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Journal of Jewish Identities
Number of Followers: 11

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ISSN (Print) 1939-7941 - ISSN (Online) 1946-2522
Published by Project MUSE

[305 journals]

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  Abstract: Victoria Aarons holds the position of O.R. and Eva Mitchell Distinguished Professor of Literature at Trinity University, San Antonio, TX, where she teaches courses on American Jewish and Holocaust literatures. In addition to over 90 scholarly articles and book chapters, she is author or editor of eleven books, including Third-Generation Holocaust Representation: Trauma, History, and Memory (co-authored with Alan L. Berger, 2017); The Cambridge Companion to Saul Bellow (2017); Third-Generation Holocaust Narratives: Memory in Memoir and Fiction (2019); The New Jewish American Literary Studies (2019); Holocaust Graphic Narratives: Generation, Trauma, and Memory (2020); The Palgrave Handbook of Holocaust Literature and ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-06-05T00:00:00-05:00
Post-Holocaust Culture and Jewish Identity
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  Abstract: Titled “Cultural Expressions of Jewish Identities and the Holocaust,” this special issue of The Journal of Jewish Identities explores new directions in scholarly inquiry that emerge when the fields of Holocaust representation and Jewish identities are set in interwoven, critical relationships and in dialogue with each other. Although the impact of the Holocaust on Jewish identities has been an ongoing focus of scholarly investigation and debate, this collection of essays highlights the reflexive, mutually mediated, and interdependent relationship between the two subjects. Despite the manifold differences among evolving Jewish religious and secular denominations and identities, this collection argues that the ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-06-05T00:00:00-05:00
Poems
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  Abstract: In many ways it was a miracle that I was born. My parents had escaped from the international city of Danzig on the last nights before Hitler’s invasion after six years of seeking a way out. They were stateless because they had escaped from persecution in Lithuania, but persecution and arrests continued. They became teachers of Esperanto in order to escape to Palestine through the international Esperanto conference in Sweden but were sent back to Danzig for their lack of papers. In August, 1939, they shipped out to Palestine with false papers but were discovered and sent back to Danzig. On the last day it was possible to escape, they received agricultural permits to work in England and were saved. They spent the war ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-06-05T00:00:00-05:00
“I was a prisoner. Jew. Whore”: Inherited Sexualized Trauma in Sonia
Pilcer’s The Holocaust Kid
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  Abstract: Despite contemporary scholars’ continued discussions of sexualized violence during the Holocaust, few have addressed the sexualized traumas that are sometimes inherited by the children of Holocaust survivors, those known as the second generation. In this study, we consider the second generation’s inherited sexualized traumas as forms of postmemory. Marianne Hirsch defines postmemory as “the experience of those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are evacuated by the stories of the previous generation shaped by traumatic events that can be neither understood nor recreated.”1 According to Hirsch, postmemory is a “retrospective witnessing by adoption,”2 and though ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-06-05T00:00:00-05:00
Jewish American Relief Organizations in the Aftermath of WWII: Media,
Commemoration, Memory, and Acknowledgment of the Holocaust
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  Abstract: In the three years after World War II, prominent Jewish organizations in the United States, led by Hadassah, the JDC (Joint Distribution Committee), the UPA (United Palestine Appeal), and the UJA (United Jewish Appeal), launched worldwide Zionist media campaigns for the rehabilitation and re-settlement of Holocaust survivors.1 These campaigns, which were based on short documentaries2 the organizations produced and newsletters they published, influenced attitudes towards the Holocaust and the survivors. Even though this campaign reached millions of people and helped raise hundreds of millions of dollars for the Zionist movement, they have received scant attention in research. Studies examining perceptions of the ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-06-05T00:00:00-05:00
Containing the Past: Edith Kiss’s Deportation and Jewish Experiences
at Ravensbrück
