In the first academic book to describe the life of poor Jews in Amsterdam between the two world wars, We Lived with Dignity captures in poignant detail the unique qualities of that city's Jewish ghetto before Hitler's reign of terror. Interviews with more than ninety survivors who shared memories of living conditions in the ghetto and their feelings about the tremendous changes they lived through create an oral history that has not previously been recorded in formal descriptions and archives. The research in this book raises questions and challenges assumptions about what the past was like and how it can be portrayed. Selma Leydesdorff suggests that oral history may not always be an accurate measure. Because memories about the period before the war are veiled by the massive slaughter of the Jews by the Germans, survivors often idealize their circumstances, burying under layers of romantic nostalgia the reality of hunger, poor housing, poverty and filth, unemployment, and a lack of social stability - precisely of the sort depicted in present-day literature about the old Jewish quarter. She found that the processing of practically every interview, every "fact", involved a struggle between reality, distortion, and myth. We Lived with Dignity contains more than people's stories. Leydesdorff confirms events, exposes the truth, and explains distortions by reference to other material. To bring order into the world she hears about, she frames her interviews with critical information including a summary of the historical, economic, and demographic relationships within which the Amsterdam Jewish proletariat lived; an explanation of the changes in living conditions and the conscious attempts thatwere made to help the Jews - a cultural and religious minority - adapt to what was regarded as "modern" or "progressive"; and a description of the culture of poverty, the strategies for survival that characterized it, and the apparent impossibility of escaping it. Of the 140,000 Jews living in the Netherlands in 1941, eighty percent died during World War II. Although there are no exact figures, it is generally assumed that the slaughter was worst among the proletariat. The devastation can be seen from the fact that there is no Jewish proletarian culture left at all. In this sense, Leydesdorff's study of the history of the Jewish proletariat of Amsterdam is also a study of the consequences of World War II, and of the nature of the destruction brought about by the Holocaust.

Verslag van de enige overlevende van een joods/Italiaans gezin dat in de Tweede Wereldoorlog in Auschwitz werd vermoord.

artikelen, replieken, interviews

Verslag van de enige overlevende van een joods/Italiaans gezin dat in de Tweede Wereldoorlog in Auschwitz werd vermoord.

"Warning- This Book Will Not Save Your Life oomsday. Judgement Day. Day of Reckoning. Apocalyspe... As the man with the sandwich board says, 'The end of the world is nigh!' For as long as mankind has walked this earth, we have lived under the shadow of extinction. Whether it be from an Act of God, a natural disaster, or as the result of a man made disaster, never before has the threat of annihilation been more pressing than right now, at the beginning of the 21st Century. A IS FOR ARMAGEDDON is a brilliantly funny, thoroughly factual and stunningly illustrated guide to every feasible disaster scenario - from plague, drought and famine, to animal flatulence, obesity and World War III, from economic collapse and terrorism, to ozone depletion and chemical sink - accompanied by a critical time line for when we might expect to die - now, soon, later, or too late it s already started. A veritable panoply of impending doom, this catalogue of disasters will inform and delight in equal measure. Just don't read it too close to bedtime!

Writing as "Z" in the world-famous article "To the Stalin Mausoleum", Malia predicted the inevitable collapse of the Soviet Union. In this brilliant narrative, he evokes both the tragedy and desperate delusion that characterized the 74-year Soviet experiment with socialism to reveal why that system held such appeal for the Russians and why they refused to let go for so long. Previously announced.

In the tradition of John Reed's classic Ten Days That Shook the World, this bestselling account of the collapse of the Soviet Union combines the global vision of the best historical scholarship with the immediacy of eyewitness journalism. "A moving illumination . . . Remnick is the witness for us all.

To be modern may mean many different things, but for nineteenth-century Europeans 'modernity' suggested a new form of life in which bourgeois activities, people, attitudes and values all played key roles. Jerrold Seigel's panoramic new history offers a magisterial and highly original account of the ties between modernity and bourgeois life, arguing that they can be best understood not in terms of the rise and fall of social classes, but as features of their common participation in expanding and thickening networks that linked together distant energies and resources across economic, political and cultural life. Exploring the different configurations of these networks in England, France and Germany, he shows how their patterns gave rise to distinctive forms of modernity in each country and shaped the rhythm and nature of change across spheres as diverse as politics, money and finance, gender relations, morality, and literary, artistic and musical life.

