White Jews: An Intersectional Approach

AJS Review ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 379-407 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Schraub
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Community ◽  
Legal Scholar ◽  
The Core ◽  
Dynamic Relation ◽  
Jewish Experience ◽  
Combination Function

“Intersectionality,” a concept coined and developed by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, examines how our various identities change in meaning and valence when placed in dynamic relation with one another. Instead of exploring identity traits like “race,” “gender,” “religion,” and so on in isolation, an intersectional approach asks what these various characteristics “do” to one another in combination. I suggest that an intersectional approach—asking “what does Whiteness do to Jewishness?”—can help illuminate elements of the Jewish experience that would otherwise remain obscure. The core claim is that Whiteness and Jewishness in combination function in ways that are not necessarily grasped if one atomizes the identities and holds them apart. What Whiteness “does” to Jewishness is act as an accelerant for certain forms of antisemitic marginalization even as it ratifies a racialized hierarchy within the Jewish community. Absent an intersectional vantage, many political projects and controversies surrounding Jewish equality will be systematically misunderstood.

scholarly journals In the Eyes of the Beholder: The Complexion of the Shoah in the Lublin District

2019 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 143-157
Author(s):  
David Silberklang
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Community ◽  
Forced Labor ◽  
Population Movements ◽  
Jewish Experience ◽  
The Holocaust

This article is part of the special cluster titled Conceptualizations of the Holocaust in Germany, Lithuania, Poland, and Ukraine since the 1990s, guest edited by Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe. The article addresses sources for understanding the complexion of the Shoah in Poland, through a focus on the Lublin District and Jewish forced labor there. From the opening story of the wedding of Shamai Grajer and Mina Fiszman in Lublin on April 17, 1942, the article extrapolates several central themes: two constants in Nazi policies and Jewish experience—forced population movements and forced labor, the behavior of the various actors involved in the story, and sources. The main individuals involved in the opening story highlight these subjects. Fiszman was a refugee deported in February 1940 from Stettin. Grajer, Fiszman, and Rabbi Zvi Elimelech Talmud, who performed the wedding, had all been selected as forced laborers when the majority of the Jewish community was murdered during the previous month, and they hoped that their labor would help them survive. The behavior of the main German actors in the story, Harry Sturm and Hermann Worthoff, was not uniformly evil, and the behavior of the Jewish actors was not uniformly “heroic.” The Bełżec forced labor complex in 1940 highlights the brutality and murderousness of much of the early forced labor in Poland. Yet, during the deportations to death in 1942 the Jews needed to “unlearn” the lessons of avoiding such labor if they were now to have a hope of surviving. Among the varied sources for this and the subsequent subjects addressed in the article, the Jewish sources provide a sense of what actually happened in these camps and situations.

Versions of Immobility: The Contemporary American Writer and the Jewish Tradition

1966 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 78-98
Author(s):  
Jonathan Raban
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Jewish Community ◽  
Jewish Tradition ◽  
American Fiction ◽  
Philip Roth ◽  
Saul Bellow ◽  
American Writer ◽  
Bernard Malamud ◽  
Jewish Experience ◽  
Urban Problems

The “Jewishness” of recent American fiction has already been well explored. But discussion of the work of Jewish writers tends to be retrospective: it leads back to the shtetl and the shlemiel without considering how “Americanised” Jewish forms and themes have become. Clearly, recent authors such as Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth and Saul Bellow are indebted to a fund of “Jewish experience”. But their novels are “American”, far more concerned with twentieth-century urban problems than with the enclosed life of the traditional Jewish community. This essay therefore attempts to assess how far “Jewish” localised material has been translated into specifically “American” terms.

Judah M. Cohen. Through the Sands of Time: A History of the Jewish Community of St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands. Hanover, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2004. xxvi, 298 pp.

