German-Jewish Women in Wartime Shanghai and Their Encounters with the Chinese

2016 ◽  
pp. 171-191
Author(s):  
Joanne Miyang Cho
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Women ◽  
German Jewish

scholarly journals Cecilia Razovsky, the American Activist Who Rescued German Jewish Children (1933-1945)

2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Bat-Ami Zucker
Keyword(s):  
Social Standing ◽  
American Jews ◽  
Jewish Women ◽  
Nazi Persecution ◽  
Jewish Children ◽  
American Jewish ◽  
German Jewish

This article deals with the reaction of one particular American Jewish sector – the Jewish women - and their response to Nazi persecution of European Jews in the 1930s and the 1940s. As against the widespread accusations that American Jews did not do enough to help their co-religionists during those tragic years, this paper claims that Jewish women, of all social standing – from homemakers to professionals – were actively involved in organizing rescue operations and assisting refugees. Of particular note is one extraordinary woman – Cecilia Razovsky-Davidson.    

scholarly journals Revolutionary perspectives: German Jewish women and 1918–19

2021 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 93-110
Author(s):  
Corinne Painter
Keyword(s):  
Direct Action ◽  
Parliamentary Democracy ◽  
Jewish Women ◽  
Daily Lives ◽  
Anti Semitism ◽  
The Subject ◽  
German Jewish ◽  
Ernst Toller ◽  
Rosa Luxemburg ◽  
The Revolution

In November 1918, revolution swept across Germany: it led to the end of the war, the abdication of the Kaiser and a new parliamentary democracy. While leading figures of the revolution, such as Ernst Toller, Rosa Luxemburg and Kurt Eisner, have been the subject of much scholarly interest, less research has been conducted into the motivations and aims of the rank and file, a group which included many women. Women played key roles as revolutionaries: by spreading the revolutionary message, working in its administration or participating in direct action on the streets. By choosing to become a revolutionary, individuals risked imprisonment or even death. For German Jewish women, who faced anti-Semitism in their daily lives, the risk was even greater. This article focuses on these forgotten female revolutionaries to uncover their roles, aims and motivations, and to contribute to a heterogeneous understanding of the revolution.

Cute Jews: Modernist Photographic Forms and Minor Aesthetic Categories in ‘Jüdische Kinder in Erez Israel. Ein Fotobuch’

2019 ◽  
Vol 64 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-71
Author(s):  
Daniel H Magilow
Keyword(s):  
Young Children ◽  
Written Language ◽  
Jewish Women ◽  
Media Environment ◽  
German Jews ◽  
Cultural Artifact ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Media ◽  
German Jewish ◽  
Photo Essay

Abstract Jüdische Kinder in Erez Israel was the last overtly Jewish-themed photobook published in Germany before the Holocaust. Although it consists only of a six-page introduction by the scholar-activist Bertha Badt-Strauß, one page of captions, and twenty-one photographs by photographer Nachum ‘Tim’ Gidal of adorable young children in Mandatory Palestine, its propaganda mission transcends its diminutive size and surface superficiality. This article interprets this photobook as an example of the photo essay, a modernist form that emerged from Weimar Germany’s unique media environment, in which photographs assumed rhetorical and argumentative functions generally associated with written language. To encourage German Jews and particularly German-Jewish women to emigrate, Jüdische Kinder in Erez Israel creates an allegory of the children’s vulnerability by eliciting responses associated with the minor aesthetic category of ‘cuteness’. To this end, it draws on two important photo essay genres of interwar Germany: photobooks and illustrated magazine photostories about cute children and about Palestine. By synthesizing these discourses, Gidal and Badt-Strauß create a cultural artifact that aims to establish positive, affective relationships between German-Jewish readers and Mandatory Palestine, and to convince the former to visualize and embrace the latter as they might imagine their own children. In this way, Jüdische Kinder in Erez Israel broadens our understandings of both the media constellation from which photo essays emerged, and how this form helped broaden the visual lexicon and aesthetic strategies central to the project of Jewish cultural and political regeneration.

scholarly journals Nation, Religion, Gender: The Triple Challenge of Middle-Class German-Jewish Women in World War I

2015 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 176-198 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martina Steer
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
German Society ◽  
Jewish Women ◽  
World War ◽  
Female Self ◽  
Weimar Germany ◽  
German Jewish ◽  
Wartime Experience

AbstractGerman-Jewish women are elusive figures in the current literature on World War I. Looking at the complexity of their wartime experience and its consequences for the Weimar years, this article deals with Jewish middle-class women's tripartite motivation as Germans, Jews, and females to make sacrifices for the war. To that end, it traces their efforts to help Germany to victory, to gain suffrage, and to become integrated into German society. At the same time, the article shows how these women not only transformed the war into an opportunity for greater female self-determination but also responded to wartime and postwar antisemitism. The experience of the war and the need for reorientation after 1918 motivated them to become more involved in the affairs of the German-Jewish community itself and to contribute significantly to shaping public Jewish life in Weimar Germany—but without giving up their German identity.

Jewish Women in Enlightenment Berlin

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natalie Naimark-Goldberg
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Jewish History ◽  
World View ◽  
Jewish Women ◽  
The Public ◽  
European Public ◽  
German Jewish ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Intellectual Advancement ◽  
Relationship Of

The encounter of Jews with the Enlightenment has so far been considered almost entirely from a masculine perspective. In shifting the focus to a group of educated Jewish women in Berlin, this book makes an important contribution to German-Jewish history as well as to gender studies. The study of these women's letters, literary activities, and social life reveals them as cultivated members of the European public. Their correspondence allowed them not only to demonstrate their intellectual talents but also to widen their horizons and acquire knowledge — a key concern of women seeking empowerment. The descriptions of their involvement in the public sphere, a key feature of Enlightenment culture, offer important new insights: social gatherings in their homes served the purpose of intellectual advancement, while the newly fashionable spas gave them the opportunity to expand their contacts with men as well as with other women, and with non-Jews as well as Jews, right across Europe. As avid readers and critical writers, these women reflected the secular world view that was then beginning to spread among Jews. Imbued with enlightened ideas and values and a new feminine awareness, they began to seek independence and freedom, to the extent of challenging the institution of marriage and traditional family frameworks. A final chapter discusses the relationship of the women to Judaism and to religion in general, including their attitude to conversion to Christianity — the route that so many ultimately took.

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