Jewish Issues Research Articles

Catastrophe and Meaning: The Holocaust and the Twentieth Century (review)

Catastrophe and Meaning: The Holocaust and Twentieth Century, by Moishe Posrone and Eric Santner. Chicago and London. University of Chicago Press, 2003. 272 pp. $25.00. Catastrophe and Meaning an exceptionally important and useful compilation of essays that revisit and sometimes rethink critical issues connected with our understanding of Holocaust and German History. It result of November 1998 conference at University of Chicago that focused on four central debates regarding scholarly approaches to Holocaust. The text reflects this fourfold division: History, Antisemitism and Holocaust; The Holocaust and Twentieth Century; Annihilation, Victimhood, Identity; and Trauma and Limits of Representation. Postone and Santner's introduction makes it clear that while focus of book Holocaust, meaning of Jewish destruction has wide implications for understanding later acts of genocide. The authors' introduction suggests these events asthe'birth' of this mutation of human possibilities, and of its relation to general historical processes in twentieth century (p. 7). Saul Friedlander and Shulamit Volkov deal with aspects of implementation of Final Solution. Friedlander focuses on what he calls redemptive anti-Semitism (as) . . . most radical form of anti-Jewish hatred (p. 18), which had apocalyptical dimensions. This becomes point of departure for convergence theory about Holocaust. Volkov likewise suggests that Nazi policy is tangled web of interaction between ideology and praxis (p. 42). Friedlander disputes idea that Nazis were modern and had Utopian goals. Rather, he prefers to refer to specificity of Nazi laws which separated Aryans and Jews as an obsession which indicative that the Jewish issue was its ideological core (p. 21). Anson Rabinbach's focus rethinking of Zygmunr Baumans thesis about Holocaust and modernity. The author sees more an era that witnessed substitution of administrative regularity for moral responsibility. Rabinbach asks question of why so many German Jewish intellectuals defended thesis while rejecting more German-centered view of Nazism as deviation from western traditions. Hannah Arendt, Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Gunther Anders, and Jean Amery, it pointed our, all concurred that Auschwitz was 'caesura' in civilization (p. 58), rather than something inherent in modernity itself. Rabinbach concludes that arguing for uniqueness of Holocaust implies certain normalcy to other genocides, which suggests that full understanding of Holocaust may be found only by analyzing other genocides. Dan Diner and Moishe Postone continue on course that suggests need to understand context of German history and exceptional period in which it occurred. Diner notes that Nazi anti-Bolshevism was different from other types of anti-communist ideology because it became connected with race. The practical aspects of mass murder of Jews, linked to German plans for territorial expansion as well as decision to implement T-4euthanasia program, may be subsumed under general idea of nation building rather than particular antisemitic policy directed only against Jews. Postone argues that modern atinsemitism did nor define Jews ultimately as an inferior race, rather as an antirace. For Postone, this antisemitism was particularly dangerous because it defined Jews by intangible concepts. Postone also suggests German antisemitism was involved with a biologization of capitalism, derived from an understanding of dispersed nature of Jews. The Nazi anti-capitalist revolt was therefore also revolt against perceived power of Jews and their invisibility. Omer Bartov's and Frank Trommler's articles deal with different forms of memory. Bartov indicates how different countries remembered World War I. …

Change and Continuity in Soviet Policy Towards Soviet Jewry and Israel, May-December 1948

Change and Continuity in Soviet Policy Towards Soviet Jewry and Israel, May–December 1948 Binyamin Pinkus (bio) Introduction This article focuses on the Jewish national awakening among Soviet and East European Jewry and the first signs of official Soviet policy on the Jewish Question. Although May-December 1948 is a relatively brief period in Israeli-Soviet relations, it is one of utmost importance because it reflects the dilemmas and inconsistencies of Soviet policy toward Israel and Jewish issues. The Soviet regime under Stalin's leadership would solve these issues in typical totalitarian style: a war to the death using all means available to the state. Israel requested that the Government of the USSR grant official recognition to the Provisional Government of the State of Israel. On May 18, 1948 Soviet Foreign Minister, Vyacheslav Molotov notified Israel of the USSR's decision to grant full de jure recognition. He asserted that the "Soviet Government hopes that the establishment of the sovereign independent state by the Jewish People will serve to strengthen peace and security in Palestine and the Near East, and it expresses its faith in the development of friendly relations between the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the State of Israel."1 The Soviet Union was the first superpower to extend de jure. Although Washington preceded Moscow in endorsing the Jewish State, it had only accorded de facto recognition. The other two Western powers, France and Britain, after exhaustive efforts granted de facto recognition to Israel in January 1949. De jure recognition was delayed until May 1949 and April 1950 respectively. The situation in eastern Europe was different. The new socialist states competed with one another to be the first to recognize Israel after the Soviet Union. On May 18, Zygmunt Modzelewski, the Polish Foreign Minister, informed Moshe Sharett, the Israeli Foreign Minister: [End Page 96] In the name of the Polish Government, I would like to express [Poland's] satisfaction with the Provisional Government as the provisional Jewish regime in Israel . . . The Polish Government's position on matters related to the Jewish People and Jewish Government in Israel is common knowledge in international forums and especially in the UN. The Polish Government has consistently maintained a position of great sympathy for the Jewish People who have fought for their freedom and their own state.2 One of the members of the Polish delegation at the UN, Julius Katz-Sukhy, lauded the establishment of the Jewish state and expressed hope that "the Arabs of Palestine would also establish their own state."3 In mid-June, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Hungary, and Rumania extended de facto recognition to Israel, and Bulgaria followed in turn.4 The "right" person had to be selected to serve as Israel's representative to the Soviet Union. Eliahu Elath, a senior official of the Jewish Agency who was involved in Zionist diplomatic affairs, could have been chosen, or a top figure in the ruling political party, Mapai. The heads of the left-wing parties in Israel had been unconditionally excluded from the mission to Moscow and were allowed a place only on the mission to Warsaw. According to Eli Tzur, "The most sensitive ministry under Mapai's control was the Foreign Ministry headed by Moshe Sharett. Mapam's (left-wing Zionist- Socialist party) involvement in this ministry was perceived as a major political issue because of the party's pro-Moscow orientation." Mapai's Central Committee debated whether to admit Mapam representatives into the Diplomatic Corps, especially to posts in eastern Europe, according to a proportional party key.5 Mapai could offer many qualified candidates of Russian origin who were fully acquainted with the country's history and culture. One of top contenders was Mordechai Namir, a leader of the Histadrut and key Mapai figure, who asked Ben-Gurion "for an assignment in Moscow or another Slavic country."6 He had already carried out a number of important diplomatic missions in February and July 1948 in East European countries and negotiated with Czechoslovakia and Rumania on arms, oil, and immigration. Namir recalled that they had received him there "with a standing ovation."7 Sharett considered Golda Meir the most suitable candidate for the Soviet mission. He approached...

