Black in White Space

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Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 0226826414
Total Pages : 299 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (268 download)

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Book Synopsis Black in White Space by : Elijah Anderson

Download or read book Black in White Space written by Elijah Anderson and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2023-04-05 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the vital voice of Elijah Anderson, Black in White Space sheds fresh light on the dire persistence of racial discrimination in our country. A birder strolling in Central Park. A college student lounging on a university quad. Two men sitting in a coffee shop. Perfectly ordinary actions in ordinary settings—and yet, they sparked jarring and inflammatory responses that involved the police and attracted national media coverage. Why? In essence, Elijah Anderson would argue, because these were Black people existing in white spaces. In Black in White Space, Anderson brings his immense knowledge and ethnography to bear in this timely study of the racial barriers that are still firmly entrenched in our society at every class level. He focuses in on symbolic racism, a new form of racism in America caused by the stubbornly powerful stereotype of the ghetto embedded in the white imagination, which subconsciously connects all Black people with crime and poverty regardless of their social or economic position. White people typically avoid Black space, but Black people are required to navigate the “white space” as a condition of their existence. From Philadelphia street-corner conversations to Anderson’s own morning jogs through a Cape Cod vacation town, he probes a wealth of experiences to shed new light on how symbolic racism makes all Black people uniquely vulnerable to implicit bias in police stops and racial discrimination in our country. An unwavering truthteller in our national conversation on race, Anderson has shared intimate and sharp insights into Black life for decades. Vital and eye-opening, Black in White Space will be a must-read for anyone hoping to understand the lived realities of Black people and the structural underpinnings of racism in America.

Out on a Ledge

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Publisher : Wicker Park Press Book
ISBN 13 : 9780978967635
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (676 download)

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Book Synopsis Out on a Ledge by : Eva Libitzky

Download or read book Out on a Ledge written by Eva Libitzky and published by Wicker Park Press Book. This book was released on 2010 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An account of one woman's uncommon resourcefulness and perseverance, Out on a Ledge uncovers some of the secrets of Jewish suffering and survival in the twentieth century. Related in her plainspoken voice, it will be of considerable interest both to scholars and the general public. This book owes much to a recently opened trove of documents on the Holocaust, 150 million pages that were digitized and made accessible to researchers by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Fred Rosenbaum was among an international team of twelve scholars assembled by the USHMM to examine and analyze the archive in the summer of 2009. It revealed a great deal of information about Eva Libitzky and her times. Original documents, including transport lists, medical records, and identity cards are reproduced in the appendix of this volume.

Harlem, the Making of a Ghetto

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Publisher : Ivan R. Dee Publisher
ISBN 13 : 9781566631044
Total Pages : 262 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (31 download)

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Book Synopsis Harlem, the Making of a Ghetto by : Gilbert Osofsky

Download or read book Harlem, the Making of a Ghetto written by Gilbert Osofsky and published by Ivan R. Dee Publisher. This book was released on 1996 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A great many books have been written about Harlem, but for social history none has surpassed Gilbert Osofsky's account of how a pleasant, pastoral upper-middle-class suburb of Manhattan turned into an appalling black slum within forty years. Mr. Osofsky sets his chronicle against the background of pre-Harlem black life in New York City and in the context of the radical changes in race relations in America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He traces Harlem's change to the largest segregated neighborhood in the nation and then its fall to a slum. Throughout he neatly balances statistics and humanly revealing details. "A careful and important study.... Osofsky at once takes his place alongside James Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay, and others who have looked at Harlem at close range." John Hope Franklin. "A pioneering scholarly achievement.... Although the subject engages his compassion, his presentation is rigorously straightforward and unsentimental and therefore all the more valuable as social analysis." New York Times Book Review"

Urban Injustice

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Publisher : Seven Stories Press
ISBN 13 : 1609800346
Total Pages : 141 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (98 download)

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Book Synopsis Urban Injustice by : David Hilfiker

Download or read book Urban Injustice written by David Hilfiker and published by Seven Stories Press. This book was released on 2011-01-04 with total page 141 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: David Hilfiker has committed his life, both as a writer and a doctor, to people in need, writing about the urban poor with whom he’s spent all his days for the last two decades. In Urban Injustice, he explains in beautiful and simple language how the myth that the urban poor siphon off precious government resources is contradicted by the facts, and how most programs help some of the people some of the time but are almost never sufficiently orchestrated to enable people to escape the cycle of urban poverty. Hilfiker is able to present a surprising history of poverty programs since the New Deal, and shows that many of the biggest programs were extremely successful at attaining the goals set out for them. Even so, Hilfiker reveals, most of the best and biggest programs were "social insurance" programs, like Medicare and Social Security, that primarily assisted the middle class, not the poor. Whereas, "public assistance" programs, directed specifically towards the poor, were often extremely effective as far as they went, but were instituted with far less ambitious goals. In a book that is short, sweet, and completely without academic verboseness or pretension, Hilfiker makes a clear path through the complex history of societal poverty, the obvious weaknesses and surprising strengths of societal responses to poverty thus far, and offers an analysis of models of assistance from around the world that might perhaps assist us in making a better world for our children once we decide that is what we must do.

