Synopses & Reviews
Before widescale emigration in the early 1960s, North Africa's Jewish communities were among the largest in the world. Without Jewish emigrants from North Africa, Israel's dynamic growth would simply not have occured. North African Jews, also called Maghribi, strengthed the new Israeli state through their settlements, often becoming the victims of Arab-Israeli conflicts and terrorist attacks. Their contribution and struggles are, in many ways, akin to the challenges emigrants from the former Soviet Union are currently encountering in Israel. Today, these North African Jewish communities are a vital force in Israeli society and politics as well as in France and Quebec.
In the first major political history of North African Jewry, Michael Laskier paints a compelling picture of three Third World Jewish communities, tracing their exposure to modernization and their relations with the Muslims and the European settlers. Perhaps the most extraordinary feature of this volume is its astonishing array of primary sources. Laskier draws on a wide range of archives in Israel, Europe, and the United States and on personal interviews with former community leaders, Maghribi Zionists, and Jewish outsiders who lived and worked among North Africa's Jews to recreate the experiences and development of these communities.Among the subjects covered:
--Jewish conditions before and during colonial penetration by the French and Spanish;
--anti-Semitism in North Africa, as promoted both by European settlers and Maghribi nationalists;
--the precarious position of Jews amidst the struggle between colonized Muslims and European colonialists;
--the impact of pogroms in the 1930s and 1940s and the Vichy/Nazi menace;
--internal Jewish communal struggles due to the conflict between the proponents of integration, and of emigration to other lands, and, later, the communal self-liquidiation process;the role of clandestine organizations, such as the Mossad, in organizing for self-defense and illegal immigration;and, more generally, the history of the North African `aliyaand Zionist activity from the beginning of the twentieth century onward.
A unique and unprecedented study, Michael Laskier's work will stand as the definitive account of North African Jewry for some time.
Review
"[An] outstanding pioneering effort. . . . Scholars and lay readers with an interest in 20th century North Africa, Jewish community life, Zionism, and political development will find much here that is new and useful. Highly recommended."
"Drawing on French government archives, documents of the Alliance Isralite Universelle (AIU), Israeli archives, interviews and published sources, Laskier provides a readable, well-integrated socio-political history of the Jewish communities of North Africa."
Review
"Drawing on French government archives, documents of the Alliance Isralite Universelle (AIU), Israeli archives, interviews and published sources, Laskier provides a readable, well-integrated socio-political history of the Jewish communities of North Africa." - Religious Studies Review
Review
“Post-Bellum, Pre-Harlem is a valuable book. These fifteen essays offer a broad overview of a rich and complicated period and complement the growing body of scholarship that takes as its focus this important and previously under-appreciated era.”
- The Journal of the Society for the Study of the MultiEthnic Literature of the United States,
Review
“ Post-Bellum, Pre-Harlem presents a compelling case for viewing the years between 1877 and 1919 as a time of outstanding literary and cultural achievement for African American men and women. . . . McCaskill and Gebhard are to be commended for the thought-provoking volume that identifies convincingly and documents meticulously the origins of "modern" African American literature. Based on solid scholarship and extensive interdisciplinary research, Post-Bellum, Pre-Harlem is a significant resource for scholars in the fields of African American history and literature. 8221;
-The Journal of African American History,
Review
“This is a rich portrait of a complex period that has been long neglected.”
-Booklist,
Review
“This is a vital reappraisal. These essays compellingly return to the often-neglected period known in African American history as 'The Nadir' to ensure that it will never again be seen as a cultural disappointment.”
-Carla Kaplan,author of Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters
Synopsis
The years between the collapse of Reconstruction and the end of World War I mark a pivotal moment in African American cultural production. Christened the “Post-Bellum-Pre-Harlem” era by the novelist Charles Chesnutt, these years look back to the antislavery movement and forward to the artistic flowering and racial self-consciousness of the Harlem Renaissance.
Post-Bellum, Pre-Harlem offers fresh perspectives on the literary and cultural achievements of African American men and women during this critically neglected, though vitally important, period of our nation's past. Using a wide range of disciplinary approaches, the sixteen scholars gathered here offer both a reappraisal and celebration of African American cultural production during these influential decades. Alongside discussions of political and artistic icons such as Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, Henry Ossawa Tanner, and James Weldon Johnson are essays revaluing figures such as the writers Paul and Alice Dunbar-Nelson, the New England painter Edward Mitchell Bannister, and Georgia-based activists Lucy Craft Laney and Emmanuel King Love.
Contributors explore an array of forms from fine art to anti-lynching drama, from sermons to ragtime and blues, and from dialect pieces and early black musical theater to serious fiction.
Contributors include: Frances Smith Foster, Carla L. Peterson, Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, Audrey Thomas McCluskey, Barbara Ryan, Robert M. Dowling, Barbara A. Baker, Paula Bernat Bennett, Philip J. Kowalski, Nikki L. Brown, Koritha A. Mitchell, Margaret Crumpton Winter, Rhonda Reymond, and Andrew J. Scheiber.
About the Author
Michael Laskier served as the Executive Director of the International Sephardic Educational Center, and is currently a professor of history and political science at Ashqelon College of Bar-Ilan University and Beit Berl College in Israel. He is the author of The Jews of Egypt 1920-1970: In the Midst of Zionism, Anti-Semitism, and the Middle East Conflict, also published by NYU Press.