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.     

“A new and modern golden age of Jewish culture”: shaping the cultural politics of transnational Jewish antifascism

The Holocaust and a worldwide Jewish enthusiasm and support for the Red Army’s defeat of the German Army on the Eastern Front led to a greater sense of international Jewish consciousness and solidarity often tied to an antifascist politics. Utilizing a transnational lens, I explore how Jewish antifascists of the immediate post-war period proffered a novel cultural politics as a means of addressing ongoing international issues of post-Holocaust Jewish survival in a dangerous and politically uncertain modernity. I examine three Jewish left magazines of the late 1940s that were involved in a loose international antifascist progressive Jewish network and ideological framework. These magazines Jewish Life (USA), New Life (UK) and Unity (Australia) represented similar antifascist politics and cultural outlooks in the USA, Britain and Australia, respectively. They have received little sustained scholarly attention previously. I analyse their vision of diverse multilingual Jewish cultures which were to be promoted and developed in any country where Jews lived and in whatever language they spoke. Their cultural vision represented antifascist values against bourgeois or nationalist Jewish culture and broadly reflected a pro-Soviet, progressive and Jewish internationalist, Popular Front politics and worldview.     

From pastoral to georgic: the Dutch Jewish country house as a rhizome

ABSTRACT

Scholars often analyze houses’ “Jewishness” vis-à-vis Jewish law and rituals. For Dutch Sephardic Jews during the long eighteenth century, however, identity is better understood using a model of rhizome in which “Jewishness” consists of the deliberate interbraiding of multiple traditions. Jewish identity was inextricable from the cultures in which Jews lived. Jewish homes along the Vecht River near Amsterdam exemplify the rhizome model. They embody the same braided pastoral ideal found in eighteenth-century Dutch Sephardic literature and material culture. As Sephardic Jews relocated to Netherlands Antilles, the rhizome present in country houses shifted, taking into account Jews’ new role as slave owners. Thus while buitenplaatsen along the Vecht embraced the Jewish pastoral ideal of a retreat from mercantile life, landhuizen in Curaçao evoked a georgic ideal that channelled the residents’ gaze not on rivers, gardens, and grottos, but on guard stations, slave huts, and enslaved workers. Leisure became redefined as an ability to watch rather than retreat from labour. Taken together, Dutch Jewish country houses along the Vecht and in Curaçao challenge the notion that Jewish material culture has a “single root system.”     

The Chicken Soup Group: Peer Supervision for Orthodox Jewish Therapists Treating Orthodox Jewish Clients

This article describes an ongoing peer supervision group, to which the author belongs, comprised of Orthodox Jewish mental health professionals, all in full-time private practice and specializing in the treatment of Orthodox Jewish patients. The benefits of this group experience are described together with some of the unique features of clinical work with Orthodox Jewish patients.     

Orthodox Peer Supervision and Orthodox Group Therapy: Two Groups—One Religion

Group Psychotherapy with Orthodox Jewish patients creates specialized benefits for members such as homogeneous cultural and religious goals plus feelings of camaraderie and familiarity. However, heightened sensitivity to social stigma in Jewish circles and the fear of being judged cause greater difficulty for such patients. This paper reviews the experience of the group members and the experiences of the author in leading such groups. Similarities and differences between Orthodox Jewish therapy groups and an Orthodox Jewish Peer Supervision Group are explored.     

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.     

Jewish Identity and the Secular Achievements of American Jewish Men and Women

Three questions are addressed concerning the relationship of Jewish identity to secular achievements. Are the secular achievements of American Jews related at all to the strength of their Jewish identity? Which has a stronger relationship to secular achievement, a religious or an ethnic Jewish identity? Do communal aspects or private, personal aspects of Jewish identity have the stronger relationship to secular achievements? Using the 2000–2001 National Jewish Population Survey, we find that educational attainment, labor force participation, and occupational achievements are related to several expressions of Jewish identity, even after controlling for the traditional sources of variation (age, gender, education, family status). Jewish identity, as expressed in terms of religion, ethnicity, communal commitment, and private attitudes and practices, is related to contemporary Jewish secular achievement, albeit differently for men and women.     

