Jewish Bodies Research Articles

It’s Time to Put Our Privileged Jewish Bodies on the Line

If we want to see an end to the Occupation, it’s time to put our privileged Jewish bodies on the line. That’s why hundreds of Jews from around the world will join with the Center for Jewish Nonviolence in the summer of 2017 to engage in civil disobedience and noncooperation with the unjust laws of 50 years of Occupation.After living in Jerusalem for seven years and seeing the daily discrimination against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank while Jewish Israeli life went on largely unperturbed, I knew something more than another educational forum or another policy paper was called for.The majority of the global Jewish world does not see the discrimination, segregation, and humiliation facing Palestinians living under the Occupation. But when Jews from America, Jews from Europe, Jews from Australia, and Jews from Israel stand together in solidarity with Palestinians, we will make the realities of the Occupation visible.When Israeli soldiers and settlers treat Jews from around the globe the same way they treat Palestinians—with arrest and suppression of nonviolent activism—the realities of the Occupation will be impossible to ignore. Why? Because while the global Jewish community is unable or unwilling to identify with Palestinians, they identify with us—because we are Jews.As we mark the shameful anniversary of 50 years of occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza, the Center for Jewish Nonviolence has been invited by our Palestinian partners to join them on Freedom Summer-esque projects. Building a community cinema in the segregated city of Hebron—not because a bunch of Jews from L.A. are expert builders but because our presence deters Israeli security forces from coming down overly harshly on the Palestinians who are otherwise prevented from building. We’re invited to till the soil in the South Hebron Hills—not because a bunch of Jews from New York City are expert farmers, but because our presence deters the neighboring Israeli settlers from harassing the Palestinians and intimidating them from planting their fields. Just as it took the presence of white civil rights activists to step into the segregated South in the 1960s to shake the rest of America out of its complacency around segregation, so too will it take the presence of Jewish civil rights activists in the Palestinian Occupied Territories to open the eyes of the international Jewish community.As a practitioner of nonviolent direct action, I agree with Rabbi Lerner that diaspora Jews must free ourselves from our deference to a moribund diplomatic process. However, there is a second, equally important habit of thinking that we must confront and reconsider: our preoccupation with Jewish views to the exclusion of Palestinians who are actually living under Occupation. Any theory of change that centers only Jewish concerns and leadership is doomed to fail. Fifty years on, we must learn this lesson.Of course Palestinians are entitled to the right to vote for the government that controls their lives. The Israeli government must immediately recognize this right. At the same time, Jewish activists who hope to end the Occupation must stop trying to call the shots, and begin listening and deferring to the vibrant, nonviolent, grassroots movement for equality that already exists among Palestinians.If and when this movement calls for a one person, one vote campaign, the Center for Jewish Nonviolence will be there to provide every resource at our disposal. If the Palestinian nonviolent movement instead decides now is not the time for such a campaign, we will defer to their strategic choices. All Jewish activists hoping to participate meaningfully in ending the occupation should do the same.

The Wadi al-Hawarith affair (Emek Hefer): disputed land and the struggle for ownership: 1929–33

ABSTRACTThe Wadi al-Hawarith (Emek Hefer) affair was considered to be one of the prominent land disputes between Jews and Arabs in Palestine during the British mandate period. The region in which the dispute broke out was found south of Hadera in Emek Hefer.The purchase of lands of Wadi al-Hawarith, by Jewish bodies, had already started at the end of the nineteenth century and continued for four decades, and during this there were disputes between the Jews and Arabs, which were accompanied by legal hearings.The Jewish National Fund tried to reach an arrangement by means of compensation for the Bedouin tenants who dwelled on the lands of the valley, in exchange for their willingness to leave the territory. From time to time, the Bedouins agreed to this, but they went back on their agreement.Despite the effort to reach compensation arrangements with the Bedouins, the Palestinian political leadership was interested in inflaming the opposition of the Bedouins to leaving the land. This is what caused a long string of trials, which continued for many years.

Memoryscapes: Urban Palimpsests and Networked Jewish Memory in the Works of Tununa Mercado and Karina Pacheco Medrano

This article traces the ways in which memories of historical trauma inscribed in the built environment of Buenos Aires, Lima, and Cusco inform the fiction of Argentine Tununa Mercado and Peruvian Karina Pacheco Medrano. Each author represents fictional cityspaces after projects of public memorialization have already begun to carve out spaces of memory in response to dictatorship (Argentina) and to the conflict with the Shining Path (Peru). These novelists, neither of whom is Jewish, map the relationship between the spatial dimension of the textual and the textual dimension of the spatial, acknowledging the value and meaning of invisibilized Jewish bodies whose presence continues to haunt the modern urban space.

