Jewish Studies Commons^™

Leaving A Covenantal Religion: Orthodox Jewish Disaffiliation From An Immigration Psychology Perspective, Joel Engelman, Glen Milstein, Irvin Sam Schonfeld, Joshua B. Grubbs

Publications and Research

This study explored psychological variables associated with disaffiliation from Orthodox Judaism (a covenantal community), and subsequent wellness. A web-based survey (N = 206) assessed factors previously used to study immigrants: push (distress within origin community), pull (toward destination community), and goal attainment. Psychological wellness, perceived stress, overall health, and loneliness were also assessed. Findings included: (1) strong pull toward opportunities for physical and ideological autonomy; (2) those who experienced more push toward disaffiliation, reported decreased current wellness; (3) goal attainment was associated with increased wellbeing; (4) significant differences in the experiences of disaffiliation between men and women; (5) most who …

Fascist Aesthetics From 1940 To Contemporary Times, Anna M. Gellerman

Publications and Research

Movies and literature all over the world share some common aesthetics: militarization, romanticization of death, beauty of perfection, and even purity. What most don't think about is how these tropes rose to popularity due to Nazi Germany's propaganda films. This work describes these fascist aesthetics, and uses famous publications from the 1940s until now to paint just how common these themes are.

Jewish Germany: An Enduring Presence From The Fourth To The Twenty-First Century, John A. Drobnicki

Publications and Research

Review of the book Jewish Germany: An enduring presence from the fourth to the twenty-first century.

Soap From Human Fat: The Case Of Professor Spanner, John A. Drobnicki

Publications and Research

Review of the book Soap from Human Fat: The Case of Professor Spanner, by Monika Tomkiewicz and Piotr Semków (Gdynia: Wydawnictwo Róza Wiatrów, 2013).

A Mission At 311, Nan Li

Theses and Dissertations

My thesis intends to look at how the aftermath of Holocaust has a tremendous life-changing impact on the children of Holocaust survivors, and to explore how these people has carried these misfortunes and burden to be resilient and joyful in their everyday lives.

The Bronx Was Brewing: A Digital Resource Of A Lost Industry, Michelle Zimmer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Bronx: a bucolic oasis laden with history, a suburb within city-limits, an urban warzone, and thanks to the recent renaissance, a phoenix of progress rising from the proverbial ashes of the fires that burned through the borough in the 1970’s. But many people are unaware that the Bronx also brewed.
Uncovering the brewing industry of the Bronx tells not only the story of the lost industry, but it also communicates the narrative of the development of the Bronx. The brewers were German immigrants who developed a thriving industry by introducing lager beer to the United States by taking advantage …

From Rochel To Rose And Mendel To Max: First Name Americanization Patterns Among Twentieth-Century Jewish Immigrants To The United States, Jason H. Greenberg

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

There has been a dearth of investigation into the distribution of and the alterations among Jewish given names. Whereas Jewish surnames are a popular topic of study, first names receive far less analysis. Because Jewish immigrants to the United States frequently changed their names, this thesis can serve as a guide to genealogists and other scholars seeking to trace the paths of Jewish immigrants from Europe. Data was drawn from about 1500 naturalization records from Brooklyn in order to determine the correspondences between the given names featured on passenger lists and their Americanized counterparts. More than three-quarters of surveyed immigrants …

Review Of The Book Harmful And Undesirable: Book Censorship In Nazi Germany, John A. Drobnicki

Publications and Research

Review of the book Harmful and undesirable: Book censorship in Nazi Germany.

