Jewish Particularism Research Articles

Arendt and Deutscher on heresy and identity

This article addresses the constitutive role of heresy in Jewish modernity. Heresy – defined here in terms of assimilation – is commonly considered destructive to Jewish tradition. I, however, examine Hannah Arendt’s works on the model of the Jewish pariah and Isaac Deutscher’s notion of the non-Jewish Jew to identify a model in which heresy gives structure to a new, modern Jewish tradition. In Deutscher, the analysis shows, this tradition of heresy suggests a universal world-view that eventually empties Judaism of any particular content. Arendt, on the other hand, connects the possibility of Jewish particularity in the present with her ideal of the pariah-as-heretic. Heresy reflects neither assimilation nor rejection of Judaism but rather offers a new foundation for Jewish particularity. The argument shows how the heresy of the pariah is also foundational to early formulations of Arendt’s politics of plurality.

Simon Szántó, Nineteenth Century Viennese Writer and Educator: A Study on Integration, Particularism, and the Ideal of Bildung

Abstract Simon Szántó is known as one of the founders of the Jewish press in Vienna, the editor and main author of the Jewish periodical Die Neuzeit, and an influential educator during the high point of Austrian liberalism between the 1860s and the early 1880s. His enormously rich literary legacy covers issues such as the integration of Jews into the Austrian-Hungarian society, religious reform, gender roles, and particularly education. Szántó’s writings offer a unique opportunity to look at the Viennese liberal period of the second half of the nineteenth century and its challenges through the eyes of a mostly overlooked, but highly significant and influential actor of the time. This article will first introduce Simon Szántó’s cultural and educational background that impacted his ideals and his activities, and go on to discuss one of his main concerns, namely Jewish education. Religious education, confessional schooling, and Jewish upbringing at home bore the burden of responsibility for shaping Austrian Jewish women and men. These Jews were to be integrated in an Austrian culture, while at the same time taught to retain a strong Jewish particularity. Szántó aimed to unite this dichotomous reality through the realization of his ideals of Jewish Bildung.

Language ideology in American Jewish thought

ABSTRACT This article establishes the existence of an American Jewish tradition of metalinguistic thought that stretches from the mid-twentieth century to our time. It demonstrates how American Jewish thinkers’ reflections on language implied a response to the claims made on their Jewish identity by their symbolic homeland, Israel. In particular, thinkers rejected the questioning approach of Israeli intellectuals towards English as a medium for Jewish cultivation, and Israel’s fundamentally secular conception of Hebrew as a language and culture. The earlier, postwar thinkers challenged Israeli Hebraist assumptions by framing language as a ‘communicative tool’ that conveys (rather than embodies) religious identity. More recent thinkers took a different approach by suggesting that English is at present already a Jewish language, as it incorporates features based on Hebrew or Yiddish. Earlier and later metalinguistic thought implies continuity, but also a shift of emphasis, in how Jewish particularism could and should be expressed in America.

The difference a wire makes: planning law, public Orthodox Judaism and urban space in Australia

AbstractThis paper considers a planning dispute that surrounded the construction of a Jewish religious installation (called an eruv) in the public urban space of an Australian suburb. The aim of this case-study is to examine the role of law in regulating Jewish difference – a topic that has to date received little attention in the socio-legal literature concerned with the governance of religious diversity. In analysing residents’ objections to the eruv, the paper explores long-standing anxieties about Jewish particularity in Australia and beyond as they surfaced in opposition to the eruv. It shows how the law continues to exclude certain forms of Jewish difference that are perceived as transgressing dominant religious and racial norms. Moreover, the paper highlights the particular ways in which planning law assigned value to these anxieties and legitimised the marginalisation of Orthodox Jews, emphasising the significance of local law as a site for exclusion and inequality.

Looking for wisdom in Wis 11:2–19:2: between universalism and particularism

The retelling of the exodus narrative in the second half of Wis 11:2–19:22 has often been treated as a thematic shift from sapiential universalism to Jewish particularism. The aim of this article is to contribute to our understanding of Wis 11:2–19:22 through a reappropriation of its universalistic outlook. I argue here that Pseudo-Solomon’s retelling of Israel’s Heilsgeschichte remains focused on the universal order of creation even when discussing themes, such as the punishment of the Egyptians in the exodus narrative, which would lend themselves to polemical and particularistic tones. Integrating creatively historical narrative and sapiential observation of nature, Pseudo-Solomon develops a reflection in which Israel’s particularistic “history of salvation” is at the same time a universal “natural history of salvation” in which salvation reveals itself in the very mechanics of God’s creation.

