Kosher Butchering Research Articles

Jews on the Frontier: Religion and Mobility in Nineteenth-Century America by Shari Rabin

Reviewed by: Jews on the Frontier: Religion and Mobility in Nineteenth-Century America by Shari Rabin Dianne Ashton (bio) Jews on the Frontier: Religion and Mobility in Nineteenth-Century America. By Shari Rabin. New York University Press, 2017. viii + 192 pp. In her new book, which won a National Jewish Book Award, Shari Rabin poses the question of how the frontier affected American Jewish life. She analyzes frontier conditions from several perspectives: mobility, scarcity, self-confidence, and a desire to remake Judaism into something suited for frontier life. It is difficult to overstate the influence of the frontier experience upon American history, and Rabin explains how that experience also influenced American Jewish history. She begins by identifying exactly what it was that made America a frontier for nineteenth-century Jewish immigrants. Frontiers were areas where Jews could find few, if any, of the resources with which to construct a Jewish life: no minyan, Torah scroll, school, mohel, kosher butcher, matzah, cemetery, or community from which to draw friends, companions, and, often, brides (most of the individuals on the frontier were men). It was a difficult life, and those who lived it moved frequently in search of better opportunities for both success and companionship. Rabin points out that America's vaunted religious freedom had a much larger impact upon Jews' lives than simply allowing them to organize congregations, charities, schools, and cemeteries at will. By refusing to craft laws that separated Jews from the general Christian public, legislatures created an American Jewry that wore no special identifying clothing; that engaged in any labor, craft, or career it chose; that married according to its members' desires; and that built homes unconfined to any particular locale and therefore paid no special tax or fee to move beyond government-designated parameters. In the U.S., Jews became mobile because no laws confined them. After setting that groundwork, Rabin examines how Jews responded to the isolation of frontier life and how they sought out other Jews for "companionship, sociability, and economic assistance" (34). In part [End Page 109] this was due to difficulty in discerning an American's "true intention and character" (35). Jews, like many other Americans, looked to clubs and associations for trustworthy associates, and several historians have explained the nineteenth century's boom in fraternities by pointing to the era's social mobility that created a world of strangers. Jewish men also turned to boardinghouses, especially those run by Jewish women, to achieve similar goals, and looked to the few Jewish newspapers in order to learn about compatriots around the country. Frontier conditions also necessarily complicated the creation of Jewish families. If a man were lucky enough to find a bride, the next question became how to legalize their union. Rabin explains that "U.S. law and the exigencies of mobility elevated" the importance of congregations because congregations could legalize marriages (63). But so also could a justice of the peace. Thus, both marriage and divorce provoked decisions "made by individual couples" but which had ramifications for their relationships to congregations (64). Rabin adds to our understanding of the rise of Reform Judaism in her discussion of how the life of scarcity and mobility generated an understanding of God that was "increasingly expansive and universal." Frontier Jews "responded to scarcity and uncertainty by transforming their understandings of Jewish objects and of the Jewish God" (95). Intention became more important than ritual acts. Her argument is certainly persuasive, but this reader expected the author to also discuss the pervasive influence of Protestant Christianity, which dominated American culture in the nineteenth century even more than it did in the twentieth century. Key elements of Protestantism, particularly in the forms that thrived on the American frontier, also valued spirit over form, and for Protestants, too, scarcity played a role in shaping their religious perspective. American Jews did not develop a language of spirit over form by themselves; rather, this language should be understood as part of their general acculturation to American life. Rabin notes that Rebecca Gratz, an urban, wealthy Jew, was also adept at the language of spirituality and emotion in describing her approach to Jewish practice. Here, too, Rabin could have deepened her...

The Transnational and the Transformative: Haim Tabakman’s Tu n’aimeras point and the Shifting Profile of French Cinema in the Twenty-first Century

The transnational in French cinema has largely been examined in terms of the industry’s relation to Hollywood. This article, through a reading of the French-Israeli coproduction Tu n’aimeras point (2009) by Haim Tabakman, will ask what the transnational means when Hollywood is not in the frame. Three kinds of “trans” will be discussed. The first is how the transnational is read in writing on French cinema. The second is translation: how the film travels to reach a wider audience. The third is the transformative. Eyes Wide Open recounts several months in the life of Aaron, a kosher butcher whose life in transformed when he welcomes the outsider Ezri as his apprentice. In reading Tabakman’s film in relation to transnational genres, it will be argued that the film can teach us something about the French transnational through the themes it explores: stagnation and mobility, hospitality and hostility.

