Jewish Refugees Research Articles

A Question of Competition? How to Deal with Inner-Jewish Diversity in Cities of the Ottoman Empire at the Turn of the 16th Century

The starting point of this essay lies in current discussions about Jewish diversity and unity. It focuses on the Jewish population in several cities of the Ottoman Empire around 1500. At that time, the local Greek Jewish (Romaniot) population saw itself confronted with thousands of Iberian Jewish (Sephardic) refugees. An understanding of the situation as one of competition for authority makes it possible to ask about the strategies the Romaniot rabbi Elijah Mizraḥi pursued as reflected in some of his legal opinions. I argue that it was in Mizraḥi’s interest to overcome competition within the heterogeneous Jewish population, through either cooperation, concession, integration, or marginalisation. An analysis of his writings thus provides an insight into context-specific contemporary constructions of Jewish unity.

The Jewish Question in the British Colonial Imagination: The Case of the Deportation to Mauritius (1940–45)

In December 1940, 1,580 Jewish refugees who fled Nazi-controlled Europe survived a long journey to Haifa only to be deported by the British Mandate authorities in Palestine to the British colony of Mauritius. Using this case study, this article explores British perceptions of the Jewish Question during World War II. It builds on a transnational archive that includes British colonial records from Britain, Palestine, and Mauritius, together with memoirs, letters, diaries, and oral testimonies from the Jewish detainees and the local Mauritians who remember them. In doing so, it asks three interconnected questions: How did the British authorities perceive the Jews deported to Mauritius? How did the deportees perceive Mauritius, their new destination, and its local population? And how were the detainees received and perceived by Mauritians? This three-pronged inquiry invites an exploration of the ambiguity of attitudes toward Jewish refugees inside and outside British colonial frames.

Albanian Customary Law, Religion, and the Rescue of Jews during the Holocaust

ABSTRACT Albania was the only German-occupied country in which the number of Jews increased after World War II. Almost all native Jews of Albania survived the Holocaust, and thousands of Jewish refugees from other European countries were assisted and protected during the years 1933–1945. The rescue was facilitated by a unique mixture of factors, but the main common motivation of Muslim, Catholic, and Orthodox rescuers was Besa, the crucial element of Kanun, the Albanian customary law.

„Wie alles sein wird“

This article deals with the essay „How everything will be“ („Wie alles sein wird“), written in the spring of 1943 by the scholar Hans-Joachim Schoeps in exile in Sweden. This is an annotated publication of the entire manuscript, in which the Jewish refugee and intellectual imagines how he might experience his post-war return to his native Germany.

Japanese and Jews in Shanghai

Abstract The actions of the Japanese government and military before and during the Holocaust saved tens of thousands of Jews in Shanghai from murder by Japan’s Nazi allies. Because the Japanese were brutal aggressors in East Asia, because their treatment of the Chinese population was genocidal, because the details and organization of Japanese sexual abuse of Korean women are still matters of international dispute, approaches to the Japanese treatment of European Jewish refugees begin from a negative standpoint. Japanese authorities have not investigated or revealed these actions, and Japanese academics have only just begun to consider this issue worthy of study. Discussion of Japanese policy in Shanghai is often dominated by evidence of antisemitism in Japan, the creation of the Designated Area in 1943 to confine Jewish refugees, and the brutally officious behavior of Kanoh Ghoya. The issuance of life-saving visas by Chiune Sugihara, Japanese Vice-Consul in Kovno, is treated as exceptional humanitarianism. This study focuses on the decisions and behavior of Japanese authorities toward European Jewish refugees in Japan and in Shanghai which allowed them to survive.

