Diasporic Jews Research Articles

Rabbi Nachman’s Sonic Schemes

This article discusses Tzvi Avni’s Second Piano Sonata, Epitaph, a sonic commentary on one of the inner tales in Rabbi Nachman’s “The Seven Beggars”. Written between 1974 and 1979, Epitaph not only marks the composer’s act of translation (from words into music and from a textual tale into a wordless and semantically unmarked piano sonata) but also his very turn to ethnographic sources that defied their negative function in a national territorial culture that vilified otherness while separating art from ethnography. Avni’s turn to Rabbi Nachman was part of a bigger shift that saw composers’ dialectical returns to Jewish histories and cultures that were previously repressed from a national culture which dehistoricized the Diaspora to the point of rendering the times and cultures of diasporic Jews a single temporality—ahistorical, contextless, and outside the teleological time of Zionism. With the (re)introduction of diasporic temporalities, non-redemptive poetics became an affordance in the music of Avni or Andre Hajdu (who is also discussed here) while steadily muting the territorial tropes that constituted Hebrew culture.

Diasporas as Audiences of Securitization

Abstract This study conceptually develops and analytically examines the role and function of diasporas as audiences in the securitization process by examining the American Jewish Diaspora in Israel's securitization of Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS). It argues that Israel's use of antisemitism as a metanarrative for the securitization of the BDS movement incorporates diasporic Jews as internal audiences in the securitization process. Audiences, however, are not monolithic. While homeland Jews, including both elites and the public, tend to support Israel's securitization process, American Jews are split; the elite support the process but public opinion is far less sympathetic to Israeli constructions of BDS as a threat. The disparity between audiences’ reactions weakens the support for Israel's counter-BDS policies and undermines its securitization process.

Armed Jews in the Americas ed. by Raanan Rein and David M.K. Sheinin

Reviewed by: Armed Jews in the Americas ed. by Raanan Rein and David M.K. Sheinin Aaron Welt (bio) Armed Jews in the Americas. Edited by Raanan Rein and David M.K. Sheinin. Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2021. xii + 251 pp. America is a society awash in guns. As of 2018, there were 1.2 firearms for every citizen in the United States. With the Constitution's Second Amendment granting a fundamental right, if a highly contested one, to "bear Arms," America has long fostered a gun culture. Though no nation comes close to the US in gun ownership (including ones currently in military conflict or recovering from war), Uruguay and Canada are also [End Page 320] in the top ten list of most armed nations. Other Western Hemisphere countries have low levels of gun ownership, but suffer from high rates of gun violence, such as El Salvador, Venezuela, Guatemala, and Colombia. Countless people in the Americas carry arms, and many wonder what effect the preponderance of guns has had on the culture and politics of those nations. Armed Jews in the Americas, an edited collection of essays from scholars of diasporic Jewish history, attempts to place Jews in this panorama of weapons and violence. A premise of this book is that the relationship of Jews in the Americas to either being armed or (for reasons not fully explored) deciding not to be armed has had a salient impact on the Jewish integration into various societies of the Western Hemisphere. The volume showcases an eclectic and compelling mosaic of armed Jews and the political and cultural debates they elicited. By the end of Armed Jews in the Americas, the reader has gained a rich exploration of Jewish soldiers, police officers, revolutionaries, gangsters, militia members, and weapon-makers, and what their stories tell us about the time and place in which they lived. Several chapters shed new light on Canadian and Argentinian Jewish history and how the perceptions of Jews with guns in those countries served as a reliable indicator of the health of liberal multiculturalism in North and South America. In the opening pages of Armed Jews in the Americas, the editors claim that "this book demystifies the links between Jews [in the Western Hemisphere] and their weapons" (1). This goal is not fully achieved, which is understandable. The chapters of this book do not collectively illustrate that popular ideas of Jews and deadly weapons animated considerable anxieties in the Americas, certainly not when compared to imaginations of, say, Jews and finance, the mass media and popular entertainment, leftist politics (a topic that is intelligently examined in this book), immigration policy, or academia. The vignettes of individual Jews or small groups of Jews with weapons in the myriad settings that Armed Jews in the Americas covers only serve to further mystify the interlinkages between Jews and guns, particularly when considering American Jews. It remains unexplained why, despite the page-turning stories that make up this collection, the vast majority of American Jews, the largest Jewish population in the Western Hemisphere, have historically abstained from gun culture. This underlying reality tells us why armed Jews require demystification in the first place. Individually, each chapter succeeds in bringing to life the experience of an armed Jewish person in the Americas and the political, cultural, and social issues their stories reveal. David Sheinin provides an insightful exploration of armed Canadian Jews by way of the political and law [End Page 321] enforcement career of Phil Givens, Toronto's mayor and top cop over the 1960s and 1970s. The product of Toronto's Jewish immigrant milieu, Givens earned a reputation as a reliable liberal during his time as mayor. But a decade later, with Toronto undergoing its version of late twentieth century urban crisis, Police Commissioner Givens emerged as a prominent face for "tough-on-crime" politics in Canada, a politics that, Sheinin skillfully shows, came up wanting in meeting the challenge of crime in a modern city facing decreasing resources and increasing racial diversity. Another triumph of Armed Jews in the Americas is its findings on the diasporic Jews who enlisted with armed political movements abroad. The several dozen Canadian Jews who joined the...

