{"title":"Holocaust Consciousness, Igbo Jewish Identity, and the Resurgence of Biafran Nationalism in Nigeria","authors":"William F. S. Miles","doi":"10.1353/jji.2023.a898139","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/jji.2023.a898139","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article focuses on Holocaust consciousness in the most populous nation of Africa. In Nigeria, the Igbo in the southeastern part of the country have been in the forefront of a normative Jewish movement that has come to encompass several other ethnic groups and has constructed dozens of synagogues in nine states as far north as the capital of Abuja in the center of the country. But consciousness of the Holocaust emerged among the Igbos even earlier, as a result of mass killings that they experienced in the run-up to and especially during the Biafran War in the late ’60s. Today, resurgence of Igbo nationalism is intensifying salience of and identification with the Shoah. In the process, Holocaust rhetoric, Zionism, and outward trappings of Judaism are instrumentalized by Biafran neo-secessionists who do not belong to the community of Nigerian Jewry per se. The latter are indirectly imperiled on account of state security reactions to the former.","PeriodicalId":420478,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Jewish Identities","volume":"80 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":"123202124","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":"Shadows in the City of Light: Paris in Postwar French Jewish Writing ed. by Sara R. Horowitz, Amira Bojadzija-Dan and Julia Creet (review)","authors":"Gayle Zachmann","doi":"10.1353/jji.2023.a898153","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/jji.2023.a898153","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":420478,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Jewish Identities","volume":"53 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":"128303870","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":"Celebrating Life, Sanctifying Death, and Creating Identity Through Two Forms of Holocaust Commemoration","authors":"J. Baumel-Schwartz","doi":"10.1353/jji.2023.a898143","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/jji.2023.a898143","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article focuses on two contemporary forms of individual Holocaust commemoration: “Small Purims,” a festive meal and celebration of deliverance usually held on a Holocaust survivor’s liberation date, and “Marker Memorialization,” commemorating Holocaust victims in the deceased’s family on their gravestone. I first mentioned these commemorative forms in passing in my 1995 article about Holocaust commemoration. In this article I revisit them close to three decades later, examining how they reflect the development of a central and dynamic strand of Jewish and Israeli identity connected to the Holocaust. Three generations after the end of the Second World War, this Holocaust-centered strand is no longer primarily institutional or statist but rather performative-personal and domestic, while remaining connected to a broader community. Describing and analyzing these commemorative forms as “invented traditions,” I discuss the Holocaust narrative that each form supports and analyze the nature of Holocaust-related Jewish identity that these new traditions strengthen. Finally, I discuss what we can learn from them about the relationship between the personal/family/survivor community acts of memorializing and the larger context of post-Holocaust Jewish identity and Jewish collective memory.","PeriodicalId":420478,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Jewish Identities","volume":"1155 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":"123844489","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":"Alternative Histories—Alternative Identities? Jewishness and the (Al)lure of “What if . . . ?”","authors":"A. Stähler","doi":"10.1353/jji.2023.a898142","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/jji.2023.a898142","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In this article, I explore negotiations of alternative Jewish identities as a response to the Holocaust in two alternative histories by the Jewish American writers Michael Chabon and Simone Zelitch. Both engage in very different ways with the destruction of a physical Yiddishland in central and eastern Europe and explore notions of Jewish guilt and the projection of Jewish identities into the future. In The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007), Chabon explores the imaginary persistence of Yiddish language and culture in a Yiddishland that, after a mitigated Holocaust, has been transferred to Alaska. The Yiddishland in Zelitch’s Judenstaat (2016) is divested of its Yiddishness. Jewish statehood after the Holocaust is conceived in her novel in retributive guilt and relies upon a potent imaginary of Jewish Germanness which, extends to culture, language, and territory in an illusory continuation of a mythical Ashkenaz and eventually ends in the dissolution of Jewish sovereignty.","PeriodicalId":420478,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Jewish Identities","volume":"41 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":"127614506","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":"Gendered Bodily Flux and Queer Catharsis in the Work of Bruno Schulz","authors":"Golan Moskowitz","doi":"10.1353/jji.2023.a898141","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/jji.2023.a898141","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article analyzes themes of shapeshifting and gendered supplication by Polish Jewish writer and artist Bruno Schulz (1892–1942) in relation to his biographical and cultural positioning in the decades preceding World War II. It does so through historically contextualized close readings of Schulz’s drawings and writings from 1919 through the 1930s, which render his embodied alienation and complex relationships to gender, Jewish cultural identity, and the pursuit of spiritual transcendence. Drawing on existing works in Jewish cultural studies and