Jewish Support Research Articles

Vom innerjüdischen Appell zur öffentlichen Kampagne. Joel Bril Löwes Sendschreiben an die Brüderschaften und der Beerdigungsfristenstreit in Breslau, 1793–1800

Abstract The danger of burying only apparently dead bodies when following the Jewish custom to bury the deceased within a day was a hotly debated topic in the eighteenth century. Joel Bril Löwe participated in this debate with an open letter to the burial brotherhoods of all Jewish communities. The article reconstructs the dispute between the traditionalists, who argued for the Jewish custom of immediate burial, and the modernizers, who argued for its abandonment. Despite Löwe’s efforts to mediate between the fronts and to convince everyone to allow three days until the funeral were not successful, the dispute escalated, particularly in Breslau. In a number of German and Hebrew journals, Jewish supporters of the three-day limit ran campaigns, some of them rather aggressive, which led to the founding of new burial societies and attracted the attention of the Prussian authorities. The practice of early burial could only be brought to an end by state order.

Jews and German Politics: The Case of Habsburg Moravia, 1867–1918

AbstractIn the Austrian province of Moravia, Jews, most of whom spoke German, continued to participate in and support the German political community until the end of the Habsburg monarchy. Unlike in nearby Bohemia, German liberals in Moravia did not abandon the Jews as the franchise expanded and antisemitism grew. Indeed, the German Progressive Party continued to attract voters in the cities of the province and did not resort to antisemitism in order to do so. Although there were only a small number of Jews in the province—just over 40,000—they played a large role among the voters in the urban curia. After the Moravian Compromise of 1905, when German parties no longer had to compete with Czech parties, Jews often formed the majority of all voters for German parties in the small market towns of the largely Czech-speaking south and central part of the province. The perception of the need for Jewish support in elections created a situation in which the German liberals did not turn to antisemitic politics and the Jewish/German liberal alliance remained strong.

Emotions and a Genre of Jewish Politics: American Jewish Advocacy for Israeli-Palestinian Peace, 1967–1977

ABSTRACT: It has long been held that American Jewish support for Israel is underwritten by a prevailing sense of emotional attachment to the Jewish state. Focusing on Jewish activist groups formed in the aftermath of the 1967 war, this article shows that emotions also played a central role in American Jewish mobilization for what is now termed the "two-state solution" to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. An entire "genre" of American Jewish political activism has emerged since 1967 to urge Israel to relinquish captured territories while embracing the Jewish state using emotional terminology. Conforming to a broader emotional regime as a way of staying within the bounds of the constructed American Jewish emotional community, generations of American Jewish activist organizations have emphasized love for Israel while simultaneously pushing for Palestinian self-determination. American Jewish advocates for a two-state solution typically argue that their commitment to a peaceful and stable future for the Jewish state drives them to support the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel. Using oral histories and archival documents, this article offers a new perspective on such activism during its first decade (1967-1977).

“What have 6 million dead people got to do with football?”: How Anglo-Jewish football supporters experience and respond to antisemitism and “banter”

ABSTRACT Life-story interviews with 39 Jewish supporters of a football club whose quasi-Jewish identity is the catalyst for antisemitic abuse were used to explain the under-researched everyday experiences among members of the Anglo-Jewish community. All interviewees said their experiences of antisemitism within English men’s football supporter culture were much worse than in wider society. All interviewees believed references to Hitler and the Holocaust exceeded any threshold of acceptability and that the death of 6 million people should never be associated with football. While denigration of Jewish rituals and practices was offensive and problematic for some, Jewish stereotypes tended to be downplayed, dismissed, or tolerated by most interviewees as part of the “banter” endemic in English supporter culture to lessen or disrupt the impact of the hate speech they endure. These responses indicate complex processes of anger, acceptance and rationalisation as recipients attempt to make sense of and deal with everyday antisemitism.

