Michael Meng – författare

In a time of national introspection regarding the country's involvement in the persecution of Jews, Poland has begun to reimagine spaces of and for Jewishness in the Polish landscape, not as a form of nostalgia but as a way to encourage the pluralization of contemporary society. The essays in this book explore issues of the restoration, restitution, memorializing, and tourism that have brought present inhabitants into contact with initiatives to revive Jewish sites. They reveal that an emergent Jewish presence in both urban and rural landscapes exists in conflict and collaboration with other remembered minorities, engaging in complex negotiations with local, regional, national, and international groups and interests. With its emphasis on spaces and built environments, this volume illuminates the role of the material world in the complex encounter with the Jewish past in contemporary Poland.

In a time of national introspection regarding the country's involvement in the persecution of Jews, Poland has begun to reimagine spaces of and for Jewishness in the Polish landscape, not as a form of nostalgia but as a way to encourage the pluralization of contemporary society. The essays in this book explore issues of the restoration, restitution, memorializing, and tourism that have brought present inhabitants into contact with initiatives to revive Jewish sites. They reveal that an emergent Jewish presence in both urban and rural landscapes exists in conflict and collaboration with other remembered minorities, engaging in complex negotiations with local, regional, national, and international groups and interests. With its emphasis on spaces and built environments, this volume illuminates the role of the material world in the complex encounter with the Jewish past in contemporary Poland.

After the Holocaust, the empty, silent spaces of bombed-out synagogues, cemeteries, and Jewish districts were all that was left in many German and Polish cities with prewar histories rich in the sights and sounds of Jewish life. What happened to this scarred landscape after the war, and how have Germans, Poles, and Jews encountered these ruins over the past sixty years?In the postwar period, city officials swept away many sites, despite protests from Jewish leaders. But in the late 1970s church groups, local residents, political dissidents, and tourists demanded the preservation of the few ruins still standing. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, this desire to preserve and restore has grown stronger. In one of the most striking and little-studied shifts in postwar European history, the traces of a long-neglected Jewish past have gradually been recovered, thanks to the rise of heritage tourism, nostalgia for ruins, international discussions about the Holocaust, and a pervasive longing for cosmopolitanism in a globalizing world.Examining this transformation from both sides of the Iron Curtain, Michael Meng finds no divided memory along West–East lines, but rather a shared memory of tensions and paradoxes that crosses borders throughout Central Europe. His narrative reveals the changing dynamics of the local and the transnational, as Germans, Poles, Americans, and Israelis confront a built environment that is inevitably altered with the passage of time. Shattered Spaces exemplifies urban history at its best, uncovering a surprising and moving postwar story of broad contemporary interest.

This book gives a philosophical account of Martin Heidegger’s influence on two important and hitherto understudied Russian philosophers, Aleksandr Dugin (b. 1962 -) and Vladimir Bibikhin (1938 - 2004). The book focuses on Heidegger’s thought as revolutionary and in search of bringing about an other beginning in philosophy and politics. Dugin and Bibikhin are examples of Russian thinkers inspired by Heidegger to consider revolutionary alternatives in the creation of a new beginning for Russia in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Dugin represents an attempt to assert the sovereign identity and destiny of Russia and Russian thought as against modern liberal thinking, inspired by the Enlightenment and embodied in the hegemony of the United States, the “unipolar tyrant” threatening to impose its domination on the world. Bibikhin envisages a different assertion of Russian identity that does not seek direct confrontation with other nations but a transformation in how we may think the political and the destiny of humanity in the modern technological age. If Dugin advocates struggle and a philosophy of chaos that is distinctively Russian in his view, Bibikhin advocates a coming to terms with our brief existence by taking on the burden of mortality, in his words, the “burden of the cross.” If Dugin advocates recognition of the negative and nothingness, Bibikhin advocates plenitude, a fullness that cannot be exhausted. These Russian thinkers take up major aspects of Heidegger’s philosophical work; they adapt them in intriguing ways to an extreme existential and political situation whose consequences are still very relevant to the present day, both in terms of Russia’s influence on the world stage and on the growing turn to the political right that is an international phenomenon of considerable importance.

