bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Journals
Authors: Brooks Joanna
Published: November 2023

For more than forty-five years of his life, Samson Occom faithfully recorded his activities and travels in small booklets he himself crafted from letter paper bound with sewing thread or small nails. His twenty-four surviving journal booklets comprise the most extensive body of autobiographical writing by a Native American in the colonial and early national eras. Beginning with his arrival at the doorstep of Eleazar Wheelock’s home in Lebanon, Connecticut, on December 6, 1743, the journals document Occom’s education, his early ministry and ordination, his travels and ministrations among the Native communities of Long Island and New England, his tour of England, Scotland, and Ireland as a fund-raising emissary for Moor’s Indian Charity School, his involvement in the administration of tribal aﬀairs, his almost constant itinerancy among communities in western New England and central New York, and his joyful participation in the organizational beginnings of Brotherton and New Stockbridge. Most of his surviving journals concentrate on the years after the American War of Independence when migration to Brotherton and Stockbridge began in earnest; Occom oﬀers a unique firsthand account of this historic pantribal movement.
Textuality, Orality, and the Shaping of the Ancient Mind
Authors: Carr David M
Published: November 2023

In her book Oral World and Written Word, Susan Niditch vividly il- lustrates the problems with contemporary assumptions about ancient textuality, as she outlines the picture many biblical scholars of- ten assume in their discussions of biblical formation. Critiquing the traditional documentary hypothesis (J, E, D, P), she says: At the heart of documentary hypothesis [sic]... is the cut-and- paste image of an individual pictured like Emperor Claudius of the PBS series, having his various written sources laid out before him as he chooses this verse or that, includes this tale not that, edits, elaborates, all in a library setting If the texts are leather, they may be heavy and need to be unrolled If texts are papyrus, they are read held in the arm, one hand clasping or “supporting” the “bulk” of the scroll, while the other unrolls.
Conclusion
Authors: Carr David M
Published: November 2023

In the preceding chapters I hope I have demonstrated the potential benefits of comparatively analyzing ancient long-duration texts from Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, and Israel as oral-written, numinous literature cognitively mastered for socialization and ongoing enculturation. Such literature was originally used for formation of elites, but this usage was expanded—at least in ideal—in different ways in the Hellenistic period. At that point we see an increasing move to- ward broader education of free citizens in certain urban quarters of the Hellenistic world. In addition, in response to the unusual circumstances of the anti-Jewish persecution by the Seleucids, we see the development of a resistant counterliteracy in Hellenistic-period Judaism: a literacy focused on cognitive mastery of the Hebrew To- rah and other pre-Hellenistic “prophetic” books, a literacy that en- compassed—ideally—all Jewish males.
Introduction
Authors: Kolker Robert
Published: November 2023

I first saw 2001 in 1968, on a gigantic Cinerama screen in a London theater. I was overwhelmed by the images and only somewhat impressed by what the images were trying to tell me. I left frankly questioning what all the fuss was about. On subsequent viewings, in slightly more intimate surroundings, on smaller screens back home in New York, the film began to grow and grow on each successive screening. Each viewing opened up more questions and more answers—and even more admiration. 2001 became one of the touchstones for my love of film and a major factor in my desire to make the study of film part of my intellectual life. I realized, as I would with all subsequent Kubrick films, that it is a kind of double, triple, quadruple play, revealing more meanings on each viewing—and more mysteries.
Auteur with a Capital A
Authors: Gilbert James
Published: November 2023

The prospect of human venture into space has always raised the disconcerting prospect of discovering either nothing or something. While the loneliness of nihilism has always been possible, it lacks dramatic potential. To find something is a very different story. Since its inception, science fiction has become the popular medium for portraying that something—the presence in the universe that challenges (or confirms) the anthropocentric presumptions of the great monotheistic civilizations of Western society. As Stanley Kubrick was fond of noting, the psychologist Carl Jung predicted that any encounter with transcendent intelligence would tear the reins from our hands, “and we would find ourselves without dreams. We would find our intellectual and spiritual aspirations so outmoded as to leave us completely paralyzed.” Quite aptly, therefore, Kubrick said of his film masterpiece, 2001: A Space Odyssey: “I will say that the God concept is at the heart of 2001—but not any traditional, anthropomorphic image of God.”1 He recognized that space travel is nothing less than a voyage into time: into the future and into the past, toward end time and back to creation.
Of Men and Monoliths Science Fiction, Gender, and 2001: A Space Odyssey
Authors: Grant Barry Keith
Published: November 2023

The general impression that viewers tend to bring away from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) is an overall feeling of “coldness,” not just the physical cold of outer space, but of the film’s sense of humanity. As has often been observed, the computer HAL seems a more complex character with greater emotional depth than any of the people in the film. And while the computer’s death is a scene of wrenching pathos, the three hibernating sci- entists expire in what is perhaps the most antiseptic depiction of death in all of cinema, a bland-looking monitor indicating “Life Functions Terminated.” 2001’s relative dearth of dialogue, wooden characters, slow pace, and sleek production design, which depicts the environments of space travel as thoroughly antiseptic and ordinary, all contribute to the film’s cold tone.
What To Make Of An Augmented Thing Amy Clampitt’s Syntactic Dramas
Authors: Spiegelman Willard
Published: November 2023

