bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Responses to a Shifting Landscape
Authors: Wiskind-Elper Ora
Published: February 2021

This chapter looks at facets of historical awareness in Hasidic commentary on the Torah. It presents certain foundational themes in Hasidic teaching related to Torah study, innovation, revelation, and religious experience. It also describes some Hadistic masters of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries and considers the ways in which they address contemporary concerns such as modernity, secularization, forces linking political revolution and divine providence, personal identity, trauma, and catastrophe. The chapter talks about the masters' teachings about God's presence in a dark world, the meaning of the covenant, and living as a Jew. It also discloses how the masters perceive their role and the role of Hasidic teaching in the larger process that leads to redemption through acts of 'reading otherwise'.
Ceremonial Synagogue Textiles
Authors: Yaniv Bracha
Published: February 2021

Richly illustrated and meticulously documented, this is the first comprehensive survey of synagogue textiles to be available in English. The book records their evolution from ancient times to the present. It contains a systematic consideration of the mantle, the wrapper, the Torah scroll binder, and the Torah ark curtain and valance, and considers the cultural factors that inspired the evolution of these different items and their motifs. Fabrics, techniques, and modes of production are described in detail; the inscriptions marking the circumstances of donation are similarly subjected to close analysis. Fully annotated plates demonstrate the richness of the styles and traditions in use in different parts of the Jewish diaspora, drawing attention to regional customs. Throughout, emphasis is placed on presenting and explaining all relevant aspects of the Jewish cultural heritage. The concluding section contains transcriptions, translations, and annotations of some 180 inscriptions recording the circumstances in which items were donated, providing a valuable survey of customs of dedication. The volume is an invaluable reference work for the scholarly community, museum curators, and others interested in the Jewish cultural heritage.
Chapter Four The Torah Mantle
Authors: Yaniv Bracha
Published: February 2021

It used to be the custom to donate a mantle (me’il) to the synagogue, either along with a new Torah scroll or on its own. When a mantle is donated with a scroll, they are kept together and the mantle acts as the scroll’s permanent covering, making it easier to identify a specific scroll. In congregations with many Torah scrolls, the dedicatory inscription on the mantle is of great importance since it helps to pick out the scroll that is to be read. There are also mantles with no connection to a specific scroll, the intention behind the donation often being that they should be used on particular sabbaths or to commemorate special occasions....
The First World War and its Aftermath
Authors: Polonsky Antony
Published: February 2021

This chapter focuses on how the First World War represented a major turning point in the history not only of the Jews, but also of Europe and the wider world. The First World War saw the three powers that had partitioned Poland go to war with each other. In spite of deep reservations about the tsarist regime, the Jews supported the Russian war effort in large numbers, and over half a million served in the tsarist army. This did not, however, allay Russian hostility. Changes in Russian anti-Jewish policies came in only after the overthrow of the tsarist system. In Ukraine, the home of the largest Jewish community in the tsarist empire, the development of the revolution and the situation of the Jews had some specific features. Jewish support for Ukrainian aspirations was undermined by the breakdown of law and order and the beginnings of the wave of pogroms, which was to assume massive proportions in late 1918 and throughout 1919. In spite of the appalling bloodshed that had occurred, Jews both in eastern Europe and elsewhere felt that the outcome of the war did have some positive elements. Zionism now enjoyed international recognition, as did the national rights of Jews in Poland and Lithuania and the autonomy that they had been granted in the latter.
Jews in Soviet Russia and the Soviet Union, 1921–1941
Authors: Polonsky Antony
Published: February 2021

This chapter describes the situation of the Jews in Soviet Russia and the Soviet Union in the years between 1921 and 1941. Here, their victory in the civil war enabled the Bolsheviks to apply the ideological principles they had developed for dealing with the ‘Jewish question’. National issues were seen by all the Bolsheviks as instrumental. They were to be judged on how they advanced the interest of the world revolution and the Soviet state. Where national groups were supported, this was a tactical alliance, like the alliance with the peasantry. The ultimate goal was the creation of a new socialist man who would be above petty nationalist divisions, and a single world socialist state. All those responsible for Jewish policy within the Bolshevik party sought this final goal; the only difference between them was their view on how long Jewish separateness could be tolerated. The aim was assimilation—a new version of the view that the Jews were to be given everything as individuals and nothing as a community.
From the End of the Second World War to the Collapse of the Communist System
Authors: Polonsky Antony
Published: February 2021

This chapter studies the situation of the Jews from the end of the Second World War to the collapse of the communist system. The Second World War left the world of east European Jewry devastated. Although the Nazis had been defeated, they had succeeded in murdering a large proportion of the Jews of eastern Europe. The end of the wartime Grand Alliance and the increasingly repressive character of the regimes in the Soviet Union and in Poland form the background against which attempts were made to rebuild the war-torn societies of eastern Europe and to recreate Jewish life. The Nazi occupation left a landscape laid waste by the effort to impose a racially structured New Order and the violent and often fratricidal resistance that it elicited. The departure of the Germans did not lead to the end of hostilities, and guerrilla war against the communist authorities continued in Poland, Ukraine, and Lithuania.
Conclusion
Authors: Polonsky Antony
Published: February 2021

