Title: Moral communities: the culture of class relations in the Russian printing industry, 1867-1907 
Author: Steinberg, Mark
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: History | European History | Russian and Eastern European Studies
Publisher's Description: This valuable study offers a rare perspective on the social and political crisis in late Imperial Russia. Mark D. Steinberg focuses on employers, supervisors, and workers in the printing industry as it evolved from a state-dependent handicraft to a capitalist industry. He explores class relations and the values, norms, and perceptions with which they were made meaningful. Using archival and printed sources, Steinberg examines economic changes, workplace relations, professional organizations, unions, strikes, and political activism, as well as shop customs, trade festivals, and everyday life. In rich detail he describes efforts to build a community of masters and men united by shared interests and moral norms. The collapse of this ideal in the face of growing class conflict is also explored, giving a full view of an important moment in Russian history.   [brief]
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Title: Owen Lattimore and the "loss" of China 
Author: Newman, Robert P
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: History | China | United States History | Politics
Publisher's Description: In March 1950 Senator Joseph R. McCarthy accused Owen Lattimore, a distinguished China scholar at The Johns Hopkins University, of being "the top Soviet espionage agent in the U.S." The Senate Foreign Relations Committee exonerated Lattimore four months later, but for the next two years Pat McCarran and his Senate Internal Security Committee investigated him, forcing the Justice Department to indict him for perjury. The case was eventually dismissed, but only after extraordinary efforts by the FBI failed to unearth a single reliable witness who could testify against Lattimore.Lattimore was a victim of the virulent witch hunts that took place in the U.S. in the 1950s after China, our friend and ally in World War II, went over to that reviled enemy, communism. Americans could not believe that China made this choice freely; its adherence to the World Communist Conspiracy must have been coerced by Soviet manipulation and domestic subversion by Americans. Some Communist mastermind in the American government had to be blamed for our "loss" of China. Lattimore, who had never been in the State Department but who had warned that China was not a stooge of Stalinist Russia and that Mao Zedong had come to power on his own, became the scapegoat.In this magisterial biography, Robert Newman follows the career of Owen Lattimore, scholar-adventurer, through his service in both the Chinese Nationalist and American governments in World War II, the tribulations of being Joe McCarthy's flagship heretic, his brilliant academic career in England, and finally his return to Central Asia as the foremost advocate of Mongolian nationalism and independence.Newman proves definitively that there was never any case against Lattimore. His book is based on a unique source, the Lattimore file from the FBI - 38,900 pages - arguably the most complete and candid file on a major prosecution ever released by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. It is on the FBI's testimony - albeit testimony of the most reluctant sort - that Lattimore is finally exonerated.   [brief]
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Title: The unending frontier: an environmental history of the early modern world
Author: Richards, J. F
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: History | Asian History | European History | United States History | Environmental Studies | Asian Studies | African Studies
Publisher's Description: It was the age of exploration, the age of empire and conquest, and human beings were extending their reach - and their numbers - as never before. In the process, they were intervening in the world's natural environment in equally unprecedented and dramatic ways. A sweeping work of environmental history, The Unending Frontier offers a truly global perspective on the profound impact of humanity on the natural world in the early modern period. John F. Richards identifies four broadly shared historical processes that speeded environmental change from roughly 1500 to 1800 c.e.: intensified human land use along settlement frontiers; biological invasions; commercial hunting of wildlife; and problems of energy scarcity. The Unending Frontier considers each of these trends in a series of case studies, sometimes of a particular place, such as Tokugawa Japan and early modern England and China, sometimes of a particular activity, such as the fur trade in North America and Russia, cod fishing in the North Atlantic, and whaling in the Arctic. Throughout, Richards shows how humans - whether clearing forests or draining wetlands, transporting bacteria, insects, and livestock; hunting species to extinction, or reshaping landscapes - altered the material well-being of the natural world along with their own.   [brief]
