An American map: essays

"This title features meditative travel essays by Michigan author Anne-Marie Oomen that explore new landscapes across America. In "An American Map", Anne-Marie Oomen, award-winning writer and self-confessed northern Michigan homebody, chronicles her recent travels across America, in essays that span rediscovered landscapes, wild back roads, vital cities, and everything in between. Oomen takes both a wide and narrow lens to her destinations, giving readers a vivid sense of each locale while findin…

Prayer & community: the havurah in American Judaism

Riv-Ellen Prell spent eighteen months of participant observation field research studying a countercultural havurah to determine why these groups emerged in the United States during the 1970s. In her book, she explores the central questions posed by the early havurot and their founders. She also examines the havurah as a development of American Judaism, continuing—rather than rejecting—many of the previous generations' ideas about religion. Combining history and ethnography, Prell uses current th…

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…

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.

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 …

The iron hunter

Originally published in 1919, The Iron Hunter is the autobiography of one of Michigan's most influential and flamboyant historical figures: the reporter, publisher, explorer, politician, and twenty-seventh governor of Michigan, Chase Salmon Osborn (1860-1949). Making unprecedented use of the automobile in his 1910 campaign, Osborn ran a memorable campaign that was followed by an even more remarkable term as governor. In two years he eliminated Michigan's deficit, ended corruption, and produced t…

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.

Trespassing: dirt stories & field notes

The electronic version of this item was provided by the Wayne State University Press.

For our soul: Ethiopian Jews in Israel

Between 1977 and 1992, practically all Ethiopian Jews migrated to Israel. This mass move followed the 1974 revolution in Ethiopia and its ensuing economic and political upheavals, compounded by the brutality of the military regime and the willingness—after years of refusal—of the Israeli government to receive them as bona fide Jews entitled to immigrate to that country. As the sole Jewish community from sub-Sahara Africa in Israel, the Ethiopian Jews have met with unique difficulties. Based on f…

The women were leaving the men: stories

The electronic version of this item was provided by the Wayne State University Press.

The lost tiki palaces of Detroit: stories

From the Publisher: A quirky and compelling collection of short stories set in and around Detroit, by award-winning local writer Michael Zadoorian.

Voices of the lost and found: stories

The electronic version of this item was provided by the Wayne State University Press.

Love/imperfect

The electronic version of this item was provided by the Wayne State University Press.

Jewish Poland: legends of origin : ethnopoetics and legendary chronicles

The first appearance of Jews in Poland and their adventures during their early years of settlement in the country are concealed in undocumented shadows of history. What survived are legends of origin that early chroniclers, historians, writers, and folklore scholars transcribed, thus contributing to their preservation. According to the legendary chronicles Jews resided in Poland for a millennium and developed a vibrant community.

Jewish Moroccan folk narratives from Israel

Jewish Moroccan Folk Narratives focuses on two central elements: textual research to examine the aesthetic qualities of the narrative, their division into genres, the various versions and their parallels, and acculturation in Israel, as well as contextual research to examine the performance art of the narrator and the role of the narrative as a communicative process in the narrating society. The collection includes twenty-one narratives by twelve storytellers; an account of the narrators' lives …

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.

In which brief stories are told

The electronic version of this item was provided by the Wayne State University Press.

Rabbinic Judaism in the making: a chapter in the history of the Halakhah from Ezra to Judah I

Through the ages, theology in Judaism has played roles of varying importance. But the role of theology is minor compared with that of law and observance. This book is devoted to a study of the evolution of normative Judaism from the time of Ezra (ca. 400 B.C.) to Judah I, the Prince (ca. 200 A.D.). Its focus on law represents a realistic approach to the history of applied Judaism.

American aliya: portrait of an innovative migration movement

The major focus is on the who, when, and where of American immigration to Israel, but it is the "why" of this aliya which constitutes the core of the book. Waxman analyzes the relationship between Zionism, aliya, and the Jewish experience. Chapters include "Zion in Jewish culture," a synopsis of Zionism through the years, and "American Jewry and the land of Israel in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries," an account of proto-Zionist ideas and movements in early America.

Chaim I. Wa…

Without bounds: the life and death of Rabbi Ya'aqov Wazana

Without Bounds illuminates the life of the mysterious Rabbi Ya'aqov Wazana, a Jewish healer who worked in the Western High Atlas region in southern Morocco and died there in the early 1950s. Impressed by his healing powers and shamanic virtuosity, Moroccan Jews are intrigued by his lifestyle and contacts with the Muslim and the demonic worlds that dangerously blurred his Jewish identity.

Based on interviews with Moroccan Jews conducted in the late 1980s, Without Bounds proposes multipl…