Harvard University Press Blog

Finding Solidarity in Others’ Struggles

As we celebrate Passover, after a year marked by protests for racial equality and social justice, Amelia M. Glaser, author of Songs in Dark Times: Yiddish Poetry of Struggle from Scottsboro to Palestine, reminds us of the Yiddish poets during the interwar years who drew on the trauma of pogroms to depict the suffering of other marginalized peoples and embraced a global community of the oppressed.

Last Spring, George Floyd gasped, “I can’t breathe,” seconds before his murder under the knee of a police officer. His plea became a metaphor for the violence of racism in America, and the months of reckoning that have followed have revealed a painful rift in America over the country’s commitment to equality. This year, many Americans have asked how it’s possible to express solidarity with, and fight for, the human rights of all groups, including those that may not be our own. In a year marked both by a deepening divide over social justice and the fear and loss due to the global pandemic, the celebration of Passover, a holiday commemorating exodus from slavery, offers an opportunity to think about how one group’s experience of injustice can help to understand another group’s pain.

I expect that this year, perhaps more than usual, many will be asking at their seder tables how Jews can translate the collective experience of trauma to speak out against racist violence in the United States. This was a burning question for the Yiddish poets who are the subject of my book, Songs in Dark Times, who found themselves between a privileged majority and threatened minority. In 1931, for example, Malka Lee, an immigrant from Galicia to New York, wrote about a Black man on a subway who described a lynching in the American south.

Now I hear his young cry on the wind

“My brother’s body’s swinging from a pine.”

He raises his fist and waves it, wild,

He sees the murderer’s portrait in every white...

The Yiddish poets I write about were not religious Jews. Nevertheless, the poetry they wrote in the interwar period is a wellspring of thought on the struggle among Jews to fight for other groups’ freedom. My book is the story of Yiddish leftist internationalist poets who, in the 1920s and ’30s, described the struggles of non-Jewish groups, including Chinese workers, Black Americans, Spanish republicans, Palestinian Arabs, and Ukrainian peasants. These writers attempted to translate the pain of others by using passwords from Jewish religious texts and collective memory. They were, in essence, changing what “we” meant—altering it from “we Jews” to “we workers of the world.” These poets were rejecting the very idea of a religious or ethnic community of Jews. But they were also drawing from a rich tradition of Jewish text and practice to make sense of a polarized world.

The Yiddish internationalist poets were drawing from a history of Jewish struggle to convince their readers to empathize with others’ struggles. For example, in keeping with the Jewish tradition of the yahrzeit (commemoration of the anniversary of a death), H. Leivick marked the occasion of a year after the execution of the Italian-born anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti in his poem “A Sacco-Vanzetti Year.” Leivick identifies the perpetrator of the crime against the two anarchists as “The same evil from accuser to accuser.” In the Yiddish original, Leivik’s “accuser” is a “kateyger,” the talmudic term for prosecutor which had come to mean, in Yiddish, “prosecuting angel.” Leivick, with this Jewish password, links the injustice against the Italian anarchists to the many historical injustices against Jews.

Esther Shumiatsher, who wrote poignantly in the late 1920s about the human suffering she observed on her world travels with her spouse, the playwright Peretz Hirschbein, wrote:

The whole world has become my comrade,—

From the Yangtze’s valleys

And the thirst of India’s hot plains.

The Soviet poet Khane Levin, who is best known for her verse about motherhood and the Revolution, weaves Biblical motifs into her poems about building a new Soviet society. In her 1928 “Crimean motifs,” Levin describes a young Jewish man named “Anaki,” a name conjuring the Biblical giants known as Anakim. Anaki, a strapping youth, must overcome the influence of his two fathers—one a Jewish peddler who “sang on the wagon” and the other the tsar who “didn’t learn to work.”

Even among these Yiddish-speaking secularists, Jewish prayer did not entirely disappear. The poet Aaron Kurtz left his Hassidic family as a teenager to join the circus and later made his way to the US where he joined the Communist Party. And yet Kurtz, writing about the Spanish Civil War in 1938, describes a Jewish volunteer for the International Brigades reciting the Kol Nidre prayer on the eve of Yom Kippur together with his comrades in arms, Pedro of Madrid and Johannes of Hamburg.

With World War II, Jewish internationalism changed. Yiddish poets in the Soviet Union, the United States, and elsewhere turned inward, mourning the genocide that had taken place in Europe. The internationalist excitement of the interwar period had faded. Those Yiddish poets who had fought the rise in fascism by binding themselves to the Soviet cause were now forced to confront Stalin’s atrocities. The radical internationalism that had become de rigueur in the 1920s and ’30s gave way to new forms of Yiddish poetry as the Jewish world mourned the horrific murder of the majority of the Jews of Europe in the Holocaust. Many of the poets who had once focused on the struggles of others now turned, in their writing, to face this indescribable loss.