H.D. & Bryher, An Untold Love Story of Modernism by Susan McCabe

Reviewed by: H.D. & Bryher, An Untold Love Story of Modernism by Susan McCabe Cynthia Hogue H.D. & Bryher, An Untold Love Story of Modernism. Susan McCabe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. 400. $39.95 (hardcover). As Susan McCabe notes at the beginning of her magisterial new biography, H.D. & Bryher, An Untold Love Story of Modernism, modernist poet H.D. (born Hilda Doolittle) and writer and humanitarian Bryher (born Winifred Ellerman) entered a "union" in which each was the other's center. McCabe calls Bryher H.D.'s "main invisible" who made H.D. "visible" (310). Without her, H.D. "might have lost her creative drive," but without H.D., who shielded Bryher from familial pressures to conform to social conventions, Bryher "might have done herself in" (311). As their "curious" story unfolds in McCabe's riveting telling, a love story emerges in terms that have only become available in the twenty-first century. H.D. was bisexual, polysexual, and Bryher nonbinary, transgender, "they." McCabe's point is that they both "consciously defied the category 'woman'" (311). New criticism and scholarship in the burgeoning field of H.D. studies, augmenting the publication of H.D.'s unpublished manuscripts and republication of Bryher's lost works, suggest the timeliness of a biography in which "this untold story reclaims the pair as unseen activists" (5). What distinguishes McCabe's biography is its objective to portray fully the love in this modern "union," so as to make it visible—and understood—in a new light. Many details of the lives of "our couple" (as McCabe tenderly refers to them throughout the book) are familiar. They met after the Great War, after H.D. had almost died giving birth to her daughter, Perdita. Bryher swept her off to Greece to save her, after which they embarked on a future together defined by making art. Bryher's role beyond that of savior and patron, however—was she H.D.'s "companion"? "partner"?—hasn't been named (14). The obvious—their love, that story—has been hiding, like the purloined letter, in plain sight. That fact is McCabe's North Star as she wends [End Page 679] her way through the rich material record of lives lived fully and thoroughly recorded. Their lives were full of the artistic and intellectual luminaries of their day—among them, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Paul Robeson, Sigmund Freud, Gertrude Stein, Sylvia Beach, and Marianne Moore, to name a few. In 1933 and 1934, H.D. was Freud's analysand in Vienna. Seeing another war on the horizon as the Nazis rose to power, Bryher put her wealth to the cause of helping Jewish refugees to flee, including the elderly Freuds and their family. To read details of the considerable trauma and its generational reverberations is harrowing, but McCabe is undaunted in the telling. Her scholarship is impeccably thorough, bringing new material to light. In addition to being a highly regarded scholar of modernist film and poetry, McCabe is a poet. The lyricism of her elegant prose also recommends H.D. & Bryher. To illustrate, I quote a passage describing a walk H.D. took on the eve of her meeting Bryher. In July 1918, both women were in Cornwall. On the continent, the war dragged on. H.D.'s husband, Richard Aldington, having had an affair on furlough, was back on active duty in France. H.D. had come to Cornwall at the invitation of the composer, Cecil Gray, memorably sketched as having "flabby cheeks," "large ears," and "a beaked nose [that] punctuated his face" (66). Although she had no passion for him (and was spending her time translating The Bacchae), she was already pregnant. Here's McCabe's description: Wandering along, H.D. collected cyclamen and violets, climbed rocks, watched gulls, and took the road to St. Ives, with its anemones, gorse, and chamomile, sensing the "sacramental power" of Druid priests who fashioned circular stones like those of Stonehenge. Her stride convinced her she was breaking from a sex-obsessed crowd toward "a cold healing breath" that "enclosed" her "in crystal." … She cultivated her animist gifts while walking, tied to her "every breath," "charged with meaning," the...

Bernard Bailyn Memorial Remarks October 25, 2020

Bernard Bailyn Memorial Remarks October 25, 2020

Shoah Education: The Indian Scenario

India represents a country that was neither directly affected nor involved with the Holocaust. As the timeline of the Holocaust overlaps the timeline of the struggle for freedom for the Indian subcontinent, the later events overshadow the former. Holocaust education is neither mandatory nor prevalent in India. Equating the partition of India with the Holocaust and tagging the Holocaust as one of the genocides, represents one of the few misconceptions about the Holocaust in India that often strips off the uniqueness of the catastrophic event. My article describes the present status of Holocaust education in schools and universities. The survey stems from the standard books used in Indian schools and my personal experience as an educator. The article not only articulates the need of creating awareness regarding the Holocaust in India but also traces a few examples, which illuminate the fact that India proved a haven for Jewish refugees during the Holocaust. The need of the hour is to recognize such connections, which would serve as the appropriate entry wedges to create awareness regarding Holocaust education in India.