A my Clampitt looked like a tea cozy; lived like a bohemian; thought like a radical; sounded, especially when reading her own work, like an excited precocious teenager (if Marilyn Monroe had been an intellectual, this is how she would have talked); and wrote like an angel. In the fifteen years between her late but flamboyant arrival on the poetry scene and her death in 1994, Clampitt was both lionized and derided. Her admirers and detractors often agree in their characterization of her work-with its old-fashioned lushness, its frank interest in the lives and the writing of the Romantic poets, its frequent flaunting of scholarly and scientific knowledge, its playful elegance, and its unashamed reveling in language at once arcane and precise-and differ only in their evaluation of it. One critic claims that one of her longer poems “refuse[s] easy enthusiasms and guard[s] against hollow ‘epic’ pretensions....The language is a deft compromise between narrative propulsion and lyric accretion.” Others, harboring an often unstated philistine suspicion of ornament and a preference for the plain over the fancy and for the simple over the baroque, belittle the elaborate, overburdening style that turns the poetry into “a parody of the Victorian silk that Pound sought to unravel,” or mock the “bathetic enthusiasm” that emerges from the “forced” accumulations of her details. De gustibus nonest disputandum. One reader’s deftness is another’s bathos.
Jorie graham’s “new way of looking”
Authors: Spiegelman Willard
Published: November 2023

In the richly laconic aphorisms that make up the “Adagia’’ in Wallace Stevens’s Opus Posthumous, we come upon two that might serve as points of entry into the alluring, stern, fiercely defiant sensibility of Jorie Graham: The thing seen becomes the thing unseen. The opposite is, or seems to be, impossible. Description is an element, like air or water.
Shots in the Mirror
Authors: Rafter Nicole
Published: November 2023

Movies play a central role in shaping our understanding of crime and the world generally, helping us define what is good and bad, desirable and unworthy, lawful and illicit, strong and weak. Crime films raise controversial issues about the distribution of social power and the meanings of deviance, and they provide a safe space for fantasies of rebellion, punishment, and the restoration of order. In the first comprehensive study of its kind, well-known criminologist Nicole Rafter examines the relationship between society and crime films from the perspectives of criminal justice, film history and technique, and sociology. Shots in the Mirror begins with an overview of the history of crime films and the emergence of various genres, surveying important films from the silent era, the early gangster films of the '30s, classic film noir, the work of Hitchcock, and recent innovations by Scorsese, Tarrentino, and the Coen brothers. Keeping pace with the evolution of crime films, Shots in the Mirror has been updated to respond to recent developments, trends, and shifting circumstances in the genre. This new edition expands the scope and increases the depth and variety of the previous edition by including foreign films in addition to American movies. Rafter also integrates an entirely new body of literature into the study, reflecting the rapid expansion of scholarship on law-related films over the past three years. She has added a chapter on psycho movies, a previously unrecognized subcategory of crime films. Another new chapter, "The Alternative Tradition and Films of Moral Ambiguity," focuses on recent sex crime films. This new final chapter grows organically out of the first edition's distinction between traditional crime films, with their easy solutions to social problems, and those more unusual critical films which belong to the bleaker, morally ambiguous, alternative tradition. Rafter examines more than three hundred films in this study, considering what they have to say, socially and ideologically, about the causes of crime, and adding valuable contributions to the on-going debate on whether media representations of violence cause crime. Shots in the Mirror is both a marvelous history of crime films and a trenchant analysis of their complex relationship to larger society.
The History of Crime Films
Authors: Rafter Nicole
Published: November 2023

Crime films feed our apparently insatiable hunger for stories about crimes, investigations, trials, and punishments. From almost the first moment of moviemaking, film writers and directors realized that nothing pleases audiences more than deception, mayhem, and underdog characters who refuse to be trampled by institutions and laws. The plots of crime films may draw on actual historic events, reproducing celebrated cases while simultaneously fashioning out of the past new heroes for the present. More frequently, crime film plots are fictions that draw on widespread attitudes toward crime, victims, law, and punishment prevalent at the time of the films’ making. Whatever the basis of their stories, crime films reflect the power relations of the context in which they are made--attitudes toward gender, ethnicity, race, and class relations, opinions about fairness and justice, and beliefs about the optimal relationship of the state to individuals. Examining the history of crime films helps explain why different types of crime films flourish at different points in time. By locating movies at some distance, in the social and political contexts in which they were produced, film history enables us to see more clearly movies’ underlying assumptions about the nature of American society.
Slasher, Serial Killer, and Psycho Movies
Authors: Rafter Nicole
Published: November 2023

