Nancy Sinkoff
Nancy Sinkoff
A Jew in the Street: New Perspectives on European Jewish History
- Publisher & Year: Wayne State University Press, June 2024
- Genre(s): East European Jewish Studies
- Book Link: https://wsupress.wayne.edu/9780814349687/
Reconsidering how early modern and modern Jews navigated schisms between Jewish community and European society.
This collection brings together original scholarship by seventeen historians drawing on the pioneering research of their teacher and colleague, Michael Stanislawski. These essays explore a mosaic of topics in the history of modern European Jewry from early modern times to the present, including the role of Jewish participants in the European revolutions of 1848, the dynamics of Zionist and non-Zionist views in the early twentieth century, the origins of a magical charm against the evil eye, and more. Collectively, these works reject ideological and doctrinal clichés, demythologize the European Jewish past, and demonstrate that early modern and modern Jews responded creatively to modern forms of culture, religion, and the state from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. Contributors to this volume pose new questions about the relationship between the particular and universal, antisemitism and modernization, religious and secular life, and the bonds and competition between cultures and languages, especially Yiddish, Hebrew, and modern European languages. These investigations illuminate the entangled experiences of Jews who sought to balance the pull of communal, religious, and linguistic traditions with the demands and allure of full participation in European life.
Polish Jewish Culture Beyond the Capital: Centering the Periphery
- Publisher & Year: Rutgers University Press, 2023
- Genre(s): East European Jewish Studies
- Book Link: https://polishjewishmusic.iu.edu
Polish Jewish Culture beyond the Capital: Centering the Periphery is a path-breaking exploration of the diversity and vitality of urban Jewish identity and culture in Polish lands from the second half of the nineteenth century to the outbreak of the Second World War (1899–1939). In this multidisciplinary essay collection, a cohort of international scholars provides an integrated history of the arts and humanities in Poland by illuminating the complex roles Jews in urban centers other than Warsaw played in the creation of Polish and Polish Jewish culture.
Each essay presents readers with the extraordinary production and consumption of culture by Polish Jews in literature, film, cabaret, theater, the visual arts, architecture, and music. They show how this process was defined by a reciprocal cultural exchange that flourished between cities at the periphery—from Lwów and Wilno to Kraków and Łódź—and international centers like Warsaw, thereby illuminating the place of Polish Jews within urban European cultures.
Out of the Shtetl: Making Jews Modern in the Polish Borderlands
- Publisher & Year: Brown Judaic Studies, 2004, 1st ed. and 2020, 2nd ed.
- Genre(s): History
- Book Link: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvzpv5tn#:~:text=In%20Out%20of%20the%20Shtetl,the%20Jews%20of%20Eastern%20Europe
In Out of the Shtetl: Making Jews Modern in the Polish Borderlands, Nancy Sinkoff examines some of the thinkers, particularly Mendel Lefin and Joseph Perl, who as part of the Jewish Enlightenment movement (Haskalah) of the nineteenth century attempted to articulate a vision and plan for how the Jews of Eastern Europe could become modern while remaining Jews. The book contains a new preface by the autho
From That Place and Time, 1938-1947: A Memoir; "Yidishkayt and the Making of Lucy S. Dawidowicz"
- Publisher & Year: Rutgers University Press, 2008
- Genre(s): American Studies
- Book Link: https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/from-that-place-and-time/9780813543628
From that Place and Time is the memoir of Lucy S. Dawidowicz, an American-Jewish historian who set out to study Yiddish language and Jewish history at YIVO, the Jewish Scientific Institute in Vilna, Poland, in 1938. Escaping Poland only days before the Nazi onslaught, she worked in the New York YIVO during the war, and returned to Europe from 1946 to 1947 to aid Jewish displaced persons in Munich and Belsen with the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. Dawidowicz's memoir not only describes her pre-war year in Jewish Eastern Europe, but also treats the ghostly post-war period, and her role in salvaging what remained of Vilna's scorched Jewish archives and libraries.
Nancy Sinkoff's new introduction explores the historical forces, particularly the dynamic world of secular Yiddish culture, which shaped Dawidowicz's decision to journey to Poland and her reassessment of those forces in the last years of her life.
Sara Levy's World: Judaism, Gender, and the Bach Tradition in Enlightenment Berlin
- Publisher & Year: Boydell and Brewer, University of Rochester Press, 2018
- Genre(s): History
- Book Link: https://boydellandbrewer.com/9781580469210/sara-levys-world/
A rich interdisciplinary exploration of the world of Sara Levy, a Jewish salonnière and skilled performing musician in late eighteenth-century Berlin, and her impact on the Bach revival, German-Jewish life, and Enlightenment culture.
Sara Levy née Itzig (1761-1854), a salonnière, skilled performing musician, and active participant in enlightened Prussian Jewish society, played a powerful role in shaping the dynamic cultural world of late eighteenth- and earlynineteenth-century Berlin. A patron and collector of music, she studied harpsichord with Wilhelm Friedemann Bach (1710-84) and commissioned musical compositions from both Friedemann and his brother Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (1714-88). Archival evidence demonstrates Levy's position as an essential link in the transmission of the music of their father, Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750), and as a catalyst for the "Bach revival" of the early nineteenth century, which was led by her great-nephew Felix Mendelssohn.
Sara Levy's World: Gender, Judaism, and the Bach Tradition in Enlightenment Berlin represents the first scholarly exploration of the cultural, political, and aesthetic contexts that shaped Levy's world. Bringing together leading scholars from the fields of musicology, Jewish Studies, history, literary studies, gender studies, and philosophy, this volume presents cutting-edge, multidisciplinary research on the numerous mutually reinforcing aspects of Levy's life and work.
