Estonia will secularise faster than the other Baltics

Significance Lithuania is the most religious: the predominant Roman Catholic Church’s socio-political influence has been increasing regarding the still-sensitive issues of LGBT+ and women’s rights. Patriarchal values are helping traditional religious entities regain influence in Latvia. Estonia is the most successful in separating religion and politics. Impacts In Latvia and Lithuania, religious and social conservatism will together hinder gender equality. The outlook for gender equality and human rights is better in Estonia. The president’s Catholicism will align Lithuania’s EU stance more towards Poland, its larger Catholic neighbour. Vilnius’s Jewish heritage -- culture, festivals, food and drink, and the surviving synagogue-- will attract West European tourists.

Did German Jews Remain German Jews Once They Left Their Homeland?

This chapter addresses the social history and geographical extent of the German-Jewish diaspora during the two major periods of migration: the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It asks what drove Jews to leave Germany during both eras and analyzes their integration and that of their children into the new societies. Focusing on religious, linguistic, organizational, and employment patterns, the chapter also addresses the tensions within these immigrant communities between adapting to their new environments and retaining the literature, music, and culture of their German-Jewish heritage.

Jewish Heritage and Cultural Revival in Poland

Interest in the Jewish heritage and Jewish communities of Central and Eastern Europe, including Poland, has grown in recent decades. The cultural phenomenon has been termed variously as the “Jewish renaissance,” “Jewish revival,” or “Jewish boom” and has demonstrated enormous complexity. The phenomenon consists of two intertwined social processes: a Jewish communal revival and a Jewish heritage celebration, the latter of which includes various cultural initiatives undertaken by outsiders to the Jewish community. The opening of the Eastern Bloc after the collapse of communism made foreign institutional support and funding for the renewal of Jewish communal life available. The growing popularity of heritage and Holocaust tourism enabled the gentrification of neglected historical Jewish neighborhoods and sites and renovation or restoration of material Jewish heritage. Increasingly people have pursued their Jewish roots upon discovering them. The “unexpected generation”—the generation of Poles born between the late 1970s and the early 1990s who claimed their Jewish ancestry as teenagers—has emerged carrying their own notions of Jewishness. Simultaneously, growing interest by non-Jewish Poles in Jews and all things Jewish has been observable in the multiplication of Jewish-style cultural products, in the opening of new cultural institutions (of which the most notable is the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw), and in the emergence of Jewish studies programs at many universities. However, as many Polish cities and towns hold Jewish festivals of some kind and concerts of klezmer music are organized all over the country, artists, intellectuals, and scholars approach the “Jewish revival” with widely divergent views. They do so mainly because Poland was the geographic epicenter of the Holocaust. Little remains of Poland’s large, vibrant, and diverse Jewish communities, which, prior to World War II, constituted approximately 10 percent of the Polish population. Until recently, most historical and sociological analysis of Jews in Poland after World War II concluded that the Jewish community will soon end. Estimates of the number of members of Jewish communities range from a little over 7,000 to 20,000 people. Polish society remains overtly homogenous in terms of its ethnicity and religion, identifying mostly as Roman Catholic. Therefore, the revival of Jewish culture and the preservation of Jewish memory have been carried out mainly by non-Jews and, for the most part, for non-Jewish audiences. Consequently, the phenomenon has been often perceived as a simulacrum, as a cultural theft lacking authenticity—morally ambivalent endeavors concerning Polish complicity in the Holocaust and widespread anti-Semitism. Yet, some scholars have put forward another reading of the Jewish cultural revival, one that is not mere imitation and reproduction of the lost heritage but rather one that entails the reinvention of a new Jewish culture, which may create a new Jewish/non-Jewish contact zone. The latter approach acknowledges the role that both Polish and foreign Jewish communities have played in the phenomenon.

Between Zurich and Romania: A Dada Exchange

In 1916, a group of ambitious artists set out to dismantle traditional art and its accompanied bourgeois culture. Living in Zurich, these artists—among them the Romanians Marcel Janco and Tristan Tzara, and the Germans Emmy Hennings and Hugo Ball—formulated the new Dada movement that would awaken new artistic and literary forms through a fusion of sound, theater, and abstract art. With absurd performances at Cabaret Voltaire, they mocked rationality, morality, and beauty. Within the Dada movement in Zurich, I would like to focus on the artists whose Romanian and Jewish heritage played a central role in Cabaret Voltaire and other Dada related events. Art historical scholarship on Dada minimized this heritage in order to situate Dada within the Western avant-garde canon. However, I argue that the five young Romanians who were present on the first night of Cabaret Voltaire on February 5, 1916 brought with them from their home country certain Jewish and Romanian folk traditions, which helped form Dada’s acclaimed reputation. The five Romanians—Tristan Tzara, Marcel Janco and his brothers Georges Janco and Jules Janco, and Arthur Segal—moved to Zurich either to escape military conscription or to continue their college studies. By the start of the twentieth-century, Romania’s intellectual scene was already a transcultural venture, with writers and artists studying and exhibiting in countries like France and Germany. Yet, Zurich’s international climate of émigrés from all over Europe allowed the young Romanians to fully expand beyond nationalistic confines and collaborate together with other exiled intellectuals. Tom Sandqvist’s book Dada East from 2007 is the most recent and most comprehensive study of the Romanian aspect of Dada. Sandqvist traces Janco’s and Tzara’s prolific, pre-Dada time in Bucharest, along with the folk and Jewish sources that Sandqvist claims influenced their Dada performances. For instance, Tzara’s simultaneous poems, which he performed at Cabaret Voltaire, may derive from nineteenth century Jewish theater in Romania and from Hasidic song rituals. Moreover, the Dada performances with grotesque masks created by Janco relate to the colinde festival in Romania’s peasant folk culture. In my paper, I aim to analyze Sandqvist’s claim and answer the following questions: to what extent did Janco and Tzara incorporate the colinde festival and Jewish theater and ritual? Was their Jewish identity more important to them than their Romanian identity? And, lastly, how did they carry Dada back to Romania after the war ended and the Dadaists in Zurich moved on to other cities?

Revelation after the Holocaust

The challenges which the Holocaust presents to reflections, especially Judeo-Christian, on divine revelation may be introduced by surveying how some poets, philosophers, and psychologists who have debated the seemliness of finding meaning in its barbarity have identified the search for this meaning to be intrinsic to conscience and necessary to human resistance against the banality of evil. However, by being the Nazi attempt and failure to exterminate the Jewish people in particular, the Holocaust must be defined in ways that address the sense of betrayal and abandonment fostered in its Jewish victims by their biblical conceptions of being the recipients and bearers of divine revelation. These definitions represent the Holocaust either as an event continuous with Jewish heritage and history, or so discontinuous as warranting either their negation or reformation in ways that suggest the contours of a new revelation. The many Jewish biblical and theological models guiding reflection on the Holocaust militate against reductionistic positions which represent it as a divine punishment and open up to representing the Jewish people as a Servant given to participate in the anguish which God nurtures for the created world. The extent to which the Holocaust was facilitated by Christian theological contempt for Judaism, and the extent to which this contempt was fostered by Christian scripture and tradition, all these stand to reveal the need for Christians to renew their understanding of Christian-Jewish relationships in general and of the relationship of Christology to Jewish suffering in particular.