Jewish Acculturation Research Articles

Wild Visionary: Maurice Sendak in Queer Jewish Context by Golan Y. Moskowitz

Reviewed by: Wild Visionary: Maurice Sendak in Queer Jewish Context by Golan Y. Moskowitz Gregg Drinkwater Golan Y. Moskowitz. Wild Visionary: Maurice Sendak in Queer Jewish Context. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2021. 298 pp. Since the 1990s, Jewish studies scholars have increasingly applied queer theory to the study of Jewish life and culture, and in more recent decades, have [End Page 173] begun exploring the lived experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Jews. In Wild Visionary: Maurice Sendak in Queer Jewish Context, Golan Y. Moskowitz simultaneously draws meaning from the life and work of Maurice Sendak (1928–2012), a gay Jewish man, while deploying queer theory to re-imagine standard narratives of twentieth-century Jewish history; the history of childhood; the purpose of children's literature; and the processes of socialization. Writing as a cultural historian and literary scholar, Moskowitz touches on such subjects as the Holocaust, gay male social worlds, the AIDS crisis, the Great Depression, the children's book industry, narratives of Jewish acculturation, and the social liberation movements of the post–World War II decades. In this engaging study of the famed children's book author, Moskowitz argues that Sendak's Jewish and queer identities deeply informed his creative work. Moskowitz builds on earlier scholars who linked Jewishness and queerness as categories that have long troubled normative boundaries and binaries. Moskowitz adds two new dimensions to these comparisons and linkages. He brings to Jewish studies an emerging understanding from literary scholars and queer theory of childhood as inherently "queer," as well as a vision of the families of acculturating immigrants—particularly Jews—as occupying unstable and liminal statuses that can be productively analyzed using insights from queer theory. Seeing childhood and migration narratives as two categories that exceed societal efforts to maintain clear and normative boundaries, Moskowitz applies queer theory to deepen our understanding of both. Moskowitz's exploration of Sendak's childhood is especially rich, providing a portrait of a boy who grew up immersed in his parents' eastern European Jewish cultural ghetto (at times sparking shame for Sendak), while also drawn to such icons of American popular culture of the 1930s and 1940s as comic books, Laurel & Hardy, Mickey Mouse, and popular movies of the era. Moskowitz describes a child torn between the conflicting norms of these two realms, acting as a bridge or familial mediator between the private space of his Yiddish-speaking home and the broader public sphere. Elaborating on this liminal, or interstitial position, Moskowitz turns to the concept of "trans-memory" (64), a kind of secondhand memory that Sendak experienced through the weight of the emotional and psychological burdens of his parents, rooted in Yiddish and eastern European culture, while Sendak himself was being simultaneously pulled toward the language and culture of America. From this, Sendak learned key lessons about childhood as performative, in which children, chameleon-like, learn to perform whatever role their parents or caretakers expect of them, while masking their own private self-awareness and "intensely felt and imagined experiences" (51) that belong to them, alone (a lesson reenforced for Sendak by The Wizard of Oz, in which Dorothy's journey remains a private experience, dismissed by those around her in post-Oz Kansas). This conception of childhood as one in which children, in order to secure the care they need for survival, must fend for themselves, and, at times, mask their realities or surrender themselves to the emotional needs of others, informed much of Sendak's work. Born and raised in Brooklyn, Sendak entered his adolescent years during World War II and the Holocaust, a tragedy that profoundly shaped the emotional [End Page 174] register of his home. Sendak learned of the violence and danger facing relatives in Europe and at an early age became fully aware of the precarity of life, even for young children, a topic from which children in culturally mainstream American families might otherwise have been shielded. The compounded realities of migration (and the attendant difficulties of acculturating into American society), the collective trauma of the legacies of European antisemitism, and the immediate tragedy of the Holocaust separated Sendak's household from other American homes. In Sendak's own words...

Selbst-Bildungen. The Tradition of Comedy and the Emancipation of German Jews in Carl Sternheim’s The Snob

Abstract The article explores the connection between enlightenment and comedy, as well as its importance for German Jewry. Following Hegel, whose thoughts on ancient drama as well as modern society have shaped the German discourse on comedy until today, this article demonstrates that questions of self-formation, emancipation, and historical self-location are central to comedy. In Carl Sternheim’s comedy The Snob, the idea of self-formation resonates with the historic concept of “civic improvement” through “Bildung”: Jewish emancipation in Germany stood at the end of an educational project that outlasted Jews’ achieving legal equality. The Snob is a comedy about Jewish acculturation and bourgeoisification and embodies Marx’s understanding of comedy as ambivalent: on the one hand, comedy helps people to part cheerfully from their past that was characterized by inequality, but, on the other, it indicates that a world-historic fact like Jewish emancipation may be prone to repeat itself as a farce. Sternheim’s comedy develops a poetic that embraces ambivalence, but also opens the genre of comedy to the question of therapy and healing. It depicts the struggle between autonomy and social formation – the dialectics of German “Bildung.”

