Book Review: Deena Aranoff, Mother’s Milk: Essays on Child-Rearing, the Household, and the Making of Jewish Culture

Viewed in historical terms, the image which Jewish teen-agers have of their milieu represents a decisive break with the past. The sense of uniqueness, of special destiny, seems to be fading. Jewish life is conceived of as middle class, nonideological, and entirely consonant with the dominant modes of American life. The younger teens have even less sense of being differentiated from the mass of Amer ican teen-agers than have the older teen-agers. If there is any significant difference between Jewish teen-age culture and the dominant models, it is that the Jewish version is somewhat less cultistic and less sharply set off from adult life. With respect to two touchstones of Jewish life—the scholarly tradi tion and the cohesion of family life—counterimages have developed among Jewish teen-agers. And, except among Orthodox children, the attitude toward religion shows a not unexpected downward arc toward indifference and secularism. It is significant in Jewish culture in the older teen years that it is largely college-oriented. Although their attitudes hardly differentiate these teen-agers from their non-Jewish peers, they tend to live in a vast, self-enclosed Jewish cosmos with relatively little contact with the non-Jewish world. Social life is characterized by extraordinary zeal and singular lack of privacy. Marriage, particularly for girls, is a prime value. Jewish teen-age culture is predominantly urban in environ ment. Small-town residence encourages one vein of Jewish teen-age contraculture. Other veins are Orthodoxy and critical intellectualism.—Ed.

The Jewish emigration from Russia after the Revolution of 1917 changed the face of Jewish culture in Western Europe. Russian Jews brought with them the visions of a national Jewish literature in Hebrew, Yiddish or Russian, and new concepts of secular Jewish music and art. Often they acted as intermediaries between Jewish centres in Europe, which resulted in the creation of a single sphere of Jewish culture common to all parts of the European diaspora. Although some stayed in Western Europe for only a few years before moving on to Palestine, the budding Hebrew culture in Palestine would not have been the same without this relatively short period of intense contact between Russian Jewish and Western European cultures.

Reviewed by: The Image of the Black in Jewish Culture: A History of the Other Vernon J. Williams Jr. The Image of the Black in Jewish Culture: A History of the Other, by Abraham Melamed. London: Routledge Curzon, 2003. 295 pp. $75.00. Since the Second World War many distinguished scholars have examined the history of ethnic and race relations between persons of the Jewish faith and majoritarian populations—especially the latter's antisemitism. Ivan Hannaford's monumental Race: The History of an Idea in the West (1996) and George M. Fredrickson's Racism: A Short [End Page 138] History (2002) are but two splendid examples of recent scholarly books by intellectual historians who have adopted the aforementioned mode of analysis. Abraham Melamed, a senior lecturer in the Department of Jewish History and Thought at the University of Haifa, Israel, however, has departed from the older approach in his new work, The Image of the Black in Jewish Culture: A History of the Other. Cognizant of the acerbic, ideological disputes between African-American Muslims—especially those in the upper echelons of the hierarchy of the Nation of Islam—and Jewish scholars and religious leaders, Melamed has attempted to explicate the racial attitudes of Jewish thinkers toward blacks from biblical times to the early modern era. Melamed takes on hard issues that divide not only Afro-Americans and Jews but also the varied and diverse segments of the Jewish population. It is thus a tribute to him to have taken on these volatile issues with the degree of courage and fairness that is usually all too lacking in such discourses. The ostensible purpose of Melamed's well-written and lucid work (translated by Betty Sigler Rosen) is to demonstrate that "the image of the black as inferior . . . does not belong exclusively to Jewish culture" (p. 3). By examining and analyzing both the Bible and the literature of rabbinical scholars and other literary genres of pagans, Christians, and Muslims, Melamed delves into both the "racist" and the "sexist" ideas that pervaded pagan, Christian, and Islamic, as well as Jewish cultures. Thus, it is not surprising that Melamed's comparative study of one of the nastiest types of human propensities leads him to comment that "there is no reason . . . that twentieth or twenty-first-century Jews need feel responsible for, or guilty about, what was said or written by Jews" (p. 5)—the accusations of Black Muslims notwithstanding. Melamed, however, does not condone anti-black racism. He insists that racist Jews who continue to voice anti-black views should not be excused for their bigotry. Those persons, he argues unequivocally, should be condemned and rejected "in a boldly negative, judgmental fashion" (p. 6). Indeed, Melamed has clearly set out the parameters of his thesis and their relevance for present-day issues. He has demonstrated convincingly that the "Midraschic treatment of Bible texts" in reference to blacks and women was racist and sexist. For example, Melamed writes that in "the rabbinic and later texts there is a clear tendency towards negative value judgments about the black and about anyone whose skin is significantly darker than the norm" (pp. 61-62). In other words, for Melamed, during most of the historical periods under scrutiny, blacks were the "negative of the observer group's self-image" (p. 6). In accounting for, or perhaps providing an excuse for, some of the Jews' racism, Melamed argues that Jewish denigration of persons of dark skin fulfilled certain psychological needs and justified their social and economic gains. To use Melamed's own words, "this identification of the Jew as inferior other by the majority culture—be it pagan, Muslim or Christian—increased the psychological need to define and confine the other's other, which . . . was so frequently people with darker skin" (p. 224). Such [End Page 139] psychological needs, he stresses, "influence the complex, ambivalent relationship of the American Jew to the Afro-American to this day, just as they do the relationships within Isreali society between 'Ashkenazi' and 'Sephardic' or 'Eastern' Jews, and between all of them and the Arabs: in Israel the other's other" (p. 224). Despite the obvious strengths of this work, I have two reservations...