Eliyana R. Adler: Survival on the Margins. Polish Jewish Refugees in the Wartime Soviet Union, Cambridge, Massachusetts/London: Harvard University Press 2020, 456 pp.

Eliyana R. Adler: Survival on the Margins. Polish Jewish Refugees in the Wartime Soviet Union, Cambridge, Massachusetts/London: Harvard University Press 2020, 456 pp.

Toward a History of Interwar Sino-Hungarian Cultural Relations: Three Advocates of Kuomintang Soft Power, Hungarian Irredentism and Pan-Danubianism

This paper aims to achieve two goals: the first is to bring a fresh perspective to the Atlanto-centric history of Chinese propaganda while tracing the roots of Sino-Hungarian bilateral approaches and Hungarian Sinology to a time dating some fifteen years earlier than the mutual recognition of the two People’s Republics. This analysis also introduces three actors of different political agendas who applied a similar PR tool of cultural diplomacy to elicit international sympathy for their homeland. After briefly surveying the primary stimuli of cultural diplomacy in interwar Hungary and Republican-Era China, I turn to pre-1949 Sino-Hungarian cultural approaches in the era of no formal diplomatic relations. Such initiatives offer valuable insights into the history of cultural diplomacy while also highlighting significant parallels with the present. Specifically, I introduce the political and cultural agenda of three individuals acting as cultural ambassadors to their homelands. The Shanghai Jewish refugee aid organizer, Paul Komor, and the women’s association president, Theresia Moll, were members of the Hungarian diaspora in China. They introduced the post-Habsburg Central European region to a cosmopolitan community while exhibiting two different foci: Hungarian irredentism and pan-Danubianism. Meanwhile, Zhenya He, a Kuomintang propagandist and the University of Budapest’s first Chinese language instructor during the 1930s, synthesized Hungarian pan-Asian Turanism with Sun Yat-sen’s Tridemism to further Sino-Hungarian exchanges.

Whose Victims and Whose Survivors? Polish Jewish Refugees between Holocaust and Gulag Memory Cultures

ABSTRACT Holocaust and Gulag studies are witnessing the belated emergence of the Soviet experience of Jewish escapees from Nazi-occupied Poland as a lieu de mémoire in its own right. Although not commemorated in official ritual, museum spaces, or memorial sites, the sheer mass of published testimonies by survivors of this experience far outweighs the previous lack of attention to the refugees’ story. It was the agency of the refugee survivors themselves which subsequently put their Soviet experience on the mnemonic map of World War II. This article discusses both the reasons for that lack of attention and the current growing interest in their accounts. It proposes a typology based on questions of victimhood and perpetratorship, analyzed through the contrast between the way the Jewish exiles in the USSR interpreted their experiences and how those who experienced the Holocaust directly interpreted theirs. The article thus asks, whose victims did the refugees consider themselves, the Germans’ or the Soviets’?

Jewish refugees who fled Europe via Franco’s Spain: coping with insufficient food in the concentration camp of Miranda de Ebro

ABSTRACT Between 1940 and 1944, thousands of persecuted Jews fled Europe via the Iberian Peninsula. For men, a defining feature of this escape was feeling hungry for several months in a Spanish detention camp, the “campo de concentración de Miranda de Ebro.” There, the men developed coping strategies for acquiring additional food, and tactics for coping psychologically with the hunger. These strategies created bonds and stable groups; conferred a sense of agency; and made the men feel useful, valued, and cared for. In parallel, Allied country diplomatic representatives, Red Cross organizations, and American relief agencies provided food parcels.