The Man in the Suit: Jewish Men and Fashion in fin-de-siècle Vienna

Fin-de-siècle Vienna has long been recognized as one of Europe’s centers of modernist culture, and Jewish men, as central participants in this cultural development. However, its role as a capital of fashion is often overshadowed by more well-known cities like London. This article explores the influence of English styles on Vienna’s men’s fashion milieu and the central function of clothing within Jewish acculturation. The adoption of modern clothing—in particular the suit—by urban male populations across the continent over the course of the nineteenth century corresponded to the broad period of Jewish emancipation in western and central Europe. Referring to contemporary fashion guides, hinged on a case study of the dress habits of Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)—arguably one of Vienna’s most renowned thinkers of Jewish origin—this article explores the complex issues surrounding Jewish men and dress in the context of one of Europe’s important capitals of modernist culture.

A Century of Childhood

The Jewish Quarterly Review (Fall 2020) Copyright © 2020 Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies. All rights reserved. T H E J E W I S H Q U A R T E R LY R E V I E W, Vol. 110, No. 4 (Fall 2020) 606–609 A ­ Century of Childhood ELISHEVA BAUMGARTEN “I SAW A JEWIS H LA DY only yesterday with a child at her knee and from whose face ­ towards the child ­ there shone a sweetness so angelical that it seemed to form a sort of glory round both.” With ­ these words quoted from W. M. Thackeray’s Pendennis, Solomon Schechter began his essay “The Child in Jewish Lit­ er­ a­ ture,” printed in the second volume of the old series of JQR in 1889. Schechter used this opening to underscore the idea that “sainted” ­ mothers’ attitudes ­ toward Jewish ­ children was proof of the exceptional treatment of ­ children by Jews of eras past. He seems to be suggesting that this uniqueness was so evident as to be discernible by “even” a non-­ Jew. Rereading Schechter’s essay, one is struck by its originality. Schechter was studying premodern childhood long before it became a popu­ lar topic of historical inquiry. It is also in­ ter­ est­ ing to note how research methods and perspectives have changed over the course of the intervening years. Where and how does he differ from current scholarship and what can be gained by rereading his essay more than 130 years ­ after its publication? A first observation relates to the sources he quotes throughout the article . Many of them have remained central in the scholarly publications of the last centuries. To provide a few examples: his discussion of ­ children’s initiation to Torah was based on the same central sources used by Ivan Marcus in his seminal 1996 study that opened up new directions for examining what Marcus called “inward acculturation.”1 Schechter discusses customs concerning the sandek, a medieval feature that has been at the center of This article was written with funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 681507, Beyond the Elite: Jewish Daily Life in Medieval Europe. 1. Ivan G. Marcus, Rituals of Childhood: Jewish Acculturation in Medieval Eu­ rope (New Haven, Conn., 1996). The Child in Jewish Literature—Baumgarten 607 multiple studies, especially from the mid-1990s onward,2 and comments on unique medieval practices concerning childhood and education that ­ were­ later featured in Ephraim Kanarfogel’s 1992 study on medieval education.3 His essay, ranging from comments on rituals to such ­ matters as lullabies, contains the stuff studied by modern social historians interested in childhood in past eras.4 In short, Schechter’s essay touches on many topics and sources that have become cornerstones of recent research. His particularistic approach, evident in the opening lines quoted above, is perhaps the most impor­ tant difference. His assumption throughout the essay—­ one that has yet to be radically altered—is that Jews, ­ whether late antique, medieval, or premodern, ­ were a defined group, clearly distinguishable from their neighbors. Yet unlike the scholarship of the past de­ cades that has sought to define the ways Jews ­ were both part of their surroundings and a distinct minority, he rejects any blurring of bound­ aries between Jews and ­ those who ­ were not Jews. Interestingly, the result of this rejection is not expressed by ignoring customs that ­ were not “wholly” Jewish. Schechter knew that many of the customs the essay explores, as well as­ those outlined by Güdemann, Löw, and ­ others whose work he references and praises, had parallels in con­ temporary non-­ Jewish culture.5 In ­ these cases, he has a quick solution in the form of derogatory comments concerning the practices he is describing. Such customs are ­ either “superstitious” or­ those of the gentiles. For example, when describing customs related to warding off Lilith, “the dev­ il’s ­ mother suspected of stealing ­ children and killing them,” he declares: “Now I do not intend to enumerate ­ here all ­ these vari­ ous precautions [against Lilith] [. . .] But of what­ ever origin they may be, Judaism could do...

The spatial morphology of synagogue visibility as a measure of Jewish acculturation in late nineteenth-century London

This paper's historical focus is the latter two decades of nineteenthcentury London. During this period the established Jewish community of the city benefited from political emancipation, but this was not the case for the recently-arrived impoverished Jewish migrants from Eastern Europe. The spatial constitution of religious practice also differed across the city. A comparative study found that the more prosperous West End, other than an isolated case in the impoverished district of Soho, had purpose-built buildings fronting the street; while the poorer district of Whitechapel in the East End was dominated by smaller ad hoc arrangements – one-room or adapted premises, shtiebels – serving a wider communal and social purpose, similar to the practice of the old country. A comparative space syntax isovist analysis of the visibility of synagogue façades from surrounding streets found that while, in the West End, most synagogues had a limited public display of religious practice by this time, East End prayer houses remained visible only to their immediate, Jewish majority surroundings. This paper proposes that the amount of synagogue-street visibility corresponds to the stage of growth in both social acculturation and political confidence.

