Yair Mintzker, an associate professor of history, joined the Princeton faculty in 2009 after earning his Ph.D. at Stanford University. He studies early modern and modern Germany, with a particular focus on the “Sattelzeit,” or the transitional period between the early modern age and the late modern age (1750-1850). This spring, Mintzker’s latest book, “The Many Deaths of Jew Süss: The Notorious Trial and Execution of an Eighteenth-Century Court Jew,” was published by Princeton University Press.(more…)
While working on a new piece, composer John Adams sometimes has to experience a deep sense of failure before his ideas really start to flow.
“You can win every prize in the book … but when you are alone with yourself in that room and what you are doing is not even worthy of a five-year-old — you can’t imagine how humiliating that is,” he told an audience in Sprague Memorial Hall on Oct. 16. “You have to get to that level of abject humility to finally get to point of being receptive, then ideas come. Usually when they come they’re dressed in extremely shabby clothes. You just have to go with it.” (more…)
More needs to be done to understand Hitler’s infamous autobiographical manifesto “Mein Kampf” to avoid a resurgence of anti-Semitism when its copyright expires in 2016, according to a holocaust historian.
Dr Jean-Marc Dreyfus, from The University of Manchester, says not enough is known about the book which preaches hatred against Jews, and why it is still popular in some parts of the world.
E-book sales of “Mein Kampf”, which gives a racist account of world history, have made the top spot on Amazon’s propaganda and political psychology chart and entered the top 20 bestselling iTunes politics and events titles.(more…)
A little-remembered Jewish culture in Germany and Austria between the 1870s and 1930s was a hotbed of ideas which drove the formation of the European Union, according to new research.
Literary and film scholar Dr Cathy Gelbin from The University of Manchester says cosmopolitan German speaking Jewish intellectuals, many of whom met in the coffee houses of Berlin, Vienna and Prague, were among the first to see their identity as European.
Her co-author on the Arts and Humanities Research Council funded study is the eminent cultural and literary historian Professor Sander Gilman from Emory University in Atlanta.(more…)
Scientist works toward molecular therapies for cardiovascular diseases
Born in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), Russia, to Jewish parents before the fall of the Soviet Union, Michael Simons, M.D., says a medical career was “sort of a default.” Anti-Semitism barred Jews from many scientific pursuits, so his parents, both doctors, encouraged his interest in medicine as the basis for a strong natural science education.
Simons’ family immigrated to Boston in 1978. Simons had begun a 6-year medical program immediately after high school in Russia, so he was admitted to Boston University School of Medicine as a third-year student, but he chose instead to start anew, as an undergraduate. “I thought, if I continue in a medical program, I’ll forever have an inadequate undergraduate education,” he says, speaking with a mild accent and an understated intensity. (more…)
Fears of terrorism in Europe and the United States have deteriorated into an irrational suspicion of Muslims, which will continue until the West turns its critical eye inward, argues University of Chicago professor Martha Nussbaum in her new book, The New Religious Intolerance: Overcoming the Politics of Fear in an Anxious Age.
While fear is an important natural emotion, its self-centered nature makes it susceptible to irrational distortions that are harmful to others, writes Nussbaum, the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics in the Law School and Philosophy. (more…)
