A skeleton in Poland's closet: The jedwabne massacre

This paper presents a case study of the Jewish ethnic economy in the Moldovan town of Belz across a number of historical periods, with particular emphasis on the Soviet era. Economic practices are seen as embedded in a larger context of ongoing social relations at various levels, both within the Jewish community of the town and across ethnic borders. The author argues that the ethnic economy under socialism may be conceived as a non-market response to the ideologically imposed prohibition of private entrepreneurship, and focuses on the Jewish involvement in the second/ shadow socialist economy. Within this approach, economic ideas and practices emerge as markers of Soviet collective Jewish identity.     

Between Philosophy and Art: The Avant-Garde Work of Debora Vogel

ABSTRACT

Debora Vogel (1900–1942) helped develop modernism in Lviv in the interwar period. As a philosopher and writer, she was able to make connections between the dominant Polish school of philosophical logic (the so-called Lviv-Warsaw School) and the artistic circles in Lviv, to which Bruno Schulz, Stanis?aw Ignacy Witkiewicz and Leon Chwistek belonged.

Inspired by Cubism and Surrealism, but also by recent philosophical discussions, Vogel developed a writing technique called montage. In her poems and prose written in Yiddish and Polish, she reflected on the relationship between humans and modern urban architecture, playing with mathematical or geometric words and color predicates. At the same time she abandoned traditional narrative models with her style of writing.

In view of the above, this article presents Vogel's experimental writing practices and aesthetics concepts by locating her work in Lviv's culture of knowledge.     

Brody always on my mind: the mental mapping of a Jewish city

Once overwhelmingly inhabited by Jews, the Austro-Galician border town of Brody, in present-day Western Ukraine, has retained an important place on Ashkenazi mental maps until today, even though scholarly studies on Brody are scarce. The present article tries to capture the elements that allowed Brody to inscribe itself so successfully in Jewish memory. Therefore, this paper analyses several lieux de mémoire underlining Brody's enduring perception as a town closely related to Jewish issues. These places, however, are not only physical spots in the cityscape, like the ruins of the synagogue and the cemetery, but also images of and texts about Brody. Whether intended or not, pictures and postcards also have an impact on how Brody has been remembered; and so do memory books, be they written in Yiddish, Hebrew, Polish or Ukrainian. This study argues that Brody appears on the mental maps of Eastern European Jewry as an amalgam of physical places, icons and texts linked to a multi-layered and multifaceted urban history     

Kvetching and carousing under Communism: old Odessa as the Soviet Union’s Jewish city of sin

Odessa has often been branded a “Jewish city.” Much like their counterparts in New York and Warsaw, Odessa’s Jews have historically played a fundamental role in the city’s demographic makeup, economic life and culture. But Odessa is unique among Jewish cities because it has been mythologised as a city of sin, a frontier seaport boomtown whose commercial prosperity and balmy climate attracted legions of adventurers, gangsters and swindlers seeking easy wealth and earthly pleasures. Old Odessa was the Russian Jew’s golden calf – gilded, wicked and ostentatious in its intemperance. Odessa’s carnivalesque environment was fertile ground for the blending of different cultures, and the Jews spearheaded this process, adopting a Yiddish‐inflected Russian as their language for celebrating their profligate city. By the 1917 Revolution the foundations had been laid for the emergence of Isaac Babel, Leonid Utesov, Mikhail Zhvanetskii and the many other Jews who subsequently left Odessa for Moscow and the Soviet interior. They would go on to disseminate the Odessa myth using literature, comedy and music, and their immense popularity ensured that Odessa was indelibly marked as a Jewish city of sin, inhabited by comical rogues whose colourful escapades were rooted in an idiom of Jewishness.     

FROM ZERO TO TEN

The Society for the Promotion of Artisanal and Agricultural Work among the Jews in Russia (ORT) was established in St Petersburg in 1880. In its post‐1921 form, as the World ORT Union, the organisation, with its headquarters in London, still operates in scores of countries throughout the world. This article analyses the ideological changes in ORT's craftsmen‐related programmes during the first decades of its history: from the initial careful attempts to use qualified artisan labour as one of the ways to adapt the Jewish population to the economic, social and political conditions of the Russian empire, to later Jewish nation‐building projects that incorporated elements of economic autonomy. Founded by maskilic intellectuals and entrepreneurs, from the 1900s ORT was gradually taken over by more radical activists. Some of them, including its future chairman Leon Bramson (1869–1941) and its leading economist Boris Brutskus (1874–1938), came from the Petersburg apparatus of the Jewish Colonization Association, which competed with ORT in all domains of philanthropic activities. Materials of two ORT conferences, in 1914 and 1916, help us understand the changes in the organisation's attitudes to vocational education and various forms of cooperatives and employment bureaux. Special attention is paid to ORT's role during World War I.     

