Modern Jewish Identity Research Articles

Modern Jewish Identity and Origins

Modern Jewish Identity and Origins

Morgenländischer Glanz. Eine deutsche jüdische Literaturgeschichte (1750–1850) by Kathrin Wittler

Reviewed by: Morgenländischer Glanz. Eine deutsche jüdische Literaturgeschichte (1750–1850) by Kathrin Wittler Carsten Schapkow Kathrin Wittler. Morgenländischer Glanz. Eine deutsche jüdische Literaturgeschichte (1750–1850). Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2019. xii + 620 pp. This ambitious, innovative, and highly readable book of 620 pages—one does not want to miss a single page—is a "German Jewish literary history" based on Kathrin Wittler's 2016 dissertation deciphering the trope of Orientalism among Jewish writers—male and female, well-known and less known today—between 1750 and 1850 in the context of their own literary productions. In doing so, this study goes beyond existing works by Hans Otto Horch, Sander Gilman, Jack Zipes, and Andreas Kilcher. As has been well researched, within this time frame, a modern Jewish identity responding to the challenges of the era of emancipation (see, e.g., Michael A. Meyer's 1996 Deutsch-jüdische Geschichte in der Neuzeit) [End Page 202] and a distinct modern German national culture was developing, as well as the emergence of the academic field of (German) Orientalism. By not focusing on the last third of the nineteenth century and beyond, with its unique debates on German Jewish identities, Wittler urges us to pay attention to these eminent earlier debates. Thus, it is the goal of this book to emphasize the connectedness between academic subjects such as Germanistik, Jewish studies, and Orientalism by also applying current discussions on postcolonialism to it. As Wittler argues, Jewish writers did not express an affiliation with the Orient but rather a connection to particular "time spaces of the Orient," which were not exclusively attached to biblical topics. This thorough book is organized into five chapters and a conclusion covering these 100 years of literary history. This is the time frame when ideas and concepts on the emancipation of the Jews in Germany were debated—decisively well before Jews eventually became citizens in 1871. Treatises like the "Civic Betterment of the Jews" (1781) by Dohm led to wide-ranging responses amongst Jews and non-Jews in the belles lettres as well. The introductory chapter, "Orientalism in German Jewish literature," not only describes the scope and goal of the study but also provides a coherent analysis regarding the existing terminology and meaning of a "German Jewish literary history" with an emphasis on German Jewish as a nonhyphenated term. Wittler opens this chapter by raising the question of who (Jewish and non-Jewish authors) and what topics belong to this literature? According to her account, it makes a difference whether one is writing about a nonhyphenated "German Jewish" literature or the hyphenated variant. Instead of asking about the "contribution" of Jewish authors to German literature and looking for traces of "Jewish identity," Wittler "analyzes the literary procedures that were used around 1800 to (self-) attribute Jewish authorship and origin." Without doubt, the relation Jews had with German literature was an intimate one, arguably finding its first peak with Mendelssohn. A central category of analysis throughout her book is what Wittler terms self- or external Orientalism (Selbst und Fremdorientalisierung). Most strikingly, the author convincingly conveys and strengthens the Jewish voice in this regard by not renarrating the multiple existing accounts of Jews' passive modes of adaption. Instead, Jewish authors cultivated an "Oriental splendor" and thus expressed their own Jewish voice. This can be seen in Chapter 2, titled "On the Oriental Spirit of Hebrew Poetry: Jewish Traditions in the Competitive Field of Antiquities." The focus here is on Hebrew poetry as the central point of reference in the intellectual discourses mainly before 1800, which, as Wittler rightly points out, has thus far been widely neglected in scholarship. In these debates, Jewish writers like Mendelssohn, Ephraim, Behr, Kuh, and Ascher helped to establish a literary discourse with a distinct Jewish voice that was built on models of antiquity and that did not perceive Jewish literary traditions as Oriental and foreign to the Western canon but rather as an integral part of it. This Jewish voice has been denied by non-Jewish writers such as Breitenbach, Gleim, and Herder who did not recognize Hebrew writings mainly those of the Bible as part of the classical canon of the Western...

