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Fighting for Rights: Conscription and Jewish Emancipation

Derek J. Penslar

in Jews and the Military: A History

This chapter illustrates the context in which western and central European armies took form and how Jews were included in them. The issue of military service played a major role in eighteenth- and ... More

This chapter illustrates the context in which western and central European armies took form and how Jews were included in them. The issue of military service played a major role in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century debates about the emancipation of Jews. In the early 1700s, Protestant Hebraists and Enlightenment thinkers reconceived the position of Jews in European society by presenting Jews as capable of martial valor and so deserving of civil rights. In the late eighteenth century, new conceptions of the meliorability of humanity led to the introduction of conscription for all men, including Jews. Proponents of the Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah) paid considerable attention to the issue of military service, especially after the introduction of mass conscription in France during the revolutionary wars. In the German lands, early nineteenth-century advocates of Jewish emancipation urged Jewish youth to volunteer to fight against Napoleonic France.Less

Jabotinsky Encounters Polish Jewish Youth

Daniel Kupfert Heller

in Jabotinsky's Children: Polish Jews and the Rise of Right-Wing Zionism

This chapter details Vladimir Jabotinsky's first encounter with Polish Jewish youth, during a last-ditch effort in 1927 to gain supporters for his political organization, the Union of Revisionist ... More

This chapter details Vladimir Jabotinsky's first encounter with Polish Jewish youth, during a last-ditch effort in 1927 to gain supporters for his political organization, the Union of Revisionist Zionists. He initially viewed the Polish Jews flocking to greet him at train stations with a mix of pity, disdain, and suspicion. Little did he know that they would transform his very understanding of Revisionism's mission and the tools required to bring him to power. The chapter then describes how members of several Jewish youth movements in Poland helped to convince the Revisionist leader to turn the celebration of militarism and the rejection of socialism into core components of his organization's program. Culminating with the founding of Poland's Betar youth movement at the end of 1927, it reveals how Polish Jewish youth were not merely the passive recipients of ideology imposed “from above” but played an active role in shaping the political beliefs and behaviors they adopted.Less

Introduction

Daniel Kupfert Heller

in Jabotinsky's Children: Polish Jews and the Rise of Right-Wing Zionism

This introductory chapter provides a background of the Betar youth movement in Poland in the 1930s. Like dozens of Zionist youth movements operating in the country at the time, Betar promised to ... More

This introductory chapter provides a background of the Betar youth movement in Poland in the 1930s. Like dozens of Zionist youth movements operating in the country at the time, Betar promised to prepare its members for a new life in the Yishuv—the Jewish community of prestate Palestine—by providing vocational training, Hebrew classes, and lessons in Jewish history. What set Betar apart was its commitment to the military training of Jewish youth, as well as its support of several prominent policies of the European Right. They deemed rifles, not ploughs or shovels, to be the most important tools to fulfill Zionism's goals. Like the vast majority of Zionist activists between the two world wars, Betar's leader, Vladimir Jabotinsky, sought to capture the hearts and minds of Jews living in Poland. His Union of Revisionist Zionists, founded in 1925, would go on to become one of the most popular Zionist organizations in the interwar period.Less

Rescuing “Endangered Youth”: Youth Welfare and the Project of Bourgeois Social Reform

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

This chapter takes as a case study the pupils who were incarcerated and subjected to strict regimes of discipline at two institutions created specifically for “endangered” Jewish youth: the boys' ... More

This chapter takes as a case study the pupils who were incarcerated and subjected to strict regimes of discipline at two institutions created specifically for “endangered” Jewish youth: the boys' home at Repzin (which later moved to Wolzig) and the girls' home at Köpenick. It compares the gender- and class-specific social norms that determined how the violations committed by girls and boys were defined, and how their “social therapy” aimed at bringing about their investment in middle-class norms and ideals. Though the institutions were Jewish, the goals for the rehabilitation of these young people were virtually identical to those of non-Jewish youth welfare programs: the creation of economically and socially productive members of 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

Taming the Shtetl

Daniel Kupfert Heller

in Jabotinsky's Children: Polish Jews and the Rise of Right-Wing Zionism

This chapter looks at the efforts of Betar's leaders in Warsaw to capture the hearts and minds of Jewish youth in provincial towns across central and eastern Poland. Armed with long-standing ... More

This chapter looks at the efforts of Betar's leaders in Warsaw to capture the hearts and minds of Jewish youth in provincial towns across central and eastern Poland. Armed with long-standing stereotypes about shtetl life, Betar leaders were certain that bringing “modernity” and “progress” to these towns would mobilize provincial youth for the Zionist cause. The chapter studies the YIVO (Yidisher visnshaftlekher institut) autobiography collection, as well as correspondence between Betar's headquarters in Warsaw and its small-town outposts, to reveal the tensions that arose between these urban activists and the young Jews they sought to transform. Providing a vivid account of Jewish life in small towns across interwar Poland, it exposes the vast gap between the ideological vision of Betar's leaders and the political beliefs and experiences of its members.Less