Identity Papers: Contemporary Narratives of American Jewishness by Helene Meyers (review)

Reviewed by: Identity Papers: Contemporary Narratives of American Jewishness by Helene Meyers Brett Krutzsch Helene Meyers. Identity Papers: Contemporary Narratives of American Jewishness. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2011. Pp. vii, 239. Paper $23.95. ISBN 9781438439228. As American Jewish leaders continue to worry about assimilation and dwindling commitments to Jewish communities, Helene Meyers, professor of English at Southwestern University, explores the potential of American Jewish literature to serve as source material for imagining Jewish identity in ways that are not predicated on hegemonic notions of gender, sexuality, and race, suggesting that embracing non-normative ways of being will lead to a thriving Jewish future. Meyers engages in a close reading of novels, films, and plays from the late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first centuries to unearth how subversion, transgression, and alterity can lead to new and fruitful ways of being Jewish. The bulk of her work is divided into three sections: “feminism and orthodoxy,” “queering the Jewish family,” and the racial off-whiteness of American Jewry. She also includes a brief epilogue arguing for a reconceptualization of intermarriage as a site of Jewish growth rather than dissolution. Ultimately, Meyers offers not only nuanced readings of many texts, but also a cogent argument about the generative possibilities for American Jewish futurity through an undoing of what constitutes normative understandings of Jewish bodies, families, and relationships. The title of the book’s first section, “Feminism and Orthodoxy: Not an Oxy-moron,” reveals that Meyers is acutely aware that she is entering territory where progressive and Orthodox readers could take issue with her positions. To assuage the concerns of some liberals, Meyers explicitly disavows herself of Orthodox apologetics, dressed as feminism, that suggest Jewish women have a superior spirituality to men, as if to explain why women are not included in many time-bound mitzvot. For Meyers, such an approach to examining women and gender within Orthodoxy does nothing to disrupt patriarchal privileges. On the other hand, Meyers also argues that labeling feminism and Orthodoxy as oxymoronic obfuscates that multivocality within Orthodoxies, erroneously presenting Orthodox Judaism as an unchanging, ahistorical monolith. Turning to novels such as Anne Rophie’s Lovingkindness, Rebecca Goldstein’s Mazel, and Tova Mirvis’s The Ladies Auxillary, Meyers explores how feminist dialogues have been imagined within Orthodox communities. She contends that these narratives expose the ongoing shaping and reconfiguration of Orthodoxy. They do not offer utopian visions, but they do illuminate ways in which gender is and has been constructed, strategic moves for renegotiating the role of both women and men within halakha, and possibilities for feminist interventions to serve as meeting points and places of dialogue for Jews of all affiliations. These texts and others, Meyers asserts, show that as some Orthodox communities continue to move to the right and prescribe stricter gender roles, feminist innovations in Orthodoxy may become the primary means for many Jews to determine if they are comfortable remaining Orthodox. In the book’s next section, “Queering the Jewish family,” Meyers convincingly argues that homophobia, not homosexuality, is the abomination that [End Page 82] threatens the continuity of Judaism. The Jewish preoccupation with heterosexual marriage and reproduction occludes other forms of kinship, ways of being Jewish, and contributions to Jewish communities. Narratives featuring queer Jewish protagonists, Meyers suggests, offer creative visions for remaining committed to Judaism in ways that are not predicated on compulsory heterosexuality. Indeed, as Meyers asserts, to insist on or privilege heterosexuality is to alienate and cast out Jews who might otherwise remain invested in Judaism if not for the pervasive heterosexism and homophobia within many American Jewish spheres. Offering a broad historical sketch of Jewish homophobia, Meyers proffers that the recurrent anti-semitic trope of Jews as sexual perverts contributed to the reluctance of many Jewish leaders to advocate for the inclusion of queers, writing that, “investments in heterosexuality, with its requisite gendering effects, have become a way for Jews to move from outsiders to insiders.” (76) In other words, as an assimilatory strategy, compulsory heterosexuality has been a vehicle for Jews to achieve bourgeois respectability. Meyers additionally contends that, in the post-Shoah world, heterosexual reproduction has been esteemed as a way of preventing Hitler a posthumous victory, and...

Jews on View: Spectacle, Degradation, and Jewish Corporeality in Contemporary Dance and Performance

in the early to mid-twentieth century, modern dance played a critical role in assimilating Jewish bodies into the majority and replacing negative images with positive ones. in contrast, postmodern dances by Jewish choreographers have rejected universality for specificity, investigated the politics of difference, and issued sharp social critiques. still, most do not delve too deeply into stereotyping. this essay considers how three contemporary dance and performance artists—Lawrence Goldhuber, Rebecca Pappas, and Steven Cohen—use spectacle, degradation, and irreverence to make corporeal and performative interventions in a bodily history of anti-semitism, and to consider the impact of this history on their own bodies and identities. Goldhuber's When the World Smells Like Bacon (2001), Pappas's Thumbnail ( Monster 0 ) (2006), and Cohen's Cleaning Time (Vienna): a Shandeh un a Charpeh (A Shame and a Disgrace) (2007) viscerally confront difference, victimization, and power through public acts and radically Jewish physicalities.

