Kategoria BISAC: History >> Jewish - General

Until the summer of 1391, when anti-Jewish riots spread across the Iberian peninsula, the person subsequently known as Honoratus de Bonafide, a Christian physician and astrologer at the court of King Joan I of Aragon, had been the Jew Profayt Duran of Perpignan. The precise details of Duran's conversion are lost to us. We do know, however, that like many other conversos, he began to conduct his professional and public life as a Christian even as he rejected that new identity in private. What is extraordinary in his case is that instead of quietly making his individual way, he began...

Why did punk--a subculture and music style characterized by a rejection of established norms--appeal to Jews? How did Jews who were genuinely struggling with their Jewish identity find ways to express it through punk rock? Oy Oy Oy Gevalt Jews and Punk explores the cultural connections between Jews and punk in music and beyond, documenting how Jews were involved in the punk movement in its origins in the 1970s through the present day.

Author Michael Croland begins by broadly defining what the terms "Jewish" and "punk" mean. This introduction is followed by an...

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, Toronto's Kensington Market neighbourhood has been home to a multicultural mosaic of immigrant communities: Jewish, Portuguese, Chinese, South Asian, Caribbean, and many others. Despite repeated transformations, the neighbourhood has never lost its vibrant, close-knit character.

In Kensington Market, urban planner and public historian Na Li explores both the Market's dynamic history and the ways in which planners can access the intangible collective memory that helps define neighbourhoods like it around the world. Through...

When the Constitution Act of 1867 was enacted, section 93 guaranteed certain educational rights to Catholics and Protestants in Quebec, but not to any others. Over the course of the next century, the Jewish community in Montreal carved out an often tenuous arrangement for public schooling as "honorary Protestants," based on complex negotiations with the Protestant and Catholic school boards, the provincial government, and individual municipalities. In the face of the constitution's exclusionary language, all parties gave their compromise a legal form which was frankly unconstitutional, but...

Else Lasker-Schuler (1869 1945) was born into an affluent German Jewish family. Following the death of her parents and the dissolution of her marriage, the fledgling poet became notorious in the fashionable cafes of Berlin for appearing in costume as a Persian girl or as an Egyptian boy. Her flamboyance was echoed in her poetry, which combined the sexual with the religious in its exploration of the ecstatic experience. Critics have long dismissed her poetry as decadent in its romantic use of references to moonlight, flowers, and woodland creatures. In his introduction, Haxton addresses...

Following the horrors of Kristallnacht in November of 1938, frightened parents were forced to find refuge for their children, far from the escalating anti-Jewish violence. To that end, a courageous group of Belgian women organized a desperate and highly dangerous rescue mission to usher nearly 1,000 children out of Germany and Austria. Of these children, ninety-three were placed on a freight train, traveling through the night away from their families and into the relative safety of Vichy France. Ranging in age from five to sixteen years, the children along with their protectors spent a...

During the postwar period of 1948 56, over 400,000 Jews from the Middle East and Asia immigrated to the newly established state of Israel. By the end of the 1950s, Mizrahim, also known as Oriental Jewry, represented the ethnic majority of the Israeli Jewish population. Despite their large numbers, Mizrahim were considered outsiders because of their non-European origins. Viewed as foreigners who came from culturally backward and distant lands, they suffered decades of socioeconomic, political, and educational injustices.
In this pioneering work, Roby traces the Mizrahi population s...

Bagels, deli sandwiches and gefilte fish are only a few of the Jewish foods to have crossed into American culture and onto American plates. Rhapsody in Schmaltz traces the history and social impact of the cuisine that Yiddish-speaking Jews from Central and Eastern Europe brought to the U.S. and that their American descendants developed and refined. The book looks at how and where these dishes came to be, how they varied from region to region, the role they played in Jewish culture in Europe, and the role that they play in Jewish and more general American culture and foodways today....