Jewish Life Research Articles

Lee Shai Weissbach (1947–2022)

Lee Shai Weissbach (1947–2022) Janice W. Fernheimer (bio) Lee Shai Weissbach, professor emeritus of history at the University of Louisville, passed away on September 29, 2022. Born in Haifa to an Egyptian-born father and a Virginian-born mother, he moved to Cincinnati at the age of five. After graduating from the University of Cincinnati with high honors (1969), he went on to pursue a PhD in history at Harvard. His dissertation formed the basis for his first book, Child Labor Reform in Nineteenth-Century France: Assuring the Future Harvest (Louisiana State University Press, 1989). Lee Shai joined the faculty of the University of Louisville in 1978 and spent his entire scholarly career there until his retirement in 2015. I had the honor and pleasure of meeting him in person when he agreed to be interviewed for the recently launched Jewish Kentucky Oral History Project. I was a little nervous to meet the scholar whom I had informally referred as the "father" of Jewish Kentucky studies, but his warmth and kindness immediately put me at ease. What touched me most at the time (as a new and first-time mom) was learning how his scholarly trajectory had shifted to fit the needs of his growing family. With two young children at home, he was unable to continue his travels to France, so he shifted his studies to Jewish life in the United States, with particular interest in his local surroundings; the research that grew out of this shift transformed the way we think about and tell the story of American Jews and Judaism.1 Lee Shai had profound impact on the way American Jewish history is both told and analyzed. The Synagogues of Kentucky: History and Architecture (University Press of Kentucky, 1995) and the field-transforming Jewish Life in Small Town America (Yale University Press, 2005) have become foundational texts for thinking about American Jews and their institutions beyond the major industrial cities of the Northeast and Midwest. He authored more than a dozen scholarly articles that engaged Jewish life in both France and the United States, often focusing on Jews in southern and non-urban (and thus under-studied) settings. Before his retirement, he published A Jewish Life on Three Continents (Stanford [End Page 409] University Press, 2013). In this deeply personal scholarly work, Lee Shai introduced, translated, and annotated his own grandfather's memoir. A transnational story of migration, global politics, and the upheavals of change in Jewish life at the turn of the century, the project reflected both his familial roots and his historical interests. During his long career at the University of Louisville, Lee Shai was a productive scholar and an active university citizen. He served as department chair twice, spearheaded the creation of an endowed chair in Judaic studies, and was associate dean of the College of Arts and Sciences from 2000–2003. Long-time friend and UofL colleague Tracy K'Meyer recalled Lee Shai to be "a warm, generous, and funny colleague, mentor, and friend. I will remember him most fondly for his pun-filled grammar tip sheet for students, which I still use in class; the truly bad jokes he shared at the department's annual winter potluck lunch; and his deep commitment to service to the profession, university, and community." Ranen Omer-Sherman, the scholar recruited to fill the endowed position in Judaic studies that Lee Shai created, recalls that his colleague enjoyed a "stellar reputation for his energy and enthusiasm for the historical profession, his eagerness to engage with colleagues no matter what their specialization, and his ability to make connections and forge intellectual ties across the boundaries of field and discipline. Indeed, for anyone active in the field of Jewish studies, he represents a truly exemplary model—even though that specialization is only a part of his accomplishments over a truly tireless and prolific career." Perhaps what most people will remember about Lee Shai is his mentschlichkeit. Long-time UofL colleague and professor of political science Jasmine Farrier praised Lee Shai for his willingness to mentor and collaborate across a wide variety of fields, as well as for his generosity with his time, advice, and good humor. Farrier also...

Elaine Black Yoneda: Jewish Immigration, Labor Activism, and Japanese Exclusion and Incarceration by Rachel Schreiber (review)

