Jewish Immigrants Research Articles

Uwagi na temat emigracji żydowskiej z Królestwa Polskiego do USA przed pierwszą wojną światową

Before 1914, more than 2 million Jews arrived in the United States of America, accounting for nearly 6% of all European emigration to that country. It is estimated that up to 70% of Jewish immigrants in the United States were subjects of the Tsar, and up to a third of them came from the Polish lands of the Russian empire. Jews from the Kingdom of Poland were the first among the inhabitants of the Russian Empire to establish legal and illegal migration channels. This was due to the proximity of the German-Russian border and thus easier access to German ports, as well as the ties connecting the Jews in the Kingdom with their co-religionists in the Prussian partition. Based on the literature on the subject and statistical data, the article discusses the volume of emigration from the Polish lands with special emphasis on the emigration of Jews from the Kingdom of Poland, the circumstances and causes of emigration with consideration given to changing theories on the subject, the nature of Jewish emigration and migration routes. The aim of this article is, first of all, to review the present state of research on the overseas emigration of Jews from the Kingdom of Poland and then to indicate source materials and literature that will help in further research.

Murray Bookchin; Dari Bolshevik ke Marxis Otonomis

This study discusses a brief biography of Murray Bookchin's revolutionary journey by tracing his activism and intellectual movements. This study uses a literary or library research approach, namely a comparative study to explore and trace the life journey of Bookchin. Boochin's long history of involvement in the revolutionary movement was inherited directly by his grandmother Zeitel Carlat who was a combatant in the war against the dictatorship of the Tsarist Empire. Zeitel who grew up with a liberal and secular education from the Haskalah tradition then passed his ideas on to his children, one of whom was Bookchin's mother, Rose. Rose is very different from her mother Zeitel. The difference was clearly illustrated when Rose chose to join the Russian Anarchist Workers' Union rather than join the American Communist Party. Over time Rose later married Nathan, a fellow Jewish immigrant. However, because Zeitel's hatred for Nathan was so strong, Rose and Nathan's relationship had to end. It was at this moment that Bookchin was first educated directly by his grandmother. From a young age, Bookchin was introduced to Russian revolutionary traditions, such as Stenka Razin, the leader of the Cossack rebellion and the large-scale peasantry in southeastern Russia. This search process is an attempt to elaborate and trace the background of Murray Bookchin's life so that he can find his own concept of thinking, namely dialectical naturalism and the concept of social ecology which has an important contribution to the dimensions of social science, especially sociology.

Ministering to Body and Soul: Medical Missions and the Jewish Community in Nineteenth-Century London

From 1879, evangelical missions aimed specifically at Jews began providing free medical services to the newly arrived immigrant community in London's East End. This article focuses on three specific medical missions to Jews belonging to the London Society for Promoting Christianity among the Jews, the British Society for the Propagation of the Gospel amongst the Jews and the Mildmay Mission to the Jews. It considers the particular attractions of these medical missions in terms of what they were able to offer the immigrant Jew that existing state and voluntary medical services did not provide, alongside the cost and possible risk posed by attendance. The article questions whether the popularity of evangelical medical missions within the Jewish East End is as surprising as it may first appear, if the limited health care options available to the nineteenth-century poor are considered in conjunction with the additional obstacles facing Jewish immigrants, such as cultural and religious differences, anti-Jewish prejudice and most notably the language barrier.

Colonial Settlement in West Bank and Means to Resist It

The settlement project is considered as the cornerstone of the Zionist Movement. It is one of the pillars of Israel's establishment of its entity after 1948 and 1967, following which Israel managed to control every part of the occupied lands. This study aims to understand the Zionist ideology, policies and goals, demonstrate the Palestinian and international positions on settlements, and recognize how serious those positions are. The researcher uses the descriptive and historic approaches, and addresses two main topics: The Settlement Projects, its concepts and practices, and the international position on the settlement project and means to resist it. The study also concludes that the Israeli occupation was based on two essentials cornerstones: Immigration and Settlements. After the Jewish immigration was reduced, the settlements became the most important element of the Jewish creed. Settlements are the heart of the Israeli existence; thus, the occupation believes that its presence is bound by the continuation of establishing settlements.

