Jewish History Research Articles

Reflections on the State of Eastern European Jewish Studies: Editor’s Introduction

Reflections on the State of Eastern European Jewish Studies: Editor’s Introduction David N. Myers One of the distinctive features of the Jewish Quarterly Review over the past seventeen years—from the time that the brilliant and dearly departed Elliott Horowitz and I became coeditors—has been our reliance on the mode of the forum to debate, revisit, and probe. Our first forum in volume 94 in 2004 brought together a diverse trio of scholars, Robert Bonfil, Gavriel Rosenfeld, and Sister Carol Rittner, to analyze Daniel Gold-hagen’s book A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and Its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair. Their critical and often sharp reflections inaugurated a new tradition and created a place of honor for the forum in JQR. Since that time, we have taken up many trends, themes, books, and scholars in our fora; they allow for more supple and compact engagement with scholarship in the field of Jewish studies than our formidable articles. In the last few issues, we have begun to utilize the forum as a means of exploring the wide world of Jewish studies scholarship in different geo-cultural settings. There is a certain ambiguity in our formulation that, in all honesty, we were not fully mindful of initially. That is, we did not clarify whether we meant scholarship produced in or about those distinct geo-cultural settings. The fact is that we mean both. We are interested in how a particular space within the wider field of Jewish history has been represented in scholarship. And we are interested, as Marcin Wodziński exemplifies in his bibliometric essay on Eastern European Jewish scholarship in this issue, where and by whom research in a given area is produced. This kind of exercise, we hope, can shed light both on the subjects and on the objects of research in the field of Jewish studies. The kinds of reflections we invite vary in scope and disposition, ranging from the “micro” to the “macro” and even on to the “meta.” Our first such forum in JQR 111.1 (Fall 2021) explored Jewish studies and cultural production in [End Page 215] Latin America by asking seven scholars to choose a character from the past who illuminated their own research paths. The present forum pivots to Eastern Europe, home to what was the world’s largest population of Jews until the Holocaust. As such, Eastern Europe was the site of extraordinary scholarly and cultural creativity in a mix of Jewish and non-Jewish languages. Among the devastating losses of the Nazi genocidal assault was the eradication of this remarkable space of multilingual creativity. Recent decades have seen two important developments that animate the authors in this forum: the reemergence of Jewish studies scholarship in Russia and Poland—stimulated by often heroic individuals who emerged from the shadows of Communism—and growing post-Communist contestation and dispute over the sites of memory on which Jews lived and created. The call to forum contributors asked them to address in concise fashion an important moment, piece of scholarship, or personality that has been important to this field of research. The first group of essays takes up a diverse group of key Eastern European personalities covering over a century. Israel Bartal reaches back to a foundational figure of the early twentieth-century, Simon Dubnov, and examines the surprising reception and afterlife of the historian and Autonomist in the Zionist worlds of Mandate Palestine and the State of Israel. Ellie Schainker excavates the fascinating story of master archivist Benyamin Lukin, who played a central role in unearthing critical sources related to Russian Jewish history already in pre-1989 Leningrad, later in post-Soviet St. Petersburg, and finally in Jerusalem as head of the Eastern European section of the Central Archives of the History of the Jewish People. Benjamin Nathans offers a touching tribute to a dear Russian friend and mentor, Viktor Yefimovich Kelner, who, after 1989, abandoned the study of British labor history to devote himself to building up an archive of Russian Jewish history, which he himself began to study and master; Kelner’s biography of Dubnov remains one of the best studies ever written...

