Bøger udgivet af Academic Studies Press

The present volume contains thirteen articles based on work presented at the "XX. Century Conference: If This Is A Woman" at Comenius University Bratislava in 2019. The papers focus on various aspects of gendered experiences during World War II and the Holocaust.

This book examines major Russian TV series focusing on three major issues: Russian television's transition to digital post-broadcast visual economy, Russian television's integration into global television markets and their genre systems, and major shifts in representation of gender and sexuality on television.

This book examines major Russian TV series focusing on three major issues: Russian television's transition to digital post-broadcast visual economy, Russian television's integration into global television markets and their genre systems, and major shifts in representation of gender and sexuality on television.

This diverse collectionof essays explore the unique history of Jews inAmerica and the various ways in which they have definedtheir identities both as Americans and as Jews. The topics ofthe essays range from sports and business to religion andbusiness.

Drawing on a wide range of sources and historiographical material, Between East and West provides a comprehensive analysis of the efforts of the Moscow princes to form a centralized Russian state. According to the author, the unification of Russia around Moscow was not historically inevitable. Tver, Novgorod, and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania also claimed this role, and if they had been victorious, a less authoritarian, less autocratic and less despotic Russian state could have emerged. Professor Shaikhutdinov rejects the concept of the "e;Mongol-Tatar yoke"e; and claims that relations between Moscow and Ulus Jochi (Golden Horde) were more complicated and interdependent. The influence of Ulus Jochi on Moscow was especially strong in the political, economic and military spheres, while the religious field was dominated by the influence from Byzantium. The volume discusses in detail the geopolitical aspirations of Russia and the "e;Moscow-Third Rome"e; theory. In sum, the formation of the Moscow state was directly influenced by both internal and external factors, countries of the East and the West.

Goncharov in theTwenty-First Century brings Ivan Goncharov's work into atwenty-first-century critical framework, engaging with approachesfrom post-colonial and queer studies, theories of genre andthe novel, desire, laughter, technology, philosophy, and mobility andtravel.

Martin Vop¿nkäs novel, The Back of Beyond¿Travels with Benjamin, is the story of a middle-aged man, who¿despite his professional success and affluence¿lacks fulfillment. After the tragic death of his wife, he is left alone with his eight-year-old son and quickly realizes that if he wants to succeed in the role of single parent that has suddenly been thrust upon him, he has to change fundamentally. So, he takes his son and sets out on a journey to what he dubs the Back of Beyond. With its unique blend of sensitive and suggestive language this book is a stylistic gem, rendered in seamless translation and appearing here for the first time in English.

Baiba Bi¿ole belongs to the postwar generation of Latvian poets living in exile who reached artistic maturity outside their native country and broke with the older exile generation¿s traditional, nationalistic poetry. In To Taste the River, Bi¿ole's poems are lyrical and personal, often with intense emotion and startling imagery. This is Bi¿ole's first collection of poems in English translation.

In the sixteenth century, the famous kabbalist Isaac Luria transmitted a secret trove of highly complex mystical practices to a select groups of students. These meditations were designed to capitalize on sleep and death states in order to effectively split one's soul into multiple parts, and which, when properly performed, permitted the adept to free oneself from the cycle of rebirth. Through an in-depth analysis of these contemplative practices within the broader context of Lurianic literature, Zvi Ish-Shalom guides us on a penetrating scholarly journey into a realm of mystical teachings and practices never before available in English, illuminating a radically monistic vision of reality at the heart of Kabbalistic metaphysics and practice.

Watermarks reflect the very stuff of the origin, date, distribution, composition, history, and culture of paper-based items. Digital imaging of watermarks releases the research potential as widely as the internet itself. One example is the digital "e;fingerprinting"e; of paper in order to enhance the security of items, such as valuable and vulnerable maps. Revealing Watermarks offers detailed instructions of this process, through the author's own PaperPrint method, and by means of the case study of a sixteenth-century watermark-a crown from the arms of Danzig-it illustrates how cultural influences spread and have endured across the centuries, in this case from Sweden to Russia.

This previously unpublished chronicle contains valuable information on the period between 1680 and 1730. It was written by a Jewish rabbi in the Crimean Peninsula, and includes insights on the political upheavals in the Crimean Khanate and the Ottoman capital; the wars between the Ottomans and the Russians; and Persia and the Caucasus.

Tells a story of movement. Moving from city to city characterized the author's growing up - from Poland to Belgium and from the East Coast to the West Coast of the United States. The book also moves between past and present, between straightforward story-telling and reflections on memory, politics and religion, and on literature.

Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed addressed Jews of his day who felt challenged by apparent contradictions between Torah and science. We Are Not Alone: A Maimonidean Theology of the Other uses Maimonides' writings to address Jews of today who are perplexed by apparent contradictions between the morality of the Torah and their conviction that all human beings are created in the image of God and are the object of divine concern, that other religions have value, that genocide is never justified, and that slavery is evil. Individuals who choose to emphasize the moral and universalist elements of Jewish tradition can often find support in positions explicitly held by Maimonides or implied by his teachings. We Are Not Alone offers an ethical and universalist vision of traditionalist Judaism.

Like a Drop of Ink in a Downpour: Memories of Soviet Russia traces Yelena Lembersky's childhood in Leningrad (Saint Petersburg) in the 1970s and '80s. Her life is upended when her family decides to emigrate to America, but instead her mother is charged with a crime and unjustly incarcerated. Told in the dual points of view, this memoir is a clear-eyed look at the reality of life in the Soviet Union during the Cold War, giving us an insider's perspective on the roots of contemporary Russia. It is also a coming-of-age story, heartfelt and funny, a testament to the unbreakable bond between mothers and daughters, and the healing power of art.

