German-Jewish Refugees Research Articles

The Second Time Around: Re-Acculturation of German-Jewish Refugees in Australia

Some 10,000 German-speaking Jews found refuge in Australia. Most of them decided after the Holocaust to remain at the ‘edge of diaspora’. After their expulsion and exile they experienced a long process of social re-integration and re-acculturation, developing firm ties with Australia as their newly adopted home country and identifying themselves as Australians and Jews. This process has been successfully completed, dissolving - as everywhere - the existence of a small German-Jewish diaspora community. This article attempts to shed light on the various processes of transformation.

Hannah Arendt and the politics of tragedy

A German Jewish refugee suffering tremendous personal and political upheaval during the years of Nazi conquest, Arendt turned to classical literature and drama as she struggled to make sense of the terrible events of her time. Studying fiction, plays, and poetry, she found a way to meld theoretical political philosophy and concrete personal commitment to action. Among her literary resources, the epics and plays of ancient Greece provided the ideal balance of politics and culture. In Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Tragedy, Pirro focuses especially on the influence of Greek tragedy on Arendt's political writings. Pirro casts Arendt's political thought as tragic storytelling, crafted to inspire her audience both to appreciate political freedoms and to act on those freedoms by participating in public life. Echoing an affinity for Greek drama common in the tradition of German philosophy and letters, Arendt draws on tragic characters, scenes, and dramatic conventions, as well as theories, to assess the maddening and often fatal contradictions of political life in modern times. Classical narratives of heroic achievements and failures shape the structure and content of Arendtian thought, as when she compares Jewish refugees' attempts to confront their stateless condition during the 1930s and 1940s to Ulysses's mythical quest. Turning her attention in the postwar years to the promise and limits of political freedom in American life, Arendt invokes Sophocles's last drama, Oedipus at Colonus, in an attempt to outline an alternative, aesthetic sense of political authority in the American Republic. In providing this new avenue of approach to Arendt, Pirro shows how elements of Greek tragedy helped her grapple with the problems of modern politics in the chaos of a universe without rules. Arendt enthusiasts and readers interested in the classics and politics will find fresh ideas to consider in Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Tragedy.

Frances Perkins and the German-Jewish Refugees, 1933-1940

Frances Perkins and the German-Jewish Refugees, 1933-1940

Asking the Questions/Telling a Story

This essay is about the relationship between intellectual and personal identity, about the patterns of scholarship and those that inflect our lives.1 In its details, it is very much an essay about my experience. As a meditation on more general themes, however, its range is intended to be more extensive: one very personal answer to the historical question of German/Jewish identity as it is posed today. Sometimes people ask me, Arendt? Why this particular intellectual preoccupation, when so many others are available? There are several answers to this question, more or less complete and depending on the circumstance. The simplest, and maybe the most accurate, is that she makes sense to me. By now, it is hard to determine to what degree she makes sense because she has shaped the way I think: I first picked up The Origins of Totalitarianism when I was sixteen. I have been reading Hannah Arendt's writing on and off ever since, a circulation of interest and surprise that has been going on for more than half my life. Given this relationship, the more intriguing question may be, why did Arendt make sense to me in the first place? Why did this particular individual's writing strike me as the best possible way to think about the world in which we live? It's a world we have both lost and gained. For Arendt, a German-Jewish intellectual who wrote and published most of her important works of political theory in English in the United States, the lost world was obviously the cultural landscape of Europe, the New World the place she landed as a refugee, after having fled Nazi Germany for France in 1933 and France for the United States in 1941.2 But for me, a postwar child born to first- and second-generation immigrants who believed the Old Worlds were well behind us, history's shadow cast a different shape. Firmly foreshortened, minimized by the cheerful lighting of a consumer paradise, the shadow of history seemed barely to tangle around one's feet. Mostly a matter of recipes and childhood mythology, history was not something that was supposed to get in your way. In our house, my mother never called herself a refugee, although that is certainly what she was when she arrived in New York in 1938. At sixteen, she and her younger sister had been shipped out of Germany to live with American relatives they had never met. Together, they set out to become Americans; when my grandparents did arrive a year later, their daughters would only speak English with them. German was part of the history they felt lucky to have been able to leave behind, a shadow my mother felt she could mostly do without. She got on with her life. When she married my father, mixing ethnicities and religions, they were happy that this was so. They felt free. For me, ironically, the shadow grew longer. Maybe it was just the passage of time, the shifting of perspective that accompanies the slow turning of the world. Raised as Americans, free to make of ourselves what we wanted, my brother and I pursued different paths, he working to build the present, I fascinated with questions of the past. The absence of certain parts of our history shaped my own life. At sixteen, finished with high school, I left home to spend a year on a kibbutz in Israel where my mother's sister lived. As a doctor, she had moved there somewhat skeptically years before, after she had married a fellow German-Jewish refugee who was also a Zionist pioneer and a distant relative. On the kibbutz, I worked in the cow shed and read everything I could get my hands on. Mostly, I depended on my aunt and uncle's library. After I had pulled out Salinger, Rousseau, de Sade, and Kazantzakis, my aunt handed me The Origins of Totalitarianism. I think she thought it might keep me busy for a while. While I was living on the kibbutz, people used to ask me if I was Jewish, and my answer kept changing. In the beginning, I said no. I was as Jewish as I was Catholic, having been raised in neither religion, but instead with the American credo of self-- creation. …

