Harry Bertoia, printmaker: monotypes and other monographics

The seventy-nine monotypes in this catalogue represent the principal styles and themes that emerged not only in Harry Bertoia's printmaking, but in his sculpture as well. June Kompass Nelson, author of Harry Bertoia, Sculptor, analyzes the graphic works and places them in the context of Bertoia's total oeuvre, with particular regard to their relationship with his sculpture. A teacher of metalwork and printmaking at the Cranbrook Academy of Arts in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, Bertoia began workin…

Twenty Israeli composers: voices of a culture

Israel’s contemporary art music reflects a modern society that is an intricate fabric of national and ethnic origins, languages and dialects, customs and traditions—a heterogeneous culture of cultures. It is a rich and distinctive environment—at once ancient and modern, spiritual and secular, traditional and progressive.

Witness through the imagination: Jewish American Holocaust literature

Criticism of Holocaust literature is an emerging field of inquiry, and as might be expected, the most innovative work has been concentrated on the vanguard of European and Israeli Holocaust literature. Now that American fiction has amassed an impressive and provocative Holocaust canon, the time is propitious for its evaluation. Witness Through the Imagination presents a critical reading of themes and stylistic strategies of major American Holocaust fiction to determine its capacity to render the…

Detroit to Fort Sackville, 1778-1779: the journal of Normand MacLeod

In 1777 Normand MacLeod, a British army officer, assumed the post of town major of Detroit, then a British colony on the frontier of late eighteenth-century America. Although it was not in the forefront of action in the American Revolution, the fort at Detroit had an important role because its strategic location made it a point of interest to military leaders on both sides.

The shaping of Jewish identity in nineteenth-century France

Nineteenth-century French Jewry was a community struggling to meet the challenges of emancipation and modernity. This struggle, with its origins in the founding of the French nation, constitutes the core of modern Jewish identity. With the Revolution of 1789 came the collapse of the social, political, and philosophical foundations of exclusiveness, forcing French society and the Jews to come to terms with the meaning of emancipation. Over time, the enormous challenge that emancipation posed for …

Expanding the frontiers of civil rights: Michigan, 1948-1968

Although historians have devoted a great deal of attention to the development of federal government policy regarding civil rights in the quarter century following World War II, little attention has been paid to the equally important developments at the state level. Few states underwent a more dramatic transformation with regard to civil rights than Michigan did. In 1948, the Michigan Committee on Civil Rights characterized the state of civil rights in Michigan as presenting "an ugly picture." Tw…

American Jewry and the Holocaust: the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, 1939-1945

In this volume Yehudi Bauer describes the efforts made to aid European victims of World War II by the New York-based American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, American Jewry's chief representative abroad. Drawing on the mass of unpublished material in the JDC archives and other repositories, as well as on his thorough knowledge of recent and continuing research into the Holocaust, he focuses alternately on the personalities and institutional decisions in New York and their effects on the …

On Jewish folklore

On Jewish Folklore spans a half-century of scholarly inquiry by the noted anthropologist and biblical scholar Raphael Patai. He essays collected in this volume, some of which are presented for the first time in English translation, provide a rich harvest of Jewish customs and traditional beliefs, gathered from all over the world and from ancient to modern times.

Harry Bertoia: sculptor

Harry Bertoia, Sculptor is devoted to the life and work of a twentieth-century Italian-born American artist whose important commissions are located in twenty-five American cities from New York to Seattle and from Minneapolis to Miami. It traces the development of Bertoia’s versatile career from his youth in Detroit, beginning with drawings, paintings, and monoprints, then jewelry and furniture designs, to his abstract sculptures in metals, many of architectural proportions.

Jewish immigrant associations and American identity in New York, 1880-1939

Landsmanshaftn, associations of immigrants from the same hometown, became the most popular form of organization among Eastern European Jewish immigrants to the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Jewish Immigrant Associations and American Identity in New York, 1880–1939, by Daniel Soyer, holds an in-depth discussion on the importance of these hometown societies that provided members with valuable material benefits and served as arenas for formal and informal social interacti…

The troubled origins of the Italian Catholic labor movement, 1878–1914

In his book, Sándor Agócs explores the conflicts that accompanied the emergence of the Italian Catholic labor movement. He examines the ideologies that were at work and details the organizational forms they inspired.

