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<p> Akiba Hebrew Academy was founded in Philadelphia in 1946 as the first community Jewish secondary day school in America. Akiba was a drastic departure and in effect, counter-cultural: an all-day secondary school program defined as community (not attached to a denomination and certainly not Orthodox), integrative (general and Jewish studies), and progressive, a term that carried weight in the Philadelphia marketplace, drawing talented faculty and skeptical parents to this yet unknown entity. Most Jewish parents were committed to public school education, favoring denominational supplemental religious schooling. </p><p> Despite Akiba&rsquo;s status as the first of its kind in American Jewish educational history, little has been written about it as a progressive school or about its leadership. Even less is known of the influence of the curriculum or the faculty on its graduates. Using archival material, this study examines the nature of the school&rsquo;s curriculum and especially the leadership of its visionary curricular architect, Louis Newman, from his selection as principal in 1951 until 1963, when he left the school for an appointment to a national curriculum initiative. It specifically explores to what degree the overt and hidden curriculum followed the founders&rsquo; initial intent. Through the use of narrative inquiry methodology, the use of participant interviews and the examination of archival material such as personal letters and communication, the study also investigates the impact of those decisions on administration, parents, faculty and early graduates in an effort to understand the influence of the school on the community and especially its students&rsquo; identities.</p>

<p> The Judeo-Spanish <i>romancero</i> is a sung folk genre, and an oral tradition dating back to twelfth-century Spain derived from medieval Spanish epics and the Spanish ballad. Although the majority of the continental Judeo-Spanish romanceros were lost after the Spanish Inquisition, they are still found throughout the Diaspora. French poet Isaac Levy documented this in <i>Chants jud&eacute;o-espagnols,</i> a 1959 anthology in which Levy compiled original fifteenth-century Judeo-Spanish romancero melodies in the Mediterranean regions. Argentine composer Jorge Liderman was inspired by Judeo-Spanish music after visiting Spain and composed <i>Aires de Sefarad,</i> using selections from Levy's anthology. In this study, the Judeo-Spanish romancero within the scope of Liderman&rsquo;s Argentine musical compositional output are explored. In addition, the musical parameters of both the Judeo-Spanish and the Argentine romancero are investigated. A consideration of the interchange of musical characteristics of both the Argentine and the Judeo-Spanish romancero in <i>Aires de Sefarad</i> is presented in this research, as well as how this contributed to the emergence of a multicultural romancero.</p>

The thesis represents the first complete academic biography of a Jewish clockmaker, warrior poet and Anarchist named Sholem Schwarzbard. Schwarzbard's experience was both typical and unique for a Jewish man of his era. It included four immigrations, two revolutions, numerous pogroms, a world war and, far less commonly, an assassination. The latter gained him fleeting international fame in 1926, when he killed the Ukrainian nationalist leader Symon Petliura in Paris in retribution for pogroms perpetrated during the Russian Civil War (1917-20). After a contentious trial, a French jury was sufficiently convinced both of Schwarzbard's sincerity as an avenger, and of Petliura's responsibility for the actions of his armies, to acquit him on all counts. Mostly forgotten by the rest of the world, the assassin has remained a divisive figure in Jewish-Ukrainian relations, leading to distorted and reductive descriptions his life. In contrast to these partial views, the thesis follows Schwarzbard's fate chronologically, from cradle to grave, emphasizing development and contradiction in his story. Special attention is paid the dynamic nature of Schwarzbard's Jewish, Anarchist, and French commitments. After a long struggle, it was the first of these that came to dominate Schwarzbard's life, as he called the Jews back into history and himself back to his people with a single, irrevocable deed. / Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations

This is the first study of the avant-garde Yiddish art theater movement, which flourished across five continents during the interwar period. From Warsaw to San Francisco, Buenos Aires to Winnipeg, Mexico City to Paris, and Johannesburg to Melbourne, the Yiddish art theaters were acclaimed by critics and popular with Jewish and non-Jewish spectators alike. These theaters had a significant impact on renowned theater practitioners around the world, who credited the Yiddish art theaters with inspiring their own artistic practice. In tracing how a small group of Yiddish theater artists developed a modernist theater movement with a global impact, my project provides a key and heretofore missing chapter in the history of the modern stage. I argue that the spirit of innovation that characterized the activities of the Yiddish art theaters and enabled them to become so influential was a direct product of the transnational nature of their movement. Operating in a Jewish cultural context unbounded by national borders, the success of these companies was propelled by a steady exchange of actors, directors, scenic designers, and critics across the world. Buoyed by a global audience base and unconfined by the geographical-linguistic borders that limited the national theaters of their neighbors, Yiddish theater artists were uniquely able to develop a fully transnational modernist theater practice. The global reach of the Yiddish art theaters is best exemplified by the Vilna Troupe (1915-1935), the catalyst for this movement and the primary focus of my study. The Vilna Troupe was the epicenter of the international Yiddish art theater movement throughout the interwar period. I demonstrate how the Troupe remained itinerant throughout its history, enabling it to reach an ever-larger global audience and inspiring dozens of other Jewish actors to create Yiddish art theaters of their own. Where previous generations of Yiddish actors had been subject to the double disapproval of Jewish and non-Jewish intellectuals alike, the Vilna Troupe legitimized the Yiddish art theater movement as a key contributor to the global theatrical avant-garde. / Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations

The objective for this dissertation is twofold: I first examine how the Israeli poet Rahel Bluvshtain-Sela (1890-1931) reclaimed the Hebrew language of the Bible in order to create a Modern Hebrew vernacular. I then evaluate Rahel's creative strategies in light of her contribution to Hebrew poetry and Israeli culture that has evolved since her death more than seventy years ago. My study focuses on the biblical intertextuality in Rahel's poems. In particular, I examine Rahel's creative use of biblical allusions, and the complex ways in which she reflects on and connects with historic memory. This strategy allowed the poet to express her intensely personal experiences in the present as they reflected on a new collectivity. By reclaiming the Hebrew language, which until her time was primarily associated with the religious sphere, this pioneering intellectual integrated the practical aspects of everyday life into both her language and her poetry. My dissertation work integrates hermeneutic literary analysis, as well as analyses of intertextuality, literary history, and translation to explore the relationship between ancient and modern Hebrew in Rahel's poetry. My project is complicated by the fact that I translate a poet who wrote in a fresh new language, one that had not been spoken colloquially for hundreds of years—indeed, Rahel herself was translating from ancient Hebrew into a developing new language. The first chapter of this dissertation is an introduction of my project as well as an overview of Rahel's status as a poet. The second chapter provides an intellectual biography of Rahel, introducing her life in light of her intellectual background and context. This chapter thus goes beyond traditional biographical readings of Ra hel that focus on her personal life, particularly her romantic relationships, and her illnesses and depressions, while removing her from the social context and community in which she lived—a community that she played a key role in creating through her poetry. For the third chapter, I selected poems from Rahel's work that serve as examples for the way in which the poet positioned biblical texts within the new context of the emerging state of Israel. The poems are grouped by sub-topics: (1) Personalities as Destinies—The Bible as the Intimate Other, (2) Writing the Land as Desire, and (3) Between Ideology as Identity and Sense of Self. In order to show Rahel's use of intertextuality with the biblical idiom and content, I introduce each of her poems in the original Hebrew, in English transliteration, and also provide my own translations. The biblical sources are identified, traced and cited at the beginning of each poem analysis. I then provide an extensive prose analysis of each poem in which I analyze the biblical allusions as palimpsestic references that are used to retain the trace of biblical history within a new Hebrew language. The analyses offer a literal interpretation of the poem interwoven with an explanatory discussion, focusing on the biblical themes and language that appear in each poem. Such detailed examination of the selected poems will present Rahel's personal and unique approach to the biblical text, an approach that grasps the Bible not only in a metaphoric way, but also with the intention to highlight collective memories. The final chapter focuses on the popular reception of Rah el's poetry, and is a mosaic reflecting Rahel's influence on the Hebrew language and culture. The section's pieces come from different areas of Israeli life: contemporary poetry, literature and songs, as well as from literary reviews, folklore/cultural features and political editorials in newspapers. The purpose of this look at snapshots of contemporary Hebrew language and Israeli culture will reveal the effectiveness of Ra hel's palimsestic writing strategies for the complex negotiations of personal, spatial and national identities.