And yet some writers still found ways of simultaneously mourning Jewish loss and the losses of other minorities. Two decades after World War II, following the murder of four young Black girls in a church in the Civil Rights era, Aaron Kurtz turned to the traditional Mourner’s Kaddish as a way of honoring the victims of American race violence:

I am not a Kaddish-sayer. But today mamas

The world over bitterly

Wept and mourned the four little black girls—

I responded to the rabbi’s Kaddish:

Omeyn!

Today, a year into a global pandemic, we celebrate Passover, at a time of personal and communal struggles for freedom and justice. Some may find hope in the utopian Yiddish writers who believed that a fairer world was at hand.

International Women’s Day 2021: Women You Should Know About

In celebration of both International Women’s Day and Women’s History Month, we spoke to HUP’s Executive Editor for History, Kathleen McDermott, and Executive Editor for Science, Janice Audet, to learn more about some exceptional women who challenged the societal standards in their fields, from groundbreaking astronomers to a seventeenth-century African Queen.

Vera Rubin

When some people hear the name Vera Rubin, they might think of Rubin’s pioneering work on galaxy rotation rates, or her data that provided evidence for dark matter. For others, a new facility in Chile comes to mind, recently named the National Science Foundation Vera C. Rubin Observatory, the first large observatory in the world to be named after a woman. And for still others, Rubin’s legacy is for her support of other women in science. When writing Vera Rubin: A Life, Jacqueline Mitton and Simon Mitton were the first people to have access to Rubin’s papers and correspondence, now preserved in the US Library of Congress. This gave them unique and in-depth insight into her character and her fascinating life as she dealt with discrimination and combined family life with an outstanding career.

Rubin’s fascination with the stars and the night sky began as a child and expanded as she studied the motion of the galaxies. An astute observer, her research provided evidence for the existence of galactic superclusters and corroborated theories about dark matter. Rubin surpassed society’s conventional ideas about women in astronomy and female scientists, especially those with children. Indeed, while breaking new ground as the first female astronomer at Palomar Observatory, Rubin and her husband, Bob, were also raising four children. When Rubin discovered there were no women’s restrooms at Palomar, she took action, establishing the first women’s restroom at the observatory and promptly kicking an outdated conception of who an astronomer could be out the door. As Rubin’s reputation and experience grew, she raised her voice for other women in science. She participated on committees and wrote reports sharing data about discrimination against women in science. She challenged colleagues to cease using sexist language and prioritize female representation and recognition whenever scientists were honored or invited to speak. Furthermore, she advocated to increase women’s representation in the leadership of astronomical associations and other scientific societies, championing equality within the most prestigious scientific organizations. From her early days as a girl who stayed up late to gaze out the window to her honor as a National Medal of Science recipient, Rubin was fueled by her love of the stars. For her contributions to research and to women in science, Vera Rubin continues to be an inspiration.

—Janice Audet

Henrietta Szold

Henrietta Szold is certainly a familiar name to members of Hadassah and to most Israelis, but she deserves even wider recognition as one of the most influential women in the first half of the twentieth century. Born in Baltimore in 1860, one of eight daughters of immigrant Jews from Hungary, Szold from a young age sought to alleviate the social ills she saw around her. As Dvora Hacohen shows in To Repair a Broken World, she aimed especially to better the lives of women and children.

As an intelligent, ambitious teenager, Szold desperately wanted to attend university, but Johns Hopkins University did not accept women and her parents could not afford to send her away to college. It was a bitter disappointment and her first significant encounter with the exclusion of women, although she would face similar discrimination throughout her life. At age seventeen, Szold began working as a teacher and became a weekly columnist for The Jewish Messenger. She established a night school in Baltimore for immigrants, raising funds, providing materials, and even teaching there herself. In her thirties, she worked as an editor at the prestigious Jewish Publication Society in Philadelphia, where she translated works from German and French and edited the American Jewish Year Book. Yet her title remained “secretary.” At the age of 42, Szold moved to New York and became the first woman to study at the Jewish Theological Seminary, where a love affair with the scholar Louis Ginzberg ended in heartbreak. To her lifelong sorrow, she would never marry or have children.

In 1912, Szold founded Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America. It led to the second major chapter of her life, which began in 1920 when at age 60 she traveled to Palestine, now under British mandate, to set up a healthcare system, dramatically reducing rates of disease and infant mortality. Under her leadership, hospitals and clinics established by Hadassah offered medical services to Jews, Muslims, and Christians alike. The only woman elected to the Zionist executive, Szold served in the quasi-governmental Jewish Agency, overseeing its health and education departments and working tirelessly to improve the educational system and social welfare network. In 1933, in response to the growing threat to Jews in Europe, Szold founded Youth Aliyah, which would provide homes for 30,000 children, including orphaned survivors of the Holocaust.

Scholar, feminist, and activist, Henrietta Szold was a visionary leader whose devotion to helping others remains a source of inspiration to thousands.