Acceptance and Rejection as a Source of Youth Conflict: The Case of Haifa University in a Divided Society

Rachel Hertz-Lazarowitz

in International Perspectives on Youth Conflict and Development

In Israel, the seven main universities are the most heterogeneous spaces for interaction between Arabs and Jews. With an Arab population of 20% attending alongside Jews, Haifa University is the most ... More

In Israel, the seven main universities are the most heterogeneous spaces for interaction between Arabs and Jews. With an Arab population of 20% attending alongside Jews, Haifa University is the most heterogeneous campus in Israel and thus has been a main stage for prolonged social coexistence on the one hand and consistent bitter conflicts on the other. This chapter explores how young undergraduates identifying as Arabs and Jews perceive their mutual rejection and acceptance, in the unique context of coexistence at a nationally and religiously heterogeneous university in Israel. The goal is to understand the factors that support peaceful coexistence, and those that explain the eruption of conflicts and violent behaviors on campus. It is argued that students' perceptions of coexistence are sources of conflict and harmony. In interviews where the research team asked students to speak about the full range of their positive and negative experiences as members of national groups on campus, both Arab and Jewish students highly valued “close relationships” and “cultural diversity,” while in terms of negative experiences, Arab students reported “discrimination” and “political tension,” more frequently than Jewish students, as the main processes of rejection in their lives on campus. On the basis of such findings, the chapter challenges the university to increase acceptance, and reduce rejection, on its heterogeneous campus.Less

America's National Game

Peter Levine

in To Ebbets Field: Sport and the American-Jewish Experience

This chapter examines Jewish Americans' participation in baseball games in the U.S. during the first half of the 20th century. Though basketball remained the most popular participatory team sport, ... More

This chapter examines Jewish Americans' participation in baseball games in the U.S. during the first half of the 20th century. Though basketball remained the most popular participatory team sport, baseball was played informally played in the streets and in more organized settings. It has always attracted its share of Jewish youth and this interest was encouraged by capitalists of leisure and social reformers.Less

“The Jewish Problem Will Be Solved as Soon as the Jews Again Become a Normal Nation” (1943)

Arthur Rosenberg

in Jewish Radicals: A Documentary History

This chapter argues that the problem of anti-Semitism can only be solved by the establishment of a Jewish homeland. This homeland can only be Palestine. Furthermore, this chapter considers arguments ... More

This chapter argues that the problem of anti-Semitism can only be solved by the establishment of a Jewish homeland. This homeland can only be Palestine. Furthermore, this chapter considers arguments regarding the Jews' right to a nation, its place in the world system, and its connections to socialism. The chapter contends that the Jews are indeed a nation, with their own language, their own culture, their own manners of life, and a separate economic and social body. Furthermore, no considerable group of Jews has ever successfully assimilated to another nation. No modern system of socialism or Communism would be able to abolish the national distinctions that exist. There is, therefore, no contradiction between the Socialist ideal of the Jewish worker and the Jewish youth and their national program.Less

Daniella Doron, Jewish Youth and Identity in Postwar France: Rebuilding Family and Nation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015. xv + 309 pp.

Richard I. Cohen (ed.)

in Place in Modern Jewish Culture and Society

This chapter reviews the book Jewish Youth and Identity in Postwar France: Rebuilding Family and Nation (2015), by Daniella Doron. Jewish Youth and Identity in Postwar France examines how the French ... More

This chapter reviews the book Jewish Youth and Identity in Postwar France: Rebuilding Family and Nation (2015), by Daniella Doron. Jewish Youth and Identity in Postwar France examines how the French Jews shifted from immediate relief and rehabilitation activities following the Holocaust to longer-term efforts aimed at establishing communal stability and unity. Doron highlights the important role played by Jewish youth in these efforts, arguing that they can serve as a lens through which to study larger concerns such as the future of Jews in France, the reconstruction of families, and ideas about national identity in the reestablished republic. Doron shows that there were competing visions for reconstruction and that hope for the future was often complicated by anxiety and an underlying sense of crisis.Less

Dov Waxman, Trouble in the Tribe: The American Jewish Conflict over Israel. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016. x + 316 pp.

Richard I. Cohen (ed.)

in Place in Modern Jewish Culture and Society

This chapter reviews the book Trouble in the Tribe: The American Jewish Conflict over Israel (2016), by Dov Waxman. Trouble in the Tribe examines the debate over the defection of growing numbers of ... More

This chapter reviews the book Trouble in the Tribe: The American Jewish Conflict over Israel (2016), by Dov Waxman. Trouble in the Tribe examines the debate over the defection of growing numbers of young Jews from the pro-Israel camp, which Peter Beinart claims is due primarily to their disillusionment with a Jewish state that has betrayed their liberal principles. While many of Beinart’s critics acknowledge that Jewish youth have indeed grown more distant from Israel, they attribute this less to political disillusionment than to a weakening of their Jewish identity. For Waxman, “perhaps the biggest reason why young American Jews tend to be more dovish and critical of Israel is that they are much more likely than older Jews to be the offspring of intermarried couples.”Less