The fifth part of Rabbi Khalifa Ben-Malka's Kaf naki (Clean Hand), Meshovah niẓaḥat (Triumphant Response) portrays a series of interreligious disputations that he conducted with Christian colleagues in Agadir during the first half of the eighteenth century. A study of Meshovah niẓaḥat reveals that, while these debates represent a direct continuation of medieval interreligious polemic, occasionally the traditional arguments took on a new garb—for example, those proofs relying on the era's geographic or scientific discoveries. Ben-Malka was well-versed in the intricacies of theological debate and was familiar with the most sophisticated tools the medieval polemical tradition had to offer, as well as with post-medieval Jewish anti-Christian literature. His writing opens a window onto eighteenth-century Jewish-Moroccan intellectual history while simultaneously raising a number of questions. Further study will be necessary to paint a fuller and more diverse picture.
{"title":"Meshovah niẓaḥat: Jewish-Christian Polemics in Kaf naki by Rabbi Khalifa Ben-Malka of Agadir","authors":"Michal Ohana","doi":"10.2979/jss.00002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jss.00002","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Abstract:</p><p>The fifth part of Rabbi Khalifa Ben-Malka's <i>Kaf naki</i> (Clean Hand), <i>Meshovah niẓaḥat</i> (Triumphant Response) portrays a series of interreligious disputations that he conducted with Christian colleagues in Agadir during the first half of the eighteenth century. A study of <i>Meshovah niẓaḥat</i> reveals that, while these debates represent a direct continuation of medieval interreligious polemic, occasionally the traditional arguments took on a new garb—for example, those proofs relying on the era's geographic or scientific discoveries. Ben-Malka was well-versed in the intricacies of theological debate and was familiar with the most sophisticated tools the medieval polemical tradition had to offer, as well as with post-medieval Jewish anti-Christian literature. His writing opens a window onto eighteenth-century Jewish-Moroccan intellectual history while simultaneously raising a number of questions. Further study will be necessary to paint a fuller and more diverse picture.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":45288,"journal":{"name":"JEWISH SOCIAL STUDIES","volume":"249 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2024-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140560214","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}
Among French Jewish intellectuals who rejected Zionism in the early twentieth century was René Worms, a sociologist who used sociological theories as well as "francojudaïsme," the French-Jewish model of assimilation, to oppose it. In 1920–21, during debates organized by the Société de sociologie de Paris on the future of Palestine and Zionism, Worms used various theories to counter Jewish nationalism. Influenced by biology and race science, he began by denying the existence of a Jewish race, emphasizing the racial heterogeneity of modern Jews. His understanding of the evolution of modern religions toward universalism, influenced by Auguste Comte and Émile Durkheim, also discredited Zionism. Finally, his sociology of nationality, interwoven with Ernest Renan's conception of the nation, precluded any national claim to Judaism. This article examines the arguments Worms made and compare them to those of other speakers in debates between sociologists in Paris.