"Minneapolis: The Curious Twin": A Reexamination

"Minneapolis: The Curious Twin"A Reexamination Laura Weber (bio) "One might even say, with a measure of justification, that Minneapolis is the capital of anti-Semitism in the United States." —Carey McWilliams, writing in Common Ground, 1946. In the seventy-five years since the publication of Carey McWilliams's article, "Minneapolis: The Curious Twin," the notion of Minneapolis as the capital of mid-twentieth-century American anti-Semitism has achieved meme status. From major overviews (including by this author) to History Day papers, it is hard to find a single account of Minnesota Jewish history that does not note the shocking (and quoteworthy) appellation penned by McWilliams.1 Minneapolis was indeed fertile ground for a variety of anti-Semitic activity in the decades before and after the 1946 publication of "Curious Twin" in the magazine Common Ground. The article provided a measure of comfort to Minneapolis Jewry for illuminating its troublesome situation. More importantly, it moved elected officials to action, whether out of genuine concern, political posturing, or perhaps a bit of both. Proving or disproving definitively a subjective claim such as whether one city or another was "the" capital of anti-Semitism in the mid-twentieth century is beyond the scope of this article, yet as repetition of this phrase—shorthand for a complex situation—shows no signs of abating in recent works, I became curious about "The Curious Twin."2 What was the article's genesis? Who was the author? What was its contemporary reception? Just as Carey McWilliams (1905–1980) aimed to demythologize the character and culture of California in his influential writings on his adopted home state, this essay [End Page 59] similarly aims to "demythologize" his characterization of Minneapolis as the U.S. capital of anti-Semitism.3 The Jewish Communities of St. Paul and Minneapolis The "Curious Twin" of the headline refers to McWilliams's observation that the adjacent cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul were markedly different when it came to attitudes towards their Jewish citizens. In both St. Paul and Minneapolis, the first Jews to arrive were small numbers of Germanspeaking people from the eastern and southern United States, originally from Central Europe. These Jews were followed, beginning in the 1880s, by a much larger wave of Yiddish-speaking, more religiously observant, eastern European Jews who were pushed to emigrate by poverty, prejudice, and pogroms. A crucial difference between the two cities is that the German Jews arrived some two decades earlier in St. Paul than Minneapolis, migrating in the 1850s, as did many others, to take advantage of commercial opportunities during Minnesota's territorial period. In both cities Jews established shops selling ready-made clothing and dry goods. But in St. Paul they arrived alongside other White settlers from the eastern United States, including a significant population of Germans, with whom the Jewish merchants shared many cultural traits. In 1856 (two years before statehood) the Jews of St. Paul established the first synagogue in Minnesota, Mount Zion Temple. The Minneapolis Jewish community still numbered fewer than two hundred in 1877; its first synagogue, Shaarai Tov (today Temple Israel), was founded in 1878. The Jewish population of Minnesota was about one thousand in 1880.4 Historian Mary Lethert Wingerd suggests a reason for the differences between the two communities. St. Paul Jewish merchants joined with other Euro-American settlers to provide capital needed to fuel the territorial economy. This was in marked contrast to Minneapolis, where a commercially self-sufficient Anglo-Saxon Protestant elite controlled both the primary industries (in particular, lumber and flour milling) and the social mores of the city. As a result, employment opportunities for Minneapolis Jews in these industries, as well as most others, were closed. By the 1920s, for the most part, Minneapolis Jews had to be self-employed, either as proprietors of their own businesses or as professionals.5 Anti-Semitism, racism, and anti-Catholicism were on the rise in the United States in the 1920s and continued their upward trajectories in the [End Page 60] 1930s. This was by no means confined to Minneapolis or Minnesota.6 One source indicates that by the end of the 1920s Jews were excluded from 90 percent of the...

Introduction: A New Angle on Midwestern History

IntroductionA New Angle on Midwestern History Jon K. Lauck In a 1966 interview, Bob Dylan said "I'm not a New Yorker. I'm North Dakota-Minnesota-Midwestern. I'm that color. I speak that way. I'm from someplace called the Iron Range. My brains and feeling have come from there." Dylan was the son of Abe and Beatrice Zimmerman, both products of Jewish immigrant families. The Zimmermans lived up on Minnesota's northern mining range in the town of Hibbing, where Abe sold appliances with his brother. Beatrice, known as "Beatty," recalled having served latkes to all her Christian neighbors on Hanukah and embraced her identity "as an American … who went to school and enjoyed every one of my Christian friends." She sent young Bob off to college at the University of Minnesota, where he found his purpose as a musician.1 The story of the Jews of Minnesota's Iron Range, including the Zimmermans, is told in this issue by Marilyn Chiat, who is an architectural historian and codirector of the Houses of Worship Project at the University of Minnesota. Our cover features the B'nai Abraham Museum and Cultural Center, formerly B'nai Abraham Synagogue, in Virginia, Minnesota, which is discussed in Chiat's article. Chiat's treatment of Iron Range Jews is part of a special symposium in this issue of Middle West Review focused on the history of midwestern Jewry. We seek to expand the scope of the story of ethnic immigration to the Midwest with this issue and seek to add to what we already know from prominent books about the immigration of Norwegians, Germans, and Poles to the region.2 Erin Faigin of the University of Wisconsin explains how Jewish immigrants to Chicago built a world of reading and debating and a lively community discourse. More specifically, they gathered in places like Ceshinsky's Bookstore in Humboldt Park and read venerable Yiddish works and translations of American classics such as Uncle Tom's Cabin. They explored their new place in the world by reading books published at Ceshinsky's such as Antologie Mitvest-Mayrev, a collection of writings about Detroit, Milwaukee, Chicago, and points west. They contributed, therefore, [End Page xi] to a midwestern regionalism that blossomed during the 1930s and did so from an interior point of view, not one from New York, whose gaze tends to dominate the historiography. As Jessica Kirzane of the University of Chicago explains, Jewish writers brought a fresh set of eyes to happenings in the Midwest. They could see the Midwest differently, as their shock at the famed Chicago stockyards makes clear. Their viewpoint, Kirzane argues, "offers a striking example of what is to be gained by studying Yiddish engagements with the American Midwest." Another important engagement took place in Cleveland, where, as Sean Martin explains, Jewish civic leaders built a monument to interethnic cooperation in the form of the Cleveland Cultural Gardens. Martin, a curator of Jewish history at the Western Reserve Historical Society in Cleveland, connects this effort to the theory of American pluralism devised by Horace Kallen, who developed his idea while living in and experiencing the ethnic diversity of Wisconsin.3 Martin sees the Gardens as a successful "enactment of the theory of cultural pluralism." Although much social and cultural cooperation and ethnic blending can be found on the Iron Range and in Chicago and Cleveland, evidence of the ancient problem of anti-Semitism can also be found. Carey McWilliams, for example, the long-time editor of The Nation, famously characterized Minneapolis as the "capital of anti-Semitism in the United States." In her contribution to our symposium, Laura Weber, most recently the editor of the journal Minnesota History, seeks to demythologize and contextualize McWilliams's claim. Weber explains Hubert Humphrey's efforts to combat anti-Semitism as mayor of Minneapolis, highlights Twin Citiesbased Jewish leaders' responses to McWilliams's article, and suggests a nuanced reading of McWilliams's later conclusion that anti-Semitism in Minneapolis was "not precisely duplicated elsewhere in the Midwest." The claims of McWilliams, the consideration of the evidence by Weber, and the comparative work of the other scholars assembled in this issue suggest even more...

