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Through closed gates: Jews and illegal immigration to the United States, 1921--1933.
No full textThis dissertation is a history of the illegal immigration of Eastern European Jews to the United States that burgeoned after the passage of highly restrictive, nation-based immigration quotas in 1921 and 1924. I argue that the history of this illicit flow of people forces us to re-examine a central narrative of twentieth-century U.S. history, namely that 1924 saw the "closing of the gates" to European immigrants, and thus the end of an era in which European immigration was a matter of national urgency. I contend that the quota legislation escalated rather than settled struggles over questions of national inclusion and exclusion, and created new gray areas between alienness and belonging. The history of illegal immigration illuminates how the laws actually functioned on the ground, something we have as yet learned little about. The laws did reorder the rules governing the nation's literal and metaphorical borders, but this reordering happened unevenly, confusedly, and with much contention. Strategies Jewish migrants employed to enter the United States despite the quotas---forgeries, disguise, and surreptitious entry---challenged the laws' premise that it was possible to secure national borders against "undesirables," or to sort desirable immigrants from undesirable ones, and aliens from citizens. Jewish migrants, as a heterogeneous group coming from many countries and speaking many languages, particularly confounded the categories of ethnicity and nationality upon which the quota laws were based.Chapter One examines the genesis of the quota laws, focusing on the U.S. government's interest in counting and classifying, as well as the challenges Jews posed to such a project. Chapter Two considers U.S. Jewish leaders' responses to the illegal immigration of Jews over the Mexico-Texas border and to the plight of Jews stranded abroad with U.S. visas rendered defunct by the 1924 law. Chapter Three investigates Jewish alien smuggling and the criminalization of migration during the era. Chapter Four examines individual migrants' experiences of illegal immigration, especially their uses of disguises and forged documents. Chapter Five explores controversies over proposals for "alien registration," arguing that Jews escaped the specter of "illegal alienness" in part through their own political efforts.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Michigan, 2004.School code: 0127
Experiments in aftermath: Representations of the post-Holocaust world in contemporary American fiction and photography.
No full textThis dissertation surveys contemporary imaginative works in fiction and photography that examine the Holocaust by gauging its impact in the present. These disruptive works reveal and resist the limits of dominant forms of Holocaust representation by adopting innovative representational strategies that refigure conventions of the genres. Formal interventions appear as correctives, attempting to reengage an audience in a discourse increasingly defined by an enforced normativity. These responses by Jewish authors and photographers, predominantly American, tend to maintain many testimonial, documentary, and memorializing aims of dominant practices of Holocaust representation, even as they question the utility of conventional representational habits. Discursive continuity relies on innovative revitalization to complement established historical forms. The experimental element, more apparent in some works than in others, expresses a commitment to the renewal of original thought that is threatened by the ubiquity and homogeneity of cliche.The dissertation begins with a review of theoretical arguments found in public discourse and the academy that challenge or champion the value of imaginative representational strategies. These innovations next appear in the dissertation as the narrative and typographic experiments of Raymond Federman's Double Or Nothing, who refigures survival in a post-Holocaust scene of writing. Ronald Sukenick's Mosaic Man recounts the evolution of his awareness of the Holocaust in autobiographical documentary fiction that reevaluates contemporary Jewish identity while reclaiming Jewish textual forms. I examine post-Holocaust photography by situating it in the context of the value of historical Holocaust photographs found in their present viewing habits. The photographers who respond to the limits of dominant photographic representation employ strategies to expand the range of the Holocaust photograph's generic composition and function, as seen in the work of Shimon Attie, Alan Schechner, David Levinthal, Jeffrey Wolin, and Alan Cohen. Walter Abish presents the photographic power of the image in post-war Germany. Also considered are Imre Kertesz's Fateless, Philip Roth's The Ghost Writer, and the Jewish Museum's recent "Mirroring Evil" exhibition. These imaginative works attend to appearances of the Holocaust in the post-Holocaust world, insisting that the Holocaust is a set of historical events with continuing consequences, whose consequences also necessarily demand examination.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of California, Irvine, 2004.School code: 0030
The place of the fifteenth-century Judeo-Persian religious epic 'Emrani's "Fath&dotbelow;nameh" in Iranian literary traditions.
No full textThe Judeo-Persian Religious Epic Fath&dotbelow;nameh,
written in the fifteenth century by `Emrani, reflects the intellectual life of
Iranian Jewry. Despite their long presence in Iran, the Iranian Jews have never been
recognized for their contribution to Iranian culture. Due to the use of Hebrew
characters in writing the Persian language, Judeo-Persian has been left out of the
mainstream of the Iranian literary tradition, depriving a large potential audience
access to the intellectual heritage of Iranian Jews.In writing Fath&dotbelow;nameh, `Emrani drew upon both
biblical and Iranian cultural sources. By focusing on a literary evaluation of
Fath&dotbelow;nameh, which compares Fath&dotbelow;nameh with other
Iranian epics, the stylistic evaluation of Fath&dotbelow;nameh, based upon
poetic arts and rhetorical biblical paraphrasing, and, a thematic analysis of
Fath&dotbelow;nameh, focusing on the literary adaptation of "Divine
Theme," "Divine Ethics" and "Divine
Law," Fath&dotbelow;nameh can clearly be identified as a religious
epic in the genre of Iranian epics. `Emrani's adaptation of the Prophetical
Characteristic of Joshua and the poet's medieval perspective of Holy War under the
theme of Fath&dotbelow;nameh, are two other pertinent subjects discussed
within the thematic analysis. `Emrani's Fath&dotbelow;nameh, as an example
of a Judeo-Persian literary work, claims the place of Judeo-Persian literature
within the Iranian literary tradition. Also as a representation of the literary
activity of Middle Eastern Jews, not well recognized in Judaic global literature,
Fath&dotbelow;nameh establishes itself as a significant Jewish literary
work.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
"It's your America": Gertrude Berg and American Broadcasting, 1929--1956.
