Finally, he examines the relation of the Dreyfus Affair to the culture of forcethat marked French society during the prewar years, thus accounting for the rise of the youthful athlete as a more compelling manly ideal than the bookish and sedentary intellectual.

Finally, he examines the relation of the Dreyfus Affair to the culture of forcethat marked French society during the prewar years, thus accounting for the rise of the youthful athlete as a more compelling manly ideal than the bookish and sedentary intellectual.

A group of distinguished historians makes the first systematic attempt to compare the experiences of French and German Jews in the modern era. The cases of France and Germany have often been depicted as the dominant paradigms for understanding the processes of Jewish emancipation and acculturation in Western and Central Europe. In the French case, emancipation was achieved during the French Revolution, and it remained in place until 1940, when the Vichy regime came to power. In Germany, emancipation was a far more gradual and piecemeal process, and even after it was achieved in 1871, popular and governmental antisemitism persisted. The essays in this volume, while buttressing many traditional assumptions regarding these two paths of emancipation, simultaneously challenge many others, and thus force us to reconsider the larger processes of Jewish integration and acculturation.

From immigrant ghetto love stories such as The Cohens and the Kellys (1926), through romantic comedies including Meet the Parents (2000) and Knocked Up (2007), to television series such as Transparent (2014–), Jewish-Christian couplings have been a staple of popular culture for over a century. In these pairings, Joshua Louis Moss argues, the unruly screen Jew is the privileged representative of progressivism, secular modernism, and the cosmopolitan sensibilities of the mass-media age. But his/her unruliness is nearly always contained through romantic union with the Anglo-Christian partner. This Jewish-Christian meta-narrative has recurred time and again as one of the most powerful and enduring, although unrecognized, mass-culture fantasies. Using the innovative framework of coupling theory, Why Harry Met Sally surveys three major waves of Jewish-Christian couplings in popular American literature, theater, film, and television. Moss explores how first-wave European and American creators in the early twentieth century used such couplings as an extension of modernist sensibilities and the American “melting pot.” He then looks at how New Hollywood of the late 1960s revived these couplings as a sexually provocative response to the political conservatism and representational absences of postwar America. Finally, Moss identifies the third wave as emerging in television sitcoms, Broadway musicals, and “gross-out” film comedies to grapple with the impact of American economic globalism since the 1990s. He demonstrates that, whether perceived as a threat or a triumph, Jewish-Christian couplings provide a visceral, easily graspable, template for understanding the rapid transformations of an increasingly globalized world.

Fat: such a little word evokes big responses. While ‘fat’ describes the size and shape of bodies, our negative reactions to corpulent bodies also depend on something tangible and tactile; as this book argues, there is more to fat than meets the eye. Fat: A Cultural History of the Stuff of Life offers a historical reflection on how fat has been perceived and imagined in the West since antiquity. Featuring fascinating historical accounts, philosophical, religious and cultural arguments, including discussions of status, gender and race, the book digs deep into the past for the roots of our current notions and prejudices. Three central themes emerge: how we have perceived and imagined obesity over the centuries; how fat as a substance has elicited disgust and how it evokes perceptions of animality; but also how it has been associated with vitality and fertility. By exploring the complex ways in which fat, fatness and fattening have been perceived over time, this book provides rich insights into the stuff our stereotypes are made of.

The turn of the twentieth century represented a crossroads in the French experience of modernization, especially in regard to ideas about gender and sexuality. Drawing together prominent scholars in French gender history, this volume explores how historians have come to view this period in light of new theoretical developments since the 1980s.

Despite its debt to French thought for theoretical constructs, masculinity studies have been dominated by work on English-language texts and contexts. Entre Hommes lays the foundation for French and Francophone masculinity studies in both a cultural and theoretical sense.This ground-breaking volume considers what is meant by 'French' or 'Francophone' masculinities per se and how these identities have or have not changed over time, with essays spanning periods from the Middle Ages to the present. An introduction situates the study of masculinity within the work of recent French thinkers, and essays examine both key writers and recurring cultural images.

Volume one of a comprehensive series on the Dreyfus Affair, this account chronicles for the first time in English and day by day, the drama that destabilized French society (1894-1906) and reverberated across the world. A deliberate miscarriage of justice, the public degradation of an innocent Jewish officer and his incarceration on Devil's Island, espionage, intrigue, media pressure, vehement antisemitism and political skulduggery - topics so relevant to our times - are set within a broad historical context. Meticulous research, new translations of key documents, a wealth of primary sources and illustrations and a select bibliography make this an indispensable reference work.

In The Republic of Men, Geoff Read explores the intersection of gender bias and the eight most important political parties in interwar France, breaking new scholarly ground in profound ways. The first to compare gender discourse across the political spectrum in a national context and trace the origins of the fascist "new man" in other political traditions, Read evaluates the impact of gender discourse upon policy during a pivotal period in French history. Skillfully exploring how differing political traditions -- from left to right -- influenced and reacted to each other, Read shows that regardless of the party, predominant notions of gender manifested themselves in misogyny and double standards when it came to women's emancipation. Despite the hostility of male politicians and party members, and despite women's exclusion from both parliament and the vote, Read argues that women were nonetheless crucial to politics and visibly prominent within almost every political party in interwar France. Read explains this seeming contradiction by demonstrating the existence of a conservative trend in gender politics that by the mid-1930s had enveloped even the Communist Party. Through his masterful analysis, Read closes significant gaps in the existing historiography and presents a truly revisionist assessment of early-twentieth-century French politics.