Crucified with the Brother from Galilee: Symbol of the Cross in Modernist Yiddish Imagination

The European Enlightenment witnessed a Jewish reclamation of Jesus. It led modernist Yiddish intellectuals to experiment with Christian motifs as they tried to contend with what it meant to be Jewish in the modern world. This article proposes to examine, with special focus on poetry, how the crucified Jesus not only became a space of hybridity for Yiddish literary artists to formulate modern Jewish identity and culture but also the medium through which to articulate Jewish suffering in a language that resonated with the oppressors. By doing so, the article seeks to understand the relevance that such literary depictions of Jesus by Jewish authors and poets can have for the Christian understanding of its own identity and its relationship with Judaism.

Israel in modern Jewish identity: an internal debate

ABSTRACT Contemporary Jewry is burdened by a fierce debate about Zionism and Israel. A sizeable sector of Jewish academics, where leftists and self-declared liberals are strongly represented, criticises the Jewish state to the point of casting doubts regarding its very existence. Although their argumentation is frequently similar to the utterances of non-Jewish antisemites, what moves these Jewish Israel-critics is not so much Jews and Judaism but rather the Zionist idea. Such anti-Israel Jews are influenced by modern ideological trends and pressures that affect also, strangely enough, certain Israeli Jewish intellectuals. These developments happen on the background of an increasing pattern of Jew-hatred in non-Jewish society, a transformation of past antisemitism now expressed as anti-Israelism.

Gideon Reuveni. Consumer Culture and the Making of Modern Jewish Identity.

G<scp>ideon</scp> R<scp>euveni</scp>. <i>Consumer Culture and the Making of Modern Jewish Identity</i>.

Review: The Making of Modern Jewish Identity: Ideological Change and Religious Conversion, by Motti Inbari

Review: <i>The Making of Modern Jewish Identity: Ideological Change and Religious Conversion</i>, by Motti Inbari

“Or la-goyim”: From Diaspora theology to Zionist dogma

ABSTRACT The term “a light unto the nations” is a hallmark of modern Jewish identity but the subtle divergences in the meaning of the expression among its diverse proponents shed light on the continuities and differences among modern Jewish ideologies. David Ben-Gurion, in particular, regarded the calling to be “a light unto the nations” as a central mission of the State of Israel. Before the 1950s, however, almost all Zionists, including Ben-Gurion himself, repudiated the term because they associated it with diasporist ideology. This article explores its shifting meanings in Zionist discourse, with a special focus on Ben-Gurion’s rhetoric. It explains Ben-Gurion’s changing attitudes term and shows how his innovative uses of the term allowed him to navigate between modernity and traditional Judaism, between Zionism and its opponents, and between the various streams within the Zionist movement. It reminds us that the lexical continuity of figurative terms can mask conceptual fluctuation and enhances a picture of Zionism that acknowledges both its revolutionary novelty and its place in the long continuum of Jewish life.

The undesired: on nudniks in Jewish American fiction

ABSTRACTThis essay discusses the recurring preoccupation in Jewish literature with the character of the nudnik, a popular figure in Jewish culture but a rather neglected one in scholarly studies. Even though the nudnik appears in many stories throughout the years, from Sholem Aleichem’s, through Franz Kafka’s, to Isaac Bashevis Singer’s stories and novels – nowhere was he more prominent than in post–World War II Jewish American fiction, more specifically in the short stories and novels of Philip Roth and Bernard Malamud. Both Roth and Malamud depict the nudnik as an embodiment of a generational divide, between the tormented Americanized young and the tormenting “Ostjuden” old. And yet, while Malamud’s nudniks serve as a critique on the fate of Jewish culture and tradition in post-Holocaust America, Roth identifies the character of the nudnik as a contaminating element that will forever haunt the younger individual. By discussing the Yiddish term “nudnik” and its ambivalent and unsettling nature in these writers’ texts, this essay will highlight the cultural impact on modern Jewish identity of the nudnik within each story.

L'Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums, une identité juive moderne entre intégration et auto-affirmation

Depuis sa naissance au XVIIIe siècle, la presse juive constitue un moteur important dans la formation d'une identité juive moderne. Dans le cas de l’Allemagne, un rôle majeur a été joué par l’Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums, fondé en 1837 par le rabbin Ludwig Philippson (1811-1889) et resté pendant très longtemps le journal juif le plus influent. Cet article analyse le discours identitaire de cette revue judéo-allemande et démontre qu’il s’agit d’un discours complexe qui, tout en favorisant l’intégration des Juifs à la nation, tente de contribuer à l’auto-affirmation juive.