Magical American Jew: The Enigma of Difference in Contemporary Jewish American Short Fiction and Film

Magical American Jew: The Enigma of Difference in Contemporary Jewish American Short Fiction and Film

Confronting the Jewish Rejection of Jewish Particularism: Chaim Zhitlowsky’s Anti-Assimilationist Intervention in the American Yiddish Press

This article examines Chaim Zhitlowsky’s (1865-1943) use of the “internal” Jewish space of the Yiddish press to critique the American melting pot and present his alternative “internationalist” model. He also attempted to raise the consciousness of immigrant Jews by analyzing the reasons for their failure to embrace what he defined as “progressive nationalism.” His application of Eastern European autonomist ideas to the American context offers a provocative critique of cosmopolitan tendencies in progressive politics, in Jewish circles and beyond.

Joyce Antler. Radical Jewish Feminism: Voices from the Women's Liberation Movement. New York: New York University Press, 2018. 464 pp.

Reviewed by: Radical Jewish Feminism: Voices from the Women's Liberation Movement by Joyce Antler Cara Rock-Singer Joyce Antler. Radical Jewish Feminism: Voices from the Women's Liberation Movement. New York: New York University Press, 2018. 464 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009419001107 Joyce Antler's Radical Jewish Feminism: Voices from the Women's Liberation Movement tells a history of Jewish feminism in the United States from the 1960s through 1980s. The book brings together the stories of the women's liberation movement, which was led disproportionately by Jewish women, with those of explicitly Jewish feminisms that emerged in the 1970s–80s. In tracing the continuities and ruptures between two generations of Jewish feminisms, Antler considers how Jewish and gender identities have mutually shaped a range of American feminist projects. The book adds significant nuance to narratives of undifferentiated white, middle-class, second-wave feminism and challenges simple divisions between gender universalism and Jewish particularism. In part 1, Antler analyzes approximately twenty organizational and intellectual leaders of radical feminist groups in Chicago, New York, and Boston during the 1960s–70s. These women rarely invoked their Jewish identities, and in turn, historians have largely ignored the role of Jewishness in the movement. By [End Page 220] contrast, Antler argues that Jewish values constituted a significant, if implicit, component of their feminist projects: "Jewish backgrounds and values" usually manifest as "latent" "imaginations and memories" of Jewish marginalization, social values, and political traditions (69). During the 1970s–80s, a new generation of women formulated feminisms as Jews, which Antler argues was itself a radical act. In part 2, Antler presents the stories of approximately twenty such women, including "religious liberationists," who sought gender equality as religious subjects; "secular Jewish feminists," who resisted antisemitism and assimilation on the political Left; Jewish lesbians, who fought both antisemitism and homophobia; and global feminists, who embraced Jewishness in a climate of anti-Zionism. The survey in part 2 illustrates that Jewish identity is far from homogenous and Jewish feminisms were not merely applications of feminist ideas to particular Jewish concerns, but rather novel negotiations of gender, sexual, ethnic, and religious identities. The book concludes with an epilogue that briefly introduces six women who have shaped the direction of Jewish feminism since the 1990s. One of the central contributions of this volume is its new source material. To redress the historiography of US feminism and American Jewry, Antler melded published writings, archival materials, and previously conducted oral histories with her own research to establish a rich new record of feminist stories. In addition to individual interviews and conference calls with women who had been members of various feminist cohorts, Antler convened "Women's Liberation and Jewish Identity," a gathering of approximately forty influential Jewish feminists at New York University in 2011, to reflect on the role of Jewish identity in their feminist activism. This book intervenes in debates among historians of second-wave feminism and of American Jewry that hinge on the status of Jews as a distinct group within American society. First, Antler sets out to show how Jewish difference mattered in the formation of radical feminism, in order to complicate narratives in which Jewish women are squarely white in a binary white-black racial system. Antler not only shows the range of socioeconomic, political, religious, and ethnic identities and experiences of radical feminist leaders, but also probes how each city's political ecology combined with the personal identities, collective chemistry of groups, and reactions to the successes and failures of prior or parallel feminist ventures to shape each unit of the broader feminist social movement. The second major historiographical conversation is concerned with the relationship between Jewish and American history. Antler draws on David Hollinger's formulation of "communalist" versus "dispersionist" histories. The former refers to narratives whose scope is limited to those self-identified or considered by others to be Jewish, while the latter opens the aperture to shed light on the lasting relevance of Jewish roots even among the unidentified or unaffiliated. The dispersionist approach enables Antler to consider a multiplicity of fluid Jewish identities and show that Jewishness, defined capaciously as a racial, religious, or ethnic category, influenced feminist thought and practice. While...