Hasbara Revisited: Israel, the New Left, and Diaspora Jewry, 1967–1973

Abstract In the years between 1967 and 1973, the younger generation of Diaspora Jewry in the West was torn between its sympathy for the State of Israel and its identification with New Left politics and ideology. In response, Israel conducted a wide-ranging campaign of Hasbara—the Hebrew word for explaining the justice of the Israeli and Zionist cause—to this cohort in order to gain its support. Until now, scholarship on Israeli hasbara has not given any attention to how Israel grappled with the New Left in general and with its Jewish supporters in particular; similarly, studies of the encounter between Jews and the New Left lack any discussion of the role played by Israeli hasbara. This article connects the two, revealing the unknown history of the relationship between Israel, Diaspora Jewry, and the New Left. But it is of more than mere historical interest, as in the last decade Israel has been deeply concerned about leftists and liberals in the West (who today largely term themselves “progressives”), many of them are young Jews who have allied with pro-Palestinian forces, first and foremost the BDS movement. This article offers a possible model that could be used to mobilize these progressive Jews in support of Israel.

Populism and Ethnicity: Peronism and the Jews of Argentina by Raanan Rein

Reviewed by: Populism and Ethnicity: Peronism and the Jews of Argentina by Raanan Rein Mollie Lewis Nouwen Raanan Rein. Populism and Ethnicity: Peronism and the Jews of Argentina. Translated by Isis Sadek. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2020. 296 pp. Raanan Rein’s excellent book combines his deep knowledge of Peronism along with his expertise in both the history of Jews in Argentina and Argentine foreign policy, particularly with Israel. The introduction sets up the premise of the book: whether or not Juan Domingo Perón (president of Argentina from [End Page 227] 1946–1955, 1973–1974) and his administration were antisemitic, and what his government meant for Jews in Argentina. Though the questions might sound simple, or even simplistic, Rein’s ten-point initial response to the questions demonstrates to readers that the answers were complex, nuanced, and led in a myriad of directions. From the beginning, Rein asserts definitively that Perón (contrary to some popular myth-making) was neither a Nazi nor a Fascist, and that he and his administration rejected antisemitism. Perón was a populist, and pulled from a variety of influences to create his pragmatic governing strategy. Trying to neatly fit Perón into an ideological framework obscures the realities and idiosyncrasies of the political movement he created. There were elements of Peronism that were authoritarian, yet others that were profoundly egalitarian. The mistake of many, which Rein points out carefully when analyzing news coverage from around the world, was to impose non-Argentine models to explain Perón’s political movement. The Israeli press, which Rein delves into at length, did a better job of apprehending what was actually occurring in Argentina, though each periodical with its own ideological flavor. Using a wide array of historical documentation, the author explores the heterogeneous nature of Perón’s political philosophy Justicialismo, the Peronist coalition, the response of different Jewish individuals and groups to the Peronist movement and government, and finally the relationship between Argentina and the new State of Israel. Each chapter approaches the book’s central questions from a different perspective. One myth that has persisted for decades is that “all Jews were opposed to Perón [and] that all prestigious or influential intellectuals kept a distance from Peronism” (154). This book clearly demonstrates the fallacy of the myth. Rein spends most of the book exploring the many Jews who were supporters of Perón, including the members of the Organización Israelita Argentina (Argentine Jewish Organization), the Jewish wing of the Peronist Party. The party had a corporatist structure, which sought to formally bring in different groups within society, from labor unions to ethnic groups. Rein argues that in this manner, Perón was opening the door to a multicultural Argentina, with many voices and viewpoints, a model that had not existed in the country before. Rein also explores Jewish intellectuals, media figures, union leaders, and businessmen who were supporters of Peronism, often to the detriment of their relationships with other Jews. What the book makes clear is that each of these men had specific and clear ideological and personal reasons for their support of Peronism. For some, it was the attention to social justice or an independent foreign policy, while others believed in the totality of the Peronist vision for Argentina. Peronism, particularly the first Peronist administration of 1946–1955, promised a new and exciting path forward for Argentina that appealed to many, and it followed through on many of its promises. In addition to the rich material on the Jewish supporters of Peronism, Rein offers an excellent perspective on the relationship between Argentina and Israel at its founding, and the ways that Jews in both countries perceived Peronism. One of the sections of the book that will be of most interest to those less familiar with the story of Argentina in the 1940s and 1950s is the section on Nazis in Argentina, and the role that the Peronist government may or may not have played. Rein ably dissects the many myths and claims about the presence of Nazis, [End Page 228] while demonstrating the complicated nature of the dispersal of former Nazis following World War II. He points out...

