Jewish Activists Research Articles

Jews and the Making of Modern German Theatre ed. by Jeanette R. Malkin and Freddie Rokem (review)

Reviewed by: Jews and the Making of Modern German Theatre ed. by Jeanette R. Malkin and Freddie Rokem Erika Hughes Jews and the Making of Modern German Theatre. Edited by Jeanette R. Malkin and Freddie Rokem. Studies in Theatre History and Culture series. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2010; pp. 320. Much has been written on post-Enlightenment Jewish contributions to German culture, particularly in the sixty-two-year period immediately preceding the Nazi rise to power, from German unification in 1871 until the end of the Weimar Republic in 1933. Yet, Jews and the Making of Modern German Theatre reshapes contemporary understandings of this relationship by focusing on both the role played by German Jews in co-creating modern German theatre, and the subsequent effect this theatre had on German Jewish self-identity. Jeanette Malkin and Freddie Rokem’s impressive collection, deriving from a conference in Israel and workshop in Germany, is comprised of fourteen essays (including Malkin’s introduction and Rokem’s epilogue) from several disciplines, including history, theatre studies, and literature, which are in direct conversation with one another. The smart arrangement of contributions progresses from the broad to the narrow, beginning with cultural and intellectual history. Steven Aschheim examines Jewish identity through both the act of performing onstage and notions of the societal performance of assimilation, while Peter Jelavich unpacks the relationship between Jewish theatre-makers and Jewish themes through a discussion of German Bildung and pluralism. In the first of her two contributions, Anat Feinberg offers a discussion of Jewish attitudes toward the theatre that not only includes anecdotes of adult performers looking back on their first plays with starry eyes, but also examines the influences of gender roles (namely, motherhood and fatherhood) on would-be performers during their youth. Delphine Bechtel takes a fascinating look at the impact that Yiddish theatre had on German and Austrian theatres, observing that attempts to attract both German- and Yiddish-language audiences meant success for popular companies (which used language comprehensible to both groups), while “highbrow” Yiddish troupes were not able to survive as easily because they were unintelligible to a German-only audience (82). Bernhard Greiner explores “Jewish theatromania” as observed by Theodor Lessing (99), while Peter Marx offers a historiographical examination of Arnold Zweig’s fascinating Jews on the German Stage that builds on Aschheim’s discussion of identity performance. Two chapters examine the familiar genres of cabaret and expressionism. Hans-Peter Bayerdörfer looks at the tensions between Jewish identity (and minority status) and the majority German and Austrian cultures within cabaret performance. Malkin’s second contribution offers a captivating discussion of what drew Jewish artists to expressionism, suggesting (per Leopold Jessner) that the “Jewish actor on stage could, through transformation, both display and cover his or her identity” (168). The Jewish actor’s body is central in a number of essays in the volume, and the influence of Sander Gilman’s work is evident in contributions by Malkin, Aschheim, Bayerdörfer, and Bechtel. Questions of the body also inform Shelly Zer-Zion’s biographical chapter on two actors from Eastern Europe who studied in Berlin but ended up on opposite sides of the globe: Alexander Granach, who was born in East Galicia (modern-day Ukraine) and made his way to the United States after Hitler came to power, and the Polish-born Shimon Finkel, who eventually settled in Israel and became a major actor with the Habima theatre. The final three biographies are concerned with two of the most important directors in Berlin: Max Reinhardt, founder of the Schall und Rauch cabaret and director of the Deutsches Theater; and Leopold Jessner, director of the Staatstheater. The necessary moments of overlap within and among these articles, acknowledged by Malkin in her introduction, are initially unsettling though they ultimately serve to illustrate the complexity of the histories that the contributors are working to convey. For example, Bechtel employs an extended quote by Granach as a primary source to describe the prevalence of lowbrow Yiddish performance in Berlin. Later, in her essay on Granach and Finkel, Zer-Zion uses the same quote to illustrate Granach’s personal dissatisfaction with the popular Yiddish theatre that surrounded him...

Building a Community of Young Leaders

This study assesses whether more frequent participation in Jewish activist learning events is associated with higher levels of engagement in social justice-related activities and conceptions of Jewish identity. The study design was cross-sectional and comparative. An online survey was completed by 165 participants in an activist learning program. Results indicated higher levels of social justice engagement, local engagement, ethical consumption and, Jewish social justice. However, there was no significant increase in Jewish identity. Results differed depending on the frequency of participation. Findings suggest that activist learning programs may be an effective method for teaching and promoting social justice engagement.

