Mordecai Would Not Bow Down

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy P. Jackson
Keyword(s):  
National Socialism ◽  
Jewish People ◽  
Radical Evil ◽  
The Core ◽  
Anti Semitism ◽  
Death Camp ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Objective Basis ◽  
State Of Israel ◽  
Survival Of The Fittest

Paradoxically, no other subjects of modern inquiry are as likely to generate false consolation as the Holocaust and anti-Semitism. Even as we acknowledge the enormity of these twin evils and resolve not to forget or repeat them, we deem them opaque or purely irrational phenomena, thereby minimizing them. We are tempted to relativize the effects of the Shoah and general hatred of the Jews by pointing to the emergence of the state of Israel on earth, or to the redemption of the elect in heaven, as compensation. More dangerously still, we blind ourselves to the objective causes of the pervasive malice by denying that there are objective causes. I argue, in contrast, that every Jew interred in a Nazi death camp was a prisoner of conscience, even as every Jew murdered by the Nazis was a martyr. It was Jewish conscience and Jewish faith themselves that the Nazis loathed and wished to eliminate by degrading and finally destroying the Jewish people. The pantheistic naturalism at the core of National Socialism—a.k.a. survival of the fittest—inevitably conflicted with Jewish moral monotheism. To this day, the erotic mind does not relish being dependent upon and decentered by God’s righteousness. If we insist the Holocaust was pure insanity without any objective basis, we fail to appreciate its radical evil. If we blind ourselves to how Christian supersessionism made the genocide possible (if not inevitable), we make the Shoah more likely to be repeated. This is not to blame the victims but to name the victimizers: our instinctually prideful selves.

A Strident Silencing

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Na'ama Sheffi
Keyword(s):  
National Socialism ◽  
Political Context ◽  
The State ◽  
Richard Wagner ◽  
Anti Semitism ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Educational Implications ◽  
Anti Jewish ◽  
State Of Israel

This chapter examines the controversy surrounding the Wagner affair in Israel: the ban on composer Richard Wagner (1813–1883) by Israeli authorities following Kristallnacht, the anti-Jewish pogrom that took place in Germany in November 1938. After the State of Israel was created in 1948, Wagner became identified with the racist views of National Socialism and vicious anti-Semitism and his work emerged as one of the explicit symbols of the Holocaust and its atrocities. This chapter considers the fundamental reasons for the opposition to performing Wagner’s work in Israel within a broad cultural and political context, suggesting that his music served as a stark reminder in Israel of the Holocaust of European Jews. It also discusses the cultural, historical, and educational implications of the ban on Wagner.

Antisemitism in Doubt. Historical and Methodological Reflections on Contemporary Europe

2021 ◽  
Vol 73 (2) ◽  
pp. 202-216
Author(s):  
Amos Morris Reich
Keyword(s):  
Normal State ◽  
Modern State ◽  
Anti Semitism ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Cultural Code ◽  
State Of Israel

Abstract In the attempt to find an Israeli approach to understanding the current European ambivalence towards Jews, this study focuses on the question of post-Holocaust anti-Semitism. It analyzes a specifically Israeli structure of experience of “schizophrenia” resulting from its decoupling of antisemitism from the Holocaust. It is shown that the justification of anti-Semitism has changed after the Holocaust. Thus, anti-Semitism has developed from a “cultural code” to a “semiotic problem”. The article concludes that the two main forms of Israel’s response to European anti-Semitism are inseparably linked to the question of whether Zionism ended with the establishment of the modern state of Israel and whether Israel is a “normal” state.

scholarly journals Political cognition. Can scientific paradigms change cognitive status of anti-semitism and the Holocaust in the history of the jewish people?

2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-54
Author(s):  
Łukasz Młyńczyk
Keyword(s):  
Jewish People ◽  
Research Strategy ◽  
Cognitive Status ◽  
Historical Experience ◽  
Research Paradigms ◽  
Scientific Paradigms ◽  
Anti Semitism ◽  
The People ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
History Of

Abstract The purpose of this article is to look at selected positions devoted to issues of historical experience of the Jewish people for their research strategy and their corresponding or lack of dominant research paradigms. The basic intention is to indicate the path of political science to know the history of the nation, through limited exemplification as a response to the absolutization of the research results before they are published to be limited exclusively to the study of the Jews, as the people, especially experienced by the history, which enforces appropriate research approaches. If we reduce the judgment of contemporary phenomena and problems concerning the Jews to the stereotypical anti-Semitism, then any knowledge does not make much sense, because everything important is explained and closed in one cause. Something else is identifying antipathy as an act of anti-Semitism, and quite something else its formal manifestation. On the basis of science, you can examine any antipathy towards minorities alike, and if we assume a separate code for the Jews, then we forget that the function of science is discovering, not decreeing the result.

