Ideology and Politics in the Early Years of the State of Israel, 1951–1956

Hadassah ◽  
2011 ◽  
pp. 137-156
Author(s):  
Mira Katzburg-Yungman

This chapter details further developments within the international Jewish community as well as Hadassah's role in these affairs. Despite Hadassah's unrelenting focus on practical work, it could not ignore the questions about the essence of Zionism that arose as a result of the establishment of the State of Israel. In the context of debates over aliyah and ḥalutsiyut, the question arose whether Hadassah was a Zionist organization or an organization of ‘friends of Israel’; the leaders of Hadassah firmly refused to ‘demote’ the organization to the level of ‘friends of Israel’. Another focus of debate between the Zionists in Israel and American Zionists was the concepts of ‘exile’ and ‘diaspora’. In this respect Hadassah, more than the other Zionist organizations in the United States, supported the view that can be defined as affirming the value and authenticity of Jewish life in the diaspora.

Author(s):  
Mira Katxzburg-Yungman

In February 1912, thirty-eight American Jewish women founded Hadassah, the Women's Zionist Organization of America. This has become the largest Zionist organization in the diaspora and the largest and most active Jewish women's organization ever. Its history is an inseparable part of the history of American Jewry and of the State of Israel. Hadassah is also part of the history of Jewish women in the United States and in the modern world more broadly. Its achievements are not only those of Zionism but, crucially, of women, and this book pays particular attention to the life stories of the women who played a role in them. The book analyses many aspects of the history of Hadassah. The introductory section describes the contexts and challenges of Hadassah's history from its founding to the birth of the State of Israel. Subsequent sections explore the organization's ideology and its activity on the American scene after Israeli statehood; its political and ideological role in the World Zionist Organization; and its involvement in the new State of Israel in medicine and health care, and in its work with children and young people. The final part deals with topics such as gender issues, comparisons of Hadassah with other Zionist organizations, and the importance of people of the Yishuv and later of Israelis in Hadassah's activities. It concludes with an epilogue that considers developments up to 2005, assessing whether the conclusions reached with regard to Hadassah as an organization remain valid.


Author(s):  
Jeffrey Shandler

This chapter investigates how pictures taken by photographers from outside the east European Jewish community became widely familiar throughout the post-war period, none more so than the work of one photographer, Roman Vishniac. Taken during a series of trips he made to Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Romania from the mid-1930s until the start of the Second World War, some of these photographs have been republished frequently, including in five books devoted solely to the photographer's work. Vishniac's images figured prominently in the first exhibitions and books of photographs of pre-war east European Jewish life to appear in the United States after the Second World War, and not a decade has passed since without some of these photographs being published or exhibited there, as well as abroad. Although these pictures are the product of a limited phase in Vishniac's career, they are his best-known accomplishment. For many post-war Americans, in particular, some of his images have served as key visual points of entry into the culture of pre-war east European Jewry.


2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (S1) ◽  
pp. S11-S27
Author(s):  
Margit COHN

AbstractThis article offers a typology of comparative law research and assesses the state of this body of research in one Asian country – the State of Israel. To identify the work that should be considered ‘comparative’, I classify studies into three groups. Following a short overview of Israel's political and legal system, I assess the ways comparative public law is addressed in the country. Relying on a first-of-its-kind quantitative study of Israeli legal scholarship in English in the field of public law that compares at least two systems, the article shows that the compared systems in Israeli comparative legal research are predominantly western, and that materials from the United States by far outweigh all other sources. The article then considers several possible reasons for the limited gaze eastwards and beyond the United States, granting special attention to the cultural ‘Americanization’ of Israel. Directions for future research are considered in the conclusion, including the expansion of the findings from public law to other fields of law; the comparison of these findings with those of similar systems in Asia and beyond; and the possible ways legal education may promote the development of eastern-bound comparative exercises.


2008 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-18 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peverill Squire

Abstract. Legislative scholars have paid almost no attention to explanations for the level of compensation provided to legislators, either within a country or cross-nationally, despite its importance to members and institutions. I posit a simple theory based on state wealth to explain differences in legislative pay. I test this theory using two novel data sets, one on 35 national assemblies, the other on subnational assemblies in Australia, Canada, Germany and the United States. Analysis of these data reveals that national or state wealth is strongly associated with legislator compensation. This finding is consistent with an intriguing analog in the labour economics literature.Résumé. Les érudits du monde législatif ne se sont guère penchés sur les raisons des divers niveaux de rémunération des législateurs, à l'échelle nationale ou transnationale, malgré l'importance du sujet pour les institutions et les membres des législatures. Pour expliquer cette disparité, j'avance une simple théorie fondée sur la richesse des États. J'évalue ensuite cette théorie en m'appuyant sur deux nouvelles bases de données, la première portant sur 35 assemblées nationales et l'autre sur des assemblées sous-nationales en Australie, au Canada, en Allemagne et aux États-Unis. Ces analyses statistiques démontrent qu'il existe effectivement un lien étroit entre la richesse de l'État et la rémunération des législateurs. Cette constatation est confirmée par une analogie fascinante dans la littérature sur l'économique du travail.


