Jewish Political Studies Review最新文献

{"title":"Jewish Resistance against the Nazis","authors":"A. Groth","doi":"10.5860/choice.186054","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.186054","url":null,"abstract":"Jewish Resistance Against the Nazis, by Patrick Henry, ed., Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University Press of America, 2014,630 pp.Reviewed by ALEXANDER J. GROTHPatrick Henry, Cushing Eells Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, Literature and Foreign Languages at Whitman College, has assembled a collection of variously informative and generally well-written essays on a subject of major importance in the field of Holocaust studies. The articles in Henrys anthology confront a pernicious myth of longstanding: that the Jews who perished in the Shoah \"were led like sheep to the slaughter.\" As Henry notes in his introduction, this idea transfers the blame for the monstrous crime to the victims partly because, in the distorted Nazi psyche, those who would not defend themselves had \"no right to live.\" Such an accusation also helps exonerate the passive by-standers because \"if the Jews did nothing to save themselves, why should others have risked their lives to help them?\" (XIII).Major Jewish scholars, such as Raul Hilberg and Hannah Arendt, notoriously took up the theme ofan alleged Jewish passivity during the Holocaust. In Eichmann in Jerusalem ( 1963), Arendt went so far as to label the role of Jewish leaders in the destruction of their own people as \"undoubtedly the darkest chapter of the whole dark story.\" The motives for this grossly unjustified interpretation of the Jewish catastrophe may never be known completely. Professor Henrys book challenges these mistaken conclusions. His selection of essays, however, is somewhat odd.The Henry collection classifies Jewish resistance in four different ways: type of resistance; geographic distribution of resistance; chronology of resistance; and the role and contribution of Jews to national resistance movements in Nazi-occupied countries. A major form of resistance described here involves what Professor Yehuda Bauer called amidah, a concept that includes cultural, educational, religious, and political activities, and indeed, all actions intended to strengthen health and morale among Jews, not only armed rebellion or the use of force. This theme is explored further by Dalia Ofer, \"Modes of Jewish Resistance in Eastern European Ghettos,\" (366-392). Similarly, Joanna B. Michlic, \"Jewish Children and Youth in German-Occupied Poland\" deals with rescue activities through efforts that did not involve violent confrontations with the killers. Nick Strimples \"Music as Resistance,\" (319-338) also comes in this category. In \"Jewish Resistance in Nazi Germany and Austria, 1933-1946,\" Dieter Kunz describes the activities of physicians and nurses in the Jewish Hospital in Berlin who opposed the prevailing Nazi policies and went to extraordinary lengths in order to save the lives of Jewish patients. And, Deborah Dwork writes about \"Childrens Resistance both through Diary Writing and Song\" (279-299).This volume also contains articles on armed resistance by Jews, such as the struggle led by the Bielski brothers in the forests of B","PeriodicalId":152917,"journal":{"name":"Jewish Political Studies Review","volume":"7 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114903795","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Jews against Themselves","authors":"A. Rosenthal","doi":"10.4324/9780203787960","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203787960","url":null,"abstract":"Edward Alexander, Jews Against Themselves, New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 2015, 178pp.Reviewed by ABIGAIL L. ROSENTHALThese remarkable essays by Edward Alexander bring intellectual precision, moral clarity and literary elegance to bear on a syndrome that could be called \"Jewish suicidalism.\" That is almost the right name for it, except that its advocates, who are described eloquently by Alexander, exempt themselves from the condemnations they rain down on their fellows. The motivational patterns that Alexander exposes cannot, as is sometimes claimed, reduce to self-hatred. Rather, shown in vivid detail are the workings of opportunistic self-love.Edward Alexander, Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Washington, is the author of books that span literary, cultural and Jewish worlds. In his latest book (Transaction Publishers, 2015), Alexander's contemporary survey is far-ranging, albeit, not exhaustive.In \"Michael Lerner: Hillary Clintons Jewish Rasputin,\" we meet the founder of the magazine Tikkun, \"the omnipresent, gentile-appointed voice of the Jewish community,\" at an earlier stage of his career, when he incited mob violence and threatened lawsuits to intimidate his opponents.And in \"Antisemitism Denial: The Berkeley School,\" we meet Judith Butler who urges progressive people to fight antisemitism but maintains that it is \"wildly improbable that somebody examining the divestment petitions signed by herself and her co-conspirators might take them (as hundreds on her own campus already had) as condoning antisemitism.