Isaiah Berlin and the Holocaust

Guest Editors’ Introduction

Throughout 2021, JPR researchers Professor Sergio DellaPergola and Dr Daniel Staetsky analysed the responses of over 16,000 European Jews in 12 European countries who participated in the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights survey conducted by JPR and Ipsos in 2018. The result of their hard work and innovative approach is ‘The Jewish identities of European Jews’, a study into the what, why and how of Jewish identity. The report finds some extraordinary differences and similarities between Jews across Europe, including: European Jews are much more likely to see themselves as a religious minority than an ethnic one, yet fewer than half of all Jewish adults across Europe light candles most Friday nights; Jewish identity is strongest in Belgium, the UK, France, Austria, Spain and Italy, and weakest in Hungary and Poland; The memory of the Holocaust and combating antisemitism played a more important part in people’s Jewish identity than support for Israel, belief in God or charitable giving. Rising perceptions of antisemitism may have stimulated a stronger bond with Jewish peoplehood; Only about half of all Jews in Europe identify with a particular denomination, although there are significant differences at the national level; Higher proportions of younger Jews are religiously observant than older Jews; Belgium has the largest proportion of Jews identifying as Orthodox in its Jewish population, followed by the UK, Italy, France and Austria; Spain has the largest proportion of Jews identifying as Reform/Progressive, followed by Germany and the Netherlands; Levels of attachment to the European Union among European Jews are higher than, or very similar to, levels of attachment among their fellow citizens in the countries in which they live

Zionism’s Frontier Legacies:Colonial Masculinity and the American Council for Judaism in San Francisco Tallie Ben-Daniel (bio) In 2011, San Francisco’s Contemporary Jewish Museum curated an exhibit called California Dreaming: Jewish Life in the Bay Area from the Gold Rush to the Present. The ambitious exhibit illustrated the specific regional history of San Francisco’s Jewish community. Arranged chronologically, most of the exhibit focused on the successes of Jewish families in San Francisco and the origin of major Jewish organizations—until the exhibit reached the end of World War II. Instead of celebrating the end of the Holocaust, the exhibit instead needed to contend with the American Council for Judaism (ACJ), a Jewish anti-Zionist organization whose strongest chapter was in San Francisco. The wall text of the exhibit explains the ACJ’s popularity as a reflection of “local comfort,” in that “the Jewish elite of San Francisco, who experienced very little anti-Semitism and held many public offices, found it difficult to imagine the dangers encountered by Jews in Europe or even in American cities that were less welcoming toward Jews.”1 The strength of San Francisco’s anti-Zionism was glossed over as a temporary aberration: With news of the Holocaust, the tenor of the local conversation changed. By the time the state of Israel was established in 1948, many ACJ leaders had come to regret their earlier positions, recognizing that the situation in the Bay Area was like no [End Page 49] other community and that there was an urgent need for a Jewish state, especially for the Jewish refugees of Europe.2 The museum’s analysis of Jewish anti-Zionism in 1940s San Francisco assumes several things about the relationship between Zionism, Jewish identity, and assimilation, namely, that Zionism is a global, populist movement, responding to an “urgent need for a Jewish state,” and that anti-Zionism must therefore be a result of assimilation, “comfort,” financial success, and a kind of provincialism—an inability to see beyond the success of Jews in the San Francisco Bay area. This article pushes against the assumption that American Zionism and American anti-Zionism are mutually exclusive political ideologies and, particularly, that Zionism emerged in the United States as an alternative to Jewish assimilation. Rather, by examining the public statements of the San Francisco chapter of the American Council for Judaism, it argues that both Zionism and anti-Zionism in the United States took up the project of assimilation and Jewish normalcy. As uniquely American political movements, both worked to situate American Jews within US racial liberal capitalism. In 1940s California, American Zionism and American Jewish anti-Zionism shared similar ideals and discursive formulations, albeit while arguing for radically different positions regarding the role of the state of Israel in American Jewish life. The American Council for Judaism was founded in 1942 and quickly became the largest Jewish anti-Zionist organization in the United States. Rather than see the ACJ as a precursor to the present-day anti-Zionist movements, I analyze the organization’s attempts to resist Zionism by defining Jewish American identity through normative discourses of proper American colonial masculinity. The political project of the ACJ did not contest the dominant racial-capitalist order and in fact explicitly supported the supremacy of the United States. The ACJ touted Jewish capitalist success as evidence of US democracy and advocated for a uniquely American Judaism. Rather than dismiss the ACJ as assimilationist, however, I will situate their political position in the context of American Zionism’s dominance and, in doing so, question the grounds for “assimilation” itself. The interplay between Zionism and the arguments of the ACJ reveals much about the complexity of belonging—or assimilating—in the postwar US urban landscape. Both the ACJ and the dominant Zionist organizations of the time were preoccupied with what made a “normal” Jewish life. As David Biale, Daniel Boyarin, Raz Yosef, and Todd Samuel Presner note, the boundaries of Jewish normalcy at this time were intimately connected to properly embodied masculinity.3 The descriptions of the “Jewish problem,” for anti-Semites, Zionists, and anti-Zionists alike, were spoken in the language of degeneracy and a failure to possess the...