Cody Jarrett, the gangster protagonist of White Heat (1949), kills seven people in the course of his movie (not counting himself, in the final explosion); Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, the bank robber protagonists of Bonnie and Clyde (1967), kill almost a dozen. Yet we do not think of these characters as serial killers or of their films as serial killer films, for their directors (Raoul Walsh and Arthur Penn, respectively) did not frame the films that way. They created multifaceted characters, not unidimensional killing-machines, giving Cody, Clyde, and Bonnie admirable as well as negative traits and thus enabling viewers to identify with them. Moreover, the stories are not “about” killing, White Heat being a study in criminal psychopathology, Bonnie and Clyde a saga of rebellion against authority, mediocrity, and anonymity. The films depict even violent criminals as sympathetic figures, attractive and heroic-a message that is fundamentally ideological in that it keeps these killers within the human fold.
Biodiver sity and Biomedical Research
Authors: Chivian Eric , Bernstein, Aaron , Rosenthal Joshua P
Published: November 2023

Biomedical research has always relied on other species—animals, plants, and microbes—to help us understand human physiology and treat human disease. From the bacterium Escherichia coli, one hundredth the thickness of a human hair, to an eleven-foot-tall, 1,300-pound (591-kilogram) male Polar Bear; from the Fruit Fly (Drosophila melanogaster), which has a life span of only several weeks, to chimpanzees, which, like us, can live for decades, these and numerous other species have brought medicine into the modern era of antibiotics, vaccines, cancer therapy, organ transplantation, and open heart surgery.
Emma England, Peace and Patriotism
Authors: Southam Brian
Published: November 2023

Such is the Patriot’s boast, where’er we roam; His first, best country, ever is at home. —Oliver Goldsmith, The Traveller or A Prospect of Society (1765) reprinted at the head of the Naval Chronicle, vol. 28, July–December 1812 How I bless my stars I am of that dear little island, under a government like ours. When I see other countries and other people, I am not only proud of being an Englishman, but feel a sort of superiority, which is in no other manner to be accounted for than its being common to all Englishmen, and is inherent in them.
Introduction
Authors: Keymer Thomas
Published: November 2023

The hospitality of tristram shandy to different approaches and divergent readings is not a discovery of modern criticism. Within this relentlessly self-conscious work, Tristram defines writing as an act of conversation or work of imagination in which a creative role is exercised by readers as well as by authors. An unruly cast of inscribed readers lurks in the margins of his text, differentiated by gender, rank, or profession, and dramatizing the openness of the work to varying modes of response. Sometimes Tristram breaks off to address these readers directly, berating “Madam” for mistaking his meaning, appealing against the judgment of “Sir Critick,” or licensing “your Worships” to interpret at will. A similar blend of irritation and glee marks Sterne’s comments as author. “It is too much to write books and find heads to understand them,” he laments, or affects to lament, in a letter of thanks to an admirer who had sent him a curiosity from Wilmington, North Carolina: an elaborately carved walking stick that branched into multiple handles.
A Medical School Curriculum on Religion and Healing
Authors: Barnes Linda L
Published: November 2023

I come to this chapter having been, since 1999, on the faculty of Boston University School of Medicine, and after having a visiting appointment at Harvard Medical School. Neither setting would ever have occurred to me during my years of training. Educated in comparative religious studies and medical anthropology, I fully expected to end up on the faculty of a religion department. Who knew! From my current vantage point, however, I have had occasion to think through how to translate some of the objectives of the humanities, and of religious studies in particular, into the training of clinicians.
Religion, Ritual, and Healing in North America
Authors: Klassen Pamela E
Published: November 2023

Like many professors developing new courses, I began teaching about healing and religion because of my own research interests. At work on a book on mainstream Protestants’ relationships to medicine and healing in twentieth-century North America, I developed a seminar as an opportunity to delve into a literature I needed to read. What I found, happily, was that both in my research and my teaching, the study of healing offered an advantageous perspective not only for my own particular questions about Protestant identity, but also for introducing students to critical perspectives on some of the key categories in the study of religion.
The Apprenticeship Of Genius
Authors: Feingold Mordechai
Published: November 2023

Isaac Newton took three days to traverse the roughly sixty miles separating his family’s manor house in Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire, and Cambridge University. He arrived there on the evening of June 4, 1661, and presented himself the following day to the dean of Trinity College. After entering his name in the College’s admissions book, Newton was assigned a tutor – Benjamin Pulleyn, a respected classicist who would become Regius Professor of Greek in 1674 – and directed to his chamber. Born in the early hours of Christmas Day 1642, Newton was eighteen-and-a-half years old that summer, somewhat older than most incoming undergraduates – a reﬂection of his twice-widowed mother’s reluctance to make her son a scholar instead of a helpmate in managing the family estate.
All Was Light
Authors: Feingold Mordechai
Published: November 2023

