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Humanities & Social SciencesMay 2025The Jewish pedlar
An untold criminal history
by Tony Kushner
An imaginative investigation into a historical crime that sheds new light on Jewish history. In 1734 a pedlar turned smuggler named Jacob Harris slit the throats of three people in a pub in Sussex. This triple-murder, for which he was hanged and gibbeted, remains the most violent crime ever committed by a British Jew. Yet today it is all but forgotten. In The Jewish pedlar, Tony Kushner goes in search of the enigmatic Harris. Digging into a remarkable range of sources, from law records and newspaper reports to ballads and folktales, he follows the traces of Harris's legend across three hundred years of British history. In doing so, he reconstructs the world of Jewish pedlars and criminals across many continents. The lives these figures eked out at the margins of society paint a picture of persistent antisemitism - but also of remarkable integration. Intellectually bold and deeply humane, The Jewish pedlar takes a new, grassroots approach to the history of Jews in the modern world, shedding light on everyday lives from the Enlightenment to the Holocaust and beyond.
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Humanities & Social SciencesApril 2024Tracking the Jews
Ecumenical Protestants, conversion, and the Holocaust
by Carolyn Sanzenbacher
This book sheds light on an unprecedented Protestant conversion initiative for the global evangelisation of Jews. Founded in 1929, the International Committee on the Christian Approach to the Jews (ICCAJ) aimed to bring Jewish people to their 'spiritual destiny', a task it saw as both benevolent and essential for a harmonious society. By the time of Hitler's rise to power it was active in thirty-two countries, educating Protestant churches on the right Christian attitude towards Jews and antisemitism. Reconstructing the activities of the ICCAJ in the years before, during and immediately after the Holocaust, Tracking the Jews reveals how ideas disseminated through the organisation's discourse - 'Jewish problem', 'Jewish influence', 'Judaising threat', 'eternal Jew' - were used to rationalise, justify, explain or advance a number of deeply troubling policies. They were, for vastly different reasons, consciously used elements of argumentation in both Protestant conversionary discourse and Nazi antisemitic ideology.
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Humanities & Social SciencesJanuary 2025Out of the depths
The first collection of Holocaust songs
by Joseph Toltz, Anna Boucher
Available for the first time in English translation, this collection of songs is a powerful memorial to the victims of the Holocaust. In June 1945, before the full devastation of the Holocaust had emerged, a team of researchers embarked on a remarkable project. While documenting the experiences of Jewish refugees, they began to collect songs composed and sung in the Nazi camps and ghettos. The resulting book, Mima'amakim (Out of the depths), was published in a short run of 500 copies. Today, only a handful survive. Out of the depths: The first collection of Holocaust songs presents the contents of this extraordinary document for a new generation of readers. Based on a copy of Mima'amakim discovered in 2013, it contains not only the songs' melodies and lyrics, the latter in a new translation by Joseph Toltz, but also short biographies of the composers, drawn from painstaking original research. Introductory essays provide historical and musicological background, deepening our knowledge of this terrible event and the creative means by which the Jewish people responded to and endured it. Described by the original editor, Yehuda Eismann, as a 'memorial stone for Polish Jewry', the songbook is a timeless document of a people's despair, hope and strength.
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October 2020Stop the Hatred!
A Pamphlet Against Antisemitism
by Sigmund Gottlieb
The increasing hostility that Jews experience can no longer be explained away with fine rhetoric. Antisemitism is taking hold in a menacing way at the heart of society. Sigmund Gottlieb addresses his wake-up call to the population at large: stand up – not only against right-wing extremist violence and radical Islamism, but also against hatred in the social media, against unfair criticism of the state of Israel, against anti-Jewish abusive language in the school playground, against trivializing reports in the media and day-to-day indifference. The resurgent talk of ‘packed suitcases’ in Jewish communities is a moral indictment. And it is intolerable.
