Pub Date : 2023-11-01DOI: 10.1353/ajs.2023.a911529
Jeffrey Shandler
Abstract: Museums provide prominent encounters with past Jewish domesticity. The most provocative encounters appear in contemporary art installations by Christian Boltanski, Simon Fujiwara, Maira Kalman and Alex Kalman, Elaine Reichek, Ellen Rothenberg, the Sala-Manca Group, and Maya Zack that variously evoke, conjure, or problematize Jewish home life in former times. Unlike historic residences or re-creations staged for historical or ethnographic exhibitions, these artworks are entirely “at home” in the museum, where they simultaneously present and interrogate notions of Jewish domesticity. This attention to artworks looks beyond the primary focus of most historians’ studies of Jewish homes, which examine the social and cultural contexts of actual houses of a bygone era, or the work of scholars in various fields who explore Jewish domestic practices as expressions of a collective identity. The artworks in question scrutinize what it has meant for Jews to feel “at home” and reveal how the imagination figures in representations of bygone Jewish domestic life as memory sites.
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Pub Date : 2023-11-01DOI: 10.1353/ajs.2023.a911541
Jessica Carr
Reviewed by: The Lives of Jessie Sampter: Queer, Disabled, Zionist by Sarah Imhoff Jessica Carr Sarah Imhoff. The Lives of Jessie Sampter: Queer, Disabled, Zionist. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022. 288 pp. In this study of Jewish life and thought in the early twentieth century, Sarah Imhoff uses a method that centers “embodied knowledge,” that is, the idea that “sensations, perceptions, and physical knowledge matter for how a person sees the world,” which includes how Jessie Sampter “thinks about the relationship of nature and God, how she thinks about the social roles people with disabilities should play, and why she thinks Palestine is a home for her people” (5). Imhoff draws an intimate connection between the nonverbal of body and movement and the verbal: “The things that make movement possible also make metaphors possible” (6). Imhoff uses the voice of Sampter and her own words to respond to the myths of Zionism prior to 1948. Unlike in the phrase “a land without a people,” [End Page 469] at the end of chapter 4, Imhoff concludes that “the desert was not deserted before Sampter or even the earliest wave of Zionist immigrants got there. . . . This, alongside certain British governing styles and policies, set the stage for conflict between Jews and Arabs in Palestine.” Her work recovers the political context for and the gaps between what Zionists argued and hoped for, a central goal of Imhoff’s “life-writing” about Sampter. “There are valuable aspects of her Zionism that are worth considering, even though—or especially because—they are roads not taken” (192), Imhoff argues. She delves into the stereotypes and frustrating flaws of Sampter’s political vision too. Imhoff does not hold Sampter as an icon with simplistic solutions to complicated politics. Each chapter of the book dissects Sampter’s life, writing, and context via a distinct theoretical lens: religion, disability, queer, theological-political. The book progresses more or less chronologically even as Imhoff retraces certain major events, travels and places, figures and friends, and experiences of Sampter through distinct theoretical approaches, to bring new perspectives to the same events. By rethinking some events and experiences, Imhoff puts intersectional deconstruction of religion into practice. Imhoff shows how each lens highlights something essential about the commitments and burdens of Sampter’s life at the same time that Imhoff convincingly argues for the importance of Sampter’s experiences to reframing each field of study. Theorizing temporality is important especially as related to the body and embodiment, particularly in her second chapter on disability (“crip time”) and her third chapter on queer kinship and relationship (“queer time”). Imhoff shows that Jewishness should not appear easily bounded or be presumed to be so in the past or present. Imhoff theorizes practices of religious “promiscuity” as “religious recombination,” channeling Catherine Albanese. The infl
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Pub Date : 2023-11-01DOI: 10.1353/ajs.2023.a911546
Audrey Kichelewski
