Berlin School, ‘Gears and God’ and Judaic Soul

Co-edited by Jaimey Fisher (professor of German and cinema and digital media, and director of the UC Davis Humanities Institute) and Marco Abel (University of Nebraska). Contributors examine global trends and works associated with the Berlin School, perhaps Germany’s most important contemporary filmmaking movement, in response to a “transnational turn” — the idea that the school, despite its name, is not a specifically German phenomenon. This collection aims to understand the Berlin School as a fundamental part of the series of new-wave films around the globe, especially those from the traditional margins of world cinema. (Wayne State University Press, June 2018)

Nathaniel Williams, a lecturer in the University Writing Program, analyzes the 19th-century dime-novel genre of technology-themed exploration — featuring steam-powered and electrified robots, airships and submersibles — and examines the genre’s complicated legacy, including what many scholars see as protoimperialist narrative (in stories of Americans’ using technology to visit and seize control of remote locales) and the novels’ frequent assertion of the Bible’s authority as a historical source. (University of Alabama Press, July 31)

By Bruce D. Haynes, professor of sociology, UC Davis; and a senior fellow, Urban Ethnography Project, Yale University. From the publisher’s website: “Putting to rest the simplistic notion that Jews are white and that Black Jews are therefore a contradiction, the volume argues that we can no longer pigeonhole Black Hebrews and Israelites as exotic, militant and nationalistic sects outside the boundaries of mainstream Jewish thought and community life. The volume spurs us to consider the significance of the growing population of self-identified Black Jews and its implications for the future of American Jewry.” (NYU Press, August 2018)