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Title: Hooliganism: crime, culture, and power in St. Petersburg, 1900-1914 
Author: Neuberger, Joan
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: History | Politics | Russian and Eastern European Studies | Criminology
Publisher's Description: n this pioneering analysis of diffuse underclass anger that simmers in many societies, Joan Neuberger takes us to the streets of St. Petersburg in 1900-1914 to show us how the phenomenon labeled hooliganism came to symbolize all that was wrong with the modern city: increasing hostility between class . . . [more]
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Title: Stalin's forgotten Zion: Birobidzhan and the making of a Soviet Jewish homeland: an illustrated history, 1928-1996
Author: Weinberg, Robert E
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Jewish Studies | Russian and Eastern European Studies | History | Politics | Judaism
Publisher's Description: Robert Weinberg and Bradley Berman's carefully documented and extensively illustrated book explores the Soviet government's failed experiment to create a socialist Jewish homeland. In 1934 an area popularly known as Birobidzhan, a sparsely populated region along the Sino-Soviet border some five thousand miles east of Moscow, was designated the national homeland of Soviet Jewry. Establishing the Jewish Autonomous Region was part of the Kremlin's plan to create an enclave where secular Jewish culture rooted in Yiddish and socialism could serve as an alternative to Palestine. The Kremlin also considered the region a solution to various perceived problems besetting Soviet Jews. Birobidzhan still exists today, but despite its continued official status Jews are a small minority of the inhabitants of the region. Drawing upon documents from archives in Moscow and Birobidzhan, as well as photograph collections never seen outside Birobidzhan, Weinberg's story of the Soviet Zion sheds new light on a host of important historical and contemporary issues regarding Jewish identity, community, and culture. Given the persistence of the "Jewish question" in Russia, the history of Birobidzhan provides an unusual point of entry into examining the fate of Soviet Jewry under communist rule.   [brief]
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Title: Chechnya: life in a war-torn society
Author: Tishkov, Valeriĭ Aleksandrovich
Published: University of California Press,  2004
Subjects: Anthropology | Ethnic Studies | European History | Sociology | Russian and Eastern European Studies
Publisher's Description: This book illuminates one of the world's most troubled regions from a unique perspective - that of a prominent Russian intellectual. Valery Tishkov, a leading ethnographer who has also served in several important political posts, examines the evolution of the war in Chechnya that erupted in 1994, untangling the myths, the long-held resentments, and the ideological manipulations that have fueled the crisis. In particular, he explores the key themes of nationalism and violence that feed the turmoil there. Forceful, original, and timely, his study combines extensive interview material, historical perspectives, and deep local knowledge. Tishkov sheds light on Chechnya in particular and on how secessionist conflicts can escalate into violent conflagrations in general. With its balanced assessments of both Russian and Chechen perspectives, this book will be essential reading for people seeking to understand the role of Islamic fundamentalist nationalism in the contemporary world.   [brief]
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Title: A little corner of freedom: Russian nature protection from Stalin to Gorbachëv 
Author: Weiner, Douglas R 1951-
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: Russian and Eastern European Studies | Environmental Studies | Politics | History | History and Philosophy of Science | Ecology
Publisher's Description: While researching Russia's historical efforts to protect nature, Douglas Weiner unearthed unexpected findings: a trail of documents that raised fundamental questions about the Soviet political system. These surprising documents attested to the unlikely survival of a critical-minded, scientist-led movement through the Stalin years and beyond. It appeared that, within scientific societies, alternative visions of land use, resrouce exploitation, habitat protection, and development were sustained and even publicly advocated. In sharp contrast to known Soviet practices, these scientific societies prided themselves on their traditions of free elections, foreign contacts, and a pre-revolutionary heritage.Weiner portrays nature protection activists not as do-or-die resisters to the system, nor as inoffensive do-gooders. Rather, they took advantage of an unpoliced realm of speech and activity and of the patronage by middle-level Soviet officials to struggle for a softer path to development. In the process, they defended independent social and professional identities in the face of a system that sought to impose official models of behavior, ethics, and identity for all. Written in a lively style, this absorbing story tells for the first time how organized participation in nature protection provided an arena for affirming and perpetuating self-generated social identities in the USSR and preserving a counterculture whose legacy survives today.   [brief]