A CONTRAST IN EUROPEAN AND US APPROACHES TO THE JEWISH CULINARY HERITAGE: CLAUDIA RODEN'S AND JOAN NATHAN'S JEWISH COOKBOOKS

Claudia Roden's The Book of Jewish Food and Joan Nathan's Jewish Cooking in America arise from markedly different sensibilities and cultural backgrounds. Roden is from Egypt and Europe, old diasporic territories marked by tragedies and traumas for their Jewish populations. Nathan lives in the United States, “a good Diaspora” where Jews have enjoyed unprecedented freedoms and possibilities. My paper argues that these different cultural backgrounds have profoundly coloured the approach that each author takes to the Jewish culinary heritage. In making this argument, I examine and compare the books' covers, formal structure, images/photographs, content and narrative, graphic design, publishing histories, and approaches to traditional and innovative recipes.     

An Atlantic Jewish republic of letters?

Atlantic port Jews began publishing English-language periodicals, pamphlets, and books during the 1840s as a means to advance an enlightened, observant form of Judaism, identified in large part with Sephardic rather than Ashkenazic religious culture and history. Three of their Jewish periodicals, the Voice of Jacob, edited by Jacob Franklin, Morris Raphall and David Aron de Sola and published in London, the Occident and American Jewish Advocate, edited by Isaac Leeser and published in Philadelphia, and the First Fruits of the West, edited by Moses N. Nathan and Lewis Ashenheim, and published in Kingston, Jamaica, provide historical evidence of the persistence of Atlantic port Jewish networks of commerce, communication, kinship and community well into the Victorian era. Publishing in a non-Jewish vernacular, and printing almost entirely in a non-Hebrew alphabet, this new “Atlantic Jewish republic of letters” did not however represent a secularizing trend. Rhetorically, ancient Jewish wisdom was invoked as the foundation, not the antithesis, of progress. The primary forces against which these editors, authors, and translators were reacting were religious, not secular in nature, namely Christian proselytizing and Jewish religious reform. Their self-conscious, programmatic activities led to the establishment of new kinds of enlightened religious educational institutions. Taken together, these phenomena constituted an Atlantic haskalah. I offer here my deep thanks and appreciation to Jonathan Karp, David Ruderman, Lois Dubin, and Kenneth Stow for their close readings and criticisms of earlier versions of this paper.     

``Speaking to Moyshe': The early socialist Yiddish press and its readers

The founding of Di arbeter tsaytung marked an important turningpoint in the intertwined histories of the American Jewish labormovement and the Yiddish press. Coinciding with a major strike wave in 1890, Di arbeter tsaytung signaled the entrance of social-democracy into the mainstream of Jewish immigrant life.At the same time, the founding of the newspaper and its subsequentsuccess consolidated a process of ``yiddishization.' This processwas twofold: the newspaper attracted a growing number of Russian-speaking intellectuals to Yiddish and gave institutionalform to their position as leaders in the nascent Jewish labormovement, and in the larger public sphere. By the middle of the 1890s,the press had become the core institution of the Jewish labormovement and the focal point of the socialist Yiddish intelligentsia.     

Becoming Visible: Jewish Senior Volunteers

Jewish older women who serve as volunteers were interviewed for this pilot study. Older persons who volunteer time and expertise make a valuable contribution to their older community. This study examined the perceptions that seniors have of themselves as contributing members to their Jewish community. Interviews and focus groups were held where the Jewish women spoke of their motivations for volunteering, frustrations and satisfactions. Interviews were also held with volunteer coordinators of three Jewish settings in Toronto. The needs of the community and the needs of the older Jewish woman are considered. Older volunteers want to be more visible, to have their contributions recognized as a vital component of their own mental health. Volunteer settings provide networks and support groups, while contributing to the well-being of the Jewish community members.     

