Jewish Subjects Research Articles

Keeping Kosher in the Camp: Feeding Interned British Jews during the First World War

ABSTRACT During the First World War, Jews interned in Germany struggled to keep kosher. The British government initially funded a kosher food programme for its own interned nationals, but it removed all government monies in late 1915. The British government’s refusal to take responsibility for the proper feeding of its Jewish subjects held as ‘enemy aliens’ was both shaped by and bolstered assumptions that Jews could never be truly British. However, it was also a response to tensions evident within the Anglo-Jewish community about how its members could best demonstrate their good citizenship.

Jewish Difference and the Arts in Vienna: Composing Compassion in Music and Biblical Theater by Caroline A. Kita

Reviewed by: Jewish Difference and the Arts in Vienna: Composing Compassion in Music and Biblical Theater by Caroline A. Kita Catherine Greer Jewish Difference and the Arts in Vienna: Composing Compassion in Music and Biblical Theater. By Caroline A. Kita. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019. Pp. xxxiii + 188. Cloth $46.00. ISBN 978-0253040534. At the heart of a movement toward German cultural renewal in nineteenth-century Vienna was the belief that compassion, or Mitleid, could enact social change through an audience’s identification with a suffering character in dramatic and musical works. Largely shaped by the writings of Schopenhauer and Wagner, this discourse of compassion excluded the Jewish subject and advanced antisemitic stereotypes. Yet as Caroline A. Kita’s monograph Jewish Difference and the Arts in Vienna shows, German Jewish writers and composers in fin-de-siècle Vienna contended with and challenged constructions of the “uncompassionate Jew” by turning to “biblical alter egos” (xvii) in their musical compositions and dramatic works. Kita draws on Lisa Silverman’s framework of Jewish difference and in five case studies of works by Siegfried Lipiner, Gustav Mahler, Arnold Schoenberg, Richard Beer-Hofmann, and Stefan Zweig, she explores how these writers and composers invoked compassion for the Jewish subject while negotiating their own German Jewish identities. Their creative works ultimately challenged popular antisemitic discourses and “reinscrib[ed] the Jews as a compassionate collective and as a modern, musical, and mythical people” (129). In response to the writings of Schopenhauer and Wagner, poet and philosopher Siegfried Lipiner developed his own theory of compassion that subsequently served as a model for Mahler, Schoenberg, Beer-Hofmann, and Zweig. In chapter 1, Kita traces the development of Lipiner’s compassionate art by looking to his early writings, including his epic poem Der entfesselte Prometheus (1876) and an 1878 speech for the Leseverein der deutschen Studenten Wiens. She illustrates how Lipiner’s biblical drama Adam, the prelude to his Christus tetralogy, embodied compassionate art by eliciting sympathy for the character of Cain. Lipiner recasts Cain as a “tragic antihero” (21) and a “victim of arbitrary categories of difference” (23) deserving of redemption. In doing so Lipiner challenges antisemitic stereotypes and his compassionate art facilitates the dissolution of cultural and religious difference, ultimately leading to the creation of an inclusive community. In the following chapter, Kita demonstrates how Gustav Mahler’s Second (1888–1896) and Third (1893–1896) Symphonies serve as a “musical corollary” (63) to Lipiner’s biblical drama and further embody his vision of compassionate art. Through the inclusion of Lieder in both symphonies (“Urlicht” [End Page 615] and “Was mir der Mensch erzählt”), Kita argues, Mahler offers “dramatic narratives of compassionate transformation” (35) that elicit sympathy for the suffering Jew while also constructing a compassionate community. Her thoughtful analyses of these two symphonies, in addition to her detailed account of Lipiner’s influence on Mahler, serve as highlights of this volume. Whereas Lipiner and Mahler evoked sympathy for the suffering Jewish subject to overcome difference, Schoenberg, Beer-Hofmann, and Zweig conversely created Jewish protagonists that served as “models of cross-cultural exchange” (xxvvii) and reflected the authors’ shifting negotiations of their individual German Jewish identities. In chapter 3, Kita focuses on two works by Arnold Schoenberg, his monodrama Totentanz der Prinzipien (1915) and the oratorio Der Jakobsleiter (1917), to show how Schoenberg employed polyphony and new poetic modes in attempts to create compassionate art that would engender collective spiritual renewal (69). In both works, Schoenberg reclaims compassion for the Jewish subject through prayer, which serves as humanity’s “compassionate covenant” with the divine. In doing so, Kita argues, Schoenberg “recast[s] the Jewish legacy of monotheism as the origin of compassionate spirituality” (93). In the following chapter Kita explores how Richard Beer-Hofmann turned to Wagner’s paradigm of Gesamtkunstwerk to enact his own vision of compassionate art in Jaákobs Traum (1915), a prelude to his planned biblical tetralogy Die Historie von König David. Beer-Hofmann’s reconceptualization of Gesamtkunstwerk evidences his attempt to reconcile German-Austrian theater practices with Jewish tradition and culture. While reviews of the 1919 premiere of Jaákobs Traum in Vienna described the work as “ein jüdischer...

