Jews seeking a new life in Canada faced problems beyond those of other immigrants. Farm colonists often lived in communities too small to afford a rabbi or ritual slaughterer, or even to form a minyan for worship. In French Canada, Protestant and Catholic school boards battled over who was responsible for educating Jewish children. In the cities, the socialist philosophies of Jews fleeing the poverty and oppression of Europe were anathema to aggressive New World capitalists. And when suspicion or resentment arose, there was always someone to revive the old antisemitic slurs and myths.Taking Root is the meticulously researched record of how Canadian Jewry coped with these obstacles, and flourished despite them. The book covers the 160 years from the beginnings of the community in the 1760s to the end of the First World War, including the great European upheavals that forever changed the lives of the Jews of Eastern Europe and their migration to Canada.Canada's Jews took root in a nation with a distinctive history, political structure, and cultural diversity Gerald Tulchinsky weaves the threads of Canadian Jewish history into the wider Canadian fabric, and shows how the unique character of this history reflects the political, economic, and social development of the countryDrawing on letters, synagogue records, diaries, newspapers, and biographies, as well as a host of archival sources, Tulchinsky makes Taking Root not just a historical account, but a very personal one.

Taking Root: The Origins of the Canadian Jewish Community (The Brandeis Series in American Jewish History, Culture, and Life)

History

Tulchinsky, Gerald J. J.

Americas

Brandeis Univ

In this lovely and moving memoir, the world's most distinguished scholar of Jewish social history recalls a life that in many ways encapsulates the arduous path of the remnant of East European Jewry through the cataclysmic events of this century. After a childhood in the crumbling Hapsburg Empire, Jacob Katz left his native Hungary to attend the famous Yeshiva of Pressburg. He later entered the University of Frankfurt, where in 1934 he received the last doctorate granted to a Jew in Nazi Germany. Heeding ominous undercurrents, Katz immigrated to Palestine-Israel in 1936. There he witnessed the birth of the new state and the growth of the prestigious Hebrew University. With My Own Eyes, guided by the hand and eye of the consummate historian, poignantly recreates the atmosphere of the period in which the author has lived.

With My Own Eyes: The Autobiography of a Historian (TAUBER INSTITUTE FOR THE STUDY OF EUROPEAN JEWRY SERIES)

Biographies & Memoirs

Katz, Jacob

Historical

An unforgetable visual and written testimony to the catastrophe of the Holocaust.

Landscapes of Jewish Experience: Paintings (TAUBER INSTITUTE FOR THE STUDY OF EUROPEAN JEWRY SERIES)

Arts & Photography

Langer, Lawrence L.

Bak, Samuel

Individual Artists

An eminent sociologist offers insightful impressions and discussions of American culture and the ways it both liberates and imprisons various social groups.

Intimate Appraisals: The Social Writings

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Cottle, Thomas J.

Psychology & Counseling

Jewish Portraits, Indian Frames: Women's Narratives from a Diaspora of Hope (Brandeis Series on Jewish Women)

A riveting family portrait of four generations of Jewish women from Calcutta.

Silliman, Jael

World

Jewish Portraits, Indian Frames offers a personal and social history of the author's foremothers -- Baghdadi Jews who lived most of their lives in the Jewish community in Calcutta. Jael Silliman begins with a portrait of Farha, her maternal great-greandmother, who dwelled almost entirely within the Baghdadi Jewish community no matter where she and her husband traveled on business (Calcutta, Rangoon, Singapore). Next is her maternal grandmother, Miriam (Mary), who was much more Anglicized than Farha and deeply influenced by British colonial practices. The third portrait, of Silliman's mother, Flower, reveals a woman in a double transition: her own and India's. Flower grew up in colonial India, witnessed India's struggle for independence, and lived her middle years in an independent India. The final sketch is of Silliman herself. Born in Calcutta in 1955 in the waning Jewish community, Silliman grew up in a cosmopolitan and Indian world, rather than a Baghdadi Jewish one. Silliman's own travels have taken her to the US, where, as a teacher and scholar, her primary identification is with the "South Asian intellectual and professional diaspora." These rich family portraits convey a sense of the singular roles women played in building and sustaining a complex diaspora in what Silliman calls "Jewish Asia" over the past 150 years. Her sketches of the everyday lives of her foremothers -- from the food they ate and the clothes they wore to the social and political relationships they forged -- bring to life a community and a culture, even as they disclose the unexpected and subtle complexities of the colonial encounter as experienced by Jewish women.

