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The construction of the American Holocaust curriculum.
No full textRemembering the Holocaust has become a central part of American culture. The Holocaust has also become an important topic in the nation's schools. By the 1990s many states had adopted or mandated their own Holocaust curricula in addition to the dozens of organizations dedicated to Holocaust study and education in the United States. This rise in interest was accompanied by a public debate over how to represent the Holocaust properly in American life, making the Holocaust one of the most controversial historical topics of the late twentieth century. This study traced the construction of the Holocaust curriculum through historical case studies of five of the first Holocaust curricula taught in American classrooms, through which I present two major arguments. First, that Holocaust education was a grassroots movement engineered by school teachers---many of whom were not Jewish. These teachers introduced the Holocaust as way to help students navigate the moral and ethical dilemmas of the time. Certain researchers have suggested that Jewish elites pushed the Holocaust into the American consciousness, or that this interest was initiated by events in popular culture. My research will complicate both these claims. My second argument is that the intense debate over how to represent the Holocaust in the curriculum has been misinterpreted as a cultural clash over different interpretations of the event---the Jewish version vs. the "Americanized" one. This explanation is too simplistic. The controversy is better understood as a curricular debate over the teaching of history. For nearly a century, educational researchers, interest groups, and historians have argued over the role and purpose of history in the schools. Having entered into this debate, the topic of the Holocaust has made these issues more conspicuous to the general public.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Virginia, 2004.School code: 0246
Old trees new roots: The resettlement experience of older Jews from the former Soviet Union.
No full textThe challenges of making an international migration in old age are enormous. Soviet Jews are the second largest immigrant group in New York City and 30% were over 60 when immigrating. (HIAS, 2000). This dissertation was a descriptive, cross sectional non-probability study of the demographic, social and health utilization profile of older Jews from the former Soviet Union living in the Bronx who emigrated after 1991. It asked what, if any, personal, familial and community support variables were associated with life satisfaction among this sample of older refugees. The study used a convenience sample (N = 62) identified from Bronx agencies and housing complexes who provided services to older immigrants. A 23 page structured questionnaire comprised of a series of standardized scales and open ended questions translated into Russian was completed in face to face interviews with Russian speaking research assistants.The research findings are understood within the limitations of the study. Limitations included recruitment difficulties due to subjects' and agencies' suspiciousness about the research purpose, the cultural sensitivity of the tools and the small homogeneous sample. This was a well-educated professional sample with strong family supports and a high level of service utilization. Though most self-rated their functional health as independent in ADL (81%), over 50% had help at home. 71% participated in adult day care programs. All reported having medical care. Life satisfaction was positively correlated with those having larger family support networks, participating in a larger number of Jewish community agencies and describing the reception of the Jewish community as good or excellent. Life satisfaction was lower for those who scored as having depressive symptoms and those with siblings.Implications for social work education included the need for improved cultural competence, mediation skills and sensitivity on concepts of health and life satisfaction. Further research is needed on the impact of the Holocaust on these refugees and their children and on the impact of the immigration process on intergenerational relationships, as refugees are so dependent on family support.Thesis (Ph.D.)--Fordham University, 2004.School code: 0072
Henna for brides and gazelles: Ritual, women's work and tourism in Morocco.