Cold War cinema and the traumatic turn in Europe: Fact (1980) as a Soviet mirror of the Holocaust film

ABSTRACTThe polarisation of WWII memory across the West and East of Europe is an enduring legacy of the Cold War. In the West, the genocide of the Jews was narrated into public memory as the defining trauma of the war and the foundation of cosmopolitan identity, with cinema playing a key role. After Stalin, Soviet cinema supplemented portrayals of monumental triumph with explorations of the personal, everyday experience of trauma. However, the Holocaust was not part of the picture, insofar as Jewish particularism was marginalised in Soviet trauma narratives of WWII, which focused rather on the internationalist ethos of communist martyrs. In time, however, this internationalism drifted towards nativism, manifest in a thematic focus on the burning of villages by German forces as an act of genocide. Soviet Lithuanian artists and filmmakers were at the centre of these developments, and their memoirs shed light on how the nativist vector of the Soviet ‘trauma drama’ of WWII developed through representations of the destruction of the village of Pirčiupiai in monument, poetry and the feature film Fact (Faktas, dir. A. Grikevičius, 1980). Presented as an orthodox rendition of the Great Patriotic War narrative, the film served as a screen memory for a nativist articulation of collective identity.

Writing on the Wall: Graffiti and the Forgo en Jews of Antiquity by Karen B. Stern

Reviewed by: Writing on the Wall: Graffiti and the Forgo en Jews of Antiquity by Karen B. Stern Benjamin D. Gordon Karen B. Stern. Writing on the Wall: Graffiti and the Forgo en Jews of Antiquity. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018. Pp. 312, 55 b&w illus., 4 maps. Hardcover $35, paper $24.95, ebook. ISBN 9780691161334, 9780691210704, 9781400890453. In this absorbing book, Karen Stern tries to recover the voices of the "forgo en" Jews of antiquity who left graffiti on the walls of public spaces throughout the eastern Mediterranean. Many of these Jews were leaving messages behind, calling upon passersby to remember them or their loved ones for good, precisely because they feared oblivion. Yet they have been overlooked nonetheless, claims Stern, not because of some form of subjugation or erasure in antiquity but because of a certain modern scholarly bias [End Page 266] working against them. Historians of ancient Jewish life, overly reliant on classic Jewish texts, can give too li le a ention to ancient Jews who lived comfortably outside of rabbinic culture. Archaeologists can neglect experiential elements of Jewish life when they a end too closely to descriptive typological analysis. And epigraphists can favor monumental inscriptions while shying away from markings that are non-textual. The book has three main chapters, one each for graffiti from devotional, mortuary, and public contexts, respectively. It does not aspire to be an exhaustive catalog, but in its modeling of how a contextually aware analysis of graffiti ought to be carried out, it offers a timely companion to the newly published volumes of the Corpus Inscriptionum Iudaeae/Palaestinae and the online Ancient Graffiti Project. When taken seriously as a source of primary data, as Stern does in this book, graffiti can be a vital tool for scholars interested in the production of social space. It can speak to the human experience in a way that official modes of writing as reflected in classical texts or monumental inscriptions cannot. Chapter 1 looks at examples of graffiti from the synagogue at Dura Europos in Syria, the sacred complex to Pan at El Kanais in Egypt, and Elijah's Cave on Mount Carmel in Israel. Most interesting in this chapter is the claim that remembrance requests were wri en on the walls of holy spaces in hopes that others would say the name when they worshipped at the space, memorializing the deceased. The act of writing graffiti thus becomes a devotional or prayerful act, as does the act of reading it aloud, with worshippers becoming agents working on behalf of the graffiti writers. This expands our sense of what Jewish prayer consisted of in antiquity. Chapter 2 considers the mortuary graffiti at the Jewish necropolis of Beit Shearim in the Galilee. The numerous catacombs of the site are covered in markings that name the dead, picture the dead, curse those who disturb the dead, and signal the special sanctity of the tombs of the dead. In contrast to the tendency of the rabbis to limit interactions with corpses, the huge collection of Beit Shearim graffiti—some of which are published here for the first time—suggest to Stern that ancient Jews actually spent a lot of time communing with the deceased. They may have left simple lines or X and V symbols to mark visits to the graves, for example, like placing pebbles on a headstone. The penchant for etching images of ships over burials might reflect the belief that the dead were traveling to the underworld as if on a journey. This belief was commonly held in the Egyptian and Greco-Roman spheres. Chapter 3 discusses graffiti in public spaces of primarily Asia Minor. The chapter is the most complete expression in the book of a tendency to downplay ancient Jewish particularity, not to mention outright hostility between Jews and non-Jews, and to emphasize how Jews of the eastern Mediterranean were embedded culturally in the Greco-Roman milieu. The copious menorahs etched into public spaces in Asia Minor signal as much; as do the Jewish symbols on an informally scratched sign noting the presence by the Tyre hippodrome of a purple-dye business run by a woman named Matrona. [End Page...