Conceiving Agency: Reproductive Authority among Haredi Women by Michal S. Raucher

Reviewed by: Conceiving Agency: Reproductive Authority among Haredi Women by Michal S. Raucher Rolin G. Mainuddin Raucher, Michal S. Conceiving Agency: Reproductive Authority among Haredi Women. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020. Michal Raucher is a religiously observant (dati) Jew. Given the Haredi norm of modesty, however, as a non-Haredi female the author was not able to interview any Haredi males—husbands or rabbis. In view of her feminist perspective, it is noteworthy that she had a liberal upbringing. The author challenged what David Ellenson called "halakhic formalism" (18), the prevailing practice of textual analysis of the scripture for discovering Jewish ethical principles. [End Page 247] The main argument of the book is that the "embodied experience" (110) of pregnancy, which connects women to God in being conferred by God, facilitates Haredi women making reproductive decisions "without" (3) rabbinic authorities, husbands, and medical professionals. Thus, the Haredi women—who are not countercultural and do not refer to themselves as autonomous or as having agency—challenged the Haredi patriarchal hierarchical structure. Consequently, the author holds that the normative gap between textual morality and lived experience must be bridged for Jewish ethics. Along with an introduction and conclusion, the work is organized into five chapters: medicine, books, pregnancy, theology, and abortion. In applying an ethnographic methodology with snowball sampling, Raucher interviewed twenty-three Haredi women between 2009 and 2011. Also, she interviewed about twenty-five medical professionals, including thirteen doctors and nurses along with eleven doulas. Furthermore, she was a participant-observer with EFRAT, the largest anti-abortion organization in Israel. (EFRAT activism through financial help is examined in chapter 5.) Rabbis play a gatekeeper role for the Haredi laity. This includes ritual contamination prevention of the kinship line when undergoing fertility treatments. Given the financial risk of losing their religious clientele, including a hospitalization grant for each hospital birth from the National Insurance Institute of Israel, doctors accept involvement of rabbis, nurses, and midwives in birth-control measures, menstruation, and prenatal testing (e.g., fetal ultrasound). Given the gendered spheres of Haredi life, men stay busy with religious books and learning while women take care of the home and children. Thus, both books and babies provide status in the Haredi community. Raucher cautions that in spite of displaying pregnancy books at home the Haredi women disavow using such books for their reproductive knowledge. Nevertheless, the author notes two themes through an examination of two books. B'Shaah Tovah: Madrich Refui Hilchati Lherayon v'Leida (In a good time: A medical and halachic guide for pregnancy and labor), coauthored by a nurse–midwife and her rabbi husband, integrates medical and religious knowledge during pregnancy. In addition to ascribing an integral role of God for fetal development, the religious teaching includes three commandments for women during labor: niddah, challah, and Sabbath lights. In contrast, many of the contributors in Hachana Ruchanit L'Leida (Spiritual preparation for labor) are emphatic about women having a say in their medical care during pregnancy. [End Page 248] Rituals in dress, eating, language, sexuality, and behavior distinguish the Haredi women from the out-group in cultivating a spiritual relationship with God. The tradition of gender-segregated upbringing and arranged marriage engenders silence about pregnancy even among family and friends. Also, there is a lack of communication regarding pregnancy among young couples. Furthermore, a Haredi wife will not approach her rabbi without the intermediary of her husband. All these societal practices leave Haredi women room to make reproductive decisions for themselves. Raucher finds that it is during the third pregnancy that Haredi women assert their autonomy in challenging advice from doctors and rabbis. Moving from distinguishing rituals to the unique (female only) embodied experience of pregnancy endows the Haredi women with divine authority, argues the author. This is because the act of creation takes place through the woman's body—a kli, a vessel for God in generating a new life. Metaphorically, labor is messianic redemption. In a rejoinder to rabbinic reproductive theology stressing fetus as God's creation, Raucher is emphatic that her Haredi women interviewees held their kli role as both "fundamental and significant" (122). Established as a "homeland" for diasporic Jews, an irony of Israel is...

