In this article I explore how Jewish immigrants in interwar Argentina navigated overlapping religious and civil legal systems in cases of bigamy. Focusing on the activities of Ezras Noschim, the Buenos Aires branch of the international Jewish Association for the Protection of Girls and Women, it introduces a distinction between "legal bigamy" (violating state law) and "ethical bigamy" (violating communal or religious norms). Through an analysis of two bigamy cases, I show how Ezras Noschim developed a flexible legal framework to manage transatlantic and local marital conflicts in the absence of civil divorce. I argue that bigamy functioned as a key site of legal innovation and communal adaptation, revealing the ways in which Jewish migrants negotiated family life amid conflicting state and religious legal regimes.
Culture has always been one of the central aspects of the Zionist movement and of Jewish nationalism in general. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Hebrew children's culture was a vibrant domain of national activity that reached tens of thousands of Jews in the Russian Empire and beyond. In this article, I explore the creation of Hebrew children's culture in the late tsarist period and examine how it was shaped by Jewish cultural nationalism. The specific focus of my research is the Warsaw-based publishing house Tushiyah, and its founder, Ben Avigdor. I argue that Hebrew children's culture was a very significant form of Jewish cultural nationalism, both Zionist and non-Zionist, at the turn of the twentieth century. Thus, this analysis sheds light on the extent and the meaning ofJewish nationalism for the Jewish public in eastern Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century.
From the late nineteenth century until the German occupation of the Netherlands, Jewish members of the Dutch financial, political, and cultural elites increasingly established or settled in homes in suburban and rural areas. In this article I demonstrate, on the one hand, how Dutch Jewish country house owners resembled their counterparts in other European countries regarding their primary settlement near main cities, their familial and their artistic lives, their philanthropy, politics, collecting, and entertaining, and, ultimately, their pursuit of belonging. On the other hand, I show how in the Netherlands, a highly bourgeois country, Jews followed general elite practices of enclaving, many houses were permanent residences rather than seasonal homes, and several entrepreneurs were unique innovators in the modern repurposing of their estates. In a country where Jewish landownership was already visible before the modern period, Jews were, although a minority, an integral part of the country house landscape.
In this article we explore the curation and history of Torah scrolls on display at regional Holocaust museums in the United States in Atlanta, Skokie, Dallas, and Pittsburgh. Through a comparative analysis of four case studies, we interrogate a variety of Torah scroll installations across different museological landscapes and their educational, memorial, and socioreligious implications. An examination of regional Holocaust museums reveals the two-fold function Torahs have assumed. Considering that most visitors to regional Holocaust museums are not Jewish, Torah scrolls have become a primary means through which institutions teach J"udaism 101." Beyond this didactic function, these Torahs have also taken on the symbolic role of object survivor-standing as a memorial to their communities of origin and to the Shoah more generally. In this way, Torahs simultaneously represent a lived tradition and its destruction, which contributes to the creation of a uniquely sacred secular space.
In this article I examine the Yiddish-language periodicals Folksgezunt and Mayn doctor in 1930s Argentina, arguing that highly educated Jewish community members used these publications to assert their pursuit of respectability both within Jewish communal spaces and in broader Argentine society. By focusing on how these periodicals framed syphilis, I contend that initiatives to combat the disease aimed not only to address a public health crisis but also to integrate Jewish communities into Argentine society by fostering a shared sense of urgency, responsibility, and belonging. This campaign aligned with broader Argentine public health strategies, incorporating elements of eugenic thought to promote preventive care. Simultaneously, by producing health promotion texts in Yiddish and fostering ties with Jewish medical networks abroad, these publications reflected an effort to counter the self-perceived marginalization and peripherality of Argentine Jews within global Yiddish culture.
In this article I offer a prologue to the more well-known story of the mid-century alliance between Jewish Zionists and liberal Protestants that took shape in the United States. In the early twentieth century, Zionism resonated widely with Protestants who harbored theologically conservative views about the end times and missionary aspirations with regard to Jews as part of their eschatology. Jewish Zionists discussed vigorously among themselves whether and exactly how to muster this reservoir of Christian Zionist support, whereas Jewish anti-Zionists seized on the opportunity to lampoon the movement for abetting Christian missionary efforts. These debates and polemics reveal just how critical American Protestantism was to the origins of Jewish Zionism in the US, setting the terms of fundamental organizational questions and even shaping how Jewish Zionists talked about their Zionism. They also suggest at least some continuity between this earlier anti-modernist variant of Christian Zionism and the more liberal one that came to dominate by the mid-twentieth century.