Muhammad Asad's Conversion to Islam as a Case Study in Jewish Self-Orientalization

After resigning from his diplomatic position as Pakistan’s ambassador to the United Nations in the early 1950s, Muhammad Asad devoted himself to writing his autobiography. Published to much acclaim in 1954, The Road to Mecca told the story of a Galician Jew named Leopold Weiss who had rejected his European Jewish heritage by converting to Islam and immersing himself in the Orient. Despite the author’s emphatic disavowal of his Jewish roots, this article argues that the author framed his conversion to Islam as a resolution to the dilemmas of emancipation and assimilation faced by Central European Jews of his generation. Thus, whereas Asad’s conversion to Islam and his shifting allegiance to the Muslim world seem to place him outside the boundaries of modern Jewish identity politics, I argue that the orientalist ideal he constructs in the autobiography draws on the same postliberal, antiassimilatory rhetoric used by Zionists in the early twentieth century. Asad’s acerbic critique of Zionism and his renunciation of European Jewry notwithstanding, his autobiography is steeped in the symbolic language of Jewish orientalist self-affirmation that characterized his generation’s search for new modes of Jewish self-definition.

Reflections of an Atheist Jew

I was not born nor raised an atheist Jew. My identity was formed by various factors among them family background; geographical migration; British education; secular Zionism; anthropological study and research. These factors were the precipitates of two earlier modern revolutions that transformed the modern world and that affected both Jews and non-Jews, namely the French Revolution which was political, and the Industrial Revolution which was economic. For Jews the French Revolution split the hitherto fused elements of religion and ethnicity into their component parts whilst the Industrial Revolution gave rise to urbanisation and increasing individualism. Jews were faced with a choice of various identities; various permutations were adopted, some apparently paradoxical such as Jewish atheist. In this article I examine the interaction of these factors and document how a single case study, my own, exemplifies but one response to the question of modern Jewish identity. Other Jews have chosen different options. For example, my research in post-communist Hungary has shown that former communist Jews have embraced a number of options. Some founded a Reform Synagogues; others became Hasidim; yet others assumed modern Orthodoxy; a few became Zionists; most, however embraced secular Jewish culture.

The Curse of a Title: bloominauschwitz (or, What's Leopold Bloom Got To Do With It?)

The Curse of a Title:bloominauschwitz (or, What's Leopold Bloom Got To Do With It?) Patrick Morris Titles of plays both reveal and conceal, often in unequal measures. bloominauschwitz is a drama by Richard Fredman, to be produced by the Menagerie Theatre Company of Cambridge at the upcoming Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2018. You have to say its name out loud, in a public place, to get its full impact. It immediately reveals a landscape of concerns, while concealing slapstick comedy, audience interaction, and a modern odyssey about identity, migration, fear of "others," and our tragic attempts to escape from history. bloominauschwitz is provocative for an obvious reason: it derives part of its name from the death camp in which over one million people, mainly European Jews, were systematically murdered over a five-year period. Within a British context, the title jars even more and needs parsing to help non-English speakers understand the nuances. In its spelling, it is a piece of Joyce-inspired, uncapitalized wordplay. The playful, almost anachronistic, "bloomin" is juxtaposed with the ugly, singularly specific, "Auschwitz." It has at least four interpretations, the first three of which are easily understood. Bloom (Leopold Bloom) in Auschwitzbloom (a flower blooming) in Auschwitzblooming (Auschwitz in bloom) Auschwitzbloomin' Auschwitz which many non-United Kingdom natives may not understand. "Bloomin'" is an old-fashioned word, rarely used today, to express anger or frustration: "It's a bloomin' disgrace!" or "I'm not going to bloomin' well clean up after him." It might also be spelled "blimmin'" and pronounced as such. "Bloomin'" can also be used to dismiss something/someone, as though the speaker has simply had enough of that subject/person. The title dares us to address that sensibility with regard to Auschwitz. Ultimately, the play reveals itself to be a piece that breathes new life into what the horrors of Auschwitz might mean for us today. In short, bloominauschwitz is a play for one actor, with arguably Joyce's most famous character, Leopold Bloom, at its center. The play begins simultaneously in the present day and on the morning of 16 June 1904, the date of the novel, in Bloom's outside toilet in Dublin. [End Page 7] He escapes from the novel to reclaim his identity and history, leading him—as the son of a Hungarian Jew—to Auschwitz, where he discovers what this identity means in a fuller sense. It culminates with Bloom being propelled forward to the present day and a reckoning with his past. Fredman was inspired to write the play as a way of exploring how we construct our personal, cultural, and historical identities. Brought up in the Jewish faith, he was particularly curious about the place of the Nazi Holocaust in the construction of modern Jewish identity. Having read Ulysses and visited the Auschwitz concentration camp, Fredman saw Bloom's uncertain history as a dramatic conduit to pursue his curiosity. Bloom is not matrilineally Jewish. His father was a Jewish immigrant to Ireland from Hungary who then converted to Christianity. Despite being born in Ireland, Bloom possesses remnants of his father's past. He is reincarnated in the play as a man in search of an identity, who claims his Jewish heritage as a way of giving himself a past and therefore the possibility of a future. The Play The play begins with Bloom—inside the novel, sitting on his outside toilet—being visited by his future self, from the present day. For the purposes of clarity, Bloom 1 is the character on the toilet inside the novel, and Bloom 2 is the modern-day version of Bloom, aware of his own fame as a literary character. This comic meeting of the two characters (one of whom is trying to protect his privacy and dignity in an outside toilet), played by the single actor, initiates the essential relationship of the play: a man divided between the self that knows nothing except what is written for him and the self that both knows history and his place within it. Bloom 2 urges Bloom 1 to come with him to the future, the audience's present day. Bloom 1, though, once he has...

