Showing papers in "Shofar in 2016"

Forget Israel - the Future is in Berlin! Local Jews, Russian Immigrants, and Israeli Jews in Berlin and Across Germany

Abstract: It goes against the intuition of some, triggers strong responses from others, and still raises the eyebrows of many: not only did Jewish Displaced Persons (DPs) and German Jews withstand attempts to entice them to make aliyah from Germany post-Shoah and become “local Jews,” but also Russian Jews immigrated in higher numbers to Germany than to Israel for a while, and now Israeli Jews are immigrating to Germany, too. Yet do Jews in Germany see themselves in exile from Israel, or has Germany become their home of choice? This paper explores the life-worlds of a select number of individuals who fall into the age cohort of the Third Generation, and who form part of the three numerically largest groups: German Jews and Displaced Persons (DPs) and their descendants (“local Jews”); Russian Jews and their children who came to Germany in the 1990s; and Israelis who started arriving in significant numbers in the 2000s. By depicting their life-worlds, the paper sheds light onto how Jews in the country structure, live, do, experience, and contend their Jewishness collectiveness, and express Jewishnessess individually, and how, effectively, they create diasporic life-worlds, and have a special relationship to Israel but hardly feel in exile from Israel.

A Nation without Borders?: Modern European Emancipation as Negation of Galut

Abstract: This is the final version of the article. It first appeared from Purdue University Press via http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/sho.2016.0026

Feminists in the temple oF orthodoxy: the struggle oF the Women oF the Wall to Change the status Quo

Abstract: IntroductionOn April 24, 2013, something extraordinary happened at the Western Wall, the Jews' most central holy place. A group of religious, activist, and feminist women-the Women of the Wall (WoW)-succeeded in breaking the ritual status quo at the site. The Jerusalem District Court Judge Moshe Sobel produced a ruling (interpreting a previous Supreme Court decision) that recognized the right of the WoW to conduct ritual worship at the Wall according to their custom, in a way that the majority of the worshippers at the place view as a disgraceful abomination.1 The WoW's worship includes prayer and singing by women at Rosh Hodesh (the first day of each Jewish month), reading from the Torah while wrapped in colorful tallitot (prayer shawls) and wearing tefillin (phylacteries).This ruling issued a dramatic change: it effectively opened the space for ritualistic pluralism at the Western Wall, a holy place that is open to everyone. It dealt a blow to the status of the hegemonic religious establishment that belongs to the Orthodox and Haredi/Ultra-Orthodox streams in Israel.2 Indeed, for the religious Orthodox Jews currently dominating the Western Wall and Israel's religious institutions, the actions of the WoW are almost like bringing an "idol into the Temple"-a desecration of the holy place.In April 2013, the same month in which Judge Sobel's ruling was published, the Chair of the Jewish Agency, Natan Sharansky, presented a new arrangement in an attempt to solve the controversy. It suggests erecting a third, egalitarian prayer plaza at the Wall, in what is known as the Robinson's Arch site (an area of the antiquities park south of the Mughrabi Ascent), identical in size and status to the current plaza dominated by the Orthodox Jews.The Sharansky Plan promoted by the government may turn the achievements of the WoW upside down. Instead of bringing an end to the dispute, the court ruling has perhaps brought the beginning of a new conflict. Rather than granting women full egalitarian worship rights at the existing historic Western Wall (which was the WoW's main goal), this solution would create two different Western Walls: the historic Orthodox Western Wall plaza, and the new prayer platform at Robinson's Arch, which would have to fight for its recognition among the general public.This case contributes to the existing research on holy places shared by more than one religious group, which mostly claims that holy places are indivisible and, by virtue of their status as "protected values," cannot be redivided without evoking a violent dispute. Ron Hassner and other scholars, for instance, have argued that at the religious level, the supreme spiritual force overpowers all else, and thus the congregation's commitment to protecting the sacredness of the place prevents the existence of any compromise or alternative on the custom of the place.3 Hassner claims that the existence of division arrangements at Samuel's Tomb and the Cave of the Patriarchs (Me'arat HaMachpela) is irrelevant because these are forced arrangements. I have studied the shared arrangements at the Cave of the Patriarchs/Al Haram Al-Ibrahimi and the Tomb of Samuel the Prophet/Nebi Samuel and conclude that the action of division arrangements creates, over time, a new reality, with which the parties come to terms. When a powerful governmental agent dictates and enforces amendments to the status quo, and when these are carried out over time, the nature of the change becomes a fact.4This study adds to previous studies of Lea Shakdiel,5 Stuart Charme,6 and Pnina Lahav,7 who studied the gender-religious factor of the dispute, and to Yuval Jobani and Nahshon Perez's study on the moral solution to the dispute.8 This article analyzes the strategies and conflict resolution methods of the dispute, incorporating also the broader perspective of the Conservative, Reform, and Modern Orthodox streams and revisiting the accomplishments of the WoW, which should also be viewed as part of a larger struggle over the shape and identity of Israeli society. …

Time to Clarify

Abstract: The field of Biblical Hebrew verb study is a fascinating and active one. No one enters the fray without the expectation of pushback from colleagues. I debuted in the field in 2002 with a doctoral thesis, to which my 2012 book stands in some tension, because over the intervening decade I have deepened, broadened, and in some significant ways changed my thinking about Hebrew verb theory. The detailed criticisms of both by several colleagues provide a welcome opportunity for me to clarify my approach and the differences between my theory and those of others in the field. Andrason’s extensive oeuvre of the past few years has used this particular approach as a foil for his theory. He devoted a 2011 Hebrew Studies article to an extended critique of my ideas. The timing was unfortunate, however, as I

Matzo Hussars & Creative (Anti)Semitism: Jewishness & Popular Culture in Post-Communist Hungary

Abstract: This article argues that a new understanding of "Jewishness" is emerging in post-communist Hungary, most clearly and visibly in the realm of popular culture. Global images of "Jewishness" and their local interpretations, which have become part of public culture since the fall of communism and especially with wider access to the internet, have shaped both popular discussions of "Jewishness" and Hungarian Jewish self-representations. These, in turn, are challenging the traditional Hungarian understanding of the meaning and place of "Jewishness" in Hungarian public life. Following a brief historical outline to help situate the current debate, I analyze four interpretations of "Jewishness" in contemporary Hungarian popular culture: an animated film, a blog, and two restaurants. I argue that they break with long-standing Hungarian discursive and political traditions and suggest a new, more open take on "Jewishness" based on the notion of "ethnic culture."