A Ceiling Made of Eggshells by Gail Carson Levine

Reviewed by: A Ceiling Made of Eggshells by Gail Carson Levine Fiona Hartley-Kroeger Levine, Gail Carson A Ceiling Made of Eggshells. Quill Tree/HarperCollins, 2020 [400p] Library ed. ISBN 9780062878205 $18.89 Trade ed. ISBN 9780062878199 $17.99 E-book ed. ISBN 9780062878229 $9.99 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 4-6 Levine (Ogre Enchanted, BCCB 10/18) departs fairy tales for fifteenth-century Spain and the experiences of the Sephardic Jewish people leading up to their expulsion from Spain in 1492. Our window on the past is Loma (short for Paloma), a young Jewish girl, who begins to accompany her formidable abuelo, Belo, on his travels throughout Spain. Belo’s mission is to promote and protect the interests of the Jews, which often involves bribery and intricate political maneuvering, especially as antisemitism grows and the Inquisition rises to prominence. Levine offers rich cultural detail alongside scrutiny of a fraught historical moment, particularly of a monarchy whose professed affection for its Jewish subjects becomes increasingly conditional on their ability to raise funds for wars against Muslims and their willingness to convert to Catholicism. Officially sanctioned cruelty and intolerance are balanced by individual examples of interfaith generosity and steadfast kindness. Loma is a girl very much of her time and place in valuing family and faith above all, and her honest voice, transparent frustrations, and growing agency make for a satisfying character arc against a dark yet intriguing slice of history. End matter includes an author’s note that provides additional historical and personal context and a glossary. [End Page 435] Copyright © 2020 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

A Hundred Acres of America: The Geography of Jewish American Literary History by Michael Hoberman

Reviewed by: A Hundred Acres of America: The Geography of Jewish American Literary History by Michael Hoberman Benjamin Schreier (bio) A Hundred Acres of America: The Geography of Jewish American Literary History By Michael Hoberman. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2018. xii + 183 pp. In one sense Michael Hoberman's short, smart, and pithy new book addresses a fairly straightforward topic: "The subject of this book is the historical relationship between the Jewish American literary imagination and the sense of place" (2). Accordingly, it sets itself a fairly straightforward task: namely, as he writes toward the book's close, "The essays in the book represent my best attempt to explore the role that the geography of North America has played in shaping the Jewish American literary imagination" (155), or, as he describes that attempt toward the book's opening, to explore "the ways in which Jewish subjects have engaged the long-standing American tendency to contemplate and experience geography as a crucible for the formation of cultural identity" (2). And yet, as we see in this last formulation, there's something more at work in Hoberman's work: critical energies more profound than merely parochially straightforward. The book's great strength—and its offering to the field—is to provide a way to de-exceptionalize Jewish American literary study; for once we recognize the role of geography in Jewish American writing, once we appreciate its "territoriality," we recognize that it shares its ground with other American writing and literatures. To understand "geography as a basis for literary and cultural continuity" is to understand Jews in America as neither "oppressed outsiders" nor "excessively complacent recipients of American privilege" (4), but rather as Americans actively engaged in experiencing and writing like other Americans. [End Page 299] This represents a critically significant—and salutary—departure from the way the field has heretofore conceptualized itself (though "taken itself for granted" is probably more accurate, at least if you ask me). One of the historicist side effects of multiculturalist pluralism in the humanities is that it's frequently easy to think of ethnicity- or identity-based literatures as more or less discrete entities—with African American literature indexed to something more or less knowable as African American experience, Queer literature indexed to something more or less knowable as Queer experience, and so forth—and it's easy as well to eschew theorizing how those various siloed experiences and symptomatic literary formations interact with, overlap, or interdetermine each other (other than, maybe, some gestures toward a minoritarian idea of oppression). In Jewish American literary study this thought-formation is often intimately bound up with, and indeed inextricable from, a foundational sense that immigration is the only real theory the field needs—that is, that Jewish American literature essentially tracks the chronologically progressive history of Jewish immigration to the United States (thus do scholars preoccupy themselves with talk of literary generations, for example, or with how temporal distance from the scene of immigration determines the contours of the literary imagination of identity). But with its focus on geography rather than immigration, A Hundred Acres of America explicitly challenges this often-unacknowledged immigration theory of Jewish American literature. As Hoberman succinctly claims in the Introduction, "This book argues that a rich and complex relationship with American geography itself, and not merely the immigrant experience, constitutes a central reference point and touchstone for the development, over the course of several centuries, of a Jewish literary consciousness in the United States" (4). In chapters on frontier writing by Jews in early America, on late nineteenth-century and turn-of-the-twentieth-century intellectuals who emphasized the Jewish presence in colonial American cities (and who therefore substantiated claims both to the "cosmopolitan and pluralistic origins of America's oldest cities" [46] and "Jewish participation in early American history" [53]), on early- to mid-twentieth-century middlebrow and middle-American Jewish writers (in which writers [End Page 300] like Edna Ferber challenge our preconceived romantic notions of regionalism by representing small towns as continuous with "other American environments" [78]), on late-twentieth-century Jewish writers' contestations of the pastoral mode, on turn-of-the-twenty-firstcentury literary returns to the shtetl...