AJS Review ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 382-384
Author(s):  
Alan F. Benjamin
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Community ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
Temporal Structure ◽  
Virgin Islands ◽  
Small Community ◽  
The Core ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
History Of ◽  
Chronological Sequence

Immediately following his acknowledgments, Cohen begins his volume with an invitation that aims to evoke our interest in the Jews of St. Thomas. This chapter structure—in which the volume commences with what is in essence a justification for its publication—elicits an intriguing question about the study of Jewish life. Cohen is asking us to consider why one should be interested in this (and by implication, any?) small community of Jews. His subsequent introductory chapter poses a second fundamental question. It asks whether, in an age in which prevailing historical models have been subject to critical reexamination, a history that is organized by chronology rather than by theme can have scholarly value. The core of his response to these questions is that the St. Thomas Jewish community is an unusual instance of “accumulative ethnicity” (xxii) and thus constitutes a pattern in Jewish ethnicity worthy of scholarly attention. The narrative is arranged in chronological sequence to convey this pattern. Its unfolding temporal structure allows the reader to watch Jewish ethnicities emerge both from, and in place of one another. In raising these questions, Cohen brings a reflexive stance to the narrative. Yet, socially constructed memory seems to lie at the heart of the notion of accumulative ethnicity. Most Jews currently living on St. Thomas are transplants from the American mainland. Might the volume's framework also represent an American search for roots, and for roots that are special?

scholarly journals Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa: Jewish Voices and Perspectives

2004 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 546-567
Author(s):  
P G J Meiring
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
South African ◽  
Jewish Community ◽  
Social Action ◽  
Truth And Reconciliation Commission ◽  
Reconciliation Commission ◽  
Truth And Reconciliation ◽  
Jewish Experience ◽  
Apartheid Regime

The author who served on the South African  Truth  and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) focuses on the Jewish experience in South Africa  during  the apartheid years. At a special TRC Hearing for Faith Communities (East London, 17-19  November 1997) Chief Rabbi Cyril Harris submitted a statement on behalf of his community. Two earlier documents were also put at  the TRC’s disposal: a statement on Reconciliation  presented by Gesher (a Jewish movement for social action) as a well as a comprehensive volume containing 27 interviews with Jewish activists (Cutting Through the Mountain). Taking his cue from both the Chief Rabbi’s presentation and the earlier documents, the author discusses the role of the Jewish community in overtly and covertly supporting the apartheid regime, as well the experiences of many Jews in struggling against apartheid. Finally the contribution of the Jewish community towards healing and reconciliation in South Africa comes under the spotlight.

scholarly journals A Genealogy of Lust

Textus ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 28-42
Author(s):  
Vladimir Olivero
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Community ◽  
Hebrew Bible ◽  
Hebrew Text ◽  
Classical Literature ◽  
Greek Literature ◽  
Foreign Material ◽  
The Core ◽  
Hybrid Character ◽  
Core Message ◽  
The Universe

Abstract In this study I argue that the translator of Prov 24:50–51 LXX (30:15–16 MT) adapts the Hebrew text to his Hellenistic audience by alluding to Hesiod’s Theogony. The core message of these verses—the ineluctability of cosmic greed—remains the same, yet the images employed in the Septuagint are engrained in and originally belong to the Hellenic mythological understanding of how the universe came into being. The use of classical literature to convey the message contained in the texts of the Hebrew Bible speaks to the hybrid character of the Jewish community of the Egyptian diaspora. When the translator quotes or alludes to Greek literature, he is not borrowing foreign material, but rather drawing wisdom from his very own well. In Alexandria, the waters that flowed from the rock at Horeb and from the Hippocrene spring have merged their course.

scholarly journals ‘Everyone does Jewish in their own way’

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mercédesz Viktória Czimbalmos
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Community ◽  
First Century ◽  
Core Material ◽  
Freedom Of Religion ◽  
Jewish Communities ◽  
Civil Marriage ◽  
The Core ◽  
Ethnographic Interviews ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Constitutional Right

