Author: Norman Toby Simms
Publisher: Academic Studies PRess
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 528
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Book Description
Simms redefines the study of two often misunderstood religious groups: the Marranos who claim descent from the persecuted Spanish Jews forced to convert to Catholicism yet who practiced Jewish rituals secretly; and the Penitentes, a Catholic group accused of violent acts of self-flagellation and other forms of masochism.
Author: John Lorinc
Publisher: Coach House Books
ISBN: 1770568271
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 226
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Book Description
A stolen sign, ‘No Jews Live Here,’ kept John Lorinc’s Hungarian Jewish family alive during the Holocaust. From pre-war Budapest to post-war Toronto, journalist John Lorinc unspools four generations of his Hungarian Jewish family's journey through the Holocaust, the 1956 Revolution, and finally exodus from a country that can't rid itself of its antisemitic demons. This braided saga centers on the writer's eccentric and defiant grandmother, a consummate survivor who, with her love of flashy jewelry and her vicious tongue, was best appreciated from afar. Lorinc also traces the stories of both his grandfathers and his father, all of whom fell victim, in different ways, to the Nazis’ genocidal campaign to rid Europe of Jews. This is a deeply reported but profoundly human telling of a vile part of history, told through Lorinc’s distinctively astute and compassionate consideration of how cities and cultures work. Set against the complicated and poorly understood background of Hungary's Jewish community, No Jews Live Here is about family stories, and how the narratives of our lives are shaped by our times and historical forces over which we have no control. "John Lorinc weaves Hungarian history with the equally fascinating history of his own family to tell a deeply researched story with universal resonance: how events, enormous and seemingly tiny (a genocidal war, foggy skies), conspire to create outcomes with life-and-death implications through generations." – Marsha Lederman, author of Kiss the Red Stairs: The Holocaust, Once Removed
Author: Norbert Finzsch
Publisher: LIT Verlag Münster
ISBN: 3643114303
Category : Christianity and politics
Languages : en
Pages : 214
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Book Description
Author: Agata Bielik-Robson
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110768348
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 370
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Book Description
The Marrano phenomenon is a still unexplored element of Western culture: the presence of the borderline Jewish identity which avoids clear-cut cultural and religious attribution and – precisely as such – prefigures the advent of the typically modern "free-oscillating" subjectivity. Yet, the aim of the book is not a historical study of the Marranos (or conversos), who were forced to convert to Christianity, but were suspected of retaining their Judaism "undercover." The book rather applies the "Marrano metaphor" to explore the fruitful area of mixture and cross-over which allowed modern thinkers, writers and artists of the Jewish origin to enter the realm of universal communication – without, at the same time, making them relinquish their Jewishness which they subsequently developed as a "hidden tradition." The book poses and then attempts to prove the "Marrano hypothesis," according to which modern subjectivity derives, to paraphrase Cohen, "out of the sources of the hidden Judaism": modernity begins not with the Cartesian abstract ego, but with the rich self-reflexive self of Michel de Montaigne who wrestled with his own marranismo in a manner that soon became paradigmatic to other Jewish thinkers entering the scene of Western modernity, from Spinoza to Derrida. The essays in the volume offer thus a new view of a "Marrano modernity," which aims to radically transform our approach to the genesis of the modern subject and shed a new light on its secret religious life as surviving the process of secularization, although merely in the form of secret traces.
Author: Naomi Leite
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520960645
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 342
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Book Description
Stirling Prize for Best Book in Psychological Anthropology, 2018 Graburn Award for Best Book in Anthropology of Tourism, 2018 Douglass Prize for Best Book in the Anthropology of Europe, Honorable Mention, 2018 National Jewish Book Award, Finalist, 2017 Unorthodox Kin is a groundbreaking exploration of identity, relatedness, and belonging in a global era. In urban Portugal today, hundreds of individuals trace their ancestry to 15th century Jews forcibly converted to Catholicism, and many now seek to rejoin the Jewish people as a whole. For the most part, however, these self-titled Marranos (“hidden Jews”) lack any direct experience of Jews or Judaism, and Portugal’s tiny, tightly knit Jewish community offers no clear path of entry. According to Jewish law, to be recognized as a Jew one must be born to a Jewish mother or pursue religious conversion, an anathema to those who feel their ancestors’ Judaism was cruelly stolen from them. After centuries of familial Catholicism, and having been refused inclusion locally, how will these self-declared ancestral Jews find belonging among “the Jewish family,” writ large? How, that is, can people rejected as strangers face-to-face become members of a global imagined community—not only rhetorically, but experientially? Leite addresses this question through intimate portraits of the lives and experiences of a network of urban Marranos who sought contact with foreign Jewish tourists and outreach workers as a means of gaining educational and moral support in their quest. Exploring mutual imaginings and direct encounters between Marranos, Portuguese Jews, and foreign Jewish visitors, Unorthodox Kin deftly tracks how visions of self and kin evolve over time and across social spaces, ending in an unexpected path to belonging. In the process, the analysis weaves together a diverse set of current anthropological themes, from intersubjectivity to international tourism, class structures to the construction of identity, cultural logics of relatedness to transcultural communication. A compelling evocation of how ideas of ancestry shape the present, how feelings of kinship arise among far-flung strangers, and how some find mystical connection in a world said to be disenchanted, Unorthodox Kin is a model study for anthropology today. This acclaimed book will appeal to a wide audience interested in anthropology, sociology, and religious studies. Its accessible, narrative-driven style makes it especially well-suited for introductory and advanced courses in general cultural anthropology, ethnography, theories of identity and social categorization, and the study of globalization, kinship, tourism, and religion.