Framing Palestinian Rights: A Rhetorical Frame Analysis of Vernacular Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) Movement Discourse

ABSTRACT This essay applies rhetorical framing analysis to vernacular student-created discourse promoting the Palestinian-led boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement and Palestinian rights. The results of this study suggest that pro-BDS student activist-rhetors typically frame the BDS movement as a nonviolent movement to achieve Palestinian rights and hold Israel accountable for an ongoing system of oppression, discrimination, settler colonialism, and apartheid against Palestinians. This framing relies on the values of justice, freedom, equality, and joint struggle—values that strongly overlap with social and racial justice discourses focusing on intersectionality and justice for marginalized and oppressed peoples. In response to the rhetorical ecology for pro-BDS discourse, including counterframing by Israel advocates and the doxa that BDS is antisemitic, pro-BDS activist-rhetors regularly denounce antisemitism, emphasize Jewish support for the BDS movement, and draw comparisons to other struggles for justice and liberation.

When Does It Make Sense to Call Hostility Towards Jews Antisemitism and When Does It Not? A Historical Perspective on Contemporary Debates

When Does It Make Sense to Call Hostility Towards Jews Antisemitism and When Does It Not?A Historical Perspective on Contemporary Debates Steven Beller (bio) Wherever one turns these days, it looks as though the scourge of antisemitism is on the rise. What concerns many people is that, while nationalist antisemitism on the political Right was always something to monitor, the recent jump in antisemitism appears to be coming from the political Left. The Labour Party in Britain seems to be riddled with it, even though for years it was seen as a bastion defending British Jews from antisemitism. Here in the United States the farleft of the Democratic Party, represented by people like Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, are also accused regularly of being antisemitic. Furthermore, there is deep concern among many American Jews and their friends and allies about the support for the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions) movement on college campuses, whose leaders are frequently assailed as being antisemitic because of their opposition to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and for their criticism of Jewish supporters of the Israeli government, as well as for their support of a secular democratic state replacing what is currently Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories. Appearances can, [End Page 115] however, be deceptive. It is debatable whether most, if any, of this behavior and rhetoric is really something that deserves to be called antisemitism. The IHRA "working definition," which is the most well-known definition of antisemitism today that has been adopted by many organizations in Europe, America, and elsewhere, would say that much of the Israel-related rhetoric and behavior on the Left could be antisemitism, depending on the context and the interpretations of the various examples given as a gloss on the IHRA definition. The rather short core IHRA definition is fairly anodyne, but the devil is in the details of the examples, which many of its advocates now assert are part of the definition, even though the phrasing of the IHRA document does not indicate so. It is in these examples that so many interpreters of the IHRA definition have transformed possibility into certainty. By a "hermeneutics of suspicion," what the IHRA definition states could be antisemitic has been turned into something that is definitely antisemitic, or at least merits watching, and exhorting against: hence the condemnation of the Left as hopelessly riddled with antisemitism. Yet this says more about problems with the IHRA working definition and its abuse by so many organizations, including the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) itself, than it does about how prevalent antisemitism is on the Left today. The Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism (JDA), while better in some respects, also has major flaws, and in both cases the reason is the confused, often self-contradictory ways in which antisemitism is defined, especially when it comes to attitudes toward Israel and Zionism. A word like "antisemitism" should not be bandied about carelessly and without thorough consideration. It is far too emotive, and even explosive, a term to be as irresponsibly handled as it has been of late in politics and the press, on both sides of the Atlantic. What follows are some observations based on the history of the term and of, indeed, the phenomenon, political movement, and ideology that attempt to explain why it should be handled with much more care. [End Page 116] At the beginning of my book Antisemitism: A Very Short Introduction, I discuss the vagaries involved in talking about antisemitism, even when trying to define it. Part of the argument in this book was that using the term "antisemitism" to simply mean hostility to, or hatred of, Jews did not get us very far in understanding the phenomenon. This is because antisemitism was not just some psychological state of mind, but a modern ideology and political movement based on modern cultural, economic, and social resentments, with its own modern logic and worldview, which had major consequences in the Holocaust. As such, modern antisemitism—the antisemitism that we should all condemn without reserve—differs in crucial respects from what so many call antisemitism when they want to describe something somewhat different that would be more accurately termed Jew...

