Jewish
Culture and History
Abstracts
of articles in Issue 3.1
- The Art of Listening: Primo Levi's Ethics of Storytelling
by Robert S.C. Gordon
- This article examines Primo Levi’s practice of and interest
in storytelling as a form of ethical enquiry, based in the reciprocity and
attention of the storytelling encounter, both in his Holocaust testimony and
beyond. It pays particular attention to the book La chiave a stella (The
Wrench), which is examined as a sort of storyteller’s manual. Through the
book’s all but unspoken subtext echoing Levi’s own Holocaust
narratives, the practice of storytelling in The Wrench is shown
as a model for his work as a whole, through parallels in Benjamin
and in Judaic storytelling
traditions.
The Queer Jew and Cinema: From Yidl to Yentl and Back and
Beyond by Michele Aaron
- This essay interrogates the various
interactions of queerness and Jewishness through the crossdressing films
Yidl Mitn Fidl (Joseph
Green, 1936) and Yentl (Barbra Streisand, 1983). Through an
application of the notion of the ‘Jew as Woman’, Yidl is found to be heavily invested in undoing the
anti-semitic myth, in unqueering the ‘Jew’. Yentl, which is revealed
as deeply rooted in the earlier Yiddish film, uses the myth for
its own feminist and erotic ends. Despite their diverse contexts,
the films suggest a
continuum of critical issues framing the cinematic representation
of Jewishness.
‘America is home’: Commentary Magazine and the
Refocusing of the Community of Memory, 1945 –60 by Nathan Abrams
- This article examines one of America’s most celebrated
periodicals, Commentary magazine, founded by the American Jewish Committee
under the editorship of Elliot E. Cohen in 1945. The article describes the
process by which young Jewish intellectuals, who had removed themselves from
their communities, would edit and write for a magazine of the organised Jewish
community. It examines Commentary’s formative years during the 1940s and
1950s, in particular the nature of the relationship between the editors and its
sponsors. In doing so, the article shows the effects of this literary and
cultural effort in producing a new Jewish-American discourse of America as
‘home’.
An Instauratio Magna of Universal Fellowship? Proposals for a
Judaic University in Revolutionary London by Carola Scott-Luckens
- This is a contextual study of a little-known
facet of mid-seventeenth-century philosemitism: a proposal by reformers
John Dury and Samuel Hartlib to found a College of Judaic Studies
in London, with funding
promised by the Commonwealth government in 1649–50. A survey of early
links between Renaissance Christian philosophy and Judaism
precedes the main focus on projects by intellectuals in England
and the Netherlands to foster
closer ties between Christianity and Judaism during the 1640s
and 1650s. This was to be part of a wider programme of social
reform representing perhaps the
last historical attempt to advance scientific and practical
knowledge within a greater framework of universal spiritual
harmony and philanthropy.
Documents
- Nazi Persecution and the Pursuit of
Science: Correspondence between the tropical medicine specialists
Erich Martini and
his former colleague, Otto Hecht in 1946 –47 by Rainer Hering
- The Hairdresser Who Loved Kandinsky by Colin
Richmond
Book Reviews