Karlip, Joshua M The Tragedy of a Generation: The Rise and Fall of Jewish Nationalism in Eastern Europe (review)

SEER, 93, 4, OCTOBER 2015 770 Bohemian spa to reassert itself — either in reality or, more likely, through the future lens of historical scholarship — as a counter-world of interanimating Jewish cultures. Department of Germanic Studies Sunny S. Yudkoff University of Chicago Karlip, Joshua M. The Tragedy of a Generation: The Rise and Fall of Jewish Nationalism in Eastern Europe. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA and London, 2013. x + 378 pp. Notes. Index. $45.00: £33.95. Joshua M. Karlip’s The Tragedy of a Generation: The Rise and Fall of Jewish Nationalism in Eastern Europe is a meticulously researched study of an extraordinarily fecund and fateful period of modern Jewish history. But readers must be aware that the title — which is probably more the choice of Harvard University Press than the author — is misleading. Karlip’s PhD dissertation from the Jewish Theological Seminary (2006) on which this work is based, ‘The Center that Could Not Hold: Afn Sheydveg and the Crisis of Diaspora Nationalism’, is an accurate description of the book. Those who are expecting a comprehensive sweep, encompassing the many varieties of Jewish nationalism, even within a single generation, will be disappointed. This is not what this book offers. Yet if one possesses a fair amount of knowledge of European Jewish history, The Tragedy of a Generation is certain to be greatly appreciated. In a rather odd way, however, the book delivers more than it promises, even with a title of such wide berth. While it mainly comprises an analysis and contextualization of a journal, Oyfn sheydveg, and its three key figures — I. M. Cherikover (1881–1943), Zelig Kalmanovich (1885–1944), and Isroel Efroikin (1884–1954) — and ends in a thunderous clap with the Holocaust, it also may be seen as prefiguring the mind-set which led numerous Jews from universalist outlooks to embrace orthodoxy, ‘essentialist’ (p. 307), and authoritarian forms of Jewish nationalism, uncompromisingly bound to the territory of Palestine (later Israel) (p. 255). The thrust of the study is these men’s conception of, and evolving thought concerning Yiddishism and Diaspora Nationalism. Inherent in this emphasis are the strains they initially rejected: Zionism, Marxism (class struggle) and separatist varieties of Jewish orthodoxy. Yiddish culture and language was supposed to serve as the chief unifying force for Jews, while ‘Jewish statelessness’ was to be ‘celebrated’ (p. 151). Central to Karlip’s analysis is his explication of the extent to which the forms of supposed ‘nonreligious’ Jewish nationalism were deeply beholden to traditional Judaism: ‘A reading of their Oyfn sheydveg articles in light of their biographies unsettles our assumptions REVIEWS 771 regarding the categories of the secular and the religious, the cultural and politically radical and the conservative. More fundamentally, it questions the long-held assumptions of historians that secular Jewish nationalism’s break with traditional religious Judaism proved total and irreversible’ (p. 3). In a standard formulation of a dissertation-turned-book, Karlip states that ‘My study reveals that Diaspora nationalists and Yiddishists, long before the crisis of Nazism, constantly sought to both rebel against the religious tradition and to draw inspiration from it’ (p. 4). Certainly this thesis is well-supported. Yet how different is it from the ideas of classics such as Moses Rischin’s Promised City: New York’s Jews, 1870–1914 (Cambridge, MA, 1962), Jonathan Frankel’s Prophesy and Politics: Socialism, Nationalism, and the Russian Jews, 1882–1917 (Cambridge and New York, 1981), Ezra Mendelsohn’s Class Struggle in the Pale: The Formative Years of the Jewish Worker’s Movement in Tsarist Russia (Cambridge and New York, 1970) and David Weinberg’s stellar (but often overlooked) Between Tradition and Modernity: Haim Zhitlowski, Simon Dubnow, Ahad Ha-Am, and the Shaping of Modern Jewish Identity (Teaneck, NJ, 1996)? In the author’s own generation, this sensibility is far from absent in the sophisticated scholarship of, for example, Barry Trachtenberg in The Revolutionary Roots of Modern Yiddish, 1913–1917 (Syracuse, NY, 2008) and Kenneth Moss, Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 2009). Rather than the purported thesis of the book its greatest contribution may be its scope: tracing what happened to these people and their thought in the fires of Nazism. ‘On the...