Colonial Settlement in West Bank and Means to resist it

Abstract
 The settlement project is considered as the cornerstone of the Zionist Movement. It is one of the pillars of Israel's establishment of its entity after 1948 and 1967, following which Israel managed to control every part of the occupied lands. This study aims to understand the Zionist ideology, policies and goals, demonstrate the Palestinian and international positions on settlements, and recognize how serious those positions are. The researcher uses the descriptive and historic approaches, and addresses two main topics: The Settlement Projects, its concepts and practices, and the international position on the settlement project and means to resist it. The study also concludes that the Israeli occupation was based on two essentials cornerstones: Immigration and Settlements. After the Jewish immigration was reduced, the settlements became the most important element of the Jewish creed. Settlements are the heart of the Israeli existence; thus, the occupation believes that its presence is bound by the continuation of establishing settlements.

Just Because We Can Doesn’t Mean We Should: On Knowing and Protecting Data Produced by the Jewish Consumptives’ Relief Society

A recent project at the University of Denver Libraries used handwritten text recognition (HTR) software to create transcriptions of records from the Jewish Consumptives’ Relief Society (JCRS), a tuberculosis sanatorium located in Denver, Colorado from 1904 to 1954. Among a great many other potential uses, these type- and hand-written records give insight into the human experience of disease and epidemic, its treatment, its effect on cultures, and of Jewish immigration to and early life in the American West. Our intent is to provide these transcripts as data so the text may be computationally analyzed, pursuant to a larger effort in developing capacity in services and infrastructure to support digital humanities as a library, and to contribute to the emerging HTR ecosystem in archival work. Just because we can, however, doesn’t always mean we should: the realities of publishing large datasets online that contain medical and personal histories of potentially vulnerable people and communities introduce serious ethical considerations. This paper both underscores the value of HTR and frames ethical considerations related to protecting data derived from it. It suggests a terms-of-use intervention perhaps valuable to similar projects, one that balances meeting the research needs of digital scholars with the care and respect of persons, their communities and inheritors, who lives produced the very data now valuable to those researchers.

Exploring Homicide Diversity: Femicide Across Sociocultural Groups

This study followed the current scholarly interest in seeking possible links between social and cultural factors and homicide by offering comparative nation-based observations on femicide. To this end, the study analyzed femicide events across social groups in Israel (veteran Jews, Jewish immigrants from the former USSR, Ethiopian immigrant Jews, Arabs, Christians, Druze, Muslims, and Bedouin) and foreigners (asylum seekers and foreign workers) during a 6-year period (2010–2015). Data from 162 cases were collected and coded based on 25 sociodemographic and criminological variables. Empirical observations suggest sociocultural diversity in the femicide phenomenon across social groups. Femicide’s frequency and sociodemographic characteristics seem to be related to cultural dimensions pertaining to individualistic versus collectivistic cultures, with social factors such as level of education, socioeconomic status, and immigration possible overriding the effects of cultural dimensions on femicide. Highlighting sociocultural criminal diversity, the article’s observations may be of great relevance to societies facing the challenge of assimilating diverse sociocultural groups.

Reproductive Citizens: Gender, Immigration, and the State in Modern France, 1880–1945 by Nimisha Barton

