Who are the Macedonians?

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Steven E. Aschheim

Brothers and Strangers traces the history of German Jewish attitudes, policies, and stereotypical images toward Eastern European Jews, demonstrating the ways in which the historic rupture between Eastern and Western Jewry developed as a function of modernism and its imperatives. By the 1880s, most German Jews had inherited and used such negative images to symbolize rejection of their own ghetto past and to emphasize the contrast between modern "enlightened" Jewry and its "half-Asian" counterpart. Moreover, stereotypes of the ghetto and the Eastern Jew figured prominently in the growth and disposition of German anti-Semitism. Not everyone shared these negative preconceptions, however, and over the years a competing post-liberal image emerged of the Ostjude as cultural hero. Brothers and Strangers examines the genesis, development, and consequences of these changing forces in their often complex cultural, political, and intellectual contexts.

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Yusuf Rizk-Allah Ghanimah

Ghanimah was the first non-Jew to write a history of the Jewish community in Iraq. Reading Dallal, the translator, was a Hebrew and etymology teacher at ETHS from 1970 to 1997.

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David A. Chapin and Ben Weinstock

"The Road from Letichev presents the history of the area through the eyes of individuals who lived there. The Letichev District (Podolia) of Ukraine was a microcosm of Jewish life in Eastern Europe. It was the home of the Baal Shem Tov and the cradle of the Chasidic movement. This book is, in part, dedicated to the 300th anniversary of his birth. The books purpose is to document what was destroyed in the Holocaust. Although the Soviet experience in the Holocaust is relatively rare in modern literature, no understanding of the Holocaust is truly complete without an understanding of what the Nazis took away from the world. Through the testimonials from survivors of the Holocaust we learn new information about the horrors of the Nazi occupation on Soviet soil. Richly illustrated, more than 8300 individuals are indexed, including more than 600 unique Jewish surnames from Letichev District. The first of its kind, it provides a complete encyclopedia of the rabbis who traveled The Road from Letichev, plus a detailed description of synagogues (most of which are now destroyed). Interwoven into the fabric of Jewish life are songs, food, folklore, health, education and crime. The best description of a Jewish agricultural colony to date is detailed. On a tragic note, new information is provided on the 1648 Khmelnitsky massacres, as well as the pogroms of 1882, 1903-7, and 1919-21"--Back cover.

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John G. Demaray

The design, staging allusions and symbolism of The Tempest are here freshly reconsidered in light of the drama's historical and theatrical milieu. Demaray maintains that Shakespeare, in composing this play, was not reverting to the "academic" dramatic structures, themes and character types of his early career, but was instead forging from different theatrical traditions a new kind of experimental drama. The Tempest, then, draws upon the European and English spectacle, pastoral, "romance" and dramatic traditions; it emphasizes reformist open symbolism rather than the classical iconography of Ben Jonson; and it points the way to the stylized "heroic" dramas of the Restoration with their exotic themes and staged scenic illusions. Shakespeare and the Spectacles of Strangeness pays close attention to genre, structure and issues of printing and textual scholarship. Demaray examines the First Folio printings of The Tempest and of printings of drama, masques, balets de cour, spectacle productions and stage documents. On the basis of these primary documents, Demaray is able to show the influence of the conventions of court presentations on Shakespeare's theatrical references, and to reveal new accounts of the imaginative significance of stage illusions designed by Inigo Jones in the early 1600s.