Academic Studies Press – förlag

From Hélène Jawhara Piñer, Gourmand World Cookbook Award-winning author of Sephardi: Cooking the History, comes a collection of 125 meticulously crafted recipes showcasing the enduring flavors that define Sephardic culinary heritage.Matzah and Flour: Recipes from the History of the Sephardic Jews offers a tantalizing exploration of the central role of matzah and flour in Sephardic cuisine. Journey through centuries of tradition as flour, from various grains like chickpea, corn, and barley, intertwines with cultural narratives and religious observance. Delve into the symbolism of matzah, from its origins in the Exodus story to its embodiment of resilience and identity. Each of this cookbook’s thoughtfully prepared recipes is a testament to the transformative power of flour in Sephardic culinary heritage. From savory delicacies to sweet delights, these timeless flavors have sustained Sephardic families through history. Matzah and Flour is a celebration of tradition, history, and the enduring legacy of Sephardic Jewish cuisine.

ENGSiblings in Tolstoy and Dostoevsky is the first book about siblings in Russian literature. Combining close readings with diverse theoretical perspectives on kinship, attachment, and brotherhood, the book offers a new understanding of love, family, and the way these intimate topics constitute the core of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky’s philosophical and religious ideals in their major novels. Berman shows how these two great writers built upon their conceptions of the literal sibling bond—that is, intimacy without the dangers of Eros—to arrive at their ideals of universal brotherhood. In the nineteenth-century, between two major revolutions (French and Russian) where “brotherhood” was a central tenant and rallying cry, ideas about siblinghood and its expansive potential were not merely family concerns, but of social and political significance. Russia's more inclusive conception of family ties made possible an extension of intimate family ties to the spiritual unity of the human family. The book’s conclusion discusses other Russian and British family novelists, situating Tolstoy and Dostoevsky’s treatment of siblings in its literary context, and making Siblings in Tolstoy and Dostoevsky an important resource for scholars of the family novel.RUSВ книге Анны А. Берман раскрывается значение братства в произведениях Л. Н. Толстого и Ф. М. Достоевского. В исследовательской литературе, посвященной их романам, психология отношений между героями изучалась преимущественно сквозь призму эротической любви у Толстого и конфликта поколений у Достоевского. Внимательно читая главные романы писателей, Берман показывает изображение отношений братьев и сестер как стабилизирующую силу, противостоящую и непредсказуемым, часто разрушительным проявлениям романтического влечения, и строгой патриархальной структуре поколений. Прослеживая творческую эволюцию каждого из писателей, в которой темы отношений внутри семьи постепенно замещаются размышлениями о всеобщем братстве, Берман доказывает, что оба автора приходят к схожему заключению: Толстой и Достоевский принимают братскую любовь как идеальную модель всех человеческих отношений.

Can one individual influence the course of history? In the example of Churchill and the Middle East during post-World War I, the answer is an irrefutable yes. Winston S. Churchill, first as Secretary for War and Air, and then as Colonial Secretary, both formulated and enacted the British imperial mandate policy for Iraq and Palestine, thereby laying the groundwork for issues that are still relevant today including conflicts in Israel, internal political upheavals in Iraq. The complicated historical intricacies of the postwar period combined with a variety of personal and political confrontations are at the core of Churchill’s decisions and finally his parliamentary successes.While most books on Churchill attempt to cover the course of his political and personal career, this volume exclusively focuses on the Middle East during the formative years of 1919-1922 and explores the foundations of some of the Middle East's most problematic issues today.

A comprehensive, readable history of the Republic of Turkey that gives equal weight to all periods in the first century of the Republic of Turkey.The republican order of Turkey seems not to have changed much since its foundation in 1923, but there were dramatic transformations: From Atatürk’s modernization dictatorship in the 1920s and 1930s, over the massive migration into the cities and the military coups in the second half of the twentieth century, up to Recep Tayyip Erdoğans electoral autocracy since the 2010s. This book makes us understand Turkey’s historical trajectory in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the fate of its various communities and ethnic groups—in particular Alevis and Kurds—and argues that a particular trait of Turkish political culture is its constant fluctuation between confidence and contention, grandeur and grievance.