Is Superman Circumcised? The Complete Jewish History of the World's Greatest Hero by Roy Schwartz

Reviewed by: Is Superman Circumcised? The Complete Jewish History of the World's Greatest Hero by Roy Schwartz Matthew Brake (bio) Roy Schwartz, Is Superman Circumcised? The Complete Jewish History of the World's Greatest Hero. McFarland, 2021. x + 364 pp, $45.00. In Is Superman Circumcised? The Complete Jewish History of the World's Greatest Hero, Roy Schwartz sets out to demonstrate that despite the many Christian allegories portraying Superman as a Christ figure (made popular by the 1978 Superman movie), Superman is actually a Jewish character. Schwartz's work joins a growing body of scholarship dedicated to parsing out the Jewishness of the Man of Steel. Schwartz himself makes note of works like Danny Fingeroth's Disguised as Clark Kent: Jews, Comics, and the Creation of the Superhero (2007). While Schwartz does not mention it, one could suggest Martin Lund's 2016 book, Re-Constructing the Man of Steel: Superman 1938–1941, Jewish American History, and the Invention of the Jewish-Comics Connection, another text that examines Superman's supposed Jewishness (with a more critical eye toward the question). Schwartz offers three ways that his book uniquely contributes to this growing body of literature: "it examines the entirety of Superman's career, from 1938 to date, whereas others have limited themselves to his formative 'Golden Age,' ending around 1945, with a few ventures up to 1960. It also explores more deeply the Jewish parallels, including their theological, folkloric, historical and sociological meaning. And it's the first to focus exclusively on Superman" (5). One of the best ways to evaluate this book is to judge it by the criteria Schwartz lays out here. Starting with Schwartz's first point, the book is impressive in its breadth of material. Schwartz guides readers through Superman's origins and the early concepts from Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster that eventually led to Superman's debut in Action Comics #1. From there, he doesn't stop until events from Brian Michael Bendis's recent run on the character, including when Superman reveals his identity to the world. Schwartz also references the recent CW television show Superman & Lois, which debuted in 2020. In between, he discusses Superman's depiction in various comic book publishing "ages" (i.e., the Golden Age, the Silver Age, etc.) as well as the various serials, television shows, movies, and other transmedia adaptations of the character. While a book like this will end up leaving some things out, Schwartz follows through [End Page 89] on his promise to explore the entirety of Superman's existence, from the early ideas leading to his creation to works that have appeared within the last two years, all the while attempting to highlight the Jewishness of the character. I will address the exploration of Jewish parallels last, but to Schwartz's claim that this book is the first to focus exclusively on Superman, that's not quite accurate. Lund's (previously mentioned) text predates Schwartz's by five years, although Lund's does confine itself to Superman's early years. Also, Schwartz's book does focus on Superman overall, although at times in deviates into a discussion, more broadly, on the history of comics in general and on Jewish contributions to the creation and growth of the industry specifically. This is fine, and is done to provide context for the claim of Superman's Jewishness, but there are places where the text veers off course into one of these other directions so that Schwartz needs to throw in a sentence to remind us that the book is about Superman's Jewishness. I direct a majority of my critiques to Schwartz's claim that the book more deeply explores Superman's Jewish parallels than many other texts. To this point, Schwartz does need to be commended for the breadth of material he has assembled in this text. It is an interesting survey of comics history as well as the Jewish presence in the comic book industry throughout this history. Many scholars studying the history of the Man of Steel may also appreciate this text as a resource to find primary and secondary sources for their own research. There are places where Schwartz makes the...

Entanglements in the colony: Jewish–Muslim connected histories in colonial India

AbstractThis article examines often ignored ‘minority entanglements’ forged between European Jewish and South Asian Muslim intellectuals in Germany and traces their evolution in colonial India. The article focuses on three individual life histories and situates them within the more extensive Jewish-Muslim intellectual dialogue that resonated in the inter-war period. It brings to light the lives and writings of Josef Horovitz (1874–1931), professor of Arabic at the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College, Aligarh, and a prolific contributor to the journal Islamic Culture published in Hyderabad; Leopold Weiss alias Muhammad Asad (1900–1992) in Islamia College, Lahore, who also served as the editor of Islamic Culture, Hyderabad; and educationist and reform pedagogue Gerda Philipsborn (1895–1943) at the Jamia Millia Islamia, Delhi. The intellectual dialogue between minority communities, together with the contribution it made both to modern Islamic studies as a discipline and the forging of a new reform pedagogy, allow us to rethink the Jewish and Muslim question as well as the minority response to it through a comparative perspective. The minor history of European Jewish and South Asian Muslim entanglements makes for a rich testimony to the problems and possibilities of studying minorities as the makers of minor cosmopolitan knowledge.

