Jewish Life Research Articles

The Holocaust, Apartheid, and Contemporary South African Jewish Perspectives on Victimhood

The Holocaust, Apartheid, and Contemporary South African Jewish Perspectives on Victimhood Shirli Gilbert (bio) and Deborah Posel (bio) Introduction This article stems from a larger study that explores aspects of contemporary South African Jewish identity, focusing on individuals who identify as Jewish but situate themselves outside what they consider to be the communal mainstream. The term “progressive Jews” is used to refer to them collectively, although they represent a broad political spectrum ranging from liberal through to social democrat and Marxist/socialist. All endorse principles of social justice, and many seek alternative Jewish institutions that they feel resonate better with their values. Alongside archival research, in-depth interviews were conducted with fifty-five South African Jews of varying ages.1 Our central aim was to understand how they define and practice their Jewishness in the distinctive historical and political context of contemporary post-apartheid South Africa. The article focuses on one of the key questions that was explored during these interviews, namely the extent to which memory of the Holocaust has inflected our respondents’ self-understanding as Jews and their engagement with South African society. The latter is an issue that is complicated by the pervasiveness of Israel–apartheid analogies, particularly in the governmental and media realms, as well as a state-sanctioned discourse about the apartheid past that is infused with references to the Holocaust. Memory of the Holocaust significantly informs how many of our respondents understand and define their Jewishness, but it does so in complex and sometimes paradoxical ways. This is in large part because of how they associate the subject with organised Jewry, with whom they have an uneasy relationship. Many respondents felt that these circles were excessively preoccupied with Jewish victimhood, a narrative they saw underpinned especially by memory of the Holocaust, and which was being used to justify what they considered problematic attitudes on a range of social and political issues, particularly South African racial issues and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. [End Page 155] It was not the fact of historic Jewish victimhood that they were rejecting— many expressed a deep connection to the Jewish past and a concern for the Jewish future—but rather the idea that victimhood stood at the center of Jewish life and identity. Some explicitly claimed that the Holocaust was not central to their Jewish identities, while others spoke more broadly of rejecting a victim-centered outlook. In many of the interviews, however, it was clear that the history of antisemitism and the Holocaust had influenced their Jewishness to a greater or lesser degree, though often in ways that diverge from what they considered to be the communal mainstream. In the first part of the article we provide a brief account of the historical origins of South African Jewry as well as the trajectory of Holocaust memorialization in South Africa, in order to situate the perspectives of our respondents. In the second part of the article we outline our research findings. Background and Context Following the first Jewish settlers in South Africa, who arrived in the mid-nineteenth century primarily from Britain, Holland, and Germany, the largest influx of immigrants came from Lithuania at the turn of the twentieth century. At its peak in the 1970s the Jewish population numbered around 120,000; at the time of writing it is estimated at around 50,000, as substantial numbers have emigrated.2 Jews’ efforts to gain acceptance in the South African racial order depended from the outset on their being recognized as white. These efforts began early in the twentieth century, as the premium attached to ideas of racial difference rapidly increased. After the creation of the Union of South Africa in 1910, the pursuit of a system of white supremacy picked up momentum, as legislation accumulated to assign access to opportunities, wealth, and privilege on racial lines. The norms and values of racial segregationism became hegemonic, as everyday life in South Africa was dominated by notions of a supposedly natural hierarchy of racial worth that positioned white people unassailably at the top. For Jews, it would have been clear that prospects for educational and commercial success, upward mobility, and political acceptance depended on their racial status. Their pursuit of...

