Cultural Representations of Jewishness at the Turn of the 21st Century (original) (raw)
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The Art of Being Jewish in Modern Times
2007
Table of Contents List of Illustrations Preface —David Ruderman Introduction —Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and Jonathan Karp I. CULTURE, COMMERCE, AND CLASS 1. Theater as Educational Institution: Jewish Immigrant Intellectuals and Yiddish Theater Reform —Nina Warnke 2. Film and Vaudeville on New York's Lower East Side —Judith Thissen 3. Of Maestros and Minstrels: American Jewish Composers between Black Vernacular and European Art Music —Jonathan Karp II. SITING THE JEWISH TOMORROW 4. May Day, Tractors, and Piglets: Yiddish Songs for Little Communists —Anna Shternshis 5. Performing the State: The Jewish Palestine Pavilion at the New York World's Fair, 1939/40 —Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 6. Was There Anything Particularly Jewish about "The First Hebrew City"? —Anat Helman 7. Re-Routing Roots: Zehava Ben's Journey between Shuk and Suk —Amy Horowitz III. LOST IN PLACE 8. The "Wandering Jew" from Medieval Legend to Modern Metaphor —Richard I. Cohen 9. Diasporic Values in Contemporary Art: Kitaj, Katchor, Frenkel —Carol Zemel IV. PORTRAITS OF THE ARTIST AS JEW 10. Modern? American? Jew? Museums and Exhibitions of Ben Shahn's Late Paintings —Diana L. Linden 11. Max Liebermann and the Amsterdam Jewish Quarter —Walter Cahn 12. Rome and Jerusalem: The Figure of Jesus in the Creation of Mark Antokol'skii —Olga Litvak V. IN SEARCH OF A USABLE AESTHETIC 13. A Modern Mitzvah-Space-Aesthetic: The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig —Zachary Braiterman 14. Reestablishing a "Jewish Spirit" in American Synagogue Music: The Music of A. W. Binder —Mark Kligman 15. The Evolution of Philadelphia's Russian Sher Medley —Hankus Netsky VI. HOTEL TERMINUS 16. Framing Nazi Art Loot —Charles Dellheim 17. Joseph Lewitan and the Nazification of Dance in Germany —Marion Kant 18. History, Memory, and Moral Judgment in Documentary Film: On Marcel Ophuls's Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie —Susan Rubin Suleiman Notes Notes on Contributors Acknowledgments
History as the rise of a modern Jewish identity
History has always held an important place in the forming, inflection and reflection of Jewish identity. The emancipation movement and subsequent Jewish enlightenment in 19th-century Germany brought about a major crisis in Jewish identity regarding issues around integration to modern German society. From this emerged both an intellectual and a religious movement that sought different ways to negotiate Judaism within a Christian hegemony. But these movements were in conflict with one another, each vying to support the correct means of social participation and integration without assimilation. History, more precisely historiography, became the central element of delineating one form of modern Jewish identity upon which this conflict was waged. In this article, I will outline the important role historiography took in the rise of the scientific study of Judaism or Wissenschaft des Judentums in modern Germany, the emergence of the Jewish Reform movement and its impact on Jewish socio-religious identity, and conclude by delineating the second-generation of Wissenschaft des Judentums and its negation of the Reform movement. This essay underscores the connections between historiography and identity. Reform Judaism developed out of the 19th-century emancipation movement in Germany that allowed Jews, and other ethnic minorities, to participate openly in civil society as citizens. Within this inclusivist social thrust, the German Jewish community were offered new opportunities to engage modes of cultural production—i.e. academia, art, governance, economics and business. This, along with new secular-modernist definitions of citizenship and an identification with the nation-state, developed a need to reinterpret Judaism from its conceptions of the past to fit modern views. However, Jewish emancipation came with the price of assimilation to Christian society. Jewish scholars and liberal reformers aimed to negotiate Jewish identity within this modern social context without succumbing to assimilation. By mid-century, this caused an irreparable rift between liberal Jewish reformers and conservative Jewish scholars. History and historiography became the rhetorical tool in this polemic between social engagement and ethnic differentiation. I wish to discuss the relevancy and impact of 19th-century Jewish historiography on the Jewish Reform and counter-reform movements, and the forging of a modern Jewish identity. This thesis will be argued in three major sections. The first section will engage the definition, historical context and experience of Jewish emancipation and the Jewish Enlightenment within a German context. In so doing, we will understand the emergence of Wissenschaft des Judentums or the scientific study of Judaism. The second section will investigate the burgeoning Reform movement by underscoring its relationship to Wissenschaft and modernity, its founders, and its core values and concerns. In order to gain the clearest view of these developments, I will explore the work and worldview of Abraham Geiger, considered the progenitor of the modern Jewish Reform movement. This will lead to the third and final section that questions the impact the Reform movement had on Jewish historiography, or the writing of Jewish history, at the height of the 19th-century. This discussion is most concerned with the place of historiography in the counter-movement against Jewish Reform. I will discuss the second generation of Wissenschaft scholars focusing on the historian Heinrich Graetz. I will outline his conception of history and delineate how he used historiography to counter Geiger's Reform movement and make epistemological innovations. This, ultimately, will explain how this very influential religious movement impacted the writing of Jewish history and, moreover, the forging of a modern Jewish identity. 1 I would like to thank Dr. Ira Robinson for his guidance and mentorship in writing this article, Dr. Rebecca Margolis for her comments and editing, and David Walsh for his insight and patience in reviewing this material.
