Jewish Solidarity Research Articles

The political partnership between Israel and authoritarian Uruguay, 1972–1980

ABSTRACT Between 1972 and 1980, Israel and authoritarian Uruguay developed a political partnership based on their shared self-perception as misunderstood Western bastions fighting terrorism and the proxies of communist expansion, as well as shared concerns about détente and Western human rights discourse. While Uruguay remained the most consequential anti-PLO South American regime, Israel helped the Uruguayan dictatorship manipulate public opinion and cover up antisemitism and Nazi sympathies within its repressive apparatus. When dealing with the effects of Uruguayan repression of leftist Jews, Israeli diplomats tended to prioritise their alliance with the regime over their ethnic-ideological commitment to Jewish solidarity.

"Yiddishists for Palestine": Diasporism and Solidarity through Twenty-First Century Yiddish Song

ABSTRACT: As many young Jews grow increasingly alienated from Zionist narratives, some have found a space for expressions of diasporism and solidarity with Palestinians in the international Yiddishist music scene. This article examines four twenty-first century Yiddish songs that refer to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and express solidarity with Palestinians: "Ver Tantzt" by Black Ox Orkestar, "Dumai" by Daniel Kahn, "A shtik fun harts" by Josh Waletzky and Michael Winograd, and "Qibya" by Koyt far dayn fardakht. These songs were compiled by the authors as part of the group "Yiddishist with Palestine," an online gathering of Yiddishist activists that started during the 2021 Gaza war, discussing strategies for expressing solidarity with Palestinians in Yiddishist communal spaces. Through textual, contextual, and musical analysis, and drawing on theories of diaspora and diasporism, the article explores the various ways these songs express Jewish solidarity with Palestinians.

Between Peretz Smolenskin and Ahad Ha’am: The Forgotten Historiography of the Jewish National Movement Hibbat Zion

Abstract When we study the Jewish-national historiography of the last quarter of the 19th century, there is a tendency to pass directly from Smolenskin’s doctrine to the Zionist-cultural approach of Ahad Ha’am and his students, omitting the works written in between. However, even before the emergence of Ahad Ha’am as a cultural icon in the Jewish national movement, some Hibbat Zion activists engaged in Hebrew cultural activities directed at shaping national Jewish consciousness. The main figures in this trend were Saul Pinchas Rabinowitz and Avraham Shalom Friedberg. Their world view was based on education that advocated proto-nationalism: Jewish solidarity, love of the Hebrew language, promoting Hebrew newspapers, and preserving Jewish tradition. To this they added settlement in Eretz Israel as a solution for the harsh conditions of the Jews in Russia. They edited literary and scientific collections in Hebrew and Jewish historiography and wrote historical monographs and biographies. In this way, they sought to introduce national historical protagonists instead of the Hasskala’s pantheon of historical characters to vividly illuminate periods of historical “golden ages” suited to the national ideology and teach the lesson of historical history—that Hibbat Zion is the solution to the plight of Jews and Judaism.

“Abhorrent Zionism, Israel are not the Solution”: Dialectics of the Soviet and the National in Ego-Documents of the 1970s–80s

Drawing on late-Soviet Jewish ego-documents: memoirs, diaries and letters, primarily on a corpus of (auto)biographical essays on the life of a Leningrad journalist, the author explores her protagonists' obsessive reflections on anti-Semitism and Zionism, evoked by the acute dissonance between their sincerely internalised communist ideology of internationalism and the widespread practice of anti-Semitism, as well as between Soviet patriotism and Jewish memory, Jewish solidarity and the temptation of emigration to Israel. The study of “ordinary” people’s ego-documents not intended for publication enables one to penetrate into their inner world and to extrapolate the obtained observations onto Soviet Jewish majority; in addition, it allows to explain the position of prominent Soviet authors of Jewish origin, such as playwright and publicist Tsezar Solodar, poet and editor-in-chief of Sovetisch Heymland Aron Vergelis, author of critical popular books on Judaism Moisei Belenkii, and others, who stigmatised Judaism and Zionism. Ego-documents allow for tracing not only Soviet, but also Jewish origins of late-Soviet anti-Zionism, which went back to the position of the poor strata of shtetl society, who, while leaning towards socialism, associated Zionism with the hostile bourgeoisie. The paper partly polemicises, partly complements the existing historiography on late Soviet Jewish identity, which is based mainly on post-Soviet interviews or the émigrés’ experience and therefore tends to simplify the picture, reducing the diversity of identities, attitudes and behaviours to two binaries, either to “thin culture”/“symbolic ethnicity”, or to hidden emigration aspirations presented as natural and self-evident.