Edmond Halley’s contribution to the first edition of the Principia included a Latin ode celebrating Newton’s supreme success in discovering the inviolable laws of the universe, laws that even “the creator of all things, while he was setting the beginning of the world, would not violate.” Because of Newton, Halley wrote, “we now have the secret keys to unlock the obscure truth; and we know the immovable order of the world, And the things that were concealed from the generations of the past.”1 Within half a century, there reigned a perception that the revolution effected by Newton and his successors had ushered in a brave new age of reason and light that went well beyond the natural sciences to include the totality of human knowledge. Alexander Pope’s celebrated couplet gives voice to the perception of Newton as God’s emissary in the discovery of the laws of nature:
Apotheosis
Authors: Feingold Mordechai
Published: November 2023

Newton died on March 20, 1727. Eight days later, he lay in state in the Jerusalem Chamber of Westminster Abbey, where he was given a public funeral the likes of which no layman had been previously accorded. Two dukes, three earls, and the Lord Chancellor supported the pall; the bishop of Rochester officiated over the services. Newton also became the first man of science to be buried at the Abbey. The funeral deeply impressed Voltaire, who experienced the spectacle firsthand. Several years later, he commented that Newton “lived honoured by his compatriots and was buried like a king who had done well by his subjects.” The tomb became something of a London tourist attraction for generations of admirers.
Constantine and the Formation of the New Testament Canon
Authors: Ehrman Bart D
Published: November 2023

We have seen that Leigh Teaming was right to say that the four Gospels of the New Testament—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—were not the original records of Jesus” life or the only Gospels available to the early Christians. Other Gospels were widely available but did not make it into the New Testament— even though Teaming is wrong to state with such assurance that there were “eighty Gospels” that were vying for a place in the canon.
The Historical Sources for Jesus
Authors: Ehrman Bart D
Published: November 2023

As we have seen, at the outset of The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown states as a “fact” that “all descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals in this novel are accurate” (p. 1). My concern in this book is not with the artwork, architecture, or secret rituals, but with the documents that Brown describes. The problem is that most of his readers will have no grounds on which to evaluate what he says, for example, about the other Gospels that are not found in the New Testament, or the formation of the canon of scripture, or the role of Constantine in shaping the Christian Bible. And so I have thought it important to set the record straight, insofar as possible, and to engage in critical history so as to separate the historical fact from the literary fiction. As it turns out, much of what Brown sets forth about the early Christian documents, largely on the lips of his Grail expert Leigh Teabing, is built into the fabric of his fictional narrative and cannot be trusted as part of the historical record.
Jesus, Mary Magdalene, and Marriage
Authors: Ehrman Bart D
Published: November 2023

One of the key historical figures in The Da Vinci Code is an early follower of Jesus, Mary Magdalene. As we learn in the course of the narrative, Mary was not simply one of Jesus” followers—she was his wife and lover, with whom he produced an offspring, a child who would begin a family line that continues down till today, protected by the members of a secret society, the Priory of Sion. I should point out that this understanding of Mary Magdalene and Jesus is not an original contribution of the fiction of Dan Brown.
Epilogue
Authors: Ehrman Bart D
Published: November 2023

I’d like to end this book in the same way I began, on a personal note. When I arrived at my new teaching position at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1988, my first course was a class called “Jesus in Myth, Tradition, and History.” As luck would have it, the semester started just as Martin Scorsese’s film The Last Temptation of Christ was released in the theaters. I wanted to take advantage of the moment by requiring my students to see the film and to write a critique of it, based on what they had learned in class.
Democracy and the Police
Authors: Bayley David H
Published: November 2023

Reform of police forces has been central to the reconstruction of governments whether they were emerging from authoritarianism or conﬂict. With the collapse of Communism as an attractive philosophy of government in the late 1980s, democracy, allied with free markets, became the avowed goal of political reform world-wide. Accordingly, the dominant template for police reform is now described as democratic policing, and the encouragement of democratic police practices has become the common goal of assistance to police by the international community, whether undertaken by individual countries or under multilateral auspices.
Security and Reform
Authors: Bayley David H
Published: November 2023

The reform of police institutions in order to support the growth of political democracy is always impeded and sometimes wholly undermined by threats to security. Increases in crime, terrorism, violent public demonstrations, or guerilla insurgency shift political agendas from reform to enhancing security (Bayley 2001; Byrne, Stanley, and Garst 2000; Carothers 1999a; Goldsmith 1997; Koci 1998; Marenin 1998; Popkin 1999; Schmidl 1998). In political life, the requirements of security trump aspirations to reform, a pattern to be found in stable as well as struggling democracies. As a consequence, foreign donors find themselves under enormous pressure to retard, amend, or stop programs of reform assistance.
Organizing for Success
Authors: Bayley David H
Published: November 2023

What should the U.S. government do to improve its ability to use foreign assistance to develop effective, democratic police abroad? The U.S. government should develop the voice and capacity for doing developmental criminal justice abroad, utilizing the latest understanding of best practices in crime control carefully adapted to the needs and traditions of recipient countries. This is easy to say but hard to do.
Introduction
Authors: van der Leeuw Gerardus
Published: November 2023

