The Holocaust and post-war anti-Semitism-propelled migration changed the face of Poland, a country that for centuries has been the heartland of the Jewish diaspora. Remnants of the Polish Jewry that did not emigrate, regardless of whether they considered themselves Poles, Poles of Jewish descent or Polish Jews, often felt fearful about speaking of their ancestry, let alone acting upon it. Jewish organizations and social life did not disappear, but religious congregations in particular gradually diminished in number and activity. Post-socialist Poland has become an arena of profound transformation of Jewish communal life, fostered by stakeholders with distinct agendas and resources: empowered and politically emancipated Jewish Religious Communities, now-marginalized secular organizations of the communist era, a nascent generation of Polish Jewish activists and volunteers, and transnational Jewish non-governmental organizations. My thesis explores Polish Jewish communal life and experiences of being and becoming Jewish. It is a study after the ‘revival’, but revealing its looming presence in unsolved predicaments over a Jewish future, global structural dependencies, and temporal dynamics of programs of socialization. I argue that the post-socialist reality not only witnessed the coming of a new Polish Jewish generation, but also the emergence of a new sociality, shaped in two decades of continuous friction between ontologies, agendas and hopes originating in different locations within, and on different scales of, the Polish Jewish contemporaneity. This new Polish Jewish reality invites us to rethink the impact of globalization on the Jewish diaspora in Eastern Europe, and also offers a new perspective on the role of global NGOs in the contemporary world.

This thesis examines the contribution of Jewish artists to American popular culture in the mid-twentieth century and argues that the Jewish imagination contains a peculiar ability to simultaneous articulate the concerns of a specifically ethnic identity and a more universal American character. The thesis posits that by exploring how the Jewish community negotiated the space between ethnic identity and an American paradigm, Jewish artists were able to explore the middle ground between individuality and conformity, selfhood and consensus, liberalism and conservatism, tradition and change, and heritage and progress that held a wider pertinence for a more general American audience. The thesis argues that the diversity of the Jewish American imagination at this time can be united by a leitmotif that can be best described as the ambivalence of transition. By examining aesthetically dissimilar texts from a variety of artistic fields, in particular comic books, theatre, cinema, television, and literature, the thesis argues that despite the cultural evolutions that occurred throughout the thirties, forties and fifties, the Jewish voice articulated a continuing concern regarding the relationship between ethnic identity, masculine identity, the individual and mass culture. This last point hints at another preoccupation of this thesis; the texts analysed here all share a narrative focus that explores and represents notions of masculine identity and ideality. In this way, the thesis necessarily focuses upon debates about masculinity within the Jewish imagination and American culture, charting the evolution of the Jewish and American male and their relationship towards notions of performed, consensus, individual and paradigm masculinity. Although there has not necessarily been a desire to fully deny the notion of a continuing thematic preoccupation within the Jewish imaginary, previous scholarship has shown a tendency towards accentuating the eclectic nature of Jewish American culture. Whilst scholars like Paul Buhle and Stephen J. Whitfield recognise the importance of popular culture as an arena in which Jewish artists sought to articulate issues at the heart of Jewish identity and community in the US, their studies focus upon the kaleidoscopic eclecticism of Jewish American culture. The intention of this thesis is to harness the diversity inherent in Jewish cultural expression via the prevailing leitmotif of the ambivalence of transition. In this way the thesis will use the multifarious and textured fabric of mid-century Jewish culture, as well as the simultaneous articulation of both ethnic and more general concerns, to illuminate the understanding of both Jewish identity and American culture throughout the mid-century. Thus, the thesis builds upon work by the likes of Julian Levinson and Hana Wirth-Nesher that revisits ideas of assimilation and attempts to complicate the inexorable movement away from Jewish distinctiveness and identity. Similarly, the thesis builds upon studies by the likes of Pamela Robertson Wojcik and Will Brooker that attempt to accentuate the reductive understanding of the mid-century based upon boundless suburbia and unthinking conformity.