Judging Jews: Court Interrogation of Rule-Making and Decision-Taking by Jewish Ecclesiastical Bodies

Determining who is in, and who is out, is a hot topic in debates about membership in religious communities, and the bodies, state and sectarian, that have the power to make decisions regarding such membership. For the most part, the state and the courts have taken a decidedly hands-off approach to interference in religious association decision-making. Some judgments have reinforced the proposition that individuals who ‘voluntarily’ commit themselves to a religious association’s rules and decision-making bodies must be prepared to accept the outcome of fair-hearings conducted by those bodies. At the same time, a number of judgments have demonstrated a willingness to intervene quite profoundly in the affairs of a variety of different religious communities and mediate the relationship between the profane and the sacred, the traditional and the modern. Our intervention concentrates on but two features of court-driven, constitutional review of religious association decisions regarding membership or participation in a given community. First, we suggest how the law of evidence can provide appropriate guidance to courts faced with the challenge of interrogating the validity of decisions taken by religious bodies. Second, we offer a theory of religious community life in a constitutional democracy that can guide courts in determining when and where they should and should not interfere in the decision-making of religious bodies.

Embodying Jewishness at the Millennium

This essay argues that in evoking and imagining vivid representations of Jewish bodily difference, Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and Philip Roth's The Plot Against America produce subjects whose distanced, critical relation to U.S. national culture is legible on their bodies. Rendering mid-twentieth-century Jewish visibility in hyperbolic terms, these texts suggest that ethnicity, queerness, and disability should be read in intimate conjunction with one another and as in some way accountable to one another. By contrast, the Jewish Americans in Tony Kushner's Caroline, or Change , while outsiders in Louisiana in the 1960s, inhabit a space of white privilege and align themselves with dominant racial and national narratives. Kushner's text, then, illuminates the stakes of Chabon's and Roth's imaginative (indeed, counter-factual) efforts to denaturalize the link between Jewish bodies and American national identity.

". . . mehr als ein Sportverein": 100 Jahre Hakoah Wien 1909-2009 (review)

Reviewed by: ". . . mehr als ein Sportverein": 100 Jahre Hakoah Wien 1909-2009 Rudolf Müllner "... mehr als ein Sportverein": 100 Jahre Hakoah Wien 1909-2009, edited by Susanne Helene Betz, Monika Löscher, Pia Schölnberger. Innsbruck: Studien Verlag, 2009. 368 pp. $39.00. Twenty-two years after John Bunzl's "classic" study of the history of Jewish sports in Austria (Hoppauf Hakoah. Jüdischer Sport in Österreich. Von den An-fängen bis in die Gegenwart [Vienna, 1987]) this ambitious anthology arises. The occasion for this book was the 100th birthday of the Jewish Hakoah Sports Club Vienna in the year 2009. The managing board of the club asked the editors to publish a book which would inform a broad public about the development of the Hakoah and also fulfill the standards of a scientific publication. Fifteen mainly young scholars with different scientific backgrounds (history, sociology, political science, architecture) contributed to this book. The study is subdivided into three main sections. It starts with seven articles focusing on the history of Jewish Sports in Vienna from the beginning of the twentieth century till the year 1938. The second section deals with development in the Nazi era and afterwards. The third section discusses the question of the role Hakoah plays nowadays in Viennese and Austrian sports, how Jewish and non-Jewish club members see their own identity, in what way especially women are involved in the club and what part antisemitism and racism still play in Austrian sports. The book also contains 55 illustrations, 11 facsimile reprints of historic key documents, and a register of persons. Most of the articles deal with historic topics. The methodological standard of almost all the papers is quite [End Page 206] good. The authors have invested an impressive amount of work and skill—using 22 private and public archives—to locate and to secure new documents and resources. With that new material it was possible to find new insights and to describe unknown coherences within the history of the Hakoah. The title of the book "... more than a sports club" ("...mehr als ein Sportverein") indicates that the goals and the meanings of sport and the Hakoah sports club go far beyond the operations on the sports field. But what does that mean? Basically the book tells a simple story of a group of Jewish people dedicated to sports. The group is not very big in numbers at the beginning in the year 1909. But the motives of its members are different from other sports organizations. They are deeply linked with the political situation in Europe and with the phenomenon of antisemitism, so it is important for them to emphasize from the very beginning that Jewish bodies are not inadequate and that Jews are not only able to fight but also can win in sports and in political competitions. In the golden era between 1919 and 1938 the club was very successful, and the number of club members rose to around 5000. Hakoah Wien was one of the world's leading multi sports clubs in the interwar period and served as an important role model for similar clubs in the Austrian cities of Graz, Leoben, Innsbruck, and Linz. But the sphere of action did not stop at the Austrian borders. Hakoah was intensively linked with its sister organization Bar Kochba in Berlin. In 1926 the Hakoah soccer team even travelled to the U.S.A. "They came; they played; they conquered" the New York Times wrote. The "Austrian Soccer Champion" attracted at least 200,000 spectators. But the successful journey ended up in disaster because fifteen of the best players of the team left Hakoah and did not return to Vienna. Stars like Bela Guttmann and Ernö Schwarcz found it more attractive to play for clubs like the New York Giants which were already involved in an economically advanced sport show business. This short chapter of the Hakoah history gives us insight into the general process of commercialization of sports in the U.S.A. and in Europe at that time and explains one of the main topics in current sport science. In another article Georg Spitaler and David Forster for the first time...