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

Reviewed by: Rescue the Surviving Souls: The Great Jewish Refugee Crisis of the Seventeenth Century by Adam Teller Joshua Teplitsky Adam Teller. Rescue the Surviving Souls: The Great Jewish Refugee Crisis of the Seventeenth Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020. 408 pp. In Rescue the Surviving Souls, Adam Teller weaves together sources and studies from across central and eastern Europe, the Italian peninsula, and the Ottoman Empire to breathe life into a little-told aspect of early modern Jewish history in the wake of the intense upheavals that followed the Khmelynytski Uprising of 1648–1649 (gezeirot tah ve-tat). The uprisings saw Polish Jews violently assaulted, killed, and subjected to extensive material loss, with a death toll of at least 18,000 lives and some 30,000 Jews forced from their homes. Teller's book picks up where most scholarly treatments end. Focusing not on the dead but rather, as the title proclaims, on the survivors whose lives were thrown into disarray, the book explores the search for solutions undertaken both by victims of the event and by others who offered them solidarity and material relief. The result is a sweeping study that aims to offer fresh paradigms for considering major episodes in early modern Jewish life and for the writing of early modern Jewish history more generally. The book is divided into three parts. The first section deals with the "internally displaced persons" who fled their homes but remained within the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Much of this section is engaged with the larger theme of trauma. It begins with a chapter outlining the events of the uprising itself before following the refugees from their homes to the confusion of the roads and into new sites of settlement. Approaching his subject with great humanity, Teller activates fragmentary sources to reconstruct not only the events as they transpired but also the emotional states of individuals. He invokes modern theories of trauma, and even the analysis of dreams, to supplement sources that are often challengingly laconic and partial, and reads individuals' struggles with their own sinfulness and the fulminations of preachers as attempts to exert agency over the most destabilizing of experiences. The second section takes as its geographic focus the Ottoman Empire and the Mediterranean and explores the larger themes of "Capture, Slavery, and Ransom." It follows the Jews who were sold in the slave trades in the Crimea and Istanbul, examining not only the fate of the Jews in those places but also the different energies undertaken across a large transregional network to raise funds for their redemption. He argues that a transregional network to redeem captives was made possible in the early modern period both on account of a more formal [End Page 423] and structured system of Jewish self-governance and through the emergence of a large Sephardic merchant trading diaspora, with a central hub in Italy. Following the trail of material relief—both its successes and failures—Teller compellingly bridges the histories of Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jewish subethnicities, arguing for far-reaching forms of transregional support. In so doing, Teller offers fresh perspectives on Jewish collective identification as expressed through widespread cooperation. He argues that "the increased levels of intercommunal cooperation that developed in the wake of the Polish crisis were thus a new phenomenon" (194), a novelty of the period that predated forms of nineteenth-century Jewish solidarity when it is commonly dated. Teller understands these cooperations as an expression of a Jewish collectivity, which he roots not in a vague sense of peoplehood or protonationalism as mid-century Zionist historians posited, arguing instead that they were formatively shaped by normative religious law and its behavioral frameworks, which resulted in a "single socioreligious system accepted by Jewish communities everywhere" (294, also 158–59). Even as he uncovers sprawling connections, Teller textures this coordination with cultural tensions and competition between different stakeholders. In the third and final section, he turns to the fate of the Jews who fled to the Holy Roman Empire and attempted to make new lives for themselves there, attracting the attention of local territorial rulers, straining Jewish communal resources, and clashing with customs and norms. Beyond its vivid depiction of this important...