News

The David H. Pinkney Prize, for the most distinguished book in French history published for the first time the preceding year by a citizen of the United States or Canada or by an author with a full-time appointment at a US or Canadian college or university, goes to Judith G. Coffin for Sex, Love, and Letters: Writing Simone de Beauvoir (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2020), with an honorable mention for Nimisha Barton, Reproductive Citizens: Gender, Immigration, and the State in Modern France, 1880–1945 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2020).The William Koren Jr. Prize, for the most outstanding article on any period of French history published the previous year by a scholar appointed at a college or university in the United States or Canada, goes to Sarah Maza for “Toy Stories: Poupées, culture matérielle et imaginaire de classe dans la France du XIXe siècle,” Revue historique, no. 694 (2020): 135–67. Ethan B. Katz receives an honorable mention for “Jewish Citizens of an Imperial Nation-State: Toward a French-Algerian Frame for French Jewish History,” French Historical Studies 43, no. 1 (2020): 63–84.The Marjorie M. and Lancelot L. Farrar Memorial Awards support outstanding in-progress dissertation projects on any period of French history by students enrolled in a doctoral program at a university in the United States or Canada. This year's winners are John Joseph Dieck, University of Minnesota, for “The Contentious Commodity: The Cannabis Trade in Colonial and Post-colonial Morocco, 1912–1962,” and Glauco Schettini, Fordham University, for “The Catholic Counter-Revolution: A Global History, 1780s–1840s.”The Gilbert Chinard Fellowship, from the Institut Francais d'Amérique research fund, supports research in any area of French historical and cultural studies and goes this year to Bryna Cameron-Steinke, Georgetown University, for a project titled “Monks, Malaria, and Marshlands: The Lived Landscape of Early Medieval Northwestern France.”The Edouard Morot-Sir Fellowship, also from the Institut Francais d'Amérique research fund, gives preference to young scholars working in cultural history, art history, or literary studies and goes to Sarah K. Miles, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, for “‘Un Seul et Même Combat’: Francophone Intellectuals, Global Solidarity, and Third Worldist Publishing from Paris to Algeria and Quebec, 1962–1981.”The Gilbert Chinard Book Prize, for the best book from a North American press on the history of French-American relations or the comparative history of France and the Americas, goes to Vanessa Mongey for Rogue Revolutionaries: The Fight for Legitimacy in the Greater Caribbean (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020).The Society for French Historical Studies and the Western Society for French History offer an annual Research Travel Award for research conducted outside North America on any aspect of the history of France. The 2021 award goes to Kelly Presutti, Cornell University, for “‘Agglomerations’: Accretive History in New Caledonia.”

The True Messiah (1669) by Yoannikii Galiatovskii: An Anti‐Judaic Treatise in Response to the Sabbatian Movement

The anti‐Judaic polemical book, The True Messiah (1669), composed by the Orthodox archimandrite Yoannikii Galiatovskii from the Mohyla Academy in Kiev, was a response to the emergence of the messianic movement of Sabbatai Zevi, the largest of its kind throughout Jewish history. Sabbatianism, as a theological phenomenon attracting not only Jews but also Christians from Eastern Europe, occupies a prominent place in Galiatovskii's polemic. This article aims to analyse its novel Orthodox anti‐Judaic features, together with factors which led to their development.

Law and Spirituality in Jewish History: On the Contribution of Isadore (Yitzḥak) Twersky

Law and Spirituality in Jewish History: On the Contribution of Isadore (Yitzḥak) Twersky

Vera Salomons and the Kotel: reading international Jewish history through a Jewish country house

ABSTRACT Vera Bryce Salomons is best known as the founder of the L. A. Mayer Museum of Islamic Art in Jerusalem. Drawing on a privately published obituary volume, this article explores her involvement in attempts to buy Waqf property adjacent to the Kotel in the 1920s. The article brings to light a forgotten story with implications for our understanding of the role of British elites in Mandate Palestine. It demonstrates how private archives and unconventional sources can be used to illuminate the role of women in international Jewish history.

Solidarity, Hope, and Wrestling with God: The Perspective of the Will for Life of the Jewish People in Modern Times as a Major Theme in Yehuda Bauer’s Historiography

ABSTRACT Yehuda Bauer is well known for his public leadership in Holocaust and genocide studies. This article, however, sheds light on another aspect of Bauer's historiography: most of his research studies—that is, those for which he dove into primary archival research and that are focused on more concrete historical topics, rather than general overviews, and have an extensive scholarly apparatus—deal with Jewish history only and, more precisely, with some very clear topics within it. They surround the Holocaust as an event but tackle a much deeper issue: the uniqueness of the Jewish people as a historical phenomenon, explored through the prism of the Shoah. Six clusters of studies, which are inter-related and often intertwine and overlap, can be discerned in this oeuvre: (1) his studies on the Brichah movement; (2) his trilogy on the history of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee; (3) his ongoing polemic regarding the American Jewish community's commitment to and investment in rescue activities of European Jewry and its (in)ability to influence US administration policies; (4) his studies on the behavior of Jewish leadership under Nazi rule; (5) his studies on the negotiations between Jewish groups and individuals and the Nazis on rescue during the Shoah; and (6) his studies of the phenomenon of Jewish communal organization and its modes of functioning, even during the last days of the Eastern European shtetlach. To these topics a seventh topic that bothered Bauer—which is quite astonishing in view of his firm stance in favor of Jewish secularism—is examined: religious Jewry and the possibility of faith in God after the Holocaust. Thus, it is claimed here, Bauer remained “on speaking terms” with God, but that his stance is mehutzaf (“contrary”)—the term he uses to describe a basic characteristic of the Jews in general.