Talking human rights: How social movement activists are constructed and constrained by human rights discourse

Human rights discourse is central for the work of international social movements. Viewing human rights as a context-dependent and socially constructed discourse, this article investigates how it is used by a specific social movement – Israel-critical diaspora Jewish activists – and argues that it can simultaneously challenge and reproduce existing practices of domination. The article applies contemporary critiques of human rights to the case of Palestine, where this discourse has arguably been used to undermine Palestinians’ political subjectivity and collective struggle, and legitimise outside intervention. Nevertheless, transnational groups critical of Israel, particularly diaspora Jewish organisations, rely on a human rights frame. There are several reasons for this: it offers activists a means to achieve ‘cognitive liberation’, to speak about the issue and to frame their activities so as to attract recruits. The article investigates this paradoxical role of human rights, and recommends understanding it as a language which both constrains and enables the practice of transnational solidarity.

Interstate: highway politics and policy since 1939

new, expanded edition brings the story of the Interstates into the twenty-first century. It includes an account of the destruction of homes, businesses, and communities as the urban expressways of the highway network destroyed large portions of the nation s central cities. Mohl and analyze the subsequent urban freeway revolts, when citizen protest groups battled highway builders in San Francisco, Baltimore, Memphis, New Orleans, Washington, DC, and other cities. Their detailed research in the archival records of the Bureau of Roads, the Federal Highway Administration, and the U.S. Department of Transportation brings to light significant evidence of federal action to tame the spreading freeway revolts, curb the authority of state highway engineers, and promote the devolution of transportation decision making to the state and regional level. They analyze the passage of congressional legislation in the 1990s, especially the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act (ISTEA), that initiated a major shift of Highway Trust Fund dollars to mass transit and light rail, as well as to hiking trails and bike lanes. Mohl and conclude with the surprising popularity of the recent freeway teardown movement, an effort to replace deteriorating, environmentally damaging, and sometimes dangerous elevated expressway segments through the inner cities. Sometimes led by former anti-highway activists of the 1960s and 1970s, teardown movements aim to restore the urban street grid, provide space for new streetcar lines, and promote urban revitalization efforts. revised edition continues to be marked by accessible writing and solid research by two well-known Raymond A. Mohl is distinguished professor of history at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He is the author of South of the South: Jewish Activists and the Civil Rights Movement in Miami, 1945-1960 and co-editor of The Making of Urban America, 3rd edition. Mark H. is professor of history at Florida Atlantic University. He is the author of Cities of Light and Heat: Domesticating Gas and Electricity in Urban America and coauthor of The Best Transportation System in the World: Railroads, Trucks, Airlines and in the Twentieth Century. Praise for the previous edition of Interstate The tale that Mark relates in great detail is an illuminating one of pressure politics, revealing aspects of the fragmentation of social and political life rarely examined by scholars. Richard Lowitt, American The best researched, most readable single document on the formation of U.S. auto-dominant policy. . Robert C. Stuart, Policy Studies Rose has done pioneering work in highway history. is a small book but an important one. We are becoming more acutely aware that in our world technology and politics are inextricably intertwined. Here is an excellent case study. John B. Rae, ISIS An extensively researched, brief, and important study that adds to our knowledge of interest group politics and the impact of the motor vehicle in the United States. Blaine A. Brownell, American Historical Review An excellent contribution to political and transportation history. an extremely useful account of the various hearings, conferences, and behind-the-scenes maneuverings that finally led to federal absorption of 90 percent of construction costs through the instrumentality of the Highway Trust Fund. an impressive beginning to historical scholarship on a vastly important topic. Kenneth T. Jackson, Journal of HistoryA remarkably thorough, objective survey and analysis of the role of various interest groups in fashioning highway policies in the 1940s and 1950s. a pioneer, definitive examination of highway development and transportation policy-making from the standpoints of various special interest groups. Michael Robinson, Public Works Historical Society This volume will fill an important area in many collections that probably have several volumes on transportation development after 1956. Persons interested in political processes, policy formation, and urban history will find this volume a useful and important contribution toward understanding the post-World War II period. Choice

Social Media New and Old in the Al-’Arakeeb Conflict: A Case Study

This article on the civic struggles of residents of the demolished Bedouin village of Al-’Arakeeb in Israel demonstrates how social media have helped marginalized communities acquire a voice. It is based on site visits to the village over the course of a year beginning in July 2010, and on interviews with residents, Bedouin and Jewish activists, and journalists covering the conflict. Media strategies of villagers and activists are described and analyzed, and use of new and old media by people with limited access to telecommunications infrastructure is explored. Subsequent news accounts of the struggle and the journalist interviews point to a multifaceted role social media play in progressive social change for the Bedouin.