This concluding chapter describes the history of the Jews since the beginning of the diaspora as that of a succession of autonomous centres. The centre that developed in Poland–Lithuania from the middle of the thirteenth century was one of the most remarkable and creative. However, the history of the Jews of this area in the short twentieth century, between the outbreak of the First World War and the collapse of communism in Europe, has been tragic. The decline of Jewish communities was the result of local integral nationalism, the devastating impact of the genocidal policies of Nazi Germany, and the longer-term destructive effects of communist rule, particularly in its Stalinist incarnation. Ultimately, the complex story of the Jews of Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia, and of their contribution to Jewish life and to the culture of the larger world around them, needs to be better known and better understood in the diaspora, in Israel, and in the countries of eastern Europe. The Nazi attempt to annihilate the Jews and Stalin's efforts to eradicate their culture ultimately failed. There are still Jews in eastern Europe, and the rich culture the Jews created there remains a source of admiration and inspiration to both Jews and non-Jews.
Introduction
Authors: Saperstein Marc
Published: February 2021

This introductory chapter provides some passing references to some of the great Jewish preaching traditions of the modern period. It focuses on preaching in Britain and the United States by representatives of the Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform movements (but not by the ultra-Orthodox, whose Yiddish and — in Israel — Hebrew preaching is a very different tradition). The chapter reveals that there is such a multitude of diverse material from the middle of the eighteenth century to the beginning of the twenty-first. All these are furthermore conducted by preachers from all over the world — from both eastern and western Europe as well as the United States and the Middle East. Though this chapter's focus is on Britain and the United States, references are also made to these other preachers from around the world.
A Sermon on the National Fast-Day
Authors: Morais Sabato
Published: February 2021

This chapter takes a look at a sermon by Sabato Morais. Its structure is fairly straightforward. An introductory section focuses on what may appear to be a relatively minor issue but was apparently one that Morais considered to be of symbolic significance: the wording of the presidential proclamation of the national fast-day (made in response to a request by the Senate, possibly in response to the Southern day of prayer on 27 March). The body of the sermon presents two major themes. The first is introduced by the celebrated verses from the fifty-eighth chapter of the Book of Isaiah in which the prophet, speaking in God's behalf, castigates the people for the insincerity of their observance of a day of fasting and prayer. The chapter then turns to the second major theme: the repudiation of a dishonourable, ignominious peace that would come at the cost of dissolution of the American body politic.
Thanksgiving Day Sermon
Authors: Morais Sabato
Published: February 2021

This chapter takes a look at another one of Morais' sermons, this time on the Franco-Prussian War. Morais presents Prussia as an awesome military power that has not only humiliated its opponent but threatens to destroy its capital city. Here, he identifies France not with the Emperor but with Paris, the centre of science and the arts, a place of magnificence and beauty, the very survival of which is in peril. And he associates France with Lafayette, bound up with the founding of the American Republic and specifically with Philadelphia's Independence Hall, a few blocks from where Morais was speaking. The preacher expresses pride in America's quick recognition of the new French Republic, and a wistful desire that America could now intervene militarily to ensure the safety of Paris. In this, Morais reflects the shift of American public opinion to greater sympathy for France after Sedan.
Through Darkness and Death Unto Light
Authors: Hertz Joseph H.
Published: February 2021

This chapter presents a sermon based on ‘intercession service’. This service was established to replace the traditional ‘day of fast and humiliation’ during World War I. This intercession sermon, delivered by Joseph H. Hertz, honestly confesses the devastating effect on morale of the events he describes as ‘a human tragedy unapproached in civilized history’, the difficulty many have in reconciling the nightmare of their time with belief in the providence of a loving God. He incorporates quotations from literature — Kipling and Milton — and refers to Aristotle's theory of the cathartic effect of tragedy. And he applies a stunning rabbinic legend of Adam's despair at the darkness of the first night and God's reassurance that this darkness was not the final reality, together with the verse from the week's Torah lesson evoking both the discouragement of Moses and the promise of a new manifestation of the divine, as a source of hope.
America’s Hour of Decision
Authors: Feinberg Abraham H.
Published: February 2021

This chapter discusses a sermon by Abraham H. Feinberg on the outbreak of World War II. The sermon is divided into two parts that appear to be in tension with each other. The first part is a condemnation of Adolf Hitler's Nazi regime and of Hitler as a psychopathic criminal. Like many other rabbis, the preacher also lashes out against the self-delusion of European countries that allowed the Nazi regime to survive and flourish despite abundant evidence that Hitler could not be trusted. The second part of the sermon draws a conclusion that seems astonishing today, yet represents an almost universal consensus among American rabbis at the time: ‘impossible as it is to maintain neutrality of opinion, sanity still prescribes neutrality of action’. This second part contains not only an argument to sustain the non-interventionist position, but a rebuke of the failings of American society that need to be corrected. The argument is made without appeal to Jewish sources; the New Year occasion is invoked at the beginning and the end, as the imagery of the final paragraph builds to a rather poignant conclusion.
The Individual in the Crisis
Authors: Wurzburger Walter
Published: February 2021