שאול פנחס רבינוביץ' (שפ"ר) ופנתיאון הגיבורים של חיבת ציון

Like many ideological movements, Hibbat Zion sought to construct a pantheon of historical heroes who would legitimize its modern message and attract a wide audience to its ranks. The first leader who deliberately and methodically engaged in this effort was Shaul Pinchas Rabinovich. Rabinovich regarded the Jewish national movement as a necessary stratum of the moderate Haskalah movement he advocated. To this end he set up a pantheon of national heroes, historical figures noted for their national and Haskalah framework of values: general education, love of mankind, affinity for Eretz Israel and the Hebrew language, knowledge of Jewish law, and a practical understanding of Jewish solidarity. He did so as editor of the Hebrew periodical, Knesset Israel, the organ of Hibbat Zion, as the Hebrew translator of Zvi Graetz's comprehensive History of the Jews, and as the author of historical monographs and biographies which served to promote Hibbat Zion ideology.

The Holocaust in South-Eastern Europe: Historiography, Archival Resources and Remembrance

<i>The Holocaust in South-Eastern Europe: Historiography, Archival Resources and Remembrance</i>

Reforming identities: Jews’ experience of German colonial expansion

ABSTRACT This essay investigates German Jews’ conceptualization of colonialism, and its consequent meanings regarding their identity formation in the years between 1884 and 1919. The discussion tackles the intersections and disjunctions of identities among German Jews of various orientations, as inspired by the colonial venture and within globalization process. The analysis reveals the interplay between the endorsement of colonialism by Jews as part of their German national identification, and the impact of growing antisemitism and racial attitudes nourished by the encounter with other ‘inferior races’ in the colonies. It explores the ideological parallels that Jews perceived between German and European colonization, and the Zionist settlement in Palestine. The article also demonstrates how Jews’ increasing exposure – real or imagined – to different places and cultures as part of the colonial experience stirred ideas of Jewish racial superiority and distinctive nationalism, alongside transnational perspectives that encouraged a broader sense of Jewish solidarity.

“A new and modern golden age of Jewish culture”: shaping the cultural politics of transnational Jewish antifascism

ABSTRACTThe Holocaust and a worldwide Jewish enthusiasm and support for the Red Army’s defeat of the German Army on the Eastern Front led to a greater sense of international Jewish consciousness and solidarity often tied to an antifascist politics. Utilizing a transnational lens, I explore how Jewish antifascists of the immediate post-war period proffered a novel cultural politics as a means of addressing ongoing international issues of post-Holocaust Jewish survival in a dangerous and politically uncertain modernity. I examine three Jewish left magazines of the late 1940s that were involved in a loose international antifascist progressive Jewish network and ideological framework. These magazines Jewish Life (USA), New Life (UK) and Unity (Australia) represented similar antifascist politics and cultural outlooks in the USA, Britain and Australia, respectively. They have received little sustained scholarly attention previously. I analyse their vision of diverse multilingual Jewish cultures which were to be promoted and developed in any country where Jews lived and in whatever language they spoke. Their cultural vision represented antifascist values against bourgeois or nationalist Jewish culture and broadly reflected a pro-Soviet, progressive and Jewish internationalist, Popular Front politics and worldview.

Reenacting Exodus and the Civil War: Passover and All Other Nights by Dara Horn

This article discusses how Dara Horn recuperates the integral roles played by Jewish Americans in the Civil War by using reenactment as a structuring concept in her novel All Other Nights (2009). Given that the Passover seder entails a kind of historical reenactment of the ancient Israelites’ exodus from Egypt, Horn casts the antebellum period itself not only in terms of competing interpretations of the Book of Exodus, but also as reenactments of key moments in Jewish history from antiquity through the mid-nineteenth century. Just as the seder is meant to strengthen Jewish communal bonds and inspire Jews to apply Exodus to their present context, the protagonist’s various personal reenactments, from childhood memories to various religious rituals, show him how learning about Jewish history and religion might motivate civic engagement in the United States. All Other Nights consequently poses a problem: how might Jewish Americans both prioritize communal ties while also putting Judaic principles into practice on behalf of others? Ultimately, I suggest the novel argues for Jewish solidarity with African American liberation struggles while also shedding light on the specific complexities of Jews’ experiences on each side of the Mason Dixon line. All Other Nights emphasizes the enduring importance of viewing Jewish Americans as a distinct ethno-religious group whose very Yiddishkeit existed generations before, and yet has also been shaped by, a nation riven over chattel slavery.

