Pub Date : 2023-07-31DOI: 10.1353/sho.2023.a903288
Rachel Feldman
{"title":"Hasidim, Race, and Social Change","authors":"Rachel Feldman","doi":"10.1353/sho.2023.a903288","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sho.2023.a903288","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":21809,"journal":{"name":"Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies","volume":"41 1","pages":"233 - 237"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-07-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47292770","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}
Pub Date : 2023-07-31DOI: 10.1353/sho.2023.a903284
Shira Schwartz
Abstract:This article traces the crossings of religion and gender, American Orthodox and secular Judaism, teachers and students, religious educational institutions and the lives that inhabit them. Highlighting Jewishness and transness as intersecting forms of crossing, it explores periods of personal and institutional transition in the lives of Professor Joy Ladin, Yeshiva University's first openly transgender employee, and three of her former students. Experimenting methodologically with form and source, this piece combines interview with textual and theoretical analysis to link the Jewish gendered lives of its interlocutors—who emerge from different locations across the Orthodox-secular Jewish spectrum—with one another, and with larger communal and institutional forms of American Judaism they index. In doing so, this essay connects gender, religion, and education as intersecting forms of lineage, which pass through the interlocutors' and institution's historical and contemporary worlds. Activating crossing as a form of Jewish learning and queer scavenging, the piece enacts a method of Jewish institutional and embodied knowledge production that moves across lived and textual religion, articulating an alternate path through current struggles for queer/trans religious lives. This path does not opt to lose or loosen these lives from American Orthodox life and its textual discourse, but rather, it links them to both, and to one another.
{"title":"Ladin in Lineage: Through the Doors of Jewish Gendered Life at Yeshiva University's Stern College for Women","authors":"Shira Schwartz","doi":"10.1353/sho.2023.a903284","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sho.2023.a903284","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article traces the crossings of religion and gender, American Orthodox and secular Judaism, teachers and students, religious educational institutions and the lives that inhabit them. Highlighting Jewishness and transness as intersecting forms of crossing, it explores periods of personal and institutional transition in the lives of Professor Joy Ladin, Yeshiva University's first openly transgender employee, and three of her former students. Experimenting methodologically with form and source, this piece combines interview with textual and theoretical analysis to link the Jewish gendered lives of its interlocutors—who emerge from different locations across the Orthodox-secular Jewish spectrum—with one another, and with larger communal and institutional forms of American Judaism they index. In doing so, this essay connects gender, religion, and education as intersecting forms of lineage, which pass through the interlocutors' and institution's historical and contemporary worlds. Activating crossing as a form of Jewish learning and queer scavenging, the piece enacts a method of Jewish institutional and embodied knowledge production that moves across lived and textual religion, articulating an alternate path through current struggles for queer/trans religious lives. This path does not opt to lose or loosen these lives from American Orthodox life and its textual discourse, but rather, it links them to both, and to one another.","PeriodicalId":21809,"journal":{"name":"Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies","volume":"41 1","pages":"144 - 184"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-07-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41515300","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}
Pub Date : 2023-07-31DOI: 10.1353/sho.2023.a903286
Kathrin Wittler
Abstract:In the nazi concentration and extermination camps, especially in Auschwitz, prisoners marked by utter physical and psychological exhaustion were called Muselmänner ("Mussulmen"). In recent years, based on a passing remark by Giorgio Agamben, many have taken this linguistic phenomenon to mean that Jews died as Muslims in the Holocaust. Quickly absorbed into current political theory, intellectual discourses, and discussion forums on the internet, this idea has become as widespread as widely misunderstood, all but turning Muselmann into a buzzword which may be (mis)used for anything from Jewish Islamophobia to US-American torture practices. The paper retraces the historical semantics of the German word Muselmann and discusses the possible reasons for its introduction into the language of the concentration camps. Based on the finding that the word's Orientalist implications do not sufficiently explain its use in the concentration camps and that neither guards nor prisoners employed it with the intention of turning Jews into Muslims, the paper cautions against the transfer of this word's historically specific use, developed under extreme conditions, into the heated political debates of the present.
