Jewish Topographies

2016-05-06
Jewish Topographies
Author: Julia Brauch
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 390
Release: 2016-05-06
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 131711101X
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How have Jews experienced their environments and how have they engaged with specific places? How do Jewish spaces emerge, how are they contested, performed and used? With these questions in mind, this anthology focuses on the production of Jewish space and lived Jewish spaces and sheds light on their diversity, inter-connectedness and multi-dimensionality. By exploring historical and contemporary case studies from around the world, the essays collected here shift the temporal focus generally applied to Jewish civilization to a spatially oriented perspective. The reader encounters sites such as the gardens cultivated in the Ghettos during World War II, the Israeli development town of Netivot, Thornhill, an Orthodox suburb of Toronto, or new virtual sites of Jewish (Second) Life on the Internet, and learns about the Jewish landkentenish movement in Interwar Poland, the Jewish connection to the sea and the culinary landscapes of Russian Jews in New York. Employing an interdisciplinary approach, with a strong foothold in cultural history and cultural anthropology, this anthology introduces new methodological and conceptual approaches to the study of the spatial aspects of Jewish civilization.

Jewish Topographies

2016-05-06
Jewish Topographies
Author: Julia Brauch
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 398
Release: 2016-05-06
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1317111001
GET BOOK

How have Jews experienced their environments and how have they engaged with specific places? How do Jewish spaces emerge, how are they contested, performed and used? With these questions in mind, this anthology focuses on the production of Jewish space and lived Jewish spaces and sheds light on their diversity, inter-connectedness and multi-dimensionality. By exploring historical and contemporary case studies from around the world, the essays collected here shift the temporal focus generally applied to Jewish civilization to a spatially oriented perspective. The reader encounters sites such as the gardens cultivated in the Ghettos during World War II, the Israeli development town of Netivot, Thornhill, an Orthodox suburb of Toronto, or new virtual sites of Jewish (Second) Life on the Internet, and learns about the Jewish landkentenish movement in Interwar Poland, the Jewish connection to the sea and the culinary landscapes of Russian Jews in New York. Employing an interdisciplinary approach, with a strong foothold in cultural history and cultural anthropology, this anthology introduces new methodological and conceptual approaches to the study of the spatial aspects of Jewish civilization.

New Perspectives on Jewish Cultural History

2019-08-19
New Perspectives on Jewish Cultural History
Author: Maja Gildin Zuckerman
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 358
Release: 2019-08-19
Genre: History
ISBN: 1000477959
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This book presents original studies of how a cultural concept of Jewishness and a coherent Jewish history came to make sense in the experiences of people entangled in different historical situations. Instead of searching for the inconsistencies, discontinuities, or ruptures of dominant grand historical narratives of Jewish cultural history, this book unfolds situations and events, where Jewishness and a coherent Jewish history became useful, meaningful, and acted upon as a site of causal explanations. Inspired by classical American pragmatism and more recent French pragmatism, we present a new perspective on Jewish cultural history in which the experiences, problems, and actions of people are at the center of reconstructions of historical causalities and projections of future horizons. The book shows how boundaries between Jewish and non-Jewish are not a priori given but are instead repeatedly experienced in a variety of situations and then acted upon as matters of facts. In different ways and on different scales, these studies show how people's experiences of Jewishness perpetually probe, test, and shape the boundaries between what is Jewish and non-Jewish, and that these boundaries shape the spatiotemporal linkages that we call history.

Jewish Religious Architecture

2019-10-29
Jewish Religious Architecture
Author: Steven Fine
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 398
Release: 2019-10-29
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9004370099
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Jewish Religious Architecture explores ways that Jews have expressed their tradition in brick and mortar and wood, in stone and word and spirit. This volume stretches from the biblical Tabernacle to Roman Jerusalem, synagogues spanning two millenia and on to contemporary Judaism. Social historians, cultural historians, art historians and philologists have come together here to present this extraordinary architectural tradition. The multidisciplinary approach employed in Jewish Religious Architecture reveals deep continuities over time, together with the distinctly local— sometimes in surprising ways.

