From communal charity to national welfare: Jewish orphanages in Eastern Europe before and after World War I

This article examines Jewish institutions for the care of orphans in an attempt to understand several aspects of Jewish life in Eastern Europe: (1) attitudes towards orphans on the part of communal leaders, intellectuals, and political activists; (2) the transition of Jewish charitable and (in the modern period) philanthropic institutions from the pre‐modern communal charity of the early nineteenth century to modern “scientific philanthropy” at the fin de siècle to national welfare in the interwar period; (3) and, to a lesser extent, the experiences of orphans themselves, as far as is possible to ascertain from documents relating to the institutions that cared for them. Marginal figures such as orphans were of growing concern to the organised Jewish community in its increasingly complex encounter with modernity in the Russian Empire, and traditional patterns of charity, family life, and relations between socioeconomic classes were cast into doubt by new government policies and modern scientific attitudes arriving from Western and Central Europe. The religiously mandated charity of the pre‐modern kehillah gave way to a paternalistic philanthropy that aimed to mould a generation of “productive” working‐class Jews. However, the upheavals of World War I and the mass politicisation of East European Jewry brought about a transformation in attitudes towards orphans and other marginal groups, whose care was made a centrepiece of national, and nationally minded, Jewish communal life in the interwar Polish Republic.     

Haunting images: stereotypes of Jewishness among Russian Jewish immigrants in Germany

Glancing at the Jewish spaces in contemporary Germany, an occasional observer would probably be startled. Since the Russian Jewish migration of the 1990s, Germany's Jewish community has come to be the third-largest in Europe. Synagogues, Jewish community centres, and Jewish cultural events have burgeoned. There is even talk about a “Jewish renaissance” in Germany. However, many immigrants claim that the resurrection of Jewish life in Germany is “only a myth,” “an illusion.” This paper is part of a project exploring the processes of the reconstruction of Jewish identities and Jewish communal life by Russian Jewish immigrants in Germany. The focus of this paper is on the stereotypes of Jews and Jewishness evident in immigrants' perceptions and imaginings of their physical gathering spaces – the Jewish community centres (Gemeinden). Focusing on the images that haunt a particular place, I seek to shed light upon the difficulties of re/creating Jewish identity and life among the Russian Jewish immigrants in contemporary Germany.     

Cyclops Cave

Written in the post‐structural traditions of symbolic interactionism, Cyclops Cave is a biographic‐interview‐based and fact‐and‐fiction‐plotted ethnodrama of anti‐Semitism in Soviet higher education. This project is premised on the theories of the “social self”—namely, the “looking‐glass racialized self,” constructed by the dominant ethnic “supremacy,” and the theories of racial stigma as an outcome of the racialized “me” production. Showing the stigma experiences of former Soviet Jewish academics from 1970 to the 1980s, the play adds a new illuminative and self‐interpretive case of a race‐situated symbolic interaction and deconstructs the “root image” of Soviet anti‐Semitism through interpreting the informants' stigma incidents and interactional conflicts between their “selfhood” symbols.     

The Conceptual Incoherence of “Culture” in American Sociology

The meaning of the concept “culture” as used in American sociology is incoherent. Despite the advances and maturing of cultural sociology, the central idea of “culture” itself remains conceptually muddled. This article demonstrates this critical point by analyzing the definitions, meanings, and uses of the word “culture” in the field of cultural sociology’s most significant, recent edited volumes, handbooks, readers, companions, annual review chapters, and award-winning books and journal articles. Arguing for the scholarly importance of conceptual coherence, this article calls for more disciplined and cooperative theoretical work to clarify and move toward a more standardized meaning of “culture” in American sociology.     

Migration,Time, and Religioethnic Identification Among U.S. Jews1

This article examines changes between 1985–1990 and 1995–2000 in relationships between migration and religioethnic identification among U.S. Jews. The results of multivariate analyses of the 1990 and 2000 National Jewish Population Surveys show that Jewish background characteristics have lost their significance as determinants of internal migration and, especially, migration across state boundaries. Concurrently, migration no longer constitutes a serious threat to group continuity and erstwhile negative effects on major religious and social behaviors have disappeared. When the two surveys were integrated into one data set, it was found that “time” enhances the inclination of Jews to move and strengthens their religious and ethnic commitments (though not their commitments to informal Jewish networks). The results are discussed in reference to three competing perspectives of migration‐identification relationships—“selectivity,”“disruption,” and “heightening”—and in the wider theoretical context of religious and ethnic processes in the contemporary United States.     

