Jewish Culture and History
Abstracts
of articles in Issue 5.2
- Instituting the Holocaust: Comic Fiction and the Moral Career of
the Survivor by Adam Rovner
- The incongruity of imagining the Holocaust through the use of
comic conventions is striking. The atrocities of the Holocaust do not
immediately present themselves as likely backdrops for humour. Yet there are
many such works and their number is growing. Critical and popular success have
greeted both cinematic and literary examples of Holocaust humour. Nonetheless,
even where humour may be wrung from destruction, some critics maintain that
humour is an inappropriate means of representing the cruelties inflicted by the
Nazis and the suffering experienced by their victims. Such objections amount to
the charge that humour is unethical given the scope of the atrocities. This
article investigates whether comic works of Holocaust literature really pose
significant ethical problems.
- Modes of Tradition? Negotiating Jewishness and Modernity in the
Synagogue Music of Isadore Freed and Frederick Piket by Judah Cohen
- This article examines the discourses surrounding
musical constructions called the ‘synagogue modes’ in post-Second World War
America. After providing a historical account of the modes in Jewish musical
thought, the article looks at the writings and compositions of Isadore Freed
(1900–60) and Frederick Piket (1903–73), two prominent Reform
movement composers with opposing viewpoints on modal usage within modern
synagogue composition. Through this comparison, I show that the modes were a
site for negotiating many of the same issues of Jewish continuity, American
identity, and the relationship with ‘Tradition’ that pervaded
American Jewish life at the time.
- Assimilation versus Idiosyncrasy: Strategic Constructions of
Sephardic Identities in Hong Kong by Caroline Plüss
- This article analyses how Sephardic traders constructed
identities in order to foster their social, political and economic aims in Hong
Kong from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth century. It argues
that there was no uniform relationship between seeking integration in the
colony and assimilating to the characteristics of the British elites who
controlled access to important resources. Sephardim formed identities which
featured Anglicised characteristics to overcome exclusion, while they also
deliberately asserted their distinctive identities to draw on the resources of
their own community in Hong Kong and in the wider Sephardic diaspora.
- Between Hammer and Anvil: On the Emigration of Iraqi Jewry
1950–51 by Moshe Gat
- During 1950–51, over 120,000 Iraqi Jews arrived
in Israel. Most of them arrived by plane in what has been described as
the largest
airborne population in history. Several factors contributed to
the removal of a deep-rooted and prosperous community from Iraq. One
was the rise of the Iraqi
national state, which did not tolerate autonomous minorities,
and the rise of a nationalist Pan-Arab movement, which regarded the destiny
of the Jews in Iraq
as belonging to that of their fellow Jews in Palestine. Second,
to calm domestic unrest the monarchist regime of Iraq adopted a policy
of repression
and discrimination against the Jews. This policy completely shattered
the confidence of the community in their future in Iraq. The Zionist
underground
movement advocated emigration to Israel. Its primary goal was
to bring the entire Iraqi Diaspora to Israel, and thus contribute to
the liberation of the
Jewish people in their land. The underground movement provided
a solution for the Jewish problem in Iraq, one which in fact coincided
with the policy of the
Iraqi regime seeking to resolve a domestic crisis.
- The World Jewish Congress: Influence Without Power by
Yitzhak Mualem
- As a non-governmental entity, the World Jewish
Congress is active in the global politics of the Jewish people, maintaining
a broad network of
relations with bodies and governments in all parts of the world.
This network assists the Congress in its activities of providing material,
political and
cultural aid to Jewish communities throughout the world. The
present article focuses on this entity in an attempt to answer the question:
What is the degree
of influence of non-national organisations in the global political
arena, in an era in which the governmental unit, namely the sovereign
state, is the chief
actor? This examination of the World Jewish Congress’ ability to act
in the global Jewish political arena concentrates on three issues which represent
three areas of activity on the organisation's agenda: reparations,
endangered
Jewry and the Waldheim affair.
- Document: Closed Down by Two Tsars: A Short Note from a
Family Archive by Rachel Bayvel
- This article is dedicated to 75 years of the activity
of the Shapiro printing houses in Slavuta and Zhitomir and based on the
family
archives and documents from the Ukrainian and Russian State Archives,
which recently became accessible. These documents clearly show the reasons
why both
the reactionary Tsar Nicholas I and the reformer Alexander II
brought their wrath upon several generations of the Shapiro printers,
although no laws were
violated by the Shapiros, who published their books only with
the permission of the censors. The main reason for the closure of the
printing houses was because
this family of printers followed their religious and ideological
principles – which was in contradiction to the official government policy of forcibly
‘reforming’ the Jewish population.
- Book Reviews