People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present

Feminist Review, 1991

The Jewish community is held up as the example of how immigrants can (and should) 'integrate' ~d 'succeed'. A picture is drawn of a homogeneous group of people who, through a tradition of hard work and mutual self-help, have moved 'up' from the poor inner cities to the green suburbs where they merge in with the surrounding middle classes and keep their distinctive customs to themselves. Jews who were left behind, along with those who wear traditional Hassidic clothes, lesbian and gay Jews, and those who dissent, particularly on Zionism or religious issues, are carefully cropped out of the picture. But the new decade has brought a wave of attacks on Jewish people and property unprecedented since the war. In Eastern Europe neo-Nazis are marching and speaking openly as political stones are overturned. In Western Europe swastikas and anti-Semitic violence are becoming a regular feature of everyday life in some areas. Jewish responses to these events reflect conflicts within the community: the struggle for power and ideas; the struggle for the right to define Jewish identity and the struggle to define how the Jewish community relates to the surrounding communities. When graves were smashed and daubed at a north London Jewish cemetery, the Chief Rabbi said: 'I think it would be wrong to over-dramatize these events. It would only feed the mills of anti-Semitism.' (Independent on Sunday, 10 June 1990). The Board of Deputies of British Jews, the community's political Establishment, said, tortuously: 'We are not looking at a rise in anti-Semitism, but an increase in anti-Semitic incidents.' (Independent on Sunday, 10 June 1990). This attempt to play down, deprive of meaning and even, at times, lie about anti-Semitic attacks, is part of a wider attempt to maintain the image of a secure, comfortable community living in harmony with its

Religions, 2021

The Book of Genesis reports that “On the sixth day of Creation “God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good” (1:31). The very, so a Talmudic sage taught refers to “death”. We are to share God’s exultant affirmation of His work of creation as culminating in death. For death is intrinsic to the blessings of life. As Buber notes in the epigraph cited above, life is “unspeakably beautiful because death looks over our shoulder”. The seeming paradox—an existential antinomy—inflected the vernacular Yiddish of my late father which was also that of Buber’s youth “the one thing needful” (Luke 10:42); “love is strong as death” (Song of Songs; 8:6).

Journal of Communication and Religion , 2016

2013

The American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 2017

This impressive book, offering essays by 19 authors on the topic of the recent upsurge in virulent anti-Jewish hostility, is daunting, not by sheer size, which is considerable, but by the very fact of its existence, the very fact of what must be its focus the worldwide rise of a pernicious, persistent anti-Semitism. The topic of course must be explored, and is explored with painstaking scholarship, intensive scrutiny of the subject itself, commitment, eloquence, and passion. The book is the outgrowth of a four-day conference involving 45 scholars from 10 countries at Indiana University's Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism (ISCA) in April 2014. The 19 authors represented in the book live in, and/or are affiliated with colleges and universities in Austria, England, France, Germany, Norway, Poland, and the United States. It is important, and impressive, that the contributors to the book are international, because anti-Semitism is a burgeoning international problem. The book is organized into four parts, (I) Defining and Assessing Antisemitism, (II) Intellectual and Ideological Contexts, (III) Holocaust Denial, Evasion, Minimization, and (IV) Regional Manifestations. The second chapter, ''The Ideology of the New Antisemitism,'' by Kenneth Marcus, is useful in identifying some key psychoanalytic issues. He sets the stage by underscoring that antisemitism is an ideology, quoting Sartre, who described antisemitism as a ''conception of the world'' (p. 21), giving us a broad, inclusive perspective to consider. He identifies the irrationality of otherwise educated, knowledgeable people who accept an ideology that includes the infamous blood libel, that Jews murder Christian babies to use their blood in making Passover matzoh. He continues by citing Holocaust-denial statements that Jews invented stories about a Holocaust that never happened, and by citing the belief that the antisemitic forgery, ''The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,'' is true. He anchors his discourse in an acknowledgment of Freudian thought, that ''the ideology of hatred is a symptom of repressed desire'' (p. 25). Marcus discusses trauma as underlying antisemitic ideology, citing projection and displacement as essential to further understanding how people deal with the conflicts generated by repressed desire, in an attempt to rid themselves of forbidden desires. He delineates various ways in which Jews are blamed for everything, quoting a 19th century CE (Common Era) tract that traces everything evil to Jews, and contemporary Islamic thought that attributes every ''catastrophe'' to Jews (p. 37).

Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, 2018

This book by Adam Katz and Eric Gans makes a significant and original contribution to the study of antisemitism. It serves as a new stage in the development of the theory and method of generative anthropology developed by Gans and his school, as well as of philosophical anthropology as the study of the mechanisms of sign and culture origination in general. At the foundation of Gans’s theory lies the idea that the human collective is formed at the moment when the “gesture of appropriation” in relation to the object of desire characteristic of the “pecking order” is aborted and deferred, is transformed into an originary sign, a symbol of this object. The sacral is the object that is designated as unassignable. The aborted gesture becomes the first sign of both language and morality, which henceforth transforms from a tribal codex into a universal correlative of the sacral as such.

SUNY Press, 2020

In my new book I show how after the Holocaust philosophy tended to fight anti-Semitism by dimissing any thinking about Jews, including Jewish thought.

This special section originates from a workshop we organized in 2020 sponsored by the Center for the History of Emotions at the Max Planck Institute, focusing on the intricate relationships between Jews and non-Jews in Germany, Israel and Poland during the long 20 th and 21 st century. The workshop explored the diverse ways these groups imagine and engage with one another. Conceptualizing these interactions in terms of a love story, complete with attractions and rejections, provided a compelling narrative framework to analyze complex relationships post-Holocaust. The use of the love trope in describing the interactions between Germans, Jews, and Poles is not new; it has a long history. Most notably, Gershom Scholem in 1966 characterized the German-Jewish relationship as a 'one-sided and unreciprocated' love affair, with Germany as the focal point of Jewish desires. Since the turn of the new millennium, this notion of a fatal attraction between Germans, Jews, and Poles has undergone significant transformation. Our understanding of this history has evolved, reflecting the emergence of new methodologies and the ongoing reassessment of these intricate and often painful relations. Above all, the strengthening ties between various European states and Israel, along with the growing personal and intimate interactions among their peoples, have necessitated new perspectives on these relationships. These developments have driven scholars to explore these connections with greater nuance, taking into account the evolving dynamics and the deeper emotional complexities involved. This shift has been inspired and nurtured by insights from the rapidly evolving field of the history, sociology, and anthropology of emotions, which has provided new frameworks for understanding these intricate relationships. Emotions, being elusive and volatile, have intrigued scholars since ancient times, prompting efforts to define their meaning, understand their nature, explain their roles, and analyze their various types. The history of emotions posits that, beyond their biological and evolutionary foundations, emotions also possess cultural and social dimensions. Emotions are learned and controlled; they are neither purely personal nor entirely impulsive. This approach highlights the significance of emotional expression within specific historical and cultural contexts, offering a deeper understanding of human interactions and historical developments. 1 The five articles presented in this special section draw extensively on the insights developed in recent years within this field of inquiry, aligning with the broader trend of an 'Emotional Turn' in Jewish Studies. 2

Consensus, 2020

Death in Jewish Life, 2014

Bar-Levav offers a framework for depicting and understanding the varied Jewish attitudes towards death, particularly in the medieval period. The author differentiates between death as an idea and death as a reality, and between the presence and absence of death. He suggests that, by and large, death is marginal in the framework of Jewish culture. Jewish attitudes towards death can be anchored between time, space and texts. There is a time of mourning and remembrance, there is a place for the dead (the cemetery), and there are distinct texts that are used in the contexts of dying and mourning. The paper describes various axes along which ideas about death may be perceived: death as punishment or desideratum; the amalgamation of the personality during life and its disintegration in death; the relationship between this world and the world to come; the connection of the soul and the body; and the burial society as a social and religious organization. Death offers a moral perspective on life, and this is also connected with the comprehension of dying as a life passage, and with the construction of the idea of the proper death.

Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies