Sundays at Sinai

Sundays at Sinai
Author: Tobias Brinkmann
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 382
Release: 2012-05-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 0226074560

First established 150 years ago, Chicago Sinai is one of America’s oldest Reform Jewish congregations. Its founders were upwardly mobile and civically committed men and women, founders and partners of banks and landmark businesses like Hart Schaffner & Marx, Sears & Roebuck, and the giant meatpacking firm Morris & Co. As explicitly modern Jews, Sinai’s members supported and led civic institutions and participated actively in Chicago politics. Perhaps most radically, their Sunday services, introduced in 1874 and still celebrated today, became a hallmark of the congregation. In Sundays at Sinai, Tobias Brinkmann brings modern Jewish history, immigration, urban history, and religious history together to trace the roots of radical Reform Judaism from across the Atlantic to this rapidly growing American metropolis. Brinkmann shines a light on the development of an urban reform congregation, illuminating Chicago Sinai’s practices and history, and its contribution to Christian-Jewish dialogue in the United States. Chronicling Chicago Sinai’s radical beginnings in antebellum Chicago to the present, Sundays at Sinai is the extraordinary story of a leading Jewish Reform congregation in one of America’s great cities.

Points of Passage

Points of Passage
Author: Tobias Brinkmann
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 185
Release: 2013-10-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1782380302

Between 1880 and 1914 several million Eastern Europeans migrated West. Much is known about the immigration experience of Jews, Poles, Greeks, and others, notably in the United States. Yet, little is known about the paths of mass migration across “green borders” via European railway stations and ports to destinations in other continents. Ellis Island, literally a point of passage into America, has a much higher symbolic significance than the often inconspicuous departure stations, makeshift facilities for migrant masses at European railway stations and port cities, and former control posts along borders that were redrawn several times during the twentieth century. This volume focuses on the journeys of Jews from Eastern Europe through Germany, Britain, and Scandinavia between 1880 and 1914. The authors investigate various aspects of transmigration including medical controls, travel conditions, and the role of the steamship lines; and also review the rise of migration restrictions around the globe in the decades before 1914.

Pieces of Victory

Pieces of Victory
Author: Jeneen C Miller
Publisher:
Total Pages: 436
Release: 2020-05-06
Genre: Family & Relationships
ISBN: 9780692539026

If telling this story can bring the darkness of these types of institutions into the light, we need to share it so the abuse can stop... -Ryjin Pearson, Filmmaker What would you do if you were held captive behind an electrical barbed wire, 12-foot fence without due process? At the age of 16, Jeneen Miller was prosecuted without a fair trial for telling a family-kept secret about a wrongdoing that was perpetrated by the hands of her uncle. After bravely coming forth to her family, they were not open to the truth. Jeneen's justifiable rage was wrongfully mistaken by her parents when they assumed she was experimenting with drugs and alcohol. In 1988, Jeneen's parents used trickery to achieve the ultimate betrayal. Instead of the therapy they promised Jeneen, they turned her over to a prison camp in spite of her self-discipline, excellent academics and responsible behavior. Trapped in Ramona, California without any communication, she was completely cut off from her soul mate. Letters, phone calls and visitors were forbidden. Pastors and staff justified their actions of isolation as a means of extinguishing the evil out of her and other inmates. This tough love program persecuted girls in the name of God while denying their constitutional rights. While going through this so-called war behind the gates of hell, the only person who kept her grounded was her one true love, Drake McCallister. This is an account of Jeneen's battle to redeem herself after being abused by her family and Victory Christian Academy. Unfortunately, the horrific reality is that these programs still exist today.

King's Vibrato

King's Vibrato
Author: Maurice O. Wallace
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2022-07-29
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 147802299X

In King’s Vibrato Maurice O. Wallace explores the sonic character of Martin Luther King Jr.’s voice and its power to move the world. Providing a cultural history and critical theory of the black modernist soundscapes that helped inform King’s vocal timbre, Wallace shows how the qualities of King’s voice depended on a mix of ecclesial architecture and acoustics, musical instrumentation and sound technology, audience and song. He examines the acoustical architectures of the African American churches where King spoke and the centrality of the pipe organ in these churches, offers a black feminist critique of the influence of gospel on King, and outlines how variations in natural environments and sound amplifications made each of King’s three deliveries of the “I Have a Dream” speech unique. By mapping the vocal timbre of one of the most important figures of black hope and protest in American history, Wallace presents King as the embodiment of the sound of modern black thought.

Liturgy and Byzantinization in Jerusalem

Liturgy and Byzantinization in Jerusalem
Author: Daniel Galadza
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 457
Release: 2018
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0198812035

This book examines the way Christians in Jerusalem prayed and how their prayer changed in the face of foreign invasions and the destruction of their places of worship.

A Woman of Uncertain Character

A Woman of Uncertain Character
Author: Clancy Sigal
Publisher: Open Road Media
Total Pages: 335
Release: 2013-08-06
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1480437093

This tale of a Russian immigrant is a “gripping and gritty memoir [and] a eulogy for a combative, self-conscious, often violent American working class” (Los Angeles Times). Jennie Persily, with her fiery red hair, buxom figure, and bohemian spirit, is a strong-willed fighter for justice and a passionate lover. A Russian-Jewish émigré who organizes unions in the sweatshops and on the mean streets of Chicago during the thirties and forties, Jennie frequently brings her son—the book’s author, Clancy Sigal—along to rallies and on dangerous missions, often eluding union-busting hit men. As unsentimental, intelligent, and brazen as its subject, A Woman of Uncertain Character is a candid look into a childhood shaped by a feverishly brave, sexually open, and very complex mother. Sigal gains a deep, satisfying understanding of the woman who made him, and the world that made her.