Abstract: 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.

Abstract: 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.

Abstract: 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 célèbre. 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.

Abstract: Beginning in 1952, the New York-based American Jewish Committee (AJC) spearheaded a transatlantic effort to stigmatize Stalinist antisemitism through direct historical comparison with the recent Nazi genocide of European Jewry. In France, home to the AJC's European headquarters, the project of tarring Stalin with Hitler's brush spurred an unprecedented flood of discourse about the Holocaust. However, the narrative that emerged among participating French intellectuals—Jewish and non-Jewish—elided the genocide's Western European dimensions. This article analyzes the AJC's French-language journal Évidences comparatively alongside its American sister journal, Commentary , and contextually against documentation from the AJC archives in order to argue that the politics of the early Cold War did not simply impede Holocaust memory in the West; rather, anti-totalitarian projects produced framings of the genocide that relied on and replicated the Cold War's own temporal and geographic logics.

Abstract: 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 haluẓ (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.

Abstract: This article draws attention to the distortions and falsehoods that appear in the 1976 Jewish Social Studies article "Political Antisemitism in Minnesota during the Great Depression" by Hyman Berman. It identifies and corrects the many errors on two of its pages. In addition, the role of Berman's article in a student movement at the University of Minnesota to remove names on four campus buildings of administrators who engaged in racist and antisemitic policies is explored. Berman's work was both a catalyst for an exhibition about this period, which inspired the movement, and then when its flagrant errors were brought to light, was used to try to discredit it. The consequences of Berman's misconduct had consequences more than forty years after its publication.

This article turns to microhistory to explain the targeting of Jews by their Muslim opponents following the Second Balkan War (July 1913) and the return of Ottoman rule to Dimetoka. It explores intercommunal tensions between Jews and Muslims over boundaries and representation in the public sphere that surfaced following the 1908 revolution and the project to construct a new building for the Jewish school in part of the town that was situated outside the boundaries of the traditional Jewish neighborhood. This article argues that the humiliation triggered by Ottoman defeat in the Balkan Wars, the atrocities against Muslim civilians at the hands of Bulgarian soldiers and irregulars, and calls to avenge the Muslims' suffering following the Ottoman retaking of Eastern Thrace provided legitimacy for retaliation against non-Muslims. Existing prewar tensions between Muslims and Jews in Dimetoka, combined with desires for revenge, made the latter into victims of sporadic violence and an economic boycott.

At the first school for deaf children in the Yishuv, established in 1932, teachers used oralist methods developed in Germany to instill the Hebrew language in pupils. Graduates joined a Hebrew-speaking Deaf community that included orally trained Jews returning from Europe. This Deaf elite envisioned an extensive oral education system for children and adults, but the sudden influx of deaf immigrants in the 1950s disrupted their plans. The resulting demographic shift accelerated the development of modern Israeli sign language and an indigenous Deaf culture. By examining the role of the Deaf community in the socially and ethnically diverse context of Palestine and early Israel, this article argues that the Deaf community not only constituted a distinct linguistic minority who enriched the linguistic landscape of Israel, but it also functioned as a cultural minority. Furthermore, this article examines how the Deaf community intersected with other social groups in the highly stratified Israeli society of the 1950s, suggesting that it could be inscribed into the social fabric of Israel as an ethnic minority in its own right.

In interwar Paris, a community of Sephardi immigrants originally from the Ottoman Empire raised a monument paying tribute to Ottoman Jews who fought for France during World War I. Its construction, which spanned over a decade, underscored the evolution of Ottoman Sephardi immigrant collective identity, goals, and anxieties in France between the close of World War I and the eve of World War II. When the memorial was first proposed in 1919, it was seen as a means of emphasizing the Ottoman Sephardi immigrant sphere as separate from that of French Jewry and other Jewish immigrant groups in the country. However, when it was finally erected in June 1935, at a time of heightened xenophobia and antisemitism within France's borders, the monument had taken on new significance. No longer a statement of Sephardi difference, it became a message of Jewish unity, patriotism, and belonging to the French Third Republic.