Creating Ethnicity: East European Jews and Lithuanian Immigrants in Chicago

Abstract

By focusing on East European Jewish and Lithuanian ethnic groups in the United States, this paper offers a three stage model for understanding the process by which assimilating groups create their ethnicity: Stage One, ethnic community and participatory organizations; Stage Two, individual perpetuation and representational organizations; Stage Three, informal behavior and residual symbols. The model considers the impact of both cultural and structural variables, instead of treating them as rival claimants to primacy. In applying the model to data gathered in the groups' Chicago communities, we found that despite particular divergencies, both groups presented a similar response to the United States, enabling their members to maintain a dual ethnic identity beyond the tightly-knit ghetto and urban village.     

Obstacles to the Integration of the Holocaust into Post-Communist East European Historical Narratives

Factors that have made it difficult for post-communist East European societies to integrate the Holocaust into their historical cultures include the communist heritage, which downplayed the specifically Jewish Holocaust; sensitivity to charges that a nation was complicit in the murder of the Jews; the framing of East European histories as national narratives into which it is difficult to incorporate the experience of other nations; the feeling that Jewish suffering is recognized, while that of other East Europeans is not; the positive re-evaluation of the interwar and wartime politics and culture after the collapse of communism; the survival and revival of anti-Semitism, with new inputs from the Middle East and from Western Holocaust deniers; the construction in the West of the Holocaust as a centrepiece of twentieth-century history; the influence of East European diasporas; the embedment of the discourse on the Holocaust in the political divide between nativists and Westernizers; the deployment of accusations of Holocaust collaboration as an instrument of foreign policy; and debate over the restitution of confiscated Jewish property. Often these factors come together into a reinforcing discursive structure. The essay’s conclusion suggests how to overcome these obstacles to the integration of the Holocaust into East European histories.     

Child maltreatment in the family: a European perspective

Child maltreatment is generally referred to under the global categories of physical, sexual, emotional/psychological abuse and neglect. The Concerted Action on the Prevention of Child Abuse in Europe (CAPCAE) reports on the specific forms of harm and injury, actions and persons believed responsible in eight European countries. The most common actions across all participating countries responsible for harm were those of violent parenting or absent parenting. A review of prevention strategies found that few programmes focused on specific behaviours or included measures to indicate whether their actions were successful in preventing further harm to children. It is recommended that fathers need to be targeted in prevention as well as mothers and that specific data collection of actual harms, actions, persons responsible and outcomes needs to be implemented as a priority in all European countries. Such specificity avoids a focus on risk which is unacceptable in some countries, over inclusive of parents and resource intensive.     

Psychological trauma from the perspective of medical history: from Paracelsus to Freud

Psychological traumatisation, as we understand it today, was—in terms of the history of ideas—anticipated by various approaches which have had a lasting impact on modern psychiatry, psychotherapy, and psychosomatic medicine. On the one hand, there is the traditional concept of possession and exorcism with its impressive psychodynamics. On the other hand, there is the theory of the imagination, of an illusion in the sense of a pathogenic infection. Especially the pathological teachings of Paracelsus (sixteenth century) and Johann Baptist van Helmont (seventeenth century)—the latter having advanced the former’s alchemist approach—demonstrate the extent to which demonological, parasitological, and psychological ideas were amalgamated in their “ontological” notion of a disease. Only the introduction of hypnotism in the middle of the nineteenth century made possible a psychological or psychodynamic understanding of psychological trauma in the modern sense. Hypnotism was striving to strictly dissociate from the magical and natural philosophical speculations of mesmerism and its theory was quite compatible with the model representations of scientific medicine. Sigmund Freud was able to tie in his ideas of hysteria and neurosis with this concept and especially to define repression of (infantile) sexuality as the cause of a culturally ineluctable psychological trauma. Finally, a brief survey of medical history is given to explore artificial trauma as a healing factor.     

