Focusing on Eastern and Central Europe before WWII, this collection explores various genres of “ethnoliterature” across temporal, geographical, and ideological borders as sites of Jewish identity formation and dissemination. Challenging the assumption of cultural uniformity among Ashkenazi Jews, the contributors consider how ethnographic literature defines Jews and Jewishness, the political context of Jewish ethnography, and the question of audience, readers, and listeners. With contributions from leading scholars and an appendix of translated historical ethnographies, this volume presents vivid case studies across linguistic and disciplinary divides, revealing a rich textual history that throws the complexity and diversity of a people into sharp relief.

The Routledge Handbook of Muslim-Jewish Relations invites readers to deepen their understanding of the historical, social, cultural, and political themes that impact modern-day perceptions of interfaith dialogue. The volume is designed to illuminate positive encounters between Muslims and Jews, as well as points of conflict, within a historical framework. Among other goals, the volume seeks to correct common misperceptions about the history of Muslim-Jewish relations by complicating familiar political narratives to include dynamics such as the cross-influence of literary and intellectual traditions. Reflecting unique and original collaborations between internationally-renowned contributors, the book is intended to spark further collaborative and constructive conversation and scholarship in the academy and beyond.

Shorenstein APARC's center overviews provide detailed information about Shorenstein APARC's mission, history, faculty, financial support, organizational structure, projects, and programs.

Although it is probably apocryphal, the etymology deriving obscene from the Latin ob and scena has proved to be enduring because it gets at something in the phenomenon itself. Thus derived, the “ob-scene” would be something opposed to the main event, or, as Svetlana Boym put it, “something played offstage with respect to the performance.” Whatever else obscenity is, it is something that is visible when properly it shouldn’t be, something that shouldn’t hold our attention but does. If we watch a performance with our minds fastened on whatever the obscene object is, then we’re not watching the performance right. That doesn’t mean that the obscene should be hidden; it means that it shouldn’t be, even as hidden. No one sits in a serious theatrical performance hoping for a wardrobe malfunction. The very imagination that would contemplate this possibility would strike us as obscene. If you know obscenity when you see it, that is at least in part because the obscene does not occur to you as viewable before it comes into view. In this respect, being obscene differs from being  perverse, which means to avail yourself of something prohibited by the law of the father but  perfectly in view as prohibited. In what follows, I will tryto argue for ballet as an obscene object in post-Wagnerian drama, musical or otherwise. Although this claim is part of a larger argument, I will  focus primarily on a failed collaboration between two post-Wagnerians, Richard Strauss and Frank Wedekind.

The present study focuses on the intersection between Islamic jurisprudence, poetics, and manuscript culture in the secret Muslim communities (moriscos) of sixteenth-century Aragon. Using as a theoretical rubric the Islamic legal concept of ^curf (“custom”), I argue that early modern Aragonese Muslims made use of handwritten Islamic legal texts, and the physical books that contained them, to incorporate specific and adaptive local innovations into their religious and cultural practice. At the center of such innovation is the practice of translation and the specific forms that Aljamiado legal texts took within the space of the manuscript folio. All of these features and practices, I argue, revolve around a broader concern with closeness at the physical, social, linguistic, and ultimately metaphysical levels.

Using two million census records, we document cultural assimilation during the Age of Mass Migration, a formative period in US history. Immigrants chose less foreign names for children as they spent more time in the US, eventually closing half of the gap with natives. Many immigrants also intermarried and learned English. Name-based assimilation was similar by literacy status, and faster for immigrants who were more culturally distant from natives. Cultural assimilation affected the next generation. Within households, brothers with more foreign names completed fewer years of schooling, faced higher unemployment, earned less and were more likely to marry foreign-born spouses.