Drawing on personal experience, the author discusses the vicissitudes of Jewish identity formation in the last two decades of Communist Poland and the first two decades which followed. He addresses the role of religion in the Jewish revival which occurred in that period, and sets it against other models of Jewish identity – Zionist, Yiddishist and assimilationist - on one hand, and the twin pressures of anti- and philosemitism in Polish society at large. This (...) discussion is placed within the broader framework of the Polish political transformation. He finally suggests that the survival and revival of the Jewish community in Poland offers a more general lesson for the continuation of Jewish peoplehood. (shrink)

This article discusses the revival of Polish national thought from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I demonstrate how the so-called Jewish question influenced the debate and the vision of Jewry in Poland after 1989 and how it was used to create a new national identity. I outline why the so-called Jewish question was so crucial in Polish national debates. Furthermore, I demon- strate how the Polish Jewish past was portrayed and commemorated in (...) the Third Polish Republic. This research focuses upon the period of Aleksander Kwasniewski’s presidency, during which the famous debate about the pogrom in Jedwabne took place. The original version of this article was presented as a paper in January 2019 at a conference in Stockholm entitled ‘Jews in Middle Eastern Europe after the Downfall of the Wall in 1989’, organised by Paideia, The European Institute for Jewish Studies in Sweden. (shrink)

This paper is an account of the conference titled Kanade, di goldene medine? Perspectives on Canadian-Jewish Literature and Culture / Perspectives sur la littérature et la culture juives canadiennes, which took place in Łódź in April, 2014 as a result of collaboration between the University of Łódź and Concordia University. As a venue for discussing Canadian Jewish identity and its links with Poland, the conference supported a dialogue between Canadians, Polish Canadianists, and European scholars from further (...) afield. Established and young scholars attended from Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Belgium, the Czech Republic, and Canada, in addition to many Polish participants. The presence of scholars such as Goldie Morgentaler or Sherry Simon as well as curator Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett contributed to an examination of both past and present Canadian and Polish Jewish life and led to an examination of Polish and Canadian literature and history from a highly personal perspective. Conference-goers took advantage of the opportunity to get to know Łódź, via walking tours and a visit to the Łódź Jewish community’s Lauder-funded centre on Narutowicza. The paper aims, as well, to investigate how the history of Jewish Łódź is conveyed in the novels of Joseph Roth and Chava Rosenfarb. (shrink)

When talking about the identity of a certain community, we are inclined to appeal to essentialist, almost metaphysical notions. This often results in a unitary, deeply rooted and stable perception of the analyzed community. But this view is not always accurate enough, for it does not offer an account of a specific history. By offering a short history and a structural presentation of the Jewish community from Transylvania, before and shortly after the Second World War, our article’s purpose (...) is to overpass, by questioning, the shortcomings of an essentialist interpretation of the discussed community. Taking into account the long history of pogroms, applied anti-Semitism and persecutions on religious or ethnic grounds that took place along the 20th century, our work aims at depicting whether religion was and remained a major characteristic, i.e. an unique communal specificity in the re(creation) of Jewish identity in Transylvania, before and after the Second World War. (shrink)

This essay reads Der Verschollene in the context of Prague cultural Zionism and its conflict between Western Jewish assimilation and Eastern Jewish “authenticity.” The novel’s symbolic network articulates Kafka’s problematic relationship to cultural Zion-ist thought, his valorization of Yiddish culture, and his ambivalent understanding of his literary identity as an assimilated Western Jew. As Karl travels West, he paradoxically travels East: through the embodiment of Yiddish by his doubles (Delamarche, Robinson) and the return of Kafka’s “black” Eastern (...) Jewish actor friend Löwy from beneath “Negro,” Karl moves toward a “Teater von Oklahama” that is a symbolic “Yiddish Theater.” The West of Oklahama figures the “primitive,” “authentic” Eastern European East; however, the ambiguous metaphors that permit this progression toward “Zion” likewise ensure its ultimate instability. (shrink)

