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.     

Tel Aviv Mizrah

Before immigrating to Israel, first-generation Iraqi Jews were deeply attached to their identity as Mizrahi Jews. Their mother tongue was Arabic and they had grown up in an oriental environment. Therefore, it was not easy for them to adopt the Euro-Israeli identity that the dominant Ashkenazi-European stratum in Israel compelled them to accept. Despite strong Westernizing tendencies in Israeli society, the first generation of Iraqi Jewish immigrants maintained strong links to the Iraqi customs and traditions they had acquired in Iraq, particularly with regard to the musical folklore and oriental cuisine. On the other hand, second-generation Iraqi Jews were more familiar with Israeli society than their parents; they grew up in Israel and learned Hebrew in Israeli schools along with Ashkenazi Jews and other ethnic groups. This paper establishes connections between the historical realities of Iraqi Jewish immigrants and the literary representation of their world in the trilogy Tel-Aviv Mizrah (Tel Aviv East) written in 2003 by the Iraqi Jewish author Shimon Ballas, through a comparison of Ballas's literary vision with the historical realities of Iraqi Jewish identity in Israel over the course of two generations.     

Jewish Identity, Hostility Toward Germany, and Knowledge About the Holocaust in the United States and Germany

This study examined the relationships among Jewish identity, hostility toward Germany, and knowledge of the Holocaust in American and German Jews. Questionnaires were distributed at synagogues in the United States, and packets were sent to heads of Jewish communities in Germany. Participants were 109 Americans and 31 Germans. Results suggested that hostility toward Germany and knowledge of the Holocaust are related to Jewish identity in American Jews, but that the variables are not related to Jewish identity for Jews in Germany. Additionally, Jews in Germany knew more about the Holocaust than did their American counterparts. Clinical psychology internship and post-doctoral fellowship at the University of California,it>Faculty position at Connecticut College in 1965 and served in its department of psychology for 33 years, until his retirement in 1998     

A DIFFERENT READING OF S. Y. AGNON'S STORY, “THE KERCHIEF”

This paper argues that effective Holocaust education involves exploring pupils' perceptions of Jews and Jewish identity. Identifying these preconceptions is necessary for combatting anti-Semitism, challenging misconceptions and facilitating a historically accurate understanding of the Holocaust. How do pupils define the Jews and what it is that makes someone Jewish? How do pupils explain the causes of the Holocaust and why it was that the Nazi regime specifically targeted Jews? The empirical basis of this paper attempts to help answer these questions. One hundred and forty seven children aged 13 and 14 took part in mixed-method research in order to explore their ideas and concepts of Jewish identity and why the Holocaust took place. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of the findings for Holocaust education.     

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 publication of Salomon Reinach's ‘Orpheus’ and the question of Christian origins

A covert reason for the decline of ritual wailing among Yemenite-Jewish women in Israel is the community's memory of its stay in Yemen as a period of ‘exile’ manifested in dhimmi status. According to respondents’ oral history, Jewish lamentation was exploited by members of the majority Muslim population to compel Jews – mostly men – to wail in honor of Muslim dead. The article makes its main contribution by revealing this historical episode and analyzing the standing of women's lamentation in the context of religio-political tension. The respondents' narrative reveals that although the wailers mitigated the humiliating effects of this spectacle, the appropriation of their community custom impaired Jewish men's gender status and ability to perform religious differentiation. This, coupled with changes caused by their relocation to Israel, has made women's lament the commemoration of a practice that evokes shame among members of this community, abetting its decline in the past decade.     

“Socialism of the soul:” Holocaust in Saul Bellow’s The Victim

Saul Bellow wrote his second novel The Victim at the Partisan Review group’s instance. In the aftermath of the Holocaust the PR group advocated the assimilation of the American Jews into mainstream American life for their future safety and prosperity. Keeping in view Bellow’s creative potentials and belief in Marxism/Trotskyism, the PR members asked him to educate the Jews in this matter through his fiction. Bellow treated the subject of Jewish assimilation in an allegorical vein, projecting the idea of universal brotherhood based on common human grounds. Here, a Jew, Asa Leventhal, behaves like a Gentile and a Gentile, Kirby Allbee, like a Jew as victim and victimizer of each other. Their repeated encounters mitigate their racial apprehensions and bring the two closer to each other. Both discover one into the other as his inescapable self, bound by a common human connection. Finally they make peace with each other, projecting Bellow’s allegory of inexorable cosmic kinship—“socialism of the soul”—despite their differences of blood, race and religion.     

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.     

