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      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        May 2025

        The Jewish pedlar

        An untold criminal history

        by Tony Kushner

        An imaginative investigation into a historical crime that sheds new light on Jewish history. In 1734 a pedlar turned smuggler named Jacob Harris slit the throats of three people in a pub in Sussex. This triple-murder, for which he was hanged and gibbeted, remains the most violent crime ever committed by a British Jew. Yet today it is all but forgotten. In The Jewish pedlar, Tony Kushner goes in search of the enigmatic Harris. Digging into a remarkable range of sources, from law records and newspaper reports to ballads and folktales, he follows the traces of Harris's legend across three hundred years of British history. In doing so, he reconstructs the world of Jewish pedlars and criminals across many continents. The lives these figures eked out at the margins of society paint a picture of persistent antisemitism - but also of remarkable integration. Intellectually bold and deeply humane, The Jewish pedlar takes a new, grassroots approach to the history of Jews in the modern world, shedding light on everyday lives from the Enlightenment to the Holocaust and beyond.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        January 2025

        Out of the depths

        The first collection of Holocaust songs

        by Joseph Toltz, Anna Boucher

        Available for the first time in English translation, this collection of songs is a powerful memorial to the victims of the Holocaust. In June 1945, before the full devastation of the Holocaust had emerged, a team of researchers embarked on a remarkable project. While documenting the experiences of Jewish refugees, they began to collect songs composed and sung in the Nazi camps and ghettos. The resulting book, Mima'amakim (Out of the depths), was published in a short run of 500 copies. Today, only a handful survive. Out of the depths: The first collection of Holocaust songs presents the contents of this extraordinary document for a new generation of readers. Based on a copy of Mima'amakim discovered in 2013, it contains not only the songs' melodies and lyrics, the latter in a new translation by Joseph Toltz, but also short biographies of the composers, drawn from painstaking original research. Introductory essays provide historical and musicological background, deepening our knowledge of this terrible event and the creative means by which the Jewish people responded to and endured it. Described by the original editor, Yehuda Eismann, as a 'memorial stone for Polish Jewry', the songbook is a timeless document of a people's despair, hope and strength.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        September 2024

        My Voice: Danny Herman

        by Danny Herman

        Danny Herman was born in 1935 in Königsberg in East Prussia. As the Nazis were rounding up Jews, Danny's father managed to escape to England in July 1939. He travelled to the Kitchener Camp in Kent, which helped refugees secure visas for safer places. Danny and his mother arrived in England just three days before war was declared in 1939, and his father was later sent to an internment camp on the Isle of Man. Danny went on to become a successful runner, competing in many international athletics events and volunteering in many roles, including at the 2002 Commonwealth Games. Danny's detailed memories of arriving in England, initially at the seaside in Kent and then moving to Manchester, create a vivid picture of life-changing events as experienced by a young child. Danny's book is part of the My Voice book collection, a stand-alone project of The Fed, the leading Jewish social care charity in Manchester, dedicated to preserving the life stories of Holocaust survivors and refugees from Nazi persecution who settled in the UK. The oral history, which is recorded and transcribed, captures their entire lives from before, during and after the war years. The books are written in the words of the survivor so that future generations can always hear their voice. The My Voice book collection is a valuable resource for Holocaust awareness and education.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        February 2025

        An unorthodox history

        British Jews since 1945

        by Gavin Schaffer

        A bold, new history of British Jewish life since the Second World War. Historian Gavin Schaffer wrestles Jewish history away from the question of what others have thought about Jews, focusing instead on the experiences of Jewish people themselves. Exploring the complexities of inclusion and exclusion, he shines a light on groups that have been marginalised within Jewish history and culture, such as queer Jews, Jews married to non-Jews, Israel-critical Jews and even Messianic Jews, while offering a fresh look at Jewish activism, Jewish religiosity and Zionism. Weaving these stories together, Schaffer argues that there are good reasons to consider Jewish Britons as a unitary whole, even as debates rage about who is entitled to call themselves a Jew. Challenging the idea that British Jewish life is in terminal decline. An unorthodox history demonstrates that Jewish Britain is thriving and that Jewishness is deeply embedded in the country's history and culture.