Reviewed by: The Expulsion of Jews from Communist Poland: Memory Wars and Homeland Anxieties by Anat Plocker Audrey Kichelewski Anat Plocker. The Expulsion of Jews from Communist Poland: Memory Wars and Homeland Anxieties. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2022. 240 pp. In 2018, Polish authorities commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of the events of March 1968, when student protests demanding democratic reforms were violently crushed, while Polish Jews were blamed for political disorder and driven out of the country. While Polish president Andrzej Duda officially apologized to the families of those who were repressed and harmed by this hate campaign, his prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki pointed out that Poland was then not a sovereign country but depended on Moscow, thus implying that Poles need not be ashamed today for past antisemitism imposed from above, but rather only to be proud of those who fought for freedom.1 Against this backdrop, Anat Plocker’s thorough examination of the “anti-Zionist campaign” that led to the expulsion of Jews from Communist Poland offers a most welcome and convincing reply to political distortions of the past. Her study gives a new framework for understanding the events, showing how they were basically a product of Polish nationalist and antisemitic thinking within the Communist Party. No documentation suggests that the Soviets initiated the antisemitic campaign: the international context—the Six-Day War of June 1967 and the politicized memory of the war and the Holocaust in the Cold War frame— merely added to deeply rooted beliefs used to create an atmosphere of panic and search for scapegoats (Polish Jews as “Zionists”). Analyzing a broad range of sources, mainly archives from the Communist Party and Security Service, supplemented by contemporaneous propaganda material and testimonies from the protagonists of the time, the author provides new insight on events hitherto solely analyzed through the dissidents’ prism, overshadowing the anti-Jewish dimension, or seeing it as merely instrumental.2 Other recent publications have collected testimonies of victims of this hate campaign, showing its long-lasting traumatizing [End Page 481] effects rather than unraveling its mechanisms.3 Plocker argues that reading the use of antisemitism as a political tool for repressing democratic voices and distracting the masses from the real problems of the regime leads to seeing Polish society as easy to manipulate and “naturally antisemitic” (14), an essentialist and highly problematic assumption. Instead, she advocates for an in-depth study of the way the crisis was created, controlled, and dealt with. After an introductory chapter that helpfully retraces the situation of Polish Jews following the Holocaust in a country that had turned to Communism, the analysis shifts to the June 1967 war in the Middle East, which dramatically changed the lives of the tiny community of Polish Jews. This war and the subsequent “fifth-column
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Pub Date : 2023-11-01DOI: 10.1353/ajs.2023.a911538
Renée Levine Melammed
Reviewed by: The Fruit of Her Hands: Jewish and Christian Women’s Work in Medieval Catalan Cities by Sarah Ifft Decker Renée Levine Melammed Sarah Ifft Decker. The Fruit of Her Hands: Jewish and Christian Women’s Work in Medieval Catalan Cities. University Park: Penn State University Press, 2022. 233 pp. Sarah Ifft Decker aims to challenge various assumptions about women’s history as well as about the communities in which they lived, which she perceives to be ingrained in the consciousness of medieval Jewish historians. In order to achieve this goal, she decided to use an intersectional approach, to look at Jewish as well as Christian women residing in the same geographical locations. The focus of this study is on three medieval Catalan communities, namely, Barcelona, Girona, and Vic, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. They ranged in size, importance, and the nature of the opportunities available to women of each faith. Barcelona was a major economic, cultural, and political center, with serious trade and shipping activity; the Jewish population ranged between seven and eight thousand out of fifty thousand residents. Girona was a textile center more or less ruled by powerful bishops. There were perhaps five hundred Jewish residents among a population of eight to ten thousand. Lastly, the smallest of the three, Vic, also ruled by bishops along with powerful families, had a modest population of three thousand. Its Jewish community, numbering around one hundred, was not confined to a call, or Jewish quarter, unlike those of the other two cities. Ifft Decker combed through thousands of