ANOTHER HISTORY: FAMILY,NATION AND THE REMEMBRANCE OF THE EGYPTIAN JEWISH PAST IN CONTEMPORARY ISRAELI LITERATURE

In this article I will focus on how Egyptian Jews who migrated to Israel after 1948 and their descendants remember Egypt and how they situate themselves vis-à-vis Israeli society and culture. I will base my analysis on three semi-autobiographical novels published between 2003 and 2011 by Israeli writers of Egyptian descent belonging to three subsequent generations: Baderekh la'itztadion by Yitzhak Gormezano Goren, Kol tze‘adenu by Ronit Matalon, and Yolanda by Moshe Sakal. By analysing specific passages from these books, I will argue that even after the decline of the Jewish presence in Egypt in the 1950s, the cultural and social worlds to which their families belonged did not vanish completely but, rather, struggled for survival at a very intimate level. This ultimately produced a multifaceted archive in which the written narrative of the family's past became an alternative homeland where historical memories and fictional details are inextricably blended.     

Reflections on the holocaust

This paper is a personal reflection on the Holocaust, its impact on the Jewish psyche, and on the anti-Jewish teachings within Christianity, which over many centuries created a climate of hatred, contempt, and suspicion of the Jews that made it possible for the Holocaust to happen within the heart of Christian Europe.Based on a talk given on April 10, 1994 at Christ Presbyterian Church in Terra Linda, San Rafael, California.     

DAVID BEN-GURION'S TELEOLOGICAL WESTERNISM

Until 1948, the westernism of the Jewish society in the Land of Israel was apparent and taken for granted, as the vast majority of Zionist immigrants who came to Palestine were of European origin, and they built a western society in the Middle East, socially, politically, culturally and economically. Only after the 1948 War and the immigration of hundreds of thousands of Jews from all over the Middle East and North Africa was Israel's westernism no longer obvious. And indeed, with the arrival of these immigrants from Muslim states, the Israeli government initiated a national-scale endeavour to acculturate the new arrivals to the norms and values of their new home. Scholars suggest various reasons for these actions of the Israeli government, but this article will pay special attention to David Ben Gurion's westernism. Israel's first Prime Minister attributed high importance to the maintenance of Israel's western and modern nature, and he did so not only with the intention of acculturating the newcomers. Based on his profound fear about the ability of the Jewish state to survive in the Middle East, Ben Gurion regarded Westernism and modernism as vital to its survival.     

Rassenschande,Genocide and the Reproductive Jewish Body: examining the use of rape and sexualized violence against Jewish women during the Holocaust?

Rape and sexual violence against Jewish women is a relatively unexplored area of investigation. This article adds to the scant literature on this topic. It asks: how and why did women's reproductive bodies (gender), combined with their status as Jews (race), make them particularly vulnerable during the Holocaust? The law against Rassenschande (racial defilement) prohibited sexual relations between Aryans and non-Aryans. Yet, Jewish women were raped by German men. Providing a more nuanced account than is provided by the dehumanization thesis, this article argues that women were targeted precisely because of their Jewishness and their reproductive capabilities. In addition, this piece proposes that the genocidal attack on women's bodies in the form of rape (subsequently leading to the murder of impregnated women) and sexualized violence (forced abortions and forced sterilizations) must be interpreted as an attack on an essentialized group: woman-as-Jew.     

An Impossible Possibility? Jewish Barthianism in Interwar Germany

In this essay I examine the Jewish reception of Karl Barth's theology in Germany of the 1930s. This I do through an analysis of a disputed exploration into the possibilities and limitations of the theological principles of dialectical theology for the formulation of a Jewish theology that took place at the time. The publication of Karl Barth's Römerbrief (1919, 1922) generated a great stir among Christian circles in Germany. Profoundly challenging the fundamental assumptions of liberal theology, Barth's ‘dialectical theology' was quickly recognized as an epoch‐making work. But the impact of Barth's theology exceeded its Christian readership. As a corresponding disillusionment of liberal theology in its Jewish version took place among Jews, Barthianism presented itself as a compelling theological model offering a profound rejoinder to the spiritual needs of Jews as well. Yet alongside the recognition of the potentially constructive engagement with Barth's radical thought for a rejuvenated articulation of Jewish theology, Jewish thinkers similarly acknowledged the many challenges and difficulties such a theological encounter implied from a Jewish point of view, thereby projecting their understanding of the Jewish‐Christian difference.     

IDEOLOGICAL FORMATIONS OF WITNESSING THE HOLOCAUST IN WARTIME DIARIES OF JAROSŁAW IWASZKIEWICZ AND MARIA DĄBROWSKA

The Polish writers Jaros?aw Iwaszkiewicz (1894–1980) and Maria D?browska (1889–1965) spent the years of brutal German occupation in Warsaw. Both witnessed the establishment of the Ghetto, the 1942 deportations, and the 1943 Uprising, as well as the attempts of the Jewish fugitives to hide on the “Aryan side” of the city. Yet their war diaries reveal contrasting attitudes toward the destruction of the Jews. Whereas D?browska projected indifference by practically ignoring the evolving genocide, Iwaszkiewicz expressed dismay and compassion. Iwaszkiewicz and his wife Anna engaged in rescuing Jews while D?browska showed no sympathy for the Jewish plight. Such polarized responses to the Holocaust by individuals who were contemporaries, fellow writers, and prominent members of the intellectual elite of Warsaw raise questions about the nature of witnessing and responding to atrocities. This essay posits that the differences in these writers' attitudes toward the genocide of the Polish Jews were indelibly tied to the ideological systems that shaped their self-identities.     