A controversial and devastatingly honest depiction of the demise of Europe.

The Strange Death of Europe is the internationally bestselling account of a continent and culture caught in the act of suicide. Douglas Murray takes a step back and explores the deeper issues behind the continent's possible demise, from an atmosphere of mass terror attacks and a global refugee crisis to the steady erosion of our freedoms. He addresses the disappointing failure of multiculturalism, Angela Merkel's U-turn on migration, and the Western fixation on guilt. Murray travels to Berlin, Paris, Scandinavia, and Greece to uncover the malaise at the very heart of the European culture, and to hear the stories of those who have arrived in Europe from far away.

Declining birth rates, mass immigration, and cultivated self-distrust and self-hatred have come together to make Europeans unable to argue for themselves and incapable of resisting their own comprehensive alteration as a society and an eventual end. This sharp and incisive book ends up with two visions for a new Europe--one hopeful, one pessimistic--which paint a picture of Europe in crisis and offer a choice as to what, if anything, we can do next. But perhaps Spengler was right: "civilizations like humans are born, briefly flourish, decay, and die."

While acknowledging France at the eve of the Revolution as the root of the modern world, Porter also makes a case for considering Britain's importance in catapulting the world into modernity.

Verzameling verhalen van tijdgenoten over gedenkwaardige gebeurtenissen in de 20e eeuw in Nederland.

Analyse van het 'oorlogsritme' in Europa tussen 1480 en 1945, waaruit zou zijn af te leiden dat een volgende wereldoorlog onvermijdelijk is, tenzij we tijdig ingrijpen.

In The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure, Victor Turner examines rituals of the Ndembu in Zambia and develops his now-famous concept of "Communitas." He characterizes it as an absolute inter-human relation beyond any form of structure. The Ritual Process has acquired the status of a small classic since these lectures were first published in 1969. Turner demonstrates how the analysis of ritual behavior and symbolism may be used as a key to understanding social structure and processes. He extends Van Gennep's notion of the "liminal phase" of rites of passage to a more general level, and applies it to gain understanding of a wide range of social phenomena. Once thought to be the "vestigial" organs of social conservatism, rituals are now seen as arenas in which social change may emerge and be absorbed into social practice. As Roger Abrahams writes in his foreword to the revised edition: "Turner argued from specific field data. His special eloquence resided in his ability to lay open a sub-Saharan African system of belief and practice in terms that took the reader beyond the exotic features of the group among whom he carried out his fieldwork, translating his experience into the terms of contemporary Western perceptions. Reflecting Turner's range of intellectual interests, the book emerged as exceptional and eccentric in many ways: yet it achieved its place within the intellectual world because it so successfully synthesized continental theory with the practices of ethnographic reports." The American Anthropologist called Turner's book "ingenious and erudite, rich in highly stimulating ideas."

Victor Turner (1920-1983) was a research officer at the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute in Zambia, where he began what was to be a lifelong study of Ndembu village life, ritual, and symbolism. He taught at the University of Manchester from 1955 to 1963, when he moved to the United States. Turner served as professor of anthropology at Cornell University, 1964-1968. From 1968 to 1977, he was professor of anthropology and social thought at the University of Chicago, and then until the time of his death he was William R. Kenan Professor of Anthropology and Religion at the University of Virginia.

Roger Abrahams recently retired as director of the Center for Folklore and Ethnography at the University of Pennsylvania.

Renaissance Configurations is a ground-breaking collection of essays on the structures and strategies of Early Modern culture - as embodied in issues of gender, sexuality and politics - by a group of critics from the new generation of Early Modern specialists. The essays focus on the relations of public and private, of verbal and spatial, of textual and material, reading and re-reading texts, both canonical and non-canonical, with a textual and historical rigour often considered lacking in work with theoretical premises. The collection as a whole offers a clear sense of the direction to be taken by Early Modern studies over the next decade.