The Distribution of Heirless Books to Morocco by the Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, Inc.

Abstract This article looks into the one-of-a-kind encounter between the inter-diasporic Jewish corporation Jewish Cultural Reconstruction (JCR), and the Alliance Israélite Universelle’s (AIU) Hebrew teachers’ seminary in Casablanca, an encounter that studies into JCR’s history have all but failed to cite. Nevertheless, Morocco’s case is of considerable significance, Morocco being the only Islamic country where the Jewish community managed to obtain books from JCR. This unique case warrants a review into what facilitated the encounter between the seminary and the corporation, and an examination in light of broader historic processes that took place as part of the Moroccan Jewish relations with other diasporic Jews.

Reading Esther as Heroine: Persian Banquets, Ethnic Cleansing, and Identity Crisis

Various historical witnesses attest to the lavishness of Persian banquets. An overwhelmingly disproportionate number of these banquet scenes glut the Esther narrative to obviate against this motif's presence as simply literary garnishment or mere critique of Persian decadence. Rather, these banquet scenes coincide with typical motifs of hero myths to serve a literary function that advances the narrative's plot. The banquet motif underscores the typical hero motifs present to inform a reading of the Esther narrative as hero myth and its portrayal of Esther as heroine though not ostensibly so. Narrative analysis will also detail how this unlikely heroine saves the Jews from a villainous plot of ethnic genocide and subsequently redeems the tarnished reputation of the House of Saul. Final thoughts address the potential cultural function of Esther as heroine who models for diasporic Jews a guide to success with identity crisis.

The Future of “Diaspora” in Diaspora Studies: Has the Word Run Its Course?

38 A & Q Rhodes, John David, and Elena Gorfinkel, eds. 2011. Taking Place: Location and the Moving Image. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Wang, Yiman. 2008. “The ‘Transnational’ as Methodology: Transnationalizing Chinese Film Studies through the Example of The Love Parade and Its Chinese Remakes.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 2, no. 1: 9–21. Yomota, Inuhiko. 2003. “Ajia eiga no taishuteki sozoryoku” [The popular imagination of Asian cinema]. In Ajia eiga no taishuteki sozoryoku [Popular cinema in Asia], 9–30. Tokyo: Seidosha. Zhang, Yingjin. 2007a. “Chinese Cinema and Transnational Film Studies .” In World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives, edited by Natasa Durovikova and Kathleen E. Newman, 124–36. New York: Routledge. ———. 2007b. “Comparative Film Studies, Transnational Film Studies: Inter-disciplinarity, Crossmediality, and Transcultural Visuality in Chinese Cinema.” Journal of Chinese Cinema 1, no. 1: 27–40. The Future of “Diaspora” in Diaspora Studies: Has the Word Run Its Course? Evelyn Hu-DeHart As someone who has been linking the term diaspora to Chinese since the 1970s, when I gingerly began my investigation into the history of Chinese migration to Latin America and the Caribbean—a large region of the Americas not commanding much attention at the time in the consideration of the wide and massive dispersal of Chinese from their homeland to practically all corners of the world, from the Ming Dynasty through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first—I feel it necessary now to reassess the continuing deployment of this term within diaspora studies in general and Asian and Asian American studies in particular. Thirty some years ago, the term diaspora was not yet familiar to most people in and out of academia and was certainly not applied to the Chinese or any other wandering people aside from Jews, for whom the term seems to have been invented. Although the word was Greek, the Jews claimed it after expulsion from their homeland and subsequent worldwide dissemination over the course of two millennia, beginning in the ancient world. These dispersed Jewish communities-in-exile maintain a collective memory of, and fierce loyalty to, their original homeland, pledging as their primary mission as a people and a culture to regain and return to that homeland and to restore it to its former security and A & Q 39 prosperity. To live in perpetual exile and yearn for return outside the homeland is the essence of the Jewish diaspora. Moreover, that desire to return home from the diaspora has been fueled by a troubled relationship with host societies that cannot or will not accept them as social equals. According to some diasporic Jews, anti-Semitism has not abated but only intensified with time.1 Most Jews understand diaspora because it has been embedded into their collective identity.2 Many others, if they hear the word diaspora, would likely connect it to Jewish history. A few might also have heard talk about the African diaspora of the modern world. Accompanying the rise of capitalism and the colonial reach of Europe to Asia, Africa, and Latin America for markets and raw materials, the African slave trade saw for over four centuries the forced removal and sale of millions of men and women who were dispersed throughout the Americas as chattel slaves. Unified initially by the dehumanizing regime of New World (plantation) slavery and later reinforced by the demeaning regime of systematic and institutionalized racism, descendants of slaves identify with each other through race, as “black people,” and have created multiple expressions of blackness through culture—music, dance, art, literature—throughout the diaspora. In contrast to the Jewish diaspora, and some notable exceptions notwithstanding ,3 most descendants of slaves have not been driven by a returnto -Africa movement but invested more in dismantling antiblack racism and fighting for citizenship, civil, and equal rights in the postemancipation , postcolonial diaspora. Although not as deeply entrenched as diaspora is among Jews, for African Americans and descendants of slaves across the Americas, the term may have resonance. At the time that Africans were being forcibly removed from their ethnic homelands, or deceptively induced to leave home, Chinese people had already been actively trading around the South China seas and across the Indian Ocean to the Arabian Peninsula and the east coast of Africa...

