Jewish Youth Research Articles

“Jew Yankel”: Three Versions of Dostoevsky’s “Finished Drama”

Only F. M. Dostoevsky’s brief message speaks about the completion of his play “Jew Yankel” in January 1844. The article formulates three hypotheses/assumptions about the content of the drama. The first correlates the writer’s idea with the literary tradition of portraying a Jewish moneylender, laid down by Shakespeare (“The Merchant of Venice”), Walter Scott (“Ivanhoe”), Pushkin (“The Miserly Knight”) and Gogol (“Taras Bulba”). The humanizing effect of V. Scott’s novel is emphasized. The second version associates Dostoevsky’s Yankel exclusively with the homonymous character from Gogol’s story, first published in 1835. It is proposed to take into account the author’s revision of the story for the 1842 edition, in which Yankel, in the process of building up the epic potential of the work, is endowed with a powerful vital resource and rises to the role of the antagonist of the title character. The third hypothesis refers to the trial of the Jews in the town of Velizh, who were accused of the ritual murder of a Christian child and acquitted many years later. Yankel Aronson died under investigation, which was conducted by inhumane methods. Evidence is provided to confirm that Russian society became aware of these events. The painful end of the Jewish youth could serve as a source of drama, structured with a focus on the writings that made a strong impression on Dostoevsky at that time: “The last day of a man sentenced to death” by V. Hugo and the melodrama “Ugolino” by N. Polevoy. All three versions confirm that pity was not only one of young writer’s motives, but also the ontological basis of his creative universe. The scientific significance of each of the proposed hypotheses also lies in the fact that their deployment allows to expand the understanding of the potential sources of the writer’s work, to reveal an unknown or little-known historical and cultural context of his early, least studied period.

Intergroup violence among Jewish and Arab youths in Israel: Testing a multifactor ecological model.

Hundreds of thousands of people around the world have lost their lives to intergroup violence (IV) over the past two decades. The current study tested a multifactor ecological model, including societal (exposure to trauma), social (exposure to community violence, and conflict with parents), and individual (exposure to microaggression) factors for engagement in IV in two samples of Israeli youths, Jewish (N = 306), and Arab (N = 302). Participants filled out self-report questionnaires assessing exposure to trauma, community violence, conflict with parents, microaggression, and engagement in IV. The results showed that Arab youths who indicated higher levels of religiosity and reported experiencing more traumatic events, community violence, and microaggression were more likely to perpetrate IV (OR = 1.31, 1.39, 1.5, 2.28, respectively). Jewish youths who reported exposure to more traumatic events, more conflict with parents, and greater exposure to microaggression events were more likely to perpetrate IV (OR = 2.28, 2.70, 3.25, respectively). The current study illuminates the similarities (traumatic events and microaggression) and the differential associations of individual, social, and societal factors and IV among Jewish and Arab youths. Microaggression emerged as the strongest predictor for IV in both groups. These findings highlight the need to inform ecological interventions aimed at mitigating IV in a context-sensitive manner. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Preserving Jewish Identity Without Returning to the Ghetto: A Case Study of the École Maïmonide, France's First Jewish Secondary School, 1935–2022

ABSTRACT: This article analyzes the history of France's first Jewish secondary school: the École Maïmonide, from its founding in Paris in 1935 to the present day. With close to 1,500 pupils today, it has become one of France's largest Jewish schools. Born out of a fear that exclusive reliance on secular French public education could lead to the inexorable erosion of Jewish religious practice and culture in France, the École Maïmonide was designed to provide French Jews with a Jewish alternative to the State's lycées, where pupils could follow a solid Jewish studies program alongside a high-quality general studies syllabus. While such a project implied a degree of separation from mainstream French society, the École Maïmonide's founders remained committed to public education for the majority of Jewish youth and the full integration of their pupils into French society. Analyzing the ways in which these aspirations materialized in the school's day-to-day organization and how the balance between them evolved throughout its history, this case study seeks to further our understanding of the history of Jewish education in France as well as the evolution of the discourse on identity preservation within the French Jewish community.

Competing for the Youth: Jewish Scout Identity, Religion, and Gender during the Holocaust in France

Abstract This article examines Jewish youth identity, gender, and ideology during the Holocaust in France in order to understand how young people responded to persecution. The author’s attempts to understand the youth perspective reveals that these adolescents’ experiences were distinct and varied, and each traversed complex and multifaceted paths through the war. Always in perpetual negotiation with other elements of their identities—such as their ideology, religion, and gender—for many, youth movements greatly impacted how they developed and matured into adulthood. Coming of age during the Holocaust meant not only enduring persecution, but also traditional discourses on the place of young people in society. Charting the trajectories of individual young people and Jewish youth groups within the context of the war, the Holocaust, and French Jewish history reveals their radicalized and accelerated wartime development. In researching this phenomenon, it becomes possible to decenter entrenched narratives of persecution and resistance and enhance our understanding of wartime gender roles, the impact of Judaism, and the various ideologies that informed these youths’ lives.

