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Role reversal and passing in postwar German and Austrian Jewish literature.
No full textThis dissertation examines role reversal and passing in postwar Austrian and German Jewish literature. Role reversal is a strategy in which individuals or characters in a literary text transform their identities by assuming attributes commonly associated with their opposites. This transformation could involve a perpetrator posing as a victim or the victim turning into a perpetrator. Passing refers to the way in which individuals or characters hide their identity in order to cross ethnic or social boundaries. For example, an individual or a character might feel compelled to conceal his or her Jewishness or non-Jewishness.This study examines a wide range of narratives by Austrian and German Jewish writers. The first chapter analyses role reversal and passing in the texts of Edgar Hilsenrath and Jurek Becker, two first generation German Jewish authors whose writing establishes certain patterns that second generation writers have adopted in their prose. The subsequent three chapters explore how second generation writers Maxim Biller, Irene Dische, Esther Dischereit, Anna Mitgutsch, Doron Rabinovici, and Robert Schindel adapt these patterns for their own purposes. I argue that role reversal and passing serve to counter anti-Semitic stereotypes, to highlight the identity problems of second generation Jews in Austria and in Germany, and to criticize the way in which non-Jewish Germans and Austrians have dealt with the Holocaust. I also argue that gender and nationality influence the way in which these authors use role reversal and passing.In the final chapter, I compare and contrast two real life cases of role reversal as documented in the memoir of Binjamin Wilkomirski, a non-Jewish Swiss posing as a Holocaust victim, and the wartime chronicle of Solomon Perel, a German Jew who disguised himself as a Hitler Youth to survive the war.Thesis (Ph.D.)--Queen's University (Canada), 2002.School code: 0283
Hibat-Zion and Yiddish: The multidimensional encounter between movement, language, and culture.
No full textHibat-Zion, the first Jewish national movement of its kind, emerged in Czarist Russia during the early 1880s. Over a fourteen-year period (1881--1895), the movement made a profound contribution to the birth of a modern Jewish national ideology. Hibat-Zion created and inspired the evolution of a new culture, which in subsequent decades, was to shape the development of the Jewish people. The historiography of the Zionist movement acknowledges that Hibat-Zion established the ideological foundation and facilitated the means for the return of the Jewish people from the Diaspora to its historical homeland in Palestine and cultivated the renaissance of the Hebrew culture.However, in a manner little known to either the research community or the lay public, the Hibat-Zion movement and its ideology created and promoted a wide range of cultural activities in Yiddish. This use of Yiddish not only enriched the language per se, but enabled the vast Jewish population then living in the Russian Empire to be reached in its mother tongue. This wealth of creative writing has been largely neglected by Jewish historians.This dissertation approached the Hibat-Zion movement from a new perspective and examined the following themes: The role played by Yiddish in spreading the Hibat-Zion ideas among the Jewish population; how various cultural mediators, who were supporters of the movement, tried to acquaint this population (the majority of which were Orthodox and Yiddish-speaking) with Hibat-Zion ideology; the role played by preachers and badhanim in the movement's culture and organization; the content of several Yiddish publications initiated by the movement, as well as that of several Yiddish trivial literary works related to this ideology. The study has also explored how the Hibat-Zion ideology influenced Yiddish theater, prose and poetry.The intention was to focus on the multi-faceted encounter between ideology, language, and culture, in order to add a new dimension to the stereotypical, simplistic image of the Hibat-Zion period in Jewish history rather than provide a detailed analysis of Yiddish works and their literary quality. Moreover, the intention was to show that cultural creativity in Yiddish inspired by Hibat-Zion movement, originated in a broad spectrum of social settings. This encounter helped build the modern Jewish national movement, in addition to enhancing the development of Yiddish as a modern language.Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 2002.School code: 0315
Soviet Jews' Witness Accounts: Interview with Michael Yofin, Part II
No full textDigital recordingDigital finding aid
Role reversal and passing in postwar German and Austrian Jewish literature.
No full textThis dissertation examines role reversal and passing in postwar Austrian and German Jewish literature. Role reversal is a strategy in which individuals or characters in a literary text transform their identities by assuming attributes commonly associated with their opposites. This transformation could involve a perpetrator posing as a victim or the victim turning into a perpetrator. Passing refers to the way in which individuals or characters hide their identity in order to cross ethnic or social boundaries. For example, an individual or a character might feel compelled to conceal his or her Jewishness or non-Jewishness.This study examines a wide range of narratives by Austrian and German Jewish writers. The first chapter analyses role reversal and passing in the texts of Edgar Hilsenrath and Jurek Becker, two first generation German Jewish authors whose writing establishes certain patterns that second generation writers have adopted in their prose. The subsequent three chapters explore how second generation writers Maxim Biller, Irene Dische, Esther Dischereit, Anna Mitgutsch, Doron Rabinovici, and Robert Schindel adapt these patterns for their own purposes. I argue that role reversal and passing serve to counter anti-Semitic stereotypes, to highlight the identity problems of second generation Jews in Austria and in Germany, and to criticize the way in which non-Jewish Germans and Austrians have dealt with the Holocaust. I also argue that gender and nationality influence the way in which these authors use role reversal and passing.In the final chapter, I compare and contrast two real life cases of role reversal as documented in the memoir of Binjamin Wilkomirski, a non-Jewish Swiss posing as a Holocaust victim, and the wartime chronicle of Solomon Perel, a German Jew who disguised himself as a Hitler Youth to survive the war.Thesis (Ph.D.)--Queen's University (Canada), 2002.School code: 0283
The price of flight: German Jews, the Nazi regime and the finance of the Ha'avarah Agreement, 1933--1939.