The Mean Streets of Beersheba: The Place of the City in Shulamit Lapid's Lizzie Badiḥi Series

Abstract: We have been accustomed to associating the detective novel with the “mean streets” of the city since the hard-boiled novels of Raymond Chandler. The detective writer serves as a cartographer of sorts, the protagonist of his works becoming a flâneur according Walter Benjamin’s definition—one who walks the urban streets of the city acknowledging its diverse forces and heterogenic population. In this article I examine how the city of Beersheba, the capital of the Negev, is depicted in Shulamit Lapid’s Lizzie Badiḥi series, following Lefebvre’s observation that “the spatial practice of a society is revealed through the deciphering of its space.” The fact that it is both the central city in its area and a periphery town, when compared to Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, gives it a hybrid character, constituting it as Homi K. Bhabha’s “third space” that blurs the binary hierarchy between center and periphery. Over the period which the series spans (the first book was published in 1989 the latest in 2007), both Beersheba and Israeli society have changed and developed. I demonstrate how these changes are reflected in the series as I examine Lizzie as a figure that symbolizes Beersheba.

Sampling and Jewishness: A Short History of Jewish Sampling and its Relationship with Hip-Hop

Abstract: In 1996 in an article by Hugh Davies on the history of sampling that concentrated on its classical and avant-garde uses and had nothing about the then-current upsurge in sampling by hip-hop artists, Davies wrote that: "Since the late 1970s the term 'sampling' has been applied in music to the method by which special musical instruments digitally 'record' external sounds for subsequent resynthesis."1 Davies was thinking primarily of the development of technologies that have enabled sounds to be reproduced and inserted into newly composed pieces of music. Samples, then, can be anything-"external sounds"-that is, taken from elsewhere and integrated as an element in a composition. The limit cases are tracks that are completely composed of samples.Sampling has held an important place in the evolution of hip-hop. Joseph Schloss provides this background:When hip-hop expanded to recorded contexts, both of these roles became more complex. MCs began to create increasingly involved narratives us- ing complex rhythms and cadences. And although DJs continued to make music with turntables when performing live, most also developed other strategies for use in the studio, and these eventually came to include the use of digital sampling.2Here sampling is understood as a practical answer to changes in hip-hop as it developed. However, Justin Williams suggests that sampling, or rather the aesthetic that underpins the practice of sampling, is central to the generic form of hip-hop. Describing his book, he writes:Rhymin' and Stealin' begins with a crucial premise: the fundamental element of hip-hop culture and aesthetics is the overt use of preexisting material to new ends. Whether it is taking an old dance move for a breakdancing battle, using spray paint to create street art, quoting from a famous speech or sampling a rapper or 1970s funk song, hip-hop aesthetics involve borrowing from the past. When these elements are appropriated and reappropriated, they become transformed into something new, something different, something hip-hop.3From this perspective sampling is integral to the practice of hip-hop as an expression of hip-hop's way of relating to the past. Such a position links sampling with African American culture and, indeed, Williams quotes Schloss writing that, "the looping aesthetic . . . combined a traditional African-American approach to composition with new technology to create a radically new way of making music."4 Looping here refers to the practice of taking an extract, a break, from one record and repeating it, originally live by using two copies of the record on two turntables. The sampling technology that developed in the 1980s, perhaps most importantly the E-mu SP-1200, which came onto the market in 1987, enabled this extraction to be achieved more easily and the sample of the break, often repeated many times, to be situated within a new composition.And yet, it is significant that the title of Williams's book, Rhymin' and Stealin', is a quotation from the title of a track off the Beastie Boys' first album, Licensed to Ill, released in 1986. With its extensive use of rock samples the album broke through to a mass, white, youth audience and over the years has sold over ten million copies in the United States alone. The Beastie Boys were Jewish and the album was produced by their long-term friend and associate, the Jewish Rick Rubin.5 On "Rhymin' and Stealin'" the Beastie Boys sampled three pieces of music, Led Zeppelin's "When The Levee Breaks," Black Sabbath's "Sweet Leaf," and The Clash's version of "I Fought The Law." As it happens, the Beasties were not stealing in the sense that the use of the samples had been cleared with the rights holders, but they were stealing in that they were taking and reusing extracts from other pieces of music as a part of their own new composition, recombining those elements into a new, synthesized whole. Williams never comments on the Jewishness of the Beastie Boys. …

A Single Combat Type-Scene in the Hebrew Bible?

Abstract: The David-Goliath and Hezekiah-Sennacherib narratives (respectively, 1 Samuel 17 and 2 Kings 18–19//Isaiah 36–37) contain a series of similarities, but they have only been noted briefly in scholarship. This article is the first detailed consideration of the issue. It suggests that Robert Alter’s conception of the “type-scene” might be the most appropriate frame for understanding these similarities. Moreover, comparison with other biblical narratives suggests that the type-scene underlying the David-Goliath and Hezekiah-Sennacherib stories is one of single combat, even though Hezekiah and Sennacherib do not engage in physical fighting. The article also considers the implications of the typescene analysis for the traditional identification of sources in these passages, as well as possible reasons why the author of the Hezekiah-Sennacherib narrative might have employed this type-scene.

Taking Care of our own: narraTives of Jewish giving and The galvesTon MoveMenT

Abstract: During the Progressive Era, American Jewish philanthropists and social workers attempted to reconcile Jewish conceptions of giving ( tzedakah ) with modern, scientific methods of assessing need and dispensing aid. The “distribution” work of the Industrial Removal Office and the Galveston Movement attempted to address both ethnic and civic needs. These projects highlight the benefits and limitations of Jewish reformers adopting bureaucratic methods to address the plight of indigent coreligionists. Proponents of distribution believed their efforts negotiated Jewish and American interests: by sending skilled laborers to the interior where they were needed, Jewish philanthropists addressed the industrial demands of the nation as well as the problems of destitute immigrants. The desire among some of these immigrants to maintain religiously observant lives posed a formidable challenge to Jewish reformers. Their practical philanthropy did not recognize the importance of daily prayer or Sabbath observance. In fact, some viewed traditional religious practice as an obstacle to successful assimilation. This examination demonstrates that Jewish and American interests were not always mutually informing and questions the success of these philanthropic endeavors to meet their exalted goals.

The Old Testament and Judaism in the Last Anglican Sermons of John Henry Newman

Abstract: The article discusses the unexplored question of the role played by the Old Testament and Judaism in the transition of John Henry Newman, a prominent nineteenth-century English theologian, from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism. Based primarily on the analysis of the sermons given by Newman in the early 1840s, prior to his conversion in 1845, it argues, first, that Newman, while remaining an adherent of supersessionism, took a stand against marginalization of the Old Testament. His attitude to Judaism of the biblical period was imbued with a sense of deep respect. Second, Newman intensely appealed in his sermons to the Old Testament tropes, drawing, for example, direct parallels between himself and the prophet Elijah. Third, he used the Old Testament as a prooftext for his principle of doctrinal development in Christianity, which allowed him to consider the emergence of new formulations and dogmas as a natural process and the Roman Catholic Church as “true.” The sermons in question, undeservedly overlooked by researchers, indicate that awareness of the role that Judaism played in the genesis of Christianity was fundamental in the development of this principle.