Becoming Jewish: New Jews and Emerging Jewish Communities in a Globalized World
The book deals with the global phenomenon of millions of people throughout the world who are converting to Judaism and identifying as Jews or Israelites in totally new ways. In this volume, leading scholars view the subject from various perspectives, as well as from different geographical locations. Starting with the people claiming Jewish descent from the Ten Lost Tribes and Forced Converts (Anousim) in Asia, Africa, south America and south Europe, to people in the west – the US (such as Ivanka Trump!) and Europe who join the Jewish fold (mainly) out of personal motivation, ending with non-halachically-Jewish Israelis who reflect a phenomenon of joining the Jewish people in its own state. This phenomenon of Becoming Jewish marks a new situation in Jewish history which characterizes the Jewish people in a new era of blurred definitions and fierce conflicts regarding Jewish identity and meaning.
Post-Traditional Jewish Identities! "Jews are a peuple who most widely differ among themselves." Elias Cancnt, Crowd and Power, 178. "What have lin common wlth Jews? I have hardly anything in common with mysele Kafka, Diary, Jan. 8, \914 Contemporary Jews variously conflgurate their Jewish identity. Since the Enlightenment and Emancipation Jewish identity is no longer exclusively defined by loyalty to the Torah and God's commandments. Indeed, formal definitions of identitymembership in the community, acceptance of its norms, teachings, values. aspirations-are no longer self-evident criteria of Jewish identity-. The ambiguities of Jewish identity in the modern period are, of course, well documented. indicatively often in fiction-and cinemas. In this paper I will seek both to compound and celebrate this ambiguity by noting that as moderns, Jews are continuously reconfigurating their identity. Indeed, the Jews of modernity are members of numerous communities-residential, vocational, cultural, professional, political, recreational-which are not necessarily coterminous. Moreover, the boundaries of these communities are often fluid. The upshot is that one is no longer exclusively Jewish. For one who wishes to grant his or her Jewish identity salience without forfeiting a dedicated membership in other communities, the challenge is to define a Jewish identity that is engaging yet not exclusive. With the concept of »cultural memory«, developed by Aleida and Jan Assmann, I shall seek to explore one possible model of a passionate, non-exclusive Jewish identity.
Introduction: Thinking Jewish Modernity
2016
"Modernity," Charles Baudelaire wrote in 1859, "is the transitory, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable." 1 As one side of art, modernity is also one side of history, and thus one side of Jewish history. In all these cases, modernity connotes a state of mind more than it indicates a historical period or structural condition. As a catalyst for latenineteenth-century critical thinking, modernity takes up the promises, limitations, and failures of the Enlightenment as they reconstitute themselves in a postrevolutionary, bourgeois age. Thinking about modernity involves a complex relation to time, in which the past appears as both distant and relevant, the future at once promising and vague. Makers of Jewish Modernity offers original portraits of thinkers, writers, artists, and leaders who founded, formed, and transformed the twentieth century and laid down intellectual, cultural, and political foundations for the world ahead of us. These forty-three portraits understand intellectual and political biographies in the context of the life-worlds of their protagonists-in other words, in terms of the mutualities of texts and contexts, space and time, thought and action, inheritance and transformation. Modern Jewish experience forms a dimension of our post-Enlightenment world. The term "Judaism" is, in English, immediately problematic as a noun alongside of which "Jewish" is the adjective. "Judaism" often connotes religion and religious texts and laws rather than a more fluid category of general cultural and intellectual inheritance. A bagel, as the saying goes, is not the Talmud. The more general category of Jewish culture in relation to the world at large is often referred to by the awkward word "Jewishness." There is no simple replacement for the powerful and polysemic German term Judentum, which strikes the tone and meaning we would engage here. Moreover, it should escape no one that the word Judentum, and its implicit claim of a strong religious as well as secular cultural world, came from the nation that subsequently sought to destroy precisely the powerful hybrid that it had nurtured. Introduction t h i n k i n g j e w i s h m o d e r n i t y