Italya. Jewish Stories, Italian History by Germano Maifreda

Reviewed by: Italya. Jewish Stories, Italian History by Germano Maifreda Elena Lolli Germano Maifreda, Italya. Storie di ebrei, storia italiana [Italya. Jewish Stories, Italian History]. Laterza: Bari-Roma, 2021. 341 pp. €24.00. ISBN: 9788858143896 A melting pot of cultures in the heart of Western Christendom, Italy, or the "island of divine dew," as described by the creative Hebrew etymology I-tal-ya, has seen a diversified presence of native, Ashkenazi, and Sephardic Jews for over two millennia. The Italian-Jewish coexistence and interaction has had a great historical impact on society that contributed to the identity-making and evolution of the country. However, despite an exceptionally long Jewish existence in the peninsula that dates back to Roman times, most Italians still think about Jews' vicissitudes as something apart from the nation's mainstream history. Jews have always been seen as an isolated, passive, and persecuted minority, and thus, their history is usually considered separate from the general one. As the title underlines, Germano Maifreda aims to dismantle such historiographical misconceptions, which are principally due to the fact that for many years the events relating to Italian Jews have been mainly reconstructed by scholars through the documentation produced by the majority society, thus leading to the emergence of fallacious metanarratives. The author argues that without taking into account the sources produced within the Jewish communities, the historical process of assimilation between Jews and Christians may appear distorted, like the one described through the medium of "pink spectacles" by eminent historians such as Jacob Burckhardt and Cecil Roth, or merely reduced to a histoire larmoyante, whose partiality was denounced by Salo Baron's famous thesis. In order to understand Italian history as inclusive of the Jewish experience, Maifreda suggests going beyond the antisemitism parameters and reflect on how the Jews have systematically negotiated their own position within the Italian authorities over the centuries. With the art of diplomacy, Jewish mediators operated discreetly through trying to use their influence and various expedients to moderate rulers' decrees. Yet, the history of Jewish diplomatic efforts contradicts the myth of Jewish passivity, because in reality, their efforts involved a much broader web of interactions than just the "vertical relationship" between sovereigns, communities, and Court-Jews. According to the author, it is necessary to develop an overall approach devoted to articulating the meaning of "identity" in the history of Italian [End Page 263] Jewry, taking into account the reciprocal influence between Jewish communities and their Christian counterparts. Also, thanks to newly discovered documents, Maifreda proposes some case studies that cover multiple relationship issues and environments that occurred over the course of several centuries. In 1516, the governor of Venice declared that Jews had to live in a ghetto, which was the first of many Jewish enclosures ordered by political powers in the Italian peninsula. The Jewish community became an important cosmopolitan center of the Republic, bringing significant economic growth for the city, including nuanced networks with Christian neighbors. In the first chapter, the author sheds fresh light on this complex interfaith encounter by showing us different types of integration, or even prohibited unions, such as the forbidden love between the Christian sailor, Moretto, and the Jewish woman, Rachel, a story that reminds us of Shakespeare's star-crossed lovers, Romeo and Juliet, but in an early-modern Venetian ghetto. In the court of Ferrara, Jewish refugees from the Iberian peninsula, invited by the Duke of Este, played a fundamental role, thanks to their financial skills. Most of the conversos in Ferrara were wealthy bankers and traders, with international relations with partners based in Middle Eastern markets or in various ports located in the Mediterranean. An emblematic figure of the complex social stratification experienced by Ferrarese Judaism after the arrival of Portuguese Marranos is that of the influential Gracia Nasi, alias Beatriz de Luna. She openly professed the Jewish religion, financing, among other things, a translation of the Bible in Judeo-Spanish printed in Ferrara between 1551 and 1553. In Chapter 2, the story of Gracia Nasi demonstrates that there was not one single Italian-Judaism model, nor a single way of living as Jews. At the start of the sixteenth century, we witness the birth of...

