Steven Ellner, Department of Economic History, Universidad Central de Venezuela, and David Myers, Department of Political Science, Pennsylvania State University, talked about democracy in Venezuela and the Chavez movement. The accompanying audio files provide the complete recording and audience discussion of the talks given by the authors. Those who download the audio files must have their own software for playing and listening.

This dissertation investigates how Lithuanian Jews positioned themselves vis-�-vis Lithuanians and the Lithuanian state in the era of democratic nation building and, after a military coup d’�tat in 1926, under an authoritarian regime. Across these dramatically different interwar political contexts, Lithuanian Jews honed different strategies to advance the idea that they belonged to Lithuania, leaning on historical, political, cultural and even linguistic evidence. At the same time, they negotiated a contradictory public discourse about them that held that Jews were integral to, and yet conditional participants in, the Lithuanian national project. I argue that, at its core, Lithuanian Jewish belonging consisted of two parts: the Russian Jewish liberal tradition and a deep-seated sense of localness, if not indigeneity. These traditions sometimes worked in tandem but were often in tension.

I trace the arc of Lithuanian Jewish political self-fashioning by looking closely at sources including the Yiddish and Lithuanian daily press, memoirs, literary production and public celebrations. I begin by looking at a group of Jewish cultural activists who, from the 1910s to 1920s, made significant inroads with Lithuanian intellectuals to advance the cause of Jewish indigeneity in a multiethnic Lithuania. In the early years of statehood, democratism, rights and the system of cultural autonomy for minorities were important vehicles for Jewish integration, and yet they were contested concepts within the Jewish community, which was fractured between Jewish parties including, most significantly for this dissertation, Zionists and Folkists. To that end, I analyze debates between party spokespeople, especially Jacob Robinson and Yudl Mark, including an exchange over the meaning of the Yiddish term "doikayt," or "hereness." I follow how Jewish supporters of democratic rights reformulated their ideas and positions under Antanas Smetona’s authoritarian government, which required Jews to present as unified and loyal, despite rising anti-Semitism among the Lithuanian middle class. By the 1930s, some Lithuanian Jews came to support Smetona’s project and the Jewish place in it, while others continued to demand the rights they were promised in the wake of World War I. Finally, I look at the phenomenon of the Jewish study of Roma and the Romani language, which I argue was a way for Jews to demonstrate their relative rootedness.

The insistence that American Jews did not respond to the Holocaust has long defined the postwar period as one of silence and inaction. In fact, American Jewish communal organizations waged a robust response to the Holocaust that addressed the immediate needs of survivors in the aftermath of the war and collected, translated, and transmitted stories about the Holocaust and its survivors to American Jews. Fundraising materials that employed narratives about Jewish persecution under Nazism reached nearly every Jewish home in America and philanthropic programs aimed at aiding survivors in the postwar period engaged Jews across the politically, culturally, and socially diverse American Jewish landscape. This study examines the fundraising pamphlets, letters, posters, short films, campaign appeals, radio programs, pen-pal letters, and advertisements that make up the material record of this communal response to the Holocaust and, in so doing, examines how American Jews came to know stories about Holocaust survivors in the early postwar period.

This kind of cultural history expands our understanding of how the Holocaust became part of an American Jewish discourse in the aftermath of the war by revealing that philanthropic efforts produced multiple survivor representations while defining American Jews as saviors of Jewish lives and a Jewish future. Paying particular attention to visual and material sources that both reflected and generated communal knowledge about the Holocaust, this work affirms how important the specific context of postwar America was in shaping this initial encounter. As such, American Jewish communal organizations integrated core American motifs such as thanksgiving, freedom, and hope into their narratives about Holocaust survivors, rendering stories of refuge and tragedy into accounts of survival and triumph. This work complicates historical assumptions about postwar silence and inaction by recognizing that philanthropy served as an important site of memory construction and a meaningful way for American Jews to respond to the Holocaust.

