73135 research outputs found
Sort by
Reinsberg family tree : (Originating in Westphalia, Germany) /
No full textGenealogy of the Reinsberg family of Westphalia, Germany, from 1737 to 2009. Included are birth, death, and marriage dates and locations; burial locations; occupational information; emigration information; notes on source material; indices of family members arranged by generation and alphabetically; and index of places.digitize
Poets' corner /
No full textCopy of Erwin Rennert's poem "Poet's Corner," which is signed by the
poet.Erwin Rennert was born on May 12, 1926, in Vienna. In November 1939, he immigrated to the Unived States via Trieste,
Italy. He joined the US Army in 1943 and fought in Europe during World War II. His parents Lea and Pinkas Rennert were murdered in the
concentration camp Maly Trostinec in 1942. 1962, Erwin Rennert immigrated back to Vienna.Austrian Heritage CollectionProcessed for digitizatio
Interview with Joel and Adele Sandberg
No full textOral history interview with Joel and Adele Sandberg, co-founders of the South Florida Conference on Soviet Jewry.Digital recordingDigital finding aid
A study of the groups in Persian Yehud.
No full textBoth Jewish and Christian traditions as well as modern scholarship on the Hebrew Bible have shown great interest in the issue of identity with special focus on the situation of the Restoration period. However, many of the contributions tend to lay their emphasis on the negative side about how the marginalization takes place in the texts of Ezra-Nehemiah (E-N hereafter) and Chronicles, but there is little attention paid to comparing and measuring the complexities of both phenomenon: marginalizing and acceptance, and no previous study has yet dealt with the different groups in E-N and Chronicles so far. This study attempts to bring the focus on the different groups during that period. Based on the archaeological and extra-biblical data, which may help us to reconstruct the social fabric of Persian Yehud, it then zeros in to appreciate how the texts have portrayed different groups and analyzes how the biblical authors establish the identity and identification of selves and others.This study is divided into two parts. Section I works on the historical background of the Persian Period, followed by Section II, which traces the marginalization of those who remained and the elevation of gatekeepers, singers, and the Nethinim.Archaeological data have shown a notable decline of the population from the end of the monarchy to the time of E-N. And there is no evidence of many outsiders swarming into Judah. Therefore the returnees constitute only a minority in Persian Yehud. A study on biblical and other sources implies that the Persian regime shaped and formulated their policy on Yehud for the Empire's own interest. With the support of the central government, the Second Temple as well as its priests and Levites have been elevated, while the remainers are marginalized, discriminated against and accused by the returnees.Meanwhile, three groups emerge for the first time. The Nethinim, who have a foreign origin are considered Israelites and assigned the role of assistants to the priests and Levites to take part in the service of the Temple. Gatekeepers become a sub-military force in Yehud and are responsible for local administration and management of temple property. As for the singers, they substitute the pre-exilic prophets and became messengers bearing the ideology of the ruling class to the people. The latter two groups therefore earn high status and are portrayed by the Chronicler as descendants of the Levites despite their doubtful origin. This enables them to claim the identity of Israelites in the canon.This study demonstrates that in the unique historical background of the Persian Period, the biblical authors of post-exilic historiography to a great extent determine the identity of "foreigners", "Israelites" and "Levites" according to the social reality of animosity between groups, rather than to the often assumed categories of ethnicity such as strict adherence to blood ties and faith.Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Chinese University of Hong Kong (Hong Kong), 2008.School code: 1307
Homecomings and homemakings: Stefanie Zweig and the exile experience in, out of, and nowhere in Africa.