«Hasta los confines de la tierra» (Hch 1,8): vocación universalista en la doble obra lucana

El judaísmo basculó siempre entre el universalismo y el particularismo identitario. La fe cristiana superó desde el principio el particularismo judío. Todos los seres humanos están llamados a la fe y la Iglesia es católica, es decir, universal. Todos los escritos del N. T. son testigos de ello. La doble obra lucana no es una excepción. En el artículo, tras caracterizar literaria e históricamente los dos libros de Lucas, se pone de relieve el universalismo que se refleja en los aspectos étnicos, culturales y sociales, así como la atención de Lucas a la historia universal.

Borrowed Voices: Writing and Racial Ventriloquism in the Jewish American Imagination

Borrowed Voices: Writing and Racial Ventriloquism in the Jewish American Imagination

Black Power, Jewish Politics: Reinventing the Alliance in the 1960s by Marc Dollinger

Reviewed by: Black Power, Jewish Politics: Reinventing the Alliance in the 1960s by Marc Dollinger Shana Bernstein (bio) Black Power, Jewish Politics: Reinventing the Alliance in the 1960s. By Marc Dollinger. Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 2018. xvii + 242 pp. Marc Dollinger's careful, thoughtful, engagingly written book reinterprets the relationship between Jews and Black Power. Political and historical observers have viewed the rise of Black Power as a destructive force vis-á-vis Jews, facilitating black anti-Semitism and, relatedly, undermining Jewish/black relations and eroding coalitions that flourished in the interracial civil rights alliances of the 1950s and early 1960s. But Dollinger's careful archival research reveals a previously obscured story of American Jews who, rather than lamenting Black Power's emergence, recognized both its validity—given African Americans' conditions—and its inevitability—given what they saw as the limits of liberal interracialism. Even more, Black Power provided an important catalyst and generative force for Jews' own ethnic resurgence, helping inspire American Jews to embrace identity politics for their own communal benefit. In fact, "The rise of Black Power forged a new, powerful, and transformative partnership between the two communities" (7). Dollinger further argues that "American Jews borrowed pages from the Black Power handbook and reinvented themselves as a strong, focused advocacy group intent on challenging the American Jewish status quo and building stronger and deeper connections to Judaism and Jewish life" (7). Dollinger even goes so far as to claim that "a new generation of American Jews owed its very definition of Jewishness to African American nationalist constructions" (17). In six chapters, Dollinger charts the change over time in American Jewish political culture from the early post-World War II/Cold War liberal consensus to the rise and influence of Black Power-inspired ethnic nationalism through the 1970s. He identifies a shift from the 1950s and early 1960s, when a consensus-based political climate influenced American Jews to downplay their ethnic identity and embrace universalism and assimilationist tactics. A mere decade later, Jews, inspired in part by black nationalism, increasingly publicly embraced Jewish particularism [End Page 97] and Jewish identity politics. In other words, over ten years Jews shifted from private to public conversations and proclamations of their identity. The organized Jewish community, both leadership and members, are the focus of this study, a choice Dollinger explains as illuminating those players "who made Jewishness the causal factor in their decision making and activism" (20). The influence of Black Power ideology helped Jews more assertively advance Jewish causes, including efforts to strengthen Jewish education and religious revivals such as Jewish day school networks and Jewish studies courses on college campuses. As Jews shifted their political activism away from southern civil rights struggles, they focused increasingly on Jewish causes, including helping oppressed Soviet Jews. Moreover, while Jews in previous decades feared that publicly embracing Zionism would lead to charges of dual loyalty, black nationalists' embrace of Africa and the related transformation of American culture into an "identity-centered political culture" helped enable Jews to publicly embrace Israel (9). Interestingly, Dollinger points to how Jews ironically "became more American by acting more Jewish," as performing ethnic identity became a main thrust of American culture (17). Dollinger challenges the popular assumption that responsibility for the decline in black/Jewish coalitions lies with Black Power. Instead, he argues that Jewish leaders even early on recognized that a black/Jewish split was eventually inevitable. Moreover, Jewish ethnic, political, and religious revivals owed their origins in significant part to African Americans who paved the way and modeled the performance of ethnic identity and particularist politics. In other words, Dollinger reinterprets Black Power as beneficial rather than fundamentally at odds with Jewish Americans' interest. This book reflects an interesting twist; while scholars of American Jewish history have examined how Jewish communal organizations were important models for the African American community and played an important role in early- to mid-twentieth century civil rights and self-determination organizations like the NAACP and Urban League, Dollinger focuses on the inverse relationship. He shows how the rise of Black Power inspired and helped shape Jewish communal responses to the post-World War II world. Furthermore, while scholars have examined white...