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MedicineMay 2024Jewish refugees and the British nursing profession
A gendered opportunity
by Jane Brooks
This book follows the lives of female Jewish refugees who fled Nazi persecution and became nurses. Nursing was nominally a profession but with its poor pay and harsh discipline, it was unpopular with British women. In the years preceding the Second World War, hospitals in Britain suffered chronic nurse staffing crises. As the country faced inevitable war, the Government and the profession's elite courted refugees as an antidote to the shortages, but many hospitals refused to employ Continental Jews. The book explores the changes in the refugees' status and lives from the war years to the foundation of the National Health Service and to the latter decades of the twentieth century. It places the refugees at the forefront of manoeuvres in nursing practice, education and research at a time of social upheaval and alterations in the position of women.
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December 2023Hatred of Jews
A never-ending story?
by Sebastian Voigt
— An overall presentation of the history of anti-Semitism based on the latest research — A necessary book that helps to recognise (and combat) anti-Jewish attitudes and patterns of behaviour even in the present day The Hamas attack on Israel is further aggravating the situation in the Middle East, and will continue to intensify anti-Semitism. And this plague, combined with Israel’s denied right to exist; the attacks in Brussels and Paris; the aggressive violence against everything Jewish in the Islamic world – is as dangerous as ever. Hatred of the Jews is old, vast and strong. The anamnesis began 2500 years ago in the Middle Ages, and came to head in the 18th and 19th centuries. It culminated ideologically in the Wannsee Conference, and became murderous in Auschwitz. Historian Sebastian Voigt provides a dense history of the hatred of the Jews – and combines it with a passionate call for courageous resistance.
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October 2014Farewell, Aleppo
by Claudette E. Sutton
The Jews of Aleppo, Syria, had been part of the city's fabric for more than two thousand years, in good times and bad, through conquerors and kings. But in the middle years of the twentieth century, all that changed. To Selim Sutton, a merchant with centuries of roots in the Syrian soil, the dangers of rising anti-Semitism made clear that his family must find a new home. With several young children and no prospect of securing visas to the United States, he devised a savvy plan for getting his family out: "exporting" his sons.In December 1940, he told the two oldest, Mea¯r and Saleh, that arrangements had been made for their transit to Shanghai, where they would work in an uncle's export business. China, he hoped, would provide a short-term safe harbor and a steppingstone to America.But the world intervened for the young men, now renamed Mike and Sal by their Uncle Joe. Sal became ill with tuberculosis soon after arriving and was sent back to Aleppo alone. And the war that soon would engulf every inhabited land loomed closer each day. Joe, Syrian-born but a naturalized American citizen, barely escaped on the last ship to sail for the U.S. before Pearl Harbor was bombed and the Japanese seized Shanghai.Mike was alone, a teen-ager in an occupied city, across the world from his family, with only his mettle to rely on as he strived to survive personally and economically in the face of increasing deprivation. Farewell, Aleppo is the story–told by Mike's daughter–of the journey that would ultimately take him from the insular Jewish community of Aleppo to the solitary task of building a new life in America.It is both her father's tale that journalist Claudette Sutton describes and also the harrowing experiences of the family members he left behind in Syria, forced to smuggle themselves out of the country after it closed its borders to Jewish emigration. The picture Sutton paints is both a poignant narrative of individual lives and the broader canvas of a people's survival over millennia, in their native land and far away, through the strength of their faith and their communities. Multiple threads come richly together as she observes their world from inside and outside the fold, shares an important and nearly forgotten epoch of Jewish history, and explores universal questions of identity, family, and culture.
