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Celebrification has thrived for centuries in literature, theater, music, and other cultural spheres, as vividly illustrated by Byron, Sarah Bernhardt, and Paganini. It especially effloresced in cinema after the symbolically named Lumière brothers pioneered movies as light-projected ?moving life? to be contemplated and shared in the intimate darkness of theaters. Actors and actresses such as Valentino and Garbo acquired the status of divine beings whose life on and offscreen stimulated fascination and a passionate devotion most frequently invested in religious figures. The recent explosion in social media has only amplified immeasurably the scale and intensity of that adulation. Yearning for the seemingly transcendent, fans as mere mortals seek contact with celebrities as objects of worship that, like nocturnal stars, are simultaneously remote yet accessible. Starlight and Stargazers examines the multifaceted nature and specific manifestations of film celebrification in Czechoslovakia/the Czech Republic, Poland, Soviet Russia/Russia, and Ukraine before and after 1991.

Israel and the Nations: The Bible, The Rabbis, and Jewish-Gentile Relations explores the theological and legal (halakhic) aspects of Jewish thought relating to non-Jews. It analyzes biblical, rabbinic, medieval, and contemporary Jewish writings about gentiles and their religions. The book will interest both Jewish laypersons familiar with Jewish tradition as well as scholars of theology and interfaith relations

How did Gorbachev and Yeltsin get away with transforming and replacing the Soviet system and its foreign relations? Why did they act as they did in pushing for such radical changes? And how will history evaluate their accomplishments? In this unique and original study, George W. Breslauer compares and evaluates the leadership strategies adopted by Gorbachev and Yeltsin at each stage of their administrations: political rise, political ascendancy, and political decline. He demonstrates how these men used the power of ideas to mobilize support for their policies, to seize the initiative from political rivals, and to mold their images as effective problem solvers, indispensable politicians, and symbols of national unity and élan. Gorbachev and Yeltsin as Leaders also compares these men with Khrushchev and Brezhnev, yielding new insight into the nature of Soviet and post-Soviet politics and into the dynamics of "transformational" leadership more generally. The book is an important contribution to the analysis and evaluation of political leadership. It is exceptionally well written and accessible to the nonspecialist.

Bieganski is a stereotype of Poles and other Eastern Europeans. In the 'Bieganski' stereotype, Poles exhibit the qualities of animals. Their special hatefulness is epitomized by their Polish anti-Semitism. This book discovers this stereotype in the mainstream press, scholarship, film, in Jews' self-definition, and in responses to the Holocaust.

"Extraordinary storytelling about unfathomable horror." - Library Journal (starred review)"[A] worthy tribute to the extraordinary bravery of a remarkable woman." -- Publishers WeeklyIn World War II's Poland, thirty year old Zofia Sterner and her husband Wacek refuse to be classified as Jews destined for extermination.Instead, they evade the Nazis and the Soviets in several dramatic escapes and selflessly rescue many Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto and a labor camp, later becoming active participants in the Warsaw Uprising where they are taken prisoner. This retelling, captured through diaries, interviews, war crime trial testimonies, and letters, detail the Sterners' heroic rescues, escapes, and ultimate survival. A true story of hope amid horrifying tragedy, How We Outwitted and Survived the Nazis illustrates how war brings out the worst and the best in people, and how true humanity and heroism of ordinary people are revealed by their willingness to risk everything and help others. This story is about being human under the most inhumane conditions.

Over one million refugees left Russia at the Bolshevik Revolution. The pain of losing one's homeland may fade, but the psyche is slow to heal. The Nansen Factor shines a light on the lives of some of these refugees.

In this book, Paul Contino offers a theological interpretation of Dostoevsky's novel "The Brothers Karamazov." The author introduces the concept of "incarnational realism": a method used by Dostoevsky to animate and enspirit his heroes - applying the concept especially to Alyosha Karamazov, to the person who, as the novel's hero, makes decisions and accomplishes deeds. The book examines in detail the figure of the Elder Zosima, and how, in his role as spiritual leader with his vision of responsibility for each and for all, influences Alyosha. Attention is also paid to Alyosha's brothers - to Mitya, who is trying to become a "new man," and to Ivan, who struggles with his own agonized striving toward his own sense of responsibility for the family tragedy."

