Jewish and Holocaust studies

Kultur Roms im Spiegel der neueren Forschung BETL Bibliotheca ephemeridum theologicarum lovaniensium BibInt Biblical Interpretation BJS Brown Judaic Studies BTB Biblical Theology Bulletin BZAW Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft CBQ Catholic Biblical Quarterly CBQMS Catholic Biblical Quarterly Monograph Series CEJL Commentaries on Early Jewish Literature CRINT Compendia Rerum Iudaicarum ad Novum Testamentum DJD Discoveries in the Judaean Desert DSD Dead Sea Discoveries EJL Early Judaism and Its Literature FRLANT Forschungen zur Religion und Literatur des Alten und Neuen Testaments

The Israel Science Foundation sponsored research project Contending with Crises: The Jews in XIV th Century Europe at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem under the direction of Prof. Elisheva Baumgarten is offering short term (1-2 months) visiting fellowships for Ph.D. students in the fields of History, Jewish Studies, Religious Studies, Literature, or Art History and for Postdocs in these fields, starting in October 2024. Successful candidates will receive a monthly stipend depending on their status (PhD or postdoc) as well as some travel funds if they come from abroad. They will be given offices at the Hebrew University (Mount Scopus campus), and will expected to be present at least two days a week during their period of fellowship. They will take part in a group enterprise of creating a history of Jewish life in Europe during the XIV th century with an emphasis on challenges Jews faced as part of the centuries' crises including expulsion, migration, persecution, and plague but also return to previous homes after displacement, cultural production, changing and continuing social structures. Work on any geographic area in Europe is relevant for this project. They will participate in the project's seminar, research trips, conferences and its other activities.

Israeli culture in the 1940s and 1950s was dominated by ideological considerations. Zionist films, as other aspects of Eretz-Israel and Israeli culture, distinctively propagated Zionist ideas. As a consequence of their sociopolitical focus, these films neglected the complexities of the relationship between Holocaust survivors and the native Jews in Eretz-Israel. Instead, Holocaust survivors were reduced to a homogeneous entity that bore distinct negative connotations. Films depicted female Holocaust survivors as mentally unstable, unfit mothers, and often played up negative sexual stereotypes. In these films, the women were "cured" or went through a process of "purification" thanks to the Zionist establishment. Historical research often cites the trial of Adolf Eichmann (1961) as being a turning point in the Israeli public's perception of the Holocaust, and its representation in Israeli culture. This article will focus on an analysis of the film The Hero's Wife (Peter Frye, 1963) that was produced in the aftermath of the trial. It will discuss the innovative representations of this unresearched film, and will seek to answer the questions of why, and in what way, its narrative comprises a subversive antithesis to the narrative shaped by Zionist fiction films made prior to the Eichmann trial.

Opracowanie dotyczy sprawy karnej, rozpoznanej przez Wojskowy Sąd Specjalny przy Komendzie Głównej AK, przeciw pchor. Tadeuszowi Szatkowskiemu "Gromowi", żołnierzowi AK z placówki odbioru zrzutów pod Końskimi, oskarżonemu o przywłaszczenie pieniędzy na szkodę Polskich Sił Zbrojnych. Autor omówił materiał stanowiący podstawę przeprowadzenia postępowania karnego oraz wydania wyroku i kwestii związanych z jego niewykonaniem. Podjął próbę prawnokarnej analizy powyższej sprawy oraz wydanego wyroku w odniesieniu zarówno do wymogów formalnoprawnych, jak i słuszności wydanego orzeczenia. S ł o w a k l u c z o w e: cichociemni, Armia Krajowa, sądownictwo podziemne, Wojskowy Sąd Specjalny, Związek Walki Zbrojnej. A b s t r a c t: The study deals with a criminal case examined by the Special Military Court at the High Command of the Home Army against the Home Army Offi cer Cadet Tadeusz Szatkowski aka Grom, serving at the post to receive airdrops near Końskie, charged with appropriation of money to the detriment of the Polish armed forces. The author examines the source material on which the criminal case and sentence were based together with questions related to its non-execution. He attempts to make a legal-criminal analysis of the case and the sentence in relation to both formal and legal conditions, and the validity of the sentence.