Review Of Muslims And Jews In France. History Of A Conflict By Maud S. Mandel, Bryan Turner

Publications and Research

The mood of European scholarship with respect to the recognition and integration of Islam is typically pessimistic. The rise of anti-immigrant and anti-Islam political parties – Golden Dawn in Greece, the Northern League in Italy, Marine Le Penn and the National Front in France, and the English defense league in Britain – have exposed a hitherto hidden or ignored under-current of resentment against foreigners. In the context of these developments, Maud Mandel’s study of Muslims and Jews in France is a welcome corrective to the dominant focus on anti-Islam in the academic literature and in the popular media. The historical …

Ni Francaise, Ni Juive, Ni Arabe: The Influence Of Nineteenth Century French Judaism On The Emergence Of Franco- Jewish- Arab Literature, Deborah Rosalind Gruber

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study proposes that the influence of nineteenth century French Judaism on the Jewish communities of the Middle East from approximately 1910­‐1956 has had an indelible influence on the evolution of Franco- Jewish‐Arab literature today. From the late nineteenth century, the education of the Jews of the Ottoman Empire was provided by the Paris based Alliance Israélite Universelle, an organization established by French Jews with the purpose of emancipating disadvantaged Jewish communities outside of France. The result was the establishment of Franco­‐Jewish-Arab communities that regarded French education as a means of both social and economic advancement. Although the curriculum of …

Techniques For Automatic Normalization Of Orthographically Variant Yiddish Texts, Yakov Peretz Blum

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Yiddish is characterized by a multitude of orthographic systems. A number of approaches to automatic normalization of variant orthography have been explored for the processing of historic texts of languages whose orthography has since been standardized. However, these approaches have not yet been applied to Yiddish.

Using a manually normalized set of 16 Yiddish documents as a training and test corpus, four techniques for automatic normalization were compared: a hand-crafted set of transformation rules, an off-the-shelf spell checker, edit distance minimization with manually set weights, and edit distance minimization with weights learned through a training set.

Performance was evaluated by …

El Transnacionalismo Y La Identidad Judia En La Obra De Isaac Goldemberg, Jose Goni

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The objective of this research is to study the work of Isaac Goldemberg, a Peruvian writer of Jewish roots who settled for several years in the United States. His work shows a combination of elements that reflect both his Jewish origin and his country of birth. I believe that studies of Jewish Latin American writers are scarce. They have been approached from a sociological, anthropological, religious and historical perspective, but not from a literary one. Therefore, I intend to make a literary analysis of Goldemberg's work first, and secondly, an interpretation of his Jewish identity and his transnationalism as shown …

Review Of The Book The Swastika’S Darkening Shadow: Voices Before The Holocaust, John A. Drobnicki

Publications and Research

Review of the book The swastika’s darkening shadow: Voices before the Holocaust.

The Privileged "In-Between" Status Of Latino Jews In The Northeastern United States, Laura Limonic

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study is an in-depth look at how religion, class, and ethno-racial status interact and intersect to affect assimilation and integration prospects for new immigrants. The research focuses on Latin American Jewish immigrants in the Northeastern United States, a particularly interesting group to study because they are not easily classified within the American racial and ethnic system and existing ethno-racial categories. As a result, they are presented with a number of ethnic options that they can call upon. The choices they make as well as the constraints they face in making these choices, can broaden our understanding of contemporary immigrant …

Holocaust Denial Literature Twenty Years Later: A Follow-Up Investigation Of Public Librarians' Attitudes Regarding Acquisition And Access, John A. Drobnicki

Publications and Research

This study was undertaken to learn about public librarians' attitudes and opinions concerning the sometimes conflicting issues of intellectual freedom, collection balance, and controversial materials, and whether those attitudes and opinions have changed over twenty years. The investigation focused on Holocaust denial literature, a body of work which ranges from minimizing the Holocaust to outright denying that it happened. Public librarians in Nassau County, New York, were surveyed, and the results were compared with a similar survey from 1992. The results indicate that librarians are even more open to Holocaust denial literature than they were twenty years ago and, regardless …

Review Of The Website The Nuremberg Trials Project, John A. Drobnicki

Publications and Research

Review of the website The Nuremberg trials project.

Review Of The Book Fifty Key Thinkers On The Holocaust And Genocide, John A. Drobnicki

Publications and Research

Review of the book Fifty key thinkers on the Holocaust and genocide.

