Author: Jael Miriam Silliman
Publisher: UPNE
ISBN: 9781584653059
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
A riveting family portrait of four generations of Jewish women from Calcutta.

Author: Jael Silliman
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780857429919
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
Jewish Portraits, Indian Frames offers a personal and social history of the author's foremothers -- Baghdadi Jews who lived most of their lives in the Jewish community in Calcutta. Jael Silliman begins with a portrait of Farha, her maternal great-greandmother, who dwelled almost entirely within the Baghdadi Jewish community no matter where she and her husband traveled on business (Calcutta, Rangoon, Singapore). Next is her maternal grandmother, Miriam (Mary), who was much more Anglicized than Farha and deeply influenced by British colonial practices. The third portrait, of Silliman's mother, Flower, reveals a woman in a double transition: her own and India's. Flower grew up in colonial India, witnessed India's struggle for independence, and lived her middle years in an independent India. The final sketch is of Silliman herself. Born in Calcutta in 1955 in the waning Jewish community, Silliman grew up in a cosmopolitan and Indian world, rather than a Baghdadi Jewish one. Silliman's own travels have taken her to the US, where, as a teacher and scholar, her primary identification is with the "South Asian intellectual and professional diaspora." These rich family portraits convey a sense of the singular roles women played in building and sustaining a complex diaspora in what Silliman calls "Jewish Asia" over the past 150 years. Her sketches of the everyday lives of her foremothers -- from the food they ate and the clothes they wore to the social and political relationships they forged -- bring to life a community and a culture, even as they disclose the unexpected and subtle complexities of the colonial encounter as experienced by Jewish women.

Author: Shashi Tharoor
Publisher: Penguin Books India
ISBN: 9780670081455
Category : India
Languages : en
Pages : 408

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Book Description
For More Than Four Decades After Gaining Independence, India, With Its Massive Size And Population, Staggering Poverty And Slow Rate Of Growth, Was Associated With The Plodding, Somnolent Elephant, Comfortably Resting On Its Achievements Of Centuries Gone By. Then In The Early 1990S The Elephant Seemed To Wake Up From Its Slumber And Slowly Begin To Change Until Today, In The First Decade Of The Twenty-First Century, Some Have Begun To See It Morphing Into A Tiger. As India Turns Sixty, Shashi Tharoor, Novelist And Essayist, Reminds Us Of The Paradox That Is India, The Elephant That Is Becoming A Tiger: With The Highest Number Of Billionaires In Asia, It Still Has The Largest Number Of People Living Amid Poverty And Neglect, And More Children Who Have Not Seen The Inside Of A Schoolroom Than Any Other Country. So What Does The Twenty-First Century Hold For India? Will It Bring The Strength Of The Tiger And The Size Of An Elephant To Bear Upon The World? Or Will It Remain An Elephant At Heart? In More Than Sixty Essays Organized Thematically Into Six Parts, Shashi Tharoor Analyses The Forces That Have Made Twenty-First Century India And Could Yet Unmake It. He Discusses The Country S Transformation In His Characteristic Lucid Prose, Writing With Passion And Engagement On A Broad Range Of Subjects, From The Very Notion Of Indianness In A Pluralist Society To The Evolution Of The Once Sleeping Giant Into A World Leader In The Realms Of Science And Technology; From The Men And Women Who Make Up His India Gandhi And Nehru And The Less Obvious Ramanujan And Krishna Menon To An Eclectic Array Of Indian Experiences And Realities, Virtual And Spiritual, Political And Filmi. The Book Is Leavened With Whimsical And Witty Pieces On Cricket, Bollywood And The National Penchant For Holidays, And Topped Off With An A To Z Glossary On Indianness, Written With Tongue Firmly In Cheek. Diverting And Instructive As Ever, Artfully Combining Hard Facts And Statistics With Personal Opinions And Observations, Tharoor Offers A Fresh, Insightful Look At This Timeless And Fast-Changing Society, Emphasizing That India Must Rise Above The Past If It Is To Conquer The Future.

Author: Shalva Weil
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 042953387X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
This book explores the extraordinary differentiation of the Baghdadi Jewish community over time during their sojourn in India from the end of the eighteenth century until their dispersion to Indian diasporas in Israel and English-speaking countries throughout the world after India gained independence in 1947. Chapters on schools, institutions and culture present how Baghdadis in India managed to maintain their communities by negotiating multiple identities in a stratified and complex society. Several disciplinary perspectives are utilized to explore the super-diversity of the Baghdadis and the ways in which they successfully adapted to new situations during the Raj, while retaining particular traditions and modifying and incorporating others. Providing a comprehensive overview of this community, the contributions to the book show that the legacy of the Baghdadi Jews lives on for Indians today through landmarks and monuments in Mumbai, Pune and Kolkata, and for Jews, through memories woven by members of the community residing in diverse diasporas. Offering refreshing historical perspectives on the colonial period in India, this book will be of interest to those studying South Asian Studies, Diaspora and Ethnic Studies, Sociology, History, Jewish Studies and Asian Religion.

