Jewish Studies Commons^™

March 2015, Temple Shalom Synagogue Center

Newsletter Archive

Contents: Purim Masked Ball; From the Rabbi; President's Message; Announcements; Colby Professor Visits to Discuss the Significance of Food to Religious Groups: Book Group; Jewish Genealogical Tidbits

The Subject Librarian Newsletter, Judaic Studies, Spring 2015, Richard Harrison

Libraries' Newsletters

No abstract provided.

Bach's Christmas Oratorio, Bwv 248, And The Jews, Daniel R. Melamed

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

It has been recognized since the nineteenth century that most of the poetic arias and choruses in J. S. Bach’s Christmas Oratorio BWV 248 are parodies of music composed to other texts. In the early twentieth century it was claimed that at least one gospel narrative chorus was also derived from extant music, a hypothesis subsequently expanded to include several such movements said to be parodies as well. The claims are flimsily argued and are unlikely on source-critical grounds, but they have stuck, persisting in scholarly writings, reference works, and popular literature.

The origin of this idea is a 1916 …

February 2015, Temple Shalom Synagogue Center

Newsletter Archive

Contents: Café Shalom; From the Rabbi; President's Message; Announcents; Book Group

Escape Artistry: Elisabeth Bergner And Jewish Disappearance In Der Träumende Mund (Czinner, 1932), Kerry Wallach

German Studies Faculty Publications

The late Weimar film Der träumende Mund culminates in the apparent but unconfirmed suicide of its female protagonist, played by Elisabeth Bergner. Bergner, whose background contributed to the film’s Jewish reception, and who later claimed to have written the film’s screenplay, left Germany and went into exile with director Paul Czinner in 1932. This film and the circumstances of its production and premiere link tragic modes of self-erasure, including the suicides of both many women and many German Jews, to notions of escape, emigration, and reemergence. Its success among Jewish spectators points to its enduring and international appeal.

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 …

Refugees And Relief: The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee And European Jews In Cuba And Shanghai 1938-1943, Zhava Litvac Glaser

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Traditionally, pre-modern Jewish communities sensed an obligation to bind together to provide aid to Jews who found themselves in catastrophic situations; however, with the advent of modernity and the dissolution of Jewish communal authority, the fragmentation of Jewish communities, and the unprecedented stresses of the Holocaust, communal dynamics grew far more complex. The Jews of Cuba and Shanghai were two small and relatively remote communities overwhelmed by Jewish refugees fleeing the Nazis. At their request, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee stepped in and provided both the funding and leadership that both of these locations so desperately needed.

The Jewish …

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 …

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 …

Making It In Maine: Stories Of Jewish Life In Small-Town America, David M. Freidenreich

Faculty Scholarship

There are countless stories of Jewish life in Maine, stretching back 200 years. These are stories worth telling not only for their enjoyment value but also because we can learn a great deal from them. They reflect the challenges that confronted members of an immigrant community as they sought to become true Mainers, as well as the challenges this ethnic group now faces as a result of its successful integration. The experiences of Jews in Maine, moreover, encapsulate in many ways the experiences of small-town Jews throughout New England and the United States. Their stories offer glimpses into the changing …

Playing The Whore: Illicit Union And The Biblical Typology Of Promiscuity In The Toledot Yeshu Tradition, Natalie Latteri

Theology & Religious Studies

Toledot Yeshu, or “Stories about Jesus,” have been transmitted by Jews for centuries but only recently have begun to garner signifcant scholarly attention as part of a tradition of anti-Christian polemic. This paper contends that the varied depictions of Jesus’ conception in the Toledot corpus refect the intracommunal issues of forced conversion, apostasy, and overfamiliarity with non-Jews. The theme was neither new to the Toledot nor a product of the late-antique and medieval contexts that Jewish stories of Jesus frst circulated in. Rather, it echoes biblical representations of, and admonishments against, illicit relationships with non-Jews which ancient authors commonly depicted …

Ijcs News, Volume 3, The Institute Of Judaeo-Christian Studies

Newsletters

The 2015 issue of IJCS News, the Institute of Judaeo-Christian Studies' annual newsletter, Vol 3.

January 2015, Temple Shalom Synagogue Center

Newsletter Archive

Contents: MLK Day Program; From the Rabbi; Presidents Message; Announcements; Book Group; Jewish Genealogical Tidbits

Book Review: On Goldman's The American Jewish Story Through Cinema, David B. Levy

Touro University Libraries Publications and Research

The author provides a review of the book The American Jewish Story through Cinema, written by Eric Goldman.

Book Review: Rav Hisda's Daughter, Book 1: Apprentice: A Novel Of Love, The Talmud, And Sorcery, David B. Levy

Touro University Libraries Publications and Research

The author presents a review of Rav Hisda's Daughter, Book 1: Apprentice: A Novel of Love, the Talmud, and Sorcery.

Book Review: New Heavens And A New Earth: The Jewish Reception Of Copernican Thought, David B. Levy

Touro University Libraries Publications and Research

The author reviews the book New Heavens and a New Earth: The Jewish Reception of Copernican Thought.

Book Review: Dislocated Memories: Jews, Music, And Postwar German Culture, David B. Levy

Touro University Libraries Publications and Research

The author reviews the book Dislocated Memories: Jews, Music, and Postwar German Culture.

Jud Ms 06 Myer Marcus Interview Finding Aid, Katharine Renolds Thomas

Search the Manuscript Collection (Finding Aids)

Description:

Myer M. Marcus was born in Portland, Maine in 1914, the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants Saul Marcus, a Portland clothier, and his wife Bertha Marcus, nee Goldstein. As a boy he enjoyed spending his free time at the Portland Boys Club on Plum Street. He attended North School and Portland High School, then spent one year at the University of Virginia before transferring to Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. Marcus earned his LL.B. in 1937 from Boston University School of Law, then returned to Portland to open the Marcus and Marcus law office on Exchange Street with his younger …

Germans, Jews And Turks (Fall 2015), Robert D. Tobin

Syllabi

This class studies the expression of cultural identity in central European literature. How have people come to think of themselves or others as “Germans,” “Jews,” “Turks,” or some combinations thereof? While the Holocaust is obviously central to the German-Jewish relationship, it is not the only focus of this course—we will read literary reflections of the emancipation of the Jews, of German-Jewish assimilation and symbiosis, of the rise of anti-Semitism and Zionism, as well as attempts to remember the past. And while the long history of the relationship between Jews and non-Jews in Germany will be a major component of our …

Dressing Up: Religion And Ethnicity In Israeli National Dolls, Maya Balakirsky Katz

Graduate School of Jewish Studies Publications and Research

This article considers Israel’s national image both at home and abroad through the framework of Israeli costume dolls, looking specifically at the way that gender played a role in Israel’s national image as it travelled from domestic production to international reception. Initially, predominantly female doll makers produced three main types of Israeli dolls, but over time the religious Eastern European male doll triumphed in the pantheon of national types. Produced for retail sale to non-Hebrew speaking tourists by immigrant woman, the Eastern European religious male doll came to represent Israel abroad while the market pushed representations of the Middle Eastern …