Most doctors’ testimonies, male and female, date from the earliest period, and it is some of these that I will discuss first and to which I will devote a major part of my analysis. However, my study will actually encompass the broader period beginning with 1933 and will begin with a discussion of the diaries and memoirs of three female doctors, Käte Frankenthal, Hertha Nathorf, and Lucie Adelsberger, who describe life for female Jewish doctors in that earlier period, followed by accounts written and published right after liberation by Sima Vaisman, and the paired accounts of Olga Lengyel and Gisella Perl, as well as several accounts from the subsequent two decades. As more and more survivors who were not in camps but survived in hiding, in particular child survivors, began to add their voices to the growing number of testimonies, the steadily wider scope of Holocaust writing has broadened and this also relative to medical issues as well, as I will illustrate through a subsequent group of memoirs, published four and five decades later,  and finally a dual-voiced accounts by the child survivor of her doctor survivor mother who was unable to write her own memoir, and a post-memory account by a second-generation daughter of a survivor about the saintly lesbian doctor, who had been in the camps with her mother, and who after the war delivered the author.

It is not surprising that Yiddish, the language of medieval Ashkenazic Jewry, is rare in the Arabic-speaking world of the Genizah. Only a few leaves and a single-and highly significant-codex in Yiddish have been found in the Collection. Among the leaves are five letters dating from the 1560s, written by a woman living in Jerusalem called Rachel Zusman. Four of the letters were sent to her son in Cairo and one was intended for a rabbi in Venice. Alerted by my colleague Dotan Arad to the presence of Yiddish fragments in the Additional Series, I was surprised to find four more pieces of letters there. The handwriting of the first of the fragments (T-S AS 202.383) seemed very familiar and it turned out to be the missing right-hand part of a letter sent by Rachel Zusman to her son Moshe (T-S NS 298.18). The fragment greatly improves our understanding of the letter, in which Moshe's mother complains about her son's failure to write to her, ‫קיין‬ ‫האב‬ ‫אונ'‬ ‫בנג‬ ‫זיר‬ ‫בעו'‬ ‫איז‬ ‫מיר‬ ... ‫גיהט‬ ‫דיר‬ ‫בון‬ ‫ניט‬ ‫בריב‬ ‫קיין‬ ‫האב‬ ‫איך‬ ‫הערצן‬ ‫מיין‬ ‫אויף‬ ‫רוא‬ ('I have not had a letter from you, I am scared and have no rest in my heart'). She pleads with Moshe to leave Cairo and settle in Jerusalem because he can learn so much more in the Holy City, ‫חברות‬ ‫דיינר‬ ‫מיט‬ ‫דארט‬ ‫דיר‬ ‫לערנשט‬ ‫דען‬ ('than what you learn there with your fellowship'), and will have no problem in making a living, ‫זיין‬ ‫מחיה‬ ‫קינן‬ ‫וואל‬ ‫היא‬ ‫דיך‬ ‫ווערשט‬ ‫דו‬ ('you will be able to support yourself here'). She talks up the city's popularity, ‫הער‬ ‫מער‬ ‫קומן‬ ‫טאג‬ ‫אל‬ ‫אונ'‬ ‫היא‬ ‫וואלק‬ ‫וויל‬ ‫אזו‬ ‫איז‬ ‫עז‬ ('there are so many people here and every day more are coming'), and prosperity, ‫ליב‬ ‫מיט‬ ‫לנג‬ ‫גינירן‬ ‫וואל‬ ‫היא‬ ‫לויט‬ ‫די‬ ‫זיך‬ ‫דז‬ ‫של'‬ ‫זיך‬ ‫איך‬ ('I see that the people are all feeding well; may it stay like that'), apparently brought on by the arrival of a new leader: ‫שלו'‬ ‫גוטר‬ ‫הער‬ ‫איז‬ ‫טירקיי‬ ‫דער‬ ‫אויז‬ ‫חכם‬ ‫איין‬ ‫זינט‬ ('good peace since a wise man from Turkey has come here'). He should bring his wife's parents too, ‫קינן‬ ‫וואל‬ ... ‫היא‬ ‫זיך‬ ‫ווערן‬ ‫זי‬ ‫קומן‬ ‫הער‬ ‫זי‬ ‫דז‬ ‫שוויגר‬ ‫אונ'‬ ‫שוועהר‬ ‫דיין‬ ‫מיט‬ ‫בוטיק‬ ‫איינר‬ ‫מיט‬ ‫זיין‬ ‫מחיה‬ ('(talk) with your in-laws, that they come here; they will be able to have a livelihood here with a shop'). The other three fragments (T-S AS 205.53, T-S AS 205.64 and T-S AS 224.165) together form a new letter to Rachel Zusman from an as yet unidentified man (as evidenced by the remark ‫מיין‬ ‫גרושן‬ ‫זער‬ ‫אוייך‬ ‫לושט‬ ‫די‬ ‫,וייב‬ 'my wife sends greetings to you') who addresses Rachel as a ‫פריינדין‬ ‫ליב‬ ('dear friend'). The letter is short and touches upon a relative's illness and minor business matters. Verso contains a note, perhaps in the hand of Moshe, Rachel's son, whose job it was to forward her letters on to Venice. It is likely, therefore, that this is a reply to Rachel from her correspondent, the Venetian rabbi Jacob Katz. The fact that this letter, Rachel's note for Rabbi Katz and a letter from Moshe himself were all found in the Genizah, indicates that they probably never reached their destinations. We can only speculate about the reasons for that. But perhaps it is the son's negligence in these matters that causes Rachel to scold him in another letter: ‫גיוועזן‬ ‫מצער‬ ‫אוזו‬ ‫האשט‬ ‫מיך‬ ‫דו‬ ‫דז‬ ‫זיין‬ ‫מוחל‬ ‫עז‬ ‫דיר‬ ‫זול‬ ‫הקב''ה‬ ('may God forgive you that you made me so sad'), before adding a somewhat more enraged ‫שטירב‬ ‫איך‬ ‫אי‬ ‫שטראפן‬ ‫דיך‬ ‫וויל‬ ‫איך‬ ('I want to punish you before I die'). T-S AS 205.53, recto: an unidentified man writes to Rachel Zusman in Jerusalem Readers are invited to send comments to