Conflicted Subjects: An Ethnography of Jewish Israeli Left Radical Activism in Israel/Palestine

This anthropological research project addresses the ethics and politics of Jewish Israeli solidarity with those oppressed by Israeli state violence, confronting the ways in which radical activism m...

Groping for the greats: the strange musical claims of Nathan Ausubel

ABSTRACTNathan Ausubel (1898–1986) achieved unprecedented popularity as a compiler and translator of Jewish folklore during the 1940s and 1950s. Beneath the inspiring stories and charming sayings was a leftist ideologue preoccupied with the demise of Jewish life in Europe and the loss of Jewish identity to capitalist forces in the United States. Ausubel's agenda is elucidated in his polemical essays, which advocate using folklore as a means of bolstering Jewish pride and solidarity. Part of his strategy involved exaggerating the influence of Jewish culture on famous non-Jews, including Bach, Beethoven, and Schubert. This article examines these dubious musical claims and how they furthered Ausubel's activist agenda.

The Colors of Zion: Blacks, Jews, and Irish, from 1845 to 1945 by George Bornstein (review)

Reviewed by: The Colors of Zion: Blacks, Jews, and Irish, from 1845 to 1945 by George Bornstein Matthew Pratt Guterl (bio) George Bornstein , The Colors of Zion: Blacks, Jews, and Irish, from 1845 to 1945. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011. xiixii + 254254 pp. The search for a lost moment of cross-racial solidarity is the "grail quest" of American history, shaped more by contemporary myth and fantasy about a better past than by the literature's oversight of material remains. At moments where the present day circumstance of race relations seems just plain awful, it can be soothing to look for evidence of a moment when things were different, neither mean nor untrusting. But, despite its wide-eyed ethos, this is also a productive quest because it exists in tension with its exact opposite, a serious, dour, historical cynicism, which offers only the story of the bloody struggle not to be at the bottom of the social ladder. And that tension, in turn, has more clearly revealed a series of great turning points and consistent plotlines. [End Page 317] George Bornstein's book is a perfect example of this long-term search for connection and dialogue and shared struggle. Drawing from a vast range of sources and crisscrossing periods and genres, he engagingly stitches together a history of black, Irish, and Jewish solidarity. There are sections on jazz, on the Harlem Renaissance, on nationalisms, and on literary culture, each revealing the widespread sense of alliance and common cause. There are close readings of deeply symbolic, if rare, expressions of sympathy. The heroes of the book—and they are presented as such, and blessed at the end for their contributions, include Frederick Douglass, Louis Armstrong, James Joyce, Al Jolson, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Zora Neale Hurston, all champions, for Bornstein, of cosmopolitan links across racial lines. Bornstein writes—politely, elliptically, and poetically—against the literature generally known as "Whiteness Studies." Emerging out of the riotous early 1990s and becoming ever more dominant over the 2000s, this loosely cohered field argues that race has been a source of unbridgeable division and that whiteness in particular has made the absorption of some immigrants possible, even as it effectively keeps others—and African Americans, too—outside of what is normal, or "American," or privileged. The difficult relations of these three groups (blacks, Jews, and the Irish) are the centerpiece of Whiteness Studies, but the emphasis is invariably on their falling out and not their coming together—on the way, that is, that power of whiteness in American political culture makes it impossible for any long-term coalitions, partnerships, or sympathies across the color line. Whiteness Studies has transformed the way we see interracial relations. Every story that begins, for example, with Frederick Douglass touring Ireland and noting the synergies between the famine and slavery ends in a riot back home, with Irish Americans refusing to accept any outstretched hand from a "fellow" oppressed group. This trans-Atlantic disconnect—between, say, the Irish in Ireland and the Irish in America— reveals the dark back story of the melting pot myth, in which the alignments of "ethnic" nationalisms were transformed, through American alchemy, into competing minority petitions for rights and resources. But Bornstein is determined, against this heavy grain, to recover nostalgically the first part of this story alone, underscoring merely that once, long ago, things were different. Indeed, after referencing Douglass's tour in his introduction, Bornstein skips (he does this often) over all the messy black-Irish conflicts between 1850 and 1920 and jumps right to Marcus Garvey, who, like Douglass, envisioned a strategic parallelism between black, Irish, and Jewish struggles. Using many of the same examples as his cynical opposites, Bornstein stresses connection over disconnection, [End Page 318] homage where others see theft, idealism instead of opportunism, support but never exploitation, small gestures of sympathy but never micro-aggressions. It should not surprise anyone that Bornstein draws from the philosopher Anthony Appiah, who has labored to restore the collaborative virtues of cosmopolitanism, or that he sympathizes deeply with literary historian George Hutchinson's The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White, which chronicles the extraordinary efforts to make cross-racial connections not...

