The Ghetto: A Very Short Introduction

· Tantor Media Inc · Narrated by Julian Elfer
Audiobook
4 hr 2 min
Unabridged
Eligible
Ratings and reviews aren’t verified  Learn More
Want a 24 min sample? Listen anytime, even offline. 
Add

About this audiobook

For three hundred years the ghetto defined Jewish culture in the late medieval and early modern period in Western Europe. In the nineteenth-century it was a free-floating concept which traveled to Eastern Europe and the United States. Eastern European "ghettos", which enabled genocide, were crudely rehabilitated by the Nazis during World War Two as if they were part of a benign medieval tradition. In the United States, the word ghetto was routinely applied to endemic black ghettoization which has lasted from 1920 until the present. Outside of America "the ghetto" has been universalized as the incarnation of class difference, or colonialism, or apartheid, and has been applied to segregated cities and countries throughout the world. In this Very Short Introduction Bryan Cheyette unpicks the extraordinarily complex layers of contrasting meanings that have accrued over five hundred years to ghettos, considering their different settings across the globe. He considers core questions of why and when urban, racial, and colonial ghettos have appeared, and who they contain. Exploring their various identities, he shows how different ghettos interrelate, or are contrasted, across time and space, or even in the same place.

About the author

Bryan Cheyette is chair in modern literature and culture at the University of Reading, and a fellow of the English association. He has authored or edited several books, including The Ghetto: A Very Short Introduction and is a series editor for New Horizons in Contemporary Writing.

British-born Julian Elfer is an award-winning New York City-based actor and audiobook narrator. With over 100 titles to his credit, Julian brings a unique facility for characterization in fiction and an empathy for the personalities and events of the past.

Rate this audiobook

Tell us what you think.

Listening information

Smartphones and tablets
Install the Google Play Books app for Android and iPad/iPhone. It syncs automatically with your account and allows you to read online or offline wherever you are.
Laptops and computers
You can read books purchased on Google Play using your computer's web browser.