Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies最新文献

{"title":"The Children of Death Never Die: Specters of the Early Zionist Past","authors":"Liora R. Halperin","doi":"10.1353/sho.2023.a911220","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sho.2023.a911220","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: This chapter considers the curious and perennial recurrence, in Zionist periodicals, memoirs and historiographic literature, of the claim that Palestinian Arabs referred to Jews in Palestine in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century as \" Awlad al-mawt \" (Children of Death). Invocations of this term are typically paired with ideologically laden statements of Zionists overcoming this characterization by demonstrating their capacity for physical strength and willingness to employ violence. Evoking a legacy of conflict with Palestinian Arabs, a longstanding European trope of Jews lacking vitality, and the promise of Jewish revival, Awlad al-mawt , in multiple dialectical variations and transliterations, became a byword for Jewish transformation but also for a lingering anxiety about its ultimate impossibility. By tracing the usages and context of this term throughout the twentieth century, from its first known appearances just before the Kishinev Pogrom of 1903 through 1948, it argues that ambivalence about early Zionist strength informs evolving anxieties about the Zionist-Palestinian conflict, the inherent precarity of Zionism as a settler project, and the attendant militarization of Zionist and Israeli society.","PeriodicalId":21809,"journal":{"name":"Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies","volume":"25 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135505412","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Exceptional Whites, Bad Jews: Racial Subjectivity, Anti-Zionism, and the Jewish New Left","authors":"Benjamin Balthaser","doi":"10.1353/sho.2023.a911218","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sho.2023.a911218","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: It is often assumed that the 1967 Arab-Israeli War led to the \"wholesale conversion of the Jews to Zionism,\" as Norman Podhoretz famously phrased it. This \"conversion\" is equally, if often less explicitly, said to coincide with the end of the era of Jewish marginality in the U.S. and West more broadly, as Jews of European descent were half-included, half-conscripted, into normative structures of whiteness, class ascension, and citizenship. While this epochal shift in Jewish racial formation and political allegiance is undeniable especially in the context of large Jewish secular and religious institutions, at the time this \"conversion\" was seen as anything but inevitable. Many Jewish liberals, including Irving Howe, Seymour Lipset, and Nathan Glazer, and reactionaries such as Meir Kahane, saw Jewish overrepresentation and hypervisibility in New Left organizations such as Students for a Democratic Society, the Youth International Party, and the Socialist Workers Party as a sign that Jewish youth rejected Zionism as well as the Jewish rise into the middle class. That retrospectively we see Jewish racial formation and political alignment after 1967 as a fait accompli often relies on the erasure not only of mass Jewish participation in the New Left, but also the erasure of the New Left's anti-imperialist political commitments, including critique of expansive Israeli militarism and the settler colonial assumptions underlying Zionism. Looking at memoirs, pamphlets, histories, and original interviews with Jewish participants in the New Left, this article excavates the political alignments of Jewish New Left activists, exploring opposition to the U.S.'s new support of the Israeli state as well as the changing Ashkenazi Jewish racial assignment. Rather than finding Third World and Black Power critiques of Israel antisemitic, it was precisely the Jewish New Left's politics of international and multiracial solidarity that encouraged their support for Black Power critiques of Zionism. In this way, Jewish members of the New Left also attempted to critically challenge their own whiteness, aligning support for Israel after 1967 with support for the racial and economic structures of militarism and capitalism at home.","PeriodicalId":21809,"journal":{"name":"Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135505890","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Zion, the Diaspora, and the Future of the Jewish People","authors":"Yossi Turner","doi":"10.1353/sho.2023.a911222","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sho.2023.a911222","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: This paper considers the question of Zion and the Diaspora pragmatically, as a question concerning the conditions necessary to ensure the continued existence of the Jewish people. My overall goal is to show that because of the differences between Jewish life in the State of Israel and the contemporary Diaspora, there is a strong difference in the challenges that confront Israeli and Diaspora Jewry; but that because of a common past (for which the adjective \"Jewish\" can be applied to both) on the one hand, and the global implications of the digital revolution, on the other, even these differences are rooted in a shared problematic. The first phase of discussion demonstrates that while the prevailing tendency to see the question of Zion and the Diaspora as