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Stories [ca. 1866-2001]
No full textFamily history written for Renata Manasse Schwebel's grandchildrendigitizedRenata Schwebel, née Manasse was born 1930 in Germany, the daughter of Georg Manasse (1893-1980) and his wife Anne-Marie, née Simon (1908-1974). Her father was director general of the Schocken department store ( Kaufhaus Schocken ) in Berlin. In 1935 the family escaped to Sweden and immigrated to the United States in 1940. In 1955 she got married to Jack P. Schwebel
The medieval Sephardic frontier: The Jewish experience in reconquest Iberia.
No full textFor the Christian kingdoms of the Iberian peninsula, the rapid territorial expansion which took place between the battle of Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212 and the fall of Seville in 1248 created a broad frontier with Muslim al-Andalus which would stand for two and a half centuries. This study is the first synthetic attempt to examine the impact which the reconquista and subsequent colonization of the thirteenth century had on Jewish settlement and communal development in the territories of Mallorca, Valencia, Murcia, Andalusia and southern Portugal.The dissertation begins with an analysis of the reestablishment of a Jewish presence in southern Iberia as the region passed from Muslim to Christian rule. The first three chapters focus on the individual Jew, tracing the process of Jewish immigration and settlement, as well as examining Jewish landownership, and the nature and diversity of economic opportunities which drew Jews to the frontier. Over the course of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, the early settlements founded by these immigrants matured into more organized and elaborate communities, and the second half of this study explores the social and political dynamics of Jewish society on the frontier. Chapters four, five and six discuss the effects which royal, ecclesiastical, and municipal authorities had on the development of their legal status, the organization and autonomy of their communities, and their relationships with their non-Jewish neighbors.Part II also examines the crown's efforts to exert greater control over the boundaries of the Jewish community during the latter half of the thirteenth century, and the degree to which this royal program met with resistance from individual Jews and Christians alike. The resulting portrait of Jewish communities in the wake of the reconquista is one which elucidates the complex texture of Jewish social, political, and economic life on the frontier of Christendom during the high Middle Ages.Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 2003.School code: 0315
Mendelssohn to Mendelsohn: Visual case studies of Jewish life in Berlin.
No full textThis dissertation presents visual case studies of Jews in Berlin from their readmission in 1671 to the final years of the Weimar Republic. The principal images of the five chapters are, respectively, the Baroque Heidereutergasse synagogue (1712--14), examined in relation to the feudal conditions imposed on Jews; Daniel Moritz Oppenheim's 1856 painting of the 1769 meeting represented in Lavater and Lessing Visit Moses Mendelssohn; the Oriental facade of the Oranienburgerstrasse synagogue (1861--66) and its relation to the modernity of the building and its sponsoring community: Alfred Messel's Wertheim department store (1897--1904) and its historicist architecture; and Erich Mendelsohn's Herpich store and Mossehaus renovations and the WOGA housing and retail complex (1925--1931), their modernist vocabulary and relation to German architectural precedents. I propose extended readings of these paintings, photographs, prints and representations of architecture, engaging both other images and textual sources. The plurality of interpretative possibilities problematizes the dominant narrative characterizing most historical and art historical accounts of the period, one in which the Jewish subject is incrementally emancipated in the nineteenth century and despite desiring to participate fully in German society, is rejected and destroyed. The critical strategies that I engage highlight both the continuities in German-Jewish history and the necessarily fragmented and contingent nature of changing historical circumstances.I engage discourses that allow an adequate translation of this visual material to the textual. To accomplish this, I foreground space, including representations of the urban space that constitutes Berlin. I relate this to historical material that I interpret through historiographical categories of scene, agent (protagonist), act, agency, and purpose that are figured prior to representation of the historic field. These categories are employed to identify the narratival structure driving the literature where Jewish authors read history back from, most dramatically, the Final Solution and from the vantage point of the liberal democratic subject. I incorporate German nation building into this narrative, guided by the model of visual analysis where the language of the visual is already that of the majority culture.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Rochester, 2003.School code: 0188
Finding their voice: Jewish women artists in the 19th and 20th centuries.
