Introduction

The introduction presents the book’s core argument that twentieth-century Jewish archives were not just about the past but also about the future: We can look to a process whereby Jews turned increasingly toward archives as anchors of memory in a rapidly changing world. Jews in Germany, the United States, and Israel/Palestine all sought to gather the files of the past in order to represent their place in Jewish life and articulate a vision of the future. It situates these projects in the history of community-based archiving and archival theory and methodology, as well as Jewish history at large. It also dives into the ways we can see archive making as a metaphor for the broader patterns in modern Jewish history, as Jews sought to gather the sources and resources of their culture both before the Holocaust and especially in its aftermath.

A Radical Transformation?

The Introduction notes the tendency of international law and Jewish history scholars to read the international law engagement of Jewish scholars as a cosmopolitan project yet limit inquiry to the period preceding Israel’s establishment and the ‘sovereign turn’ in modern Jewish history; as well as the emphasis, in scholarship on Israel’s foreign policy, on the ‘Jewish aspect’ of the Jewish state’s international outlook. Against this backdrop, the Introduction presents the object, scope, and underlying argument of the book: a study of Israel’s early ambivalence towards three post-war international law reform projects, at the United Nations arena, given voice by two Ministry of Foreign Affairs legal advisers. The Introduction points to ideology as the force driving the protagonists’ ambivalence towards international law. It argues that how Jacob Robinson and Shabtai Rosenne approached international law was determined by pre-sovereign sensibilities expressing the creed of the Jewish national movement and its political experience.

Introduction

The introduction outlines the objectives of the book and contextualizes it in terms of existing Holocaust studies scholarship in general and Theresienstadt in particular. It offers a brief chronology of the ghetto and explains why it was a ghetto and not a concentration camp. It also relates the work to issues pertinent to modern Jewish history, the history of everyday life, and research on ethnicity and Central Europe. Specifically, it shows how ethnicity became the central category of difference in the prisoner society, one directly linked to stratification. This introduction also lays out the central claim of the book that social interaction continues under extreme circumstances and brings Holocaust and Jewish history into the wider context of modern history. It also discusses forms of prisoners’ agency in the everyday of the ghetto.

Conclusion

This concluding chapter assesses whether the fate of the Polish Jewish refugees in each of the three major arenas in which they found themselves was really a single, interconnected refugee crisis or whether there were, in fact, three different crises sparked by a common cause: the mid-seventeenth-century wars of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. Underlying all of the differences in the conditions in each of the three regions were numerous commonalities. Perhaps most important was the sense of solidarity that induced Jews to come to the aid of other Jews in distress. The term most commonly used at the time to describe this connection was “brotherhood.” The phenomena examined in this book are indeed, therefore, aspects of a single refugee crisis. The chapter then considers how large the problem was and how well Jewish society dealt with its challenges. It also highlights the effects of the refugee crisis on Jewish society, both while it was happening and in the longer term, and the importance of the crisis for the course of early modern and modern Jewish history in general.

The Politics and Poetics of Oppression in Caryl Churchill's Seven Jewish Children

Caryl Churchill is one of the leading contemporary British playwrights. Because of the Israel military strike on Gaza in early 2009, she wrote her short poetic play, Seven Jewish Children, which densely explores modern Jewish history, from the time of pre-holocaust Europe up to the current struggles between Israel and Palestinian militant organizations. The stimulating dynamism of Churchill's historical chronicle is that though it introduces the past suffering of the Jews, it exposes their moral insincerity when it comes to labeling the current brutal actions performed by the state of Israel against Palestinian civilians. Employing a descriptive-analytical approach, this paper examines the play as a poetic narrative representing a pattern of reversed oppression in which contemporary Israelis, descendants of former victims of the Nazi, have inherited the legacy of the Holocaust and are deemed accountable for the ruthless violence perpetrated on the Arab residents of the occupied land.

Intersections between Jews and Media

In this volume, the relationship between Jews and media is not only vividly illustrated, but it is consciously drawn into the formation of modern Jewish history and modern media. Maya Balakirsky Katz addresses key Jewish-media intersections in which Jews and mass media implicated (or were implicated by) one another. In this study, Katz discusses the relationship that Jews have had with mass media forms of print, film, photography, advertising, and postcards within the periods that these media have gained cultural ascendancy. These historical moments are tethered to a broader conversation addressing the major theoretical issues at the center of the discourse on Jews and media. Bearing this mutually constructive relationship in mind, Intersections between Jews and Media offers both a tangible demographic portrait of the real Jews who entered mass media and lays a theoretical and methodological framework for more qualitative analyses.

Antimodernism and Orthodox Judaism's Heretical Imperative: An American Religious Counterpoint

This article argues that the case of religious authority within Orthodox Judaism is an important counterexample to the broader and understudied developments in American religion during the final decades of the twentieth century. Using an array of untapped primary sources and drawing on themes addressed by scholars of American religious history and modern Jewish history, this article demonstrates how Orthodox Jewish elites used “approximational heresies” to police their faith community. In so doing, Orthodox leaders furnished “indicators” of apostasy that were unknown in previous epochs and served to stand in for traditional types that proved otherwise insufficient to counteract new trends in modern life and culture. Orthodox Jewish “antimodernism” was animated by a need to demonstrate what was “in” and what was “out” of bounds as well as by the emergence of a triumphalism that was unique among American faiths. Likewise, the rank-and-file abided because they either agreed with these measures or feared becoming “outsiders.” This outlook contrasts with the attitudes of other religious groups—on the “left” and the “right”—that absorbed a spirit of “inclusiveness” and, therefore, eschewed heresy hunting and the boldness evinced by Orthodox elites during this period. The article concludes that the pervasiveness of this counterculture among the Orthodox Jewish community was so powerful that it, counterintuitively, introduced the strategies of the antimodernists to the American-acculturated, so-called Modern Orthodox community.