Contested identities: interpreting and representing medieval Jewish History in Bristol

ABSTRACT In the late 1980s, a potentially significant site with links to the city’s medieval Jews was discovered in Bristol. The site has ‘Scheduled Monument’ status, granted by Historic England, and has been described as a ritual bath, ranging from mikveh to bet tohorah. This paper takes an interdisciplinary approach, discussing the complexities of interpreting the monument, its authenticity, and significance to the memory of local medieval Jewish history. This paper highlights utilises the historical narrative of the site and the roles of multiple stakeholders to frame wider considerations of prominent issues concerning identity, authority and ownership.

Conscious History: Polish Jewish Historians before the Holocaust by Natalia Aleksiun

Reviewed by: Conscious History: Polish Jewish Historians before the Holocaust by Natalia Aleksiun Helene Sinnreich (bio) Conscious History: Polish Jewish Historians before the Holocaust By Natalia Aleksiun. London: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2021. 329 pp. Natalia aleksiun's new monograph, conscious history: polish jewish Historians before the Holocaust, makes the compelling case that through an examination of the early historians of Polish Jewry, one gains an understanding of Jewish experience in the Second Polish Republic. According to Aleksiun, this is because not only were these scholars formed by the time in which they wrote and lived, but also that as scholar-activists they helped shape interwar Polish Jewry. Aleksiun begins and ends her analytical volume with storytelling, which wraps herself and contemporary scholars of Polish Jewry into the long history of Polish Jewish historians, which she canonizes in her important contribution to the field. She brings readers on a journey of the evolution of professional writing about the history of Polish Jews, starting with her chapter "Historical Beginnings," in which she provides a rich history of the scholars who preceded and influenced the post-World War I community of university-educated Jewish historians. This early group "embraced history as an important political and cultural tool for improving the status of the Jews and for strengthening communal self-awareness" (61). Aleksiun then introduces us in the aptly named chapter "The Making of Professional Polish Jewish Historians" to a new cohort of scholars, the main focus of the volume, whose university training led to their professional approach to the field of Polish Jewish history. They rejected Jewish apologetics and embraced "the creation of a national Jewish historiography in accordance with academic standards of critical scholarship" (63). As scholars in a freshly emerged state where nationalism helped forge the historical narrative being formed in Polish universities, these scholars created a place for Polish Jewry in the new national narratives. However, as Aleksiun informs, even as these academics saw themselves as part of the academic project of national history formation, their marginal status as Jews made placement in university positions difficult. This led these men to take positions in the public sphere and disseminate their conceptions of Polish Jewish history into the wider Jewish community. In their roles [End Page 206] as teachers, journalists, and religious leaders, they imbued those within their sphere of influence with their conception of collective Polish Jewish identity. They created curricula for Jewish schools; they discussed their conceptions of the history of Polish Jewry from the pages of newspapers and pulpits. As a result, these historians became extremely important in the formation of Jewish Polish identity in interwar Polish Jewish communities. As Aleksiun notes, Polish Jewish history, which was studied almost exclusively by Jews, ended up influencing those Jews and the members of their community. Aleksiun grapples with "the questions raised by historian Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi in Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory, probing within the Polish context his idea that in modern times a secularizing and consciously Jewish intelligentsia takes on history-writing as a profoundly Jewish act" (11–12). These scholars became Jewish actors on their communities. Ultimately, however, it was these same Jewish historians equipped in university settings with the tools of professional historians who set to work to write the first histories of the Holocaust in Poland. In ghettos, in hiding, and in occupied cities, they compiled the documents utilized later to tell the story of their community's devastation. They composed the first narrative and analytical histories of Jewish experience during the Holocaust. Ultimately, many died during the war, but as Aleksiun informs in her "Epilogue," their work lives on as a deep influence on those writing on the Jews of Poland today. [End Page 207] Helene Sinnreich Helene Sinnreich is director of the Fern and Manfred Steinfeld Program in Judaic Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She is a scholar of Jewish experience during the Holocaust and European Jewry. Sinnreich serves as the coeditor in chief of the academic journal Holocaust and Genocide Studies (Oxford University Press) and was the founding editor of the Journal of Jewish Identities (Johns Hopkins University Press). Sinnreich obtained her PhD and MA from...

Honey on the Page: A Treasury of Yiddish Children's Literature ed. by Miriam Udel