Reviewed by: Reproductive Citizens: Gender, Immigration, and the State in Modern France, 1880–1945 by Nimisha Barton Virginie Ems-Bléneau Barton, Nimisha. Reproductive Citizens: Gender, Immigration, and the State in Modern France, 1880–1945. Cornell UP, 2020. ISBN 978-1-5017-4963-6. Pp. xv + 284. While Barton did not coin the term "reproductive citizenship," it is a relatively novel concept in the study of individual rights and social frameworks. As presented in this book, the phrase accounts for the interwoven privileges, duties, and protections to which foreign-born French residents were subjected during France's populationist Third Republic. Due to France's (real and perceived, qualitative and quantitative) depopulation crisis, France eagerly opened its borders to immigrants as long as they "adopted profamily attitudes and procreative behaviors, and presented themselves in the acceptable accents of heterosexual masculinity and femininity" (5). The State, with the help of private and state-run welfare institutions, participated in shaping the gendered identity of its foreign population through what Barton calls "disciplinary paternalism" and "supportive maternalism." Foreign men were tolerated as long as they married and produced new French citizens, while foreign women, as the mothers of this new generation of French citizens, were supported through an array of benefits, if not rights (although family law also evolved to offer single mothers more stability at that time). Reproductive citizenship manifested itself in some perhaps unexpected ways: Women, an historically powerless class, received unprecedented attention from French officials with whom they often negotiated to obtain benefits, pensions, or even their husband's citizenship, thus showing a certain level of agency usually reserved to male subjects. Reproductive citizenship also proved more effective than legal citizenship in protecting France's Jewish population during the Vichy Regime. Many members of welfare organizations who had helped immigrant Jews for decades before the war refused to abandon their mission and charges, often actively aiding Jewish children and women by transporting or hiding them, sometimes at the cost of their own life. Furthermore, French citizens who had lived side-by-side with their foreign neighbors in Paris were much less inclined to denounce them than was the case in less diverse rural communities. Reproductive citizenship can therefore be seen as a set of practical, sometimes life-or-death, regulatory practices that affected the day-to-day life of foreign and French-born citizens as much as, if not more than, legal citizenship. The strength of this book lies in its attention to details and relatability. By offering personal accounts to illustrate the effects of these populationist policies, Barton has made History accessible, and maybe more importantly, real: These are people's stories, [End Page 219] lives lived. This book will therefore appeal to a wide readership, from historians and anthropologists to sociologists and gender studies scholars, to name just a few. Political scientists and lawmakers would particularly benefit from learning how policies aimed at increasing a nation's population through immigration can strengthen neighborhoods through mutual support and cohesion, all the while promoting national sentiment. [End Page 220] Virginie Ems-Bléneau Georgia Southern University Copyright © 2022 American Association of Teachers of French

International Jewish Humanitarianism in the Age of the Great War by Jaclyn Granick

Reviewed by: International Jewish Humanitarianism in the Age of the Great War by Jaclyn Granick Carole Fink (bio) International Jewish Humanitarianism in the Age of the Great War. By Jaclyn Granick. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. xiv + 404 pp. Jaclyn Granick's meticulous and compelling monograph is an important contribution to contemporary Jewish history and to the international history of World War I and the postwar era. Adding substantially to Zosa Szajkowski's earlier studies, Granick, drawing on her extensive archival research, not only places the overseas work led by American Jews in a very large diplomatic, political, social, and economic framework but also elucidates its challenges, accomplishments, and uniqueness. At the center of Granick's narrative is the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC). Created in November 1914 by a union of Orthodox and Reform American Jews, the JDC by 1931 had expended more than $80 million (equivalent to well over $1 billion in today's currency) on its philanthropic work in Eastern Europe and Palestine. Deftly tracing the organization's wartime origins and activities, its postwar projects, and its ties with Jewish and non-Jewish NGOs and with US, foreign, and international officials, Granick depicts the JDC's American leadership and its US and local field workers along with its recurring deliberations and debates over its goals and priorities. Richly illustrated with photographs, maps, and charts, the book contains a helpful table of acronyms and abbreviations and is supplemented by an impressive bibliography. Granick's introduction explains the complex national and international environment of the JDC's birth and its unprecedented initiatives "to protect, rebuild, and remake Jewish life abroad" (22). Chapter One details the challenges of dispatching aid to Jewish war sufferers in Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean before and after April 1917, which included intensive domestic fundraising, reliance on existing overseas Jewish charitable networks, and close [End Page 210] cooperation with US government officials, along with its intelligence and financial collaboration with other groups, including newly arrived Jewish immigrants in the US. Moving on to the postwar period, Chapter 2 details the JDC's entry into international politics resulting from its ambitious and arduous campaigns to provide food relief in Poland and Ukraine. Chapter Three examines the JDC's reluctant involvement in the burgeoning refugee problem in which Jews were among the major victims, a fraught and costly undertaking complicated by its competition with rival NGOs, America's rejection of the League of Nations, and the US's sweeping immigration restrictions of 1921 and 1924 as well as by the swell of antisemitism in Europe and the US. After replacing its foreign missions with thematic divisions, the American-led and funded JDC moved from emergency relief to preserving and uplifting the lives of millions of needy Jews left abroad. Chapters Four, Five, and Six contain richly detailed accounts of the JDC's involvement in three complex and difficult programs: expanding and sustaining medical facilities in Eastern Europe and Palestine; attempting to uplift the next Jewish generation by aiding orphaned and needy children by building technical-training institutions and creating a job-ready population; and forming the basis of financial support and economic development within targeted Jewish communities in Eastern Europe and Soviet Ukraine. Granick demonstrates convincingly that in the 1920s the JDC, working through local communities—but also relying on US influence and non-Jewish local and state bureaucrats and NGOs—despite its mounting internal and external critics and rivals and its hesitations and setbacks created a unique model of welfare building and international development. Although the organization's decision-making apparatus and its policy shifts and turns were occasionally impenetrable, Granick largely succeeds in explaining how distant benefactors operated under often crisis situations. This critical, wide-ranging analysis enables us to think anew about Jewish international humanitarianism during a pivotal decade and to revise our understanding of its reach and effectiveness. Granick's epilogue goes even further: although gravely shaken by the economic and political crises between 1929 and 1945, Jewish international humanitarianism has not only survived but also expanded well into the twenty-first century. And the JDC, defying its critics' charges of an elitist project, a global Jewish conspiracy, and an arm of...