Race, Rights and Rebellion in the Custodial State: A Post-Los Angeles Marxian Reconstruction

America’s new race/class contradictions erupted in the 1992 Los Angeles rebellion, providing an impetus to think through the dialectic of political and human emancipation the young Marx articulated in Zur Judenfrage. For Stanford Lyman, the theoretical response to the assimilation of diasporic Jews into modernizing 19th-century Europe was appropriated by American sociologists responding to 20th-century America’s ‘ethnoracial mix’. At the text’s four discursive sites, history contextualizes theory and theory contextualizes history, beginning with a recollection of the authoritarian custodial state and Third World America that came screaming to life with the LA rebellion. At the second site, Black Studies, post-LA, found itself on the discursive frontline of this neoliberal turn. The third site is the intersection of religion, race and rights, where we reconstruct Marx’s theses on the Jewish Question, revealing the undisclosed biopolitics of a racial formation theory embedded in his writings of the 1850s and 1860s on the US Civil War and Capital. The fourth site of this post-LA reconstruction is a discussion of the state and the limits of black political empowerment.

Jews in the diaspora with Sepharad in the mirror: ruptures, relations, and forms of identity: a theme examined through three cases

Recent historiography has led to a reevaluation of the diachronic paradigm that undergirds the classic story of Iberian Jews and conversos. In line with that reevaluation, this article investigates what motivated diasporic Sephardim, especially ones with cultural and other ties to Portugal, to conserve elements of an identity that pointed to their Iberian past, such as the Portuguese and Castilian languages, as well as what one might call “Ibero-conscious” forms of self-identification. What benefits, beyond expressing a nostalgic and otherwise emotive sensibility, could accrue from the retention of these forms? How did they and similar forms facilitate the building internal, group cohesion on the basis of shared connections to a common past? How did the forms articulate the relations of New Christians to the Iberian countries and to the Iberian Empires? To reflect on these and related questions, which focus on the continuity of ties between diasporic Jews and the Iberian Peninsula, we analyze here various temporally and geographically distinct cases: The case of the converso financier and politican Joseph Nasi (formerly Joao Micas); the case of the Sephardi convert and anti-Jewish polemicist, Joao Baptista D’Este (formerly Abraham Bendanan Serfatim); and the case of Portuguese Jews in Sale, Morocco, whose wide-ranging relations with the Portuguese Jews Community of Amsterdam and with Christian Dutchmen made for complex phenomena of identity-construction.

Regional history, Jewish memory: the purim of Narbonne

Records of traumatic events in the Jewish past provide the historian a rare glimpse at how community leaders interpreted and understood the historical conditions of diasporic Jews as well as their own immediate communities. In 1236 a violent altercation between a Jewish traveler and a local Christian precipitated a mass uprising against the city's Jewish community. Rapid intervention by the local viscount, Don Aymeric, restored peace to the Jewish quarter, averting loss of life or valuable property. Modern interpretations of this text have varied significantly since its discovery in the late nineteenth century. Scholars have struggled to reconcile it with their expectations of the shape and meaning of the Jewish past. Because the thirteenth-century author of this brief narrative suggested a typological link between the events in Narbonne and the story of Purim, the dominant modern interpretation has viewed this account as evidence of a very early Second Purim commemoration. However there is little evidence to support this claim. This article reads the narrative of the “Purim of Narbonne” against other medieval Jewish narratives about the history and legacy of Jewish Narbonne*.

