Jewish Subjects Research Articles

Leon Kojen: “Son of the Serbian Nation”

Leon Kojen: “Son of the Serbian Nation”* Nenad Makuljević Artists’ relationships with contemporary social movements, government institutions, or national ideas shape their thematic repertoire and determined exhibition policies and public engagement. This was particularly evident during turbulent political times and in regions that experienced multinational conflict. The activities of Leon Kojen (1859–1934) provide a clear example of the relationship of the artist to society and the State. Kojen was a well-known Jewish painter from Serbia who in his work incorporated Jewish themes, while also expressing a commitment to the idea of the Serbian state. In scholarship to date, this has not been addressed even though it is of particular importance to better understand the art of Leon Kojen and Serbian culture at the turn of the last century. Leon Kojen was one of the most prominent Serbian artists of the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century (see Figure 1).1 He was born in 1859 into an old Belgrade Jewish family, in the Jewish quarter of Belgrade, Jalija. According to the preserved oral tradition, the family of Leon Kojen, some of whom were rabbis, settled in Belgrade as early as the 17th century. Leon was born into a large family and was particularly close to his brother David, who was a lawyer (see Figure 2). Even though it was predetermined in his family that he would be a tailor, Leon in his youth decided to pursue the study of painting. In Belgrade he received instruction in the fundamentals of painting from two prominent artists, Stevan Todorović and Djoka Milovanović. [End Page 117] During these lessons, he also expanded his knowledge of the world of art and poetry. As there was no fine arts academy in Belgrade, Kojen, like other Serbian artists, went abroad. He decided to hone his painting skills in the capital of Bavaria—Munich. Munich at that time was one of the most significant Central European cultural centers with a rich artistic tradition and a very reputable Academy of Fine Arts. He enrolled in 1882. Along with his studies he engaged in the artistic life of the city. He participated in international exhibitions held in the Glaspalast (Glass Palace), and exhibited with the members of the artists’ group, Phalanx, led by Wassily Kandinsky. Kojen became ill in Munich and so returned to Belgrade after the First World War. He died on 15 May 1934 and was buried in the city’s Jewish cemetery. Even though the greatest portion of his artistic effort and most significant works were created in Munich, Leon Kojen remained tightly bound to the Kingdom of Serbia and to Belgrade. In Belgrade and Serbia during the second half of the 19th century tolerance toward the Jewish community was well established. Having grown up in this atmosphere of tolerance, Leon Kojen and his brother David considered themselves to be both Serbian citizens and Serbian patriots. They were interested in the current and national political problems of Serbia, and David even participated in political life. During the First World War David fought and died as a soldier of the Serbian army. While receiving instruction in painting, Leon Kojen was initially helped by prominent members of the Jewish community in Belgrade. They introduced him to Jewish benefactors in Munich, but he chose not to pursue this type of support. Instead, eventually he turned to the government of the Kingdom of Serbia for financial assistance and received a stipend. In his 1884 petition for a stipend, he underscored that he was writing to the Minister of Education and Religious Affairs “as a son of the Serbian nation, desiring to one day be of use to her through his work in the field of art…”2 Even though Kojen did not return to Serbia at this time, while in Munich he still made a significant contribution to Serbian artistic life, and in this way he fulfilled the patriotic promise he had made in his 1884 stipend petition. In 1898 Kojen had an exhibition in the halls of Belgrade’s National Assembly. The exhibition drew the attention of foreign critics and was reported in the Serbian press. The critic writing in Brankovo Kolo emphasized...

It’s the Occupation, Stupid!

It’s the Occupation, Stupid!

