Portrayals of the internal God among Ashkenazi Jewish Orthodox lesbians in Israel

Abstract

Most of the existing literature on Ashkenazi Orthodox Jewish lesbians focuses on sociological aspects, mainly the negative attitudes held by religious communities towards their sexual identity and the various problems that arise from these. Less attention has been paid to lesbians’ psychological coping mechanisms with the tensions between their two central identities: the religious and the sexual. Ashkenazi Orthodox lesbians find themselves in a complicated situation where they remain on the margins of both their “natural” communities: the religious one and the homosexual one. As a result, they feel rejected, isolated, and even punished by society. As believers, God is their ultimate refuge. But there are different conceptions of God, ranging from benevolent to persecutory, accepting or highly judgmental and punishing. This variance has not been considered in regard to the dual identity of Ashkenazi Orthodox lesbians. This article focuses on this neglected issue, examining Ashkenazi Orthodox lesbians’ conception of God and its relation to their managing the conflict between their apparently conflicting identities.     

Translating Spirituality: Universalism and Particularism in the Diffusion of Spiritual Care from the United States to Israel

Research on the transnational diffusion of ideas and practices shows how cultural objects go through translation, adaptation, and vernacularization when implemented in new localities. Less attention is given to the translators themselves and their heterogeneous and often conflicting visions. Drawing on the notion of transnational social fields (TSF s), this article investigates how cultural objects get vernacularized differently in different parts of the TSF , demonstrating how processes of translation reflect larger social and political struggles over questions of identity. As a case study, we focus on the attempt of actors from Israel and the United States to institutionalize spiritual care in Israeli health‐care organizations. The analysis reveals how spiritual care functioned as a porous cultural object, open to a wide range of interpretations and debates. While actors in New York saw in spiritual care the opportunity to bridge to Israeli Jews and create a global Jewish identity, Israeli actors split between using spiritual care as a vehicle for creating a local Israeli Jewish identity and seeing in spiritual care the opportunity to establish universal identities, broader than the Jewish one. The disagreement and conflicts between the groups influenced the translation process, turning it into a contentious struggle that involved different positions on the continuum between particularism and universalism.     

哈尔滨:近代东亚犹太人最大的活动中心

:在近代 ,哈尔滨曾是东亚犹太人最大的聚居中心和宗教精神中心。犹太人在哈尔滨进行政治、宗教、经济和文化活动 ,对哈尔滨的经济繁荣、城市建设曾起过重要作用。目前在哈尔滨仍保存着一批犹太人档案、历史文献、建筑遗址及东亚最大的犹太墓地。保护和利用这一文化遗产 ,深入研究哈尔滨犹太人史和散居于世界各地的哈尔滨犹太人及其后裔的生活状况 ,有利于加强中国与以色列、中国与世界各国的犹太人的文化交流与经贸合作     

Images of transit: the experiential traces of Soviet Jewish emigration

ABSTRACT

Between 1971 and 1990, approximately 185,000 Soviet Jews who immigrated to countries other than Israel traveled through Austria and Italy. This period of transit migration through the “Vienna–Rome pipeline” left deep impressions on most emigrants, as it entailed their first encounter with the West as well as their first steps in their new identity as immigrants. This essay focuses on photography of remnants of the journey – of objects, of old photographs, and of landscapes – in order to explore ideas about immigrants' relationship to the passage of time and their migration experiences. It emphasizes the embodied though often unacknowledged tenor of the past rather than treating it as a distant object of nostalgia. This essay further shows that immigrants draw not only on their experiences in the Soviet Union or the United States to reflect on their lives; the places of transit migration also hold lasting meaning for them.     

Lena Finkle’s magic arc: hybrid influences in the Russian American graphic novel

ABSTRACT

The article examines Anya Ulinich’s graphic narrative Lena Finkle’s Magic Barrel and the novel’s use of visual culture from both the author’s Russian and US American backgrounds. The article interrogates the use of history and timelines, Russian art history and Russian art education in Ulinich’s text. It also analyzes other literary constructs that influenced Ulinich’s novel: US American comics/graphic novels and their use of stereotype, and novels by Russian-speaking Jewish American writers, with their thematized Jewishness.     