In stark contrast to the widespread preoccupation with the wartime looting of priceless works of art, Bo¿ena Shallcross focuses on the meaning of ordinary objects¿pots, eyeglasses, shoes, clothing, kitchen utensils¿tangible vestiges of a once-lived reality, which she reads here ascultural texts. Shallcross delineates the ways in which Holocaust objects are represented in Polish and Polish-Jewish texts written during or shortly after World War II. These representational strategies are distilled from the writings of Zuzanna Ginczanka, W¿adys¿aw Szlengel, Zofia Näkowska, Czes¿aw Mi¿osz, Jerzy Andrzejewski, and Tadeusz Borowski. Combining close readings of selected texts with critical interrogations of a wide range of philosophical and theoretical approaches to the nature of matter, Shallcross's study broadens the current discourse on the Holocaust by embracing humble and overlooked material objects as they were perceived by writers of that time.

The Comics of Asaf Hanuka: Telling Particular and Universal Stories traces how Asaf Hanuka's comics and graphic novels reflect his own experiences of being an insider (as a Jew and Israeli) and an outsider (as a Mizrahi or Judeo-Arab) in Israeli society alongside what it means to be a parent and a spouse in contemporary Western society.

From Victory to Peace: Russian Diplomacy After Napoleon explores how Russia's diplomats understood European security as they worked to implement the edifice of pacification and peace constructed in 1814, 1815, and 1818. In response to developments across Europe and in Spanish America, Emperor Alexander I's hopes for peace, pragmatic adaptability, and commitment to act in concert with the other great powers came fully into focus. Based on sources of Russian provenance, the book challenges characterizations of Alexander's behavior as erratic and his foreign policy as heavy-handed and expansionist. Indeed, as historians assimilate the Russian perspective on European order (as well as the perspectives of other less well-studied countries), they encounter a multifaceted Restoration built upon practices of enlightened reformism and direct experience of revolution and war.

From the late nineteenth century to the eve of World War II, America's experts on Russia watched as Russia and the Soviet Union embarked on a course of rapid industrialization. Captivated by the idea of modernization, diplomats, journalists, and scholars across the political spectrum rationalized the enormous human cost of this path to progress. In a fascinating examination of this crucial era, David Engerman underscores the key role economic development played in America's understanding of Russia and explores its profound effects on U.S. policy.American intellectuals from George Kennan to Samuel Harper to Calvin Hoover understood Russian events in terms of national character. Many of them used stereotypes of Russian passivity, backwardness, and fatalism to explain the need for-and the costs of-Soviet economic development. These costs included devastating famines that left millions starving while the government still exported grain.This book is a stellar example of the new international history that seamlessly blends cultural and intellectual currents with policymaking and foreign relations. It offers valuable insights into the role of cultural differences and the shaping of economic policy for developing nations even today.

In The Icon and the Square, Maria Taroutina examines how the traditional interests of institutions such as the crown, the church, and the Imperial Academy of Arts temporarily aligned with the radical, leftist, and revolutionary avant-garde at the turn of the twentieth century through a shared interest in the Byzantine past, offering a counternarrative to prevailing notions of Russian modernism. Focusing on the works of four different artists-Mikhail Vrubel, Vasily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, and Vladimir Tatlin-Taroutina shows how engagement with medieval pictorial traditions drove each artist to transform his own practice, pushing beyond the established boundaries of his respective artistic and intellectual milieu. She also contextualizes and complements her study of the work of these artists with an examination of the activities of a number of important cultural associations and institutions over the course of several decades. As a result, The Icon and the Square gives a more complete picture of Russian modernism: one that attends to the dialogue between generations of artists, curators, collectors, critics, and theorists.

In this incisive analysis of one of the most spectacular economic breakthroughs in the Deng era, Jean C. Oi shows how and why Chinese rural-based industry has become the fastest growing economic sector not just in China but in the world. Oi argues that decollectivization and fiscal decentralization provided party officials of the localities-counties, townships, and villages-with the incentives to act as entrepreneurs and to promote rural industrialization in many areas of the Chinese countryside. As a result, the corporatism practiced by local officials has become effective enough to challenge the centrality of the national state.

Russia's emergence as a Great Power in the eighteenth century is usually attributed to Peter Is radical programme of Westernising reforms. But the Russian military did not simply copy European armies. Adapting the tactics of its neighbours on both sides, Russia created a powerful strategy of its own, integrating steppe defence with European concerns. In Russia's Wars of Emergence, Carol Stevens examines the social and political factors underpinning Muscovite military history, the eventual success of the Russian Empire in the 18th century, and the sacrifices made for power.

