A imaginação nacional dos judeus norte-americanos: do pluralismo cultural liberal e sionista de Horace Kallen às incertezas do século XXI

No debate de inícios do século XX acerca da incorporação dos imigrantes europeus, duas perspectivas compartilhavam a visão de que a nação norte-americana se assentava sobre valores cívicos, mas divergiam quanto às formas da incorporação: de um lado, o melting-pot de Israel Zangwill; de outro, o pluralismo cultural de Horace Kallen. Ao elaborar a ideia de pluralismo cultural, Kallen propôs, ademais, que os judeus dos Estados Unidos construíssem sua identidade norte-americana articulando sionismo e liberalismo. No pós-Segunda Guerra Mundial, os judeus dos Estados Unidos teriam, portanto, construído uma imaginação nacional assentada nesses dois eixos culturais e políticos. Desde os anos 1970, porém, o consenso sionista dos judeus norte-americanos entrou em processo de erosão, o que, ao lado de mudanças demográficas, tem colocado novos desafios à sua imaginação nacional neste início de século XXI.

Israel Zangwill, or ‘The Jewish Dickens’: Representing Minority Communities in Novel and Newspaper

This chapter examines how the newspaper participates in novelistic depictions of late nineteenth-century Anglo-Jewishness, with a focus on Israel Zangwill’s 1892 novel, Children of the Ghetto: A Study of a Peculiar People (1892) and George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876). The dominant nineteenth-century Jewish newspaper, The Jewish Chronicle, sought to accommodate its readers and to represent a unified Jewish community to the larger national public; however, Jewish print culture more broadly was politically, culturally, and linguistically diverse. Acknowledging the centrality of newspapers to the Jewish community Zangwill dramatises the limitations of newspaper form and function to the cultivation of a broader affective attachment. In Children of the Ghetto, Zangwill contrasts the representative potential of novelistic realism with the English-language Orthodox newspaper, The Flag of Judah, which only imperfectly fosters an Anglo-Jewish community. The newspaper’s regularity and routinised labor dull its editor’s sense of time and weakens his affective attachment to other members of his community. In contrast, novelistic realism enables Zangwill to convey the complex feelings that the Jewish ghetto elicits in the protagonist and novelist Esther Ansell. The newspaper looks like a form conducive to affective connections only when it is repurposed by readers and made to work more like a novel. This chapter also argues that Israel Zangwill reworks Eliot’s novelistic approaches to community in Children of the Ghetto. Whereas Daniel Deronda concludes with Deronda’s yearning towards Palestine and a nation for his people, Children of the Ghetto valorises the idea of the Jewish ghetto as a place of nostalgia, a setting that fosters affective attachment based not in anonymous communal imaginings but in lived and material proximity. Zangwill’s novel dramatises the difficulties in creating a minor community within a larger national community, and the extent to which form matters in how that community is envisioned.

Plotting the News in the Victorian Novel

Newspapers are constantly lying in the worlds of Victorian novels, from the false report of John Harmon’s death in Our Mutual Friend (1864-1865) to allegations of extramarital affairs in Phineas Finn (1867-1868). Yet characters continue to believe what they read in the newspaper, assuming that news must be recent, relevant, and true. Victorian novels thus explore the contradictory logic of news: claims to journalistic reality sit uneasily alongside unrepresentative, malicious, or even false news. This book argues that nineteenth-century novels analysed the formal and social workings of news through a shifting series of metaphors, analogies, and plots. By incorporating newspapers and news discourse into their narratives, Victorian novels experimented with the ways that generic and formal qualities might reshape communal and national imaginings. This book shows that novelists often responded to newspapers by reworking well-known events covered by Victorian newspapers in their fictions. Each chapter addresses a different narrative modality and its relationship to the news: Charles Dickens interrogates the distinctions between fictional and journalistic storytelling, while Anthony Trollope explores novelistic bildung in serial form; the sensation novels of Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon locate melodrama in realist discourses, whereas Anglo-Jewish writer Israel Zangwill represents a hybrid minority experience. At the core of these metaphors and narrative forms is a theorisation of the newspaper’s influence on society.

Normalization and Its Discontents

This chapter concentrates on the question of normalcy and its relationship to twentieth-century notions of Jewish distinctiveness and purpose. It describes how the idea of a special Jewish mission that initially thrived within the American Reform movement disintegrated as the urge to integrate within American society to gather strength among Jews prominently waned. It talks about Jewish exemplarity that was influentially presented in relation to specifics of the American context through the competing “melting pot” and “orchestra” metaphors of Israel Zangwill and Horace Kallen. The chapter illustrates the hope of Jewish normalization that was perceived by sharp observers, such as Karl Kraus, Theodor Lessing and Sigmund Freud in the first half of the twentieth century. It also mentions the horror of the Holocaust that cast a profound chill over the idea of Jewish instrumental purpose, but at the same time brought about a renewal of the idea on the ethical and historical lessons imparted by the Nazi genocide.