Book Review

Book Review

La ciudad guetoizada: Buenos Aires en la narrativa de Ana María Shua

The article analyzes the image of Buenos Aires in the narrative of Ana María Shua, an Argentine writer of Polish Jewish descent. Urban space plays an important role in her prose described often as apocalyptic or dystopian. Through a historiographical metafiction, the author rewrites the memory of the ancestors in El libro de los recuerdos (2007), a novel that presents the life of Jewish immigrants in the capital of Argentina, divided into neighborhoods marked by their ethnicity. Eroticism and the use of the female body are, on the other hand, the topics that dominate in the author’s collection of micro-stories titled Casa de geishas (2009), where the brothel is described as a singular ghetto, rooted in the city panorama. Finally, the novel La muerte como efecto secundario offers a dystopic description of a future of a ghettoized city, where compulsory geriatric ghettos become a reality. The article, based on the analysis of the aforementioned works, presents a critical look at the use of the concept of “ghetto” or “urban island” in the construction of the narrative structure and space in Ana María Shua’s fiction.

Forbidden Melodies: Music and Arab-Jewish Identity in Contemporary Mizrahi Cinema

This article explores the role Arab music has played in forming Mizrahi identity in contemporary Israeli cinema, focusing on the films “The Ballad of the Weeping Spring”, “Testimony” and “Three Mothers”, which second and third generation Mizrahi filmmakers born to Jewish immigrants from Arab and Muslim countries made in Israel. Using Arab music, these films display the vast array of historical and imaginary relations between the Jew and the Arab, West and East, Israel and the Middle East. Memory of the Arab-Jewish past is a place that cannot be revisited, even if one can travel to the geographical territory that appears to be a place of ‘origin.’ As members of the second and third generations born in Israel, these Mizrahi filmmakers cannot reclaim the Arab-Jewish past of which they never really were a part, and so they try to trace musical routes that will take them to places, histories and encounters with people they have not known before. The grounded certainty of their Mizrahi roots is replaced in the films by the contingencies of the routes that the music enabled.

