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     

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.     

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。     

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.     

Interculturalism and the pendulum of identity

This article offers a critical appraisal of the role played by cultural identity in intercultural bilingual Arabic–Hebrew schools in Israel. While engineered as oases of interculturalism amidst a life of ethnic segregation, such schools ultimately confront serious difficulties in escaping the constraints of identity politics and representation. This is expressed by the leading part that group identity plays in the schools’ everyday life. By drawing on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, we argue that this state of affairs diminishes the potential of the intercultural encounter to overcome emotional and conceptual inhibitions reigning in larger society. Interculturalism, in order to distance itself from a politics of ressentiment that can only restrict its capacity to flourish, needs to place itself before representation.     

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.