Jewish Studies Commons^™

Film Review: The Impure: An Abolitionist Documentary Film Of The 19th Century Traffic In Jewish Women, Caroline Norma

Dignity: A Journal on Sexual Exploitation and Violence

No abstract provided.

Food Acquisition Strategies Within Theresienstadt Ghetto: An Analysis Of Oral Testimonies, Jaime L. Marquis

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

The Musical World Of Joseph Rumshinsky’S Mamele, D. A. Geller

All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“The Musical World of Joseph Rumshinsky’s Mamele” consists of a set of three cases studies that demonstrate the enormous need and potential for further Yiddish theater music scholarship. There exists little Yiddish theater scholarship that addresses music in any meaningful way: scholars like David Lifson, Nahma Sandrow, and Joel Berkowitz tend to view Yiddish theater’s rich musical traditions as a footnote in the larger history of Yiddish theater’s dramatic development. Yet Yiddish theater music developed independently from Yiddish drama, and therefore needs to be studied from a primarily musical perspective. I connect scholarship across the fields of ...

Name Fluidity And Its Effect On Ashkenazi Genealogical Research, Meredith Dreyfuss

Senior Theses and Capstone Projects

It is commonly believed that genealogical research has become easier and more popular than ever before, and with more and more records being digitized and available over the internet, the ability to research family history can be done by anyone with an interest and a computer. Where one might have had to travel to the places that housed the records that trace family life, now many of those records are online, with the data store growing all the time. Similarly, relatively inexpensive DNA testing is bringing family background and history to the masses.

However, while science and technology have revolutionized ...

Finding Edith: Surviving The Holocaust In Plain Sight, Edith Mayer Cord

Purdue University Press Book Previews

Finding Edith: Surviving the Holocaust in Plain Sight is the coming-of-age story of a young Jewish girl chased in Europe during World War II. Like a great adventure story, the book describes the childhood and adolescence of a Viennese girl growing up against the backdrop of the Great Depression, the rise of Nazism, World War II, and the religious persecution of Jews throughout Europe. Edith was hunted in Western Europe and Vichy France, where she was hidden in plain sight, constantly afraid of discovery and denunciation. Forced to keep every thought to herself, Edith developed an intense inner life. After ...

Wisdom (Hikmah) As Perceived By Iranian Muslim Scholars: Reflections On Ibn Sina, Ghazali, And Suhrawardi, Leyla H. Tajer, Amir H. Zekrgoo

Journal of Islamic and Middle Eastern Multidisciplinary Studies

The evolution of the concept of spiritual/religious wisdom (ḥikamt) by the Iranian Muslim philosophers from the 10^th to 12^th century, may be studied under three main trends namely Mashā’i (Peripatetic), Kalām (theology), and Ishrāq (Illumination). Despite the correlation among these trends each of them grew independently. Among the three, the Hikmat-i Ishrāq (Illumination Wisdom) which is also known as Ḥikamt-i Dhawqi (Intuitive Wisdom) of Shahab al-Din Suhrawardi (1153-1191) found a special place as it tended to bring together the philosophical and theological aspects of wisdom. This survey would address the development of ḥikmat (wisdom) among ...

Who Is Like God? The Deer Hunter As Angelic Allegory, Nicholas J. Schaser

Journal of Religion & Film

Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter utilizes Christian contexts and biblical motifs in order to present an allegory in which Michael (Robert De Niro) represents an angelic being. While Michael displays powers that parallel those of biblical angels, his lack of religious reverence and divine self-perception lead to a metaphorical fall in Vietnam. Michael’s friend Nick (Christopher Walken) is also an allegorical symbol for imperiled humanity in need of salvation. When Michael is unable to rescue Nick from a Russian roulette table in Saigon, Cimino’s film emerges as a theological statement about the problem of human violence and ...