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  Abstract: A gouache painting shows a nighttime scene in a barracks.1 Twelve women occupy a row of three-tiered bunks, two to each bunk. Some of the women lie back-to-back while others face each other. Most seem to be asleep. Their bare arms and legs, slender, angular, conspicuous, poke out from grey blankets. Tangled feet and bent knees attest to the cramped, box-like conditions. Each of the women is individualized, either through their appearance or gestures. There are brunettes, blondes, and redheads, most with shoulder-length hair. One woman in the top right bunk has a shaved head.2 Her lips, like many of the women, are painted scarlet. The red lips and the sickly flesh, the pinkish and yellowish limbs of the figures ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-06-05T00:00:00-05:00
Holocaust Consciousness, Igbo Jewish Identity, and the Resurgence of
Biafran Nationalism in Nigeria
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  Abstract: As I began to draft this essay, I received an email with this subject line from an Igbo protégé who practices Judaism in Nigeria: “Caught-up with Anti-Semitism.” Following the detention by Nigerian security forces of three newly arrived male Israeli videographers (along with a female Nigerian congregational leader), my friend went into hiding: he had been among those awaiting the Israelis’ arrival at the airport and is known as a blogger of Jewish Nigeria. The reasons the Israelis were being held, and which tainted my protégé with guilt by association, ostensibly stemmed from social media disinformation. Perpetrators of this fake news were members of a secession-ist group known as the Indigenous People of Biafra ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-06-05T00:00:00-05:00
“A Monstrously Difficult Subject”: Stanley Kubrick’s Aryan Papers
(1991–1993)
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  Abstract: Stanley Kubrick was obsessed with all things German. Whether this was because he was a Jew growing up in the post-Holocaust era or because of his marriage to Christiane Harlan, the niece of the director of the notoriously antisemitic Jud Süß (dir. Veit Harlan, 1940), or both, we cannot precisely know. But Harlan’s family background had a major influence on Kubrick. Her uncle had been a Nazi filmmaker—Kubrick watched all his films and even met him. Her parents were cultured performers. Born in New York in 1928, Kubrick grew up as Hitler rose to power in Germany and as the war raged in Europe. An awareness of the war was something he was familiar with: fifteen years old in 1943, he was surely alert to Allied ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-06-05T00:00:00-05:00
Gendered Bodily Flux and Queer Catharsis in the Work of Bruno Schulz
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  Abstract: Bruno Schulz’s (1892–1942) monumental innovations in modern Polish literature and his visual artwork’s unconventional handling of gender are sometimes overshadowed by the story of his murder at the hands of a Gestapo officer in the ghetto of Drohobycz, the town in which Schulz lived. Schulz’s work renders wondrous creative forces tragically trapped within immobile forms, human beings temporarily reduced to storefront mannequins, stuffed birds, and pieces of furniture. As interwar sensibilities of commodified urban leisure and eroticized mass consumer culture crept eastward into towns like Schulz’s, mass ideologies in favor of reshaping a decidedly non-capitalist “New Man” also gained steam in and around Poland ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-06-05T00:00:00-05:00
Alternative Histories—Alternative Identities' Jewishness and the
(Al)lure of “What if . . . '”
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  Abstract: In his novel Altneuland, Theodor Herzl unfolded the vision of a Jewish State in Palestine. It offered the idealized fictionalization of Jewish settlement and sovereignty in the Promised Land pursued by the Zionist movement that Herzl had organized following the publication of his pamphlet Der Judenstaat. “We had to become new men, and yet remain loyal to our ancient race [Wir mußten neue Menschen geworden und doch auch dem alten Stamme nicht untreu sein],” one of the new Jews in Altneuland explains.1 To Herzl, Altneuland was not a utopia, but the hopeful projection of an alternative future: a future that was alternative to the historically predetermined trajectory extrapolated from past experience; a future that ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-06-05T00:00:00-05:00
Celebrating Life, Sanctifying Death, and Creating Identity Through Two
Forms of Holocaust Commemoration
