Jewish Sensibilities Research Articles

But Is It Jewish? Teaching Photography in a Day School

ABSTRACT Over a period of 13 years, I taught a class in photography to high school students, using a taxonomy I developed based on my own understanding of what makes for excellence in photography. Five of the elements of this taxonomy are explained and illustrated by photographs taken by my students; I submit these as evidence of my success in this endeavor. But since the school in which I taught is a community Jewish day school, a second goal of the course was for students to illustrate Jewish themes and explore their Jewish identities through the photographs they took. With this goal I had mixed success; over the years I received only 45 photographs (out of a total of 2,500) that were explicitly Jewish. I draw on Tali Hyman Zelkowicz’s ethnography of a similar Jewish high school and on James Fowler’s theory of faith development to consider what might have been on the minds of the students who submitted images that didn’t seem particularly Jewish. Whether or not some of the other photographs the students took might be considered Jewish is a question that will be taken up toward the end of this paper, when I explore the notion of conveying “Jewish sensibilities,” a term first introduced by Vanessa Ochs and elaborated on in several articles in this journal.

Wild Visionary: Maurice Sendak in Queer Jewish Context by Golan Moskowitz (review)

Reviewed by: Wild Visionary: Maurice Sendak in Queer Jewish Context by Golan Moskowitz Dainy Bernstein (bio) Wild Visionary: Maurice Sendak in Queer Jewish Context, by Golan Moskowitz. Stanford UP, 2021. In Wild Visionary, Golan Moskowitz reads Maurice Sendak's works through the Jewish and queer identities of the celebrated children's [End Page 224] author, making a convincing argument for these identities as essential to understanding Sendak's body of work. The book is organized both chronologically and thematically. Each chapter provides a comprehensive overview of one stage of Sendak's life, drawing from a variety of sources to piece together the narrative of the author's life. Since Sendak ordered all his papers destroyed upon his death, Moskowitz relies on newspaper and magazine profiles, published interviews, letters from Sendak surviving in the collections of those he wrote to, and interviews with those who knew Sendak. In addition to Sendak's personal life, each chapter delves into the social and cultural landscapes of the era, providing rich context within which Sendak's work can be understood. Throughout the book, Moskowitz traces queer history, American Jewish history, and the development of American children's literature. The first chapter, narrating Sendak's parents' histories as well as his own childhood, analyzes the effects of growing up in interwar Jewish Brooklyn on the author and artist's work. The chapter discusses the shifting models of childhood in early-twentieth-century America, as well as the shifting models of childhood in European Jewish culture, both of which provided the context for Sendak's upbringing as the child of European Jewish immigrants. The structure of the family and the child's sense of home and safety were affected as the American government and culture attempted to "loosen parent-child bonds in order to cultivate pliable citizens and consumers" (28), and Sendak's parents, like many immigrants, put their hopes for American success on their children. At the same time, relatives newly immigrating to America arrived and kept "Old World" Jewish sensibilities alive in the Sendak household. Moskowitz traces the effects of all these factors on Sendak's work, particularly his grappling with parental figures. The second chapter opens with Sendak's bar mitzvah at age thirteen against the backdrop of the Holocaust in Europe and his parents' worry over relatives and old friends as news of deaths came through via Jewish organizations. In many American Jewish homes, the specter of dead relatives affected the way family was perceived, and children were often viewed as both the continuation of a lost line and a reminder of all those children who did not survive. Moskowitz describes Sendak's tumultuous adolescence and his reconceptualization of the family unit. As his parents mourned dead relatives, their children were put into the position of comforting them, and Sendak's relationship with his brother and sister deepened to near-inappropriate levels. With his queerness becoming undeniable during this same period, Sendak's [End Page 225] ability to understand himself, platonic affection, and romantic affection became troubled. Later in life, Sendak would apologize "for his inability to understand boundaries between himself and those with whom he formed close relationships" (91). Moskowitz draws connections between this period of Sendak's life and his portrayal of sexualized parent-child and sibling relationships. The third chapter follows Sendak from Brooklyn to Manhattan as he begins his adult life and his career as an illustrator. Moskowitz begins with a deep dive into the postwar explosion of American children's literature and the vibrant culture of Jewish children's periodicals, contexts which shaped Sendak's early interaction with the world of publishing, especially as a Jewish artist illustrating Jewish children's books. Sendak became part of the queer Manhattan community, and his sphere grew to include both Jewish and queer friends and mentors who encouraged him to be more confident and embrace his own voice. Layering onto the previous chapters' discussions of Sendak's views of childhood emotion and parent-child relationships, Moskowitz argues here that "[t]hrough a focus on early childhood and his own coming of age, Sendak's creative vision increasingly blared and demanded dignity for queer truths that he could not always speak...