No full textHenna, a semi-permanent vegetable dye, is used in many contexts in Morocco, as in other Muslim societies. The hadith document the use of henna to relieve arthritic pain, and as a dye used by men to color the hair and beard, and by women to stain their hands and feet. This association of henna with Islam gave the plant the stamp of religious orthodoxy. However, the ritual use of henna, notably its use at marriage and burial, has much earlier roots, following a pattern of red ochre use in very early human society. Contemporary henna practices are strongly associated with ceremonies that mark calendrical and life cycle transitions. Applied to women preparing for marriage or childbirth, awaiting a male child's circumcision, and re-entering the community after a spouse's death, henna indicates (and conveys) the passage of individuals through dangerous states---a meaning that has been easily adapted to encompass the physical and social liminality that accompanies travel. In recent years, henna practices have been increasingly commoditized, particularly with the appearance of artisans who apply henna for domestic and international tourists in public markets. Conflicts between artisans and police, in particular, highlight both the socio-economic importance of this work and the salience of manipulating tradition in gaining/retaining control of cash earned in this high profit sector. Employing a cultural biography approach, this study breaks with impact-oriented evaluations of tourism to examine how meaning is embedded in newly commoditized rituals through (1) a survey of henna practices that identifies general characteristics as well as those specific to Muslim and Jewish Moroccan communities; (2) similarities and contrasts between contemporary local and tourist sector producers' technical and social knowledge relating to henna application; and (3) the social context of production. Data was drawn from participant observation among 15 local and 30 tourist sector henna artisans carried out over 18 months of fieldwork in Morocco in 1998, and 2000--2001. Contemporary practices are contrasted with descriptions drawn from the nineteenth and early twentieth century ethnographic records, with particular attention to French sources.Thesis (Ph.D.)--Universite de Montreal (Canada), 2004.School code: 0992
Rabbis and revolution: A study in nineteenth-century Moravian Jewry.
No full textThis dissertation examines the communal, religious and political history of Moravian Jewry in the course of the nineteenth century, with particular emphasis on the Revolution of 1848 as a critical watershed. The Moravian chief rabbinate---the principal supra-communal institution of Moravian Jewry in the first half of the nineteenth century---serves as a prism through which to view the conflicts among Moravia's fifty-two Jewish communities, the debates over religious and educational reform, and the struggle for Jewish emancipation. Based on a wide variety of sources from archives in the Czech Republic, Austria, Israel and the United States, this dissertation traces the perpetual tension between the collective will of Moravian Jewry and the individual will of the autonomous Jewish communities---a tension that was temporarily relieved during the Revolution of 1848. The Revolution of 1848 provided a rare opportunity for the Jews of Moravia to coalesce around a common goal (Jewish emancipation) and a common leader (Chief Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch), but this unity proved to be rather fleeting. Although the Revolution ushered in a new age of freedom, it also precipitated demographic, financial and social transformations that threatened Moravian Jewry's unity as well as its future.Samson Raphael Hirsch, who served as Moravia's chief rabbi from 1847 until 1851, assumes a central place in this dissertation. While scholars have focused on Hirsch's subsequent tenure in Frankfurt-am-Main (1851--1888), which was marked by a militant and uncompromising defense of Orthodoxy, Hirsch's brief yet industrious sojourn in Moravia has, until now, received little attention. Hirsch came to Moravia with an almost messianic hope of unifying its Jews and guiding them into the age of emancipation with their traditional Jewish observance intact. However, after a frustrating four years in Moravia, he departed for Frankfurt, convinced that unity was no longer a possibility as far as religious and communal affairs were concerned.Thesis (Ph.D.)--Columbia University, 2004.School code: 0054
Conquest and restoration: United States policy on the restitution of personal assets from the Holocaust, a constructivist view.
No full textThe robbery of Europe's Jews preceded the genocide of the Holocaust and served as a warning of worse events to come. The Nazis, through the molding and construction of a religion meant to supercede the Jewish religion and the Jews as the new "chosen," achieved this robbery, as well as the disenfranchisement, and annihilation of the Jews, first of Germany, and then in the rest of Europe. Following the Nazis' defeat, the United States in concert with its war-time allies, began what would become a decade's long struggle for restitution for these crimes. Together, the robbery of Europe's Jews and the successes and failures of post-Holocaust restitution are explained through Constructivist theory which examines social construction through the interaction of linguistic speech rules.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Miami, 2004.School code: 0125
The poetics of place: Unraveling home and exile in Jewish literature from Israel and the United States.