Jewish Objects and Jewish Affects: A Conversation

Jewish Objects and Jewish AffectsA Conversation Jodi Eichler-Levine (bio), Rachel B. Gross (bio), Laura A. Leibman, and Laura S. Levitt (bio) The following conversation is an edited version of a roundtable originally held at the American Academy of Religion annual meeting in December 2020. Each of the four discussants have published new books that touch on the topics of this special issue of CrossCurrents. The books under discussion are: • Jodi Eichler-Levine, Painted Pomegranates and Needlepoint Rabbis: How Jews Craft Resilience and Create Community. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2020. • Rachel B. Gross, Beyond the Synagogue: Jewish Nostalgia as Religious Practice. New York: New York University Press, 2021. • Laura A. Leibman, The Art of the Jewish Family: A History of Women in Early New York in Five Objects. New York: Bard Graduate Center, 2020 [Winner of three National Jewish Book Awards, 2020]. • Laura S. Levitt, The Objects that Remain. University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2020. What is your recent book about? In what context were you studying Jewish objects and affects? Why and how? Jodi Eichler-Levine: My new book, Painted Pomegranates and Needlepoint Rabbis, tells the story of how contemporary Jews craft a “Judaism of feeling” through the creation of objects. It is the result of three years of participant observation, interviews, survey, and digital work. I talked primarily with women from all over the United States, with particular focus on the Pomegranate Guild. My subject matter was immensely tactile. I got to see lots of objects in homes, at a convention, and as portrayed online. I started with the [End Page 82] people and their practices, which incorporated objects: I wanted to think about how the process and location of making art and craft were (or were not) part of Jewish life, and what those processes—and the objects in which they culminated—meant, particularly to Jewish women. I wanted to get at the lived religion, the literal texture of Jewish life in the United States through this focus. Rachel B. Gross: In Beyond the Synagogue: Jewish Nostalgia as Religious Practice, I look at materials and institutions through which American Jews engage, promote, and teach nostalgia for turn-of-the-century Jewish immigration from Central and Eastern Europe to the United States. I find that nostalgia—a sentimental longing for Jewish communal origins that can’t be fulfilled—is both affect and practice, and I think that that feeling and that practice have become a prominent part of American Jewish practice since the 1970s and into the present day. I look at case studies of the materials and institutions of Jewish genealogists, historic synagogues that are used as museums, children’s books and dolls, and artisanal delis and other Jewish food entrepreneurs. As I’ve learned from others, including those on this panel, American Jews have always used material culture to create communities in the present. I think the materials of nostalgia don’t just connect Jews to other Jews in the present, though that’s a large part of it. I think they help shape a sacred narrative about where American Jewish individuals, families, and communities come from and where they’re going. They provide sacred meaning that places individuals in relation to past, present, and future Jewish communities. Nostalgic materials invoke a community that includes both the living and the dead and that provides meaning in the present by telling stories about the past—two important features of religious practice. I did this research by studying the materials Jews created—including but not limited to family history books, genealogy newsletters, historic synagogues and their spaces and artifacts, picture books and dolls, and delis and dishes. I looked at how they were discussed online, in online reviews and in conversations in Jewish newspapers and other forums. I conducted some short-term ethnographies in genealogical societies, historic synagogues, and delis. And I think the heart of my study was the interviews I conducted with genealogists, museum staff members, philanthropists, authors, illustrators, publishers, restaurateurs and other entrepreneurs. [End Page 83] Laura A. Leibman: My most recent book, The Art of the Jewish Family, uses five objects to create biographies of Jewish women...

Jewish Autonomy in a Slave Society: Suriname in the Atlantic World, 1651–1825 by Aviva Ben-Ur

Reviewed by: Jewish Autonomy in a Slave Society: Suriname in the Atlantic World, 1651–1825 by Aviva Ben-Ur Sarah Phillips Casteel (bio) Jewish Autonomy in a Slave Society: Suriname in the Atlantic World, 1651–1825. By Aviva Ben-Ur, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020. 358 pp. Aviva Ben-Ur's brilliant new history of Suriname's Portuguese Jews not only illuminates the colonial formation of a major Atlantic Jewish community but also maps important new methodological and conceptual directions for the nascent field of Caribbean Jewish studies. Within the Jewish Caribbean, the Surinamese community is a particularly rich subject for the historian because of the unique legal status it enjoyed—one that is reflected in its abundant records. While the exceptionality of Surinamese Jewry has long been recognized, Ben-Ur recasts the terms of that uniqueness, pointing not only to the community's territorial and legal autonomy but also its inclusion of Eurafricans. Only in Suriname did Eurafrican Jews "emerg[e] as a distinct and separate class" with cultural and institutional independence (261). Moreover, Ben-Ur reframes the exceptionality of the famed Jewish agricultural village of Jodensavanne ("the Jews' Savannah"), which she presents less as a haven of religious freedom than a frontier settlement that contained Jewish difference while advancing the interests of empire. Historical scholarship on Caribbean Jewry has grown steadily over the past two decades, often positioning itself against Jewish historiographies that relegate the Caribbean to the margins. In a sign of the field's maturation, Ben-Ur instead largely presents her study as a corrective to previous Caribbean Jewish scholarship. She argues that such scholarship's focus on Jewish identity and perspectives has tended to marginalize enslaved peoples or construct them as passive observers of Jewish life. By contrast, Ben-Ur adopts an Atlantic history model in which the story of Surinamese Jewry becomes inseparable from that of enslaved peoples. With its emphasis on contact and exchange, the Atlantic history lens enables Ben-Ur to attend to the voices of the silenced and to explore the implications of Surinamese Jewish history for the study of Africans in the Americas. This paradigm shift is reflected in the book's structure, which devotes two chapters to Eurafrican Jews and a third to enslaved people. Ben-Ur reminds us that Suriname's status as one of the largest slave societies in the Americas was the fundamental condition of the Jews' presence there. The opening chapter debunks the idealized image of Jodensavanne as a [End Page 431] "new Jerusalem" that can be traced back to Surinamese Jewish historian David Nassy's Essai historique sur la colonie de Surinam (1788). While Nassy described Jodensavanne as a peaceful haven, Ben-Ur emphasizes that the majority of Jodensavanne's inhabitants were enslaved Africans whose labor sustained the village. Situated on the frontier, Jodensavanne "serve[d] as a human bulwark against Indian and Maroon attacks" and later as a military outpost (77). Its synagogue square was the designated site for the violent punishment of enslaved people. The central paradox, captured in the book's title, is that Jewish autonomy in Suriname was bound up with the unfreedom of enslaved Africans. The second chapter further nuances previous accounts of Surinamese Jewish autonomy by examining internal and external challenges to Jewish communal authority, while the third chapter addresses Portuguese Jewish rootedness in Suriname. Ben-Ur shows how Jewishness became "nearly synonymous with settler society" through the community's longevity, demographic presence, and deepening interaction with the African-descended population (136). The subsequent two chapters are devoted to the Eurafrican Jewish population that resulted from sexual exploitation of enslaved women and slave concubinage. Eurafrican children were routinely converted to Judaism and sometimes manumitted and inherited by their Jewish owners, practices that enabled Judaism to survive in Suriname. As Eurafrican Jews grew in number and status, they became increasingly activist, forming their own society, Darhe Jesarim. While Darhe Jesarim's quest for ritual equality has previously been documented, Ben-Ur resituates this episode as part of a larger struggle of free people of color to obtain rights. She further makes the case that Judaism needs to be recognized as a significant religious presence in the lives of...