Queer Jewish lives on screen

ABSTRACT This piece explores the clashing preconceptions and elective affinities regarding queerness and Jewishness in the filmic representation of intersectional queer and Jewish sensibilities from the 1980s to the present, a period in which postmodern paradigms came to the fore in popular culture, academic theory and alternative community politics. As I argue, these films convey a tug and pull between religious tradition and cultural innovation; between the old essentialisms and new fluidities associated with ethnicized, gendered and sexualized constellations and between Israel and the Diaspora, with varying relevance to cosmopolitanist and nationalistic discourses.

Jewish Creative Sensibilities: Framing a New Aspiration for Jewish Education

ABSTRACTProponents of building a “creative society” through educational innovation are calling for engaging learners in new modes of collaboration, problem solving, and original thinking. How might the enterprise of Jewish education contribute to this evolution in creative thinking and action? This article explores how “the Jewish sensibilities” can be adapted into a framework infusing Jewish “ways of seeing and being” into a vision of “Jewish education for a creative society.” The proposed conceptual framework aims to spark conversation, experimentation, research, and inquiry within the broader discourse of rethinking the aims of Jewish education for the future.

Prescribing Jewish Sensibilities Off-Label: A Reflective Essay

ABSTRACTWhen Jewish Sensibilities were formulated (2003) as a framework, it was not for the purpose of teaching Jews how or why to be Jewish. Rather, Jewish Sensibilities were a way for Jews to reflect on the Jewish content already in their lives; they also allowed practitioners in the field of health care to think about the Jewish patients and families they were encountering with greater comprehension and compassion. But of late, Jewish Sensibilities have been used in an “off-label way” to teach Jewish wisdom and codes of behavior to those who are unfamiliar with them. This article considers the efficacy of that strategy.

The Mormon University on the Mount of Olives: A Case Study in LDS Public Relations

This article explores the use of media by small anti-missionary organizations in Israel to block construction of Brigham Young University's Jerusalem Center for Near Eastern Studies on the Mount of Olives in the mid-1980s. These groups defined Mormons in the public square as aggressive proselytizers with no regard for law or Jewish sensibilities. They felt that Mormons were enemies to Judaism because of their purported interest to convert Jews. The anti-missionary groups were highly organized and effectively employed communitarian arguments couched in spiritual and concrete conceptions of Judaism. To counter these attacks, Mormons hired an Israeli public relations firm to redefine public perceptions of Mormons among Israelis. They created a campaign that focused on public reasons (the appeal to arguments that resonate across sectarian lines) over faith-based justifications for the Mormon construction project. The campaign was based in historicity, political expediency, and legalism. In this way, Mormons successfully argued their position and completed construction of the Jerusalem Center. This high-profile media campaign continues to inform Mormon public affairs efforts today.