This article examines the use of central elements of the Jewish religious repertoire and transcendental realm, such as prophecy or revelation, within the aesthetic secular realm of musical avant-garde and modern Hebrew literature. By focusing on two case studies, I attempt to shed new light on the question of Jewish secular culture. Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951), an Austrian Jewish composer, was born into an assimilated Viennese family and converted to Protestantism before returning to Judaism in the 1930s while escaping to the United States. Aharon Appelfeld (1932–2018), an Israeli Jewish writer, was born in Czernowitz to assimilated German-speaking parents, survived the Holocaust and emigrated to Israel in 1946. My claim is that in their works both composer and author testify to traumatic experiences that avoid verbal representation by: (1) subverting and transgressing conventional aesthetic means and (2) alluding to sacred tropes and theological concepts. In exploring Schoenberg’s opera Moses und Aron and Appelfeld’s Journey into Winter among others, this article shows how the transcendent sphere returns within the musical and poetic avant-garde (musical prose, 12-tone composition, prose poem, non-semantic or semiotic fiction) as a “sound” of old traditions that can only be heard through the voices of a new Jewish culture.

This article offers an ethnographic-historical interpretation of Israeli public culture as reflected in the various forms in which Yom Kippur has been observed in the Israeli public sphere since the 1920s. The analysis demonstrates how Israeli culture is an independent Jewish culture, which should be judged separately from other historical Jewish cultures and from its marginal groups, the strictly religious and the radically secular.

This volume focuses on the study of contemporary North African Jewish culture. It aims to develop a shared historical space for the study of Jewish and Muslim culture as an area in and of itself.Ao...

Tw o years before he became the first Jewish Professor of Hebrew Language and Literature at University College, London, in 1828, Hyman Hurwitz published the first collection of Hebrew literature in English, an anthology entitled Hebrew Tales.1 The volume is composed of tales and aphorisms from rabbinic literature, including the Talmud and midrash. As Hurwitz’s preface and essay make clear, he intended the volume to counter negative and uninformed assumptions about this literature in much Christian writing, and to educate British Jews in their own rich traditions. More fundamentally, he wanted to show the compatibility of traditional Jewish wisdom and contemporary British culture. Inspired by his friend Coleridge, Hurwitz set out to redeem the Talmud and to cultivate a new tradition that would make Jews more at home in Britain and Britain more hospitable to Jews and Jewish culture.2 The historian David Ruderman, who sees the project of translation as a major part of the Haskalah or Enlightenment in England, believes that Hurwitz’s project, like that of Jewish biblical translators of the period, “constructed a radically new image of what they thought Judaism meant to their age. This image was so formidable and pervasive that, to the readers of their prodigious translations, the reality on which their new image was based was virtually displaced.”