Jewish Identity in an Individual Age: A Theoretical Analysis of Interpersonal Religious Connections and Commitments

Jewish Identity in an Individual Age:A Theoretical Analysis of Interpersonal Religious Connections and Commitments Vered Sakal (bio) "Among its many functions, political theory opens discussion and engagement and forces people to confront their political beliefs and practices."1 Over the course of their history, Jews have operated within a variety of political contexts. These experiences have generated a rich body of political thought that tends to focus on wide-scale frameworks such as State, Nation, Peoplehood, etc. In a religious era that is described by many as the "age of the individual," i.e., the age of religious independence, authenticity, and freethinking, it seems reasonable to expand the boundaries of Jewish political thought by looking at the issue of Jewish political contexts from the micro rather than the macro point of view.2 Therefore, this study will focus on small-scale social religious associations.3 What kinds of relationships constitute these interactions? How do participants interpret them? What, if any, effect do they have on the way Jewish religiosity is experienced? To answer these questions regarding interpersonal religious engagements, we will adhere to Gordon Schochet's suggestion to apply political tools and definitions as a means to open discussion about beliefs, practices, and engagements. Focusing mainly on the atomistic-relational debate (concepts we shall further develop below) we will utilize this perspective to obtain insights into the characteristics of micro Jewish/religious associations. Consequently, this exploration will provide us with more than just a mere taxonomy with which we can better analyze Jewish/religious connections. Alongside the development of an analytical tool for studying different approaches to the conflicting impulses of communal tradition and modern individualism, our analysis strives to offer a reformulation of the interpretive foundations of Jewish identity. In an individualistic age, in which many define religion/Judaism in primarily individualistic terms, our notions of what constitutes Jewishness must accommodate the twenty-first century's Jewish experience. Hopefully, this study will provide an opportunity to rethink concepts such as private, common, communal, etc., and draw attention to the pivotal part micro bonds and associations play in current Jewish life. [End Page 21] Interpersonal Religious Interactions in an Individual Age We believe in the dignity, indeed the sacredness, of the individual. Anything that would violate our right to think for ourselves, judge for ourselves, make our own decisions, live our lives as we see fit, is not only morally wrong, it is sacrilegious.4 Individual religiosity, one of the central trends of the twenty-first century's religiosity, focuses above all else on the individual's private religious life and conscience, thus endowing her with great power (as well as the responsibility) to shape and make sense of her own religious experience.5 Accordingly, it is the individual, rather than an outside person or establishment, who ought to determine the nature of God/Higher Reality,6 her duties toward that God/Higher Reality, and what practices necessarily follow.7 Otherwise, there is no relevance or authenticity, and therefore no validity or value, to her religious experience. How, or even why, do we discuss interactions, connections, and commitments in such an individual environment? Although the individual-oriented approach recognizes the inner realm as the main religious arena, it does not necessarily understand religiosity as a hidden and exclusive experience. Accordingly, albeit its tendencies toward seclusion, it will include (in most cases) external aspects that introduce otherness, publicness, and socialization to the private religious experience.8 Therefore, it can be claimed that even though individual religiosity/Jewishness is indeed oriented inward, it is not a project of solitude confined within the intimate sphere exclusively comprising the individual and her God. Let us consider these outer aspects and the influence they might have on our understanding of Jewish connections and commitments. A Functionalist Approach to Jewish/Religious Connections and Commitments We can speak of common space when people come together in a common act of focus for whatever purpose, be it ritual, the enjoyment of a play, conversation, or the celebration of a major event. Their focus is common, as against merely convergent, because it is part of what is commonly understood that they are attending to, the common object or...

