No Small Matter: Features of Jewish Childhood (Studies in Contemporary Jewry) 9780197577301, 019757730X

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ST U DI E S IN C ON T E M P ORA R Y JEWRY

The publication of Studies in Contemporary Jewry has been made possible through the generous assistance of the Samuel and Althea Stroum Philanthropic Fund Seattle, Washington

THE AVRAHAM HARMAN INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY JEWRY THE HEBREW UNIVERSITY OF JERUSALEM

NO SMALL MATTER: FEATURES OF JEWISH CHILDHOOD STUDIES IN CONTEMPORARY JEWRY AN ANNUAL XXXII

2021 Editor: Anat Helman

Published for the Institute by

1

3 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Oxford University Press 2021 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Control Number: 2020952933 ISBN 978–​0–​19–​757730–​1 DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197577301.001.0001 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Printed by Integrated Books International, United States of America

STUDIES IN CONTEMPORARY JEWRY Founding Editors Jonathan Frankel (1935-​2008) Peter Y. Medding Ezra Mendelsohn (1940-​2015) Editors Richard I. Cohen Anat Helman Eli Lederhendler Uzi Rebhun Institute Editorial Board Michel Abitbol, Haim Avni, Yehuda Bauer, Daniel Blatman, Jonathan Dekel-​Chen, Sergio DellaPergola, Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, Amos Goldberg, Hagit Lavsky, Pnina Morag-​Talmon, Dalia Ofer, Gideon Shimoni, Dimitry Shumsky, Yfaat Weiss Managing Editors Laurie E. Fialkoff Robin L. Zalben

Preface

Volume XXXII of Studies in Contemporary Jewry explores various facets of Jewish childhood since the late 19th century, throughout the 20th century, and into the 21st. We have chosen to focus on children under the age of adolescence, as young children tend to receive less scholarly attention than do adolescents or young adults. Young children rarely leave written documentation, such that gleaning and reconstructing their experiences poses particular methodological challenges. The essays in this symposium seek to overcome these challenges in addressing this relatively marginalized topic. Visiting five continents, our journey into modern Jewish childhood begins with birth and ends at the time of bar or bat mitzvah. Following an introduction by Paula Fass, Uzi Rebhun lays a demographic contextual basis in his portrayal of patterns of Jewish reproduction since the late 19th century until 2018. The next two essays deal with effects of immigration: Yael Reshef describes the important role children played in the national project of Hebrew revival in Jewish Palestine, and Eli Lederhendler depicts Jewish child immigrant experiences in the United States as social history and as narrated memory. Children’s literature was produced by Jewish writers in both Palestine and the United States, and in her essay, Yael Darr compares two late 1930s novels for young Jewish readers, one written in Hebrew, the other in Yiddish. Both of the novels discussed by Darr depict European Jewish children persecuted by the Nazis; indeed, young children were overrepresented among the victims of the Holocaust. Joanna Michlic maps the overall history and historiography of child Holocaust survivors, while Nava Barazani reconstructs the stories of three specific girls in the Giado camp in Libya. Childhood memories are also explored by Amia Lieblich, who traces the sources of resilience among the children of Kibbutz Kfar Etzion, dealing personally and collectively with the tragic consequences of the 1948 war. Children born to Holocaust survivors, too, were affected by their parents’ past. Hannah Levinsky-​Koevary investigates the “second generation” within the American context, as she revisits childhood summers spent in the bungalow colonies in the Catskills and deciphers their unique familial-​communal meanings. Liat Steir-​Livny studies the childhood of this same generation within the Israeli context, tracing the noticeable shadows the Holocaust had left via documentary films these children (and, in some cases, grandchildren) created in adulthood. Contemporary cinema is also studied by Nathan Abrams. His essay focuses on children depicted in American, European, and Australian films, revealing both direct and vii

viii

Preface

indirect treatments of Jewish topics, themes, and sensibilities. Our symposium ends with David Golinkin’s longue durée history of the bar and bat mitzvah ceremonies and their evolution in the modern era. In an additional essay. Anna Shternshis examines the commemoration of Jewish children who perished during the Second World War in the Soviet Union. It is a pleasant duty to once again thank the Nachum Ben-​Eli Honig Fund, whose continuous generosity makes the publication of Studies in Contemporary Jewry possible. This volume has also been supported by the Haruv Institute. Special thanks are due to Robin Zalben, our talented and tireless managing editor, as well as to my colleagues, Richard I. Cohen, Eli Lederhendler, and Uzi Rebhun. With this volume, Laurie Fialkoff, who for three decades has been a stalwart of Studies, guaranteeing that each article be given her acute attention, takes leave of her present capacity as one of the managing editors. The present editors and their predecessors have constantly alluded to Laurie’s remarkable ability to sharpen and clarify all accepted submissions, as she has done for this volume as well. She has been a wonderful partner in the production of Studies, and we are extremely pleased that she will continue to serve the annual in a different capacity but certainly with the same indispensable attentiveness to the printed word. A.H.

Contents

Symposium No Small Matter: Features of Jewish Childhood Paula S. Fass, Introduction: Jewish Children in the 20th Century

3

Uzi Rebhun, Jewish Reproduction and Children in the Modern Era

6

Yael Reshef, The Role of Children in the Revival of Hebrew

20

Eli Lederhendler, Children of the Great Atlantic Migration: Narratives of Young Jewish Lives

39

Yael Darr, Divided Unity: Jewish Writing for Children in the United States and Palestine at the Onset of the Second World War

64

Joanna Beata Michlic, Mapping the History of Child Holocaust Survivors

79

Nava T. Barazani, Hide-​and-​Seek: The Tale of Three Girls in the Giado Concentration Camp in Libya (1942–​1943)

103

Amia Lieblich, The Children of Kfar Etzion: Resilience and Its Causes

121

Hannah Levinsky-​Koevary, Catskills Idyll: Children of Holocaust Survivors and the Bungalow Colony Experience, 1950s–​1960s

137

Liat Steir-​Livny, Growing Up in the Shadow of the Past: Second-​ Generation Holocaust Survivors’ Childhoods as Depicted in Israeli Documentary Films

157

Nathan Abrams, Rites of Passage: Jewish Representations of Children and Childhood in Contemporary Cinema

170

David Golinkin, The Transformation of the Bar Mitzvah Ceremony, 1800–​2020

188

Essays Anna Shternshis, The Child Who Cannot Ask: The Holocaust Poetry of Moisei Teif

217

Stephen J. Whitfield, The American Jewish Intelligentsia, the Claims of Humor—​and the Case of Lenny Bruce

232

ix

x

Contents

Review Essay Deborah Dash Moore, Judaism and Jewishness in Histories of American Jewry 253 Book Reviews (arranged by subject) Antisemitism and Holocaust Aomar Boum and Sarah Abrevaya Stein (eds.), The Holocaust and North Africa, Denis Charbit

263

Havi Dreifuss (Ben-​Sasson), Relations between Jews and Poles during the Holocaust: The Jewish Perspective, trans. Ora Cummings, Joshua D. Zimmerman

264

Otto Dov Kulka, German Jews in the Era of the “Final Solution”: Essays on Jewish and Universal History, Richard Breitman

266

Hannah Pollin-​Galay, Ecologies of Witnessing: Language, Place, and Holocaust Testimony, Eva Fogelman

268

Dan Porat, Bitter Reckoning: Israel Tries Holocaust Survivors as Nazi Collaborators, Gabriel N. Finder

270

Liat Steir-​Livny, Remaking Holocaust Memory: Documentary Cinema by Third-​Generation Survivors in Israel, Tobias Ebbrecht-​Hartmann

273

Claus-​Christian W. Szejnmann, Paula Cowan, and James Griffiths (eds.), Holocaust Education in Primary Schools in the Twenty-​First Century: Current Practices, Potentials and Ways Forward, Eleni Karayianni

275

Arkadi Zeltser, Unwelcome Memory: Holocaust Monuments in the Soviet Union, Kiril Feferman

278

Cultural Studies and Literature Omri Asscher, Reading America, Reading Israel: The Politics of Translation between Jews, Philip Hollander

281

Batya Brutin, Holocaust Icons in Art: The Warsaw Ghetto Boy and Anne Frank, Richard I. Cohen 283 Shalom Goldman, Starstruck in the Promised Land: How the Arts Shaped American Passions about Israel, M.M. Silver

285

Naomi B. Sokoloff and Nancy E. Berg (eds.), What We Talk About When We Talk about Hebrew (And What It Means to Americans), Hana Wirth-​Nesher

287

xi

Contents

History, Biography, and Social Science Joyce Antler, Jewish Radical Feminism: Voices from the Women’s Liberation Movement, Deborah Dash Moore

253

Jerold S. Auerbach, Print to Fit: The New York Times, Zionism and Israel 1896–​2016, Stephen J. Whitfield

290

Jessica Cooperman, Making Judaism Safe for America: World War I and the Origins of Religious Pluralism, Deborah Dash Moore

253

Yaacov Falkov, Meragelei haye’arot: pe’ilutam hamodi’init shel hapartizanim hasovyetim 1941–​1945 (Forest Spies: The Intelligence Activity of the Soviet Partisans 1941–​1945), Samuel Barnai

292

Kirsten Fermaglich, A Rosenberg By Any Other Name: A History of Jewish Name Changing in America, Deborah Dash Moore

253

Viktor Kel’ner, Shchit: M.M. Vinaver i evreiskii vopros v Rossii v kontse XIX–​nachale XX veka (Shield: M.M. Vinaver and the Jewish Question in Russia at the End of the Nineteenth–​Beginning of the Twentieth Century), Brian Horowitz 294 Rachel Kranson, Ambivalent Embrace: Jewish Upward Mobility in Postwar America, Deborah Dash Moore

253

Laura Limonic, Kugel and Frijoles: Latino Jews in the United States, Ruth Behar

297

Daniel J. Walkowitz, The Remembered and Forgotten Jewish World: Jewish Heritage in Europe and the United States, Jack Kugelmass

299

Martina L. Weisz, Jews and Muslims in Contemporary Spain: Redefining National Boundaries, Daniela Flesler

300

Jack Wertheimer, The New American Judaism: How Jews Practice Their Religion Today, Deborah Dash Moore

253

Zionism, Israel, and the Middle East Rachel S. Harris (ed.), Teaching the Arab–​Israeli Conflict, Neil Caplan

303

Brian J. Horowitz, Vladimir Jabotinsky’s Russian Years, 1900–​1925, Abraham Ascher

306

Pnina Motzafi-​Haller, Concrete Boxes: Mizrahi Women on Israel’s Periphery, Hila Shalem Baharad

308

Hanna Yablonka, Yeladim beseder gamur: biyografiyah dorit shel yelidei haaretz 1948–​1955 (Children by the Book, Biography of a Generation: The First Native Israelis Born 1948–​1955), Israel Bartal

310

Note on Editorial Policy

313

Symposium No Small Matter: Features of Jewish Childhood

Introduction: Jewish Children in the 20th Century Paula S. Fass (UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY)

In 1900, when the Swedish reformer Ellen Key proclaimed that the 20th century would be the century of the child, she could not have foreseen the enormous changes and unprecedented disasters the century would bring.1 Imagining a steady deepening of concern and solicitude toward children and an elevation of childhood into a beacon of Western idealism, Key expressed the hope that children would be the most conspicuous beneficiaries of post-​Enlightenment progress. That progress had begun in the 19th century and was gradually spreading from the West, from countries such as England, France, and the United States, toward Eastern and Southern Europe and from there into the large Eurasian landmass dominated by Russia. Even though Key did not mention them explicitly, Jewish children, securely part of Euro-​American development by that time, would also benefit. They, too, would grow up with better health conditions, better schools, and more protective government policies. Today, however, we are all too aware that a different fate was to befall Europe (and the world), and that children would be among the century’s most helpless victims. Two world wars, a history-​shattering revolution, civil wars and many other conflicts, large and small, would spread throughout the century. In all of them, children would be caught in the turmoil, whether torn away from parents and other relatives, deprived of food and shelter, or forced to flee. Because they were keenly aware that childhood was held out as an important promise, reformers in the 20th century often showed how that promise was unfulfilled. Throughout the century, the plight of children was hauntingly portrayed by photojournalists such as Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine, who explored child poverty and deprivation. In the modern world, children have a unique ability to appeal to our sentiments of loss and hope and our humanistic instinct to pity and to save. Roman Vishniac appealed to this sense of loss and pity when he portrayed East European Jewish children just before the Second World War was to wipe them out. Displacement, starvation, and death, the shadowing realities of massive 20th-​ century conflicts, were not the only products of that century. The children of the 20th century were part of a huge voluntary transfer of populations from Europe to the Americas; they were the recipients of both new vaccines and medicinal drugs that Paula S. Fass, Introduction: Jewish Children in the 20th Century In: No Small Matter: Features of Jewish Childhood. Edited by: Anat Helman, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197577301.003.0001

4

Paula S. Fass

allowed them to survive, and new forms of education and popular culture that elevated their lives; and they were also entangled in a dramatic expression of idealistic (even utopian) thinking about the possibilities of a genuinely new world in Russia, the United States, and Israel. As such, they were active agents of hopes and aspirations for a much better life. The essays in this volume look at the century in its full and contradictory range of events. The Jewish children described here were subjected to the worst that could befall them as they lost their homes, their parents, and their lives in massive numbers (Michlic; Lieblich). Other Jewish children, sometimes their cousins or even siblings, were transported to the shores of North America, where their efforts contributed to amazing successes in scientific and professional fields and in the arts (Lederhendler), or to Palestine, where they helped to build a new Jewish nation (Reshef). Like other children of the 20th century, Jewish children participated in some of the fundamental democratizing and technological changes of their time. They were both consumers and subjects of films and children’s books (Darr; Abrams; Steir-​Livny). And this was also an era in which the rites of Jewish childhood were reconsidered in the midst of changes taking place in Jewish observance and as the global migrations brought Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews from different parts of the diaspora into each other’s presence (Golinkin). Children were important aspects of a changing Jewish life in the 20th century and, as one of the essays makes clear, played an important role in the revival of the Hebrew language (Reshef). In addition, the various languages spoken by Jewish children affected the languages in which books directed toward them were written (Darr). In many ways, one could argue, the lives of Jewish children caught up in the tumultuous changes of the 20th century were but a variant of the lives of children in Europe, North Africa, and the Americas more generally. They were part of a global transfer of population (Lederhendler) and a demographic transition that first increased and then shrank family size (Rebhun); they took part in new experiments in communal living (Lieblich) and were involved in the explosion of readership for children’s books (Darr). Like other children, they were victims of terrible conflicts. And yet we know that the case of Jewish children is different from that of children in general. In the midst of the greatest crisis of Jewish history, the continued existence of Jewish children could not be taken for granted. The obliteration of Ashkenazi European Jewish life as it was known and lived was realized in the Holocaust, and the future of Ashkenazi Jews was uncertain (Michlic; Rebhun; Steir-​Livny). Sephardi children in North Africa were caught up as well in the savage events (Barazani). Those Jewish children who survived, as well as those who were conceived and born soon thereafter, were marked in a way that other children were not. After 1945, Jewish children were a unique cohort. For those who immigrated to the United States, these children of survivors carried a heavier burden than the Jewish immigrants (earlier greenhorns) who had preceded them by half a century into a strange land (Levinsky-​ Koevary; Lederhendler). Memory is central to this experience. Those who write about the Shoah often probe their own memories as well as those of others from the “second generation” (Levinsky-​Koevary) because they are aware of what sets these children apart. But in regard to the Shoah, as many scholars have discovered, memory is far more potent

