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Unlike most other ancient European, Near Eastern, and Mediterranean civilizations, Jewish culture surprisingly developed no early epic tradition: while the Bible comprises a broad range of literary genres, epic is not among them. Not until the late medieval period, Beginning in the fourteenth century, did an extensive and thriving epic tradition emerge in Yiddish.

Among the few dozen extant early epics, there are several masterpieces, of which ten are translated into English in this volume. Divided between the religious and the secular, the book includes eight epics presented in their entirety, an illustrative excerpt from another epic, and a brief heroic prose tale.These texts have been chosen as the best and the most interesting representatives of the genre in terms of cultural history and literary quality: the pious "epicizing" of biblical narrative, the swashbuckling medieval courtly epic, Arthurian romance, heroic vignettes, intellectual high art, and popular camp.

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Rose Pastor Stokes, Anzia Yezierska, Sonya Levien, and Jetta Goudal

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The Salome Ensemble probes the entangled lives, works, and passions of a political activist, a novelist, a screenwriter, and a movie actress who collaborated in 1920s New York City. Together they created the shape-shifting, genre-crossing Salome of the Tenements, first a popular novel and then a Hollywood movie. The title character was a combination Cinderella and Salome like the women who conceived her. Rose Pastor Stokes was the role model. Anzia Yezierska wrote the novel. Sonya Levien wrote the screenplay. Jetta Goudal played her on the silver screen.

Ginsberg considers the women individually and collectively, exploring how they shaped and reflected their cultural landscape. These European Jewish immigrants pursued their own versions of the American dream, escaped the squalor of sweatshops, knew romance and heartache, and achieved prominence in politics, fashion, journalism, literature, and film.

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Chronicles of Majnun Layla and Selected Poems

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Chronicles of Majnun Layla and Selected Poems brings together in one volume Haddads seminal work and a considerable selection of poems from his oeuvre, stretching over forty years. The central poem, Chronicles of Majnun Layla, recasts the seventh-century myth into a contemporary, postmodern narrative that revels in the foibles of oral transmission, weaving a small side cast of characters into the fabric of the poem. Haddad portrays Layla as a daring woman aware of her own needs and desires and not afraid to articulate them. The author succeeds in reviving this classical work of Arabian love while liberating it from its puritanical dimension and tribal overtones.
The selected poems reveal Haddads playful yet profound meditations. A powerful lyric poet, Haddad juxtaposes classical and modern symbols, and mixes the old with the new, the sensual with the sacred, and the common with the extraordinary. Ghazoul and Verlendens masterful translation remains faithful to the cultural and historical context in which the original poetry was produced while also reflecting the uniqueness of the poets style and his poetics.

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Qassim Haddad, Ferial Ghazoul, John Verlenden

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Fifty-Plus Years of Published Commentary by Ron Rubin

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According to the medieval Jewish philosopher Maimonides, one of the ways to find divine forgiveness is by "dismantling for the purpose of building." Spiritually, the careful analysis of ones speech, actions, and thoughts can lead to self-improvement. For more than fifty years, political science professor Ron Rubin adapted this concept to the political arena. Through his writing, he endeavored to "dismantle" political forces and events with the hope of "building" a more secure future. The centrality of political power as a tool for a thriving Jewish population has been Rubins constant theme.

A Jewish Professors Political Punditry is an anthology of Rubins works focusing on Israel, Judaism, and world politics, and the personalities who have influenced world Jewry. It includes articles, opinion pieces, letters, serials, papers, and columns gathered from more than thirty publications worldwide including New York Magazine, the New York Times, the Jewish Press, the Jerusalem Post, Western Political Quarterly, Christian Science Monitor, Forward, and the Wall Street Journal. Erudite and impassioned, Rubin offers an acute analytical perspective on American Jewish political behavior, US foreign policy, the plight of Soviet Jewry, the Middle East, terrorism, Israeli communications, Jewish personalities, and more.

One of the few Americans of his generation who has written on such a dazzling variety of subjects, Rubin is also among the most prolific writers on the subject of Soviet Jewry. This anthology gives readers a critical portrait of Jewish interaction with the world during a turbulent era as seen through the eyes of an observant modern Orthodox Jew.

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Aphra Behn (16401689) and Margaret Cavendish (16231673) were two of the boldest women authors of seventeenth century England. They made gestures toward a utopian future involving female emancipation and gender agreement, but depicted a world too complex for simple answers.

