Raanan Rein, Fútbol, Jews and the Making of Argentina, trans. Marsha Grenzeback. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014. 166 pp.

This chapter reviews the books Fútbol, Jews and the Making of Argentina (2014), by Raanan Rein, translated by Marsha Grenzeback, and Muscling in on New Worlds: Jews, Sport, and the Making of the Americas (2014), edited by Raanan Rein and David M.K. Sheinin. Rein’s book deals with the “making” of Argentina through football (soccer), while Muscling in on New Worlds focuses on the “making” of the Americas (mainly the one America, called the United States) through sports. Muscling in on New Worlds is a collection of essays that seeks to advance the common theme of sport as “an avenue by which Jews threaded the needle of asserting a Jewish identity.” Topics include Jews as boxers, Jews and football, Jews and yoga, Orthodox Jewish athletes, and American Jews and baseball. There are also essays about the cinematic and literary representations of Jews in sports.

Author(s):  
Jodi Eichler-Levine

Thinking about American Jews, race, and religion entails confronting the instability of those terms. This chapter examines the history of Jews and race in the United States through three lenses. First, it looks at the history of how Eastern European Jews have been “raced” in America, and in particular how they became “white.” Second, it considers Jewish interactions with other groups, such as blacks, Native Americans, and Asians, and how Jewish identity has been co-constituted with and against that of other groups. Third, the chapter looks at internal Jewish diversity and the challenges presented by Euro-centric models of Jewishness. The chapter concludes by considering Jews, race, and religion in the age of Ferguson.


Author(s):  
Richard Jones-Bamman

This chapter and the one that follows (Chapter Five) draw on interviews with twenty-two banjo makers in the United States and Canada to explore the issues facing these individuals who strive to maintain their preferred connections with the old-time music community without losing sight of the artistic and personal motivations that drew them into this undertaking initially. Chapter Four is focused on those who create instruments most closely adhering to the common expectations of old-time banjo players, factors that include certain structural and design features as well as playability and tone production. What unites all of those in this chapter is the influence of the past on their own efforts, but how this is defined is quite different from one person to the next. For some, this means replicating existing instruments from a specific era or locale, and involves learning techniques that long ago passed from common practice. For others, the past is purely inspirational, providing ideas to be expanded upon and subject to new interpretation. The chapter concludes with a consideration of tone production, how this has changed in recent decades, and how banjo builders approach what is clearly a highly subjective topic. The builders profiled here include Kevin Enoch, Chuck Waldman, Wayne Sagmoen, Kevin Fore, Jason and Pharis Romero, Greg Galbreath and Brooks Masten.


2007 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Read ◽  
Marivic Wyndham

The Museum of Playa Giron (the Bay of Pigs) in the region of Cienega De Zapata, Cuba, celebrates the repulse of Brigade 2506 as the first reverse of US imperialism on the American continents. The equivalent Brigade 2506 Museum in Miami, dedicated to and maintained by the members of Brigade 2506, celebrates defeat at the Bay of Pigs as moral victory for the Cuban exiles. The forces were indeed implacable foes. Yet between the museums can be detected some curious similarities. Both present the common theme of the confrontation between forces of good and evil. Both celebrate the philosophy that dying for one’s country is the greatest good a citizen may achieve. Both museums fly the common Cuban flag. Both museums identify a common enemy: the United States of America. This article, by comparing the displays in the two museums, analyses some cultural elements of what, despite decades of separation, in some ways remains a common Cuban culture.


Author(s):  
Susan C. Cook

In the years before the entry of the United States into World War I, the One Step replaced the Two Step as the common popular dance. As the name suggests, it signaled a new relationship between dance step and musical meter. Whereas the Two Step, popular since the 1890s, consisted of a skipping step to music in 6/8 meter, the One Step featured a step, glide, or trot on each beat of duple-meter music marked by the syncopated and dotted rhythms long associated with African American musical practices. African American composer and bandleader James Reese Europe similarly proclaimed the One Step "the national dance of the negro."