Memories of Two Generations: A Yiddish Life in Russia and Texas by Alexander Z. Gurwitz

Reviewed by: Memories of Two Generations: A Yiddish Life in Russia and Texasby Alexander Z. Gurwitz Joshua J. Furman Memories of Two Generations: A Yiddish Life in Russia and Texas. By Alexander Z. Gurwitz. Edited by Bryan Edward Stone. Translated by Amram Prero. Jews and Judaism: History and Culture. ( Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2016. Pp. xxiv, 416. $59.95, ISBN 978-0-8173-1903-8.) In August 1910, when he was fifty-one years old, Alexander Z. Gurwitz set out from a Ukrainian town in czarist Russia along with his wife and four children. A month later, the Gurwitz family boarded the ship in Bremen, Germany, that eventually brought them to Galveston, Texas, and a new life in San Antonio. Twenty-five years later, in his seventies, Gurwitz composed a Yiddish-language memoir about his traditional religious upbringing in eastern Europe and his experiences as an immigrant and member of the San Antonio Jewish community in the early twentieth century. Thanks to an older English translation by Rabbi Amram Prero and a new scholarly introduction and footnotes by historian Bryan Edward Stone, both scholars and laypeople will find Memories of Two Generations: A Yiddish Life in Russia and Texasa treasure trove of information about Jewish life spanning two eras and two continents. The first 240 pages of the memoir offer an intimate account of eastern European Jewish life in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Gurwitz narrates in detail the rhythms of his family's religious observances, the particulars of his yeshiva education, and the vicissitudes of his life as a married man, kosher butcher, and teacher who spent twenty years of his adult life in eastern Ukraine. Regular readers of this journal will be drawn to the final sixty pages of Gurwitz's book, which describe his immigration journey and his impressions of America and Texas. [End Page 728] From the standpoint of southern Jewish historical scholarship, the memoir is particularly notable on two counts. First, it offers a rare full account from an individual who participated in the "Galveston Immigration Movement," the coordinated effort on the part of Jewish community leaders to redirect eastern European immigrants away from the East Coast in the decade before World War I (p. 4). Second, Gurwitz's memoir sheds valuable light on the inner workings of a small but viable Orthodox Jewish community in early-twentieth-century San Antonio, helping reframe the way scholars think about immigrant Jewish life in pockets of settlement far from the major urban centers of the East Coast and Midwest. Gurwitz himself offers a somewhat unusual portrait of an eastern European Jewish immigrant, as editor Bryan Edward Stone notes. Poverty did not drive him and his family away from Russia; unlike the majority of his contemporaries, Gurwitz enjoyed relative economic stability at the time he made the decision to emigrate. By leaving for America, Gurwitz hoped to protect his family from a cholera outbreak raging in their town, and from the ever-present threats of anti-Semitic violence and czarist persecution. "Thus," Stone writes, "Gurwitz reversed the conventional narrative in which Russia was the site of traditional Jewish worship and America of assimilation and secularism. He came to America believing it was a better place for an Orthodox Jew to lead a traditional life than Russia was" (p. 2). Notwithstanding a few minor errors in the book's glossary of foreign terms, Stone is to be commended for shepherding this valuable new edition of Gurwitz's memoir into our hands. Joshua J. Furman Rice University Copyright © 2017 The Southern Historical Association

Memories of Two Generations: A Yiddish Life in Russia and Texas by Alexander Z. Gurwitz

Reviewed by: Memories of Two Generations: A Yiddish Life in Russia and Texas by Alexander Z. Gurwitz Hollace Ava Weiner Memories of Two Generations: A Yiddish Life in Russia and Texas. By Alexander Z. Gurwitz. Edited by Bryan Edward Stone. Translated by Amram Prero. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2016. Pp. 536. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.) Ready for a veritable Fiddler on the Roof in Texas? Memories of Two Generations provides just that. The book’s subtitle—A Yiddish Life in Russia and Texas—sounds contradictory, almost comical. Yet it aptly describes an immigrant saga filled with dichotomies and ironies as told through the sardonic pen of Alexander Ziskind Gurwitz. A Talmudic teacher and kosher butcher, Gurwitz spent his first fifty-one years, which make up the first three-quarters of his memoir, in Russia’s Pale of Settlement. In 1910 he settled in San Antonio. By 1935, writing in his mother tongue, he completed this chronicle, a time capsule that straddles two worlds. Long hidden in typescript form in a handful of archives, his translated life story is at last available, richly annotated and expertly introduced by editor Bryan Edward Stone, who examined Texas Jewry in his 2010 book, The Chosen Folks: Jews on the Frontiers of Texas (University of Texas Press). Memories of Two Generations brings back to life a San Antonio of muddy roads where scrawny horses pulled wagons to Little Jerusalem, a four-block stretch of West Commerce Street. Yiddish-speaking merchants whose storefronts had Spanish names sold yards of cloth to Mexican Americans. Amid the commercial confusion, as many as three kosher butchers competed to carve beef for Jewish households, evidence of a vibrant ethnic enclave that has received scant attention from scholars. Most Texas Jewish histories focus on acculturated Reform Jews who arrived during the frontier days or the cattle era and rapidly integrated into the mainstream. Few histories examine Orthodox Jews who clung to Eastern European foodways and worshipped in synagogues where Old World rabbis, hired and fired at whim, delivered sermons and lessons in Yiddish. Though largely insulated from the rest of the city, this isolated enclave could not seal itself off from the 1921 rains that deluged San Antonio. Gurwitz’s eyewitness account adds to descriptions of the city’s worst recorded floods when he writes that “there was grave danger that [End Page 400] the entire synagogue building might be washed away. … The benches were floating” (310). Gurwitz immigrated to Texas via the Galveston Movement, a channel that from 1907 to 1913 delivered 10,000 Eastern European Jews to the Gulf Coast island. Memories of Two Generations provides the only first-person published account of the complete journey, starting with his family’s departure from the shtetl. “Half the town accompanied us to the station,” he writes (273). As the train left Russia behind, Gurwitz recalls, “We took deep breaths … free at last from Tsar Nicholas and his miserable agents” (276). However, as the Gurwitz family continued across German soil to the Baltic Sea, agents working for the Galveston Movement were rude and condescending; fellow émigrés traveling in steerage were pushy and coarse. “I saw at once this was to be no pleasure trip” (277). Gurwitz paid to upgrade his shipboard accommodations, thus skirting “this gehinnom” (279), the Hebrew term for the cursed place where ancient kings of Judah sacrificed their children by fire. This Old Testament analogy is among dozens intertwined throughout the memoir, making Gurwitz’s autobiography a treasure for biblical scholars as well as ethnographers and urban historians. What’s more, the Yiddish rhythm and Talmudic reasoning throughout the text make this primary source a delight to read. Hollace Ava Weiner Fort Worth Jewish Archives Copyright © 2015 The Texas State Historical Association