a political one often focuses solely on contemporary issues concerning Jewish existence, a cultural view requires consideration of the past and future as well. Following this, I discuss the question of Zion and the Diaspora through the generations, noting that the continuation of Jewish life in the Land of Israel as well as in the Diaspora has historically depended upon the \"midrashic\" method of interpretation when confronting the junction between the diachronic and synchronic aspects of Jewish life, in order to mediate the influences coming from within and from without. The paper then considers the implications of these findings with respect to two of the major revolutions in Jewish life of the modern and contemporary periods: the effects of emancipation and the digital revolution. The final section of the paper discusses the challenges facing the existence of the Jewish people in the contemporary Diaspora and State of Israel. Here I argue that Zionism has succeeded in reconstructing, within the State of Israel, a Jewish society that carries a much greater potential for the continued existence of the Jews as a people than is possible in the Diaspora, but that because of the contemporary state of human affairs in general, it still has much to learn from Diaspora Jewry.","PeriodicalId":21809,"journal":{"name":"Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies","volume":"3 4 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135505891","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Rebbe and the Poet on Yom Kippur 1973","authors":"Nehama Aschkenasy","doi":"10.1353/sho.2023.a911226","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sho.2023.a911226","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: Avot Yeshurun's poem, \"The Tsaddik of Modzitz,\" highlights the unusual bond between two polar opposite personalities from the 1970s Tel Aviv scene: the secular poet Avot Yeshurun, and the ultraorthodox Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu Taub, the Rebbe of Modzitz, who transcended his non-Zionist circles, gaining the admiration of Israelis of all walks of life. This relationship reaches a dramatic climax on a cataclysmic day in Israel's history, Yom Kippur 1973, when the surprising outbreak of a war shook Israelis' sense of invincibility and some of their Zionist creeds. At the heart of the poem is the Rebbe's luminous personality and demeanor during the services, and their impact on the poet. In his poetry, Yeshurun had revealed a conflicted personality, unable to reconcile between the vanished old world and the new reality, between the Zionist dream of his youth and the current Israeli geopolitical and ethical dilemmas. The Rebbe represents wholeness, finding in the ancient liturgy about the animals that were led to slaughter in the Temple an opportunity to subtly communicate his grief over the human sacrifices in Jewish recent past as well as at that very moment. The Rebbe's compassionate presence and his stirring niggunim eventually comfort the troubled poet. The Rebbe's words, with which Yeshurun closes his poem, reassure the poet of the validity of the State of Israel and appear to align with the paradigm of religious Zionism, viewing Israel as an essential moment in the Jewish journey toward redemption.","PeriodicalId":21809,"journal":{"name":"Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies","volume":"181 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135504978","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Dear Omar, Dear Mira: Exploring Zionism Across the Ethnic Divide","authors":"Omar M. Dajani, Mira Sucharov","doi":"10.1353/sho.2023.a911225","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sho.2023.a911225","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: What happens to Zionism as an idea when it is encountered through the lens of attachment, loss, and interpersonal connection? This article uses a creative-nonfiction form and a dual autoethnographic lens to examine the question of Jewish Zionist longings and Palestinian memory through the heart and mind of two scholars: a Canadian Jew and a Palestinian American. Mira Sucharov, a professor of political science at Carleton University and a frequent public commentator on Middle East issues, writes to Omar M. Dajani, a former member of the Palestinian negotiating team's legal support unit, who is now a law professor at University of the Pacific's McGeorge School of Law, and Omar writes back. Their correspondence—set both in the present and in a recreated past—suggests avenues for a reexamination of identity and connection to place, and a rediscovery of relationality to one another.","PeriodicalId":21809,"journal":{"name":"Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies","volume":"19 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135505420","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Zionism and its Jewish Critics: Introduction","authors":"Shaul Magid","doi":"10.1353/sho.2023.a911216","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sho.2023.a911216","url":null,"abstract":"Zionism and its Jewish CriticsIntroduction Shaul Magid (bio) What is zionism? why is it so important? and why is it so vexing? on its most basic level, Zionism is a Jewish national movement of self-determination. While some scholars argue that the concept has biblical origins, most acknowledge that it is a modern Jewish iteration of western European nationalism that emerged in the