Agency versus Insurgency

While reading the four very intriguing chapters, I kept asking myself in what ways the situation studied and the realities described in these chapters apply to other cultures outside the United States. My own experience with American urban schools, underprivileged communities, and racial issues lies with my postdoctoral research at the University of Michigan in 1999–2000, which exposed me to research on equity in science education. However, issues of dominant culture, marginalized sectors, poverty, and equity are familiar to me in my own diverse and complex Israeli society, as well. When discussing minority issues in my country, we generally refer to the Arab minority population. The Palestinian citizens of Israel struggle to achieve equality in all possible domains, while maintaining their care for and support of the Palestinians in the occupied territories (West Bank and Gaza) who are struggling for freedom and independence. This Arabic-speaking population is diverse as well and is composed of a Muslim majority and Druze and Christian minorities who live either in mixed or segregated communities. Other minorities, within the Jewish population of the country, are Jewish immigrants from Ethiopia who first immigrated as an ethnic group in the 1980s and 1990s, and have kept streaming into the country in smaller groups up until now. Additionally, there are Jews who emigrated from Middle Eastern and North African countries in the 1950s (Sephardic Jews), and who became almost half the population until the breakdown of the Soviet Union (which allowed more than a million Jews to emigrate). However, despite being nearly half of Israel’s Jewish population in 1989, for many years, the Sephardic Jews were politically and socially marginalized by the European Jews’ hegemony. Even nowadays, there are clear differences in the socioeconomic status, demographic distribution, and education between descendents of European and Middle Eastern immigrants. In the following commentary, I will address some issues, such as place-based education and reflection, while referring to the above-mentioned context.KeywordsScience EducationJewish ImmigrantOccupied TerritoryNorth African CountryMuslim MajorityThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Biological weapons are not just topics for contemporary novelists but found their way into classical literature long ago. Shakespeare has Hamlet's father's ghost describe, ‘Upon my secure hour thy uncle stole, with juice of cursed hebona in a vial, and in the porches of my ears did pour the leprous distillment.’ (Act 1, Scene 5) Indeed, neither the act nor the accusation is new. Jews in Europe were accused of poisoning wells to cause plague in the Middle Ages. Japanese planes in World War II dropped plague‐infested fleas over Chinese cities and villages. Murder or terrorism with biological or chemical agents is not a far‐fetched scenario—it has been used before. Criminal cases in the USA include various uses of biological agents in the last decades. The Rajneesh Foundation used Salmonella bacteria in 1984 to poison ten restaurant salad bars in the city of The Dalles, OR, hoping it would influence an election in its favour. A separatist group calling itself ‘Republic of Texas’ used Botulinum , HIV and rabies in 1998 and 1999 to threaten judges. Three members were later charged with conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction and the eldest, Johnnie Wise, was sentenced to 24 years in prison. In 1977, Diane Thompson, a nurse from Texas, was sentenced to 20 years for intentionally contaminating doughnuts with Shigella dysenteriae in order to achieve personal revenge. > In 1998 and 1999, a separatist group from Texas used Botulinum, HIV and rabies to threaten judges The particular risk of biological agents, when used as weapons, is their extreme uncontrollableness. An infectious agent can easily spread from the original victim to relatives or colleagues. Particularly at risk are the medical personnel who treat victims without knowing what kind of infection they are dealing with. More unpredictable are the number of people and …

