On Ashkenazi’s Weimar Film and Modern Jewish Identity

Every scholar of modern Jewish history is familiar with the poet Judah Leib Gordon’s 1862 exhortation to European Jewry: “Be a man in the street and a Jew at home” (as quoted in Ashkenazi, xv, 48). This motto takes on new relevance in the work of historian Ofer Ashkenazi, for whom public and private behaviors play out in the spatial terms of Weimar cinematic representation. Within the world of the street, Jews display only authentic bourgeois mannerisms and appearances; in private, the masquerade ceases to be necessary. According to Ashkenazi, we see this duality reflected in films made by Jewish directors and writers for whom public and domestic spaces are necessarily linked in the project of representing Jewish identity. [excerpt

Review of Leonard Barkan\u27s Berlin for Jews: A Twenty-First-Century Companion

Berlin for Jews: A Twenty-First-Century Companion seems to be directed at an insider community of Jews who care about Jewish history, especially those considering a trip to Germany. The book\u27s meandering look at Berlin is broader and more nuanced than a travel guide, with close attention to how Jews of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries understood their own relationships to Jewishness. Still, it remains unclear who beyond a small subset of travelers will be interested in Leonard Barkan\u27s writing on Berlin. That the author is not an expert in either German or Jewish Studies has both merits and drawbacks. As a professor of comparative literature, art and archaeology, classics, and English, Barkan has written a type of memoir for a general audience that scholars in German or Jewish Studies might not venture or desire to write. The first two chapters use a cemetery in Prenzlauer Berg and a neighborhood in Schöneberg as windows into specific eras of history. Chapters 3 through 5 present Barkan\u27s own special Jewish pantheon of Berlin Jews: salon hostess Rahel Varnhagen, art collector James Simon, and writer Walter Benjamin, whose legacies are intertwined with the history, people, and places of Berlin. Barkan concludes with a brief discussion of Holocaust memorialization and tourism, with a few poignant pages on Jewish daily life in Nazi Germany. One highlight throughout is the book\u27s emphasis on architecture and works of art. [excerpt

America Abandoned: German-Jewish Visions of American Poverty in Serialized Novels by Joseph Roth, Sholem Asch, and Michael Gold

In 1930, Hungarian- born Jewish author Arthur Holitscher’s book Wiedersehn mit Amerika: Die Verwandlung der U.S.A. (Reunion with America: The Trans-formation of the U.S.A.) was reviewed by one J. Raphael in the German- Jewish Orthodox weekly newspaper, Der Israelit. This reviewer concluded: “Despite its good reputation, America is a strange country. And Holitscher, whose relationship to Judaism is not explicit, but direct, has determined that to be the case for American Jews as well.” The reviewer’s use of the word “strange” (komisch) offers powerful insight into the complex perceptions of America held by many German- speaking Jews, which in 1930 were at best mixed and ambivalent. An earlier travel book by Arthur Holitscher (1869– 1941) from 1912 depicts America more favorably, though it is widely believed to have provided inspiration for Franz Kafka’s unfinished novel, Amerika: Der Verschollene (Amerika or The Man who Disappeared, published posthumously in 1927), which famously opens with a description of the Statue of Liberty holding aloft a sword rather than a torch. [excerpt

Trapped in mirror-images: The rhetoric of maps in Israel/Palestine

The map of Israel/Palestine has long been used by both Israelis and Palestinians, from their unequal power positions, as a celebrated national symbol. It is virtually the same map, depicting a sliver-shaped land between River Jordan and the Mediterranean, two overlapping homelands in one territory. Thus, a single geo-body appears to contain two antagonistic and asymmetrical nations, locked in a bitter struggle. The article interprets the uncanny mirror-maps of Israel/Palestine by drawing on recent work in critical cartography. One approach has read maps as rhetorical claims for power and over territory; indeed, the mirror-maps of Israel/Palestine are often read as indications of maximalist territorial ambitions and hidden wishes to “wipe the other off the map”. However, this article suggests an alter- native, de-territorialised reading of political maps as “empty signifiers” of multiple meanings. Following analysis of maps as objects of performance, whose meaning depends on users and contexts, the article emphasises the ritualistic sacralisation of the Israel/Palestine map. Embedded within discourses of memory and history, maps are tools of narrating the nation, often in diasporic contexts, carrying with them vast emotional significance to both peoples. These issues were largely left unaddressed by the territorial paradigm which has dominated scholarship and political negotiations. Moving the discussion of geography beyond narrow territorial claims towards an appreciation of the richness and heterogeneity of space is crucial, yet faces formidable challenges both politically and conceptually