mid-nineteenth century as part of a response to the failure of emancipation to solve the \"Jewish Question\" in a newly nationalized Europe. The \"Jewish Question\" arguably served as the very impetus of Zionism, illustrated in Theodore Herzl's famous 1897 essay of the same name in which he first articulates Zionism (a term coined by his friend Nathan Birnbaum) as a solution to Europe's inability to fully integrate its Jewish population. The antecedents to this idea may have existed earlier, including calls for Jews to resettle Palestine, but its political and cultural manifestation was born from the experience of the Jews' complex engagement with modernity in all its myriad forms. While today Zionism has largely come to mean support of, and advocacy for, a Jewish state (Israel), it has a long and sordid history full of contradictions, debates, opposition, and internal challenges. One can readily consult the various Zionist Congresses to witness how these contentious fellow Zionists viewed their contemporaries. Politics, culture, religion, aesthetics, language, and territory became enormous issues vociferously debated among those who identified as Zionists. Breakdowns and deep divisions were common. For example, the great cultural Zionist Ahad Ha-Am (1856–1927) penned a critique of the Jewish settlement project in 1889 entitled \"This is Not the Way.\" Territorialism also presented a robust alternative to Zionism (also endorsed by some Zionists), that focused on offering a safe haven to the Jews of Europe without a commitment to the land of Israel. Moreover, in 1923, Zev Jabotinsky, the founder of Revisionist Zionism, resigned from the World Zionism Organization [End Page 3] to establish his own New World Zionist Organization. Additionally, Zionism's Eurocentric context did not offer Jews who resided in Arab lands full inclusion and participation, and its orientalist perspective has been the subject of much criticism. In short, Zionism has been at war with itself since its inception. Zionism is, of course, a multifaceted political, cultural, linguistic, and artistic project that encompasses a sweeping recalibration of Jewish existence in modernity outside of the formal boundaries of traditional religion. Today, however, most Jews and non-Jews in the Diaspora who identify as Zionists do not really care much about that complex history. The sweeping recalibration of Jewish existence may be historically or academically interesting to some, but Zionism today for many Diaspora Jews, at least, has largely become flattened to political advocacy of the state of Israel. While this is u","PeriodicalId":21809,"journal":{"name":"Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies","volume":"4 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135505413","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Post-Religious-Zionism: Alternative Ideas of Jewish Statism in the Writings of Moshe Koppel","authors":"Hayim Katsman","doi":"10.1353/sho.2023.a911219","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sho.2023.a911219","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: This article discusses the rise of the Israeli conservative movement, and examines the dominance of religious-Zionists within the movement. The article focuses on the ideology of Moshe Koppel, the chair of the Kohelet Policy Forum and a dominant figure in the conservative movement. Through an analysis of Koppel's political writings, this article presents Koppel's unique worldview, and demonstrates how it is a critique of the secular-Zionist hegemony, and also of the \"classical\" religious-Zionist worldview. The article argues that Koppel's ideology appeals to religious-Zionists, who have undergone a political crisis as a result of their failure to convince the general Israeli public to oppose the evacuation of Gaza settlements in 2005. Koppel's worldview addresses the need for religious-Zionists to justify their commitment to Jewish settlement in the Occupied Palestinian territories in a way that will appeal tonon-Orthodox Jews as well. This is a key factor in the Israeli right's conscious attempt to achieve political hegemony in Israel.","PeriodicalId":21809,"journal":{"name":"Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies","volume":"25 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135506991","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Hagar's Prayer in the Desert and Great Bracha in the High: A Dissenting and Decentralizing Voice in Israeli Poetry","authors":"Galit Hasan-Rokem","doi":"10.1353/sho.2023.a911224","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sho.2023.a911224","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: This essay addresses the power of poetry to express dissenting voices in a society that demands ideological unity in the name of collective survival. The revival of Hebrew has been intimately associated with Zionist cultural politics. However, Hebrew poetry has continuously challenged the dominant ideological precepts of the political movements of Zionism. This essay focuses on reading the poetry of Bracha Serri, a feminist poet who was born in Sanaa, Yemen in 1940 and passed away in Jerusalem in 2013. The religious education of her childhood, her academic studies, and the period she spent in Northern California have inspired the unabashed and highly original feminist voice of her poems. Her religious idiom powerfully revolutionizes the patriarchal hierarchies embodied in