The Jewish Centrality of Israel

This article examines reactions in the Jewish Diaspora to the ways the Diaspora is viewed in Israel, especially with regard to the Israeli self-perception of Israel as the ultimate spiritual and religious center for its Diaspora. These ideas are explored using as a case study the 1958 ‘Who is a Jew?’ controversy and David Ben-Gurion’s famous correspondence with 51 ‘Jewish sages’ on the question of how to classify on an Israeli identity card a child born in Israel to a non-Jewish mother. Focusing on the responses of the Orthodox Jewish sages, I suggest that this correspondence may be understood as a reflection of different, sometimes conflicting understandings of the nature and meaning of Israel’s centrality for Jews and Judaism.

The Paradoxes of Postwar Domesticity

At the height of the postwar domestic revival, a subset of women who fully participated in the culture of domesticity nonetheless claimed a unique space for leisure with their peers in the form of a weekly evening mahjong game. Although the culture of mahjong could reinforce their domestic roles as much as undermine them, the weekly mahjong ritual explicitly came at the expense of both household labor and their family members’ comfort. Despite their claims on autonomous domestic leisure, mahjong-playing middle-class women became emblematic of the trappings of stereotypical postwar domesticity. As Jewish mahjong players established their strong cultural norms in the 1950s and 1960s, they became embedded in the evolving stereotype of the domineering Jewish mother. This association signaled the waning of both postwar domestic norms and the patterns of leisured domesticity that thrived within them, as economic changes and generational shifts transformed middle-class home life.

Lebensraum i przestrzeń abjectu. O Białym kamieniu Anny Boleckiej

The article analyzes the category of literary space which is understood here rather as a metaphor of experiencing identity, memory and postmemory than as a spatial term sensu stricto. The author reflects on the novel by Anna Bolecka, Biały kamień [White stone], and more specifically on the hidden tropes of the blurred and denied past memories of Jewish genealogical component of today’s Polishness. The reading of the novel’s poetics demonstrates the importance of female characters that, apart from their function in the plot construction, figuratively signify the lost Jewish mother of today’s, mostly Catholic, Poland. In addition, following the thinking of Julia Kristeva, of special significance are the images of abject art.

Autoportret z lisem. Przeszłość do przezwyciężenia w prozie autobiograficznej Magdaleny Tulli

The author focuses on the creation of the children’s hero from autobiographical novels by Magdalena Tulli: Włoskie szpilki (2011) and Szum (2014). The expressing of traumatic experience from the past in Tulli’s works takes not only the form of a successful artistic endeavour, but is also a kind of self-care. Waligóra argues that the fact of rejecting a girl by her mother and numerous examples of oppressiveness of the outside world result in life failures, the heroine’s emotional dys­function and melancholic-depressive nature of memories.The psychological and sociological vivisection of the existence of a family of Jewish (mother) and Italian (father) origin is enriched by the Holocaust and postwar anti-Semitic topics. The female narrator of both novels explores the sources of devastating experience of Shoah that became a pain­ful part of her motherʼs and auntʼs biography. The moving complaint about an unhappy childhood, tempered by the creation of a fictional friend — a fox, takes the form of a difficult forgiveness in parallel, the forgiveness including the closest people: the wrongdoers who have become victims themselves.

Module 5—Problem-Solving (Sessions 13–15)

This chapter is designed to help clinicians teach clients an efficient, step-by-step approach for problem-solving. Family members are first taught to systematically examine their beliefs and values to help them identify issues worth tackling (e.g., to pick their battles wisely). Next, clients are taught a systematic technique, using detailed handouts, for operationalizing their chosen problems, identifying the best solution or set of solutions, and developing a plan to implement the solution/s. In subsequent sessions, clinicians are instructed to help families revise their implementation strategy, if needed, or move on to tackle a new problem. Several examples of relevant problem-solving homework assignments that families can complete together are provided. The chapter concludes with a case example of problem-solving with a Jewish mother and her adult daughter.

Pan-Jewish Solidarity and the Jewish Significance of Modern Israel: The 1958 “Who Is a Jew?” Affair Revisited

The focus of this article is the 1958 “Who is a Jew?” controversy and David Ben-Gurion’s inquiry into Jewishness leading intellectuals from Israel and the Diaspora regarding how to register a child born to a non-Jewish mother in the Israeli identity card. The article’s main claim is that this correspondence must be understood not only as reflecting a continuous struggle between diaspora and Israeli Jews or between Jews of various religious persuasions, but rather as reflecting a built-in tension between pan-Jewish solidarity and Israeli Jewish sovereignty. This built-in tension seems to prevail today as well, and thus our analysis of the 1958 event may enable a more complex understanding of the continuous and seemingly unresolved tensions within today’s Jewish world.