Returning to Flesh: A Jewish Reflection on Feminist Disability Theology

Returning to Flesh:A Jewish Reflection on Feminist Disability Theology Julia Watts Belser (bio) In her powerful assessment of feminist disability theology, Sharon Betcher argues that feminist recuperation of body has not been inherently liberating for people with disabilities. While a focus on the body allowed feminists to challenge a discourse that valorized the masculine-spirit above the physical-feminine, [End Page 127] Betcher argues that the body is too easily transcendentalized. Though attention to the body has allowed feminists to reclaim the spiritual value of embodiment, it has not necessarily occasioned feminist grappling with the gritty realities of corporeal existence. She notes the degree to which ability, health, beauty, and productivity are expected of today's body, and how these cultural norms become means of policing and subjugating the disabled. Flesh, Betcher suggests, is different. Unlike the body's heady wholesomeness, flesh is vulnerable. Flesh is exposed. Flesh is subject to violence. Judaism has unwillingly played flesh to Christianity's spirit for centuries. For many late antique Christian writers, Jewish resistance to the allegorical and spiritual meanings of the Hebrew Bible led the Jews into a resolute and stubborn denial of the Christian message—a persistant preoccupation with the corporeality of the law. Daniel Boyarin has emphasized the way in which Augustine and other church fathers framed the emerging Jewish-Christian difference in bodily terms. "The carnality of Israel's understanding," he writes, "is what consigns it forever to the realm of the flesh. That is to say, the hermeneutic practices of the rabbinic Jews, their corporeal existence as a people and their emphasis on sex and reproduction, are all stigmatized as 'carnal.'"1 Throughout Christian history, Jews have suffered for this unwillingness to surrender the flesh. Refusal to renounce the physical, tangible reality of Jewishness has left millions of actual Jewish bodies violated and dismembered. But the forcible separation of spirit, body, and flesh is not solely a matter of Jewish-Christian difference. A similar rhetoric of exalted spirit and deviant carnality underscores the relations between Judaism and paganism. In popular Jewish and Christian discourse, the divine call to Abraham heralded a spiritual revolution that transformed the ancient Near East. According to this view, the ethical monotheism first articulated by Judaism and later exemplified through Christianity served as spiritual corrective to the hypersexualized hedonistic culture of Canaan. The subjugation of sexuality, the body, and its flesh comes part and parcel with another triumphalist paradigm of religious evolution.2 Like fantastical and demonic caricatures of the Jews, the rhetorical portrayal of paganism becomes a dangerous specter with little grounding in historical reality. The "pagan" conjures up fears of child sacrifice, sexual indiscriminacy, homosexuality, moral degeneracy, and the overthrow of Western civilization—and links them with the feminine, the Goddess, the earth, and an embrace of the sacredness [End Page 128] of body and flesh.3 As Carol P. Christ describes, the charge of paganism has all-too-often allowed the institutional establishment to police Christian and Jewish feminist theologians, and to break burgeoning alliances between Christian, Jewish, and Neo-Pagan feminists.4 So yes. Let us examine the flesh. But let us not rush to remediate the amputations and scars that these inherited dichotomies have imposed upon our difficult, untidy bodies. Let us open up the terrain of loss and grief and exposure. Disability theologians have critical testimony to bear about the violence implicit in cultural efforts to sever and distance dangerous, unruly flesh from the rest of the more holy and wholesome body. As both Betcher and Eiesland underscore, disability names an identity created and reinforced through the experience of social exclusion and stigma. When Eiesland calls for the body's portrait to represent both bones and braces, she intends it as an explicit critique of "the unexpressed agenda of 'normal' embodiment."5 Likewise, Betcher emphasizes the ways in which global capitalism's incessant demand for cheap labor intersects with its power to fuel the aesthetic expectation for beautiful bodies as sites of consumption. Numerous studies have chronicled the sociological fact that disability is correlated with poverty and vulnerability to violence.6 This vulnerability results not so much from our physical experience, but because of the social and...

The Holocaust as Literature of the Body: Charlotte Delbo's Qui rapportera ces paroles? and Michel Vinaver's Par-dessus bord

This essay explores the Nazi glorification of the body as a tool for work and the concomitant notion that Jews, as threats to the Volk, shirked physical labor and thus were biologically crippling to the Reich. In retaliation, the Nazis degraded Jewish bodies and forced them to do hard labor, which they believed conflicted with the Jews' natural constitution. The extermination camp experience became an assault on the body, for the Nazis ultimately deprived Jews of their possessions, families, friends, homes, fortunes, and occupations—the cultural matrix that had previously sustained them. Prisoners were subjected to constant hunger, thirst, fatigue, and bodily harassment; diseases eroded their bodies. Charlotte Delbo's Who Will Carry the Word ? and Michel Vinaver's Overboard are discussed as exemplars of Holocaust plays that delve into the erosion of the body in extermination camps and thus personify literature of the body.

