Showing 1-7 of 7 items.

Impure Migration

Jews and Sex Work in Golden Age Argentina

Rutgers University Press

Impure Migration investigates the period from the 1890s until the 1930s, when prostitution was a legal institution in Argentina. Yarfitz examines how thousands of Eastern European Jewish women and men migrated to Latin America and engaged in organized sex work to escape from the difficult conditions in their home countries. 

  • Copyright year: 2019
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Kabbalistic Revolution

Reimagining Judaism in Medieval Spain

Rutgers University Press

The set of Jewish mystical teachings known as Kabbalah are often imagined as timeless texts. Yet, as this fresh approach shows, Kabbalah flourished in a specific time and place, one where anti-Semitic propaganda was on the rise. Hartley Lachter, a scholar of religion studies, transports us to medieval Spain and demonstrates how Kabbalah served as a radical rebuke to the era’s prejudices, placing the increasingly marginalized Jews at the center of the divine universe. 

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The Phantom Holocaust

Soviet Cinema and Jewish Catastrophe

Rutgers University Press

Focusing on work by both celebrated and unknown Soviet directors and screenwriters, this is the first book written about all Soviet narrative films dealing with the Holocaust from 1938 to 1991. In addition to studying the completed films, it analyzes the projects that were banned at various stages of production. Archival research and in-depth interviews are used to tell the stories of filmmakers who found authentic ways to represent the Holocaust in the face of official silencing.

  • Copyright year: 2013
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Becoming Frum

How Newcomers Learn the Language and Culture of Orthodox Judaism

Rutgers University Press

When non-Orthodox Jews become frum (religious), they encounter much more than dietary laws and Sabbath prohibitions. They find themselves in the midst of a whole new culture, involving matchmakers, homemade gefilte fish, and Yiddish-influenced grammar. Becoming Frum explains how these newcomers learn Orthodox language and culture through their interactions with community veterans and other newcomers. 

  • Copyright year: 2012
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Through Soviet Jewish Eyes

Photography, War, and the Holocaust

Rutgers University Press

Most view the relationship of Jews to the Soviet Union through the lens of repression and silence. Focusing on an elite group of two dozen Soviet-Jewish photographers, including Arkady Shaykhet, Alexander Grinberg, Mark Markov-Grinberg, Evgenii Khaldei, Dmitrii Baltermants, and Max Alpert, Through Soviet Jewish Eyes presents a different picture. These artists participated in a social project they believed in and with which they were emotionally and intellectually invested-they were charged by the Stalinist state to tell the visual story of the unprecedented horror we now call the Holocaust.

These wartime photographers were the first liberators to bear witness with cameras to Nazi atrocities, three years before Americans arrived at Buchenwald and Dachau. In this passionate work, David Shneer tells their stories and highlights their work through their very own images-he has amassed never-before-published photographs from families, collectors, and private archives.

Through Soviet Jewish Eyes
helps us understand why so many Jews flocked to Soviet photography; what their lives and work looked like during the rise of Stalinism, during and then after the war; and why Jews were the ones charged with documenting the Soviet experiment and then its near destruction at the hands of the Nazis.

  • Copyright year: 2010
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Arabs of the Jewish Faith

The Civilizing Mission in Colonial Algeria

Rutgers University Press

Exploring how Algerian Jews responded to and appropriated France's newly conceived "civilizing mission" in the mid-nineteenth century, Arabs of the Jewish Faith shows that the ideology, while rooted in French Revolutionary ideals of regeneration, enlightenment, and emancipation, actually developed as a strategic response to the challenges of controlling the unruly and highly diverse populations of Algeria's coastal cities.

  • Copyright year: 2010
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One People, One Blood

Ethiopian-Israelis and the Return to Judaism

Rutgers University Press

Distilling more than ten years of ethnographic research, Don Seeman depicts the rich culture of the group, as well as their social and cultural vulnerability, and addresses the problems that arise when immigration officials, religious leaders, or academic scholars try to determine the legitimacy of Jewish identity or Jewish religious experience.

  • Copyright year: 2010
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