Beyond Production vs. Consumption and Structure vs. Identity: The Case for a Renewed Jewish Economic History

Beyond Production vs. Consumption and Structure vs. Identity:The Case for a Renewed Jewish Economic History Francesca Trivellato (bio) When Riv-Ellen Prell points out that "virtually all of the scholars writing in the vein of the economic turn in American Jewish history have marginalized or simply erased women as subjects and actors in history" (484), she raises an important issue that speaks to a wider academic community. At a minimum, it is not a coincidence that to make her case for the importance of women's history and gender analysis, she draws on the work of Marion Kaplan on imperial Germany and on Paula Hyman's study of both North America and Western Europe. My remarks point into an even further geographical, temporal, and thematic direction and highlight the potential implications of Jewish economic history beyond the field of North American Jewish studies. In Prell's diagnosis, women are the casualty of the recent economic turn in (American) Jewish history because of its tendency to privilege production over consumption and structure over culture. I expand on her argument to suggest two ways in which Jewish economic history can afford us the opportunity to move beyond these binaries and become more relevant for all scholars of Jewish studies and all economic historians. Building on Prell's case, I suggest that Jewish economic history needs not only to incorporate women and gender more systematically in its analysis but also to become more comparative. By doing so, it can pursue the dual goals of ascertaining what is specifically Jewish about the experience of Jewish women in the marketplace and of demonstrating to so-called general economic historians the relevance of taking Jewish particularism into consideration when writing the grand narratives about the rise of Western capitalism and modernity. My first point is that Jewish economic history should become more economic and more comparative. There is a plethora of work in economic history that addresses the role of women, their economic contributions, and the discrimination they suffered. This is particularly the case for US history, a subject for which data are more plentiful than for other times and places. The study of the gender gap in US wages, for example, has a venerable tradition, and scholars of Jewish economic history would [End Page 523] benefit from engaging with it more directly.1 Did Jewish women enter the labor force in the same proportion as other women in their neighborhoods, cities, regions, and nations? How did their wages compare with those of other women and men? What impact did the gender gap have in the sectors and tasks in which Jewish women specialized? These are some of the questions for which numbers can be compiled, and even if numbers are not sufficient to answer all our questions, they do often reveal important patterns of discrimination and change over time that otherwise are hard to account for with precision. Prell rightly stresses how women figure more in studies of consumption than production and praises work such as Sarah Abrevaya Stein's Plumes: Ostrich Feathers, Jews, and a Lost World of Global Commerce (2010) for keeping all three dimensions—production, distribution, and consumption—together. I would add that an emphasis on consumption need not eschew larger causal questions. Scholarship on pre-industrial Europe has yielded provocative interpretations of the chronology and causes of the British Industrial Revolution by focusing on the role of women in the family unity of production and consumption. In a series of influential contributions, culminating in The Industrious Revolution: Consumer Behavior and the Household Economy, 1650 to the Present (2008), Jan de Vries has made the case that an increasing desire to consume goods available on the market led families in north-western Europe to increase their labor input during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In this account, peasant women are the protagonists of a gradual but steady process of technological and capital expansion that ushered in industrialization. By contrast, during the Victorian age, class concerns about gender propriety once again relegated women to the domestic sphere.2 In early modern England and the Netherlands—the areas where de Vries locates the epicenter of this industrious revolution—Jews were almost exclusively an...

