Jewish Refugees Research Articles

How Jewish Refugee Critics Changed British Literary Criticism, 1970–2020

During the mid- and late 20th century, a small group of Jewish refugee critics changed the way British culture thought about what kind of literature mattered and why. These outsiders went on to have an enormous impact on late 20th-century British literary culture. What was this impact? Why in the last third of the 20th century? Why did British literary culture become so much more receptive to critics like George Steiner, Gabriel Josipovici, Martin Esslin and SS Prawer and to a new canon of continental Jewish writers? The obstacles to Jewish refugee critics were formidable. Yet their work on writers like Kafka, Brecht and Paul Celan, and thinkers like Heidegger and Lukacs had a huge impact. They also broke the post-war silence about the Holocaust and moved the Jewish Bibl from the margins of English-speaking culture.

Disentangling Displacements: Historical Justice for Mizrahim and Palestinians in Israel

AbstractIsrael’s discursive strategy for legitimizing the displacement of Palestinians in 1948 involved describing it as part of a regional “population exchange.” This argument contributed to three critical characteristics of Israeli citizenship. First, it solidified an understanding of citizenship as a negation of persecution and a haven for would-be Jewish refugees. Second, it tied Mizrahi claims against states across the Middle East to Palestinian claims against Israel. Israel thus exploited Mizrahi refugee rights for its geostrategic interests—a fight against the claims of Palestinian refugees. This had detrimental material consequences for both groups. Third, this strategy contributed to the construction of Palestinians as an “exchangeable remainder” and a demographic threat that could potentially pose a risk to the Jewish majority. Ultimately, Israel irrevocably entangled the displacement histories of three groups: Ashkenazi Jews, Mizrahi Jews, and Arab Palestinians. This Gordian knot remains with us today, and is reflected in a stratified Israeli society. But the vision that this symposium suggests we consider, that of “historical justice,” demands that it be undone. This Article therefore offers a way in which the refugee histories could perhaps one day be disentangled: a program of reparations for the Mizrahi and Palestinian citizens of Israel.

Problems of Сultural Adaptation of European Jewish in Shanghai During World War II

During World War II, the inhumane Nazi policy condemned millions of people to death. The National Socialist ideology having anti-Semitism as one of its pillars was consolidated during Hitler’s tenure in Germany, descending into taking the villainous crimes against humanity for granted. More than 18 thousand European Jewish emigrants arrived in Shanghai in the late 1930’s seeking refuge. No special permission to enter this multinational city was required and the local community provided all assistance to make their adaptation easy. Despite the cultural and linguistic differences between the local community and the refugees, the latter succeeded in adaptation, contributing to the city`s development. Quite quickly a model of adaptation to new political, economic and sociocultural conditions was found. Over time, however, the pressure and volatility of the policy of Japan, which occupied Shanghai in 1937, placed Jews in a difficult, unpredictable and dangerous position. The study reveals the concealed chapter of the history of the Holocaust describing the hardship of the Jewish population forced to emigrate to the other parts of the world to save their own lives from Nazi persecution. The name «Shanghai» has become a synonym of «salvation» for the participants of those events who have always gratefully remembered the hard, but life-saving years spent there. Along with the historical context, the cultural issue is considered in this study based on evaluation of the Jewish refugees’ assimilation in the Asian metropolis, analysis of the crosscultural interaction having arisen in the new communication space and the research on maintenance of the Jewish community’s fundamental values in an unfamiliar environment.

ASSIMILATION AND IDENTITY CRISIS IN ANITA DESAI'S BAUMGARTNER'S BOMBAY AND THE COLLECTION OF NOVELLAS THE ARTIST OF DISAPPEARANCE

Baumgartner's Bombay (1988) by Anita Desai is based on letters written from concentration camp in Nazi Germany by a mother to her son. It presents the struggles of a German Jewish war time refugee in establishing himself in India. The letters present an obvious repetitive message of well-being in a bid to shroud the actual message of suffering due to the censorship of letters (Judie Newman). All of the collection of novellas, 'The Museum of Final Journeys', 'Translator, Translated', 'The Artist of Disappearance' (2011), by Anita Desai present a front- ambitiousness, as an obvious reason for her characters' unhappiness. In all the novellas the protagonists demonstrate a great desire to succeed in their specific situation in life. In all four of the stories the obvious front present is often taken up as a subconscious reason for the characters' identity crisis. Yet, the literature review is absent when it comes to specific underlying issues of assimilation which runs constant in the selected stories of Anita Desai. Hence, this paper aims to analyse Anita Desai's selected texts associating the issues of assimilation to the identity crisis her characters suffer. Postcolonial power struggle and the struggle to assimilate not just in the new social order, but also into contrasting values, the researcher argues is instrumental to the identity crisis portrayed by Anita Desai. Therefore, this paper depends on various psychoanalytic theories to link the concept of assimilation to individual search for identity. The characters' decision to deviate from certain established norms dictates their particular alienation.

