Jewish Culture and History
Abstracts of
articles in Issue 9.1
- Sally Smith, Sex, Leisure and Jewish
Youth Clubs in Inter-War London
- The inter-war years witnessed dramatic social and cultural change
in London; higher wages, better transport and cheaper entertainments
opened up commercial leisure to the masses; including second-generation
Jewish adolescents. Both Jewish and gentile communal leaders feared
that increased adolescent autonomy and regular interaction between
the sexes during leisure time would heighten sexual awareness and experimentation.
The Anglo-Jewish response was to use youth clubs to mould and control
young people and their sexual identity. This article examines the extent
to which leisure was responsible for increasing Jewish adolescent sexual
precocity and how successful Jewish youth clubs were in controlling
juvenile behaviour.
- Brian Gibson, ‘The Unrest-Cure’ and
Saki’s Uneasy Anti-Semitism
- Depictions of Jews in the Edwardian fiction
of Saki (Hector Hugh Munro, 1870–1916) have been overlooked or condemned out-of-hand.
Yet what is usually stark anti-semitism in Saki’s fiction turns,
in ‘The Unrest-Cure’, on its purveyor and audience, satirising
anti-Jewish feelings in Munro’s bourgeois world. Saki exposes
a dark lining in the golden idyll of Edwardian rural England while
subverting the Jewish cabal stereotype. But as Munro and Saki blur
into a strident, jingoistic voice with the approach of war, there is
a return to the unironic, overt anti-semitism of earlier stories, culminating
in the reactionary, anti-cosmopolitan attacks of When William Came
(1913).
- Ruth Gilbert, The Golem in the Attic: Rodinsky’s
Room and Jewish Memory
- This article focuses on Rachel Lichtenstein
and Iain Sinclair’s co-authored text Rodinsky’s Room
(1999). The discussion reads the text’s figuring of David Rodinsky
as an absent presence in particular relation to the Jewish golem
legend. In developing the connection between collective myth and
Lichtenstein’s pursuit of Rodinsky’s story the article
draws from Jonathan Boyarin and David Roskies’ theorisation
of cultural memory and Jewish identity in order to ask questions
about the interplay between remembering and forgetting in the construction
of contemporary Jewish identity.
- Götz Nordbruch, The Conspiracy against
Community: Tracing the Popularity of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
in Contemporary
Egypt
- The warning about conspiracies is a frequent topic in Egyptian
public discourse. Recent debates about The Protocols of the Elders
of Zion exemplarily link various scenarios of threat that are identified
with the influence of Jewish hidden hands. This article reconstructs
diverse facets of these assumed plots and places them in the context
of the ideologies of community that have shaped modern Egyptian political
culture. The imagining of an abstract and universal enemy that challenges
the very existence of the Arab community can be explained as a result
of a distorted intellectual appropriation of ongoing social and political
changes and transformations.