Hebrew Nominal Patterns in the Speaker's Mind

Abstract: Some psycholinguists have claimed that the seven verbal Hebrew patterns are part of the mental lexicon (alongside the lexemes and the roots) whereas the nominal patterns are not. The difference is explained by the great number (over 100) of the nominal patterns and their semantic inconsistency. This claim is questioned by the present article. The number of the living or productive nominal patterns system is around thirty. Thirteen of them are common to the verbal and the nominal systems (five regular noun actions, five active participles, three perfective participles), and they are as frequent as the verbal forms themselves. The living nominal pattern system acts similarly to that of the verbal patterns. This is demonstrated by three phenomena that display the speakers’ awareness of the nominal patterns’ functions: a) pattern switching when there is no matching between the pattern and the content of the word; b) colloquial derivation in the living patterns; c) acceptance or rejection of proposed new items according to the extent of their adaptation to the pattern’s function. The evidence is naturalistic data taken from the speakers’ linguistic behavior as manifested in spoken and written sources including the Internet and television shows.

A Reevaluation of the Semitic Direct Object Markers

Abstract: This paper aims to clarify the relationship between the superficially similar direct object markers attested in Modern South Arabian, Ge’ez, Arabic, Aramaic, Samalian, Hebrew, and Phoenician. I argue that the direct object markers in Aramaic and the Canaanite languages derive from a single innovative form, which I reconstruct as *ʾ ayāt -. I further claim that the remaining forms are unrelated.

Introduction to Messianic Judaism

Abstract: This essay outlines the history of Messianic Judaism, describing how communities of Torah observant, Jesus-believing Jews existed in the first four centuries of the common era and then reappeared in the eighteenth century. A short synopsis of the recently published Introduction to Messianic Judaism is also provided.

Torn between Earth and Sky: National Jewish Homeland

Abstract: "Can a Holy Land also be a homeland?" So begins Aviezer Ravitzky's 2008 essay, "A Land Adored Yet Feared." In it he bemoans the contemporary absence of a striking feature of Jewish tradition regarding the historic Land of Israel- dread. Dread that Jewish presence in the land would not live up to its holiness, for which Jewish sages regard Jews as particularly accountable, and thus result in the catastrophic loss of which Jewish memory is so replete.1But this tradition of dread of the land is of a piece with what early Zionists found so burdensome, if not repulsive, about Rabbinic Judaism. Understandably weary of exilic conditions, along with the apparent rabbinic enabling of those conditions, they hungered for the security and promise of Jewish sovereignty in a national homeland. This is precisely what other, modern Euro-American peoples had been acquiring.2 Early Zionists could scarcely imagine what the Shoah would do to stoke this hunger among Jews in Europe and beyond, even as it confirmed the error of Zionism among so many ultra-orthodox and other Jews among them.3Galvanized by the security imperative issuing from the Shoah, Zionism has forced contemporary Judaism to face squarely the romance of modern state nationalism and to attempt to digest its own, peculiar iteration of it.4 And Israeli nationalism, vulnerable on so many fronts both domestically and internationally (although not as militarily vulnerable as Israeli administrations have characteristically claimed), has had little room for the dread of the land of Israel in Jewish tradi- tion. Such scruples have hardly seemed fitting, given the stakes. Only the luxury of a relatively stable exile could afford them. But are the acidic pressures of such perceived stakes themselves what that dread of the land is traditionally about, even if not for the more pious reasons given by (fewer and fewer) ultra orthodox Jews?I wish to consider not so much the challenge of a Jewish homeland, as that of a national Jewish homeland to contemporary Judaism, at least insofar as its life depends on its rabbinic and biblical inheritance. In line with Ravitzky's concern about the loss of Jewish dread of the land of Israel, I am convinced that much Zionism in Israel and North America, religious and otherwise, underestimates the structured ideological influence of modern nationalism. In its Zionist form, this nationalism is often too easily equated with the land commitments of pre-exilic "Judaism" and ancient Israel, or it is otherwise naturalized. A consequence of thus naturalizing or essentializing modern Jewish state nationalism is that its particular burdens are not subject to needed scrutiny, and therefore they go unaddressed. I am inviting scholars of Judaica to apply such scrutiny and address such burdens, and I do so as something of an implicated guest. While I have studied Zionism seriously, including several stints of study in Israel, and I have significant academic training in various strands of Judaism, ancient and modern, I am a non-Jew for whom these remain secondary fields. My primary area of research deals with the Christian religious moorings and liabilities of Western nationalism, which I have found illuminating in the study of the relation between Judaism and Zionism.Below I will use theorists of modern nationalism, Benedict Anderson and Etienne Balibar, to articulate in summary form its ideological burden for Zionism, and for the rest of contemporary Judaism insofar as it is shaped by the nationalizing effects of Zionism. I will then point to the weight of this burden on Jewish diversity and Jewish ethics, highlighting finally how it is felt as a consequence of a key ideological characteristic of modern nationalism, the sublimation of the human. My hope is that this line of criticism can promote healthy scrutiny of the relationship between Zionist nationalism and Judaism, and signal the relevance of the Jewish tradition of dread of the land of Israel. …

Fútbol, Jews, and the Making of Argentina

Abstract: Futbol, Jews, and the Making of Argentina By Raanan Rein. Translated by Martha Grenzeback. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015. 226 pp.Jewish Latin American history is moving in exciting new directions. Historians once concentrated on studying Jews affiliated with religious or communal institutions. Now, however, they are likely to research unaffiliated Jews, who constitute the majority of Jewish Latin Americans. Instead of focusing solely on men, their gaze includes women. Specialists are exploring Jewish engagement with the larger Latin American society, rather than Jewish membership in what were seen as isolated and closed communities. Antisemitism is no longer a major focus, although when scholars find it, they interrogate it carefully. The formation of Latin American as well as Jewish identities is an important topic, as is the comparative study of different subsets of Jews, and of Jewish and nonJewish Arabs. Raanan Rein has been a leading contributor to this innovative scholarship. The first major work on Jewish Latin Americans and football (soccer), his new book embodies all these currents.Rein focuses on the Atlanta Athletic Club, situated in Villa Crespo, a neighborhood in Buenos Aires, and its intersections with Jews. This characteristically porteno (of Buenos Aires) working- and lower-middle-class neighborhood inspired many tangos and sainete plays, and it was known for its lively social and cultural scene and its devotion to football. It was a center of the textile industry and textile unions, and the owners, workers, and union militants were largely Jewish during the interwar period. People of diverse national and ethnic origins, including Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews, lived in Villa Crespo. While they formed only a minority of its population, Villa Crespo became the barrio with the most sizable number of Jews in the city. Jewish food stores, cafes, and communal organizations established themselves here, and eventually Atlanta did as well. Founded in 1904, this football organization moved from one barrio to another before it found a permanent home in Villa Crespo in the 1920s.The author argues that the team became identified as Jewish by the 1940s or 1950s. The Jewish presence in Villa Crespo promoted this identification, as did the Jewish president who reigned over the club from 1959 to 1969 and the significant numbers of Jews on its board by the late 1950s. Atlanta's long search for a site and playing field, like that of a gypsy or "wandering Jew," also may have strengthened this image. So too, perhaps, did the team's marginality and many ups-and-downs. Its frequently precarious financial status, location in a neighborhood with a strong Jewish Communist contingent, and several Communist directors gave it a leftist-and Jewish leftist-tinge. Further tightening the association, Atlanta has played in Israel and has attracted fans there. Curiously, while the Club Atletico River Plate has had more Jewish players and fans than Atlanta, it lacks any such Jewish connotation. …

