Russian Jews in California

His study of Russian Jewish and Vietnamese refugees, Refugee Communities: A Comparative Field Study,is forthcoming.     

Books in review

the author of Against All Odds: Holocaust Survivors and the Successful Lives They Made in America,winner of the 1993 National Jewish Book Award.     

Multiculturalists and anti-semitism

His most recent books are The Jewish Idea and Its Enemies;and The Holocaust and the War of Ideas,both published by Transaction.     

Assimilation and enlightenment

He is a frequent contributor to The Times Literary Supplement, The Jewish Quarterly,and other journals. His most recent book is Modernity and the Holocaust.     

The Jewish community of Danzig 1930–1939

Günter Grass is a German writer and politician. He was born in Danzig in 1926. This article was first published in Danzig 1939: Treasures of a Destroyed Community,issued by the Jewish Museum of New York.     

The rhetoric of chosenness

He is author of The Chosen People in Americaand Galut: Modern Jewish Reflection on Homelessness and Homecoming.He is at work on a study of transformations in the ideas of ritual and commandment in the Judaism of the modern West.     

Domesticating ideology

He is editor-in-chief of Transaction/SOCIETY.His most recent book, The Decomposition of Sociology,will be issued by Oxford University Press in the fall of 1993. He received the National Jewish Book Award for Daydreams and Nightmares,his autobiographical memoir of growing up in Harlem.     

Gore Vidal’s Anti-Jewish nationalism

Edward Alexander is professor of English at the University of Washington and at Tel Aviv University in Israel. He is author of, among other works, Matthew Arnold and John Stuart Mill; The Resonance of Dust; Isaac Bashevis Singer;and, most recently. The Jewish Idea and Its Enemies.     

The evolution of Israeli citizenship: an overview

Israel's citizenship discourse has consisted of three different layers, superimposed on one another: An ethno-nationalist discourse of inclusion and exclusion, a republican discourse of community goals and civic virtue, and a liberal discourse of civil, political, and social rights. The liberal discourse has served as the public face of Israeli citizenship and functioned to separate Israel's Jewish and Palestinians citizens from the non-citizen Palestinians in the occupied territories. The ethno-nationalist discourse has been invoked to discriminate between Jewish and Palestinian citizens within the sovereign State of Israel. Last, the republican discourse has been used to legitimate the different positions occupied by the major Jewish social groups: ashkenazim vs. mizrachim, males vs. females, secular vs. religiously orthodox. Until the mid-1980s the republican discourse, based on a corporatist economy centered on the umbrella labor organization – the Histadrut – mediated between the contradictory dictates of the liberal and the ethno-nationalist discourses. Since then, the liberalization of the Israeli economy has weakened the republican discourse, causing the liberal and ethno-nationalist ones to confront each other directly. Since the failure of the Oslo peace process in 2000, these two discourses have each gained the upper hand in one policy area – the liberal one in economic policy and the ethno-national one in policy towards the Palestinians and the Arabs in general. This division of labor is the reason why on the eve of its 60th anniversary as a state Israel is experiencing its worst crisis of governability ever. While Israel's economy is booming and the country's international standing remains high, due to the global ‘war on terror,’ public trust in state institutions and leaders is at an all-time low, so that the government cannot tend to the country's pressing business.     

Reviews

The forgotten antisemites, Bruce F. Pauley, From Prejudice to Destruction. A History of Austrian Anti‐Semitism. Chapel Hill/London: University of North Carolina Press, 1992. xxx+426pp. Notes. Bibl. Ind. Illus. $49.95.

Equating Bolshevism and Jews, Sharman Kadish, Bolsheviks and British Jews. The Anglo‐Jewish Community, Britain and the Russian Revolution. London: Frank Cass, 1992. xiv+298pp. Notes. Bibl. Ind. £35.00.

A case of Jewish integration?, Michael Burns, Dreyfus: A Family Affair 1789–1945. London: Chatto & Windus, 1992 c1991. xvi+576pp. Notes. Bibl. Ind. Illus. £20.00.

Anti‐Judaism vs. antisemitism, Gavin I. Langmuir, Toward a Definition of Antisemitism. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990. x+417pp. Notes. Ind. £45.00.

Evaluating contemporary fascism, Luciano Cheles, Ronnie Ferguson and Michalina Vaughan (eds.), Neo‐Fasdsm in Europe. London: Longman, 1991. xii+299pp. Bibl. Ind. £11.99.