In the Lions’ Den and The Panther by Felix Mitterer (review)

Reviewed by: In the Lions’ Den and The Panther by Felix Mitterer Todd C. Hanlin Felix Mitterer, In the Lions’ Den and The Panther. Trans. Patrick Drysdale, Mike Lyons, Victoria Martin, and Dennis McCort. Riverside: Ariadne Press, 2011. 209 pp. Felix Mitterer is arguably the most successful living Austrian dramatist. This latest volume of his plays to be published by Ariadne Press complements earlier translations of eleven major plays, dating from 1977 to 1998; this book presents two works from 2008. Mitterer himself provides a brief preface. In the Lions’ Den is the story of a Jewish actor who is dismissed from the stage by the Nazis, only to reappear a year later as a Tyrolean farmer, complete with costume and a beard and speaking in dialect; his triumph as the ultimate Aryan actor is celebrated by Goebbels himself, thus making the impersonation even more perilous. Translator Victoria Martin ably renders the various speech patterns for the English stage. One example is Meisel, the director, who blurts out fragments and stutters: Aber, meine Herrschaften, das ist ja, wo sind wir denn, Sie können doch Ihren Unmut nach, ich bitte Sie, hören Sie doch auf, unsere verehrten Premierenabonnenten haben doch das Recht, Sie, ich hole die Polizei. Gentlemen, this is, I mean, consider where you are, you can’t simply let your feelings, please, stop this, we value our regular audience, they have the right to, remember this is a premiere, you, I shall call the police. (6) A more formidable challenge, however, is the dialect of the counterfeit Tyrolean who recounts his attempts at theater and the reactions of his family: Der Vatter, da hat er no glebt, hat zan rearn angfangen, aber nit, weils ihm gfallen hat, sondern weil er mir oane schmieren wollt und er hats aber nimmer derpackt. Mei Weib hat a greart, weil sie gmoant hat, es hat mi a gfährlicher Rappel packt, die Muatter is ma eingschlafen und meine Kinder ham mi hoamlich ausglacht [. . .]. Der Vatter is gstorben, die Muatter is gstorben, mei Frau is gstorben, zwoa von meine Kinder sein unter der Lahn blieben, oans von die Madeln is ma in’ Bach gangen, weil i s’ a bißl gschimpft hab wengan ledigen Kind, dem Ältesten hab i vor oaner Wochen den Hof übergeben, und jetzt bin i da und möcht Theater spielen. [End Page 199] A comic tour de force in the original becomes a nightmare for the translator attempting to find a dialect equivalent in English: Ma da wiz still alive then, they used tae make him weep, but it wiznae cuz he liked the plays, it wiz cuz he wanted tae smack me one, but he wiz too auld by then. My wife used to cry too, cuz she thought ah wiz goin’ mad, my ma wid fall asleep and ma weans laughed at me behind ma back [. . .]. Ma da died, my ma died, ma wife died, an avalanche got two of ma weans, one of ma lassies jumped intae the river cuz ah scolded her a bit on account of her having a basturt bairn, ma eldest lad’s got the farm, ah handed it over tae him a week ago, and now ah’m here and ah want tae act (41–42). The effect is clear, and it is successful in English, at least until the character admits his modest background in Tyrol in the same Scottish brogue. Martin has taken the liberty to change the name of the character “Jakschitz” to “Morovitz” for obvious reasons of pronunciation in English, but two Anglicisms that are anachronistic for the historical period are “Moral Majority” for Pfaffen and “bet your bottom dollar” for Gift nehmen. The play’s ending is also somewhat controversial, as clarified in an editor’s note (presumably composed by Martin). Mitterer preferred a “von-Trapp-family ending,” with the hero escaping Nazi retribution and fleeing to the mountains with his children (who brilliantly recite verses from Lessing’s Nathan der Weise, imploring love and tolerance). Martin has constructed her own ending, allowing the Jew/Aryan to depart alone, without his intended revenge but with his sanity and his decency intact in a closing...

