{"title":"Outside the Frame: The Josef Nassy Collection and the Boundaries of Holocaust Art","authors":"Sarah Casteel","doi":"10.2979/jewisocistud.27.1.02","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jewisocistud.27.1.02","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s largely unknown Josef Nassy Collection is situated at the intersection of multiple cultural histories of migration and oppression. Josef Nassy (1904–76) was an artist of African, Sephardi, and European descent from the Dutch Caribbean colony of Suriname. While interned in Belgium and Germany from 1942–45, he created a poignant visual diary that brings into view unfamiliar facets of the Nazi camp system as well as unexpected points of intersection between Jewish and African diaspora experience. This article traces the story of the Nassy Collection’s wartime creation and postwar reception to illustrate how entrenched categories of art and victimhood can obstruct our access to the past. In contrast to this reception history, Nassy’s artworks encourage a relational approach to Holocaust studies, one that is attuned to the entanglement of European and colonial wartime experience and the diversity of Jewish identities.","PeriodicalId":45288,"journal":{"name":"JEWISH SOCIAL STUDIES","volume":"27 1","pages":"43 - 82"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44406113","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":"How Race Travels: Navigating Global Blackness in J. Ida Jiggetts’s Study of Afro-Asian Israeli Jewry","authors":"Bryan K. Roby","doi":"10.2979/jewisocistud.27.1.01","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jewisocistud.27.1.01","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article explores the intellectual history of Black scholar (John) Ida Jiggetts in her study of Yemenite Jewish integration efforts in Israel in the 1950s. I begin with a critical look into the scholarship that heavily influenced her: Zionist ethnography and anthropology. Jewish engagement in these fields, then dominated by race scientists, constructed Afro-Asian Jewry as a Black foil meant to highlight the normative whiteness of European Jews. The article then moves on to Jiggetts’s travel memoir, Israel to Me, in which she details her observations on intra-Jewish race relations, how she struggled to navigate race in Hebrew, and how her experiences in Israel pushed her to reflect on her own perceptions of race. Enacting a form of racial diplomacy, Jiggetts shaped Black American perspectives on Israel in the twentieth century as one Black community looked to another as a means of understanding the global color line. Navigating shifting interpellations of her own Blackness while observing the racialization of Mizrahi Israelis, her reflections on race in Israel shed light on the transnational process of racecraft for those who share the experience of the color line.","PeriodicalId":45288,"journal":{"name":"JEWISH SOCIAL STUDIES","volume":"27 1","pages":"1 - 42"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41431451","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":"AIDS Was Our Earthquake: American Jewish Responses to the AIDS Crisis, 1985–92","authors":"G. Drinkwater","doi":"10.2979/jewisocistud.26.1.11","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jewisocistud.26.1.11","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45288,"journal":{"name":"JEWISH SOCIAL STUDIES","volume":"26 1","pages":"122 - 142"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2020-12-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44017332","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":"Lessons of Hurricane Katrina for American Jews, 2020 Edition","authors":"Karla S. Goldman","doi":"10.2979/jewisocistud.26.1.14","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jewisocistud.26.1.14","url":null,"abstract":"Taken together, the oral histories illustrate how those in the Jewish community drew upon shared resources, historical experience, established networks, and a strong sense of community to assist individuals, sustain institutions, and also attend, in a limited fashion, to the needs of those beyond their own group With these lists in hand, a Baton Rouge-based communal effort was allowed to send rescue boats into New Orleans to seek out those on the list, rescuing scores ofJewish and non-Jewish residents whom they were looking for or whom they encountered during their searches 4 2 The ability to draw upon existing networks to generate a national grassroots fundraising campaign supported short, medium, and long-term efforts to assist the community Most immediately, UJC offered all Jewish residents affected by Katrina $700 in cash-a vital resource at a time when banking systems had collapsed 3 Jewish Family Service agencies across the country, from Baltimore to Ann Arbor to Houston, activated their national network to provide points of contact and welcome (including housing, furniture, clothing, synagogue and JCC memberships, and day school tuitions) for individuals and families arriving as part of an exodus from New Orleans 5 4 The UJC provided two years of support for agencies in New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and the Gulf South Even though most members of the Jewish community were ultimately able to access their bank accounts, insurance, and other resources to rebuild, it is important to remember that \"getting off easy\" could mean something on the order of months of displacement, followed by a return home to find a refrigerator full of maggots, a house full of mold, and rugs that had been eaten by rats 9 One of the most striking aspects of both Katrina and the COVID19 crisis has been the disconnect between perceptions of shared vulnerability (\"we're all in it together\") and the hugely disproportionate impact of each disaster","PeriodicalId":45288,"journal":{"name":"JEWISH