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Welcome to Vallentine Mitchell Publishers!
Vallentine Mitchell, founded over fifty years ago, are international publishers of books of Jewish interest, both for the scholar and general reader. Subjects published include Jewish history, culture and heritage, modern Jewish thought, biography and reference.
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| | |  | Messianism, Secrecy and Mysticism
A New Interpretation of Early American Jewish Life
New in Paperback!
Winner in the category of American Jewish Studies, National Jewish Book Awards
Winner Jordan Schnitzer Book Award in the Category of Cultural Studies and Media Studies
Leibman, Laura
Messianism, Secrecy and Mysticism tells the history of Early American Jews, focusing on the objects of everyday life used and created by Jews, such as ritual baths, food, gravestones, portraits, furniture, as well as the synagogue. By uncovering these objects and exposing the common culture of the Jewish Atlantic world, the book provides a fresh understanding of a crucial era in Jewish and American history. It offers new insights about the origins of Jewish American messianism, helping readers better understand messianism in contemporary American society. It charts the shared culture of these Jews who lived in the port towns in the Caribbean and on both sides of the Atlantic, and author Laura Arnold Leibman argues that thinking about Judaism as an embodied religion is key to understanding their culture. Messianism, Secrecy and Mysticism makes early Jewish American history entertaining, accessible, and interesting to general readers, as well as to academic audiences. A companion website contains thousands of photographs of material culture from throughout the Jewish Atlantic world, as well as study guides for using the images; http://cdm.reed.edu/cdm4/jewishatlanticworld/
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|  | From Victim to Survivor
The Emergence and Development of the Holocaust Witness, 1941-1949
Taft, Margaret
This original study into the development of the Holocaust witness makes a groundbreaking contribution to the scholarship of early Holocaust testimony. Taft challenges the prevailing view that the Eichmann trial in 1961 was the impetus for the public emergence of the Holocaust witness. Through a close reading of diaries, memoirs, reports and chronicles, Taft proves that the Holocaust witness emerged long before Eichmann was captured and before the world was ready to acknowledge their role and status. She argues that witnesses to the Holocaust first strove to give meaning to the events that threatened their existence over a critical eight year period from 1941 until 1949, and contributed to a shared understanding of what it meant to be a victim during the onslaught of the Final Solution, and what it meant to be a survivor in the immediate post war period. Initially they confronted an unprecedented threat to their existence that they struggled to comprehend, and a deliberate attempt by the Nazis to conceal it. After liberation they encountered a climate of continued anti-Semitism, hostility and indifference both from the Allies and the world they liberated. By refusing to remain silent, victims and survivors made a meaningful and enduring contribution to their own communities at a time when few others showed interest in or an understanding of the Jewish experience of the Holocaust.
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|  | Soldiers' Tales
Two Palestinian Jewish Soldiers in the Ottoman Army during the First World War
Abramson, Glenda
Yehuda Amon and Haim Nahmias were middle-class Jerusalem Jews who were conscripted into the Ottoman army and transported to Western Anatolia with the labor battalions during World War I. They kept detailed notes of their dreadful experiences which they later extended into complete narratives. Both diaries were discovered only recently and both appear here for the first time in this English translation. In addition to the translation of the diaries, the book includes a detailed introduction which describes life in the Jewish settlement in Palestine during the war under the autocratic rule of Jemal Pasha, the Governor of Syria and Palestine. It provides insight into the Ottoman army in the Middle East and the declining years of the Ottoman Empire, as seen through the two diaries and also through unpublished letters of Yehuda Burla, another Palestinian Jewish conscript who later became a well-known Hebrew author. The book also contains a detailed description of the Yishuv during the early years of the war, including the devastating locust plague of 1915.
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|  | Governments-in-Exile and the Jews during the Second World War
Jordan, James; Lanicek, Jan
While the examination of bystanders to the Holocaust has constituted an important part of Holocaust research in the last decades, historians have focused mainly on the two major Western Allied powers, the United States and the United Kingdom. This book broadens this important research area to include the other members of the anti-Hitler alliance and how they helped to shape the attitudes and responses to the Nazi persecution and extermination of European Jewry. Specifically, it looks at the 'Jewish policy' of the various governments-in-exile that were established during the war in London and elsewhere, offering for the first time a comparative perspective on an important topic. The book contains an extensive introductory essay by Antony Polonsky, along with contributions by leading academics, including Tony Kushner, Renee Poznanski, Rainer Schulze, and Dariusz Stola.