The Russian Empire 1450-1801 surveys early modern Russia as an "empire of difference," that is, the government ruled the empire primarily by tolerating the great cultural, linguistic and religious diversity of its subject peoples. Over its many lands the Moscow center used a combination of coercion, cooptation and supranational ideology to maintain power, and the book explores each of those themes. The Moscow government did not hesitate to use violence and oppression to conquer and subdue territories; it coopted elites into the imperial nobility and local administrations; it projected an image of a benevolent tsar who protected his people and used architecture and ceremony to project that unifying ideology.

Conventional narratives describe the United States as a continental country bordered by Canada and Mexico. Yet, since the late twentieth century the United States has claimed more water space than land space, and more water space than perhaps any other country in the world. This watery version of the United States borders some twenty-one countries, particularly in the archipelagoes of the Pacific and the Caribbean. In Borderwaters Brian Russell Roberts dispels continental national mythologies to advance an alternative image of the United States as an archipelagic nation. Drawing on literature, visual art, and other expressive forms that range from novels by Mark Twain and Zora Neale Hurston to Indigenous testimonies against nuclear testing and Miguel Covarrubias's visual representations of Indonesia and the Caribbean, Roberts remaps both the fundamentals of US geography and the foundations of how we discuss US culture.

In Erik Mueggler's powerful and imaginative ethnography, an Indigenous community in the mountains of Southwest China struggles to find its place at the margins of a nation-state. Here, people describe the period that began with the Great Leap Famine of 1958-1960 and continued through the 1990s as the "age of wild ghosts." Their stories of this age converged on a dream of community-a bad dream, embodied in the life, death, and spectral reawakening of a local political and ritual system that expired violently under the Maoist regime. Displaying a sensitive understanding of both Chinese and the Tibeto-Burman language of this community, Mueggler explores memories of this institution, including of the rituals and poetics that once surrounded it and the bitter conflicts that came to haunt it. To exorcise "wild ghosts," he shows, is nothing less than to re-imagine the state and its power, to trace the responsibility for violence to its morally ambiguous origins, and to articulate demands for justice and longings for reconciliation.

The Blue Lagoon, Anthology of Modern Russian Poetry, was published in nine volumes in the United States from 1980 till 1986. For many years it remained one of the most important sources on Russian unofficial poetry of the Soviet period. It is also the biggest anthology of Russian poetry ever. Today, mostly in online version, it is a living mirror of the Soviet era and its chronicler - poet and publisher Konstantin Kuzminsky (1940-2015).

Anticipating some Soviet Union developments, Evgenii Zamyatsin's We (1920) is a futuristic dystopic novel in which D-503, builder of the first rocket ship, extols the glories of the Single State and discovers another way of life beyond his highly controlled society. From the newer field of biopoetics, which applies evolutionary psychology to art instead of emphasizing the social construction of human behavior and consciousness, Cooke (Texas A&M U.) explores themes in the novel including workforce mechanization, the symbolic roles of food-sharing, eugenics, and writing as subversion. Comparisons are made with other dystopian literature (e.g. Brave New World ), and novels by Russian authors including Solzhenitsyn and Tolstoy.

In the United States, antisemitism has once again risen, and is spread in all our major institutions and political and cultural venues. In a series of essays by leading scholars, this work provides a detailed analysis of contemporary antisemitism and examines its origins, development, and alarming implications for the future.

Long before Vasco da Gama rounded the Cape of Good Hope en route to India, the peoples of Africa, the Middle East, and Asia engaged in vigorous cross-cultural exchanges across the Indian Ocean. This book focuses on the years 700 to 1500, a period when powerful dynasties governed both regions, to document the relationship between the Islamic and Chinese worlds before the arrival of the Europeans. Through a close analysis of the maps, geographic accounts, and travelogues compiled by both Chinese and Islamic writers, the book traces the development of major contacts between people in China and the Islamic world and explores their interactions on matters as varied as diplomacy, commerce, mutual understanding, world geography, navigation, shipbuilding, and scientific exploration. When the Mongols ruled both China and Iran in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, their geographic understanding of each other's society increased markedly. This rich, engaging, and pioneering study offers glimpses into the worlds of Asian geographers and mapmakers, whose accumulated wisdom underpinned the celebrated voyages of European explorers like Vasco da Gama.