{"title":"Sociology against Zionism? The Thought of French Jewish Sociologist René Worms on Jews and Judaism at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century","authors":"Sébastien Mosbah-Natanson","doi":"10.2979/jss.00003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jss.00003","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Abstract:</p><p>Among French Jewish intellectuals who rejected Zionism in the early twentieth century was René Worms, a sociologist who used sociological theories as well as \"francojudaïsme,\" the French-Jewish model of assimilation, to oppose it. In 1920–21, during debates organized by the Société de sociologie de Paris on the future of Palestine and Zionism, Worms used various theories to counter Jewish nationalism. Influenced by biology and race science, he began by denying the existence of a Jewish race, emphasizing the racial heterogeneity of modern Jews. His understanding of the evolution of modern religions toward universalism, influenced by Auguste Comte and Émile Durkheim, also discredited Zionism. Finally, his sociology of nationality, interwoven with Ernest Renan's conception of the nation, precluded any national claim to Judaism. This article examines the arguments Worms made and compare them to those of other speakers in debates between sociologists in Paris.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":45288,"journal":{"name":"JEWISH SOCIAL STUDIES","volume":"24 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2024-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140560213","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}
Beginning in 1952, the New York-based American Jewish Committee (AJC) spearheaded a transatlantic effort to stigmatize Stalinist antisemitism through direct historical comparison with the recent Nazi genocide of European Jewry. In France, home to the AJC's European headquarters, the project of tarring Stalin with Hitler's brush spurred an unprecedented flood of discourse about the Holocaust. However, the narrative that emerged among participating French intellectuals—Jewish and non-Jewish—elided the genocide's Western European dimensions. This article analyzes the AJC's French-language journal Évidences comparatively alongside its American sister journal, Commentary, and contextually against documentation from the AJC archives in order to argue that the politics of the early Cold War did not simply impede Holocaust memory in the West; rather, anti-totalitarian projects produced framings of the genocide that relied on and replicated the Cold War's own temporal and geographic logics.
{"title":"\"The Last Act in the Tragedy of Judaism\": Stalinist Antisemitism, the American Jewish Committee, and French Holocaust Memory in the Cold War","authors":"Emma Kuby","doi":"10.2979/jss.00004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jss.00004","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Abstract:</p><p>Beginning in 1952, the New York-based American Jewish Committee (AJC) spearheaded a transatlantic effort to stigmatize Stalinist antisemitism through direct historical comparison with the recent Nazi genocide of European Jewry. In France, home to the AJC's European headquarters, the project of tarring Stalin with Hitler's brush spurred an unprecedented flood of discourse about the Holocaust. However, the narrative that emerged among participating French intellectuals—Jewish and non-Jewish—elided the genocide's Western European dimensions. This article analyzes the AJC's French-language journal <i>Évidences</i> comparatively alongside its American sister journal, <i>Commentary</i>, and contextually against documentation from the AJC archives in order to argue that the politics of the early Cold War did not simply impede Holocaust memory in the West; rather, anti-totalitarian projects produced framings of the genocide that relied on and replicated the Cold War's own temporal and geographic logics.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":45288,"journal":{"name":"JEWISH SOCIAL STUDIES","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2024-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140560383","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}
Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.2979/jss.2023.a910386
Yael Levi
Abstract: During the early twentieth century, suicide among Jewish immigrants in the United States was hardly uncommon. The American Yiddish press regularly reported on suicide cases, and Jewish public figures acknowledged the phenomenon's frequency. Uncovering this forgotten chapter in American Jewish history and drawing on immigrants' letters, reports from the Yiddish press, burial records, and autobiographies, this article explores patterns of despair and self-violence among eastern European Jewish immigrants and their reflections in the American Jewish press, specifically in Yiddish. It traces expressions of immigrant suffering and identifies patterns of cultural failure to revisit the emotional and cultural dynamics of east European Jewish immigration to the United States in the age of mass migration. By focusing on marginal cases in American Jewish history, this article highlights a broad cultural spectrum of immigrant experiences.