O teatro judaico na língua ídiche na crítica teatral de L. S. Vygótski

O artigo tem por objetivo apresentar alguns aspectos da formação de um teatro judaico de língua ídiche na Rússia, seus desafios e principais características, para, em seguida, comentar uma série de resenhas escritas por L. S. Vygótski (1896-1934) acerca das apresentações da companhia de teatro dirigida por Menachem Rubin, as quais tiveram lugar na cidade de Gomel (atual Bielorrússia), no ano de 1923. As resenhas acompanham as inovações trazidas pelo teatro judaico no contexto das vanguardas russas, mas também seus paradoxos e inconsistências. O olhar sobre a produção da província revela, ainda, as diferenças em relação ao que se faz nas grandes capitais. Por fim, as resenhas trazem à tona a ligação de Vygótski com tradições e temas judaicos, aspecto frequentemente negligenciado de sua biografia e que só recentemente tem recebido maior atenção.

Deflationary tactics with the archive of life: contemporary Jewish art and popular culture

ABSTRACTThis paper discusses art works by Suzanne Treister, Deborah Kass and Doug Fishbone. It considers the importance of their work for contemporary Jewish identity within the terms of wider conceptual questions that preoccupy contemporary art. These concerns are challenging the perceived structures of power, the “performance” of subjectivity and the questioning of authenticity. A deflationary aesthetic is central to the critique of these structures of thinking fuelled by an interest in the relationship between Jewish subjectivity and popular culture that underpins all of these art works. I argue that popular culture plays a key role as a constituting factor in the production of contemporary Anglophone subjectivity. I use the case studies to develop the argument in the three artists’ specificities and the way they all question the idea of authenticity as a stable source of self-understanding. Suzanne Treister questions history and our relationship with historical events, specifically the Holocaust. She also explores questions of the relationship between structures of power and narratives of history. Debora Kass considers the representation of Jewish women, power and iconicity. Doug Fishbone, a younger artist, takes on self-hate as a transformative tool and as a motif that destabilizes Jewishness as a category, especially in an age of the accelerated post-internet-derived subjectivity.

Maximalism as a Cosmopolitan strategy in the art of Ruth Novaczek and Doug Fishbone

This article looks at the work of the experimental filmmaker Ruth Novaczek and the artist Doug Fishbone to think through the relationship between the cosmopolitan imagination, Jewishness and the visual arts. The author suggests through her analysis of their artwork that both artists proffer a cosmopolitan subject that arises out of their Jewish subjectivity. The author does this in different ways, discussing the artworks both in their various forms as well as the subject matter within the films. The author thinks through two recent publications on the cosmopolitan and art by Marsha Merskimmon and Nikos Papastergiadis to discuss what is at stake in the cosmopolitan in relation to the two artist case studies. Central to her argument is a maximalist tendency that goes against the usual current paradigmatic trend of the ‘long look’ that was first articulated by the influential André Bazin as more real than the dialectical editing techniques argued (and performed) by Sergei Eisenstein. But neither is she arguing for a return to Eisenstein. Maximalism, as offered by the work of these artists, signifies an excessive overloading that allows the viewer to insert themselves into the narrative of the work through the editing, the collage and in the density of the range of the material. Finally, the author brings the formal discussion into dialogue with the explicit meaning developed by the artwork. Each of these artists proffer an unstable subject that is profoundly formed out of their Jewish and Diasporic subjectivity. This arises not just out of the formal structural scaffolding of the work but in terms of the subject matter within the work. They both explicitly use Jewish cultural references as normative navigational tools in the work and as a way of forming their cultural worlds. These references range from dialogues of Jewish characters in cinema, to Jewish jokes and use of Yiddish or Hebrew. Importantly Jewish religion or ritual is absent. For both of these artists the Holocaust is a backdrop but not as way to valorise a victim status, but as a way to reach out to a wider humanity and to understand its legacies. This is done through multi-positionality and the questioning of what a ‘home’ might be outside of an attachment to a nation-state or a singular geographic location and embracing that estrangement. In sum, the author argues that the work offers a reiterative provisionality as a refusal to judge or to know the world; instead there is an attempt to incorporate its complexities and range into the vision of the work, challenging the viewer to identify what is at stake in the work and in the subject.

Dante and Islam. Edited by Jan M. Ziolkowski. New York: Fordham University Press, 2015. Pp. viii+372.

<i>Dante and Islam</i>. Edited by Jan M. Ziolkowski. New York: Fordham University Press, 2015. Pp. viii+372.

