Reflections on the Pandemic: COVID and Social Crises in the Year Everything Changed is a collection of essays, poems, and artwork that captures the raw energy and emotion of 2020 from the perspective of the Rutgers University community. This book, through its rich and imaginative storytelling at the intersection of scholarly expertise and personal narrative brings readers into the hearts and minds of not just the Rutgers community, but the world.

Happy Days investigates how 1970s popular culture was obsessed with America’s past, but offered radically different interpretations of the same historical events and icons. Looking at representations of 1950s teenagers, the noir detective, America’s bicentennial, and neo-slave narratives, Benjamin Alpers examines how American history provoked both nostalgia and deep soul searching. 

Through their approximately $2.5 billion in donations each year to Israel, American Jews have profoundly impacted the direction of Israeli society. Checkbook Zionism uncovers how tensions over potential influence have been mediated and offers a new paradigm for evaluating philanthropic power sharing today.
 

Being Human: Political Modernity and Hospitality in Kurdistan-Iraq is a unique work of anthropological hospitality that draws on historical sources, eyewitness testimonies, perpetrator testimony, archival documents, trial records, artwork, novels, and poetry, to engage with one of political modernity’s acts of genocide in Iraq under the Iraqi Baʿth state.
 

Between 1970 and 1985, lesbian, gay, and bisexual educators (LGB) formed communities and began advocating for a place of openness and safety for LGB people in America's schools. They fought for protection and representation in the National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers in New York, Los Angeles and Northern California.

China and the Internet analyzes how Chinese activists, NGOs, and government offices have used the Internet to fight rural malnutrition, the digital divide, the COVID-19 pandemic, and other urgent problems affecting millions of people. It presents five theoretically-informed case studies of how new media have been used in interventions for development and social change, including how activists battled against COVID-19.

Between Care and Criminality examines Australian social welfare’s encounter with migration and marriage in an era of intensified border control. It offers an in-depth ethnographic account of how social welfare practitioners carry out a migrant-targeted social policy designed to prevent forced marriage in the aftermath of a 2013 law which criminalized the practice.

When Cowboys Come Home shows how World War II changed the ways men thought about their roles in American society. For three writers who served—James Jones, Stewart Stern, and Edward Field—the war taught that manhood didn’t have to be based on bravery and heroism, but could be defined by authenticity, sensitivity, and male camaraderie. Rebelling against the orthodoxies of their time, these veterans reimagined what roles a man could play and their work set the foundation for the revolutions of the sixties.
 

Watching While Black Rebooted: The Television and Digitality of Black Audiences examines what watching while Black means within an expanded U.S. televisual landscape. In this edition, media scholars return to television and digital spaces (those spaces relying on television structure) to think anew about what engages and captures Black audiences and users and why it matters.

Watching While Black Rebooted: The Television and Digitality of Black Audiences examines what watching while Black means within an expanded U.S. televisual landscape. In this edition, media scholars return to television and digital spaces (those spaces relying on television structure) to think anew about what engages and captures Black audiences and users and why it matters.

Self-Alteration: How People Change Themselves across Cultures approaches the subject of the self and its becoming through the exploration of modes of its transformation, including through religious and spiritual traditions and innovations; embodied participation in therepeutic prorams like psychoanalysis and gendered care services; and through political activism or relationships with animals. The essays in this collection show that both minor and major modes of self-alteration exist in many places and times, and across very different modern societies.
 

Providing a critical history of Tandem Productions, the company behind nearly all the hit Black sitcoms of the 1970s, including Good Times, The Jeffersons, Sanford and Son, and Diff’rent Strokes, Adrien Sebro explores how their sitcom plots paralleled what was happening behind the scenes, as talented African-Americans devised strategies to gain creative agency and fair financial compensation.   
 

Barbara Smith has been doing groundbreaking work since the early 1970s, describing a Black feminism for Black women. This collection contains some of her major essays on Black women's literature, Black lesbian writing, on racism in the women's movement, Black-Jewish relations, and homophobia in the Black community. Her forays into these areas ignited dialogue about topics that few other writers were addressing at the time, and which, sadly, remain pertinent to this day. This 25th anniversary edition, in a beautiful new package, retains the urgency these essays had when they were first written.  

The Brodsky Center at Rutgers: Three Decades, 1986-2017, chronicles the history and artists involved with an internationally acclaimed print and papermaking studio at Rutgers University. Judith K. Brodsky conceived, founded, and directed the atelier, which, from its onset, provided state-of-the-arts technology and expertise for under-represented contemporary artists — women, Indigenous, and from diasporas of the African, Eastern European, Latin and Asian communities — to make innovative works on paper. These artistic creations presented new narratives to American and global visual arts from voices previously not heard or seen.

Playful Frames: Styles of Widescreen Cinema studies the poetics of the auteur-driven widescreen image, offering nimble, expansive analyses of the work of four distinctive filmmakers – Jean Negulesco, Blake Edwards, Robert Altman, and John Carpenter – who creatively inhabited the nooks and crannies of widescreen moviemaking during the final decades of the twentieth century.