This book tells the story of Di Warheit ("The Truth"), a Yiddish daily established in New York in late 1905. Its founder, Louis Miller (1866-1927), emigrated from Russia to the US in 1884, and by 1897 he was the leader of a group that established the Forverts, later to be the most successful Yiddish newspaper in the US. Common wisdom depicts Miller's social leaning as stemming from ego and opportunism, but this book suggests that Miller's publishing philosophy was based primarily on ideological and political grounds. Why begin Miller's story in 1905? Because in that year, 'The Jewish Question' - especially in Russia with its pogroms - turned dramatic. Miller understood that the time had come for a paradigm shift. The result was labeled Klal-Yisruel Politics, a combined nationalist all-Jewish effort to ameliorate 'the Jewish condition' wherever Jews suffered or were oppressed. The drive behind Miller's decision to run Di Warheit was his eagerness to promote a progressive, non-radical, and pragmatic political mind set among his immigrant brethren. This somewhat forgotten chapter in American Jewish history is told here in chronological order, mainly through the texts of Miller's newspaper. Each chapter is dedicated to the main issue that drove Miller's publishing effort at a specific time period and in response to external events impacting Jewry, until the management forced him out of Di Warheit due to his non-conventional interpretation of the war that broke out in Europe in 1914. This long-awaited book tells the story of a Yiddish-speaking socialist, who, after denying the very existence of a specific Jewish people, was open-minded enough to re-examine his beliefs and was courageous enough to publicly change his mind. But, he paid the price for telling, or at least trying to tell, that truth.

First published serially in the Yiddish daily newspaper di Varhayt in 1916–18, Diary of a Lonely Girl, or The Battle against Free Love is a novel of intimate feelings and scandalous behaviors, shot through with a dark humor. From the perch of a diarist writing in first person about her own love life, Miriam Karpilove’s novel offers a snarky, melodramatic criticism of radical leftist immigrant youth culture in early twentieth-century New York City. Squeezed between men who use their freethinking ideals to pressure her to be sexually available and nosy landladies who require her to maintain her respectability, the narrator expresses frustration at her vulnerable circumstances with wry irreverence. The novel boldly explores issues of consent, body autonomy, women’s empowerment and disempowerment around sexuality, courtship, and politics. Karpilove immigrated to the United States from a small town near Minsk in 1905 and went on to become one of the most prolific and widely published women writers of prose in Yiddish. Kirzane’s skillful translation gives English readers long-overdue access to Karpilove’s original and provocative voice.

Jacob Henry Schiff (1847–1920), a German-born American Jewish banker, facilitated critical loans for Japan in the early twentieth century. Working on behalf of the firm of Kuhn, Loeb & Co., Schiff’s assertiveness in favour of Japan separated him from his fellow German Jewish financiers and the banking establishment generally. This book’s analysis differs from the consensus that Schiff funded Japan largely out of enmity towards Russia but rather sought to work with Japan for over thirty years. This was as much a factor in his actions surrounding the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905) as his concern to thwart Russian antisemitism. Of interest to financial historians alongside Japanese historians and academics of both genres, this book provides a lively and thoroughly researched volume that precisely focuses on Schiff’s mastery of banking.

An examination of how early twentieth-century American Jewish men experienced manhood and presented their masculinity to others. How did American Jewish men experience manhood, and how did they present their masculinity to others? In this distinctive book, Sarah Imhoff shows that the project of shaping American Jewish manhood was not just one of assimilation or exclusion. Jewish manhood was neither a mirror of normative American manhood nor its negative, effeminate opposite. Imhoff demonstrates how early twentieth-century Jews constructed a gentler, less aggressive manhood, drawn partly from the American pioneer spirit and immigration experience, but also from Hollywood and the YMCA, which required intense cultivation of a muscled male physique. She contends that these models helped Jews articulate the value of an acculturated American Judaism. Tapping into a rich historical literature to reveal how Jews looked at masculinity differently than Protestants or other religious groups, Imhoff illuminates the particular experience of American Jewish men. “There is so much literature—and very good scholarship—on Judaism and gender, but the majority of that literature reflects an interest in women. A hearty thank you to Sarah Imhoff for writing the other half of the story and for doing it so elegantly.” —Claire Elise Katz, author of Levinas and the Crisis of Humanism “Invariably lucid and engaging, Sarah Imhoff provides a secure foundation for how religion shaped American masculinity and how masculinity shaped American Judaism in the early twentieth century.” —Judith Gerson, author of By Thanksgiving We Were Americans: German Jewish Refugees and Holocaust Memory

