When French troops occupy the Italian port city of Ancona, freeing the city’s Jews from their repressive ghetto, it unleashes a whirlwind of progressivism and brutal backlash as two very different cultures collide. Mirelle, a young Jewish maiden, must choose between her duty—an arranged marriage to a wealthy Jewish merchant—and her love for a dashing French Catholic soldier. Meanwhile, Francesca, a devout Catholic, must decide if she will honor her marriage vows to an abusive and murderous husband when he enmeshes their family in the theft of a miracle portrait of the Madonna. Set during the turbulent days of Napoleon Bonaparte’s Italian campaign (1796–97), Beyond the Ghetto Gates is both a cautionary tale for our present moment, with its rising tide of anti-Semitism, and a story of hope—a reminder of a time in history when men and women of conflicting faiths were able to reconcile their prejudices in the face of a rapidly changing world.

The Ghetto in Global History explores the stubborn tenacity of ‘the ghetto’ over time. As a concept, policy, and experience, the ghetto has served to maintain social, religious, and racial hierarchies over the past five centuries. Transnational in scope, this book allows readers to draw thought-provoking comparisons across time and space among ghettos that are not usually studied alongside one another. The volume is structured around four main case studies, covering the first ghettos created for Jews in early modern Europe, the Nazis' use of ghettos, the enclosure of African Americans in segregated areas in the United States, and the extreme segregation of blacks in South Africa. The contributors explore issues of discourse, power, and control; examine the internal structures of authority that prevailed; and document the lived experiences of ghetto inhabitants. By discussing ghettos as both tools of control and as sites of resistance, this book offers an unprecedented and fascinating range of interpretations of the meanings of the "ghetto" throughout history. It allows us to trace the circulation of the idea and practice over time and across continents, revealing new linkages between widely disparate settings. Geographically and chronologically wide-ranging, The Ghetto in Global History will prove indispensable reading for all those interested in the history of spatial segregation, power dynamics, and racial and religious relations across the globe.

This book is about me and the adversity that he has beset me in this community due to my diagnosed mental illness and my advocacy for the mentally ill. Many of the poems come from life experiences in the past and absorb the reality of death. There were days when no one encouraged me, many ignored me, and others talked about me. This weaved in and out of the poetry when I felt this pain and wrote it out in my poetry. There are also poems relating to nature that revive my mind and inspires me to continue on. America is in some of my poems and how I feel that a nation has come so far but up at a standstill now. I listen to the news everyday because when I graduated in 1963, that was what we were told to do- keep up with the news because the world would get smaller and my poetry reflects what is going on in the world today. This book is a combination of adversity, nature, death, and world conflict. And I think all can relate to my book in diverse ways. My name is Peggy Marie Ridge Oliver, mother of two children, and grandmother of eight. The last I counted. I have a B.A. degree in social work and was pursuing a second B.A. degree in English Literature/Creative writing which was not a completed due to a medical condition. On top of all this, I have had a mental illness for 30 years and accomplished all of the above. Most professional people, especially in the mental health field, say I am a remarkable woman because many people with a diagnosed mental illness do not accomplish this in a lifetime.

“For the rare Jews of Poland who managed to survive the Holocaust, the very idea of a return to what had been one’s homeland might seem both physically and psychologically impossible, perhaps even absurd. Yet it is precisely this paradoxical journey that Mira Kimmelman undertakes with great dignity and generosity. In words that are both direct and intimate, she exposes the ambivalence of what it means to learn to live again after Auschwitz—to experience love, raise a family, and assume a steadfast place in the Jewish community of a new land. At the same time, she acknowledges the abyss of losses that can never be retrieved. Perhaps even more importantly, Mira reveals how the pain of a return is transformed into a new adventure of discovery and reconciliation to be shared with her sons, their families, and her readers for generations to come.”—Karen D. LevyProfessor of French StudiesUniversity of Tennessee “This book is written with intelligence, sensitivity, and eloquence. As a post-Holocaust memoir, it is an excellent volume, inasmuch as it brings out the scope of the Holocaust, its impact on future generations, and how it affects our understanding of past generations. The author explores and elucidates the problems of liberation from death and the return to life that forever confront Holocaust survivors.” —David Patterson Bornblum Chair in Judaic Studies University of Memphis “Life beyond the Holocaust brings to mind in its power to document painful memories Primo Levi’s The Reawakening. Ms. Kimmelman’s memoir is, above all, a beautiful love story of herself and her husband, Max. She writes in a vernacular style that evokes her experiences with specific details. Her book is alive ... and celebrates in good prose human values triumphing over radical evil.” —Hugh Nissenson