Reviewed by: Elaine Black Yoneda: Jewish Immigration, Labor Activism, and Japanese Exclusion and Incarceration by Rachel Schreiber Paul C. Mishler (bio) Elaine Black Yoneda: Jewish Immigration, Labor Activism, and Japanese Exclusion and Incarceration. By Rachel Schreiber. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2022. xi + 215 pp. This biography of Elaine Black Yoneda joins many other studies of radical activists that have explored individual lives rather than organizational histories or studies of radical ideologies. The author, Rachel Schreiber, is a dean at the Parsons School of Design in New York, and her earlier work was in art history, especially printmaking in the radical movement in the United States. She "discovered" Elaine Black Yoneda when she was asked to curate a historical exhibition on Jewish life in California. In her introduction Schreiber details the multiple tendencies in the writing of history that she draws on to produce this portrait of a remarkable woman. She names the "new biography" as a way to flesh out the lived experiences of individuals who may figure in organizational or social histories, but only as types. Then she talks about the contributions of women's history and the ways it has offered us a historical perspective that highlights both gender inequality and oppression and can bring to life the experiences of women who have been neglected previously. Finally, she draws on the multi-ethnic history of California and details her subject's position at the intersection of these three narrative traditions. It is a marvelous book not only because it brings to a larger audience the life of Elaine Black Yoneda and grounds it in clear writing and broad knowledge of the kinds of historical explorations that have informed her research. Importantly, it can also be read by someone who knows little about the scholarly literature on, for example, left-wing Jewish immigrants and their families. Similarly, Schreiber's discussions of class and ethnicity in California during the first half of the twentieth century; issues around anti-Japanese war-time incarceration; and complicated debates within the Japanese and Japanese American community are all done so well that any reader will understand the multiple strands of history that informed Elaine Black Yoneda's life. It is both supremely well-researched and scholarly and accessible. Elaine Black Yoneda was a significant figure in the Communist Party in California. She was born in 1906 to immigrant Jewish radicals in New York City. Her father became quite successful as the owner of dry-goods store in Boyle Heights, Los Angeles, where she grew up. While her parents were Communists themselves, their daughter initially showed little interest in radical politics. She was, by her own account, more interested in expensive dresses and fancy restaurants, an early iteration of what has become known as a "valley girl." Elaine Black's life changed when she was arrested by accident at a workers' demonstration and was outraged by the police brutality she [End Page 416] witnessed. As a result, she attended the March 6, 1930, demonstration that had been organized by the Community Party, in response to the crisis caused by the onset of the Great Depression. She became an activist for the International Labor Defense (ILD), the CPUSA legal defense organization, quickly becoming a leader of the ILD in California. It was in this capacity that Elaine Black met Karl Yoneda, a Japanese American Communist. She was delivering bail money after Karl and others had been arrested at a workers' demonstration. It was "love at first sight" for both of them. The high point of this period in her life is when she became the only woman on the Executive Committee of the 1934 San Francisco General Strike representing the ILD. The second period of Elaine's life was after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December of 1941. As the United States moved toward war with Japan, Japanese and Japanese Americans were told to leave the West Coast because they were all deemed security risks. They were forced from their homes and jobs and resettled in barren camps away from the West Coast. Karl was sent to Manzanar War Relocation Camp in eastern California near the Nevada border. Elaine decided that she, along with...

The Future of the German-Jewish Past: Memory and the Question of Antisemitism - Gideon Reuveni and Diana Franklin

