Light and Shadows

Light and Shadows PDF Author: David Yeroushalmi
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780984755028
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Light and Shadows highlights the 2,700-year history of Jews in Iran. It reveals centuries of oppression, fascinating cultural borrowings, and great artistic achievements. The story is told through rare archaeological artifacts, illuminated manuscripts, beautiful ritual objects and amulets, ceremonial garments, musical instruments, photographs, and more. It examines as well the large-scale exodus of the Jewish community following the Islamic Revolution in 1979. Today, at least 25,000 practicing Jews remain in Iran, unwilling to give up their ancestral home and the distinctive way of life they have led there. Light and Shadows is a co-publication between the Fowler Museum at UCLA and Beit Hatfutsot--The Museum of the Jewish People in Tel Aviv.

Light and Shadows

Light and Shadows PDF Author: David Yeroushalmi
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780984755028
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
Light and Shadows highlights the 2,700-year history of Jews in Iran. It reveals centuries of oppression, fascinating cultural borrowings, and great artistic achievements. The story is told through rare archaeological artifacts, illuminated manuscripts, beautiful ritual objects and amulets, ceremonial garments, musical instruments, photographs, and more. It examines as well the large-scale exodus of the Jewish community following the Islamic Revolution in 1979. Today, at least 25,000 practicing Jews remain in Iran, unwilling to give up their ancestral home and the distinctive way of life they have led there. Light and Shadows is a co-publication between the Fowler Museum at UCLA and Beit Hatfutsot--The Museum of the Jewish People in Tel Aviv.

From Miniskirt to Hijab

From Miniskirt to Hijab PDF Author: Jacqueline Saper
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1640122427
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
Jacqueline Saper, named after Jacqueline Kennedy, was born in Tehran to Iranian and British parents. At eighteen she witnessed the civil unrest of the 1979 Iranian revolution and continued to live in the Islamic Republic during its most volatile times, including the Iran-Iraq War. In a deeply intimate and personal story, Saper recounts her privileged childhood in prerevolutionary Iran and how she gradually became aware of the paradoxes in her life and community--primarily the disparate religions and cultures. In 1979 under the Ayatollah regime, Iran became increasingly unfamiliar and hostile to Saper. Seemingly overnight she went from living a carefree life of wearing miniskirts and attending high school to listening to fanatic diatribes, forced to wear the hijab, and hiding in the basement as Iraqi bombs fell over the city. She eventually fled to the United States in 1987 with her husband and children after, in part, witnessing her six-year-old daughter's indoctrination into radical Islamic politics at school. At the heart of Saper's story is a harrowing and instructive tale of how extremist ideologies seized a Westernized, affluent country and transformed it into a fundamentalist Islamic society.

The Jews of Iran

The Jews of Iran PDF Author: David Yeroushalmi
Publisher: Mazda Publishers
ISBN: 9781568593081
Category : Jews
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
"The present work provides a historical overview of Jews living on Iranian soil and offers studies dealing with specific facets of their centuries old cultural heritage. Divided into two separate but closely related parts, the book consists of eight chapters. Part one, History and Community, includes four chapters that throw light on the history of Iran's Jewish minority from the 8th-century BCE through the 20th century. The second part, Cultural Heritage, investigates some specific features of Jewish culture and tradition in Iran. These include Judeo-Persian literature and poetry, a typical Judeo-Persian treatment of a Jewish canonical text, and the character of Jewish education in pre-modern Iran"--Provided by publisher.

Jewish Identities in Iran

Jewish Identities in Iran PDF Author: Mehrdad Amanat
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0857719920
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
The nineteenth century was a time of significant global socioeconomic change, and Persian Jews, like other Iranians, were deeply affected by its challenges. For minority faith groups living in nineteenth-century Iran, religious conversion to Islam - both voluntary and involuntary - was the primary means of social integration and assimilation. However, why was it that some Persian Jews, who had for centuries resisted the relative security of Islam, instead embraced the Baha'i Faith - which was subject to harsher persecution that Judaism? Baha'ism emerged from the messianic Babi movement in the mid-nineteenth century and attracted large numbers of mostly Muslim converts, and its ecumenical message appealed to many Iranian Jews. Many converts adopted fluid, multiple religious identities, revealing an alternative to the widely accepted notion of religious experience as an oppressive, rigidly dogmatic and consistently divisive social force. Mehrdad Amanat explores the conversion experiences of Jewish families during this time. Many converted sporadically to Islam, although not always voluntarily. The most notorious case of forced mass-conversion in modern times occurred in Mashhad in 1839 when, in response to an organized attack, the entire Jewish community converted to Shi'i Islam. A contrast is offered by a Tehran Jewish family of court physicians who nominally converted to Islam and yet continued to openly observe Jewish rituals while also remaining intellectually sympathetic to Baha'ism. Many petty merchants and pedlars, in a position to benefit from Iran's expanding market, migrated from ancient communities to thriving trade centres which proved fertile grounds for the spread of new ideas and, often, conversion to Christianity or Baha'ism. This is an important scholarly contribution which also provides a fascinating insight into the personal experiences of Jewish families living in nineteenth-century Iran.

Religious Networks in the Roman Empire

Religious Networks in the Roman Empire PDF Author: Anna Collar
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107043441
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 335

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Book Description
Examines the relationship between social networks and religious transmission to reappraise how new religious ideas spread in the Roman Empire.