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Title: The lustre of our country: the American experience of religious freedom
Author: Noonan, John Thomas 1926-
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Law | United States History | Religion | American Studies | Politics
Publisher's Description: A New York Times Notable Book This remarkable work offers a fresh approach to a freedom that is often taken for granted in the United States, yet is one of the strongest and proudest elements of American culture: religious freedom. In this compellingly written, distinctively personal book, Judge John T. Noonan asserts that freedom of religion, as James Madison conceived it, is an American invention previously unknown to any nation on earth. The Lustre of Our Country demonstrates how the idea of religious liberty is central to the American experience and to American influence around the world.Noonan's original book is a history of the idea of religious liberty and its relationship with the law. He begins with an intellectual autobiography, describing his own religious and legal training. After setting the stage with autobiography, Noonan turns to history, with each chapter written in a new voice. One chapter takes the form of a catechism (questions and answers), presenting the history of the idea of religious freedom in Christianity and the American colonies. Another chapter on James Madison argues that Madison's support of religious freedom was not purely secular but rather the outcome of his own religious beliefs. A fictional sister of Alexis de Toqueville writes, contrary to her brother's work, that the U.S. government is very closely tied to religion. Other chapters offer straightforward considerations of constitutional law.Throughout the book, Noonan shows how the free exercise of religion led to profound changes in American law - he discusses abolition, temperance, and civil rights - and how the legal notion of religious liberty influenced revolutionary France, Japan, and Russia, as well as the Catholic Church during Vatican II. The Lustre of Our Country is a celebration of religious freedom - a personal and profound statement on what the author considers America's greatest moral contribution to the world.   [brief]
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Title: Stravinsky and the Russian traditions: a biography of the works through Mavra
Author: Taruskin, Richard
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Music | Musicology | Russian and Eastern European Studies
Publisher's Description: This book undoes 50 years of mythmaking about Stravinsky's life in music.During his spectacular career, Igor Stravinsky underplayed his Russian past in favor of a European cosmopolitanism. Richard Taruskin has refused to take the composer at his word. In this long-awaited study, he defines Stravinsky's relationship to the musical and artistic traditions of his native land and gives us a dramatically new picture of one of the major figures in the history of music.Taruskin draws directly on newly accessible archives and on a wealth of Russian documents. In Volume One, he sets the historical scene: the St. Petersburg musical press, the arts journals, and the writings of anthropologists, folklorists, philosophers, and poets. Volume Two addresses the masterpieces of Stravinsky's early maturity - Petrushka, The Rite of Spring, and Les Noces . Taruskin investigates the composer's collaborations with Diaghilev to illuminate the relationship between folklore and modernity. He elucidates the Silver Age ideal of "neonationalism" - the professional appropriation of motifs and style characteristics from folk art - and how Stravinsky realized this ideal in his music.Taruskin demonstrates how Stravinsky achieved his modernist technique by combining what was most characteristically Russian in his musical training with stylistic elements abstracted from Russian folklore. The stylistic synthesis thus achieved formed Stravinsky as a composer for life, whatever the aesthetic allegiances he later professed.Written with Taruskin's characteristic mixture of in-depth research and stylistic verve, this book will be mandatory reading for all those seriously interested in the life and work of Stravinsky.   [brief]
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Title: The maiden of Ludmir: a Jewish holy woman and her world
Author: Deutsch, Nathaniel
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Jewish Studies | Women's Studies | European History | Judaism | Autobiographies and Biographies
