{"title":"Michael Hoberman","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"hundred-acres-of-america-book-michael-hoberman-9780813589695","title":"A Hundred Acres of America","description":"Combines literary history and geography to restore Jewish American writers to their roles as critical members of the American literary landscape from the 1850s to the present, and argues that Jewish history, American literary history, and the inhabitation of American geography are, and always have been, contiguous entities.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49955714400529,"sku":"CIN081358969XG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/081358969X.jpg?v=1786103572"},{"product_id":"how-strange-it-seems-book-michael-hoberman-9781558496460","title":"How Strange It Seems","description":"Jews have lived in small-town New England since the colonial era, but during the last hundred years they have been especially active contributors to the region's cultural life. Part oral history, part ethnography, and part literary portrait, How Strange It Seems tells the story of this often overlooked group, tracing its patterns of settlement, economic activity, civic involvement, and religious life since the late 1800s. Based on more than fifty interviews with men and women of all ages from Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, and Connecticut, it seeks to understand what is distinctive--and not so distinctive--about contemporary Jewish communities outside the larger urban centers of the Northeast. Michael Hoberman weaves the personal stories of these individuals and families into a collective narrative that offers as much folklore as history and is equal parts Jewish and Yankee. He introduces us to Hiram Adelman, a Russian immigrant peddler and potato farmer who settled in northernmost Maine because its climate was comparable to his native Siberia, and to Shmuel Simenowitz, an urban transplant who produces kosher maple syrup in southern Vermont. We also meet Suzie Laskin, who moved to the White Mountains region of New Hampshire in the 1900s and soon established a local havurah, and Bob August of Whately, Massachusetts, who once ran what may have been the world's only Christmas tree farm owned by a Jewish family. Each section of the book explores how small-town New England Jews have both departed from and mimicked the broader patterns of Jewish American experience, while also illustrating how they have acclimated themselves to local practices without relinquishing a strong sense of Jewish identity. Accompanying the text are photographs by Janice Sorensen that include portraits of many of the interviewees and lively glimpses of the region's present-day Jewish revival.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50202711589137,"sku":"CIN1558496467VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51327537545489,"sku":"CIN1558496467G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1558496467.jpg?v=1786080075"},{"product_id":"yankee-moderns-book-michael-hoberman-9781572330870","title":"Yankee Moderns","description":"In Yankee Moderns, Michael Hoberman explores the convergence of folk regional identity—a culturally based sense of place—with the social, economic, and psychic pressures that have come with modernity. Focusing on the oral traditions of a small place, the Sawmill Valley of western Massachusetts, he finds that the folklife of apparently isolated rural communities is far more dynamic and adaptable to change than is popularly supposed.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDeftly intertwining anecdote and analysis, Hoberman draws largely upon interviews he conducted with older residents of the Sawmill Valley. He uses their words to paint a vivid picture of everyday life there during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—a time when small-scale farming and lumbering began to give way to the newer economic forces of industrialization and tourism.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAs he studied these oral traditions, Hoberman discovered a high degree of self-consciousness and social tension, which he attributes to the region’s post-agricultural economic woes and to its somewhat reluctant proximity to several Connecticut Valley immigrant enclaves. Yet, he asserts, even as their old agrarian ideals and one-time cultural uniformity became matters of distant memory, the residents of Sawmill Valley recognized these facts and coped quite competently with the changing conditions of their lives.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eRural New Englanders, Hoberman suggests, have too long been portrayed as backward-looking and dangerously homogenous in their makeup—crotchety exceptions to modernity’s nearly worldwide sweep. This insightful work, with its emphasis on instability and adaptation as persistent features of the folk region, does much to lay that stereotype to rest.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe Author: Michael Hoberman teaches English at Greenfield Community College in Greenfield, Massachusetts, and  also works as a visiting lecturer in American Studies\u003cbr\u003eat Utrecht University in the Netherlands.