Community,Ethnicity, and Class in a Changing Rural California Town*

Abstract This study investigates how community is constructed, maintained, and contested among diverse residents of a rural town in California's Central Valley. Drawing on observations, interviews, and archival material, I examine the way in which ethnicity and class play a significant role in recasting how community is organized and interpreted by Mexicans and long‐term white residents. In my field site, Mexicans have long been involved in (in)formal community‐making, yet long‐term white residents perceive a “loss of community” because social relations are no longer structured around an agrarian culture that at one time reinforced ties through volunteerism and interaction in local mainstream institutions. This article demonstrates the continual significance of place and interaction in defining community, but suggests that immigrants develop communities of need aimed at providing important social, emotional, and political support absent in mainstream society. Finally, this study also speaks of the competition for representation and respectability among rural residents developing a sense of belonging. “Community” is never simply the recognition of cultural similarity or social contiguity but a categorical identity that is premised on various forms of exclusion and constructions of otherness     

Whither pogromshchina – historiographical synthesis or deconstruction? 1

This historiographical discussion piece on the implication of Simon Petliura and the Directory in the pogroms during the ill‐fated struggle for Ukrainian independence between 1917 and 1920 focuses on four core issues. Firstly, it suggests that those committed to the current Ukrainian nation‐building agenda face a crucial paradox: for the Directory’s endeavours to qualify as a precedent in nation building, one has to talk up its ability to influence the developments in the territory under its control. Yet to get Petliura and the Directory off the hook as far as the pogroms are concerned, one has to talk down their ability to influence those same developments. Secondly, it fundamentally questions the juxtaposition of “Ukrainian” and “Jewish” approaches on which Henry Abramson’s claim to have achieved a new synthesis between these two positions hinges. Thirdly, it demonstrates just how crucial conceptual transparency is for any useful debate on the significance of antisemitism in this context. Finally, it revisits the contention that it is a priori implausible to hold Petliura and his colleagues responsible because their attitudes towards Jews were generally positive as demonstrated not least by their commitment to Jewish autonomy rights.     

Jewish studies underground in Leningrad in the 1980s†

ABSTRACT

This article is a first-hand report of a participant and leader of a number of underground initiatives within the “refuseniks’” community which aimed to encourage Jewish studies. These underground initiatives involved seminars (scholarly as well as public), excursions through Jewish historical sites, and the publication of a samizdat journal. In short, these initiatives sought to recover and disseminate knowledge of Jewish history and culture.     

Requisite conditions for the formation and viability of a counter‐cultural community

Many scholars have noted that religion is essential for a counter‐culture or utopian community to survive. It has also frequently been maintained that any religion will do, that the content of the religion is inconsequential. This article focuses on the formation and viability of alternative societies and concludes that either harsh circumstances or a particular religious orientation is necessary. Three social conditions and four characteristics of the religious world‐view are specified as being necessary for the formation of an “intentional counter‐culture community.” Each of the predisposing structural factors and each of the characteristics of the world view must be present for the formation and viability of this type of alternative culture. In the “circumstantial counter‐culture community,” religion is much less important; oppressive conditions serve as a functional alternative to the specific religious outlook.     

Nationwide Newspaper Coverage of Immigration Reform: A Community Structure Approach

A community structure analysis compared community characteristics and nationwide coverage of immigration reform in newspapers in 21 major U.S. cities, sampling all 250+ word articles April 23, 2010 to November 12, 2013. The resulting 262 articles were coded for “prominence” and “direction” (“favorable,” “unfavorable,” or “balanced/neutral” coverage), then combined into each newspaper's composite “Media Vector” (range = .632 to ?.4800). Nineteen of 21 newspapers showed favorable coverage of immigration reform. Pearson correlations yielded 4 significant results, the most powerful of which supported immigration reform. The “vulnerability” hypothesis (media “mirror” the interests of marginal/disadvantaged groups) was essentially confirmed. Higher percentages below the poverty line (r = .607, p = .003) and higher crime rates (r = .490, p = .017) correlated with more favorable coverage of immigration reform. By contrast, higher percentages of women in the workforce (r = ?.543, p = .008) and higher proportions of hate crimes (r = ?.403, p = .048) were linked with less favorable coverage. Regression analysis yielded the percentage living below the poverty line accounting for 37.2% of the variance, and proportion of hate crimes yielded an additional 19.1% of the variance. The Midwest had by far the most favorable coverage of immigration reform, more than any other region.     