No Better Home? Jews, Canada, and the Sense of Belonging ed. by David S. Koffman

Reviewed by: No Better Home? Jews, Canada, and the Sense of Belonging ed. by David S. Koffman Gerald Sorin (bio) No Better Home? Jews, Canada, and the Sense of Belonging. Edited by David S. Koffman. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2021. 314 pp. No Better Home? begins with an audacious question: "Has there ever been a better home for Jews than Canada?" The question, however, seems rhetorical, inviting only one answer: "No. There's never been a better home for the Jews." But David Koffman, the editor of this extraordinarily rich anthology, has asked more than a dozen top-ranking specialists in Canadian Jewish history to take the question seriously and to shape their answers in scholarly articles, essays, and personal memoirs. Koffman says he raised the question "because it has seldom been asked" (3). One might argue, however, that it is seldom asked because it can't be answered. What, after all, do we mean by such non-academic categories as "better" or "best," or even by the concept of "home?" Putting aside these epistemological problems, there remain enormous methodological barriers to answering the question. A responsible conclusion would require comparing the quality of Jewish life in Canada, not only to the US, which has been done several times before, but to Jewish life in more than one hundred other diasporas over many continents, over the course of many centuries. Canada, with 390,000 Jewish residents, is the fourth largest Jewish community in the world, trailing only Israel, the US, and France, but not by very much. This alone merits the attention of Jewish historians, anthropologists, and sociologists and explains why they established the now long-standing field of Canadian Jewish Studies. It is not clear to me, however, whether the book at issue here, as good as it is, muddies the waters or serves as a useful exploratory start to answering the question it raises. Morton Weinfeld wisely restricts his comparative essay to the Western liberal democracies of the past two hundred years. He examines a series of data points which reveal aspects of Jewish self-possession and religious and communal freedom in a multicultural Canadian society. Weinfeld is confident that within his circumscribed comparisons, Canada has been the best home for Jews over the past two centuries. In her chapter, however, historian Hasia Diner takes issue with Weinfeld. Canada, she writes, certainly offered a better home than the various other "homes" Jews left behind. But this does not mean that immigrants to Canada made the best choice, particularly in comparison to destination USA. Diner points to the fact that in the vast compendium of information consumed by East European Jews considering a new home, "Canada occupied a decidedly minor role" (35). But how does that claim address [End Page 314] the question about the quality of life Jews actually experienced in their new location? The essay fails to say. Kalman Weiser's chapter demonstrates that Jewish intellectuals, especially those who visited Montreal in the first half of the twentieth-century, envisioned the city as a "Vilna on the St. Lawrence." They had reasonable expectations that Montreal's Jewish culture might prove fertile ground for Yiddish and Yiddishkeit when sheltered from some of the assimilating forces Jews faced in the US Jews were the largest immigrant group in Montreal, and Yiddish did indeed remain the third most spoken language in the city into the early decades of the twentieth century. Other essays by historians Harold Troper, Ira Robinson, and Richard Menkis pay attention to positive transformations in Canadian Jewish life over time, including increased political and cultural influence and more assurance of Jewish continuity through the growth of Jewish day schools. The picture is mixed, however. Robinson describes the institutional and demographic shifts that reshaped the Canadian Jewish experience, particularly in Montreal after the Parti Quebecois gained influence in the 1970s. The pronounced nationalism expressed in French Canada's "Quiet Revolution" was alarming to Jews who thought their safe and stable home, as one group among other minority groups, might be threatened. For some Jews, the reemergence of a radical French nationalism prompted memories of Canada's restrictive immigration policy toward Jewish refugees during the Holocaust years. The...

