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.