      • Trusted Partner
        April 2026

        Being Jewish Today

        Jüdische Stimmen aus Amerika

        by Amir Eshel, Thomas Sparr, Ursula Kömen

        Der 7. Oktober, der Terror der Hamas und der nachfolgende Krieg in Gaza, die weltweiten Proteste dagegen stellen Jüdinnen und Juden in aller Welt vor neue entscheidende Fragen: nach Zugehörigkeit, Entfremdung von Israel oder Loyalität zum jüdischen Staat, nach Repräsentation. Die jüdische Welt ist in Aufruhr und Unruhe. Antisemitische Anfeindungen haben weltweit, besonders in Deutschland massiv zugenommen. Gleichzeitig sind viele liberale, säkulare oder progressive Jüdinnen und Juden uneins mit der Politik der derzeitigen israelischen Regierung, geraten in Erklärungsnot oder einen Zwang, sich anderen erklären zu müssen. Ein Spannungsfeld ist entstanden, das nicht nur politisch, sondern existentiell ist. Wie lassen sich Solidarität und Kritik zusammendenken? Wie sieht ein jüdisches Selbstverständnis aus, das Raum für Vielstimmigkeit und Widerspruch bietet? Bedeutet jüdisch zu sein auch israelisch zu sein? Inwieweit verändert der 7. Oktober jüdisches Gemeindeleben, die Gedankenwelt und jüdische Publizistik? Wie steht es um das jüdische Gemeindeleben in den USA?In den USA wird eine intensive Diskussion über all das geführt, mit der dieser Band vertraut machen möchte: Peter Beinart ist darin mit seinem Beitrag Being Jewish after the Destruction of Gaza vertreten, die Gegenstimme von Elliot Crosgrove mit In such a time as this. On being Jewish Today sowie Susannah Heschel, Sarah Hammerschlag, Emily Levine, Shaul Magid und David N. Myers.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        January 2013

        The Jews in western Europe, 1400–1600

        by John Edwards

        As European politics, society, economy and religion underwent epoch-making changes between 1400 and 1600, the treatment of Europe's Jews by the non-Jewish majority was, then as in later periods, a symptom of social problems and tensions in the Continent as a whole. Through a broad-ranging collection of documents, John Edwards sets out to present a vivid picture of the Jewish presence in European life during this vital and turbulent period. Subjects covered include the Jews' own economic presence and culture, social relations between Jews and Christians, the policies and actions of Christian authorities in Church and State. He also draws upon original source material to convey ordinary people's prejudices about Jews, including myths about Jewish 'devilishness', money-grabbing, and 'ritual murder' of Christian children. Full introductory and explanatory material makes accessible the historical context of the subject and highlights the insights offered by the documents as well as the pitfalls to be avoided in this area of historical enquiry. This volume aims to provide a coherent working collection of texts for lecturers, teachers and students who wish to understand the experience of Jewish Europeans in this period.

      • Trusted Partner
        December 2023

        Hatred of Jews

        A never-ending story?

        by Sebastian Voigt

        — An overall presentation of the history of anti-Semitism based on the latest research — A necessary book that helps to recognise (and combat) anti-Jewish attitudes and patterns of behaviour even in the present day The Hamas attack on Israel is further aggravating the situation in the Middle East, and will continue to intensify anti-Semitism. And this plague, combined with Israel’s denied right to exist; the attacks in Brussels and Paris; the aggressive violence against everything Jewish in the Islamic world – is as dangerous as ever. Hatred of the Jews is old, vast and strong. The anamnesis began 2500 years ago in the Middle Ages, and came to head in the 18th and 19th centuries. It culminated ideologically in the Wannsee Conference, and became murderous in Auschwitz. Historian Sebastian Voigt provides a dense history of the hatred of the Jews – and combines it with a passionate call for courageous resistance.

      • Trusted Partner
        Science & Mathematics
        April 2021

        Medicalising borders

        Selection, containment and quarantine since 1800

        by Sevasti Trubeta, Christian Promitzer, Paul Weindling, Hastings Donnan

        The research of pandemics, epidemics, and pathogens like COVID-19 reaches far beyond the scope of biomedicine. It is not only an objective for the health, political and social sciences, but epidemics and pandemics are a matter of geography: foci and vectors of communicable diseases continue to test the efficacy of medical control at state borders. This volume illuminates these issues from various disciplinary viewpoints. It starts by exploring historical models of quarantine, spatial isolation and detention as precautionary means against the dissemination of disease and contagion by border crossers, migrants and refugees. Besides the patterns of prejudice with which these groups are confronted, the book also deals with various kinds of fear of contamination from outside of the nation state. The contributors address the implementation of medical techniques at state borders in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, as well as the presently practiced measures of medical and biometric screening of migrants and refugees. Uniquely, this volume shows that the current border security regimes of Western states exhibit a high share of medicalised techniques of power, which originate both in European modernity and in the medical and biological disciplines developed during the last quarter of the millennium. Drawing on the collective expertise of a network of international researchers, this interdisciplinary volume is essential reading for those wishing to understand the medicalisation of borders across the globe, from the early eighteenth century up to the present day.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        April 2024

