SHADOWS OF WAR AND HOLOCAUST: JEWS,GERMAN JEWS,AND THE SIXTIES IN THE UNITED STATES,REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

The article reflects on the––muted––“shadows of war and Holocaust” motivating Jewish activists in the civil rights and New Left movements of the “sixties” as well as the women's movement in the 1970s. For children of Jewish refugees from National Socialism, as well as for “red diaper” offspring of American Communists and alienated rebels against the newly comfortable Jewish suburban middle class, participation in these political struggles could serve both as a key form of alternative “Americanization” or “assimilation through protest” and a link to Jewish values of social justice. In a radically forward-looking movement, profoundly influenced by the African-American church, and linked with a few prominent refugee rabbis, the call for “Never Again” admonished young Jews never to be “good Germans,” to reject complicity with unjust policies at home and abroad; the specifically Jewish invocation of “never again a victim” only came later, decades removed from the events of war and Holocaust.     

The “Jewish Knight” of Slobodka honor culture and the image of the body in an Ultra-Orthodox Jewish context

Scholarship on Ultra-Orthodox Jewish thought has traditionally assumed that the views of these communities derive from a struggle against the Jewish Enlightenment and Zionism, as well as against any values they identify as “modern.” This article challenges that assumption. Beginning with an examination of Ultra-Orthodox sources that present an image of the religious leader as the “ideal Jew,” the author then focuses on sources concerning the founder of the Slobodka Yeshiva in Lithuania. This rabbi intended his students to internalize “modern” norms found in the European honor culture of his time, while translating them into the language of Jewish Ultra-Orthodoxy. The author chooses to present his argument by tracing the image of the body in the Slobodka method, since it is precisely through the nexus of the body that Ultra-Orthodox Judaism was segregated from general European society and culture.     

Acculturation orientations towards Israeli Arabs and Jewish immigrants in Israel

The State of Israel can be characterized as having two integration policies: an assimilationist one towards “valued” Jewish immigrants and a somewhat ethnist one towards its “devalued” national minority, namely Israeli Arabs. Using the Host Community Acculturation Scale (HCAS), this study explored Jewish undergraduate (N = 153) acculturation orientations towards “valued” Jewish immigrants of Russian and Ethiopian background and towards “devalued” Israeli Arabs. Results showed that Jewish undergraduates mainly endorsed the integrationism and individualism acculturation orientations towards Jewish immigrants. However, they were more segregationist and exclusionist towards Israeli Arabs than towards Jewish immigrants of Russian and Ethiopian background. Assimilation was weakly endorsed towards both Jewish immigrants and Israeli Arabs. Based on an extensive questionnaire, multiple regression analyses showed that each acculturation orientation had a distinct psychological profile. The integrationism and individualism orientations were endorsed by undergraduates who were tolerant towards ethnic diversity, felt secure personally, culturally, and militarily, and did not endorse the social dominance orientation (SDO). In addition to not feeling threatened by the presence of Israeli Arabs, integrationists and individualists were identified as secular Israelis and Labour Party sympathizers rather than as religious Jews. In contrast, the assimilationism, segregationism, and exclusionism orientations were endorsed by undergraduates who felt insecure personally, religiously, culturally, and militarily, who tended to be less tolerant towards ethnic diversity, and who were more prone to endorse the SDO. In addition to feeling threatened by Israeli Arabs, they avoided close relations with Russian and Ethiopian immigrants. Segregationists and exclusionists were identified mainly as Jewish nationals. Orthodox Jews, and as Likud Party sympathizers. Exclusionists were distinctive in also feeling threatened by the presence Jewish immigrants of Russian and Ethiopian background. While taking into consideration the context of intergroup relations in Israel, results are discussed using the Interactive Acculturation Model (Bourhis, Moïse, Perreault, & Senecal, 1997).     