Jewish Organizations of Western Siberia during the First World War and the Civil War and the Problem of Jewish Refugees

The measures to improve the situation of Jewish refugees in Western Siberia in the conditions of social and political cataclysms of the beginning of the XX century are discussed in the article. It is noted that legislative documents clearly regulated issues related to the migration of Jews, so not all settlements in Siberia were available for their residence. It is emphasized that due to a number of factors, including the economic plan, forced migrants preferred to settle in Western Siberia. It is indicated that, in addition to state authorities, support for arriving refugees was provided by local Jewish communities: a branch of the Petrograd society, the Jewish Committee for Assistance to War Victims (JCAWV), was opened in the Tomsk province; there was a branch under the auspices of JCAWV in Mariinsk, Novonikolaevsk and Kainsk; in Omsk, the All-Russian Union of Cities supported the creation of national committees. Based on the involvement of a wide range of sources, the following areas of activity of Jewish organizations in helping co-religionists were characterized: providing housing, teaching the Russian language, employment, medical support, etc. It is concluded that for a number of reasons, not all of the tasks assigned to organizations were implemented, primarily due to the lack of stable sources of funding.

Special Section: Memorial Festschrift for the Late Professor Frank Kreith Sunrise Delayed but the Sun Shines Brightly: The Energy-Sustainability Quandary and Legacy of Professor Frank Kreith

Special Section: Memorial Festschrift for the Late Professor Frank Kreith Sunrise Delayed but the Sun Shines Brightly: The Energy-Sustainability Quandary and Legacy of Professor Frank Kreith

Megan Koreman. The Escape Line: How the Ordinary Heroes of Dutch-Paris Resisted the Nazi Occupation of Western Europe.

As we learn in Megan Koreman’s The Escape Line: How the Ordinary Heroes of Dutch-Paris Resisted the Nazi Occupation of Western Europe, during the Second World War, “Dutch-Paris” was one of the most important and also most successful underground resistance networks in Western Europe. Members of this network provided support to Jews, resistance fighters, Allied pilots, and prominent individuals who had to stay out of the hands of the German occupier by escaping from the Netherlands, Belgium, and France to Switzerland or Spain. This underground network was large and highly efficient. It comprised over three hundred members who eventually saved over one thousand people, most of them Jewish refugees from the Netherlands and downed Allied pilots (26–27). The countermeasures of the German occupier were outright deadly. During the war, half of the network’s members would be arrested and many of them died in German prisons or did not survive...

Humanitarian Encounters: Charity and Gender in Post–World War I Jewish Budapest

Across East Central Europe, World War I and its violent aftermath impacted Jewish perspectives on home and homeland and forced many Jews to reconsider, reformulate, and at times even discard previous beliefs about the idea of national belonging. In Hungary, the White Terror of the early 1920s set off shock waves among the population of mainly urban Hungarian Jews, who until then had imagined themselves relatively safe. As social exclusion entered public and domestic life, it deeply influenced the way Jews imagined themselves at home in postwar Hungary. This article examines the ways in which Jewish women navigated the transitional period between war and peace in Hungary, and asks how the postwar years affected their sense of belonging and notions of home. Apart from being catapulted into public life, how did women navigate the intersection of antisemitism, physical violence, and displacement? How, for instance, did Jewish women react to the influx of Jewish refugees from Galicia, among them many children, who arrived in Budapest in great numbers seeking shelter and aid? Did the displacement of East European Jews affect existing notions of charity and Jewish identity among the women involved in humanitarian aid? And finally, how did war, revolution, and violence change Jewish women’s sense of identity as Hungarian?

