Abstract: This response puts Tzuberi's analysis into a broader comparative context. First, the post-1990 attempt to create Jews in the image of the liberal-secular German nation-state met considerable resistance by the Central Council of Jews in Germany. In addition, the majority of post-Soviet Jews showed no interest in liberal Jewish theology or the fantasy of reviving the German-Jewish past. Second, the milieu of Judaizing Germans (core architects of German-Jewish revivalism) shows a strong resemblance to other attempts of escaping colonial whiteness, including patterns of what has been called »ethnic fraud.« Third, in comparison to other cases of minority repatriation, the German practice of expiatory demographic engineering was relatively cost-intensive, but contributed considerably to the country's »nation re-branding« after reunification. Fourth, the German politics of reforestation vis-à-vis its Jewish community points to the rise of a post-migratory »gardening state,« heavily invested in regulating its diverse population through a policy mix of migration, education and surveillance.
Abstract: The Shoah belongs to one of the most thoroughly investigated aspects of modern European history. Scholars have used the Holocaust methodology to study other genocides, or forms of ethnic or political violence. Nevertheless, our understanding of the extermination of the European Jewry is limited, fragmented, and changes constantly due to new investigation methods, research interests, and public debates. The first studies on the Holocaust were conducted already during the Shoah but because of different reasons historians in some countries such as Germany and Ukraine did not pay much attention to them and concentrated rather on the documents left by the perpetrators and their fate during the war. While in Poland the research on the Holocaust never stopped, even if it was subjected to various political and ideological limitations, and the Shoah has been publicly debated since the middle of the 1980s, this was not the case in Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine. Nevertheless, in the last two decades, the importance of the Holocaust was discovered in these countries as well and it is currently conceptualized in the framework of regional, national, and European history.
Abstract: After the decades of discrimination against organized Jewish life in the Soviet Union, the present period shows creation and rapid development of Jewish national organizations and institutional infrastructure of Jewish communities in most of the post-Soviet states, especially in Russia and Ukraine. Not a few of these organizations were rooted in history of Jewish life in the USSR after World War II, including the experience of the creation and existence of legal (state-sponsored), illegal (underground national and human rights organizations), and quasi-legal (religious communities) Jewish social institutions in a hostile social and political environment. The Jewish organizations, including local/sectarian institutions, municipal/regional federations, as well as nationwide «umbrella» structures, that were established in the USSR successor states, had to meet the challenge of new conditions of Jewish life in post-communist countries which included a demand for services normally provided by a Jewish community (education, welfare, synagogues, cultural activities, etc.) and a need for an adequate institutional framework which reflected local Jewish identity (whether ethnic nationalism or cultural/religious affiliation)...
Abstract: While the liberation of Europe in 1945 did not result in the end of antisemitism, Jews, Judaism, and Jewishness acquired new value in the aftermath of the Shoah. In democratic Europe, the Jew became at the very least the “enemy that we now must love”. Like antisemitism, European philosemitic discourse mutated over time. To counteract the image of the Jewish enemy, secular and Christian philosemites imagined various types of loveable “good Jews”. This newfound sympathy was not devoid of ambiguities. Philosemitism, broadly conceived as positive discourse on Jews, can indeed easily recycle antisemitic themes, recreate Jewish otherness, or strategically compensate for Holocaust guilt. However, while the Israeli or cosmopolitan Jew continues to fuel antisemitic paranoia, post-Holocaust ‘philosemitism’ has redefined the relationship between contemporary Europe and its Jews.
Abstract: A mentally healthy human being can go insane if suddenly diagnosed with leprosy. Eugen Ionescu finds out that even the “Ionescu” name, an indisputable Romanian father, and the fact of being born Christian can do nothing, nothing, nothing to cover the curse of having Jewish blood in his veins. With resignation and sometimes with I don't know what sad and discouraged pride, we got used to this dear leprosy a long time ago.
With these words, the Romanian–Jewish writer Mihail Sebastian expresses within his private diary some of the darkest moments of a World War II “transfigured” Romania, populated as they are by the gothic characters of legionaries, Nazis, and antisemitism. His death soon followed in 1945, when Romania was at the threshold of fascism and communism. However, with the discovery and the subsequent publishing of Sebastian's diary in 1996, and following 50 years of communist mystification of the Jewish Holocaust, the entire chaotic war atmosphere with the fascist affections of the Romanian intellectual elite was once again brought to light with all the flavor and scent of the dark past. In this entry from Sebastian's diary he speaks of his friend, Eugen Ionescu who, born of a French-related mother and a Romanian father, was living in Bucharest at that time. He would later become known to the world as Eugène Ionesco, the famous French playwright and author of the well-known plays The Bald Soprano and The Rhinoceros. The above quote from Sebastian's journal, predating the international fame of Ionesco, but already marking the end of Sebastian's career under fascism, remains a traumatizing testimony of the Jewish Kafkian torment as “guilt,” a deeply claustrophobic identity that many Eastern European Jewish intellectuals have learned to internalize. Beyond this symbolism, the publishing of Sebastian's diary in Romania unintentionally challenged an existent post-communist tendency of legitimizing inter-war fascist personalities within the framework of a general lack of knowledge about the Jewish Holocaust in both the communist and post-communist periods.
Abstract: Kniha sa zaoberá židovskou komunitou v období po novembri 1989. Úvodné časti (Úvod, Výskum, Literatúra) majú informatívny charakter. Ťažisko knihy tvoria tri kapitoly. Prvá z nich, nazvaná Komunita, sumarizuje vznik Ústredného zväzu Židovských náboženských obcí a jeho vzťahy s náboženskými obcami. Priestor dostala aj charakteristika základných pojomov, súčasné aktivity a dve dôležité inštitúcie židovskej komunity: Dokumentačné stredisko holokaustu a Židovské komunitné múzeum, ktoré pôsobí v priestoroch bratislavskej synagógy.