—Kathleen McDermott

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin

In early twentieth-century England there were few female scientists, let alone astronomers. Often the lone woman in her courses and the observatory, Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin faced constant skepticism from her peers and a lack of recognition for her work. And still, clear-eyed and determined, she went on to pen what fellow astronomer Otto Struve would call “the most brilliant PhD thesis ever written in astronomy.” In it, she proposed a theory that was eventually proven true: Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin revealed the atomic composition of stars. Now, for any astronomer it was difficult to posit a revolutionary theory, but for a woman in science it was almost impossible. As Donovan Moore reveals in What Stars Are Made Of: The Life of Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, a notable male colleague dismissed her work, stating that her conclusions were wrong. But Payne-Gaposchkin was not deterred by her critics, and eventually, she was duly recognized for correctly theorizing what stars are made of.

This discovery was one of many illustrious firsts throughout the course of Payne-Gaposchkin’s life. She became the first woman to receive a PhD in astronomy from Radcliffe College. She was the first woman to be promoted to full professor by Harvard and the first woman to head a department at Harvard. Throughout a lifetime of facing obstacles and closed doors, Payne-Gaposchkin rose to the challenge time and again, and through her commitment to science, she cut a path for others to follow.

—Janice Audet

Queen Njinga

Asked to name one of the most powerful ruling women of the early modern era, many people might point to Queen Elizabeth I of England. Few would likely name her near contemporary Queen Njinga, ruler of Ndongo, a large territory in central Africa. But they should. Born in 1582, descendant of a royal line reaching back to the founding of the kingdom of Ndongo, Njinga learned statecraft at her father’s court. After her brother assumed the throne, she served as his envoy to the Portuguese, who were conducting relentless wars of conquest in the region for land and slaves. Njinga proved more adept than her brother in both diplomacy and strategy. Upon his death, she became the real defender of Ndongo’s independence.

In Njinga of Angola: Africa’s Warrior Queen, Linda Heywood recounts the dramatic twists and turns in the life of this fascinating and complex woman. After a short reign as ruler of Ndongo, Njinga was forced into exile and lived in the bush, where she transformed herself into a fierce military leader who fought alongside her soldiers. She conquered the neighboring state of Matamba and established a court that was a powerhouse in the region. Njinga upended traditional gender norms, declaring herself “king” and keeping many young male consorts. She owned slaves and engaged in slave trading. She converted to Christianity and corresponded with the Vatican, even concocting a clever plan to have the pope recognize her as a Christian monarch and Matamba as a Christian state. Once, during peace negotiations with the Portuguese, she refused to sit before them on carpets, which signaled defeat. She instead ordered a slave on all fours to act as a chair, on whom she sat before the Europeans as an equal.

This astute and innovative leader, named one of UNESCO’s twenty-five most influential women in African history, became an icon of resistance and a folk hero throughout the African diaspora in the Atlantic. Daring warrior, master diplomat, and crafty politician, Queen Njinga was a force to be reckoned with. We should all know her story.

—Kathleen McDermott

We’ll be highlighting other books for Women’s History Month across our social media channels throughout March. Follow us on Instagram and Twitter, and be sure to follow our international office on Twitter, too.

The History of a Word

Few words are as ideologically charged as ghetto. Daniel B. Schwartz offers a fascinating account of the changing nuances of this slippery term, from its coinage to the present day, in Ghetto: The History of a Word. We asked him for a quick run-down of the word’s origin, what it described, and its modern meaning.

In the U.S., we associate the term “ghetto” with African American communities in inner cities. Could you explain how it originated in a very different setting?

In 1516, the Venetian Senate restricted all Jews living in Venice to a small island in the northern part of the lagoon city that was already known as the Ghetto Nuovo (or New Ghetto). It is generally believed that the island got its name from a copper foundry that had formerly been located there. “Ghetto” is thought to derive from the Italian verb gettare, meaning to throw or to cast, which would evoke the casting of metal for the production of ammunition at the foundry. By osmosis, the proper name Ghetto came to be associated with the Jews who now lived there, and more specifically with the phenomenon of the compulsory, segregated, and enclosed Jewish quarter. When residential segregation of Jews spread to other Italian towns and cities from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, the all-Jewish and only-Jewish areas formed came to be called ghettos. There were mandatory and exclusive Jewish neighborhoods in Europe before 1516—in Frankfurt am Main, for example, where Jews were forcibly concentrated in a particular street in 1462—but Venice is where the name “ghetto” for such neighborhoods originated.

What was life like in European ghettos at their peak? How isolated were Jewish residents?

