European anti-Semitism Research Articles

Genesis 12 and the Abraham‐Paradigm Concerning the Promised Land

Genesis 12 and the Abraham‐Paradigm Concerning the Promised Land

Franz Werfel und der Genozid an den Armeniern ed. by Roy Knocke and Werner Treß

Reviewed by: Franz Werfel und der Genozid an den Armeniern ed. by Roy Knocke and Werner Treß Francis Michael Sharp Roy Knocke and Werner Treß, eds., Franz Werfel und der Genozid an den Armeniern. Europäisch-jüdische Studien Beiträge 22. Oldenbourg: De Gruyter, 2015. 178pp. The essays collected in this volume were first given as papers in 2013 at the conference “Genozid und Literatur: Franz Werfel aus armenisch-jüdischtürkisch-deutscher Perspektive” in Potsdam. At the very beginning of the introductory chapter, the editors bring the historical significance of the assembled scholarship into focus. They take a first step in this direction by citing the description of a scene in the Warsaw Ghetto observed by a resistance fighter in which the internees scramble to get their hands on the book “The Forty Days of Musa Dagh by Franz Werfel about the Turkish massacre of the Armeniens. This is the most popular novel among the adults in the ghetto. They’ll read it aloud this evening, if there is electricity.” Following this evocative tableau that conjures up the perilous situation for the internees themselves, the editors then give concise summations of each of the individual essays. [End Page 162] Together with the suggestive pictorial image, the summations foreshadow the multiple political, historical, and literary strands woven together by the following twelve essays, all tied together by Werfel’s novel, a novel about the first and less well-known of twentieth-century genocides. Several of these are basically biographical in nature but always accentuate his life story against the political and historical background. Peter Stefan Jungk, author of the still-authoritative Werfel biography published in 1987, provides the broadest sketch of Werfel’s life and accomplishments from its beginnings as an expressionist poet with the publication of Der Weltfreund in 1911 to his own defamation of these beginnings at the very end of his life in exile in 1944. Other biographical contributions follow with emphasis on various tensions in his life and writing, such as those between his origins as the offspring of a Jewish family in Prague and a German-language author of the first rank in literary history. A deep affinity for Christianity was also at times in conflict with his inherited religious affiliation, a tension that took on deeper and more troubling aspects against the background of the increasingly virulent anti-Semitism in Europe during the first half of the twentieth century. In his contribution to the volume, titled “Franz Werfel als Kulturkritiker: Individualismus, Kollektivismus und die moralisch-ästhetische Stellung des Dichters,” co-editor Roy Knocke attempts to counter Walter Benjamin’s placement of Werfel among the “besonderen reaktionären Autoren” of the times by referencing a series of lectures he gave in the 1930s. In one of these Werfel distinguishes between what he calls the “Motorenmensch” and the “geistigseelischen Menschen.” Among those he assigns to the latter category are not only artists but also those whose lives center around religion and science. Knocke’s further comments about Werfel’s concept of the “Orphic” poet, his admiration of Rilke, and Rilke’s relationship to Nietzsche are fascinating but seem to have wandered far from the volume’s central concerns. Andreas Meier’s article, subtitled “Zur Entdeckung des Armenienthemas in der deutschen Literatur” brings these concerns back into focus. Traveling with his wife Alma Mahler on a second trip through the Middle East in 1930, Werfel saw with his own eyes in Damascus the consequences of the genocidal actions in 1915 of the Turkish government against its Armenian population. During a visit to a large carpet-weaving mill, he observed a number of emaciated children working the machines who had been orphaned by these actions and thrown into a state of permanent poverty and homelessness. This experience [End Page 163] became the relentless driving force, Alma noted in her diary, in the genesis of Werfel’s novel (64). In his essay, Martin Tamcke explores and compares Werfel’s fictional approach to the subject matter with the never-realized plans of Armin T. Wegner for a more realistic portrayal. The subtitles of two of the final six essays focus on the fate of both author—“ein verfemter und...

