Trauma Memorials: searching for meaning in memorials to the Holocaust,the atomic bomb, and 9-11, Laurie Beth Clark (promotional poster)

Full color promotional poster for lecture by Laurie Beth Clark, Professor of Art, University of Wisconsin-Madison, as part of an on-going series at the Center for the Humanities.Promotional material showcasing one program in the 2003-2004 Humanities Forums on Contemporary Issues series. Using the humanities as a lens, the series explores new ways of looking at current political, social, and economic issues, and encourages a vigorous, two-way dialogue between UW faculty speakers and audiences.The Anonymous Fund of the UW-Madison College of Letters & Scienc

Strange Encounter: The East European Jew in German and German Jewish Consciousness, 1800-1923

This work examines the place of East European Jews (Ostjuden) in German and German Jewish consciousness from 1800-1923. A cultural and intellectual history, it attempts to locate the nature of discourse concerning the Ostjuden and to pinpoint its major changes and continuities. In many ways the Ostjuden represented the 'underside' of the German-Jewish dialogue. They were a key ingredient in the development of German anti-semitism and were critically implicated in German Jewish liberal self-definition. As 'authentic' Jews they were an essential part of German Jewish ideologies of Renaissance. East European Jews concretized the dialectic between liberalism, anti-Semitism and Zionism. Through an examination of these forces this study attempts to shed new light on the nature of the German Jewish experience. For the attitude projected onto East European Jewry was a sensitive measuring rod of German Jewish identity itself.The study traces the development of a general nineteenth century antipathy to the Ostjude. By the 1880's most German Jews viewed their East European brethren in distinctively stereotypical terms. They often used this negative image to symbolize rejection of their own ghetto past and to facilitate the contrast between modern Enlightened Jewry and its 'half-Asian' counterpart. Such dissociation, moreover, deflected onto unassimilated Ostjuden all the negative traits commonly ascribed to 'Jews'. Yet not all Jews shared these conceptions. Over the years a positive image emerged amongst certain post-liberal circles. This was the notion of the Ostjude as Jewish cultural hero, embodiment of a pure and ancient Volk, symbol and center of Jewish revival. The present investigation examines the genesis, functions and consequences of these changing images in their cultural and intellectual contexts.The negative image of the Ostjude was linked to the process of Emancipation and anti-semitic agitation. Celebratory conceptions were related to the rise of Zionism and neo-romantic ideology. These competing perceptions were crystallized in the context of increasing contact between Germans, German Jews and Ostjuden following the post-1880 mass migrations. With Germany's occupation of Poland this triangular encounter received its most intense expression during World War I. . . . (Author's abstract exceeds stipulated maximum length. Discontinued here with permission of school.) UMIThesis (Ph.D.)--The University of Wisconsin - Madison, 1982.School code: 0262

Something Old, Something New: The Domestic Side of Moroccan-Israeli Ethnicity

The research on which this dissertation is based was carried out in Ramot Rakefet (fictitious name), a town in northern Israel. The primary theoretical focus of this work is ethnicity. The object of the study was to examine the ways in which Moroccan-Israeli women resident in Ramot Rakefet can be said to be ethnic and maintain ethnic values. Ethnicity is defined as those ties based on real or putative assumptions of a common historical and cultural past. Ethnic values derive in various ways from these assumptions and ties.The areas of activity examined in this work concern social life, family interactions, home life, child rearing, and family planning. Each area was chosen because it represents a social arena in which women were prominent actors.Research was carried out by participant observation as well as structured and unstructured interviews. In effect I tried to answer a number of questions about the lives of these women: With whom do they interact and spend most of their time? In what ways do they act as ethnics and how do they manipulate their ethnicity? What are the ethnic constraints on their present-day decision making? How do they influence their children and families? What do they value?I found that, although in many areas of life these women had adopted the values and behavior patterns of the larger, "national" society, in others they showed remarkable cultural persistence. Most significantly however there were also many situations in which the Moroccan-Israelis were able to innovate responses which accommodated both prior cultural constraints and the immediate social and cultural milieu in which they found themselves.This work adds to our theoretical knowledge by focussing on a number of topics such as ethnicity in an Israeli urban area, women as ethnics, and the role of ethnicity in family planning decision making.Thesis (Ph.D.)--The University of Wisconsin - Madison, 1983.School code: 0262