Front-Page Jews: Doris Wittner\u27s (1880-1937) Berlin Feuilletons

In ‘Die jüdische Frau und das jüdische Buch’ (The Jewish woman and the Jewish book), an article published 18 March 1931 on the front page of the Jüdisch-liberale Zeitung, Doris Wittner included the following lines that concisely sum up her pioneering ideological and political agendas: ‘Aber bis der endgültige Rechtspruch über des Weibes Ruf und Berufung erfolgt, werden wir jedem Frauengeist, der “strebend sich bemüht”, Anerkennung und Ehrerbietung zollen. […] Insbesondere unsere Glaubensgenossinnen, die gewohnt sind, Menschenlose nur nach Jahrtausenden zu messen.’ With such feuilleton articles, Wittner worked to validate women’s contributions to professional spheres, particularly literature and journalism; to offer both Jewish women and men due credit for their achievements in light of growing antisemitism; and to advocate for the special talents of Jews due to their historical and cultural connections. That this article appeared on the front page of this liberal Berlin Jewish newspaper is no less telling, as Wittner was a regular contributor whose pieces often earned prominent display. Indeed, part of what makes Wittner a journalist of note is the fact that her work appeared with surprising frequency on front pages or in other prominent positions in both general and Jewish publications. [excerpt

Review of Violent Sensations: Sex, Crime, and Utopia in Vienna and Berlin, 1860-1914 by Scott Spector

The question “who is the murderer?” remains at the heart of countless media scandals today, just as over a century ago; many rely on graphic images of violence, brutality, and criminal activity. Scott Spector’s long-awaited book eloquently demonstrates that the fascination with such spectacles dates back to the 1860s, with the rise of media scandals about sexual practices (especially between men) and their potential connections to violent criminal acts. Ritual murder accusations that gained momentum in the 1880s made for Central European versions of the Dreyfus Affair, which strained Christian-Jewish relations and put allegedly treacherous Jews on trial. The fin-de-siècle, when killers similar to London’s Jack the Ripper and other marginal or degenerate figures came to signify urban modernity, marks a further turning point in this history. It was also around 1900 when new sensationalist texts about the criminality of the metropolis proliferated. [excerpt

Kosher Seductions: Jewish Women as Employees and Consumers in German Department Stores

Department stores have long been associated with the trope of seducing female consumers, at least since the publication of Emile Zola’s novel Au bonheur des dames in 1883. This fictionalized portrayal of the Parisian department store Bon Marche, which has exerted considerable influence among early chroniclers of department store culture, identifies store owners as men who build ‘temples’ for prospective customers, and who use inebriating tactics to encourage them to enter and spend money. The consumer is gendered female in this and in many other literary works on the department store of the time; she is depicted as reluctant, yet sometimes eager to be tempted by male-driven consumer worlds

Weimar Jewish Chic: Jewish Women and Fashion in 1920s Germany

This volume presents papers delivered at the 24th Annual Klutznick-Harris Symposium, held at Creighton University in October 2011. The contributors look at all aspects of the intimate relationship between Jews and clothing, through case studies from ancient, medieval, recent, and contemporary history. Papers explore topics ranging from Jewish leadership in the textile industry, through the art of fashion in nineteenth century Vienna, to the use of clothing as a badge of ethnic identity, in both secular and religious contexts. Dr. Kerry Wallach\u27s chapter examines the uniquely Jewish engagement with fashion and attire in Weimar, Germany

Fr\'echet completions of moderate growth old and (somewhat) new results

This article has two objectives. The first is to give a guide to the proof of the (so-called) Casselman-Wallach theorem as it appears in Real Reductive Groups II. The emphasis will be on one aspect of the original proof that leads to the new result in this paper which is the second objective. We show how a theorem of van der Noort combined with a clarification of the original argument in my book lead to a theorem with parameters (an alternative is one announced by Berstein and Kr\"otz). This result gives a new proof of the meromorphic continulation of the smooth Eisenstein series