Migration History in Five Stories (and a Basement): The Lower East Side Tenement Museum

IN LATE 2012, JOHN SCHNEIDER’S SALOON on Manhattan’s Lower East Side reopened—nearly a century and a half after Schneider first set up shop—and this time, without the beer. Schneider, a Bavarian immigrant, and his Westphalian wife, Caroline, ran their lager beer Lokal out of the basement of a tenement building at 97 Orchard Street from 1864, just after the building’s construction, to the mid1880s. Today, a reconstruction of Schneider’s front barroom, complete with polished bar top, beer Steine, and a “free lunch” table with (plaster) comestibles, greets visitors to the “Shop Life” exhibit at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum. Shop Life, now in its third year, exemplifies the approaches that have made the Tenement Museum one of the most innovative and compelling interpretive sites of immigration and urban history in the United States. Located in perhaps the longeststanding immigrant neighborhood in the country, and centered on the fivestory tenement built at 97 Orchard in 1863 (fig. 1), the museum uses period reconstructions of tenants’ apartments to explore the lives of some of the thousands of newcomers who rented there between 1863 and 1935, when the upper floors became a warehouse. Shop Life goes downstairs to examine the immigrant businesses that ran out of the building’s basement over a century—Schneider’s saloon, Lustgarten’s kosher butcher shop, Marcus’s wholesale auction house, and Meda’s discount underwear store, among others. In its use of one locale to explore a facet of immigrant life across multiple groups and a stretch of time reaching down to the present, Shop Life reflects the museum’s focus on immigration history as a multiethnic matter that should involve visitors making connections between their own and their families’ experience and the nation’s immigrant past and present. This article provides an overview of the Tenement Museum, its history and recent initiatives, and its potential as a resource for college and university teachers, along with some observations about the challenges it faces in pursuing a public immigration history. That pursuit has involved a notable

Kosher Nation: Why More and More of America's Food Answers to a Higher AuthoritySueFishkoff. New York: Schoken Books, 2010.

Kosher Nation: Why More and More of America's Food Answers to a Higher Authority Sue Fishkoff. New York: Schoken Books, 2010. Food is hot; not just in its eating, but as an observational and participatory activity, in journalism, and in the scholarly worlds. Works like Eric Schlosser's 2005 expose Fast Food have brought food from the supermarket, refrigerator, and dinner table into the classroom. Carolyn Walker Bynum's groundbreaking work Holy Feast and Holy Fast (1988), but also more recently Daniel Sack's 2001 work Whitebread Protestants (and others), have expanded the view to include investigations of the religious aspects of food - not in the traditional, anthropological (and often hyper-theoretical) manner of such works as Mary Douglas's classic text Purity and Danger (1978), but in a more familiar, contemporary, and mundane style that is accessible to the general reader but of value to the student as well. Sue Fishkoff's latest work falls nicely into this last category. Not quite the (you'll excuse the pun) hamhanded tour de force of Schlosser's work - which in the food studies world seems to be the ur-text for anything with the title Nation appended to it - this work draws more directly from her first work exploring the ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) world in The Rebbe's Army: Inside the World of Chabad-Lubavitch (2005). The subtitle - a reference to a long-running series of advertisements for Hebrew National hotdogs (which were less contaminated than others because they answer to a Higher Authority) - hides the twin dynamic driving the work: on the one hand, kosher food is a growing market in the United States because of a perfect storm of Jewish cultural confidence and non-Jewish food anxieties; on the other hand, within the American Jewish community there is a growing demand for - and battle over - foods identified as ritually permissible for consumption. The book is an impressive survey of topics related to the observance of kashrut (the Jewish system of dietary requirements), covering everything (as they might say in this world) from soup to nuts. After a introductory tour of the kosher world, there are chapters on the observance of kashrut, the kosher certification agencies, the Mashgiach (kosher butcher), the Jewish Deli (with a discussion of both the kosher and the kosherstyle deli), kosher wines, kosher food marketing, the internationalization of food packaging and the impact that has had on kosher certification, new styles in American kashrut observance, disputes over what can be considered kosher (and who gets to decide), and (to be expected) the scandal that rocked the kosher meateating world when Agriprocessors (of Stephen Bloom's 2001 Postville fame) was raided by federal marshals for immigration violations. …