No full textThis dissertation examines the multiple place narratives in modern Jewish literature from Israel and the United States, showing that the standard tropes of exile and home insufficiently express the Jewish perception of place.Recently, some scholars have overturned the conventional Zionist model of Jewish place that privileges Israel as the Jewish home and the Diaspora as the place of exile. They articulate an alternative model that posits the sacred text in exile as the Jewish homeland. Despite these resistant readings, however, the paradigm of Israel as home and the Diaspora as exile remains the dominant one. Furthermore, while the alternative model insists on redefining exile as home, it continues to utilize the vocabulary of nationalism. By exploring the diverse possibilities of home in Jewishness, I try to unravel the exile/home dichotomy rather than simply reverse it. This dissertation expands the scholarly resistance against the dominant nationalist narrative of place, by analyzing the variety of alternatives found in fiction.Scholarly dialogue on place among the geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, the philosopher Edward Casey, and the literary critic Roberto Dainotto, among others, grounds my study. I also explore themes that remain largely unacknowledged in the discourse on the Jewish notion of place but inextricably linked to it, such as gender and race, widening the relevance of the study beyond Jewish literature.The dissertation reveals the complexity of place in various contexts represented by Philip Roth, Allegra Goodman, Amos Oz, and Orly Castel-Bloom. Hovering between Israel and America, Jewish men question the relationship between "authentic" Jewishness and place. American women discover sites of Jewish spirituality that allow them to position themselves in textual homelands in subversively feminine configurations. In Israel, the opposition between the mythologized desert and the Zionist place parallels the tension between a primeval pre-Zionist state and the nationalist construction of boundaries that attempts to erase it. Imaginary literary worlds characterized by grotesque injustice reflect the flaws of the homeland that cannot function as a home for all its inhabitants, and which necessitates the invention of fantastic worlds at which to direct critical wrath.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of California, Los Angeles, 2004.School code: 0031
"Marianne and the Jew": Far-right intellectuals and antisemitism in 1930s France.
No full textThis dissertation explores the cultural and political project in which a number of young far-right intellectuals engaged in, in the 1930s, and their articulation of an anti-Jewish agenda which helped them produce a vision of the male French citizen restored to his rightful place within the nation. Antisemitism played a central role in these far-right intellectuals' imagination of the nation because it allowed them to put forward the terms of identity---the conditions of male subjectivity-that they believed needed redefining.The figure of the "Jew" was essential in their political and literary conception of the individual, the self, and the nation as it provided the fantasmatic figure against which they defined the boundaries of a French masculine heterosexual subject and citizen. These intellectuals, who were trained in a far-right nationalist tradition inherited from the nineteenth century, were trying to erase the anxieties created in the wake of World War One concerning the nature of the male individual, whose sense of self appeared to them to have been unseated by the cultural and political developments of the post-war period. They denounced what they believed to be the "dissolution" of the national community, and the "abjection" of the nation's citizens. In order to restore French civilization and culture---the foundations of the French nation---these intellectuals offered a solution that was both political and aesthetic, and could be expressed within the literary realm. Through the mastery of language, literature offered harmony, order, and a restored integrity. For them, the political and the aesthetic were mutually complementary and actually provided the site for restoration of a sense of self they perceived to be in crisis and tainted by the presence of the "Jew."This project addresses the ways historians read literature and politics when trying to account for figures who do not fit easily-defined categories because they are authors firmly celebrated by the literary canon yet engaged in reactionary and exclusionary politics. In reading politics and aesthetics together, it insists on a historical rather than moral analysis of a contested yet crucial moment of French history.Thesis (Ph.D.)--Rutgers The State University of New Jersey - New Brunswick, 2004.School code: 0190
Henna for brides and gazelles: Ritual, women's work and tourism in Morocco.
