Henry Srebrnik began his research of the place of Birobidzhan in the ideological space of American Jews over a decade ago. I believe I have read the majority of his publications on this fascinating and little-known topic, and this new book, Dreams of Nationhood, is the best among them.-Gennady Estraikh, New York University Author of In Harness: Yiddish Writers' Romance with Communism.

Over the last quarter-century, Palestinian cinema has emerged as a major artistic force on the global scene. Deeply rooted in the historic struggles for national self-determination, this cinema is the single most important artistic expression of a much-maligned people. In Dreams of a Nation, filmmakers, critics and scholars discuss the extraordinary social and artistic significance of Palestinian film. It is the only volume of its kind in any language.

In Dreams for Lesotho: Independence, Foreign Assistance, and Development, John Aerni-Flessner studies the post-independence emergence of Lesotho as an example of the uneven ways in which people experienced development at the end of colonialism in Africa. The book posits that development became the language through which Basotho (the people of Lesotho) conceived of the dream of independence, both before and after the 1966 transfer of power. While many studies of development have focused on the perspectives of funding governments and agencies, Aerni-Flessner approaches development as an African-driven process in Lesotho. The book examines why both political leaders and ordinary people put their faith in development, even when projects regularly failed to alleviate poverty. He argues that the potential promise of development helped make independence real for Africans. The book utilizes government archives in four countries, but also relies heavily on newspapers, oral histories, and the archives of multilateral organizations like the World Bank. It will interest scholars of decolonization, development, empire, and African and South African history.

Kelley unearths freedom dreams in this exciting history of renegade intellectuals and artists of the African diaspora in the twentieth century. Focusing on the visions of activists from C. L. R. James to Aime Cesaire and Malcolm X, Kelley writes of the hope that Communism offered, the mindscapes of Surrealism, the transformative potential of radical feminism, and of the four-hundred-year-old dream of reparations for slavery and Jim Crow. From'the preeminent historian of black popular culture' (Cornel West), an inspiring work on the power of imagination to transform society.

The nine essays in this volume deal with several well known French authors through the ages - for example Descartes, Voltaire, Mme de Staël, Nerval, Verlaine - and explore the problematic relationship between dreams and literature. Generally speaking, contributors are interested in the production of literary meaning. How does various dream material, ranging from the traditional dream to visions and hallucinations and day dreams, come to be? And how is the dream image transformed into discourse? What exactly is the relationship between dream and narrative? Each essay focuses on a different author and different period, ranging from the Middle Ages to the late nineteenth-century, but also takes a unique critical and theoretical approach. What the contributors have in common, though, is an analytical, sensemaking strategy that characterizes the interpretation of dreams through the ages, from ancients such as Artemidorus and Cicero to modern thinkers such as Freud. Most of the texts studied here, from the Chanson de Roland to Chateaubriand's Mémoires d'outre-tombe, lend themselves to this type of approach because they promote narrative unity. So too do Voltaire, Mme de Staël, Nerval and Verlaine. Many if not most texts, however, in the end, turn out to be not quite so tightly-knit as one may have supposed at first and, in the case of Agrippa d'Aubigné and Descartes, the reader is in for several surprises when the normal course of events leading from dream to text, from signifier to signified, is interrupted and subverted.

National Dreams is an incisive study of the most persistent icons and stories in Canadian history.

While a number of books and articles have been written about Jewish Communist organizations and their supporters in particular countries, an academic treatment of the overall movement per se has yet to be published. A Vanished Ideology examines the politics of the Jewish Communist movement in Australia, Canada, Great Britain, South Africa, and the United States. Though officially part of the larger world Communist movement, it developed its own specific ideology, which was infused as much by Jewish sources as it was inspired by the Bolshevik revolution. The Yiddish language groups, especially, were interconnected through international movements such as the World Jewish Cultural Union. Jewish Communists were able to communicate, disseminate information, and debate issues such as Jewish nationality and statehood independently of other Communists, and Jewish Communism remained a significant force in Jewish life until the mid-1950s.