Arendt, Eichmann and the Politics of the Past

Arendt, Eichmann and the Politics of the Past offers a critical analysis of the original American debate over Hannah Arendt’s report of the trial of Adolf Eichmann. First published in 2008, Tuija Parvikko’s book discusses both the campaign against Arendt organised by American Zionist organisations and the controversy Arendt’s report caused within American Jewish intellectual circles. Parvikko’s analysis carefully draws from the historical background of the report, discussing Arendt’s early studies of Zionism and her critique of the Jewish state. The volume also gives an account of Eichmann’s capture in Argentina and the reception of the report among legal scholars and the world press. This edition includes a new prologue in which Parvikko reflects on her own account in connection to recent academic discussions on the controversy. The author’s analysis also covers contributions that have attempted to follow Arendt’s notion of thinking without banisters. With them, Parvikko engages in debate about going beyond Arendt’s theoretical reflections on cohabitation, sharing the world, and discussing the new political evils of the present world without pregiven norms and patterns of thought.

Frenchman, Jew, Positivist

This article investigates German-speaking scholarship’s reception of the programme of scientific sociology that Durkheim presented in The Rules of Sociological Method. It highlights intra-European historical dynamics and academic hierarchies. References to national, cultural, disciplinary and theoretical frames of reference are clearly discernible in the ways the Rules have been read and Durkheim has been mapped. First, his reception was embedded in a complex geometry of power between two nation states during a historical period of competitive nationalism. Second, it was affected by the way he was perceived within networks of academics who occupied unequal geo-cultural positions inside and across nation states. At times, the special location assigned to him as a Jewish intellectual played an important role. Third, his positioning as a positivist within the specific epistemological structuring of sociology is key to understanding how he was perceived east of the Rhine.

Das Hohelied als jüdische Version der Liebesdichtung innerhalb eines gemeinsamen intellektuellen Hintergrundes in der hellenistischen Zeit

This essay is intended to demonstrate that the Song of Songs (Canticles) is a product of a Hellenistic and Jewish intellectual background. It takes up motifs from Egypt, Mesopotamia, and is based on the Hellenistic poetry from Greece–Sicily–Alexandria. Its basic literary forms (Paraklausithyron, runaway love, descriptive songs of man and woman) were derived from the Hellenism of Alexandria, e.g. Theocritus and Moschus or its predecessors as an amalgam of these cultures. This conclusion is further supported by the manuscript evidence for the Songs of Songs found among the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Hidden Gems

Unlike the Hebrew maqāma from Iberia, the Hebrew maqāma from Yemen has received little attention. This article brings the reader into the world of the Yemeni Hebrew maqāma between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries with such works as Aluʾel’s “Dispute Between the Calf and the Slaughterer,” the seemingly related “Parable of the Rooster,” “Haman’s Epistle,” al-Ḍāhirī’s Sefer ha-musar (roughly, “Book of adab”), Ḥarazi’s “Paths of Faith,” and Manṣura’s “Book of Thought.” Al-Ḍāhirī’s monumental work, for example, builds on diverse sources such as the maqāmāt of al-Hamaḏānī and al-Ḥarīrī, al-Ḥarīzī’s Taḥkemoni, and Immanuel of Rome’s Maḥberot and, like other maqāma collections, reworks many existing genres (folk tales, homilies, poems, letters, riddles, travelogues, dialogues, debates, and mystical writings). As such, it is a poignant testimony to Jewish intellectual culture in Yemen writ large.

Leah Horowitz’s Tkhine Imohos A Proto-Feminist Demand to Increase Jewish Women’s Religious Capital

This chapter discusses an article from 1961, in which Haim Liberman introduced the academic world to an eight-page booklet entitled Tkhine imohos. It explains that the booklet has three parts: a Hebrew introduction, an Aramaic piyut, and a Yiddish tkhine. It also points out that Aramaic piyut and the Yiddish tkhine were intended for liturgical recitation in the synagogue on sabbaths when the day of the appearance of the new moon was announced and a special prayer was said to bless the upcoming Hebrew month. The chapter describes the booklet as unusual since it presented material in three different languages and it was written by a woman. It provides a background about Sarah Rebecca Rachel Leah Horowitz as the author of Tkhine imohos, noting how her ability to write in both Hebrew and Aramaic placed her among the Jewish intellectual elite of her era and region.

La Nostra Vita con Ezio e Ricordi di guerra

Our life with Ezio and Memories of War, written by Flora Aghib Levi D’Ancona traces the life of her husband Ezio Levi, a Jewish Italian philologist and hispanist, their experiences of exile in the US where the couple fled after the racial laws. Completed with a historiographical introduction and an appendix of unpublished letters, the volume traces Ezio’s path as a Jewish intellectual in Fascist Italy, his role as a cultural mediator of Spanish contemporary literature to Italy, the trauma of the racial laws, and the challenges of the American exile. Expression of a women’s exile literature, the pages reflect the authors experience as a mother writing for her children left in Italy and of an intellectual Italian Jewish woman dealing with the challenges of exile and memory.

Stanley Kubrick, Jewish Filmmaker: A Review Essay

This is a review of two books: Nathan Abrams, Stanley Kubrick: New York Jewish Intellectual (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2018), and David Mikics, Stanley Kubrick: American Filmmaker (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020).