IUB journalism professor Carol Polsgrove’s Divided Minds: Intellectuals and the Civil Rights Movement was released this week by W.W. Norton. The book is the culmination of five years of research on the attitudes of novelists, artists, historians and other intellectuals prominent during the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, and the relative ambivalence displayed by white intellectuals to the U.S. Supreme Court desegregation ruling of 1954 in Brown v. Board of Education.

Polsgrove began working on the new book while researching It Wasn’t Pretty, Folks, but Didn’t We Have Fun?: Esquire in the Sixties, published by Norton in 1995.

Another great summer read is IUB history and Jewish studies professor Jeffrey Veidlinger’s The Moscow State Yiddish Theater: Jewish Culture on the Soviet Stage (Indiana University Press, 2000) which has received the National Jewish Book Award in Yiddish language and literature.

Veidlinger’s book traces the fascinating and tragic history of the Moscow State Yiddish Theater, founded in 1919 and liquidated by the Soviet government in 1949. Since the conventional view of the fate of Jews in Soviet Russia is that from the beginning, the Soviet state pursued policies aimed at stamping out Jewish culture, it is surprising to learn that from the 1920s through World War II, secular Yiddish culture was actively promoted and Yiddish cultural institutions thrived, supported by the Soviet government, albeit for its own propaganda purposes. Veidlinger draws on newly available archives that demonstrate how Jewish writers and artists were able to promote Jewish national culture within the confines of Soviet nationality policies.