Jewish Man Research Articles

Rocks versus Gravel, or: Schechter on Modern Jewish Excellence

Rocks versus Gravel, or: Schechter on Modern Jewish Excellence Irene E. Zwiep on “the seminary as a witness” (1903) It is “the duty of every great religion to produce great men.” Thus spoke Solomon Schechter in an address delivered in New York at the dedication of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America building, in April 1903. His address was later published in a volume that appeared in 1915, the year of his death.1 Schechter’s words were a deliberate correction of the American poet-diplomat James Russell Lowell’s view that generating greatness was the responsibility of all great nations. For Schechter, whose commitment to diasporic Jewry outweighed his pragmatic sympathy for Zionist nationalism,2 it was Judaism as religion, not polity, that should supply the world with Great Jewish Men. As the newly appointed president of the seminary, Schechter was in an excellent position to supplement this ambition with a proper educational program. Hardly surprising—Schechter being a thinker of enviable consistency—that program was based on his cherished principles of “eternity and catholicity” (p. 44). Seminary students should prepare for a life in the service of the great Jewish continuum, united in God and his law from time immemorial. A curriculum catering only to the demands of the banal here and now, he believed, would fail to yield great leaders. He was well aware, however, that for more than a century a new form of “isolated and detached present” had been gnawing its way into Judaism’s [End Page 155] timeless groundwork. In the current “great market of believers,” the “caprice of the mob, or a whim of fashion, or the hobby of some wilful individual” meant serious competition for the pristine truth of old-school organized religion (pp. 44–46). Schechter did not write essays in the classical sense. His short pieces were not essays (literally: attempts) at probing the contours of human existence vis-à-vis God and the world.3 In the case of Montaigne, the tensions between ephemeral man and his infinite God had triggered a passionate scrutiny of the human self, trapped in the here and now. In Schechter, it provoked exactly the opposite. Rather than trying to fathom finite mankind, he set out to bolster eternal Judaism against the vicissitudes of a fleeting, profane present. Ever true to this mission, Schechter could not afford to merely jot down a few “loose sallies of the mind,” as Samuel Johnson once characterized the genre, stressing its lack of doctrinal rigor.4 The defense of timelessly uniform catholic Judaism against modernity surely called for sterner stuff. For substance, Schechter could draw on Judaism’s ancient, innermost sources. Form and tone, on the other hand, remind us of contemporary critiques of mass modernism, which pervaded Western thought from the early twentieth century onward. As we will see, his search for a modern Jewish ethos prefigures some of the values later expounded by the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset in his famous Revolt of the Masses (1930). Schechter’s brief sketch “The Seminary as a Witness” is a case in point. In its insistence on historical continuity, on the need to temper the new with the old and to embrace all things Jewish including the sublime Lord God, it represents hard-core (and well-researched) Schechterian theology. It is Schechter’s conception of elite, and of what made a Great Jewish Man, that I wish to consider here, for it is there that his critique of the modern Zeitgeist found its most poignant articulation. Rocks versus gravel: that is how Schechter typified the leaders of a generation (pp. 41–42). But what was it that elevated these gallant individuals above the petty masses? For one, he argued, it was their capacity for saintliness, an ancient rabbinic quality with a more complex pedigree than the English term suggests. Schechter himself acknowledged difficulty in providing an exact definition—as the last of ten virtues leading up to the Holy Spirit (ruaḥ ha-kodesh), saintliness seemed to defy straight-forward [End Page 156] analysis. In defense of Schechter we might add that it was his talmudic source (b‘AZ 20b) that had inspired the ambiguity. There Rabbi Pin...

Reclaimed Pasts: Intermarriage and Remembrances of National Socialist Racial Stigmatization by Jewish and non-Jewish Spouses and Mischling Children

One of the ways in which the National Socialist state sought to achieve its linked aims to consolidate German unity in preparation for war and to exclude Jews from every aspect of German life was by the reinterpretation of family histories using its taxonomy of difference. This effort is a less commonly recognized aspect of the Blood Protection Law and its subsequent clarifications; the orientation toward future marriage regulations required a revision of past marriages and what they meant. This article argues that post-war narratives from individuals whom the regime targeted because they were intermarried need to be read as reassertions of narrative authority that directly challenge the way National Socialism recast such families in German history. Specifically, the experiences were diverse and informed by memory as well as context. The article posits that the variability of memory is evident in the memoirs written by Heinz Freudenthal, who was Jewish and married to a non-Jewish woman; Brigitte Steiner, who was non-Jewish but married to a Jewish man; and Elsbeth von Ameln, who was the daughter of a man the state classified as Jewish and a non-Jewish woman.

