JEWISH SOCIAL STUDIES最新文献

Abstract:

La epoka was a Ladino newspaper published in Salonica. Its editor Sam Lévy published three interviews with Theodor Herzl between 1901 and 1904. His announcement and subsequent publication of the third interview drew angry responses from the Sublime Porte, which ordered the governor of Salonica to close it down. The governor resisted the orders and La epoka remained open, even publishing a eulogistic obituary of Herzl. In this article, I examine these interviews and obituary, showing that Lévy combined his sharp criticisms of Zionism with an adulation of the Zionist leader. I also explore Ottoman archival documents about the Ladino press and argue that Hamidian censorship could be flexible according to political circumstances, overlooking Lévy’s first two interviews that were made during the Ottoman government’s negotiations with Herzl, yet reacting sharply to the third interview conducted afterward and containing direct references to the Sixth Zionist Congress.

Abstract:

Surreptitiously collected field recordings of cantors at the pulpit, made in disregard for the rules of synagogue comportment, circulated for decades among a small group of collectors in an underground economy of homemade dubbed cassettes. These secret recordings, referred to as “live davenings,” usurp the characteristic ephemerality of prayer to document a twentieth century aesthetic concept of cantorial music as an art form beyond its ritual function. In the past decade, many of these recordings have surfaced on YouTube and file sharing sites, reaching an expanded audience and exposing a new generation to a largely abandoned style of liturgical performance. Through ethnography with field recording makers, internet-savvy collectors, and the artists who use the secrets in the live davening archive to build projects of cantorial revival, this article offers an examination of a body of archival material that has not previously been the topic of any scholarly investigation.

Abstract:

This forum brings together eight scholars of various disciplines who take stock of queer perspectives on Jewish Studies, introduce new lines of research, and show the many ways in which queering Jewish Studies energizes the field. The authors also discuss the particular promise of Jewish trans studies as well as the nexus of queers and Jews in the age of rising populism. Overall, the forum serves as a primer for those interested in how to teach or do queer Jewish Studies.

Abstract:

This article delves into human responses to pandemics, with a specific focus on the religious practices and folk rituals employed by various social groups in Poland and the western regions of the Russian Empire throughout the nineteenth century. Employing a unique microhistorical case study, it unveils the intricate relationship between these popular religious traditions and the ongoing processes of modernization. Through this example, alongside examinations of rituals practiced within both Jewish and Christian communities, this research sheds light on the dynamic interactions and mutual influences between these groups. Additionally, it highlights the pivotal role of women in revitalizing folk rituals, offering broader insights into cultural transformations during tumultuous and challenging times. This exploration encompasses cross-cultural encounters with magical practices and folk beliefs, providing a nuanced examination of how these practices contributed to the delineation of social boundaries and the ever-evolving landscape of cultural diversification amid the rapid currents of modernization.

Abstract:

This article explores how age became racialized in the context of British Mandate Palestine (1917–48). Specifically, it charts European Zionist discourses about how Ashkenazi and Mizrahi Jews aged in different ways. These discourses, which I call “age talk,” played an important role in the court case of Rachel Habshush Ohevet-Ami. In June 1939, Ohevet-Ami, a young Jewish woman of Yemeni and Moroccan descent, disguised herself as an “Arab” and attempted to execute an attack targeting Palestinians in Jerusalem. In her ensuing trial, two questions would decide Ohevet-Ami’s fate: How old was she? And who had the power to decide? As this article searches for an answer, it addresses questions along the way that lie at the heart of the history of British Mandate Palestine about what it meant to be an Arab or a Jew, an “oriental” or a “European,” a terrorist or a freedom fighter, and a child or an adult.

Abstract:

The 1920s and 30s witnessed an explosion of interest in Spinoza among Zionist intellectuals. The reflexive equation of nation and state has led scholars to conclude that Zionists were drawn to Spinoza because he justified state sovereignty. This assumption is mistaken. Eastern European Zionists rejected Spinoza’s sovereignty-centered political thought—precisely because it denies political standing to non-sovereign bodies such as the kahal. Drawing on diasporic history, Spinoza’s Zionist critics elaborated a distinctive political vision that prized national autonomy but did not equate self-rule with sovereign power. I foreground Zionist repudiation of Spinozist sovereignty to challenge reigning assumptions about the ideological sources of non-sovereign politics. Theorists influenced by German Jewish thought have predicated the cultivation of non-sovereign political imagination on a disavowal of nationalism. This opposition—between diaspora and nation, between nationalism and non-sovereignty—is false. In eastern Europe, nationalist figurations of galut (exile) have long inspired non-sovereign, non-Spinozist political imaginaries.

Abstract:

From its 1940 establishment to the Great Deportation of 1942, accounts from the Warsaw Ghetto testify to the misery of beggars within its walls, who drew attention to their plight using songs, cries, shouts, and other sounds. Diaries, reports, and song texts from the ghetto, alongside memoirs and testimonies, reveal beggars’ struggles—as well as non-beggars’ often hostile reactions to their songs and other sounds. Drawing on scholarship in sensory history and cultural histories of the Holocaust, this article reveals that these reactions perpetuated established critiques of shund (artistic “trash”) and tapped into longstanding anxieties about the Jewish community’s status as modern, civilized, and European. However, certain beggars’ songs overcame listeners’ hostility by directly confronting inequality and ghetto authorities’ abuses of power. Beggars and their music were intrinsic to the Warsaw Ghetto’s soundscape, and the debates they engendered reveal how Polish Jews imagined their community’s future, even amid its destruction.

Abstract:

This article addresses a lacuna in scholarship: the burial and mourning rites for premodern Jewish children's deaths. I explore three genres of sources from western and central Europe: bylaws, custom books, and epitaphs. I argue that communal leaders regulated the process of grieving one's children, marking those deaths in ways that are different from how an adult is memorialized. Nevertheless, by creating additional rites or by permitting parents to circumvent certain norms, communal leaders acknowledged and even facilitated more intense expressions of parental loss.

Abstract:

This study analyzes late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century photographs in a family album belonging to Roman Jews. The album was compiled at a crucial moment for Italy and for Italian Jews: after the wake of Italy's national unification. For many Roman Jews the risorgimento and Italian unification in 1870 resulted in liberation from crushing poverty, disease, and abuses under the papal state. These years coincided with the invention and development of photography. This article explores how Jewish emancipation and liberation from ghetto life, alongside the rise of photography, influenced the construction of images and photographic portraits of Roman Jews through the analysis of one family album.

Abstract:

To what extent did Ashkenazi Jews integrate and acculturate into the local society, culture, and politics of late Ottoman Palestine? This question has been almost entirely ignored by the voluminous scholarship on the migration of Jews from central and eastern Europe to Palestine. This article challenges the widely held assumption that such integration was nonexistent and impossible. Building on recent work on Ashkenazi adoption of Arab clothes, Arabic language, and urban encounters and cohabitation, I argue that Ashkenazi integration in Ottoman Palestine was a very real process, which took on significant dimensions. I focus on civic participation and local politics, military service in the Ottoman army, and deep economic interdependence. Integration was uneven and did not follow a single pathway; rather, there were diverse avenues of integration through Jewish Sephardi society, the Arab elite, Ottoman institutions, and more.