5

Introduction

historically and more complicated than a matter of self -​exploration for the individual (Barazani; Lieblich). What was remembered, how memories were reconstructed, their reliability, and its consequences for those who were victims of the Shoah (and even for those who were not) are essential questions for Holocaust scholarship. The reconstruction of memory, and its meaning for the individual as well as for our historical knowledge of the events, are now a fundamental part of how we study the Holocaust. We interrogate Holocaust memories, in part because the experiences they document might otherwise seem surreal. As memory for children is a critical component of the self, scholars are thus also eager to understand how a healthy/​whole self is constructed in the shadow of the Holocaust (Levinsky-​Koevary). The survival and continuation of Jewish life in the 20th century, and the children who make this possible, are central to the story of modern Jewish history. This story needs to be told in its full dimensions. The illuminating and wide-​ranging essays in this volume begin this work and will, I hope, stimulate that research. We need to learn more about the decisions that went into the demographics of Jewish births (begun here by Rebhun); more about the role of movement into new spaces, which allowed essential elements of Jewish life to evolve and/​or be renewed (explored by Lederhendler; Golinkin; Reshef; Levinsky-​Koevary). And we need to know what children mean, and have meant, to the parents and the grandparents who either lived through, observed, or were told about the planned destruction of their people. Scholars must dig ever deeper (as the scholars are doing here) into what this all means to the generations of Jewish children born out of the bitterness and shock that followed 1945, right up to the present generation of children of the new millennium. Do the Jewish children of today still see themselves as marked and obligated by the 20th-​century past? Have they inherited that past, been liberated from it—​or are they ignorant or careless of it? As with the four sons of the Passover seder, there are large variations in children’s knowledge, consciousness, and accountability. History taunts everyone; Jews know this better than most. Ellen Key thought that all children would become the objects of 20th-​century study. She could not have imagined that this would be especially the case for the children of Jews whose story lies at the heart of that century.

Note 1. Ellen Key, The Century of the Child (New York: 1909); first published in Sweden in 1900.

Jewish Reproduction and Children in the Modern Era Uzi Rebhun (THE HEBREW UNIVERSITY)

In the book of Genesis, God blesses Adam and Eve, and later, Noah and his sons, commanding them to “be fruitful and multiply.” Indeed, each generation has the responsibility to ensure population replacement, and the same is true of every religious, ethnic, or national group within it. A  paramount determinant of demographic continuity is women’s reproduction and the overall number of children in a given population. High levels of fertility provide a sufficient number of young people, hence population growth; low fertility, by contrast, is likely to result in the aging of the population, an excess of deaths over births and, inevitably, demographic erosion.1 Births, alongside deaths and migration, shape the profile of the population by age and sex, including the division between children and adults. Despite the complex and often unfolding interplay between the three demographic components, deaths mainly influence the number of elderly people in the population, whereas migration typically takes place in early stages of adulthood. Only births, in the most significant way, add “people . . . at age zero . . . but that effect stays with the population age after age.”2 Fertility is affected by multiple and complex factors. The determinants of fertility affect Jews in different ways in accordance with time, place of residence, status as a minority or majority group, religious orientation, and educational and economic attainment. Likewise, the sources of information on the demography of the Jews are uniform neither in quality nor in scope.3 Notwithstanding, this essay seeks to depict some of the major aspects of Jewish reproduction and children in modern times. As such, it sets the demographic context necessary for examining various perspectives (for instance, social, cultural, and educational) on children’s lives and experiences.

Demographic Transitions Hundreds of years of Jewish demographic stagnation came to an end with the beginning of the modern era.4 The period from the 18th century through the eve of

Uzi Rebhun, Jewish Reproduction and Children in the Modern Era In: No Small Matter: Features of Jewish Childhood. Edited by: Anat Helman, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197577301.003.0002

7

Jewish Reproduction and Children in the Modern Era

the Second World War was characterized by a sweeping increase in the number of Jews in the world. The demographic evolution of Jews preceded that of the general (European) population, and the Jewish increase in population was also relatively larger. Moreover, whether due to increased life expectancy, changes in patterns of fertility, or the adoption by immigrants of demographic patterns of their host countries, the number of Jewish children was consistently on the rise. At the same time, Jewish demographic alterations in general, and those among children in particular, were not spread evenly across Jewish communities.5 At the beginning of the 18th century, there were approximately one million Jews in the world. Their number increased to 2.5 million by the end of that century (Table 2.1). This rapid increase can be attributed in the main to increased life expectancy in the wake of improvements in hygienic conditions, food supply, medical care, and personal safety. Not only did adults live longer but a growing number of infants survived the critical process of delivery and the stages following birth and, later in childhood, overcame life-​threatening illnesses.6 These processes further intensified during the 19th century, when the number of Jews in the world increased four-​fold, to Table 2.1  World Jewish Population and Jewish Children, 1700–​2018 Year

World Jewish Population (Millions)1

1700 1800 1900 1939 1945 1970 2000 2018

1.1 2.5 10.6 16.6 11.0 12.6 13.2 14.6

1

Change (%)

—​ +127% +324% +57% –​34% +16% +3% +11%

} }

}

Children Aged Number of 0–​14 (% of Children total)2 (Millions) ~40% ~30%

~20%

~1/​4 ~1 ~4 ~5 ~3 ~2.7 ~2.5 ~3

Sergio DellaPergola, “Changing Patterns of Jewish Demography in the Modern World,” Studia Rosenthaliana 8, no. 2 (1989), 156; idem, “World Jewish Population, 2000,” American Jewish Year Book 100 (New York: 2000), 489; idem, “World Jewish Population, 2018,” American Jewish Year Book, vol. 118 (Cham, Switzerland: 2018), 371. 2 For 1800, largely based on the age composition of the Jewish population in Prussia in 1843, see Haim Shalom Halevi, Hashpa’at milḥemet ha’olam hasheniyah ’al hatekhunot hademografiyot shel ’am yisrael (Jerusalem: 1963), 73. For 1900, based on information for Russia, Romania, Hungary, Amsterdam, and Berlin, see Sergio DellaPergola, “Major Demographic Trends of World Jewry: The Last Hundred Years,” in Genetic Diversity among Jews: Diseases and Markers at the DNA Level, ed. Batsheva Bonné-​Tamir and Avinoam Adam (New York: 1992), 26; see also Halevi, Hashpa’at milḥemet ha’olam hasheniyah ’al hatekhunot hademografiyot shel ’am yisrael, 72, 87, 112. For 1939, see Sergio DellaPergola, “Between Science and Fiction:  Notes on the Demography of the Holocaust,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 10, no. 1 (Spring 1996), 41. For 1970, see Roberto Bachi, Population Trends of World Jewry (Jerusalem: 1976), 57. For 2000, see Sergio DellaPergola, Uzi Rebhun, and Mark Tolts, “Prospecting the Jewish Future: Population Projections 2000–​2080,” American Jewish Year Book, vol. 100 (New York: 2000), 125. For 2018, based on Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, Statistical Abstract of Israel (Jerusalem: 2017), 19, and Sergio DellaPergola, “World Jewish Population,” American Jewish Year Book, vol. 115 (Cham, Switzerland: 2015), 91.

8

Uzi Rebhun

10.6 million in 1900 (Table 2.1). During these two centuries, amid the increase in life expectancy, the major Jewish communities maintained high levels of fertility, averaging five to six children for every Jewish woman.7 At the time, Jewish population growth was especially pronounced in Eastern Europe. Consequently, this part of the world became home to the largest concentration of Jews. At the turn of the 20th century, recurrent persecution and pogroms propelled large waves of East European Jews to emigrate overseas, first and foremost to the United States. Another large Jewish community, that of the Ottoman Empire, experienced less growth during this era, as Ottoman Jews had only limited exposure to modernization. Thus, although fertility levels were high among Ottoman Jewry, death rates also remained high.8 Although Jewish fertility declined in some areas during the 18th and 19th centuries, it generally remained high, and the combination of high fertility and low mortality resulted in a very young age composition.9 Children under the age of 15 constituted some 40 percent of the total Jewish population in the Russian Empire, where about half of world Jewry lived. A similar proportion of children characterized many other Jewish communities in Europe. In Asia and North Africa, the share of children might have been even slightly higher—​about 45 percent of the total Jewish population.10 Our (very rough) estimate is that, at the beginning of the 19th century, there were about one million Jewish children in the world. With the unprecedented growth in world Jewish population, the number of children also gained momentum, totaling some four million by the turn of the 20th century (Table 2.1). Jewish demographic growth continued in the period from 1900 through the outbreak of the Second World War. By 1939, world Jewish population had reached an all-​ time peak of 16.6 million (Table 2.1). The somewhat moderate increase, relative to the earlier two centuries, reflects a substantial diminution in levels of fertility. This process, which began first in Western Europe and North America, now also extensively affected Jews in Eastern Europe. In general, modern societies tend to be characterized by lower levels of fertility. In the specific case of Jews, the main explanations for the transition to smaller families point to processes such as urbanization, secularization, the acquisition of general education, structural changes in employment (from heavy concentration in owned businesses to working as employees), increasing rates of marital dissolution, an increase in the number of interfaith marriages, and new methods of contraception, hence greater control over birth. Likewise, changes in lifestyle and standard of living affected the desired family size. Along with social and political processes of modernization, there was a general change of mentality in which the traditional emphasis on Jewish values was supplanted by rationalism, individualism, and the importance of personal autonomy.11 Table 2.2 traces changes in births per 1,000 population for various Jewish communities. In Russia, Jewish birth rates declined from 36 in 1897 to 24 in 1926. In Hungary, for which we have available data for a longer time interval, birth rates declined from 36 during the last decade of the 19th century to 25 in the second decade of the 20th century and down to 11 for the years 1931–​1935. Italian Jews, for their part, had low levels of birth (23) as early as the end of the 19th century, and the level dipped to 12 by the first half of the 1930s. It should be noted that European colonization and increasing cultural influences at that time exposed many North African and Asian communities to major elements of modernization; this lowered their morbidity

9

Jewish Reproduction and Children in the Modern Era

Table 2.2  Birth Rates among Selected Jewish Communities per 1,000 Population: Late 19th Century through Mid-​20th Century1 Country Europe Austria/​Vienna

Bulgaria

Germany/​Berlin

Hungary

Italy

Netherlands Poland

Prussia

Romania

Year

Birth Rate

1890–​18951 1910–​19151 1930–​19351 1960–​19622 1891–​18952 1910–​19151 1933–​19362 18713 1910–​19151 19273 1930–​19351 1960–​19622 1891–​18952 1910–​19151 1931–​19352 1851–​18752 1876–​19003 1910–​19151 1931–​19353 1956–​19653 1908–​19112 1919–​19212 19101 19262 19303 1822–​18402 1876–​18802 1900–​19052 19292 1871–​18752 1896–​19002 1910–​19152 1926–​19302 1930–​19351

22 13 4 6 38 31 17 28 15 9 6 6 36 25 11 29 23 15 12 11 20 19 27 21 21 36 32 19 9 47 40 27 18 15

Continued

10

Uzi Rebhun

Table 2.2  Continued Country

Year

Birth Rate

Russia/​USSR

1896–​18972 19262

36 24

1910–​19151 1930–​19351 19602 1930–​19351 1957–​19592

38 23 10 14 15

1901–​19051

47

1936–​19463 1919–​19233 1945–​19473 19223 19303 19483 1964–​19662

37 37 38 28 33 26 22

North/South America Argentina/​Buenos Aires

Canada North Africa Algeria Morocco Tunisia Palestine/​Israel

1

Sergio DellaPergola, “Contemporary Jewish Fertility: An Overview,” in Papers in Jewish Demography 1981, ed. Uziel O. Schmelz, Paul Glikson, and Sergio DellaPergola (Jerusalem: 1983), 216. 2 Roberto Bachi, Population Trends of World Jewry (Jerusalem: 1976), 43–​44, 58. 3 Haim Shalom Halevi, Hashpa’at milḥemet ha’olam hasheniyah ’al hatekhunot hademografiyot shel ’am yisrael (Jerusalem: 1963), passim.

whereas fertility remained fairly high (as was evident among Jewish women immigrants upon arrival in Israel after 1948), which led to substantial demographic growth. The overall decline in Jewish fertility in Europe and America resulted in a diminished share of children out of the total Jewish population. On the basis of weighting of the age composition of Jewish populations in several countries and areas, we estimate that, on the eve of the Second World War, children accounted for about 30 percent of all Jews. In absolute terms, however, and given that the total Jewish population was continuously on the rise, the number of Jewish children had already reached the high number of five million (Table 2.1). (For the proportion of children for individual Jewish communities, see Table 2.3.)