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Humanities & Social SciencesSeptember 2024My Voice: Danny Herman
by Danny Herman
Danny Herman was born in 1935 in Königsberg in East Prussia. As the Nazis were rounding up Jews, Danny's father managed to escape to England in July 1939. He travelled to the Kitchener Camp in Kent, which helped refugees secure visas for safer places. Danny and his mother arrived in England just three days before war was declared in 1939, and his father was later sent to an internment camp on the Isle of Man. Danny went on to become a successful runner, competing in many international athletics events and volunteering in many roles, including at the 2002 Commonwealth Games. Danny's detailed memories of arriving in England, initially at the seaside in Kent and then moving to Manchester, create a vivid picture of life-changing events as experienced by a young child. Danny's book is part of the My Voice book collection, a stand-alone project of The Fed, the leading Jewish social care charity in Manchester, dedicated to preserving the life stories of Holocaust survivors and refugees from Nazi persecution who settled in the UK. The oral history, which is recorded and transcribed, captures their entire lives from before, during and after the war years. The books are written in the words of the survivor so that future generations can always hear their voice. The My Voice book collection is a valuable resource for Holocaust awareness and education.
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Humanities & Social SciencesFebruary 2025An unorthodox history
British Jews since 1945
by Gavin Schaffer
A bold, new history of British Jewish life since the Second World War. Historian Gavin Schaffer wrestles Jewish history away from the question of what others have thought about Jews, focusing instead on the experiences of Jewish people themselves. Exploring the complexities of inclusion and exclusion, he shines a light on groups that have been marginalised within Jewish history and culture, such as queer Jews, Jews married to non-Jews, Israel-critical Jews and even Messianic Jews, while offering a fresh look at Jewish activism, Jewish religiosity and Zionism. Weaving these stories together, Schaffer argues that there are good reasons to consider Jewish Britons as a unitary whole, even as debates rage about who is entitled to call themselves a Jew. Challenging the idea that British Jewish life is in terminal decline. An unorthodox history demonstrates that Jewish Britain is thriving and that Jewishness is deeply embedded in the country's history and culture.
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The ArtsFebruary 2025Passage works
Ruth Beckermann’s art
by Patricia Allmer, John Sears
Passage Works is the first book-length English language critical analysis of the transdisciplinary work of the Austrian film-maker, writer, and artist Ruth Beckermann (b. 1952, Vienna). Beckermann's works interrogate identity and geography as formations of the intersections between the past and the contemporary. Taking as her central topics Austria and its history and politics, her own identity as a Jewish woman, and the contemporary global geopolitics of migration and displacement, Beckermann develops wider meditations in film, art, and writing on the persistence of European memory, and the meanings of Europe itself; on borders, migrations, and identities; on memories, traumas, and traditions; on the image as marker of presence and absence, repository of the traces of historical violence; and on the passage as metaphor for a range of physical, psychological, and ideological movements defining the complexities of contemporary cosmopolitan identities.
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Suitcases and Backpacks
by Chava Kohavi Pines
Suitcases and Backpacksis a testimony of intricate detail that describes a young girl’s survival in ghettos and concentration camps between 1942 and 1945. Readers follow her journey from Vienna to the Theresienstadt Ghetto, then to Auschwitz and to a labor camp near Breslau, followed by the alienation she feels upon returning to Vienna, her subsequent journey to Prague, and, finally, the realization of her dream to immigrate to Palestine. The original edition published in Hebrew has proved interesting to readers of all ages. Chava Kohavi Pines was born Eva Hirsch in 1927 in Vienna, Austria, to a middle-class Jewish family. Since immigrating to Palestine in 1946, the author has resided in Kibbutz Dorot in the northern Negev where she worked as a teacher and counselor for years. Only with forty years’ distance from the trauma of her youth has she been able to write an account of some of her experiences during the Holocaust. An English-language eBook edition was published in late 2014 by Samuel Wachtman's Sons Inc., CA. An Italian edition was published in early 2017 by Edizioni Terra Santa, Milano. 80 pages, 14 x 21.5 cm
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Fiction2015Pantalones azules
by Sara Gallardo
Pantalones azules is a novel with a deceptively simple appearance. As Leopoldo Brizuela has noted, fifty years after its first publication, it "reveals itself as the recounting of a process infinitely more subtle" than an impossible love affair, which was the key interpretation by its contemporaries. On the contrary, Pantalones azules is a story of multiple disillusionments: those of Alejandro, the young protagonist from a well-to-do family, Catholic and anti-Semitic, who encounters the limits of his convictions upon meeting Irma, an immigrant with a Jewish mother who lost her parents in the European war; those of Irma, who receives not compassion but the inhuman brutality of Alejandro’s convictions; and those of Elisa, Alejandro’s virgin fiancée, who must decide her position within the patriarchal family structure and whether to accept her role as a future wife subjected to the tacit violence of her fiancé. But more than a story of love and disillusionment, Pantalones azules is a prodigious representation, for its freshness and vitality, of the distances that separate social groups, cultures, generations, and genders within the same time and place. A prime example of Sara Gallardo’s extraordinary ability to bring her characters to life with wisdom, humor, a touch of malice, and a surprising economy of resources, this second novel by the author also broadens her perspective on the landscape: the countryside, the city, and the river are depicted here with unusual accuracy, possible only for someone who has experienced landscape and language as a unique amalgam, a defining characteristic of her works. First published in 1963, Pantalones azules has circulated only minimally since then. Fiordo is proud to bring this superb novel by one of Argentina’s greatest writers back to readers.