The Second World War and Second-Wave Historical Criticism: A Selection of Rosemond Tuve's Chapel Talks (1944–1956)

Rosemond Tuve's (1903–1964) Chapel Talks, delivered to an audience of students at Connecticut College for Women between 1944 and 1956, provide insight into the larger motivation behind mid-century historical criticism emerging from the Second World War. These talks, a selection of which is introduced and transcribed here, show the link between Tuve's literary thinking and her moral commitments while she was articulating her widely influential arguments about typological criticism and historical criticism more generally. The introduction to her Chapel Talks traces the context of historicism in the turbulence of the war, as in the connection between her groundbreaking analysis of typology in George Herbert's "The Sacrifice" and her experience with Jewish refugees at Black Mountain College. Further, it shows the connection between her critical response to American habits that emerged after victory in the war and questions of medieval and Renaissance periodization posed by Ernst Curtius's European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. The introduction argues that Tuve's historical criticism is the second wave to Edwin Greenlaw's first wave, articulated in the wake of the First World War, and is linked to emerging European democratic movements supported by the war-time "Anglo-Saxon," or Anglo-American, alliance, in which the United States would play the leading role in politics and literary criticism.

The Integration of Jewish Refugees from Shanghai into Post-World War II San Francisco

The Integration of Jewish Refugees from Shanghai into Post-World War II San Francisco1 Sara Halpern (bio) The transnational story of "Shanghai Jews" began in 1938 after the Nazi annexation of Austria (Anschluss) and the November pogroms (Kristallnacht), when German and Austrian Jews sought to escape the inferno. Shanghai, which was one of the few places in the world that did not require an entry visa, offered one possible route out.2 In their quest to get there, more than 16,000 Jews rode on trains through the Brenner Pass on the Austrian-Italian border and embarked on ocean liners in Genoa. After that path closed in June 1940, they traveled on the Trans-Siberian Railway to Vladivostok, where they boarded ships bound for Shanghai via Japan.3 Those trains and ships carried them to safety in Asia's largest port, a city with over 5,000,000 Chinese and 50,000 foreigners. Over the next decade, as China experienced military and political turmoil, these German-speaking Jewish refugees formed a cohesive community of families and unaccompanied men, who were [End Page 87] either unmarried or had left their non-Jewish wives behind. The Chinese Civil War (1945–1949) and the refugees' hope that Shanghai would serve only as a waystation led all but a few to emigrate from China after the collapse of the Axis powers in 1945. Approximately 7,000 refugees traveled to San Francisco. Unlike Canada and Australia, which ran selective labor schemes, the United States permitted corporate affidavits with no labor contracts.4 The US government also offered transit visas to those journeying onward to Canada, Europe, Palestine/State of Israel, or Latin America. The rest of the group traveled directly to Australia, Canada, and Europe.5 Little is known of Shanghai Jews' post-World War II emigration and resettlement processes. After spending an anxious decade together, including twenty-eight months confined in a Japanese-sanctioned "designated area," which the refugees called the "ghetto," it is striking that so many refugees' memoirs, diaries, and testimonies were silent about their transition to freedom outside of China.6 Their stories instead frequently conformed to the Holocaust survivor narrative of experiences under Nazism, flight, survival, and grief. Those who spent their childhood in Shanghai frequently employed this literary strategy and supplemented their stories with what they learned from their parents. The absence of Shanghai Jews' post-Holocaust stories in memoirs, diaries, and testimonies raises questions concerning their postwar transition from Shanghai to their new homes in Australia, Europe, Israel, and the Americas. How did the refugees experience their first days of arrival? How did they interact with the local Jewish community and other Holocaust survivors? How did the former groups perceive Shanghai Jews while still reeling from the news in Europe? How did Shanghai Jews negotiate their refugee experiences as they attempted to find a place for themselves socially and economically in their new locales? In turn, how did the broader society treat these traumatized new migrants? These questions can be answered through the framework of diaspora: Shanghai Jews carved out their own space within the German-speaking [End Page 88] Jewish diaspora of over 250,000 refugees from Nazism.7 They constructed a "microdiaspora," grounded in their shared trauma of uprooting, and in experiences and memories of surviving in and emigrating from Shanghai during a catastrophic moment in Jewish history.8 While not a "home" in a literal sense, Shanghai served as a nexus for experiencing and remembering their Holocaust survival.9 As white Europeans, they grappled with cultural shocks; as impoverished and stateless residents, they struggled with hyperinflation, scarce goods, and uncertainty without consular protection; as Jews, they were confined in a "ghetto." Amidst these difficulties, Shanghai's transcolonial and cosmopolitan nature afforded new arrivals a chance to create economic, political, social, and cultural activities with German-Jewish flair. In "Little Vienna"—as English-language Shanghai newspapers described the German-Jewish community—they spoke German while learning English and "pidgin English," a blend of Chinese and English.10 Compared to other transient communities that had escaped Nazi persecution, Shanghai lasted the longest, from 1938 to 1950. This protracted wait for resettlement elsewhere contributed to formations of...