Reviewed by: The Future of the German-Jewish Past: Memory and the Question of Antisemitism ed. by Gideon Reuveni and Diana Franklin Paul Lerner The Future of the German-Jewish Past: Memory and the Question of Antisemitism. Edited by Gideon Reuveni and Diana Franklin. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2020. 332 pages. $34.99 (paper). In 1989, Fritz Pinkuss, chief rabbi of the Congregação Israelita Paulista in São Paolo, Brazil, returned to his native Heidelberg and lamented the disappearance of German Jewry, noting the few remaining traces of its once thriving cultural and religious life, the vanishing of its institutions, structures, memories, and legacies. With these words, he was evoking Leo Baeck's famous assertation in the aftermath of the war that the Nazi regime and the Holocaust had brought an end to centuries of German Jewish history. Not long after Pinkuss's lament, however, it became clear that those pronouncements were premature. Neither Pinkuss nor Baeck could have predicted the remarkable resurgence of Jewish life in a reunified Germany; nor could they have foreseen the repopulation of hollowed out Jewish institutions by new waves of émigrés and expats from the former Soviet Union, Israel, and North America. How do the Jewish cultures and communities in Germany today, which consist of a great number of Jews with eastern-European backgrounds, connect to the longer German Jewish past? How does that past look at a moment when the disappearance of the last Holocaust survivors is so close at hand, and when the influx of Syrian refugees and broader immigration patterns have begun to shift perceptions of the homogenous ethnic bedrock of German national identity, even as the backlash against those refugees fuels a resurgent radical Right? How is Israel entangled in this matrix, as a flashpoint of political controversy, and alternately as a projection of philosemitic identification? What, in short, are the geographical, spatial, and temporal boundaries of German Jewish history, and how are those boundaries changing at a time when Holocaust memory is almost completely mediated by recorded testimonies and institutions in an increasingly diverse and globalized Germany? These are among the questions posed throughout this excellent volume, a collection conceived in celebration of the twentieth [End Page 418] anniversary of the official inauguration of the Centre for German-Jewish Studies at the University of Sussex. Beyond demarcating this noteworthy milestone, The Future of the German-Jewish Past does the sub-field of German Jewish Studies an important service by bringing together the contributions of a range of international voices, from younger scholars to established professors, including public-facing historians, memoirists, and academicians in the humanities and social scientists. Taken together, these essays offer glimpses of the exciting new work being done today and catalogue the range of approaches, topics, and methods that animate the study of the "inexhaustible richness of the German-Jewish interrelationship" (xxii), which makes this area of research as vibrant and challenging as ever. What ties many of these works together, beyond the subject itself, is a shared self-consciousness about the ways history writing as practice is itself embedded in historical processes—fittingly so, given the intense historicism of generations of German Jewish scholars and writers. Several focus on often overlooked questions about the raw material of history, how sources are collected and archived, for example, or how museum exhibitions address different audiences and community and municipal pressures. Many of the contributors historicize themselves both concerning their place in evolving disciplinary landscapes and in the context of ever-changing Jewish presents and futures in a Germany marked by both flourishing Jewish life and resurgent antisemitic violence, in cityscapes where pedestrians literally stumble over memorials to the genocidal past, but often partake in a collective blindness toward other kinds of racism and hatred in the present. This rich intellectual thicket makes the volume useful for scholars beyond German Jewish Studies and indeed to anyone interested in considering the limits and possibilities of history, relationships between scholarly history and public memory, trauma and its aftereffects, and antisemitism, ethnicity, and race in the past and present. The volume's 20 chapters (following an informative introduction by co-editor and institute director Gideon Reuveni) are...

In Memoriam: Dr. Dianne Ashton

The Department of Philosophy and World Religions at Rowan University is deeply saddened to announce the passing of our esteemed colleague and dear friend Dr. Dianne Ashton, Professor Emerita of World Religions in 2022. After earning her Ph.D. from Temple University, Dr. Ashton joined Rowan’s faculty in 1989 and taught with distinction in the Department of Philosophy and World Religions until her retirement in 2021.Dr. Ashton became one of the eminent scholars of American Jewish history and Jewish women’s history. Her contributions included Hanukkah in America: A History, Rebecca Gratz: Women and Judaism in Antebellum America, and Four Centuries of Jewish Women’s Spirituality, along with dozens of scholarly articles, book reviews, and essays. Dr. Ashton served six years as the editor of the journal American Jewish History, the premier journal in the study of Jewish history in America. She was the first female editor in the 118-year history of the journal.In her influential book on Rebecca Gratz, Ashton uses hundreds of Gratz’s own letters in her research and examines the context behind her life. With the help of Gratz College president Zev Eleff, Dr. Ashton had plans to digitize and annotate about 500 of Rebecca Gratz’s letters. That project will move forward with support from Gratz College and Rowan University.Dr. Ashton wrote Jewish Life in Pennsylvania, which is one of the PHA’s Pennsylvania History Series books, published in 1998.