Silent or Outspoken? Re-Examining French Jewish Responses to the Dreyfus Affair

Historians of the Dreyfus Affair have long argued over the response of French Jews to the wrongful arrest of their coreligionist, French army captain Alfred Dreyfus, on charges of treason in 1894. While early historiographies focused on Jewish silence and passivity, more recent works have claimed to reveal a Jewish outspokenness. This article attempts to resolve this dissonance by showing that the Jewish response to the Dreyfus Affair is best understood in two phases: an early phase from 1894–1897 and a late phase from 1898–1906. During the early phase, silence prevailed among French Jews who feared confronting a powerful antisemitism driven largely by the Catholic Church. Bernard Lazare, one of the only French Jewish intellectuals to rise in Dreyfus's defense, revealed the role of antisemitism in the Affair during this period by pointing to its religious underpinnings. During the late phase of the Affair beginning in 1898, as more Frenchmen joined the Dreyfusard cause, French Jews were more comfortable being outspoken in defense of Dreyfus and in opposition to antisemitism. This is clearly documented in articles published in the two largest Jewish periodicals in France, the religiously liberal Les Archives Israélites de France and the religiously conservative L'Univers Israélite. Even though anti-clericalism was not the fundamental rationale for Jewish support for Dreyfus, Jews engaged with the clerical/anti-clerical debate at this time, pushing the community in a more anti-clerical direction and strengthening its faith in republican ideals.

Solidarity as an Emotion: American Jews and Israel in 1948

American Jewish support for Israel during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War was in part the result of an emotional mobilization. American Jewish fundraisers constructed an extensive public-relations apparatus and formulated strategies for honoring supporters and shaming shirkers. They, along with journalists for the Jewish press, interpreted events through the lens of information provided by the newly formed Israeli government. Fundraising, however, could succeed only by responding to donors’ emotional proclivities, and expressions of solidarity with Israel in Jewish media were laterally reinforcing as well as shaped from the top down. These findings underscore the role of positive emotions in generating “groupness.”

Jewish People in the German Far-Right: How AfD is Pandering to Jews to Gain Legitimacy

Despite the consistent rise of anti-Semitic attacks, Jewish people from across Germany are joining the far-right Alternative für Deutschland political party in increasing numbers. In 2018 a group of nineteen Jewish AfD members formed the JAfD, the Jewish division of the party, reflecting just how much Jewish support for the AfD is growing even as national and global Jewish organizations have branded the AfD as anti-Semitic. This growth comes as a shock considering incidents like AfD politician Wolfgang Gedeon’s denial of the Holocaust and accusations that numerous AfD politicians encourage extremist behavior. This paper examines the AfD’s official policy statements to understand how Jewish-Germans can merge their political beliefs with the AfD’s German nationalist position. This paper argues that the AfD has deliberately re-structured its platform to appeal to a Jewish base, which enables party heads to challenge allegations of extremism in a bid to gain mainstream legitimacy.

