not only a list of must-see sites in each country but also a comprehensive list of organisations that run tours, commemorations and volunteer schemes. Suggestions of where to eat and stay (including Kosher restaurants and hotels) ease the traveller’s way, as do descriptions of local Jewish organisations and tips on how to pace potentially difficult journeys into Europe’s dark past. Bradt’s The Holocaust: Europe’s Sites, Museums and Memorials is the first comprehensive travel guide to the genocide and the first to help the traveller understand the Holocaust by seeing the places where it unfurled.