The Holocaust and Its Aftermath The immediate demographic effect of the Holocaust on world Jewry was a significant diminution of one-​third of its size, to 11 million in 1945 (Table 2.1). In addition, the Holocaust had long-​range and indirect demographic consequences, especially on children. Between 1939 and 1945, a slump in marriage, alongside fears of bringing

11

Jewish Reproduction and Children in the Modern Era

Table 2.3  Proportion of Children in Selected Countries, Mid-​19th Century through Mid-​20th Century Country

Year

Age Group

Proportion of Total Jews

Total World Jews Diaspora Jews

19701 19701

0–​14 0–​14

21.9 19.0

Israel

19702

0–​14

30.2

Western Europe

19254 19611 19004 19304 19414 After WWII4 18994 19474 19665 19213 19474 18434 19254 19394 18973 19263 19701 19601

0–​14 0–​14 0–​14 0–​14 0–​14 0–​20 0–​19 0–​19 0–​14 0–​14 0–​14 0–​14 0–​14 0–​14 0–​14 0–​14 0–​14 0–​14

15.7 14.3 36.1 17.6 15.2 14.5 45.8 (M); 42.5 (F) 25.2 (M); 19.8 (F) 16.1 33.9 19.5 36.0 16.2 7.9 41.1 28.8 11.2 19.3

North/South America Argentina

19601

0–​14

20.5

19313 19615 19706

0–​14 0–​14 0–​14

27.3 27.6 22.5

19661 19364 19514 19611

0–​14 0–​14 0–​14 0–​14

36.3 41.0 43.4 43.2

19374

0–​14

20.5

Europe Germany/​Berlin Hungary

Netherlands

Poland Prussia

Russia/​USSR

Canada USA North Africa/​Asia Iran Morocco

Oceania Australia

Continued

12

Uzi Rebhun

Table 2.3  Continued Country

Year

Age Group

Proportion of Total Jews

Palestine/​Israel

19313 19483 19613 19702 19702 19702

0–​14 0–​14 0–​14 0–​14 0–​14 0–​14

32.8 28.7 34.5 30.2 36.6 16.9

Asian/​African origin European/​American origin

1 Roberto Bachi, Population Trends of World Jewry (Jerusalem: 1976), 57. 2 Israel Central Bureau of Statistics (Jerusalem: 1971), Statistical Abstract of Israel 1970,  46–​47. 3

Sergio DellaPergola, “Major Demographic Trends of World Jewry: The Last Hundred Years,” in Genetic Diversity among Jews: Diseases and Markers at the DNA Level, ed. Batsheva Bonné-​Tamir and Avinoam Adam (New York: 1992), 26. 4 Haim Shalom Halevi, Hashpa’at milhḥemet ha’olam hasheniyah ’al hatekhunot hademografiyot shel ’am yisrael (Jerusalem: 1963), passim. 5 Uziel O. Schmelz, “Jewish Survival: The Demographic Factor,” American Jewish Year Book, vol. 81 (New York: 1981),  94–​95. 6 Fred Massarik and Alvin Chenkin, “U.S. National Jewish Population Study: A First Report,” American Jewish Year Book 1973 (New York: 1973), 271.

children to the world under the prevailing conditions of the war, drastically reduced Jewish births. As a result, the cohorts that were born during the war were unusually small, and when members of those cohorts grew up and reached the critical ages of family formation, they themselves now had a relatively small number of children. Moreover, many children and young adults had perished in the Holocaust, and among the adult Jewish victims, there were more men than women. These demographic turbulences undermined the age and sex structure of the Jewish population.12 The Holocaust was more severe in Eastern Europe than in other parts of the continent. The Jewish population in this area was comparatively young. As compared with young and middle-​aged adults, children, especially infants, were less able to overcome wartime deprivations such as lack of food and shelter, and those rounded up by Nazis or Nazi collaborators were almost invariably killed. Consequently, young children were overrepresented among the victims (approximately 1.3-​ 1.4 million were under the age of 16).13 Across the continent, a number of contextual circumstances acted to improve or to further diminish children’s chances of survival. In Italy, for example, parents who were being deported often insisted upon taking their little children with them. By contrast, in France it was easier to hide children; many of them thus survived the war.14 Overall, the share of children among the Jewish victims was higher than their proportion in the Jewish population on the eve of the war.15 The years immediately after the war were characterized by rising levels of fertility among the general population (the “baby boom”). In Western Europe, this phenomenon lasted for a short duration, after which fertility stabilized at moderate levels.

Jewish Reproduction and Children in the Modern Era

13

In the United States, Canada, and Australia, high levels of fertility extended into the 1960s.16 Concurrently, Jews began immigrating in large numbers to Israel; among them were many from Muslim countries that were still characterized by high levels of fertility. In the postwar era, Jewish population increased at an accelerated rhythm, and by 1970 totaled 12.6 million (Table 2.1). Yet the demographic consequences of the Holocaust were saliently reflected in the age composition of the Jews, both among those who stayed in Europe and among Jewish immigrants in their new countries: in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, children aged 0–​14 now accounted for approximately one-​fifth (21.9 percent) of world Jewish population, or slightly more than 2.5 million, whereas before the war there had been approximately 5 million Jewish children (Table 2.1). In the midst of these demographic dynamics, and in light of intensive international migration, variations evolved in the age composition of major Jewish communities. Of special importance are the differences between the proportion of children among Jews in the diaspora, on the one hand, and in Israel, on the other. In 1970, children in the diaspora accounted for about one-​fifth of total Jewish population, whereas in Israel they accounted for close to one third of the total (Table 2.3). More specifically, between 1960 and 1970, the proportion of children among the Jewish population of Russia was about 11 percent; in Western Europe, the United States, and Argentina, between about 19–​23 percent; in Canada, 28 percent; and in Iran, 36 percent. Significant variations were also found in Israel in accordance with region of origin: whereas in 1970, children below the age of 15 accounted for 30 percent of the total Jewish population, among the group of European/​American background, the proportion was only 16.9 percent, whereas among Jews of Asian/​African background, it was 36.6 percent, or more than twice as high (Table 2.3).

Contemporary Patterns Since the 1970s, Jewish population growth has slowed down. Total worldwide Jewish population reached 13 million around the turn of the 21st century and, as of 2018, there were approximately 14.6 million Jews in the world (Table 2.1). This moderate increase reflects different demographic trends in the diaspora as compared with Israel: in the diaspora, there was a moderate decrease in population, versus a much more intensive increase in Israel. Although part of the explanation lies in the salient excess of immigration to Israel versus emigration out of the country,17 a stronger determinant is the below-​replacement level of fertility among almost all diasporic Jewish communities. By contrast, among the Israeli Jewish population, women give birth, on average, to three children, thus ensuring a young age composition and positive natural movement (that is, an excess of births over deaths).18 Jewish fertility outside Israel stands today at around 1.5 children. This hides some substantial variations by community of residence. Probably the lowest level (about one child) characterizes Jews in the European republics of the former Soviet Union. Fertility level is only slightly higher among Jews in the Asian republics of the FSU. The large Jewish communities of the United States, Canada, the UK, France, and

14

Uzi Rebhun

Argentina exhibit fertility that ranges between 1.5 and 1.7. In Mexico, Jewish fertility is at replacement level (2.1); only in the very small communities left in Muslim countries does Jewish fertility slightly surpass this number.19 Low fertility in the diaspora is explained by the high socioeconomic stratification of the Jews, weakening of Jewish identity, enhanced tendency for mixed-​marriage (resulting in some of the children not being raised Jewish), and the status of being a minority within a non-​Jewish, often Christian, majority. Minor group status involves fear of discrimination and insecurity and, more generally, a lack of full acceptance, which in turn leads to a propensity on the part of Jews to maintain a low profile among the population at large.20 In Israel, as noted, Jewish women have on average three children. The higher levels in Israel mainly derive from the more even balance between Sephardi and Ashkenazi Jews, lower educational attainments, stronger religious orientation, and the fact of being a majority in a sovereign country. Overall, for every Jewish child born in the diaspora, two are born in Israel. Patterns of fertility affect not only the pace of growth of Jews in Israel and in the diaspora but also the spatial dispersion of Jewish children. With only a few exceptions (all in Latin America), children under the age of 15 constitute less than one-​fifth of the total Jewish population in all countries of the diaspora. In some countries, such as Russia, Germany, or Romania, their proportion is even smaller. In Israel, by contrast, children account for slightly more than one-​quarter (27 percent) of the Jewish population.21 Accordingly, we estimate the number of Jewish children in the world today at about three million (Table 2.1). Yet while total world Jewish population is divided between 45 percent who live in Israel and 55 percent in other countries, insofar as children are concerned, a majority, some 58 percent, live in Israel (Fig. 2.1). In Israel, for many years, there were substantial variations in levels of fertility among the two major Jewish ethnic subgroups of Jews of European origin (Ashkenazim)

100 90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0

42

55

58

45 Total Jews

Jewish Children Israel

Diaspora

Figure 2.1  Distribution of Total Jewish Population and Jewish Children Aged 0-​14 between Israel and the Diaspora, ~2018 (Percentages) Source: Adapted from Sergio DellaPergola, Uzi Rebhun, and Mark Toltz, “Prospecting the Jewish Future: Population Projections, 2000-​2080,” American Jewish Year Book, vol. 100 (New York: 2000), 125; Sergio DellaPergola, “World Jewish Population, 2018,” American Jewish Year Book 118 (Cham, Switzerland: 2018), 392–394.

15

Jewish Reproduction and Children in the Modern Era

versus those of Asian/​North African origin (Mizrahim). Such variations reflected different stages of modernization in the region of origin of immigrants who arrived in Israel following statehood. On arrival, Mizrahi Jewish women had an average of 4.5 children, and during their first years in Israel, the average number of children increased to about six. This was the outcome of traditional fertility patterns being preserved in an environment of overall improved ecological conditions and medical services, which resulted in lower levels of newborn and infant mortality. Beginning in the mid-​1950s, there was a gradual decline in fertility among Mizrahi women; recently, the level converged with that of Ashkenazi women. Overall, the fertility level of the latter group (about three children) was quite stable over time (Fig. 2.2). A paramount determinant of differential fertility in contemporary Israel is religious identity. The data pertaining to five subgroups among Israeli Jews—​those identifying as secular, traditional (nonreligious), traditional (religious), religious, and ultra-​Orthodox22—​show that ultra-​Orthodox Jews have the highest total fertility rate (seven children). At the other end of the religious continuum, secular women have a total fertility rate of slightly more than two children. The slight ups and downs in the fertility of secular women over the last three decades was affected by the entrance of a large number of immigrants from the FSU who arrived in Israel with very low fertility but who slowly began to adopt the norms of their native-​born secular counterparts. Religious women have a total fertility rate of about four children, which 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0

Y48 Y50 Y54 Y58 Y61 Y65 Y70 Y75 Y80 Y85 Y94 Y16 Asia-Africa

Europe-America

Israel

Figure 2.2  Total Fertility Rate (TFR) among Jewish Women in Israel, by Ethnicity, 1948-​2016 Source: For 1948–​1985, adapted from Uziel O. Schmelz, Sergio DellaPergola, and Uri Avner, Ethnic Differences among Israeli Jews: A New Look (Jerusalem: 1991) (original data were given for interval years; here we indicate the first year of each interval); for 1994, Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, Statistical Abstract of Israel, 1995 (Jerusalem: 1995), Table 3.14; for 2016, idem, Statistical Abstract of Israel, 2016 (Jerusalem: 2017), Table 3.14. It should be noted that for 1948–​1994, ethnic origin is defined according to place of birth; for 2016, the data are for native-​born Jewish women according to father’s place of birth. Since the Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) provides data for each continent separately, we calculated a weighted TFR that takes into account the different proportion of women whose father was born in Asia and those whose father was born in Africa for the Asia–​Africa category, and similarly, the different proportion of women whose father was born in Europe and those whose father was born in America for the Europe–​America category.

16

Uzi Rebhun 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0

1980–82

1990–92

Total Traditional-Religious

2000–02

2010–12

2015–17

Ultra-Orthodox Religious Traditional-Nonreligious

Secular

Figure 2.3  Total Fertility Rate (TFR) among Jewish Women in Israel, by Level of Religiosity, 1980-​2017 Source: Ahmad Hleihel, Fertility among Jewish Women in Israel by Level of Religiosity, 1979-​2017 (Jerusalem: 2017),  16–​20.

represents an increase of about half a child over the last few decades; we attribute this change to strengthened religious and nationalistic sentiments, especially among a growing number of young religious couples who choose to settle in the West Bank. The traditional-​religious sector of the Israeli Jewish population has a fertility rate that is very close to the overall average, whereas the traditional-​nonreligious group has on average half a child less (Fig. 2.3). The religiosity-​fertility nexus determines the pace of growth of children in each religious group. We can gain good insights on this through an analysis of the division of pupils according to type of school in which they are enrolled. In Israel, there are three official educational tracks for Jewish pupils:  independent (ultra-​ Orthodox), state secular, and state religious. Between 1989–​1990 and 2015–​2016, the share of pupils in the independent (ultra-​Orthodox) religious track increased four-​fold—​from 6  percent to one-​quarter of all pupils in the Jewish educational system in Israel. By contrast, the proportion of pupils in the state secular track declined from 71.5 percent to 55.4 percent, whereas pupils in state religious schools remained more or less stable (Fig. 2.4). It should be noted that similar trends were observed among the largest Jewish community in the diaspora, that of the United States:  whereas Orthodox Jews (including the ultra-​Orthodox) comprise some 10 percent of the total American Jewish population, among Jewish children aged 0–​18, the proportion of the Orthodox is slightly higher than one-​fourth, with eight out of every ten Orthodox children being raised in ultra-​Orthodox families.23 It should be emphasized that in Israel the number of children in all subgroups defined by ethnicity (Mizrahi/​Ashkenazi) or religious identity (ultra-​Orthodox, religious, traditional, secular) is steadily on the rise; what is changing is the relative share of each subgroup within the population of children. In the United States, and more generally in the diaspora, the number of ultra-​Orthodox and religious children is on the rise, while that of the other denominations (or those declaring no denominational preference) is in decline. The demographic trends in Israel versus the Jewish diaspora, and among each subgroup by religiosity, are strongly determined by fertility behavior.

17

Jewish Reproduction and Children in the Modern Era 100 90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0

55.4

60.9

71.5

19.5

19.7 22.2 6.3 1989/90

19.4

25.1

1999/00

2015/16

Independent (Ultra-Orthodox)

State-Religious

State-Secular

Figure 2.4  Distribution of Jewish Pupils in Israel by Educational Tracks, 1989/​90, 1999/​2000, and 2015/​16 (Percentages) Source: Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, Statistical Abstract, various years.