Ritual in Martin Buber's Myth of Zion

Abstract: undeRstanding MaRtin BuBeR on Jewish RitualMartin Buber's exposition of Jewish religiosity in contrast to Jewish religion has led to an understanding of his thought as "implicit secularism."1 He did not deny theism, but he opposed a heteronomous legal tradition, a set of rules and regulations imposed by a deity and meant to be unchanging through time. His thinking has been traced back to Kant's emphasis on autonomy that leads to a negation of "the traditional, heteronomic belief in Divine transmission." This suggests that Buber rejected the identification of God's commandments with the rabbinic and biblical laws.2 The rituals that define Jewish life, according to that reading, obscured rather than revealed the divine will. What God desired, he felt, became clear only through each new encounter with the deity. He located that encounter in the context of daily living among other people. It might appear, then, that Buber's approach is"secular" because it looked to communities of human beings rather than to received traditions as the locus for a meeting with the divine.3 While several scholars do hold this view a more nuanced approach shows that Buber not only evaluated ritual more positively than seems apparent but also that his detailed study of ritual generally, and Jewish ritual in particular, pointed to often overlooked aspects of the role of ritual in human life.Zachary Braiterman made a pioneering foray into this possibility and argued that ritual practice plays a "more active" role in Buber's thought than might appear "at first glance." Those who insist that Buber's emphasis on personal meeting and direct encounters between "I and Thou" relegated ritual to a secondary position have, in that argument, misunderstood his thinking. Buber, Braiterman has shown, recognized that ritual plays an important function as a stimulus for human meetings. He noted, perceptively, for Buber this activity occurred "at the performative intersection between religion and art."4 He used the term "performative" in a sense used by some theorists of ritual. Many thinkers consider ritual a purposive action that achieves a certain goal. It communicates a message through actions that attain a definite purpose, through the construction of an environment that creates an intense experience, and through the establishment of a worldview, a cosmos, both inhabited by the performers and incarnated in the ritual itself.5 From this perspective, ritual has "little to do with the transmission of new information and everything to do with interpersonal orchestration and with social integration and continuity."6 This characterization does seem to apply to Buber's view of genuine religiosity in contrast to ritual and what he calls "religion."Braiterman's study provides a point of departure for looking at Buber's interpretation of ritual as well as his view of religion. Building on that study offers new ways of looking at ritual generally, a more detailed view of Buber's particular approach, and an understanding of his "idea of Zion," best categorized as what Buber would have called a "myth."Buber viewed ritual and religion generally as human creations. Others have expressed similar ideas. Jonathan Z. Smith entitled one of his studies of ritual "Imagining Religion."7 Religion, he argued, originates as a mental category invented by scholars. Although that designation could be considered negative, it raised a positive possibility. Religion, and ritual with it, may well express human creativity. That interpretation of religion comes close to what Buber thought about what he called "religiosity" as well as supporting his valorization of myth and what can be deemed a more nuanced evaluation of ritual than usually understood. His distinction between religion and religiosity flows from this consideration of the spiritual creations humans produce.Religion, Religiosity, and RitualWhile Smith's analysis does not illuminate this distinction, Braiterman used it in his rehabilitation of Buber's approach to ritual. …

Nihilism, Modernity and the "Jewish Spirit": Margarete Susman's Transvaluation of a Fin-de-Siècle Trope

Abstract: Margarete Susman’s reflections on that evocative metaphor known as the “Jewish spirit” begin with the disconcerting identification of Jewishness with nihilism and modernity. This troubling association underlies the anti-Jewish tirades of numerous fin-de-siecle thinkers such as Richard Wagner and Wilhelm Marr. Despite the term’s overridingly negative connotations, Susman grapples with the “Jewish spirit” in her essays from the 1930s for the constructive purpose of articulating her unique vision of German Jewry’s cultural and intellectual legacy. Her reworking of this metaphor represents a unique form of Jewish self-affirmation that differs from both the Zionist and liberal responses to antisemitism. She does not seek to turn the “Jewish spirit” into a resource for collective self-identification, but to undo the very logic that posits this figure as an antithesis of the “German spirit.” In the process of rethinking Jewishness, Susman destabilizes the volkisch conception of Germanness. Not only does her account of the “Jewish spirit” subvert a prevalent antisemitic fantasy, but it also forms a pointed polemic against the identity politics of cultural Zionism. Responding to the reductive essentialism she attributes to both the German volkisch and Jewish-national ideals of collective identity, Susman’s notion of the “Jewish spirit” constitutes a poetically and politically imaginative attempt to interweave German Jewry’s particularistic heritage into the larger story of European modernity.

The Meursault Investigation by Kamel Daoud (review)

Abstract: Spring 2016 elites’ assimilation, but also an aspiration for dissimilation as exemplified by Zionism in the life and work of Salman Schocken. Although the author has chosen an interesting thematic, rather than chronological, structure for his monograph, there is a certain expectation that the book’s last chapter would zoom in on the decline and demise of the Jewish department store during the rise of National Socialist dictatorship. Indeed, by focusing on the interrelated themes of “fire,” “violence,” and “destruction,” the author arrives eventually at the November pogroms of 1938, but not before dwelling at length on the representation of these motifs in several novels and fictional works of the earlier decades of the twentieth century. By comparison, the fourpage account of the physical assails and the political action against department stores by the Nazis is somewhat terse and condensed—perhaps short-shifted. In that sense, 1940 as the date marking the end of the period under consideration is somewhat misleading. Rather than detailing the demise of the Jewish department store, Paul Lerner’s Consuming Temple prefers to devote the bulk of its rich, engaging, lucid narrative to the golden age of the business, from the late nineteenth century through the early 1930s. This was the time when it was both marveled and feared, greeted with concurrent excitement and concern, embraced by some as an occasion for cosmopolitan consumption and rejected by others as a treacherous Jewish invasion. Lerner’s book captures this complexity with unrivaled elegance and subtlety.