Where Do the Hijab and the Kippah Belong? On Being Publicly Jewish or Muslim in Post-Hebdo France

To date, scholars have rarely talked about contemporary antisemitism and Islamophobia in France as part of a single story. When they have, it has typically been as part of a framework for analyzing racism that is essentially competitive: some depict Islamophobia as less a real problem than a frequent excuse to ignore antisemitism; others minimize antisemitism as an unfortunate but marginal phenomenon by comparison with the pervasive nature of anti-Muslim racism in French society. This article argues that the two are inseparable, and it focuses on a hitherto overlooked set of connections: in the era since the attacks on Charlie Hebdo and Hyper Cacher in January 2015, at key flash points that question Muslim belonging in France, the position of Jews has repeatedly been invoked in ambiguous, contradictory ways. Participants in these public debates have sometimes forcefully maintained that Jews are unlike Muslims, since they have long been fully integrated French citizens. At other moments, these discussions have raised the specter of Jewish ethnic and religious difference. By emphasizing Jewish particularity, such debates evoke, perforce, the past twenty-five years of controversies about the allegedly problematic attire, food, and beliefs of France’s Muslims. The article focuses on several key moments, from the speech of Prime Minister Manuel Valls before the French parliament in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo and Hyper Cacher attacks, to the kippah and burkini affairs of 2016, to the provocative comments of candidates in the 2017 presidential elections concerning Muslim and Jewish religious and ethnic markers of difference.

A Vanished Ideology: Essays on the Jewish Communist Movement in the English-Speaking World in the Twentieth Century ed. by Matthew B. Hoffman and Henry F. Srebrnik

