From Shtetl to Socialism

From Shtetl to Socialism

Author: Antony Polonsky

Publisher:

Published: 1993

Total Pages: 640

ISBN-13:

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This selection of articles from Volumes 1-7 of Polin, the definitive Jewish history reference, covers many aspects of the history of the Jews in Poland, from the earliest settlement to World War II, with an extensive new introduction, a chronology, maps, and an index.


Shtetl

Shtetl

Author: Jeffrey Shandler

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Published: 2014-01-15

Total Pages: 193

ISBN-13: 0813562740

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In Yiddish, shtetl simply means “town.” How does such an unassuming word come to loom so large in modern Jewish culture, with a proliferation of uses and connotations? By examining the meaning of shtetl, Jeffrey Shandler asks how Jewish life in provincial towns in Eastern Europe has become the subject of extensive creativity, memory, and scholarship from the early modern era in European history to the present. In the post-Holocaust era, the shtetl looms large in public culture as the epitome of a bygone traditional Jewish communal life. People now encounter the Jewish history of these towns through an array of cultural practices, including fiction, documentary photography, film, memoirs, art, heritage tourism, and political activism. At the same time, the shtetl attracts growing scholarly interest, as historians, social scientists, literary critics, and others seek to understand both the complex reality of life in provincial towns and the nature of its wide-ranging remembrance. Shtetl: A Vernacular Intellectual History traces the trajectory of writing about these towns—by Jews and non-Jews, residents and visitors, researchers, novelists, memoirists, journalists and others—to demonstrate how the Yiddish word for “town” emerged as a key word in Jewish culture and studies. Shandler proposes that the intellectual history of the shtetl is best approached as an exemplar of engaging Jewish vernacularity, and that the variable nature of this engagement, far from being a drawback, is central to the subject’s enduring interest.


In the Shadow of the Shtetl

In the Shadow of the Shtetl

Author: Jeffrey Veidlinger

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2013-11-01

Total Pages: 441

ISBN-13: 0253011523

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A history based on interviews with hundreds of Ukrainian Jews who survived both Hitler and Stalin, recounting experiences ordinary and extraordinary. The story of how the Holocaust decimated Jewish life in the shtetls of Eastern Europe is well known. Still, thousands of Jews in these small towns survived the war and returned afterward to rebuild their communities. The recollections of some four hundred returnees in Ukraine provide the basis for Jeffrey Veidlinger’s reappraisal of the traditional narrative of twentieth-century Jewish history. These elderly Yiddish speakers relate their memories of Jewish life in the prewar shtetl, their stories of survival during the Holocaust, and their experiences living as Jews under Communism. Despite Stalinist repressions, the Holocaust, and official antisemitism, their individual remembrances of family life, religious observance, education, and work testify to the survival of Jewish life in the shadow of the shtetl to this day.


Re-Centring the City

Re-Centring the City

Author: Michal Murawski

Publisher: Saint Philip Street Press

Published: 2020-10-09

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 9781013294778

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What is the role of monumentality, verticality and centrality in the twenty-first century? Are palaces, skyscrapers and grand urban ensembles obsolete relics of twentieth-century modernity, inexorably giving way to a more humble and sustainable de-centred urban age? Or do the aesthetics and politics of pomp and grandiosity rather linger and even prosper in the cities of today and tomorrow? Re-Centring the City zooms in on these questions, taking as its point of departure the experience of Eurasian socialist cities, where twentieth-century high modernity arguably saw its most radical and furthest-reaching realisation. It frames the experience of global high modernity (and its unravelling) through the eyes of the socialist city, rather than the other way around: instead of explaining Warsaw or Moscow through the prism of Paris or New York, it refracts London, Mexico City and Chennai through the lens of Kyiv, Simferopol and the former Polish shtetls. This transdisciplinary volume re-centres the experiences of the 'Global East', and thereby our understanding of world urbanism, by shedding light on some of the still-extant (and often disavowed) forms of 'zombie' centrality, hierarchy and violence that pervade and shape our contemporary urban experience. This work was published by Saint Philip Street Press pursuant to a Creative Commons license permitting commercial use. All rights not granted by the work's license are retained by the author or authors.