THE POLITICS OF INTERTEXTUALITY IN ANTON SHMAMAS'S ARABESQUES

New directions have been found in the study of Jewish topographies. This article attempts to relocalise Jewish space and move it beyond European and American cityscapes to encompass a wider Jewish geographical horizon. The article explores the summer resort of Alwaye (or Aluva), the holiday home to the Cochin (or Kochi) Jews of south India, as an example of a hitherto unexplored Jewish location. In this holiday space, social divisions influenced by hierarchical perceptions of society in India between Paradesi (“White”), Malabar (“Black”) and “Meshuchrarim”, manumitted slaves, were replicated. It was in Alwaye in the year 1909 that the death of the two‐year old Rivka, nicknamed Dolly, occurred. An elegy in Hebrew written by Dolly’s father, community leader Isaac Elias (I.E.) Hallegua, is mentioned for the first time in Cochin Jewish history. It is hoped that the awareness of the space in which the death occurred and the interconnectedness between Jewish holiday space and Jewish quotidian space will contribute to the ever‐growing field of the study of Jewish landscapes.     

THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BRITAIN

This article explores the theme of a purported lack of seriousness or superficiality in Anglo‐Jewish historiography. It begins with an analysis of the role this idea played as a catalyst for the first generation of organised or professionalising Anglo‐Jewish historians. It argues that the idea of “success”—whether economic, political or social—has been a thorn in the side of British Jewish historians since the late nineteenth century, and that the conceptualisation of Anglo‐Jewish history has been to a large degree a response to an ambivalence about Anglo‐Jewish “success”. After a consideration of early Anglo‐Jewish historians, the article turns to the work of contemporary historians of Anglo‐Jewry, and explores how this anxiety over success and seriousness has remained a spur, in both senses of the term: “Success” continues to be both an irritant and a catalyst for re‐interpretation.     

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.     

FINDING ROTHKOWITZ: THE JEWISH ROTHKO

While Mark Rothko's canvases are renowned for their rich, monumental expanses of colour, he has insisted that his paintings should be appreciated on more than an aesthetic level. “The people who weep before my pictures,” he commented in 1956, “are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them.” While various critics and scholars have recognized the importance of this remark, just what Rothko meant by “religious experience” has been highly contested. In this article I will argue that Rothko's Jewish identity—informed by his experiences in Russia and New York—influenced his understanding of “religious experience” in subtle but powerful ways. I will not attempt to spot a raft of Jewish symbols and references in Rothko's work, an endeavour that has yielded spurious results in previous studies. Instead, I will examine Rothko's sense of “religious experience” as an evolving concept in his thought and painting; a process which finds its culmination in the Rothko Chapel, a space informed but not defined by the artist's Jewishness.     

ON THE TENACITY OF CHRISTIAN ANTI‐JUDAISM1

Joachim of Fiore's three ages of Father, Son and Spirit demonstrated that the supersessionist gambit Christianity had introduced against Judaism is a logic any successor can employ. Modernity (cf. modo, “now”) is constituted by a relentless supersessionist logic; the modern issue is less supersessionism than a conflict of supersessionisms. Christianity has repeatedly overspiritualized God's “bodily covenant” with Israel (Wyschogrod). This distortive tendency is intensified in modernity by Christianity's anxiety that it too will appear old/“Jewish” vis‐à‐vis a new New Testament of infinite spiritual freedom (cf. Romanticism.) One corrective would be for Christianity to return to a more Jewish understanding of election.     

Freud's Ironically Jewish Science: Commentary on Paper by Jill Salberg

In his commentary on Jill Salberg's integrative and contextualizing article, “Hidden in Plain Sight: Freud's Jewish Identity Revisited,” Aron examines several ideas related to Freud's ironically “Jewish science.” First, this commentary takes up the question of what it has meant to speak of a “Jewish science” historically, and what it might mean today. Shockingly, Aron shows that the rise and fall of psychoanalysis has been traced to Jewish influence. He then expands on Salberg's article by reviewing the relationship between circumcision and castration and considers the impact of Freud's Jewish identity and his anxiety about anti-Semitism on the structure of the psychoanalytic method and specifically on Freud's discovery of the “royal road.”     