Ghetto

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Publisher : Macmillan + ORM
ISBN 13 : 1429942754
Total Pages : 308 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (299 download)

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Book Synopsis Ghetto by : Mitchell Duneier

Download or read book Ghetto written by Mitchell Duneier and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2016-04-19 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Notable Book of 2016 Winner of the Zócalo Public Square Book Prize On March 29, 1516, the city council of Venice issued a decree forcing Jews to live in il geto—a closed quarter named for the copper foundry that once occupied the area. The term stuck. In this sweeping and original account, Mitchell Duneier traces the idea of the ghetto from its beginnings in the sixteenth century and its revival by the Nazis to the present. As Duneier shows, we cannot comprehend the entanglements of race, poverty, and place in America today without recalling the ghettos of Europe, as well as earlier efforts to understand the problems of the American city. Ghetto is the story of the scholars and activists who tried to achieve that understanding. As Duneier shows, their efforts to wrestle with race and poverty cannot be divorced from their individual biographies, which often included direct encounters with prejudice and discrimination in the academy and elsewhere. Using new and forgotten sources, Duneier introduces us to Horace Cayton and St. Clair Drake, graduate students whose conception of the South Side of Chicago established a new paradigm for thinking about Northern racism and poverty in the 1940s. We learn how the psychologist Kenneth Clark subsequently linked Harlem’s slum conditions with the persistence of black powerlessness, and we follow the controversy over Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s report on the black family. We see how the sociologist William Julius Wilson redefined the debate about urban America as middle-class African Americans increasingly escaped the ghetto and the country retreated from racially specific remedies. And we trace the education reformer Geoffrey Canada’s efforts to transform the lives of inner-city children with ambitious interventions, even as other reformers sought to help families escape their neighborhoods altogether. Duneier offers a clear-eyed assessment of the thinkers and doers who have shaped American ideas about urban poverty—and the ghetto. The result is a valuable new estimation of an age-old concept.

Lodz Ghetto

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Publisher : Penguin (Non-Classics)
ISBN 13 : 9780140132281
Total Pages : 526 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (322 download)

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Book Synopsis Lodz Ghetto by : Alan Adelson

Download or read book Lodz Ghetto written by Alan Adelson and published by Penguin (Non-Classics). This book was released on 1991 with total page 526 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offers a powerful testimonial to the everyday horrors and the enduring human spirit present in Lodz Ghetto

The Ghetto

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Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 0429976143
Total Pages : 341 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (299 download)

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Book Synopsis The Ghetto by : Ray Hutchison

Download or read book The Ghetto written by Ray Hutchison and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-04-19 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book discusses more general consideration of marginalized urban spaces and peoples around the globe. It considers the question: Is the formation and later dissolution of the Jewish ghetto an appropriate model for understanding the experience of other ethnic or racial populations?

White Space, Black Hood

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Publisher : Beacon Press
ISBN 13 : 080700037X
Total Pages : 322 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (7 download)

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Book Synopsis White Space, Black Hood by : Sheryll Cashin

Download or read book White Space, Black Hood written by Sheryll Cashin and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 2021-09-14 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A 2021 C. Wright Mills Award Finalist Shows how government created “ghettos” and affluent white space and entrenched a system of American residential caste that is the linchpin of US inequality—and issues a call for abolition. The iconic Black hood, like slavery and Jim Crow, is a peculiar American institution animated by the ideology of white supremacy. Politicians and people of all colors propagated “ghetto” myths to justify racist policies that concentrated poverty in the hood and created high-opportunity white spaces. In White Space, Black Hood, Sheryll Cashin traces the history of anti-Black residential caste—boundary maintenance, opportunity hoarding, and stereotype-driven surveillance—and unpacks its current legacy so we can begin the work to dismantle the structures and policies that undermine Black lives. Drawing on nearly 2 decades of research in cities including Baltimore, St. Louis, Chicago, New York, and Cleveland, Cashin traces the processes of residential caste as it relates to housing, policing, schools, and transportation. She contends that geography is now central to American caste. Poverty-free havens and poverty-dense hoods would not exist if the state had not designed, constructed, and maintained this physical racial order. Cashin calls for abolition of these state-sanctioned processes. The ultimate goal is to change the lens through which society sees residents of poor Black neighborhoods from presumed thug to presumed citizen, and to transform the relationship of the state with these neighborhoods from punitive to caring. She calls for investment in a new infrastructure of opportunity in poor Black neighborhoods, including richly resourced schools and neighborhood centers, public transit, Peacemaker Fellowships, universal basic incomes, housing choice vouchers for residents, and mandatory inclusive housing elsewhere. Deeply researched and sharply written, White Space, Black Hood is a call to action for repairing what white supremacy still breaks. Includes historical photos, maps, and charts that illuminate the history of residential segregation as an institution and a tactic of racial oppression.