Germany on their Minds: German Jewish Refugees in the United States and their Relationships with Germany, 1938–1988 by Anne C. Schenderlein

Germany on their Minds: German Jewish Refugees in the United States and their Relationships with Germany, 1938–1988 by Anne C. Schenderlein

The Kindertransport: Contesting Memory by Jennifer Craig-Norton

Reviewed by: The Kindertransport: Contesting Memory by Jennifer Craig-Norton Andrea Hammel The Kindertransport: Contesting Memory. By Jennifer Craig-Norton. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019. xiii + 350 pp. Cloth $86.80, paper $33.15, e-book $31.82. Jennifer Craig-Norton's monograph The Kindertransport: Contesting Memory adds to the emerging fuller picture of this phenomenon describing child refugees from National Socialism in the 1930s. The flight and resettlement of around 10,000 children and young people from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland is much discussed in twenty-first century Britain and increasingly in other countries as well. The eightieth commemoration (2018–19) intensified the public as well as the academic interest in the Kindertransport. A lot of the academic focus is now on debunking some of the myths that have built up around the memory of the Kindertransport and Craig-Norton's book is no exception. Craig-Norton's starting point is the so-called "Polenaktion," the expulsion of 17,000 Polish Jews from the German Reich and their deportation to the Polish border. She rightly points out that this action—different from the later pogrom within Germany on November 9 and 19, 1938—did not spark an international response or any rescue efforts. The Kindertransport was, in part, a reaction to the pogrom. The connection between the two events is the fact that many Polish Jewish parents tried to place their children on a list for the Kindertransport, and Craig-Norton uses the files of the Polish Jewish Refugee Fund (PJRG) together with a selection of other material to write the history of the mission. Chapter 1 focuses on the organization of the Kindertransport, and Craig-Norton manages to show evidence that the organizing bodies tried keep in close contact with many of the child refugees, a view that goes contrary to the assumptions deduced from many ego documents such as memoirs, where former Kindertransportees state that they do not remember contact with anyone overseeing their progress. In some cases that is clearly wrong, as the files of the [End Page 463] Polish Jewish Refugee Fund are clearly more accessible and in better shape than the files of the large umbrella association, the Refugee Children's Movement (RCM), which was involved with the majority of the Kindertransportees. Chapter 2 focuses on the carers. Here Craig-Norton critically examines the view that the foster parents and other carers were always motivated by altruism and kind-heartedness. She points out that this narrative of gratitude and survival has been told by many researchers and by many of the child refugees themselves, and it is used to furnish a British triumphalist narrative. The reality, of course, was more complex: Craig-Norton again uses the records of the Polenaktion Kindertransportee files and the files of the Birmingham Refugee Committee and West London Synagogue to show that in some cases, the foster parents were clearly motivated by the expected maintenance payments or ability to contribute to housework and child care. On the other side of the spectrum, there were those carers who did not sufficiently acknowledge that a fostering arrangement is not the same as adopting a child. Chapter 3 discusses the dependency and the agency of the child refugees and how these changed over the years. Unsurprisingly, many of the older ones had career aspirations, which were often not met with positive encouragement by individuals and agencies, who saw them as refugees and thus as individuals of low status who should take up manual work. The last chapter's focus is on the parents, a group that has been relatively underexamined in Kindertransport research. Craig-Norton points to the lack of documentation for this gap in Kindertransport historiography. She bases her analysis on the correspondence of a small number of Kindertransportees with their parents, showing the parents' efforts and determination to get their children to safety and their hopes and dreams for their children's futures—which, in the majority of cases, they were not around to see grow. This volume is another key work in the developing journey of Kindertransport historiography. It uses little-known archives to show a fuller picture. The monograph manages its aim of "contesting" the over-celebratory...

