Is South Los Angeles on the mend? How is it combating the blight of crime, gang violence, high unemployment, and dire poverty? In provocative essays, the contributing authors to "Post-Ghetto" address these questions by pointing out robust signs of hope for the area's residents--an increase in corporate retail investment, a decrease in homicides, a proliferation of nonprofit service providers, a paradigm shift in violence- and gang-prevention programs, and progress toward a strengthened, more racially integrated labor movement. By charting the connections between public policy and the health of a community, the authors offer innovative ideas and visionary strategies for further urban renewal and remediation. Contributors: Jake Alimahomed-Wilson, Andrea Azuma, Edna Bonacich, Robert Gottlieb, Karen M. Hennigan, Jorge N. Leal, Jill Leovy, Cheryl Maxson, Scott Saul, David C. Sloane, Mark Vallianatos, Danny Widener, Natale Zappia

This text contains fresh articles about a much neglected genre--fiction from and about the Jewish ghetto.

After the Nazis took power, Heppner, a member of a privileged middle-class German Jewish family, suffered from constant anti-Semitism. But Kristallnacht, in November 1938, introduced a new level of Nazi horror: Heppner and his mother used the family’s resources to escape to Shanghai, the only city in the world that did not require a visa. Heppner was taken aback by experiences on the ocean liner that took him and other refugees to Shanghai: he was embarrassed and confounded when Egyptian Jews offered worn clothing to the Jewish passengers, he resented the edicts against Jewish passengers disembarking in any ports on the way, and he was unprepared for the poverty and cultural dislocation of the great city of Shanghai. But being self-reliant, energetic, and clever, Heppner found niches for his skills that enabled him to survive in a precarious fashion in Shanghai’s ghetto. In 1945, after the liberation of China, Heppner found a responsible position with the American forces in Nanjing. He and his wife, a fellow refugee he had met and married in Shanghai, arrived in the United States in 1947 with only eleven dollars but boundless hope and energy. “This inspiring memoir is a story of survival... The unique and traumatic experiences of tens of thousands of Jews who managed to escape for the ‘temporary’ haven of Shanghai are described with objectivity and clarity.” — Leonard H. D. Gordon, Shofar “The author describes in detail the sights and sounds of his adopted environment, the mingling of Jews and many nationalities, the choking stench and the humidity, the decadent, exotic underworld of criminals and beggars, the terror of air raids and Japanese guards, the rampant poverty and disease. The general tone, however, is positive, even inspiring, and behind all the experiences lurks a sense of adventure and simple good luck.” — Association of Jewish Libraries Newsletter “A fascinating and moving memoir that begins with [Heppner’s] childhood in Nazi Germany and moves briskly from one compelling scene to the next.” — Forward “Ernest G. Heppner’s Shanghai Refuge fills in the fragments... of this little-known Jewish community... His story is an odd mixture of defiance, courage, endurance and survival. His experience [is] fascinating.” — Michael Berenbaum, Director, U.S. Holocaust Research Institute “An important addition to the historical record of World War II, an autobiography of a remarkable man’s formative years, and a testimony to the power of community and human perseverance.” — Indianapolis Star “Heppner’s descriptions... ring true and carry conviction, especially when he recalls in evocative detail his day-to-day experiences in Nazi Germany. Similarly, his recollection of Shanghai, with its small, telling details of privations, indignities, anxieties, and horrors make maximum impact—from the rat in the bakery that he lifted up by its tail to the carnage following an American air raid.” — Bernard Wasserstein, author ofThe Secret Lives of Trebitsch Lincoln

A man of towering intellectual accomplishment and extraordinary tenacity, Emmanuel Ringelblum devoted his life to recording the fate of his people at the hands of the Germans. Convinced that he must remain in the Warsaw Ghetto to complete his work, and rejecting an invitation to flee to refuge on the Aryan side, Ringelbaum, his wife, and their son were eventually betrayed to the Germans and killed. This book represents Ringelbaum's attempt to answer the questions he knew history would ask about the Polish people: what did the Poles do while millions of Jews were being led to the stake? What did the Polish underground do? What did the Government-in-Exile do? Was it inevitable that the Jews, looking their last on this world, should have to see indifference or even gladness on the faces of their neighbors? These questions have haunted Polish-Jewish relations for the last fifty years. Behind them are forces that have haunted Polish-Jewish relations for a thousand years.