Contested Rituals: Circumcision, Kosher Butchering and Jewish Political Life in Germany 1843-1933, by Robin Judd

Contested Rituals: Circumcision, Kosher Butchering and Jewish Political Life in Germany 1843-1933, by Robin Judd

Contested Rituals: Circumcision, Kosher Butchering, and Jewish Political Life in Germany, 1843–1933 (review)

Reviewed by: Contested Rituals: Circumcision, Kosher Butchering, and Jewish Political Life in Germany, 1843–1933 Richard S. Levy Contested Rituals: Circumcision, Kosher Butchering, and Jewish Political Life in Germany, 1843–1933, by Robin Judd. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2007. 283 pp. $45.00. When writing about an aspect of the German-Jewish experience that does not have to do with victimization, one of the most difficult things to do is to escape what one author has called the “paper ghetto,” that is, the perfunctory treatment of Jewish issues in separate sections or chapters of books devoted to mainstream German history. Robin Judd overcomes this difficulty by embedding her study of circumcision and kosher slaughtering from the 1840s to 1933 in the larger German story. Like all good history, hers spares us none of the subject’s rich complications. Arguments that began within the Jewish community concerning the defining nature of religiously prescribed rites soon became a matter of lively interest to non-Jews, the controversies surrounding ritual slaughter winning by far the greater attention. State and municipal authorities, the medical establishment, the animal rights movement, and antisemites intervened repeatedly in the debates centering on the two rituals that most clearly separated Jews from non-Jews. Judd corrects the commonly held view that opposition to circumcision and especially kosher slaughtering was always and everywhere simply an antisemitic pretext. She distinguishes degrees of antisemitism in anti-kosher slaughtering campaigns and does not assume its centrality or its significance where bans and partial bans were enacted before 1917. In the Weimar era, the Nazis commandeered the movement against circumcision and kosher butchering and intensified the antisemitic rhetoric that had always portrayed both practices as irrefutable evidence of Jewish cruelty and the futility of trying to integrate Jews into German life. During the imperial era, antisemitism often made its way into public discourse, but it seems only rarely to have swayed governmental action. There were many in the animal rights movement who thought the Jewish method of animal slaughter to be inhumane but who nevertheless distanced themselves from antisemitic arguments and even called for exempting Jews from the general reforms they advocated. The practices also became embroiled in a tangle of jurisdictional disputes at a time when state [End Page 155] and local governments sought to extend their reach by regulating economic activity, safeguarding food supplies, and policing public hygiene. How the state should balance the rights of religious minorities against the larger public good was a source of ongoing conflict. All this is laid out in meticulously researched detail and admirably clear prose. Jews by and large rallied to the defense of Judaism, even as most of them became less and less observant. ( Judd estimates that perhaps fifteen to twenty percent kept kosher by the 1920s. Liberal [Reform] Jews constituted the majority of the community as early as 1870.) In 1886, national campaigns against kosher slaughtering politicized Germany’s Jews, who saw a threat to their civic as well as their religious freedom and responded in a new way. The traditional timid petitioning of the powerful or resigned silence gave way to vigorous action. Nearly a decade before the founding of the Centralverein, the main vehicle of Jewish self-defense from 1893 until the 1930s, Jews carried their fight into the public sphere. Having made this revisionist point, Judd then spells out what it meant. Jewish organizations and individuals—often in conflict with one another—forged an activist network that was able to exploit modern techniques in fund-raising, public relations, and the exerting of economic and political influence. Their defense used every available argument, from the insistence that the method was in fact humane to stirring appeals for religious toleration. They often made common cause with the Catholic Center Party to protect the free practice of religion. Jews learned how to behave politically and were successful in fending off national bans on kosher slaughtering and having several local prohibitions repealed. In 1917, the Bundesrat approved a set of policies that safeguarded the rite, a great but short-lived victory that was undone by the Nazis in April 1933. Judd has written an important book, using a seemingly small subject to...

Contested Rituals: Circumcision, Kosher Butchering, and Jewish Political Life in Germany 1844-1933

Contested Rituals: Circumcision, Kosher Butchering, and Jewish Political Life in Germany 1844-1933

:Contested Rituals: Circumcision, Kosher Butchering, and Jewish Political Life in Germany, 1843–1933

In this book, Robin Judd provides a history of two central blood rituals practiced by Jews in Germany during the nine decades between 1843 and 1933. Her decision to synthesize the histories of circumcision and kosher butchering is very clever. The parallels are uncanny, as both rituals define Jewish affiliation and require special ways of cutting flesh. Moreover, as various German governments extended control over religious life, both rituals underwent scrutiny by those who questioned their medical and physical consequences. Judd pays close attention to how Jewish organizations defended these rituals when state officials, animal protectionists, and antisemites campaigned to regulate or even forbid them. Her work brings neglected episodes in medical, civic, and religious history into sharp focus and thereby helps us better understand Jewish life during these crucial nine decades. This is no mean feat, considering the great attention historians have paid to understanding how much and what kind of agency Jews possessed in Germany before the Nazi era.