An anti-fascist struggle conditioned by ethnic concerns: Jewish self-defense groups in 1960s South America

ABSTRACT Following the kidnapping of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Buenos Aires in May 1960 and the antisemitic wave it provoked in South America throughout the 1960s, Jewish-Argentines, Jewish-Uruguayans and Jewish-Chileans organized themselves into armed self-defense groups and trained in response to growing xenophobia and racism. This little-researched history highlights the efforts of Jewish youth to break away from communal political traditions. They defied the practice of their parents and grandparents who preferred peaceful compromise over direct confrontation with either state officials or extreme right-wing organizations. These Jewish youngsters defined organizations like the Argentine Tacuara or Juventud Uruguaya de Pie as neo-Nazi. They took as a role model the ghetto fighters and the partisans of World War II and were now prepared to resort to violence in their struggle against antisemitism. Based on an oral history project, the article describes how they not only guarded community institutions but also attacked nationalist bullies, printing houses of antisemitic literature and Arab diplomatic legations. However, as this article argues, they did not collaborate with leftist anti-fascist groups, since they were also concerned in promoting Zionism and immigration to Israel.

Feeling Familial Separation: Emotions, Agency, and Holocaust Refugee Youths

Abstract: During the years of the Nazi regime, well over 1,000 European Jewish youths migrated to the United States in organized unaccompanied child migration schemes. These youths left an abundant, and largely untapped, trove of sources in which they constructed narratives of their lives and emotions to their parents in letters, to their social workers in their various interactions, and to themselves in their diaries. Though refugee youths undeniably felt a range of emotions, in this article I suggest that emotional expression tells us less about the emotional inner lives of youths than the attempt to exert and subvert control and power in a topsy-turvy world. By drawing attention to the language of emotions, their inherent power dynamics, and the potential gulf between emotions and experience, this article opens a conversation about our capacity to document children's agency and to study emotions to explain decision-making and experience.

Feeling Familial Separation: Emotions, Agency, and Holocaust Refugee Youths

Abstract: During the years of the Nazi regime, well over 1,000 European Jewish youths migrated to the United States in organized unaccompanied child migration schemes. These youths left an abundant, and largely untapped, trove of sources in which they constructed narratives of their lives and emotions to their parents in letters, to their social workers in their various interactions, and to themselves in their diaries. Though refugee youths undeniably felt a range of emotions, in this article I suggest that emotional expression tells us less about the emotional inner lives of youths than the attempt to exert and subvert control and power in a topsy-turvy world. By drawing attention to the language of emotions, their inherent power dynamics, and the potential gulf between emotions and experience, this article opens a conversation about our capacity to document children's agency and to study emotions to explain decision-making and experience.

„… prawda musi wybrać połowę paradoksu i połowę stereotypu”. O tajemnicach Żyda wiecznego tułacza Aleksandra Wata

Aleksander Wat’s novella The Wandering Jew, published in 1926, is his only prose text in which the Jewish motif is the very center of the narrative. Wat carefully avoids dramatic or frightening notes, staying away from the characters created by Potocki, Quinet, Schubart, and Meyrink. However, certain aspects of the old version of the ancient myth remain: the millennial peregrination through history, the absolute solitude of the hero, and his magical movement and appearance in different parts of the world. The fusion of Catholicism and communism in the shadow of Marranism, represented by the protagonist Nathan, reflects grotesquely either on the phenomenon of Jewish youth fleeing the shtetls observed by young Wat, or on his own ecumenical dreams and reflections on the metahistorical role of Jews and their conversion. The article analyzes this issue also with particular regard either to the reception of the old Christian legend, or to the Anti-semitic narrative on the conspiracy of Jewish converts, shared by Keith Gilbert Chesterton, a contemporary writer very important for Wat.

Boys rule!: Purim and the holy innocents in early modern Worms

AbstractThe role of boys and young men in premodern societies was both precarious and promising. Being in a liminal space between childhood and adulthood, they needed to practice their future roles in society. This article discusses Jewish and Christian annual celebrations involving groups of boys and young men in late medieval and early modern Worms that show similar features and an effort across different religious groups to provide a space for them. Jewish youth took leading roles in the liturgy and in festivities outside the synagogue on and after Shabbat ha‐baḥurim (the boys’ Sabbath), observed on the first Sabbath after Purim. Cathedral choristers and other Christian schoolboys in Worms, led by boy kings and boy bishops, celebrated in connection with the Feast of the Holy Innocents. These festivities were structured similarly in both communities and consisted of the selection of leaders, processions, liturgical inversions, and festive meals. With these celebrations, both communities offered an occasion for young men to practice masculine behaviors and internalize masculine norms.