“No Palestinian House Is Without Tears”

Abstract This article argues that as American Jewish support for Israel wanes American Jews need a new Jewish ethical framework in which to understand the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It extends the discourse beyond a Jewish narrative and examines the values of empathy and responsibility toward Palestinians, as well as the importance of recognizing historical injustices perpetrated by Israel. This article draws on the work of scholars and discusses their ideas in conjunction with the author's experiences as a congregational rabbi. It evaluates the dual-narrative approach and then focuses on the work of Bashir Bashir and Amos Goldberg to explore how narratives such as me-shoah le-tekumah, from the destruction of the Holocaust to the rebirth of Israel, can lead American Jews to view the Palestinian experience as entirely separate from their own.

“No Palestinian House Is Without Tears”: Disrupting American Jewish Narratives of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

Abstract This article argues that as American Jewish support for Israel wanes American Jews need a new Jewish ethical framework in which to understand the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It extends the discourse beyond a Jewish narrative and examines the values of empathy and responsibility toward Palestinians, as well as the importance of recognizing historical injustices perpetrated by Israel. This article draws on the work of scholars and discusses their ideas in conjunction with the author's experiences as a congregational rabbi. It evaluates the dual-narrative approach and then focuses on the work of Bashir Bashir and Amos Goldberg to explore how narratives such as me-shoah le-tekumah, from the destruction of the Holocaust to the rebirth of Israel, can lead American Jews to view the Palestinian experience as entirely separate from their own.

Markus Barth

Abstract Like that of his father, Markus Barth’s work can be appreciated as a tireless effort to exegetically reorder Jewish-Christian relations. Even so, Barth’s writings on the Jews leave little doubt that he is vexed by a certain strain of Jewish support for Israel. More important, Barth’s writings about post-1967 Israel put his own discourse about the brotherhood of Christians and Jews into crisis. This essay will attempt to offer a working solution to this problem that can help followers of Markus Barth’s ideas continue to engage in productive and meaningful Jewish-Christian conversation.

Judaism, Pluralism & Public Reason

Central values of Judaism and the historical experience of Jews are sources of strong Jewish support for democracy, especially in the United States, where Jews did not have to wait for citizenship and rights to be conferred on them – and possibly withdrawn. Judaism is strongly committed to the political order in the United States and to the pluralistic, dynamic civil society it helps make possible. Jews have the freedoms that others have, and those freedoms resonate with fundamental Jewish values in ways that matter even to nonpracticing Jews. Moreover, there are reasons to regard the Constitution's nonestablishment neutrality as comparing very favorably with a notion of public reason as a political approach to the question of state and church relations. Neutrality does not impose upon or require bracketing of individuals' constitutive commitments and their conceptions of what matters most integrally to them. Public reason is vulnerable to that troubling possibility.

The Israel Question after Trump—and Before

ABSTRACT The new Jew-hatred of the Trump era, and reactions to it, seem hopelessly snarled with feelings for or against Israel. The tight association of Jewishness with Zionism is not an automatic or “natural” consequence of ineluctable historical facts, but rather a product of historical acts by many Americans, prominently including American Jews. Throughout the decades following the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, American Jewish supporters of Israel worked consciously to establish the very conflation between Zionism and Jewish identity in the United States that now sometimes appears toxic. After the 1967 war, American Jewish forces across most of the ideological spectrum supported Israel’s retention of the Occupied Territories, particularly East Jerusalem, and the Democratic and Republican Parties ultimately embraced that stance by calling for the relocation of the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. Therefore, the Trump administration’s decision to move the embassy to Jerusalem, far from a sharp break with mainstream American and Jewish politics, followed a long political process that made it seem, to many Americans, that supporting Israel without stint equaled pro-Jewishness.