Despite commercial availability since the 1950's, silicon strain sensors have not experienced the same success as other microdevices, such as accelerometers, pressure sensors, and inkjet heads. Strain sensors measure mechanical deformation and could be used in many structural components, improving safety, controls, and manufacturing tolerances. This thesis examines major strain sensing techniques and highlights both advantages and disadvantages of each. MEMS resonant strain gauges are identified to have superior performance over many traditional strain gauges in terms of sensitivity, resolution, stability, and size. To use these gauges, additional issues such as harsh environment survivability, strain transfer, temperature stability, and encapsulation must be solved, as detailed in this thesis.

Concerning harsh environment survivability, this work presents a MEMS resonant strain gauge fabricated from silicon carbide, which operates at 600°C, and has been tested to 64,000 G, while still resolving 0.01 microstrain in a 10 kHz bandwidth. Specific details on how to create harsh environment testing equipment are presented. Additionally, this original work identifies a unique temperature stability method based on purposely mismatched device and substrate layers. Full analytical equations are presented, and experimental confirmation of the scheme shows that temperature stability is improved from 23 ppm/°C to 3.6 ppm/°C.

All MEMS devices are created on flat substrates, which are useful when integrating electronics, but can be difficult to use when measuring strain in structural components, especially round objects. Furthermore, no work has been presented for gauges operating at high strain. To address this issue, this thesis contains the first demonstration of a MEMS resonant strain gauge operating at 1000 microstrain on a static automobile halfshaft. Details on joining the substrate to the circular halfshaft are presented, as well as how to treat the issue of strain transfer.

To protect the device, encapsulation is designed specifically to not change the strain sensitivity of the gauge. The encapsulation utilizes directional ion beam sputtering, which is experimentally shown to deposit spatially confined, extremely thin material through the release holes. Typical depositions were nanometers in thickness (<0.5% of deposited material) and on the order of tens to hundreds of femtograms.

This dissertation examines how the Centralverein deutscher Staatsb�rger j�dischen Glaubens and the Volksverein f�r das katholische Deutschland utilized decentralization into the local and regional spheres to participate in German society, shape public and political discourse, and strengthen their respective community’s sense of belonging and identity. Drawing on the Centralverein and Volksverein’s administrative records held in archives in England and Germany, this dissertation assesses how their networks of local and regional branches operated and how power and responsibility shifted between the center and the periphery during the German Empire, the Weimar Republic, and Nazi Germany. In decentering away from their respective central office to focus on the local and regional branches, this dissertation argues that local and regional branches were the main sites in which religious minority groups constructed and reinforced their influence, whether political or social. Whether through providing legal or political defense or holding assemblies and lectures, religious minority associations worked to unite their members and create a unified front for political and social action on their own behalf. In promoting a positive connection to Jewishness while also defending Germanness, the Centralverein’s local and regional branches created tailored spaces in which Centralverein members could develop and affirm a synthesized German-Jewish identity while also asserting their civic belonging in the local, regional, and national spheres. Through both a comparative and integrated institutional history of the Centralverein and Volksverein’s decentralization, this dissertation provides a more detailed understanding of social and political relations between minority and majority communities during the German Empire, the Weimar Republic, and Nazi Germany. A comparative perspective allows for examining how minority religious associations responded and adapted to changes at the state level and navigated shifting means of self-assertion and political expression. In examining how German-Jewish and German-Catholic associations implemented decentralization and accommodated regionalization, this study decenters the examination of belonging, the pluralities of civic, regional, and religious identities and what it meant to represent religious minority interests in the German public sphere in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

"The Struggle for Sephardic-Mizrahi Autonomy" chronicles the creation of a Sephardic-Mizrahi identity-literally, "Oriental" Jews-uncovering the ways that political and racial factors contributed to the emergence of this identity. My inquiry draws from an extensive body of archives located in Israel, New York, and Los Angeles. I have investigated immigration records of the Jewish community in Palestine from the 1920s, protocols of Sephardic-Mizrahi organizations and letters, and journalistic pieces to chart the crystallization of a unified Sephardic-Mizrahi entity by 1918, the organizational forms it took in the 1920s, and the way in which it became the subject of careful scholarly scrutiny in the 1930s and 1940s.