Dramatizing Displacement in Israel

Dramatizing Displacement in Israel Chen Alon (bio) and Sonja Kuftinec (bio) As coauthors, we have been in dialogue about theatre and nation-formation for close to two decades. We enter this dialogue from perspectives of ancestral displacement that index the flux of national borders, identities, and movements. In Kuftinec's Croatian family, this migration pattern traced economic opportunity to the United States, where assimilation into the dominant culture was eased by a passage into whiteness. For Alon's grandfather, migration from Europe to Israel offered asylum from the Holocaust. As Zionists, Alon's family felt saved by a return to their "homeland"; serving in the Israeli Defense Force to guard the Jewish "shelter" became a point of generational duty. But serving in the army in Occupied Palestinian territory eventually radicalized Alon. He began to see Israel not only as a safe haven, but also as a colonizing state, one which did not fully recognize Palestinian human rights. He created alliances with Palestinian ex-combatants, cofounding Combatants for Peace in 2005 (cfpeace.org). Shared rituals, theatre, and storytelling became key tools in rehumanization and dialogue, as well as prompting nonviolent direct action resisting Israeli Occupation. These practices of animating dialogue and engaging direct action—grounded in personal stories and collective analysis—informed later activist theatre work with African asylumseekers in Israel. Israel has a complicated relationship with the politics of migration and the embrace of asylumseekers. On the one hand, the state openly welcomes the diasporic return of Jewish refugees to their "homeland." Israel also strongly supported the 1951 United Nations Refugee Convention, advocating for global asylum. On the other, Israel struggles to navigate its relationship with the Palestinian diaspora, demands for return to (sometimes erased) ancestral communities, and with welcoming African asylum-seekers from areas such as Eritrea and Sudan. We focus in this essay on migration, movement, and polarization in Israel, with particular attention to refugees and asylum-seekers. We examine how vectors of migration align with ethno-national imaginaries—both iterated and challenged through theatre. We first sketch out the emergence of Israel as a state and as a Jewish refuge, while naming the tensions that mark its existence. We then review recent scholarship about Hebrew and Arab-language theatre that structures the social identity of the Zionist subject and reflects on the status of the refugee in Israel more broadly. Finally, we outline adaptations of Theatre of the Oppressed with Holot Theatre (2014–22). This case study of polarized alliances between African asylum-seekers and Israeli citizens models how theatre can reflect and shift the dynamics of migration and belonging, activating ethical citizenship beyond national identity. Establishing Israel as a State of Jewish Refuge The narrative of migration in and around the state of Israel is itself a polarized one, featuring two main historiographic accountings, both oriented around exile and return. For the purposes of this essay, we focus on a timeline beginning with Jewish immigration in the late nineteenth century, prompted by organized massacres (pogroms) in Eastern Europe, and further migration in the 1930s and '40s around the Holocaust. This migration pattern aligns Judaism with asylum-seeking and European nationalism. In the nineteenth century, Jewish intellectuals in Europe began to understand [End Page 61] themselves as a nation rather than only as a religion (Berkowitz 84–85). Zionism emerged as a cultural framing for potential Jewish statehood in an Israeli "homeland," then known as Palestine, part of the Ottoman Empire and later British Mandate. Under the pressure of Jewish migration following the Holocaust, in November 1947 the United Nations proposed the creation of two independent states: Israel and Palestine. The Arab world refused to take part in this division, which they saw as an illegal land grab by newly arrived immigrants. The UN affirmed Israeli statehood in May 1948 and, from Israel's perspective, the Arab world attacked and Israel defended itself through the Independence War, in which Arab villagers "ran away" from their homes. In contrast, Palestinians frame the 1948 exodus as the nakba (catastrophe), a violent expulsion of natives by colonial settlers. In 1967, Israel fought allied Arab forces resulting in the occupation of Palestinian land and residents in the Gaza Strip and West...

Rescue the Surviving Souls: The Great Jewish Refugee Crisis of the Seventeenth Century. By Adam Teller.

Rescue the Surviving Souls: The Great Jewish Refugee Crisis of the Seventeenth Century. By Adam Teller.

Exposure to Terror Attacks and Traumatization Among Immigrants From the Former Soviet Union to Israel: The Positive Effects of Bicultural Identity and BiculturalSocial Support.