Publisher's Description: Hannah Rochel Verbermacher, a Hasidic holy woman known as the Maiden of Ludmir, was born in early-nineteenth-century Russia and became famous as the only woman in the three-hundred-year history of Hasidism to function as a rebbe - or charismatic leader - in her own right. Nathaniel Deutsch follows the traces left by the Maiden in both history and legend to fully explore her fascinating story for the first time. The Maiden of Ludmir offers powerful insights into the Jewish mystical tradition, into the Maiden's place within it, and into the remarkable Jewish community of Ludmir. Her biography ultimately becomes a provocative meditation on the complex relationships between history and memory, Judaism and modernity. History first finds the Maiden in the eastern European town of Ludmir, venerated by her followers as a master of the Kabbalah, teacher, and visionary, and accused by her detractors of being possessed by a dybbuk, or evil spirit. Deutsch traces the Maiden's steps from Ludmir to Ottoman Palestine, where she eventually immigrated and re-established herself as a holy woman. While the Maiden's story - including her adamant refusal to marry - recalls the lives of holy women in other traditions, it also brings to light the largely unwritten history of early-modern Jewish women. To this day, her transgressive behavior, a challenge to traditional Jewish views of gender and sexuality, continues to inspire debate and, sometimes, censorship within the Jewish community.   [brief]
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Title: A coat of many colors: Osip Mandelstam and his mythologies of self-presentation 
Author: Freidin, Gregory
Published: University of California Press,  1987
Subjects: Literature | European Literature
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Title: Smallpox: the fight to eradicate a global scourge
Author: Koplow, David A 1951-
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Politics | American Studies | Public Policy | Disease
Publisher's Description: Though smallpox was eradicated from the planet two decades ago, recent terrorist acts have raised the horrific possibility that rogue states, laboratories, or terrorist groups are in possession of secret stockpiles of the virus that causes the disease, and may be preparing to unleash it on target populations. Because it is a far deadlier killer than other biological warfare agents such as anthrax, and because the universal vaccination against smallpox was halted decades ago, a smallpox attack today would be nothing short of catastrophic. This clear, authoritative study looks at the long and fascinating history of the virus, with an informative overview of the political, biological, environmental, medical, and legal issues surrounding the question of whether or not the virus should be exterminated. The only two known samples of the virus are currently stored in Atlanta and Russia. The World Health Organization has repeatedly scheduled their destruction - an action that would rid the planet of all publicly acknowledged smallpox strains forever. Opponents of this plan argue that by destroying these last samples we are denying the possibility that this unique virus could be turned to beneficial purposes in basic scientific research. Others see the stockpile as part of a deterrent against future germ attacks. Proponents of prompt eradication argue that scientists have already learned all they can from this particular virus, and that by destroying the stockpile we are preventing it from ever falling into the wrong hands. As a thirty-year veteran of arms control issues, David Koplow is uniquely suited to provide readers with an informed and well-considered understanding of the complexities involved in the handling of this deadly virus.   [brief]
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Title: Decades of crisis: Central and Eastern Europe before World War II
Author: Berend, T. Iván (Tibor Iván) 1930-
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: History | European History | European Studies | Russian and Eastern European Studies | Economics and Business
Publisher's Description: Only by understanding Central and Eastern Europe's turbulent history during the first half of the twentieth century can we hope to make sense of the conflicts and crises that have followed World War II and, after that, the collapse of Soviet-controlled state socialism. Ivan Berend looks closely at the fateful decades preceding World War II and at twelve countries whose absence from the roster of major players was enough in itself, he says, to precipitate much of the turmoil.As waves of modernization swept over Europe, the less developed countries on the periphery tried with little or no success to imitate Western capitalism and liberalism. Instead they remained, as Berend shows, rural, agrarian societies notable for the tenacious survival of feudal and aristocratic institutions. In that context of frustration and disappointment, rebellion was inevitable. Berend leads the reader skillfully through the maze of social, cultural, economic, and political changes in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, Austria, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and the Soviet Union, showing how every path ended in dictatorship and despotism by the start of World War II.   [brief]