In the first book-length exploration of the two authors together, Holmesland reevaluates the nature of utopianism in the writings of both, considering a wide range of their literary output. Both writers try to avoid fixed positions, exploring areas in between, seeking mediating solutions through "utopian negotiation." Requiring more equal gender relations, for instance, they challenge patriarchalism; however, while seeking to redefine the heroic code of honor, idealizing gentleness in men, they call for a femininity with heroic resources. Aspiring to such ideals of male-female mutuality, both authors extend this thinking to their view of the body politic.

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A rare and entertaining look at Felicity Ashbee's experiences as a member of the Women's Auxiliary Air Force during World War II

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In 1965, Gene Basset, a well-known political cartoonist, was sent to Vietnam by his newspaper publishing syndicate. His assignment: to sketch scenes of the increasingly controversial war in order to help the newspaper-reading public better understand the events occurring in Southeast Asia. In much the same way that M.A.S.H. gave viewers an irreverent, wry view of war and its devastating effects on citizens as well as soldiers, Bassets sketches portray the everyday, often mundane, aspects of wartime with an intimate touch that eases access to the dark subject matter. In this affectionately curated collection, author, doctor, and longtime friend of the artist, Thom Rooke, deftly leads us through more than eighty of Bassets cartoons, organizing his insights according to the well-known stages of grief, from denial to acceptance, and demonstrating how Bassets images convey moments of trauma, coping, and healing.

From scenes of American GIs haggling with Vietnamese street vendors to a medic dressing the wounds of a wide-eyed soldier, Bassets endearing sketches and Rookes friendly prose humanize life during wartime. The seriocomic vignettes and analyses are delivered with wit, compassion, and subtle charm sure to please academic, artistic, and casual readers alike.

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The Education of Women and The Vices of Men

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At the close of the nineteenth century, modern ideas of democracy and equality were slowly beginning to take hold in Iran. Exposed to European ideas about law, equality, and education, upper- and middle-class men and women increasingly questioned traditional ideas about the role of women and their place in society. In apparent response to this emerging independence of women, an anonymous author penned The Education of Women, a small booklet published in 1889. This guide, aimed at husbands as much as at wives, instructed women on how to behave toward their husbands, counseling them on proper dress, intimacy, and subservience.

One woman, Bibi Khanom Astarabadi, took up the authors challenge and wrote a refutation of the guides arguments. An outspoken mother of seven, Astarabadi established the first school for girls in Tehran and often advocated for the rights of women. In The Vices of Men, she details the flaws of men, offering a scathing diatribe on the nature of mens behavior toward women.

Astarabadi mixes the traditional florid style of the time with street Persian, slang words, and bawdy language. This new edition, the first to be translated into English, faithfully preserves the style and irreverent tone of the essays. The two texts, together with an introduction and afterword situating both within the customs, language, and social life of Iran, offer a rare candid dialogue between men and women in late nineteenth-century Persia.

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Family, Ideology, and Law in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Egypt

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In 1910, when Khedive Abbas II married a second wife surreptitiously, the contrast with his openly polygamous grandfather, Ismail, whose multiple wives and concubines signified his grandeur and masculinity, could not have been greater. That contrast reflected the spread of new ideals of family life that accompanied the development of Egypts modern marriage system. Modernizing Marriage explores the evolution of marriage and marital relations, shedding new light on the social and cultural history of Egypt. Family is central to modern Egyptian history and in the ruling court did the "political work." Indeed, the modern state began as a household government in which members of the rulers household served in the military and civil service. Cuno discusses political and sociodemographic changes that affected marriage and family life and the production of a family ideology by modernist intellectuals, who identified the family as a site crucial to social improvement, and for whom the reform and codification of Muslim family law was a principal aim. Throughout Modernizing Marriage, Cuno examines Egyptian family history in a comparative and transnational context, addressing issues of colonial modernity and colonial knowledge, Islamic law and legal reform, social history, and the history of women and gender.

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Charlotte Perkins Gilman's In This Our World and Uncollected Poems

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Prominent American author, lecturer, and social reformer Charlotte Perkins Gilman (18601935) is best known for her 1898 treatise Women and Economics, which ascribed gender inequality to womens economic dependence upon men, and for her 1892 short story "The Yellow Wall-Paper," which depicts a womans descent into madness. However, she began her career as a poet. Her first authored book, a collection of verse entitled In This Our World, was issued in four different editions between 1893 and 1898. While virtually all of Gilmans later poems appeared in her monthly magazine, The Forerunner (190916), or in The Later Poetry of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1996), Gilmans early verse has been largely inaccessible to modern readers, and dozens of her poems have never been collected. This volume, coedited by Scharnhorst and Knight, includes all 149 poems in the 1898 edition of In This Our World as well as 112 vagrant poems that appeared in a variety of newspapers and magazines. This critical volume features a comprehensive introduction and extensive notes. Gilman devotees and a new generation of readers will find this edition an indispensable resource.