On the Limits of Contemporary Jewish Theology Response to Martin Kavka

Reviewed by: American Jewry: A New History by Eli Lederhendler Deborah Dash Moore (bio) American Jewry: A New History. By Eli Lederhendler. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. xxi+ 331 pp. It has been over a decade since American Jews have had a new history. In the years since 2004, there have been a number of shifts of intellectual interest in United States historical scholarship. Some of these developments extend back into the twentieth century, such as a focus on gender and sexuality, or visual and material culture. Others, such as an expanding and deepening exploration of race and racism in its structural, political, and cultural dimensions, continue to provoke fresh and compelling reinterpretations of the American past. Still other trends, including a renewed interest in economic and transnational history, have flourished largely in this century. American Jewry participates in the latter. Its bold self-designation as "a new history" particularly invites consideration of where this volume departs from previous syntheses. The table of contents reveals a significantly revised historical trajectory. The first fifty pages take the reader up to the Civil War, using that traumatic event to mark American Jewish history. The second chapter, however, shifts to emphasize the twin themes of migration and Americanization. Its title, "Changing Places," signifies the importance of European origins as much as American residence. Then comes a chapter that connects the interwar years with the postwar years, an important gesture stressing continuities across the disruption of World War II and the Holocaust. But before one reaches the final chapter, which covers more than sixty years and brings the account into the twenty-first century, a startling new chapter appears. Titled "The European Nexus: Spain, Germany, and Russia," it conveys Lederhendler's contention that unlike other American immigrant groups or religious communities, Jews have been engaged with multiple connections abroad. "Jews have related equally as much to countries and communities where they personally remembered languages, people, and places," he writes, "as to those places where they had no direct family ties or memories" (191). Here, as with his tables of marriages across group boundaries in New York City from 1908–12 and of Jewish refugee immigrants to Canada, Britain, Palestine/ Israel and United States during the years 1933–1954, Lederhendler firmly contextualizes American Jewish history within distinctively comparative and transnational Jewish contexts. The three areas that Lederhendler explores in his fourth chapter emphasize the varied character of Jewish involvement with European Jews and their culture. Spain refers to Iberian influence, indirectly felt through [End Page 451] the presence of Sephardic Jews arriving in North America not only in the colonial era but also in the late nineteenth century. It also references Spanish-speaking trans-migrants from Latin America, Jews of largely Ashkenazi descent, who arrived in the twentieth century. Lederhendler connects a Jewish concern with Spain to politics that range from anti-Catholicism in the nineteenth century to anti-fascism in the twentieth. The German example similarly includes both the lived experiences of immigrants and refugees, as well as the impact of Central European rabbis on the emergence of American Reform Judaism. Lederhendler brings the discussion up through the Holocaust. The Russian example is perhaps most familiar. However, its placement as part of a chapter on the international entanglements of American Jews and the ways these ties situated American Jews as part of and apart from other comparable American groups amplifies his account. His conclusion, that these three European countries "limned the political and cultural imagination of American Jews and provided a foreign dimension that anchored their collective consciousness," presents a persuasive argument for where Jews differed from American national myths of identity (246). While this chapter is clearly the newest dimension of this volume, there are many other emphases that differentiate it from its predecessors. Lederhendler deliberately writes a history that does not hover over the east coast, and especially New York City. He draws examples repeatedly from the Midwest to make his points. He pays attention to enduring Jewish poverty even in the context of upward social mobility. Although religious change registers throughout the volume, it rarely occupies primacy of place. Near the end of Chapter One, which emphasizes economic patterns, Lederhendler specifically...

Reviewed by: The Impact of the Holocaust in America: The Jewish Role in American Life: An Annual Review, Volume 6 Judith Tydor Baumel-Schwartz The Impact of the Holocaust in America: The Jewish Role in American Life: An Annual Review, Volume 6, edited by Zev Garber. W. Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press for the Casden Institute for the Study of the Jewish Role in American Life, University of Southern California, 2008. 230 pp. $25.00. Not long ago I was present at a meeting of Holocaust scholars at Yad Vashem discussing contemporary research among graduate students and young lecturers. [End Page 188] "Almost none of them are actually dealing with the Holocaust these days," sighed one of the senior historians, himself a Holocaust survivor. "If they study history, they write about the impact of the Holocaust after the war. If they study memory, then they usually choose something about Holocaust representation in the arts. And if they deal with comprehension then they end up writing about post-Holocaust philosophy, theology or education. No one deals any more with the actual event which brought about the impact, the memory, the philosophy or the education!" he moaned. Although all of us present understood and empathized with what he was saying, a few reminded him that it wasn't only the lack of knowledge of European languages or the difficulty of traveling for long periods to archives throughout Europe that was drawing scholars towards topics of post-war impact and aftermath. And it wasn't only young scholars who were drawn towards these topics. "Every Man is close to Himself," states the author of Ecclesiastes, and so, many scholars were drawn to writing about their present, the impact of the Holocaust on the world in which they lived in the recent past and in which they live today. This choice in no way diminishes the importance of the Holocaust or detracts from its horror; instead it provides an additional perspective to the tremendous depth and scope of its impact, showing how it continues to affect various aspects of our lives today in countries far away from the killing grounds or even those who had been under Nazi domination. The most recent volume of the Casden Annual Review, The Impact of the Holocaust in America, is an excellent example of this phenomenon. Ten articles, most of which were based on papers delivered at the Association of Jewish Studies conference held in San Diego in 2006, provide the reader with a broad vista of topics, all related to how the major Jewish cataclysm of the twentieth century affected various areas of thought, action, education, media, economy, theology, sociology, and history in the United States. Although all the articles are worthy of note, I will focus on three which were of particular interest to me and I think are especially deserving of further discussion. The first is Beth Cohen's excellent analysis of the survivor's first years in America. Based on the research for her book on the subject, Case Closed, Cohen paints a vivid picture of what life was really like for some of the 140,000 European Jewish refugees who resettled in the United States between 1946 and 1954. Citing poignant case studies of families who were brought from Europe to the United States during the immediate post-war years, Cohen depicts the complex and often multifaceted process through which "refugees" became "new Americans." It would still take years before they could be identified publicly as "Holocaust survivors," she shows us, and meanwhile, to their American-Jewish [End Page 189] relatives, to the organizations that cared for them, and to the Jewish community in general they were often just "poor refugees," some with severe emotional difficulties which they were unable to overcome in the war's aftermath. Cohen paints a very different picture than that described in most existing studies regarding the life of Holocaust survivors in America, primarily because she concentrates on the immediate post-war years, those in which various survivors who came to America were still quite far from being success stories. Lawrence Baron's relatively brief but fascinating article, "Imagining the Shoa in American Third Generation Cinema," takes us...