Life in the European ghettos at their peak was in many ways paradoxical. On one hand, the ghettos had many of the drawbacks of segregated areas: because the boundaries of the ghetto typically were not extended sufficiently to accommodate the growth of population, they were often appallingly overcrowded. Ghettos featured some of the tallest buildings in the city, with seven to as many as nine floors needed to house all the people; when these tenement-like apartments were built in narrow alleys, they frequently obscured the flow of light. A saying that originated in eighteenth-century Italian, fare un ghetto, “to make a ghetto,” may have betrayed traditional stereotypes about Jewish noisiness, but it stands to reason that ghettos were clamorous, cacophonous places where sounds were intensified. On the other hand, the ghetto was also seen as a kind of haven, a walled city in miniature where Jews enjoyed a measure of protection from the outside world and, significantly, were spared the much worse fate of expulsion. It must be emphasized that the original ghettos of early modern Europe were not prisons. Though there were curfews that required Jews to be back in the ghettos by a certain hour, when the gates would be shut and locked, Jews (so long as they were wearing some distinguishing garment, typically in the case of the Italian ghettos a colored hat) were free to leave the ghetto by day to conduct business or visit gentile acquaintances. The boundaries of the ghetto were porous; there were always, at least during the permitted hours, Christians entering and Jews leaving. They were not only physically, but culturally permeable: behind the walls of the ghetto, Jews absorbed everything from the language to the folkways of the surrounding society, even if they tended also to “Judaize” them. Despite the fact Jews were forced to live apart in their own quarters, they were much less isolated than the connotations of the word “ghetto” would lead one to expect.

How did the ghettos come to an end?

Many of the ghettos of Italy and Central Europe were razed to the ground by French armies during the Napoleonic Wars, as part of their campaign to export the French revolution and its emancipation of the Jews to all the areas they conquered. In some cases, most notably in Rome, Napoleon’s defeat and the restoration of the old regime resulted in a re-ghettoization of Jews. The plight of Roman Jewry, which had been steadily impoverished and worn down as a result of papal pressure over the centuries, was a focus of a great deal of attention on the part of both Jews and non-Jews in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, by which point the fact this community was still ghettoized was seen as anomalous. Rome’s ghetto was finally dismantled in 1870, after the popes were stripped of all temporal power and the project of Italian unification was completed. It was the last of the old European ghettos to fall. Most of the European ghettos were leveled as part of urban renewal projects, so that there are only a handful that one can visit today that even somewhat resemble what they once looked like. In Venice, most of the buildings (including the synagogues) and the layout of the ghetto were preserved, so that it offers the best opportunity to see the ghetto as it was.

The dismantling of ghettos sounds like a completely good thing. But did it have any unanticipated effects on Jewish communities?

In the wake of the dismantling of ghettos, some began to express a certain nostalgia for what they believed had been lost in the process. They associated the ghetto with an entire gestalt of Jewish traditions, customs, folkways, values, and social types in the midst of disappearing. This outlook conveyed a degree of unease about modernity, which was seen as a homogenizing force that threatened to swallow any residual spaces of old-world Judaism. Later, when Zionists began to polemicize against Jewish liberal integrationists, they occasionally sought to redeem the much-derided figure of the “ghetto Jew” (associated with weakness, servility, and obscurantism) by comparing him favorably to an “assimilated Jew” they deemed rootless, inauthentic, and neurotic.

How and when did the term cross the Atlantic? When did we start to apply it chiefly to African American urban communities?

In the case of America, we can speak of two fundamental migrations of the word “ghetto.” The first was when it crossed the Atlantic and came to be applied to Jewish immigrant enclaves such as New York’s Lower East Side and Chicago’s Near West Side. This began in the final quarter of the nineteenth century, amid the groundswell of East European Jewish immigration to America, though it really gathered momentum in the 1890s. These immigrant enclaves were legally voluntary, even if Jews clustered there in part because of social and economic pressures. This use of the word “ghetto” to designate a voluntary as opposed to mandatory form of Jewish residential concentration represented a major stretching of the term, though this had already begun in Europe, where Jewish immigrant quarters such as London’s East End were also referred to as ghettos. The new application of the word, however, was not without controversy; some protested the use of “ghetto” as a synonym for “Jewish quarter” because of the negative images it conjured, and one American Jewish notable succeeded in persuading the New York Times to cease referring to the LES as the “New York Ghetto.” The second migration was the transfer of the term from Jewish to African American enclaves. Usage of the word “ghetto” to refer to the residential segregation of blacks began in the African American press in the 1910s as part of a protest against new city ordinances in the South and Midwest that forbade blacks from buying or renting a home on a block the majority of whose residents were white (and vice versa). Such zoning laws were found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1917. But residential segregation of blacks continued in the form of restrictive covenants, redlining, and the segregation of public housing (among other things)—and usage of the word “ghetto” to refer to black segregation gradually became more mainstream. That said, the term only came to be primarily associated with African Americans rather than Jews in the postwar period and in particular in the 1960s and 1970s, when the focus of the civil rights movement began to shift from Jim Crow in the South to the ghettos of the North.

How do Jewish people today think about the term?