As critics, a vital part of our task is to examine the ways in which language mystifies and reveals, serves and disserves human desires and aspirations. In that spirit we feel that engaging the leading Palestinian intellectual in the United States in a critical dialogue is a vital task. Although this reply takes issue with several points in Edward Said’s paper, “An Ideology of Difference” , our critique is intended as part of the struggle for increased mutual empathy. We in (...) no way wish to deny Said’s claims regarding the legitimacy of Palestinian aspirations, nor the validity of Said and other Palestinian intellectuals’ efforts to counter the destructive military, political, and ideological forces that stand in the way of the Palestinians’ achievement and self-determination. Said’s critiques of the idea that Israel is somehow above criticism, and of the elimination of the Palestinians from “Western” discourse, are both valid.2We wish to make our own perspective clear at the start. We are both Jewish nationalists. We believe that it’s a good thing to be Jewish. We believe that those of Jewish heritage who fail to explore and re-create that heritage lose something of themselves. We think that Judaism still has a role to play in the healing of the world. By making this statement, we are not claiming that our views are identical,3 nor that they are the same from day to day, nor, a fortiori, that they are identical or even similar to those of many or most other people who would define themselves in that way. This, we note, touches on one of the aspects of Said’s paper of which we are most critical: The statements that he makes at several points, which seem to reify Zionists and Zionism into one model of theory and social practice, as well as his occlusion of the fact that other options for Jewish self-renewal were obviated by genocide or Soviet repression. 2. We are hardly alone among Jewish intellectuals in concurring with this point. Compare the recent comments by the American Jewish leader Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg:In memory of the Holocaust we have been reminded by you that silence is a sin. You have spoken out against indifference and injustice. Why are you making a special exception of Israel? Do you think that our silence will help Israel? The texts that we study and restudy teach the contrary. Daniel Boyarin is associate professor of midrash at Bar-Ilan University. His articles on midrash and theory have appeared in Poetics Today and Representations, and a monograph on the subject is forthcoming this year. Jonathan Boyarin is a fellow of the Max Weinreich Center at the VIVO Institute for Jewish Research. He edited and translated, with Jack Kugelmass, From a Ruined Garden: The Memorial Books of Polish Jewry, and is currently completing an ethnography of Polish Jews in Paris. He is active in the International Jewish Peace Union. (shrink)

During his more than fifty-year writing and teaching career, Horace M. Kallen (1882-1974), the American Jewish philosopher who coined the term "cultural pluralism," incorporated into his pragmatism-infused philosophy of life a number of different sciences, from racial science to psychology and physics. Part biography, part cultural history, "Horace Kallen Confronts America" offers fresh insight into the larger question of how social discourses shape modern American Jewish identity.

s Jewish identity contributed to his philosophical outlook. His life in a Hungarian-acculturated, nonobservant Jewish family in the last decades of the Austro-Hungarian Empire; his experience as a Jew emigrating from Hitler’s Germany; and his thoughts about Zionism informed his theory of knowledge. During the late 1930s and 1940s, he worked to reconcile his Jewish identity with his commitments to Christianity, and this tension contributed to his thinking about the nature of scientific discovery. The malapropism (...) baptized Jew characterizes the scientist on the verge of discovery, one who occupies a twilight world between adherence and apostasy with regard to the scientific community. Key Words: Jewish identity • Hungarian Jews • Karl Popper • Zionism • scientific discovery. (shrink)

Editorial for issue 30 of Nordisk judaistik – Scandinavian Jewish Studies, 'Boundaries of Jewish Identities in Contemporary Finland'.

Drawing extensively on her letters and published writings, this study synthesizes Hannah Arendt’s own perspectives on her Jewish identity and the views of others, and then offers a reconsideration. What emerges is that Arendt’s Jewishness is problematic and interesting to her only in relation to Germany and Israel, and not in the American context where she engages in a universalistic discourse transcending identity conflicts and perplexities.

This book proposes a theory of reference--answering the question of whether Jewish, Christian, and Muslim scriptures refer to the same God--within a semantic framework acceptable to atheists and fideists.