traditional Jewish religion and produces an innovative religious language which not only addresses a divine female figure in traditional sacred language but also boldly shatters the boundaries of gender. Finally, it also uplifts the poet herself from an oppressed position dictated by gender hierarchy as well as the ethnic injustices characterizing Israeli society. Serri was not afraid to shock and to attack dominant norms. Not only is her poetry antimilitaristic but it also identifies the common interests of Palestinian women and Mizrahi Israeli women, as well as women in general. In her poetic language, she also admiringly incorporates associations from the Black struggle in the United States. Her choice to avoid publishing her poetry at leading Israeli publishing houses and journals and to instead publish most of her literary work by herself was not merely an act of dissent, but also constituted an act of decentralization by establishing a center of her own that resisted the dominant centers of power. Serri's poetry is a particularly beautiful, moving, forceful, and important voice among the voices critically responding to Zionism.","PeriodicalId":21809,"journal":{"name":"Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies","volume":"4 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135505894","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Restorative Justice Pathways in Palestine/Israel: Undoing the Settler Colonial Captivity of Jewishness","authors":"Atalia Omer","doi":"10.1353/sho.2023.a911223","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sho.2023.a911223","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: Jewish critique of Zionism is not an abstract exercise, but one that is also, and necessarily, about Palestinians and sociopolitical realities in Palestine/Israel, where Zionist sovereignty defines the space in its entirety. This article traces sites of Jewish Israeli decolonial restorative justice potential and argues that some interventions that appear restorative, in effect, obscure and normalize historical injustices. Accordingly, a spectrum of Jewish critics posit Zionism as a form of Jewish \"moral exile\" or \"moral transgression,\" and they seek Jewish authenticity to return \"home\" ethically. I argue that, to the degree that restorative justice practices are missing from ethical Jewish reflections on Zionism and Israelism, the sources of such Jewish critiques of Zionism remain diasporic. Focusing on the potentials of Jewish Israeli restorative justice, including those articulated by the feminist organization Zochrot and the petition of Jewish Israelis against Israeli apartheid propelled by the escalation of violence in May 2021, offers a pathway for unsettling and troubling the diasporic as the primary Jewish source of an ethical critique of Israelism as the idolatry of the Jewish State and as Zionism's imbrication in a settler colonial paradigm.","PeriodicalId":21809,"journal":{"name":"Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies","volume":"12 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135505892","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Musical Fusion and Allusion in the Core and the Transitional Klezmer Repertoires","authors":"W. Feldman","doi":"10.1353/sho.2022.0026","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sho.2022.0026","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Uniquely within Europe—from the mid-seventeenth to the mid-twentieth centuries—in Ottoman and then post-Ottoman Moldova, Jewish klezmer and Gypsy (lautar) musicians had worked within a single professional structure. As the Ottoman Empire gradually withdrew from the Danubian Principalities (Wallachia and Moldova) during the mid-nineteenth century, a new \"national\" dance music was created by Gypsy, Jewish, Austrian, Greek, and other musicians in the Moldavian cities. Local klezmorim created a Judaized version of this repertoire. By the last third of the century this new repertoire also took hold among Jewish communities in Ukraine and Galicia. Part of the popularity of this repertoire lay in its partial continuity with an earlier Greco-Turkish element within klezmer music. This entire group of dance genres were barely acknowledged and never analyzed by the initial Russian and Soviet researchers, such as Engel, Kiselgoff, Beregovski, and Magid. Hence in 1994 I had coined the term \"transitional\" klezmer repertoire to describe it. The \"transitional\" and some of the \"core\" klezmer repertoires were transported massively with the contemporaneous Jewish immigration to America. The newer transitional repertoire dominated the klezmer music known by mid-century and thereafter. While the leading immigrant klezmorim—such as Dave Tarras (1897–1989)—were well aware of these distinctions of repertoire, they were quickly forgotten by the native-born generations of musicians. At the same time, the retention of earlier Greco-Turkish elements allowed for new interactions with immigrant Greek musicians. Thus, any attempt to analyze the entire klezmer repertoire must first deal with the relationship between the \"core\" and the \"transitional\" repertoires.","PeriodicalId":21809,"journal":{"name":"Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies","volume":"40 1","pages":"143 - 166"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-10-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47357191","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}