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Recollections and thoughts.
No full textdigitizedPeter Strauss was born June 16, 1926 in Nuremberg, GermanyPeter Straus
AHC interview with Fred Sterzer.
No full textSeptember 18, 2008Fred Sterzer was born as Friedrich Albert Sterzer in Vienna in 1929. He lived in Vienna’s 12th district (Karl Meisselstrasse). In 1942 the whole family was deported to Theresienstadt and then to Auschwitz. At first, Fred Sterzer and his older brother, Ernest stayed together, but they got separated when Ernest’s diabetes became immanent. Fred Sterzer was sent to Gross-Rosen (now Rogoźnica, Poland), where he was liberated in May 1945; Ernest Sterzer survived Auschwitz. They were reunited in Vienna after liberation. In 1947 they immigrated to the United States where they were reunited with their sister, who had reached the US in 1939. Fred Sterzer became a renowned physicist, settling in Princeton, New Jersey.Austrian Heritage Collectio
"I Hear America Kvelling": Staging a Jewish American future in the twentieth century.
No full textI Hear America Kvelling engages three twentieth century performances that deploy Jewish-ness to embrace, encourage and interrogate Democratic Ideals put forward by American Romanticism: self-reliance, speaking a universal truth from the depths of a particular self and realizing emancipation as not only a legal status but a cultural, social, emotional, intellectual and spiritual fulfillment.The Zionist pageant The Romance of a People was produced at the 1933 Chicago World's Fair, just six months into Hitler's chancellorship and only a few years after the issuance of a British White Paper that restricted Jewish settlement in Palestine. To overcome these obstacles and secure ties to Christians in the United States, The Romance placed the Jewish Nation in the center of a popular narrative about the West's civilizing taming of the East. I argue that the pageant effectively conflated an American narrative with a Zionist narrative and in so doing signified Zionist ideology as Jewish ideology.Angels in America has gotten a lot of scholarly attention, including attention to its efficacy in dispelling (or reinforcing) anti-semitism. In this study, I try to shift critical focus away from the politics of defamation. I look instead for Angels' dramaturgical deployment of Jewish-ness (history, practice, ritual, philosophy) as a critical tool. I argue that a Jewish sensibility is a key component of its liberated multicultural dream of a radical democracy yet to come.The mass public funeral procession for the Yiddish author Sholem Aleichem was an effort to stage first-generation Jews' readiness for American citizenship---a status that I argue depended not only upon civic orderliness, but also on bodily comportment and the performance of collective affect that conformed to Anglo-Protestant standards of legibility. Jewish mourning was demonstrated during the long procession as aesthetically beautiful and morally uplifting, thereby reminding us of the ties that bind representational (theatrical) practices and representational politics.The study proposes that Jewish difference has re-shaped both Jewish and North American self-understanding and that performance events have been efficacious catalysts for the negotiations, rehearsals and proposals that open imaginations, make ideological space for, and bodily engage the dynamics of sociopolitical change.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Minnesota, 2008.School code: 0130
Jewish citizens of socialist Yugoslavia: Politics of Jewish identity in a socialist state, 1944--1974.
No full textThis study investigates the process of Jewish communal rebuilding in Yugoslavia after the Holocaust. Focusing on the activities of the central Jewish organization in the period, the Federation of Jewish Communities, it explores linkages between Jewish identity, politics, social memory, and ideology in the context of a multiethnic socialist state. It tells the story of the Jewish rebuilding efforts in the post-Holocaust era in Yugoslavia in order to show how commemorative practices and processes of identification emerge, position themselves in, and are shaped by a matrix of conflicting state and non-state political projects.Taking advantage of the political climate in postwar Yugoslavia, the leadership of the central Jewish organization situated its rebuilding efforts within a wider narrative of Yugoslav reconstruction spearheaded by the Communist government. From rebuilding communal infrastructure to dedicating monuments to Jewish victims of the Holocaust, the leaders of the Federation of Jewish Communities pushed through a rebuilding agenda that was a part of a wider Yugoslav narrative, and that defined Jewishness as an identity firmly rooted in the new Yugoslav political project. By focusing on several micro-level debates about the boundaries of Jewishness in Yugoslavia, the dissertation shows how patterns of Jewish identification formed within the discursive framework provided by the new Yugoslav socialist ideology.This dissertation aims to contribute to the integration of seemingly separate "Jewish" and "non-Jewish" histories, provide insights into the processes of creation of space for Jewish identification in socialism and the forging of diverse Jewish identities after the Holocaust, as well as into the politics of memory and the competing narratives of victimhood in postwar Europe and their consequences for different politics of nationhood.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Michigan, 2008.School code: 0127
Choreographing identity: Modern dance and American Jewish life, 1924--1954.