“A Doll’s House Conquered Europe”: Ibsen, His English Parodists, and the Debate over World Drama

The London premieres of Henrik Ibsen’s plays in the late 1880s and 1890s sparked strong reactions both of admiration and disgust. This controversy, I suggest, was largely focused on national identity and artistic cosmopolitanism. While Ibsen’s English supporters viewed him as a leader of a new international theatrical movement, detractors dismissed him as an obscure writer from a primitive, marginal nation. This essay examines the ways in which these competing assessments were reflected in the English adaptations, parodies, and sequels of Ibsen’s plays that were written and published during the final decades of the nineteenth century, texts by Henry Herman and Henry Arthur Jones, Walter Besant, Bernard Shaw, Eleanor Marx and Israel Zangwill, and F. Anstey (Thomas Anstey Guthrie). These rewritings tended to respond to Ibsen’s foreignness in one of three ways: Either to assimilate the plays’ settings, characters, and values into normative Englishness; to exaggerate their exoticism (generally in combination with a suggestion of moral danger); or to keep their Norwegian settings and depict those settings (along with characters and ideas) as ordinary and familiar. Through their varying responses to Ibsen’s Norwegian origin, I suggest, these adaptations offered a uniquely practical and concrete medium for articulating ideas about the ways in which art shapes both national identity and the international community.

Zangwill, Israel (1864–1926)

Israel Zangwill was a British-Jewish author, journalist, and activist. Among his best-known literary works are the novel The Children of the Ghetto (1892), and the melodrama ‘The Melting Pot’ (1908). In Jewish political circles, Zangwill was well known both for his role in the Zionist movement and as the founder of the Jewish Territorial Organization (ITO). Like other modern Jewish thinkers, Zangwill pursued a Jewish identity that balanced tradition and assimilation. Initially attracted to the Zionism of Theodore Herzl, Zangwill later founded the ITO, which sought a Jewish home in any plausible location as a result of the Kishinev pogroms of 1903, Britain’s subsequent offer of an autonomous Jewish home in Africa (the Uganda Plan), and Herzl’s death in 1904. But Zangwill also argued that the growing importance of the American Jewish community should become a cultural centre of Jewish life by means of the creation of a vibrant, evolutionary, Jewish religion and culture, uniting Jewish history with American creativity. Zangwill eventually abandoned both Zionism and American idealism as solutions. In a 1923 address to the American Jewish Congress, which alienated many listeners, he pronounced political Zionism dead, arguing that the restrictions of the Balfour Declaration and the demographic superiority of the Arab population would doom the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine — a prediction that resonates today. Zangwill also criticized the American Jewish community for its failure to demand social justice in the political arena. After 1923, Zangwill was a marginal figure in Jewish discourse, though today there is renewed scholarly interest in his work.

Sketching Theoretical Frameworks for American Studies

This paper analyzes briefly the theoretical frameworks developed by major thinkers in American Studies (Alexis de Toccqueville, Israel Zangwill, Max Weber, Frederick Jackson Turner) and proposes a new theoretical framework that approaches to the USA as the biggest, earliest, and the most successful Special Free Economic Zone in the history. Keywords American studies, area studies, culture studies, USA, Special Free Economic Zone References 1. Chomsky, Noam. "Secrets, Lies and Democracy". Odonian Press, 2001.2. De Tocqueville, Alexis, "Nền dân trị Mỹ", Phạm Toàn dịch, Hà Nội: Tri thức, 2007.3. Loewen, James W., "Lies my Teacher Told Me", New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995.4. Ngô Tự Lập, “Về Hoa Kỳ như một đặc khu kinh tế tự do”, trong Minh triết của giới hạn, Nhà xuất bản Hội Nhà Văn, Hà Nội, 2005. Tr. 273-284.5. Todd, Emmanuel. “Après L'Empire: essai sur la décomposition du système américain”, Paris, Gallimard, 2001.6. Turner, Frederick Jackson. "The Significance of the Frontier in American History", Bản PDF trên internet: <http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/gilded/empire/text1/turner.pdf>7. Weber, Max. “Nền đạo đức tin lành và tinh thần của chủ nghĩa tư bản”, Bùi Văn Nam Sơn, Nguyễn Nghị, Nguyễn Tùng, Trần Hữu Quang dịch, Hà Nội, Tri Thức, 2008.8. Zangwill, Israel, “The Melting-Pot”, Bản PDF trên internet: <https://www.gutenberg.org/files/23893/23893-h/23893-h.htm>9. Zinn, Howard, "A People's History of the United States", New York: The New Press, 1997.