Zagłada i odrodzenie w twórczości ocalonej – łódzkiej malarki Sary Gliksman-Fajtlowicz (1909–2005)

The Holocaust and Rebirth in the Works of Sara Gliksman-Fajtlowicz, a Painter From Łódź, 1909–2005 Sara Gliksman-Fajtlowicz, a painter, came from a well-off family of Majerowiczs, the owners of opticians’ shops in Łódź. She studied at private painting and drawing schools in Łódźand Warsaw. Before the outbreak of World War II, she was active in the Polish art milieu. In 1933, she became a member of the Trade Union of Polish Artists (Związek Zawodowy Polskich Artystów Plastyków, ZZPAP) and participated in its exhibitions in Łódź, Warsaw, Kraków,and Lviv. She painted mainly landscapes, still lifes, and—less frequently—portraits. She published her works in the union magazine Forma. In 1940, she was displaced to the Łódźghetto where she worked as a graphic artist at the Statistics Department. Thanks to this she could obtain art materials. Her clandestine activity was documenting life in the ghetto in paintings and drawings. She survived the liquidation of the ghetto and then was forced to work on cleaning that area. Liberated on 19 January 1945, she returned to her house where some of her prewar works had survived. After 1945 she continued her artistic career and exhibited with the ZZPAP, as well as with the Jewish Society for the Encouragement of Fine Arts. In 1957, she emigrated to Israel. Gliksman died in Tel Aviv in 2005. The aim of this article is to verify and describe Sara Gliksman’s biography, to present her activities in the Polish-Jewish artistic community of postwar Poland, as well as to place her works in the context of issues concerning survivors’ memory and artistic attitudes toward the Holocaust, and art as a manifestation of hope for the rebirth of Jewish life and culture in postwar Poland in the second half of the 1940s and the beginning of the 1950s.

Kobiece micwot – rola i pozycja kobiety w świetle religijnego prawa żydowskiego

Women’s Mitzvot: The Role and Position of Women in the Light of the Jewish Religious Law It is not possible to understand the history and present day of Jewish women without placing them in the Jewish tradition, resulting mainly from religion which for centuries was the foundation of Jewish life, regulating its finest aspects. The article describes how the regulations of the religious Jewish law, halakha, determine the place of Jewish women in traditional society, and how the resulting adjustments relate to Jews according to gender. The analysis covers three so-called special women’s mitzvot, i.e. the lighting of the Sabbath lights, the separation of the challah, and the observance of the laws related to the family purity, as well as the resulting positioning of women within a clear apportionment into female−male, public−domestic, or culture−nature.

Beyond the Synagogue: Jewish Nostalgia as Religious Practice by Rachel B. Gross

Reviewed by: Beyond the Synagogue: Jewish Nostalgia as Religious Practice by Rachel B. Gross Laura Yares Rachel B. Gross. Beyond the Synagogue: Jewish Nostalgia as Religious Practice. New York, NY: New York University Press, 2021. Pp. 272 pages. Hard-cover $39. ISBN: 9781479803385 Where do American Jews go to do Jewish? Where do they feel Jewish? Where are networks of Jewishly affiliated people most likely to be concentrated? Demographers, Rachel B. Gross contends, have tried to answer these questions too narrowly. They have looked for the numbers of Jews who regularly attend synagogue, who light candles on Friday nights, and who join Jewish institutions. Concomitantly, as participation in all of the above has decreased, they have sounded the alarm bells of American Jewish decline. In Beyond the Synagogue, Gross argues that this demographic handwringing may in fact be the result of looking for Judaism in all the wrong places. Her book contributes to a growing literature within the study of American Jewry that encourages scholars to look beyond the boundaries of ritual [End Page 261] practice and institutional affiliation to understand the breadth of ways that American Jews construct Jewish identities. Jodi Eichler-Levine, for example, has explored how women craft Jewish identities through creative arts, and Laura Arnold Leibman has powerfully illuminated the ways that objects can speak to the texture of Jewish lives richly lived.1 In this compelling new volume, Gross shows that the vitality of contemporary American Judaism can equally be revealed by looking at the various ways that Jews engage with the objects and affects of Jewish nostalgia. Those same Jews who have no interest in synagogue or their local JCC, she suggests, may nevertheless be avid patrons of their local deli, participate in Jewish genealogy, or enjoy reading Jewish stories to their children and grandchildren. There are many ways to enact, perform, and feel Jewishness, and Gross richly illustrates that activities grouped under the rubric of American Jewish nostalgia offer positive indication that the vital signs of American Judaism are robust. Gross theorizes that American Jewish nostalgic engagements are not deviations from religious activity, but in fact constitute religious practices in their own right. Rejecting bifurcations of Judaism into the mutually separate domains of religion and culture, Gross anchors her exploration of nostalgia within the framework of lived religion. Informed by the work of Robert Orsi and Katherine Lofton, Gross defines religion as “meaningful relationships and the practices, narratives, and emotions that create and support these relationships” (6) and American Jewish religion in particular as “the commonplace personal practices and feelings that are mediated and standardized by certain materials and institutions” (18). Examining nostalgia as a form of religious practice, Gross proposes, eliminates the artificial binary so often drawn between Judaism as religion vs Judaism as ethnicity, culture or heritage. When defined in terms of relationships enacted through affective bonds, she suggests, Jewish religion is capacious enough to include them all. Deploying a mixed methods approach to the study of Jewish nostalgia that combines interviews, ethnography, and analysis of material and digital culture, Gross illuminates the production of American Jewish nostalgia across four lively case studies. Her first investigates Jews who participate in genealogical excavation of their family roots as an “emotional and spiritual experience of Jewish history” (75). The second examines historic synagogues as heritage sites, tracing the ways that staff, docents, visitors and funders collectively shape historic synagogues into sites of shared nostalgia. The third case study illuminates the production of books and toys for children as pedagogic devices that teach longing for a communal Jewish past. The final case study dives into the nostalgic revival of the Jewish deli, and illustrates the various ways that food can serve as an entry point for nostalgia, as well as a focus of disputes over nostalgic authenticity. Gross deftly illustrates why we should take nostalgia seriously as a locus of American Jewish practice, and her work opens up a rich seam of questions for further study. Gross focuses on nostalgia for an Eastern European Jewish past, which she claims as a collective enterprise, a mitzvah, even, for American Jewry writ large. Yet her observations might fruitfully be compared [End Page 262] and contrasted with...