Grotesque Ambivalence. Melancholy and Mourning in the Prose Work of Albert Drach. (Conditio Judaica 49) by Mary Cosgrove

282 Reviews widely celebrated at the end of the nineteenth century but, despite the success of his Queen ofSheba, towhich this article pays eloquent testimony, isnow virtually forgotten. Not so the music Arnold Schoenberg wrote for the stage. Michael Cherlin's contribution, with its references toErwartung, Die gl?cklicheHand and Moses und Aron, serves as a useful reminder of the Austrian's key contribution to themusical theatre of the twentieth century. The volume iswell annotated, has a good bibliography and an excellent index. I can certainly recommend it to anyone with an interest inAustrian theatre and music. Oxford Brookes University John Warren GrotesqueAmbivalence. Melancholy andMourning in the Prose Work ofAlbertDrach. By Mary Cosgrove. (Conditio Judaica 49). T?bingen: Niemeyer. 2004. 231 pp. 56,00. isbn 3-484-65149-0. Cosgrove's insightful study on one of the most original and creative Austrian post-Shoah prose writers, Albert Drach (1902-1995), is the first of its kind. Drach's death in 1995 occasioned critical publications re-appraising the author's work in the context of contemporary scholarship. Eva Schobel's interview with the author, 'Ich bin ein w?tender Weiser', in Bernhard Fetz's groundbreaking collection of essays In Sachen AlbertDrach (1995), and Gerhard Fuchs's and G?nther A. H?fler's fine anthology of articles, AlbertDrach (1995), ushered in a theoretically oriented phase inDrach research. Cosgrove presents themost ambitious analysis to date of Drach's complex and often bewildering prose. She touches on the author's biography, his experience as a Holocaust survivor in a still latently anti-Semitic environment and as the chronicler of an era that encompasses the final years of the Habsburg Empire and the inter war period, as well as the post-war years and the Second Republic of Austria. However, biography and history are not the focus of Cosgrove's study. Rather, she reads the author in lightof contemporary psychoanalytical and post-colonial criticism (Bhaba, Butler, Deleuze, Derrida, Lacan, Barthes, Kristeva, Foucault), post-Shoah criticism (Camus, Adorno, Arendt), and cultural and literary theory pertaining to theHolocaust and Jewish issues (Langer, Reich-Ranicki, Wistrich, Beller, Baumann). Earlier scholarship has noted Drach's cynicism, his penchant for the grotesque and his avoidance of pathos coupled with social criticism. Cosgrove maintains that his unprecedented textual strategies, especially the way he deploys the grotesque in conjunction with sexuality and serious, even tragic, topics calls for a revision of current theories. She considers his use of the grotesque sui gener?s, 'as a vessel of language ambivalence' and a 'level of calculated subtlety not normally associated with the grotesque' (p. 2). In the introduction Cosgrove characterizes Drach as a 'revolutionary poet and bearer of death' (pp. 1-10). She elucidates Kristeva's concept of jouissance and applies itparticularly toDrach's earlier work. She then argues that, in contradistinction to the carnivalesque mode in the earlier writing, the 'Holocaust' novel 'Z.Z. 'das istdie Zwischenzeit (1968) expresses 'inertia, closure and death' (p. 9). GrotesqueAmbivalence. Melancholy and Mourning in the Prose Work ofAlbertDrach AUSTRIAN STUDIES, I3, 2OO5 283 consists of predominantly theoretical segments ? for example, Chapters 2 and 3, The Grotesque: Topography of Transgression, Morphology of Emptiness' and 'Grotesque Discourse: Mourning and Melancholia' ? that establish the theoretical foundations for Cosgrove's discussion of Drach's works. The following segments provide detailed textual analyses in the context of carefully selected criticism. Chapter 4 focuses on Drach's 'protocol' or 'report' as novel, which Cosgrove considers his foremost contribution to the literary avant-garde. In this genre Drach voices the plight of the underdog (p. 74). Yet, through his unique textual strategy this traditionally sentimental motif assumes sadistic proportions. Cosgrove furthermore traces issues of Otherness, identity and death, and concludes that they contribute to the author's aim of narrating the condition of the modern world by way of scrutinizing specific Central European conditions. In Chapter 5 Cosgrove employs Bhaba's and Kristeva's theories of colonial discourse to examine Drach's Das Goggelbuch (1965) as it revolves around the issues of difference, language and monstrosity with regard to the Other, notably the Jewish Other and the problem of anti-Semitism. In conjunction with these issues, Cosgrove discusses identity,particularly theAryan construct of...

Contemporary Jewish American Narrative: A Selected Bibliography

Contemporary Jewish American Narrative: A Selected Bibliography Derek Parker Royal (bio) What follows is a selected bibliography related to current Jewish American novels and short fiction. The list of primary texts is somewhat extensive, and it should give the reader/scholar a broad sense of what kind of writing is being done. Working from an assumption that in many ways chronological groupings are somewhat relative, the authors that are listed here represent the most recent generation and began publishing after 1980. The vast majority of them published their first works in the late-1980s or, more likely than not, the 1990s. The age of the author, while not an overriding issue, was nonetheless a factor in the selection. Several authors who began their publishing careers before the 1980s, such as Max Apple, Leslie Epstein, Mark Helprin, and Francine Prose, are excluded from this list, although they might be currently active writers. (One could even go so far as to call this “earlier” cluster of “more recent” writers a transitional group, anticipating the shift between the Bellow-Malamud-Roth-Ozick generation and the most recent one.) Other writers, such as Steve Stern and Tova Reich, who are “older,” chronologically speaking, than the vast majority in this list, are included due to their relatively recent beginnings as authors or due to the significance of their most recent work.1 Writers whose works unquestionably involve Jewish issues—e.g., Allegra Goodman, Melvin Jules Bukiet, and Thane Rosenbaum—are included along with those authors whose focus is marginally, if at all, concerned with Jewishness. The latter—including such prolific authors as Sarah Schulman, Amy Bloom, David Leavitt, and up until recently, Michael Chabon—are rarely collected in any books or listed in any catalog representing Jewish American writers, but their contributions are certainly significant and deserve serious attention.2 [End Page 121] Some of the collections listed here, such as the Norton anthology and Bukiet’s Neurotica, do not specifically focus on post-1980 Jewish American fiction, but a significant portion of each text is devoted to such writing. Of the secondary sources, only those works that primarily concern the younger generation of writers, as a whole, are included. Some works that devote only portions of the text to these discussions are also included. However, essays that concern only one specific author and do not consider the larger context of recent Jewish American writing are not included here. If the book has been reprinted from a previous edition, or if it has been put out in paperback form under an imprint or a different press, then complete publishing information is given for both. In every case only the original and the most recent publishing information is included. If, as is the case in the first two entries, the paperback publishing details differ from the hardback only in year, then the most recent publishing information is listed along with the original year publication. Primary Sources Novels and Short Fiction Abraham, Pearl. Giving Up America. 1998. New York: Riverhead-Putnam, 1999. —. The Romance Reader. New York: Riverhead, 1995. New York: Riverhead-Putnam, 1996. Almond, Steve. My Life in Heavy Metal: Stories. 2002. New York: Grove, 2003. Ascher, Carol. Flood: A Novel. Freedom, CA : Crossing, 1987. Willimantic, CT: Curbstone, 1996. Bender, Aimee. The Girl in the Flammable Skirt: Stories. 1998. New York: Doubleday, 1999. —. An Invisible Sign of My Own. New York: Doubleday, 2000. New York: Knopf-Random, 2001. Black, David. An Impossible Life: A Novel, a Bobeh Myseh: A Novel. Wakefield, RI: Moyer Bell, 1998. Bloom, Amy. A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You: Stories. New York: Random, 2000. New York: Vintage-Random, 2001. —. Come to Me: Stories. New York: Harper, 1993. New York: Perennial-Harper, 1994. —. Love Invents Us. New York: Random, 1997. New York: Vintage-Random, 1998. Bloom, Steven. No New Jokes: A Novel. New York: Norton, 1997. Brownstein, Gabriel. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button Apt. 3W. 2002. New York: Norton, 2003. [End Page 122] Budnitz, Judy. Flying Leap: Stories. 1998. New York: Picador, 1999. —. If I Told You Once: A Novel. 1999. New York: Picador, 2000. Bukiet, Melvin Jules. After. New York: St. Martin's, 1996. —. A Faker's...