An Unrealized Vision: The "American Jewish Historical Exhibition" of 1901–1902

An Unrealized Vision:The "American Jewish Historical Exhibition" of 1901–19021 Jeffrey Shandler (bio) On June 27, 1901, the New York Times reported on "A Jewish Exhibition," planned to be presented "in this city during the Winter of 1901 and 1902" by the American Jewish Historical Society (AJHS), founded as a learned society in 1892. The committee appointed by AJHS to oversee the planning of the exhibition included "many prominent persons," among them Oscar Straus, Max Kohler, and Joseph Jacobs, all of New York; Mayer Sulzberger of Philadelphia; and others based in Baltimore, Chicago, Cincinnati, Galveston, and San Francisco. Presiding over the committee was Cyrus Adler, a librarian at the Smithsonian Institution and a leading figure in several American Jewish institutions, including AJHS. The New York Times article mentioned some of the items that AJHS intended to display, singling out "Columbus's earliest records of [the] discovery [of America] written to Jews in Spain" and "[George] Washington's letters to Jews." The extensive, wide-ranging scope envisioned for this exhibition was evinced by plans to show "a collection of all books written by the Jews of America or pertaining to American Judaism." Also, alongside objects relating the long history of Jews' presence in America, "it has been determined to give Jews from Germany and Russia"—that is, immigrants who would have arrived in the United States within the preceding half-century or so (and, in the case of Jews from the Russian Empire, were then coming to America at an unprecedented rate)—their "proper space." In addition to objects pertaining specifically to Jewish life in America, the display would also include "an international exhibit of things pertaining to ecclesiastical art and to Jewish antiquities."2 The proposed exhibition would be the first of its kind in the United States. Indeed, until that date, public exhibitions of Jewish material culture anywhere had been very limited. Two major exhibitions had been presented in Europe during the previous century: a display of the [End Page 367] Judaica collection of composer Isaac Strauss at the 1878 Exposition Universelle in Paris and the Anglo-Jewish Historical Exhibition, which had been mounted in London's Royal Albert Hall for three months in 1887. Jewish ceremonial objects had also been included in larger displays on world religions at American world's fairs in several cities in the 1880s and 1890s. None of these exhibitions addressed the history of Jews in America. By the end of 1901, however, less than half a year after the announcement in the New York Times, AJHS leaders decided to postpone the exhibition for a year and to "extend the work of the society on…the question of the advisability of holding an American Jewish Historical Exhibition."3 By the end of 1902, AJHS decided to table plans for the exhibition indefinitely, and the organization never pursued the exhibition further. Despite it being an unrealized project, the proposed American Jewish Historical Exhibition offers insights into the developing notion of placing Jewish items on public view as a new Jewish cultural practice. The planned exhibition marked a threshold in identifying what might constitute American Jewish material culture and conceptualizing its significance both for Jews in the United States and for their Christian neighbors. Shortly after the first temporary displays of Jewish ceremonial objects, manuscripts, and other items had taken place in Europe and the United States during the final quarter of the nineteenth century, efforts to create institutionalized collections of these materials were inaugurated on both sides of the Atlantic. The turn of the twentieth century witnessed the opening of the first Jewish museum in Europe (in Vienna, in 1895) and the beginnings of the oldest Jewish museum in the United States (what eventually became the Jewish Museum of New York, in 1904). The exhibition envisioned by AJHS drew on some of these initiatives for inspiration, while addressing a particular focus on American Jewry. The records of this proposed project include discussions of what items to put on display and how to arrange them, as well as practical concerns regarding the exhibition's venue, promotion, and costs. Moreover, these discussions redounded to larger issues: the mission of AJHS as a learned society; how...

Dance as a Tool of Pleasure and Humiliation in I. J. Singer’s The Brothers Ashkenazi

Dance is a crucial yet largely unrecognized motif in I. J. Singer’s Yiddish-language family epic Di brider Ashkenazi (The Brothers Ashkenazi), which chronicles Jewish life in Łódź. In his famous article, “Mayufes: A Window on Polish-Jewish Relations,” Chone Shmeruk recounts how a Polish officer orders the brothers Max and Yakub Ashkenazi to dance a humiliating mayufes—Yakub resists, and the officer shoots him. Shmeruk claims Singer’s rendition is “perhaps the most poignant mayufes of all.” While this scene of forced dancing is arguably the best-known scene in the novel, this article approaches it in connection with an earlier transgressive mixed-sex wedding dance and demonstrates how dancing scenes in the novel juxtapose late nineteenth-century dreams of embourgeoisement with the reality of early twentieth-century antisemitism. As such, the dance floor both challenges and reifies power structures in the novel. What is more, these dance scenes take place at crucial moments in the plot, emphasizing the moments of rupture and reconciliation between the eponymous brothers and highlighting the physical contrast between cerebral striver Max and lusty, good-natured Yakub. By examining these seemingly disparate dance scenes, it is possible to gain a deeper perspective into the ways acculturation and antisemitism operate on the Polish-Jewish body.