contracts in order to determine the level and type of activities Jewish and Christian women in these three locales engaged in that required such documentation. She clarifies the differences between the legal systems and how they impacted women’s economic activities and rights. Most of the documents found in notarial records are credit contracts. Ifft Decker presents an interesting perspective on the nature of notarial culture, a decidedly male-oriented institution that developed in the twelfth century when professional notaries replaced priests and monks. These notaries were, of course, Christian males, and using their services meant crossing gender boundaries that could also raise concerns about one’s reputation and level of adherence to social expectations of modesty, although Christian women might not have been as uncomfortable in their presence as Jewish women. This was a space dominated by men, an institution mainly for the use and benefit of elite and middle-class men. Thus, women in lower economic strata would not have felt comfortable there. In order to strengthen their position, women would often opt to have a male present who could guide and support them or to send an agent in their stead. On average, four men were present in the notary’s office, surely an uncomfortable environment for a woman arriving by herself. There were many economic activities
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Pub Date : 2023-11-01DOI: 10.1353/ajs.2023.a911549
Daniel Mahla
Reviewed by: Everyday Zionism in East-Central Europe: Nation-Building in War and Revolution, 1914–1920 by Jan Rybak Daniel Mahla Jan Rybak. Everyday Zionism in East-Central Europe: Nation-Building in War and Revolution, 1914–1920. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. 352 pp. In Everyday Zionism in East Central Europe, Jan Rybak examines the rise of Jewish nationalism during the turmoil of the First World War. The war not only brought unprecedented destruction and crisis to Jewish communities in east central Europe, but also represented an important breakthrough for the Zionist movement. Rybak attempts to answer the question of why the movement became such a central force during this period. Rather than focusing on ideological issues, he looks at local activism and argues that it was the active concern for welfare and communities that helped the Zionists become a significant player in Jewish life during this period. The book, based on Rybak’s dissertation, traces Zionist activism between 1914 and 1920 through the “vast area . . . from Vienna to Wilno (Vilne/Vilnius/Wilna/Vilna) and from Prague to Pińsk” (2). The author has a thorough knowledge of the complex and often rapidly changing political and social conditions in this area and bases his analysis on an impressive number of primary sources in several languages. In each of the thematically organized chapters, he devotes considerable attention to the differences and nuances of the situation in the various regions and to the interplay of local contexts and international developments. [End Page 487] The first chapter traces the changes in the region triggered by the outbreak of war and the German conquest of large areas in the west of the Russian Empire. The war, Rybak shows, forced the Zionists to reconsider their focus on Jewish settlements in Palestine and to devote their resources instead to relief efforts in east central Europe. Most importantly, he shows how the new realities of the war changed the dynamics between central Zionist institutions and local activists. In his second chapter, Rybak focuses on nationalist involvement in various forms of relief work and shows how Zionists amassed political capital and consolidated their authority as community leaders through such activities. “Throughout the region,” Rybak notes, “Zionists saw their political and relief efforts as instruments to win over and mobilize the Jewish nation” (94). At the same time, with an eye to regional specifics, he points out the different results these efforts achieved in various areas and regions. Chapter 3 looks at the importance Zionists placed on child care and education. Through their efforts to provide schooling, establish youth clubs, sports clubs, and more, local activists influenced large segments of the next generation, the generation that would reshape the movement after the collapse of the great empires and in the postwar period. One of the most fascinating parts of the book is its chapter on antisemitic
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Pub Date : 2023-11-01DOI: 10.1353/ajs.2023.a911551
