{"title":"Eliyana R. Adler and Sheila E. Jelen (eds.), Reconstructing the Old Country: American Jewry in the Post-Holocaust Decades. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2017. xviii + 374 pp.","authors":"","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780197516485.003.0014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197516485.003.0014","url":null,"abstract":"This anthology stems from a 2014 conference at the University of Maryland, which focused on how American Jews provided material aid to Holocaust refugees during and after the Holocaust, and also how they began to cope with the catastrophe. This coping involved both an imagining and a re-imagining of “the old country,” a reevaluation of the places American Jews had left behind in more or less normal circumstances before the First World War but in increasingly desperate circumstances after 1918 and, again, after 1939. American Jews who had come to the United States before the 1920s maintained ties with their former communities in Central and Eastern Europe, ties that were fostered by efforts to remain in touch with family and friends and, more generally, with the world’s most populous Jewish communities. Those efforts were aided by the ...","PeriodicalId":363580,"journal":{"name":"Textual Transmission in Contemporary Jewish Cultures","volume":"71 5 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-05-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126103776","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":"Vladimir Levin, Mimahpekhah lemilḥamah: hapolitikah hayehudit berusiyah, 1907–1914 (From Revolution to War: Jewish Politics in Russia, 1907–1914). Jerusalem: Merkaz Zalman Shazar, 2016, 432 pp.","authors":"","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780197516485.003.0036","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197516485.003.0036","url":null,"abstract":"Russian and East European studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have lately come down in the world. But there was a time, and not long ago, when the hive was buzzing with activity. The staff was full: some twenty professors in the inner circle, graduate students clustered around them, and visitors and the public encircling them. There were conferences, lectures, and meetings; the excitement was funneled into a journal, ...","PeriodicalId":363580,"journal":{"name":"Textual Transmission in Contemporary Jewish Cultures","volume":"12 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-05-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127076533","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":"Tal Dekel, Transnational Identities: Women, Art, and Migration in Contemporary Israel. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2016. 171 pp.","authors":"Tal Dekel","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780197516485.003.0044","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197516485.003.0044","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Transitional Identities: Women, Art and Migration in Contemporary Israel, translated from the original Hebrew (the name of the translator is not given), focuses on the experiences of three different groups of migrant women artists living in Israel. Dekel, who herself migrated to Israel as a 12-year-old from the United States, is interested in the double perspective that immigrants bring to their lives in the new country: both as outsider and insider, Israeli and/or “other.” Dekel, who lectures both in the department of art history and in the women and gender studies program at Tel Aviv University, has a particular interest in gender and transnationalism in contemporary art and visual culture. Her first book, ...","PeriodicalId":363580,"journal":{"name":"Textual Transmission in Contemporary Jewish Cultures","volume":"136 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-05-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130728501","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":"Transferring Jewish Knowledge","authors":"Arndt Engelhardt","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780197516485.003.0011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197516485.003.0011","url":null,"abstract":"One of the best-known publications of the publishing house founded by Salman Schocken is the series known as Schocken-Bücherei (Schocken Library), published in Germany between 1933 and 1938. This series comprised 83 volumes on Jewish history and culture dating from antiquity until the modern era, including works by such disparate figures as Philo of Alexandria, Maimonides, Heinrich Heine, and Franz Kafka. The reasonably priced volumes had average sales of 4,000–5,000 copies, with the most popular works selling up to 10,000 copies: this was the most successful series put out by Schocken. At a time when the rights of Jews in Germany were being curtailed and Jews were being expelled from German culture, ...","PeriodicalId":363580,"journal":{"name":"Textual Transmission in Contemporary Jewish Cultures","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-05-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133422844","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":"Ber Kotlerman, Broken Heart/Broken Wholeness: The Post-Holocaust Plea for Jewish Reconstruction of the Soviet Yiddish Writer Der Nister. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2017. 278 pp.","authors":"","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780197516485.003.0033","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197516485.003.0033","url":null,"abstract":"In Moscow in June 1947, the Soviet Yiddish writer known as Der Nister (Pinkhas Kahanovitsh, 1884–1950) boarded a train bound for Birobidzhan. The train, which had originated in the city of Vinnitsa, was carrying about a thousand Jewish survivors from southern Ukraine to their new home in the Jewish Autonomous Region in the Russian Far East. As Ber Kotlerman notes in his meticulously researched and captivating study of that relatively short but fateful episode, “this trip did not easily fit into Der Nister’s way of life” (p. 8). Even more remarkable, given the historical moment, is the fact that Der Nister took this trip on his own initiative, though he coordinated it with Soviet authorities. Moreover, he was the only prominent Soviet Jewish writer to visit Birobidzhan after the Second World War....","PeriodicalId":363580,"journal":{"name":"Textual Transmission in Contemporary Jewish Cultures","volume":"27 4","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-05-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131849077","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":"Amir Goldstein, Derekh rabat panim: tziyonuto shel Zeev Jabotinsky lenokhaḥ haantishemiyut (Zionism and Anti-Semitism in the Thought and Action of Ze’ev Jabotinsky). Sdeh Boker: The Ben-Gurion Institute for the Study of Israel and Zionism, 2015, 496 