New & Noteworthy

This book establishes the profound significance of MGM's 1940 film The Mortal Storm, the first major Hollywood production to depict the plight of Jews in Germany before the Holocaust.

Based on Phyllis Bottome's best seller, also titled The Mortal Storm, the film was made amidst the bitter debate that occurred between 1938 and 1941 over whether the United States should involve itself in another European war or remain an isolationist country, as Charles Lindbergh among others urged.

In 1941, the film triggered the first hostile Congressional investigation of Hollywood where the studios were accused of allegedly propagandizing for war. Lindbergh had secretly urged the Hollywood hearings, inspired by his own growing antisemitism, as his unpublished diary reveals. Hollywood studios, in turn, regarded the growing European crisis with ambivalence. They feared being accused in a film like The Mortal Storm of using the movies to represent the fate of Europe's imperiled Jews. Louis B. Mayer, the head of MGM, insisted the word "Jew" be removed from the film and "non-Aryan" be used instead, hoping to confuse American audiences about the film's real intent.

Jimmy Stewart, who starred in the film, took it on the road to urge American aid to Britain, while Lindbergh prepared his own campaign to denounce American Jews for luring the country into war. The book reveals how closely Hollywood and politics were entwined on the eve of war. It also reveals how closely the plight of Europe's Jews and American antisemitism were entwined at the same time.

A New Yorker Best Book of 2025

An irreverent new take on the Renaissance, which reveals it as anything but Europe's golden age.

From the darkness of a plagued and war-torn Middle Ages, the Renaissance (we're told) heralds the dawning of a new world--a halcyon age of art, prosperity, and rebirth. Hogwash! or so says award-winning novelist and historian Ada Palmer. In Inventing the Renaissance, Palmer turns her witty and irreverent eye on the fantasies we've told ourselves about Europe's not-so-golden age, myths she sets right with sharp clarity.

Palmer's Renaissance is altogether desperate. Troubled by centuries of conflict, she argues, Europe looked to a long-lost Roman Empire (even its education practices) to save it from unending war. Later historians met their own political challenges with a similarly nostalgic vision, only now they looked to the Renaissance and told a partial story. To right this wrong, Palmer offers fifteen provocative portraits of Renaissance men and women (some famous, some obscure) whose lives reveal a far more diverse, fragile, and wild Renaissance than its glowing reputation suggests.

Can queer life be ordinary? By answering "yes," Ordinary Queerness in American Modernism prompts queer studies to consider what it has long devalued and neglected: the ordinary lives queer people create. Declining to cede the ordinary to queer studies' critique of the normal, Jess Shollenberger argues for and models a reading practice that is attuned to queer desires, figures, and intimacies arrayed against the normal yet enabled by ordinary life. By tracing the representation of queerness in modernist literature as presence, possibility, and insistence, Shollenberger illuminates how the modernist interest in ordinary life cannot be understood apart from queer experience, culture, and aesthetics. Ordinary Queerness in American Modernism disturbs queer studies by turning toward the ordinary as an object for queer inquiry and by reading perversely without the dominant hermeneutic for queer literary studies--the closet. Across interpretations of work by Sarah Orne Jewett, Gertrude Stein, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Elizabeth Bishop, Shollenberger develops the practice of reading modernist writing without the closet, expanding the scope of modernist studies and augmenting our knowledge of queerness for a shifting, unstable present.

Shifting Blind Identities in Higher Education features accounts of how blindness and low vision intersect with other dimensions of identity for both students and faculty in higher education. Contributors from a range of institutional contexts illuminate "common but not comparable" experiences, as well as importantly different ones, and explore different intersections of identity while navigating higher education spaces. Each chapter addresses these questions: What is the relationship between seeing and selfhood? What choices do students and faculty make about how they experience and represent the intersections of their vision condition and other dimensions of their identity? What do authors wish others to understand, consider, let go of, and/or embrace regarding their experiences of navigating higher education with blindness or low vision?

Writing in their own unique voices, each author shares details of their lived experiences; analyses of how those are shaped by institutions, social norms, and individuals; and offers action steps for how everyone can make higher education more welcoming to and supportive of not only those with blindness or low vision but also those with a wide diversity of identities and experiences. Shifting Blind Identities in Higher Education inspires both insight and action into cultivating a more accessible and inclusive space in higher education.