Die »Jeckes« im Mandatsgebiet Palästina und in Israel: Versuch einer Männlichkeitsgeschichte

Growing up as a Jewish man in Germany and Austria between the wars was coupled with contradictory affects and emotions. On the one hand, young men were to become strong German bodies able to defend themselves. This was a way to resist the old anti-Semitic stigma of the Jews‹ weakness and feminization. On the other hand, they were to adopt distinctive Jewish‹ ways of being a man. With the radicalization of anti-Semitism after 1933 in Germany (respectively 1938 in Austria), emigration to Mandate Palestine became a life-saving option. Hence conforming to Zionist ideals before and after the emigration became central. This article, based on oral history interviews and other life narratives produced by yekkes, i. e. German-speaking Jews in Palestine / Israel, aims at writing a history of masculinity from below.‹ How did the yekkes post-migration representations of masculinity evolve? How did they react to the masculinist and hegemonic values that emerged in the Israeli nation-building process?

Beyond Sociolinguistics: Joshua Fishman's Influence on Students in Native American Studies

6 J O U R N A L O F A M E R I C A N I N D I A N E D U C A T I O N — 5 4 , I S S U E 2 Beyond Sociolinguistics: Joshua Fishman’s Influence on Students in Native American Studies tiffany s. lee Imet dr. fishman while I was a graduate student at Stanford University , and he spent the winter months there teaching for the School of Education. Of course, I knew of him prior to this time, not just because of his prolific work on heritage-language issues but because of his impact on my family. My uncle, Wayne Holm, and my late aunt Agnes Holm, both former educators at Rock Point Community School on the Navajo Nation, would tell me stories of his visit to Rock Point and the impact of his work on American Indian language education. So I felt very honored and excited to have the opportunity to take courses with Dr. Fishman at Stanford. I learned about language maintenance, connections to identity, language shift, and the politics of language across linguistic contexts worldwide . Having the eternally inquisitive mind, Dr. Fishman would call on me to personally discuss with him the language politics, change, shift, and connections to identity among Navajo people and communities . He challenged me to think deeply and critically about various theories and experiences related to language change and revitalization. I cannot express in words the level of impact he had on my research, thinking, learning, and personal connection to language revitalization research. I have tried to extend the influence Dr. Fishman had on my learning to my students in Native American Studies (NAS) at the University of New Mexico (UNM). I teach a course titled Language Recovery, Revitalization, and Renewal in Native American Communities. It is a popular course among Native students at UNM because of the close relationship students feel between language and identity and because of the language change and shift they observe and experience in their own communities. Dr. Fishman understood that connection and J O U R N A L O F A M E R I C A N I N D I A N E D U C A T I O N — 5 4 , I S S U E 2 7 wrote about it. Although he was a Jewish man of another generation and experienced the world from a completely different place than my students, his academic and personal writings have personally and meaningfully connected with my students, their learning, and the connections they make to their own communities’ linguistic situations. For example, I have had students read the speeches he gave at the Stabilizing Indigenous Languages conferences (e.g., Cantoni, 1996). His speeches are personal essays imbued with academic content and humor . In one essay titled “What Do You Lose When You Lose Your Language?,” he discussed the relationship between language and culture and how those who study language (outsiders) examine this relationship and what the people of the language (insiders) think about it. He said of this relationship: It is not a perfect relationship. Every language grows; every culture changes. Some words hang on after they are no longer culturally active. “Little Miss Muffet sat on a tuffet eating her curds and whey.” Well, who knows what a tuffet is any more, and you cannot find anybody who knows what curds and whey are any more without doing research. Those are frozen traces. Even if there is often a good relationship between the words of the language and the concerns of the culture, there are more important relationships between language and culture than the indexical one. (Fishman, 1996, p. 81) His speech continued to share how people talk about this relationship in different terms when asked about it. He said people talk about their language in terms of its sanctity, its importance for kinship , and their sense of moral responsibility to it. These ideas fall completely in line with what NAS students have shared regarding the relationship of language and culture in Native contexts. In our class discussions, students relay their familial experiences with language...