1987 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-88
Author(s):  
CHARLOTTE M PORTER

A curious error affects the names of three North American clupeids—the Alewife, American Shad, and Menhaden. The Alewife was first described by the British-born American architect, Benjamin Henry Latrobe in 1799, just two years after what is generally acknowledged as the earliest description of any ichthyological species published in the United States. Latrobe also described the ‘fish louse’, the common isopod parasite of the Alewife, with the new name, Oniscus praegustator. Expressing an enthusiasm for American independence typical of his generation, Latrobe humorously proposed the name Clupea tyrannus for the Alewife because the fish, like all tyrants, had parasites or hangers-on.


2017 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 175-185
Author(s):  
Edyta Sokalska

The reception of common law in the United States was stimulated by a very popular and influential treatise Commentaries on the Laws of England by Sir William Blackstone, published in the late 18th century. The work of Blackstone strengthened the continued reception of the common law from the American colonies into the constituent states. Because of the large measure of sovereignty of the states, common law had not exactly developed in the same way in every state. Despite the fact that a single common law was originally exported from England to America, a great variety of factors had led to the development of different common law rules in different states. Albert W. Alschuler from University of Chicago Law School is one of the contemporary American professors of law. The part of his works can be assumed as academic historical-legal narrations, especially those concerning Blackstone: Rediscovering Blackstone and Sir William Blackstone and the Shaping of American Law. Alschuler argues that Blackstone’s Commentaries inspired the evolution of American and British law. He introduces not only the profile of William Blackstone, but also examines to which extent the concepts of Blackstone have become the basis for the development of the American legal thought.


Screen Bodies ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 22-37
Author(s):  
David Yagüe González

The behaviors and actions that an individual carries out in their daily life and how they are translated by their society overdetermine the gender one might have—or not—according to social norms. However, do the postulates enounced by feminist and queer Western thinkers still maintain their validity when the context changes? Can the performances of gender carry out their validity when the landscape is other than the one in Europe or the United States? And how can the context of drag complicate these matters? These are the questions that this article will try to answer by analyzing the 2015 movie Viva by Irish director Paddy Breathnach.


Author(s):  
Jonathan Holslag

The chapter argues that India has a strong interest to balance China and that the two Asian giants will not be able grow together without conflict. However, India will not be able to balance China’s rise. The chapter argues that India remains stuck between nonalignment and nonperformance. On the one hand, it resists the prospect of a new coalition that balances China from the maritime fringes of Eurasia, especially if that coalition is led by the United States. On the other hand, it has failed to strengthen its own capabilities. Its military power lags behind China’s, its efforts to reach out to both East and Central Asia have ended in disappointment, and its economic reforms have gone nowhere. As a result of that economic underachievement, India finds itself also torn between emotional nationalism and paralyzing political fragmentation, which, in turn, will further complicate its role as a regional power.


Author(s):  
Mark Byers

This concluding chapter charts the continuing significance of the early postwar moment in Olson’s later work, particularly The Maximus Poems. The philosophical and political concerns of the American avant-garde between 1946 and 1951 play out across The Maximus Poems just as they inform later American art practices. The search of the early postwar American independent left for a source of political action rooted in the embodied individual is seen, on the one hand, to have been personified in the figure of Maximus. At the same time, Maximus’s radical ‘practice of the self’ charts a sophisticated alternative to the Enlightenment humanist subject widely critiqued in the United States in the immediate postwar period.


Author(s):  
June Howard

The Center of the World: Regional Writing and the Puzzles of Place-Time is a study of literary regionalism. It focuses on but is not limited to fiction in the United States, also considering the place of the genre in world literature. It argues that regional writing shapes ways of imagining not only the neighborhood, the province, and nation, but also the world. It argues that thinking about place always entails imagining time. It demonstrates the importance of the figure of the schoolteacher and the one-room schoolhouse in local color writing and subsequent place-focused writing. These representations embody the contested relation between localities and the knowledge they produce, and books that carry metropolitan and cosmopolitan learning, in modernity. The book undertakes analysis of how concepts work across disciplines and in everyday discourse, coordinating that work with proposals for revising American literary history and close readings of particular authors’ work. Works from the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries are discussed, and the book’s analysis of the form is extended into multiple media.


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