{"title":"\"Like Salt in Water\": Toward a History of Jewish Immigrants' Suicide in Urban America, 1890–1910","authors":"Yael Levi","doi":"10.2979/jss.2023.a910386","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jss.2023.a910386","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: During the early twentieth century, suicide among Jewish immigrants in the United States was hardly uncommon. The American Yiddish press regularly reported on suicide cases, and Jewish public figures acknowledged the phenomenon's frequency. Uncovering this forgotten chapter in American Jewish history and drawing on immigrants' letters, reports from the Yiddish press, burial records, and autobiographies, this article explores patterns of despair and self-violence among eastern European Jewish immigrants and their reflections in the American Jewish press, specifically in Yiddish. It traces expressions of immigrant suffering and identifies patterns of cultural failure to revisit the emotional and cultural dynamics of east European Jewish immigration to the United States in the age of mass migration. By focusing on marginal cases in American Jewish history, this article highlights a broad cultural spectrum of immigrant experiences.","PeriodicalId":45288,"journal":{"name":"JEWISH SOCIAL STUDIES","volume":"31 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135736933","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}
Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.2979/jss.2023.a910390
Daniel Mahla
Abstract: For two decades, from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s, Israeli soccer players participated in Asian leagues and associations. During this period, they achieved much and celebrated significant athletic victories. But at the same time, they were met with hostility and boycotts and excluded from entire tournaments, until August 1976, when the Asian Football Confederation (AFC) officially expelled the Israeli Football Association (IFA) from its ranks. From the outset, the national team's activities in Asia elicited intense discussions about Israel's membership in the AFC that went far beyond the weighing of practical and athletic issues. By tracing these debates as they raged in the Israeli press, in this article I demonstrate that the question of the IFA's regional affiliation was a platform for deeper deliberations about the country's very place on the Asian continent. The highly ambivalent attitudes that emerged, I argue, reflected deep insecurities about the Jewish state's geo-cultural belonging and self-perception that are best understood against the backdrop of Israeli political realities of the 1960s and 70s and in the context of early twentieth-century debates about the orientation of the Zionist movement.
{"title":"\"To the East\"? Israeli Soccer's Asian Period and Debates about the Jewish State's Cultural Affiliations with the Continent","authors":"Daniel Mahla","doi":"10.2979/jss.2023.a910390","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jss.2023.a910390","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: For two decades, from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s, Israeli soccer players participated in Asian leagues and associations. During this period, they achieved much and celebrated significant athletic victories. But at the same time, they were met with hostility and boycotts and excluded from entire tournaments, until August 1976, when the Asian Football Confederation (AFC) officially expelled the Israeli Football Association (IFA) from its ranks. From the outset, the national team's activities in Asia elicited intense discussions about Israel's membership in the AFC that went far beyond the weighing of practical and athletic issues. By tracing these debates as they raged in the Israeli press, in this article I demonstrate that the question of the IFA's regional affiliation was a platform for deeper deliberations about the country's very place on the Asian continent. The highly ambivalent attitudes that emerged, I argue, reflected deep insecurities about the Jewish state's geo-cultural belonging and self-perception that are best understood against the backdrop of Israeli political realities of the 1960s and 70s and in the context of early twentieth-century debates about the orientation of the Zionist movement.","PeriodicalId":45288,"journal":{"name":"JEWISH SOCIAL STUDIES","volume":"2014 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135736658","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}
Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.2979/jss.2023.a910388
James Loeffler
Abstract: In this article, I examine a curious chapter in the history of modern Jewish culture: the 1914 Berlin meeting of Zionist musician Avraham Zvi Idelsohn with the philosopher Hermann Cohen. A shared belief in the redemptive power of aesthetics and the unique character of Jewish music briefly drew the two men together. Each saw in sound an unparalleled means by which to recalibrate Jewish difference in relation to Western civilization. Each identified music as the key to large-scale cultural and emotional Jewish renewal in the face of European modernity. Yet their ensuing argument revealed not only the political fissures in European Jewry but also the deeper philosophical contradictions within each man's respective theories and, more broadly, the unstable relationship between aesthetics and affect in modern Jewish culture.