Certainly, there are several misunderstandings that continue to prevail. Many Jews would argue that most Jews lived in ghettos prior to emancipation, despite the fact urban ghettos were generally limited to the Italian peninsula and a few Central European cities (e.g. Frankfurt, Prague) and were not, on balance, to be found in Poland, where most early modern Jews lived. Despite decades of revisionist scholarship that has challenged the notion that the original European ghettos were largely isolated, it is not clear that this has made a significant dent in popular perceptions. The fact that Jewish immigrant enclaves in this country were once referred to as ghettos has mostly been forgotten; it would probably surprise most Jews to see a postcard of the Lower East Side from the early twentieth century with a street scene labeled “The Ghetto.” When Jews think of Jewish ghettos today, it is probably the Warsaw Ghetto that comes first to mind, though the Nazi ghetto was starkly different (and much worse) than the original European ghettos that coined the term. I think Jews regard the fact the word “ghetto” has come to be primarily associated with another people with some ambivalence. On one hand, the term has mostly pejorative connotations, so that many are happy to bid it farewell. On the other hand, some view the application of the term to African American enclaves with skepticism, whether on account of the fact the de jure dimensions of black segregation in this country were typically not as overt and clear-cut as the statutory laws of early modern Jewish segregation or the Nazi segregation of Jews, or because they see the term as somehow “belonging” to Jewish history and resent its appropriation. Whatever the case, I would say that the word “ghetto” remains a keyword for Jews, one that carries a special ideological charge and is capable of evoking images and associations that exceed any dictionary definition of the term.

Haunted Reflections: Walter Benjamin in San Francisco

Having spent decades now helping to bring the vast and varied writings of Walter Benjamin to readers of English, we’re very excited to be joining City Lights and others in spending this week considering Benjamin’s life and ideas. “Haunted Reflections: Walter Benjamin in San Francisco” aims to take Benjamin’s work as “a lens through which to observe the sweeping socio-political changes that have enwrapped both the Bay Area and the globe,” by engaging with Benjamin’s ideas via lectures, roundtables, installations, and film screenings.

Among many others, Haunted Reflections features the participation of Howard Eiland, Michael Jennings, and Lindsay Waters, our Executive Editor for the Humanities. Eiland and Jennings have been critical to our Benjamin project, which, as Waters shared with the City Lights blog, can be traced back to his graduate school exposure to Benjamin by Paul de Man and Hannah Arendt. Eiland and Jennings have most recently expanded our Benjamin offerings with the publication of Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life, the first full critical biography of Benjamin in any language. The pair adapted a brief introduction to Benjamin’s life and work from the book, which can be read in full online.

Haunted Reflections begins this evening at City Lights, with “Angel of History at the Gates of the West,” a “skeleton key” to Benjamin’s life and work, featuring Eiland, Jennings, and Waters, and moderated by Paul Yamazaki, chief book buyer at City Lights. The week’s events are presented by City Lights in conjunction with the Contemporary Jewish Museum, Goethe Institut San Francisco, the Program in Critical Theory at University of California Berkeley, The Mechanics’ Institute Library, the San Francisco Art Institute, and HUP.

Greil Marcus on The Collaboration

On January 23rd the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco hosted Ben Urwand, author of The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact with Hitler, in conversation with Greil Marcus. During the event (which you can watch in full via the video below), Urwand presented on his research, discussed the book with Marcus, and took questions from the audience.

Marcus—whom we’ve also published several times—began the evening by addressing the controversy surrounding the book, which documents major Hollywood studios accepting direction from German authorities for a longer period and to a much greater extent than previously known.

We’ll pick things up with Marcus addressing the persistent calls for HUP to withdraw the book:

This book has been attacked because it is sensationalistic; because it’s one-sided; because it’s exaggerated. Well this is quite remarkable. Nobody asks that a book be withdrawn because it’s sensationalistic or exaggerated. The argument has also been made that, “Well, everybody knew this was going on. You could find it in Variety. There’s nothing new here.” You know, traffic accident, nothing to see, move along, move along. “But if there is anything new here it’s not important.” It’s like the argument that people made for generations about the Rosenbergs: “They didn’t give anything to the Soviet Union. And if they did it wasn’t anything important. It didn’t have any effect.”

Marcus went on to situate the response to Urwand’s book within a history of Jewish authors discussing Jewish matters and being met by outcry:

The campaign—and it has been among various people an organized campaign—against The Collaboration has been of such virulence and so hysterical, and with accusations that verge on the criminal, that it recalls other instances where Jewish authors have delved into forbidden material, and have come back with stories that a lot of people want to hear, and a lot of people don’t. When Hannah Arendt published Eichmann in Jerusalem, and she argued that members of the Jewish councils in Eastern Europe worked with the Nazis to facilitate transport of Jews from the ghettoes to concentration camps, in hopes that the people they were supposedly representing would get better treatment, and that they would get better treatment. This was a small part of Hannah Arendt’s book, but it was an explosive argument. She was attacked by not only people in the press, but attacked my colleagues, attacked by lifelong friends. She was shunned. Her classes at the New School in New York were taken away from her. When Philip Roth published Portnoy’s Complaint, Gershom Scholem, the great Israeli historian, compared it to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Which I think no one has done of The Collaboration yet.