Reviewed by: A Vanished Ideology: Essays on the Jewish Communist Movement in the English-Speaking World in the Twentieth Century ed. by Matthew B. Hoffman and Henry F. Srebrnik Christine Elie Matthew B. Hoffman and Henry F. Srebrnik, eds., A Vanished Ideology: Essays on the Jewish Communist Movement in the English-Speaking World in the Twentieth Century (Albany: State University of New York Press 2016) Histories of the Communist Party lend themselves well to collected works. While these histories are transnational, the nature of organizing – often under circumstances of repression – make them deeply local. Following directives from [End Page 358] the USSR, Communist Parties around the world shared common ideology, but no two shared the same experiences. A Vanished Ideology is located along this intersection of local and global. Focusing specifically on Jewish Communist Party members adds fascinating complexity to the already gripping historiography of transnational leftism. In A Vanished Ideology, Matthew B. Hoffman and Henry F. Srebrnik thoughtfully curate a collection of essays on the local experiences of Jewish Communists in the English-speaking world. Central to this work are the competing identity politics that often challenged the allegiance of Jewish Communist Party members. Connecting these pieces is the pervasive issue of the primary affiliation of such Party members – often posed is the question: were they Communist Jews or were they Jewish Communists? This distinction was even more pronounced when local party members faced international schisms and debates – among the most ravenous to the Party were the rise (and subsequent Soviet criticism) of Zionism, the escalation of fascism in Europe, and ultimately the revelations of Khrushchev's secret speech in 1956. Hoffman opens the collection with his piece on the place of Yiddish-speaking Communists in the Communist Party of the United States (cpusa). He examines the role of both Jewish particularism and the forging of a distinct Jewish communist culture. Jennifer Young similarly addresses the cpusa, doing so through an analysis of the allegiance of the Jewish Peoples' Fraternal Order (jppo) and its role in forging the Jewish Communist movement. Young argues that the jppo contributed to the creation of a community that lasted far beyond its affiliation with the Communist Party. Gennady Estraikh explores Jewish Communism in the United States through the lens of Paul Novick – editor of the daily Frayhayt. Estraikh follows Novick's career and dedication to the daily from its inception in 1922 until its final edition in 1988 during which time it weathered myriad international scandals. Henry Srebrnik introduces the Communist Party of Canada (cpc) and the role of the Jewish community in fostering Jewish identity while both reacting to and resisting burgeoning Zionism. Srebrnik contends that following the 1956 Khrushchev revelations, Jewish Party members had to confront the reality that the USSR and its promised Birobidzhan region had not offered a viable safe heaven from anti-Semitism. Ester Reiter also addresses the cpc, exploring the internationalism that marked eastern European Jewish migrants as secular socialists inclined towards working-class movements. Reiter zeroes in on women's activism and confronts several challenges to Canada's left – notably the Padlock law and 1951 expulsion of the United Jewish People's Order from the Canadian Jewish Congress. Stephen M. Cullen takes us out of North America with his piece on the Communist Party of Great Britain (cpgb). Cullen argues that Jewish Party members are inaccurately painted out of the picture in Great Britain in part due to the reliance on class as the primary unit of analysis in Communist historiography. In addition, Cullen contends, there has been intentional negligence by Stalinist historiography to acknowledge the presence and contributions of Jewish Party members. Basing his work on sound recordings, Cullen "tests" his theories on Jewish presence by relying on interviews with notable Jewish members of the cpgb. Philip Mendes examines the small yet present group of Jewish Communists in Australia. Mendes argues that while they were by no means a mass, Jewish Communists (and their allies) were active participants in the Jewish community. [End Page 359] Concluding the volume, David Yoram Saks delves into the fascinating world of the Communist Party of South Africa. Saks follows the trajectory of several Jewish Communists as they achieved...

Universalism in 3 Baruch

This article argues that universalistic themes of the apocalyptic work 3 Baruch should be seen as evidence for the integrity of the text's ending. The author of the work emphasizes the unity of the human condition through a firmly structured cosmology and universalistic moral demands. The text presents the figures associated with the Tower of Babel, a vision of a phoenix protecting the world, and a heavenly temple scene with the archangel Michael, as helping the seer Baruch to acknowledge God's dominion over the world. 3 Baruch presents God's glory as tied to a concern for all people and control over the cosmos. The structure and episodes created by the author of the text work to downplay Jewish particularism and halakhic commands as a response to the destruction of the Temple by the Romans.

Zeno’s Dissonant Violin: Italo Svevo, Judaism, and Western Art Music

This essay argues that Zeno Cosini’s futile attempts to master the violin reveal Italo Svevo’s contestation of a musical anti-Semitism that revolved around claims for Jewish imitation as opposed to non-Jewish originality, Jewish particularity as opposed to non-Jewish universality, and Jewish noise as opposed to non-Jewish concord. La coscienza di Zeno features a protagonist whose imperfect musicianship is far more than a comic manifestation of his critically well-trodden ineptitude and infirmity. Zeno’s musicality appropriates and subverts the anti-Jewish accusations formulated most infamously by Richard Wagner, and ultimately challenges conventional Western musical architectures and harmonies by opening art music to an aesthetics of fragmentation and instability. Zeno’s project might be paralleled with a modernist tonal reconfiguration that, to paraphrase Schoenberg, emancipated a Jewish dissonance.