The vernacularization of Hebrew speech was an integral component of the Zionist conception of national revival. In this article I explore some of the ways in which the discourse of regeneration and the figure of the “muscle Jew” shaped ideas about the sonic component of Hebrew speech, through the case of study of Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky. I show that Jabotinsky took speech, and Hebrew speech in particular, to be a potent site of regeneration, viewed as the cultivation of corporeal sensitivity to form. I trace his invention of a sonic counterpart to the muscle Jew, and demonstrate how, employing a conception of speech sounds as manifesting qualities of speakers, he constructed an ideological program for regenerative Hebrew speech that challenged the grammatical prescriptions of mainstream revivalists and included observations of and prescriptions about patterns of Hebrew speech down to the level of phonemes and phonological processes.
On June 11, 1771, a group of thieves broke into a private house in Chelsea, a village outside London. The event ended with the killing of one of the servants in addition to the theft itself. Soon enough it became known that the perpetrators were Jewish and the case became a cause c & eacute;l & egrave;bre. The perpetrators were apprehended five months later, put on trial, and sentenced to death. The case attracted wide public attention and resonated into the nineteenth century. What made it a catalyst of such broad public agitation? I argue that it became a compelling case because it effectively featured the contradictions that were embedded in the contemporary imagery of the Jew-specifically of the masculine Jew-oscillating between an assimilated gentleman and a perilous criminal who poses a constant threat to the English woman. At the same time, and relatedly, it touched on the borders of Englishness. The question of whether Jews could be part of English civil society became a contested issue in the second half of the eighteenth century, a debate that reflected the uncertainty of the definitions of both Jewishness and English identity. As we shall see, gender and masculinity were hotspots of vulnerability for both concerns, and they figured prominently in depictions of the Chelsea case.
In this article I present a case study of one of the most massively popular, hugely expensive, and globally influential works of culture ever made, the video game The Last of Us, Part 2 (2020), with particular attention to its creators’ deliberate effort to offer “Jewish representation” to its audiences. I survey contemporary discourse about “Jewish representation” and Jewishness in video games, and attend in detail to the strategies of this particular game’s creators for including Jewish characters and content. Drawing on Adam Y. Stern’s recent “theological-political genealogy” of “survival,” I demonstrate that when a corporation spends hundreds of millions of dollars to produce a cultural product for a global audience, even what that product’s creators earnestly intend as “Jewish representation” can, instead, reflect Christian hegemony.
Kest made early marriage possible for the Ashkenazi Jewish elite and had a significant impact on the role of women where it was practiced. It was standard in Ashkenazi Jewish society for centuries. This was not an accident. It was part of the “toolbox” of a community that developed creative responses to challenges in its environment. This is despite the fact that it was the total opposite to many of the characteristics of ancient Judaism. Nonetheless, it was regarded as one more element of Jewish tradition. Ultimately, it was abandoned, but the tradition of kest, at least in the use of the term, lives on.
In this article I argue that the transformation of the heder (the traditional Jewish study room) in modern Hebrew literature from the late-nineteenth to the late-twentieth century reflects a profound shift in Jewish identity, encapsulating the tensions between tradition and modernity. I explore how the heder, once a site of rigorous religious education, evolves into a potent symbol of individual creativity and self-expression in the works of Micha Josef Berdyczewski, Yosef Haim Brenner, Dvora Baron, Hayim Nahman Bialik, and Shmuel Yosef Agnon. By situating this literary transformation within the broader currents of secularization and European modernism, I illuminate how these authors grapple with the dual forces of cultural continuity and change. I conclude with a discussion of Youval Shimoni's 1999 novel Heder, which suggests that while the heder's function has changed, the room continues to serve as a space for introspection and artistic creation in a world that is increasingly uncertain.
In this article I identify a trend in the mainstream of Israeli literature of the second decade of the twenty-first century, namely, nostalgia for a lost anticipation for the future signaled in the Oslo Accords, signed between Israel and the Palestinians in the early 1990s. I focus on five novels published in the years 2014-15, by some of the most central and successful novelists in Israel, that express the way the Israeli cultural elite is haunted by the specter of the lost future implied in the vision of the Oslo Accords. The (2014); and The Third by Yishai Sarid (2015). These novels try to relive a lost anticipation for the future by looking back to the past.
In June 1950, American newspapers reported a heated skirmish between two Holocaust survivors in New York. The altercation stemmed from one survivor accusing the other of murdering his brother in the M & uuml;hldorf labor camp in Germany. As the news spread, concerns rippled through the leadership of the American Jewish Congress (AJC), fearing that the ensuing negative publicity could jeopardize the willingness of authorities to allow survivors to immigrate to the United States. Drawing upon extensive archival material, including a comprehensive transcript of the legal proceedings meticulously assembled by the AJC, I delve into the intricate motivations and multifaceted reactions surrounding this trial. By excavating the historical layers, I shed light on underlying tensions within the survivors' community and underscore gaps between survivors and American Jews in their perceptions of the Holocaust.
