DELEGITIMIZING JEWS AND ISRAEL IN IRAN'S INTERNATIONAL HOLOCAUST CARTOON CONTEST

In 2006, the Iranian government-aligned newspaper Hamshahri sponsored The International Holocaust Cartoon Contest. The stated aim of the contest was to denounce “Western hypocrisy on freedom of speech,” and to challenge “Western hegemony” in relation to Holocaust knowledge. This government-backed initiative was a clear attempt to export the Iranian regime's anti-Zionist agenda. Using qualitative thematic analysis and Social Representations Theory, this article provides an in-depth qualitative analysis of the cartoons submitted to the contest in order to identify emerging social representations of Jews and Israel. Three superordinate themes are outlined: (i) “Constructing the ‘Evil Jew’ and ‘Brutal Israel’ as a Universal Threat;” (ii) “Denying the Holocaust and Affirming Palestinian Suffering;” (iii) “Constructing International Subservience to ‘Nazi-Zionist’ Ideology.” Although the organizers of the International Holocaust Cartoon Contest claimed that their aims were anti-Zionist, this article elucidates the overtly anti-Semitic character of the contest and its cartoons. It is argued that the cartoons exhibit a distorted, one-sided version of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and of Jewish history, and may therefore shape viewers' beliefs concerning Jews and Israel in fundamentally negative ways, with negative outcomes for intergroup relations and social harmony.     

Holocaust and resistance

This article deals with the following themes: (1) Nazi malevolence in selecting Jewish holidays as dates for some of their most barbarous action; (2) U.S. official observance of the Holocaust; (3) the irresponsible use of the term Holocaust and its precise use; (4) because of extermination of two-thirds of the Jews of Europe, the world Jewish population in 1979 is still 4 million less than in 1933; (5) are we “all guilty?” (6) are we “all Survivors?” (7) were we “all at Auschwitz?” (8) demystification of the Holocaust as a comprehensible event in twentieth-century history; (9) why “never to forgive?” and (10) the quality and extent of resistance.     

THE ACHIEVEMENT OF MICHAEL WYSCHOGROD

Michael Wyschogrod is the most important Jewish thinker in the Modern Orthodox tradition since Joseph Soloveitchik. The key to Wyschogrod's significance consists in the point where he differs from Soloveitchik most dramatically. Whereas Soloveitchik held that “the religious or theological logos should not be employed as the medium of communication between two [different] faith communities”, Wyschogrod regards such communication as a Jewish imperative. The essay explores Wyschogrod's use of “the theological logos as the medium of communication” with reference to his understanding of the relation of faith and reason as illustrated by the story of Franz Redner, a Holocaust survivor.     

MANY QUESTIONS,FEW ANSWERS: THE HOLOCAUST IN THE THEOLOGY OF LOUIS JACOBS

Louis Jacobs identified the Holocaust—and the creation of Israel—as the two most significant events influencing contemporary Jewish consciousness. Yet his engagement with the theological implications of the Holocaust is notably limited. Since many of his writings are focused on issues facing those he termed “the Jew in the pew,” this absence of detailed consideration of the theological questions posed by the Holocaust seems particularly perplexing. This paper will consider if there is an explanation for this lacuna.     

“ONCE UPON A TIME THERE WAS AN S.S. OFFICER”: THE HOLOCAUST BETWEEN HISTORY AND FICTION IN ELSA MORANTE'S LA STORIA

The twentieth-century Italian Jewish novelist Elsa Morante's La Storia, published in 1974, is rarely included in the canon of Holocaust literature today, yet contains considerable content regarding the Italian experience of the Holocaust. In this essay I examine how Morante's proclaimed artistic principles, in particular her notion of “verità poetica”, “poetic truth”, and “storia”, “history” or “story”, affect her depiction of the Holocaust. I also trace what I term an “anxiety of absence” in La Storia, which I believe explains not only Morante's use of characters who are unreliable witnesses to the Holocaust as it unfolds in Rome, but also explains her ultimate swerve away from her artistic ideals and her problematic use of historical sources.     