Die Geschichtswissenschaft hat sich in den letzten Jahrzehnten im Sinne eines Digital Turns der systematischen Bearbeitung von digitalisierten Zeitungen zugewendet. Dabei hat die Betrachtung der Berichterstattung außerhalb Deutschlands über die Verfolgung von jüdischen Bürger*innen in Deutschland besondere Aufmerksamkeit erhalten. In dem folgenden Artikel werden die zumeist übergangenen Lokal- und Regionalzeitungen in den Vorkriegsjahren von 1933-1939 untersucht. Die Analyse des Nottingham Journal und des Lincolnshire Echo aus den britischen Midlands deckt die selektive und stark variierende Berichterstattung der Regional- und Lokalzeitungen in den Midlands auf. Die Betrachtung von Leser*innenbriefen erweist sich als nützlich, um den potenziellen Wissensstand von Bürger*innen zu ermitteln und lokale Diskurse ausfindig zu machen. Es ist erkennbar, dass Leser*innen fundiertes Wissen über die Schwere der Judenverfolgung haben konnten und sich mit diesem Wissen in den Diskurs über die Flüchtlingspolitik Großbritanniens einbrachten.

“A trailblazing introduction to a budding field of digital Holocaust memory, combining insights from media studies, production studies, and reception studies. This volume aptly focuses on new technologies of commemoration, educational websites, the policing of the social media by traditional museums, and a much needed fine-tuning of the theoretical discourse. The contributors touch upon the current developments in the realm of the digital and its future.”
- Dr Tomasz Łysak, associate professor, University of Warsaw

“This collection of essays is a timely and highly anticipated intervention into research on the new affordances provided by digital technologies in the context of Holocaust commemoration and education. By addressing all aspects of the digital – the computational side, the interface, the user experience and the situatedness of the testimonial encounter – it offers a much needed and carefully curated dialogue not only between different disciplines but also between academics, heritage practitioners and educational professionals.”

- Dr Silke Arnold-de Simine, Reader in Memory, Media and Cultural Studies, Birkbeck, University of London

“Are selfies taken at Holocaust commemoration sites narcissistic, or do they express engagement and empathy? Are TikTok re-enactments legitimate and even welcome popular forms of Holocaust memory? How can virtual reality be used sensitively in Holocaust education? Assembling insights from leading Holocaust educators and digital culture scholars, this book is an essential resource for anyone concerned with the stark ethical challenges – and new educational and communicative possibilities – of digital media as agents of Holocaust memory.”

- Professor Paul Frosh, Department of Communication and Journalism, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Escaping revolutionary upheavals in Germany, Joseph Bloch arrived at the Port of Mobile in 1848 at the age of 22. Bloch experienced some of the truly formative conflicts of the age in Germany and in America. In his individual life, he made lasting contributions to Jewish communal affairs and the larger music scene in Mobile, Alabama

Remembrance in the Living Room is a Jewish-Israeli social initiative providing an intimate format for commemoration on the eve of Holocaust Martyrs and Heroes Remembrance day, in the privacy of people's homes. This initiative, which was launched in 2011 soon overshadowed other alternative ceremonies. The article analyses the way these gatherings differ from the performative acts of canonical and alternative ceremonies and suggests new strategies for audience engagement. These gatherings alter the role of the public and transform individuals from passive spectators into agents of Holocaust memory who represent various perspectives, themes, and insights. Its success indicates that this new performativity is reviving the fading interest of Jewish-Israelis (especially the younger generations) in the Holocaust Martyrs and Heroes Remembrance Day ceremonies thus creating a contemporary Israeli version of the pledge to 'never forget'.