This book illuminates important issues faced by Orthodox Judaism in the modern era by relating the life and times of Rabbi Yudel Rosenberg (1859-1935). In presenting Yudel Rosenberg's rabbinic activities, this book aims to show that Jewish Orthodoxy could serve as an agent of modernity no less than its opponents. Yudel Rosenberg's considerable literary output will demonstrate that the line between "e;secular"e; and "e;traditional"e; literature was not always sharp and distinct. Rabbi Rosenberg's kabbalistic works will shed light on the revival of kabbala study in the twentieth century. Yudel Rosenberg's career in Canada will serve as a counter-example to the often-expressed idea that Hasidism exercised no significant influence on the development of American Judaism at the turn of the twentieth century.

This book contains a collection of eight annotated translations of responsa, alongside the original Hebrew texts, focusing on the post-expulsion Spanish-Portuguese communities of the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries. Topics include excommunication in Amsterdam, ʻagunot, inheritance rights of a converso son, obligatory contracts and breach of agreement, heresy and humanist scholarship, informing on someone to the Venetian Inquisition, and more.

Taming Oblivion examines the cultural construction of senility in Japan and the moral implications of dependent behavior for older Japanese. While the biomedical construction of senility-as-pathology has become increasingly the norm in North America, in Japan a folk category of senility exists known as boke. Although symptomatically and conceptually overlapping with Alzheimer's disease and other forms of senile dementia, boke is distinguished from unambiguously pathological conditions. Rather than being viewed as a disease, boke is seen as an illness over which people have some degree of control. John Traphagan's ethnographic study of older Japanese explores their experiences as they contemplate and attempt to prevent or delay the boke condition.

The Bilingual Muse analyzes the work of seven Russian poets who translated their own poems into English, French, German, or Italian. Investigating the parallel versions of self-translated poetic texts by Joseph Brodsky, Vladimir Nabokov, Marina Tsvetaeva, Wassily Kandinsky, Elizaveta Kul'man, Andrey Gritsman, and Katia Kapovich, Adrian Wanner considers how verbal creativity functions in different languages, the conundrum of translation, and the vagaries of bilingual identities. Wanner argues that the perceived marginality of self-translation stems from a romantic privileging of the mother tongue and the original text. The unprecedented recent dispersion of Russian speakers over three continents has led to the emergence of a new generation of diasporic Russians who provide a more receptive milieu for multilingual creativity.

This book provides a thorough examination of how both Marina Tsvetaeva and Boris Pasternak perceived Rainer Maria Rilke's poetic persona and oeuvre in similar ways, and how, in their perception of Rilke's role as that of the paradigmatic poet, they had drawn on the specifically Russian poetic paradigm, i.e., the image of Pushkin in the context of Russian literature of the Silver Age. At the same time, both poets' scrutiny of the sublime, the mundane, and the tragic side of practicing poetic craft in the Soviet Union, as in the case of Pasternak, and in exile, as in Tsvetaeva's case, generates the discourse of "empathic attunement." By applying "empathic" discourse towards Rilke, both poets' anxieties about their future, and that of Russian poetry in general, come to the fore.

Religion in China survived the most radical suppression in the human history-a total ban of any religion during the Cultural Revolution. All churches, temples, and mosques were closed down, converted for secular uses, or turned into museums for the purpose of atheist education. Since the 1970s, however, religion has thrived even though China remains under Communist rule. Christianity ranks among the fastest-growing religions throughout the vast land while many Buddhist and Daoist temples have been restored. The Communist authorities have carried out waves of atheist propaganda, anti-superstition campaigns, and severe crackdowns on Christian churches and new religious movements. How do we explain the resilience and vitality of religion in modernizing China? How did religion survive the eradication measures in the 1950s to 1970s? How have various religious groups managed to revive despite strict regulations? Why have some religions grown fast? Why have some forms of spirituality gone through dramatic turns? This book provides a comprehensive overview of the religious change in China under ¿ommunist rule, and it also offers a set of theoretical tools for studying religious vitality in modernizing societies.

China's Communist Party seized power in 1949 after a long guerilla insurgency followed by full-scale war, but the revolution was just beginning. China under Mao narrates the rise and fall of the Maoist state from 1949 to 1976-an epoch of startling accomplishments and disastrous failures, steered by many forces but dominated above all by Mao Zedong.The doctrines and political organization that produced Mao's greatest achievements-victory in the civil war, the creation of China's first unified modern state, a historic transformation of urban and rural life-also generated his worst failures: industrial depression and rural famine during the Great Leap Forward and the violent destruction and stagnation of the Cultural Revolution. Misdiagnosing China's problems as capitalist restoration and prescribing continuing class struggle against imaginary enemies as the solution, Mao destroyed much of what he had built and left China backward and deeply divided.