Jewish Ghettos in Sighet and Dąbrowa Górnicza

Jewish Ghettos in Sighet and Dąbrowa Górnicza

Much More Than a Historical Novel

It is probably impossible to imagine ourselves in the place of the Jewish survivors of World War II and the Holocaust immediately after the war, but this is exactly the task that Yehiel Grenimann, the son of survivors, set for himself. Yanosh and Eva, his central characters, were hidden on the Aryan side of Warsaw, thanks to their connection with the Polish nationalist underground. Yosef Borowski, known as Bora, the third major protagonist, was a partisan leader during the war. The novel begins with the entry of the Soviet army into Warsaw and ends with Yanosh and Eva’s imminent arrival in Australia, where, despite pressure from Zionist activists in the displaced persons camps, they have elected to go rather than risk illegal immigration to Palestine.Unlike a historical novel based on research and imaginative projection into the past, Far Away from Where? develops information the author received from his parents. It is an effort to understand them — not as individuals, since the protagonists are not meant to represent them, but as people who shared harrowing experiences and found the courage and strength to begin life again despite enormous losses.Grenimann makes it clear that the Jews had to choose from among a very limited range of options after the war. Eva and Yanosh choose to start a family, and Eva’s pregnancy is a major element in the novel. Eva chooses to bring traditional Jewish ceremonies into their life, although Yanosh, an assimilated, antireligious intellectual, resists. Eva and Yanosh also choose to seek a better life for themselves in Australia rather than throw their lot in with the national struggle in Palestine. In contrast, Bora chooses not to lay down arms after the war, but to continue striking at SS officers and German war criminals. None of the characters has the luxury of considering attractive alternatives at leisure. They have to decide quickly, with little or no information.I have been Grenimann’s friend for decades. I also met his late father, the heroic partisan leader upon whom, to a degree, the character of Bora is based. Hence I know that he has moved along a complex trajectory from his secular Zionist background in Melbourne to becoming a Conservative rabbi who works for Rabbis for Human Rights in Jerusalem. Today this son of Holocaust refugees works with displaced Bedouins in the occupied Palestinian territories; this experience feeds his efforts to portray the inner worlds of those still looking for a stable home.You might say that John Green’s decision to leave Australia and become Rabbi Yehiel Grenimann was a reaction to his parents’ decision to go as far away as they could from Europe and the Middle East, a rejection of their prioritizing personal security and comfort over Jewish solidarity and risk. So you might expect to find a judgmental, Zionist attitude in his book. But you won’t. Yehiel is sympathetic to the desire of his protagonists, Eva and Yanosh, to lead a normal life in a hospitable country. He also makes us aware that the Jews of Poland were hardly of a piece. They entered the dreadful period of the Holocaust with diverse backgrounds and ambitions, and those who survived remained as diverse as they had been to begin with — though tragically diminished in number.Perhaps the most important lesson of this book for us today is the way it conveys what should be obvious: times have changed. The Jewish people is no longer recovering from the immediate trauma of slaughter, fear, deprivation, and doubt, although our collective loss remains beyond words. The constraints that dictated the decisions made by Eva, Yanosh, Bora, and the other characters in Grenimann’s book have dissipated. The survivors’ pain — the loss of family and friends, the destruction of the world they had grown up in, the traumatic burden that the war left in their souls — is largely in the past. We are the second, third, and fourth generations after the Holocaust. We remember, but we remember what we have heard and read, not what we have experienced ourselves. Unfortunately, many of us have not yet developed a worldview consistent with the historical changes that have taken place.The title of Far Away from Where? conveys many messages. Eva is worried that Australia is too “far away,” but Yanosh asks: What are you reluctant to be far away from, after all we have gone through? We, Grenimann’s readers, are far away in time and geography from the Holocaust. While we mustn’t forget what we are now far away from, we must acknowledge that we are, in fact, far away. Our actions, today and tomorrow, must be based on that recognition.