Rivalry or Ultimate Unity? The relationship between religion on the one hand and art, moral philosophy, and science on the other, raises great difficulties for human thought and comprehension. Pious men of strict observance can hardly see in art an obedient maidservant. Artists of Part pour Part look down on religion with distrust and often with contempt.
Religious Dance: Influences
Authors: van der Leeuw Gerardus
Published: November 2023

If we are now to discuss the unity of beauty and religion as manifested in many forms of the art of the dance, we should examine some points at which religion and the dance couch and interpenetrate, before drawing any general conclusions. We must trace the influences which contribute to their rapprochement and the manner in which this takes place, We shall do this first quite atomistically, taking up one influence at a time. There is one point, though, which we shall examine at the start, since it is present in other arts, too, and since its presence has occasionally been cited as an explanation of the connection which exists generally between religion and art.
The Fixation of an Idea as a Holy Image
Authors: van der Leeuw Gerardus
Published: November 2023

The Art of Movement and Pictorial Art “Pictorial art” is a convenient expression, though hardly a happy one. It is wrong to limit the power of representation to painting and sculpture, in the face of the fact that it belongs, beyond doubt, as a major component of the other arts, such as dance and, above all, literature, and is actually lacking only in music. The ability to make images is primeval, and it is no accident that the earliest records of human activity show men making pictures. The prehistoric drawings and paintings on the walls of caves are not only evidence of the creative ability of man, but also evidence at the same time of his mastery.
Unhindered Pictorial Representation
Authors: van der Leeuw Gerardus
Published: November 2023

Real and Decorative Nakedness Religious reverence paid to human likeness (idolatry) is by no means primitive. We have seen, in stead, that primitive man worshiped fetishes, animals, forms, mixed forms of men and animals, monsters, but seldom or never realistic likenesses of gods or demons in human form. Primitive man can certainly not be said to have made his god in his own image. The bond between the representation and what is represented is not realistic, but magical. In the image, in the representation, the creature is contained, no matter how little out ward similarity it evidences with the thing represented. The fact that objects and animals, but not men, are often represented extremely realistically, agrees with our observations. When art frees itself from its sacred ties, it breaks through the identity of image and object.218 From this grows the need to proceed “realistically,” by illustrating that which is seen, When the existential connection with reality is lost, a visual connection replaces it.
The Theological Aesthetics of Building
Authors: van der Leeuw Gerardus
Published: November 2023

In architecture, the principle of creation, which is so important in theological aesthetics, is manifested most clearly. Naturally it is indispensable in every art, but it is the law of life for the architect. A poet can be said to “construct” a poem, and even the composer speaks of the “construction” of a piece. The terminology is nevertheless derivative, or rather it points to the architectonic element which is contained in all arts. Therefore, architecture receives such a prominent place, both in the totality of the arts and in theological aesthetics. Whoever builds, creates. Naturally he does not create ex nihilo, and if one chooses, one can therefore say that he does not create at all. Only God creates in the absolute, actual sense of the word. But the architect makes new forms.
Holy Sound
Authors: van der Leeuw Gerardus
Published: November 2023

Powerful sound In the world of the primitives, music is never an end in itself, but has its effect only in combination with other actions such as dancing or work or the recital of poetry. The situation remains thus for a long period, as the history of music teaches us.Music for the sake of music is a “modem” invention.
The Theological Aesthetics of Music
Authors: van der Leeuw Gerardus
Published: November 2023

Music, The ‘‘Telephone Of the Beyond’’? Does music here occupy an exceptional position? Does it possess a direct relationship to God, unhindered by any resistance? We have briefly rejected this assertion, but it is too weighty and throws too much light on our problem for us to be able co proceed without treating it at greater length.
The Theology of the Arts
Authors: van der Leeuw Gerardus
Published: November 2023

If in this manner we seek the path from art to theology and from theology to art, we find a theology which we can comprehend in the follow ing schema: the image Christian theology does not begin with God, but with Christ; not with creation, but with redemption. Only sorteriol- ogy has entrance to theology. Thus, at this point begins also the theology of the arts. Its center is the image, the fact that God represented himself. The central idea is therefore pictorial art. Of course, the representational element is missing in no art, just as Christology is missing in no portion of dogmatics.
General Introduction
Authors: Katz Steven T
Published: November 2023

