In Yiddish, shtetl simply means “town.” How does such an unassuming word come to loom so large in modern Jewish culture, with a proliferation of uses and connotations? By examining the meaning of shtetl, Jeffrey Shandler asks how Jewish life in provincial towns in Eastern Europe has become the subject of extensive creativity, memory, and scholarship from the early modern era in European history to the present. In the post-Holocaust era, the shtetl looms large in public culture as the epitome of a bygone traditional Jewish communal life. People now encounter the Jewish history of these towns through an array of cultural practices, including fiction, documentary photography, film, memoirs, art, heritage tourism, and political activism. At the same time, the shtetl attracts growing scholarly interest, as historians, social scientists, literary critics, and others seek to understand both the complex reality of life in provincial towns and the nature of its wide-ranging remembrance. Shtetl: A Vernacular Intellectual History traces the trajectory of writing about these towns—by Jews and non-Jews, residents and visitors, researchers, novelists, memoirists, journalists and others—to demonstrate how the Yiddish word for “town” emerged as a key word in Jewish culture and studies. Shandler proposes that the intellectual history of the shtetl is best approached as an exemplar of engaging Jewish vernacularity, and that the variable nature of this engagement, far from being a drawback, is central to the subject’s enduring interest.

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.

Developed in the spirit of C.G. Jung, and extended by the work of James Hillman, Depth Psychology: Meditations in the Field grows directly from the soil of the Romantic Movement of the 19th century, itself a rebellion against the legacy of Enlightenment fundamentalism, which emphasized the literal reality of the world, and feasted on Measurement and the quantification of all knowledge. These essays build on the observation outlined by Jung in his provocative introduction to The Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature: "Since it is a characteristic of the psyche not only to be the source of all productivity but, more especially, to express itself in all the activities and achievements of the human mind, we can nowhere grasp the nature of the psyche per se but can meet it only in its various manifestations". (p 85) We believe the essays in this volume honor the spirit of Jung’s regard for the psyche’s diverse expressions. (Pacifica Institute) Contents Introduction: Pacifica Graduate Institute – Unfolding a Dream A Note from the Editors Chapter 1: The Contemplative Self – The Spiritual Journey and Therapeutic Work by Charles Asher Chapter 2: Creativity as an Archetypal Calling by Dianne Skafte Chapter 3: Psyche’s Silent Muse – Desert and Wilderness by Dennis Patrick Slattery Chapter 4: Sigmund Freud’s Mythology of Soul – The Body As Dwelling Place of Soul by Christine Downing Chapter 5: A Depth Psychological Approach to the Sacred by Lionel Corbett Chapter 6: Religious Pluralism in the Service of the Psyche by Patrick J. Mahaffey Chapter 7: The Challenge to Stay Open – Buber and Bion by Avedis Panajian Chapter 8: Dreams are Alive by Stephen Aizenstat Chapter 9: Telling Our Stories – Making Meaning from Myth and Memoir by Maureen Murdock Chapter 10: Divinities of Marriage by Ginette Paris Chapter 11: The Chrysalis Experience – A Mythology for Times of Transition by Hendrika de Vries Chapter 12: Look Out – Three Occasions of Public Excitation by James Hillman Chapter 13: ‘A Myth is as Good as a Smile!’ – The Mythology of a Consumerist Culture by David L. Miller Chapter 14: Yes, Indeed! Do Call the World The Vale of Soul Making – Reveries Toward an Archetypal Presence by Robert Romanyshyn Chapter 15: Seeding Liberation – A Dialogue Between Depth Psychology and Liberation Psychology by Mary Watkins Chapter 16: The Presence of Absence: Mapping Postcolonial Spaces by Helene Shulman Lorenz Chapter 17: Prisoners of our Imagination – The Boys Inside the American Gulag by Aaron Kipnis

Abel Kiviat (1892-1991) was one of track and field’s legendary personalities, a world record-holder and Olympic medalist in the metric mile. A teenage prodigy, he defeated Hall of Fame runners before his twentieth birthday. Alan S. Katchen brings Kiviat’s fascinating story to life and re-creates a lost world, when track and field was at the height of its popularity and occupying a central place in America’s sporting world. The oldest of seven children of Moishe and Zelda Kiviat, Jewish immigrants from Poland, Abel competed as "the Hebrew runner" for New York’s famed Irish-American Athletic Club and was elected its captain. Katchen’s engaging biography centers Abel Kiviat’s life and his sport firmly in the context of American social history. As a quintessential New Yorker, Kiviat embodies the urban and ethnic roots of American track. From his first schoolboy competitions on city playgrounds, to his world records at Madison Square Garden, to his pioneering role as track’s press steward in the age of emerging media, Kiviat’s life reveals how his sport was shaped by the culture of the emerging metropolis. New York City is not only the setting for these developments but also a subject of the book. The narration is enriched with brief portraits of celebrated track athletes including Kiviat’s Olympic roommate, Jim Thorpe. In addition, Katchen offers a detailed account of the I-AAC’s evolution, including its close ties to the Tammany Hall political machine, and sheds light on the rapid modernization of the sport and the ways it provided a vehicle for the assimilation of working-class, immigrant athletes. Finally, Katchen explores the social origins of the ideology of amateurism and its devastating impact on Kiviat’s career. Kiviat died at ninety-nine, just months short of carrying the torch for the opening ceremonies of the Barcelona Olympics. Abel Kiviat, National Champion pays tribute to a remarkable athlete and the sport during its most dynamic and celebrated era.