Reframing the Periphery: Narrative Authority and Self-Reflexivity in Mathieu Kassovitz’s La Haine 1I gratefully acknowledge the support of Barbara Hanna, Juliana de Nooy, the UQ Arts article development scheme and the Nottingham-Trent University visiting scholars program in the preparation of this article.

This article takes a narratological approach in examining how Mathieu Kassovitz’s La Haine (1995) establishes itself as an authoritative voice in framing the banlieue. It argues that framing is essential in establishing the film’s narrative authority, the idea that it is recounted from a position of experience. To do so, the film juggles two contradictory narrative impulses: a sense of critical distance which propels the film to its finale; and an emphasis on what Ross Chambers would call loiterliness, as the film tracks the wanderings of its trio of protagonists. By concentrating on three key storytelling sequences—the opening and closing voiceovers, as well as a story told by an elderly Jewish man which will be read self-reflexively—it will be argued that the key means through which the film adopts an insider’s perspective is through its affinity with Hubert, a character often overlooked in writing on the film.

Magical Mystery Tour: Failures From The Beatles’ Self-Managed Era and Lessons for Today’s DIY Musicians

IntroductionThe Beatles, comprising John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr, are arguably the most popular musical group of all time. Based upon music sales, cultural and musical influence, and posthumous interest (Lennon and Harrison are dead), one can argue that the Beatles have meant more to popular music than Benny Goodman, John Coltrane, or Elvis Presley. This doesn't mean the Beatles themselves were infallible. As artists, they were close to infallible. But as businessmen, their poor decisions and lack of experience clearly showed their weaknesses as individuals and as group.The purpose of this paper is to describe the mistakes the Beatles made in the era between the death of their manager, Brian Epstein, in August 1967 and May 1969 when John Lennon, George Harrison, and Richard Starkey (but not Paul McCartney) contracted the services of new manager, Allen Klein.While this 21-month period was musically creative whirlwind for the band, it was also the beginning of its demise. From egos to depression, personal growth to poor communication, drugs, ignorance, passing whims, and general lethargy, this stretch of time taxed these four men in more ways than they could understand. When it was over, Klein presided over disbanded collection of individuals who proceeded to sue and counter-sue each other (and Klein) for years.Today's DIY (do-it-yourself) musician culture can learn more from the Beatles than how to write, arrange, and record memorable song. This study will delineate those lessons so musicians and artists can learn from the blunders and misjudgments made by the most popular musical group of all time.The Brian Epstein YearsTrivial Pursuit fans and hardcore Beatles purists probably know that the first manager of the Beatles was not Brian Epstein, the son of furniture shop owner and operator of NEMS, Liverpool's biggest record store.1 The band's first manager was Allan Williams, a hard-drinking figure who flourished on the fringes of Liverpool's rough-and-tumble night life.2 Williams booked early gigs for the Beatles, the most important being their first lengthy stay in Hamburg, Germany, at the Indra club and then the Kaiserkeller.3 After the Beatles were deported for working underage, Williams helped obtain work permits for the group in early 1961.4 The group returned to residency in Germany at The Top Ten Club, playing six to seven hours of music each night.5 Williams stayed loosely in touch but ceased running the group's affairs.Upon the band's return to Liverpool, they began playing lunchtime concerts at The Cavern Club. Sporting new haircuts fashioned by former bassist Stuart Sutcliffe's girlfriend, Astrid Kirchherr,6 and live performance style honed from hundreds of hours playing in front of what Paul McCartney described as fat Germans,7 the group soon earned the attention of Brian Epstein in October 1961. Epstein didn't fall in love with the music he heard, but he did sense something special among the foursome. He considered managing the group and asked the opinion of Williams, who suggested they'd ultimately let him down,8 especially since the Beatles still owed Williams commission for the Hamburg shows.9Regardless of what Williams thought, Epstein decided to forge his own path. They are awful, but I think they're fabulous, he said.10 The awfulness to which he was referring was the band's attire, including black leather jackets and high black boots.When Epstein explained his intentions to the band, there was initially no contract. He was twenty-seven year old, well-dressed Jewish man with what the group thought was wealthy background. Based upon the band's lower to lower-middle class backgrounds, Epstein's station in life meant something. He met with them few times, including once with their families. When he finally told the band he wanted to manage them, the answer came from John: Right then, Brian, he said. …