This collection of Jewish theological responses to the Holocaust presents a wide–ranging selection of fundamental and important material. Indeed, it is the most complete anthology of its sort ever assembled. It is constructed in three sections, each the work of a different editor. Part I brings together for the first time a major selection of ultra-Orthodox responses to the Holocaust, written originally in Hebrew and Yiddish during and after the war. These writings show a profound, distinctive, religious sensibility that grew out of a deep commitment to the Jewish theological tradition. Though diverse, they all retain a commitment to the God of Israel and the Orthodox norms of Jewish life. Part II contains a substantial selection of essays written over the past half-century by Israeli authors. These essays were, for the most part, originally written in Hebrew, and they reflect both the subterranean and overt ideological influences operating in the rebuilt Jewish Zionist state. Compared to the selections in the first part, they also reveal a wider spectrum of theological opinion, ranging from staunch defenders of the Jewish tradition to those who affirm the non–existence of God. Part III collects a broad sampling of works originally written in English and French by American and European authors since the 1950s. These selections contain both defenders of the normative Jewish theological tradition and radical theological innovators. These views range from the claim that “God is dead,” to those of conservative thinkers who attempt to respond to the Holocaust by re–cycling classical defenses of God, drawing on biblical models such as the “binding of Isaac,” the “suffering servant” of the Book of lsaiah, and that offered by the Book of Job, among others. Taken in their totality, the highly diverse statements in the three sections of this collection represent just about every significant theological position that has been articulated by a Jewish thinker in response to the Holocaust.
Introduction
Authors: Greenberg Gershon
Published: November 2023

As the Jewish communities in Europe were being shattered and those in Palestine and America were seized with shock and a sense of unspeakable loss, Jewish religious thinkers found a way to continue their activity, both within and around the Holocaust. The history of Jewish thought itself was not broken. But for two decades thereafter, the existence and path of wartime thought were overlooked by the historians, even denied. The situation began to change when Mendel Piekarz published his bibliography of wartime sources for religious thought in 1967; PessaJ:i Schindler wrote on wartime liasidic responses in the 1970s; Pinlias Peli opened the window to the data in terms of religious language; and the journal Sinai (Jerusalem) identified theological dimensions to wartime Responsa literature. What could account for the delay in integrating Holocaust era religious thought into the history of Jewish thought? To begin with, there was an overall paralysis in reacting to the trauma. Next, the sources were almost exclusively Orthodox (and in Hebrew and Yiddish), and they tended to be ignored by the non-Orthodox.2 Orthodox scholars, for their part, were not inclined to study their intellectual history perhaps because of a primary concern for religious practice. Also, leading religious philosophers of the Holocaust did not cite them. Emil Fackenheim, for example, wrote in 1970 that questions born of Auschwitz were so terrifying that “until a few years ago Jewish theological thought has observed a near total silence on the subject of the Holocaust. A well-justified fear and trembling, and a crushing sense of the most awesome responsibility to four thousand years of Jewish faith ... has kept Jewish theological thought, like Job, in a state of silence.” And Arthur A. Cohen likewise averred, though incorrectly, that the historical caesura identifiable with the Holocaust bore a theological silence which prevailed for two decades until “a new moment in the assimilation.
Hayim Yisrael Tsimerman
Authors: Katz Steven T
Published: November 2023

I:Iayim Yisrael Tsimerman (1901-1967?), who was born in Kosov, Poland, studied at the Beit Yisrael yeshiva in Sokolov-Podlaski (Poland) under the Rebbe of Sokolov, Yitsqak Selig Morgenshtern. Morgenshtern was a descendant of the qasidic master Menaqem Mendl of Kotsk and son of the Rebbe of Pilov (I:Iayim Yisrael), a qasidic pioneer in Palestine. Tsimerman continued at the Novogrodok Musar yeshiva in Warsaw, and settled in Palestine in the late 1920s. There he served as rabbi of the Sokolover /Jasidim synagogues in Tel Aviv, which had been established by the Rebbe of Sokolov. He belonged to the Ateret Yosef Kolle[, a Musar-oriented institute for advanced rabbinic study, and published biblical, talmudic, and halakhic commentaries. In the summer of 1947, Tsimerman published Tamim Pa’alo (His Work is Peifect [Deuteronomy 32:4]), in response to persistent questions about how the merciful and righteous God could let the Holocaust happen. After introducing sources to justify intellectual silence on the matter, Tsimerman turned around to offer explanations in terms of the revealed tradition. As shown from the growth of the Land, redemption had begun before the war. But for redemption to be fulfilled, Jews had to do teshuvah (repent) for all sins, and they had failed to do so. Tsimerman cited the failure on the part of pious Jews to put an end to the trespasses of others and to sufficiently support the restoration of the Land of Israel. Teshuvah was therefore imposed upon them in the form of massive suffering, i.e., the Holocaust. Tsimerman also believed that the Holocaust purified Israel’s sinners from earlier eras. The sudden growth in the Jewish population over the preceding generation indicated that the kabbalistic vision in which sinful souls returned to be purified in later generations was being comprehensively and conclusively realized.
Steven T. Katz
Authors: Katz Steven T
Published: November 2023