No full textThis dissertation is intended to address German-Jewish refugee life in Kenya, which represents a lacuna in exiles studies and simultaneously a thus far relatively unknown chapter in the history of the relationship between Kenya and Germany. The touchstone of my project is the autobiographical novels by Stephanie Zweig (1932-- ), who in 1938 came to Kenya as a German-Jewish refugee. Her narratives reflect the peculiar paradox that the Jews in Kenya lived: on the one hand they were victims of Nazi racism, on the other hand they often found themselves in the position of colonizers.In my study, I look at Zweig's works as "Zeitstucke" and read the German author's depiction of the German Jewish refugee situation in Kenya in the context of several oral and written witness accounts by other former Kenya refugees. The documents that I use for my project reveal a consistent core of shared memory and form an invaluable source for research in exile studies. Drawing on Adorno's notion that a writer who lost her or his home tries to create one in her or his texts, I also address possible scriptotherapeutic effects of autobiographical writing. Moreover, my dissertation is intended as a challenge to the categorization of Zweig's works into the genre of the exoticist, belletristic Africa-novel (Afrika-Roman), which has gained immense popularity in Germany over the last decade. I offer a reading that proposes to approach Zweig's work chronologically, as a work in progress, in which the author continually assesses and reassesses her relation to Africa and simultaneously revises her literary portrayal(s) of this continent. I argue that the author in her earlier narratives demonstrates a restorative nostalgia and thus assumes a position resembling that of British colonial writers Elspeth Huxley and Karen Blixen. In her later texts, however, Zweig shifts to a more reflective form of nostalgia and distances herself from her earlier claim for an African Heimat. My study also addresses a number of tropes and metaphors of white settler writing that Zweig incorporates in her work. My main argument, which I develop around Zweig's narrative representation of the Mau Mau movement in Kenya, is that such settler writing must be read as symbolic appropriation of African (Kenyan) space and history.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of California, Irvine, 2008.School code: 0030
Anticlerical alliances: Jews and the Church question in Germany and France, 1783--1905.
No full textBeginning with the Enlightenment, European Jews expressed their visions of progress and pluralism through polemics against Catholicism and the Catholic Church. This dissertation explores the development of this Jewish criticism in Germany and France, starting with the statements of Jewish authors in the late eighteenth century and concluding with the debates surrounding the separation of Church and State in France in 1905. These polemics ranged from moderate criticism of Catholicism as anti-modern to elaborate theories of Jesuit conspiracies for world domination. Showing the pervasiveness of anticlerical and anti-Catholic tropes in the writings of German and French Jews, this study contends that anticlericalism stood at the foundation of modern Jewish politics in Western Europe. Throughout the nineteenth century, Jews' ability to criticize the Catholic Church remained a gauge of their integration into liberal and republican circles and of the opportunities they had to articulate themselves politically. Complicating the scholarship on European Jews' efforts to join the middle-classes through the appropriation of positive bourgeois values, this work focuses on the role of 2 polemics against anti-modern groups in the development of Jewish ideas of progress and citizenship.Focusing on this common element of Jewish secularism and political articulation, the dissertation adds a unifying perspective to the disaggregated narrative of differing German and French models of integration. In both countries, Jews perceived the campaign against the Catholic Church as a battle fought simultaneously for the emancipation of Jewry and the victory of genuinely German or French concepts of freedom against religious despotism. Anticlericalism thus became an expression of Jews' national belonging to their respective states. At the same time, it was part of transnational European discourses on liberal---and Jewish---solidarity in the face of perceived encroachments of the Catholic Church. Only towards the end of the nineteenth century did the trajectories of Jews in Germany and France diverge in this respect. Whereas German Jews found anticlericalism less persuasive after the rise of antisemitism in the 1880s, French Jews were reinforced during the Dreyfus affair in their sense that anticlerical alliances would guarantee their liberty and equality.Thesis (Ph.D.)--The University of Chicago, 2008.School code: 0330
Authorial fictions: Literary and public personas in modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature.