This chapter takes a look at Walter Wurzburger's sermon. Here, the central theme of the sermon, is expressed by the title. Appropriate to the occasion of Yom Kippur and its liturgy, it focuses on individual responsibility, confession, and atonement. The ritual of the high priest in the ancient Temple and the formulations of his confessions, incorporated into a climactic moment of the Yom Kippur liturgy, are applied by the preacher to the present. In time of war, in time of disaster for one's people, the proper response should not be merely to condemn others — whether the Nazis or the Allies — but to accept responsibility for one's own failures to do what might have been done. While this is a very traditional motif, it must have taken some degree of courage for a young rabbi, who had arrived in the United States less than five years earlier and had only recently arrived at his congregation in Boston, to address his auditors in this manner.
The Falklands Crisis
Authors: Eimer Colin
Published: February 2021

This chapter discusses a sermon based on the Falkland Islands War. Like many of his colleagues, Colin Eimer felt the need to address issues arising from the war in one of his sabbath sermons. Several themes emerge from the text, but its central point is the condemnation of the jingoistic sentiments stoked by tabloid journalism. The preacher identifies a ‘brutalising process’ that tends to dehumanize the enemy and expose every presentation of a viewpoint that diverges from the government position to vituperative attack — as revealed by the firestorm of protest in the media and the House of Commons that followed the statement by a high BBC official that the grief felt by Argentine widows of sailors killed in action was no less painful and tragic than the grief felt by British widows. The preacher takes his stand in defence of this statement, insisting that despite the abhorrent policies of the Argentine government, the enemy soldiers and their loved ones are as fully human as one's own.
The Morality of Warfare
Authors: Jakobovits Immanuel
Published: February 2021

This chapter discusses a sermon by Immanuel Jakobovits. This sermon does not directly respond to a war situation — the war in the Falklands. However, it does survey themes that provide the background for any wartime sermon drawing on Jewish tradition in response to contemporary circumstances. Jakobovits begins his address by justifying his topic in a manner that suggests a reaction to the view that rabbis should ‘stick to religion’ and stay away from politics. In addition to their primary responsibility to promote the observance and understanding of Jewish law, he insists that ‘Rabbis should also be expected to relate the wider moral teachings of Judaism to the contemporary scene’. The remainder of the sermon contains few surprises. Jewish teachings do not sustain a pacifist repudiation of war under all circumstances; they do not question the right to defend a just cause by war when necessary.
A Country in Decline?
Authors: Rosman Moshe
Published: February 2021

This chapter reviews the course of the Besht’s life that was affected by the geopolitical and sociocultural-economic environment in which he lived. It describes how the Ba’al Shem Tov is often portrayed in popular works with only superficial attention to his surroundings, as if his life transcended time and space. The interest in connecting the Besht’s activities and teachings to later history has frequently obscured his relationship to the place and period in which he actually lived. The chapter mentions a few historically oriented scholarly writings that attempt to relate the patterns of the Besht’s life to conditions in Poland and its Jewish community in a general way. It provides a clearer perception of the country and the region where the Besht lived, which can help establish the parameters of his existence and contribute to an understanding of the range and nature of his activities.
The Contentions of Life
Authors: Rosman Moshe
Published: February 2021

This chapter talks about how historians have re-evaluated the place of the Jews in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth as a whole and in their individual communities over the last generation. It gives details on how historians have come to regard Jews as not only “in” Poland but “of” Poland and how they are inextricably linked to the social, economic, and cultural processes of the country. G.D. Hundert, a major proponent of the new approach, insisted that to Polish Jews, “Poland was as much theirs as their neighbors.” However, the chapter explains that it does not mean the Jews were perfectly integrated in an American ideal-type pluralist society. It analyzes how Hundert was quick to point out that while Jews felt at home in their communities, there was no question that animus and tension were the governing qualities in relations between Jews and Christians.
Life Stories
Authors: Rosman Moshe
Published: February 2021

This chapter reviews the Shivhei Ha-Besht, which is considered the most prolific, interesting, intriguing, problematic, and most exploited source relating to the Ba’al Shem Tov. The title in Hebrew means, “Praises of the Ba’al Shem Tov.” The book is a collection of more than two hundred hagiographic stories concerning the Besht and some of the people associated with him. The chapter mentions some of the stories, such as the birth of the Besht, the Besht’s marriage, the Besht and the robbers, the Besht as Rabbi Gershon’s coachman, the Besht’s revelation, and the Besht’s prayer. Every writer on the Besht has made use of the Shivhei Ha-Besht in constructing a portrayal. The chapter also analyzes the relationship of the stories in Shivhei Ha-Besht to historical events.
Light from the Archives
Authors: Rosman Moshe
Published: February 2021

