Jews In The Bulgarian Hinterland

A listing of 1,926 books, pamphlets, official publications, and other materials about the Jews in Bulgaria, published between 1878-1999 in Bulgaria and in other countries. The entries are mostly in Bulgarian, some in other languages. The Bulgarian items include an English translation; all of the items are annotated in English. Pp. 127-169 deal with fascism, Nazism, racism, and antisemitism. Pp. 540-585, "Recent and Modern Bulgarian History", deal, inter alia, with antisemitism in Bulgaria between 1878-1941 and with the attempt at the "Final Solution" in Bulgaria in 1941-44.

The Stolen Narrative of the Bulgarian Jews and the Holocaust collects narratives of Bulgarian Jews who survived the Holocaust. Through the analysis of eye-witness testimonies, archival documents, photographs, and researchers’ investigations, the authors weave a complex tapestry of voices that were previously underrepresented, ignored, and denied. Taken together, the collected memories offer an alternative perspective that counters official accounts and corroborates war crimes.

In the second half of the 19th century, Southeastern Europe was home to a vast and heterogeneous constellation of Jewish communities, mainly Sephardic to the south (Bulgaria, Greece) and Ashkenazi to the north (Hungary, Romanian Moldavia), with a broad mixed area in-between (Croatia, Serbia, Romanian Wallachia). They were subject to a variety of post-Imperial governments (from the neo-constituted principality of Bulgaria to the Hungarian kingdom re-established as an autonomous entity in 1867), which shared a powerful nationalist and modernising drive. The relations between Jews and the nation-states’ governments led to a series of issues relating to the enjoyment of civil rights, public and private education, and political participation, which found varying solutions, sometimes satisfactory for the Jews, but often undermined by the political instability of the region. In this book, the position of the Jews is also approached from the point of view of contemporary western Judaism, perhaps more sensitive to the sufferings of “our poor brothers in the East”; a western Judaism, emancipated, integrated, intellectually advanced, liberal, and able to intervene in situations under observation through diplomatic networks, its international philanthropic agencies and its political representatives. For readers interested in modern history, this book offers a detailed survey of the Jewish question in the various states of Southeastern Europe before the Shoah.

Discusses the socio-historical problem areas related to the presence of Jews in major European societies from the 18th century to our days; differently from most other studies, covers the post-Shoah situation also. The approach is multi-disciplinary, mobilizing resources gained from sociology, demography and political science, based on substantial statistical information. Presents and compares the different patterns of Jewish policies of the emerging nation states and established empires. Discusses education and socio-professional stratification of Jews. Deals with the challenges of emancipation and assimilation, the emergence of Jewish nationalism in various forms, Zionism above all, as well as antisemitic ideologies. The book ends with a scrutiny of post-Shoah situation opposing in this regard Western Europe to the Sovietised East, discussing finally strategies of dissimulation or reconstruction of Jewish identity.

This work includes international secondary literature on anti-Semitism published throughout the world, from the earliest times to the present. It lists books, dissertations, and articles from periodicals and collections from a diverse range of disciplines. Written accounts are included among the recorded titles, as are manifestations of anti-Semitism in the visual arts (e.g. painting, caricatures or film), action taken against Jews and Judaism by discriminating judiciaries, pogroms, massacres and the systematic extermination during the Nazi period. The bibliography also covers works dealing with philo-Semitism or Jewish reactions to anti-Semitism and Jewish self-hate. An informative abstract in English is provided for each entry, and Hebrew titles are provided with English translations.

This book reflects on the meaning of contemporary life in the light of diverse social reactions to AIDS. Drawing on personal interviews with gay men in Montreal, newspaper reports, government action, historical parallels, and other social facts, the author shows what the AIDS phenomenon can reveal about the nature of current reality. Intimate dimensions of experience are explored in order to understand the medical definition of human life, the 'post-modern' character of the contemporary period, and the pervasive influence of technique. The social analysis of AIDS is interwoven with personal, literary, and philosophical reflections that rebound onto the terrain of intimacy, allowing us to see what a critical reading of AIDS as a social phenomenon tells us about the elemental dramas of existence — of love, pain, death, and sex. Represented here is one man's stock-taking of his generation's experience, exploring the social futures that different reactions to AIDS hold out to us. In the tradition of critical thought, the book is a contribution to the understanding which rescues life from the absurd.