Book Review: Freud in Zion: Psychoanalysis and the Making of Modern Jewish Identity

Book Review: Freud in Zion: Psychoanalysis and the Making of Modern Jewish Identity

Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, the Royal Alliance, and Jewish Political Theory

This article examines Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi’s views of the realities and myths of the “royal alliance” in medieval and modern Jewish history as a seminal contribution to Jewish political history and theory as well as a revealing entree into his overall historiographical approach. Elaborating the ideas of his teacher Salo Baron and drawing upon Hannah Arendt’s insights into the relationship between Jews and modern states, Yerushalmi ultimately used his own understanding of Jewish political experience to argue against her indictment of wartime Jewish leaders. For Yerushalmi, Jews’ awareness of their tendencies to forge vertical alliances with the highest authorities served to fortify and console them; he considered these perceptions generally realistic and, though at times tragically blinding, still ultimately anchored in historical experience. This essay situates the royal alliance within Yerushalmi’s broader conceptions of Jewish community, political agency, and domicile as diasporic survival strategies. It also views this concept as part of his post-Holocaust commitment to chart the paradoxes of Jewish hope and to regenerate Jewish hope, both collective and individual. Yerushalmi is often celebrated as a pioneering thinker who contrasted modern critical historiography to traditional collective memory and who explored the individual, existential, psychological, and skeptical dimensions of modern Jewish identity. Yet, this essay suggests, a traditionalist strain may be heard in his profound identification with the Jewish people and his deriving hope from their political and historical experience—in both its continuities and its ruptures.

Weimar Film and Modern Jewish Identity by Ofer Ashkenazi (review)

Weimar Film and Modern Jewish Identity by Ofer Ashkenazi (review)

Freud in Zion: Psychoanalysis and The Making of Modern Jewish Identity. by Eran J. Rolnik, Translated by Haim Watzman

Freud in Zion: Psychoanalysis and The Making of Modern Jewish Identity. by Eran J. Rolnik, Translated by Haim Watzman

The First Modern Jew: Spinoza and the History of an Image by Daniel B. Schwartz (review)

