Synopses & Reviews
"The Socialist Register is compulsory reading for people who refuse to be resigned to the idea that there can be no alternative to our unacceptable society."
--Daniel Singer, author of Whose Millennium?
When mainstream commentators talk about the future, they tend to predict dire doomsday apocalypses or spin wild techno-fantasies. In spite of their radically hi-tech edge, these futuristic scenarios usually assume that current social structures will persist.
Necessary and Unnecessary Utopias points toward a very different way of thinking about the future. While rejecting schematic blueprints, this book reasserts the need for a bold and revolutionary social imagination, one aimed at saner ways of living and more rational ways of organizing society.
Taking up such vital topics as work and its structure, democracy and the state, localism and internationalism, relations between the sexes, and technology and its social uses, Necessary and Unnecessary Utopias makes the case that a socialist vision of the future remains not only realistic but necessary.
More than one dozen internationally celebrated scholars, including Terry Eagleton, Frigga Haug, Johanna Brenner, Kate Soper, Carl Boggs, and Norman Geras, are contributors.
Review
“Carefully documented with particular reliance on the Ladino press, this book addresses a shortcoming involving both scholarly and “communal” engagement. Ben-Ur underscores the failure of academics and Ashkenazic Jews to acknowledge Sephardic Jews, which has resulted in “historic oblivion.””
“The book contains a great deal of information about relatively recent Sephardic immigration, much of it from interviews. . .and her research in obscure newspaper sand other printed and manuscripted sources that will be of value to any person who attempts such a history, which is surely one of the more apparent gaps in American Jewish history.”
“A landmark contribution to the history of those Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews who were all too often invisible to the “mainstream” Jewish community and to the historiography of American Judaism.”
“Now, more than five centuries later, dozens of musicians, writers, poets . . . are reclaiming that culture to create a veritable Sephardic renaissance. Many artists mine Sephardic culture because they want to popularize a lesser-known Jewish heritage.”
“Now, more than five centuries later, dozens of musicians, writers, poets . . . are reclaiming that culture to create a veritable Sephardic renaissance. Many artists mine Sephardic culture because they want to popularize a lesser-known Jewish heritage.”
Synopsis
Synopsis
A significant number of Sephardic Jews, tracing their remote origins to Spain and Portugal, immigrated to the United States from Turkey, Greece, and the Balkans from 1880 through the 1920s, joined by a smaller number of Mizrahi Jews arriving from Arab lands. Most Sephardim settled in New York, establishing the leading Judeo-Spanish community outside the Ottoman Empire. With their distinct languages, cultures, and rituals, Sephardim and Arab-speaking Mizrahim were not readily recognized as Jews by their Ashkenazic coreligionists. At the same time, they forged alliances outside Jewish circles with Hispanics and Arabs, with whom they shared significant cultural and linguistic ties.
The failure among Ashkenazic Jews to recognize Sephardim and Mizrahim as fellow Jews continues today. More often than not, these Jewish communities are simply absent from portrayals of American Jewry. Drawing on primary sources such as the Ladino (Judeo-Spanish) press, archival documents, and oral histories, Sephardic Jews in America offers the first book-length academic treatment of their history in the United States, from 1654 to the present, focusing on the age of mass immigration.
About the Author
Aviva Ben-Ur is Associate Professor of Judaic and Near Eastern Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she also serves as Adjunct Associate Professor in the history department and the Spanish and Portuguese programs. She is the author of A Ladino Legacy: The Judeo-Spanish Collection of Louis N. Levy.