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The role of Agreement as one of the first and classic ways of knowing is examined in this chapter. It critiques one of the major philosophical bases on which professional education rests, the philosophy of empiricism. Of all the means that humans have invented to learn about and control their world, none has been more persistent or more powerful than the notion that for something to count as knowledge, it must be based on facts or observations. The tale of the Delphi is critically examined in this chapter. The authors demonstrate how it is a simple but a very powerful and clear example of a particular kind of knowledge or Inquiry System. Also, the Asch effect is presented as a counterargument to the notion of empiricism.

Under the cloud of international conflict, numerous early-1940s progressives cast the working-class, ethnic-accented city neighborhood as a place where democratic values became most concrete. The mixture of creeds and nationalities at the heart of the nation's older cities seemed to offer a uniquely American rebuff to the fascist drive for purity. As chapter 1 explains, elaborations of this vision emerged in the celebratory cadences of the popular press, in the projects of intercultural educators such as Rachel Davis DuBois, and in novels, radio plays, and Broadway shows by figures such as Sidney Meller, Sholem Asch, Louis Hazam, Kurt Weill, and Langston Hughes. Each offered new ways for making sense of urban space, yet these works also revealed contradictions and uncertainties, most notably in an inability to meld competing impulses toward assimilation and particularism. Interpreting such texts as a collective form of imaginative “placemaking,” this chapter examines the conflicted form of liberal nationalism that took the polyglot city neighborhood as its emblem.

When Niles was 65, his concerts slowed down and his younger audience were curious about his high voice and dramatic articulation. He began to consolidate his life works in recordings. Niles chose to record with Moses Asch, on a new label that seemed more supportive of his role as a folk artist. All three of Niles's albums for Disc were recorded in 1946 and released in 1947. Asch was more visionary than pragmatic, and the disc label folded one year later in 1948. Niles was distressed at the prospect of starting up another label with Asch, so John Jacob and Rena decided to control the recording business themselves.

This chapter reviews the book Lingering Bilingualism: Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literatures in Contact (2016), by Naomi Brenner. In Lingering Bilingualism, Brenner tells the story of maskilim who used a combination of Hebrew and Russian (or Hebrew and German) in their writings, while other Jewish writers and intellectuals wrote in the two “Jewish” languages, Yiddish and Hebrew. According to Brenner, although most writers opted to choose either Hebrew or Yiddish, “there was a third choice available to interwar writers [...] to continue writing in Hebrew and Yiddish. Despite the radical transformations of the Eastern European world in which traditional Jewish bilingualism had thrived, individual bilingualism remained a viable option for a small group of writers.” Brenner coined the term “lingering bilingualism” and uses many examples to make a good case for this phenomenon. She also explores one key event: the 1927 visit of Sholem Asch and Perets Hirshbeyn to Palestine.

This chapter examines Minskii’s retelling of the massacre at Tulʹchyn in his Russian language play in verse, “Osada Tulʹchina” (The Siege of Tulʹchyn), which appeared in the St. Petersburg Jewish literary journal Voskhod in 1888 (the same year Mikeshin’s monument was unveiled in Kyiv’s St. Sophia Square for the 900 year anniversary of the baptism of Rus’). Minskii emphasizes Jewish resistance to the Cossacks, and creates a heroic Jewish figure, a Marrano named Joseph de Kastro, who flouts Ashkenazi passivity to fight the Cossacks. Avrom Reisin translated this play into Yiddish in 1905. Many aspects of Minskii’s version of the Tulʹchyn episode would reappear in twentieth-century Jewish narratives about 1648, including Sholem Asch’s 1919 Kidesh Hashem, which describes the uprising as a test of Jewish protagonists, revealing unexpected acts of bravery and heroism in the face of destruction.

Despite, Roth believed, going to prison due to his fight for freedom of expression, he was psychically unfulfilled. In Lewisburg penitentiary, he wrote a long novel entitled My Friend Yeshea. The plot describes Mishillim (Roth’s Hebrew name) accompanying Yeshea (Jesus) on His final trip to Jerusalem and witnessing His benevolence, crucifixion, and resurrection. Other writers, most importantly Sholem Asch (The Nazarene), had delineated Jesus as an exemplary Jew. Yeshea is uniquely American, modernist, and even Joycean in its author’s belief in the ability of commonplace, worldly behavior to co-exist with the deeply spiritual. In the novel, Yahweh himself proclaims Mishillim a wise man (tzaddik) in his generation and gives him the mission of bringing about world peace. After prison, Roth resumed publishing. He found that the popular literature he dealt in had been supplanted by more explicit media.

This chapter speaks about Asch’s classic study about how individuals will conform to the group even in the face of unambiguously true information. Similar trends were witnessed in the real world during the Bay of Pigs fiasco, where President Kennedy’s top advisors succumbed to groupthink and failed to recognize Cuba’s military strength and foresight in predicting the planned US invasion. Contrary to common sense, individuals tend to resolve the cognitive dissonance they experience when faced with group pressure by changing their deeply held (and objectively true) opinions. Conformity to work processes is necessary in any workplace environment, but when taken to the extreme, it can lead to false perceptions about agreement, a lack of speaking out, and ultimately poor decision-making.

Questions

Which of the following theories was NOT proposed by Sigmund Freud?

The topographical model of mind

Affect trauma theory

Individual psychology theory

The structural model of the mind

Psychosexual stages of development

Which of the following is...

Craig Johnson was the “third man” in what has become one of the legendary ethnographic adventures and bodies of ethnographic cinema: the series of films about the indigenous Yanomamö living in the highland jungles of southern Venezuela, produced by anthropologists Napoleon Chagnon and Timothy Asch. Johnson, who took sound for the canonical The Ax Fight (1974) and other Yanomamö films, and edited some of them, had never spoken publicly about his involvement in and thoughts about his early filmmaking adventure, until this interview. In the years following his disenchantment with the Yanomamö project, Johnson worked on various films and now, through his Interpret Green, develops and constructs interactive installations for museums.

Any important contribution to the history of cinema requires more than accomplished filmmakers. Indeed, filmmaking accomplishment itself is nearly always dependent on the availability of exhibition venues and distribution organizations. Documentary Educational Resources (DER) is a crucial distributor for a wide range of ethnographic films from across the world. Founded by John Marshall and Timothy Asch in 1971 in order to make their own films available, DER now makes available to colleges and universities, schools, and festivals, eight hundred films by hundreds of nonfiction filmmakers from across the globe who are committed to cinema as a form of cultural education and immersion. This interview with the three women who have served as DER’s executive directors over recent decades traces the evolution of a model independent distributor.

This chapter is devoted to the writer Sholem Asch, arguably the Yiddish writer most aligned with the normative demands of world literature—as market, network, and idealized transnational republic. Asch’s fame in the interwar period, in Europe and then in the US, in Yiddish and in translation, relied on his belief in the possibility for reconciliation between Jews and Christians, especially through the creation of a unified redemptive literary institution. Focusing on his novels Three Cities and Salvation, the chapter posits that Asch is a model for a monolingual world literature, which may be written in multiple languages but whose texts seek to employ a mutually translatable universal vocabulary. This chapter counters this faith in translation by reading vernacular incongruity back into Asch’s texts, revealing a disjunction between Asch’s institutional longings and the realities of his vernacular commitments.