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  Abstract: Every society has its holidays, celebrations, commemorative rituals, and monuments. In addition to the religious and national ones related to the Holocaust, our family had two more: my father’s liberation date, the 28th of Nissan, which we observed as a “Small Purim,” and “Marker Memorialization,” as we listed numerous family members, Holocaust victims lacking graves and markers, on my parents’ tombstones. Purim is the Jewish holiday of deliverance from Haman, the ancient Persian royal vizier who planned to kill all Jews in the empire. “Small Purims” (for individuals and families) or “Second Purims” (for communities) are declared when communities or individuals are saved from almost certain disaster.1 Anchored in ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-06-05T00:00:00-05:00
Hyam Plutzik’s War
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  Abstract: At the time of his early death in 1962, Hyam Plutzik left among his unpublished poems “An Agadah of Hyam ben Samuel,” whose title names him, according to tradition, the son of his father, Samuel.1 The poem explicates its opening text: “It is the function of a match to be scraped against roughness, / To flare to fire, and to become ashes.” In mythic time when matches could speak one complained about such rough justice, wondering why the tribe of matches could not live safely “in comfort and amity.” Like the Lord speaking to Job out of a whirlwind, a gigantic voice looming over the workshop replies: “Both the beauty and utility of a match / Are in their burning” (296). We might style this a parable or a legend, but ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-06-05T00:00:00-05:00
The Revolt of Job: Salvaging the Lost World of Rural Hungarian Hasidim
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  Abstract: In the foreword to the second edition of Annette Insdorf’s Indelible Shadows, Elie Wiesel doubted whether feature films could ever depict the Holocaust by asserting, “One does not imagine the unimaginable. And in particular one does not show it on screen.” Nevertheless, he praised six films for revealing “human beings undergoing the curse of the gods.” These were Obchod na korze (The Shop on Main Street) from 1965, Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini (The Garden of the Finzi Continis) from 1970, Das Boot ist voll (The Boat Is Full) from 1981, Les Violons du Bal (Violins at the Ball) from 1974, Jób lázadása (The Revolt of Job) from 1983, and Debajo del mundo (Under the World) from 1987.1 What these films have in common is ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-06-05T00:00:00-05:00
Women Writers and the Postwar Remaking of Yiddish Paris
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  Abstract: In February 1950, the Yiddish-language, Zionist journal Kium published an article “Vegn poezie” (“On poetry”), in which the author, poet Malke Loker, sought to answer the question: “What is a poet'”2 For Loker, the poet’s role—even “at a time like ours, when everything is crumbling” as she wrote—was to help others recognize and understand the present moment.3 During the immediate post-Holocaust years in France, there was seemingly a longing for a type of understanding that could be done by way of prose.Between 1944 and 1960, there were three women writers who found themselves in Paris and who were emblematic of these efforts: Lili Berger (1916–1996), Rayzl Zshikhlinski (1910–2001), and Dora Teitelboim (1914–1992). ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-06-05T00:00:00-05:00
Second- and Third-Generation Holocaust Writing in Australia: Towards a
Cultural History
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  Abstract: With deep roots in Australia and a long history of relative integration and prosperity, the country’s Jewish community has come to comprise a small but robust part of the country’s multicultural landscape. Generations of writers, artists, and performers have interrogated their Jewish and emerging Australian identities into creative works, be it poetry, fiction, memoirs, theater, or musical performance. In the decades after World War II, Jews have increasingly created a distinct locally-specific rich and diverse culture. Among the first European settlers in the penal colony that was to become Australia, Jews have played a prominent role in Australian political and business life. Because of its geographic distance ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-06-05T00:00:00-05:00
Saint Hershele
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  Abstract: For Ada Skromne“Don’t look up to heaven, for what will you see in the sky except stars, luminous but cold, wholly insensitive to pity'”Every life in retrospect is easily dividable into parts. Hershele’s might be said to have had almost symmetrical halves. The first half, from his birth in 1959 to the age of twenty-five, when he left Mexico City, was a period that served as an incubator for the ideals that would later on define him. The realization that his father was an Auschwitz survivor, for instance, transformed him deeply. And, unlike the rest of us, the love he developed for the country that opened its doors to Jewish immigrants was incommensurable; I, for one, never experienced such love. In any case, that ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-06-05T00:00:00-05:00
