Jewish Self Research Articles

Secularize, psychologize, neoliberalize: The entangled Jewish self of North American Jews

AbstractThis article unpacks the construction of the Jewish spiritual self in three current projects of Jewish spirituality in North America—Jewish mindfulness, the neo‐Musar movement, and the nascent Positive Judaism—and explores their relations with the neoliberal economic regime and ideology. Based on the content analysis of 30 popular online and offline texts, among them promotional websites, podcasts, and published works, and data gathered during long‐term ethnographic study on Jewish spirituality in Israel and North America, the article argues that the highly individualized Jewish spirituality has become an institutionally mediated form of Jewish self‐expression. By building on anthropological works about the cultural implications of neoliberalism on the self and following the lead of the foundational works linking Jewish cultural production and neoliberalism in North America, this article offers a perspective on Jewish spirituality that recognizes the relations between neoliberalism, self‐cultivation, and community life. Fusing the spiritual, therapeutic, and neoliberal discourses, projects of Jewish spirituality package neoliberal ideals such as choice, emotional, resilience, well‐being, and happiness as Jewish spiritual commodities. At the same time, the subjectivity cultivated in these projects is a Jewish‐specific formation—a self that is highly individualized but remains strongly connected to its religious‐ethnic community and cultural tradition. Jewish spirituality is thus used here as a case study for how neoliberalism affects contemporary forms of religious practice and creates new ethical orientations to communal belongings.

Cross-border biographies: representations of the “Bukharan” Jewish self in changing cultural and political settings

ABSTRACT Scholarly and popular literature dealing with the Persian-speaking Jews of Central Asia tends to divide the history and historiography of these Jewish communities along political boundaries that came into being only in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The “Bukharan” Jews are commonly portrayed as an ancient, secluded, and isolated “ethnic” Jewish group, disconnected from neighbouring Jewish communities and the wider Jewish world. Looking into a set of Bukharan Jewish family stories, this article is meant to complicate the narrative, offering “mobility” and the metaphor of “border crossing” as a different paradigm to understand Jewish history and geography in Central Asia, Afghanistan, and Iran.

The Integration of Arabo-Islamic Culture into the Emergent Hebrew Culture of Late Ottoman Palestine

This essay explores the ways in which Abraham Shalom Yahuda (1877–1951) mobilizes Arabo-Islamic culture for the construction of Hebrew culture as manifested in his writings that treat Arabic literature. The essay's argument comprises two parts: first, that Yahuda's production of Arabic poetical literature endeavored to familiarize Jewish communities, in particular European Jews, with Arabic culture. As such, I argue that Yahuda did not Hebraize Arabic poetical texts nor he Judaize Arab figures that he treated. Rather, he preserved essential characteristics that were intended to acquaint European Jews with the otherness of Arabs and simultaneously with the Jewish self. Second, Yahuda's efforts also sought to draw a connection between contemporary Jews and their "Israelite brethren"—in Yahuda's words—as Yahuda concurrently urged his Hebrew-reading audience to embrace spiritual and moral values that characterized the Jewish forefathers. Prominent Arab figures, particularly poets, represented the perfect example to transmit moral values that Jews needed in order to restore their relation with the land of their ancestors. In advocating for embracing moral values such as bravery, loyalty, and hospitality, Yahuda's noble Arabs and heroes represented the Orientalism of Arabic culture and its relevance to the Jews of his time, highlighting the common denominators between Arabs and Israelites.

Family Business: Charles Reznikoff in Text and Textile

ABSTRACTCharles Reznikoff, according to established scholarship, is an exemplar of disinheritance, an ideal representative for the modernist and modern Jewish self. But Reznikoff also inherits and finds in this an alternative to both urban capitalism and market-influenced modernist publishing. Manually setting type at a printing press in his parents’ basement, Reznikoff self-published many of his early books while also working in the family clothing business. Writing was a craft that continued, rather than broke from, his family trade. His production of texts, following his depiction of his parents’ textile-work in the rarely examined memoir Family Chronicle, takes part in what we can term a “fabriculture” that resists commodity valuation in modern industry and modernist publishing. In the 1930 novel By the Waters of Manhattan, Reznikoff’s protagonist uses the fabricultural lessons of material production to rescue the individuality of the self from the anonymity and interchangeability of the modern city. Reznikoff’s poetry and prose weave together his parents’ lives in textile with his own in text, establishing this inherited family trade as a metaphor for crafting a whole garment from the disparate elements of the modern Jewish self.