The Holocaust in the Painting of Valentin Lustig (review)

Reviewed by: The Holocaust in the Painting of Valentin Lustig Stephen C. Feinstein The Holocaust in the Painting of Valentin Lustig, by Edith Balas. Pittsburgh: Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2002. 64 pages including color plates. $29.00. Valentin Lustig is the son of Holocaust survivors from Cluj, Romania. Art Historian Edith Balas calls him not a child of survivors (Lustig was born in 1955) but “a child of the Holocaust” (p. 10). Lustig studied art in Romania with Lazlo Toth, arrived in Israel in 1974, went on to study painting in Florence, and now lives in Europe. Well exhibited in Europe, his work on the Holocaust has largely been unknown until the welcome research by Edith Balas helped create this volume, which appears more like a catalogue. Lustig’s paintings, well-documented in this work, strike one at first as surrealist in nature but also harken back to the Renaissance style of Breugel and Bosch, and more recently to the fantastic realism of Vienna artist Erich Brauer, who also painted some extraordinary themes about Jewish history and the Holocaust. Most significantly, of the twenty-five paintings shown and discussed in this volume, none have titles that mention the Holocaust. In terms of subject, a viewer not familiar with the Holocaust might discern ominous symbols in these works but no clear narrative dedicated to the representation of Jewish suffering. Thus, an essential question that runs through Lustig’s painting, and all such post-Holocaust painting, is the question of what the artist intends to represent, and how it should be represented. Among post-Holocaust artists, many have sought new inroads [End Page 190] of representation but have become slaves to the well-known symbols of oppression, which by now have become clichés: the guard tower, barbed wire, railroad tracks, the Yellow Star, the camp uniform, the Swastika, and so forth. Chances are the proliferation of art laden with such symbolism will be relegated to the trash heap, despite the serious intentions of every artist. Those artists who have created works with new insights seem to be those who have used elements such as classicism and mythological references, fragmented images not dependent on those so well-known from the camps and ghettos themselves, new symbolic language, metaphor, contemporary poetry, subjects and mediums with an edge, and even “beautiful” images with strong colors. Lustig falls into this latter category. His works are allegorical, mysterious, colorful, sometimes fantastic and even beautiful. Once the artist’s biography is introduced, a Holocaust context is established which becomes easier to comprehend. One such image is of exile. “The Traveler” (1992), “Cautious Approach to the Monuments” (1997), “The Solemn Reception of Maria Theresia in the Harbor of Klausenburg” (1999), “The Never-Ending Ascension to the Alps” (1999), and “Ellis Island” (2000) all contain images of presumably Jewish refugees in some stage of their exile carrying suitcases. Lustig, however, does not make this theme so obvious, as the images are often concealed in a complex landscape that includes foreboding places, competitive events, and the gaze of onlookers. In essence the viewer gets no easy answers but has to play detective. The images are powerful, but they also raise the issue of alternative interpretation which is so common and necessary in art. “Cautious Approach to Monuments,” for example, is sufficiently generic with its refugee image and East European landscape to be symbolic of not only the Jewish issues, but also more recent refugee questions in Bosnia and Kosovo. In “The Solemn Reception of Maria Theresia in the Harbor of Klausenburg,” the Jewish question is more precise because of the Jewish figures seeking flight from an East European landscape. One can read more into the painting because of the symbolic reference to Rubens’ famous “Arrival of Marie de Medici in Marseilles,” on display at the Louvre, and the history of Maria Theresa and her son, Joseph II, on questions of the Enlightenment and the Jewish question in the eighteenth century. In “The Punished Fish” (1999), the allegorical presence of Jewish persecution is more visible in the form of a carp-like fish hanged from a gallows with a large hook. This painting is a reflection on the deportation of the...

Stem Cell Research

Stem cell research involves destruction of the developing embryo and hence poses issues regarding the sanctity of nascent human life. Jewish law issues related to that matter are discussed. Among those are the parameters of the obligation to engage in medical research, the status of a subvisual fetus, of the fetus in the very early stages of gestation and of a fetus conceived ex utero. Public policy considerations in a pluralistic society are also addressed.

The Judges and the Jews

The Jews have been a source of constant trouble to the judiciary of this country; but, to be fair, only for the last 350 years. Between 1066, when the first Jews to settle here came over from what is now France in the wake of the Norman Conquest, to 1290, when the Jews were expelled, Jewish issues do not appear to have concerned the judges. This discussion of judicial involvement with Jewish issues begins in 1655, when, following Menasseh ben Israel's famous initiative, two senior judges, Chief Justice Glyn and Chief Baron Steel, advised the assembly that had been summoned by Cromwell to consider the matter, that ‘there was no law which forbids the Jews’return into England’.

The Relevance of the Past: Between Construction and Debt

Intertexts, Vol. 7, No. 2, 2003 The Relevance of the Past: B e t w e e n C o n s t r u c t i o n a n d D e b t Max Pensky B I N G H A M T O N U N I V E R S I T Y Let me begin this by juxtaposing two quotes. The first comes from Philip Roth’s 1993 novel Operation Shylock, wherein the protagonist, anovelist named Philip Roth, discovers that his identity has been stolen by “Philip Roth,” now busy in Israel giving interviews in which he advocates his new political movement, “diasporism.” Diasporism’s aim: the mass repatriation of Israeli Jews back to their original towns and settlements in Eastern and Central Europe. “Roth” describes his vision of the moment of Jewish Return in language that fuses the Biblical promise and the modern media spectacular: You know what will happen in Warsaw, at the railway station, when the first trainload of Jews returns? There will be crowds to welcome them. People will be jubilant. People will be in tears. They will be shouting “Our Jews are back! Our Jews are back!” The spectade will be transmitted by television throughout the world.And what ahistoric day for Europe, for Jewry, for all mankind when the cattle cars that transported Jews to death camps are transformed by the Diasporist movement into decent, comfortable railway carriages carrying Jews by the tens of thousands back to their native cities and towns.Ahistoric day for human memory, for human justice, and for atonement too. In those train stations where the crowds gather to weep and sing and celebrate, where people fell to their knees in Christian prayer at the feet of their Jewish brethren, only there and then will the consdencecleansing of Europe begin. (Roth 45) In the second quote, Ruth Ellen Gruber, apopular commentator on the vicissitudes of Jewish cultural life in Europe, observes the odd sort of Jewish “now staged in the capitals of Eastern and Central Europe in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet bloc. With the transition to affee-market economy, history itself is transformed into the commodity form, quite liter¬ ally: r e t u r n Kiosks, shops, and postcards sport imagery ranging from candlesticks and tombstones to caricatures of Franz Kafka. There are painted wooden carv¬ ings of hook-nosed, bearded Jews for sale in Poland and Golem statuettes and sidelocked Jewish puppets for sale in Prague. In the ancient ghetto of Venice, shop windows sparkle with brightly colored miniature Jews of 1 I N T E R T E X T S 1 3 2 hand-blown Murano glass. In Krakow aUkrainian band at one “Jewishstyle ” cafe dresses up in Hasidic attire and plays Yiddish tunes for patrons sipping chicken soup and kosher vodka, while local travel agencies take visi¬ tors on “Schindler’s List” and other Jewish tours, and a“Jewish” gallery has been known to display, among other things, antique Jewish clothing— including men’s ritually fringed undergarments. (Gruber 6) As away of introducing the arguments of this paper, it’s useful to reflect for amoment on the complex range of reactions to these quotations, espe¬ cially in their relation to one another. Roth’s novel brilliantly and mercilessly targets the tension between two modes of reflection on the history of the Jews in Europe, modes that one would have thought to be utterly incompat¬ ible but prove, at least in the literary subjunctive, to be on quite intimate terms with one another. What makes “Philip Roth’”s diasporist fantasy at once poignant and perverse is not just its utter impossibility, its unseemly flaunting of its own fictionality. It is the emotional realism that attaches to the fantasized event. Desperate for atonement, the descendants of the perpe¬ trators cry that their Jews are back, repeating in distant form the wound— regarding others as “their Jews” and hence interchangeable with people who are dead and gone—^with the same formula by which they declare it healed. The repetition of trauma implicit in the event of return, though, cannot in the end entirely hide from view the...