Monika Rice
Reviewed by: Resurrecting the Jew: Nationalism, Philosemitism, and Poland’s Jewish Revival by Geneviève Zubrzycki Monika Rice Geneviève Zubrzycki. Resurrecting the Jew: Nationalism, Philosemitism, and Poland’s Jewish Revival. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2022. 288 pp. Geneviève Zubrzycki’s original scholarship, straddling sociology and anthropology, analyzes conflicting influences of nationalism and religion in crucial moments of cultural transformation. Following one essential book on the Auschwitz cross controversy, and another on the formation of a secular Québécois identity, she turns to address the confounding phenomenon of Jewish revival in Poland. The growing literature on material and symbolic interpretations of what Zubrzycki calls a “Jewish turn” displays a spectrum of assessments. One fascinating development is the formation of an ultracritical “school” of researchers who analyze these complex phenomena as stemming exclusively from antisemitism. Elżbieta Janicka, in particular, in her brilliant and alluring work, casts a clear judgment on some “less-adequate” Polish attempts to recover the memory of Jewish existence in public commemorative and artistic initiatives. Zubrzycki’s approach, in contrast, seems more humanistically underwritten and open to surprising research developments. Upending established canons whenever analyses appear inadequate to the Polish context, her more than a decade of patient, multifaceted research has produced unimpeachable findings. As a foundational premise, Zubrzycki assumes that both “anti-and philosemitism—non-Jews’ support of and even identification with, Jews—are part of a single struggle to define what constitutes Polishness” (2). Like Erica Lehrer, who regards “vicarious Jewishness” as a critique of Polish antisemitism, she posits [End Page 491] that these seemingly contradicting phenomena express multilayered attitudes to the current political climate in Poland. The first part of the book describes cultural sites of a mnemonic Jewish awakening. Zubrzycki begins by crediting the diverse mnemonic practices that indicate both Jewish presence in a given locality and the process of its erasure and tabooization. From the installation of a path tracing the ghetto wall into the pavement of present-day Warsaw, to a project recreating the presence of mezuzot from remnants on the doorframes of Kraków’s Kazimierz district, these initiatives commemorate the dead and indict the intentional acts of postwar forgetting of the Polish Jews, for whatever political and social reasons, not all of which can be ascribed to the Communist control of public discourse. Immediately following, there is an analysis of testimonies gathered in response to Rafal Betlejewski’s artistic action, I Miss You Jew. Although most appear self-serving, even narcissistic, the project garnered positive feedback from both Polish and Jewish communities. In contrast, Betlejewski’s next “performance,” Burning the Barn, on the Jedwabne
书评:《复活的犹太人:民族主义、哲学主义和波兰的犹太人复兴》，作者:莫妮卡·赖斯·吉纳维·祖布日茨基。《复活的犹太人:民族主义、哲学主义和波兰的犹太人复兴》。普林斯顿，新泽西州:普林斯顿大学出版社，2022。genevi Zubrzycki的原创学术，横跨社会学和人类学，分析了在文化转型的关键时刻，民族主义和宗教的冲突影响。在一本关于奥斯维辛十字架争议的重要著作和另一本关于世俗的quacimbsicois身份形成的著作之后，她转向了犹太人在波兰复兴的令人困惑的现象。关于祖布日茨基所称的“犹太转向”的物质和象征解释的文献越来越多，呈现出一系列的评估。一个引人入胜的发展是形成了一个极端批判的研究“学派”，他们将这些复杂的现象分析为完全源于反犹主义。Elżbieta特别是Janicka，在她辉煌而诱人的作品中，对一些“不够充分”的波兰人试图在公共纪念和艺术活动中恢复犹太人存在的记忆做出了明确的判断。相比之下，Zubrzycki的方法似乎更人性化，并对令人惊讶的研究发展持开放态度。每当分析似乎不适合波兰的背景时，她就会颠覆既定的经典，她十多年来耐心而多方面的研究得出了无懈可击的发现。作为一个基本前提，Zubrzycki假设“反犹太人主义和哲学主义——非犹太人对犹太人的支持甚至认同——都是定义波兰性的单一斗争的一部分”(2)。就像Erica Lehrer一样，她认为“替代犹太人”是对波兰反犹主义的批评，她认为这些看似矛盾的现象表达了对波兰当前政治气候的多层次态度。这本书的第一部分描述了犹太人的记忆觉醒的文化遗址。Zubrzycki首先将各种各样的记忆方法归功于这些方法，这些方法既表明了犹太人在特定地区的存在，也表明了犹太人被抹去和禁忌化的过程。从修建一条从隔都墙延伸到今天华沙人行道的道路，到在Kraków Kazimierz区的门框上重建mezuzot存在的项目，这些举措都是为了纪念死者，并谴责战后蓄意遗忘波兰犹太人的行为，无论出于何种政治和社会原因，并非所有这些都可以归因于共产党对公共话语的控制。紧接着是对拉斐尔·贝特莱耶夫斯基的艺术作品《我想念你犹太人》所收集的证词的分析。尽管大多数人表现得自私自利，甚至自恋，但该项目获得了波兰和犹太社区的积极反馈。相比之下，贝特莱耶夫斯基的下一部“表演”《燃烧谷仓》(Burning the Barn)讲述的是耶德瓦布内大屠杀，这部作品因轻视残忍的谋杀，并将“对肇事者罪行的赎罪置于对犹太人创伤的尊重之上”的特权而激起了愤怒(86)。在第四章中，祖布日茨基讨论了她在华沙的波兰犹太人历史博物馆中遭遇的民族志研究。她承认，博物馆的设计似乎强化了波兰人是主人、犹太人是客人的观念，让犹太人的历史没有融入波兰的历史。她承认，对于一些来自国外的游客来说，这种经历可能是“救赎”的。进一步挑战博物馆的批评者，Zubrzycki合理地质疑，“暴力和死亡是否应该成为展示犹太历史的棱镜”(107)?这个问题似乎没有令人满意的答案;挖掘一个人被掩埋的“黑暗过去”可能经常与公共教育的目标相冲突。书的第二部分以分析非犹太人扮演的犹太人身份开始，祖布日茨基认为，这是一种重建“多元文化、丰富多彩、宽容的波兰”的渴望，是一种对多种族、多宗教波兰历史的想象建构。这种想象中的对多元文化的渴望不是通过认同像越南人和乌克兰人这样的当代少数民族，而是通过认同波兰人渴望回归的缺席犹太人来实现的。考虑到文化挪用的范式不足以讨论这一现象，Zubrzycki提出了六个与犹太文化“接触”的清单。从“粗糙的文化挪用”到“随意的参与”、“浪漫的参与”、“批判内省的参与”、“政治参与”和“移情版的挪用”(157)，她的类型学出色地定位了波兰对犹太人的不同态度，可能是任何未来文化的有用工具……