No full textHenna, a semi-permanent vegetable dye, is used in many contexts in Morocco, as in other Muslim societies. The hadith document the use of henna to relieve arthritic pain, and as a dye used by men to color the hair and beard, and by women to stain their hands and feet. This association of henna with Islam gave the plant the stamp of religious orthodoxy. However, the ritual use of henna, notably its use at marriage and burial, has much earlier roots, following a pattern of red ochre use in very early human society. Contemporary henna practices are strongly associated with ceremonies that mark calendrical and life cycle transitions. Applied to women preparing for marriage or childbirth, awaiting a male child's circumcision, and re-entering the community after a spouse's death, henna indicates (and conveys) the passage of individuals through dangerous states---a meaning that has been easily adapted to encompass the physical and social liminality that accompanies travel. In recent years, henna practices have been increasingly commoditized, particularly with the appearance of artisans who apply henna for domestic and international tourists in public markets. Conflicts between artisans and police, in particular, highlight both the socio-economic importance of this work and the salience of manipulating tradition in gaining/retaining control of cash earned in this high profit sector. Employing a cultural biography approach, this study breaks with impact-oriented evaluations of tourism to examine how meaning is embedded in newly commoditized rituals through (1) a survey of henna practices that identifies general characteristics as well as those specific to Muslim and Jewish Moroccan communities; (2) similarities and contrasts between contemporary local and tourist sector producers' technical and social knowledge relating to henna application; and (3) the social context of production. Data was drawn from participant observation among 15 local and 30 tourist sector henna artisans carried out over 18 months of fieldwork in Morocco in 1998, and 2000--2001. Contemporary practices are contrasted with descriptions drawn from the nineteenth and early twentieth century ethnographic records, with particular attention to French sources.Thesis (Ph.D.)--Universite de Montreal (Canada), 2004.School code: 0992
Schalom, genosse schriftsteller! German-Jewish literature in the German Democratic Republic.
No full textThis dissertation addresses the question of whether it is possible to speak of a German-Jewish literature in the GDR. It conceptualizes texts by writers of Jewish descent as German-Jewish literature in the GDR which allow themselves to be read as literary expressions of the difficulties to negotiate their post-Holocaust existence between self-determination and external attribution within the social, cultural, and political reality in East Germany. Drawing on a critical analysis of definitions of German-Jewish literature before and after the Holocaust, it investigates the presence and/or absence of Jewish themes and traditions as well as depictions of Jews and their relationship with 'other' Germans within a selected body of literature by German writers of Jewish descent in the German Democratic Republic. This study examines literary texts by Anna Seghers, Stefan Heym, and Barbara Honigmann as representative of three generational groups: Ruckkehrer, Dableiber, and Auswanderer.By analyzing how their narratives express their (non)existing Jewish identity this dissertation demonstrates how the authors' Jewish background and the cultural and political reality in the GDR informed their writing and their relationship to their Jewishness. This study explores ruptures and continuities to previous literary expressions of German-Jewish existence in Germany as well as changes within this literature. It suggests that despite a continuous presence of the Holocaust as a referential frame, significant transformations take place during the forty years of East Germany's existence in how these writers approached their Jewishness. Whereas Anna Seghers' and Stefan Heym's texts imply that they were able to develop a Jewish self-understanding that justified and complemented their commitment for a Socialist GDR, Barbara Honigmann's testify to her perceived inability to explore the meaning of her Jewish origin in this country. This study ascertains that although it can in many respects be considered a continuation of previous literary traditions, the experience of the Holocaust and the Socialist experiment in the GDR re-defined not only the relationship of Germans and Jews but also the literature of German-Jewish writers in Germany.Thesis (Ph.D.)--Georgetown University, 2004.School code: 0076
AHC interview with Eva Gertrud Weisman
No full textEva Gertrud Weissman (nee Broessler) was born on September 27, 1923, in Vienna where she lived at Gersthoferstrasse 28 in the 18th district of Vienna. After the Nazis’ rise to power she fled to the Netherlands on a children’s transport where she delivered clandestine newspapers for the Dutch underground and was arrested in 1942. She finally came to the United States of America in January 1947. She now lives at Lakewood, Ohio