Second Generation Voices: Reflections by Children of Holocaust Survivors and Perpetrators (review)

Reviewed by: Second Generation Voices: Reflections by Children of Holocaust Survivors and Perpetrators Ethan Goffman Second Generation Voices: Reflections by Children of Holocaust Survivors and Perpetrators, edited by Alan L. Berger & Naomi Berger. Syracuse University Press, 2001. 378 pp. $59.95 (c); $24.95 (p). The children of concentration camp survivors have long been prominent in the media and in scholarship, while the stories and thoughts of children of holocaust perpetrators have been more submerged. Despite the obvious dichotomy between the two groups, they have much in common. Both must grapple with a family history dealing with events almost beyond belief. Both groups find their personal identity often overshadowed by their tragic history. And members of both groups have responded to this history with lives dedicated to helping humanity through teaching, activism, and community service. Because of the personal nature of these essays, they constitute in no way a unifying overview, but rather a series of viewpoints, almost of short stories, always dramatic and compelling and often beautifully written. As such, the volume provides a rich vein of raw material to be further mined by future scholars and analysts. Nevertheless, more scholarly balance is called for; the voices in Second Generation Voices mirror current media and social awareness, foregrounding the Jewish experience over the German. Most of the volume explores the perceptions and experience of the children of holocaust survivors, [End Page 166] while a shorter section is devoted to essays by children of Germany’s wartime generation, often children of Nazis. Some Jewish sections are digressive, such as a discussion of the Yiddish language. Jewish issues are explored in depth and intricacy, whereas the German voices, equally heartfelt and dramatic, do not as fully discuss issues of historical identity. One issue confronted by both the German and the Jewish second generation is the need to reconstitute a vanished, often repressed past. This repression, while notable in American Jews in the years after World War II, is no longer a part of the larger Jewish social landscape. Yet historical restoration remains critical to individuals; one essay discusses the need “to fill in the gaps, fit the pieces of the puzzle together” (p. 52), a task shared by all writers in this volume. Historical and personal reconstruction are approached most directly through flashes of memory and meaning in which history and symbol converge. One child of survivors remembers dreams of being hunted by Nazis. Another describes a routine question from her gynecologist, “had anyone in my family had breast cancer. I thought for a moment and to my shock realized that every single woman in my family, excepting my mother, had been killed in the war” (p. 245). Still others recall moments of realization that long ago their parents had lived other lives with other spouses and children and discuss the burden of being replacement children for those destroyed by the Nazis. One German writer also born as a replacement for war deaths, as a gift to Hitler, has rejected her personal history, going so far as to convert to Judaism, epitomizing a blatant confrontation with the past. Obviously, this situation is not a representative reaction; indeed the German writers in this volume are notable as anti-Nazi activists. Anna Rosmus, for instance, is famous for unearthing her hometown’s crimes in the face of virulent resistance. The drama of repression and recovery shared by all of these writers is stronger among the Germans, for whom often “Jews had been edited out of family narratives” (p. 267). Paradoxically, then, German children of the Nazi generation may face a more difficult task than children of Holocaust survivors. The latter, while dealing with a horrific past and with shorn family trees, often look up to their parents as heroic or, at the very least, consider them innocent. Children of Nazis, by contrast, inherit a terrible shame. One writer complains of being orphaned when she learned of her parents’ deeds, and believes that “to stop loving one’s parents is to stop loving oneself” (p. 304). As someone who believes in a collective responsibility to the past but not in collective guilt, I became aware, through reading this volume, of how guilt, both intellectual...

The Counseling Profession's Relationship to Jews and the Issues That Concern Them: More Than a Case of Selective Awareness

The goals of this article are to define anti‐Semitism; demonstrate the necessity for accurately labeling anti‐Semitic behavior as such; provide longitudinal evidence of anti‐Semitism and the mistreatment of Jews and the absence of addressing Jewish issues by the counseling profession; prepare a compendium of the preceding—and in so doing, create an awareness of the resulting problem. The author posits that the near universal failure of those committed to multicultural counseling to rail against anti‐Semitism and embrace the notion of Jews as a culturally distinct group poses a serious threat to the delivery of bias‐free counseling and thus the image that the counseling profession presents of itself to other mental health professions and the general public.

Wright Morris and the Jews

Wright Morris was born in Nebraska in 1910 and left the state by 1925. Despite the relatively short contact, the Midwest was a formative influence as rural and small-town Nebraska and ethnic diversity in Omaha frequently provided material for many of the essays, novels, and photographs produced from 1942 to 1985. The Jewish aspect of Morris's production lies in the characters, plots, and world events generated by Jewish issues including his 1933 residence in Vienna, fascism, the Holocaust, and anti- McCarthyism. Morris acknowledges a deep reading influence of Jewish writers including Isaac Babel, Ettore Svevo, and Marcel Proust. Morris died in 1998. Although much has been written about Morris, this essay provides the first recognition of the Jewish motif in his work.

Religious Homogamy, Marital Conflict, and Stability in Same‐Faith and Interfaith Jewish Marriages

This study examined the relationship between a couple’s similarity in religious beliefs and practices and their level of marital conflict and stability. One‐hundred‐fifty‐five adult children of same‐faith and interfaith Jewish marriages reported on each of their parents’ religious beliefs and behaviors. Religious homogamy was defined as similar attitudes and beliefs about specific religious practices. The parents’ level of marital conflict was obtained by having their adult children fill out the Children’s Perception Questionnaire (Emery and O’Leary 1982). The major hypotheses tested were that a positive correlation would exist between religious homogamy and marital stability and this relationship would be mediated by the level of marital conflict. That is to say, as marital conflict increases, marital stability should decrease. It was expected that these correlations would still hold after controlling for religious denomination (same‐faith and interfaith). Partial support for the model was found: more disagreement on Jewish issues predicted higher levels of marital conflict. Higher conflict, in turn, predicted less marital stability.

