52 research outputs found
„Les russes“ – The Eastern European Jewish Immigrants in the Eyes of the Jewish Bourgeoisie in La Chaux-de-Fonds and Zurich in the Early 20th Century
No full textBen-Ami's Swisse Experience: Narrative and the Zionist Dream
No full text“Ben-Ami’s Swiss Experience: Narrative and the Zionist Dream”
in: East European Jews in Switzerland, T. Lewinsky, S. Mayoraz (Eds.), Berlin-Boston, De Gruyter, pp. 178-198.
ISBN 978-3-11-030069-7
e-ISBN 978-3-11-030071-0
ISSN 2192-9645
This article specifically analyzes a question that has received only minor attention in my previous research on Ben-Ami, a question concerning the role of Switzerland in the writer’s prose and his attitude toward this beloved but temporary shelter. Ben-Ami spent more than two decades in Geneva, after leaving the Russian Empire with his family (in 1905) and before moving permanently to Palestine (probably in 1924); moreover, even before settling in Geneva, he visited Switzerland repeatedly both on holiday and as a representative from Southern Russia at Zionist congresses. Even though the number of pages that Ben-Ami dedicates wholly to his Swiss experiences is small, these are of great interest insofar as they contain crucial details about the “Jewish question” at the beginning of the 20th Century. Ben-Ami’s first “Swiss work” is a short story entitled “Tovarishchi” (‘Friends’) and published in 1909 in the Journal Evreisky Mir (‘The Jewish World’). The second is a short but extraordinary memoir of the First Zionist Congress, published in Moscow in 1918 (it is proposed for the first time in English translation as the Appendix 1 in the same volume). The third work is still in manuscript: a tale under the title “Na vershine gory” (‘On the Mountain Peak’), written in Geneva in 1911 and never published (at least in its Russian original version). The analysis of these three works offers a very coherent and detailed picture of Ben-Ami’s approach to the exceptional crises that beset European Jewry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, i.e. the power struggle among Social Democrats, Bundists, nationalists, Hasidim, the assimilated petty bourgeoisie, the capitalists, etc. Finally, the theoretical suggestions by Svetlana Boym (2001) and Yuri Sleskine (2004) are applied for a enriched interpretation of Ben-Ami’s obsessive and paradoxical feeling of toska/nostalgija
Het Lewinsky-schandaal. Van pekelzonde tot impeachment
No full textThis article discusses the Monica Lewinsky scandal which concerned a love affair between the President of the United States and a 21 year old trainee Monica Lewinsky. The affair started in the summer of 1995 and became public knowledge in January 1998. At first it seemed that a real 'Lewinsky gate' was in the making but as it turned out - surprisingly for many - the public was not willing to participate in the kind of character assassination some of Clinton's mostly Republican political adversaries had in mind. 'Independent counsel' Kenneth Starr was seen to be less independent than he should have been and much more politically prejudiced. Although Clinton clearly lied under oath about the nature of his relationship with Lewinsky public opinion remained solidly opposed to impeachment. The author concludes that this scandal does not confirm James Lull and Stephen Hinerman's thesis that 'managers of modern news media actively try to turn stories into scandals.' If the media had lived up to the thesis Clinton certainly would have lost the presidency
East European Jews in Switzerland
No full textKlappentext: During the era of Jewish mass migration from Eastern Europe (from the 1880s until the First World War), Switzerland played an important role in absorbing immigrants. Though located at the periphery of the main migration routes, the federal state with its liberal policies on foreigners became a key destination for students, revolutionaries, and travelers. The micro-studies and more general papers of this volume approach the topic in its transnational, local, linguistic, gendered, and ideological dimensions and from various disciplinary angles. They interweave and facilitate a novel take on the transitory spatial history and the Lebenswelt of East European Jews in Switzerland. Topics of this volume range – among others – from the location of Switzerland on the map of East European Jewish politics (Bundism, Socialism, Yiddishism, Zionism), conflicting performative cultures of Jewish and Russian revolutionaries, the Swiss Lehr- and Wanderjahre of the Jewish public intellectual Meir Wiener, the impact of Geneva on the Zionist Hebrew writer Ben Ami, the Russian-Jewish students’ colonies in Berne and Zurich and questions of individuals' integration and acculturation
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