Jewish Bodies in Divine Form: Jewish Difference and Historical Consciousness in Medieval Kabbalah

Jewish Bodies in Divine Form:Jewish Difference and Historical Consciousness in Medieval Kabbalah Hartley Lachter (bio) Introduction The struggle over the place of Jews in Christian society, especially as it developed between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, was a negotiation over the religious meaning and political place of the Jewish body within the body politic. This cultural tension created the space and the need for the development of a religious discourse of Jewish bodily otherness by both Jews and Christians. The first section of this article considers how kabbalistic discourses of the Jewish male body constructed in the late-thirteenth and early-fourteenth century were inversions of Christian depictions of Jewish maleness. Kabbalistic constructions of Jewish male identity are in this sense counter-theologies formulated in light of Christian anti-Jewish arguments. The second section explores the counter-histories found in two kabbalistic texts written in the wake of calamitous historical events that took place in Spain in 1391 and 1492. Each of the texts addressed in both sections advance, in their own way, a notion of Jewish distinctiveness that responded to challenges faced by Jews. By claiming secret knowledge about the hidden power of Jewish male bodies and Jewish ritual observance, and about the salvific role of the Jewish historical experience, kabbalists made an important contribution to the ongoing redefinition of the Jewish self in relation to, and in terms of, the Christian other. Redefining Boundaries and Bodies The twelfth and thirteenth centuries witnessed an important shift in the way that Jewish difference was articulated in Christian discourse in Western Europe. While Christian men, and especially Christian male clergy, were frequently described as rarefied spiritual beings in Christian texts, Jewish men were often characterized as overly carnal, sensual, and feminine. Christian art in the High Middle Ages depicted increasingly grotesque images of male Jews [End Page 123] who, through their attachment to the physical practice of the law, refuse to see the spiritual message of the Hebrew Bible revealed by Christ. As Sara Lipton points out, male Jewish ugliness in medieval Christian art is constructed to "proclaim his [the Jew's] misunderstanding of the law and consequent carnality and perfidy, even fiendishness."1 And while Jewish women were rarely depicted as being physically different from Christian women, Jewish men were often described in polemical as well as medical literature as somatically distinct from Christian men, suffering a monthly bloody flux similar to menstruation as punishment for shedding the blood of Christ.2 The strategy of feminizing Jewish men in Christian polemical and medical literature signifies more than a denigration of Jewish masculinity. The association of Jewish men with feminine characteristics,3 especially that of menstruation, was connected to a broader demonization of Jews.4 The introduction of scientific medical ideas and terminology into the Latin West during this period contributed to the characterization of women's bodies as a site of danger and impurity. This in turn contributed to a new discourse regarding Jews, according to which the punishments they suffer for rejecting Christ entail feminization. Take, for instance, Jacques de Vitry's comment in the early-thirteenth century that the Jews are those: … whose fathers cried, as the Gospel says, "The blood of Jesus Christ be on us and on our children," who are scattered throughout the world, serfs and vassals, and so it is as the prophet says, "Their strength has turned to ash." And so they do not make use of arms and also like women every month they suffer, and for this it is written, "The Lord struck them in [their] posteriors and gave them eternal opprobrium"—which is to say God struck them in [their] shameful parts and gave them perpetual reproach—because since they killed their brother, the true Abel, Jesus Christ, they are made vagabond and broken throughout the lands like the cursed Cain, they have a trembling head, which is to say, a fearful heart, shaking night and day, and they do not believe at all in their own lives.5 In this passage de Vitry brings together well-worn notions regarding the collective bloodguilt of the Jews for the death of Christ and their subsequent suffering as part of their...