Steven T. Katz was born in Jersey City, New Jersey, on August 24, 1944, into an orthodox Jewish family. He received a traditional yeshiva education in his youth and then went on to receive his B.A. from Rutgers University (New Jersey) in 1966, his M.A. from New York University in 1967, and his Ph.D. from Cambridge University, England, in 1972. He began his teaching career at Dartmouth College in 1972. In 1984 he moved to Cornell University where he chaired the Department of Near Eastern Studies and directed the Jewish Studies Program. In 1996 he was invited to become the director of the Judaic Studies Program at Boston University, a position he still holds. He has also been a visiting professor at, among other universities, Yale, the Hebrew University, and the University of Pennsylvania. His scholarly work has been concentrated in three areas: (a) modem Jewish thought; (b) Holocaust studies; and (c) comparative mysticism. In the first he has published, among other studies, two collections of essays, Post-Holocaust Dialogues: Critical Studies in Modem Jewish Thought (New York, 1983) and Historicism, the Holocaust, and Zionism: Critical Studies in Modem Jewish Thought and History (New York, 1992). In the area of Holocaust studies he is the author of a multivolume study entitled The Holocaust in Historical Context, volume 1 of which appeared in 1994 and volumes 2 and 3 of which will appear shortly. In the area of comparative mysticism, Katz has edited and contributed to four collections of original essays, as well as an anthology of mystical sources, all published by Oxford University Press.
The Past is a Foreign Country
Authors: Holmes David L
Published: November 2023

What, then, is definitely known about the religion of the founding fathers of the American republic? Tirree months after the death of James Monroe, Bird Wilson, a professor at the General Theological Seminary in New York City-the oldest theological seminary in the Episcopal Church-preached a sermon purporting to answer that question. His credentials for providing the answer were excellent. Wilson’s father, James, was himself a founding father.
The Conjurer Recoils Slavery in Richard Pryor’s Performances and Chappelle’s Show
Authors: Carpio Glenda R
Published: November 2023

Bicentennial Nigger, Richard Pryor’s 1976 album, is simply brilliant. It brims with a sharp, eviscerating humor through which Pryor highlights his country’s founding contradiction: its profession of democratic principles despite its history of racial oppression. True to Pryor’s style, none but the last track assumes the serious tone of that objective. The first track, in fact, features Pryor imitating a hillbilly screaming at the moment of orgasm, and the second depicts Pryor’s varying degrees of success in satisfying the sexual appetites of both black and white women. Using his trademark ability to mimic cartoonish but clearly identifiable “white” and “black” voices, Pryor sets off a raunchy play of stereotypes. White women are docile: they consent to sex easily, don’t complain if they do not reach orgasm, don’t put up a fight when they are physically threatened, and are happy to stay at home when their man goes out in the evening. Black women, by contrast, are assertive and intractable: when their men announce that they are going out, they start getting ready too; they fight right back when their men threaten them with violence and refuse to give oral sex but complain when they do not achieve orgasm. After unsatisfactory sex one of them says (in Pryor’s imitation of a sassy “black” woman), “Nigga, that’s some sad dick!”
“A Comedy Of The Grotesque” Robert Colescott, Kara Walker, and the Iconography of Slavery
Authors: Carpio Glenda R
Published: November 2023

In 1936, when Ralph Ellison was new to the New York milieu in which he would eventually become a novelist, essayist, and critic, he was invited by Langston Hughes to see a Broadway production of Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road. The play, on whose white, poor, and rural characters Caldwell had satirically placed “the yokelike” stereotypes then commonly associated with African Americans, provoked such a wild fit of laughter in Ellison that at one point he, rather than the play, became the center of the audience’s attention. Years later, in an essay appropriately titled “An Extravagance of Laughter,” Ellison recalled the freedom the play unleashed in him—then freshly arrived from the South—to laugh at the stereotypes that had always signified the harsh realities of discrimination and the ever-present potential for crude violence in his life. For, in the world he had just left, Negroes were seen as ignorant, cowardly, thieving, lying, hypocritical and superstitious in their religious beliefs and practices, morally loose, drunken, filthy of personal habit, sexually animalistic, rude, crude, and disgusting in their public conduct, and aesthetically just plain unpleasant . . . [They] were considered guilty of all the deadly sins except pride, and were seen as sometimes the comic but nevertheless threatening negative image to the whites’ idealized images of themselves.
Brown’s Indirect Effects
Authors: Klarman Michael J
Published: November 2023

Counting the number of black children attending desegregated schools is only one way—and perhaps a rather poor one—of evaluating Brown’s importance. Countless scholars have asserted Brown’s broader significance, calling the decision “the most important political, social, and legal event in America’s twentieth-century history” and “the foundation of our quest for equal justice in the United States.” More specifically, observers have claimed that Brown “launched the public debate over racial equality,” “raised black awareness,” “stimulated black hope,” and “awoke a new activism within the black community.”
Brown’s Backlash
Authors: Klarman Michael J
Published: November 2023

Whatever its connection to Brown, a powerful direct-action protest movement had exploded in the South by the early 1960s. Sit-ins, Freedom Rides, and street demonstrations became a regular feature of southern life. When law enforcement officers responded to such protests with restraint and (even unlawful) arrests, media attention quickly waned, and demonstrators usually failed to accomplish their objectives. This is how Sheriff Laurie Pritchett defeated mass demonstrations in Albany, Georgia, in 1961–1962 and how Mississippi officials defused the Freedom Rides in the summer of 1961. By contrast, when southern sheriffs violently suppressed demonstrations with beatings, police dogs, and fire hoses, media attention escalated, and northerners reacted with horror and outrage. It was the brutality of southern whites resisting desegregation that ultimately rallied national opinion behind the enforcement of Brown and the enactment of civil rights legislation. Brown helped to bring that violence about.
Brown, Violence, and Civil Rights Legislation
Authors: Klarman Michael J
Published: November 2023