Contested Rituals: Circumcision, Kosher Butchering, and Jewish Political Life in Germany, 1843-1933, Robin Judd (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), xiv + 283 pp., cloth $45.00.

Contested Rituals: Circumcision, Kosher Butchering, and Jewish Political Life in Germany, 1843-1933, Robin Judd (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), xiv + 283 pp., cloth $45.00.

Indignation: A Novel

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article Book ReviewFull AccessIndignation: A NovelJeffrey L. Geller M.D., M.P.H.Jeffrey L. Geller M.D., M.P.H.Search for more papers by this authorPublished Online:13 Jan 2015https://doi.org/10.1176/ps.2008.59.12.1476AboutSectionsPDF/EPUB ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InEmail In a marvelously written novel, Philip Roth covers about two years in the life of Marcus Messner, son of a kosher butcher. Messner is a high school graduate, class of 1950, as well as captain of his debate team and second baseman on his high school baseball team. He is the first in his family to go to college, an observant Jew and ardent atheist who endorses the writings of Bertrand Russell, and famous at Winesburg College for vomiting all over the dean's office. The readers are informed of the point of all this: "The terrible, the incomprehensible way one's most banal, incidental, even comical choices achieve the most disproportionate result." Messner basically suffers from toxic indignation.The novel is enriched by the ins and outs of the characters' cross-weaving stories and the fascinating presentation of how people's lives are touched profoundly by ever-so-short encounters with others. Roth tells his tale with absolutely terrific sentences such as, "Where better than at Winesburg for a Bertrand Flusser to luxuriate without abatement in an abundance of rebuke?" Or, "[T]hough I knew without a doubt, even then, knew like the son of my fear-laden father, that this preternaturally handsome Jewish boy with a privileged paragon's princely bearing, used to inspiring respect and being obeyed and ingratiating himself with everyone and never quarreling with anyone and attracting the admiring attention of everyone, used to taking delight in being the biggest thing in his little interfraternity world, would turn out to be the angel of death." Roth is truly a master at work.From a psychiatric perspective, there are characters galore with more than enough psychopathology for this reasonably short book. Marcus' father becomes obsessed and controlling when his son leaves for college. His mother is a stalwart. Olivia, the object of Marcus' attention, has had bouts of depression, suicide attempts, and multiple hospitalizations. Roth does make a mistake, however, in giving Olivia her wrist-slashing scar on the wrong wrist. If I can't intrigue you to read this book for any other purpose, read it to find out how I reached that conclusion. The novel is set during the Korean War, a fact that is repeatedly of import to many of the characters. It also moves between Newark, New Jersey, and the Midwest, which also is of importance to many of the characters. Anti-Semitism, anti-intellectualism, and antidepressants all play roles in Indignation. I can't recommend this book highly enough for those who are Philip Roth fans; this will resonate with readings of Portnoy's Complaint, Goodbye Columbus, and Letting Go. For those who have never read a Roth novel, start here. After reading Indignation you'll probably think twice before experiencing indignation any time soon. Dr. Geller who is book review editor, is professor of psychiatry and director of public-sector psychiatry at University of Massachusetts Medical School, Worcester. FiguresReferencesCited byDetailsCited ByNone Volume 59Issue 12 December, 2008Pages 1476-1476PSYCHIATRIC SERVICES December 2008 Volume 59 Number 12 Metrics PDF download History Published online 13 January 2015 Published in print 1 December 2008

Indignation: A Novel

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article Book ReviewFull AccessIndignation: A NovelJeffrey L. Geller M.D., M.P.H.Jeffrey L. Geller M.D., M.P.H.Search for more papers by this authorPublished Online:13 Jan 2015https://doi.org/10.1176/ps.2008.59.12.1476AboutSectionsPDF/EPUB ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InEmail In a marvelously written novel, Philip Roth covers about two years in the life of Marcus Messner, son of a kosher butcher. Messner is a high school graduate, class of 1950, as well as captain of his debate team and second baseman on his high school baseball team. He is the first in his family to go to college, an observant Jew and ardent atheist who endorses the writings of Bertrand Russell, and famous at Winesburg College for vomiting all over the dean's office. The readers are informed of the point of all this: "The terrible, the incomprehensible way one's most banal, incidental, even comical choices achieve the most disproportionate result." Messner basically suffers from toxic indignation.The novel is enriched by the ins and outs of the characters' cross-weaving stories and the fascinating presentation of how people's lives are touched profoundly by ever-so-short encounters with others. Roth tells his tale with absolutely terrific sentences such as, "Where better than at Winesburg for a Bertrand Flusser to luxuriate without abatement in an abundance of rebuke?" Or, "[T]hough I knew without a doubt, even then, knew like the son of my fear-laden father, that this preternaturally handsome Jewish boy with a privileged paragon's princely bearing, used to inspiring respect and being obeyed and ingratiating himself with everyone and never quarreling with anyone and attracting the admiring attention of everyone, used to taking delight in being the biggest thing in his little interfraternity world, would turn out to be the angel of death." Roth is truly a master at work.From a psychiatric perspective, there are characters galore with more than enough psychopathology for this reasonably short book. Marcus' father becomes obsessed and controlling when his son leaves for college. His mother is a stalwart. Olivia, the object of Marcus' attention, has had bouts of depression, suicide attempts, and multiple hospitalizations. Roth does make a mistake, however, in giving Olivia her wrist-slashing scar on the wrong wrist. If I can't intrigue you to read this book for any other purpose, read it to find out how I reached that conclusion. The novel is set during the Korean War, a fact that is repeatedly of import to many of the characters. It also moves between Newark, New Jersey, and the Midwest, which also is of importance to many of the characters. Anti-Semitism, anti-intellectualism, and antidepressants all play roles in Indignation. I can't recommend this book highly enough for those who are Philip Roth fans; this will resonate with readings of Portnoy's Complaint, Goodbye Columbus, and Letting Go. For those who have never read a Roth novel, start here. After reading Indignation you'll probably think twice before experiencing indignation any time soon. Dr. Geller who is book review editor, is professor of psychiatry and director of public-sector psychiatry at University of Massachusetts Medical School, Worcester. FiguresReferencesCited byDetailsCited ByNone Volume 59Issue 12 December, 2008Pages 1476-1476PSYCHIATRIC SERVICES December 2008 Volume 59 Number 12 Metrics PDF download History Published online 13 January 2015 Published in print 1 December 2008