Making History in Iran

Making History in Iran PDF Author: Farzin Vejdani
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 080479281X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
Iranian history was long told through a variety of stories and legend, tribal lore and genealogies, and tales of the prophets. But in the late nineteenth century, new institutions emerged to produce and circulate a coherent history that fundamentally reshaped these fragmented narratives and dynastic storylines. Farzin Vejdani investigates this transformation to show how cultural institutions and a growing public-sphere affected history-writing, and how in turn this writing defined Iranian nationalism. Interactions between the state and a cross-section of Iranian society—scholars, schoolteachers, students, intellectuals, feminists, and poets—were crucial in shaping a new understanding of nation and history. This enlightening book draws on previously unexamined primary sources—including histories, school curricula, pedagogical materials, periodicals, and memoirs—to demonstrate how the social locations of historians writ broadly influenced their interpretations of the past. The relative autonomy of these historians had a direct bearing on whether history upheld the status quo or became an instrument for radical change, and the writing of history became central to debates on social and political reform, the role of women in society, and the criteria for citizenship and nationality. Ultimately, this book traces how contending visions of Iranian history were increasingly unified as a centralized Iranian state emerged in the early twentieth century.

The Invention of the Jewish People

The Invention of the Jewish People PDF Author: Shlomo Sand
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 178168362X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
A historical tour de force, The Invention of the Jewish People offers a groundbreaking account of Jewish and Israeli history. Exploding the myth that there was a forced Jewish exile in the first century at the hands of the Romans, Israeli historian Shlomo Sand argues that most modern Jews descend from converts, whose native lands were scattered across the Middle East and Eastern Europe. In this iconoclastic work, which spent nineteen weeks on the Israeli bestseller list and won the coveted Aujourd'hui Award in France, Sand provides the intellectual foundations for a new vision of Israel's future.

Cultural Trauma

Cultural Trauma PDF Author: Ron Eyerman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521004374
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
In this book, Ron Eyerman explores the formation of the African-American identity through the theory of cultural trauma. The trauma in question is slavery, not as an institution or as personal experience, but as collective memory: a pervasive remembrance that grounded a people's sense of itself. Combining a broad narrative sweep with more detailed studies of important events and individuals, Eyerman reaches from Emancipation through the Harlem Renaissance, the Depression, the New Deal and the Second World War to the Civil Rights movement and beyond. He offers insights into the intellectual and generational conflicts of identity-formation which have a truly universal significance, as well as providing a compelling account of the birth of African-American identity. Anyone interested in questions of assimilation, multiculturalism and postcolonialism will find this book indispensable.

Iranophobia

Iranophobia PDF Author: Haggai Ram
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804771197
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 333

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Book Description
Israel and Iran invariably are portrayed as sworn enemies, engaged in an unending conflict with potentially apocalyptic implications.Iranophobia offers an innovative and provocative new reading of this conflict. Concerned foremost with how Israelis perceive Iran, the author steps back from all-too-common geopolitical analyses to show that this conflict is as much a product of shared cultural trajectories and entangled histories as it is one of strategic concerns and political differences. Haggai Ram, an Israeli scholar, explores prevalent Israeli assumptions about Iran to look at how these assumptions have, in turn, reflected and shaped Jewish Israeli identity. Drawing on diverse political, cultural, and academic sources, he concludes that anti-Iran phobias in the Israeli public sphere are largely projections of perceived domestic threats to the prevailing Israeli ethnocratic order. At the same time, he examines these phobias in relation to the Jewish state's use of violence in the Palestinian territories and Lebanon in the post-9/11 world. In the end, Ram demonstrates that the conflict between Israel and Iran may not be as essential and polarized as common knowledge assumes. Israeli anti-Iran phobias are derived equally from domestic anxieties about the Jewish state's ethnic and religious identities and from exaggerated and displaced strategic concerns in the era of the "war on terrorism."

Treacherous Alliance

Treacherous Alliance PDF Author: Trita Parsi
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300138067
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 381

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Book Description
This award-winning study traces the shifting relations between Israel, Iran, and the U.S. since 1948—including secret alliances and treacherous acts. Vitriolic exchanges between the leaders of Iran and Israel are a disturbingly common feature of the news cycle. But the real roots of their enmity mystify Washington policymakers, leaving no promising pathways to stability. In Treacherous Alliance, U.S. foreign policy expert Trita Parsi untangles to complex and often duplicitous relationship among Israel, Iran, and the United States from 1948 to the present. In the process, he reveals shocking details of unsavory political maneuverings that have undermined Middle Eastern peace and disrupted U.S. foreign policy initiatives in the region. Parsi draws on his unique access to senior American, Iranian, and Israeli decision makers to present behind-the-scenes revelations that will surprise even the most knowledgeable readers: Iran’s prime minister asks Israel to assassinate Khomeini; Israel reaches out to Saddam Hussein after the Gulf War; the United States foils Iran’s plan to withdraw support from Hamas and Hezbollah; and more. Treacherous Alliance not only revises our understanding of the recent past, it also spells out a course for the future. An Arthur Ross Book Award Silver Medal Winner A Choice Magazine Outstanding Academic Title