Looking and behaving: Sartorial politics and Jewish men in fin-de-siècle Vienna

Abstract The contribution of Viennese Jews to the cultural milieu of the Austrian capital at the fin de siècle is undisputed. Jewish women and men contributed to the social artistic, economic and philosophical centrality of Viennese culture. But what did Jewish urban, middle-class men wear and in what ways was it significant. This article examines the sartorial habits of two Viennese cultural and literary icons, Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) and Peter Altenberg (1859–1919), and considers how men’s fashions in Vienna during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries both facilitated and negated the assimilatory aspirations of the city’s middle-class Jewish population. A comparison of visual and literary accounts of Jewish acculturation and assimilation will offer a further understanding of the manifestation of visual ‘Jewishness’ and the heterogeneous Jewish identities present in Vienna during the period.

Survival Strategies during the Holocaust and Why They Matter

Survival Strategies during the Holocaust and Why They Matter Jeffrey Kopstein (bio) Based on a thorough study of the three ghettos—Minsk, Białystok, and Kraków—Evgeny Finkel paints a highly differentiated, fascinating, and necessarily grim picture of Jewish behavior during the Holocaust. In many ways it is a post-Arendtian picture in that the categories of collaboration, compliance, and resistance are readjusted and reconceptualized to provide a much richer and empirically more grounded account of Jewish behavior in the ghettos. Whether Jews cooperated and collaborated, coped and stayed put, evaded their persecutors through escape, or engaged in organized and violent resistance depended upon the skills they had obtained in the years running up to the Nazi occupation and, crucially, on the broader political environment of the particular community. So, for example, Jews who had previous experience in Zionist or Communist politics were more likely to resist, and these resistance organizations were likely to be most robust where they faced a modicum of repression before the war (too much repression and they ceased to function). At the same time, those who had experience in Jewish politics were also more likely to be useful within the Judenrats (which, contra Arendt, were not only collaborationist but also frequently worked closely with resistance organizations). In cities, such as Białystok, which in interwar Poland had a record of strong antisemitism and little Jewish acculturation not only within the municipality but in the surrounding communities, Jews had little hope of receiving assistance from local Poles and therefore escape was not rational; reliance on the strong local network of Jewish organizations—that is, coping and staying put—made more sense. In Kraków, by contrast, with its moderate politics and high rate of Jewish acculturation in the interwar Polish republic, evasion was possible. Meanwhile, in Minsk, which had been part of the Soviet Union since 1922, making one’s way to the forests and the partisans was the [End Page 227] best route to survival, but whether one could do so depended upon preexisting connections to these groups. In short, what Evgeny Finkel has done is remind us that the Holocaust unfolded in specific communities and each of these communities had a specific history. This history, he maintains, shaped not only the chances of Jewish survival but also specific Jewish survival strategies. Resistance may have been “heroic” but this heroism was not randomly distributed. It was easier to be heroic in some places than in others. So much of Holocaust historiography and accounts of Jewish behavior during the Holocaust focuses on individual character traits of resisters, villains, and bystanders; it is, however, worth recalling that all of this human behavior in extremis occurred in contexts. Finkel’s book, by concentrating neither at the macro level (“Germany,” the “Soviet Union,” “Poland”) nor at the micro level (heroes or cowards) but at what he terms the “meso” (the community) level, is able to draw us back to the histories of where the Holocaust occurred and tell us why they mattered. That Białystok had been part of the Russian empire before becoming part of interwar Poland; that Kraków came to Poland out of Habsburg Galicia; that Minsk had been incorporated into the Soviet Union; and that in all three of these cities the relations between Jews and their neighbors were different—all of this shaped Jewish responses to ghettoization and their impending destruction. This on its own is a huge contribution and I believe it will be a lasting one. Political scientists have largely ignored the Holocaust. Finkel himself took part in the first panel on the Holocaust in the history of the American Political Science Association meetings in 2011 (!). Of course, other individual political scientists have made important individual contributions, but the problem has been—and this is almost hard to believe—to tell political scientists why this “index case” of violence in the modern world should be integrated into the general corpus of social scientific knowledge. Finkel’s book does this by directly engaging with other accounts of victim behavior in the social scientific literature from other instance of mass violence. His book follows Charles King’s in breaking down the Holocaust itself...