The Radicalization of European Jews in the US Metropolis

The Radicalization of European Jews in the US Metropolis

Author: Frank Jacob

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2024-08-19

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13: 3110656884

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During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many Jews from Central and Eastern Europe arrived in New York City, where they did not only find a new home, but far away from their shtetl origin, the new members of the American society also began to politically radicalize. There has been a discussion in the literature related to the field, where, how, and why the Jewish population radicalized. This study analyses two waves of radicalization: one related to the American environment that is responsible for the described process at the end of the 19th century; one, related to the developments in Eastern Europe during the early decades of the 20th century. For both radicalization processes this book compares the reasons, elements, and aims of those who join radical movements to show that there is a transatlantic perspective that links both processes to each other.


Jewish Lives Under Communism

Jewish Lives Under Communism

Author: Katerina Capková

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Published: 2022-07-15

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 1978830793

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This volume provides new, groundbreaking views of Jewish life in the pro-Soviet bloc from the end of the Second World War until the collapse of Communism in late 1989 by recovering and analyzing the agency of Jews and their creativity in Communist Europe after the Holocaust.


Socialism as a Secular Creed

Socialism as a Secular Creed

Author: Andrei Znamenski

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2021-01-29

Total Pages: 495

ISBN-13: 1498557317

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Andrei Znamenski argues that socialism arose out of activities of secularized apocalyptic sects, the Enlightenment tradition, and dislocations produced by the Industrial Revolution. He examines how, by the 1850s, Marx and Engels made the socialist creed “scientific” by linking it to “history laws” and inventing the proletariat—the “chosen people” that were to redeem the world from oppression. Focusing on the fractions between social democracy and communism, Znamenski explores why, historically, socialism became associated with social engineering and centralized planning. He explains the rise of the New Left in the 1960s and its role in fostering the cultural left that came to privilege race and identity over class. Exploring the global retreat of the left in the 1980s–1990s and the “great neoliberalism scare,” Znamenski also analyzes the subsequent renaissance of socialism in wake of the 2007–2008 crisis.


When Nationalism Began to Hate

When Nationalism Began to Hate

Author: Brian Porter

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2000-02-24

Total Pages: 318

ISBN-13: 0195351274

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In When Nationalism Began to Hate, Brian Porter offers a challenging new explanation for the emergence of xenophobic, authoritarian nationalism in Europe. He begins by examining the common assumption that nationalist movements by nature draw lines of inclusion and exclusion around social groups, establishing authority and hierarchy among "one's own" and antagonism towards "others." Porter argues instead that the penetration of communal hatred and social discipline into the rhetoric of nationalism must be explained, not merely assumed. Porter focuses on nineteenth-century Poland, tracing the transformation of revolutionary patriotism into a violent anti-Semitic ideology. Instead of deterministically attributing this change to the "forces of modernization," Porter demonstrates that the language of hatred and discipline was central to the way "modernity" itself was perceived by fin-de-siècle intellectuals. The book is based on a wide variety of sources, including political speeches and posters, newspaper articles and editorials, underground brochures, published and unpublished memoirs, personal letters, and nineteenth-century books on history, sociology, and politics. It embeds nationalism within a much broader framework, showing how the concept of "the nation" played a role in liberal, conservative, socialist, and populist thought. When Nationalism Began to Hate is not only a detailed history of Polish nationalism but also an ambitious study of how the term "nation" functioned within the political imagination of "modernity." It will prove an important text for a wide range of students and researchers of European history and politics.


Imaginary Neighbors

Imaginary Neighbors

Author: Dorota Glowacka

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 2007-01-01

Total Pages: 350

ISBN-13: 0803205996

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Imaginary Neighbors offers a unique and significant contribution to the contemporary debate concerning Holocaust memory by exploring the most important current political topic in Poland: Jewish-Polish relations during and after World War II.


Jews in Poland-Lithuania in the Eighteenth Century

Jews in Poland-Lithuania in the Eighteenth Century

Author: Gershon David Hundert

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 307

ISBN-13: 0520249941

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Annotation A history of Jews in Poland-Lithuania in the eighteenth century which argues that this largest Jewish community in the world at that time must be at the center of consideration of modernity in Jewish history.