Genealogy and genocide: The Nazi "ancestral proof" and the Holocaust

In order to increase our understanding of how an industrialized, highly westernized society came to perpetrate the intentional destruction of European Jewry, this dissertation examines the "ancestral proof (Abstammungsnachweis)" requirement, the method by which one proved one's "racial acceptability" in Nazi Germany. During the Nazi Era, the vast majority of the German population had to make an ancestral proof, primarily through provision of genealogical information. The regime justified the requirement largely by claiming that science had shown "race-mixing" to be the main cause of cultural and social decline, and that in Germany Jews were the primary culprits in this regard. These assertions were demonstrably false.Prior to the Third Reich, many of the officials involved in implementing the ancestral proof had been genealogical practitioners, and in late 19th and early 20th-century Germany, genealogical practice was spreading across socio-economic strata. The false claims of scientific support for racist ideas were closely related to a respected eugenic ideology that was an important component of the mainstream genealogical literature in this period.Once the Nazi regime put the ancestral proof requirement into operation, virtually the entire German population behaved as if it was a legitimate obligation. German firms, for example, incorporated genealogy into their marketing practices and the vocation of "Professional Kinship Researcher" became prominent. The files of the Reich Genealogical Authority, the office whose primary task was determining a person's "race" for purposes of implementing the racial laws, show that almost every government, academic, and religious entity, as well as the individual Germans with whom it interacted, also treated the requirement as legitimate. This acquiescence occurred because most Germans, motivated by fear of the regime and/or a desire to profit from racist policies, wanted to believe the obligation was legitimate. Because the proof's proponents established it within both eugenic and other respected cultural traditions, many Germans could accept it and, more generally, Nazi racist policy, in good conscience. This helped create the conditions for perpetration of the Final Solution.Thesis (Ph.D.)--The University of Wisconsin - Madison, 2004.School code: 0262

Domestic Political Interests and American Policy in the Middle East: Pro-Israel, Pro-Arab and Corporate Non-Governmental Actors and the Making of American Foreign Policy, 1966-1971

Thesis (Ph.D.)--The University of Wisconsin - Madison, 1974.School code: 0262

i ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to begin by thanking my advisers, Andrea and Remzi Arpaci-Dusseau. Had they not been at Wisconsin, I don't know who else I would have worked with. They have a unique combination of taking their research and their student's work very seriously, while not taking themselves too seriously. Among other things, they taught me how to ask the right questions when conducting research. Indeed it has been an honor and a privilege working with both of them. I thank Jeff Naughton, Marv Solomon and Tehshik Yoon for serving on my thesis committee. They provided valuable advice and feedback. I thank Tehshik in particular for making it to my defense despite his illness that day so I could avoid delaying my graduation

Adrienne Thomas, Gertrud Isolani, and Gabriele Tergit: German Jewish women writers and the experience of exile

This dissertation examines the post-1933 novels of Adrienne Thomas, Gertrud Isolani, and Gabriele Tergit, three German-Jewish women authors who were forced into exile just as their writing careers were beginning. My analysis demonstrates the mutual dependence of biography and literary production in their subsequent experience of exile. Using the socio-historical work of Monika Richarz as well as Gabriele Kreis's theories about women in exile, I show that the authors' writings reflect not only the physical and emotional rigors of refugee life, but also constitute a more specific attempt on the part of the writers to construct their own gender and ethnic identities, as women and as Jews. This dissertation supplements existing scholarship by detailing the exile experiences of women from the assimilated German-Jewish bourgeoisie.Chapter one examines the novels of Adrienne Thomas. Her position as both a woman and a French-speaking Jew informs her critical stance vis-a-vis German chauvinism in the 1930 antiwar novel Die katrin wird Soldat. The author's exile novel, Reisen Sie ab, Mademoiselle!, is significant in that Thomas increasingly distances herself from her Jewish identity, instead demonstrating a marked sympathy for the antifascist struggle of the workers.Chapter two focuses on Gertrud Isolani's fictional depiction of Gurs, Stadt ohne Manner. She celebrates the superior abilities of women to adapt to concentration camp life, but at the same time the romantic genre of the novel offers a fanciful retreat from the women's suffering: her idealized fictional protrayals stand in stark contrast to the harsh conditions Isolani experienced in both France and Switzerland. Isolani's budding attraction to Zionism was reflected in later stories on the mission of the Jews in a post-Holocaust world.Chapter three examines the development of the Weimar-era journalist, Gabriele Tergit. The 1931 novel Kasebier erobert den Kurfurstendamm demonstrates her interest in the problems of emancipated women. In her exile novel Effingers she adds an explicit historical dimension to her analysis of womens' issues, locating the specific experience of Jewish women within the cultural context of a Germany on the way to fascism.Thesis (Ph.D.)--The University of Wisconsin - Madison, 1995.School code: 0262