Het uitzonderlijke verhaal dat in De last van veel geluk verteld wordt begint in 1555 en eindigt in 1702, als de bloeitijd van de Nederlandse Republiek voorbij is. In deze periode hebben zich vooral de gebeurtenissen afgespeeld die lange tijd tot de vaste vaderlandse overlevering behoorden, maar tegenwoordig in het onderwijs nog maar weinig aandacht krijgen. En daardoor dreigt een wezenlijk element in onze cultuur verloren te gaan, want het verhaal van de opstand tegen de Spanjaarden, de onafhankelijkheid van Nederland en de ongekende bloeiperiode tijdens de Gouden Eeuw geven ons alle reden trots te zijn op ons verleden.  Dit glorieuze tijdvak wordt op superieure wijze tot leven geroepen door A.Th. van Deursen, de grootste kenner van deze periode. Op ingetogen, maar gepassioneerde wijze weet hij als geen ander de lezer mee te trekken in het fascinerende verhaal over deze unieke periode uit onze geschiedenis. 
Prof. dr. A.Th. van Deursen (1931) is emeritus hoogleraar nieuwe geschiedenis aan de Vrije Universiteit van Amsterdam. Van hem verschenen eerder onder meer Mensen van klein vermogen, Een dorp in de polder en Maurits van Nassau.

Te veel nationalisme kan doorslaan of ontaarden in imperialisme. Maar te weinig nationalisme is niet minder gevaarlijk. Recente ontwikkelingen - de aanslag in Noorwegen, de rellen in Engeland - laten zien wat er kan gebeuren als een samenleving desintegreert; en de patstelling in de Belgische politiek toont hoe een staat uiteindelijk onbestuurbaar kan worden als een gedeeld natiebesef ontbreekt. In dit boek gaat Baudet terug naar de oorsprong van de moderne staten in de zestiende en zeventiende eeuw en volgt hij hun ontwikkeling tot aan het heden. Hij laat zien dat de democratische rechtsstaat voor zijn functioneren afhankelijk is van precies de soevereiniteit en de nationale identiteit die de West-Europese elites de afgelopen decennia juist hebben afgebroken. En hij betoogt dat waar in het verleden een teveel aan nationalisme het gevaar was, de grote bedreiging in de eenentwintigste eeuw interne sociale desintegratie is.

Journalistieke reportage over Edward Snowden (1983), de voormailge CIA-medewerker die als klokkenluider informatie naar buiten bracht over de wereldwijde Amerikaanse spionagepraktijken.

This important and timely book delivers a startling analysis of the clash of faith and reason in today's world. Harris offers a vivid historical tour of mankind's willingness to suspend reason in favor of religious beliefs, even when those beliefs are used to justify harmful behavior and sometimes heinous crimes. He asserts that in the shadow of weapons of mass destruction, we can no longer tolerate views that pit one true god against another. Most controversially, he argues that we cannot afford moderate lip service to religion--an accommodation that only blinds us to the real perils of fundamentalism. While warning against the encroachment of organized religion into world politics, Harris also draws on new evidence from neuroscience and insights from philosophy to explore spirituality as a biological, brain-based need. He calls on us to invoke that need in taking a secular humanistic approach to solving the problems of this world.

The confinement of some 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II, often called the Japanese American internment, has been described as the worst official civil rights violation of modern U. S. history. Greg Robinson not only offers a bold new understanding of these events but also studies them within a larger time frame and from a transnational perspective.

Drawing on newly discovered material, Robinson provides a backstory of confinement that reveals for the first time the extent of the American government's surveillance of Japanese communities in the years leading up to war and the construction of what officials termed "concentration camps" for enemy aliens. He also considers the aftermath of confinement, including the place of Japanese Americans in postwar civil rights struggles, the long movement by former camp inmates for redress, and the continuing role of the camps as touchstones for nationwide commemoration and debate.

