Bringing together contributions from a diverse group of scholars, Volume XXX of Studies in Contemporary Jewry presents a multifaceted view of the subtle and intricate relations between Jews and their relationship to place. The symposium covers Europe, the Middle East, and North America from the 18th century to the 21st.

Awarded the Texas State Historical Association's Coral Horton Tullis Memorial Prize; presented March 2005 Despite controversies over current educational practices, Texas boasts a rich and vibrant bilingual tradition-and not just for Spanish-English instruction, but for Czech, German, Polish, and Dutch as well. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Texas educational policymakers embraced, ignored, rejected, outlawed, then once again embraced this tradition. In The Strange Career of Bilingual Education in Texas, author Carlos Blanton traces the educational policies and their underlying rationales, from Stephen F. Austin's proposal in the 1830s to "Mexicanize" Anglo children by teaching them Spanish along with English and French, through the 1981 passage of the most encompassing bilingual education law in the state's history. Blanton draws on primary materials, such as the handwritten records of county administrators and the minutes of state education meetings, and presents the Texas experience in light of national trends and movements, such as Progressive Education, the Americanization Movement, and the Good Neighbor Movement. By tracing the many changes that eventually led to the re-establishment of bilingual education in its modern form in the 1960s and the 1981 passage of a landmark state law, Blanton reconnects Texas with its bilingual past. CARLOS KEVIN BLANTON, an assistant professor of history at Texas A&M University, earned his Ph.D. from Rice University. His research in Mexican American educational history has been published in journals such as the Pacific Historical Review and Social Science Quarterly.

An estimated forty thousand Jews were murdered during the Russian Civil War between 1918 and 1922. As the Dust of the Earth examines the Yiddish and Russian literary response to the violence (pogroms) and the relief effort, exploring both the poetry of catastrophe and the documentation of catastrophe and care. Brilliantly weaving together narrative fiction, poetry, memoirs, newspaper articles, and documentary, Harriet Murav argues that poets and pogrom investigators were doing more than recording the facts of violence and expressing emotions in response to it. They were interrogating what was taking place through a central concept familiar from their everyday lifeworld—hefker, or abandonment. Hefker shaped the documentation of catastrophe by Jewish investigators at pogrom sites impossibly tasked with producing comprehensive reports of chaos. Hefker also became a framework for Yiddish writers to think through such incomprehensible violence by creating new forms of poetry. Focusing less on the perpetrators and more on the responses to the pogroms, As the Dust of the Earth offers a fuller understanding of the seismic effects of such organized violence and a moving testimony to the resilience of survivors to process and cope with catastrophe.

Catastrophe and Utopia studies the biographical trajectories, intellectual agendas, and major accomplishments of select Jewish intellectuals during the age of Nazism, and the partly simultaneous, partly subsequent period of incipient Stalinization. By focusing on the relatively underexplored region of Central and Eastern Europe – which was the primary centre of Jewish life prior to the Holocaust, served as the main setting of the Nazi genocide, but also had notable communities of survivors – the volume offers significant contributions to a European Jewish intellectual history of the twentieth century. Approaching specific historical experiences in their diverse local contexts, the twelve case studies explore how Jewish intellectuals responded to the unprecedented catastrophe, how they renegotiated their utopian commitments and how the complex relationship between the two evolved over time. They analyze proximate Jewish reactions to the most abysmal discontinuity represented by the Judeocide while also revealing more subtle lines of continuity in Jewish thinking. Ferenc Laczó is assistant professor in History at Maastricht University and Joachim von Puttkamer is professor of Eastern European History at Friedrich Schiller University Jena and director of the Imre Kertész Kolleg.

Dan Miron—widely recognized as one of the world's leading experts on modern Jewish literatures—begins this study by surveying and critiquing previous attempts to define a common denominator unifying the various modern Jewish literatures. He argues that these prior efforts have all been trapped by the need to see these literatures as a continuum. Miron seeks to break through this impasse by acknowledging discontinuity as the staple characteristic of modern Jewish writing. These literatures instead form a complex of independent, yet touching, components related through contiguity. From Continuity to Contiguity offers original insights into modern Hebrew, Yiddish, and other Jewish literatures, including a new interpretation of Franz Kafka's place within them and discussions of Sholem Aleichem, Sh. Y. Abramovitsh, Akhad ha'am, M. Y. Berditshevsky, Kh. N. Bialik, and Y. L. Peretz.

In the Face of Adversity explores the dynamics of translating texts that articulate particular notions of adverse circumstances. The chapters illustrate how literary records of often painful experiences and dissenting voices are at risk of being stripped of their authenticity when not carefully handled by the translator; how cultural moments in which the translation of a text that would have otherwise fallen into oblivion instead gave rise to a translator who enabled its preservation while ultimately coming into their own as an author as a result; and how the difficulties the translator faces in intercultural or transnational constellations in which prejudice plays a role endangers projects meant to facilitate mutual understanding. The authors address translation as a project of making available and preserving a corpus of texts that would otherwise be in danger of becoming censored, misperceived or ignored. They look at translation and adaptation as a project of curating textual models of personal, communal or collective perseverance, and they offer insights into the dynamics of cultural inclusion and exclusion through a series of theoretical frameworks, as well as through a set of concrete case studies drawn from different cultural and historical contexts. The collection also explores some of the venues that artists have pursued by transferring artistic expressions from one medium into another in order to preserve and disseminate important experiences in different cultural settings, media and arts.

Around the beginning of the twentieth century, Jewish writers and artists across Europe began depicting fellow Jews as savages or "primitive" tribesmen. Primitivism—the European appreciation of and fascination with so-called "primitive," non-Western peoples who were also subjugated and denigrated—was a powerful artistic critique of the modern world and was adopted by Jewish writers and artists to explore the urgent questions surrounding their own identity and status in Europe as insiders and outsiders. Jewish primitivism found expression in a variety of forms in Yiddish, Hebrew, and German literature, photography, and graphic art, including in the work of figures such as Franz Kafka, Y.L. Peretz, S. An-sky, Uri Zvi Greenberg, Else Lasker-Schüler, and Moï Ver. In Jewish Primitivism, Samuel J. Spinner argues that these and other Jewish modernists developed a distinct primitivist aesthetic that, by locating the savage present within Europe, challenged the idea of the threatening savage other from outside Europe on which much primitivism relied: in Jewish primitivism, the savage is already there. This book offers a new assessment of modern Jewish art and literature and shows how Jewish primitivism troubles the boundary between observer and observed, cultured and "primitive," colonizer and colonized.