This chapter explains how Jewish scholars tended to view the Besht, Hasidism, and the relevant sources as quintessentially internal Jewish phenomena that grew out of a genuinely and exclusively Jewish tradition. It points out how the scholars emphasized the Besht’s thought and actions without much reference to the physical, social, and economic framework within which these have taken shape. The chapter also provides evidence how Besht was not isolated. By virtue of his being a ba’al shem, the Besht had to be concerned with the personal problems of the people among whom he lived. His own letters and the traditions about him depict that Besht both as involved in issues on the public agenda and as active in helping individuals recover from illness, finance their marriages, exorcise demons, and escape from danger.
Legal Decision-Making in Fourteenth-Century Toledo: The Responsa of Rabbi Judah ben Asher
Authors: Saperstein Marc
Published: February 2021

This chapter is based on the responsa of Rabbi Judah ben Asher, a member of one of the leading rabbinic families in early fourteenth-century Castile. His responsa often diverges dramatically and explicitly from the principles of classical Jewish legal texts in addressing what the writer saw as the needs of his time. The chapter looks particularly at extra-halakhic aspects of his decision-making — the extent to which his adjudication is explicitly motivated, influenced, or guided by factors other than the interpretation of the classical sources of halakhah — and what this can say about Jewish life in fourteenth-century Castile. The question of takanot, communal legislation inconsistent with the traditional law, is relevant here. So are decisions manifestly said to be not in accordance with Torah law, whether because of urgent immediate needs or because changing historical circumstances seemed to make the talmudic principle no longer applicable.
Cultural Juxtapositions: Problematizing Scripture in Late Medieval Jewish and Christian Exegesis
Authors: Saperstein Marc
Published: February 2021

This chapter addresses a dramatically different approach that was apparently taken by late medieval Spanish Jewish writers under the influence of the Christian academies. This involves the explicit articulation of problems, difficulties, or doubts raised by a biblical or rabbinic passage, bringing them to the attention even of those to whom they had never occurred, and then resolving the difficulties in what was expected to be a satisfactory and persuasive manner. It was a rather risky undertaking because of the possibility that the reader or listener would remember the doubt but not its resolution. The chapter provides evidence for widespread use of this technique especially by Spanish Jews in the late Middle Ages. It also presents several possible explanations as to why this exegetical technique became so popular in the generation of the Expulsion from Spain.
Ein li esek banistarot: Saul Levi Morteira’s Sermons on Parashat ‘Bereshit’
Authors: Saperstein Marc
Published: February 2021

This chapter focuses on Saul Levi Morteira, rabbi and preacher to the Portuguese community of Amsterdam in the first half of the seventeenth century. This community was at first composed entirely of immigrants who had been born and educated as Christians in Portugal — many of them fourth- or fifth-generation descendants of those who had been subjected to a universal forced baptism in 1497 — and who decided that they wanted to leave the Iberian peninsula for somewhere they could live openly as Jews. Because of their background, they were heavily dependent on rabbinic leadership for guidance about what Jewish living meant, including the limits of acceptable dissent. Morteira's beautifully crafted sermons, delivered in Portuguese over four decades, provided an ongoing programme of higher Jewish learning on a sophisticated level. This chapter follows the preacher as he systematically addresses, year after year, the many intellectual and exegetical problems arising from successive verses in the opening chapter of Genesis.
Jewish Leadership in the Generation of Expulsion
Authors: Saperstein Marc
Published: February 2021

This chapter explores and challenges the basis for modern criticism against Jewish leaders in the Middle Ages. It then reviews the work of one of the most important rabbinic figures in that perilous time, Rabbi Isaac Aboab, focusing especially on the texts of his sermons. Aboab left Spain for Portugal in the summer of 1492 and died less than a year later. Aboab's stature as one of the most important talmudists of his generation is attested by many. There is clear evidence that Aboab took preaching seriously, reflecting on the techniques and conventions of the art, occasionally preaching twice on the same sabbath (at Shaharit and Minhah services), delivering wedding sermons and eulogies as well as the expected sermons for Shabat Hagadol and Shabat Shuvah (the sabbaths immediately preceding Passover and Yom Kippur, respectively).
Rabbis, Martyrs, and Merchants: Jewish Communal Conflict as Reflected in the Responsa on the Boycott of Ancona
Authors: Saperstein Marc
Published: February 2021