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Title: The origins of modernism in Russian architecture 
Author: Brumfield, William Craft 1944-
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Architecture | Architectural History | Russian and Eastern European Studies
Publisher's Description: The dramatic transformation of Russian architecture from the 1880s to the 1917 revolution reflected the profound changes in Russian society as it entered the modern industrial age. William Craft Brumfield examines the extraordinary diversity of architectural styles in this period and traces the search by architects and critics for a "unifying idea" that would define a new architecture. Generously illustrated with archival materials and with the author's own superb photographs, this is the first comprehensive study by a Western scholar of a neglected period in European architectural and cultural history.Brumfield explores the diverse styles of Russian modernism in part by analyzing the contemporary theoretical debate about them: the relation between technology and style, the obligation of architecture to society, and the role of architecture as an expression of national identity. Steeped in controversy, Russian modernism at the beginning of the century foreshadowed the radical restructuring of architectural form in the Soviet Union during the two decades after the revolution. This authoritative work provides a new understanding of Russian architecture's last brief entrepreneurial episode and offers insight on our own era, when individual freedom and initiative may once again find expression in Russian architecture.   [brief]
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Title: The enigma of 1989: the USSR and the liberation of Eastern Europe 
Author: Lévesque, Jacques
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Politics | History | European History | Russian and Eastern European Studies
Publisher's Description: The Soviet external empire fell in 1989 virtually without bloodshed. The domino-like collapse of the communist regimes of Eastern Europe was not anticipated by political experts in either the East or the West. Most surprising of all was the Soviet Union's permissive reactions to the secession. For the first time in modern history, such an epochal upheaval could take place not only without war but also without major international tensions.This book is the first comprehensive scholarly attempt to elucidate Soviet behavior toward Eastern Europe in 1989. Jacques Lévesque thoroughly analyses the policies of the USSR toward Eastern Europe during the Gorbachev era and clarifies the goals that underpinned these policies.Based on interviews with political leaders and exhaustive research in Russia, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and the other ex-Warsaw Pact countries, this book traces the nuances of each country's case as a set of continually changing, mutually reinforcing causes and effects.   [brief]
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Title: Bolshevik festivals, 1917-1920 
Author: Von Geldern, James
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: History | European History | European Literature | Russian and Eastern European Studies
Publisher's Description: In the early years of the USSR, socialist festivals - events entailing enormous expense and the deployment of thousands of people - were inaugurated by the Bolsheviks. Avant-garde canvases decorated the streets, workers marched, and elaborate mass spectacles were staged. Why, with a civil war raging and an economy in ruins, did the regime sponsor such spectacles?In this first comprehensive investigation of the way festivals helped build a new political culture, James von Geldern examines the mass spectacles that captured the Bolsheviks' historical vision. Spectacle directors borrowed from a tradition that included tsarist pomp, avant-garde theater, and popular celebrations. They transformed the ideology of revolution into a mythologized sequence of events that provided new foundations for the Bolsheviks' claim to power.   [brief]
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Title: Letters and autobiographical writings 
Author: Mills, C. Wright (Charles Wright) 1916-1962
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: American Studies | Anthropology | Sociology | Literature | United States History | Letters
Publisher's Description: One of the leading public intellectuals of twentieth-century America and a pioneering and brilliant social scientist, C. Wright Mills left a legacy of interdisciplinary and hard-hitting work including two books that changed the way many people viewed their lives and the structure of power in the United States: White Collar (1951) and The Power Elite (1956). Mills persistently challenged the status quo within his profession--as in The Sociological Imagination (1959)--and within his country, until his untimely death in 1962. This collection of letters and writings, edited by his daughters, allows readers to see behind Mills's public persona for the first time. Mills's letters to prominent figures--including Saul Alinsky, Daniel Bell, Lewis Coser, Carlos Fuentes, Hans Gerth, Irving Howe, Dwight MacDonald, Robert K. Merton, Ralph Miliband, William Miller, David Riesman, and Harvey Swados--are joined by his letters to family members, letter-essays to an imaginary friend in Russia, personal narratives by his daughters, and annotations drawing on published and unpublished material, including the FBI file on Mills.   [brief]