On Marcuse's Jewish Identity Discussing the identity of his father, Herbert, and the family, Peter Marcuse says: "We were certainly Jewish; we would never have been in the US otherwise. My father was bar mitzvah'd, and to my knowledge his parents were relatively observant. But he himself was strictly secular. I remember at home hearing Jewish jokes, a smattering of Yiddish, Jewish friends, a Jewish intellectual circle—no doubt we were Jewish; but I (...) remember no religious observance, no going to schul or services, even on the High Holy Days.1" This testament indeed seems to reflect…. (shrink)

The topic of Hannah Arendt's Jewish identity can be approached from many directions. This chapter considers Arendt in the context of the vision of world history articulated by her teacher and mentor Karl Jaspers, in which her people, the Jews of Palestine, were considered as one of the “Axial Age” peoples. It argues that it is Arendt's Jewish identity—not just the identity she asserted in defending herself as a Jew when attacked as one, but more (...) deeply her connection to the Axial Age prophetic tradition—that made her the cosmopolitan she was, while Jaspers's cosmopolitanism was more learned than inherited and reinforced by group experience. (shrink)

"Koltun-Fromm’s reading of Hess is of crucial import for those who study the construction of self in the modern world as well as for those who are concerned with Hess and his contributions to modern thought.... a reading of Hess that is subtle, judicious, insightful, and well supported." —David Ellenson Moses Hess, a fascinating 19th-century German Jewish intellectual figure, was at times religious and secular, traditional and modern, practical and theoretical, socialist and nationalist. Ken Koltun-Fromm’s radical reinterpretation of his (...) writings shows Hess as a Jew struggling with the meaning of conflicting commitments and impulses. Modern readers will realize that in Hess’s life, as in their own, these commitments remain fragmented and torn. As contemporary Jews negotiate multiple, often contradictory allegiances in the modern world, Koltun-Fromm argues that Hess’s struggle to unite conflicting traditions and frameworks of meaning offers intellectual and practical resources to re-examine the dilemmas of modern Jewish identity. Adopting Charles Taylor’s philosophical theory of the self to uncover Hess’s various commitments, Koltun-Fromm demonstrates that Hess offers a rich, textured, though deeply conflicted and torn account of the modern Jew. This groundbreaking study in conceptions of identity in modern Jewish texts is a vital contribution to the diverse fields of Jewish intellectual history, philosophy, Zionism, and religious studies. Jewish Literature and Culture—Alvin H. Rosenfeld, editor Published with the generous support of the Koret Foundation. (shrink)

This paper seeks to situate Jewish individuals from the upper echelons of the Mongol government in Iran and Iraq (1258‒1335) in relation to the process of confessional, Sunnī-Shīʿī polarization. Focusing on the case of the Baghdadi Jewish physician and vizier Saʿd al-Dawla (d. 1291), I explore how the Jewish minister sought to take advantage of Twelver-Shīʿī rise to prominence under the Mongols. I argue that the vizier attempted to strike an alliance with the Shīʿī communities in Iraq (...) and with influential Shīʿī families with long-established ties to the Mongol regime, in order to curtail resistance to his policies and to the Jewish dominance in the realm’s bureaucracy. I consider Saʿd al-Dawla’s endeavors within the broader historical context of Shīʿī-Jewish relations. The article concludes by examining the two decades following Saʿd al-Dawla’s downfall, when a group of eminent Jewish physicians at the Mongol court converted to Islam. I show how these converts continued to exploit the process of politicization of confessional identities under the Mongols. (shrink)

In this paper, I work towards a conceptualization of a new form of epistemic injustice – one that occurs within groups, as opposed to across groups – which I call ‘intra-group epistemic injustice’. Specifically, I focus on a case that occurs within the Jewish community, regarding what I and others see as the silencing of anti-Zionist Jews by Zionist Jews, via a conflation of Jewish identity with Zionism. Anti-Zionist Jews are accused by Zionist Jews of being ‘self-hating (...) Jews’ or perhaps not even Jews at all, and as such, the former’s contributions to discussions of what it means to be Jewish are preemptively disregarded by the latter. Consequently, the harm of this epistemic injustice is that it effectively issues a denial of one’s identity as a Jew, which may amount to a nearly complete denial of one’s self. (shrink)

