Jeffrey Shandler

This chapter investigates how pictures taken by photographers from outside the east European Jewish community became widely familiar throughout the post-war period, none more so than the work of one photographer, Roman Vishniac. Taken during a series of trips he made to Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Romania from the mid-1930s until the start of the Second World War, some of these photographs have been republished frequently, including in five books devoted solely to the photographer's work. Vishniac's images figured prominently in the first exhibitions and books of photographs of pre-war east European Jewish life to appear in the United States after the Second World War, and not a decade has passed since without some of these photographs being published or exhibited there, as well as abroad. Although these pictures are the product of a limited phase in Vishniac's career, they are his best-known accomplishment. For many post-war Americans, in particular, some of his images ...

Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art, 1925–1945, an exhibition that opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art in February, 2020, proposed to remake art history by demonstrating the profound impact Mexican painters had on their counterparts in the United States, inspiring American artists “to use their art to protest economic, social, and racial injustices.” An unexamined part of this chapter of art history concerns the role of radical Jews, who constitute almost one half of the American artists whose work appears in the exhibition. Rooted in a distinct experience, as either immigrants or their American-born children, these Jewish artists had been making politically charged artworks well before the Mexican muralists’ arrival in the United States. Considering the role of left-wing Jews in this period of art-making would complicate the curatorial thesis of Vida Americana. Moreover, the exhibition’s lack of attention to Jews in creating and promoting this body of wor...

Within less than a decade, almost half of the world's 11 million Yiddish speakers were murdered, and the language's centuries-old cultural heartland in Eastern Europe was demolished. The implications for Yiddish have been profound, both instrumentally and symbolically. There is at present a heightened awareness of the use of Yiddish as a language of conversation, both on the part of the speakers and on the part of observers. In “postvernacular Yiddish,” every utterance is enveloped in a performative aura and freighted with significance as a speech act quite apart from the meaning of whatever words are spoken.

ABSTRACT Since the 1980s, American card stores have been selling an unusual kind of greeting card, which marks not the celebration of a holiday per se but the seasonal coincidence of two holidays of different religions: Christmas and Hanukkah. These cards not only formalize the phenomenon often referred to as the “December dilemma” but also engage with the challenges that it epitomizes for interfaith and interethnic relationships through the rubric of a “consumer rite.” This essay examines December dilemma cards as part of several larger cultural practices, including the merchandising and sending of holiday greeting cards, American celebrations of Hanukkah and Christmas, and the public culture of American multiculturalism. In addition, the essay analyzes these cards' materiality, with regard to both their form and the social practices they engender. The essay demonstrates how these cards offer structures for engaging in conversations about challenging notions of religion, community, and public culture, relating these large-scale social issues to the intimacy of home, family, and personal acquaintances. The cards are also evaluated as mediating agents, seeking to articulate a variety of strategies for accommodating and confronting challenges for a diverse American population that has been experiencing signal shifts in its understandings of difference and commonality amid a holiday season that idealizes optimism.

ends, Maciejko argues, returning to traditional Sabbatean discourse. The main borrowing from Frankism, the liberation of the feminine principle, was converted from a religious into a political program to improve the social position of women and promote their sexual liberation. Maciejko at times overstates the break between Frank and Sabbateanism, depicting the latter as being far more conservative and causing less upheaval than it actually did. Later chapters of the book would have benefited from a comparison with the Dönme. Nevertheless, this is the single best study written to date of Frank and Frankism in all their complexity and will be required reading for any student or scholar of early modern Jewish history and Christian-Jewish relations, kabbalah, and Jewish messianism.

Ketubbot (Jewish marriage contracts) exemplify the dynamics of ritual objects in Jewish life from ancient times to the present. Though often characterized in modern publications and museum exhibitions as demonstrating the continuity of traditional practice, their history is characterized less by endurance than by transformation, as a shifting series of purposes are assigned to the ketubbah: legal document, ritual object, collectible, artifact, domestic artwork. Each of these purposes entails its own contestations of the ketubbah’s significance, thereby challenging claims that these objects betoken cultural (and, by implication, demographic) continuity. The contemporary design of ketubbot offer an unprecedented array of aesthetic possibilities, and the practices surrounding their creation and disposition following the wedding (including their fate in cases of divorce) sometimes challenge rabbinic authority, familiar customs, and the conventions of Jewish public culture. These most re...

Once a topic thought inappropriate for children, the Holocaust is now presented to them in a proliferation of undertakings: state-mandated educational programs beginning in elementary school, special exhibitions for young visitors in Holocaust museums, and the burgeoning genre of children's Holocaust literature, which now boasts hundreds of titles. (1) Long before Holocaust education was widely endorsed for young people, childhood had begun to figure strategically in the form of young protagonists in major works of Holocaust literature such as H. G. Adler's novel Panorama (1968), Gunter Grass's Die Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum) (1959), and Jerzy Kosinski's The Painted Bird (1965). (2) More recently, literary works engage childhood through provocative use of the idioms of storytelling for the young; for example, David Grossman's 1986 novel Ayen erekh: ahavah (See Under. Love) evokes children's literature, while Art Spiegelman's Maus: A Survivor's Tale (1986) employs the "juvenile" genre of comics. The disparity between childhood, conceived as the age of innocence, and genocide, understood as the fundamental collapse of civil society, is a productive opening for the creation of avant-garde literary works on the Holocaust, including the occasional work of fiction for young readers, such as Markus Zusak's The Book Thief (2005). A remarkable precedent for this confluence of the Holocaust, the sensibility of the child, and the literary avant-garde can be found in works written in the early 1940s by one of the leading modernist American Yiddish poets of the twentieth century, Yankev Glatshteyn (1896-1971), especially his novel Emil un Karl (Emil and Karl) (1940). Written for young adult readers, Emil un Karl was published in New York only months after World War II had begun and more than a year before the United States entered the conflict. A pioneering work of Holocaust fiction, the novel comes from the pen of a major Jewish writer who achieved considerable acclaim for his postwar poetry on the Holocaust. And yet, the novel has merited only a passing reference in most Glatshteyn scholarship. (3) Emil un Karl and two shorter pieces on the Holocaust that Glatshteyn wrote for young readers during the war years are noteworthy on several counts. As early examples of Holocaust literature, these works engage an event that not only had yet to be given this name (or its Yiddish equivalent, khurbn) but also was still unfolding as these works were written and published, in contrast with postwar writing on the Holocaust. This distinction is especially telling with regard to the preponderance of children's literature on the subject. This literature has been written well after a master narrative of the Holocaust as a discrete historical event was established--a narrative distinct from the history of European anti-Semitism, the Nazi era, or World War II. Indeed, in America the Holocaust was not secured as a prominent fixture of the national moral landscape until several decades after the war. Moreover, as the Nazi-led mass murder of Europe's Jews, Roma, and other civilian populations took place far from the United States and bore no direct connection to the lives of most of its citizens, the Holocaust has been valued here as a paradigmatic event as well as a subject of importance in its own right. In this capacity, the Holocaust informs American public discussions of other genocides, both earlier (for example, of American Indians) and later (such as the "ethnic cleansing" operations in the Balkans), as well as an array of morally challenging issues, including the abortion rights debate, the AIDS pandemic, the nuclear arms race, animal rights, and world hunger. Glatshteyn's writings on the Holocaust for young readers are revealing as among the first attempts to engage Americans in this remote event of unrivaled enormity. The works are also noteworthy as some of Glatshteyn's earliest efforts to address the Holocaust, which loomed large in his postwar career as a poet, essayist, and editor. …