The “Former Sun” in the Sidereal Clock: The Kabbalistic Heavens and Time in The Spanish Gypsy and Daniel Deronda

In both her epic poem The Spanish Gypsy and her final novel Daniel Deronda, Eliot drew upon kabbalistic concepts of the heavens through the characters of Jewish mystics. In the later novel, Eliot moved the mystic, Mordecai, from the narrative's periphery to its center. This change, symbolically equated within the novel to a shift from geocentricism to heliocentrism, affects time in Daniel Deronda both in terms of plot and historical focus. Not only does time slow as Mordecai assumes a central role, the astral imagery begins to draw upon a medieval past when Jewish thinkers explored interdisciplinary concepts of the heavens. This essay argues for the centrality of the astronomical imagery in relation to the Jewish themes of Daniel Deronda and shows through its analysis of The Spanish Gypsy how Eliot employed kabbalistic ideas of the skies in an attempt to create a new vision of star-crossed love for literature.

Hugo Kauder's unexpressed philosophical concept: Schelling's transcendence, Nietzsche's visions and Buber's Israel

ABSTRACTHugo Kauder, born in 1888 near Prague, composer, instrumentalist, theoretician and music-philosopher, came to Vienna in 1905, left Austria after the Novemberpogrom 1938 and reached New York via the Netherlands and England in 1940. In 1938 Tel Aviv was also one of his intended havens (parts of Kauder's estate are kept at the National Library of Israel, Jerusalem). Engaged in the crisis discourse in Vienna's postwar period of the early 1920s, Kauder drafted his philosophical ideas under the influence of Friedrich Schelling and Friedrich Nietzsche, also speculating on music-teleology, mysticism and cosmology. Corresponding with the German philosopher Rudolf Pannwitz, with the authors Karl Wolfskehl and Erich von Kahler, Kauder expressed his Jewishness – much more as a mindset than an active Jewish identity. Coming from a system of transcendental and natural philosophy combined with Christian ideas, Kauder moved to a more complex syncretism also reflecting on Jewish topics. Kauder did not organize his ideas into a concept, they are, rather, the theoretical framework of his educational books and are widespread in his essays and letters.

Guest Editors’ Introduction

Guest Editors’ Introduction

A New Language of Equality: Jews and the State in Nineteenth-Century Morocco

In the late nineteenth century, the Moroccan government’s concern for its image abroad ushered in a new approach to understanding Jews’ rights. Although the sultans never abandoned the dhimma contract in favour of religious egalitarianism, government officials increasingly adopted a new language of equality to describe how Jewish subjects should be treated. This language of equality borrowed vocabulary from Western notions of tolerance, but did not fundamentally conflict with Islamic ideals of justice. Mawlāy Ḥasan (reigned 1873–1894) refused to declare that Jews and Muslims were equal, but he increasingly insisted that Jews and Muslims must be treated equally before the law. Jews trod a similarly fine line, between pushing the envelope of their legal rights as dhimmīs and affirming their status as the personal protégés of the sultan. Through an examination of correspondence among Moroccan government officials, Jews and foreign diplomats, this article locates the shifting relationship between the state and its Jewish subjects in the language which the Makhzan used to define justice.

