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Tehilla Lichtenstein and the Society of Jewish Science

Ellen M. Umansky

in From Christian Science to Jewish Science: Spiritual Healing and American Jews

This chapter discusses Tehilla Lichtenstein’s activities as leader of the Society of Jewish Science; she succeeded her husband Morris Lichtenstein after his death in 1938. She viewed Jewish Science ... More

This chapter discusses Tehilla Lichtenstein’s activities as leader of the Society of Jewish Science; she succeeded her husband Morris Lichtenstein after his death in 1938. She viewed Jewish Science as something that “reveals to the Jew the great treasures contained within Judaism”. She articulated her views in over 500 sermons, essays, lectures, and radio broadcasts.Less

Spiritual Healing, Divine Assistance, and Peace of Mind

Ellen M. Umansky

in From Christian Science to Jewish Science: Spiritual Healing and American Jews

This chapter begins with an analysis of virtues of peace of mind as extolled by Tehilla Lichtenstein, Alfred Geiger Moses, Morris Lichtenstein, and Clifton Harby Levy. It then examines the reasons ... More

This chapter begins with an analysis of virtues of peace of mind as extolled by Tehilla Lichtenstein, Alfred Geiger Moses, Morris Lichtenstein, and Clifton Harby Levy. It then examines the reasons behind the lack of membership in the Society of Jewish Science. Finally, the emergence of Jewish community-based healing centers is discussed.Less

Solving the “Jewish Problem”: Jewish Social Policy, 1860–1933

Derek J. Penslar

in Shylock's Children: Economics and Jewish Identity in Modern Europe

This chapter talks about Jewish social policy, particularly that produced by the simultaneous intertwining of the institutional-administrative and socioeconomic aspects of Jewish society, and ... More

This chapter talks about Jewish social policy, particularly that produced by the simultaneous intertwining of the institutional-administrative and socioeconomic aspects of Jewish society, and engendered by modern social policy parallel to the melding of state and civil society. Even where and when liberalism enjoyed its greatest hegemony in Europe, the nineteenth-century Jewish community as a legal entity had never dissolved, and the provision of charity had remained one of the community's most important functions in the eyes of the host society. The purview of Jewish philanthropy widened considerably in the late 1860s. A fresh wave of crisis galvanized Jewish public opinion, stimulated wide-ranging philanthropic activity, and promoted international Jewish solidarity through concerted action on behalf of one's oppressed brethren. The sense of common fate transcended national boundaries. Despite rivalries between states and between Jews living in those states, expressions of international Jewish brotherhood were frequent and sincere.Less

Homo economicus judaicus and the Spirit of Capitalism, 1848–1914

Derek J. Penslar

in Shylock's Children: Economics and Jewish Identity in Modern Europe

This chapter discusses the flourishing of commercial and industrial capitalism in nineteenth-century Europe that strengthened the historic association between Jews and Trade. For Jews, as for any ... More

This chapter discusses the flourishing of commercial and industrial capitalism in nineteenth-century Europe that strengthened the historic association between Jews and Trade. For Jews, as for any ethnic minority that falls into a particular economic niche, economic distinctiveness may engender or reinforce group identity. The Homo economicus judaicus, who was glorified by middle-class Jews in western Europe, was one of their own kind or a heroic progenitor of bourgeois Jewish society. When bourgeois Jews turned their attention from themselves to eastern Europe, their visages darkened. Impoverished eastern European Jews, particularly the millions who traveled westward, became the site of a different kind of Jewish social knowledge and the object of a new academic language: that of scientific philanthropy.Less

From Listening to Reading: Publishing the Interviews

Alan Rosen

in The Wonder of Their Voices: The 1946 Holocaust Interviews of David Boder

Boder was unique in his taking a wire recorder to the DP camps. But most of Boder's efforts in the aftermath were devoted to getting the interviews into print. This chapter chronicles this process in ... More

Boder was unique in his taking a wire recorder to the DP camps. But most of Boder's efforts in the aftermath were devoted to getting the interviews into print. This chapter chronicles this process in its evolving stages, from first publishing excerpts of the interviews, to fashioning a hybrid book, I Did Not Interview the Dead, to finally the freedom provided by self-publishing the interviews in Topical Autobiographies. The chapter further argues that Boder worked fastidiously to keep recording in the foreground even while rendering the recorded interviews into print. His indefatigable efforts to find the proper vehicle for the interviews—articles, academic or trade books, self-published manuscript—also illuminate the context of publishing books on the Holocaust in the late 1940s and 1950s, showing that interest was there, though publishers did not always share Boder's idiosyncratic expectations. A close examination of Boder's negotiations with The Jewish Publication Society dramatizes the problems and possibilities of his approach to publishing the DP interviews.Less