"One Jew More or Less—What Does It Matter?": Nietzsche on the Jewish Question

Abstract: Nietzsche1 had "a terrible fear that one day [he would] be pronounced holy." To obviate this end-"to prevent people from doing mischief to [him]"-he penned Ecce Homo, his final work before his flight from sanity.2 It was a beguiling effort, though ultimately it was for naught. The people could not be stopped; mischief would be done.It is curious that a philosopher who avowedly wore masks,3 who invited the interpretation and hence misinterpretation of his writing,4 in short, who wanted to be misunderstood,5 should be concerned about being called something he was not. It suggests the degree of his disdain for holy men and the mendacity he beheld in them. But why did Nietzsche not use his final work to prevent further mischief, of a far more pernicious and irreparable kind, from being done? For while, in spite of a friend's eulogistic remark,6 his name has not exactly remained holy for generations to come, the antisemitic label attached to his name has yet to be effaced.7 There is no reason to doubt that Nietzsche found the prospect of being considered an antisemite at least as abhorrent as that of being called a holy man.8 Yet he did not use Ecce Homo to make plain that he was no antisemite. It is true that one does find scattered references to antisemitism and the Jews throughout the work: the former invariably critical, the latter almost unfailingly favorable. One reasonably could contend that Nietzsche saw no need to set the record straight regarding the Jewish Question, because throughout his writings, he had addressed the matter time and time again.9 The passing references in Ecce Homo were enough to substantiate what had been spelled out earlier. Nevertheless, one cannot avoid noting that for so perspicuous a thinker, Nietzsche was remarkably shortsighted on this score. If there was enough in his writings to encourage people to pronounce his name holy, there certainly was enough to support the charge of antisemitism.Nietzsche may not have written for the people,10 but that has not prevented people from reading him as though he had. That individuals holding dissonant viewpoints on myriad issues can claim Nietzsche's favor is a testament to the breadth of his philosophy and his rhetorical prowess.11 In his oeuvre, there is, literally, something for everyone. As Kurt Tucholsky, the German satirist, remarked, "Who cannot claim [Nietzsche] for their own? Tell me what you need and I will supply you with a Nietzsche citation . . . for Germany and against Germany; for peace and against peace; for literature and against literature- whatever you want."12 In view of this, one is not shocked to unearth from Nietzsche's corpus stimuli for antisemites, notwithstanding that Nietzsche himself disdained antisemitism. One need only consider the following isolated, though particularly inflammatory example:Every nation, every man, possesses unpleasant, indeed dangerous qualities: it is cruel to demand that the Jew should constitute an exception. In him these qualities may even be dangerous and repellent to an exceptional degree; and perhaps the youthful stock-exchange Jew is the most repulsive invention of the entire human race.13A movement bent on marginalizing, to say nothing of annihilating, the Jews could find in Nietzsche's writings plenty of exploitative material. A movement, moreover, set on opposing parliamentary democracy, pacifism, and the comingling of races could employ Nietzsche as an effective, albeit posthumous and unwitting, mouthpiece.14 But Nietzsche despised German power almost as much as he despised antisemitism, as careful reading reveals.15 The virtue of Nietzsche's writing style is also its vice; or rather, by allowing and even encouraging readers to extrapolate ideas inattentively, it lends itself to all sorts of vices. Often Nietzsche says A and not-A in the same breath and it is easy enough to bowdlerize the text so that supporters of A can claim Nietzsche as their champion, even if what Nietzsche's own thinking-discernible to anyone who chose to consider it carefully-supports is not-A. …

Comments on the Uses and Meanings of אין in the Masoretic Text of the Hebrew Bible: Revisiting Vriezen

Abstract: In 1977, T. C. Vriezen published in Dutch an important study on the Hebrew existential/negative particle אין. He mainly focused on its absolute form, אין, and drew attention to the rich semantic potential of the particle, its primary meaning “non-existence,” and the impact of its position in clauses on its meaning. This study examines Vriezen’s comments on the uses and meanings of אין and the arguments he espouses in support of his views. The goal of the contribution is to move toward a better understanding of אין in the Hebrew Bible by revisiting Vriezen’s treatment of selected passages that feature the absolute form of the particle. It builds on, refines, and revises Vriezen’s insights by means of syntactical, philological, and text-critical comments on verses from the Hebrew Bible that contain ואין clauses, אם־אין clauses, and clauses with אין in non-initial position. The study concludes that further analysis of אין is necessary to better elucidate its polysemous nature and its rich semantic potential.

Incest, Exogamy, and Jewishness on Roseanne

Abstract: On the April 17, 1994 episode of 60Minutes, Morley Safer reported on daytime television's fascination with confessions, recovered memories, and adult allegations of childhood abuse. As Safer put it, "the more bizarre the confession, the more airtime you get."1 Dr. Elizabeth Loftus, a central figure in the 1990s "memory wars," who consistently challenged the credibility of recovered memories of sexual abuse, framed the issue starkly: "People are remembering sexual abuse in ways that is [sic] absolutely impossible; being abused in the womb, being abused in a prior life, being abused by, an alien . . . on a UFO."2 Safer also interviewed Roseanne Barr's siblings and her parents, Jerry and Helen Barr, whom she had accused of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse in 1991. Then known as Roseanne Arnold, the actress and comedian disclosed her memories of abuse and her identification as a survivor at an incest survivor meeting at a church in Denver, Colorado, and in People Magazine. Barr stated, "My father molested me until I left home at age 17. He constantly put his hands all over me. He forced me to sit on his lap, to cuddle with him, to play with his penis in the bathtub."3 Describing her difficulty in coming to terms with the trauma, Barr wrote, "I clung to my fantasy of our happy, quirky family, a bit off-kilter, but colorful, all-American, Jewish."4The 60Minutes interview allowed Jerry and Helen Barr, along with Roseanne's siblings Geraldine, Ben, and Stephanie, to publicly deny these (and other) allegations, as the sitcom Roseanne drew to the close of its sixth season. While the denials are forceful, Barr's parents and siblings also acknowledge some truths. When Safer brings up Barr's daughter's contention that her grandfather molested her at Barr's wedding (misattributing the accusation to Barr), Jerry Barr responds in an equivocal fashion: "And then my children asked me, 'Dad, did you pinch her on the tush? ' And I said, 'I can't recall,' but knowing me? Probably, probably." Barr's sister Geraldine confirms this: "My parents are guilty of being tushy touchers. They are. And that, I believe, is the genesis of a lot of Roseanne's claims. And I think, however, as tushy touchers, the punishment should fit the crime."5Geraldine Barr's allusion to punishment fitting the crime is more than idiom. In her second memoir, My Lives, Roseanne Barr divulged that her then husband, Tom Arnold, "filed police reports in three states" against Jerry Barr based on his granddaughter's allegations.6 While Jerry Barr was never convicted of any crime, the tabloid and news media fascination surrounding Roseanne Barr's "crying incest" was enough for Safer to describe Jerry and Helen Barr as "the most famous accused molesters in the country."7 While Safer presents Roseanne's words with skepticism, the Barr family-Jerry Barr in particular- is treated sympathetically. Yet only a hundred years earlier, nineteenth-century antisemitic stereotypes associated Jewish men with incest and sexual predation, especially in Europe. The historical context reveals an extraordinary transformation: a once prevalent stereotype has not only receded considerably, but white Jewish men now often benefit from white privilege in the face of such allegations.This rare televised appearance of Barr's parents and siblings frames the ensuing reading of Barr's eponymous television show. Roseanne directly engaged issues of memory, abuse, and incest within the Conner family, a working-class white family whose representative qualities invite consideration next to Barr's assessment of her own working-class family as "all-American, Jewish."8 The show's depictions of the fictional Roseanne and (her sister) Jackie's memories of physical abuse at the hands of their father dovetailed with ongoing media coverage of Barr's actual family allegations, blurring the lines between fiction and autobiographical fiction. While 60 Minutes cast doubt on Barr's assertions and credibility, Barr's television show can be read as a complex incest narra- tive with vertical and lateral components, offering a sophisticated rendering of how abuse (and memories of abuse) could affect siblings in different ways, and portraying the possibilities and limitations of reconciliation. …