No full textIn November 1929, The Rise of the Goldbergs, a radio series about a New York Jewish family and its matriarch, Molly Goldberg, debuted on the National Broadcasting System (NBC). The brainchild of Gertrude Berg, the program was a precursor to the radio soap opera, with an audience measuring in the millions by 1933, and Molly's shouts to her imaginary neighbor---"Yoo, Hoo! Mrs. Bloom!"---a national catchphrase. By 1948, The Goldbergs had seen life as a book, jigsaw puzzle, comic strip, vaudeville tour, and a Broadway play, with Berg becoming one of broadcasting's highest paid personalities in the process. After creating at least three other series while on radio, she anxiously explored the new frontier of television.The Goldbergs, a prototype of the television situation comedy, first appeared on the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) in January 1949. The next year Berg found herself in a political battle to save the career of Philip Loeb, who played her television husband, Jake Goldberg. He was blacklisted, named in the publication Red Channels with 151 other entertainers in broadcasting, film, stage and literature for alleged Communist activities.Loeb committed suicide in September 1955, mentally exhausted from fighting the rumors and accusations. The Goldbergs also disappeared that year, a victim of the blacklist and the fickle nature of television. Berg's professional reputation was damaged as well; in 1952, because of her refusal to fire Loeb, she was listed as a "Communist fellow traveler" by at least one anti-Communist watchdog group. In her last decade, Berg was relegated to summer stock and the occasional role on Broadway or in television.This dissertation records Berg's broadcasting career between 1929, when The Goldbergs first aired, and 1956, the year of its demise. Since Berg spent much of her career playing Molly Goldberg, much of the dissertation will focus on the birth and evolution of that character. However, Berg's other radio and television productions, her life before, during, and after The Goldbergs, and her fight against the blacklist are also explored.Thesis (Ph.D.)--The University of Southern Mississippi, 2004.School code: 0211
The contours of identity: Sephardic Jews and the construction of Jewish communities in Argentina, 1880 to the present.
No full textThis dissertation explores the emergence of an Argentine Jewish identity through the study of the Sephardic minorities that settled in that country. Home to one of the largest Jewish communities outside Israel, Argentina received large numbers of both Ashkenazim and Sephardim starting in 1880s. The Sephardim who settled in Argentina came mostly from Morocco, Damascus and Aleppo, and Turkey. With cultural, linguistic, and religious traditions distinct from the Ashkenazic majority, each of these Sephardic groups founded their own cemeteries, philanthropic and religious organizations from the 1880s to the 1920s. During this stage, these Sephardic communities sought to preserve their own distinctive cultural and religious practices vis-a-vis each other and the Yiddish Ashkenazic majority.This early picture of fragmentation changed, however, during the interwar years and especially after World War II and the creation of the state of Israel. At that point, the Sephardim were able to create a new identity partly because Zionist ideology opened up social, political and cultural spaces that did not conflict with national diasporic Jewish identities. Sephardic participation in the movement allowed for the emergence, by the 1960s, of a more inclusive Sephardic identity which, although premised upon becoming Argentine Jews, did not erase the particularities of each Sephardic geographical community; they had become Argentine Jews who were also Sephardic .Drawing on oral sources, the dissertation moves beyond institutional history to explore the actual lived contours of identity. In focusing on food and female philanthropic organizations, the dissertation explores the specificity of Sephardic women's role in the reconfiguration of Jewish communities' identities. Sephardic women, marginalized from participation in religious organizations, used these activities to promote community preservation. Down to the present, women's influence over these mundane tasks places them at the center of identity formation, a process which involved interaction with other Sephardic, Ashkenazic and Argentine cultural practices. Fusing archival sources with my own personal journey of discovery, this study ends with an analysis of family photographs that allows one to explore the visual narrative of identity constructed by the author's Sephardic relatives.Thesis (Ph.D.)--Duke University, 2004.School code: 0066
The jazz singer's legacy: The racial role-play of African-Americans and Jews in twentieth-century American performance.