A classic children’s tale about Gnomes, appealing equally, if not more so, to the adult child. Written in rich, lyrical prose, frequently shifting into the peasant dialect and interspersed with sundry verses and songs, the tale is replete with mytho-folkloric motifs, legends, superstitions, historical and biblical references, magical depictions of natural phenomena, the sunsets, the twilights, the dawns; the changing seasons, the shadows, the colors, the sounds and silences, Poland’s diverse landscape, her fields, forests and mountains, along with her flora and fauna, and realistic descriptions of late 19th-century Polish rural life. Not least among The Fair Folk’s charms is the author’s whimsical sense of humor—a humor that often rises to a level of high hilarity.

The Way to Walk is a collection of early Hasidic instructions for living a proper moral and spiritual life.  These were written for an emerging new spiritual elite among the followers of R. Yisra’el Ba‘al Shem Tov, composed in the two decades following his death in 1760.  Hasidism was not yet a popular movement: it began rather as a small community of those seeking a more intense spiritual path than could be expected of the general public. These are the key documents that defined that path, one that was to lead toward devekut, or intimate attachment to God.

Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938) is widely regarded as one of the twentieth century's most influential poets. This collection, compiled, translated, and edited by poet and scholar Ian Probstein, provides Anglophone audiences with a powerful selection of Mandelstam's most beloved and haunting poems. Both scholars and general readers will gain a deeper understanding of his poetics, as Probstein situates each poem in its historical and literary context. The English translations presented here are so deeply immersed in the Russian sources and language through the ear of a Russian-born Probstein who has spent most of his adult life in the US, that they provide reader's with a Mandelstam unseen any translations that precede it.

Lessons of history are often referred to in public discourse, but seldom in scholarly discussions. This book seeks to change this by introducing an innovative analytical model of historical lessons, starting from the basic three-fold perspective that everyone simultaneously is history, shares history, and makes history. Not all history, however, is useful for extracting lessons. Here, what are called borderline historical events, which demonstrate both time-specific and time-transcending qualities, are suggested as useful didactic material. Scholarly works on the Holocaust and Soviet terror, from Raul Hilberg’s and Robert Conquest’s classical works of the 1960s, to more recent books by Jan Gross and Timothy Snyder, are analyzed to identify lessons of history, and how they have changed during a full half-century.

In today’s America, a disturbing surge in anti-Semitism is making alarming inroads into the national mainstream. This book explores the many factors fueling this hostility while also questioning why the American Jewish community has been largely reticent in its response. The author offers a fresh perspective by linking this reticence to the psychological challenges faced by minority groups under constant attack, showing how these pressures have led to historically ineffective responses.Drawing on historical research and psychological analysis, the work highlights a recurring pattern of vulnerability within the Jewish Diaspora and suggests new ways to build a more proactive and resilient community. Whether you’re an academic, a community leader, or simply someone who cares about social justice, this book provides an essential look at how anti-Semitism takes root and points the way forward for a stronger collective response.

Learning to Read Talmud is the first book-length study of how teachers teach and how students learn to read Talmud. Through a series of studies conducted by scholars of Talmud in classrooms that range from seminaries to secular universities and with students from novice to advanced, this book elucidates a broad range of ideas about what it means to learn to read Talmud and tools for how to achieve that goal. Bridging the study of Talmud and the study of pedagogy, this book is an essential resource for scholars, curriculum writers, and classroom teachers of Talmud.

