scholarly journals ‘Jewish Culture is Inseparable From the Struggle Against Reaction’: Forging an Australian Jewish Antifascist Culture in the 1940s

Fascism ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 34-55
Author(s):  
Max Kaiser

Abstract In the immediate postwar period Jewish communities worldwide sought to draw political lessons from the events of the Holocaust, the rise of fascism and the Second World War. A distinctive popular Jewish left antifascist politics developed as a way of memorialising the Holocaust, struggling against antisemitism and developing anti-racist and anti-assimilationist Jewish cultures. This article looks at the trilingual magazine Jewish Youth, published in Melbourne in the 1940s in English, Yiddish and Hebrew, as a prism through which to examine Jewish antifascist culture in Australia. Jewish Youth featured an oppositional political stance against antisemitism and fascism, tied often to Holocaust memorialisation; a conscious political and cultural minoritarianism and resistance to assimilation; and a certain fluctuating multilingualism, tied to its transnational situatedness and plurality of audiences.

2020 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 41-59
Author(s):  
Orna Keren-Carmel

This article has two distinct yet interrelated aims. Firstly, through an exploration of three examples from Sweden, Norway and Denmark, it seeks to illustrate that an integrated examination of the events of both the Second World War and the Holocaust yields a more accurate, albeit complex, understanding of the period. Secondly, it endeavours to refute the widely accepted assumption that the close relations between Israel and the Scandinavian countries in the early years of Israel’s existence were a corollary of the exceptional manner in which these north European states behaved towards their Jewish communities during the war. A historical analysis in fact indicates the opposite, namely that the close ties existing between the countries during the 1950s led to the positive, even heroic, depiction of the Scandinavian nations’ conduct during the Second World War in Israeli Holocaust commemoration. Together, these twofold aims clearly reflect the implications of early Scandinavian–Israeli relations on the latter’s Holocaust memory, and vice versa.


2019 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 00007
Author(s):  
B Dewi Puspitaningrum ◽  
Airin Miranda

<p class="Keyword">Nazi Germany used Endlösung to persecute Jews during the Second World War, leading them to the Holocaust, known as “death”. During the German occupation in France, the status of the Jews was applied. Polonski reacted to the situation by establishing a Zionist resistance, Jewish Army, in January 1942. Their first visions were to create a state of Israel and save the Jews as much as they could. Although the members of the group are not numerous, they represented Israel and played an important role in the rescue of the Jews in France, also in Europe. Using descriptive methods and three aspects of historical research, this article shows that the Jewish Army has played an important role in safeguarding Jewish children, smuggling smugglers, physical education and the safeguarding of Jews in other countries. In order to realize their visions, collaborations with other Jewish resistances and the French army itself were often created. With the feeling of belonging to France, they finally extended their vision to the liberation of France in 1945 by joining the French Forces of the Interior and allied troops.</p>


This chapter reviews the book The Story of an Underground: The Resistance of the Jews in Kovno in the Second World War (2014), by Dov Levin and Zvie A. Brown, translated by Jessica Setbon. The Story of an Underground is about the Jews of Kovno (Kaunas) who founded an underground movement during the Holocaust. The armed underground developed a plan to escape to the forests and join the partisans. The ghetto was liquidated in the summer of 1944. Many of the remaining Jews were sent to the Stutthof and Dachau concentration camps. The book highlights the dilemmas of Jewish armed resistance such as difficulties in obtaining weapons and training, some of the failures of the resistance, and some of the positive aspects of those who thought differently from members of the armed resistance.


2006 ◽  
Vol 93 (1) ◽  
pp. 106-137 ◽  
Author(s):  
FRANK MORT

ABSTRACT Historians of the sexual and cultural changes associated with the ““permissive”” moment of the 1960s have tended to emphasize a progressive narrative of reform focused on national policies and their social outcomes. This article explores a diffierent dynamic, highlighting the ways in which a series of scandalous and transgressive events, associated with particular networks of metropolitan culture in London, played a significant role in reshaping sexual beliefs and attitudes within English society during the postwar period.


2021 ◽  
pp. 153270862199758
Author(s):  
Eloise Florence

This article investigates the possibilities for experiential encounters with ruins in Berlin to complicate the dominant articulations of the cultural memory of Allied bombing attacks on German cities during the Second World War. Building on works that seek to disrupt normative models of cultural memory of the bombings, and entangling them with existing literature that uses new materialism to engage the sensorial nature of memory site-encounters, I examine my own fieldwork visits the ruins of Anhalter Bahnhof—a former train station—as an entanglement of both. Specifically, I investigate how encountering Anhalter through this entangled method allows the site to emerge as haunted. Encountering Anhalter as haunted might complicate the linear temporality that underpins enduring the narrative that the Allies’ actions during the war were completely ethical because they are largely framed as a response to— ergo following—the Holocaust.