No full textIn the intimate circles of Hebrew and Yiddish culture during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, prominent writers often became celebrities: writers like S.Y. Abramovitsh, Sholem Aleykhem, and Itzik Manger were greeted by large crowds across Eastern Europe; others, like Chayim Nachman Bialik and S.Y. Agnon, were celebrated in person and in print; and still others, like Rachel Bluvstein, were mythologized in the popular imagination. These literary celebrities embodied new forms of Jewish identity as they navigated the wide-ranging political and cultural possibilities of modern Jewish culture.This dissertation analyzes the ways in which writers invent themselves as formidable authorial figures in the dynamic arenas of modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature. I develop the authorial persona, often regarded as a feature of the literary text, as a critical concept that mediates between text and context, registering the literary, historical, and ideological pressures of writing in a modern Jewish language. Reading Hebrew and Yiddish texts and their authors together, I argue that the construction of authorial personas becomes a critical strategy for negotiating the dramatic transformations of Jewish modernity and modernism.Focusing on unconventional pairings of Hebrew and Yiddish authors, I trace the changing politics and poetics of authorship that traverse boundaries of genre, language, and literary traditions. In the first chapter, I analyze the iconic figures of Sholem Aleykhem and S.Y. Agnon, who shape themselves into complex fictional beings through sly performances of authorship. My second chapter focuses on the ideologically-inflected modernist personas that Avraham Shlonsky and Itzik Manger produce in their poetry and manifestos. Analyzing the personas of Rachel Bluvstein and Anna Margolin in the third chapter, I trace how both poets challenge canonical representations of the masculine author. Finally, I examine the cultural afterlife of Chayim Nachman Bialik, whose persona haunts subsequent generations of Jewish writers, demonstrating the ways in which authorial identities are continually negotiated and renegotiated. Despite the gradual divergence of Hebrew and Yiddish literatures and ideologies, I argue that an intricate relationship between the two cultures continues well into the twentieth century, manifested in literature and specifically, in the contours of the authorial persona.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of California, Berkeley, 2008.School code: 0028
Overlapping jurisdictions: Confessional boundaries and judicial choice among Christians and Jews under early Muslim rule.
No full textThis study examines the legislative responses of Christian and Jewish religious elites to the problems posed by the appeal of their coreligionists to judicial systems outside their communities. Focusing on the late seventh--early eleventh centuries in the region between Iraq in the east and present-day Tunisia in the west, the project explores the multiplicity of judicial systems that coexisted under early Muslim rule in order to reveal the complex array of social obligations that bound individuals across confessional boundaries. By examining the incentives for appeal to external judicial systems on the one hand and the response of minority confessional elites on the other, the thesis fundamentally alters our conception of the social history of the Near East in the early Islamic period. Contrary to the prevalent scholarly notion of a rigid social setting, strictly demarcated along confessional lines, a comparative study of Christian and Jewish legal behavior under Muslim rule exposes a considerable degree of fluidity across communal boundaries. The transcendence of religious affiliations threatened to undermine the position of traditional religious elites. In response, these elites acted vigorously to reinforce communal boundaries, censuring recourse to external judicial systems and even threatening transgressors with excommunication.I begin this study with an analysis of pre-Islamic precedent by surveying late antique judicial systems. I then consider the Muslim judicial setting during the first centuries following the Arab takeover. In both cases, I seek to illustrate the wide choice of judicial systems, both formal and informal, available to contemporary individuals. Following these two introductory chapters, I turn to examine the Christian and Jewish judicial organizations after the Muslim conquest, the challenges that faced these organizations, and the legislative response of Christian and Jewish religious elites to these challenges. I conclude my study with a comparative discussion of the social changes undergone by Christian and Jewish communities under Muslim rule, reconsidering questions of authority, boundaries, and allegiance.The study relies heavily on two main bodies of literary materials: (1) Christian legal codices (including ad hoc rulings), issued primarily between the late seventh and tenth centuries. This material largely derives from the East-Syrian Church in Mesopotamia and the West-Syrian Church in the Fertile Crescent. (2) Geonic responsa: the widespread exchange of questions and answers between local Jewish communal leaders throughout the Near East and their spiritual superiors, the geonim, in Baghdad. Most of these questions originated from North Africa between the ninth and eleventh centuries.Thesis (Ph.D.)--Princeton University, 2008.School code: 0181
Diaspora and representation: Jewish Argentine, Turkish German, and Chinese American women writers.