This book, in its 113th year, provides insight into major trends in the North American Jewish community, examining Jewish education, New York Jewry, national and Jewish communal affairs, and the US and world Jewish population. It also acts as an important resource with its lists of Jewish Institutions, Jewish periodicals, and academic resources as well as Jewish honorees, obituaries, and major recent events. It should prove useful to social scientists and historians of the American Jewish community, Jewish communal workers, and the press, among others. For more than a century, the American Jewish Year Book has remained and continues to serve, even in the Internet age, as the leading reference work on contemporary Jewish life. This year’s volume, with its special reports on Jewish education and the New York community and its updates on Jewish population statistics, Jewish institutions, and the major Jewish figures who passed in the year past, continues this splendid tradition. Pamela S. Nadell, Chair, Department of History, American University and Co-editor, Making Women’s Histories: Beyond National Perspectives The 2013 volume of the American Jewish Year Book impressively demonstrates that Arnold Dashefsky and Ira Sheskin have restored this important resource in all its former glory. Bruce A. Phillips, Professor of Sociology and Jewish Communal Service, Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, Los Angeles Having a current American Jewish Year Book on my shelf is like having a panel of experts on American Jewish life at the ready, prepared to give me thoughtful, accurate answers and observations on the key issues, trends and statistics that define our continental Jewish community today. Well into its second century, the American Jewish Year Book continues to be an essential resource for serious leaders, practitioners and students who seek to ground their work in solid research and up-to-date data. Jacob Solomon, Greater Miami Jewish Federation President and CEO

This volume is the result of an international conference held at Sapienza University of Rome in June 2014, which brought together scholars from different countries to re-analyse and re-interpret the events of the First World War, one hundred years after a young Bosnian Serb student from the “Mlada Bosna,” Gavrilo Princip, “lit the fuse” and ignited the conflict which was to forever change the world. The Great War – initially on a European and then on a world scale – demonstrated the fragility of the international system of the European balance of powers, and determined the dissolution of the great multinational empires and the need to redraw the map of Europe according to the principles of national sovereignty. This book provides new insights into theories of this conflict, and is characterized by internationality, interdisciplinarity and a combination of different research methods. The contributions, based on archival documents from various different countries, international and local historiography, and on the analysis of newspaper articles, postcards, propaganda material, memorials and school books, examine the role of intellectuals and artists in the conflict, the issue of minorities and nationalities, the economy, and international relations and politics, in addition to specific case studies such as Russia and the Ottoman Empire, the Caucasus and the Middle East.

The Encyclopedia of New York State is one of the most complete works on the Empire State to be published in a half-century. In nearly 2,000 pages and 4,000 signed entries, this single volume captures the impressive complexity of New York State as a historic crossroads of people and ideas, as a cradle of abolitionism and feminism, and as an apex of modern urban, suburban, and rural life. The Encyclopedia is packed with fascinating details from fields ranging from sociology and geography to history. Did you know that Manhattan's Lower East Side was once the most populated neighborhood in the world, but Hamilton County in the Adirondacks is the least densely populated county east of the Mississippi; New York is the only state to border both the Great Lakes and the Atlantic Ocean; the Erie Canal opened New York City to rich farmland upstate . . . and to the west. Entries by experts chronicle New York's varied areas, politics, and persuasions with a cornucopia of subjects from environmentalism to higher education to railroads, weaving the state's diverse regions and peoples into one idea of New York State. Lavishly illustrated with 500 photographs and figures, 120 maps, and 140 tables, the Encyclopedia is key to understanding the state's past, present, and future. It is a crucial reference for students, teachers, historians, and business people, for New Yorkers of all persuasions, and for anyone interested in finding out more about New York State.

At the end of life, our comfort lies mainly in relationships. In this book, Daniel Miller, one of the world's leading anthropologists, examines the social worlds of people suffering from terminal or long-term illness. Threading together a series of personal stories, based on interviews conducted with patients of an English hospice, Miller draws out the implications of these narratives for our understanding of community, friendship, and kinship, but also loneliness and isolation. This is a book about people's lives, not their deaths: about the hospice patients rather than the hospice. It focuses on the comfort given by friends, carers and relatives through both face-to-face relations and, increasingly, online communication. Miller asks whether the loneliness and isolation he uncovers is the result of a decline of English patterns of socialising, or their continuation. This moving and deeply humane book combines warmth and sharp observation with anthropological insight and practical suggestions for the use of media by the hospice. It will be of interest not only to students and scholars of anthropology, sociology, social policy and media and cultural studies, but also to healthcare professionals and, indeed, to anyone who would like to know more about the role of relationships in the final stage of our lives.