When Anti-Zionism Was Jewish: Jewish Racial Subjectivity and the Anti-Imperialist Literary Left from the Great Depression to the Cold War

When Anti-Zionism Was Jewish: Jewish Racial Subjectivity and the Anti-Imperialist Literary Left from the Great Depression to the Cold War

«I see a Jew in me…»: the Jewish Studies of Leonid Frizman

The article discusses the role of Jewish topics in the scholarly heritage of Leonid Frizman, a Kharkov-born historian of Russian literature. Turning to Jewish Studies quite late in life, Frizman outlined potentially fruitful areas of research on a number of writers and created an experimental platform that allowed him to test and challenge widely accepted assumptions and arrive at new perspectives on various historical, literary and philosophical issues.

Dalla “Jamesian idea” alla “Jewish idea”:il caso di Trust di Cynthia Ozick

The present paper focuses on Trust , Cynthia Ozick’s first novel. In my reading, the text epitomizes a significant transition, in the novelist’s career, from the “Jamesian idea” to the “Jewish idea”. The “Jamesian idea” can be traced back to what Ozick calls her “youthful intoxication” with James’s work, i.e. an idolatrous worship of his prose, which led her to an unnatural isolation from life in pursuit of a literary achievement that would emulate the Master’s legendary prowess. Ozick saw her mistake when, having decided to educate herself on Jewish theology and philosophy, she became familiar with Leo Baeck’s work. His essay Romantic Religion started her on a path that she would go on to pursue throughout her long career: the exploration of Jewish theology in literary form. Written during the aforementioned self-study period, Trust is characterized by two dimensions: a conspicuous intertextual dialogue with James’s prose, and an equally noticeable emphasis on Jewish themes. In that respect, the novel shows Ozick’s evolution from an “American” writer to a “Jewish writer”.

Sophie Tucker, Racial Hybridity and Interracial Relations in American Vaudeville

This article discusses Sophie Tucker's racialized performance in the context of early twentieth-century American vaudeville and black–Jewish interracial relations. Tucker's vaudeville musical acts involved mixed racial referents: ‘black-style’ music and dance, Jewish themes, Yiddish language and the collaboration of both African American and Jewish artists. I show how these racial combinations were a studied tactic to succeed in white vaudeville, a corporate entertainment industry that capitalized on racialized images and fast changes in characters. From historical records it is clear that Tucker's black signifiers also fostered connections with the African American artists who inspired her work or were employed by her. How these interracial relations contended with Tucker's brand of racialized performance is the focus of the latter part of the article. Here I analyse Tucker's autobiography as a performative act, in order to reveal a reparative effort toward some of her exploitative approaches to black labour and creativity.