“Outside the Shul”: The American Soviet Jewry Movement and the Rise of Solidarity Orthodoxy, 1964–1986

AbstractConcern for the plight of Soviet Jewry grew steadily from the early 1950s. The rise of this issue to the forefront of American Jewish consciousness, however, was driven by the broader protest movement that emerged in the mid-1960s. Its central goal was to ensure civic and religious rights for Jewish residents of the Soviet Union, with a particular emphasis on the ability to emigrate. The movement's peak impact was in the 1970s. This decade witnessed the proliferation of grassroots organizations throughout the United States, along with the adoption of a more activist orientation by large segments of the American Jewish establishment.To date, minimal attention has been paid to the place of the Soviet Jewry movement in the religious history of American Judaism. The article's investigation of American Orthodoxy's role is intended to confront this lacuna and describes the central role played by Orthodox Jews in the rise and development of the Soviet Jewry movement. Through their actions, the members of this segment of American Jewry experienced a role reversal in which they helped to redefine the nature of the Jewish relationship to the public sphere. Simultaneously, such activism sharpened the internal divide between Modern Orthodoxy and its traditionalist counterparts who opposed demonstrations, encouraged quiet diplomacy, and were loathe to work in unison with the broader Jewish community. Through their involvement in a core Jewish activity that entailed partnership with non-Orthodox Jews in efforts for their common brethren, a generation of Modern Orthodox leaders arose that made Jewish solidarity a central expression of their Orthodox religious identities.

Zionism and the Roads Not Taken: Rawidowicz, Kaplan, Kohn (review)

Reviewed by: Zionism and the Roads Not Taken: Rawidowicz, Kaplan, Kohn Samuel Moyn (bio) Zionism and the Roads Not Taken: Rawidowicz, Kaplan, Kohn. By Noam Pianko. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. xii + 279 pp. Noam Pianko's important new book is written from the perspective of American Jewry at the moment when uncertainty about the moral standing of the State of Israel promises (or threatens) to move from the margins of communal consciousness to the center. Pianko revives three lost alternatives or "forgotten voices" that he thinks could and should inform this moment. His point is to show that solidarity and, indeed, nationalism need not take the form of statism. Mordecai Kaplan, Hans Kohn, and Simon Rawidowicz were different from one another but all, Pianko says, offered creativity in imagining different communal bonds than recent history has allowed. The reason Pianko's book is so successful and stimulating is that his chapters on his three protagonists are so good at faithfully and empathetically reconstructing their positions. Pianko plausibly wants to move beyond a tired objection that commitment to solidarity based on shared culture is not "political" (though it is another matter whether it offers a persuasive institutional account of how cultural unity is embodied). Thanks to David Myers's useful recent book, some attention has already been lavished on Rawidowicz, the sage of Waltham, but Pianko's chapter on his Hebraist politics is insightful.1 And his sections on Kaplan and especially Kohn—generally thought to have given up Zionism on coming to America—are equally so. Pianko's exploration of Kaplan's better known depiction of "Jewish civilization" shines, and his case for the continuity of Kohn's concerns as he became a scholarly advocate of multinational states is convincing. There are a few drawbacks to Pianko's enterprise, however. One is that his book is too American. Recognizing that all of his protagonists began as Europeans, Pianko starts out his book with a general picture of the options for Jewish solidarity after World War I (and dutifully covers the pre-American trajectories in his chapter on each thinker). But he understates or misunderstands both the imperial and eventually international frameworks that gave a non-statist nationalism salience in [End Page 307] the age in European politics. In an area and era when such frameworks were rife in imperial and post-imperial locales, it was indeed not obvious that nations always had states as their proper destiny (one should remember that the nation-state never became the normative political form for non-Jews either until long after World War II was over). As for the international realm, the League of Nations committed itself and precisely where the Jews were concerned to a non-statist recognition that nations often live amongst and athwart other nations, making a different model than the territorial nation-state most sensible for them. Strangely, however, Pianko remarks of the minorities regime that "the victorious powers [after World War I] refused to include a formal policy within the League of Nations charter because they feared challenges to their own sovereign authority. Instead of obligating member states to guarantee minority rights, the League underscored the importance of universal human rights" (218). This is wholly mistaken, for the Versailles settlement famously set up a minorities regime, one indeed in large part for Jews, to interfere with the sovereignty of the weaker new nations of Eastern Europe where Jews lived. As for human rights, they were reserved for after World War II, not before. The conceptual point is that much more detail about the European politics of the age when the non-statist thought of Pianko's characters germinated is necessary to grasp why it did so. A related drawback is that Pianko fails to ask why, to the extent anyone noticed them at all, the roads not taken seemed worth bypassing. He acknowledges that his heroes were "idiosyncratic" even in their time but fails to theorize the consequences of this fact (9). Out of an understandable interest in establishing the theoretical credentials of non-statist nationalism, Pianko does not explain how marginal the alternatives really were, especially as time passed. One reason is surely that experiments like the...