No full textThis work traces the origins, development and operation of the Ha'avarah Agreement (Transfer Agreement) signed between German and Palestinian Jews and the Nazi Administration in 1933 to facilitate the orderly and legal transfer of sequestered German-Jewish wealth to Palestine. Not only does it place the agreement into the broader context of social and political developments in Jewish Palestine before World War II, but also it seeks to explain the economic and political importance of the agreement to the Nazi regime. This is most notable in the years between 1933 and 1936, when Nazi power remained weakest and when Reich authorities pursued every opportunity for financial advantages leading to rapid economic recovery. The deal established the basis for renewed and augmented trade between the Third Reich and Palestine. It also provided a vehicle for Reich authorities to expand trade, with Jewish participation, throughout the Near and Middle East. In this way, this manuscript places the Ha'avarah Agreement within the context of broader Reich trade initiatives, especially those leading to bilateral clearing treaties, which the Reich engineered with twenty-five nations before 1939. The Ha'avarah Agreement, therefore, is understood as a small, but important component in the complex mosaic of reoriented trade strategy, which took place under the direction of Reich Economics Minister Hjalmar Schacht before 1936--37.Thesis (Ph.D.)--The George Washington University, 2002.School code: 0075
AHC Interview with Gertrude Goetz.
No full textGertrude Goetz (née Kopfstein) was born in Vienna in 1931. After the Nazis' rise to power, she emigrated to Italy, where she was interned during the war. Then she immigrated to the USA.Austrian Heritage Collectio
My life /
No full textThe typescript with the memoirs of the pediatrician Alice Schiff follows her notes that she assembled throughout her retirement.Dr. Alice Schiff was born 1894 in Rees, Germany, the second daughter of Jacob Goldstein and Fanny née Muller. She grew up in Düsseldorf; 1914 she graduated from high school at the Luisen school, where Rabbi Leo Baeck was one of her teachers. She studied medicine in Munich, Weimar and Jena, and in 1922 she married the physician Hans Schiff. The couple lived in Cologne, and they had 2 children, Eva and Gunther. The family left Germany for the United States in early 1936, settling in California. Alice and Hans Schiff shared a medical office in Los Angeles, where they became physicians to many Hollywood-greats and their children, including Joseph von Sternberg, Marlene Dietrich and many others. Hans Schiff died in 1962; Alice Schiff died on September 25, 1989
The Holocaust, collective memory and Jewish cultural heritage in America.
No full textIncludes interviews with LBI archivist
Inventing Bourgeois Judaism : Jewish culture, gender, and religion in Germany, 1800-1870 /
No full textPh.D. thesis, Columbia University, 2002In nineteenth-century Germany the gender order of Jewish society and Judaism as a religious culture underwent a dramatic transformation from pre-modern, rabbinic, and halakhic Judaism to a culture of bourgeois religiosity in which religious sentiment and bourgeois aesthetics figured prominently, and in which the hierarchical division between men and women subsided
The botched kiss: Abraham Goldfaden and the literary origins of the Yiddish theatre.
No full textAlthough an impressive body of scholarship has illuminated aspects of the early Yiddish theatre (1876--1883) and its founder Avraham Goldfaden (1840--1909), there have been few sustained inquiries into the literary quality of his work. Scholars have been quick to dismiss Goldfaden's plays and musical operettas as belonging to the "lowbrow" class of early modern Yiddish culture-itself a category that scholars have, until now, defined only vaguely and inconsistently. Moreover, contradictions still suffuse the great deal we have learned about the events leading up to Goldfaden's establishment of the Yiddish theatre. Did his founding of the theatre originate in Jewish traditional performance? Or was Goldfaden's destiny as the father of the Yiddish theatre sealed when he was first attracted to writing modern Yiddish drama almost a decade earlier? How did these elements come to coalesce in his artistic efforts?This thesis argues that Goldfaden's work is, in fact, of high literary merit that is revealed in close-readings of his major plays. Close readings of works by earlier Yiddish playwrights such as Israel Aksenfeld and Shlomo Ettinger are included in attempt to establish Goldfaden's literary pedigree. Three chapters that explore aspects of Goldfaden's early literary context precede the series of close textual analyses. What intended audience accounts for the sophistication of Goldfaden's work? How were his works made accessible to a common audience? Although scholars have assumed that Yiddish literature during this early era was pitched to a mass audience, these chapters reveal that a variegated Yiddish audience existed and, in fact, had an important impact on the Yiddish literature of the 1860s, 1870s, and 1880s."The Botched Kiss" of the title encapsulates the aesthetic-ideological dilemma that shaped Goldfaden's imaginative world and is elaborated throughout the close readings of his dramas. It equally describes the limited, if not doomed, cultural relationship that grew up between well-intentioned Yiddish-writing Enlightenment proponents and their intended audience of "the Yiddish masses."Thesis (Ph.D.)--Harvard University, 2002.School code: 0084