2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 218-234
Author(s):  
PURMER MICHIEL ◽  
HENK BAAS

Threatened ruins. Castle remains in the Dutch landscape anno 2019 In The Netherlands, around 80 castle ruins are preserved. In 1997, a book was dedicated to the castle ruin. A year later, one of the authors of this paper investigated castle remains as part of a historical geographical inventory. In 2012, the Dutch State Heritage Agency wrote a practical guide for the conservation and development of castle ruins. In this article, the authors describe the development of ruins in the past 20 years. They tried to investigate the development of the castle ruins since the late nineties and tried to categorize this. Rebuilding of the castle, partly or totally, appeared in almost 10% of all ruins. In other cases, there was attention for the touristic infrastructure around the ruin. In most cases however (68%), the ruins stayed more or less intact, with sometimes careful consolidation or restoration. Sometimes, the surroundings of the ruin changed dramatically with the development of housing, infrastructure or other forms of urbanization. In other examples, historical gardens were restored or reconstructed. There are however several plans for the rebuilding or reconstruction of ruins. These plans often provide the new castle with functions, from wedding location to hotel or office-space. This could be a good development for castles destroyed relatively short ago, i.e. in the Second World War or in de postwar period. Many ruins are however destroyed centuries ago. Given the limited amount of ruins in The Netherlands and the sometimes centuries old development of the landscape and the ruin itself, the authors plea for more attention for the castle ruins as such.


Modern Italy ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 317-330
Author(s):  
Giorgia Priorelli

At the dawn of the Second World War, the successes of the Axis seemed to herald the realisation of a new anti-Bolshevik and anti-democratic European order dominated by Nazi-fascist powers. Italian Fascists and Spanish Falangists enthusiastically welcomed plans for the ‘new civilisation’ in which they were determined to participate as protagonists. This article sheds light on the roles projected for the respective countries in the New European Order in the postwar period, according to the black and the blue shirts. It also investigates the ideological and cultural foundations of the Fascist and Falangist projects related to the new continental configuration, identifying similarities and differences between them. Considering the scarcity of comparative writings about fascist movements in the Mediterranean area, the present research fills a historiographic gap.


2017 ◽  
pp. 197-210
Author(s):  
Dagmar Kročanová

The article discusses several Slovak plays with the theme of the Holocaust; namely Ticho (Silence) by Juraj Váh, Holokaust (Holocaust) by Viliam Klimáček, and Rabínka (The Woman Rabbi) by Anna Grusková. It also briefly refers to Návrat do života (Return to Life) and Antigona a tí druhí (Antigone and Those Others) by Peter Karvaš, both mediating traumas from concentration camps. Two plays (Ticho and Návrat do života) were written and staged immediately after the Second World War. Karvaš’s Antigona is a rare occurrence of the theme in Slovak drama during the Communism (in the early 1960s), whereas Klimáček’s and Grusková’s plays are recent, both staged in 2012. The article focuses on several aspects of these five plays: on dramatic characters representing “victims”, “witnesses” and “culprits” (Panas, quoted in Gawliński 2007: 19); on references about and/or representation of the Holocaust in dramatic texts; and on the type of the conflict(s) in the plays. It also mentions specific approaches of respective authors when dealing with the theme of the Holocaust, as well as with the relevance of their reflection of the theme for Slovak society in respective periods.


Author(s):  
Ivan Matkovskyy

The history of relations of the Sheptytskyj family and the Jewish people reaches back to those remote times when the representatives of the Sheptytskyi lineage held high and honorable secular and clerical posts, and the Jews, either upon invitation of King Danylo of Halych or King Casimir the Great, began to build up their own world in Halychyna. Throughout the whole life of Metropolitan Sheptytskyi and Blessed Martyr Klymentii, a thread of cooperation with the Jews is traceable. It should be noted that heroic deeds of the Sheptytskyi Brothers to save Jews during the Second World War were not purely circumstantial: they were preceded by a long-standing deep relationship with representatives of Jewish culture. In addition, the sense of responsibility of the Spiritual Pastor, as advocated by the Brothers, extended to all people of different religions and genesis with no exception. The world-view principles of Metropolitan Sheptytskyi are important for us in order to understand what was going on in the then society in attitude to the Jews. Also, of importance is the influence of the Metropolitan on Kasymyr Sheptytskyi, later Fr. Klymentii, because the Archbishop was not only his Brother, but also a church authority and the leader. And if from under the Metropolitan Sheptytskyi’s pen letters and pastorals were published, they were directives, instructions, edifications and explanations for the faithful and the clergy, and not at all, the products of His own reflections or personal experiences, which Archbishop Andrey wanted to share with the faithful. On the grounds of the available archive materials, an effort to reconstruct the chief moments of those relations was undertaken, aiming among others, to illustrate the fact that the saving of Jews during the Holocaust was not incidental, nor with any underlying reasons behind, but a natural manifestation of a good Christian tradition of «Love thy Neighbor», to which the Sheptytskyj were faithful. Keywords: Andrey Sheptytskyi, the Blessed Hieromartyr Klymentii Sheptytskyi, Jews, the Holocaust, Galicia, Righteous Among the Nations.


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