No full textDrawing upon the work of Chandra Talpade Mohanty, this dissertation is born of a concern regarding the prevalence of criticism that presents essentializing analyses of work by minority writers; therefore, the primary aim of this research is to complicate readings of immigrant literatures, particularly those of immigrant women. All too often, literary analyses of minority women writers' works offer reductive and, at times, even inaccurate readings of specific immigrant realities. Such literary criticism posits a continuous and universal female immigrant identity as well as an immutable, inescapable immigrant status. Consequently, analyses of their literary works frequently represent their immigrant experiences as those of perpetual victims trapped at the juncture of an absolute cultural divide between static cultures: that of their culture of origin and of their "guest country." Other essentializing readers suggest that, in spite of the immigrant woman's apparent lack of agency, she has felicitous options: after resolving her ethnic conflicts, which include a formulaic critique of the guest country's culture, these critics presume that the immigrant woman achieves a joyful assimilation or, more accurately, a state of felicitous hybridity in which she consciously chooses the best aspects from each discrete culture and finds fortuitous personal resolution.In this project, I explore writing by the Jewish Argentine writers Cecilia Absatz (1943- ) and Nora Glickman (1944- ), the Turkish German writers Seyran Ates (1963- ) and Yade Kara (1965- ), and the Chinese American writers Gish Jen 1955- ) and Sigrid Nunez (1951- ). By examining their works through a non-binary rather than a binary lens, this research complicates the logics of incommensurability and stereotypical facile hybridity that have prevailed in the literary analysis of narratives of immigrant women. The readings offered here avoid such dichotomies as inclusion vs. exclusion, majority vs. minority, oppressor vs. oppressed, or the center vs. periphery/margin/fringe/interstice of nations and endeavors, in order to instead enhance the literary criticism of minority writing, to portray minority women as integral members of the nations that many of them have come to view as their home countries. These women writers, as instigators of change who are capable of refashioning the circumstances of their lives, also fashion narratives that present their own critical perspective on their own situation.Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Pennsylvania State University, 2008.School code: 0176
The social and economic history of Jews in Kiev before February 1917.
No full textMy dissertation describes the social and economic history of Jews in Kiev from the tenth century to the February 1917 Revolution. At the turn of the twentieth century the Kiev Jewish community was one of the largest and wealthiest in the Russian Empire. According to the all-Russian census of 1897 Jews were the third largest nationality in Kiev, after Russians and Ukrainians. In 1913 over 80 thousand Jews lived in Kiev.Kiev was the third most important city of Imperial Russia, after Moscow and St. Petersburg. The authorities gave a special meaning and status to the city due to its holiness to all Russian Orthodox believers; in 988 Prince Vladimir converted the local population to Christianity. Kiev was the capital of the old Slavic state Kievan Rus' and the Russian population always had a special sentiment toward their ancient capital.Unfortunately the special meaning and holiness of Kiev for the Russian people, as well as the dramatic and turbulent history of the city, had a negative impact on the status of Jews who lived there. The history of the Jewish community was interrupted several times due to religious intolerance and the Judeophobia of various Kiev authorities. In the periods when Jews where tolerated in Kiev, their conditions of life in the city were harsher than in many other places in Imperial Russia.But the city was always attractive for Jews in spite of the hostility of the authorities and many Christian residents. Kiev was a commercial hub, educational and cultural center and the only large city in the Southwest region. It had a reputation as a city where it was easy to make money. So none of the restrictions and bans by the authorities could completely "protect" Kiev from the Jews, many of whom lived illegally in the city. The authorities repeatedly expelled Jews from Kiev, but Jews always came back and despite all the restrictive measures the Jewish population of Kiev grew steadily from 1861 to 1917. While Judeophobes complained that Kiev had become a Jewish city, Jews saw this city as one of most hostile to them in the Russian Empire, Yehupets (Egypt) as it was called by Sholom Aleichem.The increase of the Kiev Jewish population benefited the Jews themselves, who found in Kiev better conditions of life than in the overcrowded shtetls. All residents of the city also profited as Jewish entrepreneurs contributed greatly to its economic development.In the Kiev Jewish population at the turn of the twentieth century there was a huge financial and social differentiation: there were a number of Jewish magnates who occupied the key positions in the Jewish community, while at the same time twenty percent of Kiev Jews lived below the poverty level. A number of Jewish philanthropic organizations and institutions provided aid to poor Jews in Kiev. However restrictions in residence in Kiev and education for the Jewish population created a cycle of poverty, which was very difficult to break.The dissertation focuses on the Jewish urban, social and economic history, the everyday life of Jews in Kiev, the social status of the Jewish population, development of Jewish enterprises and the contribution of the Jewish population in the development of the city. The history of the Kiev Jewish community, one of the oldest Jewish communities in Eastern Europe, illuminates many important processes and problems in Modern Jewish history.Thesis (Ph.D.)--Brandeis University, 2008.School code: 0021