An Imaginary Ararat: Jewish Bodies and Jewish Homelands in Ben Katchor's The Jew of New York

In Adventures in Yiddishland: Postvernacular Language & Culture, the historian Jeffrey Shandler analyzes the circulation of Yiddish as cultural currency in an era when the Jewish has become largely postvernacular. As Shandler sees it, despite the plummeting numbers of native Yiddish speakers subsequent to the Holocaust and the decimation of European Jewry to which gave rise, the language of the shtetl has maintained a vibrant existence and profound importance in Jewish identity and self-fashioning. The decline of Yiddish as a medium for daily communication correlates with the increase in the language's importance on secondary, or meta-level of signification--the invested in the language apart from the semantic of any given utterance in it (4). This reliance on the symbolic value of the language as an organizing principle of Jewish life long after its vernacular heyday emerges in a number of ways, according to Shandler. Most notably, proves a structure around which diasporic Jews can cohere in the post-war world. Those who wish to maintain ties to Yiddish in spite of the destruction of its Eastern and Central European speakers do so by creating an imaginary linguistic community, a space Shandler elegantly calls Yiddishland. A play on Benedict Anderson's Shandler's Yiddishland is a space more fictive than real, yet profoundly meaningful for those who opt to live within its smudged geographical and emotional boundaries. For contemporary Jewish American authors in search of a new topography for Jewish identity, the concept of such a space is a particularly resonant, if conflicted, one. In fact, in order to explain his idea of a postvernacular Yiddishland, Shandler points to a 1997 piece by Jewish American novelist Michael Chabon entitled Guidebook to a Land of Ghosts, published first in the Library of Congress magazine Civilization and later in the more popular publication Harper's. (1) In this article, Chabon composes a mournful paean to the nostalgic Say in Yiddish, a post-World War II dictionary of common Yiddish phrases that imagines an impossible land where the mameloshen or mother tongue is spoken on every street corner and in every citizen's home. According to Shandler, not only does Chabon's essay fail to take into account the continuing power of Yiddish as a spoken language in ultra-Orthodox and other extant Jewish communities, also refuses to see the true importance of this guidebook to a land of ghosts--namely that allows Jews to conjure a homeland for Yiddish, with its implications of indigenousness, territoriality, and even sovereignty (Shandler 33). Throughout history Yiddish has been a language associated with marginality and the transient condition of the archetypical Wandering Jew, yet in its postvernacular mode Yiddish finally has found a resting place in the imagination of a host of Jews bent on resuscitating the language and world of their antecedents. (2) What Shandler does not specifically state, but what is particularly important about the Yiddishland he outlines in his critique of Chabon, is that in contrast to Israel--the other imagined homeland for the Jews--Yiddishland provides a space for secular diasporic Jews uncomfortable with grounding their Jewish identity on the land mapped out by the Zionist project in the Middle East. Ironically, although Shandler criticizes Chabon's piece in order to undergird his assertions about the importance of Yiddish in the post-war Jewish imaginary, he does not fully explore the illustrations that accompany Chabon's ode to a dead language. In both Civilization and Harper's, Chabon's article is accompanied by the intricate drawings of Ben Katchor. In contrast to Chabon's text, Katchor's images of an ersatz home for Yiddish and Yiddish speakers--complete with Hebrew-lettered factories and cinemas, telephone booths and ferry boats--participate in the creation of a Yiddishland much like the one Shandler invokes in his exploration of Say in Yiddish. …

In Search of a Critical Voice in the Jewish Diaspora: Homelessness and Home in Edward Said and Shalom Noah Barzofsky'sNetivot Shalom

This article explores the perception of Israel and Zionism in the diasporic imagination. I argue that the dominance of Israel as a tool of diasporicJewish identity has impeded DiasporaJews from developing their own identity alongside, yet distinct from, Israel. I use the work of Edward Said and the late Slonimer Rebbe, Shalom Noah Barzofsky, as lenses through which to view the notion of as a positive and constructive social and ideological posture. I challenge the progressive Jewish attempt to erase exile as a category and replace it with the more tepid Diaspora. I argue that diasporic Jews are indeed living in exile-not as refugees but as expatriates-and this should be a positive part of their identity, used to create new avenues of Jewish expression in the contemporary world.