This chapter reviews the rabbinic responsa regarding the Boycott of Ancona. It was written by Ottoman rabbis addressing dramatic issues of international significance that affected both the morale and the economic well-being of many Jews. These texts, grappling with legal issues on the basis of conflicting narratives of what had happened, reveal that the boycott was far more complicated than it originally appears. The boycott of the port of Ancona in 1556 was an unparalleled event in early modern Jewish history, the only attempt before the twentieth century to organize Jewish economic pressure and to wield it in the arena of international affairs for the benefit of Jews persecuted in other lands. Powerful forces converged in this event.
‘Arab Chains’ and the ‘Good Things of Spain’: Aspects of Jewish Exile
Authors: Saperstein Marc
Published: February 2021

This chapter analyses three brief, powerful passages, from different environments and different literary genres. These reveal an enduring ambivalence towards Jewish life in ‘exile’, a reluctance to concede that the centuries of Jewish life in foreign lands were devoid of any positive qualities, and even — rather surprisingly — the suggestion that life in exile might have religious advantages for Jews that were not available in the Holy Land. In short, the actual treatment of exile in Jewish literary texts reveals more nuanced and multivalent aspects. The familiar geography of the traditional concept — exile as forced removal from the Land of Israel and the end of exile as return to that land — is occasionally subverted in unexpected ways. Perhaps even more surprising is a revalorization of the concept, in which living in the ancestral homeland is no longer automatically identified as good, and living outside the land as bad. This chapter attempts to illustrate some of the permutations of this central concept through a literary and conceptual analysis of the three pre-modern passages from Jewish literature.
Messianic Leadership in Jewish History: Movements and Personalities
Authors: Saperstein Marc
Published: February 2021

This chapter is a survey of the dynamics of messianic movements over a period of some two millennia. The most dramatic tests of leadership in the history of the Jewish diaspora have come when an individual presented himself as playing a central role in the process that would bring an end to the exile of the diaspora. The messianic figure — whether claiming to be the actual messiah from the line of David or a prophet or forerunner of the messiah — transcended the accepted categories by which authority has been asserted and expressed in post-biblical Jewish life. However, rooted in traditional texts and expectations, the ideology of the incipient movement may have been, for the individual at its core this claim was by its very nature a radical departure from the norms, a revolutionary challenge to the status quo. This placed the more traditional Jewish leadership, especially the rabbinic authorities, who were structurally bound to a conservative position in society, in a difficult situation.
Introduction
Authors: Adler Eliyana R.
Published: February 2021

This chapter provides an in-depth analysis of an ambitious project for revitalizing Jewish education and Jewish society through exposure to intense musar instruction. It analyses grand expectations and limited results on the regulations for the support of Torah in Munkács and explores the Jewish education during the period of the dual monarchy in Hungary. It also traces the response to an educational endeavour initiated by the philanthropist Baron Maurice de Hirsch for the Jews of Galicia. The chapter looks at books written used in modern Jewish schools and by Jewish pupils in Russian schools. It explores different facets of the interplay between official government policies and Jewish communal initiatives.
Repairing Character Traits and Repairing the Jews
Authors: Claussen Geoffrey
Published: February 2021

THE talmud torah in Kelm (Kelmė) was a yeshiva regarded by many of its students and admirers as offering a model of education that was unique in the world. Their pride in this model is well illustrated by the story that some told about a conference of German university chancellors at which one admitted that there was an important subject that was not taught in German universities: ‘the repair of human character traits’. In fact, the chancellor noted, the repair of human character traits was taught seriously in only one place in the whole world: at a Jewish school in the small Lithuanian town of Kelm....
Legislation for Education
Authors: Cooper Levi
Published: February 2021

IN THE LATE 1820s a set of takanot (regulations) regarding traditional Jewish education for all boys in Munkács, in Carpathian Ruthenia, at the time part of the Habsburg monarchy, was enacted by the local rabbinic leadership. They were titled Takanot tamkhin de’orayta (‘Regulations for the Support of Torah’), and over the next century they were copied and printed in different locations in eastern Europe. This chapter examines the ...
The Survival of Yidishkeyt
Authors: Schneider Anna Sommer
Published: February 2021

THE END of the Second World War revealed the huge extent of the damage to Poland, damage which was not just physical. The country had lost nearly six million of its citizens, including almost its entire Jewish population. According to Albert Stankowski, only some 425,000 of the estimated pre-war Jewish population of 3,330,000 were still alive at the end of the war. Not all of them returned to Poland from the Soviet Union, where the largest proportion had survived. As a result, in the immediate post-war period the Jewish population of the country numbered between 220,000 and 350,000, including almost 160,000 Jews repatriated from the USSR....
Everyday Life and the Shtetl
Authors: Veidlinger Jeffrey
Published: February 2021

This chapter talks about the historiography and idea of the shtetl that has become so romanticized in the Jewish imagination of today that it has become difficult to separate fact from fiction. It looks at the antisemitic campaigns in interwar Poland by focusing on the propaganda of the radical movement called Ruch Narodowo-Radykalny propaganda. It also investigates the gender perspective on the rescue of Jews in Poland during the Second World War. The chapter discusses a report on the situation in Poland in mid-1941 that was prepared by Roman Catholic activists. It also looks at the interview with David Roskies on his most recent book on Holocaust literature, which was conducted by Paweł Wolski.
A Biography of a Person and a Book
Authors: Magnus Shulamit S.
Published: February 2021