Editor's Note

In this issue of the journal we inaugurate a new manuscript form we are calling “Design & Analysis.” Like a Forum, it is composed of several short essays providing different perspectives on a single topic. But in this case, the focus is on describing and analyzing a specific learning design. Chad Bauman, Associate Professor of Religion at Butler University and a “graduate” of a Wabash Center pre-tenure workshop, approached me with a short text describing an assignment he had developed for his introduction to religion class. The manuscript described in some detail a semester-long assignment requiring students to “invent” a new religious system and then seek to attract converts by explaining its characteristics. This is a creative assignment, to be sure, engaging his students in a playful game that requires them to think about and apply the various theories of religion they are learning during the semester. But the text was too short for the journal. How could this be developed into a full-fledged article? We discussed the manuscript for a while, pointing out places where he could provide a bit more analysis, give us more details about his teaching context and students, say more about the learning goals he had for the assignment, and so forth. I realized that what we had was a very clear and compelling description of a learning design and an analysis of its strengths and weaknesses, why it works, and how it might be improved. It was rather like an extended Teaching Tactic – referring to our very popular 400-word (one page) manuscripts describing a particular teaching strategy through rigorous adherence to four specific prompts: the context, the purpose, description of the strategy, and why it is effective. (For more on writing and submitting Teaching Tactics, see: http://www.wabashcenter.wabash.edu/journal/article2.aspx?id=14417.) But a Teaching Tactic, however extended, does not constitute a true article. What is the argument or claim being made: “You should try this too,” I suppose. We then decided that the way to turn this into a fully developed essay for the journal was to solicit short responses – make it into a Forum of sorts, in which the authors together would pull out pedagogical insights from this learning design. The teaching context The pedagogical purpose A description of the strategy (or assignment) Assessment of how it worked and Reflection on what he would do differently next time. Five respondents contribute 500 to 1000 words each, analyzing the effectiveness of the assignment, and articulating larger questions about teaching religion and theology that are made visible in the submission. We are very pleased with the results. And just a few weeks after receiving the initial inquiries from Chad Bauman we received a similarly focused short essay on a creative teaching moment that developed rather spontaneously in a seminary classroom discussing the book of Genesis. You can look for it fleshed out into a Design & Analysis forum in the next issue (April, 19:2). This issue also includes two Teaching Tactics: one describes a method for engaging students' religious questions in an Islamic Studies course, and the other uses visual arts in the biblical studies classroom. This issue also includes a Forum that arose from a paper that Russell McCutcheon delivered to the University of Chicago Divinity School's “Craft of Teaching” workshop for doctoral students: “Crafting the Introductory Course in Religious Studies.” The four articles in this issue cover a wide spectrum. Nathan Loewen uses Derrida's arguments about hospitality to analyze learning in a classroom that he has connected with other classrooms around the globe via Skype. Molly Bassett explains how she teaches – and assesses – critical thinking skills through innovative multiple-choice exams in large introductory courses. Natalie Wigg-Stevenson's essay describes Emmanuel College's Contextual Education seminars that help MDiv students develop integrative learning while simultaneously providing doctoral students with a much-needed teaching practicum. And finally, Willa M. Johnson uses the social theory she teaches to her students to help them (and us) understand how they respond to her as an African-American teaching about European anti-Semitism in a large southern university with a horrific racist history of its own. And, since January 2015, our book reviews are now available for free download on the Wabash Center's website: http://www.wabashcenter.wabash.edu/resources/article.aspx?id=29111.