A Winner of the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa 2023 Bernard Lewis PrizeLandes, a medievalist and historian of apocalyptic movements, takes us through the first years of the third millennium (2000-2003), documenting how a radical inability of Westerners to understand the medieval mentality that drove Global Jihad prompted a series of disastrous misinterpretations and misguided reactions that have shaped our so-far unhappy century. These misinterpretations in 2000, 2001, 2002, and 2005, contributed fundamentally to the ever-worsening moral and empirical disorientations of our information elites (journalists, academics, pundits). So while journalists reported Palestinian war propaganda as news (lethal journalism), they were also reporting Jihadi war propaganda as news (own-goal war journalism). These radical disorientations have created our current dilemma of pervasive information distrust, deep splits within the voting public in most democracies, the politicization of science, and the inability of Western elites to defend their civilization, and instead, to stand down before an invasion.

The Karamazov Correspondence: Letters of Vladimir S. Soloviev represents the first fully annotated and chronologically arranged collection of the Russian philosopher-poet’s most important letters, the vast majority of which have never before been translated into English. Soloviev was widely known for his close association with Fyodor M. Dostoevsky in the final years of the novelist’s life, and these letters reflect many of the qualities and contradictions that also personify the title characters of Dostoevsky’s last and greatest novel, The Brothers Karamazov. The selected letters cover all aspects of Soloviev’s life, ranging from vital concerns about human rights and the political and religious turmoil of his day to matters related to family and friends, his love life, and early drafts of his works, including poetic endeavors.

Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita, set in Stalin’s Moscow, is an intriguing work with a complex structure, wonderful comic episodes and moments of great beauty. Readers are often left tantalized but uncertain how to understand its rich meanings. To what extent is it political? Or religious? And how should we interpret the Satanic Woland? This reader’s companion offers readers a biographical introduction, and analyses of the structure and the main themes of the novel. More curious readers will also enjoy the accounts of the novel’s writing and publication history, alongside analyses of the work’s astonishing linguistic complexity and a review of available English translations.

Man and His Surroundings irreverently explores Soviet and post-Soviet identity, politics, and history. In what Iskander himself calls the book’s seminal novella, the narrator meets a man who believes himself to be Lenin, thawed out after decades of cryogenic storage. The narrator endures a phantasmagorical account of what “Lenin” thought and did during the October Revolution of 1917 and how another revolution is imminent. In another novella, the narrator tells of a nationally renowned fencer as the fencer sits at a neighboring table, discussing the impossibility of equality on earth, while his son pesters him for ice cream. The novellas enrapture the reader with their humor and impart a better intuitive understanding of the Soviet cultural heritage and mindset.

ENG: The internet and digital technologies have generated a flood of texts and widespread worries about information overload. But this phenomenon is not unique to our age. Already centuries ago scholars complained about an overabundance of books, especially in the wake of the invention of printing in mid-15th century Europe. Blair studies the remedies that the learned devised to cope with that explosion of texts, notably by making summaries and excerpts which could be sorted and accessed in reference books. First she traces methods of information management back to antiquity and the middle ages and across cultures with long textual traditions such the Islamic and Chinese worlds. Then she focuses on the tools and practices in use in early modern Europe, such as note-taking, alphabetical indexing, thematic diagramming, and large scale compiling. The result combines intellectual history with book history to emphasize long continuities between past and present.RUS: Интернет и цифровые технологии порождают необозримый поток текстов, что вызывает особенного типа тревожность — по поводу информационной перегрузки. Но это явление не является уникальным для нашей эпохи. Уже столетия назад — и особенно после изобретения книгопечатания в Европе в середине XV века — ученые жаловались на переизбыток книг. Энн Блэр исследует те средства, которые ученые прошлого придумывали, чтобы справиться с этим шквалом текстов. В своей работе она прослеживает методы управления информацией в античности и средневековье, в традиционных исламской и китайской культурах. Другим фокусом книги становятся инструменты и практики, использовавшиеся в Европе раннего нового времени. В результате интеллектуальная история в ее исследовании сочетается с историей книги, что позволяет подчеркнуть преемственность между прошлым и настоящим.

