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.     

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。     

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。     

“轴心期”形成的犹太教文化传统对后世之影响——兼对“犹太模式”的历史考察与未来展望

在德国哲学家雅斯贝斯提出的世界历史的"轴心期"的概念里,犹太人所创立的以犹太教为主旨内容的希伯来文明和中华文明、印度文明一样成为东西方文化传统的源头;探讨轴心期产生的犹太教对后世的基督教和伊斯兰教的影响,可以看出三者同属犹太系宗教的范畴;根据汤因比提出的三种文明解体的模式分析当今世界的格局,可以发现美国似乎正在成为罗马帝国的翻版,而道德至上的中华文明的复兴则给世界的美好未来带来了一丝希望之光。同时,由于犹太教、基督教和伊斯兰教同属犹太系宗教,有着很多根本的相同点,所以在人类要共同面对生存危机的条件下也许可以实现和解而和平共处。     

A reconstruction of the size and composition of Jewish Holocaust survivors in the Netherlands, 1945

Compared to other countries that have suffered from the Nazioccupation, the destructive impact of the Holocaust on theJewish population has been particularly strong in the Netherlands. This paper gives a demographicreconstruction of the Jewish population in the Netherlands by the end of the war (1945),disaggregated by age and sex. The reconstruction is based on two approaches: a forwardprojection 1941–1945, starting from registration data supplemented by information onHolocaust losses; and a backward projection 1966–1945, starting from an enumerationof Halachic Jews carried out in 1966. The two approaches yieldtwo estimates that are comfortingly similar.     

Between hagiography and historiography: Chabad,scholars of Hasidism,and the case of the portrait of Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liady

The portrait of Shneur Zalman of Liady is one of the most popular images in modern Jewish iconography. Published at the end of the nineteenth century, the portrait has quickly gained popularity both within and without the Chabad community. However, unlike the religious audience, which reveres the portrait as a faithful representation of the founder of Chabad, the secular, academic audience rejects it as fraudulent, together with all the supporting evidence provided by Chabad. This article revisits the history of the portrait’s creation and publication, paying particular attention to Russian documentation produced by Chabad in the 1930s, which has so far been entirely ignored by the scholarship. It identifies the portrait’s alleged painter and owner as well as other characters mentioned in these documents, with the aim of verifying Chabad’s version of events. Although this article does not answer conclusively whether the portrait is authentic or not, it proffers corroborating evidence for the Chabad point of view, and briefly discusses future research possibilities for the topic. Furthermore, the article considers the ways in which the leadership of Chabad used the history of the portrait to consolidate the movement and discusses the challenges that Chabad partisan historiography poses for the academic study of Hasidism.     

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.