To begin with, the individual and collective wartime experiences of Poles have been falsely universalized. Since the 1940s, those who found themselves in Poland during the war have been portrayed in the same terms, without drawing a distinction between Poles and Jews. Second, this experience has been Holocaustized, that is, the narrative of the Polish experience was made to resemble descriptions of the Holocaust as experienced by the Jews. 1 As a result, Polish Jews writing on their World War II experience have come to focus their efforts on foregrounding that difference, and ensuring that the disparity between the war accounts of Jews and Poles-whether individual or collective-would not pass unnoticed. Because the difference was largely marked by Polish attitudes toward Jews, any "mere" act had become elevated in the Polish context to an "exceptional" one.

Israeli culture in the 1940s and 1950s was dominated by ideological considerations. Zionist films, as other aspects of Eretz-Israel and Israeli culture, distinctively propagated Zionist ideas. As a consequence of their sociopolitical focus, these films neglected the complexities of the relationship between Holocaust survivors and the native Jews in Eretz Israel. Instead, Holocaust survivors were reduced to a homogeneous entity that bore distinct negative connotations. Films depicted female Holocaust survivors as mentally unstable, unfit mothers, and often played up negative sexual stereotypes. In these films, the women were “cured” or went through a process of “purification” thanks to the Zionist establishment. Historical research often cites the trial of Adolf Eichmann (1961) as being a turning point in the Israeli public’s perception of the Holocaust, and its representation in Israeli culture. This article will focus on an analysis of the film The Hero’s Wife (Peter Frye, 1963) th...

In English:
The Great Extermination of Jews during the Second World War, known as the Holocaust or the Shoah, was of course a crime against the Jews, but committed not only by the Germans and their allies - from France and the Netherlands through Hungary, Romania, Croatia and Slovakia to Ukraine, Lithuania and Latvia - but also by the Jews themselves, just as the Germans committed countless crimes against the German people during the years of NSDAP rule and especially during the Second World War. Representatives of other nations helped in various ways and often under strong pressure to commit crimes against the Jews, but the Poles, unlike the allies of the Third Reich, committed these crimes exceptionally rarely and against the orders of their government in exile. The ghettos were ruled by Jews - the Judenrats, or Jewish councils, and the Odmen, or Jewish policemen, and in the concentration camps themselves, or in fact the extermination camps, the gas chambers and crematorium ovens were manned to a large extent by special units made up of Jewish prisoners. The Germans took great care to ensure that the extermination of Jews was carried out by Jewish hands. Transports from the ghettos to the extermination camps were organised to a large extent by the Jews themselves, i.e. the Judenrats and the Odmen. Outside the walls (entanglements), soldiers from Germany's allies and Ukrainian fascists from the OUN often aided the Germans by catching or killing those who escaped during the liquidation operations.
However, it must be remembered that the Holocaust of European Jews was not the only Holocaust in human history. There is also the Australian Aboriginal Holocaust, the Congolese Negro Holocaust, the American Indian Holocaust, including the crimes of the Conquistadors in Latin America and, last but not least, the famines in Bengal, China, Iran and Soviet Russia - the latter during the period of counter-revolution, civil war and armed Western intervention, including from Poland, and under Stalin's policy of accelerated industrialisation, which was financed under conditions of extreme state capitalism by the rapacious, even slavish exploitation of workers and peasants.