Final Reflections

Final Reflections Shaul Magid (bio) Schver zu sein a yid (It's hard to be a Jew).1 This pithy Yiddish expression embodies the exasperation, and also humor, of centuries of Jewish identity. The struggle of being (zu sein) relates mostly to the physcial existence of a people in exile, often despised and just as often the victim of economic hardship coupled with the burden (in Hebrew, the yoke‚'ol) of a demanding tradition. It is telling that the rabbis define the mitzvoth (ritual commandments) simultaneoulsy as an object of servitude (a yoke) and a sign of freedom (in reference to the Tabets of Law they say, "do not read engraved [ḥ arut] but free [ḥ erut]").2 The humor in this phrase schver zu sein a yid is that this difficult state is not understood by the Jews as a sign of rejection (by God) but just the opposite (in Yiddish, pum fakert). This difficult state is precisely what confirms their chosenness. The tradition relates that God places Jews in exile to prepare them for redemption. So the difficulty in being a Jew is precisely the blessed condition of being a Jew. But of course today the situation has changed somewhat. Jews have a state of their own, with all its complexity. Is it a Jewish state or a state of the Jews (how does one finally translate Herzl's Zionist manifesto Judenstaat?).3 And what would be the difference? Or, how is Jew-ish different than Jew? And today well over 90 percent of Jews live in democratic countries where they are free to practice, or not practice, their religion in any manner they choose.4 While antisemitism still persists, the threat is arguably quite different than it was in other more perilous times in Jewish history. So today, what does schver zu zein a yid actually mean? In the wonderful essays in this volume scholars from various fields have weighed in from historical, theological, and cultural perspectives on the question of Jew, Jewishness, and Judaism. Below I offer some of my own reflections. The difficulty of being a Jew, or being Jewish, or practicing Judaism has a long history. Of course, the very notion, or nature, of the Jew is already "difficult" as David Nirenberg documents in his Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition and Cynthia Baker shows in her new book Jew.5 Baker's comment that the Christian essentially creates the term "Jew" (not Jews, Judeans, or Israel, which were operative before the Christian intervention) is quite jarring. And whether the argument can sustain criticism from various scholarly corners remains to be seen. But her argument is suggestive and compels us to look [End Page 205] more closely at the genealogy of a term we take for granted: Jew. And Nirenberg's Anti-Judaism asks a different but related question in that he too gestures toward a distinction between Jew and Judaism. Why did anti-Judaism exist in places where no Jews lived, espoused by people (Shakespeare, for example) who never met a Jew? Is anti-Judaism related yet not identical to antisemitism (which does appear to focus on the Jew and not Judaism)? And if so what might be the differences? The essays in this volume were written before Baker's book and after Nirenberg's and yet each arguably exists inside an orbit created by both Baker and Nirenberg; in Baker's words, this "conjunctive disjunction, a space where unity and difference, belonging and alienation hover in a delicate—and sometimes indelicate—balance."6 Bodies, gender, sexuality, politics, progeny: liminal categories that make the Jew, and her identity, far more elusive that we might have imagined.7 One of the things I gleaned from this impressive collection is the complex nature of binaries that non-Jews use to describe the Jew and that the Jew uses to describe the non-Jew and thus the Jewish self. It makes one wonder whether the term "Jew" may be little more than a binary marker and thus deconstructing it might require first erasing or bracketing it as such. Jew/gentile (goy), like Japanese gaijin, situates the self (individual and collective) against all others. Gaijin, from the words gaikoku (foreign...