集体无意识与刻意颠覆 ——《雾都孤儿》与《我们共同的朋友》中的犹太形象分析

狄更斯在其第二部小说《雾都孤儿》和最后一部小说《我们共同的朋友》中,塑造了两个迥然不同的犹太人物形象——恶棍费金和绅士瑞亚先生。费金的肮脏丑陋、讨好巴结、吝啬贪婪以及残忍恶毒,与瑞亚的温和优雅、自尊坚定、追求平和以及同情友善形成了鲜明的反差。这种反差背后所反映的,一方面是英国社会对犹太人的盲目偏见所形成的集体无意识的反犹主义文学传统,以及丑化犹太人的典型模式;另一方面是作为人道主义作家的狄更斯刻意进行的犹太人形象颠覆,狄更斯为自己、也为整个犹太民族进行了正名。     

跨文化视野中的卡夫卡及其创作

卡夫卡无疑是一个西方作家,但他对东方文化,譬如日本艺术、印度宗教,尤其是中国文化却情有独钟,他阅读了大量中国文化典籍,深受中国文化的影响,并且,这种影响已明显地体现在他的思想和创作中;卡夫卡是一个犹太人,但他一直生活在基督徒中间,他不信犹太教,但对基督教思想却有着深刻的体悟和亲和性;他是一个接受德语教育并用德语写作的作家,尽管他对德语的掌握和运用已到了炉火纯青的地步,但他在德语中却始终感到自己是一个陌生人。他生活在绝大多数人说捷克语的欧洲城市布拉格,他在家里经常使用捷克语,他还学过英语、法语、意大利和意第绪语,他渴望在犹太语中找到自己的家,但他最终却未能如愿。全部的文化冲突几乎总是以语言为依托的,卡夫卡由于如此深刻地体悟了语言的冲突和困境,因此,他对文化冲突的描述和表现总是和语言问题连在一起,而这又使得卡夫卡的思想和创作具有非常浓郁的现代气息和意义。     

Jewish power and powerlessness: Prague Zionists and the Paris Peace Conference

This article explores how perceptions of Jewish power shaped the negotiations between Czechoslovak leaders and Jewish minority representatives at the time of the Paris Peace Conference. In the aftermath of the First World War, Prague-based Zionists embarked on a mission to convince Czechoslovak elites that attacks on Jews were detrimental to the internal stability of the new state and to Czechoslovak interests abroad. As Edvard Bene?, the head of the Czechoslovak delegation in Paris, worked to cultivate an image of the new state as more “Western” and “civilised” than other successor states – a strategy meant to garner international support for Czechoslovak territorial demands and its projected absorption of large minority populations – Jewish activists encouraged his uncertainty with regard to Jews' influence on Western audiences and statesmen. They did so in order to convince him to accept their demands for special protection clauses for the new country's Jews. The paper thus shows that the unprecedented victimisation of Jews and the upsurge in antisemitism during and after the war coexisted with a new bold and public Jewish activism. Yet, Jewish leaders did not in the end have the ability to convince Bene? and his colleagues to give in to international Jewish demands for special protection. Instead, they sought to cultivate a strategic alliance between the state's Czech elite and the Jewish minority which centred on the claim that Czechoslovakia was a particularly welcoming and tolerant place for Jews, an image that would evolve into a significant component of the myth of Czechoslovakia as an island of democracy in Eastern Europe.     

Limits to “Jewish power”: how Slovak Jewish leaders negotiated restitution of property after the Second World War

This article examines how Jewish leaders in post-war Slovakia negotiated the restitution of property with the legislative and executive powers in Bratislava and Prague. The Jewish leaders were affiliated with two Slovak Jewish organisations founded in 1945: the Central Union of Jewish Religious Communities in Slovakia (Ústredný sväz ?idovských nábo?enských obci na Slovensku, ÚS?NO) and the Organisation of Victims of Racial Persecution at the Hands of the Fascist Regime in Bratislava (Sdru?enie fa?istickým re?imom rasovo prenasledovaných v Bratislave, SRP). The Secretary General of the SRP, Dr Vojtech Winterstein, was the main voice negotiating and promoting the interests of the post-war Jewish community. His invaluable collection of documents – the Winterstein collection – provides the source base for this article.