Is ‘Spiritual But Not Religious’ a Replacement for Religion or Just One Step on the Path Between Religion and Non-religion?

We analyze survey data collected from six universities in the United States, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (n?=?6571). Survey respondents were asked to self-identify as “spiritual and religious,” “spiritual but not religious,” “religious but not spiritual” or “not religious or spiritual.” Using a battery of items describing both religious and spiritual beliefs, we uncover which beliefs are most regularly shared by persons choosing each of the four self-identity labels. Even though American students are generally more religious than the Scandinavian students, we find that three of the four self-identity labels have quite similar meanings across cultural settings. Factor analyzing the belief items, we find two latent factors that we label as “religio-spirituality” and “anti-institutional spirituality.” However, when plotted in a two-dimensional space defined by these two latent factors, respondents in each of the four self-identity categories mostly align along a single continuum from “spiritual and religious” to “not spiritual or religious.” Nevertheless, the “spiritual but not religious” students stand out for their high scores on “anti-institutional spirituality.”     

The undesired: on nudniks in Jewish American fiction

This essay discusses the recurring preoccupation in Jewish literature with the character of the nudnik, a popular figure in Jewish culture but a rather neglected one in scholarly studies. Even though the nudnik appears in many stories throughout the years, from Sholem Aleichem’s, through Franz Kafka’s, to Isaac Bashevis Singer’s stories and novels – nowhere was he more prominent than in post–World War II Jewish American fiction, more specifically in the short stories and novels of Philip Roth and Bernard Malamud. Both Roth and Malamud depict the nudnik as an embodiment of a generational divide, between the tormented Americanized young and the tormenting “Ostjuden” old. And yet, while Malamud’s nudniks serve as a critique on the fate of Jewish culture and tradition in post-Holocaust America, Roth identifies the character of the nudnik as a contaminating element that will forever haunt the younger individual. By discussing the Yiddish term “nudnik” and its ambivalent and unsettling nature in these writers’ texts, this essay will highlight the cultural impact on modern Jewish identity of the nudnik within each story.     

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.     

Assessing depressive symptoms with the Borg centiMax Scale® in a Swedish sample of patients and students

The Borg centiMax Scale, is a psychophysically composed general intensity ratio scale, which could enable more precise inter- and intraindividual comparisons of the intensity of depressive symptoms. In the present study, the properties of the centiMax scale were examined in 38 patients with clinical depression and 109 students. Additionally, preliminary centiMax cut-off scores for mild, moderate and severe depression were estimated. The psychometric properties of the centiMax were found to be satisfactory regarding internal consistency, convergent, discriminative and predictive validity. Moreover, the centiMax was demonstrated to provide meaningful comparisons of symptom intensity, which makes it possible to evaluate the relative importance of individual symptoms in a profile and make more precise comparisons within and between individuals. With regard to intraindividual comparisons, patients rated , for example, the intensity of feeling “guilt” twice as strong as feelings of “being punished,” and the intensity of “loss of pleasure” almost three times as strong as “being punished.” With regard to interindividual comparisons, patients rated e.g., the intensity of “being punished” as 12 times stronger than controls, and the intensity of “worthlessness” about nine times stronger. In conclusion, the centiMax was shown to be reliable and valid for assessing depressive symptoms. The centiMax with level anchored ratio data, appears to be highly advantageous as it permits rather precise values of symptom intensity for intra- and interindividual comparisons that could be useful in the diagnostic process and in treatment planning.     

“As his name indicates”: R. S. Woodworth's letters of reference and employment for jewish psychologists in the 1930s

Letters of reference from Robert S. Woodworth identified some psychologists as Jews and reveal an implicit stereotype of Jewish “objectionable traits.” I examine these conceptions of “Jewish character” in the context of Woodworth's general views on individual differences and in the broader context of Jewish immigration to America and enrollment at Columbia University in the early 1900s. Constructing the exclusion of Jews from academic psychology in terms of the personality and social behavior of the individual and dividing of Jews into “acceptable” and “unacceptable” allowed for a face-saving gloss on the generally antisemitic hiring practices in 1930s American academia.     

