European Judaism

Our policy of alternating themed issues with more general ones means that sometimes contributions that were delayed, or those sent in response to a particular theme, can be placed together in a subsequent issue. Here we have the opportunity to follow up on two significant subjects of recent issues, the ‘Children and Literature’ topic of Spring 2009 and the ‘State of Yiddish’ of Autumn 2009.

From its very beginnings the character of Yiddish was marked by its role as translator and interpreter of religious texts. Although there were secular writings, they were not substantial until the nineteenth century. One hundred years ago the primary role of translation was to present the outside world to Yiddish-speaking Jews, and libraries were full of translations of the international classics. Today the main role is the reverse: translation from Yiddish to other languages to gain access to that lost Jewish world. Functional translation into Yiddish is still required, mainly for Hasidim/Haredim, for example in the field of health or (in Israel) civil defence. Yiddish has clearly influenced other languages spoken by Jews, where one finds Yiddish words or calques, particularly in Hebrew and English. The concept of 'postvernacular Yiddish' has arisen to describe the contemporary use of Yiddish by speakers of these other languages. Both in the past and the present, Yiddish has been represented stereotypically, and often as an essentially 'ludic' language. One of the functions of literary translation ought to be to combat these stereotypes and demonstrate the richness and flexibility of Yiddish, as of any other language.

Klezmer Music and Yiddish Song in post-war Germany developed in three phases, which are clearly divided through repertoire and style of interpretation: Yiddish song from the 1960s to the 1980s was followed by Klezmer as instrumental music, until Klezmer as World Music became part of the intercultural scene. This corresponds with the way the audience and the musicians attribute meaning to the music: Protest against the fathers generation and coping with the past by singing and hearing Yiddish song in both parts of then divided Germany was followed by the liberation of the 'unpolitical' and cheerful Klezmer as a meeting with the missing Jewish reality in reunited Germany. With Klezmer making up only one facet of the rich multicultural musical scene of Tango, Salsa, Turkish Music and many others, it is suddenly turning into something it has not been in Germany for some hundred years: a symbol of Jewish identity.

The Shtetl in New York

The Poet Malka Lee

Both Sholem Aleichem's collection of stories Tevye the Dairyman and Vladimir Jabotinsky's novel The Five take as their main subject what Tevye frequently refers to as 'today's children': children growing up in a world of transition, where customs and morals are subject to external and internal pressures, and the old world is evolving and trying to adjust to confusing aspects of 'modernity'. The authors explore this theme within the context of the Jewish family: Tevye lives in the village of Anatevka in central Ukraine, and Jabotinsky's Milgroms live in Odessa on the shores of the Black Sea. The article examines the fates of two sets of children and compares the authors' views on the complex issues of modernity and assimilation. As traditions weakened, there was a significant shift in power and decision-making from parents to children. The eternal conflict of generations took on dramatic form as children violated the most sacred conventions of their parents' moral universe. In addition, these two extraordinary books succeed as original artistic expressions of the authors' personal journeys, documenting their own paths to ideological maturity: the subtitle of each could well be one and the same, namely: 'How and why I became a Zionist'.

Beginning in the 1960s, British children's literature began to include sympathetic representations of people from outside the dominant culture. Greater numbers of Jewish characters appeared as part of this trend. In the succeeding decades, the British publishing industry has continued to encourage cultural sensitivity in children's books, but this article argues that, despite this, in the twenty-first century constructions of Jews and Judaism increasingly resemble the stereotypical images common in works from previous eras. The paper goes on to contend that although these stereotypes were acknowledged and challenged in historical fiction for children of the 1960s and 1970s in order to promote tolerance, authorial intent in employing such images in more recent historical novels is often unclear, and as a result the texts convey ambivalent messages to today's young readers about the place of Jews in British society.

The Anglo-Jewish conundrum is that we have never been so secure – despite our protestations of anti-Semitism; never been so creative, though often not within our own community; never been as fashionable, despite our numbers apparently reducing; and never been so charitable, despite claims that we cannot afford to do everything we want. What is actually happening is that we are changing, and, in that change, we should look both to continental Europe and the United States, as much as to Israel. We need to encourage those activities that go across denominational lines, such as Limmud; we need to welcome new initiatives, even if they seem to be 'not invented here', such as the Jewish Community Centre for London; we need to show excitement at the plethora of informal services and Seders that occur around the country, and we need to welcome a definition of identity that allows us to be Jewish, British, Londoners or not, male or female, gay or straight, and so on. And we need to recognize that our relationships with other faiths and communities is of paramount importance if we want the national policy conversation to be one that embraces difference, but regards us all as active and full citizens of the whole.

Neo-Nazism, Holocaust Denial and UK Law

As illuminated by the contemporary Jewish press and the texts of Jewish sermons, many British Jews were initially deeply ambivalent about going to war on the side of Czarist Russia, with its legacy of recent pogroms, against Germany and Austria, both with emancipated Jewish communities. Jews in the west were reassured by reports that the Russian Jews had been uplifted by a wave of patriotic enthusiasm, expressed in massive numbers of volunteers for the Czarist army. For many weeks in the autumn of 1914, articles in the Jewish press featured the bravery and devotion of Russian Jewish soldiers, some of whom were rewarded by high military honours, amid claims that even Russian anti-Semites were re-thinking their assumptions. In dramatic contrast comes the report of a Russian Jewish soldier who suffered a breakdown when he heard the words Sh'ma Yisra'el from the lips of an Austrian soldier he had just fatally bayoneted. The beginning of the Great War exposes the clash of these themes: sacrificial patriotic identification by Jews with the war effort of their own countries, and the international solidarity of the Jewish people being painfully subverted by Jews fighting in opposing armies. The story - perhaps something of an 'urban legend' - would be re-told in many different contexts and literary expressions.

This article presents a new reading of the tragic end of R. Johanan and Resh Lakish (BT Bava Metzia 84a). It reviews the traditional apologetic interpretations of the narrative, as if it was meant to aggrandize these sages' devotion to the value of Torah study – before rejecting this understanding, arguing that the intent of the narrative is to present these sages in a critical light, as being repositories of knowledge, while lacking the attribute of humility. The article analyses the narrative from a gender perspective, and shows that the phallic model of the two males is surprisingly contrasted with the wife of Resh Lakish – despite her being a woman and apparently totally illiterate - as a spiritually mature model, who stands outside the exclusive club of Torah scholars.

Rechitsa (After R. B. Kitaj, Babel Riding with Budyonny)

No Great Artist Perpetrators (Adapted from Zbigniew Herbert)

Death stills things down Sunday Immigrant

Nathan Sees the Whole Synagogue God’s People

The Human Genome Rebekah in the Modern World

Allen Wells, TROPICAL ZION – General Trujillo, FDR, and the Jews of Sosúa. £17.99 paperback. £69.00 library cloth. 480 pages. Duke University Press.