Judah Magnes: The Prophetic Politics of a Religious Binationalist by David Barak-Gorodetsky (review)

Reviewed by: Judah Magnes: The Prophetic Politics of a Religious Binationalist by David Barak-Gorodetsky Chad Alan Goldberg (bio) Judah Magnes: The Prophetic Politics of a Religious Binationalist. By David Barak-Gorodetsky. Translated by Merav Datan. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2021. xxx + 328 pp. This superb biography of the American rabbi, Zionist, and first president of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem Judah Leon Magnes (1877–1948) makes two broad contributions. First, by emphasizing the religious roots of Magnes's political thought, David Barak-Gorodetsky contributes to a wider scholarly effort to reintroduce "the question of religion's place in the Zionist story" (xv). Second, the author provides a "comprehensive conceptual study on the American aspects of the Jewish perspective on binationalism, of which Magnes was the main representative" (xxv). The first of the book's three parts, "'Mending the World,'" traces the formation of Magnes's religious and political views in the United States. Born in California, Magnes was ordained as a rabbi at Hebrew Union College in 1900 and received his doctoral degree from the University of Heidelberg in 1902. From 1906 to 1910, he served as a rabbi at Temple Emanu-El in New York City. In these years, under the influence of the rabbi and scholar Solomon Schechter, Magnes underwent a "religious evolution … beyond Reform Judaism to what would in time be known as the Conservative movement" (12). He subsequently worked to establish and then led the Jewish Kehillah of New York, an experimental attempt from 1909 to 1922 to provide the city's burgeoning Jewish population with a unified and democratic community structure. Surprisingly, Barak-Gorodetsky devotes scant space to Magnes's leadership of the Kehillah, noting only that his role as a mediator between the city's affluent, assimilated, "uptown" Jews and its poor, eastern European, Yiddish-speaking "downtown" Jews prefigured his later commitment to binationalism in Palestine (20). Barak-Gorodetsky has more to say about Magnes's Zionism, cultural pluralism, socialism, and pacifism. Magnes welcomed Zionism during his studies in Germany "because of its contribution to promoting Jewish self-respect among young Jews in Europe," and he subsequently embraced Zionism as a means of "reviving the spirit of Judaism in the United States" (26, 22). He also espoused a form of cultural pluralism similar to that propounded by the philosopher Horace Kallen. Because Magnes distinguished between religiosity and its manifestation in "formal [End Page 411] religious institutions," he was able to see "elements of the sacred" in the secular Jewish socialist and Zionist movements (48, 50). Furthermore, he understood Jewish socialism, like Zionism, as a means to "the renewal of Jewish life" (41). His pacifism likewise had religious roots in Christian pacifism and Reform Judaism's Mission Theology. Magnes's distinction between religiosity and religious institutions allowed him to criticize the latter's support for the First World War as a religious betrayal. Part Two, "'For the Sake of Zion,'" describes Magnes's political thought and practice from 1922, when he emigrated to Palestine, to 1939. As the chancellor of the Hebrew University when it opened in 1925 and its first president from 1935 until his death in 1948, Magnes envisioned the university playing a cultural and even spiritual role for the Jewish people. These years were characterized inwardly by an unfulfilled desire to achieve the closeness to God that he associated with authentic Judaism and outwardly by his involvement in the binationalist group Brit Shalom. Magnes shared with the religious philosopher and Brit Shalom member Martin Buber a "prophetic orientation for the Jewish politics of Palestine," but they "articulated [it] differently" (179). These differences stemmed in part from the influence on Magnes of William James's pluralistic ideal of a federal republic and of American reliance on political institutions and constitutionalism to "bridge political divides" (131), which informed his commitment to binationalism. Magnes's identification with the prophet Jeremiah, who advocated a "peaceful path" and preached "against the supposedly imminent danger of Jewish nationalism" but "ultimately failed to convince the kingdom of Judah to mend its ways" comes to the fore in Part Two (174, 117, 186). Interestingly, though the German sociologist Max Weber also identified with Jeremiah, Magnes's striving to bridge...

“We Are Cousins. Our Father Is Abraham…”: Combating Antisemitism and Anti-Zionism with the Abraham Accords

This article addresses how the Abraham Accords, a series of agreements that are normalizing relations between Israel and a growing number of countries in the Arab world, could be harnessed to counter antisemitic discourses outside of the Middle East region. In particular, we argue that interfaith activities under the framework of the Abraham Accords demonstrate that hostility is not an inevitable response to Israel’s presence in the region. This article highlights the unique framework for peacebuilding that underpins the Abraham Accords and discusses how it has generated a new flourishing of Jewish life in its signatory countries, including unprecedented efforts to address antisemitism and an acknowledgement of the centrality of Zionism to contemporary Jewish identity. We juxtapose these positive developments with the growing ostracism and demoralization of those Jews in the diaspora who identify with Israel and highlight how the Abraham Accords offers a different narrative for fruitful dialogue.