Run and Hide: How Jewish Youth Escaped the Holocaust by Don Brown (review)

Run and Hide: How Jewish Youth Escaped the Holocaust by Don Brown (review)

Exceptional Whites, Bad Jews: Racial Subjectivity, Anti-Zionism, and the Jewish New Left

Abstract: It is often assumed that the 1967 Arab-Israeli War led to the "wholesale conversion of the Jews to Zionism," as Norman Podhoretz famously phrased it. This "conversion" is equally, if often less explicitly, said to coincide with the end of the era of Jewish marginality in the U.S. and West more broadly, as Jews of European descent were half-included, half-conscripted, into normative structures of whiteness, class ascension, and citizenship. While this epochal shift in Jewish racial formation and political allegiance is undeniable especially in the context of large Jewish secular and religious institutions, at the time this "conversion" was seen as anything but inevitable. Many Jewish liberals, including Irving Howe, Seymour Lipset, and Nathan Glazer, and reactionaries such as Meir Kahane, saw Jewish overrepresentation and hypervisibility in New Left organizations such as Students for a Democratic Society, the Youth International Party, and the Socialist Workers Party as a sign that Jewish youth rejected Zionism as well as the Jewish rise into the middle class. That retrospectively we see Jewish racial formation and political alignment after 1967 as a fait accompli often relies on the erasure not only of mass Jewish participation in the New Left, but also the erasure of the New Left's anti-imperialist political commitments, including critique of expansive Israeli militarism and the settler colonial assumptions underlying Zionism. Looking at memoirs, pamphlets, histories, and original interviews with Jewish participants in the New Left, this article excavates the political alignments of Jewish New Left activists, exploring opposition to the U.S.'s new support of the Israeli state as well as the changing Ashkenazi Jewish racial assignment. Rather than finding Third World and Black Power critiques of Israel antisemitic, it was precisely the Jewish New Left's politics of international and multiracial solidarity that encouraged their support for Black Power critiques of Zionism. In this way, Jewish members of the New Left also attempted to critically challenge their own whiteness, aligning support for Israel after 1967 with support for the racial and economic structures of militarism and capitalism at home.

Nazi Germany in the Viewfinder: On Space and Movement in German-Jewish Youth Culture

Abstract This article analyzes instances of independent mobility of Jewish youngsters in Nazi Germany through the lens of photography. Photographs, taken by teenagers of their trips and sometimes assembled in albums or collages demonstrate that the category of mobility helps to uncover and define a particular kind of agency exclusive to Jewish youth, shaped by the simultaneous attachment to and disconnect from the environments they crossed. Travel is observed as a space in which freedom and restrictions were negotiated, preparing youngsters for a near future of sometimes radically independent choices. Moreover, it is investigated in its capacity of offering instances of contact – planned or spontaneous – with other youth, with Jewish adults or with Germans, which additionally shaped the youngers’ identities on the move. Photography not only helped youngsters to produce records and memories. It also incited new trips and encounters. The camera, then, served as a means of translation which helped Jewish teenagers make sense of their surroundings in a moment of utmost crisis. Ultimately, the photographs attest to an alternative German topography created by independent youngsters who found a home in a cosmopolitan way of life tested on provincial roads.

“Clerks of Revolution”: Jewish Youth of Province in Events of Civil War (Tambov Province)

Based on archival materials and published sources, the article deals with the problem of the participation of provincial Jewish youth in the suppression of the insurgent movement on the territory of the Tambov province. The relevance of the study is due to the need to specificate and clarify the historical role of the Jewish youth of the Russian province in the tragic events of the Civil War. The scientific novelty of the work lies in the fact that on the basis of the biographies of the Jews of the “revolutionary turning point” generation, the mechanism of their social lifts is established. For the first time, the role and motives of the participation of Tambov Jewish communists in the fight against the peasant uprising of 1920—1921 under the leadership of A. S. Antonova are studied. The causes of anti-Semitic sentiments in the provincial society of the period of the civil war are revealed. The authors come to the conclusion that the anti-Semitism of urban and rural residents was largely due to the abuse of power by local Jews. It is noted that due to the noticeable penetration of the Jewish element into the Communist Party, in the public consciousness of the peasantry, the Bolsheviks were often identified with the Jews, stimulating the growth of dissatisfaction with the Soviet government within the peasant society.