Guest Editors’ Introduction

Guest Editors’ Introduction

“Enta Omri, You Are My Life”: Embracing the Arab Self in André Aciman’s Harvard Square

ABSTRACT In most of his previous fiction and nonfiction writing, André Aciman constructs himself as a permanent exile, challenging Ammiel Alcalay’s claim that the Levantine Jewish experience gives the lie to the “modern myth of the Jew as pariah, outsider and wanderer.” Yet in his recent novel Harvard Square, Aciman approaches an affirmation of a very different kind of Levantine Jewish identity, exploring what Alcalay has called “the relationship of the Jew to the Arab within him- or herself” (28), and suggesting the possibility of a genuine homecoming for the Levantine Jewish self. Through his portrayal of the conflicted friendship between a diffident Egyptian-Jewish Harvard graduate student and a voluble, undocumented Tunisian cab driver, Aciman explores how his Jewish narrator, seeking to “pass” in America, simultaneously embraces and rejects his Arab double. In a counter-factual, hypothetical move at the conclusion of his narrative, the narrator confesses his love for the double, though the fact remains that he has, in truth, rejected and abandoned him.

A Jewish Life on Three Continents: The Memoir of Menachem Mendel Frieden by Menachem Mendel Frieden

Reviewed by: A Jewish Life on Three Continents: The Memoir of Menachem Mendel Frieden by Menachem Mendel Frieden David B. Levy Menachem Mendel Frieden. A Jewish Life on Three Continents: The Memoir of Menachem Mendel Frieden. Translated, edited, annotated, and with an introduction and afterword, by Lee Shai Weissbach. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013. Pp. 520Cloth $60. ISBN 978-0-8047-8363-7. The memoir of Menachem Frieden (1878–1963) makes a significant scholarly contribution to the study of a tumultuous era influenced by Haskalah, nation building, mass migration from Eastern Europe to America, and the creation of the modern Jewish homeland in Israel. He depicts life in the shtetl, and the scope covers several generations of family history, his early years in a Lithuanian village, schooling and the life of yeshiva students, courtship, marriage, tensions between Hasidic elements of his family and anti-Hasidic Mitnagdic members, travel and the readjustment that comes with migration, his business experience as a peddler in the south of the United States and entrepreneurship in Norfolk, Virginia, and settlement in Palestine in 1921 through the middle of the twentieth century. While Frieden’s memoir seeks to transmit his own family memories, one of its strengths is that it also aims to place those events in historical context. Thus, for example, we learn through this deeply personal story aspects of the impact of the Arab riots of 1929, and of the functioning of early charity organizations in nineteenth-century Palestine. The memoir offers a window on the generation of Jews who lived through great transformations of Jewish life. Frieden’s identity is grounded by his refusal to forget his roots in the old country, and the folkways of Ashkenazic Jewry. His identity is not that of a self-hating Jew, as identified by Sander Gilman in On the Origins of Jewish Self Hatred (2012), but Frieden is rather outspokenly proud of his Jewish heritage. He openly bemoans the choices he made that took him away from Jewish tradition, and chooses to record his memoirs so that others may learn from his mistakes and avoid making them too. His voice is jaded; with the sadness of [End Page 195] abandoning his yeshiva studies and his admiration, valorization, and respect for learned rabbis, which meant the most to him. He clearly was a devoted family man, dutiful son, loving husband, and concerned and caring father but in the end, being a part of something greater than the self, being a part of a living tradition, is what Frieden values. He confesses that he regrets not accepting an offer to lead one of Norfolk’s synagogues, which he speculates might have led to his children being educated differently. Yet he states that he has no “Nietzschean” regrets about marrying a second time or making aliyah. His memoir also sheds light on the many Jews who came to Palestine but did not take up agricultural development. Frieden worked in banking, seeking to bring American “know-how” to help establish an urban entrepreneurial infrastructure in the Yishuv. He identified as a strong Zionist. Thus Frieden’s identity as family patriarch often gives him a pedagogic voice and role, to transmit to familial memories of religious rituals and customs that he wishes his heirs to remember. Some readers may be challenged in identifying individual personalities of his times, the geographic locations in eastern Europe, his allusions to rabbinic commentators such as the Maharsha, and his references to Yiddish novelists like Shomer that were a part of the common culture of the East European Jew. Frieden’s identity is informed by the concept of “yerida” (descent), which holds that each generation is of a lower stature than the previous one. Thus he takes on pedagogic goals: to transmit and keep alive the religious fervor, culture, and folkways of past generations for Jewish continuity. Frieden’s frequent moments of introspection about turning points in his life sheds light on his identity and what he valued in life: to take the best of the new but not forget the good of the past. He at times bares his soul so that readers may learn from his life experience. The fact that Frieden chose...