Contested Rituals: Circumcision, Kosher Butchering, and Jewish Political Life in Germany, 1843–1933 – By Robin Judd

Contested Rituals: Circumcision, Kosher Butchering, and Jewish Political Life in Germany, 1843–1933 – By Robin Judd

Spared Another Day

Spared Another Day Shulamit Lotate (bio) "Yalah! Yalah!" come closer! The voice of the Berber in his djelaba (Moroccan hooded overcoat) rises above the bustling crowd. The year is 1959. Outside the ramparts of the old Jewish quarter in the city of Fez, also known as the mellah, is the market place. The souk is the traditional outdoor market where merchants sell everything from vegetables to items of clothing, vegetables, poultry and cattle. Under the dark and translucent fabric canopies, vendors display their wear on the ground and shout out to attract clientele. Only the waterman carrying gallons of water from a nearby spring, attracts his thirsty clients with the sound of a little bell. He carries the water in a sewn goat hide over his shoulder with a metal spout where the throat used to be, and a metal cup. Once in a while I have enough 'sous' to get the waterman to tilt his gourd and fill an ornate brass cup with water under the watchful and content eye of my father. To accompany our father to the market is a privilege among my siblings. I recall those [End Page 108] occasions with affection. I pride myself in my ability to assist with the load of colorful woven panniers. We pass mounds of colorful spices displayed on burlap bags. The smells of cumin, turmeric and cardamom are intoxicating. I walk one step behind him for two reasons. The first is because it is so crowded that I need to grab on to his jacket with my free hand, the other reason is to watch for pickpockets. At nine years old, I am the right height for the job. Today is a special day. It is the eve of Yom Kippur. The Day of Atonement when Jews around the world ask their fellow human beings and God for forgiveness for any offence they might have committed throughout the year. It is a day of fast, conducted almost entirely in prayers and followed by a substantial dinner at the end of the day. Our custom is to prepare a chicken as a symbolic sacrifice for our sins. We reach the area where the chickens, turkeys and doves are being sold. The birds lay under the scorching sun, in bunches on the reddish soil, feet tied and beaks open. My father, with a humble smile, confides in me that this year he can afford a bird for each of us. Two grown chicken for Papa and Maman and one white dove for each child: Alice, Mathieu, Loulou and myself. After a careful examination, he gently places the four handpicked doves in my basket and carries the chicken from their feet, upside down. With a final customary bargaining of the price, we are heading to the kosher butcher towards the gate of the city. I carry my bundle with care, as we weave a path through the crowd. To assure they have ample space to fold their wings, I wrap my arms around my basket and watch their silky heads bob in cadence with my small hurried steps. How white, delicate and beautiful they are! How helpless? Right then, I decide that I could not take them to the butcher and should set them free. I spread my arms and let the doves take to the sky. The sound and flutter of wings startles the crowd around us. It is our turn to hold our mouths open at the surprising and delightful sight of doves' flight. Their life is spared another day. My father finally turns his head slowly and looks at me. I search his eyes, expecting some reproach. A faint smile lights his face, he is not angry! I detect the look of empathy behind the veiled faces and smiling eyes lined with kohl of the Arab women around us. He puts his hand on my shoulder, pulls me a little closer "We still have enough for all of us." [End Page 109] Shulamit Lotate Shulamit Lotate is a 56-year-old Moroccan Jewess, and proud parent of three. She immigrated to Israel at the age of fourteen, studied two years at the University of Haifa Philosophy and Fine Arts...