Postmemorial Autobiography in Daniel Mendelsohn's the Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million

Abstract: Scholarship on written Holocaust accounts deals extensively with problems of witnessing, but primarily assumes that the writer is a survivor. As a result, attention focuses on the process of survivors reflecting on their experiences in autobiography. Yet autobiography relating to the Holocaust has also been written by nonsurvivors. In The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (2006), Daniel Mendelsohn adapts the genre of written survivor accounts and incorporates it into his own autobiography. Both an autobiography about himself and his relationship to his family, as well as a memoir about his six "lost" relatives, The Lost explores whether or not someone who was not there to witness can nevertheless function as a witness. The immense scholarship on written Holocaust survivor accounts, viewed in relation to autobiography,1 demonstrates the rise of a new type in the context of Holocaust Studies: postmemorial autobiography.2 With this term, I draw on Marianne Hirsch's concept of "postmemory" and relate it to autobiography.As a nonwitness nonetheless affected by the Holocaust, Mendelsohn retains the "structure" of postmemory.3 "Post" does not signify a movement beyond memory, but signifies instead that those who came after, for example, the second generation, cannot possess the memories themselves, only the traumatic aftereffects. Hirsch ties her concept of postmemory to photography, arguing "photographs mediate familial memory and postmemory."4 Photographs, in their capturing of an image in the past which endures into the present, function as a medium in which presence and absence, memory and postmemory come prominently to the fore.In his description of the genre, autobiography theorist Georges Gusdorf employs diction that immediately raises the issue of witnessing: "The narrative [of the autobiography] offers us the testimony of a man about himself, the contest of a being in dialogue with itself, seeking its innermost fidelity."5 Earlier in the essay, Gusdorf describes the autobiographer as a "historian of himself [who] wishes to produce his own portrait," who "gives himself the job of narrating his own history."6 Along with the term "historian," Gusdorf also uses "witness": "The witness of each person about himself is in addition a privileged one."7 According to Gusdorf, the autobiographer acts as both historian and witness and his autobiography is his testimony; he possesses a privileged position of spectatorship in reference to himself. The scholarship on written Holocaust survivor accounts provides a conceptual framework that must be adapted to allow for written Holocaust accounts by nonsurvivors, as exemplified by The Lost.Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson identify witness narratives as one of the cases that complicates autobiography: "Autobiographical theory . . . raises questions about narratives of witness, about who is authorized to tell stories, why, and when, of what kinds, and to what ends."8 Written survivor accounts of the Holocaust bear witness to the victims of the Holocaust while at the same time providing a narrative of the survivor's experience during the Holocaust. In other words, witness narratives, and thus, written survivor autobiographies, carry out a double function. Mendelsohn's autobiography becomes a witness narrative: in tracing the story of Shmiel Jager and his family, The Lost bears witness to a fraction of the victims of the Holocaust, while simultaneously narrating Mendelsohn's own experience in uncovering their story. Mendelsohn is not a witness to the events of the Holocaust themselves, but is a witness to the structure of postmemory and the way in which postmemory affects his own life.This article examines the narrative strategies, more specifically, the interplay between text and image, or between narrative and photography, that Mendelsohn employs throughout his autobiography.9 Mendelsohn grew up knowing only that his great-uncle, Shmiel Jager, along with his wife and four daughters, had been "killed by the Nazis. …

Jewish Bakers in Late Nineteenth-Century Great Britain and Sunday Baking Restrictions

Abstract: When immigrants first arrive in a country there is almost always friction between the host population and the new immigrants over housing, jobs, and culture. This article tells the story of such a clash in Britain in the late nineteenth century, tracing how Jewish bakers ran afoul of Britain's Sundays closing laws, which forbade bakers to bake and bakeries to sell their good on Sundays. In a time when most businesses worked a six-day week, Jewish bakers felt unfairly victimized, since their religion called upon them to close their establishments on Saturday in observance of the Sabbath while Christian bakers were free to bake and sell on Saturday, but the law required all bakers, including Jews, to close on Sunday for the Christian Sabbath. This story is a microcosm of social conflict and social change, and reveals the serious pressures that observant Jewish immigrants faced as they tried to find a place for themselves in British society.From medieval times, custom and the law in England assumed that Sunday was a day of rest and worship. Sunday observance laws were directed at errant Christians who failed to observe the Sabbath. Renaissance urban growth, increasing commercial activity, and the turmoil of the Civil War in the midseventeenth century all disrupted the habits of Sabbath observance. After the restoration of the monarchy, Parliament sought to restore religion to a central place in British life and to reestablish strict observance of the Sunday Sabbath with respect to the commercial life of the country. It passed the Sunday Observance Act of 1677, an avowedly religious law that was for centuries the foundation of Britain's legal structure on Sabbath observance. The act prohibited work and commerce on Sunday except in some limited instances.1 It was augmented a century later by the Sunday Observance Act of 1781, which required that the nation's theaters, taverns, libraries, museums, zoos, and retail shops were to be closed on Sundays.2 However, it was recognized that some businesses such as bakeries and food merchants had to be allowed to work even on Sundays in order to provision the populace.Medieval England had a small but thriving community of Jews but it was destroyed by the expulsion of Jews in 1290. Under the Tudors, Jews, mainly Spanish Jews, began to trickle back into Britain. The number of Jews continued to grow as British commerce and empire grew and British trade spanned the world. In 1734, there were about 6,000 Jews living in England.3 The Jewish population of Britain began to rise more rapidly in the nineteenth century as Jews from the German states arrived on British shores. In 1850, the Jewish population was approximately 25,000.4 Toward the end of the nineteenth century a new wave of Jewish immigration, composed largely of Jews from the Russian and Hapsburg Empires in eastern and central Europe, led to a substantial increase in Jewish population. About 120,000 Jews immigrated to Great Britain between 1880 and 1914. The Jewish population of London alone went from 47,000 in 1883 to 150,000 in 1905, which accounted for about three-fourths of the Jewish population in the UK.5 This influx of new Jewish immigrants, arriving at a time of significant changes in British social and economic life, faced them with-and helped to create-tension with the host population. Nowhere was this tension played out more visibly than in the British baking industry. Jewish bakers wanted to bake on Sunday, the day that was not their Sabbath, and ignore the legal restrictions on Sunday commercial activity. British law forbade that. By the late nineteenth century, there was conflict in the baking industry.Some legal restrictions on baking connected with Sunday closing existed before the nineteenth century. For instance, a 1794 act obliged bakers to refrain from work on Sunday except for three hours, from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m.6 The purpose was not to unburden bakers per se, but rather to obtain "better observation of the Lord's day by persons exercising the trade of Bakers. …

