Katrina Goldstone. Review of "Irish Questions and Jewish Questions: Crossovers in Culture". H-Judaic (July, 2019) (original) (raw)
Related papers
Frank O'Connor and the Irish Holocaust
Hungry Words: Images of Famine in the Irish Canon, 2005
Frank O'Connor and the Irish Holocaust Book By: Evans, Robert C.. pp. 225-44 IN: Cusack, George(ed. and introd.); Goss, Sarah(ed.) Hungry Words: Images of Famine in the Irish Canon. Dublin, Ireland: Irish Academic Press; 2005.
Niall Meehan analyses some aspects of the late Professor Peter Hart’s treatment of the 1922 ‘April killings’ in West Cork (aka, 'The Bandon Valley Massacre'), confusion created by Hart and by his PhD supervisor on the question of 'ethnic cleansing', and errors of elision, omission and distortion that gravitated from Hart's PhD thesis into his book on the subject. The Year of Disappearances, Political Killing in Cork, 1920-23 by Gerard Murphy, published in November 2010 by Gill & Macmillan, excited considerable media and academic interest. It attempted to document in extensive detail a previous historian’s assertion that the IRA ramped up a campaign of anti-Protestant violence beginning in the summer of 1920. Despite an impressive initial flurry of favourable commentary from Eoghan Harris in the Irish Examiner, Kevin Myers in the Irish Independent and from Oxford University based historian John Paul McCarthy in the Sunday Independent (on 5,7,12 November, respectively), the book fared less well subsequently. A problem for Murphy was that, aside from documented errors, most of his disappeared Protestant victims were unnamed. They had no known prior existence. No archive reveals them, no relatives searched for them and no one cried wolf. At the time of writing, Professor David Fitzpatrick’s commentary in the Dublin Review of Books (DRB) is the sixth consecutive considered response to argue that it cannot be seriously taken as historical research. Mine was the first to make this point. However, I expressed a similar conclusion about aspects of pioneering work by the late Professor Peter Hart, Fitzpatrick’s much-celebrated former student, and also the historian whose book, The IRA and its Enemies, Violence and Community in Cork, 1916-1923 (1998), inspired Murphy. Perhaps for this reason, Fitzpatrick’s review went some lengths to separate what he termed Gerard Murphy’s ‘disorganised dossier’ from the ‘intellectual power and academic skill’ displayed by Peter Hart. Even some of Peter Hart’s harshest detractors concede the attributes Fitzpatrick rightly awarded him. Hart was capable of combining gifted and imaginative scholarship with exceptional powers of exposition. At its best, his work demonstrated a masterful integration of archival detail that drove forward a clearly structured and an elegantly composed narrative. However, while Hart’s academic skill and narrative presentation was superior to Murphy’s, problems associated with Murphy’s book have also been identified in Hart’s scholarship. This is most evident in the selection and presentation of sources appearing to imply that ethnic and sectarian hatreds drove the quest for Irish independence during the period, 1919-23. In that sense, Murphy’s book represents a kind of continuity with Hart’s work, rather than the binary Fitzpatrick suggested. For those who question Hart’s historical scholarship, Murphy’s book represents a logical, and a significant, decline in Irish historical standards. This is a subject I would like to further develop here. For more, download the PDF [See also in 'Papers': Distorting Irish History [One], the stubborn facts of Kilmichael: Peter Hart and Irish Historiography, November 2010 A response on use (and non-use) of sources to Professor David Fitzpatrick (TCD), HIstory Ireland, July August 2009]
Kultura Popularna, 2017
This paper examines popular representations of Jewish attitudes towards Irish nationalism, and the way that these have evolved in the hundred years between the Easter Rising of 1916 and its centenary commemorations in 2016. Although it is now a standard assumption that Jews supported the Irish nationalist movement, including its militant branch, sources from the first half of the twentieth century suggest that the reality was in fact significantly more nuanced and ambivalent. The fiftieth anniversary of the Easter Rising appears to have marked a turning point for constructions of both Irish and Irish Jewish identity. In 1966, the Irish government viewed the first state-sponsored commemoration of 1916 as an opportunity to foster more unifying and inclusive constructions of “Irishness” with the Easter Rising as a focal point. Around this time, a more positive narrative of Jewish engagement with Irish nationalism also appears to have emerged. In the ensuing fifty years this narrative has been gradually buttressed, expanded upon and embellished, particularly in the run-up to the much anticipated centenary commemorations of 2016. In this article I investigate how the narrative of Jews and Irish nationalism has evolved, and continues to evolve, in response to changing needs and circumstances both within and beyond Ireland’s Jewish community.
Responses to the Holocaust in Modern Irish Poetry
Estudios irlandeses= Journal of Irish Studies, 2011
This essay examines twentieth and twenty-first century responses by Irish poets to the Holocaust. It argues that, despite the illiberal tendencies of the Irish state towards Jewish immigration during and after the 1939-1945 war, recent commemorative activities in Ireland have included the Holocaust and are part of a wider commemorative 'opening up' in Ireland towards twentieth-century historical events. Important contemporary Irish poets have written Holocaust poems of notable merit including: , all of whom are discussed here. These poets are noted as second-generation Holocaust poets, more at home in the lyric form and less troubled by communicative dilemmas than their precursors such as Paul Celan and Samuel Beckett whose resemblance is briefly discussed. The essay concludes by arguing that Giorgio Agamben's arguments about testimony after Auschwitz are strikingly pertinent to some of the poems under discussion. It also suggests that the historical essays of Hubert Butler may have acted as an unseen influence on some of these writers.
This paper focuses on three of the most canonical Irish nationalists of the nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries – Daniel O’Connell (1775-1847), Michael Davitt (1846-1906) and Eamon de Valera (1882-1975) – and the various claims they made that the Irish nation was analogous to the Jewish nation. In his recent work on Anti-Judaism, David Nirenberg has shown how abstract “figures of Judaism” have been used in large swathes of European political thought. Such abstract “Jewish” figures, Nirenberg argues, have been utilised in debates over secular authority, the perils of capitalism, even modernity itself. Following Nirenberg, this paper argues that O’Connell, Davitt and de Valera engaged in a comparable Irish nationalist “thinking with Judaism”; this was a means of thinking about Irish statelessness and about where Ireland fit into a broader white, European world, whilst simultaneously attacking British rule as analogous to the worst excesses of violent anti-Semitism.