THE ELUSIVENESS OF JEWISHNESS: JEWS IN VIENNESE POPULAR CULTURE AROUND 1900

The participation of Jews in Viennese popular culture in the fin-de-siècle period has to date been scarcely investigated. This essay sheds light on one aspect of the vast field of popular culture, the lively scene of Jewish Volkssänger. They formed ensembles of musicians who played Viennese songs (Wienerlieder) and performed short theatrical pieces. The central questions posed in the article concern the Jewishness of the Volkssänger: how is it expressed and can it be determined, what distinguishes Jewish from non-Jewish Volkssänger, does Jewishness play a role in the formers' performances? In order to answer these questions, several theatre pieces of various Jewish Volkssänger ensembles are examined using a new analytical tool, Jewish difference. Through its application, it is possible to show that the theatre pieces performed by the Jewish Volkssänger represented Jews without a fixed, static self-understanding. Their Jewishness was depicted as fluid, diverse, determinable only at certain moments and in specific contexts. The distinction between Jews and non-Jews was blurred. A glance at the biographies of the Jewish Volkssänger revealed that their lives were very much like those of the Jewish characters in the plays: they readily intermingled with non-Jews, and their Jewishness was only one––and an always changing––facet of their multiple identities.     

THE ABSENT JEWISH CHILD: PHOTOGRAPHY AND HOLOCAUST REPRESENTATION IN POLAND

This article considers the representations of Holocaust in Poland by discussing the ways in which photographs of Jewish children are used in literature, film and public commemoration. It shows how a “postmemorial reading” of these images by, predominantly gentile, writers, directors and social actors might be viewed as an attempt to rhetorically fill the void left after the destruction of Poland's Jewish community and to project an image of a tolerant civic society. The article examines famous images, like the photo of the Warsaw Ghetto boy, with which this discussion begins, and lesser known pictures, such as the family photographs of Henio ?ytomirski from Lublin, which are examined towards the end of this article. While looking at these images, I reflect on the interaction between the visual representations of Jewish children, the memory of the Shoah in Poland and the fashioning of Polish national identity in the wake of the accession to European Union.     

March of the Living, a Holocaust Educational Tour: Effect on Adolescent Jewish Identity

March of the Living (MOTL) is a worldwide two-week trip for high school seniors to learn about the Holocaust by traveling to sites of concentration/death camps and Jewish historical sites in Poland and Israel. The mission statement of MOTL International states that participants will be able to “bolster their Jewish identity by acquainting them with the rich Jewish heritage in pre-war Eastern Europe.” However, this claim has never been studied quantitatively. Therefore, 152 adolescents who participated in MOTL voluntarily completed an initial background questionnaire, a Jewish Identity Survey and a Global Domains Survey pre-MOTL, end-Poland and end-Israel. Results suggest that Jewish identity did not substantially increase overall or from one time period to the next.     

COMMENT

In the aftermath of the Holocaust, Jews around the world intensified their call for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. The Jewish Labour Bund, an Eastern European Jewish socialist party, had been, throughout its existence vehemently anti-Zionist, advocating instead its notion of doikayt (literally “here-ness”), which claimed that Jews should focus on building viable communities in any place in which they lived. This article will examine the way the movement remained steadfast in its opposition to Jewish statehood in the aftermath of the Holocaust and even in the wake Israel's establishment in 1948, and it will chart the process by which the Bund embraced Israel as quickly in 1955, looking at the rise of a Bund organization in Israel. I will argue that the Bund's position was neither desperate nor naïve. It was grounded in the Bundists' traditional enmity towards Zionism, and reflected their faith in a universalist answer to the problem of Jewish survival. This story complicates contemporary understandings of postwar Jewish and European history, and sheds new light on notions of diaspora and experiences of displacement.     

THE RETURN OF THE DEAD SOULS: THE GERMAN STUDENTS' MOVEMENT AND THE GHOSTS OF AUSCHWITZ

The intellectual history determined by the 1968 students' revolt sometimes appears as a ghost scene, emerging from the strong identification of the radical students with Jews and Judaism. This essay wishes to demonstrate the inner connection between the messianic political theology of the movement and the psychological effects of this over-identification, leading to a leftist anti-Semitism. While the revolutionary students saw themselves as the true successors of Jewish revolutionary messianism, they accused the real Jew, the one who settled in Israel, of being an imperialist traitor. The essay reconstructs the metamorphosis of these ghosts in a “phenomenology of the spirits” as a “Geistergeschichte” behind the official “Geistesgeschichte.” Against this pathological path the essay presents Jürgen Habermas's reflections on the ethics of memory as its best therapy.     