{"title":"When Hermann Cohen Cried: Zionism, Culture, and Emotion","authors":"James Loeffler","doi":"10.2979/jss.2023.a910388","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jss.2023.a910388","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: In this article, I examine a curious chapter in the history of modern Jewish culture: the 1914 Berlin meeting of Zionist musician Avraham Zvi Idelsohn with the philosopher Hermann Cohen. A shared belief in the redemptive power of aesthetics and the unique character of Jewish music briefly drew the two men together. Each saw in sound an unparalleled means by which to recalibrate Jewish difference in relation to Western civilization. Each identified music as the key to large-scale cultural and emotional Jewish renewal in the face of European modernity. Yet their ensuing argument revealed not only the political fissures in European Jewry but also the deeper philosophical contradictions within each man's respective theories and, more broadly, the unstable relationship between aesthetics and affect in modern Jewish culture.","PeriodicalId":45288,"journal":{"name":"JEWISH SOCIAL STUDIES","volume":"47 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135736934","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}
Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.2979/jss.2023.a910391
Daniella Farah
Abstract: In the 1960s and 70s, several transnational Jewish organizations—the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, the Alliance Israélite Universelle, Ozar Hatorah, and the Jewish Agency—expressed dire concern over the purported assimilation of Jews into Iranian society, claiming that it stemmed from their upward mobility and increasing enrollment in non-Jewish schools. Drawing on previously untapped archival documents, printed materials, and oral histories in Persian, French, Hebrew, and English, I argue that it was mainly foreign Jews, and not Iranian Jews themselves, who feared the specter of assimilation. In fact, Iranian Jewish parents viewed their children's attendance in non-Jewish schools as integral to their economic and social prosperity in a Muslim-majority country. Ultimately, because Iranian Jews were not as preoccupied with assimilation as their non-Iranian coreligionists, I suggest that an examination of assimilation in the Iranian context can help us complicate the importance of this concept in modern Jewish historical scholarship.
{"title":"Jews and Education in Modern Iran: The \"Threat of Assimilation\" and Changing Educational Landscapes","authors":"Daniella Farah","doi":"10.2979/jss.2023.a910391","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jss.2023.a910391","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: In the 1960s and 70s, several transnational Jewish organizations—the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, the Alliance Israélite Universelle, Ozar Hatorah, and the Jewish Agency—expressed dire concern over the purported assimilation of Jews into Iranian society, claiming that it stemmed from their upward mobility and increasing enrollment in non-Jewish schools. Drawing on previously untapped archival documents, printed materials, and oral histories in Persian, French, Hebrew, and English, I argue that it was mainly foreign Jews, and not Iranian Jews themselves, who feared the specter of assimilation. In fact, Iranian Jewish parents viewed their children's attendance in non-Jewish schools as integral to their economic and social prosperity in a Muslim-majority country. Ultimately, because Iranian Jews were not as preoccupied with assimilation as their non-Iranian coreligionists, I suggest that an examination of assimilation in the Iranian context can help us complicate the importance of this concept in modern Jewish historical scholarship.","PeriodicalId":45288,"journal":{"name":"JEWISH SOCIAL STUDIES","volume":"19 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135736940","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}
Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.2979/jss.2023.a910389
Caroline Kahlenberg
Abstract: Early twentieth-century Palestine was a noisy place. Urban streets echoed with the cries of hawkers, the songs of nationalists, and the whistles of trains announcing their arrival. Conversations in Arabic, Turkish, Yiddish, English, Ladino, French, Hebrew, and other languages reverberated in the soundscape. In this article, I explore how Palestine's residents made sense of what they heard, focusing on one type of sound in particular: Hebrew-language accents. Building on the work of sensory historians, and focusing on Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews, I investigate the following questions: How did Palestine's residents use accents to mark identity, belonging, and exclusion? What were the stakes of sounding different? And what did it mean to sound "native"?