Benjamin Disraeli (review)

Reviewed by: Benjamin Disraeli Michael Berkowitz Benjamin Disraeli, by Adam Kirsch. New York: Nextbook and Schocken, 2008. 258 pp. $21.00. Adam Kirsch's biography, Benjamin Disraeli, is a recent installment of the notable "Nextbook" collaboration with Schocken Press, a respected and frequently cutting-edge publisher in Jewish Studies. An attractively produced, trim volume, it richly deserves a wide readership. In many respects Kirsch's biography is a superb contribution, providing an insightful and accessible interpretation of the Jewish dimensions of Disraeli—who continues to inspire immense interest. In addition to a pithy survey of Disraeli's political career, Kirsch renders a unique and valuable service in providing a synopsis of Disraeli's staggering literary output, most of which is unread (and undervalued) by the current generation of scholars and students. Contarini Fleming (1832), according to Kirsch, "is not a great novel, [but] it is a vitally important document of Disraeli's mind" (p. 79), even more so than his veiled autobiography, Vivian Grey (1826) (pp. 30, 48–51). Regarding The Wondrous Tale of Alroy (1833), "it is Disraeli's distinction between Jewish belief and Jewish solidarity, and his insistence that it is possible to have the latter without the former, that makes Alroy a significant proto-Zionist text" (p. 89). "Indirectly in Contarini Fleming and explicitly in Alroy, Disraeli reclaimed the imaginative freedom to define Jewishness, and himself as a Jew, on his own terms. In this sense, it was necessary for Disraeli to become a novelist before [End Page 178] he could be a statesman, and his career as a statesman was a continuation of the work of self-invention that he began as a novelist" (p. 78). Despite its merits and erudition, academics should be aware that this is not a scholarly book. There are no footnotes, sometimes making it difficult to follow up on Kirsch's points. He does, however, attach a small section at the end "For Further Reading." Here Kirsch acknowledges his indebtedness to the six-volume biography of Disraeli commenced by William Flavelle Moneypenny and finished by George Earle Buckle (published between 1910 and 1920), and Robert Blake's Disraeli (1966). Although he cites Todd Endelman's textbook on Anglo-Jewry as major source for background, Kirsch seems unaware of the anthology Endelman co-edited with Tony Kushner, Disraeli's Jewishness (2002), which complements his own study. Indeed, Kirsch's thesis is precisely a guiding thread of Endelman and Kushner: that "Disraeli's Jewishness was both the greatest obstacle to his ambition and its greatest engine" (Kirsch, p. xxiii). Perhaps more problematic than his ignorance or omission of the most relevant scholarly work is Kirsch's statement that "Hannah Arendt devoted a largely hostile section of The Origins of Totalitarianism to [Disraeli's] Jewish mythmaking . . ." (p. 246). Those familiar with Arendt's work might find this disingenuous. A major thrust of Kirsch's interpretation is that Disraeli "had to turn his Jewishness from a handicap into a mystique. He had to convince the world, and himself, that the Jews were a noble race, with a glorious past and a great future. He even had to turn anti-Semitic myths to his own account—to make people believe, if he was a wizard and conjurer, he would at least use his powers for England. As a result, Disraeli became one of the nineteenth century's chief points of reference for thinking about Jews and Judaism. Jews and anti-Semites alike looked to Disraeli in constructing their own images of Jewish power" (pp. xxii–xxiii). Toward the conclusion, Kirsch avers: "Disraeli's imagination of Jewishness did what he needed it to do" (p. 241). This is indeed a compelling argument—but essentially that of Hannah Arendt in "The Potent Wizard," ten dense pages from which Kirsch professes to distance himself. "With a few slight changes," Kirsch asserts, "you could easily turn the Sidonia scenes in [Disraeli's novels] Coningsby and Tancred into an anti-Semitic tract to rival The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. And, as a matter of fact, the most vicious anti-Semites of the late nineteenth century all reprised Disraeli's ideas, sometimes giving him explicit credit" (p. 132). In light...

