The Humble Shoe Gets a Place of Honor in Iraq

Very nice of MoveOn.org. and the Democratic National Committee to contribute funding for the project.

Speaking about SHOES…

Jimmy Choo is not Jewish, but shoes still have a special place in Jewish history. Just check out the new book edited by Edna Nahshon, titled “Jews and Shoes.”

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As one reviewer wrote, “Jews and Shoes is a remarkable and wonderful offbeat collection of pieces on shoes (or the lack of them) from Moses’ refusal to wear them to Ernst Lubitsch’s evocation of WWI Berlin’s Jewish world of shoe selling. A wild mix of cultural history (Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimlett and her father Mayer’s images of shoe making), anthropology (Rivka Parciack on Jewish tombstones in the shape of shoes), and literary study (Andrew Ingall on Bruno Schulz), this is a great book of everyone who wears shoes, is Jewish or is Jewish and wears shoes.”

TABLE OF CONTENTS:
Introduction: Jews and Shoes, Edna Nahshon
Part 1: Religion and the Bible
1. The Biblical Shoe, Ora Prouser “… Put Off Thy Shoes From Off Thy Feet …”
2. The Halitzah Shoe, Catherine Heszer * The Halitza Shoe: Between Female Subjugation and Symbolic Emasculation
3. The Tombstone Shoe, Rivka Parciack – The Living within the Dead: Shoe-Shaped Tombstones at Jewish Cemeteries
4. The Israeli Shoe, Orna Ben-Meir ‘Biblical Sandals’ and Native Israeli Identity

Part 2: Memories and Commemoration
5. The Shtetl Shoe, Mayer Kirshenblatt and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett – How to Make a Shoe
6. The Folkloristic Shoe, Robert A. Rothstein – Shoes and Shoemakers in Yiddish Language and Folklore
7. The Holocaust Shoe, Jeffrey Feldman – Untying Memory: Shoes as Holocaust Discourse

Part 3: Ideology and Economics
8. The Cobbler’s Shoe, Natalia Aleksiun – Shoes, Poverty and National Minority: Shoemakers in the Discourse of Jewish Intellectuals in Interwar Poland
9. The Wanderer’s Shoe, Shelly Zer-Zion – The Cobbler’s Penalty: the Wandering Jew in Search for Salvation
10. The Equalizing Shoe, Ayala Raz – On Shoes, Pioneers, and the Zionist Search for Equality

Part 4: Theatre, Art and Film
11. The Fetishist’s Shoe, Andrew Ingall – ‘Poems of Pedal Atrocity’: Sexuality, Ethnicity, and Religion in the Art and Literature of Bruno Schulz
12. The Artist’s Shoe, Sonya Rapoport – Digging Into the Jewish Roots of Shoe-Field
13. The Theatrical Shoe, Dorit Yerushalmi – The Voice of Shoemaking: Cobblers on the Israeli Stage
14. The Cinematic Shoe, Jeanette Malkin – Shoes and the City: Ernst Lubitsch and the Urban ‘Jewish’ Film

if the Iraqis use their democracy similarly to Americans, then they will re-construct shoe sculpture after U.S. forces leave — twice as big