Through the Bay Window: Harriet Lane Levy's 920 O'Farrell Street as Modernist Memoir

This essay examines an understudied Jewish American autobiographical text, Harriet Lane Levy's memoir 920 O'Farrell Street (1947). Completed when she was eighty years old, the memoir uses modernist aesthetics to describe Levy's Jewish upbringing in late nineteenth-century San Francisco. Arguing that 920 O'Farrell Street fills a significant gap in Jewish American literary history, I consider Levy's modernist memoir as an alternative to the established Jewish American autobiographical tradition, which has privileged the stories of working-class immigrants making their way from the ghetto into mainstream America. As I demonstrate through close analysis of the memoir, and in particular Levy's use of the Victorian house as a structuring device, 920 O'Farrell Street expands the parameters of Jewish American literary history by mapping Jewishness to the geographic and architectural sites of turn-of-the-twentieth-century San Francisco, and displacing the ghetto as the sole locus of Jewish life and literature in the United States. Further, Jewish American literary scholarship's New York-centrism and its privileging of the ghetto tale have obscured the pivotal role played by California Jewish women in the early stages of the modernist movement. As a corrective, I preface my close reading of the memoir with background on Levy, placing her in the context of a group of remarkable women—including Gertrude Stein, an Oakland resident in her youth, and Alice B. Toklas, Levy's O'Farrell Street neighbor—who moved between the middle-class Jewish communities of northern California and the expatriate salons of Paris in the first decades of the twentieth century.

Written Testimony of Pamela S. Nadell Before the United States House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary November 7, 2017: Examining Anti-Semitism on College Campuses

Written Testimony of Pamela S. Nadell Before the United States House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary November 7, 2017Examining Anti-Semitism on College Campuses Pamela S. Nadell (bio) INTRODUCTION Thank you, Chairman Goodlatte, Ranking Member Conyers, and distinguished members of this committee for inviting me to this important hearing on antisemitism on our nation's college campuses.1 I am Pamela Nadell, a professor of history and director of the Jewish Studies Program at American University. I am also president of the Association for Jewish Studies, a learned society of nearly two thousand [End Page 195] members in the U.S. and far beyond who research, write, and teach in all fields of Jewish Studies from the Bible to contemporary Jewish life.2 I have spent most of my life on a college campus. As a scholar of American Jewish history, I know that antisemitism has coursed through our nation's past since twenty-three Jews landed in New Amsterdam in 1654 and the colony's governor, Peter Stuyvesant, wanted to expel what he called a "deceitful race [of] … hateful enemies and blasphemers." Had his "request that the new territories should no more be allowed to be infected by people of the Jewish nation" been granted, perhaps we would not have this morning's hearing.3 But, more than 350 years ago, he failed, and, since then, Jews have immigrated to America from around the world, and they and their descendants have proudly called this nation their home. As citizens, American Jews enjoy the rights guaranteed in our First Amendment—the freedoms of worship, speech, the press, and peaceable assembly. Those same rights allow others to voice their contempt for the Jewish people and the Jewish religion. We call that antisemitism, a form of bigotry and hatred based on many stereotypes and myths. Antisemites charge that Jews conspire to control governments, the media, the entire world; they deny the historicity of the Holocaust; they call Jews Christ-killers. At its heart antisemitism is a malevolent ideology. It targets Jews as individuals and as a people. As an historian, I know that antisemitism has waxed and waned across the landscape of American history.4 The political moment, economic dislocations, social forces, the movies in their heyday, and social media today set its volume control. ANTISEMITISM TODAY We are, by all, accounts, sadly, at one of those moments where the volume on antisemitism in American life is turned way up. Scholars and watchdog Jewish communal agencies produce alarming surveys. The press and, as this hearing demonstrates, the U.S. Congress, rightly pay attention.5 When a violent protest erupts as white supremacists in Charlottesville, [End Page 196] a college town, chant "Jews will not replace us," American Jews are rightly fearful.6 Antisemitism takes many forms: harassment and threats against individuals and Jewish organizations, vandalism and bomb threats against Jewish institutions. Swastikas spray-painted anywhere signal a renewed call to exterminate the Jews. The number of physical assaults remains low, but each is a shocking reminder of the vulnerability of all Jews. On social media, antisemitic threats have exploded. Attacks there, especially targeting Jewish journalists, run horrifically into the millions.7 The hard evidence about the rising numbers of antisemitic incidents is indisputable, and everyone—politicians, government officials, leaders of business and industry, and especially our nation's educators—must do all they can to model respectful behavior and condemn this bigotry, and all expressions of racial hatred. But, the question that has brought us to this hearing today is the climate of antisemitism on our campuses. Some charting its rise have specifically called out our colleges and universities as "hotspots of antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiment."8 Social scientists find that, when Jewish students are handed a list of antisemitic statements, nearly three-quarters will confess that they were exposed to at least one of them in the past year. As one 2015 study concluded from this data: "Hostility towards Jews and Israel appears to be a problem for a significant number of Jewish students."9 [End Page 197] But how does such unfortunate stereotyping impact Jewish student life on campus? Are campuses really hot-beds of antisemitism? Or...