{"title":"Did Jews Die as Muslims in Auschwitz? Specters of the Muselmann","authors":"Kathrin Wittler","doi":"10.1353/sho.2023.a903286","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sho.2023.a903286","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In the nazi concentration and extermination camps, especially in Auschwitz, prisoners marked by utter physical and psychological exhaustion were called Muselmänner (\"Mussulmen\"). In recent years, based on a passing remark by Giorgio Agamben, many have taken this linguistic phenomenon to mean that Jews died as Muslims in the Holocaust. Quickly absorbed into current political theory, intellectual discourses, and discussion forums on the internet, this idea has become as widespread as widely misunderstood, all but turning Muselmann into a buzzword which may be (mis)used for anything from Jewish Islamophobia to US-American torture practices. The paper retraces the historical semantics of the German word Muselmann and discusses the possible reasons for its introduction into the language of the concentration camps. Based on the finding that the word's Orientalist implications do not sufficiently explain its use in the concentration camps and that neither guards nor prisoners employed it with the intention of turning Jews into Muslims, the paper cautions against the transfer of this word's historically specific use, developed under extreme conditions, into the heated political debates of the present.","PeriodicalId":21809,"journal":{"name":"Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies","volume":"41 1","pages":"212 - 224"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-07-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42906030","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":"Antisemitism and Pogroms","authors":"Anna Cichopek-Gajraj","doi":"10.1353/sho.2022.0035","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sho.2022.0035","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":21809,"journal":{"name":"Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies","volume":"40 1","pages":"174 - 181"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-04-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44523285","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}
Abstract:Meir ibn Gabbai (1480–ca. 1540) was an influential kabbalist active in the first half of the fifteenth century. He was born in Spain, but following the edict of expulsion in 1492, he and his family fled and resettled in the Ottoman Empire. There, he composed three important works that enjoyed a wide readership and shaped the views of subsequent generations of kabbalists. While these texts do not reflect an interest in chronicling historical events, they are a rich resource for understanding how Jews in this period understood themselves within the broader sweep of history, and how they assigned meaning to collective Jewish historical experience. Ibn Gabbai regarded the dissemination of Kabbalah through the composition of kabbalistic books as a means by which Jews could survive the traumas of exile and correct the course of human and cosmic events. Drawing upon a rich array of medieval kabbalistic texts, ibn Gabbai argued for the power of Jewish religious practice as a mechanism for rebalancing the divine realm, perfecting the cosmic order, and returning the Jewish people to their proper place in the world of human affairs and flow of historical time. The rhetorical strategies evident in ibn Gabbai's texts reveal a remarkably self-aware approach to the importance of kabbalistic discourse for sustaining Jewish life in the face of historical challenges.
