Growing Up Communist and Jewish in Bondi Volume 1

Growing Up Communist and Jewish in Bondi Volume 1

Author: John Docker

Publisher: Kerr Publishing

Published: 2020-10-15

Total Pages: 316

ISBN-13: 1875703373

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Ted Docker was an Australian of Irish descent who as a young man wanted to change the world, joining first the Industrial Workers of the World and then helping form the Communist Party of Australia. He was steadfastly loyal to the Soviet Union and by historical record a stern hard-liner. This is not the whole story.


Growing Up Communist and Jewish in Bondi Volume 3

Growing Up Communist and Jewish in Bondi Volume 3

Author: John Docker

Publisher: Kerr Publishing

Published: 2020-10-15

Total Pages: 314

ISBN-13: 187570339X

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John Docker grew up in Bondi, the son of Communist parents, his mother Jewish from the East End of London and his father of Irish descent. His Bondi is not the site of sunny mindlessness but rather a place of intense immigrant and political life. This book traces his often comic experiences at Bondi Wellington Primary School and Randwick Boys High School. At the University of Sydney from 1963, he became a teenage Leavisite and participated in the anarchistic New Left. With Ann Curthoys he travelled on the Hippie Trail through Asia to London, which became for both the scene of what Gorky referred to as the University of Life.


Growing Up Communist and Jewish in Bondi Volume 2

Growing Up Communist and Jewish in Bondi Volume 2

Author: John Docker

Publisher: Kerr Publishing

Published: 2020-10-15

Total Pages: 518

ISBN-13: 1875703381

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Elsie Levy was born in the Jewish East End of London, came to Sydney with her family when she was 14, and joined the Communist Party of Australia when she was a young woman. In this book, her son explores her disaporic Jewish identity, both English and Australian, and in the process journeys into Jewish cultural histories. We meet important cultural figures such as Leonard Woolf, Freud, Schnitzler, Veza Canetti and Ida Rubinstein. This journey leads also to English anti-Semitism, including, shockingly, Bloomsbury. In turning to Communism and marrying out, Elsie Levy became one of history's undutiful daughters.


Legacies of Orientalism and Slavery in European Intellectual and Literary History

Legacies of Orientalism and Slavery in European Intellectual and Literary History

Author: John Docker

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2024-09-25

Total Pages: 211

ISBN-13: 103640837X

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This book is an exercise in ethical criticism. It draws on and works with ideas and suggestions from two of its notable exponents, Wayne C. Booth and Martha C. Nussbaum, who propose that we regard cultural texts as “friends” with whom we can enjoy productive conversations that address contemporary challenges and developments, such as coercive control in gender relations, imperial and colonial thinking, and the centuries-long history of slavery. Throughout, attention is drawn to female agency in figures from Joan of Arc, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and Rebecca in Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe through to Princess Diana. The book begins by looking closely at The Thousand and One Nights in terms of its wayward narratology, its displays of female power, and its significance for arguments over the relationship between the Enlightenment and the conceptual underpinnings of the Holocaust. Montesquieu in Persian Letters and Voltaire in Zadig destabilise any certainty that the Enlightenment was straightforward or easily definable. After evoking a slavery thread in chapters on Jane Austen’s Persuasion and Mansfield Park, Patricia Rozema’s film Mansfield Park, and Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John, the book concludes with a radical re-reading of Middlemarch.


1492

1492

Author: John Docker

Publisher: Burns & Oates

Published: 2001-08-02

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13:

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An ambitious and wide-ranging book by a well-known author that ranges from discussions of literary texts to an examination of Genesis, Mediterranean cookery, The Thousand and One Nights, Zionism and Anti-Zionism, Jewish mysticism and English Romanticism.1492 takes as a premise the 'lost world' of a shared Indian, Arab and Jewish culture which was destroyed in the early modern period by the expansion of Europe. For Docker, as for Salman Rushdie in The Moor's Last Sigh, the crucial event of 1492 was not the discovery of the Americas but the almost simultaneous final defeat of Moorish Spain in the fall of Granada and the expulsion of the Jews of Spain. Besides destroying the great Islamic-Judaic culture in Spain, it marked the beginning of nationalisms based on race, religion and language. Like the Crusades, it created a notion of Europe in opposition to a previous Mediterranean civilization and one of its direct results was the Spanish inquisition. 1492 was also the beginning of several diasporas and, in the course of examining several 19th-and 20th-century works that deal with the 'Wandering Jew' (Ivanhoe, Ulysses), the author goes on to look at a number of literary texts as a vehicle for speculating about various consequences and complications for cultural and intellectual history which followed from this 'lost ideal.'>


