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Richard Careaga's avatar

Fashioning history with sculptor’s clay provides much more finished results than using Lego™️ blocks.

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Doga Ozturk's avatar

I don’t know how to take this statement Richard!

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Richard Careaga's avatar

Sorry to be obscure. I meant that the approach you describe is like sculpting from a fine grained matrix allows more fidelity to the subject than attempting to shoe horn in the representation into uniform discrete chunks

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Doga Ozturk's avatar

I also like exploring a specific topic through a book review (I'm guessing this is what you mean). It's kind of like the articles in the London Review of Books, although my pieces are obviously not as high quality.

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Richard Careaga's avatar

Quality as measured by length and pedigree is the only difference.

I’ve been unclear again.

Cohen directs her gaze away from the state apparatus, focusing instead on the Jewish institutions, such as Jewish schools, synagogues, and the Jewish press,

Is what I had in mind, with the pieces of the state apparatus being Lego logs in the scholarship while the Jewish community, being organic has much more subtle and dynamic interactions.

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Doga Ozturk's avatar

That’s a great point Richard! Yes, although Ottoman history used to be much more “state-oriented,” a new generation of scholars from the 90s onwards (more or less) started to build their analyses on different source bases, which opened up new vistas in history writing.

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Francisco J. Bernal's avatar

Esther Bembassa's Sephardi Jewry is a good source about Salónica. Ultimately, the Federación had it wrong. The 1917 arson and the ethnic cleansing that followed, turning a Sephardi city into a Greek one proved Zionism right. In a time of national revivals, Jews couldn't afford to be a nation without a land.

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Doga Ozturk's avatar

Thank you Francisco. I haven’t read this book but I’ll check it out.

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Queena Li's avatar

These are great!

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Doga Ozturk's avatar

Thank you very much, I appreciate it. I hope you enjoy them!

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Paul Hesse's avatar

Thanks for sharing these stories Doga!

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Doga Ozturk's avatar

Thank you for reading them Paul!

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