Teaching the Historical Jesus: Issues and Exegesis ed. by Zev Garber

Reviewed by: Teaching the Historical Jesus: Issues and Exegesis ed. by Zev Garber Drew W. Billings Teaching the Historical Jesus: Issues and Exegesis Edited by Zev Garber. New York: Routledge, 2015. 273 pp. Zev Garber draws together an exceptional group of twenty scholars, who, in turn, contribute essays on the benefits, challenges, and issues pertaining to teaching the historical Jesus in introductory college classes. The enriching conversation Garber facilitates includes a broad range of topics with a special emphasis on the pedagogical implications of stressing the Jewish context and identity of the historical Jesus. How Jesus figures into the contributors’ teaching provides the focus of the majority of essays, complimented by extended descriptions of their institutions’ religious or nonreligious affiliations, student characteristics and demographics, and curricular structures. What emerges is a refreshing compendium of perspectives on how Jesus provides an effective portal for a broad array of learning opportunities, while simultaneously provoking certain pedagogical challenges. The book is remarkable for the rich array of contributing scholars, for the diversity of perspectives they represent, and the spectrum of academic contexts in which they teach. They work in diverse educational institutions, not only research and liberal arts universities, but also Jewish, Christian, and denominationally unaffiliated institutions. Each contributor focuses on how the teaching-learning exchange that takes place in their own classrooms is both challenged and benefited by curriculum that focuses on the historical Jesus. As such, the scholars who contribute are not necessarily leading voices in historical Jesus research (though there are exceptions), but rather, exemplary academics who treat the ethics, science, and art of teaching with the utmost importance. Drawing on over four decades of experience teaching in the context of a Judaic Studies Program, Garber insists that “no one contemporary manifesto can be superimposed on the Jesus learning exchange.” Garber argues that the Jewishness of Jesus is a prominent feature of quests for the historical Jesus, and provides a sufficient entry point for exploring Jewish topics in the classroom. This stands in opposition to some of the more traditional ways Jesus has been discussed in the classroom, specifically as the “Christ of faith” who is often invoked to highlight anti-Jewish and antisemitic sentiments, similar to what one might encounter in age-old Good Friday sermons. According to Garber, teaching the historical Jesus provides a prime opportunity for Jews and Christians to explore Jewish beliefs and practices in the context of both Second Temple [End Page 110] Judaism and Judea under Rome. Garber’s article includes a description of his own teaching context at a two-year community college in Los Angeles, which apparently provides an ample number of opportunities to discuss the historical Jesus with students. His own view of the Jesus of history is as a “proto-pharisaic rabbi-nationalist closely aligned with the anti-Roman zealot insurrection,” which regularly provokes student discussions and debates given the controversial nature of the view. Garber stages an engaging conversation and stands out as a leading voice in resisting age-old prejudices and in seeking to forge a new path. Rochelle Millen reflects on growing up in a Jewish home that was subject to both positive and negative impressions of Christians. Millen acknowledges that any education she received about Christianity before college was largely in opposition to Judaism. Conversely, the students Millen now teaches at a university affiliated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America bring with them misconceptions of Judaism that were largely taught in opposition to Christianity. These myths and misconceptions are epitomized in students’ misunderstandings of Jesus. As Millen argues, “Were I to encapsulate the central misconception about Jesus in the undergraduate classroom, I would say it is that Jesus was a Christian who opposed the Judaism of his time and bettered its alleged narrowness, turning particular—often supposedly legalistic—practices into universal principles of love. Jesus was a feminist, while first-century Judaism was anti-woman. The God of Judaism is the God of wrath—vindictive and angry—while the God of Jesus is overflowing with love. These myths pervade the consciousness of Christian young adults (and many older ones as well), leading not only to a superficial understanding of their...

Exilio y cosmopolitismo en el arte y la literatura hispánica ed. by Araceli Tinajero (review)