Constituting American Jewish childhood: Parameters of acceptable difference.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century a growing concern about assimilation provoked calls for reform of Jewish education. These calls for reform of Jewish education mimic similar calls for reform of public education within the United States. The purpose of this dissertation is to explore the uptake of general social and educational discourses within the field of Jewish education and to examine (re)configurations of American Jewish childhood that have emerged as rules and standards of reasoning have shifted. In this "history of the present" I examine the mobilization of mainstream educational and social knowledge within the field of Jewish education and argue that shifting reasoning about childhood, Americanness, and Jewishness have effects of (re)constituting American Jewish childhood as the same as, but also as acceptably different from, normal American childhood. This dissertation is divided into three parts: Section One discusses the theoretical framework as well as an a priori , but shifting, relation of difference through which Jewishness constitutes itself and is constituted by others. Section Two examines Jewish educational literature of the mid-nineteenth century and the turn of the twentieth century. Section Three explores American Jewish educational literature in the decades after the Second World War, and in the present. The analysis focuses upon the uptake of shifting social and educational discourses by Jewish educational reformers such that the American Jewish child has been (re)constituted as a normal American child, whose Jewishness is within parameters of acceptable religious difference. Examination of the discursive formations of childhood, Americanness, and Jewishness, and the interactions between the discursive trajectories, within Jewish educational literature makes visible the ranking and ordering of populations inscribed within educational discourse and re-inscribed into notions of American Jewish childhood. Thus, the constitution of a same, but acceptably different American Jewish child has also had effects of constituting Jewish childhoods that are neither the same, nor acceptably different.Thesis (Ph.D.)--The University of Wisconsin - Madison, 2008.School code: 0262

A tricultural theatrical tradition: The history of the German theater in Prague, 1883-1938

As a German language "island," Prague occupied an unusual place in the history of German culture. Three cultures (Czech, German, Jewish) were living side by side in a confined area, and each had a profound effect on the development of German theater. The Jews were especially active in promoting German culture. Chapter One discusses the effects of the emancipation of the Jews on German culture in Prague. The Czech National Revival, the construction of the Czech National Theater, and the simultaneous establishment of the New German Theater all led to the decline of German culture there.Chapter Two covers the period from WW I, when German Theater was enjoying a rebirth of popularity, to 1922. During this time the Czechs annexed the German Landestheater to the Czech National Theater. Theater censorship is discussed to illustrate the criteria used by censors to judge plays for the Prague German stage. Three plays with Jewish themes are used as examples: Theodor Herzl's Das neue Ghetto, Arthuy Schnitzler's Professor Bernhardi, and Eugen Tschirikow's Die Juden.The Prague Circle's intense work to promote Prague's German Theater began in 1918. Its three main members, Max Brod, Oskar Baum, and Ludwig Winder, promoted plays through the Prague German newspapers, primarily Prager Tagblatt and Bohemia. They further wrote numerous plays specifically for the Prague German stage. One play by each author is discussed in Chapter Three to illustrate their work: Max Brod's Prozess Bunterbart, Oskar Baum's Das Wunder, and Ludwig Winder's Dr. Guillotin.The work of the Prague circle during 1933-1938 is described in detail in Chapter Four. The play The Czech and the German by J.N. Stepanek, is the most significant feature of this chapter, as it discusses the theme of reconciliation between Germans and Czechs. Prague German culture comes to an end with the closing of the German theater and the emigration or death of members of the Prague Circle.Thesis (Ph.D.)--The University of Wisconsin - Madison, 1995.School code: 0262