Attentive ears and forward-looking eyes: disciplining the senses and forming the self in the Book of Proverbs

Ancient Israelite sages recognized a dilemma regarding sensory perception: the senses are vehicles for acquiring wisdom, yet they are also channels of temptation. The sages responded to this dilemma by devising strategies for disciplining vision and audition. These strategies – which may be understood as Foucauldian technologies of the self – were designed to train sensory attention. Through these techniques of the self, the sages aimed to develop in students what Bourdieu terms practical mastery over eyes and ears, inscribing the wisdom tradition’s values in the bodies of students and preparing them to navigate the broader social world. My study thus suggests that one goal of Jewish wisdom literature was to cultivate a regime of perception that facilitated the construction of the human self. Recovering this specifically Jewish self in antiquity augments and complicates traditional modern Western histories of the self.

Redefining the Converted Jewish Self: Race, Religion, and Israel's Bene Menashe

ABSTRACTThe Bene Menashe stem from a number of Christian groups of the Indo‐Burmese borderland, some of whom back in the 1950s declared their descent from the Lost Tribes of Israel. In this article, I will use the example of the Bene Menashe migration to Israel to cast analytical light on different ways in which race and religion co‐constitute each other in processes of transnational migration. To do so, I will focus on one specific aspect of the Bene Menashe migration—the way the community has to construct and enact their religious affiliation to be able to become Israeli citizens and to be considered part of the Jewish people by their “hosts.” I argue that, in the case of the Bene Menashe, race and religion co‐produce each other in ways that reinforce racialized understandings of Judaism and Jewishness, and I suggest that what accounts for this phenomenon is that the opportunities that the Bene Menashe immigrants had in defining their religiosity in Israel were limited by the conditions of their migration, which developed against the backdrop of multiple colonial contexts. [Judaism, Israel, racialization, migration, religion]

Sexuality, Autonomy, and Community in the Writings of Eugene Borowitz

Abstract Eugene Borowitz's treatment of sexuality correlates with his developing thought on what covenant demands of liberal Jews. Borowitz's understanding of the Jewish self is expressed as a kind of dynamic equilibrium, a “dialectic” between the promptings of the (historically constituted) individual conscience and the demands of the covenant between God and Israel. Questions around sexuality make the tensions inherent in the Borowitzian dialectic especially acute, because they involve both urgent questions of social duty and equally urgent personal desires and commitments. Borowitz's thought undergoes a protracted, complicated evolution on these intertwined questions of sexuality, autonomy, and community.

Conversion and Narrative: Reading and Religious Authority in Medieval Polemic by Ryan Szpiech (review)