“May Your Holy Inspiration Call Me in the Desert”: New Jewish and Baroque Identity in the Poetry of João Pinto Delgado

AbstractThe poetry of João Pinto Delgado, a Portuguese converso, adopted Baroque literary conventions to express the viewpoint of a New Christian demonstrating in Spanish a Jewish identity. This article studies the influence of the Spanish Golden Age on poems that Pinto Delgado published in France in 1627 to show how these works express a “New Jewish,” or heretofore forbidden Jewish voice. By analyzing texts that treat themes from the books of Esther, Lamentations, and Exodus, the article explores how Pinto Delgado communicated Jewish themes, regardless of his ability to live openly as a Jew. Additionally, by comparing his poetry with works of Jorge Manrique, Fray Luis de León, and Luis de Góngora, the article proposes that the Jewish perspective of Pinto Delgado coexisted with a Spanish literary one.

Medieval Sunni historians on Fatimid policy and non-Muslim influence

ABSTRACTModern historians routinely cast the Fatimid era in Egypt and Syria as a time when flourishing non-Muslim communities enjoyed an unusual degree of influence in the state. To complement the theme of this special issue – the real and perceived influence of minority out-groups in medieval societies – this essay examines representations of non-Muslim influence in the Fatimid period by post-Fatimid Sunni authors. Such representations do not reflect pervasive hostility among Sunni historians to Shiʿis or non-Muslims. Instead, they are quite diverse and not pervaded by sectarian antagonism. They are best understood within the contemporary ‘social logic’ of the works that contain them. At times their authors simply transmitted earlier sources intact; at others they had narrative goals that superseded their implicit views of either the Fatimids or their Jewish, Christian and Samaritan subjects.

The Prague Orgy: The Life of Writers in a Totalitarian State According to Philip Roth

This paper deals with the way Philip Roth depicted writers in Czechoslovakia in the 1970s in his novella The Prague Orgy, the final part of the Zuckerman Bound tetralogy. Researchers often read The Prague Orgy in the context of the entire tetralogy and accentuate the contact with Jewish topics. The primary focus of the paper is how Roth views Czech writers and their lives through the eyes of his long-term hero (and fictional alter-ego) Nathan Zuckerman and how he perceives life in a totalitarian state. The Prague Orgy is discussed as a somewhat abstract story about the writer’s freedom and responsibility of their work. There are three types of writers in The Prague Orgy: The émigré (Sisovsky), the dissenter (Bolotka), and the pro-regime (Novak). Each of them, in an interview with Roth’s hero, formulates his attitude to the regime. Zuckerman is fascinated by the life of opposition artists, their experience of freedom (realized in the private sphere), and the social response to their work. Although the reality of life in Czechoslovakia under communism is not the main topic of the novella, the paper concludes that the depiction of life of Czech underground intellectuals interested mostly in sex is in consonance with the picture of Czech dissent in official regime propaganda.

“A Little More Jewish, Please”: Black and Jewish Secularity and Invisibility in Fran Ross’s Oreo

ABSTRACT This article argues for the consideration of Fran Ross’s novel Oreo (1974) within a Jewish American literary tradition given its articulation of black and secular Jewish identity, its recasting of more conventional “shiksa”-oriented exogamy narratives, and its frank depiction of the pressures exerted by white Jewish racism on Jews of color, both in familial and broader societal contexts. The article frames the novel as responding to broad thematic tendencies in prior depictions of simultaneously black and Jewish subjects in American Jewish fiction and journalism, which tended to consider Jews of color as novelties or frauds. The close reading also features a juxtaposition of Oreo’s use of a mezuzah as commenting on gendered aspects of Sammy Davis Jr.’s conversion narrative within his memoir Yes I Can. The article considers anthropological scholarship on nonwhite Jewish identity, analyzing Ross’s literary depiction of the black and Jewish and female body alongside accounts which comment on problematic associations of nonwhite Jewishness with “impossibility.”

