Jews have always participated in popular culture, but positive Jewish images rarely occurred until the 1990s. Jewish insider/outsider status shaped the film industry, radio and television, comic books, and stand-up comedy. A few Jewish characters were prominent in the 1960s–1970s (e.g., Barbra Streisand, Woody Allen). With the rise of the Internet and media industries targeting niche audiences, Jewish imagery now highlights Latinx Jews, Black Jews, Asian American Jews, Indigenous Jews, Sephardic Jews, and LGBTQ+ Jews. For example, Transparent (2014–2019) about a Jewish father who comes out as a transgender woman, routinely incorporates religious rituals. Broad City (2014–2019) celebrates the escapades of sexually fluid twenty-something Jewish friends. Drake and Tiffany Haddish, both Black Jews, repackaged their Bar/Bat Mitzvahs for comic effect. Explicit intra-Jewish diversity within wider American experiences disrupts historical tensions between Jewish presence and erasure in pop culture that were fueled by anti-Semitism.

Amour – Love – starts with the alphabet's first letter. And that Alpha has passed sentence on me, a sentence I must suffer unless it be revoked by the one I’ve loved and shall continue to love unceasingly, without counting the cost and without measure – and indeed increasingly, at a higher rate and faster than a usurer charges interest! It's clear, and will become clearer still, that an urge has come upon me which, I promise you, would never have stirred in my heart had it not been for the prompting of Love and of my lady. Credit must go to them both; I’m indebted to my lady for sure – indeed I am entirely hers, and here become her liegeman, and from her will hold Courtesy as my fief. With joy in my heart and in every limb, I’m bracing myself and sharpening my pen, preparing now to express my thoughts in several forms of verse, and all with the sole aim of giving pleasure to my lady. [20] [Love:]

‘I am the god of Love; I rule the lives of lovers. To the faithful I give succour and relieve them of affliction; With joy and sweet pleasure I will fill them constantly; But the fakers, the false-hearted, I’ll condemn to misery.

Being the sovereign god of lovers as I am, I sit before Fortune, as radiant to the eye As an angel of heaven, endowed with six wings. I fulfil more of my wishes than does any mortal man.

Fortune is wise indeed; we both know our business well. She directs and pays my passage: we have great control and power! We wash the faithful free of all their sickness and their pain, But the false-hearted pay a forfeit and we bar their way.

At Harvard, it took me until junior year to be accepted into Earl Kim's composition class, and until senior year to be accepted into Kirchner’s. But already in my first year, I was plunged into a world of study far from the personalized tutelage of Miss Dillon and Emilie Harris, the mini-paradise of Kinhaven, or the joyful hands-on music making at Putney. Classes included heady dissections of Brahms by theorist David Lewin, somber musicological discourses on Monteverdi given by pale and nervous graduate-scholars, a challenging course in traditional forms taught by composer John MacIvor Perkins, in which we composed sonatas, minuets, and rondos in the idiom of Haydn, and realizations of Baroque figured bass at the keyboard with the vivacious and brilliant pianist Luise Vosgerchian, who had studied with Nadia Boulanger in Paris.

Rather quickly, I met a number of composers my own age whose histories were similar to mine. These included my roommate Danny Troob, who eventually became a noted movie and Broadway orchestrator and composer. Danny had written orchestral pieces at an early age, too, and was a fine pianist. He performed the Mozart A Major Concerto with the Bach Society Orchestra. Others included Bob Telson—today a successful song writer and composer for film and dance—and Leonard Lehrman, a fiercely driven and prolific composer who wrote music reviews for The Harvard Crimson and later studied with Boulanger in Paris alongside me.

Introduction

Existing studies of U.S.–Spanish relations in the years of the Second Spanish Republic (1931–1936) have been unduly influenced by two later events: the Cold War and the Spanish Civil War. The prevailing narrative is that the eyes of administration officials in Washington were tainted by an excessive zeal, leading them to see Communist agents where there were only leftist reformists. In turn, these suspicions paved the way for the policy of neutrality, parallel to European non-intervention, which the United States practised after 1936. This interpretation is, to a degree, a somewhat ahistorical outlook, because both American and Spanish decision-makers were totally ignorant of events that lay only in the future. In fact, it is impossible to separate the Spanish policy of the Great Powers from the situation then existing in Europe. As Scott Ramsay has recently stated with respect to the United Kingdom:

By considering Foreign Office perceptions of political developments in Spain between 1931 and 1936, British responses to the outbreak of the civil war came into focus not as an ideologically-driven attempt to facilitate the overthrow of the Republic, but as responses to what the British government perceived as a major threat to its foreign policy objectives.

There is ample evidence to say something of the same kind about the United States. The uncertainties that arose in official U.S. circles when the new regime was proclaimed in April 1931 soon vanished.

As described in volume 3, pp. lxxxvii–lxxxix, from its beginnings in 1922, the BBC created a new national experience of the major occasions of special worship, in two senses. First, people throughout the United Kingdom and Ireland could now listen to or, later, watch, and, if they wished, participate in the same services – both the outside broadcasts of cathedral and church services, and the studio services and religious talks organized by the BBC's Religious Broadcasting Department. Second, the BBC broadcasts were ecumenical in character, and contributed to the wider ecumenism among British churches. While relative size, effective leadership in British religion, and the nature of the national and royal services meant that the Church of England had a special prominence, the Religious Broadcasting Department, itself established on representative principles, sought a balanced representation of the main churches in the selection of the services and clergy for its broadcasts.1 From 1935 to 1943, the studio services were usually conducted jointly by leading members of the Church of England, the free church councils and the Church of Scotland. The Roman catholic church, which until 1964 prohibited joint prayers with protestants, was represented by a separate talk or service. For some occasions, regional services were broadcast on channels which served Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, led by ministers of their main churches. The broadcast services and talks had very large audiences, especially for royal events and for national days of prayer during and at the end of the Second World War. As is noted in commentaries in volume 3, some services were relayed to audiences in the empire and commonwealth, and in other nations.

This article examines the development and use of urban soldiers in warfare in medieval England with a focus on military efficacy and strategic value. Urban soldiers most often served as supplements to royal forces, but they also gave the king an option in raising troops that circumvented the normal reliance on either fickle noble retainers or expensive stipendiary soldiers, especially as towns more often than not supported the king during warfare. What is demonstrated is that while urban soldiers were used frequently during this period, the period after the Norman Conquest saw an atrophying of the mechanisms designed to harness the military power of towns. This does not truly begin to change on a practical level until the end of the twelfth century. By the end of the thirteenth century English kings were turning to urban soldiers more and more as part of a general move towards an increasingly professionalized army and by the dawn of the fourteenth century urban soldiers were playing larger and larger roles in battle. As will be demonstrated, by the end of the period under examination urban soldiers will increasingly play larger and larger roles in military forces until the distinction itself becomes somewhat anachronistic.

This article examines the use of urban soldiers in medieval English warfare, and builds on contributions on the role of London in medieval warfare, most notably Daniel Gerrard's “‘A Large Population, Famous for their Military Qualities’: Londoners at War, c. 1000–1200” and John McEwan's “London's Militia in the Thirteenth Century.”