{"title":"How the Locals Grew an Accent: The Sounds of Modern Hebrew in Early Twentieth-Century Palestine","authors":"Caroline Kahlenberg","doi":"10.2979/jss.2023.a910389","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jss.2023.a910389","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: Early twentieth-century Palestine was a noisy place. Urban streets echoed with the cries of hawkers, the songs of nationalists, and the whistles of trains announcing their arrival. Conversations in Arabic, Turkish, Yiddish, English, Ladino, French, Hebrew, and other languages reverberated in the soundscape. In this article, I explore how Palestine's residents made sense of what they heard, focusing on one type of sound in particular: Hebrew-language accents. Building on the work of sensory historians, and focusing on Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews, I investigate the following questions: How did Palestine's residents use accents to mark identity, belonging, and exclusion? What were the stakes of sounding different? And what did it mean to sound \"native\"?","PeriodicalId":45288,"journal":{"name":"JEWISH SOCIAL STUDIES","volume":"31 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135736665","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}
Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.2979/jss.2023.a910392
Riv-Ellen Prell
Abstract: This article draws attention to the distortions and falsehoods that appear in the 1976 Jewish Social Studies article "Political Antisemitism in Minnesota during the Great Depression" by Hyman Berman. It identifies and corrects the many errors on two of its pages. In addition, the role of Berman's article in a student movement at the University of Minnesota to remove names on four campus buildings of administrators who engaged in racist and antisemitic policies is explored. Berman's work was both a catalyst for an exhibition about this period, which inspired the movement, and then when its flagrant errors were brought to light, was used to try to discredit it. The consequences of Berman's misconduct had consequences more than forty years after its publication.
{"title":"Documenting Scholarly Dishonesty in Hyman Berman's 1976 Jewish Social Studies Article, \"Political Antisemitism in Minnesota during the Great Depression,\" and Some of Its Political Consequences","authors":"Riv-Ellen Prell","doi":"10.2979/jss.2023.a910392","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jss.2023.a910392","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: This article draws attention to the distortions and falsehoods that appear in the 1976 Jewish Social Studies article \"Political Antisemitism in Minnesota during the Great Depression\" by Hyman Berman. It identifies and corrects the many errors on two of its pages. In addition, the role of Berman's article in a student movement at the University of Minnesota to remove names on four campus buildings of administrators who engaged in racist and antisemitic policies is explored. Berman's work was both a catalyst for an exhibition about this period, which inspired the movement, and then when its flagrant errors were brought to light, was used to try to discredit it. The consequences of Berman's misconduct had consequences more than forty years after its publication.","PeriodicalId":45288,"journal":{"name":"JEWISH SOCIAL STUDIES","volume":"10 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135736935","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}
Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.2979/jss.2023.a910385
Daniella Doron
Abstract: During the years of the Nazi regime, well over 1,000 European Jewish youths migrated to the United States in organized unaccompanied child migration schemes. These youths left an abundant, and largely untapped, trove of sources in which they constructed narratives of their lives and emotions to their parents in letters, to their social workers in their various interactions, and to themselves in their diaries. Though refugee youths undeniably felt a range of emotions, in this article I suggest that emotional expression tells us less about the emotional inner lives of youths than the attempt to exert and subvert control and power in a topsy-turvy world. By drawing attention to the language of emotions, their inherent power dynamics, and the potential gulf between emotions and experience, this article opens a conversation about our capacity to document children's agency and to study emotions to explain decision-making and experience.
{"title":"Feeling Familial Separation: Emotions, Agency, and Holocaust Refugee Youths","authors":"Daniella Doron","doi":"10.2979/jss.2023.a910385","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jss.2023.a910385","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: During the years of the Nazi regime, well over 1,000 European Jewish youths migrated to the United States in organized unaccompanied child migration schemes. These youths left an abundant, and largely untapped, trove of sources in which they constructed narratives of their lives and emotions to their parents in letters, to their social workers in their various interactions, and to themselves in their diaries. Though refugee youths undeniably felt a range of emotions, in this article I suggest that emotional expression tells us less about the emotional inner lives of youths than the attempt to exert and subvert control and power in a topsy-turvy world. By drawing attention to the language of emotions, their inherent power dynamics, and the potential gulf between emotions and experience, this article opens a conversation about our capacity to document children's agency and to study emotions to explain decision-making and experience.","PeriodicalId":45288,"journal":{"name":"JEWISH SOCIAL STUDIES","volume":"28 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135736660","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}