Present and Future Implications Numbers, especially those involving size of the population, are of major concern in contemporary Jewish life. The scientific and public discourse among Jews in the diaspora and in Israel alike often emphasizes quantity—​as, for instance, the ongoing arguments concerning how large is the current worldwide Jewish population, alongside discussions of issues such as the disproportional representation of Jews in the upper socioeconomic strata in their countries of residence; the ratio of Jews and Arabs in the context of the Middle East conflict; the percentage of children identified as Jews among mixed-​families in the United States and, of course, the sacred icon of six million (in the context of how to bring Jewish population back to its pre-​Holocaust size).24 The common denominator in such discussion—​whether implicit or explicit—​ is the consciousness that Jews are a small group vis-​à-​vis other groups in the world, and that it is imperative to increase the overall number of Jews. A major vehicle for achieving this goal is increasing the number of Jewish children. As I have demonstrated, fertility evolved somewhat inconsistently over time and was spread unevenly across the various Jewish communities. Today, what perhaps mainly characterizes world Jewry is the dichotomous split between Israel, where Jewish fertility is high and ensures a large proportion of children, and the diaspora, where the low fertility rate does not meet the bare requirement for Jewish continuity. Be that as it may, the matter of fertility and the number of children in the population has many social and economic implications. In Israel, where Jews are the majority group, it influences allocation of resources and planning for such things as educational institutions and cultural activities, welfare services for children, medical infrastructure both for women in their fertile years and for children, and residential neighborhoods geared toward young families. Among Jews in the diaspora, who are in a minority status, the influence of the size of the young population is mainly on non-​governmental services that the Jewish community provides, most of which are in the field of education. From a

18

Uzi Rebhun

worldwide Jewish perspective, changes in the distribution of children between countries and communities may determine how major organizations disseminate their budget for strengthening Jewish identification and ties to Israel. Israel and the Jewish diaspora differ in their ability to implement a policy aimed at encouraging fertility. Such attempts can either be direct (providing families with economic incentives and support according to number of children) or indirect (for instance, by means of tax benefits for working mothers and fathers, educational subsidies, and assistance in housing for young families). Such arrangements involve huge budgets that can only be handled by central governmental authorities, which effectively limit them to Israel. To some extent, local diasporic communities, independently or with assistance from large Jewish organizations or from Israel, may subsidize tuition in Jewish schools, although it is somewhat doubtful whether and how this can affect Jewish family planning. It should be added that such factors as a child-​friendly public atmosphere, social emulation, and national ideology further enhance Israel’s efforts to increase rates of birth. In Israel, data pertaining to children facilitate projections of the size and characteristics of the adult population in the foreseeable future, as, for example, the number of potential students, soldiers, or people in the labor force. Given the strong relationship between level of religiosity and voting patterns, the current distribution of children by educational tracks provides a good proxy (disregarding international migration and denominational switching) of the political trajectory of the country. For Jews both in Israel and in the diaspora, the number of children in a family attests to the extent of emotional, social, and supplementary nursing support (in addition to community-​ sponsored benefits) their parents are likely to receive when they get old. Finally, recent empirical findings appear to corroborate more optimistic projections carried out at the beginning of the century that anticipated a world Jewish population of 14.7 million by the year 2020. To the extent that this trend will continue, and excluding any game-​changing catastrophes, the number of Jews in the world is likely to rise to slightly more than 17 million by 2050. The proportion of children is likely to remain fairly stable, at around one-​fifth, or some 3.6 million Jewish children. In the midst of this demographic increase, Israel will have an even larger share of Jewish children than it does today—​two thirds, versus one third in the diaspora.25

Notes 1. Henry S. Shryock and Jacob S. Siegel, The Methods and Materials of Demography, vol. 2 (Washington D.C.: 1973), ch. 18. 2. John Weeks, Population:  An Introduction to Concepts and Issues, 7th ed. (Belmont, Calif.: 1999), 288. 3. Sergio DellaPergola, “Jewish Demography: Fundamentals of the Research Field,” in Studies in Contemporary Jewry, vol. 27, The Social Scientific Study of Jewry: Sources, Approaches, Debates, ed. Uzi Rebhun (New York: 2014), 11-14; Uzi Rebhun, “Demographic Issues,” in Modern Judaism: An Oxford Guide, ed. Nicholas de Lange and Miri Freud-Kandel (Oxford: 2005), 16–18. 4. Sergio DellaPergola, “Some Fundamentals of Jewish Demographic History,” in idem and Judith Even (eds.), Papers in Jewish Demography 1997 (Jerusalem: 2001), 11–33.

Jewish Reproduction and Children in the Modern Era

19

5. Roberto Bachi, Population Trends of World Jewry (Jerusalem:  1976); Sergio DellaPergola, “Major Demographic Trends of World Jewry:  The Last Hundred Years,” in Genetic Diversity among Jews: Diseases and Markers at the DNA Level, ed. Batsheva Bonné-​ Tamir and Avinoam Adam (New York: 1992), 3–​30; Haim Shalom Halevi, Hashpa’at milḥemet ha’olam hasheniyah ’al hatekhunot hademografiyot shel ’am yisrael (Jerusalem: 1963). 6. Uziel O. Schmelz, Infant and Early Childhood Mortality among the Jews in the Diaspora (Jerusalem: 1971). 7. Bachi, Population Trends of World Jewry, 42. 8. Ibid., 37; DellaPergola, “Major Demographic Trends of World Jewry,” 7. 9. Bachi, Population Trends of World Jewry, 42; DellaPergola, “Major Demographic Trends of World Jewry,” 9. 10. DellaPergola, “Major Demographic Trends of World Jewry,” 26. 11. Bachi, Population Trends of World Jewry, 49; Sergio DellaPergola, “Contemporary Jewish Fertility: An Overview,” in Papers in Jewish Demography 1981, ed. Uziel O. Schmelz, Paul Glikson, and Sergio DellaPergola (Jerusalem:  1983), 215–​217; Joseph J. Spengler, “Values and Fertility Analysis,” Demography 3, no. 1 (1966), 109–​130. 12. Sergio DellaPergola, “Between Science and Fiction:  Notes on the Demography of the Holocaust,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 10, no. 1 (January 1996), 34–​51; Halevi, Hashpa’at milḥemet ha’olam hasheniyah ’al hatekhunot hademografiyot shel ’am yisrael. 13. DellaPergola, “Between Science and Fiction,” 49; Uziel O. Schmelz, “The Demographic Impact of the Holocaust,” in Terms of Survival: The Jewish World since 1945, ed. Robert S. Wistrich (London: 1991), 46; Debórah Dwork, Children with a Star: Youth in Nazi Europe (New Haven: 1991), 274–​275 (n. 27). 14. DellaPergola, “Between Science and Fiction,” 38. 15. Halevi, Hashpa’at milḥemet ha’olam hasheniyah ’al hatekhunot hademografiyot shel ’am yisrael; Uziel O. Schmelz, “The Demographic Impact of the Holocaust,” 44–​58. 16. Uziel O. Schmelz, “Jewish Survival: The Demographic Factors,” American Jewish Year Book, vol. 81 (New York: 1981), 65. 17. Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, Statistical Abstract of Israel (Jerusalem: 2018). 18. Sergio DellaPergola, World Jewry beyond 2000:  The Demographic Prospects (Yarnton:  1999); idem, Jewish Demographic Policies:  Population Trends and Options in Israel and in the Diaspora (Jerusalem:  2011); idem, “World Jewish Population, 2018,” American Jewish Year Book 118 (Cham, Switzerland:  2018), 361–​449; Schmelz, “Jewish Survival,”  72–​73. 19. Sergio DellaPergola, Uzi Rebhun, and Mark Tolts, “Prospecting the Jewish Future: Population Projections, 2000–​2080,” American Jewish Year Book 100 (New  York:  2000), 103–​148. 20. Calvin Goldscheider, “Fertility of the Jews,” Demography 4, no. 1 (1967), 196–​209. 21. Adapted from Sergio DellaPergola, “World Jewish Population, 2015,” in Current Jewish Population Reports (New York: 2015), 35. 22. For more details regarding the five groups and the distinctions between them, see Ahmad Hleihel, Fertility among Jewish Women in Israel by Level of Religiosity 1979-​2017 (Jerusalem: 2017). 23. Based our own data analysis of the 2013 Pew Survey of American Jews. 24. Michal Kravel-​Tovi, “Introduction:  Counting in Jewish,” in Taking Stock:  Cultures of Enumeration in Contemporary Jewish Life, ed. Michal Kravel-​Tovi and Deborah Dash Moore (Bloomington: 2016), 1–​25; Theodore Sasson, Janet Krasner Aronson, Fern Chertok, Charles Kadushin, and Leonard Saxe, “Millennial Children of Intermarriage:  Religious Upbringing, Identification, and Behavior among Children of Jewish and Non-​Jewish Parents,” Contemporary Jewry 37, no. 1 (2017), 99–​123. 25. DellaPergola, Rebhun and Tolts, “Prospecting the Jewish Future,” 120, 125.

The Role of Children in the Revival of Hebrew Yael Reshef (THE HEBREW UNIVERSITY)

Speech revival was not created by our “big,” but by our young—​Menahem Ussishkin1 In the beginning, Hebrew became the language of childhood [through] children’s Hebrew chats and children’s Hebrew games, on the city’s streets and in the sanctuary of the kindergarten—​E.M. Lipschütz2

The revival of Hebrew as a spoken language was devised from the outset to be carried out by the younger generation. Proponents of the idea, who were familiar with Hebrew from the traditional Jewish education they received in their youth, regarded education as their main channel for transforming Hebrew into a spoken national language. And indeed, whereas for them Hebrew always remained a foreign language, used more at ease in writing than in speech, among the younger generation, it eventually turned into a natural spoken language and a native tongue. In fact, the notion that education in Hebrew was crucial for the preservation of a Jewish identity in an era of growing secularization preceded the idea of speech revival. In the last quarter of the 19th century, with the first stirrings of the Jewish national movement, it was already clear that children of enlightened Jews, who attended modern schools instead of receiving a traditional Jewish education, showed a tendency for assimilation. This problem was the main concern of most of the early publications authored by Eliezer Ben-​Yehuda, the central figure in the speech revival initiative.3 In a series of articles he published in 1880 in the Jewish press, he developed the idea that the only solution to the inherent breach in education between modernization and Jewishness was to adopt Hebrew as the main language of school instruction. “If we are interested in the survival of the nation, if we wish our sons to be Hebrew, we must [ . . . ] set [Hebrew] as the main language of education,” he argued.4 Since education in a given language inevitably instilled a love for the nation speaking that language, “only if we educate our youth in the Hebrew language [ . . . ], only then will the Hebrew boy or the Hebrew girl get used to viewing themselves as Hebrew, only then will the Hebrew boy get used to loving his people from childhood, and he will not cease loving this people until his last day.”5 Soon thereafter, based on this insight about the inherent connection Yael Reshef, The Role of Children in the Revival of Hebrew In: No Small Matter: Features of Jewish Childhood. Edited by: Anat Helman, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197577301.003.0003

The Role of Children in the Revival of Hebrew

21

between language and identity, he developed the idea that Hebrew should be turned into a spoken language, not only in education, but in all realms of life.6 From the 1880s onwards, despite the manifest difficulties of creating a Hebrew educational system and transforming Hebrew into a spoken language, attempts were made to implement these projects both in Palestine and in the diaspora. Educational systems comprising elementary schools, kindergartens, and gymnasia gradually developed, providing a Hebrew environment for thousands of young people.7 Graduates of these institutions possessed not only a good knowledge of Hebrew, but also the willingness to use it as their main means of communication. However, an organic speech community whose principal language was Hebrew emerged only in Palestine. It was only within that speech community, and only among the younger generation, that a distinct native variety of the language was created. The process of speech revival therefore involved two distinct developments: a sociolinguistic process, which resulted in the formation of a new speech community, and a linguistic process that brought about a new linguistic variety. Whereas the first process was conscious, premeditated, and shared by adults and children alike, the second process was spontaneous and unplanned, and it was carried out exclusively by children.8 Both these processes were intimately connected to the formation of a Hebrew educational system in Palestine.

Hebrew in the Educational System The founding of educational institutions that employed Hebrew as a main means of instruction was crucial for speech revival. However, in the first years of the endeavor, only a small percentage of children attended such institutions (according to one of the central figures in the teachers’ association, it was only three to four percent of the children in Palestine in 1903).9 Most Jewish children, both in Palestine and abroad, continued to receive a traditional Jewish education in which the purpose of Hebrew instruction was to enable the reading of religious scriptures. More modern forms of Jewish education were introduced, first in the diaspora and from 1856 in Palestine as well,10 by schools sponsored by philanthropic Jewish organizations such as the Alliance israélite or the Hilfsverein der Deutschen Juden, as well as by philanthropists such as the Rothschild family, all of which were driven by Jewish Enlightenment ideas. However, teaching in these schools was conducted in the European language of the managing organization (French, English, and later, German). To be sure, instruction of Hebrew in those schools followed more modern methods than those employed in traditional Jewish education, and beginning in the early 1880s, the “Hebrew in Hebrew” method—​namely, using the target language as the language of instruction—​was employed.11 Still, Hebrew was intended to be learned by the children only as a foreign language. The innovation of Hebrew schools was their employment of Hebrew not only in language classes, but as the language of instruction of all school subjects. Such schools began to be established in the late 1880s by a small number of zealots driven by national ideology. They were particularly dominant in the so-​called “colonies” (newly founded agricultural settlements in Palestine) where, by the early 20th century, they

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became the dominant option for modern education. In contrast, in urban centers such as Jaffa and Jerusalem, Hebrew-​only schools were attended by a minority of children at the turn of the century.12 In the first phase of their existence, these schools offered basic elementary education for three to five years; many children left school even before the end of that duration.13 As the principal goal of the institutions was to instill language skills, the division of children in classes was based on knowledge of Hebrew rather than on age.14 These initiatives had to cope with a wide range of difficulties.15 Most of the ideologists who decided to dedicate themselves to teaching in these schools lacked pedagogical training, and they had no curriculum or textbooks to guide them. Moreover, as they had learned Hebrew in the traditional manner, they were unaccustomed to speaking Hebrew, let alone teaching in that language. Even the choice of pronunciation posed a dilemma: as late as 1904, soon after a teachers’ association was founded, one of the first topics debated by its members was which pronunciation tradition of Hebrew should be preferred for school instruction, Ashkenazi or Sephardi.16 Further challenges were posed, inter alia, by financial difficulties and a great measure of instability due to the disproportional influence of individual teachers on the character of any given school, along with the often unenthusiastic reaction of parents to the idea of involving their children in this educational experiment.17 In the first years of the Hebrew schools’ existence, these difficulties were manifested in poor scholastic achievements. Up until the end of the Ottoman period, complaints were often heard that “[in] the schools in all the colonies [ . . . ] the pupils received—​and many of them still receive—​only a very superficial [level of] knowledge, and [ . . . ] they don’t even know the language well.”18 Such views were held by both supporters and opponents of the Hebrew schools. As Yeshayahu Press, one of the founders of Hebrew educational institutions in Jerusalem in the early 20th century acknowledged: “Despite our considerable success in the education enterprise, the different ages of the pupils [and] the mixture of languages they spoke [ . . . ] had a negative effect on their mental development and on the scholastic achievements in the lower grades.”19 The low level of achievement was often attributed to pedagogic factors. According to a visitor to Palestine at the beginning of the 20th century, “anyone who came to Palestine with [a]‌half, third or quarter of an education in his hand turned into a teacher of schoolchildren in the colonies [ . . . ] and since there is no specific, agreed-​ on method for school instruction among experts on that subject [ . . . ] there is much confusion in all schools in the colonies, and [ . . . ] most of them do not fulfill their true goal.”20 Linguistic factors were also commonly mentioned as a reason for the problematic state of the schools in the colonies. Writers repeatedly noted that as “the Hebrew language has still not developed sufficiently for its use in the study of general topics,”21 the insistence on its employment as the main language of instruction inevitably hampered the level of studies. In addition, children were required to learn at least one—​and often more than one—​foreign language alongside Hebrew, and consequently “the children receive meager [ . . . ] mental, moral, and national assets in those schools that dedicate most of their time to ‘languages.’ ”22 A satirical representation of this reality appeared in a feuilleton from 1906 that described the case of a little girl who, due to marked linguistic diversity among the Jewish population and the multiple