Reviewed by: Exilio y cosmopolitismo en el arte y la literatura hispánica ed. by Araceli Tinajero Roberto Rey Agudo Tinajero, Araceli, ed. Exilio y cosmopolitismo en el arte y la literatura hispánica. Madrid: Verbum, 2013. Pp. 227. ISBN 978-8-47962-850-5. Hispanicists will find in Araceli Tinajero’s Exilio y cosmopolitismo en el arte y la literatura hispánica a useful addition to the study of exile in Latin American Studies. One of the book’s strengths is drawing on disciplines like sociology, art history, film studies, and literature. Its ten essays offer a heterogeneous sampling of exile studies across Mexico, Spain, Cuba, Uruguay, Costa Rica, Chile, and Venezuela. Another important contribution is focusing on seldom explored representations of exile and diaspora (e.g., Cuba as a refugee destination or the Venezuelan exile under Chávez), and choosing less familiar texts and films to discuss better-known episodes in contemporary Spanish and Latin American history. The most insightful moments come in close readings and analyses of particular texts, films, and paintings. However, the quality of the chapters is somewhat uneven. Given that concepts like exile and diaspora are of great interest in contemporary theory and criticism, it would have been interesting to find more of the authors of [End Page 836] these chapters in dialogue with the critical literature on exile beyond the scope of each chapter. As a result, there is very little overlap in the bibliography on exile between chapters. Other than Said’s Reflections on Exile, cited in three chapters, few critical studies on exile are cited. Notable absences in the bibliography include Chinua Achebe, Terry Eagleton, Nico Israel, Michael Seidel or Kobena Mercer, and, surprisingly, Claudio Guillén. With the exception of the introduction, and the first and ninth chapters, which have only footnotes, all chapters include a bibliography at the end. With that being stated, Araceli Tinajero’s introduction makes a convincing case that most of the contemporary Latin American canon has been written in exile or deals with exile in one way or another. This section would have been a good place to frame the subsequent chapters in the wider critical examination of exile. Martínez-Assad’s thesis in the first chapter, supported by demographic data and his detailed, street-by-street account of how successive waves of foreigners settled in Mexico City, is that foreign contributions to Mexican culture are qualitatively high considering how many fewer foreigners Mexico attracted compared to the United States, Brazil, or Argentina. In the following chapter, Lemus argues that Martín Luis Guzmán’s ideas about the role of the intellectual in the construction of national identity in post-Revolutionary Mexico took shape during his exile in New York (1916–19), as seen in his personal letters and the collection A orillas del Hudson. Chapter 3 summarizes four unpublished testimonies of exiles in Monterrey. The chapter includes some inaccuracies (the term “niños de la guerra” was definitely in use before 2005) and would have benefited from a more analytical perspective. The source texts seem underutilized either as memory texts or as literary artifacts. Chapter 4 traces the lineage of the imagery of Jewish diaspora in four Latin American artists: the transatlantic crossing in Víctor Manuel’s Olvidados, the iconography of Jewish persecution by the Inquisition in Frida Kahlo’s Sin esperanza and Diego Rivera’s Sueño de una tarde dominical en la Alameda Central, and José Gurvich’s use of Jewish themes after moving from Uruguay to Israel and finally to New York. Remba’s comparative analysis of the imagery of Alfred Stieglitz’s iconic photo The Steerage (1907) and Víctor Manuel’s Olvidados (depicting the diplomatic crisis of the SS. St Louis, whose Jewish refugees were denied asylum by Cuba in 1939) is one of the highlights in the book. Chapter 5 explores the double sense of alienation felt by exiles in their countries of origin and destination through a close reading of Francisco Ayala’s “El regreso.” Suárez-Galbán Guerra argues that the many layers of meaning in the story—biblical allusions to Cain and Abel, suppressed homoerotic desire, incest, revenge—insinuate the violence...

Research on Michael Chabon and His Jewish Narration

The article discusses the research of Michael Chabon from home and abroad, which is mainly from three aspects. That is the author himself, the genres of the fictions and Jewish ethnic, Jewish identity, the difficulty. It also introduces his famous work “ The Yiddish Policemen’s Union ” from the perspective of Jewish themes.