The Representation of Hysterical Jewish Man in Philip Roth's Indignation

The Representation of Hysterical Jewish Man in Philip Roth's Indignation

Double Visions and Aesthetics of the Migratory in Aleksandar Hemon’s The Lazarus Project

An old photograph in a cheap frame hangs on a wall of the room where I work. It's a picture dating from 1946 of a house into which, at the time of its taking, I had not yet been born ... 'The past is a foreign country,' goes the famous opening sentence of L.P. Hartley's novel The Go-Between, 'they do things differently there.' But the photograph tells me to invert this idea; it reminds me that it's my present that is foreign, and that the past is home, albeit a lost home in a lost city in the mists of lost time. --Salman Rushdie (1) With their memories permanently on overload, exiles see double, feel double, are double. Andre Aciman (2) The detection of truth is the necessary goal of all serious literature, but the entire enterprise nonetheless remains an impossible business. --W. G. Sebald (3) Aleksandar Hemon's recent novel, The Lazarus Project (2008), (4) exemplifies a migrant consciousness epitomized by a fractured yet facilitating perspective instigated by the rupture of migration. (5) I will explore the ways in which the fragmented consciousness of the migrant finds expression not only in the subject matter of Hemon's novel, but also in its structure, which is characterized by a series of dualities, ruptures, and fractions. As such, the novel illustrates both the of transition as well as the transition of experience itself into new modalities, new art work, new ways of being (Durrant and Lord 12). (6) Rupture and fragmentation are introduced by Hemon through the inclusion of photography within the narrative structure, initiating a dual--verbal and visual--storyline. Given that photographs inherently embody rupture and fragmentation--by means of their subject-matter as well as by their unique representation of time--their inclusion within the framework of the novel underscores the concept of rupture as a central theme of Hemon's work. Hemon further explores the rupture lying at the heart of the migratory experience through the creation of a dual time frame, divided between the early twentieth century (the historical story of Lazarus Averbuch as imagined and narrated by Vladimir Brik) and the post-9/11 moment (the fictional story of Vladimir Brik, and his research of Lazarus Averbuch's history). The split time frame is echoed in the structure of the novel, which is divided into alternating chapters, 'historical' chapters relating Lazarus's life, death, and its aftermath, and contemporary chapters, narrating Brik's experiences while researching Lazarus's life. Hemon's introduction of two time frames, featuring two displaced ethnic Europeans relocated to Chicago, is another manifestation of his fractured yet enhancing consciousness, while it simultaneously facilitates contemplation of issues seminal to the migratory consciousness, such as memory, loss, dislocation, and the ever elusive question of what constitutes home. Subsumed within this fractured time frame is the traversing of the boundaries of fact and fiction, explored through the alternate storylines, which blend historical anecdote (Lazarus Averbuch's history) with fictional accounts (Brik's story) and create further parallels and dualities between narrator (Brik) and subject (Lazarus). Significantly, the author, Hemon, shares many biographical details with his narrator, Vladimir Brik. Both are natives of Sarajevo and of Ukrainian Christian origin (yet agnostic); both were stranded in America when war broke out in former Yugoslavia and worked as teachers of English to foreign students; both write a column in a local paper, marry American women, and live in Chicago. Yet most pertinently, in a meta-fictional twist, both author and narrator are researching and writing a story about the historical figure Lazarus Averbuch, a young Jewish man who migrated from Europe to Chicago in 1907, following the Kishinev Pogrom (1903). On March 2, 1908, for reasons unknown to this day, Lazarus went to the home of George Shippy, the Chief of Police of Chicago, where he was shot and killed on the spot. …

Presentation of orf (ecthyma contagiosum) after sheep slaughtering for religious feasts

We report two cases of orf (ecthyma contagiosum) acquired during religious practices. In the first patient, a 34-year-old Muslim man from Tunisia, orf occurred on the left hand after the patient had handled lamb meat during the "Feast of Sacrifice." In the second patient, a 57-year-old Jewish man, orf was acquired after the "kosherization" of lamb meat and occurred on a finger of the left hand. As approximately 350,000 Muslims reside in the metropolitan area of Milan (Italy), it is possible that in the next future cases of orf acquired after religious practices will occur more often.