Druhá kapitola si všíma dva historické sviatky (Pesach a Chanuka), ktoré porovnáva s prejavmi pripomienok holokaustu. Autor analyzuje spoločné a rozdielne znaky, premeny v čase, ale hlavne význam, aký majú tieto príležitosti pre súčasníkov.
V kapitole Symboly autor analyzuje a prepája zdanlivo nesúvisiace fenomény, ako sú synagóga, kaviareň, židovský humor či memoriál Chatama Sofera.
Záver monografie ukazuje, že pre zložité súčasné procesy sú charakteristické tri zdanlivo jednoduché pojmy: zjednodušovanie, individualizácia a najmä selektívny prístup k tradičným religióznym a sviatočným javom. V praxi to znamená prechod od kolektívnej realizácie aktivít k individuálnym prejavom, od verejného k súkromnému a v konečnom dôsledku od komplexného k selektívnemu. Predovšetkým faktor selektívnosti sa javí ako určujúci pri analýze súčasného stavu a úvahách o možných trendoch budúcnosti.
Abstract: Yellow Star, Red Star asks why Holocaust memory continues to be so deeply troubled—ignored, appropriated, and obfuscated—throughout Eastern Europe, even though it was in those lands that most of the extermination campaign occurred. As part of accession to the European Union, Jelena Subotić shows, East European states were required to adopt, participate in, and contribute to the established Western narrative of the Holocaust. This requirement created anxiety and resentment in post-communist states: Holocaust memory replaced communist terror as the dominant narrative in Eastern Europe, focusing instead on predominantly Jewish suffering in World War II. Influencing the European Union's own memory politics and legislation in the process, post-communist states have attempted to reconcile these two memories by pursuing new strategies of Holocaust remembrance. The memory, symbols, and imagery of the Holocaust have been appropriated to represent crimes of communism.
Yellow Star, Red Star presents in-depth accounts of Holocaust remembrance practices in Serbia, Croatia, and Lithuania, and extends the discussion to other East European states. The book demonstrates how countries of the region used Holocaust remembrance as a political strategy to resolve their contemporary "ontological insecurities"—insecurities about their identities, about their international status, and about their relationships with other international actors. As Subotić concludes, Holocaust memory in Eastern Europe has never been about the Holocaust or about the desire to remember the past, whether during communism or in its aftermath. Rather, it has been about managing national identities in a precarious and uncertain world.
Abstract: Dévastée et démantelée par l’occupation nazie, lieu principal de la Catastrophe, la Pologne a un statut particulier pour la mémoire juive et la mémoire de la Shoah. Depuis une quinzaine d’années, un réexamen de cette époque est devenu possible. Avec la démocratie et l’intégration à l’Union européenne, on voit naître un vif intérêt pour cette histoire dans les nouvelles générations et de grands débats publics émergent. La recherche historique est libre, ouverte et riche. La culture et le patrimoine juif sont étudiés et restaurés. Des artistes en interrogent la mémoire. Des festivals, des journaux, des émissions de radio ou de télévision, des programmes éducatifs touchent la jeune génération. Une petite communauté juive reprend vie. Bien entendu, la mémoire du génocide et la responsabilité des témoins sont au cœur des commémorations et des discussions sur ce passé. La Fin de l’innocence entend faire connaître ce travail de la société polonaise sur elle-même et sur son passé. Texte de voyage, construit autour de l’évocation des lieux de mémoire, texte de conversations, qui présente des portraits entretiens des principaux acteurs de ce renouveau, et texte de réflexion, cet ouvrage est à l’image du foisonnement et des interrogations qu’il présente.
Abstract: Describes and gives results of an opinion poll conducted by the American Jewish Committee, working with D3 Systems, a U.S. opinion-research organization, and the Emnid Institute, a similar organization in Germany (both West and East) in October 1990. The questionnaires included questions concerning the memory of the Holocaust, special relations between Germany and Israel, Jewish influence in the world, Zionism, and the danger of antisemitism in contemporary Germany. Results showed that disturbingly high percentages of the population exhibited negative attitudes toward Jews, Israel, and remembrance of the Holocaust. (From the Bibliography of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism)
Abstract: The tradition of Jewish studies in Poland has been drastically interrupted by the Second World War and the Holocaust. In the immediate postwar period the process of re-establishing research on Jewish history and heritage was undertaken by the Jewish Historical Commissions and later Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw. More examples of the individual and group initiatives can be traced only in the 1970s and 1980s. The real happened in the late 1980s with Kraków as one of the first and main centers of revitalized Jewish studies in Poland. The first postwar academic institution in Krakow specializing in Jewish studies – Research Center for Jewish History and Culture in Poland – was established already in 1986 in the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. More than a decade later, in 2000, it was transformed into the first Poland’s Department of Jewish Studies (Katedra Judaistyki) – now the Institute of Jewish Studies. Nowadays there are more similar programs and institutions – at the universities in Warsaw, Wrocław and Lublin (UMCS). Also other academic centers tend to have at least individual scholars, programs, classes or projects focusing on widely understood “Jewish topics.” Jewish studies in Poland, along with the revival of Jewish culture, reflect the contemporary Polish attitude to the Jewish heritage, and their scale and intensity remains unique in the European context. The growing interest in Jewish studies in Poland can be seen as a sign of respect for the role of Jewish Poles in the country’s history, and as an attempt to recreate the missing Jewish part of Poland through research, education and commemoration, accompanied by slow but promising revival of Jewish life in Poland.