Von der Emanzipation zur Entrechtung: Deutsch-Jüdische Lebenswege (review)

Reviewed by: Von der Emanzipation zur Entrechtung: Deutsch-Jüdische Lebenswege Dean Phillip Bell Von der Emanzipation zur Entrechtung: Deutsch-Jüdische Lebenswege [Sachor: Zeitschrift für Antisemitismusforschung, Jüdische Geschichte und Gegenwart, Volume 9 (1999)], edited by die Studentische Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Antisemitismusfor schung. Essen: Klartext Verlag, 1999. 152pp. DM 23.36. Published yearly, Sachor is an eclectic journal run by graduate students at the Rohr- Universität Bochum. The broad focus of the journal is on antisemitism, Jewish history, and contemporary Jewish issues. The central theme of this issue (Volume 9) is the more general question of German-Jewish relations between the period of Emancipation and the deprivation of legal rights during the National Socialist period. German-Jewish personalities bridging the German and Jewish worlds are considered throughout the volume. In the first article by Heike Catrin Bala, Gabriel Riesser is examined, particularly regarding his political efforts during the German National Assembly in Paulskirche (1848/49). Bala traces the tension and opposition between Riesser’s religious affiliation and many of his political initiatives. Thomas Rink next discusses the question of “double loyalty,” that is, the relationship between German and Jewish identity, in Fritz Rathenau, a cousin of the famous Walther Rathenau. Rink is particularly interested in Rathenau’s thoughts and actions regarding assimilation and acculturation, antisemitism, and emigration; Rathenau’s view of Zionism is also explored. Andrea Löw and Kerstin Robusch sketch the life history of Simon and Karola Freimark, whose children, with the help of their uncle, were able to emigrate to the United States in 1938. The parents, however, suffered under the anti-Jewish measures of the National Socialists; they were deported to Theresienstadt, survived the Red Army and a DP camp, and were eventually reunited with their now-grown children in New York, after eight years. Löw and Robusch have also contributed to this volume a conversation with the historian Saul Friedländer that probes into the ways in which Friedländer’s childhood under the National Socialists affected his later life, identity, and perspective. Benedikt Faber assesses the grappling with and understanding of “Deutschtum” in the diaries of Victor Klemperer at various times of Klemperer’s life, especially during the National Socialist period. Mirjana Stancic analyzes the work of the author and journalist Manès Sperber (1905–1984), whose sentiment was caught between his post-exile home in cosmopolitan Paris and his memories of childhood in the east Galician shtetl and Vienna. Finally, Lothar Mertens offers an obituary for George L. Mosse (who died on January 22, 1999 at the age of 81), the modern historian who taught for many years at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Mosse was born in Berlin in 1918, studied history at Cambridge beginning in 1937, and then emigrated to the United States with his parents in 1939. The obituary lists his major published works. Sachor offers a very welcome mix of short essays, an interview, and an obituary focusing on individuals as a means of addressing the central theme of the volume. But [End Page 142] the volume also includes reviews of ten books related to the theme as well as reviews of nine additional books related to a variety of themes and periods in German-Jewish history. Rounding out the volume is a poem, an obituary for Ignatz Bubis, an article on representations of Israeli religious extremism in German publications, and a useful bibliography of recent studies and sources focusing upon German-Jewish biographical and autobiographical writing. Overall, the volume includes studies of some fascinating subjects that may be less likely to appear in other forums. Much of the material is useful, if at times rather general. Throughout the essays and reviews there is a penchant for short biographical and chronological presentations and summary, rather than extended analysis. Nevertheless, the volume is well conceived and offers something for everyone; it is, in some ways, a model for a more reflective journal. Dean Phillip Bell Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies Copyright © 2001 The University of Nebraska

(review)

MLR, 96. I, 2001 MLR, 96. I, 2001 provides a contribution on her mixed fortunes in her publishing links to Britain, while G. P. Butler provides an open-ended and stimulating contribution on the possible sourcesused by Galston in his successfulEnglishtranslationof Transit and Das siebteKreuz.From this volume emerges a Seghersjust as interested in Jewish issues, in artistic and aesthetic questions, in the religious and metaphysical as in socialism and socialist realism. It becomes clear too that these interests do not alwayscombine easily.A piece on Dassiebte Kreuz would have been welcome, given attempts elsewhere to discredit it in line with the recent wave of criticism of communistresistancein the camps (similarly,in 1994,Apitz'sNacktunter Woifen was unfavourably compared by the literary critic Wilfried Schoeller with the 'truer' picture of concentration camp life offered by Remarque in Der FunkeLeben). However, this is not meant as a criticism.I can warmly recommend Ian Wallace's new volume: it is interesting,well-written,readableand stimulating. NOTTINGHAM TRENT UNIVERSITY BILL NIVEN MaxFrisch, Friedrich Durrenmatt: Briefwechsel. Ed. by PETER RUEDI. Zurich:Diogenes. I998. 240 pp. DM 39. It was perhaps inevitable that two very different German-Swiss authors who achieved world fame at approximately the same time should be linked in the perception of the public. The plays Der BesuchderaltenDame,Biedermann unddie Brandstifter, Andorra and Die Physiker all had theirpremieres in Switzerlandbetween 1956 and 1962 before going on to much wider audiences. It is alsoprobably trueto say that the worldperceived them only as playwrights,althoughFrischhad by 1956 firmly established a reputation in German-speaking Europe with Tagebuch I946-I949 and Stiller and althoughboth writerscontinued to publishin a varietyof genres for the remainderof their long lives. The irritationengendered by thisjoint perception is expressedby the French-SwisscriticMaurice Audetat when he writes of 'le Frisch-et-Dtirrenmatt, creature fantasmagorique, accouplement contre nature d'un Zurichois et d'un Bernois'. Academic critics, while seeking to explain difference, possibly only succeeded in reinforcing the notion of similarity:Hans Banziger's FrischundDiirrenmatt, first published in 1960 and running to several revised editions over the years, was followed in 1963 by Diirrenmatt undFrisch. Anmerkungen from Hans Mayer, who was later to edit Frisch'sGesammelte Werke. The one difference between the two men, at least perceived very clearly in their own country, relatednot so much to theirworkbut to their criticismof Switzerlandas a result of which, the present volume points out, Frischbecame 'StaatsfeindNr I' whereasDurrenmattwas 'derHofnarr'(p. 22). The book contains a go-page introduction by the editor entitled 'Fast eine Freundschaft',33 lettersand notes exchanged between the two writersfrom 1947to 1986, copious annotations to these exchanges, numerous photographs and a very useful 'Chronik' of the lives and works. The meticulously researched scholarly apparatusis greaterthan its subjectby a factorof at leastfourto one. When the size of the correspondence, almost certainly comprising all the extant missives, is compared with that of the recently published correspondence between Frischand Uwe Johnson, the modesty of the claim by the editor that the collection will not figure among 'den groBen Zwiegesprachender deutschsprachigenBriefschriftstellerei ' (p. 9) seems entirelyappropriate. It isnone thelessfascinatingto trace,despitethe enormousgaps,the development of the relationshipbetween the two men. It is Frischwho firsttakes up contact in 1947afterreadingthe manuscriptof Esstehtgeschrieben, Durrenmatt'sfirstperformed provides a contribution on her mixed fortunes in her publishing links to Britain, while G. P. Butler provides an open-ended and stimulating contribution on the possible sourcesused by Galston in his successfulEnglishtranslationof Transit and Das siebteKreuz.From this volume emerges a Seghersjust as interested in Jewish issues, in artistic and aesthetic questions, in the religious and metaphysical as in socialism and socialist realism. It becomes clear too that these interests do not alwayscombine easily.A piece on Dassiebte Kreuz would have been welcome, given attempts elsewhere to discredit it in line with the recent wave of criticism of communistresistancein the camps (similarly,in 1994,Apitz'sNacktunter Woifen was unfavourably compared by the literary critic Wilfried Schoeller with the 'truer' picture of concentration camp life offered by Remarque in Der FunkeLeben). However, this is not meant as a criticism.I can warmly recommend Ian Wallace's new volume: it is interesting,well-written,readableand stimulating. NOTTINGHAM TRENT UNIVERSITY BILL NIVEN MaxFrisch, Friedrich Durrenmatt: Briefwechsel. Ed. by...