This book is written for K-12 teachers and educators to understand the school experiences and life journeys of the English Language Learners (ELLs) through four Chinese ELLs by documenting their transitional experiences into an American school.Traditionally, Chinese students are perceived as the model minority in American schools who are academically successful. Yet, this book provides a new perspective by documenting the life journey and school experiences of the four Chinese ELLs. The book gives a detailed account of the four ELLs in transition from Chinese language and culture into American school and culture. Interview, observation, and documentary data at their homes and American school reflect this transitional journey. The book helps K-12 teachers and educators understand that Chinese students also come from different family backgrounds and have different previous schooling experiences. This will help teachers and educators better working with Chinese and all ELLs who adapt the new school environment.This book is reader-friendly and carefully crafted with six chapters. Each chapter focuses on one Chinese ELL with genuine research data. The book begins with an introduction to provide basic information of the four ELLs and concludes with the final chapter that provides an update on the ELL students.This book can also be used as reading texts by college students in teacher education and training programs. The book is targeted for the TESOL organizations. The TESOL has one of the largest memberships with over 12,000 members representing 156 countries (TESOL Brochure, 2017). This book also benefits various attendees of professional education conferences.

This book is written for K-12 teachers and educators to understand the school experiences and life journeys of the English Language Learners (ELLs) through four Chinese ELLs by documenting their transitional experiences into an American school.Traditionally, Chinese students are perceived as the model minority in American schools who are academically successful. Yet, this book provides a new perspective by documenting the life journey and school experiences of the four Chinese ELLs. The book gives a detailed account of the four ELLs in transition from Chinese language and culture into American school and culture. Interview, observation, and documentary data at their homes and American school reflect this transitional journey. The book helps K-12 teachers and educators understand that Chinese students also come from different family backgrounds and have different previous schooling experiences. This will help teachers and educators better working with Chinese and all ELLs who adapt the new school environment.This book is reader-friendly and carefully crafted with six chapters. Each chapter focuses on one Chinese ELL with genuine research data. The book begins with an introduction to provide basic information of the four ELLs and concludes with the final chapter that provides an update on the ELL students.This book can also be used as reading texts by college students in teacher education and training programs. The book is targeted for the TESOL organizations. The TESOL has one of the largest memberships with over 12,000 members representing 156 countries (TESOL Brochure, 2017). This book also benefits various attendees of professional education conferences.

Bringing together incisive contributions from an international group of colleagues and former students, Modern Germany in Transatlantic Perspective takes stock of the field of German history as exemplified by the extraordinary scholarly career of Konrad H. Jarausch. Through fascinating reflections on the discipline's theoretical, professional, and methodological dimensions, it explores Jarausch's monumental work as a teacher and a builder of scholarly institutions. In this way, it provides not merely a look back at the last fifty years of German history, but a path forward as new ideas and methods infuse the study of Germany's past.

Seventy-five years after the Holocaust, 100,000 Jews live in Germany. Their community is diverse and vibrant, and their mere presence in Germany is symbolically important. In Rebuilding Jewish Life in Germany, scholars of German-Jewish history, literature, film, television, and sociology illuminate important aspects of Jewish life in Germany from 1949 to the present day.  In West Germany, the development of representative bodies and research institutions reflected a desire to set down roots, despite criticism from Jewish leaders in Israel and the Diaspora.  In communist East Germany, some leftist Jewish intellectuals played a prominent role in society, and their experience reflected the regime’s fraught relationship with Jewry.  Since 1990, the growth of the Jewish community through immigration from the former Soviet Union and Israel have both brought heightened visibility in society and challenged preexisting notions of Jewish identity in the former “land of the perpetrators.”

Seventy-five years after the Holocaust, 100,000 Jews live in Germany. Their community is diverse and vibrant, and their mere presence in Germany is symbolically important. In Rebuilding Jewish Life in Germany, scholars of German-Jewish history, literature, film, television, and sociology illuminate important aspects of Jewish life in Germany from 1949 to the present day.  In West Germany, the development of representative bodies and research institutions reflected a desire to set down roots, despite criticism from Jewish leaders in Israel and the Diaspora.  In communist East Germany, some leftist Jewish intellectuals played a prominent role in society, and their experience reflected the regime’s fraught relationship with Jewry.  Since 1990, the growth of the Jewish community through immigration from the former Soviet Union and Israel have both brought heightened visibility in society and challenged preexisting notions of Jewish identity in the former “land of the perpetrators.”

This book confronts the question of immortality: Is human life without immortality tolerable? It does so by exploring three attitudes to immortality expressed in the context of three revolutions, the Soviet, the Nazi and the Communist revolution in China. The book begins with an account of the radical Russian tradition of immortalism that culminates in the thought of Nikolai Fedorov (1829-1903), then contrasting this account with the equally radical finitism of Martin Heidegger (1889-1976). Both these strands are then developed in the context of modern Chinese philosophical thinking about technology and the creation of a harmonious relation to nature that reflects in turn a harmonious relation to mortality, one that eschews the radicality of both Fedorov and Heidegger by discerning a “middle way.”