Mythical Moments in National and Other Family Histories

The flight of two sisters from Minsk before the invading German army has become a story of great importance to a Russian Jewish family in Berlin. I interpret it as a family myth, and relate its telling down three generations to the ways in which members of the family talk about themselves and their lives. I also relate their self-representations to a number of crucial historical contexts: the breakdown of the Soviet Union, German reparation for and commemoration of the Holocaust, the revitalizing of Jewish Community in Berlin, and the centrality of Israel for Jewish self-definition. To do this I employ an idea of before/after caesuras, employed in acts of commemoration, in the writing of history and in the telling of stories. Interviews with members of the family show how they hold in reserve from all these contexts their own Jewish self-definition. At the same time it is evident that their self-definition is actively dependent on these contexts of policy change, historiography, public commemoration and a television documentary of the Minsk ghetto. My argument is that this reserve from the contexts on which it depends has the potential to define a subject for a history of Diasporic Jews not yet written or commemorated.

In Search of a Mother Tongue: Locating Home in Diaspora

Place for me takes the form of memory and language. --Ilan Stavan, Other Voice The locus of truth is always extraterritorial; its diffusion is made clandestine by the barbed wire and watch-towers of national dogma. --George Steiner, Our Homeland, The Text Colonialism and the Holocaust have jointly conspired to create a legacy of global displacement, in which people are robbed of their homeland and the language in which their culture has been formed. Disparate diasporic communities are now faced with the shared struggle of articulating a cultural identity in which history and home reside in language, rather than nation, and in which language itself must be recreated so as to bespeak the specificity of cultural experience. The situations of Jewish and Caribbean writers seem a particularly useful source of comparison, in that the Jewish-originated term diaspora becomes a significant one for understanding Caribbean experiences, and the Caribbean idea of language as home becomes reciprocally edifying with respect to Jewish American writing. Both Caribbean and Jewish American communities strive to mold English into a language which can become a home within diaspora. For Caribbean women writers the task is doubly challenging: not only must they struggle to subvert aspects of the language which are culturally alien, but they are further left to grapple with the patriarchal assumptions in which English is rooted. Jewish American writers confront a different form of double alienation in the form of a double diaspora: first from the symbolic and biblical homeland of Palestine, and then again after the Holocaust and the death of both German-Jewish and Yiddish culture. The term diaspora was originally coined to describe the circumstances of the Jews who lived outside of Palestine after the Babylonian exile. Since then, its application has been enlarged to include any group who has been scattered far from its homeland, particularly with reference to the descendants of Africans who torn from their native continent and brought to the New World as slaves beginning in the seventeenth century. The linguistic yoking of diasporic Jews and Blacks is indicative of the common problems they face in trying to create a sense of identity and cultural continuity in diaspora. Writers from both groups themselves openly acknowledge the similarity of the problem that they face. Among Caribbean women writers, Michelle Cliff seems to feel particularly keenly the parallels between the plight of the Jews and that of Caribbean peoples. In The Land of Look Behind, she begins the poem A Visit to the Secret Annex with a comparison between the horrors of the Holocaust and those inflicted by colonialism in the Caribbean, which results in a particular sense of resonance between herself and Anne Frank: I was born later / not into this world. / The trees not the same / The horrors not exact--but similar (104). In Abeng as well, the narrator approaches her own Caribbean history through learning about the Holocaust. For her, Anne Frank becomes a symbol of both a voice which survived, in writing, the cultural annihilation of the Holocaust, and also of a female voice strong enough to contest the white, male version of history Cliff has been handed by her father. Jewish parallels resonate for Michelle Cliff not only in terms of the Holocaust but also in terms of the dilemmas posed by the ability to pass as white. In The Land of Look Behind, Cliff mentions the Maranos, the Jews in fifteenth century Spain who forced to pretend they had converted to Christianity. In the same text, she writes of light-skinned Jamaicans like herself who were able to pass into the white American world--saving their blackness for other Jamaicans or for trips home; in some cases, forgetting it altogether (60). The danger of succumbing to the pressure to pass, both culturally and physically, and as a result forgetting, is what gives the urgency to Cliff's project of writing herself back into her history and culture. …