Books published by Academic Studies Press

A lyrical and riveting coming of age story set among early twentieth-century settlers brought to an almost unknown Jewish farming experiment in an isolated corner of Brazil. This autobiographical novel is filled with drama, joy, disasters, romance, and humour.

The political and social turmoil of the twentieth century took Magda Nachman from a privileged childhood in St. Petersburg to a refugee existence during the Russian Civil War, then with her husband to the hardships of emigre Berlin in the 1920s and 1930s, and finally to Bombay, where she established herself as an important artist.

The first work in any language that offers both an overarching exploration of the flight and evacuation of Soviet Jews viewed at the macro level, and a personal history of one Soviet Jewish family. It is also the first study to examine Jewish life in the Northern Caucasus, a Soviet region that history scholars have rarely addressed.

While the Soviets could affect Tajiks' social status substantially, they failed in changing their ideology. Instead, they became involved in a conflict that pitted Soviet Tajiks against radical Muslim Tajiks. This volume traces the conflict from its roots in Bukhara to the establishment of an independent secular Tajik state (1997).

Vladimir Sorokin is the most prominent and the most controversial contemporary Russian writer. Having emerged as a prose writer in Moscow's artistic underground in the late 1970s and early 80s, he became visible to a broader Russian audience only in the mid-1990s, with texts shocking the moralistic expectations of traditionally minded readers.

Examines contemporary Russian cinema as a new visual economy, emerging over three decades after the Soviet collapse. Focusing on debates and films exhibited at Russian and US public festivals where the films have premiered, the volume's contributors examine issues in Russia's transition.

Examines contemporary Russian cinema as a new visual economy, emerging over three decades after the Soviet collapse. Focusing on debates and films exhibited at Russian and US public festivals where the films have premiered, the volume's contributors examine issues in Russia's transition.

A captivating memoir that bridges the past with the present, as we learn about the author's grandparents' drives to escape the Jewish worlds of Tsarist Russia, her immigrant parents' hopes for their marriage in America, and now her turn to reach for meaning and purpose: each a generation of aspirations - first theirs, now hers.

Examines how Russian writers respond to the burden of living with anxieties about their creative outputs, and, ultimately, about their own inevitable finitude. The book describes the lives and choices that concrete individuals and their literary characters must face in order to preserve their integrity while attempting to achieve fame and success.

Addresses the conundrum of how Jewish believers in the divine character of the Sinaitic revelation confront the essential questions raised by academic biblical studies. The first part is an anthology of rabbinic sources, from the medieval period to the present. The second part is a series of essays by contemporary rabbis and scholars.

Zvi Preigerzon (1900-1969), a Hebrew writer in the Soviet Union, wrote this book in complete secrecy, to the extent that he even hid its existence from his own family. The book is about the Jewish community in Hadiach, a small town in Ukraine where Shneur Zalman Schneerson, the founder of the Chabad movement, is buried.

Investigates the impact of the Russian Revolution in Norway and Sweden, and explores the High North - the Revolution and Civil War in Northern Russia and the radicalization of the workers' movement of Northern Norway. Representations of the Russian Revolution at exhibitions and on the big screen are also discussed.

Leading figures at the dawn of the sixteenth-century Reformation commonly faced the charge of ""judaizing"". 72 In His Name concerns the changing views of four such men starting with their kabbalistic treatment of the 72 divine names of angels.

Having exploded on the margins of Europe, Chornobyl marked the end of the Soviet Unionand tied the era of postmodernism in Western Europe with nuclear consciousness. The Post-Chornobyl Library becomes a metaphor of a new Ukrainian literature of the 1990s, which emerges out of the Chornobyl nuclear trauma.

Provides a compilation of articles and chapters by a dispute resolution scholar who has made remarkable contributions over his thirty-year career. Professor Abramson has focused his research and practice on parties trying to resolve their own disputes.

Offers a study of a multicultural city in times when all norms collapse. Ola Hnatiuk presents a meticulously documented portrait of Lviv's diverse intelligentsia during World War Two. She employs diverse sources in several languages to tell the story of the city and to challenge the national narratives dominant in Central and Eastern Europe.

Through thoughtful and candid recollections of the challenges they faced in becoming accepted academics, sixteen scholars of American Jewish history retell the story of how the study of Judaism rose from being long dismissed as an amateurish enterprise not worthy of serious consideration in the world of ideas to a respected field in communication with all humanities scholars.

Based on the life of a young child from a distinguished Torah lineage in Poland, and crafted from a variety of sources and languages, this book illustrates the inner resources of the refugee community that made possible survival with dignity, and tells the story of a terrifying journey to Vilna, Kobe, and Shanghai.

This critical reader aims to provide precisely such a resource for students, scholars, and the merely curious who wish to delve deeper into landmarks of the genre, discover innumerable lesser-known gems in the process, and understand why science fiction came to play such a crucial role in Russian society, politics, technology, and culture for more than a century.

This bilingual collection in honor of the great scholar and writer Alexander Zholkovsky brings together new work from forty-four leading scholars in nine countries. Like Zholkovsky's oeuvre, this volume covers a broad range of subjects and employs an array of approaches.

If a history of Russian-Jewish literature in the twentieth century were ever to be written, it would reveal a number of puzzling gaps. One is Andrei Sobol, a truly significant writer who has not received due scholarly attention. It is this scholarly gap that has led Vladimir Khazan to write this volume, a comprehensive and exhaustive account of Sobol's public, literary, and artistic activities.

A New Life in Israel, 1950-1954 is the last book in the trilogy about Shimon Redlich's childhood and adolescence. A New Life in Israel focuses on his first years in the Jewish state. The book bears witness to the adjustment of one young immigrant-one among thousands-to the realities of a new life in Israel.

The dynamics of Jewish religious continuity and change are presented in this book through a group of distinguished scholars from the fields of sociology, history, medicine, religion, and Jewish studies examining key cases and themes in religious life, emphasizing illustrations of the maintenance of tradition and facing of trends pressing for transformation.

Deals with the spatial concepts of Lithuania and other geo-images that either "competed" in the nineteenth century with the term Lithuania or were of a different taxonomic level (Samogitia, Prussia's Lithuania, Lithuania Minor, Poland, etc.). The Russian, Lithuanian, Polish, Belarusian, Jewish, and German geo-images of this territory are analyzed in separate chapters of this volume.

Leading scholars use the lenses of history, sociology, political science, psychology, philosophy, religion, and literature to examine, disentangle, and remove the disguises of the many forms of antisemitism and anti-Zionism that have inhabited or targeted the English-speaking world in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Two major dividing lines have formed the megastructure of Eurasia, determining the historical epochs of the continent's peoples. With the swift development of horse domestication and horseback riding, the nomads moved to the forefront of Eurasian history. This book focuses on the tangle of problems of these nomadic peoples' history.

How did medieval Jewish scholars, from Saadia Gaon to Rabbi Isaac Abarbanel, imagine a world that has experienced salvation? Is the Messianic reality identical to our current world, or is it a new world entirely? This work explores how a rationalist can remain calm in light of the seductive promises of the various apocalyptic teachings of Antiquity regarding the Messianic world.

This book explores how the Italian commedia dell'arte has profoundly affected the Russian artistic imagination for over three hundred years, providing a source of inspiration for leading artists as diverse as Nikolai Gogol, Evgenii Vakhtangov, Vladimir Nabokov and the pop star Alla Pugacheva.

The book deals with identity in general and with Jewish identity in particular. The book rejects rigid and one-sided notions of Jewish identity and offers a historical-cultural analysis of the identity discourse.