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May 1997Holocaust und Literatur
by Sem Dresden, Andreas Ecke, Gregor Seferens
"Der Autor zeigt in seinem Essay mögliche Zusammenhänge zwischen dem Dargestellten und sprachlichen oder formalen Merkmalen literarischer Texte über den Holocaust; auffällig oft entdeckt man einen Stil, der bei aller Beherrschtheit und scheinbaren Ruhe von irrsinnigen Empfindungen geprägt zu sein scheint und zerrüttet wirkt wie das Leben unter den Bedingungen des Holocaust. Der niederländische Literaturwissenschaftler Sem Dresden schildert die Bedingungen, unter denen in Ghettos und Lagern geschrieben wurde; er beschreibt die Wirkung dieser Zeugnisse und der späteren Literatur des Holocaust auf Leser, die Gefühle der Schuld und Scham, die auch die Überlebenden kennen, die Fragwürdigkeit des Erfolgs mancher Werke. In drei aufeinanderfolgenden Kapiteln legt Dresden dar, daß das Thema der Verfolgung und Vernichtung es unmöglich macht, herkömmliche Kriterien der Beurteilung von Literatur anzuwenden."
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September 2021Imagine Being a Jew for One Hour
Stories against anti-Semitism
by Kurt Oesterle
Hatred of Jews is long-standing, widespread and powerful. After Auschwitz, the lesson used to be: “Never again!” However, anti-Semitic resentment, like an epidemic, still grips the bourgeois middle-class in our society. In his book “A Jew for One Hour”, Kurt Oesterle convincingly demonstrates how hatred of Jews functions in aesthetic and emotional terms with no empathy whatsoever. He also shows that for the past 200 years of German literature a line of tradition can be acknowledged “in defence of Jewishness”. Kurt Oesterle accounts for this in his book of stories with an impressive depth of knowledge, with a generous heart and mind and incredible commitment. A truly significant book.
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Travel & Transport2021Jewish addresses of Ukraine. Guidebook.
by Marharyta Yehorchenko, Iryna Berliand, Ihor Vynokurov (compilers)
This guidebook leads you through the locations in cities and villages of Ukraine that are closely connected to the history and culture of Ukrainian Jewish Community. The book is based on the geographical principle, i.e. each chapter describes a particular region of Ukraine. The illustrative material allows us to see both cultural monuments that still exist as well as photos of the objects that have not survived. Special attention is paid to personalities, including Jewish writers, cultural activists, civil rights leaders, philanthropists, religious figures, and righteous men. The guidebook can be especially useful for tourists who are interested in the Jewish history of the country.