In Polish:
Wielka Zagłada Żydów w kontekście światowej historii Wielka Zagłada Żydów w latach II wojny światowej, zwana Holocaustem albo Szoah ,była oczywiście zbrodnią na Żydach, ale popełnioną nie tylko przez Niemców i ich sojuszników-od Francji i Holandii przez Węgry, Rumunię, Chorwację i Słowację po Ukrainę, Litwę i Łotwę, ale także i przez samych Żydów, analogicznie jak Niemcy dokonali w latach rządów NSDAP, a szczególnie podczas II wojny światowej, niezliczonych zbrodni na narodzie niemieckim. W dokonaniu zbrodni na Żydach w rozmaity sposób i często pod silną presją pomagali przedstawiciele innych narodów, ale Polacy, w odróżnieniu od sojuszników III Rzeszy, popełniali je wyjątkowo rzadko i wbrew rozkazom swojego rządu emigracyjnego. W gettach rządzili zaś Żydzi -Judenraty czyli samorządy żydowskie i odmani - żydowscy policjanci, a w samych obozach koncentracyjnych a właściwie zagłady, to obsługą komór gazowych i pieców krematoryjnych zajmowały się w bardzo dużej mierze specjalne oddziały tworzone z więźniów żydowskich 3. Niemcy bardzo dbali o to, aby eksterminacja Żydów dokonała się rękami Żydów. Wywózki z gett do obozów zagłady organizowane były w dużej mierze przez same służby żydowskie czyli Judenraty i odmanów. Poza murami (zasiekami) często w prześladowaniu Żydów pomagali Niemcom żołnierze z państw będących sojusznikami Niemiec oraz ukraińscy faszyści spod znaku OUN, wyłapując lub zabijając tych, którzy uciekali podczas akcji likwidacyjnych.
Jednakże należy pamiętać, że Holokaust Żydów Europejskich nie był jednym Holokaustem w ‎historii ludzkości. Dochodzą tu też Holocaust Australijskich Aborygenów, Holokaust Murzynów ‎Kongijskich, Holokaust Amerykańskich Indian, w tym także zbrodnie Konkwistadorów w ‎Ameryce Łacińskiej oraz, last but not least, klęski głodu w Bengalu, Chinach, Iranie i Rosji ‎Radzieckiej - ten ostatni w okresie kontrrewolucji, wojny domowej i zbrojnej zachodniej ‎interwencji, w tym też i ze strony Polski oraz w warunkach stalinowskiej polityki przyspieszonej ‎industrializacji, która finansowana była w warunkach skrajnego kapitalizmu państwowego z ‎rabunkowej, wręcz niewolniczej eksploatacji robotników i chłopów.‎

Remembrance in the Living Room is a Jewish-Israeli social initiative providing an intimate format for commemoration on the eve of Holocaust Martyrs and Heroes Remembrance day, in the privacy of people's homes. This initiative, which was launched in 2011 soon overshadowed other alternative ceremonies. The article analyses the way these gatherings differ from the performative acts of canonical and alternative ceremonies and suggests new strategies for audience engagement. These gatherings alter the role of the public and transform individuals from passive spectators into agents of Holocaust memory who represent various perspectives, themes, and insights. Its success indicates that this new performativity is reviving the fading interest of Jewish-Israelis (especially the younger generations) in the Holocaust Martyrs and Heroes Remembrance Day ceremonies thus creating a contemporary Israeli version of the pledge to 'never forget'.

Start of the campaign for the rescue of Jews by the Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky in August 1942 is studied in the article. The author begins with an analysis of the August campaign in 1942 as a massive Holocaust of Lviv's Jewish community. He focuses on the fact that a foreboding of imminent catastrophe felt by some Jews led them, in despair, to address the Head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church. A visit of Rabbis Dawid Kahane and Kalman Chameides started the campaign for the rescue of Jewish children from Lviv Ghetto. Active rescue efforts regarding adult Jews were made during the August operation. Some sources allow us to assert that sheltering the Jews in cellars of St. George's Cathedral architectural complex was not a onetime act of commitment but an ongoing rescue operation under conditions of growing genocide. Events that took place in August 1942 became the turning point for Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky and Lviv Jews and their relationship, since they started the process of rescuing people deprived of the right to live by the Nazis. This rescuing campaign developed during the following months of autumn 1942.

American Jewish Political Thought – At Home and Abroad. Digital Annual Conference of the Leibniz Institute for Jewish History and Culture - Simon Dubnow, in cooperation with The Goldstein-Goren Center for American Jewish History at New York University, June 15-16, 2021