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languages encountered in school, learns to speak eight different languages by the age of eight. “It is self-​evident how much knowledge, how much development and how much science can be provided by eight languages combined. This you can surely understand, parents and teachers!” the writer concluded. 23 A major problem was the need to teach the children language skills before any other school subject could be introduced. According to teachers’ testimonies, this task took up at least a year of the limited time of school attendance.24 In the view of Zionist leader Menahem Ussishkin, such a price had to be paid in order to promote the goals of Zionism even though it was obvious that, “from the pedagogical viewpoint, it is better to teach our sons in a rich, cultural language such as Russian, German, or the spoken language in the majority of ancestral homes—​Yiddish. The instruction in Hebrew in the first days [of schooling] is pedagogically deficient [ . . . ] since Hebrew is not a mother tongue and it is not the cultural language of contemporary life.”25 In any event, since after graduation the children had little use of the Hebrew they acquired, over time many of them forgot what they had learned.26 The solution found for these problems was the establishment of Hebrew-​language preschools. Since very young children possess an innate ability to learn languages easily, it was believed that attending Hebrew preschools would enable them to acquire the necessary language skills relatively easily before entering school.27 This idea was not entirely new. Preparatory preschool classes in French already existed in the Alliance school in Jerusalem,28 and in 1889, when the first society for the promotion of Hebrew speech was established in Jerusalem, its members declared their intention to send Hebrew-​speaking women to the maestras (Sephardi women who operated dame schools in Jerusalem) in order to teach young girls to speak the language, so that in the future, when they grew up and had children of their own, Hebrew would be their mother tongue.29 At the time, Hebrew-​speaking women were a rarity, since in traditional Jewish society only males were educated in Hebrew,30 but in the 1890s, when Hebrew-​speaking girls finally started to graduate from the Hebrew schools, the idea became feasible. Several girls who excelled in their studies were sent for short training periods to become preschool teachers and, beginning in 1898, a number of Hebrew kindergartens were opened in the colonies and in the cities. The inexperienced young women (all aged 16 or 17) were chosen for the task exclusively on the basis of their ability to speak Hebrew, and they relied on the more veteran male teachers to instruct and assist them in assembling (and sometimes creating) the necessary pedagogic material for the kindergartens’ activities.31 As noted, the main objective of the Hebrew kindergartens was to teach the children Hebrew before they entered school.32 Initially they functioned as preparatory classes that did not differ much from a regular school—​that is, children sat at desks and participated in frontal language classes in which they memorized words and sentences presented by the teacher, listened to stories, and learned didactic songs aimed at expanding their vocabulary.33 Despite their shortcomings, these new institutions gained immediate success. A telling case is that of Jerusalem, where Ashkenazi religious authorities had continually struggled against the establishment of modern educational institutions from the mid-​19th century.34 Despite severe warnings issued by ultra-​Orthodox leaders upon the opening of the first Hebrew kindergarten in 1903, all 70 places were soon filled, and a second kindergarten opened its doors within a year.35

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The success of these ventures is reflected as well in parents’ repeated complaints that their own neighborhoods lacked a modern, Hebrew kindergarten. “Dear Sirs!” one parent wrote to the founders of the first kindergarten in the city, “why are we denied the great favor you bestow on other neighborhoods with the ‘kindergarten’ you have founded? Here we are, six neighborhoods in one area [ . . . ] and we cannot benefit from this blessing, and why are we deprived as compared to other neighborhoods?”36 By 1906, more than 500 girls and boys in Jerusalem alone were enrolled in Hebrew-​ language kindergartens,37 and by 1913, there were 35 kindergarten classes scattered around the country in 20 different institutions.38 By contemporary standards, such numbers might seem small, yet given the small population of the Yishuv, they were sufficient to exert a significant impact on the diffusion of Hebrew.39 Whereas opinions regarding the achievements of the Hebrew schools diverged, praise for the success of the kindergartens in teaching language skills was unanimous.40 “I found groups of boys and girls playing on their own, without anyone nearby supervising them,” noted one observer in 1904, “and they were calling out in Hebrew to one another [ . . . ] the way real children naturally play with each other in their mother tongue. And all of this in only ten months! It was then that I grasped the importance of the kindergarten for bringing about Hebrew speech, and I realized [ . . . ] how much we had missed by not having started long ago.”41 The natural manner in which kindergarten children acquired the language was often illustrated by contemporary writers’ lists of activities conducted in Hebrew—​not only conversing, but also singing, playing, laughing, crying, fighting, or going for a walk with classmates and teachers.42 Because the Hebrew kindergartens were conducted exclusively in Hebrew (even when they were financed and managed by Jewish organizations abroad that followed a bilingual policy in the schools they operated in Palestine), it was the preschool children, rather than older schoolchildren, who most readily adopted it as their principal language. The early acquisition of Hebrew by preschool children had a significant effect on the Hebrew schools.43 In 1897, even before the establishment of the first kindergarten, one writer predicted that, if children became accustomed to using Hebrew in preschool, they would find, upon entering school, that “everything [is] ready for them; when a book is opened in front of them [ . . . ] they will read and understand what they read.”44 In the realm of pronunciation, kindergartens were expected to solve the indecisiveness regarding which of the various traditional pronunciations of Hebrew should be used: “[T]‌he kindergarten is the first step; elementary and middle school will follow the kindergarten; the pronunciation brought by children to school will necessarily bind the teachers.”45 And indeed, according to teachers’ testimonies, “in terms of their influence on the revival of the language among children [ . . . ] the kindergartens did wonders. Only thanks to them did Hebrew become practically the daily language of toddlers, and once they entered school they could proceed in it in a natural manner.”46 In addition, the early exposure to Hebrew was undoubtedly significant in enabling Hebrew to become a quasi-​native tongue among children who came from non-Hebrew-speaking homes.47 Because of their tender age, the language shift was less felt, and as they spent most of their waking hours among their peer group, conversing in Hebrew became for them the most natural linguistic behavior.

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The establishment of preschools was a significant step in the stabilization of Hebrew education in Palestine; other stabilizing factors soon followed suit. The foundation of the teachers’ association in 1903 brought about enhanced cooperation among teachers. In contrast to the reliance on local initiatives that characterized the activity of the Hebrew teachers in the earlier period, the teacher’s association now offered common curricula and textbooks. In addition, with the opening of gymnasia and institutions for professional education (among them, a teachers’ seminary and a school of commerce) from 1904 on, children were able to complete their education exclusively in Hebrew, from early childhood until graduation. This development provided a significant boost for Hebrew, enabling it to become the dominant language among the younger generation. The new educational reality was well reflected in the “language war” of 1913—​a controversy regarding which language of instruction would be employed at a higher technological institute in Haifa that would later become the Technion, which soon developed into a civil struggle of the Jewish population in Palestine for the cause of Hebrew.48 In a manifesto sent to the Jewish press, a group of high school students protested against the intention to set German rather than Hebrew as the language of instruction, explaining how important Hebrew was to them. In their words: “[We] speak, learn and think in [Hebrew] and only in [Hebrew ...]. No other language can replace Hebrew in our thoughts and world of knowledge.”49 The diffusion and entrenchment of Hebrew among the younger generation is evident as well in the first demographic survey of the Jewish population of Palestine that was conducted toward the end of the First World War, in which more than three quarters of the children of the “new Yishuv” (the agricultural settlements and Tel Aviv) declared themselves to be Hebrew-​speakers, as compared with only a third of the adult population.50 With the emergence of a high proportion of Hebrew-​speakers among the younger generation, an organic speech community could finally develop. This could not have happened in the first generation of native-​born children, as children of this generation (including those who spoke Hebrew from early childhood) generally heard and spoke a different language at home.51 However, once these children grew up and started their own families, they naturally set up Hebrew-​speaking homes, in which Hebrew could become for the first time a truly native tongue.

Sociolinguistic Aspects Throughout the First Aliyah (1882–​1904), the spread of Hebrew for daily communication was centered among elementary school children, whereas among the adult population, zealots of Hebrew were few and exceptional. As noted, however, children during this era knew other languages as well, and although many of them could easily converse in Hebrew by the end of their years in elementary school, they had to resort to other languages in order to attain higher education or to join the job market. The first indications of a nuclei of adult Hebrew-​speakers appeared during the next wave of mass immigration (the Second Aliyah of 1904–​1914).52 Among the ideologically motivated immigrants who arrived in Palestine during this time, many were

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willing to speak Hebrew—​this being a language they knew from traditional Jewish education, from private instruction at Zionist homes in Europe, or from their attending modernized Jewish educational institutions (primarily the so-​called “reformed ḥeders” that were established in the 1890s). In Palestine, as noted, the educational system expanded during those years beyond elementary level, and children who had been educated in the Hebrew schools gradually became young adults. A  growing presence of Hebrew was also felt in the public sphere, as, for instance, at public meetings or on street signs. During the interwar period, Hebrew education significantly expanded and consolidated both in Palestine and in Europe (particularly in Poland), such that a growing number of young people attended Hebrew institutions from preschool age until high school graduation. Moreover, a Hebrew environment was often available to them beyond school hours (regardless of the language of the surrounding society or the parental homes) not only in Palestine53 but in many diaspora communities as well, as, for instance, through participation in Zionist youth movements.54 As a result, throughout the interwar period, young people who had learned Hebrew as a modern, living language in childhood became part of the emergent speech community.55 By the time the state of Israel was established in 1948, the number of people there who declared themselves to be Hebrew-​speakers exceeded half a million.56 From a pedagogical viewpoint, schools in Europe were as successful as those in Palestine in producing Hebrew-​speakers (in fact, the achievements of Hebrew education in Europe often exceeded those of similar institutions in Palestine). From the sociolinguistic viewpoint, however, there was a fundamental difference in their span of influence. In Europe, the influence of Hebrew-​language schools ceased upon students’ graduation, and graduates could become part of the social process of Hebrew speech revival only if they immigrated to Palestine.57 In Palestine, by contrast, children influenced their own social environment and played a key role in shaping the emergent speech community. In both locations, therefore, Hebrew education played a crucial role in disseminating the knowledge of Hebrew, but only in Palestine was its effect felt in real life. Apart from the promotion of language skills, a major declared task of Hebrew education in Palestine was to create a common ground among children of various ethnic origins, not only linguistically but also culturally.58 According to Yeshayahu Press: “Nothing can bring closer all the various parts of the population [ . . . ], who differ in their languages, their costumes, their clothes and their habits . . . [H]‌ere sits the son of the banker with the son of the worker, and the Ashkenazi boy plays with the Sephardi and Yemenite boy, since they share one language, Hebrew, that ties them all together.”59 When these “toddlers become men,” another writer predicted shortly after the first kindergarten in Jerusalem was established in 1903, “all of them—​ Sephardi and Ashkenazi and Maghrebi and Yemenite and Bukharan and Persian—​ will share one language [ . . . ] and they will become one ethnic group.”60 More than three decades later, a writer who lamented the ethnic divisions in Jerusalem noted that, “from the day Hebrew schools and kindergartens were founded [ . . . ] this plague of schism is growing weaker [ . . . ] and there is hope that, given enough time, it will completely disappear. The language is what counts, as it can either split or unite.”61 The task of ethnic unification remained a central objective of the educational system

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after the founding of the state, as continued waves of mass immigration needed to be integrated into Israeli society linguistically, socially, and culturally.62 Educational activities did not focus exclusively on Hebrew-​language instruction. They also included a strong ideological component. The aim was to nurture a commitment to Hebrew that would extend beyond the hours spent in school.63 Hebrew was presented as a major symbol of the nation-​building project and as the language of the future, as opposed to whatever foreign languages were spoken at home, all of which represented the Jewish past in the diaspora.64 This indoctrination created a situation common to other immigrant societies, namely, children being unwilling to converse in their native tongues, since they regarded the language of the surrounding society as being more prestigious. Although in the case of Hebrew no adult Hebrew-​speaking society existed at first, such a surrounding was provided by the peer group. Children were used to speaking Hebrew among themselves from the long hours they spent in the educational system, and they carried over this habit beyond school hours, as the warm weather and the rural character of new Jewish settlements in Palestine enabled them to spend most of their waking hours outside the family home from a very young age (often as early as age three or four).65 In these circumstances, the peer group could be much more influential from the linguistic viewpoint than the family, and older children often taught their younger siblings Hebrew even before the latter commenced their institutional Hebrew education.66 Speaking Hebrew among themselves was not merely a matter of habit but also a point of pride, a marker of in-​group solidarity and local identity that enabled children to nurture a conscious dichotomy between their own generation and that of their immigrant parents.67 Children who attended the Hebrew schools naturally set up Hebrew-​speaking homes as adults, as they were accustomed to speaking Hebrew with each other. Yet the expansion of Hebrew from the public to the private sphere began to be felt long before that, when they were still young, as they tended to bring Hebrew from the educational system into the family home.68 An observer commented in 1902 that kindergarten children did not merely master Hebrew themselves, but also had a profound impact on their parents, for “[how] could the father and the mother resist the chirpings of their offspring?”69 Six decades later, the poet Avraham Shlonsky noted that the normal direction of language acquisition was still reversed in Israeli society, as language knowledge continued to be passed from young to old: “from his home, from older people, the child inherits linguistic poverty and pallor [ . . . ] [It is] the children who teach their grandmothers and mothers Hebrew. They are the ones who enrich the language of their parents.”70 The reversed roles of parents and children were particularly apparent during the mass immigration after 1948. “One language—​one people,” reads the headline of a poster from the early 1950s urging new immigrants to learn Hebrew in evening classes, “for your own sake and for the sake of your children” (Fig. 3.1). The illustration depicts a father whose little daughter is holding a note on which she has written “learn Hebrew.” It is the child who goads her father to acquire Hebrew, which by then was both the dominant language in Israel’s heterogeneous society and a crucial means of acculturation.71 Although the heavy-​built man, a strong manual worker, is facing us and dominating the poster, it is clear that the petite yet assertive girl with her dazzling white note is the main actor.

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Fig. 3.1  “One Language, One People: For Your Own Sake and For That of Your Children, Learn Hebrew!” Poster calling on the public to sign up for evening Hebrew classes (1954). Image reproduced courtesy Kedem Auction House Ltd.

