REMEMBERING AND REBUILDING: THE WORLD JEWISH CONGRESS,IN THE SHADOW OF THE HOLOCAUST

In this essay I expand on the role of the World Jewish Congress (WJC) in the 1940s and 1950s. Its mode of operation during the two decades that followed World War II was markedly different from those that characterized other sections of American Jewry. What set the WJC apart from other Jewish organizations was that its leaders sought not merely to institutionalize the relationship between Israel and American Jewry, but involved themselves in the Jewish world as a whole and in Europe in particular, where they vigorously worked to rehabilitate the post-Holocaust Jewish diaspora and to assist those survivors who wished to do so to reintegrate themselves into Europe.     

ISRAELI MOBILIZATION AND THE OVERSEAS VOLUNTEERS IN THE SIX-DAY WAR

This article examines the mobilization of the Israeli home front and the overseas volunteering movement that began in May 1967 and continued through the summer of 1968. The mobilization in the Six-Day War included manifestations of solidarity and volunteering in diverse fields. The Israeli government and the Histadrut sent volunteers to frontier communities and raised funds from the public to finance the war. The movement included World Jewry, which also participated in fundraising through an emergency campaign and sent thousands of volunteers to Israel. The goal of the Israeli government and the Jewish Agency to transform the volunteering movement into a Jewish immigration movement to Israel and to strengthen the bond between Israel and World Jewry, shaped the character of this movement. The article examines the character of this movement and discusses the nature of the encounter between the overseas volunteers and Israeli society.     

The Lieberman Syndrome: Public and Private Jewishness in American Political Culture

Shortly after the Second World War, Jewish communities in the Czech lands began to remember the Jewish victims of the conflict through a ceremony called the “tryzna”. This article investigates the structure and timing of tryzny to understand how Czech‐Jews memorialized the tragedy that had recently befallen their community. By 1952, it became standard practice for Jewish communities to host a tryzna in March to commemorate the Nazi liquidation of the so‐called “Czech family camp” at Auschwitz‐Birkenau in 1944. The proliferation of tryzny ensured that Czech‐Jews mourned and commemorated the dead of the Second World War in a religious and then increasingly public way. What began as small community events, coalesced and grew into national mourning ceremonies. Tryzny link a national story of loss and an awareness of the larger Jewish genocide with Jewish funerary practices. These tryzny evolved within a communist state, in a world where the concept of the “Holocaust” had not yet entered international consciousness.     

THE FINAL CHAPTER IN THE STRUGGLE FOR CULTURAL AUTONOMY

This article describes the efforts made by Yiddishist intellectuals to rehabilitate Yiddish culture after the Second World War and turn it into an organising element of the ethnic identity of diaspora Jewry—especially in America. The article investigates the efforts to establish a world organisation for Yiddish culture and make Yiddish the lingua franca of diaspora Jewry. In addition, it traces the renewed discussion in Yiddish journals in America, especially Di tsukunft, on the status of Yiddish worldwide as the language of the Jewish people, focusing on the rising status of Palestine and the establishment of the State of Israel as a central component of this discussion. The emphasis here will be on the importance that this debate attributed to the status of Yiddish in Israel.     

ITALO SVEVO AND THE FIRST PSYCHOANALYTIC NOVEL

The first fictional work that used psychoanalysis as a central plot device was La Coscienza di Zeno (Confessions of Zeno) , published in 1923 by Ettore Schmitz, a Triestino Jewish businessman who wrote under the pseudonym of 'Italo Svevo'. This paper describes Svevo's background, his relations with such important literary figures as James Joyce and with such central figures in Italian psychoanalysis as Dr Edoardo Weiss. It seeks to demonstrate to the Anglophone reader the particular psychoanalytic elements in the novel and to relate them to Svevo's personal experience (including his indirect contacts with Freud) and to the intellectual currents of the period in a city which had, until the aftermath of the First World War, been a crossroads of European culture.     

JCA-ORT-JAS-JDC: one big agrarianizing family

This essay examines ideological and institutional patterns that characterized the four most successful projects in Jewish agrarianism from the 1890s until the eve of the Second World War. These major undertakings included the agricultural settlements created by Baron Maurice de Hirsch in Argentina, colonization efforts in North America supported by the Jewish Agricultural Society, the settlement work of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee in the interwar Soviet Union, and parts of the institutional mechanisms that supported Zionist agricultural settlement in the Yishuv. The article studies the forces that drove the world of Jewish philanthropy to support such efforts over several decades and across four continents.     