Bringing Zion Home: Israel in American Jewish Culture, 1948–1967 by Emily Alice Katz (review)

Reviewed by: Bringing Zion Home: Israel in American Jewish Culture, 1948–1967 by Emily Alice Katz M. M. Silver (bio) Bringing Zion Home: Israel in American Jewish Culture, 1948–1967. By Emily Alice Katz. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2015. xiii + 215 pp. This is a valuable study that conveys a wealth of useful information about Israel’s presence in American Jewish life, and in the United States generally, in the period preceding the 1967 Six Day War. Claiming that American Jewish culture was “constructed” in the 1950s via the development of various performances and practices, Katz concentrates on topics [End Page 158] in performing and visual arts, non-fiction publication, and economics that have been mostly overlooked by historians whose work on early American-Israel connections focused overwhelmingly on diplomatic, military and political issues (13). Most of the book’s findings on subjects such as the mini-cult of Israeli folk dance, patterns of consumption of Israeli products, and exhibitions of Israeli fashion or art, derive from careful, original research. Future explorations of the Israeli-American Jewish relationship and its origins will need to take Katz’s findings into account because it is impossible to separate dynamics in realms of high culture or consumer choice from more overtly political or identity issues that have dominated discussions of American Zionist history. Katz analyzes ways in which American Jewish cultural or economic entrepreneurs utilized Israeli practices and products in this pre-1967 period due to a mix of motivations, some of them contradictory. They brought Israeli artistic or religious products into their own homes and sponsored Israeli art exhibitions or folk dancing events in public venues as a result of their own existential needs to express Jewish particularity, or to articulate ideas of compatibility between American and Israeli historical experience, or to identify themselves as patriotic Americans harnessed to various Cold War ideals and projects of cultural exchange. She is particularly insightful in the identification of cultural orientations, some of them gender-based, in areas of performing arts, fashion and consumerism, and publication, that ran counter to an evolving “muscular” narrative celebrating Israel as a fighting, victorious counterpoint to Jewish suffering in the Diaspora. As an important corrective to over-stated descriptions of American Jewish reticence about Israel in the 1950s, a Cold War period when Jews in the U.S. faced considerable pressure about political loyalty and relatively little official support from the Eisenhower administration to boost their emotional attachments to the newly founded Jewish state, Katz’s informative study will add nuance to considered discussions of how American Jewish-Israeli connections have evolved. Investigating ways to develop relationships with their Jewish somethings-or-other in Israel (co-religionists? compatriots?), American Jews after 1948 operated in uncharted territory, and Katz is entirely correct to assert that judgmental aspersions about the putatively paltry results of their explorations and efforts are unfair. No Jewish or American ethnic standard will ever avail itself as an objectively certain measure of what they were trying to do. On the other hand, this study’s assertive declarations about its value as a revision of long-standing historical judgments about the relative passivity of American Jews about Israel in the 1950s and 1960s before the Six Day War are often unpersuasive and distracting. Katz depicts [End Page 159] herself as revising generations of historical scholarship about American Jews and Israel. However, willfully or not, Katz overlooks a wide array of counter-arguments that could be made against such revisionist packaging of her findings. A partly or fully compelling counter-argument would contend that the various cultural performances and practices Katz has identified (American Zionist youth group fixation on the hora, or annual Hadassah exhibitions of fashion products designed by its Fashion and Design Institute in Jerusalem, or the purchase of Israel-made Judaica or other products) emerged in the 1950s precisely because they allowed American Jews to avoid other, emotionally inconvenient commitments or, potentially compromising political practices, much as Hadassah’s exceptional popularity in the inter-war American Zionist scene partly derived from its “non-political” character. Another counter-argument would point to issues of scale. These are evidenced by the quite modest sale figures...

The Generalization of Holocaust Denial: Meyer Levin, William James, and the Broadway Production of The Diary of Anne Frank

What importance could the radical empiricism of William James have for the ordeal of Meyer Levin? Following the suppression of his staging of The Diary of Anne Frank , Levin decried the excision, in the authorized Broadway production, of key references to Anne’s budding Judaism and to the Jewish particularism of Holocaust atrocities. Because the Communist-influenced Broadway script emphasizes the wrongs implied by universal, rather than specific, expressions of tyranny, James’s philosophy anticipates, and perhaps even helps frame, Levin’s still-pertinent charge that generalization abets both Holocaust denial and efforts to disavow Jewish identity, particularism, and nationalism.