  

Great State Autism

In The Rise of China vs. the Logic of Strategy, published last year, Edward Luttwak introduced the concept of “great state autism,” a collective national lack of situational awareness that reduces a country’s ability to perceive international realities with clarity. While the U.S. and Russia each suffer from obvious cases of the condition, Luttwak labels China’s autism an “especially virulent” strain, due to its ancient development in relative isolation and its sheer size, among other factors. Luttwak sees the affliction when, say, China flexes its military muscle in the face of a neighbor one day and then is surprised by the rebuff of a trade delegation to that same neighbor the next.

“In all great states,” writes Luttwak, “there is so much internal activity that leaders and opinion-makers cannot focus seriously on foreign affairs as well, except in particular times of crisis.”

They do not have the constant situational awareness of the world around them that is natural in small countries of equal advancement. After all, individual sensory and cranial capacities are much the same in smoothly operating states of a few million people, and in megastates such as the Russian Federation, the United States, India, and China, whose leaders face internal urgencies if not emergencies each day somewhere or other, in addition to their ordinary decision-making sessions and ceremonial obligations.

The result is not mere inattention. On the contrary, it is not only possible but common for great-state leaders and even entire ruling elites to make much of foreign affairs if only as welcome diversion from the harder choices of domestic politics, in which almost any decision that pleases some must displease others—and not mere foreigners whose political support will not be missed.

Great-state autism is worse than inattention because in the absence of the serious and earnest study that domestic urgencies make impossible, decision-makers cannot absorb in-depth information with all its complexities and subtleties, even if it is offered to them (which is unlikely: when intelligence officers adhere to the rule that their highest duty is to tell top leaders what they do not want to hear, their careers suffer). Instead, decisions on foreign affairs are almost always made on the basis of highly simplified, schematic representations of unmanageably complex realities, which are thereby distorted to fit within internally generated categories, expectations, and perspectives.

Now, in the recently-published Israel Has Moved, Diana Pinto describes Israel as suffering from its own case of autism, despite being a nation of far less territory than Luttwak’s Russia, China, India, or the United States. Pinto’s book is an unsettling take on Israel’s decades-long drift away from the European shadow in which it was founded and towards a new insularity. On the one hand are the country’s world-leading science and technology sectors, on the other its less successful international relationships.

Super-Israel at the technological heart of the new world economy suddenly becomes Israel the autistic with Asperger syndrome, the bipolar, the schizophrenic, the paranoiac, the psychotic, and even the psycho-rigid: in other words, an entity that denies the very principle of reality. These are very powerful, even terrifying, metaphors. They are not mine. Israelis from all camps—whether ultraorthodox or extremely secular, young or old, and coming from the most diverse cultural origins—used them freely before me as so many self-evident truths.

She writes of Israeli autism:

This condition, which occurs among the young (and Israel is both very young as a state and very old as a people), who are often quite brilliant in certain fields, defines those who cannot think of themselves as living in a world populated by others. They do not register the gaze or the emotions of others and are therefore unable to communicate or interact with them, because they do not grasp or understand what might motivate them… As with autistic people who feel threatened, Israel can reply to the aggressions of others (in its case most often real and not imagined) only by an excessively forceful and uncontrolled reaction, of which it often becomes its own victim.

Interestingly, while Luttwak makes no mention of Israel in his discussion of great state autism, Pinto cites China as the only other civilization whose “self-centeredness” resembles that of the Jews. Also striking are the contrasting conditions of each affliction’s incubation: Luttwak points to China’s ancient history of isolation from other states, whereas Israel’s defining characteristic is its keystoning of the lands along the Mediterranean Sea. In either case, the label seems a useful lens through which to observe these two major factors in the pursuit of geopolitical stability.

A Portal into a Vanished Jewish World

At the turn of the twentieth century, Russia’s Pale of Settlement was home to 40% of the world’s Jews—and so foreign to the rest of the country that Russian Jewish intellectuals called it “our own kind of dark continent.” How to capture this rich, mysterious land, its people and traditions? For peripatetic playwright and journalist S. An-sky, the answer was the 2,087-question Jewish Ethnographic Program, a survey now translated into English for the first time in The Jewish Dark Continent: Life and Death in the Russian Pale of Settlement. While world war and revolution prevented the survey from ever being distributed, in Nathaniel Deutsch’s hands the unanswered questions (a selection of which can be found below) and the story behind their assembly disclose a riveting account of a lost world.

Beginning with a query about a person’s soul before it enters the body, and ending with the question “What kind of life will there be after the resurrection of the dead?,” An-sky’s survey covers all aspects of Jewish life, from birth to childhood to education to marriage to aging and death.

