Sephardi Lives: A Documentary History, 1700–1950 (Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture)

This ground-breaking documentary history contains over 150 primary sources originally written in 15 languages by or about Sephardi Jews―descendants of Jews who fled medieval Spain and Portugal settling in the western portions of the Ottoman Empire, including the Balkans, Anatolia, and Palestine. Reflecting Sephardi history in all its diversity, from the courtyard to the courthouse, spheres intimate, political, commercial, familial, and religious, these documents show life within these distinctive Jewish communities as well as between Jews, Muslims, and Christians. Sephardi Lives offer readers an intimate view of how Sephardim experienced the major regional and world events of the modern era―natural disasters, violence and wars, the transition from empire to nation-states, and the Holocaust. This collection also provides a vivid exploration of the day-to-day lives of Sephardi women, men, boys, and girls in the Judeo-Spanish heartland of the Ottoman Balkans and Middle East, as well as the émigré centers Sephardim settled throughout the twentieth century, including North and South America, Africa, Asia, and Europe. The selections are of a vast range, including private letters from family collections, rabbinical writings, documents of state, memoirs and diaries, court records, selections from the popular press, and scholarship. In a single volume, Sephardi Lives preserves the cultural richness and historical complexity of a Sephardi world that is no more.

Sephardi Lives: A Documentary History, 1700-1950 (Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture)

History

Cohen, Julia

Middle East

Stanford University Press

Poetry. In a world that is both intensely biological (conscious of the nervous system, worms, owl excrement) and intensely mechanical (halogen lights, towers, helmets) there is a surprising amount of room for imagination and magic. Julia Cohen uses that space very well. "Julia Cohen's poems will knock you out with their fresh logics like some moon-governed dream...this collection is half in the world and half in the 'non-world' that 'occasionally rolls over you,' utterly grounded in the domestic and wildly transformative."—Elizabeth Willis

Triggermoon Triggermoon

Literature & Fiction

United States

Black Lawrence Press

Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. In this genre-blending collection, Julia Cohen entwines the lyric and the essay with text messages, transcripts of therapy sessions, letters between Paul Celan and Nelly Sachs, meditations on Levinas and John Coltrane to document a love story about language, suicide, anxiety, atheism, and finding a way back to feeling. "In ways unforeseeable until the very fact of this book, Julia Cohen re-interrogates and reintegrates that ongoing paradox Psyche presents us–figure that refuses to stabilize the ongoing crisis between soul and mind. As of Psyche of old, Eros lurks everywhere, even in absence. But here, resisting the ease of mere allegory, Cohen stitches together differing forms of texts—lyric verse, prose poems bordering on the surreal, brief narratives, excerpts from psychoanalysis—to unfold the agonized reality of a lover's attempted suicide. I WAS NOT BORN opens in the ex- treme difficulty of relations falling apart; it ends in affirmation that word calls out as a lover calls—be it in sonnet or be it in text message—to its dearest counterpart, world."—Dan Beachy-Quick "In I WAS NOT BORN, Julia Cohen kindles a pillar of fire that reminds us that we do not always get out alive, that not everyone survives her or his youthful dreams. Like 'breaking into an apple,' the nourishment, the seeds, the core of life pulses throughout this accomplished work."—Brenda Coultas "Julia Cohen proves herself a protean writer, engaged with both world and word, playing for keeps. A finely etched portrait of a relationship with a suicidal lover proves but the portal for the author to recover a self and bid it sing. A beautiful, original, and deft achievement."—Maggie Nelson

I Was Not Born

Essays & Correspondence

Noemi Press

Collateral Light

Poetry

Brooklyn Arts Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Cohen, Julia. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Cohen, Julia