The authors examine from different perspectives some of the most challenging themes in Mesopotamian religion such as gender switch of deities and changes of the status, roles and functions of goddesses. Julia M. Asher-Greve and Goodnick Westenholz incorporate recent scholarship from various disciplines into their analysis of textual and visual sources, representations in diverse media, theological strategies, typologies, and the place of image in religion and cult over a span of three millennia. Different types of syncretism (fusion, fission, mutation) resulted in transformation and homogenization of goddesses' roles and functions. The processes of syncretism (a useful heuristic tool for studying the evolution of religions and the attendant political and social changes) and gender switch were facilitated by the fluidity of personality due to multiple or similar divine roles and functions. Few goddesses kept their identity throughout the millennia. Individuality is rare in the iconography of goddesses while visual emphasis is on repetition of generic divine figures (hieros typos) in order to retain recognizability of divinity, where femininity is of secondary significance. This richly illustrated book demonstrates that goddesses were never marginalized or extrinsic and that their continuous presence in texts, cult images, rituals, and worship throughout Mesopotamian history is testimony to their powerful numinous impact. This richly illustrated book is the first in-depth analysis of goddesses and the changes they underwent from the earliest visual and textual evidence around 3000 BCE to the end of ancient Mesopotamian civilization in the Seleucid period. Goddesses in Context is a compelling contribution to Mesopotamian religion and history as well as to history, art history, history of religion and gender studies.

This study of media and migrant communities in Germany’s capital city is a “model of clarity and rigor in its arguments” (Martin Stokes, University of Chicago). In this innovative and thought-provoking study, Kira Kosnick explores the landscape of Turkish-language broadcasting in Berlin. From twenty-four-hour radio broadcasting in Turkish to programming on Germany’s national public broadcasting and local public access channels, Germany’s largest immigrant minority has made its presence felt in German media. Satellite dishes have appeared in migrant neighborhoods all over the city, giving viewers access to Kurdish channels and broadcasts from Turkey. Kosnick draws on interviews with producers, her own participation in production work, and analysis of programs to elaborate a new approach to “migrant media” in relation to the larger cultural and political spaces through which immigrant life is imagined and created.

"A huge and hugely significant collection of much of the best Holocaust scholarship to appear in the last half-century." --Kirkus Reviews "... magnificent... surely among the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's] greatest achievements to date.... The range of the essays is nothing short of breathtaking." --Jerusalem Post Fifty-four chapters by the world's most eminent Holocaust researchers probe topics such as Nazi politics, racial ideology, leadership, and bureaucracy; the phases of the Holocaust from definition to expropriation, ghettoization, deportation, and the death camps; Jewish leadership and resistance; the role of the Allies, the Axis, and neutral countries; the deeds of the rescuers; and the impact of the Holocaust on survivors.

It was the largest organized robbery in history: the systematic looting of Europe's Jews by the Nazis, in cooperation with most of the nations in Europe?Axis, Allied, and neutral. Award--winning journalist Richard Z. Chesnoff, one of the first reporters to break the story that Swiss banks had hoarded the assets of Holocaust victims, traveled to fourteen countries to research this heartbreaking, compelling story of human greed. Through exclusive interviews and information from hitherto classified files, Chesnoff tells a tragic tale, the vast scope of which is only beginning to be known. Revealing new details that many would prefer remained secret, Pack of Thieves describes the detective work used to trace Holocaust assets that continue to be hidden inside the financial systems of such Allied nations as France and the Netherlands. Daring, insightful, and necessary, Pack of Thieves is at once a fascinating piece of investigative journalism and an enraging account of one of history's greatest crimes.

This book highlights the growing divide in nineteenth-century intellectual circles between amateur and professional interest, and explores the institutional means whereby professional ascendancy was achieved in the broad field of studies of the past. It is concerned with how antiquarian 'gentlemen of leisure', pursuing their interests through local archaeological societies, were, by the end of the century, relegated to the sidelines of the now university-based discipline of history. At the same time it explores the theological as well as technical barriers which arrested the development of archaeology in this period. This is a notable contribution to the intellectual history of Victorian England, attending not simply to the ideas perpetrated by these communities of scholarship but to their social status, relating such social consideration to a more traditional intellectual history to create a new social history of ideas.