The Holocaust in European History

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Roseman
Keyword(s):  
National Socialism ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Distinctive Features ◽  
Total War ◽  
Anti Semitism ◽  
Unique Event ◽  
Fundamental Causes ◽  
Entry Points ◽  
The Holocaust

This chapter outlines some of the Holocaust’s fundamental causes and characteristics, and its parallels and contrasts with other genocides. It begins by reminding readers of the profound questioning and uncertainty about human progress that emerged in the wake of the experience of National Socialism and the Holocaust, as a result of which our relationship to the modern world has changed. It notes the continuing difficulty historians, social scientists, and others face in applying general models or frameworks to explain the Holocaust, despite a growing consensus that it is neither uniquely mysterious nor a unique event. It then identifies a series of causal moments—crisis, ideology and specifically anti-Semitism, participation, total war, imperialism, and collaboration—that provide entry points to understanding the Holocaust, and at the same time illustrate the ways it mirrors and diverges from other genocides and mega-murders. It concludes with one of the Holocaust’s most distinctive features—the scale and sophistication of victim chronicles of the event.

Anti-Semitism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Oliver Leaman ◽  
Clive Nyman
Keyword(s):  
Sense Of Self ◽  
Jewish People ◽  
German Idealism ◽  
The State ◽  
Self Identity ◽  
Sharp Distinction ◽  
Anti Semitism ◽  
Integral Role ◽  
The Individual ◽  
State Of Israel

Anti-Semitism is a form of racism which sees Jews as a dangerous and despicable group in society. It has solid philosophical sources in the work of German Idealism which emphasized the distinctiveness of Judaism and how it has been superseded by Christianity. Both Kant and Hegel made a sharp distinction between Judaism and what they regarded as more rational religions, and they questioned the capability of the Jewish people for playing an integral role in the state. Sartre used the notion of anti-Semitism to show how a sense of self-identity is created by the attitudes of others towards the individual and the group. That is, what makes Jews Jews is the fact that there is anti-Semitism, and there is nothing that Jews can do about anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism is a problem for the anti-Semites themselves; anti-Semitism, by Sartre’s account, is in fact an attempted solution to the difficulties of taking free and authentic decisions. Anti-Semitism has played an important role in Jews’ self-definition, in attitudes to the State of Israel and to the religion of Judaism itself.

National Socialism and Fascism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Irving Hexham
Keyword(s):  
National Socialism ◽  
Nazi Party ◽  
National Socialist ◽  
Italian Fascism ◽  
Anti Semitism ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Press ◽  
Foreign Office ◽  
National Socialists ◽  
The 1950S

To appreciate that the various forms of fascism, particularly German National Socialism under Adolf Hitler’s Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP, National Socialist German Workers' Party commonly known as the Nazi Party; 1920–1945) and Italian Fascism under Benito Mussolini’s Partito Nazionale Fascista (PNF, National Fascist Party; 1922–1943), are embedded within modernism, one must first recognize that the reality and horror of the Holocaust has distorted our understanding of Nazism in three significant ways. First, until at least the early 1990s the crude anti-Semitism of National Socialists like Julius Streicher (1885–1946) and Johann van Leers (1902–1965) prevented scholars from taking seriously the notion that National Socialism is an ideology that intellectuals helped define. Secondly, because anti-Semitism did not obviously manifest itself among Italian modernists and fascists, it discouraged comparison. Thirdly, starting in the 1950s many surviving National Socialists, who were formerly passionate SS-intellectuals like Sigrid Hunke (1913–1999) (Poewe 2011) or like the head of the Press Division of Ribbentrop’s Foreign Office Paul Karl Schmidt (1911–1997) (Plöger 2009), among many others, reinvented themselves.

The ‘New Nazis’ or the ‘People of our God’? Jews and Zionism in the Latin Church of Jerusalem, 1948–1962

2017 ◽  
Vol 68 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-107
Author(s):  
MARIA CHIARA RIOLI
Keyword(s):  
Catholic Church ◽  
Jewish People ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Situation ◽  
The People ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Before And After ◽  
Changing Attitudes ◽  
State Of Israel ◽  
The Church

In the aftermath of the Holocaust the elaboration of Catholic perceptions of the Jewish people has been particularly problematic. The weight of a long tradition of Christian antisemitism and its influence on the Nazi extermination programme, as well as the revision of this attitude before and after the Shoah in various Catholic circles as a means of promoting a rapprochement, made it difficult to redefine the image of Jewish people in the Catholic imagination, and gave rise to different and conflicting interpretations. Some members of the Latin Catholic Church of Jerusalem began to argue for an analogy between Nazism and Zionism. This assertion took different forms as the political situation in Palestine evolved and in response to changing attitudes within the Church towards the Jews. This paper will reconstruct the ‘new Nazis’ paradigm in the Jerusalem Church, analysing three key periods: the 1947–9 Arab-Israeli war; the consolidation of the State of Israel in the 1950s; and the Eichmann trial of 1961–2.

scholarly journals THE VERDICT IN KARLSRUHE: "LIFE IMPRISONMENT FOR THE BUTCHER FROM MINSK!»

