Jewish Culture and History
Abstracts
of articles in Issue 8.2
- Sue Vice, ‘It’ll make ashenblotty of the seating-plan!’:British-Jewishness
inJack Rosenthal’s Bar Mitzvah Boy
- This article argues that the work of Jack Rosenthal,
the television dramatist, has been unaccountably excluded from the
canon of British-Jewish
writing. A comparison of two different versions of his 1976 television
play Bar Mitzvah Boy – which was turned into musicals in both Britain
and the US – shows how innovative Rosenthal’s aesthetic practice
is in representing Jewish characters. The success of the television
play is due to its reliance on a hybrid of British and Jewish discourses,
rather than setting these against each other (as in the case of
the British
musical) or merging them (in the American musical).
- Anat Helman, Civic Involvement and Street-Naming
in Inter-War Tel-Aviv
- During the 1920s and 1930s, the autonomous Jewish
municipality of Tel Aviv received constant requests, demands and complaints
about the city’s
street names. Archival documents and other historical sources indicate
popular involvement in the process of naming and renaming the streets of
the ‘First Hebrew City’, as various urban segments, organisations,
firms and individuals tried to express particular priorities and
values within the comprehensive Zionist ideal. Rather than being imposed
by municipal
institutions upon a passive public, the hegemonic messages conveyed
in Tel Aviv street names were negotiated and confirmed in a vivid dialogue.
- Maite Ojeda Mata, Thinking about ‘the
Jew’ in
Modern Spain: Historiography, Nationalism and Anti-semitism
- The history of the recuperation of Sephardim in
nineteenth and early twentieth-century Spain is an important historical
precedent for understanding Franco’s ambivalent policy during the
persecution of European Jews by Hitler. The re-encounter with this Spanish-Jewish
past in the nineteenth century can shed light on the wider phenomenon
of European anti-semitism as well as on the development of nationalism
in modern Spanish history. This article suggests the presences, absences
and continuities in the visualisation of Jews in Spanish liberal historiography
and historiographic writings and the conservative reaction to this (re)thinking,
the result of which was Franco’s apparently paradoxical attitude
towards the persecution of European Jews by Nazi Germany.
- Marvin Spevack, In the Shadow of the Son:Isaac
D’Israeli
and Benjamin Disraeli
- Critical opinion has tended to regard Isaac D’Israeli and Benjamin
Disraeli, father and son, as foils, stretching their differences of character
and stressing the different paths they pursued. There is no doubt that
they were foils. But they were also secret sharers. For a closer examination
of their day-to-day interaction, based especially on the hitherto neglected
papers of the father, reveals the emotional tenor as well as the intellectual
affinity of their relationship and offers a new perspective on the formation
and development of the person and persona of the son.