Research on the Jewish Community in Polish Social Sciences: Achievements, Perspectives and Scientific Challenges over the Last Two Decades

In my paper, I would like to focus on the achievements of researchers studying the Jewish community and culture in Poland. In recent decades, there have been numerous publications in this area. It must be admitted that most of them are historical works. However, I would like to draw attention to slightly dispersed studies in the field of social sciences (sociology, psychology, pedagogy). Who are the researchers who deal with Jewish themes? What are the common and individual elements of their scientific approaches? Are all of these elements part of the discourse of research on the ‘renaissance of the Jewish community and identity’? I would like to look at the explorations of both researchers connected with the Jewish environment and ‘outsiders’ (including young foreign researchers interested in Polish Jews). The scope of their research is therefore quite diverse and includes issues such as: building Jewish identity and institutional structures; religious life and the activities of religious and secular associations; relations with dominant culture; informal education, Jewish education and family upbringing.

“A Little More Jewish, Please”: Black and Jewish Secularity and Invisibility in Fran Ross’s <em>Oreo</em>

ABSTRACT This article argues for the consideration of Fran Ross’s novel Oreo (1974) within a Jewish American literary tradition given its articulation of black and secular Jewish identity, its recasting of more conventional “shiksa”-oriented exogamy narratives, and its frank depiction of the pressures exerted by white Jewish racism on Jews of color, both in familial and broader societal contexts. The article frames the novel as responding to broad thematic tendencies in prior depictions of simultaneously black and Jewish subjects in American Jewish fiction and journalism, which tended to consider Jews of color as novelties or frauds. The close reading also features a juxtaposition of Oreo’s use of a mezuzah as commenting on gendered aspects of Sammy Davis Jr.’s conversion narrative within his memoir Yes I Can. The article considers anthropological scholarship on nonwhite Jewish identity, analyzing Ross’s literary depiction of the black and Jewish and female body alongside accounts which comment on problematic associations of nonwhite Jewishness with “impossibility.”

Єврейська тема у творчості Дениса Лукіяновича

The article deals with the early works of Denys Lukiyanovych (1873–1965) on Jewish subjects in the aspect of genre-style specificity and in the context of the history of Ukrainian literature of the late 19th – early 20th centuries. The key images and motives of the works, their problems, plot-compositional, linguistic and artistic features, marked by modernity, the tendency to impressionism, combined with a realistic vision of reality, are analyzed. It is proved that D. Lukiyanovych's early prose is characterized by colourful artistic time, multifaceted compositional construction, variety of plot elements (artistic precursions, decorations, etc.), layers of one event to another, and a vivid impressionistic manner. Nevertheless, the writer was able to create a true picture of life with clear realistic features, saturated with elements of naturalism, but not devoid of deep psychological content. Humanism and internationalism, author’s sincere compassion for the ordinary man are manifested in D. Lukiyanovych's literary works. In his early prose some important antipodes emerge, i.e. the «little man» and the «social order», which perhaps most succinctly convey the acute social conflict. Particular attention was also paid to Lukiyanovych's «Jewish people», who exemplify the assertion of high moral qualities that do not depend on nationality, because these traits are inherent by nature. It is the inner, mental reflections that prevail in such authorial images, though there is no complete blurring of the boundaries of the rational and irrational world. Such an interpretation by D. Lukiyanovych of the Jewish theme was a contrast almost to everything written in our literature about Jews before. The original focus is on some human issues: the injustice of power in the treatment of the ordinary man, bureaucracy of the state machine, the class division in a society, often the imbalance of urban lifestyles, which has its own rules, the possibility of discrepancy between the appearance of the individual and his inner consciousness, kindness among people, inability of the followers to enjoy their social rights and freedoms. It is noteworthy that D. Lukiyanovych doesn’t put the problem of the disadvantage of the Jewish people as such at the center of his works, but nevertheless the author focuses more on the «individual» misfortune of each particular person.