No full textWhile Jewish women artists became active in the visual arts beginning in the mid-19th century, to date they have not been addressed as a group. This project presents a theoretical and historical overview of the work of six Jewish women artists---Rebecca Solomon, Charlotte Salomon, Helen Frankenthaler, Sonia Delaunay, Louise Nevelson, and Eva Hesse---examining their art in the context of their cultural heritage, Euro-American nationalities, social environments, life experiences, and contemporary art movements. Providing both representational and nonrepresentational artists---an important factor in Jewish aesthetics---this group includes both well-recognized artists and those whose work has only recently become known. For Delaunay, Frankenthaler, Nevelson, and Hesse, this analysis provides an understanding of their artwork in light of their Jewish heritage, as opposed to the Western cultural context in which they are most often viewed.To properly examine the lives and artwork of these artists requires a multi-faceted theoretical framework. Given the history of Jewish exile, which dispersed artists among Euro-American societies, cross-cultural perspectives and analyses provide a context in which to situate their artwork. Contemporary aesthetic theories and women's art scholarship reframe the visual arts, particularly in reference to Jewish women artists. Finally, new textual methods of interpretation contribute to a broader understanding than traditional art historical practice.Since Euro-American art scholars most usually confine themselves within Western culture and aesthetics, the introduction of Jewish aesthetic history and theory provides a more appropriate structure within which to examine the work of Jewish women artists.While this sample group is small, it represents a broad historical and geographical range and examines the various ways of creating visual art within that range. This study weaves together traditional art historical models with newer theories from textual art scholarship, as well as cross-cultural and Jewish cultural studies. This use of a multi-faceted theoretical framework seeks to provide a more complete understanding of the lives and artwork of Jewish women artists, and their place within art history.Thesis (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2003.School code: 0119
Diasporic sephardic identities: A transnational poetics of Jewish languages.
No full textIn this dissertation I depart from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's formula for "minor literatures" as presented in Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Using Chana Kronfeld's rebuttal of Deleuze and Guattari, I offer two counter-arguments to their position: first, I argue that minor literatures can emerge from multilingual contexts and social conditions, and second, that minor languages have the capacity to challenge and re-inscribe dominant languages. As counter-examples to their theory I present three multilingual and multicultural Jewish poets who write from an oppositional or marginal position and use minor and threatened languages---Algerian Sadia Levy, Israeli Margalit Matitiahu and Argentine Juan Gelman. I also argue that it is through strategic choices of competing languages and intertexts that each poet expresses a Sephardic hybrid identity. In the process, I point out how their work challenges established notions of ethnic, literary and linguistic identity.Sadia Levy is a late Symbolist Algerian poet who writes in a French enriched by infusions of Hebrew and sometimes Judeo-Spanish, activating biblical and Kabbalistic allusions in his poems, and combining two main universes of discourse---French Symbolist and Jewish. Israeli contemporary poet Margalit Matitiahu writes bilingual Hebrew-Ladino books, which reveal her active bilingualism in a society that worked so hard to erase "minor" languages while "reviving" Hebrew as it built a national state. Argentine Ashkenazi poet Juan Gelman destabilizes notions of fixed identity and breaks down dichotomic divisions of ethnic origins as he gradually rewrites himself as a Sephardic Jew at the very moment when he most identifies as a Jew.I brought into my reading several theories, among them formalist readings, Benjamin Harshav's concept of "frames of reference," Joshua Fishman's ethnolinguistics and his work on threatened languages, theories of translation and intertextuality and also of nationalism and diaspora. In a cross-cultural perspective, I combine stylistic analysis and cultural theory, because I believe that a stylistic analysis that is sociologically and historically informed is the best approach to a body of text that is not only multilingual, but that also thematizes the problem of language choice.This dissertation is also proposed as a step toward correcting an oversight of the Sephardic component in the Jewish cultural production. Centering on these three poets, it addresses the issue of competing narratives within Jewish cultural history, and focusing on intra-Jewish difference, it stresses the internal multiculturalism of the Jews.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of California, Berkeley, 2003.School code: 0028
AHC Interview with Anne L. Powis.
No full textSeptember 30, 2003Anne L. Powis, nee Winters (prewar: Winternitz), was born in Vienna on April 28, 1918. She lived at Gersthoferstrasse in the eighth Viennese district. In Vienna, she went to high school, later to a hotel school, and worked in Palace Hotel in Vienna as bookkeeper, cashier, and at the front desk. She fled from Vienna via Germany (Hamburg) to England (London), later to the USA where she arrived in January 1940. She got support from the relief organization IMAS. She worked as a book keeper.Austrian Heritage Collectio
AHC interview with Anita Weisbord.
No full textAnita Weisbord (née Nagel) was born in Vienna in 1923 where she lived at Grosse Mohrengasse 38 in the second Viennese district. She left Vienna on a Kindertransport on 03/13/1939 to England. In December of 1947, she immigrated to the USA where she worked as a dressmaker. She served as vice-president of the Kintertransport Association in New York.Austrian Heritage Collectio
AHC interview with Erich E. Schiller.