Stuck in Place

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Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 0226924262
Total Pages : 261 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (269 download)

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Book Synopsis Stuck in Place by : Patrick Sharkey

Download or read book Stuck in Place written by Patrick Sharkey and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013-05-15 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the 1960s, many believed that the civil rights movement’s successes would foster a new era of racial equality in America. Four decades later, the degree of racial inequality has barely changed. To understand what went wrong, Patrick Sharkey argues that we have to understand what has happened to African American communities over the last several decades. In Stuck in Place, Sharkey describes how political decisions and social policies have led to severe disinvestment from black neighborhoods, persistent segregation, declining economic opportunities, and a growing link between African American communities and the criminal justice system. As a result, neighborhood inequality that existed in the 1970s has been passed down to the current generation of African Americans. Some of the most persistent forms of racial inequality, such as gaps in income and test scores, can only be explained by considering the neighborhoods in which black and white families have lived over multiple generations. This multigenerational nature of neighborhood inequality also means that a new kind of urban policy is necessary for our nation’s cities. Sharkey argues for urban policies that have the potential to create transformative and sustained changes in urban communities and the families that live within them, and he outlines a durable urban policy agenda to move in that direction.

The "Underclass" Debate

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Author :
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 0691188548
Total Pages : 516 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (911 download)

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Book Synopsis The "Underclass" Debate by : Michael B. Katz

Download or read book The "Underclass" Debate written by Michael B. Katz and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2018-06-05 with total page 516 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Do ominous reports of an emerging "underclass" reveal an unprecedented crisis in American society? Or are social commentators simply rediscovering the tragedy of recurring urban poverty, as they seem to do every few decades? Although social scientists and members of the public make frequent assumptions about these questions, they have little information about the crucial differences between past and present. By providing a badly needed historical context, these essays reframe today's "underclass" debate. Realizing that labels of "social pathology" echo fruitless distinctions between the "deserving" and "undeserving" poor, the contributors focus not on individual and family behavior but on a complex set of processes that have been at work over a long period, degrading the inner cities and, inevitably, the nation as a whole. How do individuals among the urban poor manage to survive? How have they created a dissident "infrapolitics?" How have social relations within the urban ghettos changed? What has been the effect of industrial restructuring on poverty? Besides exploring these questions, the contributors discuss the influence of African traditions on the family patterns of African Americans, the origins of institutions that serve the urban poor, the reasons for the crisis in urban education, the achievements and limits of the War on Poverty, and the role of income transfers, earnings, and the contributions of family members in overcoming poverty. The message of the essays is clear: Americans will flourish or fail together.

Life Behind a Veil

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Publisher : LSU Press
ISBN 13 : 9780807130568
Total Pages : 324 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (35 download)

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Book Synopsis Life Behind a Veil by : George C. Wright

Download or read book Life Behind a Veil written by George C. Wright and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2004-09-01 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the period between the Civil War and the Great Depression, Louisville, Kentucky was host to what George C. Wright calls "a polite form of racism." There were no lynchings or race riots, and to a great extent, Louisville blacks escaped the harsh violence that was a fact of life for blacks in the Deep South. Furthermore, black Louisvillians consistently enjoyed and exercised an oft-contested but never effectively retracted enfranchisement. However, their votes usually did not amount to any real political leverage, and there were no radical improvements in civil rights during this period. Instead, there existed a delicate balance between relative privilege and enforced passivity.A substantial paternalism carried over from antebellum days in Louisville, and many leading white citizens lent support to a limited uplifting of blacks in society. They helped blacks establish their own schools, hospitals, and other institutions. But the dual purpose that such actions served, providing assistance while making the maintenance of strict segregation easier, was not incidental. Whites salved their consequences without really threatening an established order. And blacks, obliged to be grateful for the assistance, generally refrained from arguing for real social and political equality for fear of jeopardizing a partially improved situation and regressing to a status similar to that of other southern blacks.In Life Behind a Veil: Blacks in Louisville, Kentucky, 1865 - 1930, George Wright looks at the particulars of this form of racism. He also looks at the ways in which blacks made the most of their less than ideal position, focusing on the institutions that were central to their lives. Blacks in Louisville boasted the first library for blacks in the United States, as well as black-owned banks, hospitals, churches, settlement houses, and social clubs. These supported and reinforced a sense of community, self-esteem, and pride that was often undermined by the white world.Life Behind a Veil is a comprehensive account of race relations, black response to white discrimination, and the black community behind the walls of segregation in this border town. The title echoes Blyden Jackson's recollection of his childhood in Louisville, where blacks were always aware that there were two very distinct Louisvilles, one of which they were excluded from.