Critical Embodied Praxis For Social Justice And Peace Educators: A Story Of Personal Transformation Through Analysis Of My Jewish And Settler Identities, Cara Michelle Silverberg

Capstone Collection

In this paper, I examine definitions of and relationships between violence, oppression, peace, liberation, and embodiment in the context of critical pedagogy in order to construct a theory of critical embodied praxis for social justice and peace educators. Considering the body to be a tangible vessel through which narratives and mechanisms of violence are expressed and maintained, I explore the potential of the body to be a vessel through which liberatory narratives may be generated and shared. After constructing a theory of critical embodied praxis, I illustrate this framework in action through a personal narrative that explores the intersections of ...

The Complicated Cases Of Soghomon Tehlirian And Sholem Schwartzbard And Their Influences On Raphaël Lemkin's Thinking About Genocide, Steven Leonard Jacobs

Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal

The article is an examination of the persons and trials of Soghomon Tehlirian and Sholem Schwartzbard, their political assassinations as acts of vengeance for genocide and pogroms, their trials and subsequent acquittals. It is also an examination of the influences of these two events on the evolved thinking of Raphael Lemkin on his conceptualization of the needs for an international law contra genocide. Finally, it also elaborates on what information is now available on both men and their associations, and what was known and unknown to Lemkin and whether or not these two cases remained centrally important to his understandings.

Narrating Public Space: Franz Kafka In Nationalized Prague, Jordan Wyner

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis analyzes Franz Kafka’s representation of public space by situating his short fiction in the context of how Prague’s public spaces transformed around the fin-de-siècle. During the Czech National Revival, the Czech educated and semi-educated middle-class sought to transform Prague from a nationally undifferentiated space, shared by both Czech- and German-speakers, to one exclusively promoting a Czech national identity. The German middle-class responded by also publicly expressing its own national identity and values. Indeed, middle-class civic society in nineteenth century and early-twentieth century Prague brought changes to urban space to create distinct spaces oriented around the language ...

The Mathematical Imagination: On The Origins And Promise Of Critical Theory, Matthew Handelman

Philosophy

This book offers an archeology of the undeveloped potential of mathematics for critical theory. As Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno first conceived of the critical project in the 1930s, critical theory steadfastly opposed the mathematization of thought. Mathematics flattened thought into a dangerous positivism that led reason to the barbarism of World War II. The Mathematical Imagination challenges this narrative, showing how for other German-Jewish thinkers, such as Gershom Scholem, Franz Rosenzweig, and Siegfried Kracauer, mathematics offered metaphors to negotiate the crises of modernity during the Weimar Republic. Influential theories of poetry, messianism, and cultural critique, Handelman shows, borrowed ...

The Notorious Ben Hecht: Iconoclastic Writer And Militant Zionist, Julien Gorbach

Purdue University Press Book Previews

Ben Hecht had seen his share of death-row psychopaths, crooked ward bosses, and Capone gun thugs by the time he had come of age as a crime reporter in gangland Chicago. His grim experience with what he called “the soul of man” gave him a kind of uncanny foresight a decade later, when a loose cannon named Adolf Hitler began to rise to power in central Europe.

In 1932, Hecht solidified his legend as "the Shakespeare of Hollywood" with his thriller Scarface, the Howard Hughes epic considered the gangster movie to end all gangster movies. But Hecht rebelled against his ...

Triptych: Genesis, Kavana, Sabbath, Ben Spatz, N. Eda Erçin, Caroline Gatt, Agnieszka Mendel

PARtake: The Journal of Performance as Research

These three video essays come out of a multi-year research project that attempts to rethink and redesign the relationship between embodiment and audiovisuality in the context of academic research. As one anonymous reviewer noted, they gesture towards “a new kind of research artifact, making a space somewhere between standard documentation and contemporary creative product.” All three of the video essays comprise footage taken from experimental practice or “laboratory” sessions conducted at the University of Huddersfield in summer 2017. During this period the core research team (Ben Spatz, Nazlıhan Eda Erçin, and Agnieszka Mendel) undertook sustained practice research, working with and ...

Abe, John C. Lyden

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a film review of Abe (2019) directed by Fernando Grostein Andrade.