Repeated testimonies indicate that the expansion of Hebrew into the family home involved primarily preschool children.72 For children who were first exposed to Hebrew in elementary school, communicating with their parents in Hebrew involved a change of existing linguistic habits, namely a language shift. Moreover, the low level of familiarity with Hebrew among women in the parent generation restricted the possibility of involving mothers in a significant Hebrew conversation.73 Such inhibitions did not affect younger, preschool children who were still in an initial phase of their language acquisition process, not only in Hebrew but in their mother tongue as

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well. A telling example of this difference is provided by a resident of Jaffa, where a Hebrew kindergarten was first opened in 1902. When her younger children started speaking Hebrew among themselves and with their elder brothers, she writes, “I had to start speaking Hebrew as well, as it was impossible [ . . . ] for the language of school and the language of home not to coincide.” However, she notes, “with the older children I continued to speak Yiddish, and likewise with the visitors to my home, since I was ashamed to start all of a sudden to speak Hebrew with them, and it also seemed to me unnatural.”74 A similar story is told by Ita Yellin, well-​known for her own public activity in the Yishuv, as well as for being the daughter of Yechiel Michal Pines (a leading Hebraist and an associate of Eliezer Ben-​Yehuda) and the wife of David Yellin (one of the first Hebrew teachers, who later served as president both of the teachers’ association and the Hebrew Language Committee). In her memoir, she notes that “the Hebrew mother had no choice but to learn the language from her children who were educated in our language, and once they returned home from the kindergarten, they chattered with their parents and sang their songs in Hebrew.”75 According to Yellin, poor language skills among the mothers was not the sole factor inhibiting Hebrew speech at home. She herself initially kept a Yiddish-​speaking household; although she knew Hebrew well from a young age, having received lessons in spoken Hebrew directly from Ben-​ Yehuda, she objected to the fact that “those who stood at the forefront of the revival of our language took no heed of our traditional faith.” Thus, “[a]‌lthough I learned and read books in Hebrew, I have to admit that I started to speak Hebrew only when my children [ . . . ] learned in the Hebrew kindergarten and their only language was Hebrew.”76 The acquisition of Hebrew by girls was viewed as particularly crucial for speech revival, since the care of young children at home and at the preschool during the critical period of language acquisition was considered to be a female task.77 However, during the late 19th century and early 20th century, few girls (as opposed to boys) outside Palestine knew Hebrew, as girls were mostly educated either in Yiddish or, in more modernized homes, in foreign-​language schools.78 In Palestine, by contrast, the Hebrew schools and kindergartens were attended equally by boys and girls. In a 1902 newspaper column titled “our possessions,” Ben-​Yehuda explicitly identified female speakers as the most essential factor for the future of Hebrew. Estimating that, at the time, there were no more than 200 women aged 16 and older who spoke Hebrew in Palestine (in his words, “these possessions are meager”), he was nonetheless optimistic. “We can safely turn our eyes from the past to the future, the near future,” he assured his readers, since there were already more than 700 girls in kindergartens and schools in the colonies and in Jaffa who spoke Hebrew almost exclusively.79 From the cultural viewpoint, the spread of Hebrew among children involved the expansion of the language into new usage domains.80 The daily activity of kindergartens and elementary schools was dependent on the availability of songs, stories, plays, and textbooks, and reading material in Hebrew was needed for leisure time. When the Hebrew schools were first established, children’s literature in Hebrew was very limited in scope. It was aimed at children who were speakers of other languages, and it reflected the archaic, highly didactic contents and linguistic style of Jewish Enlightenment literary production.81 Thus, pupils complained about “a style that is

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alien to them; the elevated language (leshon hamelitzot) in which they are written is odd for these children, who speak Hebrew as a simple, living language.”82 In consequence, Hebrew speakers initially had to resort to reading material in other languages in order to satisfy their cultural needs,83 a phenomenon that undermined the wish to transform Hebrew into a principal language.84 By the end of the First World War, however—​thanks to efforts made by teachers, linguists, writers, and publishers in Europe and in Palestine—​Hebrew children’s literature was totally transformed.85 The growing corpus of modern children’s literature, both original and translated, was no longer intended to suit the needs of language learners, but was written for a target audience for whom Hebrew had already become a native, spoken, principal language.86

Linguistic Aspects During the first decades of the 20th century, the growing presence of Hebrew among children in Palestine evoked ambivalent reactions. In the kindergartens, an observer commented as early as 1904, children quickly acquired a “holy tongue unlike that of the Rambam. And yet all these little children speak Hebrew!”87 On the one hand, educators and language planners considered much of the language used by children to be erroneous, and they attempted to stamp out linguistic features that did not conform to their definition of correct usage. On the other hand, they were charmed by this new Hebrew’s naturalness, which differed so greatly from the artificial character of Hebrew speech among members of their own generation.88 The linguist Haim Blanc, one of the founders of the scientific study of Modern Hebrew, attributed the difference between these two generations to a different mechanism of language acquisition:  “The Hebrew they [= the revivalists] had learned in their youth was different from the one we speak and write today in one fundamental respect: They studied primarily from school and from the written sources”; whereas the younger generation “learns primarily from the living language and from speech.”89 Certain members of the revival generation likewise acknowledged that, since they grew up speaking other languages, they were unable “to imagine the inner mental character of a child who grew up in Hebrew as a sole language of culture and speech.”90 For the revivalists, the changes in the language that resulted from the successful implementation of Hebrew speech revival were unexpected and mostly unwelcome. Although they hoped that children would transform Hebrew into a natural means of oral communication, something they themselves were unable to do,91 they expected the children to fully conform to the linguistic models presented by the classical written texts. However, from the linguistic viewpoint, far-​reaching changes in the linguistic system were inevitable, as spoken vernaculars and written languages are known to be subject to different dynamics.92 Thus, whereas for the revivalists the primary linguistic model was the classical Hebrew sources, and therefore they perceived language use among children as distorted, what they actually witnessed was the formation of a fundamentally new linguistic variety. This new linguistic variety—​ native Hebrew—​reflected spontaneous linguistic processes that naturally occur in any

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living spoken language learned in early childhood. The main peculiarity of the case of Hebrew was that, in contrast to most cases of early language acquisition, the children could not internalize an existing linguistic model presented by the adult environment but rather needed to form their own linguistic system based on the partial, highly variable, example of adult speech that was presented to them by their non-​native teachers and parents.93 One of the most notable characteristics of the emergent native variety was its relatively high level of uniformity. For many decades, adult non-​native speech remained highly variable, marked by numerous foreign accents, varying levels of proficiency, and different kinds of influence from the speakers’ background languages, whereas among children educated in the Hebrew schools in Palestine from a tender age, a distinct native variety of Hebrew, shared by all, soon emerged. “If there is anything that impresses the external observer, it is the great uniformity of sabra speech, despite the great variability of the ethnic origins and backgrounds of the native-​born children,” Blanc wrote in a newspaper column originally published in the early 1950s. “This uniformity is specifically expressed in uniformity of the deviations from traditional Hebrew.”94 A similar observation is included in the first study of Hebrew child language that was conducted around that time. Whereas adult speech is highly divergent, the writer commented, anyone who listens at “any school, kindergarten, playground, etc. [ . . . ] to the exchange among children when playing peacefully or quarreling [ . . . ] immediately feels that this population speaks a common, uniform language.”95 Such observations refer to the results of the nativization processes of Hebrew, but they teach us very little about the nature of the linguistic processes that operated in the language during the formative period of speech revival. Nowadays, it is no longer possible to study these processes, since reliable linguistic evidence from the early 20th century on the nature of Hebrew speech is unavailable.96 However, certain insights regarding the principles of the linguistic processes involved may be extracted from studies of parallel cases of new linguistic varieties that emerged among children in newly created speech communities where, as was the case in Palestine, adults did not share common speech habits. One such well-​studied case is the emergence of a distinctive regional variety of English in a new urban center, Milton Keynes, that was established in 1969 as a means of promoting internal migration within the United Kingdom. As opposed to members of the adult population who speak English in many different varieties in accordance with their place of origin, children born in Milton Keynes speak the language in a new, uniform manner. This variety, shared by all local children, differs in its accent both from that of the original inhabitants of the area and from that of parents originating in other areas of the U.K., indicating the stronger influence of the peer group as opposed to linguistic models provided by adult caregivers, whether parents or teachers.97 An additional well-​studied case showing a similar pattern is the formation of New Zealand English.98 The emergence of these new varieties of English was attributed in research to the human tendency for linguistic accommodation in face-​to-​face interaction (“talk like the others talk”).99 Faced with a linguistic variety different from their own, people naturally modify their speech patterns to better conform to those of their interlocutor. They rarely do so by adopting unfamiliar features from the various available options,

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but instead tend to reduce (or altogether avoid) the employment of linguistic features that are in some way unusual.100 This mechanism, which operates on a local basis in any linguistic encounter (for instance, in exchanges between young and old, or in familiar versus formal circumstances) may lead, in situations of continual contact over an extended period of time, to permanent linguistic changes. The study of historical cases of long-​term mutually intelligible dialect contact, notes the linguist Peter Trudgill, indicate that, in such circumstances, the formation of a new variety by the local children through mutual linguistic accommodation is practically inevitable—​in fact, “there is no known case of it not happening.”101 The case of Hebrew, despite its idiosyncratic circumstances, shares certain fundamental features with such well-​studied historical cases, as it involved the exposure of children to a highly variable adult example of mutually intelligible varieties of the language. Throughout the process of language acquisition, children always engage in reanalysis of the linguistic material they are exposed to in their interactions both with adults and with other children, as they need to extract a coherent set of implicit grammatical rules out of the highly variable individual examples of words, morphological forms, and syntactic constructions occurring in speech.102 In a situation of dialect contact, a process of homogenization is necessarily involved in this reanalysis.103 Such a homogenization process was central to the emergence of native Hebrew. A telling testimony regarding the operation of this mechanism is provided by a central scholar in the field of dialect contact, Talmy Givón, based on recollections of his childhood in Palestine in the 1930s: The models of spoken Hebrew which were presented to the first-​generation native speaker were variable, unstable and “degenerate” in both phonology and grammar. To this day the old-​time immigrants speak what the native speaker tends to consider erroneous, “funny,” variable Hebrew. Nevertheless in the first 3–​6 years of language acquisition, the native speakers managed to produce a coherent, unified and stable dialect of Hebrew that bears little resemblance to [the] speech of their parents and teachers. The linguistic dichotomy between the first-​generation native speaker and the immigrant was a strong factor in the children’s consciousness [ . . . ] [generating a] feeling of social “differentness”—​and elitism—​which often marked the conscious attitude of the natives towards their own parents.104

The homogenization process operated in all fields of the linguistic system, but its results are most easily observed in the realm of pronunciation. Modern Hebrew pronunciation is based on a combination of features derived from two liturgical reading traditions used by Jews at the eve of speech revival—​the Ashkenazi and the Sephardi. In principle, the revivalists preferred the Sephardi over the Ashkenazi pronunciation, but since the majority of them were Ashkenazi, their adoption of the Sephardi pronunciation was only partial. The resulting pronunciation system, succinctly defined by one member of the revival generation as “Sephardi by will but Ashkenazi by ability,”105 is best described as the lowest common denominator of the two pronunciation systems:  the stress placement and the vowel system are based in principle on those of the Sephardi pronunciation, whereas the inventory of consonants is based (with certain amendments) on the Ashkenazi pronunciation.106 The resulting

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pronunciation system therefore includes fewer vowels than the Ashkenazi tradition (which, unlike the Sephardi tradition, distinguishes the kamatz from the pataḥ and the segol from the tzere), and fewer consonants than the Sephardi tradition (which includes, inter alia, a distinct pronunciation of the gutturals ḥet and ’ayin).107 However, although this basic combination of the two traditional pronunciation systems was shared by adults and children alike, a significant difference soon developed between the generations. The pronunciation of adults was highly variable, being heavily marked by the influence of their former languages, and occasionally also by their reading tradition of the sacred texts. As an educator writing during the 1930s noted: “A person who came from Germany pronounces a German /​l/​in his Hebrew as well, one who came from Russia is immediately recognized by his Russian /​r/​, and one who came from England or America is totally incapable of pronouncing the Hebrew /​ḥ/​and changes it to /​h/​in accordance with English usage.”108 Children, though, soon developed a distinct, native pronunciation, which did “not ordinarily exhibit identifiable signs of their (i.e. their parents’) linguistic background.”109 This pronunciation was not restricted to native-​born children, but was largely adopted by immigrant children who managed to fully assimilate into Israeli society, such that, “although they were not born in Israel, their language use is no different from the language of those born in the land, and bears no signs of an accent that may attest to a direct link to a foreign language.”110 In this new, shared pronunciation system, the highly marked sounds of the various foreign accents were discarded. Nowadays, only two distinct native varieties of Hebrew may be broadly distinguished: a “general” pronunciation used by most speakers, regardless of ethnic origin, and an “Oriental” variety, marked by the presence of up to three consonants (guttural ḥet and ’ayin and frontal resh), but otherwise including no other clear distinctive features as compared with the general variety. The latter variety is found exclusively among a certain portion of speakers born to families of Oriental origins, and its distribution among them is partial, as many of them adopt the general pronunciation. Initially, children who used the native variety of Hebrew were a small minority in the emergent speech community, but in the long run the selection processes that resulted in the adoption or rejection of linguistic features available in their linguistic environment shaped the standard, unmarked variety of Modern Hebrew.111 This process was, at the same time, both quick and gradual. On the one hand, the diffusion of a distinct variety of Hebrew among children had become increasingly apparent as early as the end of the Ottoman period. On the other hand, the number of children belonging to this group remained for several decades relatively small (estimated as no more than 10 percent of the Jewish population in the pre-​state period, namely a mere 5,000–​8,000 speakers in the 1930s, and some 20,000 at the time of independence).112 As late as the 1960s, Blanc still estimated that “present-​ day native and near-​native usage [ . . . ] is recent [ . . . ], not yet that of a majority, but it shows unmistakable signs of becoming dominant.”113 Since its first users had reached middle age by that time, their offspring spoke Hebrew as a true mother tongue. It is this linguistic variety, Blanc concludes, “the language of the native and near-​native speaker (in all its aspects) which most properly deserves the name of ‘Israeli Hebrew.’ ”114