gender theory, Schulz’s shape-shifting and supplicated male characters are shown to speak, rather than to an alleged Jewish sexual perversity, to a history of Jewish affective alienation and sexual displacement in modern Europe. These themes in Schulz’s work are also considered as forms of aesthetic opposition to modernizing social ideologies and to the sexual antisemitism bolstered by them.","PeriodicalId":420478,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Jewish Identities","volume":"34 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":"124361835","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":"“A Monstrously Difficult Subject”: Stanley Kubrick’s Aryan Papers (1991–1993)","authors":"N. Abrams","doi":"10.1353/jji.2023.a898140","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/jji.2023.a898140","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:While Stanley Kubrick long sought to make a film about World War II and the Holocaust, he never succeeded. He came very close in his attempt to adapt Louis Begley’s Wartime Lies as Aryan Papers between 1991 and 1993. Combining the latest insights in the emerging field of Kubrick Studies, specifically into Kubrick’s Jewishness, with the newly available archival material deposited in the Stanley Kubrick Archive at the University of Arts London, this article explores the pre-production of Aryan Papers before considering why it was never realized and then tentatively suggesting, in the absence of any shot footage, how it may have looked.","PeriodicalId":420478,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Jewish Identities","volume":"47 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":"125244810","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":"Saint Hershele","authors":"Ilan Stavans","doi":"10.1353/jji.2023.a898148","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/jji.2023.a898148","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:History pursues the truth through facts; fiction juices those facts until it is possible to extract their truthfulness. The story of Henry Eisenberg Glantz (1959–2020), alias El Santo Judío, a Mexican Jew whose life is the stuff of myth on the US-Mexican border, is surrounded in controversy. An idiot savant, “Hershele” was the child of an Auschwitz survivor and the grandchild of an important Yiddish poet. Obsessed with urban planning, he was particularly interested in the role traffic lights might play in easing vehicular fluency. He coined the now-ubiquitous term “vialidad,” a metaphor for metropolitan dynamism. After entering and abruptly exiting Mexico City’s political establishment, Hershele moved to Tijuana, where he became a successful radio host. In time, he metamorphosed into an associate of the Sinaloa Cartel with influence to commit crimes whose ultimate goal was, in his words, “to bring justice to earth.” As this false profile suggests, at the core of Hershele’s quest was the redemption of the “caged” children of Central American immigrants imprisoned in warehouses by the Trump Administration—“‘los pequeños que los nazis siguen acribillando,’ the little people the Nazis are still massacring.” There is a petition to beatify Hershele being considered by the Vatican.","PeriodicalId":420478,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Jewish Identities","volume":"14 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":"126416661","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":"Trans Talmud: Androgynes and Eunuchs in Rabbinic Literature by Max K. Strassfeld (review)","authors":"J. Rosenblum","doi":"10.1353/jji.2023.a898151","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/jji.2023.a898151","url":null,"abstract":"263 January/July 2023, 16(1 & 2) This rich, nuanced memoir is dedicated to the author’s mother: “For Rózka.” In this way, while honoring her mother, the memoirist also names her. She lays claim to her under her given name, which is also the name that her mother chose to give up in America, when she legally changed “Rózka Aronowicz” to “Rose Arnold.” Aronowicz is clear about her own feelings about this change in name: she did not like it. This act of posthumous naming has its parallel in another act of posthumous identification on which Aronowicz meditates at length in the book, namely, that her father is located in a Jewish cemetery. How did this come to pass? Only because her mother had his remains exhumed and reburied there. That the remains of her father, who lived with the utopian, universalist idealism of a Communist, reside in a Jewish space has become an important inheritance for his daughter. It is the inspiration for her particular idea of Jewish universalism. The same holds for her mother’s name, also put to rest as Rózka, not Rose. Symbolically, in the matter of the inheritance, the last will of each parent is overruled. When one reflects on the emergent voice and intellect of the writer-daughter, one wonders how it could be otherwise. L. SCOTT LERNER, Franklin & Marshall College","PeriodicalId":420478,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Jewish Identities","volume":"7 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":"129465320","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":"Italya. Jewish Stories, Italian History by Germano Maifreda (review)","authors":"Elena Lolli","doi":"10.1353/jji.2022.0026","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/jji.2022.0026","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":420478,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Jewish Identities","volume":"47 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123779212","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":"The Touch of an Angel by Henryk Schönker (review)","authors":"Daniel H. Magilow","doi":"10.1353/jji.2022.0025","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/jji.2022.0025","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":420478,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Jewish Identities","volume":"28 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128357608","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}