4. Enterrés dans Paris occupé. Les tombes des Juifs dans les cimetières parisiens (1941-1944)

While it is not commonly known, Jews were able to participate in the social conventions surrounding funeral traditions during the Occupation. In her diary, Hélène Berr describes the funeral she attended in broad daylight at Montparnasse Cemetery in 1943. This article discusses which burial methods were available to Jewish people during their persecution in Paris. Are their grave sites still visible in the city’s cemeteries? Do those that remain show evidence of the government’s persecution? Do they indicate that the deceased passed away during the Occupation? What do the graves of the Jewish people who died during this time have to tell us?In Paris, regardless of whether they died “naturally,” i.e. from disease or starvation, or in internment camps, Jews could be: 1) laid to rest by their family in a personal tomb, 2) buried for free by the national community in trench graves, 3) interred by the association representing French Jews within the General Union of Jews in France (UGIF). A common characteristic of the remaining grave sites of Jews who died in the Drancy internment camp is the total absence of any mention of the persecution they faced in France during the Occupation. No inscriptions or any other form of evidence describes their tragic fate. Indeed, their tombstones do not mention the Drancy camp or their status as a prisoner at the time of their death.This article also explores one of UGIF’s unique strategies for burying the dead, namely the use of collective vaults owned by Jewish mutual aid societies. This strategy represented a commonality between two distinct types of Jewish populations, namely French Israelites, who made up the majority of UGIF’s leadership, and immigrant Jews, most of whom came from Eastern Europe. Their funeral traditions differed, as did their preferred places of burial in Paris at the time. Members of the first group were buried in Montparnasse and Montmartre, while members of the second group were buried in the Bagneux and Pantin cemeteries. And yet, during the government-led persecution of Jews and the collaborationist regime, these two groups adopted similar funeral rites by requisitioning vaults owned by Jewish mutual aid societies. The purpose of these organizations was to voluntarily unite Jews from Eastern European cities or their descendants. These individuals agreed to offer mutual aid to all members upon their death through the purchase of a collective and permanent tomb where the remains of all contributors and their families could be interred. In the 19th and 20th centuries, these organizations set up an ingenious system in France that made it possible to evade the French regulations that prohibited this type of collective vault. At the time, only family vaults were allowed.By creating its “burial” service using the funds and vaults of this type of organization, called “La Terre Promise,” UGIF also absorbed the assets of all Jewish associations in France, which had been dissolved after its creation in November 1941. From that point on, UGIF had control over the empty spaces in these collective vaults, which it decided to allocate to interned Jews who had died in the Drancy camp and had no pre-existing vaults.A paradox ensued. Jews who died as a result of the anti-Semitic movement in France, but who had not contributed to or joined these kinds of organizations, were nevertheless buried in these vaults, even though they did not have any ties with them. If descendants of the deceased are around today, what do they know? Victims were able to be re-buried by their loved ones in similar vaults after the war. After several years spent renewing the plot the UGIF purchased for his daughter, who died at the age of 4 as an internee in the Drancy camp, a Polish father who had returned from deportation finally had her body exhumed and re-buried in Bagneux in the collective vault of his village’s mutual aid society, before going into permanent exile in the United States himself. However, the direct descendants, who were cousins of the little girl, did not know she had died on French soil, nor that her current grave, an imposing collective monument, is located less than 600 feet from their family vault in the same cemetery.This example shows how the Jewish graves in Parisian cemeteries (because no Jewish cemeteries exist in France today) are the site of a fragmented remembrance that is separate from the persecution Jews suffered in occupied France.

Exploring the Motivations for Completing Advance Care Directives: A Qualitative Study of Majority/Minority Israeli People Without Dementia.

BackgroundCompleting advance directives has been declared an essential instrument for preserving and respecting the autonomy and preferences for end-of-life care of people living with dementia. However, research deciphering the reasoning behind the decision to complete or not advance directives in the case of dementia remains limited, especially among people pertaining to different majority/minority groups.ObjectivesTo explore the motivations of people without dementia in Israel to complete or not to complete advance directives and to compare these motivations among the majority veteran Jewish group, the minority Jewish Former Soviet Union immigrant group, and the minority Arab group.MethodsThis qualitative study used purposive sampling and focus groups with discussions elicited by a vignette. A total of 42 Israeli people without dementia participated in 6 focus groups: two with veteran Jews (n = 14), two with Jewish immigrants from the Former Soviet Union (n = 14), and two with Arabs (n = 14). The analysis followed recommended steps for thematic content analysis.ResultsFour overarching themes were identified: (1) the meaning of dementia-related advance directives, (2) motivations for willingness to complete advance directives, (3) motivations for not being willing to complete advance directives, and (4) ethical dilemmas. Some of the themes were common to all groups, while others were informed by the groups' unique characteristics. Participants displayed a lack of knowledge and misunderstanding about advance directives, and central concepts such as autonomy and competence. Furthermore, stigmatic images of dementia and of the person with the diagnosis were associated to participants' motivations to complete advance directives.ConclusionsThere is need to expand comparative research among culturally and socially similar and dissimilar groups within a country as well as between countries in order to better guide public health efforts to increase the rates of advance directives completion. Special attention should be paid to decreasing stigmatic beliefs and understanding unique cultural values and motivations.

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...