Organizational transformation of a community‐based clinic

This article reports a case study of the planned transformation of a volunteer‐run community crisis‐care center into a community clinic. The data for this study are drawn from organizational records and participant observation. During the transformation, the clinic had to plan an orderly transition from volunteer to paid staff, from paper records to an integrated management information system, from primarily crisis care to chronic care, from primarily (physical) medical care to integrated case management. Along the way, some of the planned activities proved impossible to implement, some of what turned out to be key events were completely unanticipated, and many activities were finally accomplished but in a fashion very different from what was proposed in the plan. Four lessons were drawn from this case. First, as much as the caseload increased, the need for supportive services grew at a much faster rate. Second, the case demonstrates the need to develop productivity benchmarks that are speci.c to the group being served. Third, the case demonstrates the need for .exibility to go “off plan” to accomplish a larger goal. Fourth, the case illustrates how “big money” and rapid growth can threaten the sustainability of an organization. “What we think of as idyllic only looks that way to sightseers from other places, and other times.” —Carolyn Heilbrun, The Last Gift of Time     

National Minority, National Mentality, and Communal Ethnicity: Changes in Ethnic Identity of Former Soviet Union Jewish Emigrants on the Israeli Kibbutz

In this paper we examine and compare the ethnic identity of the Jews in the former Soviet Union (FSU) and the process of change in ethnic identity among the new immigrants from the FSU. This analysis considers the role of the kibbutz as the first experience of Jewish community in their lives, as well as the location of the first phase of their process of absorption and resocialization into new and unfamiliar surroundings. The data are drawn through a longitudinal research design, with a pre‐ and post‐analysis of changes in the ethnicity of migrants studied from their arrival on the Israeli kibbutz until the completion of the five‐month kibbutz programme. We found that pre‐migration Soviet Jews defined their ethnicity as a discriminated national minority with a weak symbolic ethnicity content. The ambivalent nature of the ethnicity of Jews while in the FSU was expressed in the fact that although a majority were deculturized from traditional dimensions of Jewish life, they nevertheless felt they belonged to a specific ethnic group. Post‐migration ethnicity was found to be remarkably altered; the former ambivalence was dissolved. On the macro‐level, membership in the economically and politically successful Russian‐speaking group of Israeli society is a source of self esteem, rather than a sign of shameful otherness. On the micro‐level of ethnicity, the encounter in the initial phase of absorption in Israel, within the kibbutz Jewish community, often demands a re‐examination of their private concept of Jewishness, serving as a first step in resolving their ambivalent ethnic identity. Consequently, their new ethnic identity may now well have weaker boundaries, but a more positive (non‐alienating) content than that left behind.     

Dostoevsky and Freud: Autonomy and Addiction in Gambling

In this paper the modern ideal of “autonomous” or “pure” gambling is put forward in an analysis of Dostoevsky's gambling behavior, his novel The Gambler (1866) and Freud's psychoanalysis of Dostoevsky. The significance of The Gambler lies in the way conceptions of gambling are related to the social conditions of gamblers. Furthermore, the author demonstrates that Dostoevsky and Freud express contradictory views on gambling addiction. While Dostoevsky primarily appreciated roulette as a means of making money, Freud mistakenly interpreted this as a “pathological passion”. In different ways, however, both approaches toward excessive gambling presuppose and reinforce “gambling‐for‐its‐own‐sake” – Le jeu pour le jeu.     

Social Meanings of the Occult*

Data from a participant-observational study of the tarot are used to explore the social meanings of modern occultism and to examine certain rival contentions about these beliefs, practices, adherents, and the manner in which activities are or are not organized socially. Unlike collective behavioral audiences, which employ occultisms as a form of popular entertainment, the occult practitioners reported here participate in an “esoteric community” involving practitioner-client relations, social networks, and small cult-like groups. Although the occult tarot constitutes an elaborate theosophy, contemporary adherents selectively subscribe to these doctrines and they freely mix the occult, other esoteric teachings, and elements of traditional culture. When the tarot is used in a divinatory fashion as a service to the general public for pay, problems of legitimacy commonly arise. Occultists in the community deal with this problem by presenting themselves as “professionals.” Within the nominally pluralistic climate of American society, occultisms thereby become another path to dealing meaningfully with life's problems and expressing individual identity. Organized in terms of loose collections of practitioners and groups and supported by the larger cultic milieu, occult communities represent an adaptation to modern society which is likely to persist long after particular groups fail or particular individuals move on to other social scenes.     

ACKNOWLEDGMENT OF GUEST REVIEWERS

This study explored 14‐month‐old infants' ability to form novel word‐spatial relation associations. During habituation, infants heard 1 novel word (e.g., teek) while viewing dynamic containment events (i.e., Big Bird placed in a box) and, on other habituation trials, a second novel word (e.g., blick) while viewing dynamic support events (i.e., Big Bird placed on the box). Each novel word was presented in a sentence (e.g., “She's putting Big Bird teek the box”). During the test, infants discriminated an event that maintained the habituation word‐relation pairing from one that presented a switch in this pairing. The results indicate that 14‐month‐olds can learn to form word‐relation associations quickly, requiring only a few minutes of experience with each word‐relation pairing.     