In tandem with tracing the political strengthening of the Sephardic-Mizrahi federation, my dissertation throws into sharp relief the multiple studies undertaken by Jewish social scientists and medical professionals in the mid-1930s and into the 1940s. These studies invariably concluded that Sephardim-Mizrahim were intellectually impaired and predisposed to criminality, ascribing their imputed inferiority to biological differences. Ironically, Sephardic-Mizrahi leaders not only accepted such "scientific evidence" of their inferiority, but also leveraged this imposed racialized identity to highlight their invisible histories and marginal status. Previous scholarship has theorized Sephardim-Mizrahim ahistorically within a framework of passivity and victimization. My work, by contrast, identifies narratives of Sephardic-Mizrahi agency. By such agency, however, I am referring to the complicity of Sephardic-Mizrahi leaders in reifying racial hierarchies, which enlarged the trope of "Oriental backwardness" beyond Sephardim-Mizrahim to include Palestinian-Arabs as a national "problem" in the formative years leading up to the creation of the Israeli State.

The first chapter delineates the separate chronologies of the Sephardic and Mizrahi ethnic categories, as well as the political context in the Yishuv under which Sephardic leaders were interested in conflating the two terms and their histories. This chapter explores the role of this leadership in attempting to unify the varied Sephardic and Mediterranean communities into an independent political and economic entity in the 1910s. The second chapter focuses on the folkloristic, literary, and scientific work of three self-identified Sephardic-Mizrahi leaders. It charts their contribution to the emergence of Sephardic-Mizrahi institutions in the 1920s that gradually turned a porous understanding of Sephardim-Mizrahim into a standardized ethnic identity carefully catalogued in immigration records and demographic surveys in the Yishuv.

The third chapter explores the political context and tensions that led Sephardic-Mizrahi community leaders to establish a global federation with its own economic and settler network by 1925, independent from the Zionist Organization. The chapter contends that Sephardic-Mizrahi leaders chose to mobilize and capitalize on their "Oriental" identity by reaching out to Diasporic communities abroad. The fourth chapter considers the consistent exclusion of Sephardic-Mizrahi leaders from the Ashkenazi-dominated Zionist Organization, which drove Sephardic-Mizrahi leaders to strategically leverage the resulting isolation. This sense of alienation had two effects. On the one hand, it further extended their own economic and settler network to resist their subjugation. On the other hand, it promoted the internalization of inferiority. The final chapter traces the work of Israeli social scientists from such disciplines as anthropology and education conducted in the 1940s and 1950s, and the impact of their studies concerning a Sephardic-Mizrahi biological "type," associated with irreparable intellectual inferiority and criminalization.

At the opening of the twentieth century, Jewish scholars turned to archives as a primary source of Jewish history and culture, and created diverse archives of their own. It was to be, as one scholar put it, a "time to gather"—a time when Jews the world over worked to bring together the records of the Jewish past, but when the shared impulse to preserve the past led to intense conflict. This dissertation explores the landscape of twentieth-century Jewish archives, tracing a transnational network of archives and archivists in Germany, the United States, and Israel/Palestine. Rather than casting these archives as neutral oases of objectivity, this study examines them as highly political sites of struggle over control of Jewish culture and memory. It investigates Jews’ rising interest in archives and the proliferation of archival projects that followed, and excavates a tradition of comprehensive collecting and the resulting conflicts over who could "own" the past.

A Time to Gather argues that both before the Holocaust and especially in its aftermath, the act of creating Jewish archives was just as much about the future as it was about the past. In the twentieth century, Jews in various parts of the world harbored dreams of "total archives" that would comprehensively document Jewish life. These aspirations fueled fierce competition, as centralizing historical materials was one way to project cultural hegemony and to shape the way that history would be written. Against this backdrop, the study examines major archives including, among others, the Gesamtarchiv der deutschen Juden, founded in Berlin in 1905, the Jewish Historical General Archives in Jerusalem (since 1969 the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People), and the American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati, both of which opened in 1947. This work seeks to comprehend the scope of this "time to gather," when Jewish scholars and leaders on three continents looked to archives as an important source of history and an anchor for communal memory, and to examine the significance of archiving for the development of the discipline of Jewish history as well as the politics of Jewish culture.