Contested Cultural Affiliations: Salman Schocken’s Novalis Collection and the Nuremberg Haggadot from the Germanisches Nationalmuseum

Abstract ‘To trace the history of the Jewish people in its books but also by its books, was [...] for a long time the leading idea of the collector’, Salman Schocken noted in 1933. His personal Hebraica library developed into a semi-public research collection, and his extraordinary collection of German literature seems to reveal a similar approach—the use of books as objects and texts to reflect the historical development and intellectual scope of thought within literary tradition—although the latter collection appears to have remained private. The rise of National Socialism, Schocken’s migration to Mandatory Palestine, and the destruction of Jewish life in Europe had a strong impact on both collections. This article explores the joint history of Salman Schocken’s Novalis collection and two medieval Haggadot in order to identify some of the collector’s ideas on German and Jewish cultural property. This case study provides insights both into Salman Schocken’s collections and the ways in which he made use of his personal collection in order to engage with German and Jewish history.

Suicide in Nazi Germany: Transformative Family History

ABSTRACT This article focuses on two lesser-known characteristics of German Jewish life during the Third Reich: the high rate of suicide amongst Jews and the extraordinary impediments to their migration. Beginning with memoir-narrative which centres on my Jewish father’s revelation that my grandmother and great-grandmother had committed suicide, the paper then outlines the reasons for and characteristics of suicide in Nazi Germany, and the phenomenon’s connection to the difficulties most Jews faced in attempting to leave Germany. I demonstrate the ways in which I have been able to reshape the family narratives told to me through historical and genealogical research, returning the given knowledge back. Researching these family and national tragedies have brought about new knowledge and transformative understandings.

Warsaw and Yiddish: Europe’s Once Largest Jewish City

Prior to the Katastrofe (Yiddish for ‘Holocaust’), Warsaw was the world’s capital of Yiddishland, or the Ashkenazic civilization of Yiddish language and culture. In the terms of absolute numbers of Jewish inhabitants, at the turn of the 20th century, New York City surpassed Warsaw. Yet, from the perspective of cultural and political institutions and organizations, Warsaw remained the center of Europe’s Jewish life. This article offers an overview of the rise of Warsaw as such a center, its destruction during World War II, and the center’s partial revival in the aftermath, followed by its extinction, which was sealed with the antisemitic ethnic cleansing of Poland’s last Jewish communities in 1968. Twenty years after the fall of communism, beginning at the turn of the 2010s, a new awareness of the Jewish facet of Warsaw’s and Poland’s culture and history has developed during the past decade. It is a chance for a new opening, for embracing Jewish culture, Yiddish and Judaism as inherent elements of Polish culture and history This country’s history and culture was not created exclusively by Catholics, as ethnonationalists are wont to claim incorrectly. Hence, the essay is intended to serve as a corrective to this anachronistic preconception.

“To reconstruct this period of martyrdom and heroism”: The Jewish Historical Institute and the Ringelblum Archive, 1946–1989

ABSTRACT During the years 1946–1989, the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw (Żydowski Instytut Historyczny; ŻIH) was forced to navigate between conflicting imperatives – on the one hand, safeguarding the memory of Polish Jews by means of extensive documentation of the scope and devastating outcome of the Holocaust; and, on the other, adhering to the official Polish historical narrative and constraints imposed by the Communist regime. This article examines the varying ways in which research connected with the Ringelblum Archive was carried out during this period, and how this mirrored the changing situation of the Jewish community in postwar Poland. For many, the institute's work of cataloging and publishing documents from the archive served as a proof of the continuity of Jewish life in Poland.

The prospects and perils of Holocaust research in Communist Poland: The first twenty years of the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw

ABSTRACT This article analyzes the history of the Jewish Historical Institute (Żydowski Instytut Historyczny; ŻIH) from its creation in the late 1940s until the late 1960s. During this period, ŻIH was not only a documentation center but also a principal source of knowledge about the Holocaust beyond Poland and the Soviet bloc. It played a significant role in the establishment of a transnational collective memory of the Holocaust, one that transcended the Iron Curtain. Equally important in these years was its contribution to the continued existence of Jewish life in Poland after the Holocaust. In particular, the article highlights the significant role of its director, Ber Mark, who led the institute from 1949 until his death in 1966. A convinced Communist, he nevertheless remained deeply rooted in Polish Jewish culture. Under his direction, ŻIH sought to preserve its autonomy to the greatest extent possible and to maintain international contacts with scholars in Israel and Western countries.