Volume XXV of the distinguished annual Studies in Contemporary Jewry explores new understandings and approaches to Jewish "ethnicity." In current parlance regarding multicultural diversity, Jews are often considered to belong socially to the "majority," whereas "otherness" is reserved for "minorities." But these group labels and their meanings have changed over time. This volume analyzes how "ethnic," "ethnicity," and "identity" have been applied to Jews, past and present, individually and collectively. Most of the symposium papers on the ethnicity of Jewish people and the social groups they form draw heavily on the case of American Jews, while others offer wider geographical perspectives. Contributors address ex-Soviet Jews in Philadelphia, comparing them to a similar population in Tel Aviv; Communism and ethnicity; intermarriage and group blending; American Jewish dialogue; and German Jewish migration in the interwar decades. Leading academics, employing a variety of social scientific methods and historical paradigms, propose to enhance the clarity of definitions used to relate "ethnic identity" to the Jews. They point to ethnic experience in a variety of different social manifestations: language use in social context, marital behavior across generations, spatial and occupational differentiation in relation to other members of society, and new immigrant communities as sub-ethnic units within larger Jewish populations. They also ponder the relevance of individual experience and preference as compared to the weight of larger socializing factors. Taken as a whole, this work offers revisionist views on the utility of terms like "Jewish ethnicity" that were given wider scope by scholars in the 1960s, '70s, and '80s.

Finalist for National Jewish Book Award for Writing Based on Archival Material 2022. Jewish political and cultural behaviour during the first half of the twentieth century comes to the fore in this portrayal of a forgotten movement with contemporary relevance. Commencing with the Zionist rejection of the Uganda proposal in 1905, the Jewish Territorialist Movement searched for areas outside Palestine in which to create settlements of Jews. This study analyses the Territorialists’ ideology and activities in the Jewish context of the time, but their thought and discourse also reflect geopolitical concerns that still have resonance today in debates about colonialist attitudes to peoplehood, territory, and space. As the colonial world order rapidly changed after 1945, the Territorialists did not abandon their aspirations in overseas lands. Instead, in their attempts to find settlement solutions for Europe’s ‘surplus’ Jews, they moved from negotiating predominantly with the European colonizers to negotiating also with the ever more powerful non-Western leaders of decolonizing nations. This book reconstructs the rich history of the activities and changing ideologies of Jewish Territorialism, represented by Israel Zangwill’s Jewish Territorial Organisation (the ITO) and, later, by the Freeland League for Jewish Colonization under the leadership of Isaac Steinberg. Via Uganda, Angola, Madagascar, Australia, and Suriname, this story eventually leads us to questions about yidishkeyt, and to forgotten early twentieth-century ideas of how to be Jewish.

Bringing together thirteen leading art historians, Beyond the Yellow Badge seeks to reframe the relationship between European visual culture and the many changing aspects of the Christian majority’s negative conceptions of Jews and Judaism during the Middle Ages and early modern periods.

Prague's magnificent synagogues and Old Jewish Cemetery attract millions of visitors each year, and travelers who venture beyond the capital find physical evidence of once vibrant Jewish communities in towns and villages throughout today's Czech Republic. For those seeking to learn more about the people who once lived and died at those sites, however, there has until now been no comprehensive account in English of the region's Jews. Prague and Beyond presents a new and accessible history of the Jews of the Bohemian Lands written by an international team of scholars. It offers a multifaceted account of the Jewish people in a region that has been, over the centuries, a part of the Holy Roman Empire and the Habsburg Monarchy, was constituted as the democratic Czechoslovakia in the years following the First World War, became the Nazi Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and later a postwar Communist state, and is today's Czech Republic. This ever-changing landscape provides the backdrop for a historical reinterpretation that emphasizes the rootedness of Jews in the Bohemian Lands, the intricate variety of their social, economic, and cultural relationships, their negotiations with state power, the connections that existed among Jewish communities, and the close, if often conflictual, ties between Jews and their non-Jewish neighbors. Prague and Beyond is written in a narrative style with a focus on several unifying themes across the periods. These include migration and mobility; the shape of social networks; religious life and education; civic rights, citizenship, and Jewish autonomy; gender and the family; popular culture; and memory and commemorative practices. Collectively these perspectives work to revise conventional understandings of Central Europe's Jewish past and present, and more fully capture the diversity and multivalence of life in the Bohemian Lands.