Purim Gifts from Russian Neighbors: Prewar Identity Formation and Wartime Survival among Young Jews from Soviet Vitebsk

Life under Stalinism in the 1930s challenged Jews, particularly the young, with innumerable compromises to their religious and ethnic identity, yielding unexpected responses during World War II and the Holocaust. This article analyzes how Jewish youth raised in 1930s Vitebsk in the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic acquired firsthand knowledge of the language and customs of their Slavic neighbors, and how some of this cohort harnessed their experiences and understanding in their attempts to survive during the Holocaust. Bolshevik policies unique to Soviet Belarus affected its Jews in ways distinct from their counterparts elsewhere in the Soviet Union. Nationalities and religious policies as well as the Five-Year Plans and the Great Terror served as the context for this situation, shaping and distorting transmission of Jewish traditions along with changing the dynamics of the family and social relationships. Young Jews in Vitebsk learned Slavic languages and culture from their neighbors, in Soviet schools, and through other means. After the German invasion in 1941, the application of these skills and knowledge are a common thread through the survival narratives of young Holocaust survivors from Soviet Vitebsk.

Ethno-Symbolism in Aron Lyuboshitsky’s Hebrew Literary Works for Jewish Youth

The article focuses on three poems authored by Aron Lyuboshitsky (1874–1942?), a Hebrew teacher, author, poet, editor, and translator, who lived and worked in Warsaw and Łódź, and his contribution to building a Jewish national identity through his literary works for children and youth. The prism through which the article views Lyuboshitsky’s activities is that of ethno-symbolism, a concept drawn from the field of cultural studies. For an ethno-symbolic analysis of his works, three key criteria were considered: (1) linking the present to the past; (2) using cultural symbols; and (3) actively promoting the formation of a shared ethnocultural identity. Lyuboshitsky’s literary-cultural and didactic oeuvre was devoted to reawakening the Jewish nation by appealing to the younger generation. He interconnected the Hebrew language, Hebrew literature, the Jewish people, and the Holy Land.

Modern Communication Techniques as Means of Breaking the Cultural Barrier of Arab-Bedouin Youth and Jewish Youth

New media have facilitated communication all over the world and we are able to maintain long-distance relationships. The purpose of this study was to investigate how young Arab Bedouin people engage with their friends online via social networking sites. The researchers employed 200 questionnaires to gather information from Jewish and Arab-Bedouin users of social networking sites. According to the findings, online interaction between Bedouin and Jewish teenagers in the Arab world helped them acquire social and emotional experiences. Additionally, many mentioned how communicating online has improved their perceptions of and relationships with Jews. This kind of communication is more important for exposing people to different cultures because it does not put their community membership at risk. The results of this study are an initial encouragement to modify the relations between young people in the country. It is also a golden opportunity for Arab Bedouin youth to get to know the Jewish community. Therefore, this study emphasizes the interaction between the two communities, which differ in religion, language and cultural heritage.

The scholarly legacy of Ruta Sakowska

ABSTRACT Ruta Sakowska spent her entire professional career at the Jewish Historical Institute (Żydowski Instytut Historyczny; ŻIH) in Warsaw, and her scholarly legacy is inextricably linked to Oyneg Shabes, the clandestine documentation project organized by Emanuel Ringelblum in the Warsaw Ghetto that became the focus of her work. Sakowska belonged to a generation of Jewish youth that came of age as second-class citizens in a newly independent Poland; most of her cohort was murdered during the Holocaust. Although she survived the war in the Soviet Union, she lost many years performing relatively menial jobs and did not receive her doctorate in history until she was in her fifties. Her fraught relationships with her colleagues at ŻIH were another significant obstacle to her professional advancement. Notwithstanding, she made several major scholarly contributions, both in her analysis of the Ringelblum Archive and in her preparations for its publication.

Wearing leadership: Girl Scouts’ uniforms as symbolic signifiers

ABSTRACT The present article distances itself from the scholarship’s tendency to describe youth leadership through the prism of the adult world. Leaning on ethnographic data, I explain how adolescent leadership is an outgrowth of social relations and cultural symbols that are perpetually negotiating the status quo. As part of an extensive study on female youth leaders, the paper focuses on the rich array of insignia that are made, worn, and exchanged by my research subjects: teenage female members of the Israeli Scouts (a co-ed Jewish youth movement). More specifically, I examine how the creation and display of material symbols on clothing mirror the leadership identity of Girl Scouts. In contrast to their uniforms and rank, which conform to restrictions and a formal hierarchy, the subjects engender a dynamic, non-formal, and open-ended set of symbols that visually represent power and status within their social group. Among the principal contributions of this study are insights on the nature of adolescent leadership and how it is wrought, maintained, and renewed within social networks.

“Jeune Israël”: Multiple Modernities of Jewish Childhood and Youth in Morocco in the First Half of the Twentieth Century

“Jeune Israël”: Multiple Modernities of Jewish Childhood and Youth in Morocco in the First Half of the Twentieth Century

Introduction: Margin Release

Introduction: Margin Release