“To prove the correctness and authenticity of my statements”: Solomon Nunes Carvalho’s Revision of the Western Travel Narrative

“To prove the correctness and authenticity of my statements”: Solomon Nunes Carvalho’s Revision of the Western Travel Narrative1 Michael Hoberman (bio) Introduction: Carvalho’s Domestication of the Frontier Landscape Solomon Nunes Carvalho was thirty-eight years old when he accepted John C. Frémont’s invitation to undertake a midwinter crossing of the Far West from Kansas to California as the expedition’s official daguerreotypist.2 The famous explorer’s achievement of safe passage through the worst imaginable conditions in the western wilderness would ascertain the viability of his proposed transcontinental railway route and enhance his prospects as a political figure on the national stage.3 While [End Page 237] Frémont was an old hand at wilderness exploration, Carvalho was an urbane scion of the Jewish middle class, unschooled in the art of outdoor survival. Born in Charleston, South Carolina, he had spent most of his youth in Philadelphia and Baltimore. By the mid 1850s his daguerreo-type studios in those cities, as well as in Charleston and New York, had earned him sufficient renown to gain Frémont’s notice. Despite his urban upbringing and the fact that he was “accustomed to the luxuries that were part of his heritage as a Jewish grandee,” Carvalho possessed a plucky spirit.4 As a writer, however, he went out of his way to avoid drawing attention to his own accomplishments. Without acquiring its more imperious elements, he managed to imbibe the ego-diminishing aspects of his era’s Transcendentalist ethos.5 Perhaps this was because he employed its aesthetic principles without brandishing its attendant political ideologies. By reputation, frontier adventure stories exaggerated their protagonists’ triumphs over topographical adversity. Carvalho made his mark on the literature of the American West by maintaining a low profile and emphasizing the accomplishments of others. His greatest innovation as a writer was the emphasis he placed on the tenuousness of his accomplishments and of his own authority as a chronicler of a gargantuan and sublimely beautiful landscape. In his “fascinating and complex ethnographic profiles of the people he met,” which highlighted the humanity of his diverse subjects, he operated outside the norm of American letters.6 Instead of indulging the grandiosity that readers associated with transcontinental travel, Carvalho’s 1857 book, Incidents of Travel and Adventure in the Far West, emphasized the complex social interactions that shaped his experiences in the wilderness. “In the heyday of imperialist expansion and acquisition,” as Rachel Rubinstein has pointed out, Carvalho’s representations of the Native Americans he met on the prairie, the Mormons he later encountered in Utah, and the polyglot members of the expeditionary party, were “curious, absorptive, willing to suspend judgment, self-mocking, and self-effacing.”7 No matter how wild and [End Page 238] remote the immediate physical surroundings were, he understood and welcomed the presence of human institutions wherever he encountered them. Carvalho’s having done so was commensurate with the wider historical pattern of Jewish acculturation to the Americas. The earliest Jews to travel to the Far West were not escapees from civilization. Whether they worked as storeowners, ranchers, or elected officials, Jews acted as agents of order. In the midst of an ever shifting and dynamic social geographical milieu, as Jeanne Abrams writes, “pioneer Jews in communities throughout the west were generally viewed as a stabilizing influence that upheld morality and order in new settlements as well as bringing a measure of culture to the rough frontier.”8 While it purported to be a tale of adventure, Solomon Carvalho’s Incidents gave voice to this stabilizing impulse. By the year of his birth in 1815, several generations of Solomon Nunes Carvalho’s family had established a pattern of seeking an orderly existence in waypoints of civilization. Refugees from the Inquisition, they made their homes first in Amsterdam and then in London, where his grandfather and namesake had been born in 1743. Solomon’s father, David Carvalho, had spent eight years in Barbados before leaving that island for the bustling Jewish community of Charleston in 1811, where he was one of the founders of the New World’s first Reform congregation. While he never referred overtly to his Judaic heritage in...

Jewish acculturation in late nineteenth-century Russia: the case of Yonah Berkhin

ABSTRACTYoung Jewish students in the Pale of Settlement have not received comprehensive scholarly attention, despite their impact on Jewish politics and the public sphere in the late nineteenth century. Typically, representations of Jewish pupils and students are limited to the study of small and non-representative radical groups. This paper fills this gap through a contextualized examination of the practices and meanings of acculturation among educated Jewish youth. It focuses on a previously unknown diary by Yonah Berkhin, a Jewish teenager who strove to obtain a secondary education between 1879 and 1882. The discussion of this document adds a critical contextual perspective to the existing scholarship on acculturation among Jewish learning youth in late nineteenth-century Russia. I suggest that acculturation was a complex, multidirectional process. I show how, rather than merely creating alienation from Jewish society – which is often described as a “departure” leading either to a complete assimilation or to “repentance” and “return” – acculturation created new as well as modified existing modes of attachment to Jewish society.