Black Power, Jewish Politics: Reinventing the Alliance in the 1960s

Marc Dollinger's well-written and provocative work provides an innovative interpretation of the mythic story of the alliance between Jews and blacks forged over the twentieth century and rent asunder in the post–civil rights era as a result of the rise of black power. Historians have long studied that alliance, and have generally agreed on its outlines. Jews, in becoming part of the white majority, imagined themselves to have a special relationship to African Americans based on their similar histories of victimization and Jewish support for civil rights causes. African Americans, meanwhile, saw Jewish support as inspiring but also patronizing. Dollinger does not challenge those ideas, but brings key insights that illuminate how Jews understood and benefited from the demise of the relationship when Jewish and black interests diverged publicly, primarily over Zionism and affirmative action in the late 1970s. He argues convincingly that the role of black power in this process has not been adequately examined by historians. Black power was a positive force, according to Dollinger, paving the way for Jews (and a wide variety of other identity groups) to assert their own values and self-determination in American society. Rather than heralding the end of the imagined black-Jewish alliance, black power created the opportunity for Jews to be part of a new pluralism that ushered in a rebirth of American Jewish life: the creation of Jewish studies in universities, havurot and new Jewish rituals, liberal day schools, social activism around Israel and Soviet Jewry, and Jewish feminism. As Dollinger persuasively argues, black power, rather than being “bad for the Jews” was “good for the Jews.”

At the Intersection of Political Science and Social History

At the Intersection of Political Science and Social History Anna Cichopek-Gajraj (bio) In his important book Ordinary Jews: Choice and Survival during the Holocaust, Evgeny Finkel shifts the analytical focus from the behavior of perpetrators to that of their victims. He asks why did “individual Jews choose particular behavioral strategies, and why does the distribution of these strategies vary across localities?”1 Building on existing historiography, Finkel proposes the following revised typology of victim strategies: (a) cooperation and collaboration, (b) coping and compliance, (c) evasion, and (d) resistance. He then uses nearly 500 Holocaust survivor testimonies to test this typology across three ghettos in Minsk, Białystok, and Kraków. He arrives at several important conclusions. He argues that the factors that shaped the Jewish victims’ choices were “the patterns and contents of their political activism, the type and intensity of the repression they experienced, the degree of their integration into non-Jewish society, and the ethnic composition of their social networks.”2 More specifically, “Jews who were politically active before World War II were substantially more likely to choose cooperation, public collaboration, or resistance than those who were not.”3 He further shows that “compliance was the strategy of a tiny minority; the majority’s choices fell between coping and evasion. … [P]eople who were more integrated into non-Jewish society were more likely to choose evasion. Those who occupied a predominantly Jewish social milieu and had Jewish support networks were more likely to opt for coping.”4 More broadly, Finkel argues that Jewish behavior was primarily shaped by one crucial variable: “pre-Holocaust political regimes,” especially “states’ policies that promoted or discouraged the Jews’ integration into non-Jewish society and patterns of state repression of independent political activism.”5 The role of the state in forging or hindering Jewish assimilation and political activism has long been the subject of Jewish [End Page 214] studies, especially in the European and East European context. What is novel about Finkel’s work is his comparative analysis of three cities under different regimes (the Hapsburg and Russian empires, the prewar Polish Republic, and Soviet rule), which enables him to make a highly focused study of the impact of the state on the behavior of the selected populations. However, when he tries to extrapolate his findings from the three cities to the more than 1,100 ghettos in the USSR and the east and “rest” of Poland, his analysis comes up short. He offers a simplified model (based on a limited quantitative analysis of the Jewish uprisings and electoral politics), which does not account for local particularities or “potential alternative explanations,” as the author himself admits.6 In his quest for a pattern “beyond the three ghettos,” Finkel loses his greatest strength: his extraordinary attention to local context. His brilliance lies in an interdisciplinary approach in which he successfully marries historical analyses of the local with social-scientific methodological rigor and extensive qualitative data for the three cities under study. Indeed, his book exemplifies the best traditions of interdisciplinary research and shows beyond any doubt the value of speaking across disciplines in our attempt to understand society in times of mass violence. Trained in political science, Finkel also shows comfort in social and oral historical methodologies. In his words, his analysis is an attempt to “bridge historical studies of the Holocaust and the social science literature on mass violence.”7 His writing demonstrates a sensibility in both fields. When he admits that his patterns are inevitably generalized—but with as much fine-grain as possible—he addresses a potential critique from historians who are notoriously suspicious of the typologies and structures of social science seen as generalizations that often obscure context, difference, and change. His claim of the importance of context (the prewar conditions) is obviously addressed to political scientists, since no historian would dispute that “[t]he past—both of people and their communities—must be taken seriously if we want to know how and why they [survivors] chose particular behaviors.”8 To effectively bridge both disciplines, Finkel uses a rigorous comparative approach. His comparison of Minsk, Białystok, and Kraków [End Page 215] is masterful. In my own work...