Space and Place in Jewish Studies

This paper traces the historical development of the discourse of violent retribution in Jewish culture over the course of Late Antiquity. The paper argues that, although Jews had long engaged in anti-Roman rhetoric, Jewish anti-imperial sentiment intensified in the fifth to seventh centuries CE. This heightened level of antipathy toward the Roman state is perhaps best exemplified by a number of texts that present tableaux of graphic violence directed against the figure of the Roman emperor. The paper shows that these fantasies of revenge redeployed and inverted specific elements of Roman imperial ideology and practice, while at the same time internalizing the pervasive stereotype of Jews in sixth- and especially seventh-century Christian sources as violent troublemakers. The paper argues that, in attempting to assert some measure of control over the "symbolic weapons" of religious violence at play in their society, the Jewish creators of this vivid discourse of retributive justice colluded with their Christian counterparts in constructing the Jew as a member of an oppositional and even dangerous religious minority.

Few subgenres of the Spanish comedia have garnered as much critical attention as those plays in which a husband kills, or conspires to kill, his wife. From Seneca's Hercules furens to Hardy's Procris and Dolce's Marianna, to Shakespeare's Othello, it is clear that the murder of a spouse was considered worthy of theatrical treatment over a great span of time. The wife-murder plays drew upon so many different historical and literary traditions spanning more than two millennia tell us that wife murder as a theatrical plot was not unique to Spain, but what of those plays based upon incidents recorded in Spanish history? Considerable criticism has sought to establish connections between these plays and Spain's past, especially the influences of Visigothic, Jewish, and Muslim cultures in the development of the nation, in order to assert that wife murder was a well-known, feature of medieval and early modern Spanish society.Keywords: Jewish culture; Muslim culture; Shakespeare's Othello; Spanish society; wife-murder plays

In the American Jewish world, the presence of lesbians and gay men no longer seems particularly worthy of comment. This segment of the larger Jewish community began to create its own organizations, including synagogues, as early as the 1970s, consolidating itself throughout the 1980s and passing one milestone of communal acceptance after another as the twentieth century drew to a close. (The Jewish Mosaic website, www.JewishMosaic.org, offers a comprehensive and accessible overview of lesbian and gay inclusion in American Jewish life.) Which is not to say, of course, that the battle for acceptance is complete; it continues in many ways, family by family and congregation by congregation. Its outcome, however, seems like a foregone conclusion, with the Jewish community among the most accepting in American life. How did such a vast change take place, at what seems (relatively speaking) like lightening speed? A series of fascinating and suggestive clues is presented in The Passing Game, Warren Hoffman’s new study of precursors and harbingers of this massive cultural shift in Jewish life. As he clarifies early on, Hoffman is not seeking to document the histories of gay and lesbian Jews. His optic is both more indirect and more encompassing: He is searching for traces of a queer sensibility in American Jewish culture itself, whether explicit, implicit, or heatedly—excessively?—denied. A scholar of literature and the theater, Hoffman looks at six key texts (and performers) of what he terms “the Jewish American cultural canon” (p. 4), devoting a chapter to each. As he notes in the book’s introduction, he is not searching for rarities of cultural production, but for works that attracted significant critical attention when they appeared, and (in some cases) are still discussed in college courses. In effect, he is drawing our attention to aspects of Jewish culture that have been hidden in plain sight. The works he has chosen include novels, plays, short stories and films, spanning the period from the earliest years of the twentieth century—midway through the