The Rural Miniature in the Culture of the Jewish Diaspora

Joshua S. Walden

in Sounding Authentic: The Rural Miniature and Musical Modernism

For the members of the St. Petersburg Society for Jewish Folk Music, founded in 1908, the rural miniature offered a crucial method of representing Jewish musical traditions including liturgy and ... More

For the members of the St. Petersburg Society for Jewish Folk Music, founded in 1908, the rural miniature offered a crucial method of representing Jewish musical traditions including liturgy and klezmer for broad audiences. This chapter investigates early twentieth-century theories about the music of Russian Jewish communities, and considers the metaphorical association, invoked commonly in the writings of members of the Society and in literary and artistic depictions of Jewish culture, between the timbres of the violin and the nationalist concept of a “Jewish voice” expressed in music. The chapter focuses on a case study Joseph Achron’s “Hebrew Melody,” viewing the history of its composition, performance, and reception across the diaspora, following its adaptation in multiple new forms, including its use as a film score and recreation as a concert aria, popular song, and theremin solo.Less

The Sources of Slaves

Catherine Hezser

in Jewish Slavery in Antiquity

The main source of slaves in antiquity was the enslavement of war captives, which accompanied conquest of foreign territories in the course of imperialist policies. Other forms of enslavement such as ... More

The main source of slaves in antiquity was the enslavement of war captives, which accompanied conquest of foreign territories in the course of imperialist policies. Other forms of enslavement such as natural reproduction, debt slavery, child exposure and sale, and the theft of human beings seem to have been less common and dependent on particular socioeconomic conditions and behavioural patterns. They will have gained in significance in late antiquity, however, when new war captives became scarce. Slaves would be sold at slave markets but also on other occasions, on the basis of mutual sales agreements between owners. Since the category of the slave was markedly distinct from that of the free person in both Jewish and Roman society, the transition from one mode to the other was legally regulated, so that particular forms of enslavement were prohibited and others allowed. However, it is not clear whether and to what extent these legal limitations were actually followed by the populace.Less

Medieval Inheritance

Jonathan Ray

in After Expulsion: 1492 and the Making of Sephardic Jewry

This chapter explores the roots of the Sephardic Diaspora, particularly the amorphous structure of the Jewish community (aljama). Hispano-Jewish society was characterized by a loose association of ... More

This chapter explores the roots of the Sephardic Diaspora, particularly the amorphous structure of the Jewish community (aljama). Hispano-Jewish society was characterized by a loose association of local polities that were themselves divided by internal fissures among various factions and families. These tensions and mutual suspicions also pervaded the relationships among the rabbinic elite, popular preachers, and the general Jewish populace that both groups sought to guide. Although various factions sought leadership over Iberia's Jewish communities throughout the late medieval period, no single group emerged as the primary authority. Recognition of this internal complexity of the medieval Iberian aljama emphasizes that the reorganization of communal life in the Sephardic Diaspora was not the product of a natural solidarity inherited from the Middle Ages, and allows a greater appreciation of the individuality and effective pragmatism of the exiles.Less

The Location of Slaves in Ancient Jewish Society

Catherine Hezser

in Jewish Slavery in Antiquity

Although the actual number and percentage of slaves in ancient Jewish society cannot be determined any more, one can hypothesise about the social and economic location of slaves amongst the Jewish ... More

Although the actual number and percentage of slaves in ancient Jewish society cannot be determined any more, one can hypothesise about the social and economic location of slaves amongst the Jewish inhabitants of Roman Palestine. One way to arrive at such a hypothesis is to look at the representations of slave ownership and slaves' activities in ancient Jewish sources. Another, complementary way to assess slaves' location is to look at their structural place in other Roman provinces and to use that model as an analogy. The problem with such an approach is that it may be too generalising, not taking local differences into account. If both of these approaches are combined, they may yield results which may approximate historical reality, although certainty can never be reached in this regard.Less

Crowds

Yaacob Dweck

in Dissident Rabbi: The Life of Jacob Sasportas

This chapter assesses the doubt of an individual versus the certainty of the crowd. It posits that Jacob Sasportas's aversion to Sabbetai Zevi as the Messiah was as much a response to the force of ... More

This chapter assesses the doubt of an individual versus the certainty of the crowd. It posits that Jacob Sasportas's aversion to Sabbetai Zevi as the Messiah was as much a response to the force of perceived social chaos as it was an attack on the truth-value of Sabbetai Zevi's claims. Sabbatianism posed an acute philosophical problem to Sasportas. The certainty with which the Sabbatian believers propagated their newfound faith, the confidence and imperiousness with which they attempted to silence dissent, and their contempt for doubt as a condition for belief, all of these threatened the welfare of the body politic. Belief, or the acquisition of the correct opinions, could be cultivated and acquired only if the welfare of the body politic and the welfare of the soul had been adequately regulated. These intellectual and social demands forced Sasportas to draw upon the single most important resource he had in order to confer intellectual legitimacy upon his argument for the conditionality of messianic belief: Maimonides. As opposed to the collective need for instant certainty, he upheld the individual quest for discernment. Throughout The Fading Flower of the Zevi and throughout his long career in the Sephardic Diaspora, Sasportas consciously cultivated the posture of an articulate outsider. He saw himself as a figure of authority, the product of his lineage and his learning, who was quite capable of seeing the problems in Jewish society.Less

