{"title":"Zoya Cherkassky’s Collection Judaica: Immigration and the “Making Strange” of Jewish Art","authors":"Liliya Dashevski","doi":"10.1080/13501674.2021.1952028","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13501674.2021.1952028","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This essay analyzes Zoya Cherkassky’s early project, first presented in 2003, titled Collection Judaica (Kolektziyat yudaikah). I examine Collection Judaica not only in relation to Jewish art history, but also in the context of immigration studies. Collection Judaica aimed to explore Jewish self-perception “through an antisemitic gaze.” By means of defamiliarization (ostranenie), Cherkassky enables her viewers to feel a strong sense of alienation, as experienced by immigrants, from common Jewish practices. Her combination of Jewish and antisemitic visual materials complicates the attempt of creating “pure” Jewish art by stressing the visual danger and unattainability of such efforts.","PeriodicalId":42363,"journal":{"name":"East European Jewish Affairs","volume":"51 1","pages":"86 - 105"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41782939","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Journey into the Land of the Zeks and Back: a memoir of the Gulag","authors":"Lidia Zessin-Jurek","doi":"10.1080/13501674.2021.1952030","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13501674.2021.1952030","url":null,"abstract":"Jewish internationalism. According to Glaser, the Yiddish poets of her study sought to “build a new religious tradition, modeled on Judaism” that would be “consecrated through its affiliation with the Communist Party” (p. 2) This formulation, it appears, seems to share so much with the construction of the European Christian mission to “distant” and “exotic” souls across empires, Jews included. While many topics relating to Yiddish poets’ complex self-identification remain to be explored, Glaser has provided us with a fine start. The usefulness of this book extends beyond the scholar’s shelf to the classroom, where its contents will no doubt spur lively debate. Songs in Dark Times is an important and sensitive translation and analysis of overlooked poets traversing moral crises, pointing toward a critique that resists analogy while recognizing the full presence of Yiddish colonial and racial discourse from its inception in the 17th century until the present day.","PeriodicalId":42363,"journal":{"name":"East European Jewish Affairs","volume":"51 1","pages":"129 - 131"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49171854","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Book Smugglers: partisans, poets, and the race to save Jewish treasures from the Nazis","authors":"Hannah Pollin-Galay","doi":"10.1080/13501674.2021.1952031","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13501674.2021.1952031","url":null,"abstract":"he spent the remaining decades of his life (he died in 1971). He describes how he was urged to abandon his “anti-Soviet propaganda” because it allegedly besmirched the reputation of the USSR, the country that had stopped the Nazi advance and had supported establishment of the state of Israel. Notwithstanding, and unlike dozens of other former inmates who published their memoirs much later, Margolin did not succumb to pressure. He testified to Soviet crimes wherever could (for instance, at the Rousset libel trial in France in 1951), and he continued to write about the Gulag in his later publications. Margolin’s continued attempts to publish his manuscript in Israel, France, and the United States are noted in Timothy Snyder’s and Katherine R. Jolluck’s foreword and introduction to the English edition, as well as in the prefaces to earlier editions in other languages (the memoir was first published in French in 1949). Snyder highlights Margolin’s impatience with relativist approaches that essentially excused the Soviet system, and Jolluck adds interesting details concerning the philosopher’s postwar campaigning for the truth. This English edition, brought to press by Margolin’s son, Ephraim, and carefully translated by Stefani Hoffman, joins previous editions in Polish, German, and Hebrew that were published in the past decade. It also includes several additional chapters in a section titled “The Road to the West,” which detail Margolin’s re-emergence into the world of the living and his eventual return to Palestine. This was a journey in stages; among the depictions are those of Łódź, a city full of postwar ghosts, and a lively Paris, which Margolin described as greeting with his “toothless camp grin” (p. 554). From the time of his return to Palestine, Margolin felt a moral imperative to break through the wall of silence, sound an alarm, and “throw a lifebelt into the Soviet sea of injustice” (p. 576). While it is too late to alter the fate of Margolin’s fellow prisoners, this English edition of his memoir may play an important role in preserving the memory of millions of people of various nationalities and religions who perished in the Gulag – people who, “concealed from the human eye and human judgment,” (p. 525) had come to think that the outside world was nothing more than a dream.","PeriodicalId":42363,"journal":{"name":"East European Jewish Affairs","volume":"51 1","pages":"131 - 134"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45614530","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Songs in Dark Times: Yiddish poetry of struggle from Scottsboro to Palestine","authors":"E. Rosenblatt","doi":"10.1080/13501674.2021.1952029","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13501674.2021.1952029","url":null,"abstract":"Which Yiddish past ought to inform contemporary Jewish values? This is the question Amelia M. Glaser sets out to answer in her intricate study of selected “Yiddish poetry of struggle” published in the 1930s in Communist-aligned periodicals. Glaser argues that these poems, borne out of solidarity with the global proletariat, make their non-Jewish subjects “metaphorically Jewish” through the use of “passwords” situated within Yiddish discourse—for instance, kateyger (“accusing angel”) to characterize