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Romanian societies, reunions or associations in Sibiu, established in the second half of the 19th century, contributed significantly to the education and training of the audience in this community. The present article highlights the role played by these institutions - Transylvanian Association for Romanian Literature and the Culture of the Romanian People, Reunion of Romanian Apprentices of Sibiu, National Cultural Reunion of Romanian Craftsmen in Sibiu, The Music Reunion in Sibiu, in the build-up of an educated theatre audience. The pioneering activity carried out by these associations makes its effects felt today, leading to the informed and knowledgeable public of Radu Stanca National Theatre in Sibiu. This article argues the sustained activity of the Transylvanian cultural associations in the second half of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century have created the foundations of a vibrant theatre community where one of the most important theatre events in Romania - Sibiu International Theatre Festival (FITS) - was born thirty years ago. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

My study explores the construction and reflection of social and cultural issues salient for the existence of the Romanian community in the United States in Romanian heritage festivals. It analyzes the strategies employed by Romanian-Americans to make sense of their own ethnic identity, while organizing and participating in such festivals. To create and maintain these discursive formations of the Romanian ethos in the United States, the Romanian communities in the United States make sense of and use (references to) emotions or memories in interaction. While looking at how heritage festivals produce versions of Romanian ethnicity, this essay analyzes the extent to which the changing social and cultural contents of Romanian heritage festivals, enacted and performed annually, shape the construction of the Romanian-American collective identity. It also touches on how the concept of heritage is employed by Romanian heritage festivals as a tool for the assertion of grassroots economic and cultural agencies and how festivals can be construed as sites of competition among communities and ethnic organizations, striving to maximize their access to resources, status and representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Romanian is known for having a rich inflectional morphology due to the multitude of inflectional ending categories as well as due to stem alternations (apophony). This richness poses difficulties both for second language learners attempting to acquire the many variations, as well as for researchers attempting to describe and incorporate them in Natural Language Processing pipelines. While many studies in Computational Morphology have proposed methods to automatically learn word inflection or segmentation, very few have focused on learning apophony, specifically vowel and consonant mutation in the stem, a phenomenon typical for Romanian inflection. In this paper, we investigate the applicability of recent strategies proposed for the Romanian verbal domain 1,2 to the Romanian nominal domain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Romanian Armed Forces transformation process has derived from the Alliance new strategic orientations and major changes that have allowed for expanding the range of objectives and processes, structuring and preparing forces to participate in collective defence, as well as for enhancing the capabilities to be used in the entire spectrum of crisis management operations and in the multinational operations to combat terrorism. In the context of forces, concepts and capabilities transformation, the Romanian Armed Forces Transformation Strategy represents the medium and long-term vision of the size, training and equipment of the armed forces to participate in future operations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Immigration historians have illuminated the institutional forces that made possible Eastern and southern European immigrants' inclusion in the white racial category in the early twentieth century, initiating their ascent into mainstream America. Sociologists have shown that their descendants assimilated into American society while maintaining symbolic attachments to their ethnic roots. But, whereas current studies of immigrant racialization have focused on the strategies of immigrants of colour for asserting a higher position in the American social hierarchy, scholars have generally overlooked such processes for phenotypically white immigrants. This paper highlights first and 1.5 generation Romanian immigrants' strategies for navigating their ambivalent relationship to Americanness. While they assumed their whiteness unproblematically, Romanian Americans sought to distinguish themselves from whites and non-whites on the basis of their ethnicity. Furthermore, they used American values to distance themselves from their former compatriots. Through moral bricolage, Romanians made strategic use of desirable traits they associated with being Romanian and American, melding them into a particularly worthy ethnic identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article tries to demystify the idea that America is the country of the free where there is no censorship. The reference year taken by the author is 1934, when a book by the Romanian- American author Peter Neagoe is censored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ethnic Romanian communication behavior constitutes a remarkably understudied area of research. The present study seeks to remedy that by investigating the role of apologies in ethnic Romanian culture. The research questions are (1) What situations demand an apology in ethnic Romanian culture? and (2) What forms and expressions of apology do ethnic Romanians use in situations which demand apology? In-depth interviews were conducted with 15 ethnic Romanians currently residing in the American mid-west using both English and Romanian language. Drawing upon concepts from the intercultural communication literature focusing on apologies, the transcribed interviews were analyzed. The analysis revealed distinctive cultural characteristics regarding use of apology in daily life of ethnic Romanians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the particulars of prejudiced and moral exclusion discourse about ethnic minorities in a Romanian socio-cultural context. It examines in detail the discourse of middle-class Romanian professionals taking up different ideological positions on the issue of the fairness of extremist politics towards ethnic minorities. A comparison is made between participants ‘supporting’ extremist politics and those ‘opposing’ this kind of politics to see whether there are differences in the way participants from both categories talk about the Romanies. It is suggested that a very similar expression of moral exclusion discourse is to be found across both positions, a very similar use of various discursive and rhetorical strategies to blame the Romanies and ‘naturalize’ their characteristics, position them beyond the moral order, nationhood and difference. The analysis, inspired by a critical discursive approach will focus on the construction of ideological representations of Romanies. In examining prejudiced and moral exclusion discourse against Romanies, this article constitutes an attempt to understand the situated dynamics of prejudice and some of the ways in which particular ways of talking delegitimize and, sometimes, dehumanize the ‘other’. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article briefly introduces several Romanian Jewish immigrants to the U.S. who have contributed in different fields over the years. According to historical documents, in 1860 a group of Romanian Jews had already established their first synagogue in New York City at 10 Hester Street in Lower Manhattan. This synagogue is still in existence, with a seating capacity of over 1,600 people, and it has been recognized as a historical landmark. Many leading cantors and musicians came out of this synagogue, including the prominent opera singers Jan Pierce and Richard Tucker. By means of their talent and ingenuity they distinguished themselves in a variety of fields during the first half of the twentieth century. Some of famous names belonging to the synagogue are: Abraham Harriton , noted landscape and figure painter; Norbert Horowitz, Yiddish language actor and author of radio scripts; Max Jacobs, composer and conductor of several American symphonic orchestras; Solomon F. Bloom, professor of modem history at the Brooklyn College; Charles Davison, neuropsychiatrist; Leib Golub, gynecologist; and Joseph Hager, rabbi at Wall Street Synagogue, New York City.