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Bundist Counterculture in Interwar Poland

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In the years between the two world wars, the Jewish community of Polandthe largest in Europewas the cultural heart of the Jewish diaspora. The Jewish Workers Bund, which had a socialist, secularist, Yiddishist, and anti-Zionist orientation, won a series of important electoral battles in Poland on the eve of the Second World War and became a major political party. Many earlier works on the politics of Polish Jewry have suggested that Bundist victories were ephemeral or attributable to outside forces. Jack Jacobs, however, argues convincingly that the electoral success of the Bund was linked to the long-term efforts of the constellation of cultural, educational, and other movements revolving around the party. The Bundist movements for children, youth, and women, and for physical education offered highly innovative programs and promoted countercultural values.

Drawing on meticulously researched archival materials, Jacobs shows how the development of these programssuch as a program to provide sex education to working-class Jewish youthtranslated into a stronger, more robust party. At the same time, he suggests the Bunds limitations, highlighting its failed womens movement. Jacobs provides a fascinating account of Bundist movements and a thoughtful revision to the accepted view.

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More than fifty years ago, Thomas Szasz showed that the concept of mental illnessa disease of the mindis an oxymoron, a metaphor, a myth. Disease, in the medical sense, affects only the body. He also demonstrated that civil commitment and the insanity defense, the paradigmatic practices of psychiatry, are incompatible with the political values of personal responsibility and individual liberty. The psychiatric establishments rejection of Szaszs critique posed no danger to his work: its defense of coercions and excuses as "therapy" supported his argument regarding the metaphorical nature of mental illness and the transparent immorality of brutal psychiatric control masquerading as humane medical care.

In the late 1960s, the launching of the so-called antipsychiatry movement vitiated Szaszs effort to present a precisely formulated conceptual and political critique of the medical identity of psychiatry. Led by the Scottish psychiatrist R. D. Laing, the antipsychiatrists used the term to attract attention to themselves and to deflect attention from what they did, which included coercions and excuses based on psychiatric principles and power.

For this reason, Szasz rejected, and continues to reject, psychiatry and antipsychiatry with equal vigor. Subsuming his work under the rubric of antipsychiatry betrays and negates it just as surely and effectively as subsuming it under the rubric of psychiatry. In Antipsychiatry: Quackery Squared, Szasz powerfully argues that his writings belong to neither psychiatry nor antipsychiatry. They stem from conceptual analysis, social-political criticism, and common sense.

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Sex, Law, and Medicine in Khedival Egypt

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Policing Egyptian Women delineates the intricate manner in which the modern state in Egypt monitored, controlled, and "policed" the bodies of subaltern women. Some of these women were runaway slaves, others were deflowered outside of marriage, and still others were prostitutes. Kozma traces the effects of nineteenth-century developments such as the expansion of cities, the abolition of the slave trade, the formation of a new legal system, and the development of a new forensic medical expertise on these women who lived at the margins of society.

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The People and the Stories Behind 40 Food Favorites

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Upstate New York is the birthplace of many of Americas favorite foods. The chicken wing was born in a bar in Buffalo, the potato chip originated in the kitchen of a glitzy Saratoga Springs hotel, the salt potato got its start along the marshy shores of a Syracuse lake, and Thousand Island dressing was created in a hotel along the St. Lawrence Seaway.

In this book, DImperio travels across the region to discover the stories and people behind forty iconic foods of Upstate New York. He introduces readers to the black dirt farmers of Orange County who give America its best-tasting onions, to the Catskills Candy Cane King, and to "Charlie the Butcher," purveyor of the best beef on weck in the state. Filled with color photographs, the book includes a map of the various regions around Upstate New York, allowing readers to create their own cultural and historic food tour.

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The Rise of American High School Sports and the Search for Control

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Nearly half of all American high school students participate in sports teams. With a total of 7.6 million participants as of 2008, this makes the high school sports program in America the largest organized sports program in the world. Pruters work traces the history of high school sports from the student-led athletic clubs of the 1800s through to the establishment of educator control of high school sports under a national federation by the 1930s. Pruters research serves not only to highlight this rich history but also to provide new perspectives on how high school sports became the arena by which Americans fought for some of the most contentious issues in society, such as race, immigration and Americanization, gender roles, religious conflict, the role of the military in democracy, and the commercial exploitation of our youth.

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Beginning with an account of Clarks musical family, Kaiser chronicles the founding in 1859 of the Clark Music Company, of which Melville Clark became president in 1919. Originally just a tinkers shed, the business ultimately moved into a six-story building in the center of Syracuse, New York. The music company celebrates its 150th anniversary in 2010. Clark also combined his talents as a gifted musician and an astute entrepreneur to start the first Syracuse Symphony Orchestra.