Algerische Ouvertüren. Pierre Nora und Jacques Derrida im Widerstreit

Abstract By way of a historical narrative, the article focuses on the background of biographical experience - familial and existential, cultural and political (in terms of the respective historical upheavals) - so as to scrutinize the emergence of the scholarly paradigms connected with the historian Pierre Nora and the philosopher Jacques Derrida. Proceeding fromthe set of problems pertaining to Algeria - which affected either of them, albeit differently - the epistemologically significant interrelation between “body and corpus” (Derrida) will be reflected upon. The historically dissimilar modes of a Jewish acculturation and accommodation to French modernity are crucial to both Nora’s and Derrida’s experience - Ashkenazic in the former, Sephardic-Maghrebian in the latter. The Algerian experience lays the foundation for their respective conceptions of knowledge and interpretation: in Nora’s case, the continental preconditions for his historical concept of “lieu dememoire”; in Derrida’s, the colonial origins of deconstruction in terms of its conceptualization.

Empire Jews: Jewish Nationalism and Acculturation in 19 th - and Early 20 th -Century Russia. By Brian Horowitz.

Empire Jews: Jewish Nationalism and Acculturation in 19 th - and Early 20 th -Century Russia. By Brian Horowitz.

On Ashkenazi’s <em>Weimar Film and Modern Jewish Identity</em>

On Ashkenazi’s Weimar Film and Modern Jewish Identity Kerry Wallach Weimar Film and Modern Jewish Identity. By Ofer Ashkenazi. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. 234 pp., ISBN 978-0-230-34136-4 (hc). US $90.00 Every scholar of modern Jewish history is familiar with the poet Judah Leib Gordon’s 1862 exhortation to European Jewry: “Be a man in the street and a Jew at home” (as quoted in Ashkenazi, xv, 48). This motto takes on new relevance in the work of historian Ofer Ashkenazi, for whom public and private behaviors play out in the spatial terms of Weimar cinematic representation. Within the world of the street, Jews display only authentic bourgeois mannerisms and appearances; in private, the masquerade ceases to be necessary. According to Ashkenazi, we see this duality reflected in films made by Jewish directors and writers for whom public and domestic spaces are necessarily linked in the project of representing Jewish identity. In his innovative contribution to Weimar Jewish history and cinema studies, Ashkenazi compellingly argues that the urban and immigrant experiences of Jewish filmmakers—particularly their investment in becoming further integrated into German culture—shaped many of the films made in Weimar Germany. Moreover, he boldly asserts that even more than theatrical works, “film was the main contribution of German Jews” to Weimar culture, and that Weimar films to a large extent “promote the formation of a liberal, multicultural, transnational bourgeois society, in which ‘the Jew’ could be different, but equal” (14–15). By [End Page 226] making a case for film as the quintessential mode of creative expression for Jews in Weimar Germany, Ashkenazi insists that historians and other scholars consider film alongside literature, theater, art, and other forms of German-Jewish cultural production. This move follows recent turns in German and Jewish studies to explore cinematic works as an integral part of twentieth-century visual culture. It also connects arguments about “Jewish talent” and mastery of theater acting with Jewish film performances, thereby building on the claims of such early critics as Arnold Zweig as well as more recent work by scholars including Galili Shahar. As a way of grappling with the potentially essentialist (and often anti-Semitic) nature of claims about the link between perceived otherness and Jewish artistic talent, Ashkenazi notes that although it is “at best, problematic,” this portrayal “is, however, a fair depiction of an influential group within German urban Jewry” (21). In Weimar Film and Modern Jewish Identity, Ashkenazi skillfully blends formal analysis of popular and lesser-known films with a broader discussion of Jewish acculturation. In five concise chapters, the book addresses genres key to his central argument that Jewish filmmakers “formulated and exploited” the conventions of Weimar genre film: urban comedies, domestic melodramas, horror film, and exotic adventure and war films (13). In chapter 2, Ashkenazi focuses on visual mimicry of Germanness and stereotypical representation of Jewishness in such comedies as Hans Steinhoff’s Family Day at the Prellsteins (1927), Reinhold Schünzel’s Heaven on Earth (1926–27) and Hercules Maier (1927), and Ernst Lubitsch’s I Don’t Want to Be a Man (1918) and Meyer from Berlin (1919). Changes of clothing serve as a coded mask for both gender and Jewish identities, the latter expressed fully only in private. Failed attempts to convey authentic (Jewish) identity in spaces including nightclubs lead alienated characters back to the safety of their apartments. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 take up the genres of domestic melodrama, horror film, and exotic adventure and war films. In his readings of Karl Grune’s Jealousy (1925) and The Street (1923), Ashkenazi reiterates “that role-play can express authenticity (and efface individual ‘otherness’)” in melodramas as in comedies (46). Here he argues against Siegfried Kracauer’s reading of The Street as exemplary of the German psyche, suggesting instead that the film mirrors the Jewish immigrant experience of desiring not to be other. Additional sections focus on the tragic consequences of perceived difference in Paul Czinner’s Nju (1924) and Fritz Lang’s early films, and in F. W. Murnau’s The Walk into the Night (1921), from which Ashkenazi borrowed the title of his 2010 book on reason and subjectivity...

The Terms on Which Jews and Muslims Join Western Civilization

The Terms on Which Jews and Muslims Join Western Civilization

Brian Horowitz. Empire Jews: Jewish Nationalism and Acculturation in 19th- and Early 20th-Century Russia. Bloomington, IN: Slavica, 2009. 305 pp.