Через несколько недель после объединения Германии Леонард Бернстайн продирижировал Девятую симфонию Бетховена на руинах Берлинской стены, заменив в знаменитой Оде «радость» на «свободу». Это ставшее культовым выступление — наглядный пример музыкальной монументальности, важной концепции, которая демонстрирует наше культурное и идеологическое понимание западного музыкального искусства. На материале ведущих австро-немецких композиторов XIX века — Бетховена, Листа, Вагнера, Брамса, Брукнера — Александр Рединг раскрывает двоякое определение монументальности. Это и стилистическое свойство, и культурная задача утверждения национальной идентичности. Сквозь эту теоретическую призму Рединг исследует стратегии монументальной музыки и то, как благодаря ей немецкая музыка становится единым культурным и музыкальным брендом.

ENGTelling October examines the rich and accretive processes by which the new Soviet regime sought to construct the events of 1917 as a major revolutionary event, indeed a foundation event, for the new Communist state. As a "memory project," it sought to socialize generations of Soviet citizens into an understanding of "October" as just such a watershed event. Although by no means completely successful, these efforts still leave their traces today in modern Russia.RUSКнига Фредерика Корни посвящена анализу процессов, с помощью которых советский режим сделал Октябрьскую революцию 1917 года основополагающим событием для нового коммунистического государства. Этот «проект памяти» был сконструирован так, чтобы объединить поколения советских граждан в понимании Октября как точки эпохального перелома. Несмотря на далеко не полный успех, следы этих усилий и сегодня заметны в российском общественном сознании.

Книга Анны Крыловой, профессора кафедры современной русской истории (Duke University), предлагает переосмыслить феномен женщин-добровольцев, которыеbвместе со своими любимыми и близкими ушли на фронт в 1941-м. Пулеметчицы и снайперы, зенитчицы и летчицы, саперы и танкистки, и даже командиры мужских подразделений — женщины наравне с мужчинами сражались на фронтах Второй мировой войны. Какие изменения должны были произойти в гендерном мировоззрении довоенного сталинского общества, чтобы феномен женщины-добровольца, женщины-солдата и женщины-командира стал культурно, социально и психологически возможным? Как менялись фронтовые отношения между женщинами и мужчинами, а также гендерные представления в армии и обществе в целом во время и после войны? Книга Анны Крыловой дает ответы на эти вопросы.

While acknowledging Dostoevsky’s personal commitment to the Russian Orthodox faith, Jones argues that it is possible to understand his fictional world only in terms of the interplay of a wide variety of religious experiences and outlooks, including affirmations of faith and expressions of radical doubt and unbelief, and a constant questioning of one by the other. In their neglect of its outward expressions, Dostoevsky’s novels seem to acknowledge that the Orthodox tradition has to die in order to be reborn in the light of the image of Christ and that, to use his own expression, the final ‘hosanna’ must pass through a ‘furnace of doubt’.

Lives Lived and Lost stands at the intersection of biography, autobiography, memory and history. It narrates a mother’s and daughter’s separate perspectives of their experiences before, during, and after World War II. The book is also an ethnography of lives of women and children during a transformative period in Eastern Europe and opens a window to the crucial events of that epoch. The challenge of the narratives provides the urgency of the story and the richness of the historical record. It is also an unforgettable story of love, loss, and longing for family engulfed by war. The book will resonate with those interested in the lives of individual women and children; scholars, and students of history, gender, and religion, especially Hasidism, and with mainstream readers in this and future generations unfamiliar with life during the first half of the twentieth century in Europe.

This collection of Russian short stories from the 21st century includes works by famous writers and young talents alike, representing a diversity of generational, gender, ethnic and national identities. Their authors live not only in Russia, but also in Europe and the US. Short stories in this volume display a vast spectrum of subgenres, from grotesque absurdist stories to lyrical essays, from realistic narratives to fantastic parables. Taken together, they display rich and complex cultural and intellectual reality of contemporary Russia, in which political, social, and ethnic conflicts of today coexist with themes and characters resonating with classical literature, albeit invariably twisted and transformed in an unpredictable way. Most of texts in this volume appear in English for the first time. 21 may be useful for college courses but will also provide exciting reading for anyone interested in contemporary Russia.