Trauma and Transference: War Orphans Shape a New Jewish Nation

in Germans into Jews: Remaking the Jewish Social Body in the Weimar Republic

This chapter focuses on several youth-welfare experiments that were designed to transform a traumatized orphan population into the cadre of a new Jewish nation. In contrast to the goals of ... More

This chapter focuses on several youth-welfare experiments that were designed to transform a traumatized orphan population into the cadre of a new Jewish nation. In contrast to the goals of correctional education, which aimed to make “endangered youths” into useful members of German, middle-class society, the programs discussed sought to transform Jewish society itself. Jewish educators, most significantly Siegfried Bernfeld and Siegfried Lehmann, consciously positioned themselves outside the rubric of the Jewish communal welfare establishment, and were deeply influenced by the youth movement and a radical spirit of communitarianism. Employing psychoanalysis as a means to heal the psyches of troubled Jewish youth, these educators believed that the absence of emotional bonds to the family would allow orphans to fix their emotional attachments more powerfully to the Jewish Volksgemeinschaft. At the heart of these programs was the goal of socializing young Jews, in settings outside their families, in the service of the Jewish collectivity.Less

“The Strongest Weapons in the Hands of Jewish Workers” (1924)

United Jewish Workers’ Cultural Society

in Jewish Radicals: A Documentary History

This chapter calls for further support for the United Jewish Workers' Cultural Society to develop Yiddish language and culture, in resistance to the general trend toward Americanization. It details ... More

This chapter calls for further support for the United Jewish Workers' Cultural Society to develop Yiddish language and culture, in resistance to the general trend toward Americanization. It details the accomplishments and ongoing efforts of the Cultural Society from the past year, highlighting their goal “of preparing the warm sentiments needed for tackling our local cultural problems in their full depth and breadth, and for the creation of a beautiful, festive cultural atmosphere in our prosaic working-class life.” For its second year of activities, the Cultural Society proposes to build cultural institutions, such as schools, courses for adults, and the like, in the hopes that these will form the basis of the Society and the cultural activities of the working class.Less

Super-Job

Bruce Zuckerman

in Job the Silent: A Study in Historical Counterpoint

The chapter deviates from the world of biblical scholarship and turns to a story from Yiddish literature. The chapter discusses a figure created in the image of Job—Y. L. Perets’ “Bontsye Shvayg” ... More

The chapter deviates from the world of biblical scholarship and turns to a story from Yiddish literature. The chapter discusses a figure created in the image of Job—Y. L. Perets’ “Bontsye Shvayg” also known as Bontsye the Silent. Perets tries to make implications by placing Joban themes in the background of his tale so readers will see the connection between two characters. There is a huge difference between the two though because Job was once rich with family, friends, and honor while Bontsye suffers silently with virtually no respite from the time he was born until he dies. Even though he is far more unfortunate than Job, he has never complained making him “Super-Job.” Perets aim to present that suffering is an ordinary phenomenon but what makes Bontsye exceptional was that he suffered in silence. It is also interesting to read about the incident when Bontsye was faced with the Presiding Judge and the implications of what he asked for in exchange for all the suffering he endured, revealing his true nature and the true meaning of his silence. The chapter explains Perets anger to the Jewish society who thinks that a noble silence is the only pious response to the afflictions the community endures.Less

Women in Medieval Jewish Societies

Renée Levine Melammed

in Women and Judaism: New Insights and Scholarship

This chapter examines women's lives in medieval Jewish societies based on recently discovered documents pertaining to the lives of two groups, namely women in medieval Mediterranean (“Genizah ... More

This chapter examines women's lives in medieval Jewish societies based on recently discovered documents pertaining to the lives of two groups, namely women in medieval Mediterranean (“Genizah society”) and in 15th- and 16th-century crypto-Jewish society. Because of the separations created by living in a mobile society, letter writing was the primary means of communication, and women appeared in the letters as recipients and as senders. Sometimes women's voices are heard indirectly, as in a letter written by a husband to his wife, frequently with references to comments made by the wife in her letters to him. Some express love and nostalgia for their homes, families, and/or mates. By contrast, women's voices can be heard directly in the letters they themselves wrote or dictated.Less