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Title: Jewish memories 
Author: Valensi, Lucette
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Jewish Studies | Postcolonial Studies
Publisher's Description: Collective memory: a living, breathing gift from the past, less fragmentary than the recollections of any one individual, more personal by far than "history." The authors of Jewish Memories saw in the large numbers of Jews who migrated to France during the twentieth century the chance to retrieve a past that might otherwise be lost forever. Through dozens of interviews, they listened to men and women talking of their lives and the places they came from, and found an almost uncanny resonance of individual voices with one another. Individual memories became part of a shared memory, projecting major themes of the Jewish tradition - exile and the sense of loss, the duty to remember, and the transmission of Jewish experience to the next generations.Hélène H. tells of dropping the all-important family teakettle during a terrified race to escape skirmishing soldiers. Charles H. talks about the innocent love he shared with a non-Jewish girl who studied with him. Anna D. describes her wordless reunion with her wounded husband after World War II. From communities now disappeared, scenes of home and family life, occupations, happy times and holidays reinforce one another, and we can feel the painful nostalgia for a kind of existence no longer possible.Two distinct but parallel sets of memories run through the narrative, that of Sephardi and that of Ashkenazi Jews, all of whom found their way to France. They arrived from Tunisia, Turkey, Poland, and Russia, from poor and well-to-do families, almost always driven from their homes by difficult circumstances, often with their most recent memories filled with horror and tragedy. The desire to remember it all and to pass it on to others who will also remember shines from every page, and makes this book as memorable for general readers as it is valuable for anthropologists, sociologists, and historians.   [brief]
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Title: Law and disorder on the Narova River: the Kreenholm strike of 1872
Author: Zelnik, Reginald E
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: History | Labor Studies | European History | European Studies
Publisher's Description: Reginald Zelnik uses a single episode - a militant strike at the Kreenholm factory, Europe's largest textile plant - to explore the broad historical moment. In examining this crucial event of Russian history he sheds fresh light on local power relations, high politics in St. Petersburg, controversies over the rule of law, and the origins of the Russian labor movement. Zelnik sees this pivotal moment in Russian labor history as the beginning step in the series of conflicts that eventually led to the upheavals of the early twentieth century.   [brief]
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Title: The life of Judaism
Author: Goldberg, Harvey E
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: Religion | Jewish Studies | Judaism
Publisher's Description: Approximately thirteen million people around the world define themselves as Jews, with the majority residing in the United States and Israel. This collection portrays the diversity of Jewish experience as it is practiced and lived in contemporary societies. The book's attention to material culture offers a much-needed addition to more traditional views advanced in the study of Judaism. Through ethnographic and autobiographical perspectives, the essays provide an appreciation of Judaism in daily activities, from domestic food preparation to worshipping; Jewish attachment to the cultures of specific communities, be they in Russia or Morocco; the impact of the Holocaust; the place of the State of Israel in Jewish life; and the role of women. Harvey E. Goldberg, a leading scholar in the anthropology of Judaism, provides an introduction to each chapter that demonstrates the links among the various themes. Ease of communication and travel has resulted in frequent contact--and at times, conflict--between Jews of similar and diverging backgrounds around the world. Visiting distinctive Jewish spaces has become a way of cultivating specific identities and senses of a Jewish past. As ritual, prayers, and attitudes toward authority undergo new constructions and interpretation, Judaism of "the book" also takes on new forms. These essays go a long way in helping us understand a contemporary and multifaceted Judaism, along with its history and texts.   [brief]
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