Personal history

The ambulance slipped quietly down the twenty blocks of upper Broadway past the entrance to the George Washington Bridge. This was not the Great White Way of midtown Manhattan, with its brightly lit animated billboards, theaters, and tacky movie houses. Here—the northern tip of Manhattan Island—the street was lined with gray, nondescript apartment buildings, kosher butcher shops, bodegas, Chinese laundries, and other 1950-style small stores. It was already dark, the evening dreary and overcast. The ambulance moved silently, stopping at an occasional red light. No screaming siren or flashing lights—on purpose. “The lights, the noise, it makes people crazy,” the driver said, turning to me in the next seat. “They crash into things. Besides,” he continued, looking back at the old man lying on the gurney, “he looks like he'll make it to the Neurologic Institute just fine.” This driver seemed to know what he was talking about. He was a calm, old, experienced hand and I wasn't calm or old or experienced—in fact, I was young and terribly upset. It had all begun earlier in the evening. I was a third year medical student assigned to the general medicine wards at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital and had just returned home to Bard Hall, the student dorm on Haven Avenue. The note I found in my mailbox read, “Urgent. Please call Mrs. Katz, your uncle's housekeeper. He had a stroke.” I called her right away. Uncle Sidney was my favorite relative. Most of the older family members called him Friedl, short for Siegfried, but he'd Americanized his name when he immigrated to New York. Sidney lived just five blocks from the hospital. I'd seen him just two days before, as I did nearly every weekend. “Ludwig,” Mrs. Katz said on the phone, her heavily accented voice trembling with urgency, “I found …

The Chechen Wars: Will Russia Go the Way of the Soviet Union? by Matthew s> Evangelista (review)

350 SEER, 83, 2, 2005 The only kind of source she might have made more use of for insights and colour is fiction. There is a brief reference to TheMasterandMargarita on Torgsin shops (thepredecessors of the Berezki)on p. 200, and a vivid, pagelong description of a wartime market by Boldyrev, used as an epigraph on p. 250. That is all. Still, the book is full of intriguingdetail as it is. There is the storyof Liliana Isaevna building up an underground business with a workforce of three in 1951, providing feathers for hats made by underground milliners for Party elite wives: she got the feathers from a kosher butcher and the Aragvi restaurant (pp. 290-9I). Admiring mid-1930S official reports on Macy's of New Yorkas a model of culturedtrade (pp. 207, 2 I0) illustratethe anomalies in what Soviet officialstried to do. So do storieslike that of the I940S TsUM shop assistantwho escorteda customerto herbicycle and then slasheditstyres when she refusedhim a tip (p. 322). The photographs help to convey the diversityof this segment of everyday life in Lenin's and Stalin's Soviet Union. They range from 'cultured trade' (the Eliseev food store in 1935 and the TsUM lace department in I948) to grim depictions of trading to survive, including a German army photograph ofapeasantmarket in 194 I. Hessler has documented and partlyquantifiedwhat she calls 'thepersistent privatesector'.She showshow ambiguousthe treatmentof it was, even during NEP. The OGPU were arrestinglargenumbersof privatetradersonlymonths after the introduction of the RSFSR Civil Code in early I923, a piece of legislationthatmight have been seen as entrenchingsome of the rightsneeded forthe conduct of privatetrade.And she also showshow privatetrade,mainly in the form of peasant markets,continued to help (some)people to survivein the 1930s. As a historian, she treatsthe whole story, not as an example of the inevitable effects of a system, but as something that could have turned out differentlyif particularpeople had made differentchoices. Fairenough; but thisexemplaryhistoricalaccount also supportsthe economist's 'systemic'view that when a political regime repressesprivate commerce, the citizens pay a heavy price. Centrefor Russian andEastEuropean Studies PHILIP HANSON University ofBirmingham! RussiaandEurasia Programme, Chatham House Evangelista, Matthew. TheChechen Wars. WillRussiaGothe Wayof theSoviet Union? BrookingsInstitutionPress,Washington,D.C., 2002. Xi+ 244 pp. Maps. Notes. Index. $19.95: f14.50 (paperback). IN this book, Matthew Evangelista, professor of government and director of the Peace StudiesProgramat Cornell University,discussesthree issues.In the firstpartof thebook (chapters2-4), he exploresthe originsof the two Chechen wars -the war of I994-96 and the new war that began in i999 and considerswhetherthey could have been avoided. The centralpartof the book (chapters 5-6) is devoted to an assessment of Putin's version of the 'domino theory' that is, the proposition that the secession of Chechnya would lead REVIEWS 35I to the disintegration of the whole Russian Federation and must therefore be prevented at all costs. In the final section of the book (chapters7 and 8), the authordiscussesRussia'swar crimesin Chechnya and the Westernresponse. The analysis of the origins of the Chechen wars adds little if anything to knowledge thatis alreadywidely available,though it may be usefulto the nonspecialist reader. The conclusion that 'a more responsible and competent leadershipin Moscow' could have prevented the firstwar by negotiation with Dudaev (p. 45) is weakly supported. The author appears to share the widespread supposition that if only El'tsin had consented to meet Dudaev man to man and accord him the respect he craved the conflict would have been resolved. Given what we know of the personalities of both these politicians,thisbelief requiresquite a leap offaith.It alsoleaves out of account the testimony of Taimaz Abubakarov,Dudaev's finance minister and one of his main negotiators,to the effectthat Dudaev was not seriouslycommitted to reaching an agreement with Moscow and did not really want to meet with El'tsin(see the last chapter of Taimaz Abubakarov,Rezhim Dzhokhara Dudaeva: pravda i vymysel. Zapiski dudaevskogo ministra ekonomiki ifinansov, Moscow, i 998). There is an alternativeand (in my view) more plausiblethesisaccording to which a more responsibleand competent leadershipin Moscow could indeed have preventedwar not by negotiatingwith Dudaev but by engineeringhis downfall through more skilfulmanipulation of intra-Chechenpolitics. This is not a...