Christian Zionists in the Holy Land: Evangelical Churches,Labor Migrants,and the Jewish State

In this article we trace the creation of Evangelical churches created by and for Latin American undocumented migrants in Israel. First, we relate to the social significance of religious practices and beliefs for migrants' individual and collective identity in the host society and the ways through which non-Jewish labor migrants in Israel are creating alternative spaces that operate simultaneously as a new community of belonging. We consider the possibilities latent in the churches as “free spaces” for foreigners in the Jewish State, along with the limitations that participation in such a church entails for the migrant community. The second theme involves the universe of meanings through which believing migrants interpret their existence and place in the Jewish State. Here we probe how religion becomes a way of legitimizing the migrants' presence in a Jewish state and a means of channeling their claims for inclusion in the host country. We delve into the modes whereby the theological position of Christian Zionism is translated into a sociological position of Christian migrants in a Jewish state.     

Communities in Question: Sociality and Solidarity in Nancy and Blanchot

In his early essays “Violence and Metaphysics” and “The Ends of Man”, Jacques Derrida evoked a “community of the question” when he called for a fundamental questioning of the being of the “we” in the West. This demand was later formulated by Jean‐Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue‐Labarthe as the philosophical interrogation of the political (le politique), in distinction from the question of politics (la politique). This essay begins by arguing that what is at stake in this distinction is the very possibility of politics that is otherwise foreclosed. It then explores Nancy’s interrogation of le politique in The Inoperative Community, and compares his response to Maurice Blanchot’s response in The Unavowable Community. It is argued that both deconstructions of “community” depict a certain sociality that corresponds to Derrida’s call—a “communality” beyond or radically other than the traditional model of community as formed by sovereign individuals and as forming the sovereign state. Where they differ is that Blanchot founds the ethical relation of the “unavowable” community on the radical interruption of ontology signaled by death, whereas Nancy casts ontology itself in an ethical register, and thereby allows a certain solidarity to emerge as well.

At the very moment when there is no longer a “command post” from which a “socialist vision” could put forward a subject of history or politics, or, in an even broader sense, when there is no longer a “city” or “society” out of which a regulative figure could be modeled, at this moment being‐many, shielded from all intuition, from all representation or imagination, presents itself with all the acuity of its question, with all the sovereignty of its demand (Jean‐Luc Nancy 2000 Nancy, Jean‐Luc. 2000. Being Singular Plural, Edited by: Robert, Richardson and Anne, O’Byrne. Stanford [1996]: Stanford University Press.  [Google Scholar], p. 43).     

Hierarchical Processing in Seven‐Month‐Old Infants

Hierarchical structures are crucial to many aspects of cognitive processing and especially for language. However, there still is little experimental support for the ability of infants to learn such structures. Here, we show that, with structures simple enough to be processed by various animals, seven‐month‐old infants seem to learn hierarchical relations. Infants were presented with an artificial language composed of “sentences” made of three‐syllable “words.” The syllables within words conformed to repetition patterns based on syllable tokens involving either adjacent repetitions (e.g., dubaba) or nonadjacent repetitions (e.g., du ba du ) . Importantly, the sequence of word structures in each sentence conformed to repetition patterns based on word types (e.g., aba‐ abb ‐ abb ). Infants learned this repetition pattern of repetition patterns and thus likely a hierarchical pattern based on repetitions, but only when the repeated word structure was based on adjacent repetitions. While our results leave open the question of which exact sentence‐level pattern infants learned, they suggest that infants embedded the word‐level patterns into a higher‐level pattern and thus seemed to acquire a hierarchically embedded pattern.     

Jewish acculturation in late nineteenth-century Russia: the case of Yonah Berkhin

Young Jewish students in the Pale of Settlement have not received comprehensive scholarly attention, despite their impact on Jewish politics and the public sphere in the late nineteenth century. Typically, representations of Jewish pupils and students are limited to the study of small and non-representative radical groups. This paper fills this gap through a contextualized examination of the practices and meanings of acculturation among educated Jewish youth. It focuses on a previously unknown diary by Yonah Berkhin, a Jewish teenager who strove to obtain a secondary education between 1879 and 1882. The discussion of this document adds a critical contextual perspective to the existing scholarship on acculturation among Jewish learning youth in late nineteenth-century Russia. I suggest that acculturation was a complex, multidirectional process. I show how, rather than merely creating alienation from Jewish society – which is often described as a “departure” leading either to a complete assimilation or to “repentance” and “return” – acculturation created new as well as modified existing modes of attachment to Jewish society.