Reviewed by: Honey on the Page: A Treasury of Yiddish Children's Literature ed. by Miriam Udel Veronica Schanoes (bio) Honey on the Page: A Treasury of Yiddish Children's Literature. Edited and translated by Miriam Udel, New York University Press, 2020, 323 pp. Miriam Udel's Honey on the Page is a beautiful book and of great interest to fairy-tale scholars and aficionados. While the book does not focus on [End Page 325] fairy tales specifically, there are wonder tales found throughout the volume, and they offer provocative questions to our definitions of "fairy tale" as well as insight into the world of Yiddish literature, which thrived for seventy-five years in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The book opens with a foreword by Jack Zipes, who reflects on the political and ethical themes woven throughout the various stories. This topic is taken up in Udel's own introduction to the volume (the one directed at adults), where she gives the reader a very capable and informative overview of the development of Yiddish literature for children and the cultural and ideological milieus that gave it life. It is here she writes also of her decisions regarding the structure of the volume, which is modeled, she writes, on "early Yiddish anthologies, which tended to progress from the narrowly Jewish to the broadly humanistic," in an effort to "strike a sustainable balance between expressions of particular Jewish identity and gestures toward universal human belonging" (5). The book is divided into eight sections by theme: Jewish Holidays; Jewish History and Heroes; Folktales, Fairy Tales, Wonder Tales; wise Fools; Allegories, Parables, and Fables; School Days; In Life's Classroom; and Jewish Families, Here and There. Thus the volume begins with tales of Jewish holidays. Here can be found at least three tales that I would classify as fairy tales, such as Yaakov Fichmann's "A Sabbath in the Forest," which tells of a tailor who never fails to keep Shabbas, lost in the woods as the sun sets on a Friday night, before whom a magical palace, warm and full of food and wise fellowship, appears, so that he might observe the Sabbath properly. It is followed by Yankev Pat's "The Magic Lion," in which a rabbi, abandoned by his caravan while crossing a desert because he insisted on stopping to observe Shabbas, is sent a magic lion who helps him reach his destination. This section also contains Levin Kipnis's "Children of the Field," a retelling of "a legend very briefly related in the Talmud" having to do with Exodus (40). It might be argued that these stories concern divine miracles and so are not true fairy tales, but I would point to the often quite Christian literary tales of the late nineteenth century in response, such as those of Oscar wilde. A wonder tale can also be found in Part II on "Jewish History and Heroes," in which Rokhl Shabad's "Gur Aryeh" tells a tale of Rabbi Judah Loew of Prague, in which the rabbi throws a miraculous feast for the king and becomes his most trusted advisor. The volume continues with Part III, "Folktales, Fairy Tales, wonder Tales," in which Solomon Bastomski's "The King and the Rabbi" presents us with another wonder-working rabbi, this time one who saves the Jews of the king's realm from a wicked advisor. This trope, of the rabbi who advises a king, speaks to one of the realities that separate a Yiddish wonder tale concerning royalty from a gentile one: if the protagonist is Jewish, his reward cannot be [End Page 326] marriage into the royal family and incorporation into the larger community. That "reward" would mean the abandonment of Judaism, and of course such an ending would be no happy ending at all, at least from a Jewish point of view. Being trusted as an advisor, then, is the highest material reward possible. Two other tales in this section, Judah Steinberg's "Roses and Emeralds" and David Ignatov's "The Red Giant" recall to me the tales of Hans Christian Andersen and Oscar wilde in their lyricism, but with gentler moralizing. Further sections of the book...

НАСЛЕДИЕ А.Б. РАНОВИЧА В КОНТЕКСТЕ ИЗУЧЕНИЯ ГОСУДАРСТВА ХАСМОНЕЕВ

This article examines the views of A.B. Ranovich, a prominent Soviet historian of antique civilizations, on the Hasmonean state by analyzing his works through the lens of the epoch and, simultaneously, as opposing Soviet and “bourgeois” history. This approach opens up new perspectives for the interpretation of how the scholar turned his attention from Christianity to Hellenism. A possible explanation may be that the first scholarly quest for the historical Jesus and the Christ myth theory, promoted by A.B. Ranovich in particular, led their adherents to a deadlock. They finally broke through it with the discovery of the Qumran Caves Scrolls (1948) and the development of new methods of studying the early Christian texts, i.e., after the death of A.B. Ranovich. It is of peculiar interest to get an insight into what thoughts A.B. Ranovich had about E. Bickerman and V. Cherikover’s works because they all had a similar pre-revolutionary experience (Jewish background, traditional Jewish lifestyle in families, secular education, and membership in the academic community). The analysis shows that A.B. Ranovich was critical of “bourgeois” historians and refused their approach to studying Jewish history. However, this made him focus on the socio-economic features of the Hasmonean state and thus he proved that the Hellenistic states encouraged slavery. A.B. Ranovich’s work “Hellenism and Its Historical Role” testifies to his unique concern about the history of the Jews, although it was outwardly shunned. The conclusion is made that A.B. Ranovich preferred not to publicly identify and portray himself as a Jewish historian, but his reasoning, regardless of the numerous ideological clichés and constructs, was built on the Jewish traditions that he knew.

Contradictions between Faith and Reality in the Rabbinic Literature

In the following study, I examine the attitude of the Rabbis to reality on the basis of the parables told in the Rabbinic literature. I would like to answer the following question: how did the Rabbis react to attempts by gentiles to introduce substantial changes to the basic spiritual principles in Judaism in wake of the Destruction of the Second Temple? The paper reveals that the Rabbis ignored reality in order to preserve the fundamental concepts in of Judaism and rejected any attempt to introduce changes therein in light of changes in actual reality. They accepted positively only those ideas that strengthened the traditional principles of Judaism. Thus, when pagan sages called the Rabbis’ attention to aspects of reality that contradicted their traditional approach, the Rabbis ignored the pagans’ provocative questions. The Rabbis rebuked any attempts by gentiles to engage them in a dispute intended to prove that the Jewish God is wrong or has decided to forego His covenant with the Jewish people. However, when the Rabbis they feel that the pagans are truly asking how to fulfill Judaism in the best possible way, the Rabbis respond to them gladly, with focused and substantive answers. The Rabbis are unwilling to forego Judaism under any circumstances, even in wake of the catastrophe which befell the people of Israel upon the Destruction of the Second Temple which was the most terrible catastrophe in the Jewish history in that period.