"The Horizontal Society" is an exposition of rabbinic thought as exemplified by Maimonides. The thought streams of Greece, Rome, and Christendom serve as a contrast. This work is in the Hebrew rhetorical tradition of melisa. The main text in five sections - The God of Israel, The Books of Israel, The Governance of Israel, The Memory of Israel, and The Folly of Israel - focuses on these core matters. It includes numerous references to orient the reader. The mode is similar to the author's previous work, such as "Golden Doves with Silver Dots: Semiotics and Textuality in Rabbinic Tradition", interacting with the latest thought from today's academy.This book illustrates the horizontal organisation of the Jewish people. Other social organisation is based on hierarchy. Two principles made this difference possible for Israel. First, the Hebrew Scriptures alone propose that every human being is created in the image of God. This necessitates the absolute equality of every human being. Second, the Sinai covenant establishes the Law as the supreme authority. Whereas in other societies, might is the source of authority, in Judaism authority is limited by the Law.These principles were summarised by the last Prophet of Israel: 'Had not one God created us? Why do we deal treacherously..., profaning the covenant of our fathers?' (Mal 2:10). There is a subdivided bibliography of forty pages, including both Jewish and 'Western' sources. The scholarly apparatus includes indices of terms, names, and subjects. There are also seventy appendices of interest to a rabbinic readership.

The Horizontal Society is an exposition of rabbinic thought as exemplified by Maimonides. The thought streams of Greece, Rome, and Christendom serve as a contrast. This work is in the Hebrew rhetorical tradition of melisa. The main text in five sections-—The God of Israel, The Books of Israel, The Governance of Israel, The Memory of Israel, and The Folly of Israel—focuses on these core matters. It includes numerous references to orient the reader. The mode is similar to the author's previous work, such as Golden Doves with Silver Dots: Semiotics and Textuality in Rabbinic Tradition, interacting with the latest thought from today's academy. This book illustrates the horizontal organization of the Jewish people. Other social organization is based on hierarchy. Two principles made this difference possible for Israel. First, the Hebrew Scriptures alone propose that every human being is created in the image of God.This necessitates the absolute equality of every human being. Second, the Sinai covenant establishes the Law as the supreme authority. Whereas in other societies, might is the source of authority, in Judaism authority is limited by the Law. These principles were summarized by the last Prophet of Israel: "Has not one God created us? Why do we deal treacherously…, profaning the covenant of our fathers?" (Mal 2:10). There is a subdivided bibliography of forty pages, including both Jewish and "Western" sources. The scholarly apparatus includes indices of terms, names, and subjects. There are also seventy appendices of interest to rabbinic readership.

Bone China, or Letters Not about Love is an unconventional murder mystery that blends suspense with lyrical storytelling.Its protagonist Mila Freeman is recovering from a broken leg when she receives the news that her old friendan artist and human rights activisthas been found dead under suspicious circumstances. The death is officially ruled a suicide, but the truth lingers unresolved, seeping into Milas world despite her friends vow to avoid the subject.What unfolds is a witty and haunting meditation on exile, nostalgia, fractured bodies, and lost loves. Through digressive folktales, etymologies, and a chorus of emails woven into the narrative, Bone China explores the tension between silence and revelation, grief and resilience, intimacy and estrangement.A genre-defying novel, it invites readers into a mystery that is as much about memory and identity as it is about uncovering a death. With sharp wit and emotional depth, Bone China is perfect for readers who crave literary fiction that pushes boundaries while keeping them enthralled by the puzzle at its core.

Companion to Victor Pelevin, a collaborative undertaking by a group of emerging Russianist scholars, focuses on the work of one of the most important and hotly debated post-Soviet writers. It provides a valuable resource to scholars, teachers, and students, including how best to teach Pelevin to university-level students, and which critical debates invite further investigation. The contributors offer new readings of Pelevin texts that cover a broad time span and pay due attention to the philosophical and aesthetic complexities of Pelevin’s oeuvre in its development from the early post-Soviet years to the second decade of the present millennium. Examining all of Pelevin’s major works and all Peleviniana currently available in English, the Companion aims to prompt further inquiry into this author’s intellectually stimulating and socially prescient work.