Holding on to history and each other: The unexpected LGBTQ legacy of a Czech Holocaust survivor and a Torah scroll from her hometown

Abstract

A Czech Holocaust survivor rescued by a Kindertransport in 1939; a long-lost Torah scroll, rediscovered in 1964, from a Jewish community wiped out in World War II; a German American lesbian who converted to Judaism in 2001. Three disparate stories, unfolding decades apart, converge in one memorable encounter, a Kristallnacht commemoration in Los Angeles organized by Beth Chayim Chadashim (BCC), the world’s first LGBTQ synagogue, which leads to an enduring friendship and fresh insight into contemporary queer Jewish life. In this personal essay, longtime BCC member Sylvia Sukop interweaves history and autobiography to explore the beauty and power of ritual, the resonance of the “Choose life” passage in Deuteronomy that her congregation reads from its rescued Czech scroll every Yom Kippur, and the many forms that good deeds and survival can take. Progressive faith communities, the author suggests, and the traditions in which they are rooted make space to witness and affirm the fullness of one another’s humanity, bridging differences and fostering unexpected kinship in a brutally divisive world.     

Cultural diversity and school equality: Intercultural education in Spain from a European perspective

Formerly a country of emigrants, Spain has now become a receptor of immigrants from other countries. In spite of the great diversity that existed in our country's past, reflection, legislation and educational concern pertaining to cultural pluralism developed only after this phenomenon. In this paper we examine the adoption of the intercultural perspective in education in Spain, and the relationship between policy and practice. We first discuss the theoretical framework that we use. Second, we look at European policies in this area and finally we describe how cultural diversity is dealt with in Spain, both from a legislative and a practical point of view.     

Materials relating to East European Jewish history and culture in the archives of the former Soviet Union

The Kiev Institute of Jewish (from the early 1930s “Proletarian”) Culture (Institut Evreiskoi Proletarskoi Kul'tury, IEPK), based at the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences (UAS), was one of two such organisations in the inter-war period. This article discusses the fate of its archive, a rich source that included material from Leningrad and elsewhere, in the wake of two interventions; firstly, its sudden closure in 1936 by the Soviet authorities and, secondly, the Nazi occupation of Kiev in the Second World War. As a consequence, the archive was scattered to the winds, ending up in two continents.     

Khash,history and Armenian national identity: reconsidering post-socialist gender,food practices and the domestic

This article explores how improvisation with food and cooking is a way for Armenian women to appeal to ‘public’ national narratives from within their ‘private’ spaces. Such appeal to the grand narrative of Armenian identity is in many ways predicated on their skilful abilities to survive or ‘make do’ with what is available and it is these skills that establish connections between individuals, the community and the nation. When these skills are enacted, women have the power to invoke national feelings of Armenianness and feminine morality through their ability to find and cook a proper Armenian meal. These skills also give women the ability to obligate individuals both within their families and amongst their peers at the same time that they can use them to express creativity and personal identities through their cooking. In other words, through cooking and from within the kitchen, I argue that women engage with powerful ‘public’ or national discourses that are often assumed to suppress them.     

Modernity and the hybridization of nationalism and religion: Zionism and the Jews of the Middle East as a heuristic case

This article looks at nationalism and religion, analyzing the sociological mechanisms by which their intersection is simultaneously produced and obscured. I propose that the construction of modern nationalism follows two contradictory principles that operate simultaneously: hybridization and purification. Hybridization refers to the mixing of “religious” and “secular” practices; purification refers to the separation between “religion” and “nationalism” as two distinct ontological zones. I test these arguments empirically using the case of Zionist nationalism. As a movement that was born in Europe but traveled to the Middle East, Zionism exhibits traits of both of these seemingly contradictory principles, of hybridization and purification, and pushes them to their limits. The article concludes by pointing to an epistemological asymmetry in the literature by which the fusion of nationalism and religion tends to be underplayed in studies of the West and overplayed in studies of the East/global South.