Between the Diaspora and Zion: Cecil Roth and his American friends

Near the start of his career (1925–1930) Cecil Roth developed a vision of the significance of the Diaspora to Jewish life, which he articulated during his tenure at the Intercollegiate Menorah Society Summer School of 1930. For Roth, Jewish creativity could be expressed only by possessing a firm grasp of Jewish history and its essentials. In his summer school lectures Roth sought to integrate Jewish history into the broader sweep of European history, while at the same time he introduced students to historical sources beyond traditional Jewish texts. In the aftermath of World War II Roth entered into a prolonged correspondence with the American Jewish historian Jacob Rader Marcus, who had recently founded the American Jewish Archives, whose purpose was to forward the study of Jewish history by collecting the documents that would enable future research. In their correspondence, Roth and Marcus enunciated an approach to Jewish history that would influence the field for a generation.     

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.     

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.     

“JEWISH TRAFFICKING” AND LONDON JEWS IN THE AGE OF MIGRATION

There are excellent accounts of the Jewish response to “trafficking” in women for prostitution during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but recent analyses of the white slavery phenomenon have raised new questions. This article concerns the response of Jews in England, and specifically the motivations and activities of those who founded the Jewish Association for the Protection of Girls and Women (JAPGW). The JAPGW set the model for initiatives carried out by Jewish communities throughout the British Empire and was a primary contributor to internationalisation of the issue on the part of the League of Nations after the First World War. The JAPGW’s motivations were complex: they involved a particular religious outlook, the response to antisemitism and assumptions along lines of class and gender. In addressing “Jewish trafficking”, Britain’s established Jewish community sought to take ownership of what it meant to be a Jew in British society.     

EICHMANN’S BLOOD‐BARTER IN HUNGARY

In 1944, with the Second World War all but lost for Germany and her bombed‐out industry unable to supply the military, one desperate measure taken to obtain needed war material was an offer by Eichmann to barter the lives of one million Jews for ten thousand trucks. The interaction between the SS and Jewish leaders in Budapest—and in turn their appeals outside Hungary—is the subject of five plays: one originating in Austria, two in Germany, one in Great Britain and one in Israel. All five are discussed here in terms of their approach to the subject, their raisons d’être and their pursuit of the ethical issues raised by Jewish involvement with the Nazis. Whether under a fictional or his real name, a central character in these plays is Reszö Kastner (1906–1957), who was accused after the war of cooperation with the Nazis.     

Shifting from nervous to normal through love machines: Battle exhaustion,military psychiatrists and emotionally traumatized soldiers in World War II

At the onset of World War II, both military and civilian psychiatrists were keen on designating internal factors, such as, cowardice, an overbearing mother, or a henpecked father as determinants of war neuroses. By the end of the war, the notion that anyone could break down under extreme pressure displaced most other explanations of war neuroses. In this paper, using feminist emotional geographies as a framework, I look at how love contributed to this shift. I read three types of texts created through the practices engaged by military psychiatrists in the Canadian Army during World War II at three different sites—in units treating only exhaustion, at a convalescent depot, and at a field dressing station. These texts as both the outcome and record of Canadian military psychiatric practices in World War II form the basis upon which I read how love as a machine (a lá Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari) passes through both psychiatry and the military as it contributes to enacting a reality in practice (a lá Annemarie Mol).     

Transnational intervention and its limits: the case of interwar Poland*

This article reassesses the efforts by western Jews to rescue their imperilled European brethren in the years before and during the Second World War. It goes beyond the conventional question, “Could more have been done to rescue European Jewry?” Rather, the article explores what Jewish leaders learned about the global practice of philanthropic relief during the decades before the rise of European fascism and hyper-nationalism. It then asks how this accumulated knowledge may have informed their decisions once they understood the dangers faced by Jews in Germany, Poland, and Romania. This holistic analysis of actions taken by transnational leaders accounts for operational precedents, geo-politics, migration regimes, diaspora networks, organizational history, intra-communal relations, and economics and contemporary orientations toward aid. All these create a realistic reckoning of the strengths and limitations of Jewish transnationalism at the time, allowing us to transcend value-based judgements of this painful chapter in Jewish history.     

New Testament studies in the 20th century

Considered diachronically, NT studies in the twentieth century is a story of vigorous scholarship. Especially after World War II, there is increasing diversification in approach and in the makeup of scholars, with a noticeable shift of centre to English-speaking settings (especially North America), and greater involvement of Roman Catholic, Evangelical, and Jewish scholars, a growing prominence of women, and a proliferation of approaches.     

