Description: "In this text, Stein recounts the history of Sephardic and southeastern European Jews' experience of WWI, especially as it concerns the dizzying shifts in legal status so many experienced as the boundaries of the Ottoman Empire retracted, new states were created in its wake, and as Ottoman-born Jews living abroad found themselves "extra-territorial" subjects--citizens of no polity at a time when national identity and, even more, citizen papers, were of ever greater import to the modern world"--
Brief description:
Sarah Abrevaya Stein is professor of history and the Maurice Amado Chair in Sephardic Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of Plumes: Ostrich Feathers, Jews, and a Lost World of Global Commerce and Making Jews Modern: The Yiddish and Ladino Press in the Russian and Ottoman Empires, and coeditor of A Jewish Voice from Ottoman Salonica: The Ladino Memoir of Sa'adi Besalel a-Levi and Sephardi Lives: a documentary history, 1700-1950.
Review Quotes: "Stein's excellent and insightful Extraterritorial Dreams presents the difficulties, ironies, and vexations of Jewish 'nationality' in the twentieth century. In so doing, it traces historical threads that take us from the early modern period to the present day, from the Bronx to Baghdad, and to numerous places and moments in between."-- "American Historical Review"