Stanley Kubrick: New York Jewish Intellectual by Nathan Abrams

Reviewed by: Stanley Kubrick: New York Jewish Intellectual by Nathan Abrams Nigel Morris (bio) Stanley Kubrick: New York Jewish Intellectual New Brunswick By Nathan Abrams. NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2018. 340 pp. Determining a movie's meaning from its director's biography is a suspect strategy associated with journalism rather than academia. That Steven Spielberg suffered bullying as a teenager, for example, or watched numerous movies on TV because he lacked friends, helps explain his motivation and clarifies themes discernible in his pictures, but hardly accounts for their narrative or cinematic workings, critical or commercial reception, or ability to attract funding initially. An underdog success story endorses the American Dream and enhances a marketable star profile accordingly, yet evades cultural, political, or aesthetic concerns that help determine value. Nathan Abrams instead uses biography and production context to find in Stanley Kubrick's work "Jewish moments" that for most audiences pass as "universal" (16). His account of the director's life, career, and possible meanings of his films systematically "plumbs the depths of Kubrick's Jewishness" (18), which most obituaries ignored. Employing archival research, analyses of Kubrick's films chronologically explore "four key concerns—men, menschlikayt, evil, and Jews/Jewishness" (18). The second and fourth of these may be surprising: Kubrick was not religious, and ostensibly downplayed his heritage. The tripartite subtitle—such arithmetical discourse mirroring logic that Abrams unearths in Kubrick's projects, elucidated according to Kabbalistic principles the book suggests Kubrick was aware of—is key to the enigma. That Kubrick was a native New Yorker is objective fact, yet the director moved to Britain. His intellectualism will be self-evident to any prospective reader. The Jewishness is problematic to the extent that screenwriters Dalton Trumbo and Frederic Raphael, four decades apart, deemed him a Jew-hater. [End Page 196] Abrams shows how Kubrick methodically expunged Jewishness from characters inherited from literary sources, or eliminated them entirely, right up to Eyes Wide Shut (1999). He furthermore enjoyed a long, happy marriage to a German—not merely a former Hitler Youth, but niece of the director of the hate propaganda film Jud Süss, Veit Harlan, whom Kubrick, fascinated by him, met, and whose story he considered filming. Many such revelations are not new. Abrams, however, demonstrates persuasively how Kubrick's contradictions spring from the metropolitan culture—his Columbia University education and subsequent residence in Greenwich Village—that shaped the young artist, and that they informed his entire output. Their working-through confers unity and continuity on otherwise disparate films, mostly adaptations, across various genres. Abrams is a film professor specializing in Jewish topics and representations. For Jewish cultural studies this book might seem to offer an insider's view: note the general absence of italics for Hebrew and Yiddish terms. Particularly distinctive is exegesis consciously influenced by mid-rash, a traditional Judaic inferring of scriptural significance beyond overt meanings. The term appears in the text and index but—an uncharacteristic lapse from Abrams's usual care—remains undefined. Despite this unconventional film studies strategy, Abrams explains everything patiently and engagingly for secular and non-Jewish readers, too. Reclaiming Kubrick's sensibility for Jewish cultural identity, Abrams nevertheless enriches and expands the significance of this most cerebral and influential director's work. Abrams identifies "core elements" (21) in Kubrick's practice: mis-direction and manipulation, derived from his passionate chess playing and early photojournalism, which both routinely involved staging events. Chess and photography, Abrams claims, "were extraordinarily Jewish professions or pastimes" (4)—"even if the public was unaware" (82)—as were jazz, which Kubrick aspired to perform professionally, and boxing, the topic of his first film. These interests, Abrams contends, explicitly evidence Jewish content and sensibility in Kubrick's first three, New York-situated, features before analogy, allegory, and metaphor intervened as intentional misdirection. [End Page 197] Insistence that meaning is other than transparent produces readings that are tentative and speculative, or otherwise bluntly assertive as when "performative and comedic abilities" are "commonly known as Jewish traits" (33). Abrams treads a fine line between ingenious, provocative, illuminating exegesis to which no brief review can do justice, and seeming reinforcement, if not imposition, of stereotypes while simultaneously revealing antisemitic prejudices Kubrick...

Редакторський стиль О. Зілоті: досвід інтерпретації (на матеріалі редакцій творів Йоганна Себастьяна Баха та Моріса Равеля)