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|  | Reconfiguring Surrealism in Modern Hebrew Literature
Menashe Levin, Yitzhak Oren and Yitzhak Orpaz
Miller, Giulia
This book challenges the popular notion that there is no Modern Hebrew Surrealist literature. It focuses upon the writings of three lesser-known Hebrew authors - Menashe Levin, Yitzhak Oren, and Yitzhak Orpaz - and considers the nature and function of their particular strands of Hebrew Surrealism. The book takes as its departure the alleged absence of Surrealism in Modern Hebrew literature, an absence that suggests that Surrealism has made little impact upon Hebrew and Israeli culture. It suggests that the relationship is more complex. In so doing, the book moves beyond the conception of Surrealism as a regimented artistic movement and proposes instead that we broaden our definition to encompass the multifarious guises in which it appears.
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|  | Representing Perpetrators in Holocaust Literature and Film
Adams, Jenni; Vice, Sue
The majority of books on Holocaust literature and film focus on its victims or survivors. The essays in this collection, by established academics as well as newer voices, take the more unusual method of analyzing representations of the Holocaust perpetrators. In doing so, they explore what has until now held critics back from this topic, including moral and emotional distaste, the dangers of confusing understanding with exculpation, and the possibility of problematic identification. Acknowledging and moving beyond these concerns, the contributors develop instead a range of innovative approaches and conclusions, emphasizing the ethical and aesthetic challenges of representing evil and the ways in which these are negotiated by writers, filmmakers, and others. The ethics of such representation are explored by a series of cases studies, analyzing, for instance, how the Nazis and Nazism are shown in: German museums; in fiction, such as Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones and Muriel Spark's The Mandelbaum Gate; in films, including Downfall and Shoah; in ghetto diaries; and in the paintings of Francis Bacon.
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|  | 'Thank you for your business'
The Jewish Contribution to the British Economy
Taylor, Derek
Over the centuries, arguments have raged over whether or not Britain should be welcoming toward immigrants. This is a book about a tiny proportion of the immigrants to whom Britain did grant asylum, refuge, and liberty. It is the first detailed examination into the survival and economic growth of the Jews in Britain. In Stuart times, the Jews amounted to a few hundred people. Today, there are still only 300,000 Jews in Britain. When they came to that country as impoverished immigrants, they had no jobs, little education, and could not speak English. And yet, some went on to run the biggest business empires in the country. Illustrated throughout, 'Thank You for Your Business' details the astonishing contribution Jews have made over the years to the British economy: how they sustained the currency through many wars; how they invented jigsaw puzzles and postcards; and the creation of such household names as Lyons, Glaxo, Burtons, Shell, ICI, Ladbrokes, and many more. The book examines the background of their founders to see what enabled them to spot opportunities that others missed, and how they overcame obstacles and succeeded where others failed. Over 350 firms are examined to describe the survival and economic growth of the Jews in Britain and to assess the contribution of their cultural and religious background to the success of these entrepreneurs.
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|  | Portraits in Literature: The Jews of Poland
An Anthology
Finalist in Anthologies and Collections, National Jewish Book Awards
Bromberg Ben-Zvi, Hava
Of the six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust, three million were from Poland. Their literary heritage is a treasure to be preserved, and this lavish anthology gathers together the rich and varied forms of magnificent Jewish life and culture from a Poland that is no more. The book includes memoirs, short stories, poetry, eyewitness reports, fragments of novels, essays, letters, folk tales, and humor. The work of writers - both Jewish and Polish, prominent and new - presents a true, valid, rich, and compelling panorama of life as it was. Historically informative, heartbreaking, poignant, and amusing, the book speaks in many voices: those of women, children, and survivors. It is an exceptionally broad range of literature which paints a rich panorama of life before, during, and following the Holocaust, ending with tales of hope and renewal in new centers of Jewish life. With every emotion sensitively and skillfully explored, this anthology will fascinate Jewish and non-Jewish readers, shedding light on the origins and roots of contemporary Jewry in the English-speaking world. Meticulous listing of sources and a bibliography will prove fertile ground for students and scholars alike.
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|  | Siddur Shevet Asher
The Tribe Siddur for Children and Families
Tribe: The Young United Synagogue
Each religious service and section of prayer in the new 280 page siddur is now colour coded. Symbols throughout guide readers, both children and their families, to information, instructions and brief translations. Links to ‘JOG’, the Jewish Online Guides on the United Synagogue website and a QR code take you straight to the instructional video clips – another innovation. The Prayer Book, with an introduction by Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks, has also expanded to include all the additional prayers for High Holydays, asked for by teachers and children’s service leaders, avoiding the need for an additional prayerbook. Also included are additional tehillim, psalms said at time of difficulty and for the healing of a sick person etc. With full colour illustrations throughout, the new Siddur Shevet Asher is certain to become the new ‘must have’ Prayer Book for all children and families, as a stepping stone to the, now familiar, ‘Sacks’ Singer’s Authorised Daily Prayer Book.