The study examines the connection between exposure to terror attacks from the Gaza Strip, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms, cultural identities, and social support among immigrants from the Former Soviet Union (FSU) to Israel. The study was conducted using a community sample of immigrants from the FSU to Israel living within a radius of 60kilometers from the Gaza Strip (n = 601). The study was cross-sectional and used anonymous questionnaires. The following scales were applied: the Measure of Exposure to Terrorism (Pat-Horenczyk, R., Abramovitz, R., Peled, O., Brom, D., Daie, A., & Chemtob, C. M. (2007). Adolescent exposure to recurrent terrorism in Israel: Post-traumatic distress and functional impairment. Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 77 (1), 76-85), the PTSD Checklist - Civilian Version (Weathers, F., Litz, B., Herman, D., Huska, J., & Keane, T. (1993). The PTSD checklist (PCL): Reliability, validity, and diagnostic utility. Paper presented at the ninth annual meeting of the international society for traumatic stress studies), the Social Network Interview (Mueller, D. P. (1980). Social networks: a promising direction for research on the relationship of the social environment to psychiatric disorder. Social Science &Medicine-Medical Psychology & Medical Sociology, 14A (2), 147-161), the Scale of Identification with Cultural Groups (Roccas, S. (1997). Factors affecting identification with groups: Personality, group characteristics, and interaction between them. The Hebrew University), and the Scale of Adherence to Group Cultural Practices (Birman, D., & Tyler, F. B. (1994). Acculturation and alienation of Soviet Jewish refugees in the United States. Genetic, Social, and General Psychology Monographs, 120 (1), 101-115). The study results demonstrated that social support received from both the immigrant group and the larger society buffered the effect of exposure to terror attacks on PTSD symptoms among immigrants. Both components of cultural identity, identification with the group and adherence to the group's cultural practices, predicted social support received from the group. The effects were demonstrated for the support received from the immigrant group and the larger society. The study results indicate that the immigrant group and the larger society may provide social support to immigrants in a stressful situation. The bicultural identity enables immigrants to receive social support from both cultural groups. Thus, the present study advances our understanding of the connection between the immigrants' bicultural identity and psychological well-being/distress. On the theoretical level, the present study advances our understanding of the immigrants' coping with the potentially traumatizing situations combining ideas of the conservation of resources (Hobfoll, S. E. (2011). Conservation of resources theory: Its implication for stress, health, and resilience. In S. Folkman (Ed.) The Oxford handbook of stress, health, and coping. Oxford University Press) and acculturation theories (Berry, J. W. (2005). Acculturation: Living successfully in two cultures. International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 29 (6), 697-712). From the practical point of view, the study results indicate that for immigrants to cope successfully with life-threatening situations, helping services must ensure the immigrants' access to the resources of both the immigrant group and the larger society and strengthen the immigrants' bicultural identity.

A Place in the Empire: Gibraltar Camp in Jamaica and the British Imperial Order, 1940–1947

ABSTRACT In July 1940 the British Government erected a camp in Jamaica to house thousands of civilian evacuees from Gibraltar. Only about 1,500 Gibraltarians ended up there – mostly women, children, and elderly. The available space that remained served to intern a few hundred European Jewish refugees, as well as Enemy Aliens and Prisoners of War. About two hundred Jamaicans were employed in the camp, including the Camp Commandant. The little-known Gibraltar Camp created a rather odd encounter between people who occupied different positions within the British imperial global order, and outside of it. My main purpose in this article is to learn about the ways in which people engaged with imperial classifications as they were simultaneously placed and displaced by them. Drawing on official and non-official documents from several archives, and on newspapers, recordings of interviews, and self-published autobiographies, I argue that while the intention of the authorities in sending groups of people to Gibraltar Camp was to ‘put aside’ those who were deemed a disturbance, the constant negotiations about labels indicate that the physical placement of people in a camp did not work to wholly exclude them from the prevailing order of things.