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

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

The Spectral Jew: Conversion and Embodiment in Medieval Europe by Steven F. Kruger

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER Romance as History, means that some texts, most notably the Bridlington Prophecy, do not receive as clear an analysis as they may have otherwise. I trust, however, that this will be rectified in that project, and I particularly look forward to the promised expansion of the discussion of the relationship between romance and historiographic discourses. A short review, however, cannot do justice to the depth of Ingledew’s scholarship . His careful reading will enrich our understanding of the penitential and liturgical aspects of the poem and renew debate about its historical context and references. Richard J. Moll University of Western Ontario Steven F. Kruger. The Spectral Jew: Conversion and Embodiment in Medieval Europe. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. Pp. xxx, 320. $26.00 paper, $78.00 cloth. Steven Kruger has been writing important and innovative articles on the topic of representations of Jews in the Middle Ages for over a decade now. This background shows in the breadth and erudition of this book, which is not simply a reprinting of earlier articles, but a significant and thoughtful expansion of this earlier work. The study draws upon an unusually wide range of sources and locations and thereby fulfills its goal of presenting changes and continuities over time and geographical region. Kruger opens with a reading of a visual representation of ‘‘The Living Cross,’’ engaging questions of gender as well as religious difference. This is a real strength of the book; although the title focus is on Jews, Kruger never loses sight of the intersection of this category not only with gender but also with sexuality and with other forms of religious difference, including representations of Islam and of heresy. This opening reading is later echoed by an equally compelling reading of Chagall’s White Crucifixion . Kruger’s readings maintain a firm basis in specific historical times and settings, but he also never loses sight of the relevance of his readings to contemporary issues and debates. The book’s title concept, ‘‘spectrality,’’ is a very effective tool for understanding what Kruger rightly terms the ‘‘strong ambivalence’’ in PAGE 502 502 ................. 16596$ CH13 11-01-10 14:08:29 PS REVIEWS medieval Christian representations of and treatment of Jews and Judaism (p. 5). Kruger’s theoretical frame draws primarily on Derrida’s Specters of Marx, but it is also influenced by work on sexuality (Terry Castle) and race (Kathleen Brogan). Kruger begins by examining the importance of temporality to Christian formulations of the role of Jews and Judaism; the notion of supersession posits that Judaism is the Old Law, but this ancestor cannot be completely discarded, since it is upon this Jewish foundation that Christianity’s claims to truth lie. In order to deal with this paradox, Kruger argues, Christianity attempts to ‘‘conjure’’ away the Jewish past, but this very conjuring perpetuates a haunting Jewish presence. As Kruger observes, ‘‘In being summoned up for burial, Jewish corporeality is also paradoxically preserved and invested with a transgressive, polluting power’’ (p. 13). In describing this phenomenon of an ‘‘absent presence,’’ Kruger takes care not to erase actual Jews from his argument. The book continually attempts to take into the account the impact of their spectral representational role on actual Jews, particularly through focusing on the debate genre and the question of conversion, which, as Kruger shows, are often interrelated historically and textually. Chapter 2 focuses on what Kruger calls the ‘‘long twelfth century,’’ a period marked by increased and significant cultural and intellectual exchange between Christians and Jews as well as a significant negative shift in the nature, tone, and magnitude of polemic against Jews and Judaism. Focusing on the writings of Guibert de Nogent, Kruger shows the ways in which the new formulations of Christian identity developed in the ‘‘twelfth-century Renaissance’’ were dependent on conceptions of Jews and particularly of Jewish bodies as a site through and against which Christian identity was defined. Kruger also demonstrates how the figure of the Muslim was seen as a different, but related, form of threat and reads Guibert against contemporary Jewish writings, specifically responses to the pogroms of the first Crusade, which constructed models of martyrdom in response to...