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A European perspective: The Nonprofit Almanac and the development of European profiles

Conclusion The Independent Sector approach to measuring the US non-profit sector, as summarised inThe Almanac, provides a valuable and instructive model for European and other attempts to describe and measure the sector. The aim of mappers in those other countries should not be to replicateThe Almanac, but to imitate its broad approach, using it to stimulate and encourage statistical efforts elsewhere. Although the time for whole-Europe mappings has not yet come — in fact, it is very many years away — individual European countries could and should make substantial progress. As I have argued, progress will generally be greatest when an imaginative blend of five main approaches is employed. This is exemplified by the Independent Sector's work, and would-be mimics should endeavour to match both this blending and the energy and zest with which the task has been tackled.Professor of the Economics of Social Care and Deputy Director of the Personal Social Services Research Unit, University of Kent at Canterbury and Co-editor,Voluntas.I would like to acknowledge a number of European colleagues whose comments assisted my preparation of this paper, in particular Edith Archambault, Paulo Barbetta, Andrea Bassi, Rudolph Bauer, Andrew Crook, Jim Jackson, Jeremy Kendall, Éva Kuti, Susan Saxon-Harrold, Wolfgang Seibel, Justin Davis Smith and Tymen van den Ploeg. This paper is lodged in the Personal Social Services Research Unit as Discussion Paper 873.     

A note on the migration of Jews from Dublin

The emigration of Jews from Dublin, Ireland, between 1930 and 1980 is analyzed. Data are from a survey carried out in 1980 among 130 randomly selected Jewish households in Dublin.     

The individual in Japanese history: Parallels to and divergences from the European experience

This paper shows that Japan underwent a sequence of historical periods during which the level of technical development and the place of the individual in society paralleled that of similar periods in Europe. Particular attention is paid to 16th-century Japan, a period remarkably similar to the European Renaissance in its individualism and socioeconomic and cultural vitality. In both Japan and Western Europe, this renaissance followed the breakdown of an imperium and its replacement by a feudal system. The historical parallel continues with those parts of Europe in which absolutist governments were successfully imposed, since Japan underwent a similar phenomenon, accompanied by a similar decline in individualism and in technological development. Although no definitive conclusions can be reached, the paper explores the implications of these parallels for our understanding of both Japan and the general historical and psychological processes involved in the growth of individualism and technology.     

Service user involvement in social work education: experiences from Germany and implications for a European perspective

ABSTRACT

Service user involvement (SUI) in social work education has gained widespread attention in Europe and other continents. Nevertheless, experiences on including service users in social work education have not been reported from Germany or other German-speaking countries to date. This paper reports preliminary experiences with implementing SUI in a bachelor’s programme of social work in a German University of Applied Sciences. The main goals of the current paper are (1) to provide a background for implementing service user approaches in Germany by introducing the structure of social work education in Germany; (2) to report experiences from a weekend seminar where service users worked together with students of social work in the framework of a curriculum of a German University of Applied Sciences and (3) to formulate some implications of these experiences for SUI across Europe. The main results were that introducing service user involvement into a German curriculum of social work is possible but needs careful reflection and planning. Experiences gathered in the weekend seminar with service users were encouraging for service users, students and teachers. We conclude that systematically implementing SUI into German curricula of social work is important.     

Exodus from the Babylonian Captivity: The Jews of Modern Iraq

The solving of the Eastern Question during the twentieth century ended the existence of the oldest Jewish Diaspora community; modern political, social, and economic phenomenon marginalized a significant ethnic minority that resided in Iraq for over two millennia. Much of this breakdown of relations with the Muslim majority, and the further marginalization of the Iraqi Jewish community can be traced to several events after the turn of the century that occurred during the inter-war period and extending to the creation of Israel in 1948. A rise in Arab nationalism, Germanophilia, British colonialism, and more importantly the answering of the Palestine Question effectively marginalized, and subsequently lead to the expulsion of the Iraqi Jewish community. The Iraqi Jews were marginalized in part by religio-cultural differences in language, which were exacerbated by Jewish economic preeminence in international commerce, which had expanded since the European Capitulations in the 1800s. Furthermore, Jews were denied full cultural inclusion by their exclusion from the military, which served as a cultural and political force in the period of Iraqi state-formation. Coupled with Zionism's rise in Palestine, and Europe, and its regional impact, the Iraqi Jews became viewed as a fifth column and a Trojan horse of European and Zionist imperialism by the Iraqi Muslim majority. Tensions came to a head in the Farhud of June 1941, an anti-Jewish uprising, which followed a pro-Nazi coup lead by Rashid Ali al-Gaylani. The Farhud came to symbolize the breaking point for the Iraqi Jewish community; because of a disproportionately privileged socio-economic status that was based on a different cultural existence, and regional political factors, the Jews of Iraq had been rejected by their host society of two millennia.