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Pub Date : 2023-11-01DOI: 10.1353/ajs.2023.a911537
Nahem Ilan
Reviewed by: Moses and Abraham Maimonides: Encountering the Divine by Diana Lobel Nahem Ilan Diana Lobel. Moses and Abraham Maimonides: Encountering the Divine. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2021. xix + 216 pp. Diana Lobel is an accomplished scholar of medieval Jewish thought, especially the Sufi elements to be found in Jewish thought in Spain and Egypt. In the present book, she focuses on the approaches of Maimonides and his son, Abraham Maimonides, to the Divine Name and to the possibility of an encounter between mortal and material man and an abstract and eternal God. This is a complex and challenging issue, on both the philosophical and religious levels, and herein lies the importance and the value of the didactic structure of the book. Most of the chapters are brief, each concluding with a clear and concise summary. The book consists of two parts, each made up of seven chapters. In the first part, Lobel compares the father’s and son’s positions concerning the Created Light, the Created Word, and the experience of revelation at Mount Sinai. In the second part, she discusses the phrase ʾehyeh ʾasher ʾehyeh (Exodus 3:14) and the meaning of the Tetragrammaton YHWH in their writings as they relate to the concepts of Eternity and Necessary Existence. In the introduction, Lobel points out that “while Maimonides describes an intellectual process including studying the rules of logic and inference, Abraham emphasizes a spiritual, pietistic process of purification of the heart and mind, without the goal of scientific study of creation” (xvi). And indeed, Abraham Maimonides [End Page 460] adopted a distinctive Sufi position.1 Lobel’s journey begins with Abraham Maimonides’s commentary on the story of the cleft of the rock (Exodus 33:22) and the language with which he emphasizes its visual dimension.2 Inter alia, she compares Abraham’s view to that of his father and of Al-Ghazali. In the second chapter, Lobel discusses the esoteric dimension of Maimonides’s interpretation of the Created Light. In the third chapter, she compares the approaches of Maimonides and Abraham Maimonides to the pillars of smoke and fire, and among other things, examines Judah Halevi’s position regarding the question of God’s presence. In the fourth chapter, Lobel analyzes Abraham’s approach to the Created Light in the preparation for the Sinai event (Exodus 19), observing that “the purpose of the light is to teach something about the divine” (42). Here, too, she demonstrates the affinity between Abraham and Al-Ghazali and the stark difference between father and son, noting that “for Maimonides, a key component of intellectual worship is contemplation of ‘the divine science,’ which includes physics and metaphysics, the natural order through which God governs the universe” (52). In the fifth chapter, Lobel elucidates Maimonides’s stance on the theophanic dimension of the events at Mount Sinai. In the sixth chapter, she compares Maimonides’s view with that of Rabbi Abraham he-Ḥas
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Pub Date : 2023-11-01DOI: 10.1353/ajs.2023.a911550
Chelsie May
Reviewed by: Unknown Past: Layla Murad, The Jewish-Muslim Star of Egypt by Hanan Hammad Chelsie May Hanan Hammad. Unknown Past: Layla Murad, The Jewish-Muslim Star of Egypt. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2022. 328 pp. Hanan Hammad’s Unknown Past: Layla Murad, The Jewish-Muslim Star of Egypt delicately theorizes that to examine the sensational actress-singer by way of an isolated identity factor, such as Jewishness, is to merely isolate her further. Murad (1918–1995) appeared in roughly twenty-seven films and was declared the “Cinderella of Egyptian Cinema” in the mid-twentieth century when Egyptian cinema was approaching its zenith as a dominant cultural force locally and in other Arabic-speaking countries. For the biographer, her life is a story with numerous possible opening scenes. Amplifying Murad as a renowned woman in Egyptian society is one potential starting point. A focus on her success as an actress-singer from a Jewish family in the modern Middle East is yet another. However, attempting to reveal something about Murad as primarily a woman or primarily a Jew denies the lessons born of intersectionality. Hammad insists, “Layla Murad’s case demonstrates the importance of using the concept of intersectionality, developed by queer and feminist theorists to discuss the experiences of American minority women, to study women in Egypt and