European Muslim antisemitism: why young urban males say they don't like Jews

European Muslim antisemitism: why young urban males say they don't like Jews

Diasporas of the Mind: Jewish and Postcolonial Writing and the Nightmare of History by Bryan Cheyette (review)

Cheyette, Bryan. 2014. Diasporas of Mind: Jewish and Postcolonial Writing and Nightmare of History. New Haven: Yale University Press. $55.00 hc. 306 pp.There should be no need for this book an ideal world, writes Bryan Cheyette Diasporas of Mind: Jewish and Postcolonial Writing and Nightmare of History (xii). This is so not simply because an ideal world would preclude nightmare histories of empire and colonization, New World slavery, anti-Semitism, and around which this book circles, but also-in meaning Cheyette intends-because such a world would not admit disciplinary barriers that have oddly estranged these histories from one another, rendering them mutually incomparable subjects of study.However, within world as given this illuminating, elegantly written book makes a kind of ideal contribution: breaching academic barriers and offering a powerful example of an unruly, extra-disciplinary study that will inspire others. Yet it may behoove us to pause and ask, part with Cheyette, why Jewish/black/postcolonial boundary isn't more often transgressed contemporary critique. Why do contemporary academic disciplines tend to stress specific histories of victimhood and exile, as Cheyette writes (2014, 19), rather than treat, as Frantz Fanon put it when linking of Nazi genocide to those of European colonization, the common wretchedness of different men, common enslavement of extensive social groups (quoted Cheyette 2014, 59)? Though term diaspora, long associated with Jewish experience, has come to name many modern population dispersions-the postcolonial above all- connections between postcolonial and Jewish diasporas have diminished contemporary discourse. Scholars of postcolonial and of Jewish studies operate distinct circuits, seldom sharing critical texts, terms, and assumptions that mark a common project.While Cheyette cites postcolonial thinkers (Paul Gilroy and Caryl Phillips) who assert that public representations of enabled other minorities and histories of oppression to be articulated (2014, 36), he also argues that postcolonial studies has generally expunged interconnections with Jewish history and Holocaust under rubric of a dominant white 'Judeo-Christian' Western culture (24-25). In other words, postcolonial studies tends to position Jews within imperial cultural dominant, undifferentiated from other European and American whites, rather than within excluded and oppressed margins-a positioning that reflects postwar changes world status of Jews more than it does self-conception of many individual Jews. Because of such political distinctions, and perhaps also because of fatigue with Jewish historical claims attending diaspora, Cheyette writes that some self-designated 'new' disciplines-such as Diaspora Studies, Postcolonial Studies, and Ethnic and Racial Studies-defined themselves as superseding a Jewish history that is constructed as age-old or 'classic,' and thus as no longer quite relevant (38, invoking Hilary Mantel). Indeed, an intriguing thread this book is hypothesis that postcolonial studies has a repressed Jewish other-the rootless cosmopolitan vagrant, or luftmensh, a figure harder to champion than nationalist, anticolonial insurgent (22).Meanwhile, Cheyette notes among scholars of Jewish studies fear . . . that such metaphorical thinking-where similar and dissimilar become blurred-will dilute Jewish particularity, which is held to be of particular importance in name of protecting memory of victims (39). Cheyette calls this the anxiety of appropriation, especially relation to histories of racial victimization (xiv). A related, problematic tendency takes European anti-Semitism and especially as a world-historical model of racism, with all forms of historical oppression expected to fit into this framework (37). …

The New Anti-Semitism in Europe: The Islamic Dimension of, and Jewish Belonging in, the EU

This article examines the sense of Jewish vulnerability and exclusion in Europe that has resulted from manifestations, and Jewish perceptions, of the “new anti-Semitism,” and the role of Islamic communities in Europe in propagating this form of hatred of Jews. First emerging in 2000 with the outbreak of the second Palestinian Intifada, and tied in with the Middle East conflict, anger at Israel is directed at Diaspora Jewish communities. This “new anti-Semitism” targets the Jewish collective with the characteristics of anti-Semitism previously aimed at individual Jews. The article focuses on the wave of anti-Semitism that erupted as a result of the 2014 Israeli–Hamas War. Based on an analysis of European Jewish communities, it considers the active part played by European Muslim communities in perpetrating the new anti-Semitism. Using an analysis of survey data, emigration statistics and newspaper opinion articles by leading European Jewish intellectuals, the article considers how the new anti-Semitism is adversely affecting Jewish–Muslim relations and the concomitant sense of “belonging” of European Jewry. The article considers what is required to overcome the new anti-Semitism propagated by Muslim communities to restore a greater sense of Jewish belonging to, and identification with, Europe.