No full textErich Schiller was born in Vienna in 1923. He went to school at the "Sperlgymnasium" in the second Viennese district, and was a member of the Hashomer Hadati youth group. He immigrated to the US in spring of 1938.Austrian Heritage Collectio
Attitudes and experiences of Persian American Jews in Jewish education.
No full textThe purpose of this study was to ascertain whether there were differences in attitudes and behaviors related to education, background, practices, and values of two ethnic groups of Persian American Jewry, in New York. One hundred forty-two Meshedi and Teherani Persian Jews made up the sample population.Responses to a questionnaire were analyzed using SPSS. In-depth interviews of families, and faculty members at a Yeshiva day school helped explicate the findings and provide additional insight into Meshedi and Teherani beliefs and practices. Further insights were collected by discussions with Persian communal leaders in the geographic area of the study as well as a psychologist who practices in the Persian community.Six research questions were assessed using descriptive statistics comparing the attitudes of Meshedis and Teheranis on Jewish communal life, religious observances, intermarriage, Maimonidean principles of faith, the importance of textual study, and formal Jewish education. Additional analysis of selected areas of Persian Jewish education was undertaken to compare Meshedis and Teheranis with respect to their attitudes concerning the Jewish faith. The additional analysis was carried out using t-tests, with a level of significance of .05.Results suggested that for the preponderance of Jewish education attitudes and practices, Meshedis and Teheranis reported similar beliefs. Teheranis tended to be more secular in their views, while Meshedis reported themselves to be more traditional and closer to Orthodox practices and their attitudes suggested by employment patterns within their families and community, religious observances, socialization patterns related to friendships, meeting people and opinions toward marriage, converts and intermarriage.In contrast, Meshedis were more likely to consult with a rabbi than Teheranis. Teheranis, unlike Meshedis, did not separate meat and dairy dishes. Additional analysis revealed that Meshedi males had significantly higher mean Maimonidean principle scores than either female Meshedis and or male Teheranis.Meshedis were more likely to live in a Jewish locale, near a synagogue, attend synagogues, consult with and seek guidance from their rabbis, and to provide formal Jewish education for their children.Conclusions, implications, and suggestions for research were identified and discussed providing valuable insight into many facets of Persian American Jewish culture.Thesis (Ed.D.)--Yeshiva University, 2003.School code: 0266
Natan Altman and the problem of Jewish art in Russia in the 1910s.
No full textThis dissertation examines Natan Altaian's (1889--1970) Jewish works of the 1910s in the context of emerging ideas about Jewish art in contemporary Russia. It counters two critical assessments of Altaian's significance in modern art: that his role was less than pioneering, which Abram Efros suggested in his 1922 monograph on Altman, where he called the artist a "chameleon"; and that Altman's allegiance to the Jewish nationalist movement in the early 1910s was unequivocal, which has been implied by Avram Kampf and Susan Tumarkin Goodman in their surveys of modern Jewish art.The present study promblematizes these views firstly by foregrounding the innovative aspects of Altaian's Jewish works. It shows that his 1913 Jewish Prints provided a blueprint for a folk-oriented modern Jewish style; and that his 1915 sculptural "Self-Portrait" as a Hassid, the first of its kind, challenged both anti-Semitic and Jewish nationalist tendencies to typologize images of Jews. Secondly, this study demonstrates that Altman was aware of ideas about Jewish visuality that permeated Russian culture. It thereby suggests that he used the Jewish nationalist platform to advance himself in broader artistic arenas.Chapter 1 demonstrates a pattern in Altman's biography of a preoccupation with vogue and a desire to be in the center of cultural circles, suggesting that similar concerns of self-promotion motivated his interest in Jewish art. Chapter 2 discusses constructs of Jewish visuality that were operative within art critical writing and institutional practices in Russia in the 1910s. Chapter 3 traces Altman's use of these constructs in his Jewish works. Chapter 4 shows that Altman's 1915 "Self Portrait" critiqued uniformity in artistic representations of Jews. Chapter 5 examines two institution-level projects that helped define Altman's relationship to Jewish art: An-skii's Ethnographic Expedition (1912--1914) and the Jewish Society for the Encouragement of the Arts (1915--1919). Chapter 6 outlines his early competition with Marc Chagall for recognition as a Jewish artist.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Southern California, 2003.School code: 0208