In an introductory section, Deutsch sites The Jewish Ethnographic Program in its intellectual, historical, and cultural contexts, and in the context of An-sky’s life and work. He describes his own history with the translation project, including ultimately quixotic attempts to elicit responses to the questions from subjects ranging from elderly people who had once lived in shtetls, to rabbinical students, to observant Jews. As he was translating the questions, Deutsch also lost himself in the project of their annotation:

Initially I planned on providing explanatory notes to only those questions that seemed especially obscure. After all, one of the things that I had always found most compelling about The Jewish Ethnographic Program was the very fact that it was a book of questions without answers and, therefore, a kind of stripped-down, elemental version of a classical Jewish text. And yet as I went through The Program looking for questions that needed clarification or commentary, I soon found myself creating more and more notes. Before I knew it, I had completed notes to one hundred questions, and then two hundred, and then three hundred, and so on.

By this point, practically every countertop in the house—and not a few floors—were covered with books: memoirs about growing up in the Pale of Settlement, yizker bikher (memorial books) for Eastern European Jewish communities, scholarly works on Russian Jewish history and culture, and traditional sforim, or books on Halakhah and minhag. In one sense I was reverse-engineering the creative process that had led to the composition of The Jewish Ethnographic Program in the first place, with of course the critically important difference being that I was a single individual living in twenty-first-century America, whereas The Program had been created by a team of people born and raised in the Pale of Settlement. In another sense, and despite my best—at least conscious—efforts not to do so, I was also attempting to answer all of the questions myself.

Through Europe’s Shattered Spaces: A Guide to Jewish Berlin and Warsaw

Michael Meng’s Shattered Spaces is a study of the physical legacy of destruction left in many German and Polish cities that were once rich with the sights and sounds of Jewish life. It’s also a study of remembering, an examination of how memories of the war have shaped encounters with Jewish ruins. In the piece below, Meng takes us through a series of sites that reflect the past in different ways.

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Multiple histories and layers of time interact in Berlin and Warsaw, two capitals with deep traditions of Jewish history, culture, and religion. Before the Holocaust, few other cities in the world had such dynamic Jewish populations as Berlin and Warsaw. In 1945, little more than Jewish ruins—silent synagogues, empty homes, deserted streets—marked what was left of Jewish life in both cities. Some Jews did rebuild their lives in Warsaw and Berlin, but absence dominated the early postwar decades. In East Berlin and Warsaw, this absence was made all the more palpable with the emigration of Jews in the wake of two major antisemitic campaigns in 1951-53 in East Germany and 1967-68 in Poland.

Today, antisemitism exists among segments of German and Polish society, but things have changed dramatically in both countries over the past four decades. Since the 1970s, a profound interest in Jewish culture, history, and religion has emerged among many non-Jewish Germans and Poles. At the same time, the Jewish communities of both countries have grown, especially after the collapse of Soviet Communism in 1989.

This complex, multilayered history unfolds today along the streets of Berlin and Warsaw. The knotted threads of past, present, and future run through the built environment as with few other objects of human experience. Time oozes through physical sites, saturating them with meanings, contexts, and stories, whether spaces are new or old, preserved or neglected, occupied or vacant, present or absent, fragmented or whole. Indeed, Jewish spaces uncover Europe’s myriad histories of renewal and ruination—its histories of acculturation, emancipation, tolerance, genocide, forgetting, remembering, and rebuilding. While the Holocaust runs wide and deep in our imaginations of Jewishness in Germany, Poland, and Europe, it exists among many other histories and temporalities, including the contemporary revival of Jewish life.

Experiencing Jewishness in Berlin and Warsaw involves, then, reflecting upon the webs of past, present, and future. Below are a few sites that reflect the intricacies of time.

Berlin

Unveiled in 1866, the New Synagogue (Oranienburger Str. 28/30) stands today as one of Berlin’s most distinct Jewish sites. Christian architect Eduard Knoblauch designed the synagogue in Moorish style, topping the building with a magnificent golden dome. Located in the district of Mitte, the synagogue existed among other Jewish institutions, bakeries, and bookstores in an area that was the closest thing Berlin had to a Jewish neighborhood. While the synagogue survived the Nazi attack against Jewish property in 1938, it was severely damaged by allied bombs. From 1945 to 1989, the facade stood as a ruin in East Berlin. In 1995, the surviving shell was restored, but the rest of the building was not. The bombed-out sanctuary remains, integrating the ruination of genocide, war, and postwar neglect into the building’s structure. The synagogue serves as a small prayer house for Berlin’s Jewish community, an archive for historical research, and a museum that narrates the building’s history.

Who Was Walter Benjamin in 1910?

How best to describe Walter Benjamin? Philosopher? German-Jewish Intellectual? Marxist? Moralist? Critic (as argued by Daniel Bell when we began to publish Benjamin’s work)?