A Jewish American Monster: Stanley Kubrick, Anti-Semitism andLolita(1962)

This article presents a case study of the filmmaker Stanley Kubrick, considering how his films can be considered an emotional response to the Holocaust, the legacy of European anti-Semitism, and stereotypes of the Jewish American woman. It will argue that there are various clues in Kubrick's films which produce Jewish moments; that is, where, through a complementary directing and acting strategy, in particular one of misdirection, the viewer is given the possibility of “reading Jewish,” albeit not with certainty, for Jewishness is “textually submerged.” Its focus is Kubrick's 1962 adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov'sLolita(1955), in particular the character of Charlotte Haze, played by Shelley Winters, especially in light of Kubrick's choice of casting for the role, and Winters's subsequent performance of it. It will conclude that Holocaust and anti-Semitic stereotypes/reverse stereotypes haunt Kubrick's version ofLolitaas an emotional, yet sub-epidermis, presence.

Haj Amin al-Husseini: Herald of Religious Anti-Judaism in the Contemporary Islamic World

This article follows the development of religious anti-Judaism and anti-Zionism within Arab Muslim society in the twentieth century. Using the method of historical examination, it starts from the view that Muslim religious antagonism toward the Jewish political enterprise in Palestine did not exist prior to World War I. Only after Haj Amin al-Husseini became the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem was the early Islamic perception of Jews as religiously unfit for political rule introduced as a major issue in the Muslim-Jewish relations. This article expounds how the Mufti combined Islamic canonical anti-Judaism with Christian medieval folklore, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and European anti-Semitism. Thus was introduced the notion of the Jew despised and cursed by Allah, yet powerful enough to defy Allah’s will of making that curse evident through his political, social, and economic humiliation. The pamphlet Islam and Judaism published in 1943 for an unorthodox Bosnian Muslim community has been used to demonstrate the Mufti’s aberration from traditional Islamic views on Jews and the development of an eclectic anti-Judaism that today exists in many parts of the Muslim world.

My Promised Land

My Promised Land

Combating Antisemitism in Europe

(2014). Combating Antisemitism in Europe. Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs: Vol. 8, No. 1, pp. 81-94.

In Pursuit of Greater Hungary: Eugenic Ideas of Social and Biological Improvement, 1940–1941

In Pursuit of Greater Hungary: Eugenic Ideas of Social and Biological Improvement, 1940–1941

The danger of not facing history: Exploring the link between education about the past and present-day anti-Semitism and racism in Hungary

Until a few years ago the international media devoted scant attention to Hungary. Recently, however, multiple news reports and analyses have expressed concern about rising racism and extremism in this country, as well as a sense that the country’s democracy is unraveling. It has often been argued that economic hardship is an important contributor to the rise of extremism. However, increasing evidence supports the argument that economic factors are only part of the picture in Hungary. This essay explores the link between educational factors in this picture and the rise of Romaphobia, xenophobia, and anti-Semitism in Hungary. We argue that the failure to appropriately deal with the history of the World War II is reflected in the educational system, contributing to a climate of intolerance. The rise of extremism is always a consequence of a complex set of factors, and educational approaches should need to be included in analyses that attempt to explore the roots of rising extremism in Hungary.