This introductory chapter provides an overview of Pauline Wengeroff and her Memoirs of a Grandmother: Scenes from the Cultural History of the Jews of Russia in the Nineteenth Century. Wengeroff's two volumes are extraordinary on many grounds. As their full title proclaims, she writes the history of an era in Jewish experience, coupling her story and that of her family with that of Russian Jewry in the time of its transition from tradition to modernity. In Memoirs, Wengeroff gives a rich depiction of traditional Jewish society in Russia with a particular focus on the religious practices and piety of women. She tells a dramatic tale of the dissolution of traditionalism in this society from the perspective of women, marriage, and families. Indeed, she argues for the cultural power of women, though not as a feminist. Focusing on Wengeroff's adolescent and adult life, this book traces how Memoirs of a Grandmother came to be in the form in which it is found.
Complicity, Victimization, Guilt
Authors: Magnus Shulamit S.
Published: February 2021

This chapter explains that the central point of the second volume of Pauline Wengeroff's Memoirs of a Grandmother is the consequences of the loss of tradition in Russian Jewish families, exemplified by what transpired in her marital home. Her main narrative line is dramatic, accessible, and seductive. In it, she and her fellow Jewish women are victims — of Chonon/Jewish husbands, and of the overwhelming forces of modernity. Well before all this, however, Wengeroff was a prime agent of subverting tradition. She thus felt culpable and guilty not only for the sins of her youth but for those of her married adulthood that resulted in the failure to transmit tradition to her children. The chapter then considers the complexity of Wengeroff's and Chonon's Jewishness and of their relationship. It also looks at how Wengeroff found outlets for her Judaism as well as her need for meaningful activity outside the home as a bourgeoise before she wrote Memoirs. Both Chonon and Wengeroff participated in the trend of Russian Jewish philanthropy by supporting trade schools for poor children.
Who was Pauline Wengeroff?
Authors: Magnus Shulamit S.
Published: February 2021

This chapter investigates how Pauline Wengeroff, seeming bard of Jewish traditionalism, can also be read as an apologist for assimilation and conversion. From the dramatic myth of Memoirs of a Grandmother, Wengeroff appears as a nostalgic apologist for tradition and a victim, along with Jewish women generally, of modernizing men and modernity. For those who concluded that she was an assimilationist did so based on her account of the conversion of her sons Simon and Volodya, which she calls a tragedy but which she contextualizes in several ways. The conversion of her sons was ‘the most grievous blow’ of Wengeroff's life. Given their and their cohort's lack of meaningful Jewish learning or lived experience, and the threat of thwarted lives because of anti-Jewish discrimination, she portrays it as inevitable, self-evident. There was, indeed, a wave of Jewish conversion in this period, for the reasons Wengeroff cites, and others. The chapter then looks at Wengeroff's family. There is no understanding Wengeroff and the construct that is Memoirs without knowing who her family members by blood and marriage were, and about her other associations.
A Woman’s Life
Authors: Magnus Shulamit S.
Published: February 2021

This epilogue recounts how, terrified of anti-Jewish violence, Pauline Wengeroff died, ‘lonely and miserable’, in Minsk in 1916, at the age of 83, in the midst of the First World War and a disintegrating tsarist empire, having encouraged one grandson to practise the piano so that he might get to America. The grandson, Nicolas Slonimsky, eventually succeeded in reaching the United States, as did three of Wengeroff's children, after Wengeroff's death. Ultimately, through her resonance with a generation hungry for what she had to offer, Wengeroff tried to help right some of the losses of Jewish modernity, to which she knew she had contributed. With her memoirs she hoped to inscribe herself, and some chosen others, on the tablet of Jewish memory but, above all, to perpetuate and give life, a future, to Jewish memory. In that goal she was not alone but part of a vigorous stream. Whether Memoirs of a Grandmother or the conviction that it had reached its target audience and purpose gave her any comfort in her last days no one knows; but one can hope.
Mothers and Children in Ottoman Jewish Society as Reflected in Hebrew Sources of the Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries
Authors: Lamdan Ruth
Published: February 2021

This chapter investigates an array of Ottoman Hebrew sources written following the expulsion from Spain in 1492 and focuses on the interplay between rabbinic sages and mothers in the arena of family law and relationships. It explains how the Ottoman Hebrew sources offer a more nuanced view of family life in Ottoman Jewish culture. It also examines how mothers are associated with childbirth and childrearing, as well as how they are portrayed as women who took the initiative in their role as mothers with respect to marriage, divorce, levirate marriage, and the financial stability of their family and children. The chapter considers Hebrew that honours mothers and acknowledges the active role that mothers assumed in maintaining family stability at times of crisis. It recounts families who were torn apart and forced to abandon their homes and join Jewish communities outside Spain in the period after the expulsion.
Maurice Sendak’s Jewish Mother(s)
Authors: Eichler-Levine Jodi
Published: February 2021

