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The question of the collaboration of Jews with the Nazi regime during the persecution and extermination of European Jewry is one of the most difficult and sensitive issues surrounding the Holocaust. How could people be forced to cooperate in their own destruction? Why would they help the Nazi authorities round up their own people for deportation, manage the 'collection points' and supervise the people being deported until the last moment? This book is a major new study of the role of the Jews, and more specifically the 'Judenrat' or Jewish Council, in Holocaust Vienna. It was in Vienna that Eichmann developed and tested his model for a Nazi Jewish policy from 1938 onwards, and the leaders of the Viennese Jewish community were the prototypes for all subsequent Jewish councils. By studying the situation in Vienna, it is possible to gain a unique insight into the way that the Nazi regime incorporated the Jewish community into its machinery of destruction. Drawing on recently discovered archives and extensive interviews, Doron Rabinovici explores in detail the actions of individual Jews and Jewish organizations and shows how all of their strategies to protect themselves and others were ultimately doomed to failure. His rich and insightful account enables us to understand in a new way the terrible reality of the victims' plight: faced with the stark choice of death or cooperation, many chose to cooperate with the authorities in the hope that their actions might turn out to be the lesser evil.

Complicated Lives examines the greatest conundrum of the modern world: why, despite being richer, healthier and more empowered than ever before, do we continue to feel threatened, under pressure and stressed? There's no denying that we've never had it so good, yet the stark truth is that levels of happiness are unchanged since the 1950s. Offering strategies and insights for avoiding 'the malaise of modernity' whilst exploiting positive experiences the 21st century has to offer, Michael Willmott and William Nelson take readers on a journey of self-discovery into the realities of life in today's complex, multi-channel world.

Pop music and rock music are often treated as separate genres but the distinction has always been blurred. Motti Regev argues that pop-rock is best understood as a single musical form defined by the use of electric and electronic instruments, amplification and related techniques. The history of pop-rock extends from the emergence of rock'n'roll in the 1950s to a variety of contemporary fashions and trends – rock, punk, soul, funk, techno, hip hop, indie, metal, pop and many more. This book offers a highly original account of the emergence of pop-rock music as a global phenomenon in which Anglo-American and many other national and ethnic variants interact in complex ways. Pop-rock is analysed as a prime instance of 'aesthetic cosmopolitanism' – that is, the gradual formation, in late modernity, of world culture as a single interconnected entity in which different social groupings around the world increasingly share common ground in their aesthetic perceptions, expressive forms and cultural practices. Drawing on a wide array of examples, this path-breaking book will be of great interest to students and scholars in cultural sociology, media and cultural studies as well as the study of popular music.

Winner of the American Sociological Association's 'Distinguished Book Award' in the Religion category. For most of us, «Apocalypse» suggests the cataclysmic end of the world. Yet in Greek «apocalypse» means «revelation,» and the real subject of the Book of Revelation is how the sacred arises in history at a moment of crisis and destiny. With origins in ancient religions, the apocalyptic has been a transformative force from the time of the Crusades, through the Reformation, the French Revolution and modern communism, all the way to the present day «Islamic Jihad» and «War on Terror.» In Apocalypse, John R. Hall explores the significance of apocalyptic movements and the role they have played in the rise of the West and «The Empire of Modernity.» This brilliant cross-disciplinary study offers a novel basis for rethinking our social order and its ambivalent relations to sacred history. Apocalypse will attract general readers seeking new understandings of the world in challenging times. Scholars and students will find a compelling synthesis that draws them into conversation with others interested in religion, theology, culture, philosophy, and phenomenology, as well as sociology, social theory, western civilization, and world history.