No full textWhen Congress passed the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act, it brought a dramatic halt to the era of mass migration that had begun over forty years before. For the American-born children of Jewish immigrants who came of age in the turbulent decades that followed, this shift in policy hastened their efforts to integrate into American society at the same time that it pointed to the serious challenges that they confronted. But social prejudices represented just one impediment to inclusion. Jews' efforts to figure out and explain to other Americans what it meant to be a Jew in the United States coincided with America's most serious economic crisis and the rise of Nazism in Europe, cataclysmic events that compounded the difficulty, and the necessity, of their efforts.Examining a remarkable group of American Jewish modern dancers living and working in New York City between 1924 and 1954, the tercentenary celebration of Jewish settlement in North America, this dissertation provides a vivid illustration of how immigrants' children established themselves as Americans. To the mostly female dancers featured here, modern dance offered the rare opportunity to communicate with authority about politics, identity, and sexuality unconstrained by existing gender conventions. Charting their participation in this revolutionary new performance medium provides a lens into this crucial generation efforts to bridge Jewish heritage and American aspirations.Determined to achieve inclusion, American Jewish modern dancers felt a powerful attraction to the cosmopolitan universalism that lay at the heart of both modern dance and interwar radicalism. The Popular Front emerged as a hotbed for cultural activism, and many Jewish dancers viewed its populism as an essential tool for transforming ethnic difference from a marginalizing force into a principal feature of American democracy. Although many dancers confronted fascism as a threat to democracy, few addressed it as a Jewish emergency, hesitant to undermine the strength of their appeal for integration. The consequence of a complex negotiation for acceptance, such compromising recurred throughout the interwar years. The decimation of European Jewry, however, propelled the Jewish dancers featured here to reevaluate what integration meant and begin publicly exploring the meaning of their Jewishness.Thesis (Ph.D.)--New York University, 2008.School code: 0146
AHC interview with Frances Marie Horowitz.
No full textNovember 3, 2008Frances Horowitz was born as Franziska Marie Adolfine Glaser on May 4, 1925 in Vienna. Her father passed away in 1935, so she lived with her mother from that time on. In April of 1938, they left Austria for Nice, France, where her mother sold some valuables and Frances went to an industrial school. In 1940, Frances Horowitz and her mother were interned for three weeks in Camp de Gurs in southwestern France. They left France for Portugal, where she and her mother boarded a ship to New York.Austrian Heritage Collectio
AHC interview with Doris Orgel.
No full textSeptember 18, 2008Doris Orgel was born on February 15, 1929 in Vienna, Austria. The family escaped Nazi rule in Austria, fleeing to Yugoslavia, to England, and finally to New York. She attended Radcliff College from 1946 to 1948 and graduated cum laude in 1950 from Barnard College. Prior to 1955, Ms. Orgel worked in magazine and book publishing. Since that time she has written and translated several fairy and folk tales, as well as served as a translator for other authors. Her first original book, Sarah's Room (1963) was published under the pseudonym Doris Adelberg. It was also republished in England and – in German - in Switzerland. In 1960, Ms. Orgel received the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award for her translation of Willhelm Hauff's Dwarf Long-Nose (1960). She also worked as a children's book reviewer for The New York Times.Austrian Heritage Collectio
AHC interview with Emil Ornstein.
No full textMay 25, 2008Emil Ornstein was born 1915 in Vienna, Austria, where he grew up in the IX. District (Liechtensteinstrasse). He played water polo for the Viennese Jewish sports club Hakoah. In 1933 Ornstein graduated from high school and served in the Austrian Army. Emil Ornstein left Austria in July of 1938. He went to Portugal, where he became the coach of a water polo team which played and won against (Nazi) Germany. In 1941 Emil Ornstein immigrated to the United States, where he settled in New Jersey.Austrian Heritage Collectio
AHC interview with Kurt Landsberger
No full textAugust 7, 2008Kurt Landsberger was born in Prague in 1920. He moved to Vienna and was educated there. He immigrated via Prague and London to the USA, where he served in the Army during World War II. He and his wife used their life-savings to start a successful business manufacturing laboratory supplies and equipments for the elderly. They founded the Landsberger Holocaust Collections at the Verona and Pequannock Public Libraries in New Jersey. Kurt Landsberger is also the author of several books.Austrian Heritage Collectio
Thieben family : Rousinov Bohemia and beyond.
No full textStory of the Thieben family from Bohemiadigitize