This chapter explores the power of Jewish writers to use mothers in their work in order to subvert culture. It offers an analysis of bestselling children's author Maurice Sendak's images of Jewish mothers that are destabilizing because of their complexity. It also reviews the work Sendak, which constructs Jewish mothers who dwell outside the typically Jewish legal constructions of motherhood and the gendered institutional confines of American Jewish life. The chapter reflects on Sendak's own American experience against the backdrop of the post-Holocaust world of his mother, drawing and writing mothers with all of the complexities he experienced. It investigates Sendak's stories that echo the overbearing Jewish mother and convey the limited power and emotional absence of his own mother.
Hasidism Beyond Modernity
Authors: Loewenthal Naftali
Published: February 2021

The Habad school of Hasidism is distinguished today from other hasidic groups by its famous emphasis on outreach, on messianism, and on empowering women. This book provides a critical, thematic study of the movement from its beginnings, showing how its unusual qualities evolved. Topics investigated include the theoretical underpinning of the outreach ethos; the turn towards women in the twentieth century; new attitudes to non-Jews; the role of the individual in the hasidic collective; spiritual contemplation in the context of modernity; the quest for inclusivism in the face of prevailing schismatic processes; messianism in both spiritual and political forms; and the direction of the movement after the passing of its seventh rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, in 1994. Attention is given to many contrasts: pre-modern, modern, and postmodern conceptions of Judaism; the clash between maintaining an enclave and outreach models of Jewish society; particularist and universalist trends; and the subtle interplay of mystical faith and rationality. Some of the chapters are new; others, published in an earlier form, have been updated to take account of recent scholarship. This book presents an in-depth study of an intriguing movement which takes traditional Hasidism beyond modernity.
‘Non-Remembering’ the Holocaust in Hungary and Poland
Authors: Pető Andrea
Published: February 2021

HUNGARY, as an ally of Nazi Germany, introduced anti-Jewish legislation from 1938 but managed to avoid the deportation of Jews from its post-Trianon territory until the German occupation of the whole country on 19 March 1944. The deportation of 430,000 Jews from Hungary was the quickest in the history of the Holocaust, taking less than two months with the active participation of Hungarian civil servants. Miklós Horthy, who governed the country with an iron fist from 1919, initiated discussions with the Allied forces over a separate armistice, but that did not remain unnoticed by the Germans who installed the fascist Arrow Cross party as a collaborationist government on 15 October 1944. The final days of Hungary, following the pattern of the Italian Social Republic, had started....
Social Change and Halakhic Evolution in American Orthodoxy
Authors: I. Waxman Chaim
Published: February 2021

The author of this book is one of the keenest observers of American Jewish society. In illustration of how Orthodoxy is adapting to modernity, the author presents a detailed discussion of halakhic developments, particularly regarding women's greater participation in ritual practices and other areas of communal life. The book shows that the direction of change is not uniform: there is both greater stringency and greater leniency, and it discusses the many reasons for this, both in the Jewish community and in the wider society. Relations between the various sectors of American Orthodoxy over the past several decades are also considered.
The Industrial Context of Inception: From Production to Premiere
Authors: Carter David
Published: February 2021

This chapter traces the production history of Christopher Nolan's Inception (2010). Nolan first tried out his treatment for Inception with Warner Bros. after making Memento (2000), but then realised the scope that would be required for the film and decided to gain more experience making large-scale films. After completing The Dark Knight (2008), Nolan finally decided to make Inception and spent the next six months completing the script. The filming took place in six different countries and on four separate continents, the main locations being in the UK, Morocco, Canada, Tokyo, Paris, and Los Angeles. Nolan has stressed that they deliberately filmed in six different countries, building enormous sets because he was interested in 'pushing the boundaries of what could be achieved practically, as opposed to computer effects'. Concerns for realism also governed Nolan's choice of cameras and film. Inception was released on July 10, 2010, and its opening weekend gross takings made it the second-highest grossing debut for a science-fiction film that was not a sequel or remake.
The Ending: Dreams, Reality and Ambiguity
Authors: Carter David
Published: February 2021

This chapter evaluates the ambiguous ending of Christopher Nolan's Inception (2010). Nolan has left the audience with the challenge of the final shot of Cobb's spinning top. The image abruptly cuts to black while it is still spinning, though it does appear to wobble a little. It can be argued that the fact that it does not fall indicates that the final scene of Cobb's reunion with his children is also inside a dream. On the other hand, the fact that it wobbles suggests that it is about to fall, indicating that Cobb is indeed back in the 'real world'. Of course, the shot was designed to be deliberately ambiguous, to force the audience to look back at the film and reflect on the nature of dreams and of films and the relations of both to what one considers, often unquestioningly, to be the 'real world'.
Close Encounters: Influences and Production Background
Authors: Towlson Jon
Published: February 2021