Changing Perspectives: Black-Jewish Relations in Houston during the Civil Rights Era by Allison E. Schottenstein

Reviewed by: Changing Perspectives: Black-Jewish Relations in Houston during the Civil Rights Era by Allison E. Schottenstein Timothy Riggio Quevillon Changing Perspectives: Black-Jewish Relations in Houston during the Civil Rights Era. By Allison E. Schottenstein. (Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2021. Pp. 432. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.) While much has been written on the state of Black and Jewish relations in the twentieth century, particularly in the South, Houston has long been a curious omission from scholarship. This has also been true of Houston’s place in general scholarship on African American history. Despite the city’s large Black population and historical position as one of the South’s largest cities, few works on African American history, whether they address civil rights, urban life, or Black migration, have put much focus on it. This has changed in the 2010s, as scholars such as Michael Botson, Bernadette Pruitt, and Tyina Steptoe have increasingly engaged Houston’s history within a larger southern history. Allison Schottenstein’s first book, Changing Perspectives: Black-Jewish Relations in Houston During the Civil Rights Era, fits perfectly into this growing interest in Houston and southeast Texas. Changing Perspectives focuses primarily on Jewish activists in Houston and their responses to the inequities faced by the local Black community. Schottenstein contends that, in the face of civil rights struggles, Houston’s Jews largely “adopted a philosophy that was both liberal and focused on acculturation” (12). In practice, this meant finding ways to ensure the rights of Black Houstonians without sacrificing their acceptance among White non-Jews. While Houston’s Jews created a public perception that they accepted segregation laws, Schottenstein discusses how this was not always how community relations played out in private. Focusing on eight distinct periods in Houston’s Jewish history, including communist scares, desegregation, Jewish neighborhood migration, and religion in schools, Schottenstein examines how the relationship between Houston’s Black and Jewish communities grew throughout the course of the postwar decades. [End Page 329] Perhaps the strongest part of Changing Perspectives is its chapter dedicated to the coinciding fights against segregation of and religion in the schools. Schottenstein’s is the first major work to draw a connection between desegregation and the secularization of public schools, despite both movements having targeted White, conservative school boards in the South. For Houston’s Jews, Schottenstein argues, the fight over school prayer highlighted that “their identity as white Americans of Jewish faith did not provide them with complete acceptance in the Gentile world” (197). In realizing this, and seeing the roots of White discrimination against Blacks and Jews as interrelated, Houston’s Jews embraced the causes of Black Houstonians with greater publicity. The failures of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to protect religion compelled Houston’s Jewish leadership to champion the cause of full school equality more aggressively. Overall, Allison Schottenstein’s book is a welcome addition to the historiography of Jewish civil rights activism. She builds upon the work of Clive Webb and Mark Bauman in arguing that the relationship between southern Jews and Black Americans was more nuanced than arguments of Jewish inaction would suggest. Changing Perspectives also adds to the historiography on interracial political coalitions within Texas by highlighting the interconnectedness of Black and Jewish political issues in postwar Houston. The biggest strength of Changing Perspectives is its accessibility. Schottenstein strives to use history to be inclusive and a tool to build bridges, making it accessible to a broad spectrum of our society. Both academic and lay readers alike will find use in this book as it balances original and insightful research with an accessible and compelling narrative. Schottenstein’s abundant use of oral histories highlights the unique stories of Jewish shop owners, tradesmen, and school board members who quietly became staunch allies for racial change and equality in Texas. Ultimately, these stories will be what grips lay readers while offering scholars important details on Houston’s desegregation campaign that, until now, remained unexamined. Timothy Riggio Quevillon University of Houston Copyright © 2022 The Texas State Historical Association

Silkworms of Exile: Jewish History and Collective Memory in the Kabbalistic Works of Meir ibn Gabbai

Meir ibn Gabbai (1480–ca. 1540) was an influential kabbalist active in the first half of the fifteenth century. He was born in Spain, but following the edict of expulsion in 1492, he and his family fled and resettled in the Ottoman Empire. There, he composed three important works that enjoyed a wide readership and shaped the views of subsequent generations of kabbalists. While these texts do not reflect an interest in chronicling historical events, they are a rich resource for understanding how Jews in this period understood themselves within the broader sweep of history, and how they assigned meaning to collective Jewish historical experience. Ibn Gabbai regarded the dissemination of Kabbalah through the composition of kabbalistic books as a means by which Jews could survive the traumas of exile and correct the course of human and cosmic events. Drawing upon a rich array of medieval kabbalistic texts, ibn Gabbai argued for the power of Jewish religious practice as a mechanism for rebalancing the divine realm, perfecting the cosmic order, and returning the Jewish people to their proper place in the world of human affairs and flow of historical time. The rhetorical strategies evident in ibn Gabbai's texts reveal a remarkably self-aware approach to the importance of kabbalistic discourse for sustaining Jewish life in the face of historical challenges.

