Around the world, blue-collar politics have become associated with resistance to the multicultural. While this may also be true in Edinburgh, Scotland, a closer look reveals the growth of liberal democratic ideals in the working-class population, which has a much different goal: How can this European city keep the entrepreneurial forces of globalization from commodifying what is distinctly theirs?
In Tenement Nation, Christa Ballard Tooley exp...
Moshe's Children presents the inspiring story of Moshe Zeiri, a Jewish carpenter responsible for rescuing hundreds of Jewish refugee children who had survived the Final Solution. During the liberation of Italy, Zeiri, a volunteer in the British Army in Italy, assumed responsibility for and vowed to help around seven hundred Polish, Hungarian, Russian, and Romanian children. Although these orphans of the Shoah had been deprived of a family, a h...
Ruth Blau: A Life of Paradox and Purpose explores the life of a curious, if not mysterious, character in modern Jewish history. Born a French Catholic, Ruth Blau (Ben-David) (1920-2000) lived a constantly twisting life. During World War II, Blau was active in the French Resistance, and under their command, she joined the Gestapo as a double agent. After the war, she studied philosophy as a PhD candidate at the Sorbonne during the 1950s. After ...
Rights and Responsibilities in Rural South Africa examines the gendered and generational conflicts surrounding social change in South Africa's rural Eastern Cape roughly twenty years after the end of Apartheid.
In post-Apartheid South Africa, rights-based public discourse and state practices promote liberal, autonomous, and egalitarian notions of personhood, yet widespread unemployment and poverty demand that people rely closely on one another...
In A Brief History of History, acclaimed historian Jeremy Black seeks to reinvigorate and redefine our ideas about history. The stories we tell about the past are a crucial aspect of all cultures. However, while the traditional storytelling process--what we think of as "history" in the proper sense--is useful, it is also misleading, not least because it leads to the repetition of bias and misinformation. Black suggests that the conventional id...
Transcripts of the Sacred in Nigeria explores how the sacred plays itself out in contemporary Africa. It offers a creative analysis of the logics and dynamics of the sacred (understood as the constellation of im/possibility available to a given community) in religion, politics, epistemology, economic development, and reactionary violence. Using the tools of philosophy, postcolonial criticism, political theory, African studies, religious studie...
Traditionally, humanitarianism is considered a nonpolitical urgent response to human suffering. However, this characterization ignores the context of the politics that created the crises in the first place. In The Politics of Crisis-Making, Estella Carpi exposes how the politics of defining crises affect the social identity and membership of the displaced. Her ethnographic research in Lebanon brings to light interactions among aid workers, gov...
Jews, Race, and the Politics of Difference explores how Russian Jewish writers and political activists such as Vladimir Jabotinsky turned to "race" as an operational concept in the late imperial politics of the Russian Empire. Building on the latest scholarship on racial thinking and Jewish identities, Marina Mogilner shows how Jewish anthropologists, ethnographers, writers, lawyers, and political activists in late imperial Russia sought to co...
On the nights of July 16 and 17, 1942, French police rounded up 11-year-old Joseph Weismann, his family, and 13, 000 other Jews. They were held for five days at the Vélodrome d'Hiver stadium, before being sent by cattle car to the Beaune-la-Rolande transit camp. But where would they be transported to? Separated from his parents, who were deported to Auschwitz and certain death, Joseph remained with 1, 000 other separated children, as they wait...
Elinor (Lin) Ostrom's life was an incredible journey. Being the first woman ever to win a Nobel Prize in Economics was an achievement of a lifetime. But it was just the culmination of a life spent struggling against the odds.
Even while overcoming childhood hardships and a stutter and being denied opportunities because she was a woman, Lin never lost sight of the wonders around her and was always curious to learn more. Lin would teach generati...
In Friendship, Italian philosopher Claudia Baracchi explores the philosophical underpinnings of friendship. Tackling the issue of friendship in the era of Facebook and online social networks requires courage and even a certain impertinence. The friendship relationship involves trust, fidelity, and availability for profound sharing. Sociologists assure us this attitude was never more improbable than in our time of dramatic anthropological recon...
Music scholarship has been rethinking its understanding of Franz Schubert and his work. How might our modern aesthetic values, conceptions of Schubert's life, and historiographies affect how we interpret his music? Schubert's Instrumental Music and Poetics of Interpretation examines the conditions that have prompted scholarship to reassess the composer's music and legacy. In six chapters, each devoted to one or two of Schubert's pieces, Renâe ...
For Nazi Germany, the ghetto was a conceptual tool used to facilitate social and political exclusion and further their anti-Jewish campaign. For the Jews who lived in them, the ghettos became the center of their lives¿even though they were also sites of immense suffering.
Combining thorough historical research with an interdisciplinary analysis of the relationship between space and violence, Violent Space provides a unique insight into the hi...