Jeremiah: Fortified City, Bronze Walls, and Iron Pillar against the Whole Land

Abstract: In Jer 1:18a, God promises to make Jeremiah “a fortified city, an iron pillar, and bronze walls, against the whole land.” In the prevailing scholarly opinion, these metaphors were meant to encourage and reassure the prophet, offering him divine protection from persecution by “the kings of Judah, its princes, its priests, and the people” (1:18b) whom his mission was likely to antagonize. Examining the references to walls, fortified cities, pillars, bronze, and iron in the Hebrew Bible and other ancient Near Eastern literature, the present article argues that at least two of the metaphors in question, “fortified city” and “bronze walls,” primarily describe the militant character of Jeremiah’s ministry. In a world torn by war, the prophet was called to wage a warfare of his own, battling for the people’s minds. Any encouragement conveyed by these expressions is secondary, having to do with the prophet’s invincibility in the face of violent opposition to his rhetorical onslaught. However, the connotations of the third metaphor, “iron pillar,” seem to be completely different and it may even clash with the other two.

Creative Ontologies and the Infinite Task of Language in Levinas's and Rosenzweig's Notions of Poetic Expression

Abstract: But resurrection is the explicit concern of the last part of Agnon's last collection of texts, Ha Esh Veha Etzim "The Fire and the Wood." Is this a title or a question? The words refer indisputably to the fire and wood of the gas chambers, but they are taken from the question that Isaac, walking behind his father toward Moria mountain, asked Abraham: "Behold the fire and the wood: but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?" Everything is a question in this text, and in the next to last story in this collection "The Sign." These are questions without answers, to be taken note of in their very interrogativity. In "The Sign," the author, settled in the land of the ancestors, learns, on the eve of Shavuot, the news of the extermination by the Germans of all the Jews in the Polish town where he was born.-Emmanuel Levinas, Proper NamesOne of Emmanuel Levinas's most notable claims is that ethics is first philosophy, or in other words, that "metaphysics is enacted in ethical relations."1 But what could it mean to say that the taking of responsibility, one's response to and for another, in whatever form that may be, enacts, or creates, metaphysics? By calling ethics an optics, Levinas positions every other theoretical question within the purview of moral obligations. In other words, first comes the primacy of one's relationship with another, for instance, in the significations made in a community, in the teachings passed on to others, and in the creation of frameworks of justice to which all are subject. This paper aims to show how Rosenzweig's thought in regards to poetic language helps us understand Levinas's writing about poetic expression, because both expressed similar views regarding an ontology that is not fixed and manifests in the creative, or what is called the expressive, aspect of language. I conclude by examining Agnon as a morally exemplary poet whose anxiety about the creative power of poetic language finds expression in the social reality of his time.Levinas's phenomenology of the ethical subject often stands in contrast to that of other phenomenologists such as Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre, who were his contemporaries. Standing in the unique position of being a superlatively ethical writer, it is interesting to see to whom Levinas gives credit and from whom he receives his teachings. Where does Levinas's thought and language develop into a speaking with others, and what ideas could be developed after placing him within a constellation of others' thoughts? Contrasts and criticisms of his thought in relation to other phenomenologists abound; however, my ultimate goal here will be to show how his ideas on the creation of ontology through poetic expression are rooted in and shared with Franz Rosenzweig's notions of expressive language and its power to create being.Rosenzweig lived between 1886 and 1929, which created some overlap between his and Levinas's life. Both lived through world wars and were deeply engaged in German Idealism, a representative of the philosophical milieu of their time. Both were critical of traditional Western philosophy. From its beginning in Plato, they found a disastrous, overarching theme in philosophy, which was the totalizing and rationalization of being to logos, or reason. Levinas eventually lived to see the horrors of the Shoah2 and placed its events in light of their criticism of the logocentric understanding of being, and what to him was most threatening, was the logocentric understanding of the human being.Rosenzweig is not as known in mainstream philosophy. Levinas's debt to him is incalculable, however, because Rosenzweig originally developed a notion of the "meta-ethical man," which turned into the responsible human being in Levinas.3 Levinas's indebtedness to Rosenzweig is professed in the preface of Totality and Infinity. There he admits being, "impressed by the opposition to the idea of totality in Franz Rosenzweig's Stern der Erlosung [Star of Redemption], a work too often present in this book to be cited. …

"The Chosen People" or "As All Nations": The Secularization Shift from a Semantic Perspective

Abstract: The paper investigates the notion of “secularization shift,” used by Hebrew semanticists, from a semantic perspective. After clarifying the terms “secularization” and “secularization shift” as used in Hebrew, it discusses a number of words that are described as representative of this process (characterized as social and extra-lingual, reflecting changes in Israeli reality). Using general semantic apparatuses (those not unique to any specific language), the concepts in question are examined in terms of relationships between the referent and the signifier. It is shown that the transition of Hebrew words from a sacred to a secular usage is explainable as part of the known semantic shifts (metaphor, metonymy, folk etymology, and ellipsis) and does not reflect one particular process. The theoretical and practical ramifications of the study are not limited to the specifics ways in which the meaning of one word or another changes from sacred to secular, and even to theoretical linguistic-semantic issues; rather, they touch upon the pivotal question of the relationship between the religious and the mundane, including their linguistic manifestations.