\" Alexander compares Butlers puzzlement to that of Charles Dickens, who did not know what to make of Fagin, the villainous Jew he had created in Oliver Twist. \"The reason for Dickens' puzzlement was that, in an important sense, he did indeed not make' Fagin, and therefore didn't know what to make q/Tiim. Fagin was ready-made for Dickens by the collective folklore of Christendom, which had for centuries fixed the Jew in the role of Christ-killer, surrogate of Satan, inheritor of Judas, thief, fence, corrupter of the young-to which list of attributes Butler and her friends would now add 'Zionist imperialist and occupier.'\"The type described in Jews Against Themselves is not new. Drawing on recent scholarship by Sander Gilman, Ruth Wisse and others, Alexander traces the genre to its historical medieval prototypes. Throughout the era of triumphalist Christianity, there were Jewish informers-my term not his- who converted to the dominant religion. Innocent themselves, they deflected attacks onto other, also innocent Jews, thereby becoming guilty accomplices in acts of betrayal. Indeed, Pope Gregory IX, who ordered the public burning of the Talmud in Paris and Rome, acted on the advice presented by a Jewish convert to Christianity, the Dominican Nicholas Donin, in 1239. In 1263, the Jewish convert Pablo Christiani played a leading role in the famous Barcelona Disputations. The latter actually was a show tri","PeriodicalId":152917,"journal":{"name":"Jewish Political Studies Review","volume":"10 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123597639","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"FDR and the Jews","authors":"Adrien Dallair","doi":"10.5860/choice.50-6930","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.50-6930","url":null,"abstract":"FDR and the Jews, by Breitman, Richard and Allan J. Lichtman, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013,433 pp.Reviewed by Adrien DallairThere is an on-going, contentious and passionate debate concerning Americas response to the Holocaust, and, specifically, about President Franklin Delano Roosevelts record with regard to the Jews of Europe from 1933 to 1945. This debate features two seemingly irreconcilable viewpoints that leave little room for nuance. On the one hand, critics of FDR condemn the then-president for having stood by while Hitler and the Nazis persecuted the Jews of Germany and subsequently attempted to carry out their \"Final Solution.\" On the other, defenders of Roosevelt argue that the president did everything in his power to save the greatest possible number of Jews.Richard Breitman and Allan J. Lichtman, co-authors of FDR and the Jews \"challeng[e] both extremes in this dispute\" (p. 2). Averring that \"[n]o simple or monolithic characterization of this complex president [FDR] fits the historical record,\" Breitman and Lichtman argue that \"FDR was neither a hero of the Jews nor a bystander to the Nazis' persecution and then annihilation of Jews\" (p. 315). They endeavour to strike a balance and to provide a non-partisan assessment of President Roosevelt's record with regard to European Jewry. Unfortunately, they do not succeed.At first blush, Breitman and Lichtman appear to remain faithful to their stated goal of arriving at a neutral assessment of FDR's record. The authors are at their best when they discuss the pressures exerted upon, the conflicting priorities of, and the challenges faced by FDR. The book traces the phases FDR went through on Jewish issues-what the authors call the \"four Roosevelts,\" as he responded to the changing circumstances of his presidency. Thus, they show the way in which Roosevelt at various times throughout his time in office paid particular attention to some matters, while relegating others to lower priority.The \"first Roosevelt\"-corresponding to FDR's first term-did very little, if anything, to assist the Jews of Germany. In fact, according to Breitman and Lichtman, Roosevelt's first term marked the only moment in FDR's twelve-year presidency in which the president was a veritable \"bystander to Nazi persecution\" (p. 3). In the midst of a worldwide depression, FDR placed priority on economic reform and recovery. Restoring the health of the American economy was Roosevelt's foremost objective, taking precedence over all else. As a result, FDR remained silent in the face of the escalating Nazi persecution of German Jewry. Not wanting to find himself on the end of a public antisemitic backlash in the United States, Roosevelt refused to expend any political capital in order to ease U.S. immigration restrictions against refugees. European Jewry, it would appear, had drawn the short straw.The \"second Roosevelt\" emerged after the landslide election of 1936. With his election secured and the economy contin","PeriodicalId":152917,"journal":{"name":"Jewish Political Studies Review","volume":"7 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126730881","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}