Raymond A. Kent and Louisville's Jewish Refugee Scholars

Raymond A. Kent and Louisville's Jewish Refugee Scholars

Editor's Page

Editor's Page Stephanie M. Lang The work of Kentuckians during the Depression era and World War II provide the common theme in this Register issue. From the role of the Frontier Nursing Service (FNS) in eastern Kentucky to Jewish refugee scholars at the University of Louisville, the articles illustrate how residents responded to various state and international issues on the local level—providing healthcare in rural/underserved areas and resettling refugees displaced by war and violence. However, the articles delve deeper into the historical narrative and reveal a complex push-and-pull between philanthropic and practical incentives for the FNS and the University of Louisville. The history of the Frontier Nursing Service (FNS) and its founder, Mary Breckinridge, is a recognizable story in Kentucky and the impressive healthcare outcomes of the "angels on horseback" are well-documented. Anne Z. Cockerham and Janet L. Engstrom, however, show there is more to the traditional account. The article analyzes the type of data collected by FNS nurses, the dissemination of this information by Breckinridge for donor development, and the impact of the work on the residents the FNS served. The push to document positive clinical outcomes in order to replicate the FNS in other areas, which ultimately did not happen, requires a deeper look—particularly regarding why and what Breckinridge chose to record, which was influenced by her race, class biases, and eugenic principles. David L. Baker's article focuses on Raymond A. Kent's efforts to employ Jewish refugee scholars fleeing Nazi persecution. Kent became president of the University of Louisville in 1929 and sought to rehabilitate the reputation of the university. An early participant in the [End Page 543] rescue effort initiated by the Emergency Committee for Displaced German Scholars, Kent and the university hired five Jewish professors for positions in music, art, psychology, and mathematics. Woven into the article is the role of the local community who also provided important funding support and opportunities for the refugees and their families. As Baker notes, Kent was both humanitarian and pragmatic—employment of these scholars allowed him to strengthen the national reputation of the University of Louisville. By digging into the historical narrative, the articles provide insight on the varying motivations of humanitarian work in Kentucky during the first half of the twentieth century. Although portions of the research add a complicated layer, particularly the reasoning underlying the data collected and used by Breckinridge, the articles illustrate the importance of examining new angles of familiar topics. [End Page 544] Copyright © 2020 Kentucky Historical Society

Bivstvovanje van zakona - Kafkina filozofija prava

Variations of the idea that regardless of how bad things are in the world of man, man's tendency to protect himself by creating illusionary presentations about it is worse, exist in many places in Kafka's works. If the origin of the leading among the fatal illusions of the present is connected to the need for security, safe haven, protection - the same need that laid the foundation for the necessity to introduce laws and develop a legal system - then important pages of Kafka's literature can be read in light of a type of negative anthropology. Its premises seem as if to testify to the betrayed human urge to protect every individual via courts and laws. The author pays special attention to the question of what it means to be outside of the law, stressing that the man from the country who remains before the law metaphorically represents Jewish refugees from Galicia who remained before the gates of Prague in 1914.

Irish Questions and Jewish Questions: Crossovers in Culture ed. by Aidan Beatty and Dan O'Brien