1967: An Elegy of Conquest

1967: An Elegy of Conquest Seth Anziska Shortly after Israel's lightning victory in the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, the leading Jewish philosopher and Israeli public intellectual Yeshayahu Leibowitz published his reflections on the territorial conquests that had brought the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, East Jerusalem, the Sinai Peninsula, and the Golan Heights under the state's control. Our real problem is not the territory but rather the population of about a million and a half Arabs who live in it and over whom we must rule. Inclusion of these Arabs (in addition to the half a million who are citizens of the state) in the area under our rule will effect the liquidation of the state of Israel as the state of the Jewish people and bring about a catastrophe for the Jewish people as a whole; it will undermine the social structure that we have created in the state and cause the corruption of individuals, both Jew and Arab … In a short time the spiritual and emotional links between it and world Jewry would be severed, as well as the cultural and sentimental ties to the historical tradition of the Jewish people and to Judaism. The only concern of the monstrosity called "the undivided land of Israel" would be the maintenance of its system of rule and administration.1 Leibowitz was attacked at the time for his scathing indictment, which was written in Hebrew and directed at an Israeli public that the philosopher felt had not reckoned with the consequences of the war. His sentiments did not fit well with the explosion of nationalist fervor, from the redemptive messianism of the religious right to more earthly outpourings of support for expanded state lines among secular kibbutz members and Labor party stalwarts of the left. Whether in the name of security or [End Page 536] national rights, God or Bible, a large swath of Israeli society and Jewish supporters abroad embraced Israel's expansion. Prophets of doom and their dissenting voices were unwelcome guests at this celebratory gathering.2 More than fifty years have passed, and Leibowitz sounds less like a gadfly or crank and more a diagnostician of the present reality. Revisiting his writings on the anniversary of 1967 raises the question of that fateful year's impact on Israel, on Palestinians and the wider Arab world, and finally on modern Jewish politics. Unlike the 1948 war, which enabled Israel to achieve internationally recognized borders along the armistice lines, the 1967 victory set in motion the slow erosion of state boundaries.3 In the wake of the war, a fierce debate broke out in the Israeli cabinet about the future of the newly occupied territories and how to manage the Palestinian population under direct state control. As meticulous historical research reveals, the government of Levi Eshkol made a "decision not to decide" on the fate of the territories, preferring indefinite control over the land without conferring rights on the inhabitants who lived there.4 This "temporary" state of indecision became a model for permanence, leading to one of the longest military occupations of the twentieth century.5 An entirely new legal and bureaucratic apparatus was set in place [End Page 537] to sustain this occupation, deferring any reckoning with the political rights of the captive population.6 Alongside the deprivation of rights came the extension of Jewish sovereignty through the building of settlements in the occupied territories, a project that began under the Labor government of Eshkol and expanded dramatically under the Likud-led coalitions of Menachem Begin and his chief builder, Ariel Sharon.7 The accompanying transformation of Israeli society, from the birth of Gush Emunim (Bloc of the Faithful) to the influx of American Jewish settlers, led to the normalization of settlement life and the accompanying evisceration of the contiguous Palestinian territory itself.8 Beyond the daily indignities of life under such occupation, Palestinians have had to confront the deeper existential consequences of prolonged statelessness. The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which was founded in 1964, was given new life in the aftermath of the war, as nationalist Palestinian leaders seized the struggle away from regional power brokers.9 A gradual abandonment of armed...

“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.