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|  | Leslie Howard
The Lost Actor
Eforgan, Estel
Leslie Howard's career as a Hollywood star and his ambitions for the British film industry were well known. He contributed substantially to cinema history, featured in Gone With the Wind, The Scarlet Pimpernel, and Pygmalion, amongst others. But, behind his charm was a perceptive and determined man. An ambivalent identity and a penetrating intelligence gave him the confidence to inform world opinion at the time of the Second World War. His work then is almost unknown, and startlingly unexpected. Howard made efforts to discover exactly what was happening in Nazi Germany and Austria, and what was intended. He struggled with the establishment back in England to get the British film industry restarted in 1940, and aimed to use it to give a lead in democratic values and unity. He worked secretly and alone to develop British propaganda in America, and to help the SOE and the Free French in Britain. He became a well-loved figurehead in Britain's darkest days, and Churchill made effective use of his charismatic personality to sway neutral countries at crucial times during the battle. This book follows his life by using original material from archives and libraries, personal narratives, newspaper and magazine accounts of the time, and, most of all, Howard's own voice to tell his story through his own humorous and pointed articles in The New Yorker and Vanity Fair and his autobiographical war time radio broadcasts at the BBC.
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|  | The Worlds of Wolf Mankowitz
Between Elite and Popular Cultures in Post-War Britain
Dunn, Anthony J.
Wolf Mankowitz was a high-profile and pugnacious participant in the cultural life of 1950s and 1960s London and a prolific writer throughout his life. He is now best remembered for his film scripts A Kid for Two Farthings, and Expresso Bongo, a scathing satire on the cynical construction of a teenage nonentity into a rock ‘n roll star, starring Cliff Richard. This first biography of Mankowitz reveals a writer from the Jewish East End with the confidence and the ability to exercise his talents in many fields. He was one of the founders of the Pickwick Club in Great Newport Street; an acknowledged expert on Wedgwood china; and wrote the ‘book’ for the very successful musical Pickwick, which gave Harry Secombe his first star role on stage. He was a close associate of Orson Welles, Peter Sellers and Sophia Loren, and this biography offers fresh insights into their characters and careers. Mankowitz was proud of his Jewish heritage, and equally proud of the years he spent as a scholarship boy at Cambridge studying English. This biography presents the full story of the twists and turns he made to accommodate these dual influences, and recounts the story of a man for whom writing was the very essence of his existence.
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|  | Place, Memory and Myth in Contemporary Israeli Cinema
Zanger, Anat
This book examines several Israeli fictional and non-fictional films, and how their portrayal of landscape and territory provides a unique perspective on Jewish and Israeli identity. The book demonstrates how space in film is not only a 'container' for events in the plot, but an event in and of itself, since space and place are significant elements in the on-going negotiations regarding Jewish and Israeli identity. Films capture more than just the outward appearance of a place: they also record a web of unruly traces of economic, social, and political systems. Almost 2,000 years of Jewish exile created a gap between the idea of 'the Israeli place' and how the modern State of Israel has actualized that idea. Israeli cinema contains layered expressions of this issue, and, in this book, place and space function both as the subject matter of the analysis and as a theoretical tool. This innovative perspective will enable readers to discern themes significant both to contemporary culture (maps, borders, checkpoints, and military zones) and Jewish mythology (garden, desert, water, Jerusalem, and sacred space). Place, Memory and Myth in Contemporary Israeli Cinema includes references to Israeli literature and art, and it interweaves observations from the fields of visual studies, cultural studies, mythology, and Jewish thought to create a thought-provoking analysis.
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|  | The Jewish Year Book 2013
Levy, Elkan; Taylor, Derek
For over 115 years, readers have been referring to The Jewish Year Book for information regarding Britain's Jewish community - the institutions, the organizations, the charities, contact details, and a who's who of personalities. The Jewish Year Book 2013 also provides details on: dates that matter in the Jewish calendar, award winners, anniversaries, obituaries, an overview of the position of Jews in countries outside Britain, happenings in Israel, the 2013 festivals and Sabbaths all over the country, and a 30-year Jewish calendar. The Jewish Year Book has always been meticulous in its research and widespread in its coverage. Also included in this volume are a series of articles which look back over the year gone by and the centuries gone by, including: the centenary of the appointment of Chief Rabbi Hertz * Jewish youth groups * the French Jewish community in London * the Jewish Leadership Council * Jewish chaplaincy.
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