摘要:Meir ibn Gabbai (1480-ca .)1540年)是活跃在15世纪上半叶的有影响力的卡巴拉学家。他出生在西班牙，但在1492年的驱逐令之后，他和他的家人逃离并重新定居在奥斯曼帝国。在那里，他创作了三部重要的作品，拥有广泛的读者，并影响了后来几代卡巴拉学家的观点。虽然这些文本没有反映出对历史事件编年史的兴趣，但它们是了解这一时期犹太人如何在更广泛的历史浪潮中理解自己的丰富资源，以及他们如何赋予犹太集体历史经验意义。伊本·加拜认为，通过卡巴拉书籍的组成来传播卡巴拉，是犹太人能够从流亡的创伤中幸存下来，并纠正人类和宇宙事件进程的一种手段。伊本·加拜借鉴了丰富的中世纪卡巴拉文本，主张犹太宗教实践的力量是一种重新平衡神圣领域的机制，完善宇宙秩序，使犹太人回到他们在人类事务和历史时间流动中应有的位置。在ibn Gabbai的文本中明显的修辞策略揭示了一种非常自我意识的方法，即在面对历史挑战时，卡巴拉话语对于维持犹太人生活的重要性。
{"title":"Silkworms of Exile: Jewish History and Collective Memory in the Kabbalistic Works of Meir ibn Gabbai","authors":"Hartley Lachter","doi":"10.1353/sho.2022.0028","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sho.2022.0028","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Meir ibn Gabbai (1480–ca. 1540) was an influential kabbalist active in the first half of the fifteenth century. He was born in Spain, but following the edict of expulsion in 1492, he and his family fled and resettled in the Ottoman Empire. There, he composed three important works that enjoyed a wide readership and shaped the views of subsequent generations of kabbalists. While these texts do not reflect an interest in chronicling historical events, they are a rich resource for understanding how Jews in this period understood themselves within the broader sweep of history, and how they assigned meaning to collective Jewish historical experience. Ibn Gabbai regarded the dissemination of Kabbalah through the composition of kabbalistic books as a means by which Jews could survive the traumas of exile and correct the course of human and cosmic events. Drawing upon a rich array of medieval kabbalistic texts, ibn Gabbai argued for the power of Jewish religious practice as a mechanism for rebalancing the divine realm, perfecting the cosmic order, and returning the Jewish people to their proper place in the world of human affairs and flow of historical time. The rhetorical strategies evident in ibn Gabbai's texts reveal a remarkably self-aware approach to the importance of kabbalistic discourse for sustaining Jewish life in the face of historical challenges.","PeriodicalId":21809,"journal":{"name":"Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies","volume":"40 1","pages":"1 - 37"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-04-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66690876","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 Warsaw Ghetto in American Art and Culture by Samantha Baskind (review)","authors":"Cordula Grewe","doi":"10.1353/sho.2022.0040","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sho.2022.0040","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":21809,"journal":{"name":"Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies","volume":"40 1","pages":"208 - 212"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-04-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48814267","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}
Abstract:Anna Margolin's innovative poetry has attracted the attention and admiration of Yiddish cultural research centers and literary critics worldwide. However, Rosa Lebensbaum—the real woman behind this pseudonym—has remained hidden for many years under the shadow of her well-known public figure. A family archive, carefully preserved by Rosa Lebensbaum's granddaughter in Israel, now allows the attention to be turned from Anna to Rosa. Private correspondence between Lebensbaum and her family—her divorcé, author Moshe Stavsky, and their son—reveals contradictions and understandings that illuminate new aspects in the poet's writing, as well as in her life and the lives of those around her. Based on this newly presented personal material, this article explores two aspects in the context of the life and writing of Rosa Lebensbaum; the first is personal while the other is cultural-historical. There was, on the one hand, a national, social, and creative renewal inspired by the Zionist movement, encouraging Jews to return to the land of Israel and the Hebrew language; yet, on the other hand, an American Jewish attempt to preserve and maintain the Yiddish culture, the language of exile against which the Jewish Yishuv in pre-state Israel fought vigorously. This clash of culture and languages—its implications and the price that many Jews were required to pay in pre-state Israel and America—form an additional central topic in this research.
