News feedsRecent Books by Members of the Parkes Institute
Fascism, Communism, Democracy: Hans Sahl and the Ideological Debates of the Twentieth Century
(Wallstein Verlag 2007)
Andrea Reiter has mapped Sahl's life and work, drawing on a wealth of material in the German Literary Archive.
Levene, Dan and Beno Rothenberg, A Metallurgical Gemara: Metals in the Jewish Sources (London: Institute for Archaeo-Metallurgical Studies, 2007)
The Metallurgical Gemara is the first in-depth exploration of evidence of the use of metals and related technologies within the classic Jewish literary sources.
The Land of the Body: Studies in Philo's Representation of Egypt Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen, 2007 XXVIII, 365 pages (Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament 208).
This book presents the first extended study of the representation of Egypt in the writings of Philo of Alexandria. Philo is a crucial witness, not only to the experiences of the Jews of Alexandria, but to the world of early Roman Egypt in general.
We Europeans? Mass-Observation, 'Race' and British Identity in the Twentieth Century (Ashgate, 2004)
We Europeans? is the first book-length study of the original mass observation project, and is also the first detailed historical study of the formation of ordinary people's 'racial' attitudes in Britain. Drawing upon historical, literary, cultural and anthropological approaches, and through analysis of the historical archive of Mass-Observation and the more recent material, Kushner provides fascinating insight into the everyday lives and formation of identities of ordinary people.
Tony Kushner and Donald Bloxham (eds.), The Holocaust: Critical Historical Approaches (Manchester 2004)
The Holocaust addresses the use of victim testimony and asks important questions: What function does recording the past serve for the victim? What do historians want from it? Are these two perspectives incompatible? It also examines the perpetrators of the Holocaust, and compares them to those responsible for other acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing in the early years of the twentieth century. In addition, it looks at the bystanders- considering the complexity and ambiguity at the heart of contemporary responses, especially within the western liberal democracies.
Tony Kushner and Nadia Valman (eds.), Philosemitism, Antisemitism and 'the Jews' : Perspectives from Antiquity to the Twentieth Century (London 2004)
Philosemitism, Antisemitism and 'the Jews' is designed to examine both the specific and broader themes of Parkes' life work in relation to tolerance and intolerance. From antiquity to today, Jews have often been defined as 'aliens'; these essays consider the effects of such legislative and socio-cultural exclusion on the self-definition of the dominant society.
Dan Levene, A Corpus of Magic Bowls: Incantation Texts in Jewish Aramaic from Late Antiquity (London 2003)