"There Are No Cultural Islands like Ceshinsky's": Ceshinsky's Community Bookstore and Intellectual Space in Chicago, 1922–1966

"There Are No Cultural Islands like Ceshinsky's"Ceshinsky's Community Bookstore and Intellectual Space in Chicago, 1922–1966 Erin Faigin (bio) In 1981, a local Chicago television station asked Saul Bellow to lead a walking tour through Humboldt Park, his childhood home. Although Bellow was born in Quebec, he moved with his family to Chicago in 1924 when he was nine years old. The Bellows settled in Humboldt Park, a neighborhood on the northwest side of the city. Originally settled by Germans and Scandinavians, by the 1920s Humboldt Park was home to a diverse mix of European immigrants, among them Italians, Poles, and Russian Jews. The Bellows lived on Cortez Street, just south of the intersection of Division and Damen. Walking west on Division from Damen in the 1920s, one might pass by a meeting of the Zionist Organization of America at Budapest Hall or a staging of a Yiddish play at the Biltmore Theatre.1 At the intersection of Division and Campbell, one could catch a streetcar headed downtown, but for most Humboldt Park residents there was no need. Between California and Damen, they shopped at Jewish-owned bakeries and groceries, were styled in Jewish-owned shoe stores and photo studios, visited Jewish dentists and doctors, called on Jewish exterminators and contractors, and sought counsel from Jewish undertakers in times of grief.2 Yet, for Bellow and his friends, the most important institution on Division Street was Moshe Ceshinsky's bookstore, located just east of California Street. Ceshinsky's Community Bookstore offered more than the opportunity to exchange cash for goods; the space itself facilitated the exchange of ideas. Bellow would later reminisce: [End Page 15] [My] friends and I are trying to locate Ceshinsky's little island of culture. In the days of our youth our neighborhood didn't look very different from similar districts in Manchester or St. Etienne, but it is undoubtedly worse now. There are no cultural islands like Ceshinsky's. He may not have been aware that he was selling inflammatory books—Germinal, The Flowers of Evil, Man's Fate, the works of Marx and Engels—to high-school students. To him all books were precious.3 At Ceshinsky's, fathers smoked cigars and debated politics; landsmanshaftn4 held meetings; Yiddish poets perfected manuscripts; leftists could buy the Communist Daily Worker or the Trotskyist New International; Jews purchased ritual objects imported from Israel. Ceshinsky's Community Bookstore was a cultural island for Jewish immigrants in the sea of change that was their new home, Chicago. Before Ceshinsky opened his own bookstore, he worked as a traveling salesman for Yiddish publishing houses and newspapers.5 He was introduced to America by way of rail, both its dispersion and its connection. Upon settling in Chicago in 1922, he promptly opened his own bookstore, transitioning from itinerant salesman to neighborhood businessman. In opening a storefront on Division Street, Ceshinsky claimed a stake for himself and for Yiddish literature in Humboldt Park. Although his business was vulnerable to the fluctuations of the market, he was no longer subject to the vagaries of being a mobile salesman. Yet, through his business, Ceshinsky continued to use books as mobile manifestations of a Yiddish public sphere disrupted and reconfigured by migration. As Derek Penslar argues, the Jewish press represents a microcosm of the Jewish public sphere, the collectivity of private Jewish individuals engaged in the creation of public discourse.6 Tony Michels describes the emergence of a "Yiddish-speaking, working-class version of Habermas' public sphere" in late nineteenth-century New York and identifies the Yiddish socialist press as its central institution.7 Over the course of the early twentieth century, the Yiddish public sphere described by Michels expanded in geographical and political scope. No longer centered on the Lower East Side, the Yiddish public sphere in which Ceshinsky participated was polycentric, broadly leftist, and economically diverse. When he became a publisher in the 1930s, Ceshinsky took a role in shaping the geographic boundaries and cultural content of that Yiddish public sphere. The publications produced by his publishing house, [End Page 16] Ceshinsky Farlag, described a world where Yiddish was a multigenerational, global, thriving language.8 Ceshinsky Farlag published Zishe...

The “Jewish premium”: attitudes towards Jewish and non-Jewish immigrants arriving in Israel under the Law of Return

ABSTRACT This paper examines discriminatory attitudes of Israeli Jews towards non-Jewish immigrants admitted into Israel under the Law of Return. We looked at three spheres of discrimination: admission, political rights, and welfare rights and focused on the role of realistic socioeconomic and symbolic threats in the emergence of discriminatory attitudes. We used a mixed-methods approach that allowed to test our hypotheses among a representative sample (survey) and examine the logics underlying the respondents’ justifications for endorsing discrimination (focus groups/in-depth interviews). The findings show that discrimination endorsement is strongest in the case of admission and political rights where Israeli Jews seek to prevent the presence of outgroups and deny them the right to become part of the society. By contrast, discrimination with respect to welfare rights is less pronounced – possibly because it is not viewed as awarding membership in society, but rather providing individuals their basic needs based on universalistic or democratic values.