Lex Russica ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 105-121
Author(s):  
A. P. Grakhotskiy
Keyword(s):  
Eastern Europe ◽  
National Socialism ◽  
German Law ◽  
Jewish People ◽  
Criminal Code ◽  
The State ◽  
West Germany ◽  
Criminal Cases ◽  
Life Imprisonment ◽  
The Holocaust

The trial against Karlsruhe criminal police Secretary Adolf Rube, held in 1949, was the first trial in Germany, during which Nazi atrocities committed on the territory of Belarus were considered. By the example of this process, the paper attempts to identify the specifics of West Germany courts’ consideration of criminal cases related to the commission of Holocaust crimes in Eastern Europe. German law excluded the possibility of punishing Nazi criminals for genocide, crimes against peace and humanity. Guided by the norms of the German Criminal Code of 1871, German justice considered each case of murder of Jews during the years of national socialism as a separate crime, caused by personal motives. Based on this, A. Rube was punished not for participating in the state-organized, bureaucratically planned genocide of the Jewish people, but for committing separate, unrelated murders. The defendant, who was accused of killing 436 Jews in the Minsk ghetto, was found guilty of unlawfully depriving 27 people of their lives and sentenced to life imprisonment. However, in 1962 he was amnestied and was released. By presenting the Holocaust as a mosaic of individual, unrelated criminal acts, German justice maintained the illusion that "normal" Germans "knew nothing" about the mass extermination of Jews, that the Holocaust was solely the product of the Hitler’s actions, his fanatical entourage, and individual "pathological sadists," "sex maniacs," and "upstarts" such as A. Rube, who sought to assert themselves at the expense of Jewish victims.

scholarly journals Historical Museums in Israel: Semiotics of Culture

2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (01) ◽  
pp. 43
Author(s):  
Gabriel Mayer
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Jewish History ◽  
New York Times ◽  
Jewish People ◽  
The State ◽  
Historical Museums ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Biblical History ◽  
Museum Culture ◽  
State Of Israel

<p>Tiny by physical size, the State of Israel retains some of the world’s most important cultural treasures, along with many other great cultural institutions. Archeological treasures have yielded much information as far as biblical history and have been well adapted to a Zionist narrative by both the Jewish press and international news organizations, such as the New York Times whose archives are replete with reports of Jewish history being dug up by the Jewish people. Once the State of Israel gained independence in 1948, the course was set for the development of historical museums whose discourse would reflect the most significant events in Jewish history, most especially the Holocaust and the state of constant warfare that continues to imbue the cultural consciousness of its citizens. In this paper we outline, through categorization, the various historical museums, which are currently operating. Furthermore, this article hopes to shed some light upon the cultural sensibilities conveyed through these institutions. This paper is about Israeli culture, mythology, and collective needs, as formed by and informed through a variety of historical museums. The working assumption is that in a historical museum culture is partially formed and at the same time the culture is influencing the contents and narratives on display inside the museum. It should be clear from the start that the discussion is held about Israeli museums as viewed by a Jewish population and created by and for Jews. Notwithstanding the multifaceted collective of Israeli society, this work is confined to and circumscribed by this demarcation. In the following sections, I intend to provide an explanation for this viewpoint from a historical perspective and also provide a framework of what constitutes a historical museum and justify the methodology of its employ. This will be followed by a discussion of the main categorical types of historical museums present in Israel, and finally a detailed accounting of specific museums.</p>

scholarly journals Gustav Meyrink’s 'Golem' and Leo Perutz’s 'Nachts unter der steinernen Brücke': A literary expression of the Jewish experience during the twentieth century

SURG Journal ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 40-45
Author(s):  
Caitlin Vito
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Jewish History ◽  
Jewish People ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Literary Interpretation ◽  
Literary Expression ◽  
Anti Semitism ◽  
Jewish Experience ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Authority Figures

Gustav Meyrink’s novel Der Golem [The Golem], published in 1915, and Leo Perutz’s 1953 novel Nachts unter der steinernen Brücke [By Night under the Stone Bridge] communicate the authors’ image of the Jewish experience and treatment during the period of the twentieth century. Uncanny and fantastical elements are used throughout both texts to help portray the Jewish condition. Meyrink conveys the animosity between nationalistic Jews and middle-class assimilated Jews and highlights the rising anti-Semitism among Gentiles by associating Jews with the decay and corruption of modernity. At the same time, however, Jews are also depicted as a model of higher spirituality. Nachts unter der steinernen Brücke places the Holocaust within the greater context of Jewish history and conveys Perutz’s assessment that the tragedy of the Holocaust is one in a series of devastating events which have plagued the Jewish people. Moreover, the text casts doubt on the benevolence of Jewish and non-Jewish authority figures and even the mercifulness of God. The doubt raised in the novel regarding central Jewish beliefs mirrors the Jewish experience of disorientation and confusion following the horrors of the Holocaust. Perutz also conveys the need for Jewish history to be passed down to future generations as it is their past which helps form their Jewish identity. Keywords: Der Golem [The Golem] (Meyrink, Gustav); Nachts unter der steinernen Brücke [By Night under the Stone Bridge] (Perutz, Leo); Jewish experience (portrayal of); twentieth century; uncanny and fantastical literature; literary interpretation

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