Framing Jewish Culture

2014-01-01
Framing Jewish Culture
Author: Simon J. Bronner
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Total Pages: 437
Release: 2014-01-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 180085742X
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Modernity offers people choices about who they want to be and how they want to appear to others. The way in which Jews choose to frame their identity establishes the dynamic of their social relations with other Jews and non-Jews - a dynamic complicated by how non-Jews position the boundaries around what and who they define as Jewish. This book uncovers these processes, historically, as well as in contemporary behavior, and finds explanations for the various manifestations, in feeling and action, of 'being Jewish.' Boundaries and borders raise fundamental questions about the difference between Jews and non-Jews. At root, the question is how 'Jewish' is understood in social situations where people recognize or construct boundaries between their own identity and those of others. The question is important because this is by definition the point at which the lines of demarcation between Jews and non-Jews, and between different groupings of Jews, are negotiated. Collectively, the contributors to the book expand our understanding of the social dynamics of framing Jewish identity. The book opens with an introduction that locates the issues raised by the contributors in terms of the scholarly traditions from which they have evolved. Part I presents four essays dealing with the construction and maintenance of boundaries - two by scholars showing how boundaries come to be etched on an ethnic landscape and two by activists who question and adjust distinctions among neighbors. Part II focuses on expressive means of conveying identity and memory, while, in Part III, the discussion turns to museum exhibitions and festive performances as locations for the negotiation of identity in the public sphere. A lively discussion forum concludes the book with a consideration of the paradoxes of Jewish heritage revival in Poland, and the perception of that revival by Jews and non-Jews. *** ..".these essays help us understand the social dynamics of Jewish identity and how identity is constructed in modern life." -- AJL Reviews, February/March 2015 (Series: Jewish Cultural Studies - Vol. 4) [Subject: Jewish Studies, Cultural Studies]

Jewish and Non-Jewish Spaces in the Urban Context

2015-09-22
Jewish and Non-Jewish Spaces in the Urban Context
Author: Maria Cieśla
Publisher: Neofelis Verlag
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2015-09-22
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3943414892
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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 examples and case studies together create a mosaic of possibilities for the construction of Jewish and non-Jewish spaces in different settings. The list of examined topics ranges from synagogues to ghettos, from urban neighborhoods to cafés and festivals, from art to literature. This diversity makes the volume a challenging effort of giving an overview of the current academic discussion in Europe and beyond. Although the majority of the contributions are focused on Central and Eastern Europe, a more general tendency becomes apparent in all articles: the negotiation of urban spaces seems to be a complex and ambivalent process in which a large number of participants are involved. In this regard, the volume would also like to contribute to trans-disciplinary urban studies and critical research on spatial relations.

Jewish Histories of the Holocaust

2014-09-01
Jewish Histories of the Holocaust
Author: Norman J.W. Goda
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 313
Release: 2014-09-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1782384421
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For many years, histories of the Holocaust focused on its perpetrators, and only recently have more scholars begun to consider in detail the experiences of victims and survivors, as well as the documents they left behind. This volume contains new research from internationally established scholars. It provides an introduction to and overview of Jewish narratives of the Holocaust. The essays include new considerations of sources ranging from diaries and oral testimony to the hidden Oyneg Shabbes archive of the Warsaw Ghetto; arguments regarding Jewish narratives and how they fit into the larger fields of Holocaust and Genocide studies; and new assessments of Jewish responses to mass murder ranging from ghetto leadership to resistance and memory.

The Object of Jewish Literature

2022-07-26
The Object of Jewish Literature
Author: Barbara E. Mann
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 278
Release: 2022-07-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 0300234112
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A history of modern Jewish literature that explores our enduring attachment to the book as an object With the rise of digital media, the "death of the book” has been widely discussed. But the physical object of the book persists. Here, through the lens of materiality and objects, Barbara E. Mann tells a history of modern Jewish literature, from novels and poetry to graphic novels and artists’ books. Bringing contemporary work on secularism and design in conversation with literary history, she offers a new and distinctive frame for understanding how literary genres emerge. The long twentieth century, a period of tremendous physical upheaval and geographic movement, witnessed the production of a multilingual canon of writing by Jewish authors. Literature’s objecthood is felt not only in the physical qualities of books—bindings, covers, typography, illustrations—but also through the ways in which materiality itself became a practical foundation for literary expression.

Jewish Space in Contemporary Poland

2015-04-27
Jewish Space in Contemporary Poland
Author: Erica Lehrer
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 310
Release: 2015-04-27
Genre: History
ISBN: 0253015065
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Essays on the restoration and revival of Jewish sites in post-Holocaust, post-Communist Poland: “Highly recommended.” —Choice In a time of national introspection regarding the country’s involvement in the persecution of Jews, Poland has begun to reimagine spaces of and for Jewishness in the Polish landscape, not as a form of nostalgia but as a way to encourage the pluralization of contemporary society. The essays in this book explore issues of the restoration, restitution, memorializing, and tourism that have brought present inhabitants into contact with initiatives to revive Jewish sites. They reveal that an emergent Jewish presence in both urban and rural landscapes exists in conflict and collaboration with other remembered minorities, engaging in complex negotiations with local, regional, national, and international groups and interests. With its emphasis on spaces and built environments, this volume illuminates the role of the material world in the complex encounter with the Jewish past in contemporary Poland. “Evokes a revolution—the word is not too strong—in the possibilities, new goals, and shifting facts on the ground associated with Jewish history and lives in Poland today.” —Canadian Jewish News