My Fair Sadie:Allan Sherman and a Paradox of American Jewish Culture Mark Cohen (bio) In a 1993 essay entitled The Paradoxes of American Jewish Culture, Stephen J. Whitfield found no shortage of them, including the following: "[The] American Jewish subculture looks drab in the light of an American culture that Jews have helped to energize, a mass culture that has dazzled the world."1 A good deal of the work done by scholars of Jewish studies has been energized by the desire to settle this paradox. There has been an attempt to rebalance the scales, to reinvigorate the Jewish subculture by claiming ownership of Hollywood, musical theater, comedy, Tin Pan Alley, and other cultural goods the Jews presented to America without asking for a receipt. Toward this end, Jewish cultural studies counters "the devaluation of Jewish difference" in order to "make Jewish literature, culture, and history work better to enhance Jewish possibilities for living richly."2 For Whitfield, the future health of American Jewry is linked to the success of this cultural reclamation project. His exuberant and fascinating In Search of American Jewish Culture is a lost-and-found of Jewish inventiveness he believes is crucial to a full appreciation of that culture, and essential also for American Jews who must decide "what they and their descendants might want to live for." Whitfield's account of American Jewish culture includes Jews "who did not want to serve a manifestly ethnic or communal purpose."3 He is content to ignore their wishes. Whitfield is not alone. Though important critics such as Robert Alter and Harold Bloom are committed to what Whitfield has termed a maximalist approach to Jewish studies, a stance that views as Jewish only works that "bear directly on [the Jews'] beliefs and experiences as a people," the ascendancy of Jewish cultural studies in the 1990s heralded the arrival of a rigorous minimalism.4 In an attitude that might [End Page 51] be summarized as waste not, want not, Jewish cultural studies eagerly mined American mass culture for the hidden contributions of assimilated Jews. Critics have found in Betty Boop cartoons, Milton Berle's television career, female vaudevillians who suppressed their Jewish identities, Mezz Mezzrow (a Jewish jazz musician who decided he was essentially an African-American), and even Barbie dolls, material that broadened and deepened our understanding of American Jewish culture.5 Jewish parents who once told their children to clean their plates because people in Europe were starving might well recognize the mood informing Jewish cultural studies. Like those Jewish parents, cultural historians feel that American Jewish culture is starving and that nothing of value should be thrown away. For Whitfield, the crisis is caused by another paradox of American Jewish culture. As he writes, "The very hospitality of this Diaspora site has threatened the vitality of the community that has spawned such talent."6 Jewish scholars have fought fire with fire, paradox with paradox. If Jewish talent has entered American life without Jewish markers, thus weakening Jewish culture, then the revitalization of Jewish life will depend upon a judiciously applied minimalist approach that can judaize apparently un-Jewish creations.7 Allan Sherman and the Jewishness of Broadway Allan Sherman employed this minimalist approach in the 1950s when he wrote a collection of Jewish parodies of Broadway musicals. Sherman exposed the Jewish origins of Broadway's musical theater in order to reclaim its achievements for the Jewish community. He had long been attracted to the great Broadway stage tunes of Porgy and Bess and Oklahoma!, written by the legendary teams of George and Ira Gershwin and Rodgers and Hammerstein. These musicals were embraced by the nation as authentically American. Few attached any importance to their creators' Jewish roots. In a dazzling bit of prescience, Sherman did. [End Page 52] He sensed in the Broadway musical a Jewish sensibility decades before the Norton anthology of American Jewish literature included Broadway show tunes as examples of the Jewish imagination;8 before scholars such as Andrea Most, Whitfield, and Hilene Flanzbaum pointed out that the musicals were built on themes Jews could be expected to investigate (the thrill of becoming Americans in Oklahoma!,9 bigotry in South Pacific,10...