Reviewed by: Irish Questions and Jewish Questions: Crossovers in Culture ed. by Aidan Beatty and Dan O'Brien David M. Reimers Aidan Beatty and Dan O'Brien, eds. Irish Questions and Jewish Questions: Crossovers in Culture. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2018. Pp. 280. Hardcover $65, paper & ebook $34.95. ISBN 9780815635611, 9780815635796, 9780815654261. Aidan Beatty and Dan O'Brien have brought together twelve pieces focusing on the relationship of Irish and Jews. A recent outpouring of essays about Jews in Ireland prompted the authors to note that Ireland and Israel (Jews) share, in part, a common history. Both nations were dominated by others (read English and Western powers as well as Arabs for Jews, and English for the Irish) during their long history. Not until the twentieth history did Ireland achieve independence; Israel followed in 1948. After becoming new nations both countries found little peace. For Ireland it was first a civil war, then "the troubles" after World War II. For Israel it was considerably different: four wars with their Arab neighbors have been followed by West Bank settlements that are the center of contention today. Ireland of course borders Northern Ireland, but this conflict is considerably less violent than the Israeli wars against the Arabs surrounding Palestine. For Israel no easy solution is in sight. Indeed, in many ways Israel lives as an armed nation, looking to the United States for its main support. For Ireland the present situation is less dire but it is not clear what the future holds for Ireland with Brexit looming: it is uncertain what the impact on the border will be if Great Britain withdraws from the Common Market. It is important to keep in mind the major differences between the two nations as well as the fact they share a common history. The history outlined above forms a background for this volume of essays, with the focus being almost entirely on Ireland. Israeli or Jewish voices are generally missing; it would have been interesting if more of them had been included, but the center of the book is Ireland and the voice of the Irish. It is not possible to deal with all twelve essays in a review; the exclusion of an essay in this review is not a reflection of quality. The editors surely had a difficult task limiting the number to twelve. They first include a brief history of Jews in Ireland, providing necessary background. The size of the Jewish population at any one time is important, but the Jewish population in Ireland has never been large. Still, some Irish writers were focused on Jews. For example, one of the more interesting essays was Trisha Oakley Kessler's piece on Jewish refugee factories in the 1930s, even though their numbers were not large. These refugees were driven to Ireland by the rise of Nazi [End Page 125] Germany; Kessler describes the desperate plight of Jews who sought a new home in Ireland and other nations. A question emerges: was Ireland like so many countries that were unwilling to accept more refugees? The essays in Part I deal with antisemitism in part, and to understand this bigotry it is crucial to know how many Jews were in Ireland, where they settled, how they made a living and their relationship with the Irish at various times. According to the traditional histories there was little such bigotry in early Irish history, but religious references were acute in the early days. In view of Christianity's role in Western antisemitism I wonder if the Catholic Church was really so free of antisemitism in Ireland. This issue needs more study and research. According to essayist R. M. Douglas, antisemitism grew strongly after 1900. It does appear that Ireland shares much of Western Europe's prejudice regardless of the fact that the Jewish population was small. Or in Douglas's words, "the Irish were not so different after all." (31) Peter Hession adds to the debates in his excellent essay on Jews in Ireland from 1880 to 1914. To complicate matters, Natalie Wynn discusses the lack of clear standards and definitions in the discussions of Irish antisemitism. Several essays in Part II compare aspects of the...

The Notorious Ben Hecht: Iconoclastic Writer and Militant Zionist by Julien Gorbach

Reviewed by: The Notorious Ben Hecht: Iconoclastic Writer and Militant Zionist by Julien Gorbach Rafael Medoff (bio) The Notorious Ben Hecht: Iconoclastic Writer and Militant Zionist. By Julien Gorbach. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2019. xxiii + 453 pp. Interwar Hollywood had more than its share of Jewish actors who changed their names and Jewish producers who steered clear of content that might draw attention to their ethnicity. In the early stages of his public career, Ben Hecht, the columnist, novelist and playwright turned screenwriter, seemed to be cut from the same cloth, or worse. His 1931 novel A Jew in Love was awash in stereotypes so grotesque that one prominent critic called the main character "the caricature of the anti-Semite come to life." In reality, Julien Gorbach contends in The Notorious Ben Hecht, he was just "parodying the un-Jewish Jew" (8). Not many people seemed to get the joke. "Outrage cascaded like an avalanche from some quarters of the American Jewish community," Gorbach reports. Rabbis in Cleveland declared they would never allow Hecht to be buried in their city. Hecht replied that he was not troubled to miss out on "an honor nobody I know has ever yearned for" (97). In fact, he seemed to revel in the tumult that his writings often provoked. So how did the iconoclast known for writing the scripts for such blockbusters as Gone With the Wind and The Front Page become a notorious Zionist militant? Hecht's transformation evidently had nothing to do with Judaism or Jewish culture, not his immigrant parents nor his boisterously ethnic extended family. He changed because the world had changed. Hecht looked around in 1939 and was horrified to see Jews around the world under siege and most American Jews seemingly hesitant to respond. Many had "discarded their Jewishness out of the belief that as Jews they could line up only for a snubbing," Hecht wrote (118). His instincts—honed as a gritty crime reporter on the streets of early 1900s Chicago—told him that the Jews needed to answer their persecutors with "a battle cry, rather than moans" (164). In this thoroughly-researched and finely-written study—the first comprehensive scholarly biography of Hecht—Gorbach adeptly chronicles the stages of Hecht's political evolution. It began with his decision to join the Fight for Freedom committee, which on the eve of World War II urged preemptive American military action against Nazi Germany. Polls showed the public overwhelmingly opposed to US involvement in Europe's conflicts, but Hecht never minded being in the minority. Using his dramatist's skills to make his case, Hecht created Fun to Be Free, a three-hour "Mammoth Revue" of patriotic songs, skits and speeches by [End Page 462] stars of Broadway and Hollywood, which played to capacity crowds at Madison Square Garden in 1941. When reports of the mass murder of Europe's Jews were confirmed in late 1942, Hecht joined the Bergson Group, a political action committee that sought to pressure the Roosevelt administration to aid Jewish refugees. Toward that end, he authored another dramatic spectacle at Madison Square Garden, We Will Never Die. The defiant title summed up Hecht's credo. Gorbach recounts Hecht's unsuccessful effort to coax a sympathetic message from the White House to read aloud at the event. The president and his aides feared that calling attention to the slaughter would increase the pressure to open America's doors. For Hecht, that episode was a bitter reminder that before rescuing Jews, he and his comrades first had to "rescue the word 'Jew' from the garbage can" (181). In their public statements about Nazi oppression in 1942–1943, President Roosevelt and other US officials mentioned refugees of various nationalities—but not Jews. Even a White House statement marking the first anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto revolt failed to acknowledge that the fighters were Jews. Whether to focus on Jews or subsume their suffering among that of other oppressed peoples is a debate that did not end with World War II. Hecht addressed the problem the way he knew best—with his pen. In full-page advertisements with headlines such as "Time Races Death" and "They...