Joseph Heller's Jewish War Novel Catch-22

Joseph Heller's Catch-22 (1961) is considered one of the most important American novels of the twentieth century. It was a massive bestseller that sold over 10 million copies, and it introduced a new phrase into the English language for an unsolvable conundrum or paradox. Catch-22 was groundbreaking because it was the first broadly successful American novel that offered a post-modern, satirical take on the Second World War. Ostensibly the novel had nothing whatsoever Jewish about it beyond the ethnicity of its author. Instead it was about the Assyrian/Armenian protagonist, Yossarian, a USAAF bombardier in the European theatre. As I will argue, while outwardly the novel aims to represent the war and the protagonist, Yossarian, as American rather than Jewish, the work is, in fact, packed with signs that it is about a Jewish airman confronting the Holocaust. Heller's attempt to hide this was part of a tradition established by Jewish authors in the post-war years who sought to distance themselves from their ethnicity in order to speak to “universal” themes of rebellion. However, to overlook the “Jewish” semiotics of Catch-22 is to miss many of its major themes. I am thus offering a reading of the novel that will delineate what it tells us about the post-war Jewish life in America.     

Tisha B’Av, “Ghetto Day,” and producing “authentic” Jews at postwar Jewish summer camps

The postwar period brought sweeping changes for American Jews. Communal socioeconomic transitions and the aftermath of the Holocaust triggered intense anxieties among Jewish leaders regarding the preservation of so-called Jewish “authenticity,” and to an increased focus on the moulding of American Jewish youth. This article considers how Jewish summer camps used Tisha B’Av and secular, alternative memorial days, to lead campers toward various, ideologically imbued visions of Jewish authenticity. Through fostering an aura of tragedy in what was otherwise a world of play, songs, and enjoyment, Jewish educators used memorial days as transformative educational tools. Though camps’ ceremonies looked remarkably similar, often including a carefully crafted sombre atmosphere, dirges, and responsive readings, the message of the days proved malleable to different ideological perspectives. This article considers how Zionist, Yiddishist, Reform and Conservative camps came to use memorial days to produce “real,” “ideal,” or “authentic” Jews in accordance with their ideological visions in the decades immediately following the Holocaust.     

The case of Holocaust Education Week in Toronto

How does one explain the extraordinary success of Toronto's Holocaust Education Week (HEW), 2004, in its 23rd year? This article sketches three distinct time periods of the development of this annual event and argues that the increasingly dominant role of “survivors” and of the “second generation” in these events has played a major role in its success, as well as the involvement of women. The nature of Christian‐Jewish relations and the ways in which HEW fits into a Canadian national narrative will be discussed. The article concludes that the success of HEW can best be understood if one sees its evolving practices as a popular religious movement that bridges gaps between some, but not all, streams of Judaism, of different generations and diverse geographical and class origins.     

HOLOCAUST COMMEMORATIONS IN LONDON AND ANGLO‐JEWISH (DIS‐)UNITY

This study of selected episodes of Holocaust commemorations in London (UK) sheds light on the tense and ambiguous relationship between commemoration of the Holocaust and Anglo‐Jewish unity. Many have shared the aspiration for Anglo‐Jewish unity at Holocaust commemorations, but a narrow definition of “unity”, as taken to mean centralization, uniformity and consensus, has been restrictive and has not served the desired end. As these case studies demonstrate, despite the high level of cohesion achieved by the rituals of the ceremony and the collective mourning, Holocaust commemorations have also been occasions of conflict and disunity. It is the recent proliferation of commemorations in the 1990s, taking place in a diverse range of Jewish organizations and institutions rather than one combined memorial gathering, that has led to Anglo‐Jewry’s uniting in common moments of remembrance. These differing approaches to the nature, form and content of Holocaust commemorations should be perceived not only as a positive development for the future of Holocaust remembrance in Britain but also an indication of an increasingly healthy Anglo‐Jewry.     

HORACE M. KALLEN'S USE OF EVOLUTIONARY THEORY IN SUPPORT OF AMERICAN JEWS AND DEMOCRACY

This article examines the rhetorical deployment of Darwinian natural selection by the Jewish social philosopher Horace M. Kallen (1882–1974), in what is now widely regarded as the first articulation of cultural pluralism, “Democracy versus the Melting‐Pot” (1915). My analysis proceeds in two steps. First, I identify specific strategies by means of which Kallen endeavored to insert his ideas more deeply into national discourse. I also trace reactions to his essay in the Jewish press, and argue that these indicate ongoing conversations concerning Kallen's ideas, and they also reveal how he was reinterpreted for different reading audiences. Second, I argue that Kallen's strategy was to stress the survival value of cooperation rather than competition in natural selection, and he believed that this view supported both the natural biological inclinations of social groups and reflected American democratic values. Kallen's intervention serves as a striking example of how Darwinian natural selection was deployed to support Jewish participation in American life.     