A Time to Gather: Archives and the Control of Jewish Culture

A Time to Gather: Archives and the Control of Jewish Culture

Introduction: Representing the Jewish American Woman in Popular Culture

Introduction: Representing the Jewish American Woman in Popular Culture

The Mighty Walzer

Howard Jacobson is a British author who is proud of being labelled a Jewish writer and does not hesitate to describe himself as ‘entirely and completely Jewish’. He believes that English-Jewish writers should address directly the challenge of being Jewish, which is precisely what he does in The Mighty Walzer (1999). The novel shows once again Jacobson’s greatness as a comic novelist and thus reinforces his assumption that the ingenious, joking Jew is the Jew in essence. Like many scholars, Jacobson believes that self-aimed humour has allowed Jewish people to cope with the paradoxical nature of their culture and historical situation. In The Mighty Walzer Jacobson proves to be the Jew par excellence by joking about everything from religion to food, making fun of the contradictions and incongruities of Jewish life.

Nothing Out of the Ordinary: The Life of Salomon Marcus

Abstract From roughly the first half of the eighteenth century, Jewish life in East Prussia was mostly concentrated in Königsberg, the capital city of the province. In 1811, for instance, there were eight hundred and eight Jews in East Prussia, six hundred and fifty of whom were living in Königsberg. In Tilsit, Memel and Gumbinnen, other main cities of the province, there were thirteen, twenty-five, and fourteen Jews respectively. The tiny remainder was spread out among small towns; in the villages there were almost no Jews. While the history of the Jews of Königsberg has been well researched and the Jewish presence in other cities of East Prussia synthesized in several anthologies, that little bit of Jewish life in the small East Prussian towns and villages remains unknown. Considering the insignificant number of Jews who once lived in the East Prussian countryside, this lack of research is understandable. On the other hand, studies on small communities—or, even more accurate in the case of East Prussia, on individual families—can complete the general picture of Jewish life not only in East Prussia, but in the entire Prussian territory. The accuracy of these studies complements overviews intended mainly to develop an understanding of general processes and happenings. A micro-study can therefore add to existing research—even if only used as a tool with which to confirm or question a more wide-ranging thesis. This essay, an examination of one individual Jewish life in East Prussia, is one such micro-study. It is the story of Salomon Marcus, a small-time Jewish merchant who lived in Gilgenburg, a small town in East Prussia in the Osterode District, in the last three decades of the eighteenth and the first two decades of the nineteenth century.

The Jew in the mosque: Jewish experiences in Shi’ite surroundings

ABSTRACT Jewish life in Muslim societies has historically been part of the broader public spheres and everyday experiences. Religious spheres and rituals, on the other hand, seem to signal separation: in short, Muslims go to their mosques, Jews to their synagogues. So, can a Jew find himself in a mosque? And what happens when he encounters Muslims there? This article explores narratives of Jewish experiences in two different Shi’ite surroundings: in Iran and Azerbaijan (in the south-east Caucasus). These experiences are analyzed through the prism of Jewish presence in mosques and Ashura rituals. By analyzing them within their specific contexts, this paper pursues two main goals: First, to demonstrate how Jews experienced Shi’ite religious spheres as part of their social and cultural surroundings. Second, attention to “the sacred of the other” sheds light on the complexity of intergroup relations between Jews and Shi’i Muslims. Stories on “the Jew in the Mosques” allow us a different angle to acknowledge the varied dynamics of Jewish experience in Azerbaijan and Iran from the beginning of the twentieth century to the beginning of the twenty-first century.

To Be a Holy People: Jewish Tradition and Ethical Values

To Be a Holy People: Jewish Tradition and Ethical Values

Queer Jewish lives on screen

ABSTRACT This piece explores the clashing preconceptions and elective affinities regarding queerness and Jewishness in the filmic representation of intersectional queer and Jewish sensibilities from the 1980s to the present, a period in which postmodern paradigms came to the fore in popular culture, academic theory and alternative community politics. As I argue, these films convey a tug and pull between religious tradition and cultural innovation; between the old essentialisms and new fluidities associated with ethnicized, gendered and sexualized constellations and between Israel and the Diaspora, with varying relevance to cosmopolitanist and nationalistic discourses.