Sarah Bernhardt’s presence in Montréal Québec

During the summer 2021 and under the direction of Geneviève De Viveiros, Amanda Lee produced a large portion of this study based on Sarah Bernhardt’s performances in Canada as they occurred between 1800 and 1918 and were studied by John Hare and Ramon Hathron, who included in their records her repertoire and the dates of her performances as well as critical opinions from various print sources. When Montréal constructed its francophone theater and its artistic infrastructure it quickly caught up with anglophone venues. Catholic institutions became increasingly adverse to Bernhardt deemed unworthy to represent the desired link to the French Catholic cultural bridge with the former motherland, in a context that revealed itself anti-women as well as anti-Semitic for this respected actress of Jewish ancestry, yet so famous for her French elocution. Bernhardt’s sulphureous reputation festered when she was reported as accusing people from Québec to be Iroquois or under religious guidance, setting her friend Louis Fréchette apart from the benighted crowd. Conversely, contrary to the increasingly negative reception of Bernhardt’s performances in the early 1900s, and the association of Jewish immigrants with Anglophone communities, Yiddish theatre saw a massive and fragmented growth between 1905-1910. By 1913, there were a total of three permanent professional Yiddish theatre troupes in the city.

Musical Fusion and Allusion in the Core and the Transitional Klezmer Repertoires

Uniquely within Europe—from the mid-seventeenth to the mid-twentieth centuries—in Ottoman and then post-Ottoman Moldova, Jewish klezmer and Gypsy (lautar) musicians had worked within a single professional structure. As the Ottoman Empire gradually withdrew from the Danubian Principalities (Wallachia and Moldova) during the mid-nineteenth century, a new "national" dance music was created by Gypsy, Jewish, Austrian, Greek, and other musicians in the Moldavian cities. Local klezmorim created a Judaized version of this repertoire. By the last third of the century this new repertoire also took hold among Jewish communities in Ukraine and Galicia. Part of the popularity of this repertoire lay in its partial continuity with an earlier Greco-Turkish element within klezmer music. This entire group of dance genres were barely acknowledged and never analyzed by the initial Russian and Soviet researchers, such as Engel, Kiselgoff, Beregovski, and Magid. Hence in 1994 I had coined the term "transitional" klezmer repertoire to describe it. The "transitional" and some of the "core" klezmer repertoires were transported massively with the contemporaneous Jewish immigration to America. The newer transitional repertoire dominated the klezmer music known by mid-century and thereafter. While the leading immigrant klezmorim—such as Dave Tarras (1897–1989)—were well aware of these distinctions of repertoire, they were quickly forgotten by the native-born generations of musicians. At the same time, the retention of earlier Greco-Turkish elements allowed for new interactions with immigrant Greek musicians. Thus, any attempt to analyze the entire klezmer repertoire must first deal with the relationship between the "core" and the "transitional" repertoires.

The Yiddisher Kultur Farband in Argentina: Progressive and Communist Jews (1917–1956)

Progressive and Communist Jewish identity in Argentina flourished between the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Cold War. In 1937, during the Popular Front period, Jewish Communist intellectuals organized an International Congress of Yiddish Culture in Paris. Twenty-three countries were represented, and the Congress formed the Yiddisher Kultur Farband (YKUF). In 1941, this Congress was replicated in Argentina, where the YKUF sponsored an important network of schools, clubs, theaters, socio-cultural centers, and libraries created by Yiddish-speaking Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. The Ykufist or Progressive Jewish identity reflects a particular construction that is as ethnic as it is political. As “Jewish,” it aimed to transmit the secular heritage of the Yiddishkeit devastated in Europe during World War II, but as “progressive,” “radical” or “Communist,” it postulated its yearning for integration into a universal socialism led by the Soviet model. Progressive Jewish identity was shaped in the antifascist culture and by permanent tensions between Jewish ethnicity and the guidelines of the Communist Party. Above all, it was framed by a fervent aspiration of the immigrants and their children to integrate into their Argentine society.