Jewish Bodies, Jewish Minds

Jewish Bodies, Jewish Minds Leon Wieseltier (bio) In recent decades the American sense of life has fallen under the spell of matter. In realm after realm of our existence, our explanations more and more adduce material causes, particularly biological ones and economic ones. Riddles of psychology are solved with references to biology, especially to genes and to Darwin; riddles of politics and international relations are solved with references to economics; and so on. Science has been twisted and promoted into scientism, and economics into economicism. The mind has become the brain. A dizzy era of technological utopianism has inculcated Americans with the belief that the best account of anything is an account of how it works, as opposed to an account of what it stands for and how it stands for it. As we master more and more gadgets of spectacular complexity, we come to believe that there is no higher kind of mastery than this. We are praxis junkies and freaks of information. Add to all this the frantically consumerist ethos of American society, in which the most widespread instrument of self-expression is shopping, and it may be said that we are living in a new dark age of materialism, philosophical and unphilosophical. The belief in the mind, and in the autonomy of its productions, and in the power of its productions to act as irreducible causes, is regarded as an archaism—as a "master narrative," than which there is no greater malediction. Never mind that materialism is a master narrative if ever there was one. It was inevitable, I suppose, that Jewish studies in the United States would sooner or later join in the anti-idealist fun. Jewish studies have always taken on the tincture of their surroundings, not least because critical Jewish scholarship has rarely managed to slough off the apologetic spirit in which it was born almost two centuries ago. Apologetics come in many varieties. And so cultural materialism has arrived at Jewish studies departments, with excited reports of important discoveries. (By cultural materialism I mean the view that mental expressions have their most significant or most interesting causes outside the mind, in its extra-intellectual [End Page 435] conditions and circumstances.) I propose to say a few intemperate words against this development. The history of the Jewish body was established to dispel a certain stereotype of the Jews, the old image of them as essentially "the People of the Book." It is an exercise in what Howard Eilberg-Schwartz, a pioneering scholar in this enterprise, described ten years ago as "re-membering"1 the Jewish body. The history of the Jewish body, he announced, would serve as "a reminder that Jews do not simply read and write books. Like other people, they have bodies" (PB, 7). I confess that I have never encountered a Jew, or a historian of the Jews, who thought that Jews do not have bodies. But Eilberg-Schwartz persisted in his conviction that he was bringing news: "There is a danger that the description [of the Jews] as 'People of the Book' will enable the issue of bodily reproduction and sexual intercourse to slide out of sight behind the symbol of the Jew poring over the text" (PB, 2), he wrote. And he added: "By shifting attention from the image of the Jews as a textual community to the ways Jews understand and manage their bodies—for example, to their concerns with reproduction and sexuality, marriage and death—we hope to contribute to a different picture of what Jews and Judaism are and have been" (PB, 7). In this way, Jewish historians will succeed in turning back "a larger modern strategy that attempts to disembody Jews and Judaism in hopes of spiritualizing them" (PB, 3). There are a number of objections that may be immediately offered to such a scholarly program. For a start, it is premised upon the very peculiar notion that the "textual" conception of Jewish identity, which it correctly regards as the normative conception of Jewish identity for most of Jewish history, lacked (or more likely repressed) any understanding of the corporeal dimensions of Jewish life. It projects an odd Victorianism, the image of its own fear...

Legacy of Rage: Jewish Masculinity, Violence, and Culture (review)

Reviewed by: Legacy of Rage: Jewish Masculinity, Violence, and Culture John Hoberman Legacy of Rage: Jewish Masculinity, Violence, and Culture, by Warren Rosenberg. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001. 312 pp. $34.95. The first and most famous proclamation of a masculinity deficit among Jewish males can be dated to Max Nordau's speech at the 1898 Zionist Congress in Basel, in which he proclaimed the need for a "muscular Jewry" that would rehabilitate the image of the timid and sickly European Jews of that era. From the medieval period on, he declared, the ghettoized Jews of Europe had been forced to practice an unnatural mortification of the flesh, and the result was an entire repertory of daily humiliations that could be remedied only by a physical rehabilitation that would reclaim Jewish personalities as well as Jewish bodies from their inferior status vis-à-vis other European males. Nordau described in painful detail the contemporary image of the Jew as physically out of control—pathetically clumsy, tripping over his own feet, unable to stand up straight, etc. The caricatures of "Jewish soldiers as ridiculous scarecrows" that appeared in boulevard magazines, he wrote, provided amusement to Jewish and Christian antisemites alike. A full century after Nordau's call for Jewish men "with a bold look in their eyes," popular and scholarly writing on Jewish masculinity is thriving. On the popular side, there are books that celebrate culturally anomalous types like Jewish sports figures and Jewish gangsters. This genre emphasizes cultural "pride" in Jewish male performances while displaying less interest in what might be culturally anomalous about Jewish athletes and criminals in the first place. Understanding such cultural anomalies requires a familiarity with centuries of Jewish social history, so it is hardly surprising that reader-friendly treatments of Jewish he-men do not include such historical excursions. These treatments of Jewish male heroes rather conform to Nordau's view that Jewish male dignity is to be achieved by adopting the predominant Western masculine norms—the familiar emphasis on force of character and the physical abilities that allow a man to conquer both his women and his enemies. Warren Rosenberg's book is a recent and important addition to a more scholarly literature on Jews and masculinity that dates from the publication of Paul Breines' Tough Jews: Political Fantasies and the Moral Dilemma of Modern Jewry (1990). Daniel Boyarin's Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man (1997) is another example of this subgenre. The distinguishing feature of these books is their combination of cultural history and redemptive ambition, for while the essays collected in Sander Gilman's The Jew's Body (1991) present straightforward cultural history concerning racial folklore about Jews, Breines, Boyarin, and Rosenberg [End Page 175] apply cultural and literary history to the daunting task of persuading their fellow Jews that what Breines calls "the historically dominant (if presently eroding) ideal of Jewish gentleness" is the true foundation of a genuinely Jewish masculinity. The subgenre to which Legacy of Rage belongs is thus unabashedly confessional in useful ways. The author's formative experiences around masculinity issues serve as points of departure for the exploration of Jewish male experience in a more general sense. Rosenberg's claim that his experiences "participate in a common cultural script for Jewish men" (p. 15) can be confirmed in most of the American literary texts he examines as well as in countless other sources beyond the purview of his book that document the nature of Jewish male experience throughout the American twentieth century. The thematic center of Rosenberg's book is what he calls "the contemporary Jewish male's dilemma. We have absorbed the stereotype that we tend to be more verbal and smarter than other men," he writes, "but we frantically resist the implication that we are therefore somehow less than fully masculine, that we are 'all talk'" (p. 1). The Jewish male, in short, is caught in "the continuing tension in Judaism between passivity and action, acceptance and resistance, earthly physical force and cerebral evasion, Esau and Jacob" (p. 71). One might respond to this portrait of the Jewish male predicament by pointing out that every man in...