Author: Rocio G. Davis
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824895355
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 201

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Book Description
Relative Histories focuses on the Asian American memoir that specifically recounts the story of at least three generations of the same family. This form of auto/biography concentrates as much on other members of one’s family as on oneself, generally collapses the boundaries conventionally established between biography and autobiography, and in many cases—as Rocío G. Davis proposes for the auto/biographies of ethnic writers—crosses the frontier into history, promoting collective memory. Davis centers on how Asian American family memoirs expand the limits and function of life writing by reclaiming history and promoting community cohesion. She argues that identity is shaped by not only the stories we have been told, but also the stories we tell, making these narratives important examples of the ways we remember our family’s past and tell our community’s story. In the context of auto/biographical writing or filmmaking that explores specific ethnic experiences of diaspora, assimilation, and integration, this work considers two important aspects: These texts re-imagine the past by creating a work that exists both in history and as a historical document, making the creative process a form of re-enactment of the past itself. Each chapter centers on a thematic concern germane to the Asian American experience: the narrative of twentieth-century Asian wars and revolutions, which has become the subtext of a significant number of Asian American family memoirs (Pang-Mei Natasha Chang’s Bound Feet and Western Dress, May-lee and Winberg Chai’s The Girl from Purple Mountain, K. Connie Kang’s Home Was The Land of Morning Calm, Doung Van Mai Elliott’s The Sacred Willow); family experiences of travel and displacement within Asia in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which unveil a history of multiple diasporas that are often elided after families immigrate to the United States (Helie Lee’s Still Life With Rice, Jael Silliman’s Jewish Portraits, Indian Frames, Mira Kamdar’s Motiba’s Tattoos); and the development of Chinatowns as family spaces (Maxine Hong Kingston’s China Men, Lisa See’s On Gold Mountain, Bruce Edward Hall’s Tea that Burns). The final chapter analyzes the discursive possibilities of the filmed family memoir ("family portrait documentary"), examining Lise Yasui’s A Family Gathering, Ruth Ozeki Lounsbury’s Halving the Bones, and Ann Marie Fleming’s The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam. Davis concludes the work with a metaliterary engagement with the history of her own Asian diasporic family as she demonstrates the profound interconnection between forms of life writing.

Author: S. R. Goldstein-Sabbah
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 900446056X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
Baghdadi Jewish Networks in the Age of Nationalism explores different components of Baghdadi participation in global Jewish networks through the modernization of communal leadership, satellite communities, transnational Jewish philanthropy and secular education during the Hashemite period (1920-1951).

Author: Aditi Chandra
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527544575
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
This volume questions the idea that the nation-state is the only available form of community, and challenges its hegemonic control over forms of socio-cultural belonging. The contributions here explore cross-cultural and transnational encounters which highlight narratives that escape the neat boundaries constructed by nationalities. They complicate our understanding of peoples and groups and the varying spaces they inhabit by allowing narratives that have been made invisible, due to hegemonic national control, to emerge. This volume throws light on moments of cultural encounters in the Global South, specifically South Asia, South-east Asia, West Asia, and Latin America, exploring what happens when diverse communities come together to challenge the notion that claiming national identity is the only acceptable mode of being, belonging, and existing in the world. In doing so, the book reveals other radically innovative forms of attaining cohesion and identity.

Author: J. Stratton
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230612741
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
This book looks at the post-Holocaust experience with emphasis on aspects of its impact on popular culture.

Author: Marla Brettschneider
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 1438460333
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
Addresses the absence of Jewish subjects in intersectionality studies and demonstrates how to do intersectionality work inclusive of Jewish perspectives. Jewish Feminism and Intersectionality explores a range of opportunities to apply and build intersectionality studies from within the life and work of Jewish feminism in the United States today. Marla Brettschneider builds on the best of what has been done in the field and offers a constructive internal critique. Working from a nonidentitarian paradigm, Brettschneider uses a Jewish critical lens to discuss the ways different politically salient identity signifiers cocreate and mutually constitute each other. She also includes analyses of matters of import in queer, critical race, and class-based feminist studies. This book is designed to demonstrate a range of ways that Jewish feminist work can operate with the full breadth of what intersectionality studies has to offer. “Blending feminist political theory with personal narratives, Brettschneider makes a compelling case for the inclusion of Jewish feminist perspectives in intersectionality studies—particularly its potential to provide insight in the undertheorized intersection of race, sexuality, and religious culture.” — Kimala Price, San Diego State University

Author: Peter Kupfer
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9783631575338
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
This volume summarizes the results of a research project organized at Mainz University in Germersheim, Germany. It focused on the Jewish community in Kaifeng in China (12th to 19th century). In recent years, increasing research has been done about the history and culture of the Jews in China, and in the future, more academic interest in all questions connected with it can be expected. Main topics are the perception of Chinese Judaism in European history as well as in Chinese society itself, the self-image of the descendants in Kaifeng and their present status in China, and how China deals with foreign ethnics and religions as part of its own history and identity. These topics were discussed from various interdisciplinary points of view. The authors from Australia, China, Hong Kong, Israel, Great Britain, France, and Germany are prominent sino-judaists who present their latest results of research in the light of new facts and approaches.