the prosecutor of an accused Italian anarchist. For Glaser, formally complex techniques to admit non-Jewish “Others” into a Jewish fold constitute both a literary act of moral resistance against the ruling classes, and a positive expression of Jewish identity. Divided into six chapters, the book offers analyses of Yiddish poems that express solidarity with the executed anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti, Palestinian Arabs in Mandate-era Hebron, massacred Chinese workers, lynched African-Americans, the anti-fascist brigades in the Spanish Civil War, and the peasant figures of Ukraine’s national writer, Taras Shevchenko. At the book’s chronological close, Yiddish poems of teshuva (return) express solidarity with Jewish victims of genocide. The book concludes with a small corpus of expertly translated complete poems. “The Yiddish poets whose verse filled Communist Party journals during the long 1930s,” Glaser writes,","PeriodicalId":42363,"journal":{"name":"East European Jewish Affairs","volume":"51 1","pages":"127 - 129"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44320265","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Antonio Gramsci, and the Myth of Niccolò Machiavelli","authors":"Maya Balakirsky Katz","doi":"10.1080/13501674.2021.1952024","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13501674.2021.1952024","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This paper reconsiders the criticism to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion during its initial publication and after its resurgence during the 1917 Russian Revolution. It argues that scholars have overemphasized repudiations of the text’s archaic antisemitism and plagiarism at the expense of critiques focusing on its modernist invective against “media control.” The paper recovers the issue of the Russian Empire’s control of the media, which liberal thinkers identified as central to Protocols in its first three decades of circulation, followed by a consideration of Antonio Gramsci’s interwar theorization of media control as among the most salient efforts to respond to the text. In theoretical threads that would later be picked up by the intellectuals of the Frankfurt School, among others, Gramsci responded to Protocols’ core invective by espousing the need for progressive forces to take control over mass media.","PeriodicalId":42363,"journal":{"name":"East European Jewish Affairs","volume":"51 1","pages":"18 - 35"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42768970","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“No Innocent Words”: Nachman Blumental’s Metaphorology Project and the Cultural History of the Holocaust","authors":"Karolina Szymaniak","doi":"10.1080/13501674.2021.1956180","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13501674.2021.1956180","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Nachman Blumental (1902–1983) belongs to a group of early Holocaust historians whose work is being rediscovered by contemporary scholars. Especially noteworthy is Blumental's work on the language of Holocaust victims and perpetrators. This article explores the connection between this work and Blumental's prewar studies in the field of Polish and Yiddish literary theory, focusing on his project of metaphorology, a comprehensive study of metaphor. The essay explores the place of Blumental's interwar project of metaphorology at the intersection of Polish and Yiddish scholarship at a time of rising nationalism in Poland, and investigates the way in which negotiations between the Polish and Jewish contexts shaped the project. It makes a case for the significance of the Eastern European literary theory to the contemporary cultural history of the Holocaust, and the importance of including Yiddish works into the broader history of modern literary theory in Eastern Europe.","PeriodicalId":42363,"journal":{"name":"East European Jewish Affairs","volume":"51 1","pages":"106 - 126"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48168168","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Stepchildren of the Shtetl: The Destitute, Disabled, and Mad of Jewish Eastern Europe, 1800–1939","authors":"S. Gollance","doi":"10.1080/13501674.2020.1878796","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13501674.2020.1878796","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42363,"journal":{"name":"East European Jewish Affairs","volume":"50 1","pages":"339 - 341"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/13501674.2020.1878796","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46875751","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Židé v českých zemích po šoa: identita poraněné paměti (Jews in the Bohemian Lands after the Shoah: The Identity of Wounded Memory)","authors":"Tatjana Lichtenstein","doi":"10.1080/13501674.2020.1878795","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13501674.2020.1878795","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42363,"journal":{"name":"East European Jewish Affairs","volume":"50 1","pages":"341 - 344"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/13501674.2020.1878795","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41819246","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Listings","authors":"Jacob Ari Labendz","doi":"10.1080/13501674.2020.1796126","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13501674.2020.1796126","url":null,"abstract":"Due to the volume of materials published, brief summaries have been provided for selected titles only, either copied from or based upon texts from their publishers, followed by a list of additional books (only for the Czech section). Lists of selected Holocaust memoirs and local histories follow. This resource features books from 2017 that were not included into the list for 2015–2017 publish in vol. 50, no. 1–2.","PeriodicalId":42363,"journal":{"name":"East European Jewish Affairs","volume":"50 1","pages":"354 - 360"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/13501674.2020.1796126","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46743891","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}