Brian Horowitz. Empire Jews: Jewish Nationalism and Acculturation in 19th- and Early 20th-Century Russia. Bloomington, IN: Slavica, 2009. 305 pp.

The Anti-Journalist: Karl Kraus and Jewish Self-Fashioning in Fin-de-Siècle Europe (review)

Reviewed by: The Anti-Journalist: Karl Kraus and Jewish Self-Fashioning in Fin-de-Siècle Europe Jeffrey A. Grossman The Anti-Journalist: Karl Kraus and Jewish Self-Fashioning in Fin-de-Siècle Europe, by Paul Reitter. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2008. 254 pp. $35.00. In the conclusion to The Anti-Journalist Paul Reitter points to a problem confronting anyone who writes on the difficult, sometimes exasperating, often brilliant figure of Karl Kraus: "For if important thinkers regularly rediscover Kraus, and if both the significance of his major themes and his skill at chronicling them have been vigorously underlined, he is not widely read today" (p. 178). In the nearly 200 pages that precede this remark, Reitter astutely demonstrates why students of both European modernism and German Jewish culture would do well to read and teach the work of Karl Kraus; he shows why the "anti-journalist" media critic is still relevant today and why his troubled relationship to Jewish issues helps illuminate both fin-de-siècle Europe and Jewish life there and in modern western culture, more generally. Both Kraus's criticism of language (Sprachkritik) and his complex relationship to Jewish issues pose a serious challenge to Kraus scholars—Reitter cites as preface to his analysis Gershom Scholem's admonition: "In dealing with Kraus's relation to Jewish issues, one can only commit errors, for which Kraus himself made sure there would be plenty of scope" (p. 26). Scholem's remark does more than underscore this challenge; it also suggests the stakes involved in Reitter's study, for Kraus's difficulty relates both to the larger question of German Jewish acculturation and the ways in which Kraus wove certain kinds of difficulty into his own sharp-edged analyses of society, language, culture, and the press. The fact that Reitter combines these two sides of Kraus is itself significant, for as he suggests in his introduction, one can approach Kraus without seriously exploring the question of Jewishness in his work—an approach, however, whose gaps Reitter's study throws into stark relief. A key question Reitter's study responds to is: how does Kraus's approach to language relate to his view of power? Reitter shows that Kraus criticized language abuse as a means for criticizing how the press conceals abuses of power. At the same time, Reitter addresses a second key question: how does one reconcile Kraus's use at times of antisemitic stereotypes with his repeated assertion, especially after 1910, of his own Jewishness? Reitter's response to these conflicts in Kraus is both complex and elegant: it combines a careful, lucid contextualizing of Kraus's work and the issues he responded to with a series of exacting readings of key essays by Kraus and others. In setting up this context, Reitter's introduction discusses how figures like Richard Wagner and Heinrich von Treitschke, among others, polemicized against the role of Jews in German culture. Reitter further explores in Chapter [End Page 181] 1 a troubled article on German-Jewish assimilation, "The German-Jewish Parnassus," by a young Jewish scholar named Moritz Goldstein. Appearing in 1912, the article triggered much controversy about the question of German Jewish creativity and psychic health. This debate forms a backdrop for Reitter's treatment of Kraus's own interventions on the subject. By focusing on the controversy around Goldstein, Reitter shows that influential German Jewish writers drew for their analyses of Jews in German culture, and journalism in particular, on terms and tropes disturbingly similar to those used by antisemites. But they did so in complex ways. By exploring these debates, Reitter seeks to generate a "new openness" for understanding Kraus's own capacity to align himself with such issues (p. 34). He also sets up the context for showing "how Kraus's style came to be signified within German-Jewish circles as a profoundly Jewish phenomenon," a point explored in depth in Chapter 4 (p. 34). Chapter 2, "Karl Kraus and the Jewish Self-Hatred Question," explores Kraus's utterances on journalism, Jewish issues, Zionism, antisemitism and German culture, and culminates in an exacting reading of Kraus's oft-cited essay "Heine and the Consequences...

Jewish Acculturation: Identity, Society and Schooling Buenos Aires, Argentina (1890-1930)