This chapter examines a number of filmic influences on Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), which give it an element of intertextuality. Rather than lending Close Encounters an air of postmodern pastiche, the intertextuality of the film helps to shape its inner meaning and philosophy. The chapter highlights how Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) is a major influence on Spielberg's film in a number of ways. Other influences on Close Encounters include Disney films; other great American filmmakers; Alfred Hitchcock and Frank Capra; and astrophysicist J. Allen Hynek's book The UFO Experience: A Scientific Report (1972), which rekindled Spielberg's long-term personal interest in the UFO phenomenon that had begun as a teenager growing up in Arizona, and which had already resulted in his feature-length amateur film, Firelight, made in 1964 when he was sixteen. The chapter then details the production background of Close Encounters, including its script development and filming process.
Conclusion: We Are Not Alone
Authors: Towlson Jon
Published: February 2021

This concluding chapter explains why Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) remains a singular science-fiction film. In the intervening years since the release of Close Encounters, one can arguably see in the convergence of science fiction, ufology, and SETI, a continuing desire for the kind of transformative ‘encounter’ with alien intelligence that Close Encounters represents. The cultural impact of Close Encounters and ‘transcendent’ science fiction in general has, in fact, served to increase public awareness of the work being done in the scientific community to detect extraterrestrial life. Even now, cosmologists involved in SETI are proposing a more active form of search for alien civilisations, in which radio signals will be aimed at parts of the galaxy where Earth-like planets exist and with it an increased possibility of contact with intelligent life. However, the recent detection of these Earth-like planets that may be capable of sustaining life in the ‘habitable zones’ of distant stars has prompted scientists to consider stepping up activities to what is known as METI (Messaging to Extraterrestrial Intelligence). Regardless of the objections of some scientists to METI, the scientific community in general seems to be in consensus that the likelihood of intelligent life existing elsewhere is high (the so-called ‘Drake Equation’), even though the probability of detection may be low.
Genre
Authors: Redmond Sean
Published: February 2021

This chapter reviews the terms of the themes, iconographies and mode of address of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner that made it fall within the science-fiction genre. It describes Blade Runner as a dystopian, iconic and visually spectacular film that is argued to be an exemplary case study for what constitutes a science-fiction film. It also explains how Blade Runner offers a despairing view of the future, showing high, low and expansive shots of the Gothic, patchwork city as it belches flames, chokes on its own smog, and produces the discernible sense of an omnipresent decay. The chapter discusses Blade Runner's theme on disintegration, in which earth is so over-populated and polluted that people in the film are encouraged to move to off-world colonies. It investigates the 'aesthetic of decay' of Blade Runner that is compounded by the encroachment of technology and techno-science into all areas of social life.
Cannibal Holocaust
Authors: Waddell Calum
Published: February 2021

This book is one of the most controversial horror films ever made. Despite not achieving huge success when it was first released, the Italian production found an audience on home video in the 1980s and became a 'must-see' for connoisseurs of extreme cinema. Indeed, Cannibal Holocaust's foremost legacy is in the United Kingdom, where it obtained its reputation as one of the most harrowing and offensive 'video nasties' — a term used to refer to a group of films deemed to be 'obscene' by the Department of Public Prosecutions. However, as the years have progressed, Cannibal Holocaust has been re-evaluated, mainly as the forefather of the 'found footage' film, and recent home video re-releases have added some valuable perspective to the onscreen violence with extensive cast and crew interviews. What is missing from this contemporary activity is contextualization of Cannibal Holocaust's style, affirmation and discussion of its locations and any extensive discourse about its representation of third world inhabitants (i.e. as 'primitives'). In addition, and also amiss from previous dialogue on the production, is that Cannibal Holocaust can be seen as one of the key post-Vietnam films. It is the spectre of war — and an explicit warning about Western involvement in civil conflict — which progresses Deodato's story of jungle adventurers in peril. By approaching the film from a more formalist position, this book provides an insightful discussion of this groundbreaking film.
Spectres of War in Cannibal Holocaust
Authors: Waddell Calum
Published: February 2021

This chapter talks about Ruggero Deodato's Cannibal Holocaust as the first of the Italian flesh-eating films since Man from Deep River that was shot in the same area of Leticia, Columbia in which its story is set. It mentions Cannibal Ferox, a film that drew on cocaine trafficking and was inspired by the actual narcotics trade within Colombia and specifically Leticia's role as a trading port. It also examines the US theatrical poster for Cannibal Holocaust, which boasted that the production was actually filmed in the Amazon jungles. The chapter analyzes the use of a legitimate location with illegitimate representations of their inhabitants that allowed Cannibal Holocaust to ground its own fake-documentary in a neorealist sense. It discusses how Cannibal Holocaust touches on thematic ideas that would have been better suited to a Southeast Asian locale.