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50331987214609,"sku":"CIN1572330872G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1572330872.jpg?v=1786442018"},{"product_id":"new-israel-new-england-book-michael-hoberman-9781558499201","title":"New Israel \/ New England","description":"The New England Puritans' fascination with the legacy of the Jewish religion has been well documented, but their interactions with actual Jews have escaped sustained historical attention. New Israel\/New England tells the story of the Sephardic merchants who traded and sojourned in Boston and Newport between the mid-seventeenth century and the era of the American Revolution. It also explores the complex and often contradictory meanings that the Puritans attached to Judaism and the fraught attitudes that they bore toward the Jews as a people.More often than not, Michael Hoberman shows, Puritans thought and wrote about Jews in order to resolve their own theological and cultural dilemmas. A number of prominent New Englanders, including Roger Williams, Increase Mather, Samuel Sewall, Benjamin Colman, Cotton Mather, Jonathan Edwards, and Ezra Stiles, wrote extensively about post-biblical Jews, in some cases drawing on their own personal acquaintance with Jewish contemporaries.Among the intriguing episodes that Hoberman investigates is the recruitment and conversion of Harvard's first permanent instructor of Hebrew, the Jewish-born Judah Monis. Later chapters describe the ecumenical friendship between Newport minister Ezra Stiles and Haim Carigal, an itinerant rabbi from Palestine, as well as the life and career of Moses Michael Hays, the prominent freemason who was Boston's first permanently established Jewish businessman, a founder of its insurance industry, an early sponsor of the Bank of Massachusetts, and a personal friend of Paul Revere.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50382508949777,"sku":"CIN1558499202G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50391155966225,"sku":"CIN1558499202VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1558499202.jpg?v=1761991061"},{"product_id":"imagining-early-american-jews-book-michael-hoberman-9780197804599","title":"Imagining Early American Jews","description":"Popular representations of history tend to meet the moral demands of the present. Before the social crises of the postwar era began to influence Jews' thinking and at a time when global antisemitism posed the most obvious threat to their continuity and survival, Jews in America were relatively untroubled by the nation's legacy of colonialism. Popular representations of early Jewish American history unabashedly highlighted Jewish conformity to the pioneer myth. The civil rights era and its aftermath, however, brought a new and conflicting awareness to an increasingly affluent population of Jewish Americans. Jews realized that they were beneficiaries of American plenitude and began to reckon with the fact that some of their ancestors had been complicit in the nation's greatest transgressions of racial justice. From the 1960s onward, a growing awareness of how Jews, as racial whites, may have benefitted from the colonization of the New World inspired new efforts to grapple with the legacy of early Jewish American history.Michael Hoberman examines how the Jewish experiences of the American Revolution, slaveholding in the early republic and antebellum period, and westward migration have been imagined, commemorated, and frequently mythologized. Focusing on how historical relationships between Jews and Native Americans and Jews and Blacks are interpreted in light of current political developments, he suggests that the stories Americans tell about early American Jews help to shape their views about the racial and cultural complexities of the American present. He analyzes current-day popular representations of Jewish history in the United States, including historical novels and the curation of early synagogues and house museums. Finally, he introduces several current-day descendants of early American Jews whose genealogical backgrounds inform their sense of identity. Timely and original, Imagining Early American Jews shows how non-specialists' interpretations and representations of the past are key to understanding Jewish American history and identity.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51745385087249,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":51745385283857,"sku":"NGR9780197804599","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52495841198353,"sku":"NIN9780197804599","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":53163503386897,"sku":"CIN0197804594VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780197804599.jpg?v=1786442532"},{"product_id":"jews-in-the-americas-1776-1826-book-michael-hoberman-9781138202917","title":"Jews in the Americas, 1776-1826","description":"\u003cp\u003eThe period between 1776-1826 signalled a major change in how Jewish identity was understood both by Jews and non-Jews throughout the Americas. \u003cem\u003eJews in the Americas, 1776-1826\u003c\/em\u003e brings this world of change to life by uniting important out-of-print primary sources on early American Jewish life with rare archival materials that can currently be found only in special collections in Europe, England, the United States, and the Caribbean. \u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":54116634263825,"sku":"NLS9781138202917","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9781138202917.jpg?v=1786408454"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/collections\/author-books-by-michael-hoberman.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}