Before the Freedom Rides, Birmingham, Freedom Summer, and Selma (discussed below), some of the most violent racial episodes in the South involved school desegregation. Virtually every year after Brown, school desegregation generated violent resistance somewhere: Milford, Delaware, in 1954; Hoxie, Arkansas, in 1955; Tuscaloosa, Alabama; Clinton, Tennessee; Mansfield, Texas; and Clay and Sturgis counties, Kentucky, all in 1956; Little Rock, Arkansas, and Nashville, Tennessee, in 1957; Clinton (again) in 1958; New Orleans, Louisiana, in 1960; Athens, Georgia, in 1961; Oxford, Mississippi, in 1962; and Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963. Thus, in addition to radicalizing southern politics in ways that enhanced the likelihood of racial violence, Brown created concrete occasions for such outbreaks.
Society Girls
Authors: Ben-Zvi Linda
Published: November 2023

In 1891 the Glaspell family moved into the house that was to remain their home throughout Susan’s life, and which still stands today, at 317 East 12th Street, on the bluffs of Davenport, a few blocks from the crest. It was a white-wood, two-story, five-room house, set back from the street. The front sitting room was a good size and was heated by a large fireplace; behind it was a combination dining room and kitchen. A steep flight of stairs led to three bedrooms, the back one Susan would later turn into her study, since it afforded a glimpse of the Mississippi. The immediate neigh borhood was middle-class, but within walking distance were the large mansions of the Fickes and Frenches, the leading families in town, who would also produce writers. In order for Susan to get to her high school, she would pass by these opulent Victorian homes, taking the same route her protagonist Irma Lee follows to school. As a protection against rejection, Irma immerses herself in the stories of her pioneer grandparents and imagines herself a queen still ruling “all the land between here and Scott Street.” Susan may have had many of the same feelings she attributes to Irma; but instead of masking her thoughts, she found an outlet to express them through her writing, positioning herself as the outside observer of Davenport society, able to satirize and expose the foibles of its lifestyle.
The Genesis of Trifles
Authors: Ben-Zvi Linda
Published: November 2023

Besides writing humorous columns and covering the state legislature, Susan often reported on court cases, particularly sensational ones that involved sex, scandal, and murder-and there were many. The Iowa of 1900 may not have been more violent than it is today, but it certainly was no less so. Sandwiched between ubiquitous advertisements for “Female Nerve Cures” and romantic accounts of the courtships of Vanderbilts and Rockefellers were a whole range of lurid tales that would keep a contemporary tabloid busy and happy. But, of all the cases reported in the News, the one that stands out from all the rest, both for the extended length of its coverage and its vivid detail, is the Hossack murder case, in which a mother of nine children was accused of hatcheting her husband to death while he lay in bed asleep. Susan covered the case and it became the source for her masterpiece Trifies and its short story offshoot, “A Jury of Her Peers.” The case at first glance seemed simple. Sometime after midnight on December 2, 1900, John Hossack, a well-to-do farmer, was stuck twice on the head with an ax, while he slept in bed.
Chicago
Authors: Ben-Zvi Linda
Published: November 2023

“Chicago is many things to many people and to me it is a place where you can write,” Susan jotted down in notes for an autobiographical essay in the late 1930s. By then the city was like a second home to her; however, in the summer of 1902, when she enrolled at the University of Chicago, it was more foreboding than familiar. Holding sway at the time were Robert Herrick, William Vaughn Moody, Robert Lovett, Henry Fuller, and Clara Laughlin, the first generation of Chicago literati, whom the critic Bernard Duffey dubbed the “Genteel writers.” Eight years later, after winning major prizes for her short stories and publishing an acclaimed first novel, The Glory of the Conquered, set in Chicago, she would return there and be welcomed by a quite different group-Vachel Lindsay, Edgar Lee Masters, Sherwood Anderson, and Floyd Dell-who constituted the second generation of Chicago writers. In 1902, however, she was a twenty-six-year-old graduate student with a few published stories, a budding celebrity at home but an unknown in the largest city she had lived in to that date.
“Here Pegasus Was Hitched”
Authors: Ben-Zvi Linda
Published: November 2023

At the end of May, while Jig stayed on in New York, participating in “a couple of all night drunks with millionaires” ostensibly designed to raise money for the new theatre, Susan returned to Provincetown to open the house for the summer. These summer periods were her time for short-story writing, still her steadiest source of income, since play royalties were only just beginning to trickle in. For the rights to do Suppressed Desires, the rate was fifteen dollars, or ten dollars if admission were not charged; for each story, she could expect to receive at least $350.