Jewish Acculturation:Identity, Society and Schooling Buenos Aires, Argentina (1890-1930) M. Fernanda Astiz (bio) Introduction As in the United States (U.S.), between 1890 and 1930 millions of Europeans arrived in Argentina. Although immigrants arrived from several European countries, Italians, Spaniards and Jews (the latter mainly coming from Eastern European countries and the Ottoman Empire) were among the largest groups. Jews migrated to Argentina because of its flexible and attractive immigration laws and the laicism of its social and political institutions, such as the educational system. The influx of Jewish people was so steady that Buenos Aires, Argentina's capital city, became one of the largest Jewish centers of the world, and the most important one in Latin America.1 Even though immigrant assimilation and citizen production is usually discussed as a central task of nation building, how this has happened through schools is still not well understood in the Argentine context. While there is extensive historical research of this process in the U.S., not many historians have looked into the institutional links among the nation-state, mass schooling, and the assimilation process in Argentina, particularly in the city of Buenos Aires at the turn of the twentieth century. The few studies that examined this topic in the Argentine context tend to deemphasize ethnic differences among immigrant groups and accept the predominant melting pot theory.2 The purpose of this study is to examine Jewish acculturation into Argentine society. In this sense, it functions as a case study of the larger question the role immigration and schooling played in the constitution of Argentina's national identity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Looking beyond the schooling process, Argentina's national imagery and society, this study suggests that the characteristics of the Jewish community, both before and upon arrival, affected their acculturation as well. To achieve its purpose, this study uses typical historiography research methods. Through a careful analysis of historical primary and secondary sources, this research underscores the Jewish acculturation pattern to Argentine society. Policy documents, archival materials (e.g., photographs and news [End Page 41] articles) and key cultural productions were sources of data collection. These historical sources have been obtained from Argentina's Library of Congress, Argentina's National Library, the Argentine Ministry of Education and Culture's Library, the Israeli-Argentine Mutual Aid Association's (AMIA) documentation and archives center Mark Turkow, the Institute for Jewish Research (YIWO) located both in Buenos Aires and New York City, and the Jewish Theological Seminary's affiliate in Buenos Aires. In order to fill gaps left by the paucity of documentation of this time period, the author used personal memories archived by AMIA and conducted a few personal interviews arranged by AMIA's Senior Adults program coordinator. Beyond the significance this study has for Latin American historical research, Argentine Jewish studies and international and comparative studies in general, it illuminates the implications of historical research for contemporary education policy in the U.S. and other contexts where international migration continues to be as important as it was during the early twentieth century. Schooling, Acculturation and National Identity Formation From its earliest conception as an institution, formal public mass schooling, managed and financed by the nation-state, developed with citizenship production as one of its chief services to national societies.3 Sociological and historical observations of the origins of mass schooling in nations have noted the assumption held by a wide spectrum of political interests that there is, and should be, a link between universal education and democratic citizenry as a predictable route to social order within a national polity. Creating national citizens was, and still is, a main impetus for mass schooling.4 There have been several persuasive explanations of the process of community-building that some say schools generate and encourage. Historian Benedict Anderson suggests that community building occurs through the creation of a perceived individual membership in "imagined communities."5 This argument implies that by virtue of the shared schooling experience, youth are incorporated into social, economic and political communities beyond even their own social class, school and ethnicity. Others show that national identity is more manufactured than accidental, and that it is manufactured...

NATION, GOVERNMENT, AND ‘ANTI-SEMITISM’ IN EARLY NINETEENTH-CENTURY AUSTRIA

ABSTRACTIn 1808, an Estate of the lesser nobility of the Lower Austrian diet approved a statute barring from membership persons of Jewish descent in the ‘third degree’ regardless of confession. It is the only documented instance in Europe for the revolutionary era of such a paragraph that, in its rejection of Jewish ancestry in both the paternal and maternal lines, resembled the early modern Spanish statutes of ‘blood purity’ and the twentieth-century Nuremberg laws. The Josephian patent of toleration of 1782 had not allowed Jews to become members of the corporate nobility (the first Jew was only ennobled in 1789), but had relieved some of the worst aspects of discrimination. By the early nineteenth century, the archduchy of Lower Austria (including the imperial capital at Vienna) contained the largest, wealthiest, and most self-confident Jewish community in the Hapsburg Monarchy. The statute of 1808 was a reaction to Jewish acculturation to the upper class (including conversion, intermarriage, concessions of property-rights, the existence of salons in which Jews and new Christians mixed with the nobility) that presented a perceived threat to the status of its marginal members (lesser landed nobles, ennobled officialdom, and ennobled professionals). The statute was also a product of the politically and nationally charged atmosphere in Vienna between the Austrian defeat by Napoleon at Austerlitz (1805) and the renewed war against France (1809). No simple ideological continuum connects the Lower Austrian paragraph to either the early modern Spanish or the late modern Nazi ordinances. But it was the first such statute to take shape in a political context fraught with recognizably late modern concepts of ‘nation’. The statute of 1808 furthermore evidences the continuing fractured nature of public authority and lack of thorough-going state-formation in Austria.

Predictors of Soviet Jewish refugees' acculturation: Differentiation of self and acculturative stress.

The authors investigated the acculturation of 108 Jewish young adults who had immigrated to the United States between the ages of 9 and 21 from the former Soviet Union as a function of differentiation of self (M. Bowen, 1978) and acculturative stress. One aspect of differentiation, the ability to take an "I-position" with others, uniquely predicted greater American acculturation and less Russian acculturation, indicating that participants who reported an ability to act on their own needs in the context of social pressure tended to be more assimilated. Russian acculturation was also uniquely associated with more frequent perceived discrimination (one aspect of acculturative stress) during adolescence. Participants who had spent a greater proportion of their lifetime in the United States were more American acculturated and less Russian acculturated, reflecting assimilation rather than biculturalism.