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Notes 1. Menahem Ussishkin, Sefer Ussishkin: leyovel hashiv’im (Jerusalem: 1933), 189. 2. Eliezer Meir Lipschütz, Ketavim, vol. 2 (Jerusalem: 1949), 258 (page numbers in this book are marked by the Hebrew letters, according to Jewish gematria). 3. On Eliezer Ben-​Yehuda, see Jack Fellman, Eliezer Ben Yehuda and the Modern Hebrew Language:  The Revival of a Classical Tongue (The Hague:  1973); Yosef Lang, Daber ’ivrit!: ḥayei Eliezer Ben Yehudah (Jerusalem: 2008). 4. Havatzelet (2 January 1880), 3. Page numbers in quotations from the period’s press refer to the number of the page in the specific issue, in order to facilitate searching at the Historical Jewish Press Website, online at web.nli.org.il/​sites/​JPress/​Hebrew/​Pages/​default.aspx. 5. Ibid. 6. George Mandel, “Why Did Ben-​Yehuda Suggest the Revival of Spoken Hebrew?” in Hebrew in Ashkenaz: A Language in Exile, ed. Lewis Glinert (Oxford: 1993), 193–​207. 7. For detailed descriptions of the educational system in Palestine, see Rachel Elboim-​ Dror, Haḥinukh ha’ivri beeretz yisrael, vol. 1 (Jerusalem:  1986); Shlomo Haramati, Reshit haḥinukh ha’ivri baaretz uterumato lehaḥyaat halashon (Jerusalem: 1978). On Jewish education in Eastern Europe, see Haim Ormian, “Perakim betoledot batei hasefer hapolaniyim–​ ha’ivriyim hatziburiyim bepolin bashanim 1918–​1939,” Dor ledor 1 (1981), 7–​51; Noah Pniel, Perakim betoledot haḥinukh ha’ivri (Tel Aviv: 1981); Ido Bassok, “Reshet haḥinukh ha’ivrit ‘Tarbut’ bepolin bein shetei milḥamot ha’olam,” Hed haulpan heḥadash 100 (2013), 35–​41; Adina Bar-​El, “Migvan hazeramim haḥinukhiyim bakehilah hayehudit bepolin,” Ma’of uma’aseh 1 (1994), 165–​174; idem, “Shekhinat eretz yisrael meraḥefet ’al penei kol hayeladim umoreihem: hasafah ha’ivrit veeretz yisrael bevatei sefer bepolin,” Ma’of uma’aseh 11 (2005), 145–​153. 8. Aaron Bar-​ Adon, “Reviving a Language:  Different Roles for Men, Women, and Children?” in Semitic Studies in Honor of Wolf Leslau, vol. 1, ed. Alan S. Kaye (Wiesbaden: 1991), 119–​127. 9. Yosef Azaryahu, “Haḥinukh ha’ivri beeretz yisrael,” in Sefer hayovel shel histadrut hamorim 1902–​1927, ed. David Kimhi (Jerusalem: 1928), 79. 10. Zeev Walk, “Tzemiḥat haḥinukh haleumi bamoshavot,” in Sefer ha’aliyah harishonah, ed. Mordechai Eliav, Yemima Rosenthal, and Chaya Har-​El (Jerusalem: 1981), 407–​426. 11. See, for example, Shlomo Haramati, Sheloshah shekadmu leBen Yehudah (Jerusalem: 1978). 12. Azaryahu, “Haḥinukh ha’ivri beeretz yisrael,” 79; Walk, “Tzemiḥat haḥinukh haleumi bamoshavot”; Haramati, Reshit haḥinukh ha’ivri baaretz uterumato lehaḥyaat halashon. 13. “Hasafah ha’ivrit be’erkah hamedini,” in Ha’omer: kovetz mada’i-​sifruti, vol. 2, ed. S. Ben-​Tziyon (Jaffa: 1908), 8. 14. Azaryahu, “Haḥinukh ha’ivri beeretz yisrael,” 68. 15. For a detailed description, see Haramati, Reshit haḥinukh ha’ivri baaretz uterumato lehaḥyaat halashon; Elboim-​Dror, Haḥinukh ha’ivri beeretz yisrael. 16. See David Yellin, Hamivta vehaketiv be’ivrit:  hartzaah baasefah hakelalit hashenit leagudat hamorim beeretz yisrael (Jerusalem: 1904). 17. See, for example, the testimony of Rivka Alper, Korot mishpaḥah aḥat (Jerusalem: 1966), 180. 18. Hapo’el hatza’ir (29 July 1909), 8. Similar assessments are provided by other contemporary writers, among them Ahad Ha’am; see ’Al parashat derakhim, vol. 1 (Berlin: 1903), 48. 19. Yeshayahu Press, Meah shanah biyrushalayim:  mizikhronot ish yerushalayim (Jerusalem: 1946), 108–​109; and see likewise Azaryahu, “Haḥinukh ha’ivri beeretz yisrael,” 67–​68; Ha’omer, “Hasafah ha’ivrit be’erkah hamedini,” 8. 20. Avraham Shmuel Hirshberg, Mishpat hayishuv heḥadash beeretz yisrael (Vilna: 1900), 146. 21. Ussishkin, Sefer Ussishkin, 169. 22. Ha’omer, “Hasafah ha’ivrit be’erkah hamedini,” 8.

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23. “Mipirḥei hateḥiyah,” in Ha’omer, vol. 1 (Jaffa: 1906), 28. The harmful effect of the highly multilingual nature of the social environment on children is a repeated theme among contemporary writers. See, for example, Hashkafah (21 March 1902), 4–​5; Ha’omer, “Hasafah ha’ivrit be’erkah hamedini,” 2–​3; Israel Rubin Rivkai, ’Al sefat-​yeladeinu baaretz (mikhtavim lahorim, vol. 2) (Tel Aviv: 1937), 31; Press, Meah shanah biyrushalayim, 108–​109; Daniel Persky, “Nitzanei ’ivrit ’amamit,” Leshonenu 5 (1932), 93. 24. Azaryahu, “Haḥinukh ha’ivri beeretz yisrael.” 25. Ussishkin, Sefer Ussishkin, 188. 26. See, for example, Hapo’el hatza’ir (29 July 1909), 7; Hatzevi (9 October 1908), 2. 27. Ilan Gal-​Peer, “Gan hayeladim ha’ivri harishon utḥiyat halashon ha’ivrit,” Oshiyot 2 (1980), 17. 28. Ibid. 29. See the regulations of the society in Hatzefirah (25 September 1889), 3. 30. Bar-​Adon, “Reviving a Language,” 119–​127; Iris Parush, Nashim korot: yitronah shel shuliyut baḥevrah hayehudit bemizraḥ eiropah bameah hatesha’ ’esreh (Tel Aviv: 2001),  12–​13. 31. Tzipora Shchori-​ Rubin, “Gananot ’ivriyot bitkufat ha’aliyah harishonah veha­ sheniyah,” Dor ledor 19 (2001), 120; Alper, Korot mishpaḥah aḥat, 180; David Judelovitch, “Gan hayeladim ha’ivri harishon,” in Kimhi (ed.), Sefer hayovel shel histadrut hamorim 1902–​1927, 156. 32. Tsvia Walden, “’Ivrit baketanah aval lo bagedolah? ’Al mekomo shel gan hayeladim betipuaḥ ha’ivrit—​az vehayom,” in Leshon rabim:  ha’ivrit kisfat tarbut (Tel Aviv:  2013), 118; Tzipora Shchori-​Rubin, “‘Mipi ’olelim veyonkim yisadetah ’oz’: keitzad tarmu yaldei hagan biyrushalayim lehafatzat halashon ha’ivrit,” Hed haulpan heḥadash 102 (2014), 135. Among other goals were hygiene and the prevention of diseases, nutrition, and guidance for parents (ibid.); see also the list of goals stated in a letter of founders of the first kindergarten in Jerusalem published in Hashkafah (23 April 1903), 2–​3. 33. Dina Feitelson, “Hitpatḥut gan hayeladim ha’ivri baaretz,” Oshiyot 2 (1980), 11; Azaryahu, “Haḥinukh ha’ivri beeretz yisrael,” 67; Zohar Shavit, “Yeladim kenoseei mahapekhat hadibur,” Dor ledor 36 (2010), 22; Alper, Korot mishpaḥah aḥat, 181; Walden, “ ‘Ivrit baketanah aval lo bagedolah,” 118; Shchori-​Rubin, “Gananot ’ivriyot bitkufat ha’aliyah hari­ shonah vehasheniyah,” 120. These characteristics started to change only in 1911, when certified teachers who had received full training in preschool education and were already in their 20s arrived in Palestine and joined the educational system. See Feitelson, “Hitpatḥut gan hayeladim ha’ivri baaretz,” 12; Shimon Reshef and Yuval Dror, Haḥinukh ha’ivri biymei habayit haleumi 1919–​1948 (Jerusalem: 1998), 50. 34. Yehoshua Ben-​Arieh, ’Ir berei tekufah:  yerushalayim haḥadashah bereshitah (Jerusalem:  1978), 350–​ 361; Nathan Efrati, Ha’edah hasefaradit biyrushalayim (Jerusalem: 1999),  24–​26. 35. Shchori-​Rubin, “ ‘Mipi ’olelim veyonekim yisadtah ’oz,’ ” 135–​144; Haramati, Reshit haḥinukh ha’ivri baaretz uterumato lehaḥyaat halashon, 23. 36. Hashkafah (29 November 1903), 5, and see a similar letter in ibid. (17 May 1907), 3. 37. Press, Meah shanah biyrushalayim, 111. 38. Gal-​Peer, “Gan hayeladim ha’ivri harishon utḥiyat halashon ha’ivrit,” 19. 39. In order to understand the possible weight of the numbers quoted, it is sufficient to mention that, at that time, two devoted teachers in the Galilee managed singlehandedly to disseminate a distinct dialect that dominated the speech habits of an entire generation of local children. See Aaron Bar-​Adon, The Rise and Decline of a Dialect: A Study in the Revival of Modern Hebrew (The Hague: 1975). 40. Walden, “’Ivrit baketanah aval lo bagedolah,” 116. 41. Hashkafah (15 April 1904), 1. 42. See, for example, Hashkafah (18 April 1902), 4; ibid. (5 September 1902), 5; ibid. (17 May 1907), 3. 43. Haramati, Reshit haḥinukh ha’ivri baaretz uterumato lehaḥyaat halashon, 225–​226. 44. Hashkafah (19 November 1897), 99.

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45. Ussishkin, Sefer Ussishkin, 189; and see likewise things said by Haim Arie Zuta in a meeting of the Language Committee (Zikhronot va’ad halashon 3 [1913], 41). 46. Azaryahu, “Haḥinukh ha’ivri beeretz yisrael,” 78. 47. Cf. Shavit, “Yeladim kenoseei mahapekhat hadibur,” 15–​38; Miri Bar-​Ziv Levy and Ivy Sichel, “Terumatan shel neshot ha’aliyah harishonah livniyatah shel kehilat dovrei ’ivrit be­Rishon Letziyon,” Cathedra 169 (2019), 75–​108. 48. See, for example, Margalit Shilo, “Milḥemet hasafot ke‘tenu’ah ’amamit,’” Cathedra 74 (1994), 86–​119; Elboim-​Dror, Haḥinukh ha’ivri beeretz yisrael, 1:323–​335; Moshe Rinot, Ḥevrat ha’Ezrah liyhudei germanyah biytzirah uvemaavak: perek betoledot haḥinukh ha’ivri beeretz-​yisrael uvetoledot yehudei germanyah (Jerusalem: 1971). 49. Haaḥdut (4 July 1913), 12. 50. Roberto Bachi, “A Statistical Analysis of the Revival of Hebrew in Israel,” Scripta Hierosolymitana 3 (1956), 191. 51. On the inapplicability of the term “native speakers” for the generation of children who first started to use Hebrew as a principal language, see, for example, Rivkai, ’Al sefat-​yeladeinu baaretz, 21; Aaron Bar-​Adon, “’Iyunim beotzar hamilim shel yaldei yisrael,” Leshonenu la’am 18 (1966), 35. 52. Benjamin Harshav, Language in Time of Revolution (Stanford: 1999), 133; Aaron Bar-​ Adon, “Haniv hagelili umivtao—​perek betoledot teḥiyat ha’ivrit beeretz yisrael,” Cathedra 24 (1981), 120–​121. 53. See, for example, Joseph Klausner,’Olam mithaveh:  rishmei masa’ beeretz yisrael (Odessa: 1914), 126. 54. Pniel, Perakim betoledot haḥinukh ha’ivri, 142; Harshav, Language in Time of Revolution, 110. 55. Bar-​El, “Shekhinat eretz yisrael meraḥefet ’al penei kol hayeladim umoreihem,” 153. 56. Bachi, “A Statistical Analysis of the Revival of Hebrew in Israel.” 57. Uzzi Ornan, “Hebrew in Palestine before and after 1882,” Journal of Semitic Studies 29 (1984), 237–​238; Harshav, Language in Time of Revolution, 110. 58. Judelovitch, “Gan hayeladim ha’ivri harishon,” 156; Ha’omer, “Hasafah ha’ivrit be’erkah hamedini,” 3,7; Reshef and Dror, Haḥinukh ha’ivri biymei habayit haleumi 1919–​1948, 49–​50; Elboim-​Dror, Haḥinukh ha’ivri beeretz yisrael, 1:366. 59. Press, Meah shanah biyrushalayim, 112. 60. Hashkafah (23 April 1903), 1. 61. Avraham Ben-​Yaakov, Yerushalayim bein ḥomot:  letoledot mishpaḥat Meyuḥas (Jerusalem: 1976), 275, originally published in Haaretz (7 March 1938), 3. 62. See, for example, Tzipora Shchori-​Rubin, “Ganei hayeladim bama’abarot: kur haḥitukh shel yaldei yisrael,” Dor ledor 23 (2002), 149–​198. 63. Haramati, Reshit haḥinukh ha’ivri baaretz uterumato lehaḥyaat halashon, 10, 161, 205. 64. Itamar Even-​Zohar, “Hatzemiḥah vehahitgabshut shel tarbut ’ivrit mekomit viylidit beeretz yisrael, 1882–​1948,” Cathedra 16 (1979), 165–​189. 65. Aaron Bar-​Adon, Leshonam hameduberet shel hayeladim beyisrael (Jerusalem: 1958), 4; idem, Haniv hagelili umivtao, 131; Harshav, Language in Time of Revolution, 144–​145; Haramati, Reshit haḥinukh ha’ivri baaretz uterumato lehaḥyaat halashon, 224. 66. Azaryahu, “Haḥinukh ha’ivri beeretz yisrael,” 68. 67. Ornan, “Hebrew in Palestine before and after 1882,” 226; Talmy Givón, “Prolegomena to Any Sane Creology,” in Readings in Creole Studies, ed. Ian F. Hancock (Ghent: 1979), 32. 68. See, for example, Eliezer Meir Lipschütz, Vom lebendigen Hebräisch (Berlin: 1920), 28–​29; Haramati, Reshit haḥinukh ha’ivri baaretz uterumato lehaḥyaat halashon, 226–​229; Bar-​Adon, “Haniv hagelili umivtao,” 13. 69. Hashkafah (18 April 1902), 4. 70. Avraham Shlonsky, “Mashehu ’al hasignon hatzabari,” in idem, Yalkut eshel:  tzeror maamarim ureshimot (Tel Aviv: 1960), 161. 71. On the formal and informal status of Hebrew, see Anat Helman, Becoming Israeli: National Ideals and Everyday Life in the 1950s (Waltham: 2014), 22–​34.