Jews and the Making of Modern German Theatre (review)

Reviewed by: Jews and the Making of Modern German Theatre Rebecca Rovit Jews and the Making of Modern German Theatre, edited by Jeanette R. Malkin and Freddie Rokem. Studies in Theatre History and Culture. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2010. 304 pp. $49.95. Historians and arts scholars have long discussed the rightful place of German-born Jews in German society and the tenuous relationship that they held historically vis-à-vis their non-Jewish-born fellow citizens. The curious paradigm of both belonging to German society and at the same time being apart from it distinguished Jews in Germany for centuries, despite the Enlightenment and subsequent freedoms for Jews within the unified Germany of 1871. During Wilhelmine Germany and in the Weimar Republic, Jews typically gravitated to occupations which reflected this trend. So it is not surprising that a majority of assimilated German Jews entered independent professions related to the arts, especially the theatre. What role did Jewish artists play in shaping modern German theatre during the late nineteenth- and twentieth centuries? What effect did avant-garde theatre trends have on German Jews and their self-identity? Jeanette R. Malkin and Freddie Rokem's fascinating, edited collection of essays, Jews and the Making of Modern German Theatre, begins to address such long-neglected questions. With the expert collaboration of twelve scholars, the recent addition to editor Thomas E. Postlewait's prize-winning series, Studies in Theatre History and Culture, offers an unusually varied palette of perspectives on the extent to which German Jews not only contributed to, but co-created modern German theatre. The editors, known for their scholarship in performance history, delimit their study as dating from 1871 to 1933 and encompassing non-traditional forms of theatre, known as "modernist." The book's organization devotes roughly the first half of the book to how theatre constituted Jewish identity in Germany. Many of the authors address the notion of Jewish modernization in terms of a remaking of self, acculturation, and self-transformation when Jewish actors performed their identity. In the book's second chapter, for example, [End Page 198] Steven E. Aschheim posits the theatre as an actual "physical and psychosymbolic site" within which the complexities of Jewish post-Enlightenment identity played out (p. 27). Other scholars like Bernhard Greiner and Peter M. Marx, in Chapters 6 and 7, respectively, reconsider Jewish identity and the theatre through the lens of Jewish philosopher Theodore Lessing and literary critic Arnold Zweig's provocative twentieth-century writings on the Jewish actor's propensity for mimicry and talent for physical expressiveness. The book's thematic focus on Jewish theatre artists within the German theatre resonates in each chapter wherein authors emphasize the shaping force that Jews had on their Gentile theatre colleagues. Among the anthology's strengths, in addition to excellent editing, are the thematic correspondences between the chapters. Many of the assembled essays inform one another from different points of view; and yet the separate essays also provide the reader with an overlay of topics, creating a dialogic discourse between chapters. In this way, Malkin, in her essay about Jewish actors on the German Expressionist Stage (Chapter 9), refers to the modernist director Leopold Jessner's concept of transformation (1922) by which the German Jewish actor "navigated" between being and impersonation, passing between the Jewish and the German identities enfolded within him (p. 168). Anat Feinberg (Chapter 13) offers a biography of Jessner and his influence on modernist German theatre. Feinberg's chapter thus builds on Malkin's analysis of the Jewish actor's capacity for on-stage doubleness as a social strategy to hide his identity as a Jew, while revealing a specific Jewish expressive creativity. Read together, these chapters allow the reader to better assess theatre production by Jews during the 1920s, while understanding something about Jewish identity. So too do several authors provide essays on such theatre innovators and directors as Otto Brahm (born Abrahamsohn) and Max Reinhardt (born Goldmann) and their vital contribution to German theatre. Peter Jelavich (Chapter 3) situates these theatre impresarios and their artistic influence within Imperial Germany, while Lisa Silverman discusses Reinhardt's personal metamorphosis and the impact of Yiddish theatre on his grand...

The refusenik community in Moscow: social networks and models of identification

Since the late nineteenth century the history of Russian Jewry has been one of contradictory trends: on the one hand, large-scale migration and resettlement (both abroad and in the major industrial and cultural centres of Russia/the USSR/the former Soviet Union [FSU]); and, on the other hand, attempts to (re-)establish a full Jewish life and adapt it to changing conditions. The refuseniks – a small but notable group of Soviet Jewish activists who were prevented by the Soviet authorities from leaving the country for Israel – melded both trends. Despite extensive literature on this subject, we are still lacking satisfactory answers to a few important questions, dealing with the factors in the creation of the Zionist refusenik community, its organisational frameworks, and the social and political legacy of the refuseniks for Jewish communities of the post-Soviet space and the “new Russian Jewish diaspora.” This article addresses refusenik associations in Moscow and in some other places as a “community in the making,” which between the early 1970s and mid 1980s, a period of Jewish national awakening in the USSR, experienced a process of gradual transformation from an amorphous semi-structured entity to a more institutionalised structure.