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April 2007Erinnerung im globalen Zeitalter: Der Holocaust
by Daniel Levy, Natan Sznaider
Die Globalisierung wird gegenwärtig für alles Übel oder für alles Gute verantwortlich gemacht. Eine ihrer Schattenseiten ist die weltweite Standardisierung von Lebensformen. Daniel Levy und Natan Sznaider vertreten jedoch die These, in einem besonderen Fall, der Erinnerung an den Holocaust, sei die globale Angleichung von Werten ein Fortschritt: Es bilde sich dadurch ein kosmopolitisches Gedächtnis heraus. Das Holocaust-Museum in New York, die Befreiung von Auschwitz als gesamteuropäischer Gedenktag, das Holocaust-Mahnmal in Berlin: Der »Holocaust« wird zu einem universalen moralischen Schlüsselwort, mit dem internationale politische Zusammenschlüsse, ja – wie im Kosovokrieg mit der Parole »Nie wieder Auschwitz« – militärische Interventionen gerechtfertigt werden. Die Erinnerung an den Holocaust wird also von ihren nationalen Ursachen gelöst und globalisiert. Das vorliegende Buch handelt von der Veränderung kollektiver Erinnerungen im Zeitalter der Globalisierung. Somit sprengt es den Rahmen, in welchem Debatten über den Holocaust und das kollektive Gedächtnis üblicherweise geführt werden. Durch eine vergleichende Analyse der Debatten in den USA, Israel und Deutschland zeigen die Autoren vielmehr die Möglichkeiten und Grenzen kosmopolitischer, vom öffentlichen Gedächtnis an den Holocaust getragener Erinnerungen auf. Und von diesen Möglichkeiten wird die Friedfertigkeit oder Kriegshäufigkeit des 21. Jahrhunderts abhängen.
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True stories2015Courage and Fear
by Ola Hnatiuk
Courage and Fear is a study of a multicultural city in times of great change. Olya Hnatiuk presents a meticulously documented portrait of Lviv’s ethnically diverse intellectuals during World War II. As the Soviet, Nazi, and once again Soviet occupations tear the city’s social structures apart, groups of Polish, Ukrainian, and Jewish doctors, academicians, and artists try to survive, struggling to manage complex relationships and to uphold their ethos. As their pre-war lives are violently upended, courage and fear shape their actions. Olya Hnatiuk employs diverse sources in several languages to tell the story of Lviv from a multi-ethnic perspective and to challenge the nation focused narratives dominant in Central and Eastern Europe.
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September 2022Right-Wing Judges in Germany
AfD judges, prosecutors and jurors: a danger to democracy?
by Joachim Wagner
— How politics are increasingly influencing the rule of law in Germany — Systematic failures of democracy to protect itself — Based on numerous interviews with different members of Germany's legal system Ever since the right-wing party “Alternative for Germany” (AfD) secured representation in the Bundestag and in all state parliaments, Germany’s judiciary is facing a new challenge for which it is unprepared: AfD-affiliated judges and public prosecutors are attracting attention through right-wing biased decisions and investigations. Other members of the legal system cause further damage by ignoring the right-wing extremist and anti-Semitic background of crimes and thus punishing offenders too leniently or not at all. Both the judiciary and policy-makers have so far underestimated the new danger from the right. As a result protection against the appointment of right-wing legal professionals has been insufficient. Joachim Wagner systematically analyses numerous examples from German courts in recent years. He calls on the democratic judiciary to remember the principles of a well-fortified democracy.
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PsychologyDeveloping Anti-Racist Cultural Competence
by Rehman Abdulrehman
Learn to understand how you see others with this no-nonsense,practical guide• Teaches cultural humility• Provides practical guidance• Addresses internalized racismIn today’s society, anti-racist cultural competence is an essentialskill and not something meant only to be addressedby some. Issues tied to resolving racism and understandingand including diverse cultural points of view remain highlyconflictual – and the ability to deal with these issues effectivelyis often hindered by fear, anxiety, and a misunderstandingof what it means to be culturally competent withoutmaking people feel like outsiders. While many other modelsof cultural competence approach the issue as though lookinginto a fishbowl, this book views the issue as everyoneswimming in the water together, as part of a common ecosystemand community.