The article presents results of research of editorial style of Oleksandr Ziloti are through the prism of own performance experience of author of prosecution of piano treatments of instrumental and vocal works. An organ prelude by Iohann Sebastian Bach and the part of vocal cycle by Maurice Ravel on two Jewish themes of “Kadish” are taken as an example to study. Editing is one of dominant vectors of Oleksandr Ziloti’s activities, because he only carried out writing of clavier of operas “Asleep Beauty” and “Queen of Spades” by Petro Chaikovskyi. Despite the fact that Chaikovskyi did not always agree with all the issues of Ziloti’s work, he highly appreciated the work of his editor, which is also noted in the article. A number of citations are given that substantiate the conclusions about the editorial work of Oleksandr Ziloti. However, the main author for Oleksandr Ziloti to work with is I. S. Bach. The given citations of such creative personalities as A. Rubinstein and A. Ossovsky reveal Oleksandr Ziloti’s attitude to the work of the German maestro not only from the prism of editing, but also from a performing and interpreting point of view. It is investigated the peculiarities of editing of I. S. Bach’s works, which were created at the time of Oleksandr Ziloti’s work in this genre. In addition, in his works he tries to be as close as possible to the original, covering works of different eras, styles, and genres. In view of this, Oleksandr Ziloti’s editions are useful in pedagogical and performing repertoire. That is why it is so important that the transcriptions of the artist take their place of honor on the piano stage.

Jewish themes in the Polish press photography on the example of the „Ilustrowany Kuryer Codzienny”

„Ilustrowany Kuryer Codzienny” (Illustrated Daily Courier – IKC) was issued in the years 1910- 1939 in Krakow; the title was the largest Polish newspaper (up to 400,000 copies) in the interwar period. The newspaper and press company named IKC had its branches in the main Polish cities as well as in some European capitals. Every number was read by approximately 1,000,000 readers. IKC was one of few Polish titles where the Jewish themes were regularly presented, also in photography. Photo-archive of IKC is one of the biggest and most important sources of photographs of Jewish life in the interwar Poland. The aim of the article is to present the most typical and frequent „Jewish” motifs in the Polish press and the answer to the question what was the picture of Jews in Poland presented in the newspaper.

A Jew of a rather peculiar sort: Leonard Woolf, Jewishness, and a public 20th century life

ABSTRACTLeonard Woolf (1880–1969) was a prominent British writer and international relations theorist for the Labour Party. Despite being born Jewish, scholars have long considered Woolf to have abandoned his Jewishness as the price of acceptance into wider English society, particularly the Bloomsbury literary movement with which he is associated. This article offers a different perspective, showing how Woolf constructed an alternative and positive Jewish identity. In particular, this article suggests that Woolf’s criticisms of British cultural practices and his support of international institutions that emerged after World War One were bound up with Jewish themes, ethics, and values.

POLD1 and POLE Gene Mutations in Jewish Cohorts of Early-Onset Colorectal Cancer and of Multiple Colorectal Adenomas.

Germline mutations in the DNA polymerase genes POLD1 and POLE confer high risk for multiple colorectal adenomas and colorectal cancer. However, prevalence and the clinical phenotype of mutation carriers are still not fully characterized. The purpose of this study was to assess the prevalence of germline mutations and to describe the genotype-phenotype correlation in POLD1 and POLE genes in Jewish subjects with multiple colorectal adenomas and/or early-onset mismatch repair proficient colorectal cancers. This study is a comparison of genetic and clinical data from affected and control groups. The study was conducted at a high-volume tertiary referral center. The study cohort included 132 subjects: 68 with multiple colorectal adenomas and 64 with early-onset mismatch repair proficient colorectal cancers. The control group included 5685 individuals having no colorectal cancer or colorectal adenomas. Study and control subjects were tested for POLD1 and POLE mutations and a clinical correlation was assessed. Eleven of the 132 study subjects (8.3%) carried either a POLD1 or a POLE mutation: 7 of 68 (10.3%) subjects with multiple colorectal adenomas and 4 of 64 (6.2%) subjects with early-onset mismatch repair proficient colorectal cancer. Three mutations were detected, showing statistical significance in frequency between study and control groups (p < 0.001). Eight of the 11 mutation carriers were Ashkenazi Jews carrying the same POLD1 mutation (V759I), implicating it as a possible low-to-moderate risk founder mutation. Phenotype of mutation carriers was notable for age under 50 at diagnosis, a propensity toward left-sided colorectal cancer, and extracolonic tumors (64%, 100%, and 27% of cases). The study cohort was limited by its relatively small size. Germline mutations in POLD1 and POLE were found to be relatively frequent in our Jewish cohorts. Further studies are needed to clarify the importance of POLD1 and POLE mutations and to define the most suitable surveillance program for Jewish and other POLD1 and POLE mutation carriers. See Video Abstract at http://links.lww.com/DCR/A658.