Todd M. Endelman and Zvi Gitelman— The new states that emerged in Europe and the Middle East from the collapsed German, Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and Ottoman empires were insecure, fearing their neighbors and their demands to change the borders created by the treaties ending World War I. They were suspicious of
David G. Roskies— Writing, we are told, is a form of resistance. The act of writing is an assertion of one’s selfhood, one’s right to live, think and feel in the face of all that negates it. But writing can just as easily be an escape from reality, an exercise
Hasia R. Diner— Nearly every place the immigrant Jewish peddlers went, with the exception of the British Isles and Scandinavia, they stumbled into societies in which color mattered. In some places—Canada, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand—the color divide followed a native-versus-European colonist divide. Where one stood across the native-European
The Zelmenayers is one of the great comic novels of the twentieth century, following a Soviet Jewish family through four generations as they deal with political change, new technologies, and the transformation of Jewish Life. Jewish scholar Sasha Senderovich, in a recent conversation with the Yiddish Book Center, explains, in
Follow Forbidden Music on Facebook! From the Yale Books Blog: Michael Haas‘s Forbidden Music: The Jewish Composers Banned by the Nazis, to be published in North America in June, explores the legacy of those musicians persecuted by the Third Reich. When National Socialism arrived in Germany in 1933, Jews were dominating music more
Listen to the podcast interview for Jews and Words on iTunes! Below you will find an excerpt from Amos Oz and Fania Oz-Salzberger’s Jews and Words, an exploration of the role of the written word in Jewish culture within the topics of continuity, women, timelessness and individualism. Amos Oz &
Listen to the podcast interview for Jews and Words on iTunes! Below you will find an excerpt from Amos Oz and Fania Oz-Salzberger’s Jews and Words, an exploration of the role of the written word in Jewish culture within the topics of continuity, women, timelessness and individualism. Amos Oz &
Listen to the podcast interview for Jews and Words on iTunes! Somewhere between the What is Jewish Culture? event at the 92Y launching the Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization and the NPR Weekend Edition interview with Scott Simon, we managed to catch Amos Oz and Fania Oz-Salzberger to
Acclaimed Israeli novelist Amos Oz is not religious, and yet underpinning his knowledge and his identity, his life and learning, and his family relationships, are Hebrew texts—Torah, Talmud, and Haggadah as well as modern literature and timeless lore. In Jews and Words, published today by Yale University Press, Oz and
Take our Posen Library Survey and get 15% off Yale University Press books! This fall, Yale University Press and the Posen Foundation will launch The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, a ten-volume series that collects more than 3,000 years of Jewish cultural artifacts, texts, and paintings, selected by