The Snubs and the ‘Sukkah’: John Lindsay and Jewish Voters in New York City

The Snubs and the ‘Sukkah’:John Lindsay and Jewish Voters in New York City Jeffrey F. Taffet (bio) The Jewish Community as of now stands in opposition to the Mayor’s reelection … Jews are disaffected as citizens, as New Yorkers — or more correctly — as lower middle — and middle class Brooklynites, Bronxites, and Queensites. And they share their complaints, disappointments, and exasperations with others of similar socioeconomic status. They question both the substance and motivation behind the Mayor’s policies and action …1 New York City Mayor John V. Lindsay (governed 1966–1973) needed Jewish voters to win his reelection bid in 1969. But in the months before the election, survey and anecdotal evidence suggested that Jewish support at the polls would not be forthcoming.2 Many Jews had come to believe that Lindsay had not been effective and, more importantly, that he had little interest in supporting their particular interests. Recognizing the necessity of courting Jewish voters, Lindsay took a series of important symbolic steps to reassure Jews that he understood and sympathized with their concerns. Most notable among these was an extraordinary reception he gave in a sukkah for Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir during her visit to New York in late September of 1969. Lindsay’s advisors believed that this reception was the key factor that helped him win Jewish support and, by extension, the election. In his second term, Lindsay continued to focus on appealing to Jewish voters using the model set by the Meir visit — by embracing their international concerns. This included energetically snubbing foreign leaders whom New York Jews believed had anti-Israel agendas, traveling to Israel, and embracing the nascent Soviet Jewry movement. Lindsay’s approach to these issues reflected the ways in which international and local politics intersected in New York City. In a city [End Page 413] containing large and powerful ethnic communities with ties to foreign countries, Lindsay, like his predecessors and successors, recognized he needed to act as a kind of foreign minister for the city as a way of helping him to connect with ethnic voters. While this meant an occasional trip to Ireland and Italy and, later, to Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, issues related to Israel were most significant throughout the postwar period. Many Jewish voters expected that their representatives, even ones on the city level who had little international power, would speak to their concerns about Israel’s future.3 Study of Lindsay’s efforts regarding international politics helps to explain how Jewish political power operated in New York City, where Jews were extraordinarily influential. Eli Lederhendler, in his study of New York Jewish life in the 1950s and 1960s, wrote that the city served as a kind of “Jewish Camelot.” He argued that it was a double urban utopia in which Jews could become leaders in a “cosmopolitan paradise, providing unhindered participation in the life of a world-city” and also a place where they could “build a Jewish cultural center that might sustain the entire Jewish people.”4 New York was both a great secular city that Jews had helped make great, and an object to advance Jewish concerns nationally and internationally. As a result of these two factors, New York City leaders had to make sure that their international policies reflected Jewish sensibilities, just as Jewish New Yorkers had come to understand that the municipal government could be an effective tool in influencing global politics. Many writers have addressed the relationships between Israel and American political systems, often in critical tones.5 While many Jewish [End Page 414] voters were certainly interested in Israel, and did involve themselves in lobbying activities, politicians were not simply pawns. Political leaders attempted to develop their pro-Israel credentials to advance their own electoral prospects. Understanding Lindsay’s actions and how he came to appreciate the links between Israel and city politics thus illuminates the evolution of Jewish involvement in the foreign policy arena. Lindsay and the Jewish Vote Lindsay’s need to attract Jewish voters in the 1969 election was a function of basic electoral and demographic realities in New York City. In 1960, approximately 2.1 million Jews lived in the city, representing about...

Homecoming as a National Founding Myth: Jewish Identity and German Landscapes in Konrad Wolf’s I was Nineteen

Konrad Wolf was one of the most enigmatic intellectuals of East Germany. The son of the Jewish Communist playwright Friedrich Wolf and the brother of Markus Wolf—the head of the GDR’s Foreign Intelligence Agency—Konrad Wolf was exiled in Moscow during the Nazi era and returned to Germany as a Red Army soldier by the end of World War Two. This article examines Wolf’s 1968 autobiographical film I was Nineteen (Ich war Neunzehn), which narrates the final days of World War II—and the initial formation of postwar reality—from the point of view of an exiled German volunteer in the Soviet Army. In analyzing Wolf’s portrayals of the German landscape, I argue that he used the audio-visual clichés of Heimat-symbolism in order to undermine the sense of a homogenous and apolitical community commonly associated with this concept. Thrown out of their original contexts, his displaced Heimat images negotiate a sense of a heterogeneous community, which assumes multi-layered identities and highlights the shared ideology rather than the shared origins of the members of the national community. Reading Wolf from this perspective places him within a tradition of innovative Jewish intellectuals who turned Jewish sensibilities into a major part of modern German mainstream culture.

Coercion

Coercion

How It Was Sung in Odessa: At the Intersection of Russian and Yiddish Folk Culture

Odessa has played a significant role in Russian and Yiddish folklore and popular culture. Although the city has changed with the times, the Odessa variant of the Russian language and the Russian and Yiddish songs created in and about Odessa are the lasting product of a unique brand of multiculturalism. The Russian of Odessa shows die influence of Yiddish and Ukrainian in grammar, lexicon, and phraseology, and Odessa folk humor reflects Jewish sensibilities. Odessa Yiddish is permeated with Russianisms. The repertoire of Russian and Yiddish songs about Odessa reveals the mixed character of die respective languages. The songs portray a unique city: one tfiat is more impressive than Vienna or Paris; one that embodies progress and the carefree life but is also dangerous. These songs deal with various aspects of the Jewish experience but also with the life of the underworld, employing the stylistic conventions of the so-called blatnaia pesnia.