"A Drama of Faith and Family": Familialism, Nationalism, and Ethnicity among Jews in Postwar France

"A Drama of Faith and Family": Familialism, Nationalism, and Ethnicity among Jews in Postwar France 1 Daniella Doron (bio) The Second World War presented postwar French Jews with an excruciating death toll as well as a devastating demographic landscape: large numbers of single parent households, nuclear families in economic and emotional distress, and approximately three thousand orphaned children. In the decade following the Liberation, debates over to whom these Jewish children "belonged" captivated French Jewish child welfare workers, Jewish and non-Jewish policymakers and the public, and above all else families occupied with the Herculean task of deciding the future lives of parentless youth. 2 Should children remain with those non-Jewish individuals who had hidden, saved, and often loved them even at risk to their own lives? Or should these young children be turned over to distant relatives or Jewish communal institutions in an effort to keep them as Jews? In short, who and what constituted these children's best interests? The heated issue of custody rights of orphaned Jewish children confronted social workers, families, and surely the children themselves with heart-wrenching dilemmas, but it also presented them with an opportunity to ruminate over the contours of ethnicity, nationalism, and familialism in postwar France. For Jewish activists anxious to reassert Jewish ethnicity in the aftermath of the Holocaust, the best interests of the child could only be served in a Jewish setting, be it familial or institutional. In contrast, dominant French policy and public opinion regarding the settlement of thousands of displaced Jewish youth generally favored universal and republican values. French non-Jewish families facing the prospect of an emotionally wrenching family separation generally maintained that any loving family—be it Christian or Jewish—ought to represent "the best interests of the child." Many French judges and bureaucrats concurred, viewing the custody disputes as a propitious opportunity to reassert secular republicanism after the unsettling experience of occupation and collaboration. Regardless of these youths' prior nationalities and ethnicities, they could become the citizens France desperately needed. In [End Page 1] these struggles over youth, malleable ideas about the family were utilized to articulate both contested ideas about Jewish identity after the Holocaust and republicanism after Vichy. By exploring a series of politically and emotionally charged custody disputes, this article complements recent scholarly efforts to revise older narratives that suggested that postwar Jews preferred to slip back into a "normal" life by denying particularism. 3 Instead, ensuring a Jewish identity and education for orphaned youth acquired particular urgency and poignancy for French Jewish organizations and individuals after the genocide. More generally, these case studies reveal how ideas about national identity and citizenship have informed the familialist strategies of Jews in the modern era. The debates about the Jewish family that erupted in the wake of the Liberation demonstrate the extent to which notions of family and nationhood were often intertwined and how quickly they could be destabilized in moments of crisis. "A Difference of Psychology": Familialism, Ethnicity, and Universalism The case of Jeannine G. shines a light on ideas about familialism, nationalism, and ethnicity that emerged as France's citizens—Jewish and non-Jewish—worked to rebuild children's lives and the French nation. 4 In 1946, assuming their parents dead, Mr. Goldstein of Paris approached the Bundist Jewish child welfare agency the School Colony (La colonie scolaire) to seek help in gaining custody of his young cousins. Jeannine and Simone G. had been hidden from the Nazis by the Lacostes of the Nièvre since 1942. Now that safety had arrived, however, the Lacostes hesitated to give up the two girls they had loved for years. Upon hearing of the case, the School Colony—in the words of one social worker—agreed that the "fight must be continued" and helped Mr. Goldstein organize a family court proceeding (conseille de famille), which named him guardian of the girls. Soon thereafter, the older daughter Simone, then fourteen years old, left the family that had sheltered and saved her for the home of the Feldmans, her parents' friends in Paris. Later that year, when Mrs. Lacoste now adamantly refused to return Jeannine, Mr. Goldstein, in the words of a social worker, "virtually...