Vladimir Nabokov complained about the number of Dostoevsky's characters "sinning their way to Jesus." In truth, Christ is an elusive figure not only in Dostoevsky's novels, but in Russian literature as a whole. The rise of the historical critical method of biblical criticism in the nineteenth century and the growth of secularism it stimulated made an earnest affirmation of Jesus in literature highly problematic. If they affirmed Jesus too directly, writers paradoxically risked diminishing him, either by deploying faith explanations that no longer persuade in an age of skepticism or by reducing Christ to a mere argument in an ideological dispute. The writers at the heart of this study understood that to reimage Christ for their age, they had to make him known through indirect, even negative ways, lest what they say about him be mistaken for cliché, doctrine, or naïve apologetics. The Christology of Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Mikhail Bulgakov, and Boris Pasternak is thus apophatic because they deploy negative formulations (saying what God is not) in their writings about Jesus. Professions of atheism in Dostoevsky and Tolstoy's non-divine Jesus are but separate negative paths toward truer discernment of Christ. This first study in English of the image of Christ in Russian literature highlights the importance of apophaticism as a theological practice and a literary method in understanding the Russian Christ. It also emphasizes the importance of skepticism in Russian literary attitudes toward Jesus on the part of writers whose private crucibles of doubt produced some of the most provocative and enduring images of Christ in world literature. This important study will appeal to scholars and students of Orthodox Christianity and Russian literature, as well as educated general readers interested in religion and nineteenth-century Russian novels.

Во владениях Российской империи в Новом свете жизнь была далека от европейских представлений о цивилизованности. Поселенцы не брезговали пьянством и коррупцией, что делало их плохим примером для коренных жителей — людей, которых империя считала отчаянно нуждающимися в нравственном просвещении. Что же предложила центральная власть? Прислать женщин. С 1829 года каждый новый губернатор должен быть быть женат — предполагалось, что женщины послужат образцом благочестия и очарования в этой суровой стрне. Сюзанна Рабоу-Эдлинг рассказывает истории трех жен губернаторов, отправившихся на фронтир — Елизаветы Врангель, Маргареты Этолин и Анны Фуругельм.

ENGPerforming Pain explores music’s relationships to trauma and grief by focusing upon the late 20 th century in Eastern Europe. The 1970s and 80s witnessed a cultural preoccupation with WWII and the Stalinist era. Journalists, historians, writers, artists, and filmmakers explored themes related to pain and memory, truth and history, morality and spirituality during glasnost and the years prior. Performing Pain considers how music by composers Alfred Schnittke, Galina Ustvolskaya, Arvo Pärt, and Henryk Górecki musically engage contemporary concerns regarding suffering through composition, performance, and reception. Drawing upon theories from psychology, sociology, and literary studies, this book demonstrates the ways in which people turn to music to make sense of trauma and loss.RUSВ своей книге Мария Чизмич исследует отражение травмы в музыкальном искусстве Восточной Европы конца ХХ века. В 1970-80-е годы вопрос коллективной травмы, особенно связанной со Второй мировой войной и сталинской эпохой, стал темой для публичного обсуждения. Журналисты, историки, писатели, художники и кинематографисты неоднократно обращались к сюжетам боли и памяти, правды и истории, морали и духовности как во времена гласности, так и в предшествующие годы. Мария Чизмич рассматривает, как эти проблемы затрагивались в произведениях композиторов Альфреда Шнитке, Галины Уствольской, Арво Пярта и Хенрика Гурецкого. Опираясь на данные психологии и социологии, используя методы литературоведения и культурологии, автор показывает, как средствами музыки происходило осмысление исторических травмы и потери.