Jewish Under Islamic Rule in the Middle Ages

Jewish Under Islamic Rule in the Middle Ages Hussam Abdullah Almujalli Abstract Jews were welcome most time to live there under Islamic rule. The Prophet Muhammad gives Jews the political and cultural exactly as Muslims. They are also granted their freedom of religion. Thereafter, ‘Umar gives non-Muslim, including Jews their safety. The status of the Jews under Muslim rule is better than Goths during the Medieval Period. In Iberia, Muslims respect Jews. Abd al-Rahman III hired a Jewish man, Hasadai Ibn Shabrot. Samuel ibn Naghrillah is the most politically influential Jew in Muslims land in al-Andalus. Full Text: PDF DOI: 10.15640/jisc.v2n4a4

Trayvon Martin

Excerpt of the content: Jewish activist communities have historically been allies to communities of color in the fight for racial justice and equality in our country. Jews were among those who worked to establish the NAACP in 1909. In the early 1900s, Jewish newspapers drew parallels between the Black movement out of the South and the Jews' escape from Egypt, pointing out that both Blacks and Jews lived in ghettos, and calling anti-Black riots in the South "pogroms." Historically, Jewish leaders stressed the similarities rather than the differences between the Jewish and Black experience in America, and emphasized the idea that both groups would benefit the more America moved toward a society of merit, free of religious, ethnic, and racial restrictions. In more recent history, Blacks and Jews fought side by side in the Civil Rights Movement. The kinship and relationship between the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel has been regularly and continually celebrated. What has been less often discussed is the relevance of the social circumstances that created and, in some cases, still sustains a rift between Black activists and white Jewish anti-racism activists. In the late 1960s, the birth of the Black Power movement shifted the emphasis in Black activist communities toward self-determination, self-defense tactics, and racial pride. While this shift was crucial to the evolution of Black consciousness and identity in America, the expansion from the singular nonviolence and racial integration approach espoused by King left many white Jewish activists with little input in the Black community and an anti-racism movement that seemed to be moving on without them. Click for larger view "Blacks and Jews fought side by side in the Civil Rights Movement," the author writes. Here, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth march alongside Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, in March 1965. Since the 1960s, efforts at coalition building and solidarity work for justice between white Jewish and Black communities have suffered and never reached the pinnacle that was reached during the early days of the Civil Rights Movement. The rapid decline of American anti-Semitism since 1945 (alongside the nation's continuing and pervasive anti-Black racism) and the increasing gap in accumulated wealth and education between Black and Jewish communities have widened the rift of perceived shared interests between Black and Jewish activists. Many of the civil rights struggles that joined Blacks and Jews in the middle of the last century--i.e., anti-lynching, desegregation, voter registration, etc.--were typically organized around divisions in society that easily identified injustices between persecutors and their victims (a division in which Jews could also identify as victims). Between the late 1960s and the present, much of the anti-racism work that has galvanized Black activists has shifted and come to be concerned more specifically with disparities in access, privilege, and power between those with and without white skin privilege in our country. Click for larger view Members of Beyt Tikkun Synagogue pray alongside Rev. Dr. J. Alfred Smith Jr. of Allen Temple Baptist Church in Oakland, California, after the acquittal of Trayvon Martin's killer. Disappointingly few synagogues nationwide engaged in similar expressions of Jewish-Black solidarity. A Weakened Coalition In 2013, the lack of deep and abiding connections between Black and Jewish communities of activists became apparent to me in the disparate responses I encountered to the events surrounding the killing of Trayvon Martin and the subsequent acquittal of George Zimmerman. Here's a quick summary for any readers who need a reminder of what happened: in July 2013, after more than sixteen hours of deliberation, a jury of five white women and one Latina woman found George Zimmerman not guilty of second-degree murder and manslaughter. Previously, on a drizzly February night, Zimmerman had shot Martin, an unarmed seventeen-year-old, in a gated community in Sanford, near Orlando. Citing Florida's stand-your-ground law, Sanford police originally did not charge Zimmerman or take him into custody. Only after social media outrage and civil rights protests alleged racial profiling and discrimination did Governor Rick Scott appoint a special prosecutor, who brought the charges against Zimmerman six weeks after... Language: en