Shortly after the Civil Marriage Act took effect in 1917 and the constitutional right to freedom of religion was implemented by the Freedom of Religion Act in 1922, the number of intermarriages started to rise in the Finnish Jewish congregations, affecting both their customs, and the structure of their membership. Initially, intermarried members and their spouses faced rejection in their congregations; however, during the second half of the twenty-first century, the attitudes towards intermarriages and intermarried congregants have changed significantly. Today, a high number of intermarriages is one of the key defining characteristics of Finnish Jewish communities. This article will concentrate on the vernacular practices of intermarried women in the Jewish Community of Helsinki and Turku. The core material of this article consists of semi-structured ethnographic interviews conducted in 2019 and 2020 with members of the two Finnish Jewish communities. The women presented in this study often combine models from different traditions. Instead of abandoning Judaism altogether, they ‘do Judaism in their own way’ by creating and (re)-inventing traditions they find meaningful for themselves and for their families.

Tradition and its Demise

2015 ◽  
pp. 38-86
Author(s):  
Shulamit S. Magnus
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Jewish Community ◽  
Gender Disparity ◽  
Crucial Aspect ◽  
Jewish Experience ◽  
German Jewish ◽  
German Jewry ◽  
Leadership Class ◽  
The City ◽  
Selective Integration

This chapter examines gender and class in Pauline Wengeroff's Memoirs of a Grandmother. In Volume II of Memoirs, Wengeroff asserts a stark, globalized claim of gender disparity about tradition and its loss among modernizing Russian Jews. The chapter then reflects on her life and experience in St. Petersburg. The organized Jewish community that formed in the capital in the 1860s was that of the moneyed elite; the city was the home of the elite that championed selective integration. In St. Petersburg, the Jewish leadership class was literally under the government's gaze, acutely aware of its self-appointed role as the official model for Russian Jewry and as representative of the community's interests before the authorities. The chapter also describes the struggle between Wengeroff and her husband, Chonon, over Jewish observance. It explores the notions of love and marriage in traditional Jewish culture. Whatever the divergence between Wengeroff's depictions and evidence from German Jewry, she echoes one crucial aspect of middle-class German Jewish experience: the domestication of women.

Some Basic Characteristics of the Jewish Experience in Poland

2004 ◽  
pp. 28-34
Author(s):  
Gershon David Hundert
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Community ◽  
Basic Characteristic ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
17Th Century ◽  
16Th Century ◽  
Historical Experience ◽  
Jewish Experience ◽  
The World ◽  
Basic Characteristics ◽  
Dramatic Growth

This chapter investigates the basic characteristics of the Jewish experience in Poland. For much of its history, the Polish-Jewish community was the largest in the world. It is generally asserted that there was dramatic growth in Jewish numbers during the 16th century, but it is also known that the proportion of Jews in the towns of Poland–Lithuania increased dramatically during a 150-year period beginning in the late 17th century and continuing through the 18th century. In this case, there was relative security in numbers. More than security, there was a sense of rootedness and permanence about this community. Another basic characteristic of the historical experience of Polish Jewry is the Ashkenazic character of that community. Beginning with medieval Ashkenazic forms, the Jews of the Polish Commonwealth developed the most ramified and durable of the autonomous institutions of Ashkenazic Jewry.

Western and Central European Jewry in the Modern Period: 1750–1933

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Rechter
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Question ◽  
Historical Discourse ◽  
Central European ◽  
The Core ◽  
Jewish Society ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Jewish Experience ◽  
The Many ◽  
Core Issues ◽  
East West

For many years, historical writing about the Jewish experience in modern western and central Europe was guided by emancipation and assimilation. Historians focused either on the transformations of Jewish society that accompanied the achievement or on the response this engendered in society at large. While this is still for the most part true, there has been a substantial broadening and deepening of the definitions, contours, and content of these concepts. This article provides an overarching framework looking at the core issues of identity, the minority perspective, the still-regnant emancipation paradigm, the Jewish Question, and the east-west divide. Such issues pertain to the search for the modern. In other words, the many and various ways in which European Jews became modern is now a staple of historical discourse and can be said to characterize the historiography in this field.

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