Academic literature on the topic 'Jewish Book Week'

At the end of 1941, six weeks after the mass deportations of Jews from Nazi Germany had begun, Gestapo offices across the Reich received an urgent telex from Adolf Eichmann, decreeing that all war-wounded and decorated Jewish veterans of World War I be exempted from upcoming “evacuations.” Why this was so, and how Jewish veterans at least initially were able to avoid the fate of ordinary Jews under the Nazis, is the subject of this book. The same values that compelled Jewish soldiers to demonstrate bravery in the front lines in World War I made it impossible for them to accept passively, perse

In the Letter of Severus of Minorca on the Conversion of the Jews, it is said that 540 Jews became Christians during one week in February 418. The Letter cunningly positions Christians as actors motivated by pious zeal and love for the Jews, refraining from violence and violating no laws regarding Jews and their synagogues. The underlying reality, if any, was likely quite different. Regardless, the Letter exemplifies and encapsulates many of the issues presented in this book: the reliability and rhetorical purposes of Christian accounts of Jewish conversions; social relations between Jews and Christians in late antique towns; the diverse tactics Christian bishops employed (scriptural debates, threats of violence and social misfortune, and actual mob violence, including burning synagogues and confiscating Jewish books); Roman laws pertaining to attacks on Jews and their synagogues; and the numerous consequences for Jews who became Christians.

This concluding chapter outlines how select groups of later Jews adopted and adapted the rabbinic concerns about time to their present circumstances, and the lasting legacy of these time frames and the differences they constructed on the history of Judaism and Jewish life. Among the legacies of rabbinic texts are the rhythms of time they dictated, which persisted (and persist): the annual calendar and its festivals, the week and its Sabbath, the day and its ritual schedule, the hour and its symbolism. Another legacy of rabbinic texts are the various configurations of difference — ethnic, communal, gendered, and theological — that their laws, rituals, and narratives constructed and cultivated. The central claim of this book has been that conceptions of time and practices of time-keeping can (and often do) function as mechanisms for constructing as well as challenging difference, even as, with the passage of time, such constructions of time and difference are reimagined. The examples and analyses presented in the previous chapters sought to demonstrate the various ways in which specific rabbinic times and differences were intertwined and mutually constitutive as well as to highlight the complexity of multiple times and the consequences of conflicting modes of time-keeping.

This chapter takes a look at Johann Anton Krieger. Krieger played a central role in the history of Jewish printing in Poland in the eighteenth century. This remarkably enterprising and versatile man owned a printing press in Nowy Dwór, in the province of Mazovia, and, for a time, another in the town of Korzec, in the province of Volynia. He also established a Jewish printing business close to Warsaw and engaged in extensive publishing activities. What is more, he influenced the policies of the Polish financial authorities, compelling them to take account of the needs of the Jewish printing industry inside Poland and to protect it from foreign competition while it was still weak.

This chapter studies Jan Tomasz Gross's Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne. The story that Gross recounts is well known by now. On July 10, 1941, two weeks after the Germans arrived, a pogrom took place in the small town of Jedwabne, near Białystok. But for a few who managed to run away and hide, all the town's Jews perished that day, at the hands of their Polish neighbours. Gross allowed a year to elapse between the publication of the Polish and English editions of his book, to give Poles a chance to debate the matter before the international spotlight fell on it. He was not disappointed: the appearance of Sąsiedzi in May of 2000 set off an unprecedented ‘affair’, which was still simmering more than two years later. Over the next two years, nearly a thousand articles appeared in the Polish press, many of them heatedly polemical; debate raged in public meetings and on the Internet, and there was extensive coverage in the electronic media. An official investigation was launched, and the highest authorities of Church and State became involved. The Jedwabne affair has represented really the first mass public airing of Polish-Jewish issues since the Holocaust.

As soon as he became president, Bok set out to modernize Harvard’s central administration. His first move, recruiting a core of professional administrators, met with universal approval. In principle the administration simply provided services: financial, legal, health, information technology, food, real estate, personnel, development, government relations. But in practice this meant replacing Conant’s and Pusey’s low-keyed central “holding company” with a much more assertive, take-charge body of managers. As the number and agendas of the new bureaucrats grew, so did the tension between the faculty and the administration, between the more centralized direction of the University’s affairs and the venerable each-tub-on-its-own-bottom Harvard tradition. When Bok took office, the Harvard Corporation consisted of two recently elected academics, Charles Slichter of Illinois and John Morton Blum of Yale; two lawyers, Bostonian senior fellow Hooks Burr and Hugh Calkins of Cleveland; Socony-Mobil executive Albert Nickerson of New York; and Harvard’s treasurer, State Street banker George Bennett. By the time he left in 1991, all of them were gone, replaced by a heterogeneous mix ranging from Boston-New York businessmen (Gillette CEO Colman Mockler, Time publisher Andrew Heiskell, venture capitalist Robert G. Stone, Jr.) to Henry Rosovsky, the Corporation’s first Jewish fellow and its first Harvard faculty member since 1852, and Washington lawyer Judith Richards Hope, the first female fellow. Brahmin Boston had no representative on the Corporation that Bok bequeathed to his successor. During this time, too, three new treasurers came in quick succession: George Putnam, another State Street banker; Roderick MacDougall, a Bank of New England executive; and Ronald Daniel, a former partner in the conspicuously non-Old Boston consulting firm of McKinsey and Company. Across the board, old boys gave way to non-Brahmin newcomers. As both Harvard and its bureaucracy grew, the Corporation became more detached from the mundane realities of University governance. Streaming in from points south and west, the fellows met every two weeks on Monday mornings for a heavy schedule of reports, discussions, and meetings with the president and his chief administrative officers.