"Of the many refugee trails filled with stateless Jews fleeing Europe during the decades of the Nazi Regime, the odyssey of Cantor Joseph Cysner's escape from Hamburg to Poland to the Philippines stands unique. Joseph escaped the fate of thousands of refugees held at border-camps along the German-Polish border in 1938 and joined hundreds of European refugee Jews ultimately saved from destruction between 1937 and 1941 by little known rescue plans in the East Asian Community of the Philippines. His rescue by Commonwealth officials President Manual Quezon and High Commissioner Paul V. McNutt, and American Jewish businessmen and leaders in Manila, illuminates their heroic efforts in organizing selection and sponsorship programs that overcame limits imposed by the US and other countries during the refugee crisis and heroically saved as many souls as they could before war intervened. Even though it too was ill-fated by the Japanese invasion, Quezon's remarkable offer demonstrated what could be accomplished when nation's leaders were willing to put aside political agendas to act in the universally noble cause of saving human lives. By opening their doors to the refugees, the Filipinos also opened their hearts and gave them a new homeland. Joseph Cysner's personal story of refuge in the Philippines and the vibrant Jewish community that arose there weaves itself throughout the humanitarian efforts to aid the persecuted with a sanctuary in the Pacific. This book resurrects these important events from historical oblivion"--

Since antiquity, European Jewish diaspora communities have used formal appeals to secular and religious authorities to secure favors or protection. Such petitioning took on particular significance in modern dictatorships, often as the only tool left for voicing political opposition. During the Holocaust, tens of thousands of European Jews turned to individual and collective petitions in the face of state-sponsored violence. This volume offers the first extensive analysis of petitions authored by Jews in nations ruled by the Nazis and their allies. It demonstrates their underappreciated value as a historical source and reveals the many attempts of European Jews to resist intensifying persecution and actively struggle for survival.

In Remaindered Life Neferti X. M. Tadiar offers a new conceptual vocabulary and framework for rethinking the dynamics of a global capitalism maintained through permanent imperial war. Tracking how contemporary capitalist accumulation depends on producing life-times of disposability, Tadiar focuses on what she terms remaindered life—practices of living that exceed the distinction between life worth living and life worth expending. Through this heuristic, Tadiar reinterprets the global significance and genealogy of the surplus life-making practices of migrant domestic and service workers, refugees fleeing wars and environmental disasters, criminalized communities, urban slum dwellers, and dispossessed Indigenous people. She also examines artists and filmmakers in the Global South who render forms of various living in the midst of disposability. Retelling the story of globalization from the side of those who reach beyond dominant protocols of living, Tadiar demonstrates how attending to remaindered life can open up another horizon of possibility for a radical remaking of our present global mode of life.