This book charts the performative dimension of the Holocaust memorialization culture through a selection of representative artistic, educational, and memorial projects. Performative practice refers to the participatory and performance-like aspects of the Holocaust memorial culture, the transformative potential of such practice, and its impact upon visitors. At its core, performative practice seeks to transform individuals from passive spectators into socially and morally responsible agents. This edited volume explores how performative practices came into being, what impact they exert upon audiences, and how researchers can conceptualise and understand their relevance. In doing so, the contributors to this volume innovatively draw upon existing philosophical considerations of performativity, understandings of performance in relation to performativity, and upon critical insights emerging from visual and participatory arts. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History.

The Handbook of Polish, Czech, and Slovak Holocaust Fiction aims to increase the visibility and show the versatility of works from East-Central European countries. It is the first encyclopedic work to bridge the gap between the literary production of countries that are considered to be main sites of the Holocaust and their recognition in international academic and public discourse. It contains over 100 entries offering not only facts about the content and motifs but also pointing out the characteristic fictional features of each work and its meaning for academic discourse and wider reception in the country of origin and abroad. The publication will appeal to the academic and broader public interested in the representation of the Holocaust, anti-Semitism, and World War II in literature and the arts. Besides prose, it also considers poetry and theatrical plays from 1943 through 2018. An introduction to the historical events and cultural developments in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Czech, and Slovak Republic, and their impact on the artistic output helps to contextualise the motif changes and fictional strategies that authors have been applying for decades. The publication is the result of long-term scholarly cooperation of specialists from four countries and several dozen academic centres.

After the Second World War, millions of people across Eastern Europe, displaced as a result of wartime destruction, deportations and redrawing of state boundaries, found themselves living in cities that were filled with the traces of the foreign cultures of the former inhabitants. In the immediate post-war period these traces were not acknowledged, the new inhabitants going along with official policies of oblivion, the national narratives of new post-war regimes, and the memorializing of the victors. In time, however, and increasingly over recent decades, the former "other pasts" have been embraced and taken on board as part of local cultural memory. This book explores this interesting and increasingly important phenomenon. It examines official ideologies, popular memory, literature, film, memorialization and tourism to show how other pasts are being incorporated into local cultural memory. It relates these developments to cultural theory and argues that the relationship between urban space, cultural memory and identity in Eastern Europe is increasingly becoming a question not only of cultural politics, but also of consumption and choice, alongside a tendency towards the cosmopolitanization of memory.

A Companion to the City provides the reader with an indispensable and authoritative overview of the key debates, controversies, and questions concerning the city from a variety of theoretical vantage points with an international perspective. Indispensable companion for students of the City. Multidisciplinary approach of interest across several fields. Includes contributions from major scholars in the field.

First published in 1902, and illustrated by Jacob Epstein, this evocation of the spiritual and cultural life of Yiddish New York remains fresh and relevant, and an invaluable commentary on one aspect of the formation of modern America. To an extent unequaled by any outsider before him, Hutchins Hapgood, a descendant of generations of New England Yankees, succeeded in penetrating the inner life of an American immigrant community. Hapgood did not set out to reform and cleanse the ghetto. His aim was to understand and interpret it, to find and know its poets, scholars, dramatists, actors, and artists, as well as its merchants and businessmen. He presents real people, individually identified and described, working out their destiny as part of a vital Jewish world. The sensibility and intentions of this book, as the editor points out, "anticipated a period of unexampled American artistic and intellectual gusto and creativity." Moses Rischin's discerning and affectionate introduction places Hapgood's neglected classic squarely in the mainstream of American cultural development.