Review

Review

State of the Field: The Animating Tensions of Canadian Jewish Historiography

State of the Field:The Animating Tensions of Canadian Jewish Historiography David S. Koffman (bio) and Pierre Anctil (bio) On November 7, 2018, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau offered an apology for Canada's 1939 federal government decision to deny entry to the MS St. Louis, a German ocean liner that had carried 937 Jewish refugees. The ship would eventually return to Germany and 227 of its passengers would ultimately be caught in the Nazi death dragnet. The refusal of multiple countries to accept these refugees (Britain, France, Belgium and the Netherlands each accepted asylum seekers) helped solidify the Nazis' confidence that the western world didn't care much for the plight of Jews, already apparent at the Evian Conference a year prior. In Canada, the MS St. Louis became shorthand for the country's abysmal wartime record regarding Jewish refugees. Canada accepted the fewest Jews of any refugee-accepting nation in the world: all told, a meager 7,400 souls.1 Credit for the fact that Canadians remember the St. Louis episode and that Canada's prime minister would acknowledge its dismal Naziera policies on immigration and refugees, is largely due to the scholarly work of the Canadian Jewish historians Irving Abella and Harold Troper.2 None is Too Many became and remains essential reading for Canadian political leaders, academics, and public intellectuals. The book has been credited with influencing humanitarian and immigration policy decisions [End Page 403] since it was first published in 1983.3 (Curiously, it has not yet been translated into French.) Rarely have historians of Canadian Jewish life reached so far into Canadian national public consciousness, but the case allows us to see something of the impact that Canadian Jewish historical scholarship has had on Canadian life.4 This essay aims to introduce readers to the literatures of and debates within the field of Canadian Jewish history, a field we characterize as maturing, if segmented, and one that has remained publicly engaged since the 1980s. WIDE-ANGLE LENSES For a relatively small field, Canadian Jewish history has received an outsized share of attention. There have been several attempts to capture, qualify, and quantify output within the field. A 1992 annotated bibliography by Stuart Schoenfeld and Dwight Daignault5 was soon followed by Morton Weinfeld's sociological analysis of the features that distinguish Canadian Jewry from its American counterpart.6 Weinfeld predicted that the two Jewish communities would ultimately converge into one indistinguishable, continental Jewry. These two works complement Gerald Tulchinsky's 2008 Canada's Jews: A People's Journey, a synthesis of his two previous volumes.7 Until his death in 2017, Tulchinsky was widely [End Page 404] recognized as the preeminent historian of Canadian Jewish life. His long-standing interests in political, labor, and business history shaped his view, and that of others, of the Canadian Jewish past as a history that focused on the social life of Jews as the community developed an institutional grounding for self-preservation and defense. According to this view, immigrants and their descendants worked to integrate into local and national cultures, and to safeguard their interests in the realm of politics, both domestic and international. Other historians have treated areas that Tulchinsky's work ignored or deemphasized, including religious transformation and accommodation; developments in Jewish culture, language and letters; and the histories of non-Ashkenazi, non-Orthodox Jewries. Richard Menkis and Ira Robinson have published important studies on the history of Judaism. Menkis has worked on the history of Conservative and Reform Judaism;8 Robinson has published on the Eastern European rabbinate in Canada;9 and the two together cut an innovative path using sermons as sources for interrogating the ideological, contextual, and circulation of religious ideas.10 Yolande Cohen has published extensively on the Sephardi experience in Canada11 —a sub-field that remains understudied—and Rebecca Margolis, Pierre Anctil, and others have published works on the history of Yiddish culture in Canada.12 [End Page 405] Tulchinsky's efforts in writing wide-angle work have been emulated by others over the past decade and a half. One collection foregrounded studies of Canadian Jewish subjects from disciplines largely foreign to Tulchinsky's social history, including visual arts, literature...