Reviewed by: Conversion and Narrative: Reading and Religious Authority in Medieval Polemic by Ryan Szpiech Michelle M. Hamilton Keywords Religious Studies, Medieval Iberia, Intellectual History, Islam, Judaism, Christianity, Ramon Llull, Alfonso de Valladolid, Anselm Turmeda, Catalan Studies, Mediterranean Studies, Translation, Conversos, Jewish Studies, Ryan Szpiech, Michelle M Hamilton Szpiech, Ryan. Conversion and Narrative: Reading and Religious Authority in Medieval Polemic. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2013. xi + 311 pp. In this study, Ryan Szpiech shows how various medieval authors (many of them Iberian) avoid or reify inherited models of conversion and conversion narratives to meet their needs as polemicists. Szpiech chooses from the large corpus of available material those conversion narratives associated with ‘‘explicitly polemical and interconfessional apologetic writing’’—beginning with Augustine, but focusing on the medieval Mediterranean world of Muslims, Jews, and Christians and how the latter either legitimate or discredit accepted authoritative knowledge and discourses. Szpiech’s comparative approach, which seeks patterns of similarity and of methodology across time and religion, proves fruitful and offers a portrait of polemical literature, often authored by converts, and of the changing and developing role of narrative within it. Each of the six chapters presents case studies of converts, and illustrates how their conversion narratives have been shaped to establish the authenticity of the convert’s new identity by paradoxically establishing his authority in the old faith. In chapter one, ‘‘From Peripety to Prose,’’ Szpiech explores how a convert from Islam, Juan Andrés, and a convert from Judaism, Pablo de Santa Marίa, both include autobiographical accounts of their conversions in fifteenth-century polemical treatises. Once converted, both Juan Andrés and Pablo de Santa Marίa use their knowledge of the proof texts of their former religion (the Quran and tafsir for the former, and Talmud and works of Jewish authorities like Rashi and Mai-monides in the case of the latter) in an attempt to convert their former coreligionists. These two examples reveal the strategies and models that are the end result of a long process of development and adaptation to which Szpiech turns in the following chapters. In the second chapter, ‘‘Alterity and Auctoritas,’’ Szpiech explores how two twelfth-century Jews, Judah/Herman of Cologne, and Petrus Alfonsi, a Judeo-Andalusi intellectual, adopt elements of the accepted Augustinian/Pauline conversion paradigms and meld them with the new Aristotelian rationalism entering Europe to forge a new type of conversion narrative. Both Alfonsi and Judah/Her-man introduce Jewish authorities and Scripture into their narratives, thus proving [End Page 251] their authenticity as former Jews, but also beginning a process of destabilizing traditional Christian authority. In Petrus Alfonsi’s Dialogue Against the Jews, his fictional converted self debates with his former Jewish self who demands an explanation, and in the process Alfonsi makes alterity visible. As Szpiech points out, Alfonsi uses Jewish texts both as authorities recognized by his former Jewish self, and as authoritative sources for Christological interpretations—thus he wants it both ways, and in so doing ‘‘throws the meaning of auctoritas into flux’’ (79). Szpiech explores in the following chapters how this crisis in authority played out as a growing ambivalence toward all authorities and toward the teleological notion of Christian history that undergird them. In chapter 3, ‘‘In the Shadow of the Hazards,’’ Szpiech takes up conversion to Judaism as an illustrative counterpoint to narratives of conversion to Christianity discussed in the second chapter. He compares the conversion of two ninth-century Christians, Bodo/Eleazar and the Austrian Wecelinus, with that of the legendary conversion of the king of the Khazars as recounted in the letters of the Genizah and in Judah Ha-Levi’s twelfth-century Book of the Khazars. Bodo/Eleazar’s account survives only in Paulus Alvarus’s account of the epistolary exchange he purportedly engaged in with the latter, and Wecelinus’s conversion account survives only in the work of the Benedictine chronicler Alpertus of Metz. Both are presented by their Christian narrators as invalid. In contrast, Judah Ha-Levi’s twelfth-century account of the conversion of the legendary King of the Khazars, although also polemic in nature, is presented as a logical and rational choice on the part of the...

From Defender to Critic: The Search For A New Jewish Self. By DavidHartman. Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights, 2012. Pp. xix + 303. $35.00.

Religious Studies ReviewVolume 40, Issue 1 p. 52-52 Judaism: Modern From Defender to Critic: The Search For A New Jewish Self. By David Hartman. Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights, 2012. Pp. xix + 303. $35.00. Daniel Ross Goodman, Daniel Ross Goodman Yeshivat Chovevei Torah Rabbinical SchoolSearch for more papers by this author Daniel Ross Goodman, Daniel Ross Goodman Yeshivat Chovevei Torah Rabbinical SchoolSearch for more papers by this author First published: 27 February 2014 https://doi.org/10.1111/rsr.12112_3Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume40, Issue1March 2014Pages 52-52 RelatedInformation