beyond” (230). Indeed, [End Page 489] the intersectionality of Black feminists would make visible Murad’s structural identity—power structures that capriciously made her at times famous, infamous, and invisible. The case of Murad’s celebrated life is the subject of this meticulously curated biography by Hammad, a social and cultural historian of the modern Middle East. Since Murad lived such a rich life, there is irony that she could be isolated once more by those eager to understand her. Hammad draws attention to the extent she was rendered separate, variously, on the grounds of being a girl, woman, Jew, actress, wife, convert, and single mother, all of which was perpetuated by patriarchal family and society structures, the entertainment industry, gossip, the Egyptian state, body image standards, the Free Officers, Zionist propaganda, and intimate partners. Murad was often reduced to something singular, a trap that arguably produced many of the curiosities and rumors that characterized her long public-facing life. Taking Murad’s “scandals” as seriously as she takes a set of primary sources that are often dismissed—celebrity gossip/entertainment print media—Hammad unspools an empathetic and complex treatment of the entertainer and woman that need not reify her, but also never leaves her languishing as an enigma. The intricate and sensitive assessments of Murad that Hammad returns to at the close of each chapter are intriguing conclusions that should be left for readers to experience. In these chapters, Murad comes of age, gains notoriety, marries, becomes a mother, asserts herself as an artist, navi
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Pub Date : 2023-11-01DOI: 10.1353/ajs.2023.a911540
Naomi Brenner
Reviewed by: Women Writing Jewish Modernity, 1919–1939 by Allison Schachter Naomi Brenner Allison Schachter. Women Writing Jewish Modernity, 1919–1939. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2022. 230 pp. In 1919, according to Yiddish literary lore, the Yiddish writer Fradl Shtok stormed into the office of the New York Yiddish daily Der tog and confronted her colleague Aaron Glanz-Leyeles. Glanz-Leyeles, an influential poet and editor, called Shtok’s first collection of short stories monotonous. Shtok, so the story goes, slapped Glanz-Leyeles across the face and then disappeared from the Yiddish literary scene, never to publish again. Yiddish critics summed up her brief literary career as a promising woman writer undone by hysteria and suggested that she died not long after. But rumors of Shtok’s death were premature, as Allison Schacter explains in Women Writing Jewish Modernity, 1919–1939. The fact that this talented writer was “killed off” decades before she actually died, Schacter argues, “is proof that we do not know enough about Yiddish women writers” (30). The book analyzes the experiences and texts of Shtok and four other early twentieth-century Yiddish and Hebrew women writers: Devora Baron, Elisheva Bikhovsky, Leah Goldberg, and Debora Vogel. Bringing these writers together highlights the systemic challenges that women writers encountered in attempts to find literary acclaim and financial stability across languages and geographic locations. Schachter’s book, however, is not about the failure of these writers to find secure footing in Yiddish and Hebrew literary cultures. Rather, she aims to “rewrite the narratives of Jewish modernity from their perspectives and rethink modern Jewish experience through their eyes” (174). To do so, she explores the writers’ innovations in modernist prose in the context of the devaluation of women’s labor, both domestic and artistic, by a Jewish culture dominated by men. A key term throughout the book is “aesthetic labor,” which is a concept that proves fruitful [End Page 467] in analyzing texts ranging from realist short stories to fragmented prose montages. Schacter draws on recent scholarship on modernism, feminism, and Marxism to argue that aesthetic engagement can be read as a form of labor, particularly in the context of the exploitation of women’s artistic voices. This linkage between the social forces of marginalization and women’s aesthetic projects serves as a common thread in her analysis of the literary work of these five writers. Women Writing joins a growing corpus of recent books on women’s Yiddish and Hebrew literature (e.g., Hellerstein 2014, Merin 2016, Kelman 2018). Remarkably, it is the first monograph to examine early twentieth-century women’s prose in Hebrew and Yiddish together, as part of a multilingual and transnational Jewish culture. The book’s focus on women’s prose balances the tendency within scholarship to focus on women’s poetry, long considered to be more “appropriate