Russian Jews in exile from Bolshevik Russia: the case of Lev Shestov as an example of Russian‐Jewish existential compromise

Lev Shestov (born Leib Jehuda Shvartsman in Kiev in 1866) was a product of his times and entangled cultural roots. His destiny became closely related to the Russian Diaspora in Europe (he fled Bolshevik Russia in 1920). He was also linked to the local (especially French and German) intellectual life. However, being a Jew made Shestov stand out from the purely Russian emigration, for although he connected himself first and foremost with Russian culture, he could not be integrated without reservations into the purely Russian Diaspora. On the other hand mapping him in relation to the diverse Russian‐Jewish émigré milieu in Europe is not a straightforward task because his attitude to his Jewish roots was rather ambivalent. The case of self‐identification, in varying degrees, was similarly ambiguous with many Russian Jews who left Russia after the revolution. Shestov’s activities in emigration were diverse. Apart from teaching he published regularly in the outlets of the émigré press as well as in major French literary journals and gave lectures in Germany (in particular, addressing such different audiences as the Union of Russian Jews and the Nietzschean Society). In brief, his way of coping with the experience of exile was to become a multicultural conductor of sorts. This article aims to analyse Shestov’s life path in the framework of the Russian‐Jewish Diaspora in Europe at the time in the context of both cultural and ethnic repudiation and appropriation. This in turn should shed some new light on the cultural life of this Diaspora.     

Jewish Gay Men's Accounts of Negotiating Cultural,Religious, and Sexual Identity

Abstract

Research on the construction of lesbian and gay identity has represented this process as carrying considerable potential for in-trapsychic and interpersonal stress and conflict. This process may be rendered even more psychologically challenging for those whose identities feature salient components that are not easily reconciled with a lesbian or gay identity. An example of this is the simultaneous holding of Jewish and gay identities. This paper reports findings from a qualitative study of 21 Jewish gay men in Britain. Participants were interviewed about the development of their gay identity, the relationship between their gay identity and their Jewish identity, the psychological and social implications of holding these identities, and strategies for managing any difficulties associated with this. Data were subjected to interpretative phenomenological analysis. All but one of the men reported experiences of identity conflict, arising mainly from the perceived incompatibility of Jewish and gay identities. This was said to have impacted negatively upon their psychological well-being. Those who had received negative reactions to the disclosure of sexual identity within Jewish contexts often attributed this to an anti-gay stance within Judaism and a concern with ensuring the continuation of the Jewish people. Various strategies were said to have been used to manage identity threat, including compartmentalizing Jewish and gay identity and revising the content or salience of Jewish identity. Recommendations are offered for psychological interventions which could help Jewish gay men manage identity conflict.     

What culture for the post-national subject? Understanding the nation through translation

The central question guiding this project asks: what are the possibilities of conceptualizing a political subject beyond the national cultural boundaries? In order to answer this question, I undertake, from the perspective of conceptual history, a historical reconstruction of the meaning of cultural translation, as a process that frames the integration of designed cultural minorities into the national, majoritarian community. This paper evaluates the possibility of political theory to oppose cultural racism, from neither a normative nor absolute point of view, but from the movement beyond cultural assimilation suggested by a redefinition of cultural translation.     

欧洲犹太移民潮与以色列国家的移民问题

在严格意义上说 ,以色列是现代世界上唯一的移民国家。一是指以色列国家首先是由欧洲国家的犹太移民建立的 ;二是指以色列犹太人口的一半是建国后从世界各地移民而来。从欧洲历史上看 ,欧洲国家的犹太人 ,经历了五次的“阿里亚”(AL IYA)即“移居以色列地”的移民潮 ,最终确立了以色列国家的合法地位。以色列建国后 ,从世界各地进一步移民 ,促进了经济和社会的高速发展和现代化 ,但也带来了日益严重的移民社会问题。