JESUS AS THE NEW JEW: ZIONISM AND THE LITERARY REPRESENTATION OF JESUS

This article deals with Modern Hebrew writers' attempt to present Jesus as part of the national project of Zionism. It argues that Jesus functions in these works in different and sometimes opposite ways and that the Zionist project was eager to distinguish itself from the world of traditional Judaism by embracing its ultimate Other. In this sense, the reclamation of Jesus by Zionist writers can be understood as an attempt to mark the boundaries of the new Jewish self vis-à-vis traditional Judaism. But Jesus's Otherness functioned as more than that––it provided a kind of mirror that reflected to Zionist writers their own communal identities. In order to find themselves in this mirror, they had to distinguish between the Jesus of Christianity and the historical, “authentic” Jewish Jesus.

Jewish Self-Help and Rescue in the Netherlands during the Holocaust in Comparative Perspective

The differences between rescue in the Netherlands when compared with Belgium and France are primarily in the structures of the organisations involved. In both France and Belgium the extent of Jewish self-help generated from migrant political and welfare groups at an early stage in the occupation helps to explain the speed of reaction when the deportations began. The degree of integration with wider non-Jewish welfare and resistance movements that had emerged before and during the ‘phoney war’ also reduced some of the practical problems in helping those in hiding at an early stage of the occupation. Jews under threat had the prospect of a source of assistance beyond the German-coordinated ‘official’ Jewish AJB or UGIF. This is in stark contrast to the Netherlands, where there was no such alternative, and where Jewish self help could not develop in the same way. While all countries produced individual rescuers and rescues, organisation took much longer to develop in the Netherlands. It is also worth noting that in the case of rescuing children – who were considered a special case in every country – there was a greater proliferation of organisations in the Netherlands because these were instigated by non-Jewish networks rather than by existing Jewish groups. A further contrast can be seen in the attitudes of leading churchmen. At first glance, their public statements were not particularly different, but it seems to have been their private advice and guidance to their subordinates that harnessed the power of the churches in specific areas to help Jews in hiding.

Theorizing psychosocial processes in Canadian, middle‐class, Jewish mothers' school choice

This paper presents a psychosocial analysis of interview data of three Canadian, middle‐class, Jewish mothers engaged in processes and practices of ‘school choice’. We consider how middle‐class, white identity intersects with Jewish ethnicity. We also examine how commitments to Canadian ideals of multiculturalism sit in contradiction with investments in neo‐liberal discourses of school performance and individual academic success and competition. Through analysis of narratives we illustrate how the mothers invoke binaries to differentiate self and others: self in the form of the middle‐class, Jewish self; others in the form of the risky and dangerous ‘multicultural’ body encountered in their children's primary school. We examine how contradictions are salient in the mothers' attempt to perform a morally legitimate selfhood in the face of competing commitments to individual attainment versus a collective good represented by ethnocultural diversity. Narratives reveal mothers' aspirational fantasies for their children that inform their class‐ and ethnic‐based choices and decisions around schooling. School choice is thus thoroughly inflected with imperatives to preserve middle‐classness and Jewish ethnic identity, and constituted through binary‐making. Yet as we illustrate, these processes are not stable but subject to constant to psychical re‐negotiation and flux.

MEASURING JEWISHNESS IN AMERICA: SOME FEMINIST CONCERNS

Judaism and about Jewish survival, although rarely acknowledged, play an important part in scholarly investigations as well. Prior to a postmodern turn in intellectual inquiry, most discussions of Jewish identity assumed the existence of an essential Jewish self. More recently, feminist and postmodern critiques have forced us to make explicit the political uses of linear and essentialist constructs,2 especially when doing identity research.3 These critiques have been leveled most particularly at quantitative, large-scale survey research. For instance, Sergio Delia Pergola warns those who develop and analyze Jewish population projections:

?Anticipating? Gibson?s The Passion of the Christ: The controversy over Cecil B. De Mille?s The King of Kings

Cecil. B. De. Mille’s epic production The King of Kings (1927), though not the first to recreate a Passion Play, raised first a quiet and then a more public Jewish outcry, which lead to rancor and, eventually, changes, if minor, in the film. The Anti-Defamation League also reached an agreement with the Motion Picture Producers Association allowing it to preview potentially problematic films. Jews were especially outraged at De Mille’s pernicious portrayal of Caiaphas, but saw the film in its entirety as arousing anti-Semitism. De Mille himself felt misunderstood. By contrast, Mel Gibson’s, The Passion of the Christ (2004), which uses cinema realite to create a sense of horror, evoked an immediate public uproar, although with no concessions on Gibson’s part. Following the story of reactions to The King of Kings compared to reactions to The Passion of the Christ provides important perspective on the evolving Jewish self image in the United States between 1927 and today.

