Shirli Gilbert | University College London (original) (raw)

Papers by Shirli Gilbert

Patterns of Prejudice, 2024

Between 1933 and the outbreak of the Second World War, around 6,000 Jews fleeing Nazi Germany lan... more Between 1933 and the outbreak of the Second World War, around 6,000 Jews fleeing Nazi Germany landed on South Africa’s shores, becoming the largest group of Jewish refugees on the African continent. This article by Shirli Gilbert, which is part of a larger project, explores how German Jewish refugees’ historical experiences of antisemitism informed their engagement with South African racism before and during the early years of apartheid. While a limited body of research has documented the refugees’ contributions to South African social and cultural life, as well as the close-knit communities they established upon arrival, we know very little about how the Nazi past informed their engagement with the post-war world’s quintessential racial state. Their responses to the racist policies of their country of settlement are not easily generalizable, but do reveal some distinctive patterns. Of the minority who concerned themselves with racism, few chose the route of radical political activism. Instead, they challenged the racist underpinnings of apartheid in the social and cultural spheres, as journalists, educators, social workers and intellectuals, or via legal political routes, through parliamentary opposition. Multiple factors shaped these responses, including most obviously the traumatic circumstances of the refugees’ migration, as well as gender, class and generational belonging.

Jewish Historical Studies: A Journal of English-Speaking Jewry, 2024

This article has been peer reviewed through the journal's standard double blind peer-review proce... more This article has been peer reviewed through the journal's standard double blind peer-review process, where both the reviewers and authors are anonymised during review.

Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 20/1, 2021

Like many diaspora Jewish communities, South African Jews are divided on the politics of Israel-P... more Like many diaspora Jewish communities, South African Jews are divided on the politics of Israel-Palestine. The majority, however, remain strongly Zionist and opposed to allegedly self-hating Jewish critiques of Israeli government policy and action. This article draws on a series of in-depth interviews with South Africans who identify as Jewish but situate themselves outside of what they regard as the communal mainstream. Focusing on their views about Israel and Zionism, the article reveals the often intense internal struggles provoked by their attempts to reconcile emotional connections to Israel and discomfort with the country's politics. We show the extent to which such reactions are rooted in the rhetorical link between Israel and apartheid, which dominates global discourse about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Many of these Jews reject the direct analogy but find the perceived associations between apartheid and Israel deeply unsettling. This position is generationally inflected, with those who lived through apartheid typically more disturbed by the analogy than younger Jews, whose critique of Israeli politics does not draw from a deep personal well of apartheid experience.

Journal of Jewish Identities 14/2, 2021

Drawing on interviews with South Africans who identify as Jewish but situate themselves outside w... more Drawing on interviews with South Africans who identify as Jewish but situate themselves outside what they regard as the communal mainstream, this article focuses on the extent to which their Jewishness is impacted by memory of the Holocaust. Across the age spectrum, respondents criticized what they perceived to be a dominant preoccupation with Jewish victimhood, which they saw being used to defend problematic political and social views. They rejected not the reality of historic Jewish victimhood but rather the idea that victimhood stands at the centre of Jewish identity. The Holocaust significantly informed their thinking on a range of issues, notably a commitment to social justice, but they were careful to differentiate their positions from what they considered to be the Jewish mainstream, whose narratives were seen to focus instead on Jewish preservation and self-defence. Their views echo the diverging Holocaust memory cultures that developed between activist Jews and communal institutions during the apartheid years.

The Journal of Holocaust Research 36/4, 2022

Scholars of the Holocaust have long recognized that ordinary people’s accounts, by definition sub... more Scholars of the Holocaust have long recognized that ordinary people’s accounts, by definition subjective and individual, can deepen our understanding of the experience and impact of the genocide. The distinctive value of personal letters, however, particularly collections of sustained correspondence among multiple writers, has not yet been fully appreciated or explored in Holocaust historiography. Over the past decade or so, more and more collections of personal correspondence relating to the Holocaust have been unearthed. Their distinctive form and burgeoning numbers stimulate questions about their potential historical significance and how, in both practical and analytical terms, they might most fruitfully be approached. Building on my longstanding work with the family letters of Rudolf Schwab, a German-Jewish refugee who eventually ended up in South Africa, Ireflect in this essay on a series of methodological questions surrounding the use of such private collections in Holocaust historiography. How might they differ, as sources, from the many testimonies, diaries, and other ego-documents with which Holocaust historians already work? Are they simply another addition to this already vast archive? To what extent might they enrich, complicate, or even disrupt our prevailing understandings? What new perspectives might they offer scholars about the Holocaust, the experiences of refugees, and beyond?

Contemporary Jewry 41/1, 2021

Although the death rate caused by the COVID-19 pandemic in South Africa has thus far been much lo... more Although the death rate caused by the COVID-19 pandemic in South Africa has thus far been much lower than initially feared, the economic and social impact has been severe. The country's Jewish community, constituting 0.1% of the population with a median age of 45 years, has not escaped its effects. Organizations and individuals have nonetheless been able to mobilize a rapid and wide-reaching series of responses directed towards those most in need both inside and outside the community. The uniquely coordinated, energetic, and multipronged nature of these responses are attributed to robust communal infrastructure, strong community social capital, and the history of the Jewish community's positioning in post-apartheid South Africa, alongside the perceived importance of health to collective well-being.

The Routledge History of the Holocaust, 2007

From Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 until the liberation in 1945, music played an integral role i... more From Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 until the liberation in 1945, music played an integral role in daily life under Nazism. In diverse contexts—political rallies and ghetto youth clubs, opera houses and military bands, concert halls and concentration camps—music was a medium through which the Nazi Party imposed its racist and nationalist ideals, and through which its victims expressed their opposition to the regime and confronted what was happening to them.

This chapter focuses on musical life amongst Nazism’s victims, Jews and others, in the ghettos and camps. Prisoners were most likely to encounter forced music of various kinds, particularly in the camps, where music often functioned as a means of torture. Forced singing of German marches was a regular feature of the daily roll-call, and official inmate orchestras played regularly at hangings and executions. At the same time, many inmates engaged in and derived great benefit from voluntary music-making, despite the restrictions and risks involved. Most of the larger Jewish ghettos established choirs, orchestras, theatres and chamber groups that existed for periods of months and even years. In the camps, prisoners held clandestine sing-songs and concerts and established musical groups. The music that they performed ranged from popular pre-war songs to opera and operetta, folk music, jazz, classical repertoire, choral music, film hits, religious music, and dance melodies. In addition, hundreds of new songs and pieces were created, in Yiddish, Polish, Czech, German, Russian, and other languages.

Musical life under Nazi internment was as varied as the inmate populations themselves, which included people of diverse ages, nationalities, religions, sexualities, and political affiliations. It thus has much to tell us about the spectrum of prisoners’ responses. This chapter offers an overview of key issues in the history and historiography of the subject, and concludes with some thoughts on how music enriches our understanding of the Holocaust and the experiences of its victims.

Literature of the Holocaust, 2013

Journal of the American Musicological Society, 2011

Journal of Southern African Studies, 2007

Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, 2012

Jewish Social Studies, 2010

Contemporary European History, 2004