2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 145-166
Author(s):  
Paulina Bounds ◽  
Charles J. Sutherland

This article describes the influence of various basemaps in Perceptual Dialectology, on the national and state levels. The 180 perceptual maps of the United States and Tennessee were divided into six types of basemaps; tabulated results show that basemaps play a different role on the national and state level. On the national level, basemaps that have features reminiscent of boundaries (state lines or interstates) bias the respondents’ answers. On the state level, on the other hand, the map features do not seem to influence the results in any discernible way: at times the informants seemingly go against the details present on the basemap. This striking difference indicates that, though the respondents rely on basemap details at the national level, where they may not have enough experience with the whole country, they don’t pay much attention to the state-level basemap details as they follow their own more detailed ideas about perceptions.


Hebrew literature, defined expansively, has existed outside of the land of Israel since at least the first millennium of the Common Era. Hebrew religious, liturgical, and poetic works were composed in Europe, the Middle East, and North America for a thousand years before the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. The presence of vocabulary, grammar, and genres that were adapted from non-Jewish-dominant cultures are a testament to the long imbrication of Hebrew in the Diaspora, the areas of Jewish dispersion outside the land of Israel. Hebrew literature in its modern form originated in the cities of Europe in the 19th century, drawing on European languages and literatures, historical layers of the Hebrew textual tradition, and Yiddish for inspiration. In the early 20th century, the Tarbut Ivrit (Hebrew Culture) movement, a deeply Zionist group made up of American Hebraists, most of whom had immigrated from the Russian Empire and been influenced by Ahad Ha’am’s idea of a national Hebrew culture, created another center of Hebrew literary production in the United States. At the same time, the center of Hebrew culture was shifting from Europe to Palestine, and after the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, Palestine rapidly became the main center of Hebrew literary production. Nonetheless, even since 1948, there has always been a small but significant amount of Hebrew literature written outside of Israel, whether by translingual Hebraists or Israeli expatriates. While most of the American Hebraist movement had died out by the 1960s, a few writers continued to produce Hebrew literature in America until the 1990s. And since that time, Israeli expatriate writers in the United States and Europe have begun to create a contemporary Hebrew literature outside of Israel, with its own idioms and ideologies. Unlike the American Hebraists of the Tarbut Ivrit movement, these writers often see Hebrew in apolitical terms or are explicitly anti-Zionist in their use of Hebrew in the Diaspora. This contemporary Diaspora Hebrew literature has also been accompanied by the rise of multilingual Israeli literature, often with overt references to Hebrew but written in other languages. These Hebrew and multilingual literary cultures are also strongly tied to art in other forms and media, which are essential to understanding contemporary Hebrew culture in a global context.


Author(s):  
Michael Mandelbaum

The undeniable threat that Iran poses to the other countries of the Middle East has its roots in the fundamentalist Islamist ideology that the ruling clerics there espouse. The clerics aspire to evict the long-engrained military forces, aid, and other influences of the United States from the region and to thus become the dominant power. In pursuit of these ambitious goals, Iran has trained and sponsored various proxy forces and terrorists in other nearby countries and has sought to acquire nuclear weapons for the state. Ultimately, these efforts have served to undermine the prospects of building peace in the region.


Author(s):  
Sefton D. Temkin

This chapter shows how the battles over the Pittsburgh Platform were being fought over a terrain which other factors were already transforming. Large-scale migration from Eastern Europe had begun. The number of Jews in the United States, estimated at 250,000 in 1880, reached the million mark in 1900, the year of Wise’s death. The acculturated community, speaking English albeit with a German accent, largely middle class, reformed in religion, was outnumbered by one that spoke Yiddish, belonged to the proletariat, and was untouched by Reform Judaism. The processes which Wise saw at work when he arrived in 1846 had to begin over again; but although many of the factors were similar, the answers were not necessarily the same. Incidentally, the presence of a second and larger Jewish community enhanced the importance of New York in American Jewish life and diminished the significance of Cincinnati and other Midwest communities where Wise had held sway.


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