"Even my Dad had a hard time finding a place when he and my mother were first married...Momma was pregnant with Berenice, and he went to a woman who had a house. He asked if they could rent a place. She said, no, she couldn't rent to Jews. Dad said, 'Well, now I know why Jesus was born in a manger.'" --Ruth Matz McCrimmon, A Homeland in the West Rather than a history of Utah Jews, this is a book of Utah Jewish histories. A Homeland in the West collects the stories and the voices of men and women drawn west by choice or by chance, people who made their way and earned their living in a culture often alien, occasionally hostile, sometimes welcoming. These are the stories of immigrants and explorers, artists and merchants, senators and soldiers. Culled from countless hours of oral histories comprising more than ninety current and archived interviews, Eileen Hallet Stone has gathered reminiscences that tell a tale of life in Utah from a seldom-heard perspective. These singular threads--supplemented with stirring photographs, traditional recipes, and a Yiddish glossary--weave a rich and varied tapestry of Utah's enduring Jewish heritage. Every page is a testament to the individuals who help create the state's collective history. Meet: * Solomon Nunes Carvalho, who was invited by Colonel John C. Frémont to join his final, near-fatal expedition across the Rocky Mountains in search of a viable route for the country's first transcontinental railroad. * The Auerbach brothers, who opened their first store in Salt Lake City in 1864 and who, by 1883 saw it become a mercantile enterprise worth half a million dollars in sales and real estate. * Simon Bamberger, who was elected governor in 1916--the first Democrat, first non-Mormon, and only Jew to hold the office. * Anna Rich Marks who made a fortune in real estate and mining and who at one point held the representatives of the Denver and Rio Grand Railroad at gunpoint--demanding they pay her price to cross her land. * Joel Shapiro, who, as a soldier during World War II, found himself in the detachment from his unit assigned to join the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp. With their own voices, in their own words, A Homeland in the West speaks to the dichotomy of living as 'gentiles' in Mormon 'Zion,' testifying to the ways in which memory and tradition, lifestyles and legacies layer together to form the whole of a person, the whole of a community.

As Senegal prepares to celebrate fifty years of independence from French colonial rule, academic and policy circles are engaged in a vigorous debate about its experience in nation building. An important aspect of this debate is the impact of globalization on Senegal, particularly the massive labor migration that began directly after independence. From Tokyo to Melbourne, from Turin to Buenos Aires, from to Paris to New York, 300,000 Senegalese immigrants are simultaneously negotiating their integration into their host society and seriously impacting the development of their homeland. This book addresses the modes of organization of transnational societies in the globalized context, and specifically the role of religion in the experience of migrant communities in Western societies. Abundant literature is available on immigrants from Latin America and Asia, but very little on Africans, especially those from French speaking countries in the United States. Ousmane Kane offers a case study of the growing Senegalese community in New York City. By pulling together numerous aspects (religious, ethnic, occupational, gender, generational, socio-economic, and political) of the experience of the Senegalese migrant community into an integrated analysis, linking discussion of both the homeland and host community, this book breaks new ground in the debate about postcolonial Senegal, Muslim globalization and diaspora studies in the United States. A leading scholar of African Islam, Ousmane Kane has also conducted extensive research in North America, Europe and Africa, which allows him to provide an insightful historical ethnography of the Senegalese transnational experience.

Homeland is Pulitzer Prize winning author Maharidge's biggest and most ambitious book yet, weaving together the disparate and contradictory strands of contemporary American society-common decency alongside race rage, the range of dissenting voices, and the roots of discontent that defy political affiliation. Here are American families who can no longer pay their medical bills, who've lost high-wage-earning jobs to NAFTA. And here are white supremacists who claim common ground with progressives. Maharidge's approach is rigorously historical, creating a tapestry of today as it is lived in America, a self-portrait that is shockingly different from what we're used to seeing and yet which rings of truth.

In A Traveling Homeland, Daniel Boyarin makes the case that the Babylonian Talmud is a diasporist manifesto producing and defining the practices that constitute Jewish diasporic identity in the form of textual, interpretive communities built around talmudic study.

What is a homeland and when does it become a national territory? Why have so many people been willing to die for such places throughout the twentieth century? What is the essence of the Promised Land? Following the acclaimed and controversial The Invention of the Jewish People, Shlomo Sand examines the mysterious sacred land that has become the site of the longest-running national struggle of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The Invention of the Land of Israel deconstructs the age-old legends surrounding the Holy Land and the prejudices that continue to suffocate it. Sand’s account dissects the concept of “historical right” and tracks the creation of the modern concept of the “Land of Israel” by nineteenth-century Evangelical Protestants and Jewish Zionists. This invention, he argues, not only facilitated the colonization of the Middle East and the establishment of the State of Israel; it is also threatening the existence of the Jewish state today.

A historical tour de force, The Invention of the Jewish People offers a groundbreaking account of Jewish and Israeli history. Exploding the myth that there was a forced Jewish exile in the first century at the hands of the Romans, Israeli historian Shlomo Sand argues that most modern Jews descend from converts, whose native lands were scattered across the Middle East and Eastern Europe. In this iconoclastic work, which spent nineteen weeks on the Israeli bestseller list and won the coveted Aujourd'hui Award in France, Sand provides the intellectual foundations for a new vision of Israel's future.

This "profound and provocative" work by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Disgraced and American Dervish followsan immigrant father and his son as they search for belonging—in post-Trump America, and with each other (Kirkus Reviews). "Passionate, disturbing, unputdownable." —Salman Rushdie ​ A deeply personal work about identity and belonging in a nation coming apart at the seams, Homeland Elegies blends fact and fiction to tell an epic story of longing and dispossession in the world that 9/11 made. Part family drama, part social essay, part picaresque novel, at its heart it is the story of a father, a son, and the country they both call home. ​Ayad Akhtar forges a new narrative voice to capture a country in which debt has ruined countless lives and the gods of finance rule, where immigrants live in fear, and where the nation's unhealed wounds wreak havoc around the world. Akhtar attempts to make sense of it all through the lens of a story about one family, from a heartland town in America to palatial suites in Central Europe to guerrilla lookouts in the mountains of Afghanistan, and spares no one—least of all himself—in the process. One of the New York Times 10 Best Books of the Year One of Barack Obama's Favorite Books of 2020 Finalist for the 2021 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction A Best Book of 2020 * Washington Post * O Magazine * New York Times Book Review * Publishers Weekly