Movie-Made Jews: An American Tradition by Helene Meyers (review)
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  Abstract: How can we discuss Jewish identities in an era that calls for inclusion and diversity but also restricts debate in its polarized online echo chambers, sanitized trigger-free histories, and rigid identity politics that sometimes relegate Jewishness to privileged whiteness' In Movie-Made Jews, Helene Meyers constructs an undogmatic, usable tradition of American Jewish motion pictures that through her often-brilliant readings can become a pluralistic “resource for healing a community riven by religious and political fault lines” (7). Inspired by Laura Mulvey’s landmark feminist work from the 1970s that demonstrated how films reinforced subjectivities, Meyers argues that fiction and documentary films make and remake ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-06-05T00:00:00-05:00
Self-Portrait with Parents and Footnotes: In and Out of a Postwar Jewish
Childhood by Annette Aronowicz (review)
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  Abstract: Annette Aronowicz, a scholar in the field of Jewish and Religious Studies, has written an exquisitely original memoir, a book that invites and inspires our questions rather than delivering pronouncements or giving conventional answers. The text is divided into two sections, a narrative account of the first sixteen years of her life, followed by “a series of meditations on the engagements and puzzlements that stemmed from that period, in the light of the moment in which I am writing.” The latter are organized under the headings: “Communism,” “Jewish,” “Mental Illness,” “Money,” “Russian Friendships,” and “Theological Fragments.” Missing from this synopsis are her parents, yet they appear in her title and loom so ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-06-05T00:00:00-05:00
Trans Talmud: Androgynes and Eunuchs in Rabbinic Literature by Max K.
Strassfeld (review)
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  Abstract: In the past few decades, scholarship on rabbinic literature has benefited from the inclusion of more diverse voices and perspectives. This diversity—which is reflected both in the embodied humans who study these texts and traditions and in the inclusion of theories and methods from various other fields and disciplines—has allowed for new, dynamic, and impactful developments in the field. Max K. Strassfeld’s Trans Talmud adds to the emerging—and necessary—growth in diverse perspectives and voices in scholarship on rabbinics.Strassfeld draws on theories and methods from both trans and intersex history, as well as disability studies, in order to (re-)read rabbinic texts, and vice-versa. This dual reading, wherein ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-06-05T00:00:00-05:00
Beyond Jewish Identity: Rethinking Concepts and Imagining Alternatives ed.
by Jon A. Levisohn and Ari Y. Kelman (review)
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  Abstract: Beyond Jewish Identity critically interrogates the phrase “Jewish identity” and how it is used in Jewish educational discourse. The editors, Jon Levisohn and Ari Kelman, note that key Jewish educational stakeholders have treated identity as something static and possessed. Since the late 1960s, Jewish educational and communal efforts have been tasked to strengthen Jewish identity and saw Jewish identity formation as the desired outcome of Jewish education.The book’s purpose is to understand how “Jewish identity” is used, its meanings, and also new possibilities to “understand the desired outcomes of Jewish educational interventions” (vii). Most of the book’s discussion focuses on Jewish identity in the United ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-06-05T00:00:00-05:00
Shadows in the City of Light: Paris in Postwar French Jewish Writing ed.
by Sara R. Horowitz, Amira Bojadzija-Dan and Julia Creet (review)
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  Abstract: Shadows in the City of Light: Paris in Postwar French Jewish Writing, edited by Sara R. Horowitz, Amira Bojadzija-Dan, and Julia Creet, presents an English-language collection of fourteen essays that explore literary memory and the ways that the city of Paris may depict absence in select postwar works of Jewish writers. Beautifully crafted, the introduction offers a useful historical survey of the context for Jews in France before, during, and after the war. It establishes the volume’s spatial approach to the palimpsest of Paris history and memorial culture, specifying too that “[t]he Jews of Paris in the books that we study in this volume are mostly from elsewhere, [ . . . ] from Poland, from Germany, from North ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-06-05T00:00:00-05:00