Opowieść o nieuwikłanych ziemiach

Narrative of untangled lands Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands is an extremely ambitious project not only of historiography but also, we dare say, of historiosophy. Snyder seeks originality in shaping both the geography and the narrative of what he considers to be the central occurrence of contemporary history – mass killings of the Nazi regime and Stalinist Russia. He claims that in order to comprehend the logic of the killings we need to put emphasis on the (intentional and unintentional) collusion (interaction) of the two regimes. I believe that this interpretation is trivial if we take its weak interpretation, and wrong if we want to understand it in a strong way. Snyder is widely praised for adopting or giving justice to the Central European (namely Polish) perception of the WWII, but in doing it he gladly succumbs to its lacunas and deliberate misinterpretations. He not only downgrades the importance of the Shoah but also downplays the role of Eastern European anti-Semitism and its interaction with the Nazi “messianic” anti-judaismus as the key factor in successful execution of the Final Solution.

Attacking Israel with genocidal intentions

De-legitimization of the State of Israel is the current episode in a persistent genocidal project aimed at the Jews and, more profoundly, at the values inherent in Judaism and shared by civilized societies. Skirting the shame attached to anti-Semitism after the horrors of the Holocaust, contemporary advocates of the genocidal plot are given free rein to attack Jews by a combination of severe criticism of the State of Israel and well-meaning plans for its geopolitical future, i.e. the peace process. Ugly lies – the Jews stole the land from the Palestinians, Israel is an apartheid state – function like the age-old charges that justified persecution of the Jews as Christ killers. Beautiful lies – the two state solution that everyone knows – echo the proto-legalistic measures that gradually deprived European Jews of their rights, their strength, their resources and capacity to resist deportation and extermination. Americans, misinterpreting as a repetition of the 1930s the rise of violent anti-Semitism in Europe at the dawn of the twenty-first century, are unprepared to deal with a parallel rise in Muslim Brotherhood forces within the US. As brutal Islamic Jew hatred boils in an Arab-Muslim world revolting, reforming, and submitting to sharia law, the Obama administration conducts a policy of the outstretched hand and blindfolded eyes that leaves Iran free to develop the ultimate genocidal weapon. Israel is the bulwark, not only for Jews but for the free world. Clear thinking, uncompromising discourse, and resolute action – at the risk of being labelled extremist – can stop the genocidal project and, working backward, disarm the lies.

Unmasking the ‘muscle Jew’: the Jewish soldier in British war service, 1899–1945

ABSTRACT Constructions of Jews in twentieth-century Europe have been riddled throughout with inconsistencies and contradictions. However, some themes have been surprisingly persistent, none more so than constructions of Jews as weak, effeminate and cowardly. Schaffer looks at one significant set of responses to such characterizations, specifically at the rise of the ‘muscle Jew’ in Jewish and non-Jewish thinking. After the term was coined by Max Nordau at the turn of the twentieth century, the idea of the ‘muscle Jew’ came to represent a dominant current of Jewish identity reformulation. More recently, a series of scholars have come to understand the idea as a manifestation of Zionist ideology, a statement of a nationalist desire for Jewish reinvention in the face of endemic European antisemitism. By using the example of British Jewish service in the Boer War, the First World War and the Second World War, Schaffer argues rather that the idea of the ‘muscle Jew’ can be better understood as a reflection of Jewish desire for European integration, an attempt to present Jewish soldiers as equal to their non-Jewish equivalents. Moreover, he contends that the ‘muscle Jew’ needs to be understood as an idea rooted in the longue durée of Jewish history, one that represents only one strand of Jewish self-imagining.

