Representations Of Jewish Identity Research Articles

On the Money: Existentialism and Imperial Semiotics in A. M. Klein’s The Second Scroll

ABSTRACT A great deal of scholarly attention has been paid to A. M. Klein’s The Second Scroll for its representation of Jewish identity. The narrator of the novel, however, recognizes that, as the descendant of immigrants, he is “a Canadian Jew marginalized from the Holocaust and the foundation of Israel.” In this sense, the narrator of The Second Scroll experiences a double marginalization resulting in a more complex representation of identity than the novel is usually afforded. Few critics, for instance, acknowledge the novel’s indebtedness to the existential philosophy of S⊘ren Kierkegaard and Martin Buber. A close reading of Klein’s use of British imperial symbols in concert with the foundational texts of existentialism and the work of Louis Althusser disrupts the dominant school of thought regarding The Second Scroll. The novel certainly celebrates Judaism, but it is not meant to represent the consolidation of a Jewish identity or ideology; rather, it is a parable for Canadians. As a result of the interpellation or “hail” of ideology, the narrator and his search for his mercurial Uncle Melech is prompted to assert a distinctly Canadian identity.

The Metropolis and the Attic: Spatial Representations of Jewish Identity in Kafka and the Golem of Prague

The paper queries the significance of two figures in representations of Prague, the legendary Golem and the writer Franz Kafka. It analyzes the spatial representation of Jewish identity in iterations of the Golem legend, such as AloisJirasek’s retelling of the Golem legend in Old Czech Legends ( Starepověsticeske , 1894) and Yudl Rosenberg’s treatment of the legend in The Golem and the Wondrous Deeds of the Maharal of Prague ( Niflaot Maharal , 1909); and juxtaposes them with the handling of space in Kafka’s “Report to an Academy” (“EinBerichtfureine Akademie ,” 1917) and The Metamorphosis ( Die Verwandlung , 1915). Surveying their shifts between modes of metropolitan mobility and sequestration, I suggest that these narratives of straddled identity play around the edges of identity, resonating, in particular, at the times when both Czechs and Jews found themselves caught between the responsibilities of tradition and the pressures of assimilation.

Dissociation and Visual Arguments: Creating Customers for Levy's Real Jewish Rye

This article argues that Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-tyteca's concept of dissociation is a useful framework for exploring the interaction between texts and images in visual arguments. More specifically, I use dissociation to examine the visual argument in a series of 1950s advertisements for Levy's rye bread. I argue that the dissociative interaction between the ads' text and images expanded the market for Levy's rye, yet relied on problematic representations of Jewish identity. Nevertheless, the ads' dissociative framework allows for the campaign and its parodies to critique and expand notions of Jewish identity.

Confronting the “Jewish Type”: Israel Zangwill, Composite and Mirror Photography

This article considers Israel Zangwill’s Children of the Ghetto through the lens of two late-nineteenth century photographic techniques: hinged-mirror and composite photography. These two techniques, each of which played a role in Zangwill’s personal life, are useful for reframing Zangwill’s personal and literary struggles with representations of Jewish identity that were confined to notions of “types,” or stereotypes of race and ethnicity. The article traces Zangwill’s overall discomfort with what I term the “composite photographic logic of liberalism,” a logic that predicated tolerance on the radical assimilation of Jewish difference and reinforced institutional practices of Anglicization, especially in London’s East End Ghetto.

Jewish Performance as a Means for Constructing the Society of “Living Together”

In this article, I propose an ethnography of the Festival Internacional Murcia Tres Culturas, and more particularly of the performance of the Sandra Bessis Trio to reflect on the means, role and impact of the representation of Jewish identity in a Spanish World Art/World Music festival. On one hand, we discern that the festival organizers sacralize the time of Convivencia to create a cosmopolitan event; and on the other that the Trio plays between the desacralization and the sacralization of this past, by using various performance strategies that mobilize instruments, language, repertoire and musicians identity to proceed it.

Was Peggy Guggenheim Jewish? Art Collecting and Representations of Jewish Identity In and Out of Postwar Venice

Peggy Guggenheim (1898-1979), born into the wealthy New York German-Jewish circle portrayed in Stephen Birmingham's Our Crowd , set up permanent residency for herself and her extensive modern art collection in Venice in 1947. Her biography and her representations, by herself and others (some of them anti-Semitic), offer clues about her identity as a Jewish woman and shed light on the shifting identities of modern, secular Jews in the twentieth century.