Deciphering Secrets Of Medieval Cathedrals: Crowdsourced Manuscript Transcriptions And Modern Digital Editions, Roger Louis Martinez-Davila, Sean Perrone, Francisco Garcia Serrano-Nebras, Maria Martin De Vidales Garcia

Bulletin for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies

This paper discusses Deciphering Secrets, a large-scale transcription project linked to Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) to teach Spanish paleography and the SILReST paleography method. It also addresses issues of accuracy, particularly how connecting crowdsourced transcription to class assignments will increase the accuracy of transcriptions and quickly make available to the scholarly community many manuscript transcriptions from the cathedral chapters of Burgos, Plasencia, and Toledo. It discusses the refinement of editorial techniques in migration of archival materials to digital format, creating standards for text encoding, and postulates the next steps of building databases. The paper then shows how new knowledge ...

The Failure Of Soft Law To Provide An Equitable Framework For Restitution Of Nazi-Looted Art, Michael J. Birnkrant

Washington University Global Studies Law Review

It is estimated that over 20% of the art in Europe was looted by the Nazi regime during World War II. Many pieces were taken by force from Jewish art dealers, and much of the property taken during this period of Nazi spoliation was never returned. Heirs of looted art are still filing claims for restitution in various courts, but the current global patchwork of statutes of limitations and the availability of the “good faith purchaser defense” in many jurisdictions can render proceedings confusing and unjust.

This note explores the current state of the law regarding repatriation of Nazi-looted art ...

Was Yosef On The Spectrum? Understanding Joseph Through Torah, Midrash, And Classical Jewish Sources (Introduction), Samuel J. Levine

Scholarly Works

The story of Yosef (Joseph) presents some of the most challenging questions of all biblical narratives. Yosef’s behavior, interpersonal relationships, and personal journey and development are often difficult to understand, and at times seem to defy explanation. Leading commentators are repeatedly puzzled both by Yosef’s actions and by the events that surround him. This book attempts to achieve a coherent and cohesive reading of the story that offers a plausible understanding of Yosef’s behaviors toward others and those of others toward him, while at the same time accounting for both his successes and his failures. Toward that ...

Decreasing Voluntary Employee Turnover In The Hospitality Industry, Andrew Anderson

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

The purpose of this qualitative multiple case study was to explore the strategies general managers of full-service hotels used to reduce voluntary frontline employee turnover. The conceptual framework for this study was Herzberg's motivation-hygiene theory. The 3 participants were hotel general managers in the midwestern region of the United States. Data were collected through semistructured interviews with 3 purposefully selected hotel general managers and by reviewing company documents. Data analysis consisted of gathering the data, coding for emergent themes, compiling the data into common codes, organizing the data into themes, interpreting the meaning, and reporting the themes. Four themes ...

Louisville Jewish Hospital’S “Tikkun Olam”: A Case Example Of Continuity For American Jewish Hospitals, Hannah Thompson

Dean's Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Scholarship

According to Mary Wagner, the author of Jewish Hospitals Yesterday and Today, Jewish Hospitals emerged in the mid-19th century in the U.S. for several reasons: the Jewish American community’s need to combat anti-Semitism, to provide services for its large and then-growing immigrant population, and to establish a place for Jewish medical professionals to work, since anti-Semitism prevented them from being employed elsewhere. Although, American Jews became increasingly more accepted as part of the broader American social and political milieu throughout the early 20th century, Jewish Hospitals persisted in cities across the U.S. until the 1970s. To date ...

On Writing And Righting History: The Stakes Of Holocaust Interpretation And Remembrance In Poland And The United States, Noa Gutow-Ellis

Honors Theses

This thesis explores the ways in which American Jews - and Americans more generally, by way of the Americanization of the Holocaust - have come to think about and understand Poland and how Poland has subsequently rejected their narratives. Historically, American Jewish cultural works have placed Poland as a geographic space, nation, and people at the center of stories of Jewish suffering in the Holocaust and World War II. In its quest to right and correct historical misunderstandings, this project looks at the ways Poland has worked to completely revise the historical narrative.

Through tracing historiographies of separateness between Jewish and Polish ...