The Dreyfus Affair in Retrospect: Review Essay

The Dreyfus Affair in Retrospect:Review Essay Jack Fischel (bio) Dreyfus: Politics, Emotion, and the Scandal of the Century, by Ruth Harris. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2010. 550 pp. $35.00. For the Soul of France: Culture Wars in the Age of Dreyfus, by Frederick Brown. New York: Knopf, 2010. 304 pp. $28.95. Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters, by Louis Begley. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. 249 pp. $16.00. Some hundred years after Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French army, was found guilty in 1894 by a prejudiced military tribunal of passing defense secrets to Germany, the injustice continues to resonate among the tragic events that shaped Jewish history in the twentieth century. It may be argued whether a direct link can be made between the Dreyfus Affair and the deportation by the Vichy government of more than 70,000 French Jews during the Holocaust, but it is unquestionable that the framing of Dreyfus in 1894 unleashed a virulent antisemitism in the most democratic country in Western Europe, a miscarriage of justice that continues to evoke strong emotions in contemporary France. The three books under review concerning the Dreyfus "affair" provide a comprehensive understanding of the political, cultural, and social context that permitted the injustice endured by Dreyfus to occur. In the process, the books reveal a great deal about how antisemitism in France helped shape the course of modern Jewish history in the twentieth century. Indeed, Theodore Herzl, who reported on the trial for his Viennese newspaper, wrote, "If France, the home of the Revolution, was susceptible to the basest anti-Semitism, was that not proof of the need for a Jewish homeland?." The Dreyfus affair most definitely [End Page 119] had much to do with mobilizing the nascent Zionist undertaking into the political movement that subsequently contributed almost fifty years later to the creation of the state of Israel. Too often when we think of the Dreyfus Affair, we tend to think of it along the lines of simply a struggle between antisemitic anti-Dreyfusards, who were determined to railroad Dreyfus to a lifetime of imprisonment on Devil's Island despite evidence that proved his innocence, versus the Dreyfusards, who recognized that he was framed by forces that not only hated Jews but were opposed to the idea of democratic constitutional government as epitomized by the Third French Republic. In her indispensable history of the Dreyfus Affair, Ruth Harris, author of Lourdes: Body and Spirit in the Secular Age, and a fellow and tutor at Oxford University, in her examination of the trial and the ensuing riots against Jews in France and its colonies, does not underestimate the antisemitic factor in the "affair" but also concludes that the division over Dreyfus's guilt or innocence was far more complex. Harris describes how the trial and its aftermath divided families and friendships, if not the nation itself, including a number of anti-semites, such as Georges Picquart, who placed the rule of law above his predilection to dislike Jews. But the likes of Picquart were few inasmuch as most antisemites were ready to overlook the evidence of Dreyfus's innocence because of their visceral hatred of Jews. Other factors that contributed to the division over the Dreyfus Affair included the reluctance of the military to not dishonor its leadership by admitting its criminality in forging evidence against Dreyfus, the clash between the demands of justice versus national security concerns, a theme which is also addressed in Louis Begley's book, and the oppositional role of the French Catholic Church, which associated France's Jews with the secular-minded Republic and its commitment to the separation of church and state. This, however, is not to underestimate the role of antisemitism in France as an important factor in the Dreyfus Affair. Harris notes that the universalism of the Third French Republic was countered by xenophobic nationalists (not unlike its Völkisch counterparts in Germany) who, like Maurice Barres, saw "France's regions as different 'mothers,' whose variety underpinned the country's divergent vitality. Jews and Protestants, on the other hand, were incarnations of cosmopolitanism, and therefore rootless parasites. They loved 'universalism,' Barres believed, because it masked...

Setting the Record Straight: The Arabs, Zionism, and the Holocaust

Setting the Record Straight: The Arabs, Zionism, and the Holocaust

The Jewish World of Sigmund Freud: Essays on Cultural Roots and the Problem of Religious Identity (review)