Teaching the historical Jesus: issues and exegesis

TEACHING THE HISTORICAL JESUS: ISSUES AND EXEGESIS Edited by Zev Garber. New York: Routledge, 2015. 273 pp.Zev Garber draws together an exceptional group of twenty scholars, who, in turn, contribute essays on the benefits, challenges, and issues pertaining to teaching the historical Jesus in introductory college classes. The enriching conversation Garber facilitates includes a broad range of topics with a special emphasis on the pedagogical implications of stressing the Jewish context and identity of the historical Jesus. How Jesus figures into the contributors' teaching provides the focus of the majority of essays, complimented by extended descriptions of their institutions' religious or nonreligious affiliations, student characteristics and demographics, and curricular structures. What emerges is a refreshing compendium of perspectives on how Jesus provides an effective portal for a broad array of learning opportunities, while simultaneously provoking certain pedagogical challenges.The book is remarkable for the rich array of contributing scholars, for the diversity of perspectives they represent, and the spectrum of academic contexts in which they teach. They work in diverse educational institutions, not only research and liberal arts universities, but also Jewish, Christian, and denominationally unaffiliated institutions. Each contributor focuses on how the teaching-learning exchange that takes place in their own classrooms is both challenged and benefited by curriculum that focuses on the historical Jesus. As such, the scholars who contribute are not necessarily leading voices in historical Jesus research (though there are exceptions), but rather, exemplary academics who treat the ethics, science, and art of teaching with the utmost importance.Drawing on over four decades of experience teaching in the context of a Judaic Studies Program, Garber insists that no one contemporary manifesto can be superimposed on the Jesus learning exchange. Garber argues that the Jewishness of Jesus is a prominent feature of quests for the historical Jesus, and provides a sufficient entry point for exploring Jewish topics in the classroom. This stands in opposition to some of the more traditional ways Jesus has been discussed in the classroom, specifically as the Christ of faith who is often invoked to highlight anti-Jewish and antisemitic sentiments, similar to what one might encounter in age-old Good Friday sermons. According to Garber, teaching the historical Jesus provides a prime opportunity for Jews and Christians to explore Jewish beliefs and practices in the context of both Second Temple Judaism and Judea under Rome. Garber's article includes a description of his own teaching context at a two-year community college in Los Angeles, which apparently provides an ample number of opportunities to discuss the historical Jesus with students. His own view of the Jesus of history is as a proto-pharisaic rabbi-nationalist closely aligned with the anti-Roman zealot insurrection, which regularly provokes student discussions and debates given the controversial nature of the view. Garber stages an engaging conversation and stands out as a leading voice in resisting age-old prejudices and in seeking to forge a new path.Rochelle Millen reflects on growing up in a Jewish home that was subject to both positive and negative impressions of Christians. …

A Journey across Multidirectional Connections: Linda Grant’s The Cast Iron Shore

Among the numerous groups that have negotiated their fragmented identities through various literary practices in the last few decades, the Jewish collective has come to symbolize the epitome of diaspora and homelessness. In particular, British-Jewish writers have recently started to reconstruct their fragmented memories through writing. This is an extremely interesting phenomenon in the case of those Jewish women who are fiercely struggling to find some sense of personhood as Jewish, British, female, immigrant subjects. Linda Grant’s novel The Cast Iron Shore will be analyzed so as to unveil the narrative mechanisms through which many of the identity tensions experienced by contemporary Jewish women are exhibited. The different stages in the main character’s journey will be examined by drawing on theories on the construction of Jewish identity and femininity, and by applying the model of multidirectional memory fostered by various contemporary thinkers such as Michael Rothberg, Stef Craps, Max Silverman, and Bryan Cheyette. The main claim to be demonstrated is that this narration links the (hi)stories of oppression and racism endured both by the Jewish and the Black communities in order to make the protagonist encounter the Other, develop her mature political self, and liberate her mind from rigid religious, patriarchal, and racial stereotypes. The Cast Iron Shore becomes, then, a successful attempt to demonstrate that the (hi)stories of displacement endured by divergent communities during the twentieth century are connected, and it is the establishment of these connections that can help contemporary Jewish subjects to claim new notions of their personhood in the public sphere.