The Priest, the Woman, and the Jewish Family: Gender and Conversion Fears in 1840s France

In 1844, the Jewish physician Lazard Terquem received a Catholic baptism on his deathbed in Paris. His Jewish relatives and various Jewish leaders challenged this conversion, claiming that the barely conscious man had been baptized against his will. While the affair began as a scandal about a man, the Jewish press quickly turned its attention to the earlier conversion of Terquem's wife and daughters. The ensuing controversy—which also extended to several other female conversions from Judaism—quickly turned into a general debate on the weakness of the Jewish woman and the threat of seduction by Catholicism and Catholic clergy. Jewish activists who warned against these threats were not just appealing to their coreligionists' fears about the survival of the Jewish collective, however. Inspired by the works of contemporary anticlerical writers such as historian Jules Michelet, they also invoked a secularist vision which depicted privatized religion practiced within family as the foundation of the nation. With this vision in mind, those Jews who drew upon Michelet's language asserted that the conversion of Jewish women was a threat not just to the Jewish collectivity but also to French society as a whole. As they did so, they clearly positioned themselves within the French liberal camp, while simultaneously employing anticlerical and gendered visions of domesticated religion in order to reinforce the boundaries between Judaism and Catholicism. At the same time, using anticlerical tropes in their campaigns against proselytism allowed Jewish men to champion their ideas about proper gender roles and female domesticity.

Dina Pinsky, Jewish Feminists: Complex Identities and Activist Lives

Dina Pinsky’s Jewish Feminists: Complex Identities and Activist Lives is a slim book that makes a contribution to the literature on Jewish feminist activists. Focusing on Jews who were active in the feminist movement in the 1960s and 1970s, it looks at aspects of self-identification and political engagement. Pinsky is a sociologist by training, and this book emerges from her Ph.D. dissertation. She attempts the difficult task of relying on interviews with individuals to examine important questions about identity, history, meaning and negotiating cultural politics. The research underpinning the book was carried out by means of interviews with thirty self-identified Jews, each with two Jewish parents. Their Jewish orientations span from secular to varying current levels of observance; none, however, are Orthodox. All the interviewees—twenty-five who identify as women and five men—are white and Ashkenazi, and most are currently middle class. While Pinsky did not ask them about their sexual orientations, many of them self-identified to her, six as lesbians and two as bisexual women. The men all appear to be heterosexual, and they self-identify as pro-feminist, which they describe as the proper role for men in the movement. The Jewish literature informing the study reflects the identities of the interviewees. The book’s primary scholarly aim is to “think critically about the construction of cultural discourses and the integration of diverse identities” (p. 11). Pinsky and her subjects see gender inequality as “interconnected with racial, economic, sexual, and other systems of stratification” and feminism as “part of a larger worldview of political awareness and concern with social change” (ibid.). She found numerous subjects who grew in their self-identification and involvement as Jews through their activism in the (U.S.) American feminist movement. Jewishness as an ethnic and/or cultural identity, and not primarily a religious one, was a prevalent theme. The book is well organized in four chapters, and the writing is clear. Chapter One, entitled “Torah Warriors,” discusses different approaches the feminist activists Pinsky interviewed have taken toward involvement in religious Jewish matters and modes. One model, which Pinsky associates with the liberal feminist focus on equality within

‘Race’, normativity and the history of sexuality: Magnus Hirschfeld's racism and the early-twentieth-century sexology

This article explores intersections between ‘race’ and sexuality in the work of Magnus Hirschfeld and its racialised reception. Hirschfeld, a Jewish German homosexual physician and activist, was instrumental in establishing sexology in Germany during the first three decades of the twentieth century, until his lifework was destroyed by the Nazi regime. He is best known today for his theorisations of sexuality. However, following the events of 1933, he turned his attention from sexuality to an analysis of racism, which became one of the first studies of this kind. The article retraces key moments in the formation and destruction of Hirschfeld's sexology, and his own critique of racism, in a bid to address broader questions about the politics of biological and cultural normativity. It argues that while for Hirschfeld the ‘natural human’ was sexualised, he considered his or her racialisation an invention of normative discourses that aimed to naturalise scientific ideas as universal ‘truths’.

The Russian Jew Osip Mandelstam and Jewish Kiev

Most scholars of the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam believe that he was alienated from his Jewish roots and had no interest in Jewish culture. This image was partly created by his wife, who came from a family of Jewish converts to Christianity. As a close reading of Mandelstam’s four essays on Kiev in 1926 (the two‐part essay “Kiev,” “Mikhoels” and “Berezil”) against the background of his relationships with Kiev Jewish artists and activists of the Jewish cultural association Kultur‐Lige demonstrates, Mandelstam was engaged in a complicated intrigue aimed at preserving the Moscow State Jewish Chamber Theatre, which was at that time directed by Alexander Granovsky. Mandelstam’s depictions of Kiev betray his close familiarity and fascination with everyday Jewish life in the former Pale of Settlement as well as his alienation, as an assimilated Russian Jew from St Petersburg, from Jewish “provincialism.”