JEWISH CINEMATIC SELF‐REPRESENTATIONS IN CONTEMPORARY ARGENTINE AND BRAZILIAN FILMS

In recent years, young Latin American‐Jewish film directors have produced films that portray the Jewish communities in both Argentina and Brazil. While Argentine‐Jewish filmmakers have been prominent since the beginning of the film industry in Argentina, it is the first time a group of contemporary directors share the depiction of Jewish life and culture. For his part, Brazilian‐Jewish director Cao Hamburger also chooses to present the Jewish community of São Paulo in his award‐nominated film, O ano em que meus pais saíram de férias [The year my parents went on vacation (2007)]. This article explores what this self‐representation entails for Argentine‐Jewish and Brazilian‐Jewish filmmakers, as well as on the commonalities of Jewish characters presented in the films of Daniel Burman, Gabriel Lichtmann, Ariel Winograd and Cao Hamburger.     

The other invisible hand: Jews and anarchists in London before the First World War

In the decades before the First World War, London worried about anarchist outrages, and particularly, about Jews said to instigate them. Jewish anarchists were rumoured to have been responsible for the ‘ripper’ murders in Whitechapel (1888), an attempt to blow up the Royal Observatory at Greenwich Park (1894) and the Houndsditch murders (1910)/Sidney Street affair (1911). Jews were a visible population in the East End, and editors, MPs, and police authorities offered Jewishness to explain the ‘who’ and ‘why’ of anarchist violence. Jews were also thought to have the capacity to become invisible, ‘outsiders’ who could pass for ‘insiders’. In the radical press, and fictionalised accounts in novels such as Conrad’s The Secret Agent, the image of the Jewish anarchist became that of agent provocateur paid by police to infiltrate and undermine the movement. Jews were said to operate behind-the-scenes, manipulating the economy and political structure. The invisible hand of the market and the invisible hand of anarchism were attached to a Jewish body. About the author: Paul Knepper (Ph.D. Arizona State) is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociological Studies, University of Sheffield, and Research Fellow, Centre for Jewish Studies, University of Manchester. Recent publications include ```Jewish Trafficking” and London Jews in the Age of Migration’, Journal of Modern Jewish Studies (2008); ‘British Jews and the Racialisation of Crime in the Age of Empire’ British Journal of Criminology (2007); ‘Michael Polanyi and Jewish Identity’ Philosophy of the Social Sciences (2005); ‘Polanyi, “Jewish Problems”, and Zionism’ Tradition and Discovery (2005).     

Psychotherapy; Its Relation to Biblical and Rabbinic Judaism

Some facets of the relationship between psychotherapy and Judaism are analyzed. The issue of a framework for therapy that is congruent with Jewish biblical and rabbinic sources is examined in detail. The thesis advanced is, that the healing-helping model promulgated by psychotherapeutic theorists and practitioners is amenable to Jewish thought. Some implications of this model are explored. Attention is focused on the issues of inner conflict, self-knowledge, and complexity unique to human behavior. It is argued that these are basic premises fundamental to both depth psychology and Jewish thought. The Jewish and Christian variations of the healing model are compared and analyzed.     

Effects of In-Group Bias on Planned Encounters of Jewish and Arab Youths

Abstract

In a sample of 9th-grade Jewish (n = 118) and Arab (n = 100) students in Israel who participated in planned binational encounters, the author examined in-group biases as a function of (a) their perceptions of the encounter between the groups as interpersonal or as intergroup contact and (b) their views of the status of their respective national groups in Israel as legitimate and stable. In comparisons of the 2 encounter groups (of equals status), both groups showed in-group biases. In comparisons of the national groups at large (of unequals status), the Arab students considered their group similar to the Jewish group, whereas the Jewish students rated their group more favorably than they rated the Arab group. For the Jewish, but not the Arab, students, in-group bias was contingent on simultaneous ratings (legitimate–illegitimate; stable–unstable) of the binational situation in Israel. The data support a 2-dimensional model rather than a 1-dimensional model of intergroup-interpersonal definition of the encounter.     