A Ghetto Takes Shape

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Publisher : University of Illinois Press
ISBN 13 : 9780252006906
Total Pages : 332 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (69 download)

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Book Synopsis A Ghetto Takes Shape by : Kenneth L. Kusmer

Download or read book A Ghetto Takes Shape written by Kenneth L. Kusmer and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 1976 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1865, the Cleveland Leader boasted that ''an indication of the civilized spirit of the city of Cleveland is found in the fact that colored children attend our schools, colored people are permitted to attend all public lectures and public affairs where the fashion and culture of the city congregate, and nobody is offended.'' Yet, by 1915, the Central Avenue district of town, with its cheap lodging houses, deteriorating homes, and vice, housed a majority of the black population under conditions that were decidedly inferior to those of most of the rest of the city. Tracing the development of Cleveland's black community from its antebellum beginnings to the end of the 1920s, Kenneth Kusmer systematically surveys and analyzes the emergence of the ghetto in the city where, prior to 1870, blacks were ''almost equal'' to whites. This volume deals in a comprehensive way with more aspects of black life - economic, political, social, and cultural - than any previous study of an urban community and presents the most detailed analysis of black occupations available. It is also the first work to make extensive use of manuscript collections of local black leaders and organizations. Of particular value is the comparative framework of the study. Kusmer compares the position of blacks in the social order with that of immigrants and native whites and places the development of the ghetto within the context of urban history. In addition, by contrasting Cleveland with other major cities, such as New York, Chicago, and Boston, Kusmer shows that there were important differences among black communities, especially before 1915, and proves that the causes and effects of the emergence of black ghettos are more complex historical problems than previously recognized. The consolidation of Cleveland's ghetto took over fifty years, and it left the average black citizen more isolated from the general life of the urban community than ever before. Yet, ironically, Kusmer concludes, it was this very isolation, and the sense of unique goals and needs that it fostered, that helped unify the black citizenry and provided the practical basis for the future struggle against racism in all its manifestations.''Kenneth L. Kusmer has written the best book yet on the formation of a black urban ghetto. It stands as a tribute to the blend of urban and Afro-American history.''--Howard P. Chudacoff, American Historical Review ''What makes Kusmer stand out among books on blacks in the urban North is the breadth and sophistication with which he conceptualizes his study. . . . The grace and intelligence of Kusmer make his book the single best study of the shaping of modern black ghettos. . . . Should be greeted warmly by historians of blacks and of urban America.''--Nancy Weiss, Reviews in American History ''Drawing upon a variety of statistical and literary primary sources . . . Kusmer presents a richly documented case study. His felicitously lucid and comprehensive analysis of the growth of one black ghetto promises to provide a model for future historians of the second major chapter in the Afro-American experience. In my view, Kusmer's multifaceted historical analysis of black Cleveland represents the finest case study of an urban black community to appear in the past decade.''--Marion Kilson, Journal of Interdisciplinary History ''Instead of fixing upon the pathological aspects of the ghetto or the racial discriminations of the white majority he finds his unifying theme in the leadership and decision0making within the black community. This is a richly detailed and thoughtfully constructed book.''--Louis R. Harlan, Journal of American History

Who Will Write Our History?

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Publisher : Indiana University Press
ISBN 13 : 0253041058
Total Pages : 603 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (53 download)

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Book Synopsis Who Will Write Our History? by : Samuel D. Kassow

Download or read book Who Will Write Our History? written by Samuel D. Kassow and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2018-08-01 with total page 603 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1940, the historian Emanuel Ringelblum established a clandestine organization, code named Oyneg Shabes, in Nazi-occupied Warsaw to study and document all facets of Jewish life in wartime Poland and to compile an archive that would preserve this history for posterity. As the Final Solution unfolded, although decimated by murders and deportations, the group persevered in its work until the spring of 1943. Of its more than 60 members, only three survived. Ringelblum and his family perished in March 1944. But before he died, he managed to hide thousands of documents in milk cans and tin boxes. Searchers found two of these buried caches in 1946 and 1950. Who Will Write Our History tells the gripping story of Ringelblum and his determination to use historical scholarship and the collection of documents to resist Nazi oppression.

Race and the City

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Publisher : University of Illinois Press
ISBN 13 : 9780252019869
Total Pages : 340 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (198 download)

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Book Synopsis Race and the City by : Henry Louis Taylor

Download or read book Race and the City written by Henry Louis Taylor and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Provides a rich prism through which to explore the social, economic, and political development of black Cincinnati. These studies offer insight into both the dynamics of racism and a community's changing responses to it." -- Peter Rachleff, author of Black Labor in Richmond

Who Will Write Our History?

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Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 0307793753
Total Pages : 578 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (77 download)

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Book Synopsis Who Will Write Our History? by : Samuel D. Kassow

Download or read book Who Will Write Our History? written by Samuel D. Kassow and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-05-18 with total page 578 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1940, in the Jewish ghetto of Nazi-occupied Warsaw, the Polish historian Emanuel Ringelblum established a clandestine scholarly organization called the Oyneg Shabes to record the experiences of the ghetto's inhabitants. For three years, members of the Oyneb Shabes worked in secret to chronicle the lives of hundereds of thousands as they suffered starvation, disease, and deportation by the Nazis. Shortly before the Warsaw ghetto was emptied and razed in 1943, the Oyneg Shabes buried thousands of documents from this massive archive in milk cans and tin boxes, ensuring that the voice and culture of a doomed people would outlast the efforts of their enemies to silence them. Impeccably researched and thoroughly compelling, Samuel D. Kassow's Who Will Write Our History? tells the tragic story of Ringelblum and his heroic determination to use historical scholarship to preserve the memory of a threatened people.

God and Government in the Ghetto

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Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 0226642089
Total Pages : 323 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (266 download)

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Book Synopsis God and Government in the Ghetto by : Michael Leo Owens

Download or read book God and Government in the Ghetto written by Michael Leo Owens and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2008-11-15 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years, as government agencies have encouraged faith-based organizations to help ensure social welfare, many black churches have received grants to provide services to their neighborhoods’ poorest residents. This collaboration, activist churches explain, is a way of enacting their faith and helping their neighborhoods. But as Michael Leo Owens demonstrates in God and Government in the Ghetto, this alliance also serves as a means for black clergy to reaffirm their political leadership and reposition moral authority in black civil society. Drawing on both survey data and fieldwork in New York City, Owens reveals that African American churches can use these newly forged connections with public agencies to influence policy and government responsiveness in a way that reaches beyond traditional electoral or protest politics. The churches and neighborhoods, Owens argues, can see a real benefit from that influence—but it may come at the expense of less involvement at the grassroots. Anyone with a stake in the changing strategies employed by churches as they fight for social justice will find God and Government in the Ghetto compelling reading.

Ghetto

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Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674737539
Total Pages : 289 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (747 download)

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Book Synopsis Ghetto by : Daniel B. Schwartz

Download or read book Ghetto written by Daniel B. Schwartz and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2019-09-24 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Just as European Jews were being emancipated and ghettos in their original form—compulsory, enclosed spaces designed to segregate—were being dismantled, use of the word ghetto surged in Europe and spread around the globe. Tracing the curious path of this loaded word from its first use in sixteenth-century Venice to the present turns out to be more than an adventure in linguistics. Few words are as ideologically charged as ghetto. Its early uses centered on two cities: Venice, where it referred to the segregation of the Jews in 1516, and Rome, where the ghetto survived until the fall of the Papal States in 1870, long after it had ceased to exist elsewhere. Ghetto: The History of a Word offers a fascinating account of the changing nuances of this slippery term, from its coinage to the present day. It details how the ghetto emerged as an ambivalent metaphor for “premodern” Judaism in the nineteenth century and how it was later revived to refer to everything from densely populated Jewish immigrant enclaves in modern cities to the hypersegregated holding pens of Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe. We see how this ever-evolving word traveled across the Atlantic Ocean, settled into New York’s Lower East Side and Chicago’s Near West Side, then came to be more closely associated with African Americans than with Jews. Chronicling this sinuous transatlantic odyssey, Daniel B. Schwartz reveals how the history of ghettos is tied up with the struggle and argument over the meaning of a word. Paradoxically, the term ghetto came to loom larger in discourse about Jews when Jews were no longer required to live in legal ghettos. At a time when the Jewish associations have been largely eclipsed, Ghetto retrieves the history of a disturbingly resilient word.