A Social History of Soviet Trade: Trade Policy, Retail Practices, and Consumption, 1917-1953 by Julie s> Hessler (review)

REVIEWS 349 they might, but that is a function of the book's ambitions. This is a very stimulatingstudywhich is to be highly recommended. University ofGlasgow EVAN MAWDSLEY Hessler, Julie. A Social History of Soviet Trade. TradePolicy, Retail Practices,and Consumption,I9I7-I953. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ and Oxford, 2004. xvi + 366 pp. Notes. Tables. Illustrations.Bibliography. Index. ?26.95. THIS is an excellent study.Hesslerhas dug deeply into a narrowsubject -the development of retail trade under Lenin and Stalin and has managed in the process to shed light on a wide range of issues:the natureof policymaking in the Soviet Union, the continuity or lack of it between the New Economic Policy (NEP) and the I930S and, indeed, by implication, some of the nature and limitationsof social change in thisperiod. The underlying theme of the book is that there was a recurrentpattern of crisisand normalizationin the economy from I9 I7 to the late I940s, a pattern repeated three times:around the time of the Civil War,of collectivizationand forced industrialization,and of the Second WorldWar;that the ways in which Soviet leadersand officialsacted in the face of each crisisof consumersupplies were conditioned by a set of attitudes, including a preoccupation with class war, that limited the success of the subsequent 'normalization'.The survival of private trade, in varying forms, throughout the period, is a sub-plot that runsthroughthe story. The main text consists of an introduction, seven chaptersand conclusions, with the seven chaptersgrouped into three blocks,each block concerned with a crisis: revolution, restructuring(Stalin's industrialization drive) and war. The author expresses in the Preface a regret that the book as published is 'leaner'than she would have liked. She refersthe 'trulydedicated reader'to a website where some of the omitted material is to be found: . This includes details of a particularly intriguingdatabase she has created from credit reportsof an NEP-era credit bureau which, in effect, providesa number of businesscase histories,some of them discussedin chapterthree. The scholarshipbehind thisstudyis exemplary.Hesslerhas used the central municipal archive of Moscow and the state archives of Odessa, Kursk and Riazan oblasts,aswell as the main relevantRussian Federationstate archives, a wide array of Soviet periodicals, and compendia of laws and decrees. She has paid a good deal of attention to Soviet-erahistoriansof Soviet distribution such as G. A. Dikhtiar and of price-setting (Malafeev, Turetskii),and brings out clearly the fact that these authors,writingin the Khrushchevperiod, had interesting and substantialthings to say. As for her coverage of the Western literature, the only item I can suggest she might have found useful and does not referto is Michael Ellman'spaper on the I947 famine, published in 2000 in the Cambridge Jfournalof Economics.She also interviewed in the I990S some survivingparticipants,including LilianaIsaevna,whose adventuresin private enterprisein the late Stalinperiod are describedin chaptersix. 350 SEER, 83, 2, 2005 The only kind of source she might have made more use of for insights and colour is fiction. There is a brief reference to TheMasterandMargarita on Torgsin shops (thepredecessors of the Berezki)on p. 200, and a vivid, pagelong description of a wartime market by Boldyrev, used as an epigraph on p. 250. That is all. Still, the book is full of intriguingdetail as it is. There is the storyof Liliana Isaevna building up an underground business with a workforce of three in 1951, providing feathers for hats made by underground milliners for Party elite wives: she got the feathers from a kosher butcher and the Aragvi restaurant (pp. 290-9I). Admiring mid-1930S official reports on Macy's of New Yorkas a model of culturedtrade (pp. 207, 2 I0) illustratethe anomalies in what Soviet officialstried to do. So do storieslike that of the I940S TsUM shop assistantwho escorteda customerto herbicycle and then slasheditstyres when she refusedhim a tip (p. 322). The photographs help to convey the diversityof this segment of everyday life in Lenin's and Stalin's Soviet Union. They range from 'cultured trade' (the Eliseev food store in 1935 and the TsUM lace department in I948) to grim depictions of trading to survive, including a German army photograph ofapeasantmarket in 194 I. Hessler has documented and partlyquantifiedwhat she calls 'thepersistent...

The Politics of Beef: Animal Advocacy and the Kosher Butchering Debates in Germany

Sur le fond des debats politiques concernant la protection des animaux et sur l'hygiene dans les abbatoirs dans le Royaume saxe entre 1850 et 1914, l'A. pose la question de l'observation du rituel juif concernant la viande kosher. En examinant ces debats au niveau local, regional et national, l'A. nous presente la societe allemande fragmentee et ses minorites et apporte un eclairage sur leur interaction culturelle, politique et sociale

The Politics of Beef: Animal Advocacy and the Kosher Butchering Debates in Germany

The Politics of Beef: Animal Advocacy and the Kosher Butchering Debates in Germany