The Consuming Temple: Jews, Department Stores, and the Consumer Revolution in Germany, 1880-1940 by Paul Lerner (review)

Abstract: THE CONSUMING TEMPLE: JEWS, DEPARTMENT STORES, AND THE CONSUMER REVOLUTION IN GERMANY, 1880-1940 Paul Lerner. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015. xi + 266 pp.The rise of the department store has been intimately linked to the history of modernity in the Atlantic world (United States, France, Britain). In Germany, as many other aspects of modernity, the full-fledged department store arrived relatively late, around 1890, but expanded exceptionally fast, surpassing all but the American stores in both number and sales within only a decade. Around 1900, the German department stores had also the highest percentage of Jewish owners, and nowhere else was the association between department stores and Jews as strong and persistent as in Germany.Paul Lerner's monograph on the department store in Germany between 1890 and 1940 fills sizable gaps in both the history of consumer culture in Germany and Jewish cultural history. It attends, in the words of the author, "not only to the shaping of discourse by reality, but also to the shaping of reality by discourse." Thus, The Consuming Temple digs happily into an extremely rich and varied body of material and media, both nonfictional and fictional. Key sources include articles in the daily and illustrated press, advertisements, professional treatises on the psychology of kleptomania, and studies of mass consumption, retail, and marketing. The author has combed also through an impressive number of unpublished archival materials from department store firms and other family collections. He does not shy away from using ample antisemitic material (agitation pamphlets, political propaganda, etc.) that-despite its malicious and deceitful rhetoric-drew on images of Jews and anxieties about social change that were shared across the ideological spectrum in the time before and after World War I. Particularly noteworthy are Lerner's abundant references to fiction-I counted over three dozen novels, revues, plays, short stories, and even songs and cartoons-where the plots and characters orbit around the daily functioning of a department store and reflect the public's conflicting attitudes toward this form of consumer revolution. The novels, ranging from Vicky Baum's Der grose Ausverkauf to Emile Zola's The Ladies' Paradise, from Erich Kohrer's Warenhaus Berlin to Manfred Georg's Aufruhr im Warenhaus, and from Maria Gleit's Abteilung Herrenmode to Sigfrid Siwertz's Das grose Warenhaus, offer valuable perspectives on how the department stores were seen, experienced, and represented during their heyday between 1890 and 1933. Within Lerner's own compelling narrative and analysis, references to fiction and nonfiction texts intersect in astonishing ways and form a cohesive discursive field around recurring themes that become the center of the respective chapters in the book.The first chapter situates the spread of the department store within the broader economic, sociological and political picture in the 1880s and 1890s, including developments in France, Britain, and America that served partially as a model for the entrepreneurs in Germany. The author is very precise in outlining the specificity of the German case. It was predominantly Jewish families, newcomers that had migrated between 1824 and 1871 from the East (territories that are now in Poland) into central and western Germany, who were looking for new economic opportunities. Unlike France and Britain, where the department stores emerged in the centers of Paris and London, the early departments stores in Germany started modestly in the provinces, outside of the capital, in medium-sized cities-with the retail of dry goods and textiles-before entering the bigger metropolitan markets; also, they catered mainly to working-class and lower-middle-class customers by offering quality goods at reasonable prices. With the bold move to Berlin and other big cities, however, most German department stores underwent a major shift. They became palatial structures, grandiose temples of consumption. …

Holocaust: An American Understanding

Abstract: HOLOCAUST: AN AMERICAN UNDERSTANDING By Deborah E. Lipstadt. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2016.In 2001 Elie Wiesel said "this fiery memory remains and we, you and I, you and all of us, now are its very privileged custodians." Deborah Lipstadt has been one of the foremost custodians of the tragic memory of the Holocaust. Her exceptional scholarship has included such insightful books as Beyond Belief: The American Press and the Coming of the Holocaust, 1933-1945 (1986), Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory (1993), History on Trial: My Day in Court with a Holocaust Denier (2006), The Eichmann Trial (2011), and now, Holocaust: An American Understanding (2016), published as a part of Rutgers University's Key Words in Jewish Studies series. Each of her books has significantly advanced the study of the Holocaust and demonstrated Lipstadt's continuing role as a custodian of the memory of the Holocaust.Lipstadt's deep scholarship on the Holocaust is illustrated in this thoughtful, interesting, and important study that effectively documents the evolution of the word "Holocaust" as a key critical word in Jewish studies. The book considers the Holocaust's impact on the United States and, in turn, the impact of America on the study of the Holocaust. Within some two hundred pages, Lipstadt divides her book into three themes: the first focuses on the period up to 1962, and traces both early Holocaust historiography and its impact on the development of the term "Holocaust"; the second is aligned with the impact of Holocaust studies on America, 1960s social and cultural happenings in the United States, and how these happenings impacted Holocaust studies; the third deals with increasingly critical recent scholarship of the Holocaust, with Holocaust deniers, antisemites, and others who have sought to trivialize the Holocaust and its significance.In the World War II aftermath, Nazi "victims" (the initial descriptive term) sought to bear witness to their experiences-to help the world understand, to explain what had happened to them, and to encourage the hope of "never again." Their more appropriate identification became "survivors," but the phenomenon which they had survived had yet to be designated. The initial words depicting this phenomenon included khurbn (from "destroy") and "Shoah." There were numerous English equivalents, such as "catastrophe," "destruction," and others, but Lipstadt indicated that by the 1950s the term "Holocaust" was increasingly employed. The topic, however, did not attract much attention until the time of the Eichmann trial, when Israeli prosecutor Gideon Housner put numerous survivors on the witness stand to testify about 1933-1945 Nazi persecution and destruction of the Jews. The testimony focused world-wide attention on the Holocaust, and publication of Raul Hilberg's Destruction of the European Jews (1961) provided a first comprehensive description of the deadly details.The term "Holocaust" was increasingly used by scholars, including Phillip Friedman, the first important historian who, Lipstadt contends, relied on survivor testimonies, rejected the proposition that Jews marched unresistingly like sheep to the slaughter, and viewed the Judenrate or Jewish Councils as not invariably supportive of Nazi efforts at Jewish extermination. Much debate among historians of the Holocaust revolved around these three issues. Lipstadt briefly summarized such issues in the various positions of Raul Hilberg's Destruction of the European Jews (1961), William Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1960), Bruno Bettelheim's The Informed Heart (1960), Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), Lucy Dawidowicz's The War Against the Jews (1975), Terrence Des Pres's The Survivor (1980), Christopher Browning's Ordinary Men (1992), and other publications. …

Filming Identity in the Jewish American Postwar; Or, On the Uses and Abuses of Periodization for Jewish Studies

Abstract: This article takes the postwar period in the US (from the end of World War II to the mid-1960s) as represented by a handful of canonical films—both of the era and since—as an opportunity to argue for a critical Jewish Studies-based analysis of periodization. It illustrates the need in Jewish Studies to mount a sustained critique of the concept of identity that anchors its professional practices. Questions about identity are too often asked as questions about culture as the naturalized predicate of a population, and this tendency underlies and supports a dominant historicist approach in Jewish American Studies that suppresses critical alternatives. Through a series of close readings—of The Jazz Singer (1927), Gentleman’s Agreement (1947), The Pawnbroker (1964), Liberty Heights (1999), and Inglorious Basterds (2009)—this paper instead proposes that we deploy a critical history of the concept of Jewish American identity—rather than a history of an empirical subject we take for granted as American Jewry—to destabilize the logic of periodization underlying the historicist self-evidence of Jewish identity.