Reviewed by: The Jewish World of Sigmund Freud: Essays on Cultural Roots and the Problem of Religious Identity Yves Laberge The Jewish World of Sigmund Freud: Essays on Cultural Roots and the Problem of Religious Identity. Edited by Arnold D. Richards. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Company, 2010. Pp. viii +196. Paper $45.00. ISBN 978-0786444243. Scholarship on Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) is rich and abundant, but countless dimensions still have to be studied. This impressive collection presents fourteen essays on Jewish identity, based on Freud’s writings on art, culture, history, myth, religions, and the unconscious. Most chapters quote from Freud’s essays, articles, and correspondence, with a clear preference for what would become his last book, Moses and Monotheism (1939), which is cited in almost every chapter. Like many studies on Freud’s works and ideas, this overlooked book is fascinating because it explores various facets within and outside psychoanalysis. Of course, this book is not the first to focus on Freud’s religious and cultural roots: the salient writings of Martin Bergmann on Freud’s Jewish identity are also mentioned (Salberg 6). Topics are varied: the influence of classical Greek culture on the young Freud, modernism, antisemitism in Austria, the early critique of psychoanalysis in Austrian media, Freud’s introduction to “The Moses of Michelangelo,” the links between Freud and Lévinas, Freud’s exile in London (from June 5, 1938), and finally suicidality in Freud’s life and work (171). In a chapter dedicated to “Freud’s Theory of Jewishness,” Eliza Slavet argues that the main question in Moses and Monotheism was “how and why individuals have been regularly convinced that they are Jewish and that they should practice Jewish traditions even as the ‘Jewish tradition’ does not itself satisfy any ‘material needs’” (98). The contributors’ approaches are often interdisciplinary, because Freud’s thoughts were in essence linked with an impressive number of domains. For example, Freud was aware that his own descriptive work on the psychoanalytic process during the cure was somewhat like writing a literary work in terms of narratives: according to Jill Salberg, “As early as the Studies in Hysteria, Freud writes that many of his case histories read like short stories, suggesting his awareness of the literary, associative, narrative quality of how people experience and speak about their lives” (5). Other chapters refer to Freud’s works on art, history, religion, and of course psychoanalysis. In terms of group identity, many contributors seem to agree that “Freud was a typical Viennese Jew” (e.g. 22, 35). However, it is obvious that the Viennese social context with its Christian dominant culture and Jewish minority culture influenced Freud’s worldview, subjectivity, theories, and writings (Salberg 5). By developing theories through cases and examples inspired by his everyday life and his patients’ experiences, he testified as well about his society and his own intimate, inner life. In other words, “Freud offered his memories and dreams as data for his own theories” (Salberg 5). [End Page 201] The Jewish World of Sigmund Freud is an important book because it links science to culture and religion, even though Freud was not a “believer.” For readers unfamiliar with Freud’s method or with psychoanalysis in general these essays are a treat, and can be read without any prerequisites since there is very little discussion related to the unconscious and Freudian theory. On the other hand, students will find here some interesting discussions about German and Austrian culture and collective identity in the first half of the twentieth century. Even for those who are resistant to psychoanalysis, these essays will be instructive because they aptly illustrate the importance and the solid ground of Freud’s thinking outside the domain for which he was famous. Yves Laberge Université de Haute-Bretagne Copyright © 2012 German Studies Association

The Holocaust for Beginners: Yankev Glatshteyn's <i>Emil un Karl</i> and Other Wartime Works for Young American Yiddish Readers