Kaiser recounts the development of the Clark Irish Harp, the first portable harp manufactured in the United States that could easily play accidentals. There were other Clark inventions, such as the first nylon strings for instruments, a fruit picker, and balloons that the British used in 1918 to drop more than 1,250,000 pamphlets over Germany. Clarks story unfolds in fascinating detail: a musical encounter with President Wilson, an opportunity to perform for President F. D. Roosevelt at the White House, a visit to Buckingham Palace to present Princess Elizabeth with a music box, and the journey of a Clark Irish Harp to Antarctica with Admiral Byrd.

Lavishly illustrated, Pulling Strings not only uncovers the life of a musical genius but also sheds light on a forgotten chapter in Syracuse history.

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Essays on Hodinohso:ni Visual Code and Epistemological Recovery

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Since the fourteenth century, Eastern Woodlands tribes have used delicate purple and white shells called "wampum" to form intricately woven belts. These wampum belts depict significant moments in the lives of the people who make up the tribes, portraying everything from weddings to treaties. Wampum belts can be used as a form of currency, but they are primarily used as a means to record significant oral narratives for future generations. In Reading the Wampum, Kelsey provides the first academic consideration of the ways in which these sacred belts are reinterpreted into current Haudenosaunee tradition. While Kelsey explores the aesthetic appeal of the belts, she also provides insightful analysis of how readings of wampum belts can change our understanding of specific treaty rights and land exchanges. Kelsey shows how contemporary Iroquois intellectuals and artists adapt and reconsider these traditional belts in new and innovative ways. Reading the Wampum conveys the vitality and continuance of wampum traditions in Iroquois art, literature, and community, suggesting that wampum narratives pervade and reappear in new guises with each new generation.

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This is the story of a self-educated, charismatic, gifted leader who overcame
personal tragedy in childhood and was elected the youngest mayor
of a major city in America at age twenty-six. It is the story of a reformer
who possessed a genius for politics. James K. McGuire (18681923) was
elected mayor of Syracuse three times as a Democrat in a Republican bastion.
As a candidate for governor in 1898, he nearly derailed the rise of
Theodore Roosevelt. His ideas and positions informed the candidacy of
William Jennings Bryan in his quest for the presidency and the platform of
the Democratic Party in those elections.

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Gender, Islam, and the Sahrawi Politics of Survival

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Refugee camps are typically perceived as militarized and patriarchal
spaces, and yet the Sahrawi refugee camps and their inhabitants
have consistently been represented as ideal in nature: uniquely
secular and democratic spaces, and characterized by gender
equality. Drawing on extensive research with and about Sahrawi
refugees in Algeria, Cuba, Spain, South Africa, and Syria, Fiddian-
Qasmiyeh explores how, why, and to what effect such idealized
depictions have been projected onto the international arena.

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Eluding Nazi Capture during World War II

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Following the horrors of Kristallnacht in November of 1938, frightened parents were forced to find refuge for their children, far from the escalating anti-Jewish violence. To that end, a courageous group of Belgian women organized a desperate and highly dangerous rescue mission to usher nearly 1,000 children out of Germany and Austria. Of these children, ninety-three were placed on a freight train, traveling through the night away from their families and into the relative safety of Vichy France. Ranging in age from five to sixteen years, the children along with their protectors spent a harsh winter in an abandoned barn with little food before eventually finding shelter in the isolated Chateau de la Hille in southern France. While several of the youngest children were safely routed to the United States, those who remained continued to be hunted by Nazi soldiers until finally smuggled illegally across the Swiss Alps to safe houses. Remarkably, all but eleven of the original ninety-three children survived the war due to the unrelenting efforts of their protectors and their own resilience.

In The Children of La Hille, Reed narrates this stunning firsthand account of the amazing rescue and the countless heroic efforts of those who helped along the way. As one of the La Hille children, Reed recalls with poignant detail traveling from lice-infested, abandoned convents to stately homes in the foothills of the Pyrenees, always scrambling to keep one step ahead of the Nazis. Drawing upon survivor interviews, journals, and letters, Reed affectionately describes rousing afternoon swims in a nearby natural pond and lively renditions of Moliere plays performed for an audience of local farmers. He tells of heart-stopping near misses as the Vichy police roundups intensified, forcing children to hide in the woods to escape capture. The Children of La Hille gives readers an intimate glimpse of a harrowing moment in history, paying tribute to ordinary people acting in extraordinary ways.