A Walking Guide to the Heart of a City

A Walking Guide to the Heart of a City Kazim Ali (bio) In Nazareth an excavation of the ancient city lies underneath the ground. One can walk some of the old streets on Plexiglas platforms or descend into the ruins. Just outside the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem excavations commence in the Arab town of Silwan, believed now to be the actual ancient city of David, his capital. Under this pretext Arab families are evicted from their homes, expelled from the land. What is a city but: the gathering together of people in geographic proximity. In order to create: energy, synergy, vital communication created by the closeness of bodies and the layering of history on top of history. A city has multiple definitions and in this case every street has three different names. So how do you find directions from one place to another? In the old city of Nablus, the historic soap factories—its primary industry—were reduced to rubble in the siege during the second uprising. You want to believe a city is real: that Abraham and Jacob and Isaac and others really are buried in the holy building in Hebron, called a mosque by some, synagogue by others. But if they are buried there at all, they are in a cave beneath, inaccessible. What are revered by the worshipers are only cenotaphs, constructed recently, relatively speaking. And the conflicts of the past erupt in the present moment. The museum of tolerance is being built on top of a Muslim graveyard. The graves are disturbed. City ruptured: Hebron. A cut across the middle of it rendered as “Zone C,” under control of the Israeli military. Sidewalk with a green stripe down it to clarify on which side the Arabs must stay. For their own safety, it is said. In Hebron we see two boys, probably around seventeen or eighteen years old, bumping chests. They exchange words in English. [End Page 84] One, dressed in blue pants and a red shirt, says, “I was born in this city. You can’t tell me what to do.” The other, dressed in army fatigues and a flak jacket says, “Get out of here or I’ll beat you up.” He shoves the other boy back. “Go ahead,” says the other. “Do what you want to do. See what happens.” Later our guide takes us across the line down one of the alleys to show us a house in which a blind Palestinian woman still lived. Her door is bolted from the outside, and she must knock for the soldiers to permit her to exit. A young Jewish man sees us. He tells the soldiers to arrest our guide. We are across the line in a street reserved for Jews. “I am lucky you are here,” says the guide. “Usually they throw stones at me.” The soldiers approach, calling our guide’s name. We cluster around him tightly and move back to the main street. The soldiers try to maneuver their way into our group but we huddle closer. I press against our guide. He puts his arm on my shoulder and we walk on. While on the side of the school building in Nablus is spray painted: “The University of Hip-Hop.” And “Existence is Resistance.” What do you have when your historic buildings are leveled and factories destroyed? Nablus emptied out by war. Hip-hop floods the streets, and the children dance a scintillating mixture of breakdancing and dabka. And Hebron emptied out. By ancient history. When one says, “It’s ancient history,” one usually means something is “irrelevant.” But in Hebron, all the lost children return. Some after millennia or some after only a few decades, but in any case violence is paid with violence and all deaths are used to keep score. In the fighting of 1948 and later in 1967 most of the Jewish Quarter in Jerusalem is leveled, including the Rabbi Nissan Bak Synagogue, which stood over it for years and years. When the Israeli army fights its way to the Western Wall, its immediate action is to level the Moroccan Quarter that abuts it. They complete the action before the ceasefire is signed...

When justice is vengeance, against a Jew

In Valencia, in the year 1380, the death of a child aged six unleashes hatred and fear. A Jewish man is accused of throwing a stone at him from his window. The Criminal Justice immediately opens a suit against him and, with amazing speed, pronounces sentence in less than three months. The prosecution, the defence and the witnesses provide a short but splendid picture of the lives of subordinate people in the lower classes, a picture that speaks of values, sociability and solidarity, unsteady roots and the always delicate relationship between Jews and Christians.