This dissertation examines the ethical systems created in response to the crisis of the Holocaust by Emmanuel Levinas, Elie Wiesel and Richard Rubenstein. Prior to the Holocaust, European Jewish philosophers grounded ethics in traditional metaphysics. Unlike their predecessors, Levinas, Wiesel and Rubenstein all make ethics "first philosophy" by grounding ethics in the temporal experience of suffering rather than ontology or theology, deliberately rejecting ethical views rooted in traditional metaphysical claims. With varying degrees of success, they all employ Jewish texts and traditions to do so. Their applications of Jewish sources are both orthodox and innovative, and show how philosophical approaches to ethics can benefit from religion. Suffering becomes not only the first priority of ethics, but an experience that simultaneously necessitates and activates ethical response. According to this view, human beings are not blank slates whose values are informed exclusively by culture and moral instruction alone; nor is human consciousness awakened or even primarily constituted by reason, as argued by deontologists. Rather, consciousness is characterized by affectivity and sensibility as interconnected faculties working in concert to create ethical response. This dissertation argues that if what makes ethical response possible is located in human consciousness rather than in metaphysics or culture, a re-orientation of philosophy toward the investigation of human affectivity and its role in ethical response is in order. All three thinkers examined actively resist categorization and repudiate claims that a single philosophical system can be successfully applied to all aspects of life, and this dissertation does not choose one of the three projects examined here as the most persuasive or significant. Instead, it explores how the work of Levinas, Wiesel and Rubenstein might be combined, built upon and expanded to form an ethics that is deeply informed by human experience and makes human and non-human suffering our greatest priorities.

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Chasing Yiddishkayt: Music for Accordion, Klezmorim Concertino, Strings, and Percussion is a four-movement composition that combines the idioms of klezmer music with aspects of serialism. I aimed to infuse the piece with a sense of yiddishkayt: a recognizable, rooted Jewishness. In order to accomplish this goal, I based each movement on a different klezmer style. I used the improvisatory-style of the Romanian Jewish doina as the foundation for Movement 1. For Movements 2 through 4 I selected tunes from the 1927 Hoffman Manuscript-a fake-book assembled by Joseph Hoffman in Philadelphia for his son, Morris-as the starting point in my process, and also for the generation of pitch material. Each movement places the tunes in a different serialist context through the use of abstraction, manipulation and regeneration. The orchestration of the composition is designed as a modified a concerto structure that alternates between featuring the accordion and contrasting the klezmorim concertino (fiddle, clarinet, trumpet, trombone, tuba, and accordion) with the orchestra. Depending on the context, the percussion section functions as part of the concertino and the orchestra. In the monograph, I place the composition in a historical and musical context. In Chapter 1, I trace my travels to Kraków, Poland for the Jewish Culture Festival, where I began to explore and understand the intricate language of this music. In Chapter 2, I provide a summary of the history of klezmer music by looking at it through the context of a musical style that has developed across regional and cultural boundaries, and has drawn influences as far and wide as the Turkish maqam system in Constantinople, to the Moldavian Roms (Gypsies), to czarist Military bands, to jazz and swing, and to rock and roll. I conclude the chapter with a brief survey of four contemporary klezmer musicians of the new generation. In Chapter 3, I look at the modal structure of klezmer music. I used the work of Joshua Horowitz as the starting point for my research on various modal progressions and tetrachords. I then applied this research by analyzing a set of thirty freilechs in the Hoffman manuscript. In Chapter 4, I present an analysis of my composition as well as historical background for the tunes that I used as source material. I outline my future research goals in Chapter 5. / Music Composition / Accompanied by one .pdf score: Chasing Yiddishkayt.pdf .