The Covered Wife

The Covered Wife

Author: Lisa Emanuel

Publisher: Pantera Press

Published: 2021-06-01

Total Pages: 495

ISBN-13: 0648748928

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Sarah is a smart, young lawyer living in Bondi when she falls head over heels. Daniel is handsome, passionate and is part of the kind of large, chaotically loving family Sarah longed for as an only child. When Daniel introduces her to a charismatic young couple, rabbi Menachem Lev and his wife, Chani, despite herself, Sarah is drawn in by the vibrant community at the beachside synagogue. By the time the couple move to the Jamison Valley, where Menachem and Chani have established a community of believers, Sarah can't imagine life without the joy, purpose and love she's discovered. Four years on, youthful passion has given way to something darker. The community will celebrate its first wedding, between the beautiful convert, Avital, and a much older divorcee, but no one seems to be able to give a clear explanation of where Rebecca, his wife, has gone. In the lead up to the wedding a series of terrifying truths emerges that rock Sarah's world and cause her to question everything - her faith, her marriage, and her future.


Ngapartji Ngapartji

Ngapartji Ngapartji

Author: Vanessa Castejon

Publisher: ANU Press

Published: 2014-11-12

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13: 1925021734

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In this innovative collection, Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars from Australia and Europe reflect on how their life histories have impacted on their research in Indigenous Australian Studies. Drawing on Pierre Nora’s concept of ego-histoire as an analytical tool to ask historians to apply their methods to themselves, contributors lay open their paths, personal commitments and passion involved in their research. Why are we researching in Indigenous Studies, what has driven our motivations? How have our biographical experiences influenced our research? And how has our research influenced us in our political and individual understanding as scholars and human beings? This collection tries to answer many of these complex questions, seeing them not as merely personal issues but highly relevant to the practice of Indigenous Studies. I think this rich collection will become a landmark text and a favourite within Australian scholarship. I am keen to see it published so that I can recommend it to others — Professor Emerita Margaret Allen, Gender Studies and Social Analysis, University of Adelaide The idea was to explain the link between the history you have made and the history that has made you — Pierre Nora


As the Lonely Fly

As the Lonely Fly

Author: Sara Dowse

Publisher: For Pity Sake Publishing

Published: 2017-06-17

Total Pages: 515

ISBN-13: 0994448589

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As the Lonely Fly is a profoundly moving novel from one of Australia’s most gifted storytellers. Shining a light on the dispersal of peoples and the intertwined fates of Jews and Palestinians, it is a story with deep contemporary resonance. Three remarkable women — an American immigrant, an ardent Israeli and a fearless revolutionary — lend three very different perspectives on the creation of Israel and its impact on Palestinians. In 1967, the American actor Marion Arkin visits her niece Zipporah, three months after the Six Day War in which Israel seized the Gaza Strip from Egypt, the West Bank from Jordan, and the Golan Heights from Syria. Marion has never visited Israel before, but she has ties there that are neither easy to break nor which she fully comprehends. Years before, when Marion migrated to America, her older sister Clara left for British Palestine. Reborn as Chava, the Hebrew word for life, she joins a group of pioneer Zionists. But Chava is soon uneasy about Jews taking work from Arabs and usurping their land. With her closest comrades, she finds herself at odds with Zionism, imprisoned for supporting the Arab riots and deported back to Russia. Unlike Clara, Zipporah remains a devoted Zionist. She has smuggled in refugees from Europe and seen Israel become a nation. Proud of that struggle, she shows Marion all that she can of the victorious new country. But the memory of Clara, who may be still alive somewhere, hovers between them, leaving Marion to reconsider her uncritical allegiance to the Jewish state.


The Origins of Violence

The Origins of Violence

Author: John Docker

Publisher: Pluto Press

Published: 2008-08-20

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 9780745325439

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Genocide is commonly understood to be a terrible aberration in human behaviour, performed by evil, murderous regimes such as the Nazis and dictators like Suharto and Pinochet. John Docker argues that the roots of genocide go far deeper into human nature than most people realise.Genocide features widely in the Bible, the literature of ancient Greece and Rome, and debates about the Enlightenment. These texts are studied in depth to trace the origins of violence through time and across civilisations. Developing the groundbreaking work of Raphaël Lemkin, who invented the term 'genocide', Docker guides us from the dawn of agricultural society, through classical civilisation to the present, showing that violence between groups has been integral to all periods of history.This revealing book will be of great interest to those wishing to understand the roots of genocide and why it persists in the modern age.