The Yidisher Visnshaftlekher Institut (Yiddish Scientific Institute, or YIVO) established a British section which operated from 1937-71. It collected materials for YIVO's headquarters, first in Vilna, and then in New York, and publicized YIVO activities. YIVO's British section also pursued its own aims, recording the history ofJews in Britain and centering the experience of working-class Yiddish-speaking immigrant Jews. Among other things, it organized an exhibition and an autobiography competition and it published a volume of Yiddish historical research about Jews in Britain. However, British YIVO later sent the archive it had built to the headquarters in New York, thereby dispossessing the British Jewish community of its historical record. YIVO's struggles to maintain itself in Britain reflect the institutional and ideological challenges of global history making. In this article, I use the case of YIVO to contribute to a growing critical literature on the "global" in modern Jewish history and archival construction.
In this article I offer a new interpretive key to Nahman of Bratslav's canonical tales, showing how the political dimension of the stories informed their theological message. Drawing on an archivally informed historical reconstruction of Nahman's political experience, I show how we can read the tales both as allegories as well as mimetic, concrete references to the political reality in partitioned Poland and its neighboring states. Nahman's tales, I argue, intertwined contemporary political and future eschatological events within a compact narrative frame. In so doing, Nahman sought to encourage his followers to interpret the familiar political landscape as a means to understand the divine rule of the world, and to envision the world to come as an imminent remedy of the existing political order.
In this article I present an untold story about the controversy over the ideal Jewish peasant in Palestine at the turn of the twentieth century. The controversy preceded the rise of the haluz (pioneer), a key component in Zionism's classic ethos. I discuss the two camps in this controversy and the socio-political views they represented. While one camp advocated for the simple-minded peasant, the other promoted the ideal of the proud bourgeois Jewish farmer. I examine the controversy's implications for the politics of class but also Jewish nationalism, and provide a new framework for understanding the Jewish national peasant's emergence as a central figure in Jewish nationalism.
In this article I investigate Jews' conceptualization of German colonial expansion into China and their attitudes toward the colonized population. The ambivalent postures of Jews toward the Chinese rebels reflects the complexity of Jewish identity formation. While Jews were disturbed by the 1904 massacre of the population in southwest Africa, the dominant tone was one of racial arrogance. A similar sense of racial superiority was evident among German Jews toward the Chinese people. Jews depicted them as anti-cultural people who behave like the "cannibals in Africa." At the same time, Jews called attention to their own similarities with the Chinese and they supported their cause. As a people under attack by Germans because of their "racial traits," the Chinese won Jews' empathy; they were different "Others." I conclude that Jews' attitude toward the colonized people brought them to cross the Germanness-Jewishness duality and rendered their identity in the colonial age as more hybrid.
In this article, I reexamine the historiography of the economic restratification of western Jewish communities in the modern period (roughly the eighteenth through twentieth centuries). While I acknowledge the possible influence of values and attitudes rooted in Jewish culture and tradition, I express skepticism about their explanatory power across broad historical eras. I emphasize, rather, the cumulative impact of three broad, interrelated social and political currents: the removal of barriers to Jewish economic activity both before and during the age of emancipation; the concentration of Jews in petty commerce on the eve of modernization and their familiarity with the workings of the marketplace; and the revolution of consumption patterns among broad swathes of the population. I argue that historians have not sufficiently recognized the impact of the latter. The diffusion of the ability and the desire to acquire were well-positioned to take advantage.
La epoka was a Ladino newspaper published in Salonica. Its editor Sam L & eacute;vy published three interviews with Theodor Herzl between 1901 and 1904. His announcement and subsequent publication of the third interview drew angry responses from the Sublime Porte, which ordered the governor of Salonica to close it down. The governor resisted the orders and La epoka remained open, even publishing a eulogistic obituary of Herzl. In this article, I examine these interviews and obituary, showing that L & eacute;vy combined his sharp criticisms of Zionism with an adulation of the Zionist leader. I also explore Ottoman archival documents about the Ladino press and argue that Hamidian censorship could be flexible according to political circumstances, overlooking L & eacute;vy's first two interviews that were made during the Ottoman government's negotiations with Herzl, yet reacting sharply to the third interview conducted afterward and containing direct references to the Sixth Zionist Congress.
This article explores how age became racialized in the context of British Mandate Palestine (1917-48). Specifically, it charts European Zionist discourses about how Ashkenazi and Mizrahi Jews aged in different ways. These discourses, which I call "age talk," played an important role in the court case of Rachel Habshush Ohevet-Ami. In June 1939, Ohevet-Ami, a young Jewish woman of Yemeni and Moroccan descent, disguised herself as an "Arab" and attempted to execute an attack targeting Palestinians in Jerusalem. In her ensuing trial, two questions would decide Ohevet-Ami's fate: How old was she? And who had the power to decide? As this article searches for an answer, it addresses questions along the way that lie at the heart of the history of British Mandate Palestine about what it meant to be an Arab or a Jew, an "oriental" or a "European," a terrorist or a freedom fighter, and a child or an adult.