Foundational Fiction and Representations of Jewish Identity in Jorge Isaacs' María

Foundational Fiction and Representations of Jewish Identity in Jorge Isaacs' María Julia C. Paulk Doris Sommer's landmark study of Latin American literature, Foundational Fictions, claims Jorge Isaacs' novel María as a foundational fiction because of its tremendous popularity and its allegorization of the divisions plaguing nineteenth-century Colombia. Sommer's approach to nineteenth-century Latin American literature has been widely received and generally well accepted. A recent study, "Judaísmo y desarraigo en María de Jorge Isaacs" by Gustavo Faverón Patriau, calls Sommer's interpretation into question by proposing that Isaacs's novel does not propose unification through mestizaje but rather is a novel of exile and Diaspora (341). Like his Jewish forefathers, Efraín, the protagonist, continues the search for a homeland at the conclusion of the novel. Given that almost twenty years have passed since the publication of Foundational Fictions, perhaps we should be inspired by Faverón Patriau's example to reexamine Sommer's analyses in order to determine which aspects of her methodology are still useful for us and where further work may be called for. In this article, I propose to evaluate Faverón Patriau's critique of Sommer's approach to the nation-building novels of the nineteenth-century and analysis of María in light of recent developments in a growing but still very much underrepresented area, Latin American Jewish Studies. Rather than discount Sommer's enormous contribution to the study of nineteenth-century Latin American literature as over determined, we can take this opportunity to further examine the concepts of foundational fiction and mestizaje with respect to representations of Jewishness in Latin American literature. I will demonstrate that Efraín's nostalgic look at the past offers a critique of the high cost of assimilation [End Page 43] to those groups that do not fit in with the nineteenth-century elite's vision of a homogeneous, whitened national identity. I would like to begin by briefly reviewing Doris Sommer's approach to the Latin American literary works that she calls "foundational fictions." Sommer's impact on the study of novels from the nineteenth century has been enormous; in my opinion, this is because her approach is effective and useful. A re-examination of her work can nonetheless benefit literary criticism and our understanding of nineteenth-century literature. One overarching theory unites the chapters of Sommer's book: her concern, she states, is "to locate an erotics of politics, to show how a variety of novel national ideals are all ostensibly grounded in 'natural' heterosexual love and in the marriages that provided a figure for apparently nonviolent consolidation during internecine conflicts at midcentury. Romantic passion, on my reading, gave a rhetoric for the hegemonic projects in Gramsci's sense of conquering the antagonist through mutual interest, or 'love,' rather than through coercion" (Sommer 6). Sommer arrives at her interpretation by means of her unique definition of allegory. As Sommer herself claims, people were already reading these novels as allegories: "By assuming a certain kind of translatability between romantic and republican desires, writers and readers of Latin America's canon of national novels have in fact been assuming what amounts to an allegorical relationship between personal and political narratives" (41). Rather than rely on the traditional definition of allegory as an extended metaphor or "a narrative with two parallel levels of signification" (42), Sommer defines allegory as "a narrative structure in which one line is a trace of the other, in which each helps to write the other" (42). Developing this concept even further, Sommer describes "the allegory in Latin American national novels as an interlocking, not parallel, relationship between erotics and politics" (43). As she reads, Sommer "shuttle[s] back and forth from reading romantic intrigues to considering political designs" (41). Her understanding of the love story informs her interpretation of the political commentary and vice versa. A curious aspect of Sommer's approach that must be dealt with is the fact that many of the love stories that she analyzes as political allegories proposing national unification and consolidation are in fact failed unions. In Mármol's Amalia, the lovers, Eduardo and Amalia, are killed near the...

Negotiating Jewish Identity through the Display of Art

Research on museums has proved useful in understanding the social dynamics of groups and societies and their use of material culture for the construction and reaffirmation of cultural identities. A comparison between two exhibitions of Jewish art and history taking place in London at the turn of the twentieth century reveals a gradual shift in the museological representation of Jewish identity from a focus on religion towards ethnicity. The inclusion of visitor perceptions and of unintentional and contradictory meanings of the exhibits, however, illustrates that these representations were not necessarily the outcome of a clear strategy and were socially contested.