Emmanuel Levinas and the New Science of Judaism

This article addresses Emmanuel Levinas's re‐conceptualization of Jewish identity by examining his response to a question he himself poses: “In which sense do we need a Jewish science?” First, I attend to Levinas's critique of modern science of Judaism, particularly as it was understood in the critical approaches of the nineteenth‐century school of thought, Wissenschaft des Judentums. Next, I detail Levinas's own constructive proposal that would, in his words, “enlarge the science of Judaism.” He retrieved classical textual sources that modern Judaism had neglected, while at the same time he enlarged Judaism's relevance beyond a historical community by turning to phenomenology as a rigorous science. Finally, I conclude with some reflections on the broader implications of this new science of Judaism for Jewish ethics and identity in a post‐war period.     

Multicultural Education in the Zionist State – The Mizrahi Challenge

In this paper, we explore a specific variant of multicultural education inIsrael that developed within the dominant Jewish cultural identity, that isthe claim of Jews from Islamic countries (Mizrahi Jews) for educational autonomy. This demand arose against the backdrop of an aggressive nationalist ideology – Zionism – that claimed torepresent all Jews, and yet was too ambivalent toward its non-European Jewish subjects. The Mizrahi Jews' dual identity, as Jews and as products of the Arab culture, conflated with the state's problematic self-conception as both Jewish and democratic. This phenomenon, apparently, is evidenced by the two types of multicultural responses that developed within the Mizrahi sector: a critical multiculturalism with a social-democratic character on the one hand, and an autonomist multiculturalism with fundamentalist featureson the other.     

IS A MESSIANIC POLITICAL ETHIC POSSIBLE? Recent Work by and about John Howard Yoder

In his landmark monograph, The Politics of Jesus, John Howard Yoder challenged mainstream Christian social ethics by arguing that the New Testament account of Jesus's founding of a messianic community entails a normative politics, not only for early Christianity but for the contemporary church. This challenge is further elaborated in several important posthumous publications, especially Preface to Theology, in which Yoder examines the development of early Christology with attention to its political and ethical implications, and The Jewish‐Christian Schism Revisited, Yoder's proposal for a renewed Jewish–Christian dialogue around the moral meaning of messianism. This article interprets these writings with reference to a range of critical scholarship on and about Yoder, Yoder and Augustine, and Jewish and Christian messianism, paying particular attention to questions of political ethics.     

Queer Jewish memory: André Aciman’s Call Me By Your Name

ABSTRACT

This essay brings together seminal texts evaluating Jewish memory to meet queer theory’s concern with futurity and temporality. Following a brief introduction on Yerushalmi, Hirsch, Friedlander, Améry, and Edelman, then allusion to the “postmemorial” works of Mendelsohn (on the Holocaust, the Odyssey, family secrets and gay identity), the television series “Transparent” (on Jewish and queer legacies of inherited memory) and others, the essay focuses on André Aciman’s 2007 novel Call Me By Your Name. Aciman is a Proust scholar and author of a number of works of nonfiction and fiction about memory. His story concerns a summer romance between two young Jewish men in Italy, an older and a younger, deploying an interior lens and with backdrops of ancient Mediterranean thought and family systems. Aciman brings Jewish identity to the paradigm of desire found in Plato’s Symposium to describe same-sex love and the imperative to patriarchal generation, art versus procreativity. He challenges the modern historicization of homosexual essentialism as articulated in the late nineteenth century. Leaving the reader with an anti-essentialist approach to time and transience, Aciman gestures towards continuity in his later novel Enigma Variations (2017, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux) even as he consistently returns to classicism, using examples such as Virgil’s Aeneid.