Reviewed by: The First Modern Jew: Spinoza and the History of an Image by Daniel B. Schwartz Jay Geller The First Modern Jew: Spinoza and the History of an Image Daniel B. Schwartz. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012. 270 pp. Daniel B. Schwartz’s The First Modern Jew: Spinoza and the History of an Image is an important addition to the ever-extending list of new thinking about the life, works, and reception of Baruch (Benedict) Spinoza, the seventeenth-century philosopher, political theorist, and biblical exegete, who was excommunicated by Amsterdam’s Sephardic Jewish community. The interplay of his book’s title and subtitle indicates Schwartz’s primary concern and contribution. Rather than engaging in a history of ideas, he examines the constructions of a conjunction—the figure of “the first modern Jew” (as the cover emphasizes) and its identification with the figure “Spinoza”—and the diverse purposes they served at crucial moments in the history of contestations over Jewish identity. As it moves from Spinoza’s first biographers (J.-M. Lucas, P. Bayle, and J. Colerus) at the turn of the eighteenth century to the turn-of-the-millenium efforts of Y. Yovel, S. Nadler, S. B. Smith, and R. Goldstein, The First Modern Jew delimits its purview to critical assays of the role of Jewish tradition and social location on Spinoza’s work. Further, aside from those early Gentile readers who addressed the question of Spinoza’s Jewishness, he focuses almost exclusively on Jewish authors and what he identifies as the “Jewish reclamation of Spinoza.” Not all Jewish readings sought to “reclaim” the apostate (although he never converted to Christianity) for the Jews; consequently, what distinguish the authors Schwartz analyzes are not only their ethnic or religious provenance but their motivations as well: “to validate—and in some cases critically interrogate—their own identities and ideologies” (3). Ultimately, Schwartz directs his attention at those for whom this reclamation project was also the means by which they generated genealogies of how to embody “modern” and “Jew.” His choice of “modern” rather than “secular” is also apt, since the identification of the “secular Jew” with the “modern Jew” has become a commonplace; however, as Schwartz demonstrates, the identification of the “modern” with the “secular” is only [End Page 137] one of a number of diverse identity choices Jews have made since the eighteenth century. Given the many different life-worlds in which reclaiming a Jewish Spinoza as the first or prototypical modern Jew played a significant role in grounding a modern Jewish identity over and against a hegemonic traditional one, Schwartz selects four moments that vary in time, place, language, and religious observance/notion of religion: 1830s Germany, 1850s Galicia, 1920s Palestine, and 1920s Warsaw/1940s New York. Prior to his case studies, Schwartz describes how in the first century after Spinoza’s death, as the greater Jewish community remained virtually silent, his Jewishness was being constructed by Gentile commentators along two trajectories: ex-Jew and eternal Jew. The second chapter takes up the breach of Jewish observance of the ban on discussing Spinoza by the other usual contender for the title “first modern Jew,” Moses Mendelssohn. In his first (Philosophical Dialogues) and last (Morning Hours) works Mendelssohn situated Spinoza (“someone other than a Christian”; cit. 39) in the progressive history of metaphysical thought and, if his work were to be properly “refined” (52), as not incompatible with Judaism. The initial identification of Spinoza as the “first modern Jew,” however, only emerges in the Bildung-intoxicated, early-nineteenth-century German-Jewish community on the cusp of Emancipation exploring religious reform and seeking social integration portrayed in chapter 3. While detailing a number of Jewish engagements with Spinoza from Saul Asch to Moses Hess, this chapter turns on a discussion of how liberal humanist author Berthold Auerbach, with the publication of his Spinoza novel (and of his translation, the first complete German one, of Spinoza’s works, both in 1837), proffers a Spinoza incarnating a universal Judaism that portended the modern ideal of a universal human community. In his next chapter Schwartz moves eastward to the Hebrew Haskala and its pursuit of other intellectual models immanent to the Jewish tradition...

Making of the Zionist Woman

The majority of scholarly debates on varieties of Jewish nationalism focus on the Jewish man’s role in the rebuilding of the Jewish homeland and his body in the regeneration of the Jewish nation. This article discusses Zionism’s gender politics surrounding the Jewish woman’s body and selfhood in this rebirth process and the formation of a modern Jewish identity in interwar Poland. It explores Jewish patriarchal structures and the discursive power and reach of Zionist ideology. Jewish women engaged not only in the ideological rebirth of the Jewish nation, they also initiated the physical rebirth of the Jewish Woman who was deemed too urban and thus degenerate (the modern Jewish woman was viewed as possessing next to no ideological consciousness and physical strength). Therefore, Zionist female ideologues argued that the bodily rebirth of Jewish women would lead to the strengthening of their Jewish identities and inevitably the Jewish stock. While still in the Diaspora, women had to work on developing strong healthy bodies, inasmuch as Zionist men were expected to make themselves into strong muscular Jews to be able to immigrate to Palestine and work there productively. Besides being able to work in Palestine alongside Jewish men, nationalist Jewish women had to be strong and healthy for one more reason: they had to be able to give birth to healthy children, which in the Zionist context meant giving birth to a healthy Jewish nation.

Weimar film and modern Jewish identity

Weimar film and modern Jewish identity