A fundamental fact underlies this provocative study: the Jews of South Africa shared in the status of the privileged in a society based upon a system of legalized racial discrimination. Viewed in the broad context of Jewish history, this was a highly unusual situation. What was the Jewish experience in these circumstances? What was the political behavior of Jews as members of the white group? What were the perceived implications of Jewry's moral heritage and historical experience? How did South African Jewish leadership, lay and religious, seek to reconcile these implications with its responsibility for the safety and welfare of its own community?Based on exhaustive research, Gideon Shimoni's Community and Conscience begins with a brief description of Jewish immigration to South Africa from Great Britain and eastern Europe and the consolidation of a South African Jewish community in the early twentieth century. Shimoni then turns his attention to that community under the Afrikaner nationalist regime that came to power in May 1948, which established apartheid as a governmentally sanctioned system of discrimination based on race. The body of the book explores the Jewish community's political relationship to the Afrikaner government and its policies. Shimoni looks at the behavior or Jewish political, religious, and educational institutions, South African Zionism and ties to Israel, and Israel-South African relations in the global arena.The author documents the apparent paradox that while many whites who actively opposed apartheid were Jews, few Jews were active opponents of apartheid. He seeks to explain both the largely bystander comportment of the Jewish community and the contrasting major role of Jews in all forms of resistance to apartheid. Balancing the more predictably conservative views of many Jewish institutions are riveting portraits of dozens of liberals and leftist radicals who worked to dismantle the apartheid regime. From the other side, Shimoni's look at black perceptions of the Jewish community (including the increasingly antagonistic views of the Muslim minority) suggests the contradictions of being Jews under apartheid, where, as whites, they had many privileges but, as Jews, raised strong and sometimes negative feelings in non-Jews, both white and black. Shimoni concludes his book with a discussion of new directions for the Jewish community in post-apartheid South Africa.

Community and Conscience: The Jews in Apartheid South Africa (TAUBER INSTITUTE FOR THE STUDY OF EUROPEAN JEWRY SERIES)

Shimoni, Gideon

This book makes accessible--for the first time in English--declassified archival documents from the former Soviet Union, rabbinic sources, as well as previously untranslated memoirs, illuminating everyday Jewish life as the site of interaction and negotiation among neighbors, society, and the Russian state, from the beginning of the nineteenth century to World War I. Focusing on religion, family, health, sexuality, work, and politics, these documents provide an intimate portrait of the rich diversity of Jewish life. By personalizing collective experience through individual life stories--reflecting not only the typical but also the extraordinary--these sources reveal the tensions and ruptures in a vanished society. An introductory survey of Russian Jewish history from the Polish partitions (1772-1795) to World War I, along with prefatory remarks, textual annotations, and a bibliography of suggested readings, combine to provide a new perspective on the history of the Jews of Russia.

Everyday Jewish Life in Imperial Russia: Select Documents, 1772-1914 (Tauber Institute for the Study of European Jewry)

Russia

Altered Pasts: Counterfactuals in History (Menahem Stern Jerusalem Lectures)

A bullet misses its target in Sarajevo, a would-be Austrian painter gets into the Viennese academy, Lord Halifax becomes British prime minister in 1940 instead of Churchill: seemingly minor twists of fate on which world-shaking events might have hinged. Alternative history has long been the stuff of parlor games, war-gaming, and science fiction, but over the past few decades it has become a popular stomping ground for serious historians. The historian Richard J. Evans now turns a critical, slightly jaundiced eye on a subject typically the purview of armchair historians. The book's main concern is examining the intellectual fallout from historical counterfactuals, which the author defines as "alternative versions of the past in which one alteration in the timeline leads to a different outcome from the one we know actually occurred." What if Britain had stood at the sidelines during the First World War? What if the Wehrmacht had taken Moscow? The author offers an engaging and insightful introduction to the genre, while discussing the reasons for its revival in popularity, the role of historical determinism, and the often hidden agendas of the counterfactual historian. Most important, Evans takes counterfactual history seriously, looking at the insights, pitfalls, and intellectual implications of changing one thread in the weave of history. A wonderful critical introduction to an often-overlooked genre for scholars and casual readers of history alike. Hardcover is un-jacketed.

Altered Pasts: Counterfactuals in History (The Menahem Stern Jerusalem Lectures)

Evans, Richard J.

Historical Study & Educational Resources

Three essays illuminate American interpretations of the "holy land" by examining American tourism and travel to pre-state Israel, the representation of the holy land in exhibitions and world fairs, and the symbols and the public culture of American Zionism.

Encounters With the "Holy Land": Place, Past and Future in American Jewish Culture (BRANDEIS SERIES IN AMER JEWISH HIST, CULTURE, & LIFE)

National Museum of American Jewish History (Philadelphia, Pa.)

University of Pennsylvania Center for Judaic Studies

University of Pennsylvania Library

Travel

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the Brandeis Univ publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Brandeis Univ

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the Brandeis Univ publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Taking Root: The Origins of the Canadian Jewish Community (The Brandeis Series in American Jewish History, Culture, and Life)

With My Own Eyes: The Autobiography of a Historian (TAUBER INSTITUTE FOR THE STUDY OF EUROPEAN JEWRY SERIES)

Landscapes of Jewish Experience: Paintings (TAUBER INSTITUTE FOR THE STUDY OF EUROPEAN JEWRY SERIES)

Intimate Appraisals: The Social Writings

Jewish Portraits, Indian Frames: Women's Narratives from a Diaspora of Hope (Brandeis Series on Jewish Women)

Jewish Portraits, Indian Frames: Women's Narratives from a Diaspora of Hope (Brandeis Series on Jewish Women)

Community and Conscience: The Jews in Apartheid South Africa (TAUBER INSTITUTE FOR THE STUDY OF EUROPEAN JEWRY SERIES)

Everyday Jewish Life in Imperial Russia: Select Documents, 1772-1914 (Tauber Institute for the Study of European Jewry)

Altered Pasts: Counterfactuals in History (The Menahem Stern Jerusalem Lectures)

Encounters With the "Holy Land": Place, Past and Future in American Jewish Culture (BRANDEIS SERIES IN AMER JEWISH HIST, CULTURE, & LIFE)