A stunningly original look at the forgotten Jewish political roots of contemporary international human rights, told through the moving stories of five key activistsThe year 2018 marks the seventieth anniversary of two momentous events in twentieth-century history: the birth of the State of Israel and the creation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Both remain tied together in the ongoing debates about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, global antisemitism...

Most jazz historians give short shrift to the Buckeye state, regarding as a go-through rather than a go-to place. However, the fact is jazz has been practiced in Ohio and with a vengeance. For 30 years, these authors have been researching and documenting the history of music, particularly jazz in Ohio. Their 1999 exhibit at the Ohio Historical Society, "Jazz Ohio " ran for twelve months before portions of it moved to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The exhibit inspired the book, and much o...

Columbus has long been known for its musicians. Unlike New York, San Francisco, Kansas City, Nashville, or even Cincinnati, however, it has never had a definable �scene.� Still, some truly remarkable music has been made in this musical crossroads by the many outstanding musicians who have called it home. Since 1900, Columbus has grown from the 28th- to the 15th-largest city in the United States. During this period, it has developed into a musically vibrant community that has nurtured the t...

A leading historian’s revelatory exploration of antisemitism in the United States—from 1940s anti-Jewish riots until today—showing that it has long served as a frontline in our wars over freedom of speech and the nature of American liberalismFew issues are as vexed today as antisemitism and free speech. There is scarcely an arena—college campuses, congressional hearings, immigration courtrooms, social media platforms—where we are not polarized over what counts as a...

From the Nuremberg Trials to contemporary human rights, Jews have long played prominent roles in the making of international law. But the actual ties between Jewish heritage and legal thought remain a subject of mystery and conjecture even among specialists. This volume of biographical studies takes a unique interdisciplinary approach, pairing historians and legal scholars to explore how the Jewish identities and experiences shaped their legal thought and activism. Using newly-discovered s...

Gun violence is a vexing problem in the US that needs little explanation. Yet adequate information and insight are still lacking about ownership and use of firearms, the causes and consequences of gun violence, and the effects of interventions and technological innovations. The sociological context and the implications for health and law enforcement involve a variety of disciplines; and the spectrum of questions that arise affects policymakers at all levels.Obtaining adequate infor...

Reconsidering how early modern and modern Jews navigated schisms between Jewish community and European society.This collection brings together original scholarship by seventeen historians drawing on the pioneering research of their teacher and colleague, Michael Stanislawski. These essays explore a mosaic of topics in the history of modern European Jewry from early modern times to the present, including the role of Jewish participants in the European revolutions of...

On the Eve is the portrait of a world on the brink of annihilation. In this provocative book, Bernard Wasserstein presents a new and disturbing interpretation of the collapse of European Jewish civilization even before the Nazi onslaught.In the 1930s, as Europe spiraled toward the Second World War, the continent’s Jews faced an existential crisis. The harsh realities of the age—anti-Semitic persecution, economic discrimination, and an ominous climate of violence—devastated...

Noah Prylucki (1882-1941), a leading Jewish cultural and political figure in pre-Holocaust Eastern Europe, was a proponent of Yiddishism, a movement that promoted secular Yiddish culture as the basis for Jewish collective identity in the twentieth century. Prylucki's dramatic path - from russified Zionist raised in a Ukrainian shtetl, to Diaspora nationalist parliamentarian in metropolitan Warsaw, to professor of Yiddish in Soviet Lithuania - uniquely reflects the dilemmas and competing op...

Few scholarly fields have developed in recent decades as rapidly and vigorously as Holocaust Studies. At the start of the twenty-first century, the persecution and murder perpetrated by the Nazi regime have become the subjects of an enormous literature in multiple academic disciplines and a touchstone of public and intellectual discourse in such diverse fields as politics, ethics and religion. Forward-looking and multi-disciplinary, this handbook draws on the work of an international team ...

Czernowitz at 100 represents a collection based on the proceedings of a 2008 international conference convened at York University in Toronto. Each chapter looks back at a portion over a long century, one marked with the mass migration of Ashkenazi Jews across the globe, two world wars, the Holocaust, the birth of Israel, and the rise and fall of the Soviet bloc. They assess the achievements and fate of those who participated in the 1908 Yiddish Language Conference that was held at...