Reclaiming Bonhoeffer After Auschwitz

Abstract : Christians having sought refuge from guilt by claiming Nazi martyr Dietrich Bonheoffer to be their representative have come under critique by Jewish Holocaust thinkers. Was the historical Bonhoeffer complicit in the anti‐Semitism of his era or a model of prophetic heroism in the face of state sponsored racism and genocide? This article traces the early history of Bonhoeffer's thinking on the “Jewish Question” and the implications of his prison writings for the future of Jewish‐Christian relations. Simplistic defenses and simplistic dismissals fall short of understanding this most complex of theological figures.     

THE ART OF WAR CORPUS AND CHINESE JUST WAR ETHICS PAST AND PRESENT

The idea of “just war” is not alien to Chinese thought. The term “yi zhan” (usually translated as “just war” or “righteous war” in English) is used in Mencius, was renewed by Mao Zedong, and is still being used in China today (zhengyi zhanzheng). The best place to start exploring this Chinese idea is in the enormous Art of War corpus in premodern China, of which the Seven Military Classics is the best representative. This set of treatises served as the military bible in imperial China from 1078 CE. Ideas analogous to ius ad bellum and ius in bello can be found in these texts. These norms are present in these military texts, elaborated in subsequent commentaries, understood as a matter of fact in Chinese political history, and recently and briefly acknowledged by a few Chinese military scholars in the mainland and in Taiwan. This Chinese just war ethics has its distinctiveness vis‐à‐vis James Turner Johnson's articulation of the Western classic view. It differs from Johnson's claims that military lethal violence is intrinsically morally neutral and that last resort is not a primary consideration in deciding for war. Contemporary Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) military publications show that the PLA understands the general idea of just war, but they acknowledge only the ad bellum part, not the in bello components.     

Aquinas's Opposition to Killing the Innocent and its Distinctiveness within the Christian just War Tradition

This essay argues that Aquinas's position regarding the killing of innocent people differs significantly from other representatives of the Christian just war tradition. While his predecessors, notably Augustine, as well as his successors, from Cajetan and Vitoria onward, affirm the legitimacy of causing the death of innocents in a just war in cases of necessity, Aquinas holds that causing the death of innocents in a foreseeable manner, whether intentionally or indirectly, is never justified. Even an otherwise legitimate act of just war cannot legitimate causing the death of innocent people, as this can never advance the common good. This stance also contrasts sharply with much modern and contemporary double effect theorizing in relation to jus in bello. In this regard, Aquinas's position, shaped decisively by his biblical and theological commitments, may point the way towards an ethical orientation beyond the typical divisions of “pacifism” and “just war.”     

UNFOUNDED FEARS,INFLATED HOPES,PASSIONATE MEMORIES: JEWISH SELF-DEFENCE IN 1960s ARGENTINA

In late 1963, the Argentine Foreign Ministry expressed its concern to Israeli diplomats about several matters “that might disturb relations between the two countries.” Specifically, it referred to “military training” that Jewish youth were receiving in camps in the province of Buenos Aires under the supervision of Israeli instructors. The Argentine authorities' concern was caused by the formation of Jewish self-defence groups in the Argentine capital determined to confront the provocations of anti-Semitic, nationalist right-wing bullies. Based on both diplomatic documents and a series of interviews with former members of Jewish self-defence groups, this article analyses the establishment, structure, recruitment methods, training and activities of these organizations. Our main argument is that the concern of Argentine authorities was exaggerated, as well as were the fears of Jewish-Argentines of a possible pogrom, following the kidnapping of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Argentina.     

REMEMBERING THE OTHER: POSTCOLONIAL PERSPECTIVES ON RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN JEWS AND MUSLIMS IN FRENCH ALGERIA

In July 1962, Algeria ceased to be a French colony and became an independent nation prompting the departure of almost all the land's 120,000 Jews, most of whom migrated to France. Half a century on from this “exodus,” a diverse and growing body of testimony is appearing in the form of memoirs written by Jews who grew up in colonial Algeria. Laying claim to a specific Algerian-Jewish identity, this relatively new body of work emphasizes the unique historical position and trajectory of the Algerian-Jewish community. Using this material, this article will focus on how interaction between Jews and Muslims has been reconstructed and represented from a postcolonial vantage point. Exploring the collective narrative of shared ethno-religious sensibilities created by centuries of cohabitation that were then progressively undermined by an accelerating process of cultural and socioeconomic elongation instituted by the French presence in Algeria reveals a complex and constantly shifting set of negotiations between proximity and distance that characterized Judeo-Muslim relationships. The position the authors assign to themselves and to their community within this reconstructed history is instructive for thinking about present-day issues of identity within the Algerian Jewish diaspora.