Nationalism and the ‘Jewish International’: Religious Internationalism in Europe and the Middle East c.1840–c.1880

Jewish cosmopolitanism has long assumed a central place in the ideology of anti-Semitism. Well before the publication of “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” the idea of international Jewish solidarity served as an argument against Jewish emancipation. In Britain, Sir Robert Inglis famously opposed granting the Jews political rights because “[t]he Jews of London have more sympathy with the Jews resident in Berlin or Vienna than with the Christians among whom they reside.” Likewise, in 1840, the ultramontane Univers saw international lobbying on behalf of Jews accused of ritual murder in Damascus as proof that “the Hebrew nationality is not dead … What religious connection is there between the Talmudists of Alsace, Cologne or the East, and the Messrs. Rothschild and Crémieux?” That L'Univers saw this cosmopolitan fellow-feeling as an expression of Jewish national identity is irrelevant. The point is rather that for anti-Semites Jewish ‘nationalism’ was an inherently international force.

American Zionists' Place in Israel after Statehood: From Involved Partners to Outside Supporters

After the late 1930s, American Jews became an increasingly significant part of the international Jewish arena and of the Zionist movement as a result of the United States' mounting international importance, its grow ing intervention in the Middle East, and the destruction of European Jewish communities in the Holocaust. The process intensified in the late 1940s, when American Jews in general and Zionists in particular made decisive economic and political contributions to the establishment of the State of Israel.1 Despite fears of growing antisemitism in the late 1930s due to the Great Depression and to propaganda from Nazi Germany, broad sectors of the American Jewish community were conspicuously more ready than before to engage in Jewish and Zionist activity. From the beginning of the decade substantially more money was contributed to Jewish philanthro pies and to Zionist collections. Hadassah membership increased as did enrollment in the Zionist movement in general, and more Jews attended Zionist gatherings. Jewish solidarity grew in response to the worsening plight of German Jewry, growing antisemitism in central and eastern Europe, and the rift between Britain and the Zionist movement, finding expression in Zionist activity. American Jews' willingness to act on the American scene as an ethnic group with a political agenda grew markedly stronger following the Allies' victory in Europe, as news of the Holocaust reached the United States. The resulting individual and collective shock led American Jews and their leadership to exert their full powers to ensure that a Jewish state would emerge from postwar international negotiations and agreements. As a result, Zionism became the strongest ideological, political, and organizational force among American Jews. The full force and significance of American Zionism in the 1940s and 1950s is to be understood in the light of the identification of American Jews with Zionist goals and with the state of Israel. This identification far exceeded formal membership in the Zionist Organization of America and Hadassah; Jews