Zadoff, Mirjam William Templer (review)

SEER, 93, 4, OCTOBER 2015 768 Army). Whilst they destroyed the dynasty, much of the old ruling elite, and the ideologies that sustained them, they replaced them with a new cosmopolitan ruling elite and over-arching ideology of their own, albeit one that was able to accommodate minority nationalisms in ways which neither the tsarist regime nor Ungern ever contemplated. The Baron’s Cloak manages the rare feat of being both readable and scholarly — my only real criticism would be that, no doubt with an eye to the general reader, the publishers have banished the references to endnotes, rather than at the foot of each page where they belong. Nazarbayev University Alexander Morrison Zadoff, Mirjam. Next Year in Marienbad: The Lost Worlds of Jewish Spa Culture. Translated by William Templer. Jewish Culture and Contexts. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, PA, 2012. x + 320 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $49.95: £32.50. Mirjam Zadoff’s rigorous study of Carlsbad, Marienbad and Franzensbad, recently translated from German, will be of great interest to scholars of multi-ethnic central Europe, Jewish historians and medical humanists, alike. Beginningherstudyinthe1870sandendingin1938,Zadoffexaminesthewestern Bohemian spa not only as a cosmopolitan place of healing and leisure but as a ‘Jewish place, with different sides and protagonists, infused with connotations both positive and negative’ (p. 4). Although she focuses on the experience of a minority population, Zadoff powerfully insists on the heterogeneity of the Jewish subjects who lived, visited and worked in the spa triangle. As she posits: ‘an important prerequisite’ of her project ‘is to conceptualize the individual Jewish groups as “cultures” and not as static units’ (p. 6). The merits of this approach become apparent over the course of the study’s four sections. In part one, Zadoff turns her eye to the group of Jewish physicians and balneological scientists who found work in the newly established sanatoria and hospitals. The spas offered opportunities for career advancement otherwise denied these Jewish professionals. In part two, Zadoff moves away from the Jewish medical professionals to examine the overlapping individuals and social groups who encountered each other in the spa. They included now famous figures as Franz Kafka, Ernst Bloch and Theodor Lessing alongside middle-class women looking for marriage matches, Yiddish writers who combined ‘taking the cure’ with public performances, and Chassidic rebbes and their followers. Zadoff plots the ‘invisible social boundaries’ (p. 9) and ‘miscounters’ (ch. 6) of these individuals and groups, exploring how they both engaged each other and self-segregated everywhere from the promenade to the REVIEWS 769 hotel dining room. Zadoff profiles the diverse motivations of these ‘cultures’ by drawing on memoirs, travel guides, fictional texts, spa ephemera and various archival sources in German, Hebrew, Yiddish and, to a lesser extent, Czech. For scholars unfamiliar with the diversity of Jewish life, Zadoff provides a nuanced portrait of intracommunal differences. It was the ability of the spa to anchor such variegated moments of Jewish self-identification and differentiation that also motivates Zadoff’s second interpretive key. Zadoff looks to Foucault to argue that the spas functioned as ‘compensatory heterotopias’ or, in her words, as ‘idealized counter-worlds of everydaylife’(p.9).Andinpartsthreeandfour,theabilityofthespastofunction as such idealized, orderly and protective espaces autres assumes the clearest urgency. These final sections draw attention to Jewish spa culture between the World Wars. Located between western and eastern Europe, the Bohemian resort offered tourists a reachable sanctuary of ‘relaxation and recuperation’ as German and Austrian spas became increasingly hostile to Jewish visitors (p. 208). In 1921 and 1923, for example, the World Zionist Congress convened in Carlsbad. In this atmosphere, the rhetoric of bodily healing easily translated into a Zionist discussion of national-political revivification and many Congress participants ‘stay[ed] on afterward to take the healing waters’ (p. 199). ThesefinalsectionsarealsowhereZadoff’sskillsasbothreaderandinterpreter are at their best. Here, Zadoff does the most work to examine the reaction of local Jews to the growing sentiments of antisemitism in the spa towns. As she does throughout, Zadoff draws on the tools of microhistory to narrate a number of conversations as to how best to respond to such obstacles. Jewish business owners and community organizations feared that such antisemitic rhetoric would discourage the arrival...

Commerce in Human Organs: A Study of Jewish Legal Themes Underlying a Contemporary Controversy

This paper seeks to highlight the various legal concepts and themes present in contemporary debates amongst Jewish legal scholars and analyses performed according to traditional Jewish law. This paper discusses the legality of transferring an organ regardless of the motivation or any accompanying compensation including issues related to wounding oneself in the case of inter vivos transplantation and issues relating to treatment of dead bodies in the case of postmortem transplantation. This paper discusses the permissibility of payment and rules governing payments as well as various social policy concerns such as motivating desired behaviors, paternalistic protective measures and the tension between individual concerns and communal concerns.