Sara Levy's World: Gender, Judaism, and the Bach Tradition in Enlightenment Berlin ed. by Rebecca Cypess and Nancy Sinkoff

Reviewed by: Sara Levy's World: Gender, Judaism, and the Bach Tradition in Enlightenment Berlin ed. by Rebecca Cypess and Nancy Sinkoff Deirdre Loughridge (bio) Sara Levy's World: Gender, Judaism, and the Bach Tradition in Enlightenment Berlin. Edited by Rebecca Cypess and Nancy Sinkoff. University of Rochester Press, 2018. In late 1823 or early 1824, Babette "Bella" Salomon gave her grandson Felix Mendelssohn a gift: a manuscript copy of the score of J. S. Bach's St. Matthew Passion. What might we do with such a historical fact? One option would be to put it in the backstory to the work's performance led by Mendelssohn in Berlin just over five years later, a landmark event in the revival of Bach's music and its linkage to German national identity. Another would be to interrogate the religious tensions in and around the gift, a Christian work passed from a woman committed to her Jewish faith to her converted descendant. Another would be to turn attention to Babette Salomon as a woman, someone whose gift exemplifies the active participation and contributions of women in Berlin's musical life. Sara Levy's World: Gender, Judaism, and the Bach Tradition in Enlightenment Berlin does each of these things, and readers interested in any one of them will find plenty to reward their attention. But the beauty and achievement of the volume, edited by Rebecca Cypess and Nancy Sinkoff, is to show how these historical threads connect through and around the person Sara Levy. Younger sister of Bella Salomon, Levy is at once representative and exceptional: she belongs to a "highly visible cohort of Jewish women actively engaged in becoming modern Europeans" (3), but she also "stands out among other Berlin salonnières for her resolute commitment to Jewish life" (6); her taste for older music was "hardly atypical among her peers, for Berlin salon culture was pluralistic in its consumption of literature and music from both past and present" (206), but her collection of Bach scores shows "a scope and character without parallel elsewhere" (44). The product of a symposium held at Rutgers University in 2014, the volume brings together contributions from scholars in musicology, German studies, Jewish studies, and women's studies and shows the power of joining different disciplinary strengths and perspectives to explicate a sociocultural moment both unique and consequential. This is Sara Levy's world. Born in Berlin in 1761, where she lived until her death in 1854, Levy was nearly lost to music history. Fortunately, the 1999 rediscovery of her music collection [End Page 184] kicked off a Levy Renaissance. As Christoff Wolff recounts in his chapter, Levy donated her sizable collection of eighteenth-century chamber music (much of it by members of the Bach family) to the library of the Berlin Sing-Akademie in the 1830s. The donation was not cataloged, however, and sat unstudied through World War II, at which point the Sing-Akademie music archive was thought to be lost. Through twists and turns that could be the makings of a Cold War era spy novel (the music was "transferred to an undisclosed location in 1973"!), Wolff traces the eventual repatriation of the collection to Germany, the cataloging of the Bach sources by 2006, and their digitization for online access via the Leipzig-based Bach-Archiv. While her contributions to Bach's legacy catalyzed the interest in Levy among musicologists, this volume turns a critical lens on how music mattered in Levy's world. As Sinkoff writes in the introduction, "Music was a critical vehicle" for Jewish women in the process of becoming modern Europeans. It was one of the "'gentile' arts" in which elite Jewish families educated their daughters to become "cultivated bourgeois housewives" (3), as well as an activity through which to share cultural space with Christians and press the case for Jews' equal rights (6, 124). Levy emerged from such education to become not only a collector of music manuscripts and prints but also a salonnière, hosting interfaith, mixed-gender social gatherings with music-making in her home; a keyboard performer in such salons, as well as on the public stage of the Berlin Sing-Akademie; and a patron of...

Perceptions of Minority Discrimination: Perspectives of Jews Living in Germany on News Media Coverage

This study explores how Jews in Germany perceive news coverage and its influence on third persons. Against the background of social identity theory, 29 semi-structured interviews with Jews demonstrated that they perceived sensationalist reports on antisemitism, overinsistent links to the Holocaust, the equation of Jews and Israel, and stereotypical portrayals of Jewish life. Such reports led participants to believe that non-Jews perceived Jews as strangers in society. Our findings underline the importance of nonstereotyped reporting on minorities and suggest that individuals’ contemplation about media coverage and its influence on society may be interpreted as a consequence of social identity threats.

Tricksterism, Anti-Semitism, and White Supremacy in The Education of Henry Adams: A Centennial Reassessment

Because of its place in American and world literature, The Education of Henry Adams has become enormously influential, but we have not fully understood the full scope of its impact, its subversive contexts, and Adams’s role in sustaining and furthering white supremacy. Indeed, although most of the text is devoted to the era of the American Civil War and Reconstruction, Adams never employed the term. More importantly, because of the intensity of his racism and anti-Semitism, he dismissed the era that was dominated by strife over the nation’s future and the African American role in it as one simply overwhelmed with sordid political corruption, which had its origins in alleged Jewish intrigue both in the United States and Europe. By examining the background to Adams’s work and his brilliant ingenuity, we can more fully understand what Adams sought to accomplish and how. Neither an autobiography nor a history, Adams crafted a “trickster” novel to devalue African Americans and attack Jewish life. He wrote, perhaps, the most ingenious and dangerous book of the fin de siècle.