Special Issue on Philip Roth

Long before he received a Pulitzer Prize for his novel American Pastoral, Roth was recognized as among the best novelists writing in English today. Where hitherto he had been bracketed with Bernard Malamud and Saul BeUow as one of America's leading Jewish American writers, the ethnic qualifier may now certainly be dropped. Not that Roth has stopped concerning himself with Jewish issues. In his latest novels his characters' Jewishness is still very much in evidence. But what Roth writes about them has more to do with their being Americans than being Jews. Perhaps that is one reason why the American Jewish estabhshment has ceased taking potshots at him. Another, possibly more important, reason may lie in the fact that American Jews have finally come of age as fully accepted in American culture. This more secure position has little need for the kinds of defensiveness that occasioned the attacks on Roth. Jewish Americans have arrived; they are now very much a part of mainstream America, as readers of Shofar hardly need telling. American Jews, such as those Roth now writes about, may be more or less - less rather than more, perhaps - aware of their Jewishness, but they are not as preoccupied by their ethnic origins as, say, Alexander Portnoy was in Portnoy 's Complaint. The essays in this special issue mostly focus on the later novels. Of course, the earlier work cannot be ignored, and it is not. Comparisons with what Roth did and what he is doing now are very much to the point. Many of the articles therefore refer usefully to the earlier fiction, showing how the later novels compare or contrast with it, or at times build on it, as Deborah Shostak's essay does, for example, in Philip Roth's Fictions of Self-Exposure. On the other hand, a salient feature of Roth's recent writing is his continuing tendency to experiment. He seems to approach each new book as a challenge to explore the frontiers of fiction and to find new and different ways of treating relationships among biography, autobiography, and fiction. This collection begins, however, at the beginning - with an extended analysis of one of Roth's best short stories, the Fanatic. In her essay, Victoria Aarons investigates Roth's registry of Jewish consciousness in the conflict that arises in Eli Peck, a successful young lawyer living in the mythical New York suburb of Woodenton. His friends commission Eli, an assimilated Jew, to rid the town of the newly arrived yeshiva that threatens to disrupt the harmony established between the town's resident Jews and their WASP neighbors. Aarons shows that as Eli becomes obsessed with these parvenus, his obsession is shared by Roth's narrative voice as well. Eli's eventual inability to carry out his commission and his volte face - his assumption of Leo Tzuref s identity by putting on his Hasidic dress - reveals one modern American Jew's attempt to resolve the dilemma posed by assimilationism and the need to reclaim one's identity as something rooted in history. Few, if any, of Roth's later characters resolve their conflicts similarly, though many of them grapple with it, one way or another. Eli's obsession is prelude to a major theme that runs throughout Roth's fiction and that takes many forms: the nature of the self and the problem of self-identity. This theme is by no means unique in modern fiction; Gabe Wallach in Letting Go (1962) is not the first young man to set out in quest of self-discovery. But in this and increasingly in his later fiction Roth gives the theme some interesting twists as he introduces elements of his own autobiography into his novels. In Zuckerman Unbound (1985), he presents the novelist Nathan Zuckerman, whom he had introduced in My Life as a Man (1974) and in The Ghost Writer (1984), as a kind of facsimile of himself - the author of a notorious novel called Carnovsky that seems very much in substance and reputation like Roth's Portnoy 's Complaint. But as Deborah Shostak argues, Roth is here playing with autobiography, making the most of anticipated reader inclinations to interpret factually what is presented fictionally. …

Peroutkova Přítomnost, židé a Židé

The presented study is an attempt at interpreting the relationship between Czech society and Jews, both the "ethnic" and "religious" ones, the Jewish identity and their problems upon the background of the development of the 1st and 2nd republics. While the former regime distinguished itself with a relatively liberal approach to the Jewish fellow citizens and a rapid push of anti-Semltism to the margin of society, the "2nd republic" introduced a number of anti-Jewish measures as early as January 1939. Th post-Munich regime was largely characteristic with a growing anti-Jewish hatred emanating "from below". The analysis used as a basic source Přítomnost, a political and cultural weekly with opinions close to the Castle Group. The periodical was marked with its ability to adopt a non-partisan, broad and multilateral look at the contemporary situation as well as a fine ability to highlight the most important contemporary questions and which displayed a will for a committed service to the first-republic democracy. The genesis of the Jewish issue in Přítomnost only reached a turning point in the 1930s; until then it had a form of an opinion clash between the representatives of the Czech-Jewish and Zionist movements. The argument was dominated by mutual accusations of allegedly being the biggest enemy of internal loyalty to the state. Assimilated Jews, who still called themselves Jews-Czechs or Czechs of the Jewish belief, and Zionists, committed and proud representatives of the Jewish nation reproduced in their arguments the antagonism between three identities: the Jewishness, the Czech (or Czechoslovak) national aspirations and the German national aspirations. Peroutka himself was an advocate of Czech-Jewish assimilation. Starting the 1930s Přítomnost was dominated by the theme of German anti-Semitism, its echo in the traditional dispute between advocates of assimilation and Zionists (until 1933), the growing influence of Hitlerism on the domestic German and Czech nationalisms as well as the topic of the German and Austrian emigration with its Jewish part (after 1934). All of these contributions confirmed the truthfulness of a major Czech self-stereotype of Czechoslovakia as an island of peace and freedom, although anti-Semitism rapidly spread in the North Bohemian borderland with its majority German population and the Prague-based German university. Despite this Přítomnost reacted to the altered political situation and it voiced a more reserved stance in its criticism of the German Reich since 1936. In early 1938 Peroutka, who was realistically considering the extent of tolerance of Czech society, warned the Jewish fellow citizens of the demand of solidarity with Jewish refugees. A real crisis only appeared next February. In the atmosphere of the "policy of national egoism", the strategy Peroutka had espoused, Přítomnost tried to protect Czech Jews, an integral part of the Czech nation. However, on evident tactical grounds Peroutka openly gave up responsibility for domestic German Jewry. As a result, the weekly slid even before March 15, 1939 from a broad democratic platform to a much narrower basis of national survival. However, it certainly did not join the strong contemporary anti-Semitic current, as it is sometimes alleged.