W świetle przeanalizowanych dokumentów Autor stawia tezę, że procesy z dekretu sierpniowego (31 VIII 1944 r., tzw. sierpniówka) noszą wyraźne piętno czasów w jakich powstały. W przypadku sądzenia żołnierzy Armii Krajowej na różnych etapach postępowania sądowego dochodziło do licznych manipulacji chociażby w postaci wymuszeń zeznań zgodnych z życzeniem oskarżenia czy celowych uchybień proceduralnych. Materiał ten skłania badacza do istotnej ostrożności w ferowaniu wyroków i sądów naukowych. W większości przypadków dowodzi bardziej kształtowania rzeczywistości okupacyjnej na użytek propagandowy niż obiektywnego jej odtwarzania i odpowiedzi na fundamentalne pytanie: Dlaczego?
Niezależnie jednak od krytycznej oceny wiarygodności procesowej „sierpniówek” należy przyznać, że zawierają one liczne przekazy stanowiące wartościowe źródło historyczne dotyczące dziejów Armii Krajowej w Okręgu Radomsko-Kieleckim. Obszar eksploracji dotyczy w pierwszym rzędzie działalności poszczególnych oddziałów i struktur organizacyjnych AK (w tym walk toczonych z oddziałami niemieckimi) na szczeblu placówek, obwodów oraz ich wyposażenia, uzbrojenia i składów personalnych. Równie interesujące są fragmenty poruszające zagadnienia z zakresu funkcjonowania wywiadu i kontrwywiadu AK, podziemnego wymiaru sprawiedliwości, kolportażu prasy konspiracyjnej oraz struktur Polskiego Państwa Podziemnego.

Poco prima della giornata della memoria è uscito un libro di una autrice canadese, secondo la quale la spia che avrebbe venduto i Frank ai nazisti, sarebbe  Arnold van den Bergh, uno dei leader degli ebrei di Amsterdam e membro del Jewish Council della stessa città.
Anche prendendo per buoni i fini con cui è stato realizzato il libro, senza filtri di alcun genere, è stato riproposto il mito dell’ebreo colpevole e corresponsabile del suo stesso genocidio.
I più acerrimi nemici della Shoah, non sono il negazionismo o l’uso politico della storia, ma chi banalizza e trivializza il genocidio degli ebrei.

Dear Colleagues,
The impact of the past on present identities, a dominant subject in 21st-century global art, has become an especially prominent feature of the art created in Israel.  It is articulated in a plethora of artworks that renegotiate identity through new artistic strategies of reassessment, reenactment, and even reimagination of the past. While offering alternatives to hegemonic historicizations, these representations mark a shift from the critique of power relations to interventions in the processes through which history is remembered and narrated. As Jane Blocker suggests, instead of viewing art as the subject of inquiry on the part of art historians, contemporary art should be addressed and analyzed as a form of writing or rewriting history, even as history itself (2016).

Since its very inception, art created in Israel has exhibited a consistent preoccupation with issues of identity and self-determination. Beyond being a multicultural and multiethnic young immigrant state, Israel is further characterized by a significant social binary, fluctuating between Jewish and non-Jewish, Diaspora and Homeland, and Religious and Secular. The turbulent history of the country, saturated with wars and the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict, renders the inquiry of the past within Israeli culture a fertile ground for the investigation of hybrid, complex, intersectional, and stratified local identities.

This special issue of Arts will focus on the renegotiation of histories and identities in contemporary art in Israel. Taking Blocker’s idea as our point of departure, we invite contributions that will explore art in the local arena as a form of writing [or rewriting] history in an attempt to reveal its unique manifestations and characteristics. Of special interest is the mediation of the subject through performative media – performance and video art, dance, and new media – which evoke an enhanced awareness of context and temporality through (live or documented) presence.

Die Rede von der Singularität des Holocaust schaffe »Opferkonkurrenz« und »Aufmerksamkeitskonflikte«: Michael Rothberg fordert in seinem Buch »Multidirektionale Erinnerung« ein neues Gedenken ein. Ein Vorbild findet er in den Debatten der fünfziger und sechziger Jahre. Das Wissen um die Besonderheiten der Judenvernichtung steht dabei im Wege. 1952 hielt der schwarze Bürgerrechtler W. E. B. Du Bois in New York City eine vielbeachtete Rede. Die kommunistische Zeitschrift Jewish Life hatte ihn aus Anlass des neunten Jahrestags des Aufstands im Warschauer Ghetto eingeladen. In seinem Vortrag revidierte Du Bois sein Diktum, wonach das zentrale »Problem des 20. Jahrhunderts das Problem der color line«, der Grenze zwischen den Hautfarben, sei. Sein Blick auf die sogenannte Rassenfrage habe sich vor allem durch Besuche in Europa verändert.

The power of the expert has long derived from the assumption that they bring objective, informed, and incisive analysis to the topics at hand. What those outside of academia may not understand, however, is that the standard of academic "objectivity" has long been eroding. Thanks to the postmodernist rejection of Enlightenment ideals of truth, objectivity, progress, morality, reason, and more, many scholars have come to instead embrace subjectivity, the influence of identity (or "positionality") in understanding the world, and critical theories that argue that the motivating forces behind civilization are struggles for power along the lines of gender, race, class, sexuality, and so forth.