FORCES OF TOMORROW

This article examines the social experience of belonging to the British section of the international Socialist Zionist youth movement, Hashomer Hatzair. The study is based on interviews conducted with 10 former activists across four generations and focuses primarily on the movement in London. It will be argued that Hashomer Hatzair represented a unique alternative youth culture based on a model developed by the movement's founders in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. This model synthesized Robert Baden-Powell's Scouting, the Jugendkultur of the German youth movements, Socialist Zionism and Marxism. Imported to Britain by young German and Austrian refugees from Nazism, this youth culture was reproduced initially in the English countryside, and after the war plugged into the pre-existing politics of Jewish radicalism in London and the general Zionist fervour that anticipated the establishment of Israel. Hashomer Hatzair emphasized autonomy from adult society. By creating autonomous youth spaces, the movement opened a portal for young Jews to shape their own identities. Through a process of politicization and education, the movement's adherents would identify life on Israeli kibbutzim as an ideal future in adulthood. In tandem with the projection of heroic Jewish role models, this process encouraged Hashomer Hatzair's followers to define their Jewishness in secular and existential terms, in opposition both to contemporary consumerist and urbanized capitalism, and to the traditional communal associations of the past.     

National Days,National Identity,and Collective Memory: Exploring the Impact of Holocaust Day in Israel

This study uses the case of Holocaust Day in Israel to examine the premise that national days impact national identity and collective memory. Specifically, the study examines whether a very unique type of national day—Holocaust Day—impacts national identification, nationalism, and collective memory in the form of Israeli Jews' perceptions of the “lessons” of the Holocaust. This study uses panel survey design data on national identity and perceptions of the Holocaust's lessons from the same sample of Israeli Jews (N = 665) collected two months prior to Holocaust Day and again during and after Holocaust Day. During and after Holocaust Day, respondents expressed increased levels of nationalism and more perceptions of both particularistic and universalistic Holocaust lessons. Participation in Holocaust Day practices had a stronger relationship with nationalism and national identification during Holocaust Day than before but a weaker relationship with the perception of a universalistic lesson during Holocaust Day. These findings indicate that Holocaust Day impacts national identity and collective memory and highlights the multifaceted nature of the relationships between national identity, collective memory, and national days. The theoretical implication of the findings as well as the case comparability are discussed in light of the findings.     

Luther's Schem Hamphoras

This article provides a concise summary of Luther's anti‐Jewish treatise, On the Schem Hamphoras and On the Lineage of Christ (March 1543) and describes its purpose, interworkings, and scatological rhetoric. The treatise is interpreted as Luther's defense of the Second Commandment over against Jewish superstitions regarding the name of God; his attempt to undermine the credibility of the rabbis and their influence on the Christian Hebraists; and his further strengthening of his platform for the expulsion of the Jews as initially articulated in On the Jews and Their Lies (January 1543).     

After the Shoah: Continuity and change in the postwar Jewish community of the Netherlands

The Dutch Jewish community is part of Western European Jewry and as such is part of what Bernard Wasserstein describes as the vanishing Diaspora. The community is one of Europe's smallest and it was also the Western European Jewish community most heavily damaged by the Shoah; it lost 75% of its population. It is surprising that the community still exists. It has gone through many changes, most notably in the 1960s. Progressive Judaism and the Lubavitcher Habad movement have made considerable inroads in the religious community, but the population has become largely secular, and new secular Jewish networks have been established. Dutch Jews have redefined their identity, shifting from “Dutchmen of the Israelite religion” to “Jews” or “people with a Jewish background,” belonging to a social and cultural minority. A small population exchange has taken place between Israel and the Netherlands. The brief baby boom after the Shoah and the newly formed networks outside the religious framework have revitalized the community. But most Jews in the Netherlands are married to non-Jews, and in spite of unique efforts to integrate the Israelis into the community, the future seems uncertain. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

BEYOND THE PALE: Jewish identity,radical politics and feminist art in the United States

Historians have not yet recognized how the cultural legacy of East European Jews helped change the status of women artists in the United States. Immigrant Jewish women in general reacted to institutionalized patriarchy with a desire for social change and the will to act to that end. Jewish women who were artists had professional reasons to embrace feminism, given women's virtual exclusion from professional notice. This article focuses on two pioneering feminist artists — Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro — and demonstrates the importance of their Jewish heritage, showing how and why they set in motion important changes in the tumultuous 1970s that continue to resonate in the art world today. An unusually large number of American feminist artists of the 1970s were Jewish. Their heritage resembles that of the Jewish feminist activist Betty Friedan, whose father emigrated from Eastern Europe. Once we examine the linked roles played by Jewish identity and leftist politics in the formation of the feminist art movement in the United States, it becomes evident that activism in the community of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe and the values that they passed on to the next generations made a significant contribution to the success of this movement.     

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.