A Serious Man and The Red Book

The film A Serious Man depicts the tribulations of a middle-age Jewish man living a “collective” life in 1967 Midwestern America during the countercultural revolution occurring at that time. The author uses examples from C. G. Jung's inner turmoil as depicted in The Red Book to amplify the inner-world workings of the film's main character, especially the interplay of the absurd and the profound. The author also illustrates the potential for the same interplay in the audience who watches the film. The protagonist takes hard won steps toward emotional growth as he increasingly faces the human condition.

Making of the Zionist Woman

The majority of scholarly debates on varieties of Jewish nationalism focus on the Jewish man’s role in the rebuilding of the Jewish homeland and his body in the regeneration of the Jewish nation. This article discusses Zionism’s gender politics surrounding the Jewish woman’s body and selfhood in this rebirth process and the formation of a modern Jewish identity in interwar Poland. It explores Jewish patriarchal structures and the discursive power and reach of Zionist ideology. Jewish women engaged not only in the ideological rebirth of the Jewish nation, they also initiated the physical rebirth of the Jewish Woman who was deemed too urban and thus degenerate (the modern Jewish woman was viewed as possessing next to no ideological consciousness and physical strength). Therefore, Zionist female ideologues argued that the bodily rebirth of Jewish women would lead to the strengthening of their Jewish identities and inevitably the Jewish stock. While still in the Diaspora, women had to work on developing strong healthy bodies, inasmuch as Zionist men were expected to make themselves into strong muscular Jews to be able to immigrate to Palestine and work there productively. Besides being able to work in Palestine alongside Jewish men, nationalist Jewish women had to be strong and healthy for one more reason: they had to be able to give birth to healthy children, which in the Zionist context meant giving birth to a healthy Jewish nation.

A Knight at the Opera: Heine, Herzl, Peretz, and the Legacy of Der Tannhäuser by Leah Garrett (review)

Reviewed by: A Knight at the Opera: Heine, Herzl, Peretz, and the Legacy of Der Tannhäuser by Leah Garrett Stephen Thursby A Knight at the Opera: Heine, Herzl, Peretz, and the Legacy of Der Tannhäuser Leah Garrett. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2011. 147 pp. Garrett examines the influence of the German Tannhäuser legend on four artists: the German Jewish poet Heinrich Heine (“Der Tannhäuser,” 1836), the father of modern political Zionism Theodor Herzl (Der Judenstaat, 1897), the Yiddish writer Isaac Leyb Peretz (Mesires-nefesh, 1904), and the notoriously antisemitic German composer Richard Wagner (Tannhäuser, 1845). Each artist chapter begins with biographical information before exploring the use of the legend. In her introduction, Garrett recounts Daniel Barenboim’s controversial but successful performance of excerpts from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde at the 2001 Israeli Music Festival in Jerusalem, leading the Berlin Staatskapelle. This apparent change in attitudes towards Wagner performances in Israel (after years of an unofficial ban) sets the stage for her focus on the use of the Tannhäuser legend by both German nationalists and Jewish culture builders. Garrett justifies her work because “this hidden story of Tannhäuser has never been told before in book form” (1). Chapter 1 concerns the 1515 version of the Tannhäuser ballad, the source for Heine’s rewrite. She traces the popularity of the legend with the German Romantics and observes that “whether or not the ballad has German origins,” it is most important that historians “sought to claim it as a foundation myth of medieval Germany” (10). Garrett discusses Heine as a writer supposedly “subversive to the ideals of Germanic culture” (11) in chapter 2. His Tannhäuser poem was written as a challenge to Prussian repression following revolutionary struggles of the 1820s and 1830s (12). She ties the poem to Heine’s personal crises while living in Paris, his obsessive relationship with the “uneducated and coarse” Mathilde (22), and his dabbling in the sensualist cult of St. Simonianism. He transplants the knight into modern Germany and expresses a “complicated melding of love and rage” for his native land (24). In chapter 3 Garrett analyzes Wagner’s opera [End Page 155] Tannhäuser and his fusing of the legend (based largely on Heine’s version) with the tale of a singing contest. She discusses Wagner’s antisemitism and scholarly views of its relationship to his music and critical reception. She labels Wagner’s opera a “love letter” to Germany and Heine’s poem a “bitter indictment” of it (48). Chapter 4 is devoted to Herzl and Der Judenstaat. As the Paris correspondent of the assimilationist Viennese paper the Neue Freie Presse, he attended nightly performances of Wagner’s Tannhäuser while developing his ideas for the creation of a Jewish state. As with Heine and Peretz, Herzl’s attachment to his Jewish roots increased as antisemitism became more virulent in Europe (he covered the Dreyfus trial in Paris in 1894). He was particularly drawn to the spectacle of the opera, which “offered a tool to inspire the Jewish masses” to follow his Zionist plan (82). On the controversy over whether Herzl’s and Adolf Hitler’s love of Wagner’s music links Zionism with Nazism, she states that both movements were “rooted in nineteenth-century European Romanticism,” but emerged from different branches: nationalism influenced the former and Social Darwinism and racial antisemitism the latter (85–86). Herzl opened the Second Zionist Congress to the music of the Tannhäuser overture, which Garrett characterizes as an insider’s joke: “using the work of a German nationalist to inspire Jewish nationalism” (90). The final chapter traces the influence of Wagner’s Tannhäuser on Peretz’s Mesires-nefesh. Peretz transformed Tannhäuser into a “young Jewish man in premodern Israel” and Judaized the opera such that it became a “morality tale about how to live an ethical Jewish life” (96). His Tannhäuser (Chananiah) does not sing an immoral song but uses his knowledge of the Torah to show off, the temptress Venus is transformed into Chananiah’s doting mother and a teacher who imparted “egotistical knowledge” (109), and his Elizabeth (Miriam) sacrifices herself for Chananiah...

