scholarly journals There is no interest in precious stones in a vegetable market: the life and sermons of Rabbi Jacob Gordon of Toronto

2006 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kimmy Caplan
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Jewish Community ◽  
Religious Experience ◽  
North American ◽  
Cultural Contexts ◽  
East European ◽  
Critical Moment ◽  
Preliminary Examination ◽  
Jewish Immigrants ◽  
Insight Into

A preliminary examination of Rabbi Jacob Gordon’s sermons within their biographical, communal, religious, historical, social, and cultural contexts, offers insight into the challenges Jewish immigrants faced in early twentieth century Toronto—as this Orthodox immigrant rabbi perceived them. These sermons provide details and perspectives, and they particularly illuminate doings within Toronto’s Orthodox-immigrant Jewish community. Gordon’s East-European background did not hold him back from remolding his style, as well as the content of his sermons, fully aware as he was of the need to modify his sermonic approach to respond to the novelties of Toronto’s immigrant world. Gordon’s sermons may also be compared to those of other North American contemporaries, again signaling the unique aspects of the Canadian Jewish religious experience at a critical moment.

Response to the New Nazi Government (1933–1934)

1999 ◽  
pp. 110-134
Author(s):  
Marc B. Shapiro
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Community ◽  
Intellectual Community ◽  
East European ◽  
Jewish Intellectual ◽  
German Jewish ◽  
A Minor ◽  
German Jewry ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Minor Episode

This chapter takes a step back to consider the state of the German Jewry at length after the rise of Adolf Hitler to power in 1933. Rabbi Jehiel Jacob Weinberg, for his part, held a rather hopeful view of the situation that year, going so far as to repeatedly express that the Jews had nothing to fear from the Nazis, and the controversies his optimistic views caused within the German Jewish intellectual community. In the meantime, Hitler was beginning to implement more antisemitic reforms. His banning of the sheḥitah — the Jewish practice of ritually slaughtering meat — in particular shocked the Jewish community. At the same time that discussions about the sheḥitah issue were going on, Weinberg was confronted by plans to transfer the Berlin Rabbinical Seminary to Palestine. Though a minor episode in Weinberg's life, through it the chapter provides further insight into the relationship between east European talmudists and the modern rabbinical seminary.

Mediating Judaism: Mind, Body, Spirit, and Contemporary North American Jewish Fiction

AJS Review ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 231-253
Author(s):  
Sara R. Horowitz
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
North America ◽  
North American ◽  
Traditional Practices ◽  
Jewish Literature ◽  
Women Novelists ◽  
Left Behind ◽  
American Jewish ◽  
Jewish Immigrants ◽  
Canadian Culture

That Jewish literature in North America is an altogether secular venue has long been regarded as a truism among many influential literary scholars. Indeed, for much of the twentieth century, the fiction of Jewish immigrants and their progeny wrote its way into American and Canadian culture through narratives that captured the process of acculturation by distancing itself from Jewish traditional practices, construed mockingly or nostalgically as relics of a European life left behind, a wellspring of historical or textual memories that oppress or elevate. The few departures from this trend—fiction that represents Judaic ritual and experience sympathetically, with complexity and depth—are exceptions that prove the rule: Chaim Potok’s novels, for example, beginning in the late 1960s and continuing through the close of the twentieth century, and a handful of women novelists negotiating Jewish feminism in stories and novels of the 1980s and 1990s.

Thai Protestants and Local Supernaturalism: Changing Configurations

1996 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 293-319 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edwin Zehner
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
North American ◽  
Religious Pluralism ◽  
Cultural Contexts ◽  
Protestant Churches ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
American Evangelicalism ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Although nineteenth-century Protestant missionaries in Siam tried to debunk local spirit beliefs and witchcraft accounts, they and their actions were perceived in terms of local supernaturalist frameworks. Late twentieth-century Thai Christians, supernaturalists themselves, have reclassified local spirit activity through their own Christian frameworks, using local vocabularies of spirit phenomena but retaining master categories of interpretation and practice drawn from North American evangelicalism. This practice puts Thai Protestant churches in a direct dialogue with their cultural contexts and leaves them positioned to benefit from Thailand's increasing religious pluralism.