A portrait of Hitler, Ian Kershaw, Hitler. London: Longman, 1991. x+230pp. Notes. Bibl. Chronology. Ind. (Profiles in Power). £7.50.

Israeli society divided, Eliezer Ben‐Rafael and Stephen Sharot, Ethnicity, Religion and Class in Israeli Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. x+287pp. Appends. Notes. Ind. Tables. £32.50.

Swiss Jewish history idealized, Aaron Kamis‐Müller, Antisemitismus in der Schweiz, 1900–1930. Zurich: Chronos Verlag, 1990. 547+24pp. Ind.     

Continuity and Change in the Constitutional Experience of the German Jews

Despite the progress of Emancipation in the nineteenth century,German Jews were required to to legally recognized Jewish communities.Even after this requirement was lifted, Jewish communal liferemained strong. The community structure that the Prussian stateexpected the Jews to implement was modeled after German civiladministration. This framework, however, resembled both medievalGerman and medieval Jewish models. Thus, German Jews, whilemodernizing their own communal institutions, continued to maintainboth their own and their German neighbors' political traditions.The German Jewish communal constitutions attest to a Jewishpolitical tradition of adaptation to prevailing gentile norms,as well as retention of ancient Jewish elements.     

The Indirect Effects of Discredited Stereotypes in Judgments of Jewish Leaders

Can stereotypes of ethnic groups have an indirect impact on voters' judgments even if voters reject them? We examine the case of Jewish leaders and hypothesize that acceptable political stereotypes (Jews are liberal) are linked in voters' minds to unacceptable social stereotypes (Jews are shady); consequently, a cue to the candidate's shadiness works indirectly by increasing the perception that the candidate is liberal, even as the shady cue is rejected. Using three national survey‐experiments we randomly varied a candidate's Jewish identity, ideology, and shadiness. The cue to the rejected social stereotype indeed activates the more legitimate political stereotype. Moreover, voters give more weight to the candidate's perceived liberalism in their evaluation. Consequently, the candidate's support suffers. However, when the candidate takes a more extreme ideological position on issues, the effects disappear. The indirect influence of discredited stereotypes and the limits of those stereotypes have implications for our understanding of voting and of the legacies of discrimination.     

“Freedom of Choice”: Israeli Efforts to Prevent Soviet Jewish Émigrés to Resettle in the United States

Beginning in 1967 the Soviet Union allowed some Jewish citizens to leave for family reunification in Israel (see Appendix ). Due to the break in diplomatic relations between Israel and the U.S.S.R., most émigrés traveled to Vienna where they were then flown to Israel. After 1976 the majority of émigrés who left on visas for Israel “dropped out” in Vienna and chose to resettle in the West. Several American Jewish organizations facilitated their obtaining visas and being resettled in the United States and other countries. This article examines efforts by Israel to deny Soviet Jewish émigrés the option of resettling in the United States. Israeli officials pressured American Jewish organizations to desist from aiding Russian Jews who wanted to resettle in the United States. Initially American Jews resisted Israeli efforts. Following Gorbachev's decision in the late 1980s to allow free emigration for Soviet Jews, the American Jewish community agreed to a quota on Soviet Jewish refugees in the United States, which resulted in most Soviet Jewish émigrés to Israel. The article uses the case study to explore efforts by American Jews and Israel to influence American refugee policy in the 1970s and 1980s. It provides insights into ethnic politics as well as “sponsored politics,” whereby Israel used the American Jewish community to further its interests in the making of United States foreign policy. It also deals with the issue of human rights and migration. While no migrant has the right to go to a country of his or her choice, Israel did deny some émigrés the right to exercise freedom of movement to other countries who welcomed them as refugees.     

English reactions to immigrants now and 70 years ago

In 1917 the ‘Jewish‐Bolshevik’ threat replaced the Jewish‐German’ menace in British popular opinion. The Morning Post and The Times were in the forefront of the campaign to promote White Russia and attribute the Bolsheviks' rise to power as part of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy. The press's antisemitic agitation was, however, limited in scope and, with the exposure of The Protocols in 1921, was relegated to extreme‐right publications.     

Neo‐Nazis’ hopes of Russia

Reporting on race: the ‘power to confirm a perspective’ Barry Troyna, Public Awareness and the Media: a Study of Reporting on Race, London: Commission for Racial Equality, 1981. 95pp. Notes. Append. Bibl. £2.00.