Fleeing from one place,searching for another

The history of psychoanalysis also tells the story of how individuals were uprooted. Oppression and persecution forced Jewish psychoanalysts into exile during the interwar period and the Second World War. An account of the history of psychoanalysis in a particular country is also bound to mirror international conditions. This article tells the life story of a psychoanalyst of Jewish descent. However, it also tells another story, namely the painful history of psychoanalysis. The life of the Jewish psychoanalyst, Lajos Székely (1904-1995), who found his way to Sweden in May 1944, summarises and distils the destiny of other Jewish psychoanalysts. The article describes the life of a psychoanalyst, but is at the same time about what he represents in a more general sense. It is about the many Jewish psychoanalysts who were forced to flee and who, although the flight was finally over, still uprooted, were compelled to seek a place and a purpose in a new social environment.     

The Montreal Jewish Community and the Holocaust

In 1933 Hitler and the Nazi party came to power in Germany. At the same time, in Canada in general and in Montreal in particular, anti-Semitism was becoming more widespread. The Canadian Jewish Congress, as a result of the growing tension in Europe and the increase in anti-Semitism at home, was reborn in 1934 and became the authoritative voice of Canadian Jewry. During World War II the Nazis embarked on a campaign that resulted in the systematic extermination of millions of Jews. This article focuses on the Montreal Jewish community, its leadership, and their response to the fate of European Jewry. The study pays particular attention to the Canadian Jewish Congress which influenced the outlook of the community and its subsequent actions. As the war progressed, loyalty to Canada and support for the war effort became the overriding issues for the community and the leadership and concern for their European brethren faded into the background.     

Paradoxical affinities: otherness and ambivalence as creative pathways

Referring to her own background as the child of Jewish refugees forced to leave their countries of origin before the second World War, the author describes how her attitude towards Jung and his ideas has evolved. The role of paradoxical affinities that have affected the author's life and identity as a Jungian analyst are considered, alongside the impact of experiences of otherness whilst supervising and teaching abroad, particularly in Eastern Europe.     

Coming out of the Hasidic closet: Jiří Mordechai Langer (1894–1943) and the fashioning of homosexual-Jewish identity

This essay inaugurates the historical study of the modern homosexual Jewish experience before Stonewall. I begin with a historiographic introduction to the emerging subfield of gay Jewish history. I then turn to reintroduce Jiri Langer, a homosexual and Hasidic writer affiliated with the interwar "Prague circle" (and friend of Franz Kafka and Max Brod) into the purview of modern Jewish Studies. I take up two questions: first, how Langer reconciled his homosexual and Orthodox religious identity; and second, why Langer"s homosexuality became exigent as a Jewish question at this particular historical moment. In his key text, Die Erotik der Kabbala, Langer engages with the dominant interwar debates on homosexuality, but most directly with the work of Hans Blüher, the major theoretician of the German Wandervogelbewegung. In the course of correcting Blüher's antisemitic claims about Jews and homosexuality, Langer managed to delineate a specifically homosexual Jewish identity by renegotiating the relationship between homosexuality and Judaism and by adumbrating a history of "gay" Jews. I contextualize this long-neglected text within Langer's fascinating biography; the debates in the early homosexual rights movement; the particular cultural features of the "Prague circle" in which Langer wrote; and the dislocation and devastation of Langer's beloved eastern-European Hasidic communities caused by World War I—communities that Langer experienced as deeply homoerotic.     

THE TURNING TO HISTORY OF VIENNESE JEWS

In the early years of its existence, for around ten years, the Viennese Jewish museum served the purpose of heightening the Jews’ opportunity for integration into the society at large. According to this view, the stated goal of the Jewish museum differed from the nationalist aim of non‐Jewish museums established in the nineteenth century. Although the Jewish museum undeniably enhanced the sense of solidarity among Viennese Jewry, its ultimate goal, rather, was to gain acceptance by the non‐Jewish society. However, this aim was soon to change, giving way to a strengthening of a particularistic Jewish identity. The Viennese Jewish museum also provides a telling example of the fictitiousness of historical narratives. It shows the high degree to which the past was employed in order to accomplish social goals. Against this background, the Jewish museum tells a great deal about the identity of the Jews who were affiliated to or felt sympathetic towards it. The history of the Viennese Jewish museum was thus the history of the social hopes and expectations of the acculturated part of Viennese Jewry.     

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.