Most remarkably, A Tragedy of Democracy is the first book to analyze official policy toward West Coast Japanese Americans within a North American context. Robinson studies confinement on the mainland alongside events in wartime Hawaii, where fears of Japanese Americans justified Army dictatorship, suspension of the Constitution, and the imposition of military tribunals. He similarly reads the treatment of Japanese Americans against Canada's confinement of 22,000 citizens and residents of Japanese ancestry from British Columbia. A Tragedy of Democracy recounts the expulsion of almost 5,000 Japanese from Mexico's Pacific Coast and the poignant story of the Japanese Latin Americans who were kidnapped from their homes and interned in the United States. Approaching Japanese confinement as a continental and international phenomenon, Robinson offers a truly kaleidoscopic understanding of its genesis and outcomes.
The confinement of some 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II, often called the Japanese American internment, has been described as the worst official civil rights violation of modern U. S. history. Greg Robinson not only offers a bold new understanding of these events but also studies them within a larger time frame and from a transnational perspective. Drawing on newly discovered material, Robinson provides a backstory of confinement that reveals for the first time the extent of the American government's surveillance of Japanese communities in the years leading up to war and the construction of what officials termed "concentration camps" for enemy aliens. He also considers the aftermath of confinement, including the place of Japanese Americans in postwar civil rights struggles, the long movement by former camp inmates for redress, and the continuing role of the camps as touchstones for nationwide commemoration and debate. Most remarkably, A Tragedy of Democracy is the first book to analyze official policy toward West Coast Japanese Americans within a North American context. Robinson studies confinement on the mainland alongside events in wartime Hawaii, where fears of Japanese Americans justified Army dictatorship, suspension of the Constitution, and the imposition of military tribunals. He similarly reads the treatment of Japanese Americans against Canada's confinement of 22,000 citizens and residents of Japanese ancestry from British Columbia. A Tragedy of Democracy recounts the expulsion of almost 5,000 Japanese from Mexico's Pacific Coast and the poignant story of the Japanese Latin Americans who were kidnapped from their homes and interned in the United States. Approaching Japanese confinement as a continental and international phenomenon, Robinson offers a truly kaleidoscopic understanding of its genesis and outcomes.

With My Life among the Deathworks: Illustrations of the Aesthetics of Authority, the renowned cultural theorist and Freud scholar Philip Rieff inaugurates a trilogy that signals the summation of his scholarly lifework. With this series, Sacred Order/Social Order, to be published in consecutive volumes, Rieff both continues and supersedes the lines of thought that characterize the earlier, influential works upon which his reputation was forged. Readers familiar with Rieff's distinctive oeuvre will recognize central themes and find final recitations on the cultural impact of Freud and his creation "psychological man" or "the therapeutic," which Rieff here renames the "new man." Whether conversant with Rieff's work or new to its unique interpretive power, readers of Sacred Order/Social Order will discover a series of provocative insights, illuminated by Rieff's wide-ranging expositions, theoretical advances, and stylistic innovations.

In this first volume, Rieff articulates a comprehensive, typological theory of Western culture. Using visual illustrations and unique juxtapositions, he displays remarkable erudition in drawing from such disciplines as sociology, history, literature, poetry, music, plastic arts, and film; he contrasts the changing modes of spiritual and social thought that have struggled for dominance throughout Western history. Our modern culture--to Rieff's mind only the "third" type in western history--is the object of his deepest scrutiny, described here as morally ruinous, death-affirming rather than life-affirming, and representing an unprecedented attempt to create a culture completely devoid of any concept of the sacred.

For Rieff, culture represents the "form of fighting before the firing begins" in a literal life-and-death struggle for a particular type of world-creation. Having concluded in this final phase of his career that there is no neutral ground in this struggle, Rieff takes aim at many of the most significant "deathworks" in modern literature, art, and history--from Joyce's Finnegans Wake and Duchamp's Etant donnés to Hitler's death camps--in an attempt to undo them by using them against themselves. In so doing, he seeks to show the reader what really animates, and is ultimately at stake, in the contemporary "culture wars" raging over such issues as euthanasia, education, medical research, sexuality, race, class, and gender.

Lezingen van de Roemeense godsdiensthistoricus en -fenomenoloog over riten en symbolen, waarmee in primitieve culturen bepaalde overgangen (naar volwassenheid, een geheim genootschap) omgeven werden, en die zich in de grote godsdiensten hebben weten te handhaven

A generation ago Americans undertook a revolutionary experiment to redefine marriage. The results of this experiment separating marriage from childrearing are in, and they are bad news for children and for the country as a whole. The family upheaval has hit African-Americans especially hard. We forgot what American marriage was designed to do: it ordered lives by giving the young a meaningful life script. It supported middle-class foresight, planning, and self-sufficiency. And it organized men and women around The Mission-nurturing their children's cognitive, emotional, and physical development. It is The Mission that separates middle-class kids from their less-parented and lower-achieving peers. In fact our great family experiment threatens to turn what the founders imagined as an opportunity-rich republic of equal citizens into a hereditary caste society.