The Budapest Flaneur: Urban Modernity, Popular Culture, and the "Jewish Question" in Fin-de-Siecle Hungary

In 1908, the Hungarian-Jewish journalist Adolf Ágai commemorated the newly rebuilt Budapest with a collection of urban vignettes called Voyage from Pest to Budapest, 1843-1907. Part popular history, part tourist guide, and part epic chronicle, the book presented a loving portrait of the changing landscape of late-nineteenth-century Budapest. No detail of the urban scene was too small or too unimportant to escape the watchful eye of the narrator. The city's neighborhoods and ethnic groups, its bridges and monuments, its coffeehouses and restaurants, and its hospitals and slaughterhouses were all objects of vivid interest and analysis. Ágai's text was a classic example of a type of urban literature that was pioneered in 1840s Paris and was used to celebrate the diversity and dynamism of the modern city. At the center of this popular genre was the figure of the flâneur, or urban stroller, who embodied and represented the quintessential qualities of urban modernity. In 1846, the poet Charles Baudelaire described the type as a hero of modern life;1 almost a hundred years later, Walter Benjamin saw in him the tragic incarnation of a commodified modernity.2 However one interprets the meaning of the flâneur, central to his formulaic figure was a disturbing ambiguity, manifested in his invisibility. Like his Parisian or Berlin predecessors, the urban self at the core of Ágai's text could not be identified through his physical appearance, religious origins, social position, [End Page 1] or political opinions. His distinguishing characteristic was precisely his lack of personal qualities, his complete anonymity. For all intents and purposes, he was an invisible and disembodied self, lacking a particularized ego. He rendered the physical details of the city visible and legible, even while he himself remained invisible and illegible.3 Ágai's enigmatic narrator was more than a simple incarnation of Budapest modernity, however. He was also perceived, though never explicitly identified, as a Jew. The Budapest flâneur thus raises complex questions that go beyond the problem of urban identity in the modern world. He also embodies the tangled problem of Jewish assimilation in late-nineteenth-century Hungary. What was the connection between urban sensibility and assimilated Jewish identity? Why were both perceived as "invisible"? How can we begin to define the characteristics of this invisible urban self that was also a Jewish self?4 These questions are inseparable from the so-called "Jewish Question" that preoccupied Hungarian public opinion at the end of the century. Yet they are not completely identical with it. They presuppose an exclusively cultural—as opposed to a political—approach to the problem of Jewish assimilation. What I mean by "cultural" will emerge in the course of my discussion, but, as a starting point, I would like to make two broad generalizations that underlie my approach. The first is that I regard culture as an essentially symbolic rather than an empirical phenomenon, one whose traces only exist in the discursive practices of a community. The second is that the meaning of these traces is never objectively given but highly fragmented and inseparable from the interpretative activity of the historian. Culture, as a category of historical analysis, is thus a difficult and allusive concept that does not claim to provide "objective truths" about the past. Yet, insofar as it gives access to such important and essentially fragile phenomena as experience and identity, it has a place in the repertoire of the historian.5 Viewed from the hermeneutic perspective of cultural analysis, Ágai's invisible narrator immediately acquires resonances that transcend his time and place. In fact, the problem of an "invisible Jewish Budapest" has recently emerged in several contemporary discussions of Jewish life in Hungary. Historical accounts, such as Jewish Budapest, tentatively touch on it.6 Richard Ungár's humorous short stories, Change of Regime in...