Linguistic Identities of German Jews in Anglophone Countries

This paper gives an overview of a research project on the role of persecution and identity for language use and language loss of German Jewish refugees in anglophone countries. The situation of German Jews under the Nazi regime is different from the situations of most minorities considered in research on language and identity until now. This paper tries to point out how (linguistic) identities were threatened by the changes in such attitudes after the Nazi rise to power and the increasingly virulent spread of anti-Semitic legislation and sentiments. It is on the basis of personal accounts that the mismatch between acknowledged and ascribed identity caused by this persecution and the ensuing identity and language conflicts is explored here.

Tropical Diaspora: The Jewish Experience in Cuba.

For the generations of Jews who immigrated to Cuba after 1900, the experience was bittersweet. Cuba welcomed immigrants long after the United States shut its doors to them in 1924, particularly refugees from Nazism. Yet the story of Cuban Jewry also includes the tragic 1939 drama of the SS St. Louis, turned away from Havana and the United States with its cargo of German-Jewish refugees still aboard, a propaganda coup for Germany. Although many Jews prospered economically on the island, they always remained outsiders, denied access to political influence and to high society. Unlike Jewish communities elsewhere, Jews in Cuba played virtually no cultural or intellectual role. Ironically, those who emigrated to the United States as politically (and economically) desirable refugees after the 1959 revolution were the same Jews, or the children of the same Jews, who had been deemed undesirable and denied U.S. entry in the 1920s. Robert Levine interviewed nearly a hundred Cuban-Jewish immigrants in the course of writing this book, and his use of their words lends the work an especially engaging, lively quality and makes it a vivid reflection of how the immigrants thought and felt and lived. The pages contain more than seventy-five rare photographs of the island and of the Jewish community from its origins to its near-moribund state today. Levine also compares the experience of Cuba's Jews with that of other immigrant groups, as well as that of Holocaust survivors in other Caribbean and Central American countries. The book's broad scope thus gives it appeal not only for students of Latin American Jewish issues but for all those interested in the relationship between majority and minoritysocieties in the Americas.

Continental Britons: German Jewish Refugees from Nazi Germany

Continental Britons: German Jewish Refugees from Nazi Germany

Continental Britons: German-Jewish Refugees from Nazi GermanyBerghahnMarion Continental Britons: German-Jewish Refugees from Nazi Germany BergLeamington Spa / Hamburg / New York, 1988, 294, £9.50

Continental Britons: German-Jewish Refugees from Nazi GermanyBerghahnMarion <i>Continental Britons: German-Jewish Refugees from Nazi Germany</i> BergLeamington Spa / Hamburg / New York, 1988, 294, £9.50

German-Jewish Refugees in England: The Ambiguities of Assimilation. Marion Berghahn

<i>German-Jewish Refugees in England: The Ambiguities of Assimilation</i>. Marion Berghahn

Between Washington and Jerusalem: A Reporter's Notebook, by Wolf Blitzer

Many journalists have mastered the Washington political scene, while others have gained entree to the highest echelons of Israeli politics. Wolf Blitzer is one of the few to have done both. An American fluent in Hebrew, Blitzer has interviewed and gained the respect of nearly all the major policy-makers in Israel and the United States over the past dozen years. The late Anwar Sadat credited Blitzer with first giving him the idea of making his historic trip to Jerusalem. The U.S.-Israeli relationship is like no other and this book helps explain why. Most importantly, it outlines the limits of the relationship, explaining why neither country can afford an all-out confrontation. There is special emphasis on the way decisions are made in Washington--the role of the foreign policy bureaucracy, Congress, the press, the Jewish community, the Arabs and their supporters, and the official Israeli presence. addition, chapters cover the special U.S.-Israeli cooperation in military, strategic, and intelligence matters. The book is filled with fascinating vignettes of people: the career diplomat responsible for the explosive (in 1975 terms) Saunders document which said, In many ways, the Palestinian dimension of the Arab-Israeli conflict is the heart of that conflict....the American industrialist became involved in some spectacular diplomatic back-channel efforts to save Soviet Jews...the German-Jewish refugee secretary of state came to play such a decisive role in American-Israeli affairs...the three deeply religious leaders, Begin, Sadat, and Carter, who progressed from an agreement to pray together to an agreement to make peace once and for all. From his unique vantage point, Blitzer considers the potential for either sharp strains or even closer collaboration in the future.

Book Review: German-Jewish Refugees in England: The Ambiguities of Assimilation

Book Review: German-Jewish Refugees in England: The Ambiguities of Assimilation

German-Jewish Refugees in England: The Ambiguities of Assimilation.

German-Jewish Refugees in England: The Ambiguities of Assimilation.