"We'Re not Jews": Imagining Jewish History and Jewish Bodies in Contemporary Multicultural Literature

"We'Re not Jews": Imagining Jewish History and Jewish Bodies in Contemporary Multicultural Literature

The Chosen Body: The Politics of the Body in Israeli Society (review)

Meira Weiss. The Chosen Body: The Politics of Body in Israeli Society. Stanford University Press, 2002. pp. 232. Anthropological interest in Jewish bodies has historic roots in anthropometric measures used in German science between World Wars I and II to prove Jewish biological inferiority. Historian Sander Gilman, in The Jew's Body, traces efforts of pre-Nazi German science centuries back, referring, for example, to a medieval European physicians' correlation of Jews coming out of Africa black skinned due to syphilis, a condition shared with other Africans [1991:100]. Many sorts of others have been interested in scrutinizing Jewish bodies. The Jewish religion scrutinizes body. It requires male be circumcised at eight days of age. The religiously observant Jewish male follows a regimen of rituals prescribed by halacha, Jewish law, surrounding bodily functions. The Jewish female comes under Jewish law and ritual between first menstruation and menopause, subject to intense scrutiny by rabbinic authorities over issues of purity and pollution. Judaism is Israel's official state religion; in rites de passage, all Jewish citizens are subject to fundamentalist interpretation of halacha. In recent years, anthropological interest has focused on Israeli Jewish woman's body: Rahel Wasserfall on rules governing menstruation, Susan Kahn in Reproducing Jews on rules governing halachic interpretations for using modern technology to inseminate single and married women. Most recently, Susan Sered's What Makes Israeli Women Sick? analyzes reproductive body, militarized body, ritualized body, scrutinized and resisting to explain why Israeli women are far less healthy than Israeli men. The Chosen Body touches not at all on contexts cited above. Israel was born in 1948 in an uneasy balance of triumph and tragedy. It has existed in that perpetual uneasy balance, imposed and self-inflicted, since it was conceived as an idea in 19th century. Meira Weiss is an acknowledged member of socially privileged Ashkenazi sabra status group [native-born of European ancestry). She has devoted her professional life to dark, tragic side of Israeli life and culture. She looks at various ways in which the is constituted, and others, tragic non-chosen, are rejected. She conducts a special kind of participant-observation: she is a participant, an actor vested in system, perpetuating its darkness. She is an observer: using questionnaires to study different expressions of tragic in Israeli public and private life, collecting poems, newspaper articles, television and radio broadcasts and other cultural artifacts to illustrate her research interest. At times I wondered if, unintentionally, she got answers she expected to hear, if she asked loaded questions. The actor with vested interests is methodologically problematic. For this reason, examples of her questionnaires, and allowing those questioned to speak to us directly rather than through her voice, would have been appropriate. This is not an ethnographic account; it is more similar to cultural studies. Weiss traces Zionist story of historic origin of need for Jew for a new nation, physically distinct from weakling of Diaspora. She shows centrality of male in Israeli politic, a point made by psychologist Lesley Hazleton in her 1977 book, Israeli Women: The Reality Behind Myths. The difference between Weiss's focus and other feminist anthropologists writing about Israel is that they focused on impact of patriarchal on women. Weiss's focus is squarely on of idealized, perfectly formed, physically strong, young Israeli male of European ancestry. His is Jew for new nation, Chosen People's Chosen Body in modern state. Weiss traces impact of idealized male chosen on body politic in Israeli culture as a collectivity. …

Introduction: The Debate over Homosexual Ordination: Subcultural Identity Theory in American Religious Organizations

This essay plots the moral, social and ideological map within which Protestant, Catholic and Jewish religious organizations debate the issue of homosexual ordination. It argues that the bipolar cultural war thesis may describe the rhetoric of elites on each side of the debate but it fails to grasp the diverse positions held by American religious groups. Kniss's recent model of moral mapping provides a more comprehensive understanding of the Catholic, Protestant and Jewish debates in the context of American religious and political culture. Subcultural identity theory investigates why the issue of homosexuality is at the center of controversy in American religious denominations, arguing that symbolic positions are taken by religious clites in order to mobilize political movements, resources and members. In comparing the strategic approaches of Catholic, Protestant and Jewish bodies four typologies are outlined : exclusive, semi-exclusive, semi-inclusive and inclusive. This broader perspective on the argument over the ordination of gays and lesbians gives a context for the following four essays that analyze the recent debate over the issue in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).