Speculators, swindlers and other Jews: regulating trade in revolutionary White Russia

The Bolshevik Revolution introduced sweeping campaigns for social and economic regulation in the geographic region of the former Pale of Settlement. Focusing on the policing and rhetorical construction of the economic crime of “speculation,” this article examines the effort to reconstruct Jewish economic practices in the early Soviet period of the New Economic Policy. Based on archival material from the National Archive in Minsk, Belarus, and from the contemporaneous Yiddish Press in Minsk, the article concludes that the campaign to regulate speculation and economic practices constituted a primary front in the attempt to construct post‐revolutionary Soviet Jewish culture. At the same time, this article suggests that campaigns to regulate speculation served to reinscribe Jewish actors as socially alien elements in post‐revolutionary society.

Lev Shternberg: Anthropologist, Russian Socialist, Jewish Activist

Lev Shternberg: Anthropologist, Russian Socialist, Jewish Activist

BOOK REVIEWS

Books reviewed in this issue.Literature and Fine ArtsLevitt, Marcus C. Early Modern Russian Letters: Texts and Contexts.Chandler, Robert. Alexander Pushkin.Sobol, Valeria. Febris Erotica: Lovesickness in the Russian Literary Imagination.Boele, Otto. Erotic Nihilism in Late Imperial Russia: The Case of Mikhail Artsybashev'sO'Mahony, Mike. Sergei Eisenstein.Shapiro, Gavriel. The Sublime Artist's Studio: Nabokov and Painting.Vinokur, Val. The Trace of Judaism: Dostoevsky, Babel, Mandelstam, Levinas. Kandinsky. Exhibition Catalogue.Masing‐Delic, Irene. Exotic Moscow under Western Eyes.Firtich, Nikolai and Dan Ungurianu, eds. From Gogol to Victory over the Sun: Trajectories of the Russian Avant‐Garde: Collection of Essays.Zamyatin, Yevgeny. We.Mikkonen, Simo. Music and Power in the Soviet 1930s: A History of Composers' Bureaucracy.Connolly, Julian W. A Reader's Guide to Nabokov'sHilton, Alison and Yelena Lembersky. Felix Lembersky 1913–1970: Paintings and Drawings.Ryan, Karen L. Stalin in Russian Satire, 1917–1991.HistoryMurray, Alan V., ed. The Clash of Cultures on the Medieval Baltic Frontier.Schmähling, Angelika. Hort der Frömmigkeit, Ort der Verwahrung: Russische Frauenklöster im 16.‐18. Jahrhundert.Dippel, Stewart A. The Sacralization of the World in the Seventeenth Century: The Experience of Holiness in Everyday Life.Jensen, Claudia R. Musical Cultures in Seventeenth‐Century Russia.Rey, Marie‐Pierre. Alexandre Ier.Ulianova, Galina. Female Entrepreneurs in Nineteenth‐Century Russia.Andrews, James T. Red Cosmos: K. E. Tsiolkovskii, Grandfather of Soviet Rocketry.Kan, Sergei. Lev Shternberg: Anthropologist, Russian Socialist, Jewish Activist.Patenaude, Bertrand M. Trotsky: Downfall of a Revolutionary.Graham, Loren and Jean‐Michel Kantor. Naming Infinity: A True Story of Religious Mysticism and Mathematical Creativity.Grant, Bruce. The Captive and the Gift: Cultural Histories of Sovereignty in Russia and the Caucasus.Engelstein, Laura. Slavophile Empire: Imperial Russia's Illiberal Path.Gentes, Andrew A., trans. Russia's Penal Colony in the Far East: A Translation of Vlas Doroshevich's “Sakhalin”.Sørbye, Yngvild, ed. Revolusjon, Kjaerlighet, Diplomati: Aleksandra Kollontaj og Norden.Rosenfeldt, Niels Erik. The “Special” World: Stalin's Power Apparatus and the Soviet System's Secret Structures of Communication.Moss, Kenneth B. Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution.Manley, Rebecca. To the Tashkent Station: Evacuation and Survival in the Soviet Union at War.Bergman, Jay. Meeting the Demands of Reason: The Life and Thought of Andrei Sakharov.Nikol'skaia, Tat'iana. Russkii protestantizm i gosudarstvennaia vlast' v 1905–1991 godakh.Ganson, Nicholas. The Soviet Famine of 1946–47 in Global and Historical Perspective.Dobson, Miriam. Khrushchev's Cold Summer: Gulag Returnees, Crime, and the Fate of Reform after Stalin.Karner, Stefan, and Barbara Stelzl‐Marx. Stalins Letzte Opfer: Verschleppte und erschossene Oesterreicher in Moskau, 1950–1953.Ilic, Melanie and Jeremy Smith, eds. Soviet State and Society under Nikita Khrushchev.Social Science, Contemporary Russia, and OtherJohnson, Janet Elise. Gender Violence in Russia: The Politics of Feminist Intervention.Shevchenko, Olga. Crisis and the Everyday in Postsocialist Moscow.Reuschmeyer, Marilyn and Sharon Wolchick, eds. Women in Power in Post Communist Parliaments.Wilson Rowe, Elana, ed. Russia and the North.Stepan, Alfred, ed. Democracies in Danger.Baschmakoff, Natalia and Mari Ristolainen, eds. The Dacha Kingdom: Summer Dwellers and Dwellings in the Baltic Area.Blom, Raimo, ed. Managers in Russia: Still So Different?Chaudet, Didier, et al. When Empire Meets Nationalism: Power Politics in the U.S. and Russia.Clunan, Anne L. The Social Construction of Russia's Resurgence: Aspirations, Identity, and Security Interests.