O niemieckim filmie propagandowym z warszawskiego getta. Przyczynek do analizy

2006 ◽  
pp. 351-373
Author(s):  
Maciej Kubicki
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Community ◽  
Cultural Contexts ◽  
Warsaw Ghetto ◽  
Visual Materials

This article describes the circumstances in which a German crew shot a film in the Warsaw Ghetto in May and June 1942. The author employs visual materials and eyewitness' accounts of Warsaw Ghetto Jews. They are an important counterpoint, revealing the background and the persuasive dimension of the Nazi message. The text is aimed at an understanding of the propagandistic intention, rooted in the specifically Nazi techniques of persuasion. To do this, the author refers to the sources of anti-Semitic imaginarium and the modes of depiction of the Jew as an enemy figure. The reconstruction of the image of the Jewish community in this film is reinforced by references to broader ideological and socio-cultural contexts.

The Changing Face of Irish Ireland: Séamus Ó Grianna's and Éilís Ní Dhuibhne's Fictions of the Donegal Gaeltacht

2014 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 357-380
Author(s):  
Ríona Nic Congáil
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Women's Movement ◽  
Irish Language ◽  
Shared Interest ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Rural And Urban ◽  
Historical Fact ◽  
Insight Into

Séamus Ó Grianna and Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, whose lifespans overlapped only briefly, rank among the most prolific Irish writers of the twentieth century. Their bilingualism, moreover, offers them access to two languages, cultures, and viewpoints. Their shared interest in the Donegal Gaeltacht during the revivalist period, and their use of fiction to explore and represent it, provide their readers with a remarkable insight into the changing ideologies of twentieth-century Ireland, and particularly Irish-Ireland, touching on broad issues that are linguistic, cultural, political, gendered, and spatial. This essay begins by analyzing the narrative similarities between Ó Grianna's Mo Dhá Róisín and Ní Dhuibhne's Hiring Fair Trilogy, and proceeds to examine how both writers negotiate historical fact, the Irish language, the performance of Gaelic culture, the burgeoning women's movement, and the chasm between rural and urban Ireland of the revival. Through this approach, the essay demonstrates that the fictions of these two writers reveal as much about their own agendas and the dominant ideas of the epoch in which they were writing, as they do about life in the Donegal Gaeltacht in the early twentieth century.

On Metaphysics and the Political: A Polemics of Reading Baudelaire in the 1930s

2019 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 249-259
Author(s):  
Joseph Acquisto
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Crisis ◽  
The Political ◽  
Modern Poetry ◽  
Progressive Politics ◽  
The World ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Insight Into

This essay examines a polemic between two Baudelaire critics of the 1930s, Jean Cassou and Benjamin Fondane, which centered on the relationship of poetry to progressive politics and metaphysics. I argue that a return to Baudelaire's poetry can yield insight into what seems like an impasse in Cassou and Fondane. Baudelaire provides the possibility of realigning metaphysics and politics so that poetry has the potential to become the space in which we can begin to think the two of them together, as opposed to seeing them in unresolvable tension. Or rather, the tension that Baudelaire animates between the two allows us a new way of thinking about the role of esthetics in moments of political crisis. We can in some ways see Baudelaire as responding, avant la lettre, to two of his early twentieth-century readers who correctly perceived his work as the space that breathes a new urgency into the questions of how modern poetry relates to the world from which it springs and in which it intervenes.

The Anthropological Lens

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Morton
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Natural Sciences ◽  
Social Accountability ◽  
Political Organization ◽  
Local People ◽  
South Sudanese ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Encounters ◽  
Anthropological Literature ◽  
Insight Into

Sir Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard (1902-1973) is widely considered the most influential British anthropologist of the twentieth century, known to generations of students for his seminal works on South Sudanese ethnography Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande (OUP 1937) and The Nuer (OUP 1940). In these works, now classics in the anthropological literature, Evans-Pritchard broke new ground on questions of rationality, social accountability, kinship, social and political organization, and religion, as well as influentially moving the discipline in Britain away from the natural sciences and towards history. Yet despite much discussion about his theoretical contributions to anthropology, no study has yet explored his fieldwork in detail in order to get a better understanding of its historical contexts, local circumstances or the social encounters out of which it emerged. This book then is just such an exploration, of Evans-Pritchard the fieldworker through the lens of his fieldwork photography. Through an engagement with his photographic archive, and by thinking with it alongside his written ethnographies and other unpublished evidence, the book offers a new insight into the way in which Evans-Pritchard’s theoretical contributions to the discipline were shaped by his fieldwork and the numerous local people in Africa with whom he collaborated. By writing history through field photographs we move back towards the fieldwork experiences, exploring the vivid traces, lived realities and local presences at the heart of the social encounter that formed the basis of Evans-Pritchard’s anthropology.

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