This article explores the Yiddish Othello translation produced under Soviet state auspices by the Russian Jewish folklorist Y. Goldberg and published in 1935 by the State Press of Belorussia. It is the first study devoted to Goldberg's Yiddish Shakespeare translations. The article will consider the ways in which Goldberg's translation reflects a tension between a modernising Soviet ideology on the one hand, and traditional Eastern European Jewish culture on the other. The former is manifested in the translation through its use of an accessible Soviet Yiddish style; through Goldberg's avoidance of citations from classical Jewish sources; and through his characterisation of Desdemona as an admirably modern and progressive woman. The latter is manifested through domesticating elements, specifically allusions to Jewish traditions such as oylemhaze ‘the Present World’, taneysim ‘fast days’, and yichus (Jewish ancestral pedigree); and references to Eastern European Jewish realia (e.g. herring and turnips). Examination of Goldberg's work provides a fascinating perspective on an understudied aspect of the Jewish relationship with Shakespeare. The article fits into the wider context of Jewish language, literature, and culture in the early Soviet period, and of multicultural and minority-language Shakespeare more broadly.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: In 2009 Natan Sharansky, formerly an iconic refusenik and now an Israeli politician, was named chairman of the Jewish Agency for Israel, the wing of the Israeli government historically charged with fostering Jewish immigration to Israel, traditionally known as aliya. Sharansky, however, immediately reformulated the central mission of the Jewish Agency away from aliya and toward the strengthening of secular Jewish identity around the world. The Forward reported: At the center of Sharansky's plan is the notion of peoplehood. He and a tight group of ideological allies—mostly other Russian Jews—believe that the Jewish Agency must now become a global promoter of Jewish identity, particularly among the young. Peoplehood, according to its proponents, is defined as a sense of connectivity between Jews who share a common history and fate. With Sharansky's ascent to this particular position and the concurrent shift in the Jewish Agency's mission from fomenter of migration to builder of secular Jewish identity, Jews have moved to the center of conversations about Jewish identity and culture. These new developments give reason to think seriously about Jewish culture and its impact on global Jewish culture. Indeed, a growing number of books and articles on the subject indicate that there is a new body of scholarship, defined by a cultural studies approach to the and post-Soviet Jewish experience. These new studies come from varied disciplines, such as history, anthropology, film studies, and literary criticism, to name a few, but they all put culture and cultural production at the center of scholarship on and post-Soviet Jewish community and identity. We call this emerging field Soviet Jewish Cultural This newly developing field sweeps across temporal and spatial boundaries. It encompasses Jewish experiences in both the and post-Soviet eras, as well as within the borders of the Former Union and outside of it, in Israel, North America, or elsewhere, wherever and post-Soviet Jews have migrated. What the subjects of all of this research have in common is the experience of having lived under the Union with its radical experiments in Jewish identity and culture. Scholars working in this emerging field generally do not look at and post-Soviet Jews through the more traditional lenses of vanishing diasporas, anti-Semitism, and the disappearance of Yiddish and Hebrew cultures. Rather than approaching the Jewish experience of Jews with presumptions of what it means to be Jewish, and whether in fact Jews measure up, this scholarship asks what it means to be Jewish in a and post-Soviet context. In what ways is Jewishness performed and represented? By taking a birds-eye, interdisciplinary view, we want to redefine the field of Jewish Studies, and to use particular examples of the new research to suggest what a cultural studies approach reveals about and post-Soviet Jewish culture. We will demonstrate first that scholars of Jewish Cultural Studies have focused on new forms of Jewish practice that have sometimes supplanted traditional religious practices. Secondly, we show that this body of scholarship in Jewish Cultural Studies complicates the idea that twentieth century Jewish history is a history of assimilation, a movement downward from authentic Jewish practice rooted in Jewish languages to the end of a distinctive Jewish life. Most importantly, this new scholarship takes a global rather than national perspective, since post-Soviet Jewry is one of the most transnational in contemporary Jewish life. Thus, in a post-Soviet, post-Zionist, post-assimilationist moment in global Jewish culture, this group of Jews with their unique cultural history may be placed at the center, not periphery, of the global Jewish experience. Therefore, the body of scholarship forming Jewish Cultural Studies has much to offer to scholars in Jewish and Russian Studies, as well as Diaspora Studies.

The essays in this special issue stem from a conference held at the University of Cambridge in May 2016 on the theme of “Rethinking Exile, Center, and Diaspora in Modern Jewish Culture.” With participants from the UK, Israel, Germany, and the US, the discussions and presentations took their starting point from the reflection that, over the course of multiple centuries prior to the modern era, Jewish culture was shaped in various ways by the concept of “exile” and by the practical circumstances that corresponded to this concept. The conference aimed to explore ways in which inherited Jewish culture has also been reshaped and affected by the presence of nonexilic or anti-exilic dynamics in more recent and contemporary Jewish history.