Ilans Stavans has become a polarizing figure, dismissed and praised in equal measure, a commanding if contested intellectual whose work as a cultural critic has been influential in the fields of Latino and Jewish studies, politics, immigration, religion, language, and identity. This collection celebrates twenty-five years of Stavans' work.

Darwin famously proposed that sexual competition and courtship is (or at least was) the driving force of "e;art"e; production not only in animals, but also in humans. The present book is the first to reveal that Darwin's hypothesis, rather than amounting to a full-blown antidote to the humanist tradition, is actually strongly informed both by classical rhetoric and by English and German philosophical aesthetics, thereby Darwin's theory far richer and more interesting for the understanding of poetry and song.The book also discusses how the three most discussed hypothetical functions of the human arts--competition for attention and (loving) acceptance, social cooperation, and self-enhancement--are not mutually exclusive, but can well be conceived of as different aspects of the same processes of producing and responding to the arts.Finally, reviewing the current state of archeological findings, the book advocates a new hypothesis on the multiple origins of the human arts, posing that they arose as new variants of human behavior, when three ancient and largely independent adaptions--sensory and sexual selection-driven biases regarding visual and auditory beauty, play behavior, and technology--joined forces with, and were transformed by, the human capacities for symbolic cognition and language.

Two major dividing lines have formed the megastructure of Eurasia, determining the historical epochs of the continent's peoples. The first, vertical (longitudinal) line has separated East and West since the Paleolithic Age. The East was dominated by Mongol peoples speaking Sino -Tibetan, Manchu-Tungus, and Altaic languages. The Caucasoid peoples of the West spoke mostly Indo-European, Semite, and Finno-Ugric languages. The second line divided the continent horizontally (by latitude) into North and South. This division was closely connected with the Eurasian Steppe Belt. To the north of it lay the world of hunter-gatherers and fishermen. To the south, settled agriculture was dominant. The Steppe Belt itself was the domain of pastoralists, the nomadic and semi-nomadic herders. These lines converged at the entrance to the Great Silk Road. With the swift development of horse domestication and horseback riding, the nomads moved-from the Early Metal Age (500-400 BCE) to Genghis Khan's and the Genghisid's Great Empire (1200-1400 CE)-to the forefront of Eurasian history as their world became increasingly involved in dramatic and sometimes tragic relationships with their southern neighbors. This book focuses on the tangle of problems in these nomadic peoples' history.

The past two decades have witnessed a remarkable renaissance in the academic study of the history of the Jews in Great Britain and of their impact upon British history. This title presents essays that reflect the richness of this renaissance.

A fantastical propaganda play depicting an armed revolt financed the purchase of the yacht Abril and its conversion to an "e;illegal"e; immigrant passenger ship renamed the Ben Hecht. The plan was to evade the British naval blockade and bring Holocaust survivor refugees to Palestine.Henry Mandel volunteered aboard the Ben Hecht, a converted yacht that challenged the British blockade of Jewish immigrants to pre-state Israel. Captured and detained in Acre Prison, Mandel aided the efforts of prisoners planning an escape. After release, Mandel helped set up a secret bazooka shell plant in New York, which he helped to reassemble in Israel during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. Mandel was an Orthodox Jew whose reminiscences provide a uniquely illuminating perspective on the creation of the Jewish state. Mandel's story is explicated in a running commentary that includes the personal narratives of other members of the Ben Hecht crew as well as historical background.

Based on memories of a native son and the research of a scholar, this book is an amalgam of descriptions and discussions, peppered with conversations, personal observations and an acute observer's reflections, focused on the fabric of life in the city of Lodz and its vicinity.

While trying to revive Jewish national life by teaching Hebrew and Judaism in the Soviet Union, Ephraim Kholmyansky is arrested and threatened with long years of imprisonment and exile. In response, he declares a hunger strike. Supporters throughout the world rally to pressure the Soviet government to release him. A race against time begins...Ephraim Kholmyansky was born in Moscow in 1950. In 1979, he initiated an underground network for dissemination of Hebrew, Jewish tradition and Zionist values throughout the peripheral cities of the USSR. He was arrested in 1984 when the KGB planted weapons in his apartment in order to stage a show trial and intimidate Jewish activists. Kholmyansky held a prolonged hunger strike while kept in prison. Thanks to his hunger strike and major international solidarity campaign, he received a relatively short sentence. This is an exceedingly rare case of victory over the KGB. This book documents this trying episode of his life and provides a unique perspective from inside the USSR.

This literary, cultural history examines imperial Russian tourism's entanglement in the vexed issue of cosmopolitanism understood as receptiveness to the foreign and pitted against provinciality and nationalist anxiety about the allure and the influence of Western Europe. The study maps the shift from Enlightenment cosmopolitanism to Byronic cosmopolitanism with special attention to the art pilgrimage abroad. For typically middle-class Russians daunted by the cultural riches of the West, vacationing in the North Caucasus, Georgia, and the Crimea afforded the compensatory opportunity to play colonizer kings and queens in "e;Asia."e; Drawing on Anna Karenina and other literary classics, travel writing, journalism, and guidebooks, the investigation engages with current debates in cosmopolitan studies, including the fuzzy paradigm of "e;colonial cosmopolitanism."e;