This thesis explores why shaʿbī (roughly, ‘ordinary’) Moroccans so often talk about their domestic workers as daughters, what this means for workers and employers, and how this is changing as community gives way to market. It brings together ethnographic study of urban shaʿbī society, of unmarried rural women who work as domestics, and of the communities from which the latter migrate. Drawing on anthropological discussions of kinship and fosterage, the thesis examines the fading tradition of ‘bringing up’ in which, according to a moral economy, a ‘known’ rural girl could properly be placed in the homes of wealthier Moroccans until marriage. This is giving way to new arrangements in which ‘unknown’ workers are paid a wage and may not stay long, but in which the ethics of charity, religious reward and gratitude still inform expectations from both sides. Geared to play out among neighbours, or at least well-known clients, over a lifetime, these ethics are being disrupted by the easy-come-easy-go of strangers. The thesis contributes to some fundamental concerns of economic anthropology: the atomisation of market exchange, the growing importance of physical marketplaces, and the meanings encoded in a monetary wage versus payment in kind. By putting together perspectives from domestics’ leisure time and life back home, it also questions the relationship between the commodification of labour and individualism. Finally, the thesis discusses a draft law which, if enforced, would mean employing domestics no longer made sense for shaʿbī Moroccans, state intervention respresenting a move away from local forms of empowerment and community. At a broader level, the thesis is concerned with households as internally hierarchical units linked together through exchange to make up society and explores the gendered dimension of household economy in a wider world. This, of course, reaches beyond Morocco, and parallels are suggested with English domestic service.

This period of the history of the Jews in the Yemen was selected for study on account· of the richness of the material which is available. The sources used in this research for the study of the political, economic and social situation of the Jews in the Yemen may be divided into the following groups: 1. The MSS. A - Hebrew MSS. B Arabic MSS. The printed sources A - Hebrew printed B - Arabic printed sources c - European printed sources Trave1lers A - Contemporary travellers B - Modern travellers In addition to the Hebrew and Arabic sources we have a series of eye-witness reports from travellers who visited the Yemen during the last three centuries, and whose observations have had remarkable and enduring results. The information obtained from these sources is plentiful and of great interest and importance for the history of the Yemen in general and supplies us with personal observations on the people, both Arabs and Jews. Such journevs increased the volume of knowledge and broadened its horizons owing to the opportunities taken for study and investigation. Although these sources have been mentioned in both the footnotes and the bibliography, it would be worth mentioning them here to estimate their relative informative value. One of the most essential Hebrew sources on which we have relied most in this dissertation is Korot Ha-Zman, written by Habshush. All we can learn about Habshush must be gleaned from his own writings. He was primarily a coppersmith by profession and it was only in his later years that he took up writing. In the Spring of 1893, Habshush was occupied in writing his Hebrew account of the history of the Jews'in the Yemen. The Autumn of the same year he spent writing his account about his journey with Halevy.1 His decision to write his own works was perhaps partly due to the influence of the European travellers who spread culture among the Jews in the Yemen in the nineteenth century. But his method of writing and his bitter complaints against the treatment of Ha1evy.

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Based on eighteen months fieldwork with Bedouin of the Negev, this thesis explores the varied presence of images as photographs and digital copies for local historicity in order to achieve a greater understanding of representational politics in southern Israel. It emphasizes pictures' ability to transmute, circulate, and acquire value in various social settings in contrast to popular academic treatments, which primarily focus on photographs' iconography and visual history in the Middle East. To do so, the thesis details the biographies of a series of 'significant images' (c. 1906-2010) circulating in this society. It describes their photographic and digital graphic contents as floating referents with the capacity to be coded and recoded by people but also their presence as historical evidence that acquire value in different contexts. The thesis builds on the concept of visual economy as opposed to visual culture in order to landscape images' meanings, material and digital transformations, and their influence for the making of Bedouin history over the last century amid Orientalist, national, and local imaginings. It argues that Bedouin in the Negev possess diverse representational repertoires and utilise a variety of techniques to pursue historical capital. In particular, local representations of the past are selective and instrumental but increasingly reliant on archival mediums such as photographs. Although it may be obvious, anthropologists of the Middle East have yet to adequately account for these occurrences among peripheral peoples and not merely urbanites in the region. Research found that Bedouin spokespersons treat photographs and digital images as evidentiary documentation during self-presentations of historical knowledge in the Negev. As they travel between visual economies, however, images become malleable proof for local history projects alternating between the tribal past, Islamic heritage, and ethnohistory. In conclusion, the thesis develops two theoretical themes in anthropology and visual culture studies of the Middle East: the material and visual efficacy of images for local historicity, and complicating self-representations among Bedouin in the Negev.