This article examines the relationship between mothers and medical discourse, drawing from oral narratives of 20 Jewish women who gave birth to their first children between 1928 and 1940. The author shows that women encounter medical discourse not only as a system of technical knowledge but also as a package of cultural and social enterprises. Jewish mothers during this period mobilized medicalized mothering practices to signify their advancement from immigrant culture into the American middle class. Mothers portray themselves (...) as benefiting from the new opportunities of American freedoms, as actively seeking self-improvements, and as engaging medicine in the context of their changing group membership. In more general terms, the author shows that medicalization's effect on social difference extends beyond men's control of women's subjectivity or social position; it also involves women in the creation and maintenance of status hierarchies between women. (shrink)

Nicolae Kallós, A dialogue on Jewish identity, Holocaust, and Communism as personal Experiences Registered and edited by Sandu Frunzã, The Publishing House of the Axis Foundation, Iaoi, 2003.

Baruch de Spinoza (1632-1677)--often recognized as the first modern Jewish thinker--was also a founder of modern liberal political philosophy. This book is the first to connect systematically these two aspects of Spinoza's legacy. Steven B. Smith shows that Spinoza was a politically engaged theorist who both advocated and embodied a new conception of the emancipated individual, a thinker who decisively influenced such diverse movements as the Enlightenment, liberalism, and political Zionism. Focusing on Spinoza's Theologico-Political Treatise, Smith argues that Spinoza (...) was the first thinker of note to make the civil status of Jews and Judaism (what later became known as the Jewish Question) an essential ingredient of modern political thought. Before Marx or Freud, Smith notes, Spinoza recast Judaism to include the liberal values of autonomy and emancipation from tradition. Smith examines the circumstances of Spinoza's excommunication from the Jewish community of Amsterdam, his skeptical assault on the authority of Scripture, his transformation of Mosaic prophecy into a progressive philosophy of history, his use of the language of natural right and the social contract to defend democratic political institutions, and his comprehensive comparison of the ancient Hebrew commonwealth and the modern commercial republic. According to Smith, Spinoza's Treatise represents a classic defense of religious toleration and intellectual freedom, showing them to be necessary foundations for political stability and liberal regimes. In this study Smith examines Spinoza's solution to the Jewish Question and asks whether a Judaism, so conceived, can long survive. (shrink)

This paper contrasts the religiosity ihai is expressed by the mysticism of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, which moves away from ihe traditional “narratives” of revealed religion, with Wittgenstein’s later expressions of religiosity, which endorse those “narratives” and take place within them. The paper discusses the importance of this development in Wittgenstein’s religious experience in relation to the developments in Wittgenstein’s philosophy. Both religious and philosophical developments are placed in the context of Wittgenstein’s self-directed anti-Semitism, which is interpreted in terms of the anomalies (...) of Jewish assimilation and acculturation in the inhospitable environment of European anti-Semitism. The outcome is an account of Wittgenstein as a historical figure, which can shed light on many aspects of his philosophy. To gain credibility, the account proceeds by means of a close exegesis of some Wittensteinian passages that were not adequately explained before. (shrink)

They were all staunch Alaskan Jews, which meant they were utopians, which meant they saw imperfection everywhere they looked.Zionism and science fiction, Doreet LeVitte Harten argues, have historically been conjoined in that both are predicated upon colonial enterprise, both involve a process of expansion and progress, and both rely fundamentally on a sense of wonder: “This ‘sense of wonder’ is central to the idea of Zionism, and with it—the element of terror so central to the definition of the sublime. Embedded (...) in Zionism, it is the referential framework within which Zionism is comprehended, meaning that the practical outcome of Zionism is regarded, first and foremost, as an act of wonder which should be regarded... (shrink)

Is the Holocaust Vanishing? explores the ramifications of the passing of survivors for Holocaust studies, the removal of the Jew from Holocaust studies, and what all of this means for Jewish identity after the Holocaust. The book consists of years of reflection and wrestling with these issues on the part of a man who is a Holocaust survivor, a rabbi, and a professor of Holocaust studies.