Jewish frontier settlement in the Negev, 1880–1948: perception and realization

If we adopt Mikesell's definition of 'frontier' as 'the outer edge of settlement within a given area' ,' then the Negev which extends southwards of the line passing between Ashkelon on the Mediterranean coast through the southern part of the Hebron mountains to the Dead Sea in the East, constituted a frontier region in the period under review, from both the settlement and from the climatic points of view, in that it is a semi-desert to desert region. This article will describe and analyse the Jewish pioneering frontier settlement process in the south of the country until the year in which the State of Israel emerged. Special stress will be laid on the change in perception of various Jewish bodies with regard to settlement in the Negev, the measure of the practical realization of the various concepts and their relationship to the Jewish settlement enterprise in Palestine as a whole during that period. This article will not deal with the Negev in the period following the establishment of the State of Israel although one may trace certain parallels between the change in approach and events in the Negev today and the situation obtaining at the end of the Mandatory period.

Israel's provisional state council and government

The self-administration achieved by the Jews of Palestine served them well in the unsettled period which followed the United Nationals Assembly decision of 29 November 1947 to partition the country. Arab opposition to the scheme and the consequent refusal of Britain to facilitate its implementation, did not deter the Community and Zionist bodies, working in close collaboration, from laying the foundations of the projected Jewish State. When David Ben Gurion read out the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel in the Hall of the Tel-Aviv Museum on 14 May 1948, he spoke as the Chairman of the People's Council (Moetzet Ha'am), composed for the most part of the membership of the Palestine Zionist Executive (better known by then as the Jewish Agency Executive) and of the Executive Committee of the Community's National Council. Made to coincide with the termination of the Mandate, the Declaration provided for the transformation of the 37-man People's Council into the Provisional State Council (Moetzet Hamedina Hazmanit), which was to serve as the country's provisional legislature for the first nine months of independence. The executive arm of the People's Council, the People's Administration (Minhelet Ha'am), consisting of thirteen members, became the Provisional Government by the same instrument. The form and composition of the Provisional Council and Government were the result, to some extent, of contingency. The United Nations resolution on partition required the establishment in the new State, before I April 1948, of only one body, a 'Provisional Council of Government', to act both as administrative and legislative authority until a Constituent Assembly, democratically elected, should choose a Provisional Government.' In conformity with that resolution the National Council of the Community provided at its meeting on 1 March for the setting up of the Provisional Council of Government to be composed of the Zionist and Community Executives, with the authority to co-opt additional members from groups not represented on either of those two bodies. A few weeks later, when asking for the due appointment of the Provisional Council of Government by the United Nations Palestine Commission charged with implementing the partition scheme, the Zionist and Community authorities supplied a list of 25 names for the membership.2 The Commission, having been in effect prevented by the Mandatory from carrying out its assignment, even to the point of being refused entry into Palestine until two weeks before the date set for the termination of the Mandate, did not comply with the request of the Jewish representative bodies. Moreover the Palestine Government had warned against any attempt to set up institutions of the Jewish State while the Mandate was still in force. Then, on 19 March, the United States proposed a trusteeship for Palestine which would have the effect of deferring partition indefinitely.

The End of Orthodoxy and the Catholicism of Tomorrow

A well-known Roman Catholic review recently observed that modernism is not merely an internal difficulty of the Catholic church, but that the Protestant and Jewish bodies are likewise tormented and undermined by it. And the remark is certainly correct. For if, on the one hand, modernism tends to apply to the internal discipline and rites of the Roman church many of those reforms which the Protestants adopted from the beginning of the Reformation,—reforms rendered necessary by the changed conditions of the times, and today even more necessary than ever, —on the other hand it is profoundly modifying the very concept of revelation and making more and more difficult every kind of stability of doctrine and every regula fidei; so that Christianity itself, and the Jewish religion from which it comes, are to a large extent challenged by it and are in a measure associated with the church of Rome in one common defence. This defence, so far as it has any probability of success, thus tends to change not only the relation of these religions to the spirit of contemporary thought, but even their inter-relations, constraining them to abandon one or another of those positions which caused dissension and associating them under the protection of their common spiritual inheritance. Hence it will be worth while to consider briefly what conclusions are suggested by the most recent experience in this controversy, and what forecast we can make, not so much for the future of the individual churches as for a future of much greater interest, that, namely, of Christianity itself and of the religious consciousness among the nations of western civilization.