{"title":"Women Writing Jewish Modernity, 1919–1939 by Allison Schachter (review)","authors":"Naomi Brenner","doi":"10.1353/ajs.2023.a911540","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ajs.2023.a911540","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Women Writing Jewish Modernity, 1919–1939 by Allison Schachter Naomi Brenner Allison Schachter. Women Writing Jewish Modernity, 1919–1939. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2022. 230 pp. In 1919, according to Yiddish literary lore, the Yiddish writer Fradl Shtok stormed into the office of the New York Yiddish daily Der tog and confronted her colleague Aaron Glanz-Leyeles. Glanz-Leyeles, an influential poet and editor, called Shtok’s first collection of short stories monotonous. Shtok, so the story goes, slapped Glanz-Leyeles across the face and then disappeared from the Yiddish literary scene, never to publish again. Yiddish critics summed up her brief literary career as a promising woman writer undone by hysteria and suggested that she died not long after. But rumors of Shtok’s death were premature, as Allison Schacter explains in Women Writing Jewish Modernity, 1919–1939. The fact that this talented writer was “killed off” decades before she actually died, Schacter argues, “is proof that we do not know enough about Yiddish women writers” (30). The book analyzes the experiences and texts of Shtok and four other early twentieth-century Yiddish and Hebrew women writers: Devora Baron, Elisheva Bikhovsky, Leah Goldberg, and Debora Vogel. Bringing these writers together highlights the systemic challenges that women writers encountered in attempts to find literary acclaim and financial stability across languages and geographic locations. Schachter’s book, however, is not about the failure of these writers to find secure footing in Yiddish and Hebrew literary cultures. Rather, she aims to “rewrite the narratives of Jewish modernity from their perspectives and rethink modern Jewish experience through their eyes” (174). To do so, she explores the writers’ innovations in modernist prose in the context of the devaluation of women’s labor, both domestic and artistic, by a Jewish culture dominated by men. A key term throughout the book is “aesthetic labor,” which is a concept that proves fruitful [End Page 467] in analyzing texts ranging from realist short stories to fragmented prose montages. Schacter draws on recent scholarship on modernism, feminism, and Marxism to argue that aesthetic engagement can be read as a form of labor, particularly in the context of the exploitation of women’s artistic voices. This linkage between the social forces of marginalization and women’s aesthetic projects serves as a common thread in her analysis of the literary work of these five writers. Women Writing joins a growing corpus of recent books on women’s Yiddish and Hebrew literature (e.g., Hellerstein 2014, Merin 2016, Kelman 2018). Remarkably, it is the first monograph to examine early twentieth-century women’s prose in Hebrew and Yiddish together, as part of a multilingual and transnational Jewish culture. The book’s focus on women’s prose balances the tendency within scholarship to focus on women’s poetry, long considered to be more “appropriate","PeriodicalId":54106,"journal":{"name":"AJS Review-The Journal of the Association for Jewish Studies","volume":"23 8","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135454884","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-11-01DOI: 10.1353/ajs.2023.a911528
Eliezer Sariel, Aviram Sariel
Abstract: This article presents a case study of a halakhic innovation led by Orthodox authorities: in a watershed ruling on mourning a suicide, the Ḥatam Sofer allowed families of suicides to mourn. The exemplar par excellence of Orthodoxy and coiner of its supposed motto “the novel is prohibited by the Torah,” Sofer headed a ruling both novel and permissive. Further, the bulk of his responsum is explicitly dedicated to confronting the Shulḥan ‘arukh . In our opinion, Sofer contended with a substantial challenge to the halakhic system presented by Saul Berlin in his controversial book, Besamim Rosh . We trace commonalities between Berlin and Sofer and note their differences. Consequently, we demonstrate how historical analysis must include rabbinic polemics and study their efforts to preserve the accountability and rationality of the Halakhah.
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