The universal basis of modern Zionism Shlomo Avineri, The Making of Modern Zionism: the Intellectual Origins of the Jewish State. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1981. x + 244p. Notes. Ind. £9.95.     

South African Jews and Apartheid

Jews were overwhelmingly over-represented among Whites in the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa. At the same time, the Jewish community remained inwardly focused on narrowly Jewish concerns; Jewish communal institutions, until relatively late, remained distant from the struggle against racial injustice, if not wholly complicit with the apartheid regime. In this essay, Adler attempts to account for both responses, activism and compliance, by examining the dilemmas faced by South African Jewry as a relatively small group of suspect Others living at the sufferance of the dominant and traditionally antisemitic Afrikaners. Anti-apartheid activism, he argues, was deeply rooted in Jewish culture and values, regardless of how secular the forms that it took were, and how disturbing it might have seemed to a fearful Jewish community pre-occupied with its own interests.     

When the Elders of Zion relocated to Eurabia: conspiratorial racialization in antisemitism and Islamophobia

Zia-Ebrahimi’s objective in this article is two-fold. First, to argue that antisemitism and Islamophobia display similar dynamics in representing their target population as a separate and antagonistic race (a process referred to as ‘racialization’). Second, to suggest that conspiracy theories of the ‘world Jewish domination’ type or their Islamophobic equivalent ‘Islamization of Europe’ type are powerful enablers of racialization, something that the race literature has so far neglected. In pursuing these two interrelated objectives, he offers a textual comparison of two conspiracy theories featuring Jews and Muslims. The first is The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (1903), the notorious forgery claiming to be the minutes of a meeting of Jewish leaders planning to take over Europe and the world. This text is largely considered to be at the very heart of modern-day antisemitism and an essential ingredient of the ideational context of the Holocaust. The second is Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis (2005), a pamphlet by polemicist Bat Ye’or claiming to have uncovered another ominous conspiracy, that of Muslims plotting to turn Europe into Eurabia, a dystopic land in which jihad and sharia rule, and non-Muslims live in a state of subjection. Zia-Ebrahimi argues that, despite some differences in format, the two texts display strikingly similar discursive dynamics in their attempt to racialize Jews and Muslims as the ultimate Other determined to destroy Us. This process is referred to as ‘conspiratorial racialization’.     

An NPD encyclopaedia

Henry Stimson, American Secretary of War during the Second World War, though not a rabid antisemite, strenuously opposed allowing Jewish war refugees into the US and objected strongly to American recognition of the Jewish right to a state in Palestine.     

Constructing the 'Jew', Writing the Holocaust: Hungary 1920-45

Jewish and non‐Jewish French intellectuals have tried to prove that antisemitism has no firm roots in France. In fact, much current research shows quite the opposite. Biblical Israel was a source of inspiration; modern Jewry is often seen as an unacceptable anomaly.     

The antisemitism of Henry Wickham Steed

ABSTRACT

Henry Wickham Steed (1871–1956), then editor-in-chief of the London Times, adopted an ambiguous position with regard to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion when the tract first appeared in English in 1920. He neither endorsed nor rejected it but instead mused in the editorial pages of The Times about whether it might be authentic. The following year, when The Times correspondent in Istanbul brought out proof that The Protocols was a forgery, Steed accepted his correspondent's findings and publicly retracted his earlier ambivalent position. This incident reflects on Steed's (deserved) reputation as an antisemite but it also suggests something of the complexity of his position. Steed's denunciations of Jewish influence, discovered, by his own account, through his experience as a foreign correspondent in Vienna before the First World War, are recurrent in his writings. At the same time, Steed lent strong support to Zionist aspirations at the time of the Balfour Declaration and thereafter, and, in the 1930s, he was among the very first English critics of Hitler's antisemitism. In this article, I propose to offer some hypotheses regarding Steed's antisemitism. Strange as it may sound in the wake of the Second World War, it was Steed's visceral Germanophobia that lay at the heart of his antisemitism. Until the advent of the Third Reich, Steed identified Jews with Germans and with German interests. As an ardent exponent of the ‘principle of nationality’, however, Steed consistently extended his advocacy of statehood for various Eastern European nationalities to the Jewish national cause. A final factor that helps to explain Steed's suspiciousness and gullibility is that, by disposition and as a lifelong journalist, he was drawn to conspiracy theories. He created a number of sensations in his career and, to return to the example of The Protocols, he was loath to discount so spectacular a conspiracy story.