SOCIAL STUDIES","volume":"26 1","pages":"181 - 191"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2020-12-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42608970","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":"Everyday Disruptions and Jewish Dilemmas: Preliminary Insights from the Pandemic Journaling Project","authors":"S. Willen, Sebastian Wogenstein, K. Mason","doi":"10.2979/jewisocistud.26.1.15","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jewisocistud.26.1.15","url":null,"abstract":"Notably, 12 percent of these PJP participants identify as Jewish, due likely to dissemination efforts by the University of Connecticut's Center for Judaic Studies and Contemporary Jewish Life, one of our sponsors 3 We begin by sketching the contours of the PJP itself, which was created to capture the lived realities of the coronavirus pandemic just as it began shaking the foundations of the everyday-around the world, but especially in high-rate, high-risk countries like the US In Week 1, before contributing their first journal entries, participants are asked to complete a baseline survey (using validated survey questions wherever possible), that addresses demographics, COVID-19 exposure, and self-reported physical and mental health status [ ]other analytic projects, including this essay, will examine the challenges posed by the pandemic to members of a particular demographic group (as defined by self-reported gender, age, race-ethnicity, religion, or other features or combination of features) First is a commitment to \"writing it down\"-to chronicling what people are experiencing now, in their own words","PeriodicalId":45288,"journal":{"name":"JEWISH SOCIAL STUDIES","volume":"26 1","pages":"192 - 212"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2020-12-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44695963","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":"Jewish Studies in Times of Crisis","authors":"Elissa Bemporad, J. Cohen, Ari Y. Kelman","doi":"10.2979/jewisocistud.26.1.01","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jewisocistud.26.1.01","url":null,"abstract":"The present crisis brought on by the \"novel coronavirus\" has arrived alongside other, less novel crises: the rise in ethnonationalism and repressive authoritarian regimes, increasing wealth disparities, human rights violations, a global refugee crisis, the ever-more apparent threats posed by climate change, and a growing awakening to the depth and complexities of racism and race-based violence, and to sexism and gender-based violence in the United States and beyond On the first page of the journal's first issue, Morris Raphael Cohen, one of its founding editors, tried to put the historical moment and the significance of the undertaking into context: [T]he friends of liberal democracy are beginning to realize that the gains of humane civilization, achieved at so much cost in the struggle of the ages, are threatened by the confessedly fanatic war of extermination against the Jews, since that is but a part of the war against all minorities and against all lovers of liberty of thought and conscience who cannot be regimented into the goose-stepping way of life 1 The journal, he hoped, would extend the work of the Conference on Jewish Relations, which he had founded a few years earlier with Salo Wittmayer Baron \"2 With Hans Kohn, Cohen and Baron launched Jewish Social Studies to be a regular outlet for the work of the Conference 3 An early prospectus for the journal explained its rationale: \"With the growing complexity and increasing importance of Jewish problems in the world in general and in the United States in particular, it has become a matter of the utmost necessity to have accurate and scientific information and interpretation concerning Jewish questions Similar patterns obtained in the realm of publishing: when Baron, Cohen, and Kohn joined forces to launch JSS in 1939, the number ofjournals dedicated to the scholarly study of Jewish subjects was much smaller than it is today 6 (Among the few such journals published in Europe during this time, those in Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and Soviet-occupied Eastern Europe soon either closed their doors or relocated to the United States 7) The locales in which Jewish Studies was pursued were also more constrained: in the years before the Second World War, as Jewish Studies was slowly taking root in the US and Palestine, Europe still held a significant gravitational pull","PeriodicalId":45288,"journal":{"name":"JEWISH SOCIAL STUDIES","volume":"26 1","pages":"19 - 5"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2020-12-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46717668","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":"Heroes and Victims Without Villains: Plague in Early Modern Prague","authors":"Joshua Teplitsky","doi":"10.2979/jewisocistud.26.1.06","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jewisocistud.26.1.06","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45288,"journal":{"name":"JEWISH SOCIAL STUDIES","volume":"26 1","pages":"67 - 76"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2020-12-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47430238","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":"\"Jewish Fever\": Myths and Realities in the History of Russia's Typhus Epidemic, 1914–22","authors":"Polly Zavadivker","doi":"10.2979/jewisocistud.26.1.09","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jewisocistud.26.1.09","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45288,"journal":{"name":"JEWISH SOCIAL STUDIES","volume":"26 1","pages":"101 - 112"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2020-12-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44376500","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}