M. Powell Lawton Award Presentation

“The lecture will be given by the2019 recipient, Barbara Resnick, PhD, CRNP, FGSA of the University of Maryland. The session will also include the presentation of the2020 Lawton Award to recipient Sara J. Czaja, PhD, FGSA. The M. Powell Lawton Award is presented annually to an individual who has made outstanding contributions from applied research that has benefited older people and their care. The Lawton Award is generously funded by the Polisher Research Institute of the Madlyn and Leonard Abramson Center for Jewish Life.”

On Belonging and Other Dreams. The Ambiguous Positions of the Jews in “Spanish Morocco”

This paper presents an ethnographic study of autobiographical narratives about Jewish life during the Spanish Protectorate in Morocco (1912–1956). Based on eighteen interviews conducted between 2013 and 2016, this work examines the peculiar process Sephardic Jews underwent as a consequence of the Spanish colonial presence in the north of Morocco. Spanish-Moroccan Jews developed their identity affiliations and allegiances under the influence of different institutions: the Spanish colonial agencies, the Alliance Israelite Universelle, the Jewish Agency, the Jewish community and the Moroccan authorities. These institutions presented different and often contradictory roles for Moroccan Jews. This work shows the tensions and conflicts experienced by the participants when navigating these different cultural and political spheres. The paper examines the participants' narratives about the ambiguous re-Hispanicization of Sephardic Jews during the colonial period. It studies the participants' memories about their identification with Spain and the adoption of Spanish habits and customs during the Protectorate period, which transformed Jewish life and redefined the limits between the different ethno-religious groups. This paper shows the impact of the social, historical and political conditions of the Protectorate on the participants' memories about colonial Morocco.

Crypto-Jews, Sephardim, Ashkenazim, and Refugees from Nazi Europe in Early Twentieth-Century Portugal: Together and Apart

This paper examines the complex Jewish reality in Portugal in the first half of the twentieth century. Alongside the old Sephardic community that emerged in Portugal with the dissolution of the Inquisition, the early twentieth century witnessed the emergence of two new differentiated groups: crypto-Jews, who began to return to Judaism, and Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. These two groups changed the physiognomy of the Portuguese Jewish community to a pluralistic religious, ethnic, and cultural compound never seen before in Iberian lands. Later on, the increasing Nazi persecutions and the outbreak of World War brought to Portugal thousands of Jewish refugees who tried to emigrate to countries overseas. The historical and social complexity examined in this article lasted a few years. Before the end of the Second World War, the refugees had emigrated from the country, the return of the Marranos to Judaism had lost its vitality, and the Jewish community continued its course in the Sephardic setting prior to the convulsions of the pre-war years. By focusing on the unique characteristics of Jewish life in Portugal in the first half of the twentieth century and on the diversity that each group presented in social, cultural, economic, and political terms, this study sheds light on a topic that has not yet received the attention it deserves in the historiography of Iberian Jews.

Under the Red White and Blue: Patriotism, Disenchantment and the Stubborn Myth of The Great Gatsby

Under the Red White and Blue: Patriotism, Disenchantment and the Stubborn Myth of <i>The Great Gatsby</i>

MarriageorProfession? MarriageandProfession? Marriage Patterns Among Highly Successful Women of Jewish Descent and Other Women in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century German-Speaking Central Europe

AbstractThis study analyzes the marriage patterns of five hundred highly successful women in modern German-speaking Central Europe. Among the women at the very top of their professions, women of Jewish descent were more likely than non-Jewish women to marry while they pursued their careers. The results of our quantitative study—67.6 percent of women of Jewish descent married versus 51.6 percent of non-Jewish women—provide a unique body of data that complements and contributes to other research that identifies distinctive aspects of Central European Jewish life patterns: the high number of Jewish women university students, the importance of women of Jewish descent in a number of fields, and Jewish families as early adopters of a modern family form with a small number of children and intensive investment in each child.

“I Want to Look Transgender”: Anti-Assimilation, Gender Self-Determination, and Confronting White Supremacy in the Creation of a Just Judaism

AbstractIn this article, I consider transgender identity and white Jewish identity to argue that “passing” or normative assimilation is a trap, in that it extends the offer of privilege to individuals who can “successfully” conform within the confines of normativity, while leaving intact, or even reifying, the oppressive systems that are at work. As a corrective to normative assimilation, I consider alternative models for Jewish life offered by nonnormative Jewish communities that resist these oppressive norms. I further argue for the normativity and privileging of “passing” to be replaced with a non-hierarchical approach that lets all genders, all Jewish (and other) identities, be treated as valid or “real.”