pp.","authors":"","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780197516485.003.0019","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197516485.003.0019","url":null,"abstract":"No matter how much has been written about Zeev Jabotinsky, founder of the Revisionist movement, his persona and writings continue to fascinate scholars. Recently, it seems, there has been a tendency to examine Jabotinsky’s early thinking and activity in subject-focused contexts.1 Amir Goldstein’s book takes a more classical path: by probing Jabotinsky’s attitude toward antisemitism, he proposes to shed light on Jabotinsky’s Zionist patterns of thinking throughout his lifetime....","PeriodicalId":363580,"journal":{"name":"Textual Transmission in Contemporary Jewish Cultures","volume":"20 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-05-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131967028","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":"Eli Lederhendler, American Jewry: A New History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. xxiv + 331 pp.","authors":"","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780197516485.003.0035","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197516485.003.0035","url":null,"abstract":"In composing his important, one-volume synthesis—what he calls a “new history of American Jewry”—Eli Lederhendler has benefited from many of the recent monographic works that have rethought basic themes and issues in this dynamic area of Jewish studies. What makes this discipline exciting is that its historians constantly rethink conceptualizations that once were regnant in the field, offering new understandings of both the sweep and the details of the American Jewish community saga. Lederhendler has a firm grip on these historiographical developments and has adroitly brought much of this provocative scholarship into an erudite and accessible study. Readers also gain from his extensive on-the-page notes, which guide those who are interested to the books and articles that informed his observations, and from his learned excurses for future consideration....","PeriodicalId":363580,"journal":{"name":"Textual Transmission in Contemporary Jewish Cultures","volume":"35 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-05-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133362002","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":"Maxine Jacobson, Modern Orthodoxy in American Judaism: The Era of Rabbi Leo Jung. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2016. 250 pp.","authors":"","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780197516485.003.0031","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197516485.003.0031","url":null,"abstract":"The premise of this book, actually based on an article I published in 1982, is that rabbis can serve as indicators of the Orthodoxy they serve. In her examination of a once-dominant group within Orthodox Judaism, the so-called “Modern Orthodox,” Maxine Jacobson focuses on Rabbi Dr. Leo Jung, a German Jewish immigrant to America who became a prominent spokesman and exemplar of these Jews. Admitting that a precise definition of Modern Orthodoxy is elusive and that even many of those who came to be associated with this worldview and its allied behaviors were uncomfortable with the term (nor did they all agree on its parameters), Jacobson falls back on metaphor: “The Modern Orthodox Jew has been pulled in two directions” (p. 10). Those two directions are defined by Jacobson as either “not religious enough” or “not modern enough” (p. 10). Effectively, Modern Orthodoxy hoped to harmonize these two opposites, having relationships of respect with non-Jews and embracing the larger surrounding open culture, while remaining conscientiously observant. In contrast, Jacobson notes, “the Ultra-Orthodox group seeks to exclude” all that is different from it (p. 11). Nothing new here. The many faces of Orthodoxy have been more or less defined, from almost the first days that Orthodox Jews were subject to critical analysis, by a variety of observers, including myself....","PeriodicalId":363580,"journal":{"name":"Textual Transmission in Contemporary Jewish Cultures","volume":"41 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-05-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121857631","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":"Mark Edele, Sheila Fitzpatrick, and Atina Grossmann (eds.), Shelter from the Holocaust: Rethinking Jewish Survival in the Soviet Union. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2017. 306 pp.","authors":"","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780197516485.003.0018","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197516485.003.0018","url":null,"abstract":"The enormous literature on the Holocaust has not exhausted itself. At first, the focus was largely on the “perpetrators,” dealing with how and why this enormous crime was committed by one of the most educated and sophisticated nations in the world. Recently, scholars, novelists, and popular historians have moved to the victims, survivors, and their descendants (the “second” and even “third” generations), collaborators with the Nazis, parallel genocides against Roma and Sinti, persecution of homosexuals, “displaced persons,” anti-Jewish activities in North Africa, and more theoretical treatises. Academically fashionable “memory studies” have found a fertile field for exploration not only in the Holocaust itself but in the way it has been “remembered” and used politically by journalists, scholars, and politicians....","PeriodicalId":363580,"journal":{"name":"Textual Transmission in Contemporary Jewish Cultures","volume":"19 10 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-05-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125769412","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":"Diana Dumitru, The State, Antisemitism, and Collaboration in the Holocaust: The Borderlands of Romania and the Soviet Union. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016. xiv + 268 pp.","authors":"","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780197516485.003.0017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197516485.003.0017","url":null,"abstract":"This study by Moldovian historian Diana Dumitru focuses on Jewish-Gentile relations in Bessarabia and Transnistria from the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 to the liberation of these areas by the Red Army in 1944. Her book is based on material gleaned from a wide range of sources (archival, secondary, periodicals, oral testimonies) from Moldova, Romania, Ukraine, the United States, and Israel, and its six chapters cover three chronological periods: late tsarist Russia, interwar Romania and the U.S.S.R., and the Holocaust years....","PeriodicalId":363580,"journal":{"name":"Textual Transmission in Contemporary Jewish Cultures","volume":"12 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-05-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123884929","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}