The “Nazi Detective” as Provider of Justice in Post-1990 British and German Crime Fiction: Philip Kerr's The Pale Criminal, Robert Harris's Fatherland, and Richard Birkefeld and Göran Hachmeister's Wer übrig bleibt, hat recht

The “Nazi Detective” as Provider of Justice in Post-1990 British and German Crime Fiction: Philip Kerr's <i>The Pale Criminal</i>, Robert Harris's <i>Fatherland</i>, and Richard Birkefeld and Göran Hachmeister's <i>Wer übrig bleibt, hat recht</i>

Dying to Know; Learning to Care

In writing this, Marie Curie could have been referring specifically to the care of people at the end of life. Since Victorian times death has become more hidden, often moved out of the view of most of the public and some of the professions. Cicely Saunders, the founder of the modern hospice movement was aware of this aspect of modern life and medicine when she created a professional discipline whose hallmark has been the combination of scientific understanding with personal concern. Readers of her work will know well that she identifies one of the key moments of her journey as her meeting and subsequent relationship with David Tasma, a 40 year old Jewish man who had survived World War II and the Warsaw ghetto. He spoke with her often about his life, his sufferings and what he wanted from his care-givers “I only want what is in your mind and in your heart” he told her, an oft quoted comment that addresses both the cognitive and interpersonal aspects of palliative care. Saunders was perhaps using a patient narrative to illustrate a point here. David Barnard and his colleagues, in their book “Crossing Over; Narratives of Palliative Care”, identified seven overarching themes that emerged from their research into patient narratives at the end of life.

Foreign Bodies:

Foreign Bodies:

Synthetic Biology: A Jewish View

The discipline of synthetic biology may be one of the most dramatic advances of the past few decades. It represents a radical upgrading of humankind's ability to manipulate the world in which we live. The potential for benefits to society is enormous, but the risks for deliberate abuse or dangerous miscalculations are no less great. There are serious ethical issues, legitimate concerns for biosafety, and fears of bioterrorism. The ethical dilemmas posed are new and challenging and are being addressed by various groups and commissions. The present paper presents a Jewish approach to some of the ethical issues posed by this new technology. Judaism traditionally looks favorably on man as a co-creator with God and encourages research for the benefit of humankind. Thus it would have a positive attitude towards the current goals of synthetic biology. But in the Jewish tradition man is also charged with stewardship over nature and is admonished to preserve and nurture, not just to exploit and destroy. In line with the Presidential Commission on Bioethics, it would support a carefully weighed balance between the precautionary and the "proactionary" approaches.