Jewish Culture and History Abstracts

Jewish Culture and History

Abstracts of articles in Issue 5.1

Rosenberg in the Trenches: Imagining King David’s World by Daniel A. Harris
- Isaac Rosenberg composed his last poems in response to the Balfour Declaration and Jabotinsky’s creation of the Jewish Regiment. These thoroughly Hebrew poems are not allegories of the Great War, as critics have supposed, but a summary of his lifelong preoccupation with the House of David. Reworking Hebrew national elegy as derived from Jeremiah, he backdates the origins of the Babylonian Captivity to the time of Solomon, conflates ancient and modern epochs through a secularised Jewish typology, and enters Hebrew history by placing his speaker in analogous relation to the Davidic line. By comparison with other Jewish poems about Balfour and Jabotinsky, Rosenberg’s sequence ends by confronting the reality of a ‘national home’, not a myth.
Secret Tourists in the City of their Birth: French and non-French Jewish Women in Occupied Paris by K.H. Adler
- This article examines the uncertain relationships between religion, politics and the French republic via shifts within constructions of what was thought an appropriate population for France at the end of the German occupation. The first part sets out some of the historical terrain as it pertained to Jews, women and the non-French. The second section explores the writings of Jewish women resisters to suggest that the positions of those who were politically engaged were more complex and varied than has sometimes been implied. Through an investigation of the meaning of ‘home’ it aims to understand how those varieties were articulated and experienced. Moreover, it seeks to challenge contemporary resister and later historiographic assumptions about differences between immigrant and French-born Jews.
Black and White, Blue and White and Beyond the Pale: Ethiopian Jews and the Discourse of Colour in Israel by Steven Kaplan
- This article explores aspects of racial discourse employed in discussing Ethiopian Jews in Israel. It assumes that racial classifications are social constructions which themselves must be analysed and explained. Although Ethiopian immigrants did not consider themselves to be ‘black’ in Ethiopia, they are usually described as such in Israel. This serves not only to associate them with other ‘black’ groups in the African diaspora, but also to emphasise that other Israelis are ‘white’. This ‘whiteness’ of veteran Israelis, like the ‘blackness’ of Ethiopians is not a mere description of pigmentation, but rather a designation which carries with it numerous social and political associations. In contrast to Ethiopian Jews and other Jewish Israelis, other groups – most notably Israeli Arabs – do not figure as part of the colour spectrum and are thus rendered invisible in discussions, which ignore their existence.
Gender and Nostalgia: Images of Women in Early Yizker Bikher by Natalia Aleksiun
- The yizker bikher – books Holocaust survivors created to memorialise their lost communities – have left the historian a rich trove of information about the lives of Jewish women during an era when their roles were being torn between the twin poles of tradition and revolution. Although the memorial books contain much more material on the lives of men than women, the choices the authors made about which female-centred material to include reveal much about the lost communities’ ideas of family, education and leadership. Remembrances of women for their involvement in charity, for their service to the needs of community, and for their piety and knowledge appear even in the sections devoted to religious leaders of the community. The very same volumes include images of pious rebbetzins and of socialist revolutionaries. Nostalgia and a sense of loss proved the common denominator in uniting the memory of two very different Jewish worlds. The diverse materials in the dozens of these memorial books express the personal and communal crisis in the aftermath of the Holocaust. The sense of mourning and alienation from the emerging modern Jewish identity of the inter-war period led to the construction of an idealised memory of Jewish life.
Between America and Israel: The Quest for a Distinct European Jewish Identity in the Post-War Era By David Weinberg
- This essay traces the development of European Jewish consciousness from its earliest formulations in the immediate post-war era to its culmination in the editorials and sponsored colloquia of the journal European Judaism in the 1960s and 1970s. Special emphasis is placed on the emergence of the perception of European Judaism as a ‘third way’ between America and Israel. The essay concludes with an examination of the conceptual flaws that doomed the effort to create a distinct European Jewish identity.
DOCUMENT
Correspondence between Martin Buber, Hans Kohn, Abraham Joshua Heschel and Adolph Oko, 1939–44 by Frederic Krome
Book Reviews