Imagining the Self, Imagining the Other: Visual Representation and Jewish-Christian Dynamics in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period (review)

Reviewed by: Imagining the Self, Imagining the Other: Visual Representation and Jewish-Christian Dynamics in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period Vivian B. Mann Frojmovic, Eva , ed. Imagining the Self, Imagining the Other: Visual Representation and Jewish-Christian Dynamics in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period. Cultures, Beliefs and Traditions 15. Leiden: Brill, 2002. Pp. xxii + 242. This composite volume is the fruit of a session on the representation of Jews in the Middle Ages presented at the 1999 Medieval Conference at Leeds University. It is noteworthy that although the conference traditionally draws a majority of its participants from Europe, the authors of these essays are all Americans with the exception of the editor. This fact may not be a coincidence but a reflection of the burgeoning interest in Jewish art history among American academics. Eva Frojmovic's introductory essay, "Buber in Basle, Schlosser in Sarajevo, Wischnitzer in Weimar: The Politics of Writing about Medieval Jewish Art," focuses on the historiographical treatment of medieval works in the context of recent discussions on the role of political discourse in the characterization of Jewish art.1 A brief review of Martin Buber's ambivalent attitude toward Jewish art opens the chapter: that which had been created in previous centuries demonstrated a lack of Jewish artistic skill; but what would be created in the future Jewish state would be equal to European models. Buber could speak from authority; he had completed his doctorate in art history and philosophy under the distinguished scholars Alois Riegl and Franz Wickhoff. Frojmovic proceeds to an interesting analysis of the Sarajevo Haggadah monograph, published in 1898 with essays by the Christian art historian Julius von Schlosser and the Jewish scholar David Kaufmann of Vienna. To Schlosser, Jewish art emerged from that of the church; he explained the style of the Haggadah as based on the late fourteenth-century art of northern Spain. Kaufmann saw Jewish art as emerging from synagogue decoration [End Page e014] but still a part of Western artistic traditions. Frojmovic ends her essay by considering the definitions of Jewish art offered in the 1920s and 1930s by Kurt Frey, Ernst Cohn-Weiner, and Rachel Wischnitzer, with an emphasis on their discussion of medieval works. She concludes that their essays on Jewish art are based on the same nationalist model that had been used by others to exclude Jewish art from the canon of art history. Most of the remaining chapters in Imagining the Self, Imagining the Other discuss a single manuscript or page of illumination prefaced by a theoretical discussion that appears to have been appended to the original talk given at the Leeds conference. Some dovetail nicely, for example, Marc Epstein's consideration of the Christian reformulation of the Hebrew Bible, which was transformed into an "Old Testament" whose narratives and prophecies "can only be fulfilled in the Christian community and in the life of the Christian savior" (p. 35). This preface precedes a discussion of an illumination in the Golden Haggadah (British Library, Add. MS 27210) of Moses and his family traveling to Egypt that is a reworking of the canonical Christian scene, "The Flight into Egypt." Epstein relies heavily for his interpretation on textual sources, principally midrashim, which presumes that which is not proved—namely, that the relevant literary sources were well known to miniaturists and their patrons in Catalonia where the Golden Haggadah was written and illuminated ca. 1320.2 Much more effective are the comparisons to similar iconography in other manuscripts of the period. Michael Batterman's essay "Bread of Affliction, Emblem of Power: The Passover Matzah in Haggadah Manuscripts from Christian Spain" is flawed in both its premises and its structure. Introductory material is repeated later and some of the text appears in other essays; more stringent editing of the volume would have helped. On the first page, Batterman asserts that Spanish Haggadot are the result of Jewish acculturation with Christians, an assumption that leads him to strained equations of the representation of the matsah and the host, and the attribution of Christian concepts to the Jewish symbol. As Batterman has demonstrated elsewhere, the narrative miniatures preceding the text of the Haggadah appeared after the development of...

Jewish women and their salons: the power of conversation

From their debut in Berlin in the 1780s to their emergence in 1930s California, Jewish women's salons served as welcoming havens where all classes and creeds could openly debate art, music, literature, and politics. This fascinating book is the first to explore the history of these salons where remarkable women of intellect resolved that neither gender nor religion would impede their ability to bring about social change. Emily D. Bilski and Emily Braun examine the lives of more than a dozen Jewish salonieres, charting the evolution of the salon over time and among cultures, in cities including Berlin, Vienna, Paris, London, New York, and Milan. They show how each woman uniquely adapted the salon to suit her own interests while maintaining the salon's key characteristics of basic informality and a diversity of guests. Other distinguished contributors to the volume discuss in detail the Berlin salons of the 1800s; the salon in terms of Jewish acculturation and its relation to gender and music; and the relations of Marcel Proust, Oscar Wilde, and Gertrude Stein to the literary salon. The book is enriched with a lavish array of illustrations, including documentary photographs, paintings, drawings, prints, and decorative arts.