Author: Yirmiyahu Yovel
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 069118786X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 509
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Book Description
The Marranos were former Jews forced to convert to Christianity in Spain and Portugal, and their later descendents. Despite economic and some political advancement, these "Conversos" suffered social stigma and were persecuted by the Inquisition. In this unconventional history, Yirmiyahu Yovel tells their fascinating story and reflects on what it means for modern forms of identity. He describes the Marranos as "the Other within"—people who both did and did not belong. Rejected by most Jews as renegades and by most veteran Christians as Jews with impure blood, Marranos had no definite, integral identity, Yovel argues. The "Judaizers"—Marranos who wished to remain secretly Jewish—were not actually Jews, and those Marranos who wished to assimilate were not truly integrated as Hispano-Catholics. Rather, mixing Jewish and Christian symbols and life patterns, Marranos were typically distinguished by a split identity. They also discovered the subjective mind, engaged in social and religious dissent, and demonstrated early signs of secularity and this-worldliness. In these ways, Yovel says, the Marranos anticipated and possibly helped create many central features of modern Western and Jewish experience. One of Yovel's philosophical conclusions is that split identity—which the Inquisition persecuted and modern nationalism considers illicit—is a genuine and inevitable shape of human existence, one that deserves recognition as a basic human freedom. Drawing on historical studies, Inquisition records, and contemporary poems, novels, treatises, and other writings, this engaging critical history of the Marrano experience is also a profound meditation on dual identities and the birth of modernity.
Author: Norman Simms
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781618112934
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
This groundbreaking book focuses on Alfred Dreyfus the man, with emphasis placed on his own writings, including his recently published prison workbooks and his letters to his wife Lucie. Through close reading of these documents, a much more sensitive, intellectual, and Jewish man is revealed than was previously suspected. He and Lucie, through their family connections and mutual loyalty, were interested in and supported the artistic, scientific, philosophical and historical movements that formed their Parisian milieu. But as an Alsatian Jew, Alfred was also critical of many aspects of technological and ideological developments, making his mentality one of skepticism as well as idealism. Norman Simms addresses the way Dreyfus perceived the world, challenged many of its assumptions and contextualized it in the style of a rabbinical midrash, a process that created what Alfred called a “phantasmagoria” of the Affair that bears his name, and also interprets the man, his milieu and his mentality in the style of a midrash, a creative, transformative reading.
Author: Victoria Nelson
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674275497
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 365
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Book Description
In one of those rare books that allows us to see the world not as we've never seen it before, but as we see it daily without knowing, Victoria Nelson illuminates the deep but hidden attraction the supernatural still holds for a secular mainstream culture that forced the transcendental underground and firmly displaced wonder and awe with the forces of reason, materialism, and science. In a backward look at an era now drawing to a close, The Secret Life of Puppets describes a curious reversal in the roles of art and religion: where art and literature once took their content from religion, we came increasingly to seek religion, covertly, through art and entertainment. In a tour of Western culture that is at once exhilarating and alarming, Nelson shows us the distorted forms in which the spiritual resurfaced in high art but also, strikingly, in the mass culture of puppets, horror-fantasy literature, and cyborgs: from the works of Kleist, Poe, Musil, and Lovecraft to Philip K. Dick and virtual reality simulations. At the end of the millennium, discarding a convention of the demonized grotesque that endured three hundred years, a Demiurgic consciousness shaped in Late Antiquity is emerging anew to re-divinize the human as artists like Lars von Trier and Will Self reinvent Expressionism in forms familiar to our pre-Reformation ancestors. Here as never before, we see how pervasively but unwittingly, consuming art forms of the fantastic, we allow ourselves to believe.
Author:
Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand
ISBN: 336804382X
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 354
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Book Description
Author: Mark Richard Leach
Publisher: Hudson Hills
ISBN: 9781555951269
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 172
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Book Description
Lucero's colorful, imaginative sculptures and ceramics synthesize diverse forms and influences?bottle trees and face jugs inspired by African art; a hanging ram and blood-red sacred hearts with roots in Mexico; looming stick figures suggestive of Native American rock art; delicate totem poles that evoke Pacific Northwest Indian cultures. Hybrid animals, found objects, jug-headed infants in baby carriages and dreamers who externalize the contents of their dreams in multilayered glazes animate the work of this California-born artist, now living in New York. Cataloging a traveling exhibition that opened at the Mint Museum of Art (Charlotte, N.C.), this volume reproduces 47 of Lucero's glazed ceramic, bronze and mixed-media creations in full-page color plates. Co-curator Bloemink finds pervasive echoes of surrealism and Dada in Lucero's improvisations. Art historian Lippard relates his themes of intercultural exchange to his family history; his ancestors, practicing Sephardic Jews, escaped persecution in Spain by migrating to New Mexico. Also included is an interview with Lucero by Leach, the exhibit's curator. 74 colour & 58 b/w illustrations
