Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (1836-1895), the author of Venus in Furs, is known for his tales of dominant women and suffering men, if indeed he is remembered at all today. But in his own lifetime he was also famous as the author of vibrant tales from Galicia, the exotic eastern edge of the Austrian empire, where he championed the cause of the region's most oppressed minorities, the Ruthenians and the Jews. This collection focuses on some of his better-known Jewish tales. Sacher-Masoch's unusual ability to capture the essence of a person or place with a telling detail brings this vanished world of Galician Jewry back to life in all its splendor and all its squalor, mixing the grays, browns, and blacks of European Realism with the bright, sparkling colors of legend, myth, fairy tale, and tradition. Long forgotten in the German and English-speaking countries, his work is currently enjoying a modest revival among scholars and general readers alike.

Galicia was created at the first partition of Poland in 1772 and disappeared in 1918. Yet, in slightly over a century, the idea of Galicia came to have meaning for both the peoples who lived there and the Habsburg government that ruled it. Indeed, its memory continues to exercise a powerful fascination for those who live in its former territories and for the descendants of those who emigrated out of Galicia. The idea of Galicia was largely produced by the cultures of two cities, Lviv and Cracow. Making use of travelers' accounts, newspaper reports, and literary works, Wolff engages such figures as Emperor Joseph II, Metternich, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Ivan Franko, Stanisław Wyspiański, Tadeusz "Boy" Żeleński, Isaac Babel, Martin Buber, and Bruno Schulz. He shows the exceptional importance of provincial space as a site for the evolution of cultural meanings and identities, and analyzes the province as the framework for non-national and multi-national understandings of empire in European history.

Klezmer is the first comprehensive study of the musical structure and social history of klezmer music--the music of Jewish musicians' guild of Eastern Europe. Author Walter Zev Feldman includes major written sources, as well as interviews with European-born klezmorim, conducted over a period of more than thirty years. Including musical analysis, Feldman draws upon the foundational collections of the late Tsarist and early Soviet periods, plus rare klezmer and cantorial manuscripts.

This comparative attempt, intended for postgraduates and scholars of Eastern-Central Europe, investigates the political, economic, and cultural landscape of Habsburg Galicia and the Romanian Kingdom in the second half of the 19th century. Often, in historiography and in the public sphere alike, the two cases under study have been separately regarded as contexts that provided atypical answers to modernity, and parts of a region that has been regarded as atypical in itself. Recently, efforts have been made to integrate each of the cases in a post-imperial paradigm, identifying the complex interactions between their socio-political modernisation and historical memory. This book continues this trend by investigating for the first time the two cases together, as parts of a space of alterity, as labs of shifting ideologies and labels. The public figures and the institutions depicted in the book are physically located in Central and in Eastern Europe, but by sometimes competing experiences they are illustrative for several identities and historical realms, local, regional, and continental. Secondly, the current work addresses dilemmas related to Nationalism and nation building, for the sake of separating those discourses which reflected on civic nationalism from those which directed the public mind to the values of ethnic nationalism.

As Jewish writers, artists, and intellectuals made their way into Western European and Anglo-American cultural centers, they encountered a society obsessed with decadence. An avant-garde movement characterized by self-consciously artificial art and literature, philosophic pessimism, and an interest in nonnormative sexualities, decadence was also a smear, whereby Jews were viewed as the source of social and cultural decline. In The Jewish Decadence, Jonathan Freedman argues that Jewish engagement with decadence played a major role in the emergence of modernism and the making of Jewish culture from the 1870s to the present. The first to tell this sweeping story, Freedman demonstrates the centrality of decadence to the aesthetics of modernity and its inextricability from Jewishness. Freedman recounts a series of diverse and surprising episodes that he insists do not belong solely to the past, but instead reveal that the identification of Jewishness with decadence persists today.

By looking at the problem of complicity in political violence from a social versus a legal perspective, The Politics of Conflict offers readers new insight into the ways in which violence operates. To do this, Monica Ingber applies Gilles Deleuze's analysis of the novellas of Leopold Sacher-Masoch, particularly Venus in Furs, to the politics of violence in Iraq. Specifically, Ingber develops the concept of transubstantiatory violence, to think through the relationship between social complicity and political violence. By assessing politics in Iraq through the lens of transubstantiatory violence, it becomes possible to see how social complicity validates what would be otherwise viewed as illegitimate forms of violence. This legitimization of violence is addressed through the problematization of the modern correlation of security, law, and the social contract by exploring three key areas of socio-politics: state-making and nation-building, political movements, and the popular militia. A serious study that makes important contributions to political science, political philosophy, and conflict studies, The Politics of Conflict demonstrates an alternative view of violence that is provocative in its ability to destabilize dominant understandings of regime violence and the counter-reactions of opposition movements.

The work begins with an attempt to understand the philosophy of Nazism and its attendant anti-Semitism, as a necessary prelude to the study of philo-Semitism, which also displays a continuous tradition to the present day. Most of the non-Jewish authors in Germany in the nineteenth century expressed both anti-Semitic and philo-Semitic views (as did most of the German-Jewish authors of that same time); the following work deals with philo-Semitic texts by the non-Jewish authors of the period. The writer who provides the largest body of relevant material is Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, but works by Gutzkow, Bettine von Arnim, Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, Hebbel, Freytag, Raabe, Fontane, Grillparzer, Ebner-Eschenbach, Anzengruber, and Ferdinand von Saar are also examined, as are several tales by the Alsatian authors Erckmann and Chatrian. There is a short chapter on women and philo-Semitism. The conclusion draws attention to the feelings of guilt that are revealed in a number of the texts.