Molded from Clay: The Portrayal of Jews through the Golem in Yudel Rosenberg’s The Golem and the Wondrous Deeds of the Maharal of Prague and Gustav Meyrink’s Der Golem

This thesis examines and compares Yudel Rosenberg’s The Golem and the Wondrous Deeds of the Maharal (1909) and Gustav Meyrink’s Der Golem (1915). These texts brought monumental changes to the Golem legend and brought the creature for the first time into popular modern literature. This thesis pays particular attention to how Rosenberg and Meyrink bind the Golem legend to the portrayal of the Jew in contemporary Jewish and non-Jewish discourses. I conclude my discussion of these two novels by examining them in light of the Finis Ghetto program, an urban renewal program which almost completely destroyed Prague’s Jewish Town, shocking Jews and non-Jews and changing the Golem legend forever

Citizenship from the Margins: Vernacular Theories of Rights and the State from the Interwar Caribbean

AbstractThis essay explores debates over political membership and rights within empire from the interwar British Caribbean. Although no formal status of imperial, British, or colonial citizenship existed in this era, British Caribbeans routinely hailed each other as meritorious local “citizens,” demanded political rights due them as “British citizens,” and decried rulers' failure to treat colored colonials equally with other “citizens” of the empire. In the same years, the hundreds of thousands of British West Indians who labored in circum-Caribbean republics like the United States, Panama, Cuba, Venezuela, and Costa Rica experienced firsthand the international consolidation of formal citizenship as a state-issued credential ensuring mobility and abode. This convergence pushed British Caribbeans at home and abroad to question the costs of political disfranchisement and the place of race within empire. The vernacular political philosophy they developed in response importantly complements the influential theories of citizenship and rights developed by European thinkers of the same generation, such as T. H. Marshall and Hannah Arendt.</jats:p

Harvests of shame: enduring unfree labour in twentieth century United States, 1933-1964

This article reframes the discussion on vulnerable and exploited agricultural labour in twentieth-century United States using the overarching category of unfree labour. In order to do so, it bridges two usually distinct historiographies by linking the phenomenon of ‘peonage’ during the New Deal, with the one of immigrant contract labour southern Florida, under the H2 visa. Archival research on the practices at the US Sugar Corporation in southern Florida exemplifies this link. This article draws on federal archives, government proceedings, papers of political activists and legal and labour scholarship to argue: firstly, that unfree labour has been an enduring feature of agricultural labour relations at regional level during the twentieth century, through both a transmission and a transformation of practice that had their origin in the control of black emancipated labour; secondly, that the introduction of guest workers under the H2 and Bracero programme meant a modernization in the practices of unfree labour, pivoting on the lack of citizenship rights, racial discrimination, debt at home, and threat of deportation; and, finally, that the failure to recognise forms of legal and economic deprivation and coercion as unfree labour has hurt the ability of the United States to enforce protection of human rights at home