Remembrance in the Living Room is a Jewish-Israeli social initiative
providing an intimate format for commemoration on the eve of
Holocaust Martyrs and Heroes Remembrance day, in the privacy of
people’s homes. This initiative, which was launched in 2011 soon
overshadowed other alternative ceremonies. The article analyses
the way these gatherings differ from the performative acts of
canonical and alternative ceremonies and suggests new strategies
for audience engagement. These gatherings alter the role of the
public and transform individuals from passive spectators into
agents of Holocaust memory who represent various perspectives,
themes, and insights. Its success indicates that this new
performativity is reviving the fading interest of Jewish-Israelis
(especially the younger generations) in the Holocaust Martyrs
and Heroes Remembrance Day ceremonies thus creating a
contemporary Israeli version of the pledge to ‘never forget’.

The Cellar (Hamartef, Natan Gross, 1963) is a groundbreaking film—the only Israeli fictional film created by Holocaust survivors regarding the Holocaust and its aftermath from the perspective of a Holocaust survivor protagonist. Yet it has been largely ignored by studies on the representation of the Holocaust in Israeli cinema and has not been attributed proper significance. This article is the first to give center
stage to this pioneering film. It shows that this under researched film was the marker of change, a first cinematic attempt at relating the story of Holocaust survivors with complexity and depth, which threw aside the shallow narrative of national redemption in Israel, that characterized Israeli cinema in the 1940s and 1950s. Instead it focused on 1930s Germany and the return to Germany after World War II, periods which had thus far been neglected in Israeli cinema. Moreover, the article
highlights The Cellar as exceptional in comparison to fictional films produced after 1963, which focus mainly on the lives of Holocaust survivors in Israel, and which disregard the themes of life in 1930s Europe, as well as the attempts by survivors to return home after World War II

Israeli culture in the 1940s and 1950s was dominated by ideological considerations. Zionist films, as other aspects of Eretz-Israel and Israeli culture, distinctively propagated Zionist ideas. As a consequence of their sociopolitical focus, these films neglected the complexities of the relationship between Holocaust survivors and the native Jews in Eretz-Israel. Instead, Holocaust survivors were reduced to a homogeneous entity that bore distinct negative connotations. Films depicted female Holocaust survivors as mentally unstable, unfit mothers, and often played up negative sexual stereotypes. In these films, the women were "cured" or went through a process of "purification" thanks to the Zionist establishment. Historical research often cites the trial of Adolf Eichmann (1961) as being a turning point in the Israeli public's perception of the Holocaust, and its representation in Israeli culture. This article will focus on an analysis of the film The Hero's Wife (Peter Frye, 1963) that was produced in the aftermath of the trial. It will discuss the innovative representations of this unresearched film, and will seek to answer the questions of why, and in what way, its narrative comprises a subversive antithesis to the narrative shaped by Zionist fiction films made prior to the Eichmann trial.

Front matter of Vol  31

Jewish culture places a great deal of emphasis on texts and their means of transmission. At various points in Jewish history, the primary mode of transmission has changed in response to political, geographical, technological, and cultural shifts. Contemporary textual transmission in Jewish culture has been influenced by secularization, the return to Hebrew and the emergence of modern Yiddish, and the new centers of Jewish life in the United States and in Israel, as well as by advancements in print technology and the invention of the Internet. Volume XXXI of Studies in Contemporary Jewry deals with various aspects of textual transmission in Jewish culture in the last two centuries.

This review supports the idea that there is a modest distancing from Israel going on among non-Orthodox American Jews. But it raises the question of whether this distancing will continue, and whether this will prove harmful to both Israel and to American Jewish life in the long term.

On November 30th and December 8th, 1941, German occupants and Latvian collaborators killed approximately 25000 Jewish men, women, and children in the forest of Rumbula in the southeast of Riga. It was the biggest mass shooting of Jews on Latvian soil and is known until today as one of the most tragic chapters of Holocaust history in Nazi-occupied Latvia. For nearly two decades after the war, the mass graves remained in the state the Germans had left them. In 1961 a group of Latvian Jews initiated the installation of a memorial, which was inaugurated in October 1964. Bearing a Yiddish inscription, the memorial implied that Jews had been victims of the massacre. This made Rumbula different from most monuments built at the time of Soviet rule. The regime restricted Jewish life and culture and the Jewish Holocaust was generally not presented within the official commemoration of the Second World War. Why was it possible to erect the memorial at this time? Who was involved and what motives did the activists have? How did the Soviet regime react? How did the attitude towards the memorial change after the collapse of the Soviet Union? And finally, how is a
commemoration in Rumbula organized since Latvia regained its independence? Knowledge about the memorial’s history and its present will serve to understand the development of Holocaust Commemoration in Latvia and its current impact upon the country.