During the formative years of the Italian labor movement, Neo-Thomism became the official ideology of the church. Church leadership drew upon the central Thomistic principal of caritas, Christian love, in its response to the social climate in Italy, which had become increa…

Seasons of grace: a history of the Catholic Archdiocese of Detroit

Seasons of Grace is a history of the Catholic Church and community in southern lower Michigan from the 1830s through the 1950s. More than a chronicle of clerical successions and institutional expansion, the book also examines those social and cultural influences that affected the development of the Catholic community.

All-American anarchist: Joseph A. Labadie and the labor movement

All-American Anarchist chronicles the life and work of Joseph A. Labadie (1850-1933), Detroit's prominent labor organizer and one of early labor's most influential activists. A dynamic participant in the major social reform movements of the Gilded Age, Labadie was a central figure in the pervasive struggle for a new social order as the American Midwest underwent rapid industrialization at the end of the nineteenth century.

This engaging biography follows Labadie's colorful career from …

The Israeli-American connection: its roots in the yishuv, 1914-1945

The Israeli-American Connection examines the ways in which the American experience influenced some of the major leaders of the yishuv, the Jewish settlement in Palestine, during and between the world wars. In six biographical chapters, Michael Brown studies Vladimir Jabotinsky, Chaim Nahman Bialik, Berl Katznelson, Henrietta Szold, Golda Meir, and David Ben-Gurian, focusing on each leader's involvement with and image of America, as well as the impact of America on their lives and careers.

John Jacob Astor: business and finance in the early republic

John Jacob Astor was the best-known and most important American businessman for more than a half-century. His career encompassed the country's formative economic years from the precarious days following the American Revolution to the emergence of an urban-centered manufacturing economy in the late 1840s. Change was the dominant motif of the period, and Astor either exemplified the varied economic, social, and political changes in his business career or he directly affected the course of event…

Uppermost Canada: the Western District and the Detroit frontier, 1800-1850

The publication of this volume in a freely accessible digital format has been made possible by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Mellon Foundation through their Humanities Open Book Program.

The life and work of Ludwig Lewisohn. Volume II. “this dark and desperate age”

An imposing literary figure in America and Europe during the first half of the twentieth century, Ludwig Lewisohn (1882–1955) struggled with feelings of alienation in Christian America that were gradually resolved by his developing Jewish identity, a process reflected in hundreds of works of fiction, literary analysis, and social criticism.

Jewish agricultural utopias in America, 1880-1910

Brook Farm, Oneida, Amana, and Nauvoo are familiar names in American history. Far less familiar are New Odessa, Bethlehem-Jehudah, Cotopaxi, and Alliance—the Brook Farms and Oneidas of the Jewish people in North America.

The origin of the modern jewish woman writer: romance and reform in Victorian England

Between 1830 and 1880, the Jewish community flourished in England. During this time, known as haskalah, or the Anglo-Jewish Enlightenment, Jewish women in England became the first Jewish women anywhere to publish novels, histories, periodicals, theological tracts, and conduct manuals. The Origin of the Modern Jewish Woman Writer analyzes this critical but forgotten period in the development of Jewish women's writing in relation to Victorian literary history, women's cultural history, and Jewish …

From new Zion to old Zion: American Jewish immigration and settlement in Palestine, 1917-1939

American Aliyah (immigration to Palestine) began in the mid-nineteenth century fueled by the desire of American Jews to study Torah and by their wish to live and be buried in the Holy Land. His movement of people-men and women-increased between World War I and II, in direct contrast to European Jewry’s desire to immigrate to the United States. Why would American Jews want to leave America, and what characterized their resettlement? From New Zion to Old Zion analyzes the migration of American Jew…