        Tracking the Jews

        Ecumenical Protestants, conversion, and the Holocaust

        by Carolyn Sanzenbacher

        This book sheds light on an unprecedented Protestant conversion initiative for the global evangelisation of Jews. Founded in 1929, the International Committee on the Christian Approach to the Jews (ICCAJ) aimed to bring Jewish people to their 'spiritual destiny', a task it saw as both benevolent and essential for a harmonious society. By the time of Hitler's rise to power it was active in thirty-two countries, educating Protestant churches on the right Christian attitude towards Jews and antisemitism. Reconstructing the activities of the ICCAJ in the years before, during and immediately after the Holocaust, Tracking the Jews reveals how ideas disseminated through the organisation's discourse - 'Jewish problem', 'Jewish influence', 'Judaising threat', 'eternal Jew' - were used to rationalise, justify, explain or advance a number of deeply troubling policies. They were, for vastly different reasons, consciously used elements of argumentation in both Protestant conversionary discourse and Nazi antisemitic ideology.

      • Trusted Partner
        Political oppression & persecution
        July 2014

        Co-memory and melancholia

        Israelis memorialising the Palestinian Nakba

        by Ronit Lentin

        The 1948 war that led to the creation of the State of Israel also resulted in the destruction of Palestinian society when some 80 per cent of the Palestinians who lived in the major part of Palestine upon which Israel was established became refugees. Israelis call the 1948 war their 'War of Independence' and the Palestinians their 'Nakba', or catastrophe. After many years of Nakba denial, land appropriation, political discrimination against the Palestinians within Israel and the denial of rights to Palestinian refugees, in recent years the Nakba is beginning to penetrate Israeli public discourse. This book, available at last in paperback, explores the construction of collective memory in Israeli society, where the memory of the trauma of the Holocaust and of Israel's war dead competes with the memory claims of the dispossessed Palestinians. Against a background of the Israeli resistance movement, Lentin's central argument is that co-memorating the Nakba by Israeli Jews is motivated by an unresolved melancholia about the disappearance of Palestine and the dispossession of the Palestinians, a melancholia that shifts mourning from the lost object to the grieving subject. Lentin theorises Nakba co-memory as a politics of resistance, counterpoising co-memorative practices by internally displaced Israeli Palestinians with Israeli Jewish discourses of the Palestinian right of return, and questions whether return narratives by Israeli Jews, courageous as they may seem, are ultimately about Israeli Jewish self-healing rather than justice for Palestine.

      • Trusted Partner
        Medieval history
        November 2011

        Jewish Women in Europe in the Middle Ages

        A quiet revolution

        by Simha Goldin

        Goldin's study explores the relationships between men and women within Jewish society living in Germany, northern France and England among the Christian population over a period of some 350 years. Looking at original Hebrew sources to conduct a social analysis, he takes us from the middle of the tenth century until the middle of the second half of the fourteenth century, when the Christian population had expelled the Jews from almost all of the places they were living. Particularly fascinating are the attitudes towards women, as well as their changes in social status. By examining the factors involved in these issues, including views of the leadership, economic influences, internal power politics and gender struggles, Goldin's book provides a greater understanding of the functioning of these communities. This volume will be of great interest to historians of medieval Europe, gender and religion.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        February 2023

        No masters but God

        Portraits of anarcho-Judaism

        by Hayyim Rothman

        The forgotten legacy of religious Jewish anarchism, and the adventures and ideas of its key figures, finally comes to light in this book. Set in the decades surrounding both world wars, No masters but God identifies a loosely connected group of rabbis and traditionalist thinkers who explicitly appealed to anarchist ideas in articulating the meaning of the Torah, traditional practice, Jewish life and the mission of modern Jewry. Full of archival discoveries and first translations from Yiddish and Hebrew, it explores anarcho-Judaism in its variety through the works of Yaakov Meir Zalkind, Yitshak Nahman Steinberg, Yehudah Leyb Don-Yahiya, Avraham Yehudah Heyn, Natan Hofshi, Shmuel Alexandrov, Yehudah Ashlag and Aaron Shmuel Tamaret. With this ground-breaking account, Hayyim Rothman traces a complicated story about the modern entanglement of religion and anarchism, pacifism and Zionism, prophetic anti-authoritarianism and mystical antinomianism.

      • Trusted Partner
        March 2025

        Leó Szilárd

        The man behind the bomb

        by Arne Molfenter

        Leó Szilárd is a brilliant physicist - although he originally began his studies in Berlin without even being enrolled. On long walks home from university, he discusses scientific issues of all kinds with his professor and neighbour Albert Einstein. Szilárd, who is of Jewish descent, flees to London in 1933. His goal is to prevent the Germans from being the first to have nuclear weapons. With Albert Einstein and other scientists, he puts himself at the service of the American government to advance the development of an atomic bomb for defence purposes. When he realises that the Manhattan Project is not about defence, but about an attack on Japan, he is horrified. Author and journalist Arne Molfenter traces the life of this brilliant man whose invention was used completely against his intentions. It is an exciting book about a scientist whose research influenced the course of history.

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        February 2025

        Passage works

        Ruth Beckermann’s art

        by Patricia Allmer, John Sears

        Passage Works is the first book-length English language critical analysis of the transdisciplinary work of the Austrian film-maker, writer, and artist Ruth Beckermann (b. 1952, Vienna). Beckermann's works interrogate identity and geography as formations of the intersections between the past and the contemporary. Taking as her central topics Austria and its history and politics, her own identity as a Jewish woman, and the contemporary global geopolitics of migration and displacement, Beckermann develops wider meditations in film, art, and writing on the persistence of European memory, and the meanings of Europe itself; on borders, migrations, and identities; on memories, traumas, and traditions; on the image as marker of presence and absence, repository of the traces of historical violence; and on the passage as metaphor for a range of physical, psychological, and ideological movements defining the complexities of contemporary cosmopolitan identities.

      • Trusted Partner
        October 2020

        Stop the Hatred!

        A Pamphlet Against Antisemitism

        by Sigmund Gottlieb

        The increasing hostility that Jews experience can no longer be explained away with fine rhetoric. Antisemitism is taking hold in a menacing way at the heart of society. Sigmund Gottlieb addresses his wake-up call to the population at large: stand up – not only against right-wing extremist violence and radical Islamism, but also against hatred in the social media, against unfair criticism of the state of Israel, against anti-Jewish abusive language in the school playground, against trivializing reports in the media and day-to-day indifference. The resurgent talk of ‘packed suitcases’ in Jewish communities is a moral indictment. And it is intolerable.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        May 2012

        Racism and social change in the Republic of Ireland

        Second edition

        by Bryan Fanning

        Now in its second edition, Racism and Social Change in the Republic of Ireland provides an original and challenging account of racism in twenty-first century Irish society and locates this in its historical, political, sociological and policy contexts. It includes specific case studies of the experiences of racism in twenty-first century Ireland alongside a number of historical case studies that examine how modern Ireland came to marginalize ethnic minorities. Various chapters examine responses by the Irish state to Jewish refugees before, during and after the Holocaust, asylum seekers and Travellers. Other chapters examine policy responses to and academic debates on racism in Ireland. A key focus of the various case studies is upon the mechanics of exclusion experienced by black and ethnic minorities within institutional processes and of the linked challenge of taking racism seriously in twenty-first century Ireland. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        March 2017

        New frontiers

        Imperialism's new communities in East Asia, 1842–1953

        by Robert Bickers, Christian Henriot

        In the new world order mapped out by Japanese and Western imperialism in East Asia after the mid-nineteenth century opium wars, communities of merchants and settlers took root in China and Korea. New identities were constructed, new modes of collaboration formed and new boundaries between the indigenous and foreign communities were literally and figuratively established. Newly available in paperback, this pioneering and comparative study of Western and Japanese imperialism examines European, American and Japanese communities in China and Korea, and challenges received notions of agency and collaboration by also looking at the roles in China of British and Japanese colonial subjects from Korea, Taiwan and India, and at Chinese Christians and White Russian refugees. This volume will be of interest to students and scholars of the history and anthropology of imperialism, colonialism's culture and East Asian history, as well as contemporary Asian affairs.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        January 2026

        The tragedy of the border

        Asylum, destitution and homelessness

        by Mark Rainey

        Amid the global migration crisis, the UK has created and increasingly hostile policy environment for asylum seekers that has pushed many into unnecessary hardship and homelessness. This volume is an ethnographic study alongside refused asylum seekers and refugees living destitute in Manchester, UK. Based on over three years of research in emergency night shelters and on the streets of the city, it draws on the stories and experiences of those who have been driven into destitution by an antagonistic immigration system. The book not only explores how legal and temporal uncertainty shapes the daily lives of those who have had their asylum claims refused, but also attends to the experiences of volunteers and activists working on the frontline of the crisis. While the work is rich in detail, it also extends outwards and offers new insights into our understanding of borders and the need to rethink the grand notions of justice and hospitality.

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