INTRODUCTION
In the past U.S. administration, both, media and politicians, assigned the same Nazi lexicon of "concentration camps" to the immigration crisis of the US-Mexico border. This hyperbole created a revisionist polemic of the comparison of border camps with the Nazi concentration camps which misappropriated a terminology that pre-dated the Holocaust -the British invented the term- but it acquired a new meaning after the Nazis turned them into genocide camps. This moral equivalency between camps is not only unfair but it is a show of historical ignorance that minimizes the evil actions of the Nazis and the human suffering of the Jews and other minorities. Since there is no available definition that can satisfy the loaded meaning of concentration camps during the Holocaust, this essay will instead establish the factors that preceded the establishment of Nazi concentration camps that led to the Jewish genocide, making them unique in human history, thereby differentiating them from any other camps.

Efforts to commemorate the victims of the 1903 Chişinǎu (Kishinev) pogrom and the Holocaust in Bessarabia and Transnistria have achieved varying degrees of success in the Republic of Moldova. Gaining public recognition for these experiences has proven a convoluted process. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the local Community has led an enduring memorialization campaign, which has steadily evolved with the shifting political climate. Though Community representatives have at times had a fraught relationship with Moldovan officials, they have continuously sought official acknowledgment of their efforts. This article analyzes how both the government and the Jewish Community have handled memory in public spaces and the local media of Chişinǎu.

L'ultimo libro di Federico Steinhaus (Una giornata della memoria 364 giornate dell'indifferenza, Raetia, Bolzano 2019) è il punto di arrivo, per ora, di un impegno di lungo periodo dell'autore nella lotta contro l'antisemitismo in tutte le forme in cui esso si presenta. In questo senso è significativo il sottotitolo del volume: "Mutazioni, manipolazioni e camuffamenti dell'antisemitismo". Le mutazioni e i camuffamenti dell'antisemitismo sono infatti l'oggetto principale del lavoro di Steinhaus: emarginato (ma non scomparso) l'antisemitismo tradizionale, quello che si fondava su pregiudizi religiosi o razziali, è progressivamente emerso e si è col tempo rafforzato un altro tipo di antisemitismo, quello che prende di mira non l'ebreo come persona ma gli ebrei come popolo, negando ad esso ciò che è considerato legittimo per ogni altro popolo, il diritto di avere un proprio Stato. L'antisionismo emerge così dallo studio di Steinhaus come la forma attuale dell'antisemitismo, sulla scia degli studi più recenti sull'argomento. Ma questa affermazione non è per l'autore il frutto di una elaborazione puramente teorica o ideologica: essa nasce dall'osservazione di decine, di centinaia di episodi di antisemitismo che egli ha raccolto pazientemente e che fa riemergere dalla memoria. Fra i tanti gli episodi che cita, i più significativi sono certamente quelli che si riferiscono all'Alto Adige, che ha potuto seguire da vicino come presidente, per molti anni, della Comunità ebraica di Merano. Episodi significativi per l'intreccio che avviene in questa terra di confine tra nostalgie pangermaniste, rivendicazioni autonomiste, pulsioni xenofobe e rigurgiti di antisemitismo. Sono aspetti di una realtà a lungo ignorata dall'opinione pubblica nazionale perché l'attenzione si è focalizzata esclusivamente sulle rivendicazioni separatiste di una parte della comunità di lingua tedesca, mentre la notizia dei numerosi episodi di antisemitismo raramente è stata diffusa dai grandi organi di informazione. Un impegno di lungo periodo, dicevo, quello di Federico Steinhaus, che inizia fin dagli anni dell'Università. Federico infatti fece parte-esattamente sessanta anni fa, nell'aprile 1960-del gruppo di quaranta studenti della Facoltà di Scienze Politiche dell'Università di Firenze che partecipò al viaggio in Polonia che organizzai allora e che ebbe i suoi momenti più significativi nelle visite ad Auschwitz e alle memorie del Ghetto di Varsavia. Il suo impegno è proseguito nel corso di tutta la sua vita anche con la pubblicazione di numerosi libri e con il ruolo, già ricordato, di presidente della Comunità ebraica di Merano. Valentino Baldacci (28 maggio 2020)