Judentum, Jurisprudenz und Philosophie: Bilder aus dem Leben des Juristen Eduard Gans (1797-1839) (review)

Book Reviews 125 way that the 1997 volume of documents assembled by Yeshayahu A. Jelinek is (Zwischen Moral und Realpolitik: Deutsch-israelische Beziehungen 1945-1965. Eine Dokumentensammlung. Band 16. Gerlingen: Bleicher Verlag, 1997). Lily Gardner Feldman Center for German and European Studies Georgetown University Judentum, Jurisprudenz und Philosophie: Bilder aus dem Leben des Juristen Eduard Gans (1797"':1839), by Johann Braun. Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft ; 1997. 254 pp. DM 76. Johann Braun's study, Judentum, Jurisprudenz und Philosophie: Bilder aus dem Leben des Juristen Eduard Gans (1797-1839) was published on the two hundredth anniversary of Eduard Gans's birthday, March 22,1797. A well-known legal scholar in his time, Gans's work is largely unknown today both in Germany and the United States, and he is more often cited for his role within the Berlin Jewish community than for his books on inheritance law or legal philosophy. Gans was born as the son of a Berlin banker and businessman who had worked repeatedly for the Prussian government after 1806. He was destined to follow his father's footsteps and enter the business world. After his father's death, however, he was able to pursue a different career path and study law; first in Berlin and Gottingen, and finally in Heidelberg, where he completed his dissertation with highest honors in 1819. Because ofboth personal and general political concerns, Gans became increasingly engaged in Jewish issues. 1819 was a year of extensive civic urnest, particularly in the Baden area, that led to the destruction of Jewish property and hate campaigns against Jews. With the call of"Hep-Hep!" (a possible shortening for "Hierosolima est perdita"; the origin of this call is unclear), students and citizens of many German towns ransacked Jewish houses and threatened their inhabitants. Still in Heidelberg, Gans was able to witness some of these activities. After his return to Berlin, Gans faced a personal setback. While he was able to complete his legal studies, he was by no means able to join the faculty of any German university. Despite the 1812 proclamation of Jewish emancipation, a German professorship was not in every citizen's reach. A German professor was a civil servant, and Prussia, as well as other German states, viewed itself as a Christian polity. Law, moreover, was a central field for any government. How could a Jew represent it in an official institution? 126 SHOFAR Summer 1999 Vol. 17, No.4 For the next few years, Gans's stubborn pursuit of a professorship tested the Prussian emancipation edict, and [mally resulted in more explicitly stated restriction for the professional careers of Jewish students, the so-called "Lex Gans." Gans decided to proceed with what could be viewed as a particularly German form of Jewish protest. In late 1819, he founded the Verein zur Verbesserung des Zustandes der Juden im Deutschen Bundesstaat (an association for the improvement ofthe status ofJews within the German states). A year and a halflater, it was renamed the Verein fUr die Kultur und Wissenschaft der Juden. It issued its own journal, founded its own educational institution, and drew scholars and artists like Leopold Zunz and Heinrich Heine into its fold. The Verein's goal was to work towards a Judaism without Rabbinic influence and attempt a true symbiosis of Jewish and German culture. Stifled by endless discussions about statutes, meeting schedules, and membership rules and regulations, as well as a call for assimilation that finally led to the conversion to Christianity of many of its members, the Verein folded in 1825. Gans, its forceful president, traveled that year to Paris, and was baptized in the Protestant faith. Although he was still regarded by many as a simply baptized Jew, Gans seems honestly to have embraced Christianity as the proper religion for the age of reason. A few months after his return, he received his coveted professorship, joined his admired teacher Hegel at the Berlin university, and continued as a public opponent ofthe most prominent legal scholar ofhis day, Carl von Savigny. Until his death in 1839, Gans proceeded to sketch a philosophical system of legal studies that was much at odds with Savigny's historical approach that would continue to dominate...

Jews Against Prejudice: American Jews and the Fight for Civil Liberties (review)

146 SHOFAR Summer 1999 Vol. 17, No.4 diamond and ruby buttons. In his left hand he holds a slim ivory cane with a violet bowknot. A white lambkin peeks out ofhis waistcoat pocket." Davison, following some earlier critics, says flatly, "Rudy has become a Jewish 'fairy boy of eleven'" (his emphasis). And he sees in that image a confirmation of Bloom's commitment to Judaism. Not very likely. The Jews ofDublin in 1904, the time ofthe novel, were almost entirely Eastern European immigrants-Orthodox Jews-and their fust generation progeny, refugees from restrictive Russian laws of the 1880s and accompanying pogroms. Reading from right to left and a white lambkin, which could as easily be the agnus dei as the paschal lamb, do not make the image of Rudy "Jewish"-certainly not in a world in which Jews tended to mumble and sway when they prayed and wore somber clothes. The ostentatious continued kissing of the text while reading and the bizarre dress, with echoes in that dress of Christian, classical, and Celtic lore, would be outrageous as a symbol of Judaism to Jews of any persuasion, let alone Eastern European, Orthodox Jews at the turn ofthe century; and most of Joyce's Jewish friends, even though assimilated, would have told him so. I can only read mockery in the image. Davison's book is useful as a discussion ofhow Joyce's concept of Jews probably evolved; but I do not see it as a useful explanation of Leopold Bloom, one of the three central characters in Ulysses. Erwin R. Steinberg Carnegie Mellon University Jews Against Prejudice: American Jews and the Fight for Civil Liberties, by Stuart Svonkin. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. 364 pp. $32.50. As Nathan Glazer famously lamented, "We are all multiculturalists now." Stuart Svonkin, in his well-researched history, shows that today's seemingly orrmipresent multiculturalism springs in part from the activism ofJewish defense groups ofthe 1930s and 1940s who expanded their campaigns for self-defense to an organized attack on the existence ofprejudice itself. Svonkin shows how Jews during this period developed an ideology centered upon a new "unitary theory ofprejudice." That is, the then radical idea that prejudice itself, no matter what group it was directed at, was a problem that all minority groups needed to be concerned with. This allowed Jewish groups like the Anti Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee to move beyond strictly Jewish issues to work with other minority groups, especially Blacks in the civil rights movement. Svonkin is especially strong in showing how these two Jewish groups were able to successfully mount and maintain a public education--or rather re-education-program Book Reviews 147 that ranged from films to ads on public transportation to the publication of a string of tremendously influential academic studies, the most famous of which was The Authoritarian Personality. The author then shows how these groups worked in tandem with the World Jewish Congress, which was successful in bringing about legal change in the form of anti-discriminatory laws in the areas of housing and employment practices. The major weakness of Svonkin's book is his failure to fully consider the reasons why Jewish activism, which until around 1967 identified itself with a kind of universal liberalism and the fight against the idea of unitary prejudice, once again became telescoped into a more narrow identity group politics that we see today and which men like Glazer lament. Svonkin places a great deal ofemphasis on the Six-Day War of 1967 for the change in Jewish activism. Yet he fails to consider that, at this same time, women, Blacks, Latinos, Chicanos, Gays, American Indians and others were all also abandoning the goals of liberal universalism to focus almost exclusively on the problems of their respective groups. Svonkin points out that the old idea of universal liberal activism had an "inherent contradiction"; that is, it did not make allowance for conflicts between minority groups. This, however, would seem to be begging the question. What we really need to know is why these conflicts arose and why they did so at this particular time and not at another. In a similar vein, Svonkin...