Benjamin was all of those things and more, of course. Much of his reputation is based on his writings of the ’20s and ’30s, when he produced works like his best-known essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility.” But where did that Benjamin come from? How did he develop? Who was he as a young man? Our latest Benjamin volume, Early Writings, 1910-1917, shows that, even at 18, Benjamin was already Benjamin.

A quick digression: this fall we’re publishing Becoming Dickens, a new bio of Dickens that looks just at the first half of his life, with a particular focus on the pivotal years of 1833-1838. That book lays bare all of the contingency of becoming, with Robert Douglas-Fairhurst showing that the man who became Dickens actually nearly didn’t. As origin stories go, Benjamin’s is strikingly different. The early writings in this new volume make especially clear the philosophical foundations on which Benjamin never stopped building—the concern with the role of the present in historical remembrance, the concern with truth in the work of art, and the anxiety over language’s mediation of life.

Benjamin was heavily involved with the German Youth Movement in the years before WWI, and much of the writing in this volume reflects that association. Howard Eiland, the editor and translator of this volume and others, including The Arcades Project, notes that these zealous youth- and education-focused writings clearly reflect what we know of the adult Benjamin:

In these polemical writings, exhorting the sons and daughters of the German middle class to “awaken,” we see the young Benjamin in his various roles as moralist, cultural critic, school reformer, and poet-philosopher. The pieces are concerned with matters ranging from the spiritually fruitful appropriation of history to the intellectual relevance of Romanticism in particular, from the theory of education to the idea of experience and the idea of love. The diversity of interest and profundity of thought characteristic of his better-known work from the Twenties and Thirties are already in evidence here.

Of the forty-five pieces in this volume, over thirty are presented here in English for the first time. Many are articles that were published by Benjamin in various outlets; others were never published in any language in his lifetime. The works fall into four principal subject areas: personal writing (poetry, fiction, diary); education and its reform; youth (with essays on love and eroticism); and literary subjects. These early writings lack some of the polish of his later work, and also absent are the sociological perspectives and montage techniques that Benjamin wouldn’t develop until his freelance writing days after his student years. But, as Adam Kirsch notes, through these seven years one can see Benjamin develop “from a precocious, pompous adolescent into a daring and profound thinker.”

We’ll just end here with a snippet of the 1916 essay “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man”:

What does language communicate? It communicates the spiritual essence corresponding to it. It is fundamental to recognize that this spiritual essence communicates itself in language and not through it. Hence, there is no speaker of languages, if that means someone who communicates through these languages. Spiritual being communicates itself in, not through, a language: this is to say, it is not outwardly identical with linguistic being. Spiritual being is identical with linguistic being only insofar as it is communicable. What is communicable in a spiritual entity is its linguistic being. Language, therefore, in each case communicates the linguistic being of things, but their spiritual being only insofar as this is directly included in their linguistic being, insofar as it is communicable.  

As this short excerpt makes clear, one other notable Benjaminism was already well-developed in his youth: his –abilities.

New Edition of the World-Renowned Washington Haggadah

After the Bible, the Passover haggadah is the most widely read classic text in the Jewish tradition. Among the countless editions that have been published, few are as exquisite as the Washington Haggadah, which was created in Germany in the 15th Century by the artist and scribe Joel ben Simeon. One of ten surviving Hebrew manuscripts that bear Joel ben Simeon’s signature, the Washington Haggadah resides in the Library of Congress, where it has long been considered a centerpiece of the Hebraic Section collections.

Though a beautiful work of art, the Washington Haggadah was, of course, intended to be used at the seder table, as indicated by wine stains on the parchment. So that this document can be both widely appreciated and used as intended, we have worked with the Library of Congress to produce a beautiful new full-color facsimile edition of the codex.

The image below, depicting an entire family balanced on the back of a donkey, is typical of the enchanting, sometimes-mysterious images that illuminate the pages of the Washington Haggadah.

A selection of additional images from the volume can be viewed online here.

In addition to its faithful, right-to-left reproduction of the original manuscript, our new edition includes introductions and commentary from the scholars David Stern and Katrin Kogman-Appel. In their hands, the manuscript reveals the contours of an evolving Passover ritual; the nature of European Jewish life in the 15th century; and the practice of religious and secular art in the early modern era. This edition also includes a translation of the text, along with notes on the illustrations.

In celebration of the publication of this facsimile edition, the Library of Congress has lent the Washington Haggadah to New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, where it is on display through June 26th within the context of the museum’s permanent medieval collection. Peggy Pearlstein, Head of the Hebraic Section of the Library’s African and Middle Eastern Division says of the loan: “Like the new facsimile edition itself, this unprecedented loan is a wonderful opportunity for us to share the crown jewel of the Library's Hebraic Section collections with a wider audience, and to make the public aware of the richness of the Library's holdings in this field.” Its presentation inaugurates a series of loans planned for the next several years, each of which will focus on a single, illuminated medieval Hebrew manuscript.