The unexpected cosmopolitans – Romania's Jewry facing the Communist system

This article presents the failure and inability of the emerging Communist regime in post-war Romania to integrate and make the surviving Jewish community of more than 400,000 into a productive participant in the new socialist regime. Ultimately, both leading Communists of Jewish origin and Jewish activists of the Communist Party, acting through the Jewish Democratic Committee, were branded as ‘cosmopolitans’, removed and purged as unfit to enjoy the benefits of living in a new Romania. The paper traces the mutual images between Jews and Communists, the role of the Joint Distribution Committee in becoming the major agent of the Communists to communise the Jewish community and take over its leadership and elements of civil society, only to be disbanded at the end of the Stalinist era with its leaders purged as ‘cosmopolitans’ and ‘Zionist agents’. The activities of high-ranking leaders of Jewish origin such as Ana Pauker, and their attitude towards Jewish emigration, are also examined in the light of documents available since 1989. In this context, the paper also examines the growing dilemma of the new regime. On the one hand it supported, based on the guidelines of Soviet foreign policy, the establishment of the State of Israel. At the same time, it tried to avoid mass emigration of Jews from Romania. Later, it would again shift policy according to the Soviet pattern and brand Israel as a ‘Zionist state, supported by US imperialism’. By 1951–52 the Romanian Communists realised several facts – that the Jewish community is largely made up of ‘middle class cosmopolitan’ elements, that the regime should get rid of them, and that high-ranking Communist leaders of Jewish origin, soon to be purged themselves, promoted the idea that Jews were unfit to adapt to the new regime and had better leave.

Kan, Sergei: Lev Shternberg. Anthropologist, Russian Socialist, Jewish Activist

Kan, Sergei: Lev Shternberg. Anthropologist, Russian Socialist, Jewish Activist

Lev Shternberg: Anthropologist, Russian Socialist, Jewish Activist. By Sergei Kan. Critical Studies in the History of Anthropology. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009. xx, 550 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Photographs. Maps. $65.00, hard bound.

Lev Shternberg: Anthropologist, Russian Socialist, Jewish Activist. By Sergei Kan. Critical Studies in the History of Anthropology. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009. xx, 550 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Photographs. Maps. $65.00, hard bound.

Jewish Women in Non-Jewish Philanthropy in Italy (1870–1938)

Between 1870 and 1938, a small but visible minority of Jewish women were very active in secular philanthropy in Italy. Excluded from the institutional Jewish community, which refused to recognize their changing roles, a few well-educated Jewish women became leaders, promoters and major donors in non-Jewish philanthropic projects specifically devoted to education and women’s welfare. The present paper explores this phenomenon from 1870, when the walls of the ghetto of Rome were finally brought down, to 1938, when Fascist antisemitic legislation forced the expulsion of Jewish activists and philanthropists from the institutions they had contributed to and, indeed, had often created.