Oskar Rosenfeld, the Lodz Ghetto, and the Chronotope of Hunger (original) (raw)
The Emergence of Jewish Ghettos during the Holocaust
2009
This book is a linguistic-cultural study of the emergence of the Jewish ghettos during the Holocaust. It traces the origins and uses of the term 'ghetto' in European discourse from the sixteenth century to the Nazi regime. It examines with a magnifying glass both the actual establishment of and the discourse of the Nazis and their allies on ghettos from 1939 to 1944. With conclusions that oppose all existing explanations and cursory examinations of the ghetto, the book impacts overall understanding of the anti-Jewish policies of Nazi Germany.
Leo Baeck Institute Year Book
This article analyzes Volume 11 of the History of the Jews, entitled Geschichte der Juden vom Beginn der Mendelsohn’schen Zeit (1750) bis in die neuste Zeit (1848) (‘History of the Jews from the beginning the Mendelssohnian age (1750) until the present times (1848)’), which appeared in 1870. Specifically, it examines Graetz’s discussions of the generation of Jewish scholars and communal leaders that immediately preceded his own, comparing Graetz’s youthful diary entries concerning his early meetings or thoughts about these men with his descriptions of their lives and works in Volume 11. Making such a comparison, I argue, can reveal important shifts in Graetz’s values and compassions, as well provide some new insights into the opinions toward reform and modernism held by lesser-known figures in nineteenth-century German Jewry. The Graetz who wrote about the leading German Jews of the 1830s and 1840s from the vantage of the 1860s was not always the same man as the one who had met those figures twenty or thirty years earlier. My aim in this article is, therefore, to use Graetz’s diary, letters, and Volume 11 as the basis for an analysis of Graetz’s developing intellectual personae within the broader context of his interactions with other leading German Jews, and to reveal thereby not only the growth of his personal identity as an historian but also to uncover the evolving set of values that he and his contemporaries were instantiating in their modernization of Jewish religious practice and scholarship.
This article explores early modern practices of cooking and hospitality, both in and out of homes, in the Jewish ghetto of Frankfurt am Main. The focus is on Garküchen (eateries) and communal ovens, which were increasingly regulated by the community. Communal leaders employed creative strategies to find solutions for nourishing a growing local and visiting population in the limited space of the early modern Jewish ghetto. Their attempts to expand were propelled by concrete historical events, particularly by a series of fires, which shaped the physical spaces in which this process unfolded. Looking at these institutions allows for a reconsideration of the spatial boundaries of the Jewish ghetto. On Sunday evening, March 21, 1624, around the time of the spring fair, a deadly fight broke out in the Garküche run by Gütge, the wife of Isaac Römhild zum Fisch in Frankfurt am Main. 1 This food establishment was run in Gütge's house and contained two rooms: an upstairs and a downstairs. 2 An interrogation by the city magistrates who investigated the brawl reports that on that evening, she had been serving food downstairs to a table of six men. Her nephew Yeh. iel, who helped her during the busy fair season, had been serving three full tables upstairs. 3 The table of six, all of whom were Jews foreign to Frankfurt, seemed to have been celebrating a special occasion, as one of the We would like to thank the Israel Institute of Advanced Studies, the Israel Science Foundation Grant 1802/18, and the Marie Curie Actions, EC FP7, in the frame of the EURIAS Fellowship Program, for supporting our work. 1. Institut für Stadtgeschichte Frankfurt am Main (ISG), Criminalia 609 (1624), fols. 1r-3v. 2. On Gütge, see Shlomo Ettlinger, Ele toldot [Burial Records of the Jewish Community of Frankfurt am Main] 1241-1824, n.d., http://www.lbi.org/digibaeck/results/?qtype=pid&term=258967, 15.XII.1637. Based on a tax register that is no longer extant, Ettlinger dates Gütge's Garküche to at least 1598. 3. The Lent Fair (Fastenmesse) in Frankfurt lasted for about three weeks total, from Oculi Sunday until the Friday before Palm Sunday, with some flexibility regarding its end.
Introduction to the Theme: Jews and Cities, between Utopia and Dystopia
AJS Review
The collective discussion embodied in the following group of essays is the outgrowth of a three-year-long symposium on Jewish and urban studies conducted at the Hebrew University's Scholion Interdisciplinary Research Center in the Humanities and Jewish Studies from 2009 to 2012. The synergy that animated our weekly discussions owed something to the fact that, rather than chiming in on similar notes, we partook of a wide sampling of reading and analysis. We came from different disciplines, with different agendas: scholars of literary criticism, adepts of social theory, historians, cultural analysts, an expert in religious philosophy, and a landscape architect with a critical interest in the culture and politics of spatial construction. The broad sweep of our discussions was greater than will be evident from this selection of papers, since our circle of discussants continually swelled and altered during those three years, reshuffling the range of participants and topics. However, ...
Yehushua Sobol’s 1984 play, Ghetto (directed by Gedalya Besser for the Haifa Municipal Theater), is in many ways the “return of the repressed,” as the stereotypes of Eastern European Jewry, the reminders of an uneasy past, are brought back to the Israeli stage and made uncomfortably relevant to contemporary Israeli culture. The play offers an opportunity to explore the development in literature from traditional Jewish European Life in the diaspora/exile to contemporary Israeli culture, and the remnants of European history that are still – and in contradiction to Zionist ideology – an important part of Jewish and Israeli identity. In Ghetto, Sobol presents a Shylock-like caricature of a Jew, who, under the Nazi regime, tries to benefit from the special power relations that are formed in the Jewish Ghetto. The relationship between Ghetto and The Merchant of Venice is not obvious, as both plays follow very different story lines. Moreover, some qualities that are traditionally associated with Shylock’s character are divided among a number of characters in Ghetto: A nationalistic librarian, the cruel head of the Jewish Ghetto, and an unscrupulous merchant. In reading this work, I explore the “Ghetto” as a psychological phenomenon that is ingrained and perpetuated in Modern Jewish Culture long after the physical walls of the Jewish Ghetto have been dismantled. In the same way that the character of Shylock, who takes his first steps out of the Jewish Ghetto, evokes concern both on the part of Jews and non-Jews, contemporary Israeli culture still seems to take uncertain steps – never completely confident that one is on safe grounds, equal footing, or putting one’s best foot forward. For better or worse, the Ghetto is an essential part of Modern Israeli History.