Early recollections of individuals preparing for careers in clinical psychology,dentistry, and law

This study compared the early recollections (ERs) of three groups of students preparing for careers in clinical psychology, dentistry, and law. Recollections of psychology students showed significantly more “negative affect,” “threatening situations,” and “less reference to groups of people” than did the other two groups. “School” was mentioned significantly more in the ERs of law students than in the ERs of the other groups. Law students reported ERs which indicated the highest frequency of the “active dimension,” dentistry students the least. The implications of the findings for vocational choice are discusssed.     

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 New Anti-Semitism in Europe: The Islamic Dimension of,and Jewish Belonging in,the EU

This article examines the sense of Jewish vulnerability and exclusion in Europe that has resulted from manifestations, and Jewish perceptions, of the “new anti-Semitism,” and the role of Islamic communities in Europe in propagating this form of hatred of Jews. First emerging in 2000 with the outbreak of the second Palestinian Intifada, and tied in with the Middle East conflict, anger at Israel is directed at Diaspora Jewish communities. This “new anti-Semitism” targets the Jewish collective with the characteristics of anti-Semitism previously aimed at individual Jews. The article focuses on the wave of anti-Semitism that erupted as a result of the 2014 Israeli–Hamas War. Based on an analysis of European Jewish communities, it considers the active part played by European Muslim communities in perpetrating the new anti-Semitism. Using an analysis of survey data, emigration statistics and newspaper opinion articles by leading European Jewish intellectuals, the article considers how the new anti-Semitism is adversely affecting Jewish–Muslim relations and the concomitant sense of “belonging” of European Jewry. The article considers what is required to overcome the new anti-Semitism propagated by Muslim communities to restore a greater sense of Jewish belonging to, and identification with, Europe.     

Judaism and the Contingency of Religious Law in Kant’s Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason

For Kant’s moral universalism, contingent religious law is legitimate only when it serves as a means of fulfilling the moral law. Though Kant uses traditional theological resources to account for the possibility of “statutory ecclesiastical law” in historical religions, he denies this possibility to Jewish law. Something like Kant’s logic appears in the work of some of his intellectual successors who continue to define Christianity in terms of its moral superiority to Judaism while attempting to excise remaining “Jewish” elements from it. A more adequate account of the Hebrew Bible, Judaism, and the origins of Christianity exposes deficiencies in Kant’s universalizing logic which seems to deny any intrinsic value to historical religions. A possible alternative may lie in a modified account of the relationship between the moral law and religious law, perhaps nourished by Jewish thought, including the rabbinic tradition of the Noachide commandments.     

Good writers,bad Jews: the “Jewish Question” among Hungarian Jewish intellectuals of the interwar period

This paper investigates the perceived place of the Jewish writer in interwar Hungarian Jewish literature. Post-World War I Hungary suffered from the effects of a short-lived communist regime, and the Trianon Treaty by losing two-thirds of its territories and more than half of its population. Though previously Jewish communities had thrived in the country, these events caused resentment that manifested itself in the creation of anti-Semitic laws in 1920. Within this new context, assimilated liberal young Jewish writers posed the question of “what is a Jew,” reflecting on their Jewishness and Hungarianness at the same time and pondering about the value of each. They answered the question in their creative works, where they indirectly explored issues such as whether Jews are able to write Hungarian novels or whether only a Hungarian can do so; whether Jewish Hungarians could write Hungarian Jewish novels; whether Hungarianness and Jewishness are compatible or whether writing literature is preconditioned on identity. Through the lens of Aladár Komlós, this paper examines the way in which liberal and assimilated young Hungarian Jewish writers interpreted their place in Hungarian culture and society within the framework of these questions.     

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.