Yiddish Writers in Weimar Berlin: A Fugitive Modernism by Marc Caplan

Reviewed by: Yiddish Writers in Weimar Berlin: A Fugitive Modernism by Marc Caplan Jessica Kirzane Marc Caplan. Yiddish Writers in Weimar Berlin: A Fugitive Modernism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2021. 394 pp. Marc Caplan's recent monograph, Yiddish Writers in Weimar Berlin: A Fugitive Modernism, examines the work of a small group of avant-garde male Yiddish writers working in Berlin during the Weimar Republic, in conjunction with figures working in German-language literature, critical theory, journalism, and film during the same period. Caplan limits his study to Yiddish writers in Berlin who later returned to the Soviet Union, and to German Jewish figures who identified with Jewishness and expressed their identity as an experience of "permanent exile" (20). He interprets the work of his Yiddish writers through "the aesthetic categories developed in the experimental culture of the Weimar Republic," claiming that "it is from the periphery … that modernism articulates its most productive critiques of modernity" (5). In particular, Caplan is interested in theorizing the writers he studies through the concepts of allegory, the baroque, and melancholy. Caplan's study follows his previous work theorizing peripheral modernisms through a comparative lens in How Strange the Change: Language, Temporality, [End Page 193] and Narrative Form in Peripheral Modernisms (Stanford University Press, 2011), this time taking into account the positionality of recent and temporary refugees residing and producing literature in Berlin during the interwar period. Caplan demonstrates that through their complicated vectors of allegiance and cultural context—producing work for export to the Yiddish diaspora yet situated in a European center for literary modernism—these writers managed to create literature of particular "aesthetic and emotional complexity" (7). In his work, Caplan demonstrates the formal as well as thematic components of the displacement and upheaval their writing expresses, with particular focus on their conceptions of space and time. With regard to time, Caplan is interested in the question of belatedness, a concept also recently taken up by literary scholars of Jewish modernisms such as Harriet Murav, Abigail Gillman, and Jordan Finkin. As Caplan defines it, drawing upon Walter Benjamin, belatedness is "the unsettled feeling of not coinciding with the present moment" which "prompts a longing for bygone feelings either as a means of connecting to a tradition of continuity and belonging or as a romance of previous eras … [that] provides a reproach to a current moment of mechanical, mass-produced material culture" (18). Caplan differentiates between German Jewish modes of belatedness, which he describes as "melancholic" in contrast to those of Yiddish authors, characterized by "mourning." For Caplan, "melancholy" is a condition not only of longing for home, but of having lost "faith in the concept of home as such"—a lack of connection to past or present or future (20). "Mourning," on the other hand, comes from a more rooted and specific knowledge of the home that is now obsolete, and suggests a more linear conception of time, in which the past has died and the future may yet be born. Part 1 considers David Bergelson (1884–1952) in comparison with Alfred Döblin (1878–1957). Describing Döblin's Reise in Polen (Journey to Poland, 1925) as characterized by the author's melancholic measuring of his own distance from Yiddish and Jewish tradition, Caplan argues that Bergelson shares Döblin's belief in the obsolescence of the Jewish past but is oriented toward connecting Jews, currently in an uncertain, politically impotent status, with the future of Soviet Communism. Also examining Bergelson's writing about Jewish refugee life in Berlin, Caplan further concludes that Bergelson's Berlin-focused writing about the anonymity and alienation of urban space is consistent with his shtetl writing, as both critique the modern era for trapping human subjects in circumstances in which they have no agency. Part 2 focuses on two narratives by Yiddish modernist Der Nister ("The Hidden One," Pinkhes Kahanovitsh, 1884–1950) in conversation with the stories of Hasidic storyteller Rebbe Naḥman of Bratslav (1772–1810), his German-language contemporary E. T. A. Hoffman (1776–1822), and the German film Der blaue Engel (The Blue Angel, 1930). These comparisons draw attention to the belatedness of Yiddish cultural production, placing a "Yiddish Baroque" proximate to...

The Holocaust and Hong Kong: an overlooked history

The British colony of Hong Kong was one of the last ports that Jewish refugees transited through before their arrival in Shanghai. By using recently declassified materials this paper argues that Hong Kong played a more complicated role an ambiguous refuge: one that provided shelter, but whose colonial administration was responsible for the internment and expulsion of Jewish refugees. This paper broadens its inquiry by analyzing local and historiographical factors that contributed to Hong Kong being overlooked. Adopting a Global Holocaust framework and following refugees' paths of escape reveals Hong Kong as more than just a transit port.