Philip Roth and the Jews (review)

Book Reviews 149 in the road tour, but many of the events in the novel lack a feeling of reality, with disaster following disaster. All the ingredients of a made-for-TV movie. Steven A. Riess Department of History Northeastern Illinois University Philip Roth and the Jews, by Alan Cooper. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996. 319 pp. $19.95. Alan Cooper's book on Philip Roth and the Jews comes as a long overdue and most welcome contribution to Roth studies. At last we have a comprehensive, perceptive, and in-depth analysis ofRoth's treatment ofand by Jews, mainly American Jews, who have preoccupied, astonished, and alternately hectored and gratified this gifted author ever since he began writing four decades ago. As Cooper says in his Preface-and abundantly demonstrates in the chapters that follow-"Roth is much more complex, as both a writer and a Jew, than readers of his early works know" (p. xi). Those early works, mainly the stories in Goodbye, Columbus (1959) and Portnoy's Complaint (1969), outraged the conservative Jewish establishment , who took great umbrage that an author, especially a Jewish one, would write about adultery, masturbation, blasphemy, and other high crimes and misdemeanors (as they were considered) that contemporary Jews committed. Still insecure in their social position in America, these offended Jews (most of whom were of an older generation than Roth) saw him as a betrayer, a self-hating, antisemitic Jew of the worst stripe. As Roth argued at the time, and as Cooper amply details, these Jews missed the point. They utterly mistook Roth's artistry and his confidence in Jews as a people strong enough to endure the treatment found in the work of other writers, whatever their ethnic backgrounds. What underlies Roth's writing from the 1950s to the present is precisely as Cooper says: "an American's attempt to filter out illusions from the world through the agency ofa wry Jewish sensibility" (p. 23). Ifthis attempt makes for wholesale misunderstandings , which Cooper dutifully documents and analyzes, it also links Roth to other major writers. In Herzog and The Dean's December, for example, Saul Bellow earnestly attempts to expose reality from the camouflage of illusion and to insist that we Americans confront reality-or suffer the consequences of not doing so. Roth's sensibility differs from Bellow's, just as his humor differs; but at bottom both are intent-as any serious writer must be-on the perennial quest to uncover and display the real nature of our common human existence. For Roth in his early novels, Letting 150 SHOFAR Fall 1997 Vol. 16, No.1 Go (1962) and When She Was Good (1967), this meant "trying to square the myth of opportunity with the devilish dues required to sigri on to the American dream, especially for a Jew" (p. 86). The novelist's job was not to solve the problem, but to show its dimensions, and by so doing Roth (like many writers before and since) made himself vulnerable to attack. In his later work, particularly in the trilogy Zuckerman Bound (1985), but also in My Life as a Man (1974), Roth turned autobiography into fiction. Ifhis disastrous first marriage (to Margaret Martinson Williams) along with his emphasis on a Jewish male's fascination with and pursuit ofshiksas powerfully influenced his earlier novels, Roth's experiences as a famous-or infamous-author provided a wealth of material for him to contemplate, digest, and turn into fiction. The Jewish theme, like the theme offathers and sons (which began as early as Letting Go), was again very much in evidence. In the novels that followed, especially in The Counterlife (1987) and Operation Shylock (1993), Roth raised more Jewish issues than ever before, introducing complications that Jewish Americans have experienced since Israel became not only a Jewish state, but also a conquering nation occupying disputed territories. Meanwhile, as Cooper says, a Jewish "transformation" was taking place in ways that Roth's surrogate, Nathan Zuckerman, could not adequately recognize or assess (p. 211). In Israel, grandchildren of the vanished generation of the European shtetl "were signing treaties and shouldering Uzis"; in America, they were becoming "senators and CEOs." American...

Historical Memory and the State of Jewish Studies in Germany: Editor's Introduction

Editor's Introduction Historical Memory and the State of Jewish Studies in Germany: Editor's Introduction Dean Phillip Bell Dean Bell studied medieval and early modem European History at the University of Chicago and the University ofCalifornia at Berkeley, where he received his Ph.D. He has taught at Berkeley, the Hebrew Theological College, and the Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies. Currently he works and teaches at DePaul University. His research focuses on the late medieval and early modem history of the Jews in Germany. In his seminal work The Idea ofHistory, R. G. Collingwood argued that the value of history is that "it teaches us what man has done and thus what man is."l History, according to Collingwood, is concerned with both what he called an event's outside-that "which can be described in terms ofbodies and their movements"~and its inside-"that in the event which can only be described in terms of thought."2 Such a distinction between the outside and inside of an event seems particularly applicable to the recent event ofthe "renaissance of Jewish Studies in Germany." Externally, we might ask what is meant by "renaissance of Jewish Studies," what are the scope (subjects, methodologies) and agents (institutions, individuals) of Jewish Studies in Germany? Internally, we might question why it is that Jewish Studies has seemingly become so appealing in the land of the Shoah. A spate ofrecent studies has documented many facets of the history ofthe Jews in Germany since 1945,3 though not as frequently the state ofJewish Studies in Germany.4 lR. G. Collingwood, The Idea ofHistory (Oxford, 1956), here at pp. 9-10. 2Collingwood, The Idea ofHistory, p. 213. 3See, for example, though of vastly different scope and quality: Anson Rabinbach and Jack Zipes, editors, Germans and Jews since the Holocaust (New York, 1986); Dirk Blasius and Dan Diner, editors, Zerbrochene Geschichte: Leben und Selbstverstiindnis der Juden in Deutschland (Frankfurt am Main, 1991); Micha Brumlik, The Situation ofthe Jews in Germany Today (Bloomington, 1991); Sander L. Gilman and Karen Remmler, editors, Reemerging Jewish Culture in Germany: Life and Literature Since 1989 (New York, 1994); Michael Cohn, The Jews in Germany 1945-1993: The Building ofa Minority (London, 1994); Enzo Traverso, The Jews and Germany: From the "JudeoGerman Symbiosis" to the Memory of Auschwitz (Lincoln, 1995); Wolfgang Benz, editor, Antisemitismus in Deutschland: Zur Aktualitiit eines Vorurteils (Munich, 1995); Gunther B. Ginzel, editor, Der Anfang nach dem Ende: Jiidisches Leben in Deutschland 1945 bis heute (Dusseldorf, 1996); Julius H. Schoeps, editor, Ein Volk von Mordern? Die Dokumentation zur GoldhagenKontroverse um die Rolle der Deutschen im Holocaust (Hamburg, 1996); Y. Michal Bodemann, 2 SHOFAR Summer 1997 Vol. 15, No.4 A number of libraries, institutes, and museums, as detailed by Michael Brenner, have been founded to focus upon Jewish issues. Taken together these developments have comprised something ofa renaissance in Jewish Studies in Germany, or have they? The renaissance of Jewish Studies is indebted to the older Wissenschaft des Judentums, though as Margarete Schluter makes clear, it would be presumptuous to' claim that contemporary Jewish Studies in Germany is a direct heir to the flourishing academic study of Judaism in the last decades of the nineteenth and the early decades of the twentieth centuries. Perhaps the greatest difference between these two academic endeavors-that of Wissenschaft des Judentums and the more recent Judaistik or Judische Studien-is that much of the recent scholarship of Judaism is conducted by non-Jews. Ofcourse the relatively small Jewish population in Germany today-ranging wildly between estimates of 40,000 (official) and 100,000 (unofficial) individuals-compounded by the general lack ofknowledge of things Jewish among both Jews and non-Jews, obviously contributes to this situation. The example of the Hochschule rur Jiidische Studien in Heidelberg is, in this light, revealing. The Hochschule was created originally to serve as a training institute for Jewish community professionals but has ended up educating a much more broadly non-Jewish clientele as well. Still, its very success begs a number ofimportant questions. What is the scope of Jewish Studies in Germany? What is the audience for Jewish Studies? How does the study ofJudaism in Germany defme itself and how...