Transport Kladovo i zagłada Żydów z serbskiego Šabaca Streszczenie

The author emphasizes the significance of the Serbian town of Sabac for Holocaust studies (in both Serbia and Europe). Basing on scholarly articles and books available in Serbian, she reconstructs the events connected with the tragic fate of the Jewish refugees from Central Europe and the Jewish inhabitants of Sabac. In September 1940 that Serbian town received emigrants from Central Europe who had been stopped on their way to Palestine on the border between Bulgaria, Romania, and Serbia (the Kladovo Transport). In October 1941 they were liquidated along with Jewish inhabitants of Sabac as a result of German retaliatory actions.

Den Judiska Kvinnoklubben (JKK) och de judiska flyktingarna under 1930- och 1940-talen


 
 
 
 In a Swedish context, Jewish women’s experiences and actions have gone unrecorded and unrecognised; most narratives of Swedish Jewish history offer only a partial account of their past. Marginalised or ignored, or absorbed into universalised categories of ‘Jews’, ‘women’ or ‘survivors’, the experiences and histories of Jewish women are in general not represented in previous Swedish research on the history of the Jewish minority, the Swedish Jewish response to the Nazi terror and the Holocaust or the history of the women’s movement in general. Previous research on the Swedish Jewish response and assistance for the Jewish refugees and survivors of Nazi persecution has mainly dealt with the Jewish community in Stockholm and its relief committee, where the women were absent from leadership positions. The purpose of this study is to explore if and how the Jewish women’s club in Stockholm initiated or was involved in relief activities for and with the persecuted Jews of Europe. Specifically, this is investigated in the context of how the club was established and manifested in public by examining what questions the club raised and what activities it organised in the 1930s and 1940s.
 
 
 

‘The fight on educating the public to equal treatment for all will have to come later’: Jewish Refugee Activism and Anti-Immigration Sentiment in Immediate Post-War Canada

AbstractCanadian immigration policy of the 1930s and 1940s was the most restrictive and selective in the country’s history, making it one of the countries to take the smallest number of Jewish refugees fleeing the Nazi persecution. After the war, Canada slowly opened its borders, but only through small token gestures in 1947 and 1948. This article explores how the main Canadian Jewish organization lobbied for the welcoming of more Jewish refugees and migrants in the immediate aftermath of the war. It examines how their perception of the public’s anti-Jewish immigrant sentiment and of the Canadian immigration policy’s discriminatory mechanisms informed their strategies. During that period, the Canadian Jewish Congress prioritized constant and subtle action with the government instead of trying to set up mass mobilization campaigns. This strategic shift is an overshadowed but essential chapter of both Jewish and human rights histories in Canada. This article invites a re-evaluation of Jewish activism’s role in ending ethnic selection in the Canadian immigration policy and promoting refugee rights. It contributes to broadening our understanding of how minority groups lobbied and worked with hostile media and authorities.