The Use of Isotope Tracers to Study Intermediary Metabolism: Rudolf Schoenheimer

On March 17, 1942 begins the first gassings of Jews in the General Government in the killing’s center of Belzec. In early April, the Polish Government in exile in London received a report on the first convoy of Polish Jews sent to that destination. Then nobody had anymore news. Who knows what the Allies had learned about Auschwitz ; it is not yet even sure they knew about Aktion Reinhardt. This article gives an overview of historical studies on what governments and public opinion, in Britain and in the United States, knew about the murder of Polish Jews. It shows how a large amount of information on the Holocaust reached the West during summer and fall 1942, at the height of the genocide in the General Government. It gives evidence that the information was widely reported to public opinions, through the work of Jewish associations and newspapers in the US, and how the Government retained it and delayed as long as possible to answer the question of saving the Jews of Europe. When the question was finally formally addressed in Washington, Aktion Reinhardt was completed.

At the dawn of the 1960s, the English historian of Soviet Russia E. H. Carr was anything but a non-controversial man. Known to some as 'the Red Professor of Printing House Square' on account of his pro-Stalinist columns for The Times during the Second World War, and already disliked by many others for his approval of appeasement during the 1930s, Carr was about to attract even more opposition on account of his views on the purpose of writing history in the first place. "If Mr. Carr's remaining volumes equal this impressive opening," Isaiah Berlin had written a decade earlier in a review of Carr's first installment of his The Bolshevik Revolution, "they will constitute the most monumental challenge of our time to that idea of impartiality and objective truth and even-handed justice in the writing of history which is most deeply embedded in the European liberal tradition." Now, in what would become his classic book from 1961 What Is History? Carr wrote simply: "the study of history is a study of causes." Carr famously posited the following scenario: Suppose a Mr. Jones ran over a Mr. Robinson on a blind corner, driving a car with defective brakes. Suppose Mr. Robinson had just come out of a party in which he had consumed an excessive amount of alcohol. Suppose further that he has nipped out of the bash to buy a pack of cigarettes. What must we

Atatürk in the Nazi Imagination

Since its creation in 1948, Israel has more visibly touched upon different discourses, such as political, cultural and religious, to legitimize its existence in Palestine, a land that had nothing to do with Holocaust and Nazi's violence against European Jews. Regarding the deep political influence and power of Israel over the United States, the present writer would attempt to trace such influence in recently-written American fictions which deal with the newly-shaped genre, 'literary terrorism', especially John Updike's Terrorist (2006). Having witnessed the terrorist attacks of September 11, Updike, one of the most committed American writers, portrayed an Arab-American teenage boy, Ahmad, whose extremist justifications would have turned him into an anti-hero, if Jack Levy, the Jewish protagonist of the novel, had not changed his mind at the end of the novel. Here, Updike focuses on the Orientalist and Neo-Orientalist binary opposition of ‘the Self’/ ‘the Other’, represented by Jack and Ahmad, in order to demonstrate and justify the claimed superiority of the ‘the West’ (or ‘Israel’ here) over ‘the Orient’.

Journal Article Frontier Myths and Their Applications in America and Israel: A Transnational Perspective Get access S. Ilan Troen S. Ilan Troen Sam and Anna Lopin Professor of Modern History Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva, Israel Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 86, Issue 3, December 1999, Pages 1209–1230, https://doi.org/10.2307/2568612 Published: 01 December 1999