{"title":"I am grateful to fate for this hour of grace: Children and Motherhood in the Life and Writings of Rosa Lebensbaum","authors":"Carina Alexandroff Pinhas","doi":"10.1353/sho.2022.0029","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sho.2022.0029","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Anna Margolin's innovative poetry has attracted the attention and admiration of Yiddish cultural research centers and literary critics worldwide. However, Rosa Lebensbaum—the real woman behind this pseudonym—has remained hidden for many years under the shadow of her well-known public figure. A family archive, carefully preserved by Rosa Lebensbaum's granddaughter in Israel, now allows the attention to be turned from Anna to Rosa. Private correspondence between Lebensbaum and her family—her divorcé, author Moshe Stavsky, and their son—reveals contradictions and understandings that illuminate new aspects in the poet's writing, as well as in her life and the lives of those around her. Based on this newly presented personal material, this article explores two aspects in the context of the life and writing of Rosa Lebensbaum; the first is personal while the other is cultural-historical. There was, on the one hand, a national, social, and creative renewal inspired by the Zionist movement, encouraging Jews to return to the land of Israel and the Hebrew language; yet, on the other hand, an American Jewish attempt to preserve and maintain the Yiddish culture, the language of exile against which the Jewish Yishuv in pre-state Israel fought vigorously. This clash of culture and languages—its implications and the price that many Jews were required to pay in pre-state Israel and America—form an additional central topic in this research.","PeriodicalId":21809,"journal":{"name":"Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies","volume":"40 1","pages":"38 - 67"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-04-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44088351","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}
Abstract:In Mr. Potter (2002), Jamaica Kincaid brilliantly shows the invisibility of the Jews in the multiethnic fabric of Creole society. Kincaid, who converted to Judaism in 1993, painstakingly makes clear that not only does the Afro-Caribbean majority ignore the "strangers" in their midst, but that the exiled post-Shoah migrants in these communities have difficulties making themselves feel at home in their new environments. While Mr. Potter has been read as an autobiographical text about Kincaid's own father, the eponymous Mr. Potter, two characters may have Jewish origins. First, and quite obviously, Dr. Weizenger, a physician who migrated from Czechoslovakia; second, Mr. Shoul, a man whose parents came from Damascus. I read behind Shoul the Mizrahi (Arab Jew) or the Oriental Jew (in line with the "Calypso Jews" of Sarah Phillips Casteel's 2016 book). The latter are designated in the French Antilles as "Syrians," which is a misnomer for people whose Jewish (or Christian, or Muslim) origins have possibly been erased over time. Through Kincaid's novel, I question not only the invisible links between the Afro-Caribbean and Jewish victims of genocidal violence, but also the disinterest of prominent French Caribbean intellectuals who fail to think beyond the camps. By "camp thinking," as used in his 2004 book Between Camps, Gilroy means the racial, national, cultural, and religious camps in which we live, suggesting we should move out of these camps.
{"title":"The Oriental Other (Jew, Muslim, Christian) in Jamaica Kincaid's Mr. Potter","authors":"Kathleen M. Gyssels","doi":"10.1353/sho.2022.0031","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sho.2022.0031","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In Mr. Potter (2002), Jamaica Kincaid brilliantly shows the invisibility of the Jews in the multiethnic fabric of Creole society. Kincaid, who converted to Judaism in 1993, painstakingly makes clear that not only does the Afro-Caribbean majority ignore the \"strangers\" in their midst, but that the exiled post-Shoah migrants in these communities have difficulties making themselves feel at home in their new environments. While Mr. Potter has been read as an autobiographical text about Kincaid's own father, the eponymous Mr. Potter, two characters may have Jewish origins. First, and quite obviously, Dr. Weizenger, a physician who migrated from Czechoslovakia; second, Mr. Shoul, a man whose parents came from Damascus. I read behind Shoul the Mizrahi (Arab Jew) or the Oriental Jew (in line with the \"Calypso Jews\" of Sarah Phillips Casteel's 2016 book). The latter are designated in the French Antilles as \"Syrians,\" which is a misnomer for people whose Jewish (or Christian, or Muslim) origins have possibly been erased over time. Through Kincaid's novel, I question not only the invisible links between the Afro-Caribbean and Jewish victims of genocidal violence, but also the disinterest of prominent French Caribbean intellectuals who fail to think beyond the camps. By \"camp thinking,\" as used in his 2004 book Between Camps, Gilroy means the racial, national, cultural, and religious camps in which we live, suggesting we should move out of these camps.","PeriodicalId":21809,"journal":{"name":"Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies","volume":"40 1","pages":"119 - 98"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-04-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43392025","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}
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