No full textThis study re-examines the racial role-play of African-Americans and Jewish-Americans to further understand how racial identity has been constructed in America and the ways in which these constructions overlap and affect one another. Although racial role-play is most often associated with blackface minstrelsy, I define it more broadly as an overt staging of a racial identity. Unlike passing---an attempt to assume another identity without being detected---racial role-play calls attention to its performance. Because of its negative association with blackface minstrelsy, racial role-play disturbs many Americans. Yet to dismiss or avoid the function racial role-play has had in America is to miss a key means of understanding the cultural formation of our country. Moreover, racial role-play has been used by performers of various backgrounds, including African-Americans, to undermine stereotypes, to cross racial boundaries, and to question racial definitions altogether.Chapter One discusses the history of minstrelsy and how this practice might have been used and viewed by both African-Americans and Jewish-Americans. Chapter Two follows this discussion with an in-depth look at both the play and the film of The Jazz Singer, including critical responses from the Jewish, the Black, and the mainstream press. In contrast to Whiteness scholars who argue that blackface was a means for Jews to distance themselves from Blacks in order to assimilate into White America, I argue that blackface was a form of identification with African-Americans in order to distinguish themselves from White Christians. Chapter Three focuses on the attempts of certain African-American artists in the 1960s to re-appropriate racial role-play and demonstrates how Jews functioned symbolically as a means of asserting an evolving Black identity. Chapter Four illustrates how Jews once again utilized racial role-play alongside of African-Americans in the 1990s as performance artists explored identity politics. In particular, I examine the work of Anna Deavere Smith, Sandra Bernhard, and Danny Hoch---who suggest that identities are not fixed, but rather can be continually questioned, challenged, and negotiated through performance. This fluidity, however, comes at the cost of losing or ignoring group distinctions, whether these distinctions are self-imposed or externally assigned.Thesis (Ph.D.)--Columbia University, 2004.School code: 0054
The art of interruption: A comparison of works by Daniel Libeskind, Gerhard Richter, Ilya Kabakov.
No full textThis dissertation examines the Jewish Museum Berlin by Polish-American architect Daniel Libeskind, the painting cycle October 18, 1977 by German painter Gerhard Richter and three installations--- Incident at the Museum, or Water Music; Healing with Paintings ; and the Communal Kitchen---by Russian artist Ilya Kabakov within the context of Rezeptionsasthetik (aesthetics of reception), associated with Hans Robert Jauss and Wolfgang Iser, and the aesthetic theories of Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht, Martin Heidegger and Victor Shklovsky in order to illustrate the commonalities between the works of art in terms of thematic content, the use of "interruptive" techniques and their capacity to create the conditions for the possibility of a valid aesthetic experience in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Each of the above works of art addresses issues of memory, loss, mourning or exile, and does so in a manner that, I argue, acknowledges and successfully contributes to the development of its respective medium (whether architecture, painting or installation). Such innovations are revealed to a greater degree, I believe, when the works are considered in conjunction with one another rather than separately. Similarly, corresponding aspects of the theoretical writings by the various authors are illuminated when they are brought into a dialogue around the notion of "interruption" and in tandem with actual experiences with the works of art.The "interruptive" techniques and particular innovations of these artists emerge as significant tendencies for post-World War II and post-Soviet era art in a European context.Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Ohio State University, 2004.School code: 0168
Messianic expectation and collective myth formation: Prophecy, society and imagination in early modern Portugal.
No full textThis thesis asserts that in the late-sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in Portugal a new collective Portuguese myth formed and solidified in the imagination of much of the Portuguese population. It is a myth of a return or appearance of a new messiah(s) rather than the Christian messiah who brings forth to Portugal a new a better future world. Further, the present study argues that this myth became part and parcel of Portuguese culture up through the present day in myth, legend, identity, politics, and in the arts. The primary argument of this work stems from exhaustive research in the archives of the Inquisition and others in Portugal.The period discussed is characterized by an unpopular occupation by the Spanish throne (Habsburgs, 1580--1668) and the war to restore Portuguese independence (1640--1668). In such a time of chaos and unrest, a powerful and crucial hope arose for some kind of savior or messiah to bring back the popular perception of Portugal's greatness and destiny---the popular trope of the return to a Golden Age. Using Inquisition trials and other inquisitorial sources, however, the current work identifies and discusses several popular Portuguese prophets arrested and brought to trail as false prophets that defy traditional studies on early modern Portuguese messianic developments. The main thesis suggests a new paradigm for the idea of a messiah or return of a lost king from the imaginations of these prophets. Numerous sources are traced revealing a multi-faceted coming together of a uniquely Portuguese idea or myth. The present work deeply stresses the influence of Judaism and the remnants of Jewish beliefs in early modern Portugal, in addition to traditional and novel ideas such as the hidden island, the dual messiah, egalitarianism, and unique Portuguese twists, as playing a stronger role among the future-imaging population of Portugal. Thus, this unique myth of Portuguese messianic expectation is set apart from other traditional early modern European views of the world-to-come in addition to modern evaluations of the nature of the early modern Portuguese messianic experience.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of California, Santa Barbara, 2004.School code: 0035
Moritz Lazarus : la storia e le forme.
No full textTranslation of Alberto Meschiari's "Moritz Lazarus, la storia e le forme" by John Grossmann about psychological aspects in the philosophy of Moritz Lazarus.Original available in LBI library (st 1742