The Ghosts of Rose Hill by R. M. Romero

Reviewed by: The Ghosts of Rose Hill by R. M. Romero Kate Quealy-Gainer, Editor Romero, R. M. The Ghosts of Rose Hill. Peachtree Teen, 2022 [452p] Trade ed. ISBN 9781682633380 $18.99 E-book ed. ISBN 9781682634462 $11.99 Reviewed from digital galleys R Gr. 7-10 When her grades start slipping, sixteen-year-old Ilana Lopez is shipped off to Prague to stay with her aunt Žofie, with instructions from her parents to focus on her studies and give up playing the violin. To Ilana’s surprise, she’s mostly left to her own devices by her nonplussed aunt, and while wandering an abandoned Jewish cemetery near Žofie’s cottage, she meets Benjamin, a ghost of a boy now a century dead, and the two quickly form a deep bond out of shared loneliness. On a shopping trip, Ilana also encounters the enigmatic Rudolf Wassermann, not quite a ghost but most certainly supernatural, who gives her a violin and urges her to practice. Eventually, she discovers Benjamin’s connection to Wassermann and to the missing children under Wassermann’s care, and Ilana realizes she must contend with an evil that has stalked Prague’s streets for far too long. Dreamy verse makes for an organic introduction to ghosts and Jewish folklore but remains rooted in the history of Prague and Ilana’s struggles to negotiate her parents’ immigrant identities: her dad escaped from communist-controlled Prague and her mother from Castro’s Cuba. Vivid, unsettling metaphors evoke the horrors of oppression of Jews in Czechoslovakia, while Wassermann himself is the terrifying, haunting specter of violence born out of a lust for power. Readers of Podos’ From Dust, a Flame (BCCB 1/22) will find satisfaction in this mix of family drama, Jewish history, and the supernatural. Copyright © 2022 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Racism in Modern Russia: From the Romanovs to Putin by Eugene M. Avrutin

Reviewed by: Racism in Modern Russia: From the Romanovs to Putin by Eugene M. Avrutin Kimberly St. Julian Varnon (bio) Eugene M. Avrutin, Racism in Modern Russia: From the Romanovs to Putin (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022). 140 pp., ill. Index. ISBN: 978-1-350-09728-5. Eugene M. Avrutin's Racism in Modern Russia: From the Romanovs to Putin is a new release in Bloomsbury's Russian Shorts series. The brief, easy-to-read monograph is a timely and excellent addition to the literature on race and racism in Russia and the Soviet Union. The volume begins with the 2013 Biryulevo protests, which remain a frightening reminder of the power of racism in driving violence against Central Asians in contemporary Russia. Avrutin uses Biryulevo to underscore how Central Asian migrants in Russia are racialized as Black and how the Russian crowds use inflammatory, white supremacist language to mark Central Asians and Caucasians as others (P. 3). From these scenes, the reader learns that "Russia for Russians" and other racist sentiments are not new but a continuation of racialization and othering of ethnic minorities dating back to the tsarist period of Russian history. The introduction also provides readers with a cursory but helpful overview of the treatment of race in the secondary literature in Russian [End Page 377] and Soviet history. Avrutin argues that due to Russia's lack of an overseas empire, its absence in both the African slave trade and the Scramble for Africa, and the international image of the anti-racist Soviet Union, racism and racial thinking in Russia have often been overlooked in academic discourse. He correctly points out that race has often been portrayed as a nonissue in Soviet historiography. He asks: What factors account for this silence (dismissing race-based thought and practices)? Why have scholars shown so little interest in historical and theoretical discussions of race? (P. 4). Avrutin powerfully demonstrates that racial ideologies and racial hierarchies have been part of Russian cultural and social history throughout the 150 years that his book covers. From the premise of the "messy" color line – one in which the ideas and process of racialization are not fixed nor stable – Avrutin diagrams for readers the forms and functions of race in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. He argues that race did not dictate citizenship or social position in Russia or the Soviet Union, "but by rejecting the premise that an individual could belong to multiple identities, the state's classification system primed people to see the world in unambiguous racial terms" (P. 7). Thus, the classification and ordering of groups within the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union according to nationality or ethnicity can be better contextualized in a paradigm of race. The book is organized chronologically into four chapters. Chapter 1, "The Empire's Races," relates the development of anthropological and "scientific" thinking on race in the ethnically and culturally diverse Russian Empire. The chapter also places Russia within Western European discourses on race and racial differences in the nienteenth century. One of the most interesting sections of this chapter examines how Russian anthropologists and race ideologues approached Jews and other ethnic minorities within the empire. Race scientists such as the anthropologist Aleksei Arsen'evich Ivanovskii were confounded by Russia's Jewish population and categorized them as a distinct, non-Russian, race. Imperial expansion merged with the development of social sciences making the myriad of ethnic groups within the empire's borders a boon for Russian anthropologists and reified the idea that Russia was unique relative to its European imperial counterparts. Chapter 2, "Boundaries of Exclusion," builds on the previous chapter's explanation of how race and racial difference were discussed and applied in academics and research. It explores the execution of racialization through how Russianness was defined and utilized by the [End Page 378] tsar and the imperial government to engender public support, maintain political order, and oppress minority nationalities. This chapter draws on Avrutin's expertise in Jewish history with a fascinating discussion of the 1913 Beilis trial that ties the Russian reaction to the case to similar racist attitudes in the United States toward African Americans in the post–Reconstruction Era. Another...

Introduction: Margin Release

Introduction: Margin Release