Once a topic thought inappropriate for children, the Holocaust is now presented to them in a proliferation of undertakings: state-mandated educational programs beginning in elementary school, special exhibitions for young visitors in Holocaust museums, and the burgeoning genre of children's Holocaust literature, which now boasts hundreds of titles. (1) Long before Holocaust education was widely endorsed for young people, childhood had begun to figure strategically in the form of young protagonists in major works of Holocaust literature such as H. G. Adler's novel Panorama (1968), Gunter Grass's Die Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum) (1959), and Jerzy Kosinski's The Painted Bird (1965). (2) More recently, literary works engage childhood through provocative use of the idioms of storytelling for the young; for example, David Grossman's 1986 novel Ayen erekh: ahavah (See Under. Love) evokes children's literature, while Art Spiegelman's Maus: A Survivor's Tale (1986) employs the juvenile genre of comics. The disparity between childhood, conceived as the age of innocence, and genocide, understood as the fundamental collapse of civil society, is a productive opening for the creation of avant-garde literary works on the Holocaust, including the occasional work of fiction for young readers, such as Markus Zusak's The Book Thief (2005). A remarkable precedent for this confluence of the Holocaust, the sensibility of the child, and the literary avant-garde can be found in works written in the early 1940s by one of the leading modernist American Yiddish poets of the twentieth century, Yankev Glatshteyn (1896-1971), especially his novel Emil un Karl (Emil and Karl) (1940). Written for young adult readers, Emil un Karl was published in New York only months after World War II had begun and more than a year before the United States entered the conflict. A pioneering work of Holocaust fiction, the novel comes from the pen of a major Jewish writer who achieved considerable acclaim for his postwar poetry on the Holocaust. And yet, the novel has merited only a passing reference in most Glatshteyn scholarship. (3) Emil un Karl and two shorter pieces on the Holocaust that Glatshteyn wrote for young readers during the war years are noteworthy on several counts. As early examples of Holocaust literature, these works engage an event that not only had yet to be given this name (or its Yiddish equivalent, khurbn) but also was still unfolding as these works were written and published, in contrast with postwar writing on the Holocaust. This distinction is especially telling with regard to the preponderance of children's literature on the subject. This literature has been written well after a master narrative of the Holocaust as a discrete historical event was established--a narrative distinct from the history of European anti-Semitism, the Nazi era, or World War II. Indeed, in America the Holocaust was not secured as a prominent fixture of the national moral landscape until several decades after the war. Moreover, as the Nazi-led mass murder of Europe's Jews, Roma, and other civilian populations took place far from the United States and bore no direct connection to the lives of most of its citizens, the Holocaust has been valued here as a paradigmatic event as well as a subject of importance in its own right. In this capacity, the Holocaust informs American public discussions of other genocides, both earlier (for example, of American Indians) and later (such as the ethnic cleansing operations in the Balkans), as well as an array of morally challenging issues, including the abortion rights debate, the AIDS pandemic, the nuclear arms race, animal rights, and world hunger. Glatshteyn's writings on the Holocaust for young readers are revealing as among the first attempts to engage Americans in this remote event of unrivaled enormity. The works are also noteworthy as some of Glatshteyn's earliest efforts to address the Holocaust, which loomed large in his postwar career as a poet, essayist, and editor. …

Pál Prónay: Paramilitary Violence and Anti-Semitism in Hungary, 1919–1921

This essay examines the life, political career and the moral and intellectual universe of Deputy Colonel Baron Pál Prónay, the most important paramilitary leader in Hungary after the First World War. In historical memory and public imagination, Prónay’s name is associated with militia, mob and state violence often described by contemporary liberals and socialists as the “White Terror,” namely the harassment, arbitrary arrest, torture and execution of both political opponents and apolitical Jews after the collapse of the Soviet Republic in early August of 1919. The essay is based on hitherto unused or underused primary sources, such as Prónay’s unpublished two-volume diary; trial documents; police reports; memorandums; internal communications between government agencies, civilian and military authorities; and private letters culled from fi ve major archives, as well as contemporary newspapers, political pamphlets and novels and short stories written by well and lesser known writers. It seeks to unearth the details of Prónay’s life and explain his behavior, in particular his cruelty and sadism, in the context of role expectations, behavior patterns and political and cultural values associated with the nobility, the minor aristocracy, the offi cer corps and gentlemen in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy in the early twentieth century. The essay looks at the techniques that Prónay used in his diary to project a favorable image while simultaneously destroying the reputation of his opponents as the fi rst step towards political rehabilitation. Why he failed to achieve this goal, the mistakes that he made both as a writer and politician during his belated and desperate attempt in the early 1940s to regain favor with the political elite and the memory of the “White Terror” and Prónay’s role in the Hungarian civil war are the subjects of this essay.