The Legal Status of Religious Minorities in the Euro-Mediterranean World (RELMIN)

One of the key challenges facing Europe since the end of the Second World War has been to confirm and protect the rights of minority religious groups: Jews in particular, but also Catholics or Protestants (in countries where one or the other group is a minority) and members of other religions who have immigrated into the European Union: Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Sikhs and others. The freedom to practice one's religion is a fundamental right inscribed in the laws of the Union and of its member states. Yet in practice, religious expression is perceived differently in various member states and by the members of the diverse religious communities that cohabit in those states. The wearing of a Sikh Turban, a Catholic Holy Week procession, or the call of a muezzin issuing forth from a loudspeaker atop a minaret: each such public expression of religion poses a series of questions involving distinctions between public and private spheres, between religious and cultural symbols, between the identities of religious communities and national polities. The situation is complicated by two contrasting but not mutually exclusive phenomena: an increasing secularization of European societies and a reaffirmation of religious identities. While the broad principles of religious freedom are universally acknowledged, the contours of that freedom in the daily lives of Eu-ropeans of all religions (or without religion) vary from one member state to another and are frequently subjects of debate and polemics. The issues of religious diversity and of the regulation of pluralistic European societies are not new. On the contrary, religious diversity in Europe is grounded in the practice of Christian and Muslim states of the European Middle Ages. In the Christian Roman Empire of the fifth and sixth centuries, emperors banned paganism yet allowed Jews limited freedoms, creating a protected but subordinate status for the empire's Jewish subjects. In the wake of the Muslim conquests of much of the former Roman/Byzantine Empire, Muslim rulers accorded to Jews and Christians the status of dhimmīs 1 , protected minorities that enjoyed broad religious freedoms and judicial autonomy, but whose social and political status was inferior to that of Muslims. In Christian kingdoms of medieval Europe, Jews (and in some cases Muslims) were accepted as subordinate minorities who could maintain their synagogues and mosques and openly practice their religions. Towards the end of the Middle Ages, the status of these religious minorities became increasingly precarious in many European states: minorities faced violence and often expulsion: this is the case for Christians and Jews in Almohad Spain (twelfth and thirteenth centuries), for Jews in many medieval and early modern states, and for Muslims in Sicily (thirteenth century) and Spain (fifteenth and sixteenth centuries).

Teaching Approaches of Beginning Teachers for Jewish Studies in Israeli Mamlachti Schools: A Case Study of a Jewish Education Teachers’ Training Program for Outstanding Students

This article presents findings from a longitudinal qualitative study that examined teaching approaches of neophyte teachers in Israel during their 4-year exclusive teachers’ training program for teaching Jewish subjects and first two years of teaching. The program wanted to promote change in secular pupils’ attitudes toward Jewish subjects. We found a high incidence of teaching using positivistic approaches of knowledge transmission and the teachers adopted a particular teaching approach early into their training program that they continue to employ. Can teaching oriented in the transmission of central cultural value knowledge, with pupils as passive receptacles, create a meaningful encounter?

Czech Women Writers and Racial Others: (Un)timely Reflections on the History of Czech Nationalism

Czech historians are often reluctant to study negative aspects of the Czech past, including more extreme forms of Czech nationalism and particularly racism. This article examines attitudes of Czech women writers at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to racial Others. Focusing on the works of Božena Benešová, Gabriela Preissová, and Růžena Svobodová that featured Jewish and Romani characters, it argues that women’s views resembled those of their male contemporaries and ranged from interest in marginalized groups to implicit and explicit antisemitism. The article explores contradictions characteristic of the three writers’ works with Jewish and Romani themes and points out commonalities and differences in the treatment of both groups. It is intended as an opening of a discussion on a little-studied aspect of Czech nationalism.