The Triumph of God in 2 Cor 2.14: Additional Evidence of Merkabah Mysticism in Paul

In a recent article, Martin Hengel argues that the early Christian interpretation of Ps 110.1 provided not only the most important impulse to the development of Christology in the nascent church, but also a blasphemous enormity to contemporary Jewish sensibilities: the idea that the crucified Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth, was raised and seated ‘at the right hand’ of God that is, enthroned as a co-occupant of God's own ‘throne of glory’ (cf. Jer 17.12), located in the highest heaven. For in the OT, being seated on the throne in heaven is reserved for Yahweh alone, and in subsequent Jewish tradition it is rare to find any reference to someone sharing the throne of God.

Ellis Island to Ebbets Field: Sport and the American Jewish Experience (review)

178 SHOFAR Fall 1994 Vol. 13, No. 1 those who have lapsed, become indifferent or secularized, or intermarried. The desiccated Sephardim are also inconsequential; Reform and liberal Jews may be tolerated even if seen to be scarcely Jews at all. Alderman's favored Jews keep themselves to themselves, live somewhat crabbed, if economically successful, lives between Golders Green and Colindale. While this move up from Whitechapel or St. George's in the East speaks profoundly to the lives of many, perhaps even a majority, of English Jews, it will, for some readers, omit too many and too much. Eugene C. Black Department of History Brandeis University Ellis Island to Ebbets Field: Sport and the American Jewish Experience , by Peter Levine. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. 328 pp. $25.00. Peter Levine's Ellis Island to Ebbets Field is an engaging study of the athletic experience of second-generation Eastern European Jews, primarily from the perspective of ethnicity rather than theology. Levine seeks to recreate the world of second-generation male immigrants (primarily in Brooklyn) and analyze their ability to shape their world and the impact their sporting legacy has on the continual survival of American-Jewish identity. He argues that historians like Irving Howe have stereotyped American Jews as people of the book, and places this study more in the context of recent scholarship on Jewish manliness, or toughness, particularly in the underworld. Levine argues that sport helped redefine ethnic identity, helping to determine what it was to be American and Jewish. Sport participation taught American values and possibilities, mitigating the shock of assimilation while furthering it. The agency expressed in sport helped counter feelings of helplessness and alienation in ways that encouraged claims to legitimacy and full participation while at the same time providing a sense of ethnic solidarity and identity. Partaking in a common American experience enabled Jews to dispel negative attitudes towards them, while their achievements encouraged assimilation and acceptance. Sport is described as a middle ground shaped by interactions between the community and the core culture, Jews and other ethnics, and immigrants and their children. The middle ground involved the adaptation of traditional practice to new American settings and the transformation of Book Reviews 179 American experiences into ethnic ways. The American-born could nurture communal beliefs tied closely to. Jewish traditions and culture while reinforcing mainstream American values. The narrative begins by analyzing the debate in the immigrant community about the propriety and purpose of sport, demonstrating sport's popularity with the second generation and describing the development of Jewish organizations to promote sport under Jewish auspices. Levine then examines basketball, baseball, and boxing in detail, and scrutinizes intercollegiate sport, giving special attention to Marty Glickman, who was dropped from the 400-meter relay team in the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. The final chapter analyzes the contemporary Jewish sporting experience as a continuation and counterpoint to the second generation. Levine's three chapters on basketball emphasize the game's role in interwar Jewish working-class communities. His illuminating discussion is soundly based on oral interviews with ex-professionals and recreationcenter players. Levine provided a case study of the Ducs, a Brownsville five, organized by high school underclassmen who collected dues, arranged matches, and took bets, as typical ofJewish neighborhood teams across the country who were considered positive community representatives . "Engaging sport as a middle ground, participants in this world of basketball and Jewish community acquired American ways while absorbing Jewish sensibilities, even as they moved inexorably away from the Jewish world of their immigrant parents" (p. 38). Levine emphasizes basketball's value as a middle ground between parents and youths. Levine points out that the immigrant generation supported basketball more than other sports, reserving their main objections to lost educational and economic opportunities rather than loss of traditional Jewish life. His discussion needs to take into account the factors of timing and generation. Ballplayers whose parents grew up in the United States seem to have been more supportive than the Europeanreared . Furthermore, Jewish boys who grew up after World War I seem to have had more parental support for their sporting pastimes than youths of an earlier era. Levine goes on to describe the...