Isaac Edward Kiev: Early Leader In American Judaica Librarianship, Amy F. Stempler

Publications and Research

Isaac Edward Kiev (1905–1975), former Chief Librarian of New York’s Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, spent a lifetime facilitating Jewish research. This article, based on the author’s Master’s thesis on Kiev, focuses on his contributions to the founding of Jewish book and library organizations during the American post-war era, including the Association of Jewish Libraries, Jewish Book Council of America, Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, Inc., and numerous Jewish book foundations in the United States and Israel. In addition to providing insight into the creation of these associations, the article illustrates the parallel development of the fields of Judaica librarianship and …

Review Of The Book Jewish Responses To Persecution, Vol. I: 1933-1938, John A. Drobnicki

Publications and Research

Review of the book Jewish responses to persecution, Vol. I: 1933-1938.

Holocaust-Denial Literature: A Sixth Bibliography, John A. Drobnicki

Publications and Research

This bibliography is a supplement to five earlier ones that were published in the Bulletin of Bibliography. Holocaust denial is a body of literature that seeks to prove that the Jewish Holocaust did not happen. This bibliography includes both works about Holocaust denial and works of Holocaust denial.

The Library's Bassin Collection, Scott Sheidlower, John A. Drobnicki

Publications and Research

In May 1973, York College President Milton G. Bassin donated 495 volumes to the York College Library, most of which were written in either Hebrew or Yiddish, with some also in Aramaic. The books belonged to his father, Max Bassin (who was sometimes referred to as Morris, Moses, or Moshe), who was a noted anthologist of Yiddish poetry.

Review Of The Database Testaments To The Holocaust, John A. Drobnicki

Publications and Research

Review of the database Testaments to the Holocaust.

Review Of The Book Dictionary Of Literary Biography, Vol. 299: Holocaust Novelists, John A. Drobnicki

Publications and Research

Review of the book Dictionary of literary biography, Vol. 299: Holocaust novelists.

Holocaust-Denial Literature: A Fifth Bibliography, John A. Drobnicki

Publications and Research

This bibliography is a supplement to four earlier ones that were published in the Bulletin of Bibliography. Holocaust denial is a body of literature that seeks to prove that the Jewish Holocaust did not happen. This bibliography includes both works about Holocaust denial and works of Holocaust denial.

Review Of The Book In The Shadow Of The Polish Eagle: The Poles, The Holocaust And Beyond, John A. Drobnicki

Publications and Research

Review of the book In the Shadow of the Polish Eagle: The Poles, the Holocaust and Beyond.

Historical Fabrications On The Internet: Recognition, Evaluation, And Use In Bibliographic Instruction, John A. Drobnicki, Richard Asaro

Publications and Research

Although the Internet provides access to a wealth of information, there is little, if any, control over the quality of that information. Side-by-side with reliable information, one finds disinformation, misinformation, and hoaxes. The authors of this paper discuss numerous examples of fabricated historical information on the Internet (ranging from denials of the Holocaust to personal vendettas), offer suggestions on how to evaluate websites, and argue that these fabrications can be incorporated into bibliographic instruction classes.

Holocaust-Denial Literature: A Fourth Bibliography, John A. Drobnicki

Publications and Research

This bibliography is a supplement to three earlier ones that were published in the Bulletin of Bibliography. Holocaust denial is a body of literature that seeks to prove that the Jewish Holocaust did not happen. This bibliography includes both works about Holocaust denial and works of Holocaust denial.

Review Of The Book The Holocaust: Memories, Research, Reference, John A. Drobnicki

Publications and Research

Review of the book The Holocaust: Memories, Research, Reference.

"Who Is Sleeping In The Bed Of Sodom?", Nancy Levene

Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS)

The question that I am left with from the extraordinary presentations over the conference's two days borrows from Rabbi Steve Greenberg's and Ludger Viefhues's discussion of the multiple images of the biblical "Sodom". Conventionally Sodom has signified a place of sexual deviance or, conversely, sexual censorship. But as Greenberg pointed out, in many traditional commentaries on the story of the condemnation of Sodom, the issue was not that the townspeople were engaged in forbidden sexual practices, but that they were violent and hostile to those in need of shelter and food.

Felix Posen Bibliographic Project On Antisemitism, John A. Drobnicki

Publications and Research

A review of the Felix Posen Bibliographic Project on Antisemitism.