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72. Shavit, “Yeladim kenoseei mahapekhat hadibur,” 21–​ 22; Shchori-​Rubin, “ ‘Mipi ’olelim veyonekim yisadetah ’oz,’ ” 135–​144; idem, “Gananot ’ivriyot bitkufat ha’aliyah ha­­ rishonah vehasheniyah,” 145; Elisheva Gissin Efrati, “Zikhronot ganenet vatikah,” Hed hagan 5–​6 (1936), 76–​77; Gal-​Peer, “Gan hayeladim ha’ivri harishon uteḥiyat halashon ha’ivrit,” 19–​ 20; Haramati, Reshit haḥinukh ha’ivri baaretz uterumato lehaḥyaat halashon, 206–​234. 73. Bar-​Adon, “Reviving a Language.” 74. Alper, Korot mishpaḥah aḥat, 182. 75. Ita Yellin, Letzeetzaai: zikhronotai (Jerusalem: 1978), 84. 76. Ibid., 81, 84–​85. Similar citations are provided by Shchori-​Rubin, “ ‘Mipi ’olelim veyonekim yisadetah ’oz’  ”; idem, “Gananot ’ivriyot bitkufat ha’aliyah harishonah vehasheniyah.” 77. Arieh Bruce Saposnik, Becoming Hebrew: The Creation of a Jewish National Culture in Ottoman Palestine (Oxford: 2008), 75. 78. Bar-​Adon, “Reviving a Language,” 122, 125; Ormian, “Perakim betoledot batei hasefer hapolaniyim-​ha’ivriyim hatziburiyim bepolin bashanim 1918–​1939,” 20. 79. Hashkafah (30 May 1902), 3. 80. Shavit, “Yeladim kenoseei mahapekhat hadibur,” 21. 81. Uriel Ofek, Sifrut hayeladim ha’ivrit—​hahatḥalah (Tel Aviv:  1979); Jutta Strauss, “‘Do Not Neglect the Education of Your Children’—​Aaron Wolfssohn the Pedagogue,” in Jüdische Erziehung und Aufklärerische Schulreform. Analysen zum späten 18. und frühen 19. Jahrhundert, ed. Britta L. Behm, Uta Lohmann, and Ingrid Lohmann (Münster: 2002), 307–​333. 82. Klausner, ’Olam mithaveh, 125. 83. See, for example, Ha’omer, “Hasafah ha’ivrit be’erkah hamedini,” 11; Nachum Gutman and Ehud Ben Ezer, Bein ḥolot ukhol shamayim (Jerusalem: 1985), 7. 84. Elboim-​Dror, Haḥinukh ha’ivri beeretz yisrael, 1:368. 85. Uriel Ofek, Sifrut hayeladim ha’ivrit 1900–​1948, vol. 1 (Tel Aviv: 1988), 216; Adina Bar-​El, “Mi‘shibolim’ ’ad ‘’olami haketantan’: reshet ‘Tarbut’ bepolin ve’itoneha liyladim,” Kesher 23 (1998), 102. 86. Ofek, Sifrut hayeladim ha’ivrit 1900–​1948, 1:216. 87. Hashkafah (15 April 1904), 1. 88. Lipschütz, Vom lebendigen Hebräisch, 30, 32. See also Shalom Spiegel, Hebrew Reborn (New York: 1930), 15–​16. Contemporary quotations on the difficulties faced by adult immigrants attempting to speak Hebrew and anecdotes about writers and public figures who were highly proficient in Hebrew in writing but had difficulties using it in speech are provided by Harshav, Language in Time of Revolution, 86–​87, 138–​139. 89. Haim Blanc, Leshon benei adam (Jerusalem: 1989), 40. 90. Shlomo Dov Goitein, Horaat ha’ivrit beeretz yisrael (Tel Aviv: 1945), 10. 91. Saposnik, Becoming Hebrew, 85. 92. See, for instance, Michael A.K. Halliday, Spoken and Written Language (Oxford: 1985); Wallace Chafe, “Integration and Involvement in Speaking, Writing, and Oral Literature,” in Spoken and Written Language:  Exploring Orality and Literacy, ed. Deborah Tannen (Norwood: 1982),  35–​53. 93. Shlomo Izre’el, “Letahalikhei hithavutah shel ha’ivrit hameduberet,” in idem (ed.), Medaberim ’ivrit:  leḥeker halashon hameduberet vehashonut haleshonit beyisrael (Tel Aviv: 2002), 227; see also Even-​Zohar, “Hatzemiḥah vehahitgabshut shel tarbut ’ivrit mekomit viylidit beeretz yisrael, 1882–​1948,” 182. 94. Blanc, Leshon benei adam, 90. 95. Bar-​Adon, Leshonam hamduberet shel hayeladim beyisrael, 14. 96. Yael Reshef, “‘The Language that Follows Speech Will Not Be the Same as the One that Preceded It’: Spoken Hebrew in the Pre-​State Period,” Journal of Jewish Studies 64 (2013), 157–​186. 97. Paul Kerswill, “Milton Keynes and Dialect Levelling in South-​eastern British English,” in English: History, Diversity and Change, ed. David Graddol, Dick Leith, and Joan Swann (London: 1996), 292–​300.

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98. Peter Trudgill, Elisabeth Gordon, Gillian Lewis, and Margaret Maclagan, “Determinism in New-​Dialect Formation and the Genesis of New Zealand English,” Journal of Linguistics 36, no. 2 (2000), 299–​318. 99. Howard Giles, “Accent Mobility:  A Model and Some Data,” Anthropological Linguistics 15 (1973), 87–​105; Peter Trudgill, “On the Role of Children, and the Mechanical View:  A Rejoinder,” Language in Society 37, no. 2 (2008), 278; idem, “Colonial Dialect Contact in the History of European Languages: On the Irrelevance of Identity to New-​dialect Formation,” Language in Society 37, no. 2 (2008), 243, 252–​253; idem, Dialects in Contact (Oxford 1986), 31–​34. 100. Trudgill, Dialects in Contact, 96. 101. Trudgill, “On the Role of Children, and the Mechanical View,” 278. 102. Givón, “Prolegomena to Any Sane Creology,” 4; Michel DeGraff, “Relexification: A Re-​evaluation,” Anthropological Linguistics 44 (2002), 392; Enoch O. Aboh, “Our Creolized Tongues,” in Linguistic Contact, Continuity and Change in the Genesis of Modern Hebrew, ed. Edit Doron, Malka Rapoport Hovav, Yael Reshef, and Moshe Taube (Amsterdam 2019), 287–​320. 103. DeGraff, “Relexification: A re-​evaluation,” 379. 104. Givón, “Prolegomena to Any Sane Creology,” 32. On the dichotomy between the two generations, see also Harshav, Language in Time of Revolution, 144–​145; Anita Shapira, “Dor baaretz,” Alpayim 2 (1990), 180. 105. Dov Goitein, Horaat ha’ivrit beeretz yisrael,  79–​80. 106. Harshav, Language in Time of Revolution, 164. 107. Shelomo Morag, “Planned and Unplanned Development in Modern Hebrew, Lingua 8 (1959), 248–​254; Yosef Ofer, “Reshito shel hamivta hayisreeli,” in Sha’arei lashon: meḥkarim balashon ha’ivrit, baaramit uvilshonot hayehudim, mugashim leMoshe Bar-​Asher, vol. 3, ed. Aaron Maman, Steven E. Fassberg, and Yochanan Breuer (Jerusalem: 2007), 166–​172. 108. Rivkai, ’Al sefat-​yeladeinu baaretz, 27. 109. Haim Blanc, “Hebrew in Israel: Trends and Problems,” The Middle East Journal 11, no. 4 (Autumn 1957), 400. 110. Shelomo Morag, “’Asor shel ’ivrit:  ’iyunim betoledot leshonenu baperek shebein 1948–​1958,” Leshonenu la’am 10 (1959), 84. And see likewise Bar-​Adon, Leshonam hameduberet shel hayeladim beyisrael, 4; Blanc, “Hebrew in Israel,” 400. 111. Moshe Taube, “The Limits of Multiple-​source Contact Influence: The Case of Ecel ‘at’ in Modern Hebrew,” in Linguistic Contact, Continuity and Change in the Genesis of Modern Hebrew, 35; Even-​Zohar, “Hatzemiḥah vehahitgabshut shel tarbut ’ivrit mekomit viylidit beeretz yisrael, 1882–​1948.” 112. Oz Almog, Hatzabar:  deyokan (Tel Aviv:  1997), 14; see also Shapira, “Dor baaretz,” 180. 113. Haim Blanc, “The Israeli Koine as an Emergent National Standard,” in Language Problems of Developing Nations, ed. Joshua A. Fishman, Charles A. Ferguson, and Jyotirindra Das Gupta (New York: 1968), 239. 114. Ibid., 240.

Children of the Great Atlantic Migration: Narratives of Young Jewish Lives Eli Lederhendler (THE HEBREW UNIVERSITY)

This country is full of children. In the morning their clatter down the staircase fills the house. In the afternoon they occupy the streets. In the evening they pour back into the waiting flat which they quickly distend with the clamor of their ceaseless activity—​Oscar Handlin1 I have broken away from the old world; I’m through with it. It’s behind me. I must face this loneliness till I get to the new world. .... But am I really alone in my seeking? I’m one of the millions of immigrant children, children of loneliness, wandering between worlds that are at once too old and too new to live in—​Anzia Yezierska2 The children of immigrants don’t get to be children. We lose our innocence watching our parents’ backs bend, break. I am an old soul because when I am young, I watch my parents’ spirits get slaughtered—​Lenelle Moïse3

Irving Howe, the eminent literary critic and public intellectual, famously referred to the Jewish immigrant milieu of New York in the early 20th century as “The World of Our Fathers,” to which he devoted his popular book of that name. Howe wrote as a son of immigrant parents, grown to maturity in his awareness that parental decisions and the ways that these played out had produced a certain ambience, an existential “world,” which had in turn shaped his life’s contours. Were we to imagine Howe’s parents, the Horensteins, writing a similar book, however, would they not have titled it, “The World of Our Children”? This is no idle speculation. Howe himself, despite his book’s primary orientation to the immigrant parents, devoted nearly an entire chapter to the children of Manhattan’s Lower East Side (“Growing Up in the Ghetto”).4 The consequences of the mass migration of Jews to America were inscribed in the lives of the second and third generations, Eli Lederhendler, Children of the Great Atlantic Migration: Narratives of Young Jewish Lives In: No Small Matter: Features of Jewish Childhood. Edited by: Anat Helman, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197577301.003.0004

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as well as in the literature that those generations produced. As Naomi Sokoloff, a noted literary scholar, has observed, the representation of childhood consciousness is a touchstone of that literature, just as migration is one of its central motifs: “The preponderance of texts about children stems fundamentally from the given that new worlds belong to new generations.”5 This notion of children bearing the ultimate consequences of their parents’ decision to immigrate inevitably received near-​iconic status in some of the best-​known products of Jewish literature in America. If I  had to choose among these child characters, the two most undisputed and memorable of all are Motl, “the Cantor’s Son” (Motl peysi dem khazns), the eponymous narrator-​hero of Sholem Aleichem’s last, unfinished Yiddish novel (1916); and David Schearl, the “kid” immortalized in Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep (1934), a story that unfolds amid a cacophony of New  York street urchins’ English-​Yiddish street dialect.6 Fittingly paired here, they are, quite literally, the “poster children” of the great Jewish migration across the Atlantic. Children seem to embody the essential dynamic of change and transition wrought by immigration. As alluded to in two of the epigraphs above (Anzia Yezierska and Lenelle Moïse), however, change and transition do not come without a price, and just as immigrant children are the beneficiaries of parental choices, so, too, they may be saddled with the burdens of those choices. Among those burdens, one that stands out is the early assumption of co-​responsibility for their families’ new lives. Consider this observation, written while the great Atlantic migration was still in its heyday: “Children who can talk English [sic] and understand American customs,” opined one writer in New York in 1919, “are likely to feel they have grown above their parents.”7 As these words imply, child immigrants may be encumbered, while still very young, with a sense of precocious maturity and responsibility. Mary Antin, in her classic memoir of her immigrant childhood and youth, The Promised Land (1912), muses: “Did I not begin to make my father and mother, as truly as they had ever made me? Did I not become the parent and they the children, in those relations of teacher and learner?”8 Similar issues arose for Rose (Rokhl Gollub) Cohen, as recorded in her memoir, Out of the Shadow (1918). Like that of her more famous counterpart, her book took the form of a Bildungsroman, but her reader encounters a less ebullient, less self-​ assured portrait of youth. Cohen traces her progressive emergence from a somewhat grim state of childhood and youthful dependency. Her path leads her through her work in garment factories and her exposure to new cultural experiences, but she also frequently refers to her complex relationship with her parents. In particular, she dwells on the way that she, the daughter, became the “Americanizer” of the family: “It was pathetic to see how [my mother] looked up to me because I had already been here a year, and probably showed off a little.”9 Role reversals and intercultural dissonance are but one type of issue that comes to mind when we address the specificity of the child immigrant. It seems almost intuitive to observe that the children who accompanied their parents on their journey to a new land went through the journey differently, and therefore should not be treated merely as an appendage to the first-​generational experience. In fact, the specificity of child immigrant experiences had been recognized early on by scholars whose work

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followed in the wake of the great Atlantic migration. In the 1920s, the phrase “half-​ second generation” was used in Florian Znaniecki and W.I. Thomas’ classic study of Polish immigrants in America, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America. In the 1940s, sociologists W. Lloyd Warner and Leo Srole classified members of the “immigrant stock” population as belonging to either the first, “parental” (P1), generation or the second, “filial” (F1), generation (or successive generations, F2 and so on), though they referred to child immigrants (who entered the United States before reaching the age of 18) as neither P1 nor as F1, but as P2.10 In the more recent wave of sociological studies, one preeminent expert, Rubén G. Rumbaut, put it this way: “That there are fundamental differences in the pace and mode of adaptation between persons who immigrate as adults and those who do so as children is a well-​established observation—​indeed, it is the stuff of a rich popular literature.” Another scholar, Larissa Remennick, similarly argued: “Clearly there is a substantial difference in the experience of migrants who arrive as children, as adolescents, as young adults, in middle age, or as older adults, even if they all technically belong to the first generation of immigrants.”11 Nearly all of the extant social and psychological research devoted to the life trajectories of immigrant children, however, is devoted in the main to their divergent outcomes in adulthood. The target issue is not childhood experience but rather individuals’ subsequent occupational and educational attainments, legal status, civic awareness, and cultural or group identity. In this essay, however challenging it may be, I hope to address the world of immigrant children somewhat more directly: most often, indeed, through the medium of adult self-​recollection, but not through the lens of occupational and other social outcomes. In recent years, the topic of immigrant children has attained almost unprecedented importance, in view of the large flows of international and transnational migrants.12 The subject catapulted to prominence in the wake of a massive refugee crisis confronting European countries that stemmed most concretely from the bloodshed and dislocation of millions of people in Syria and elsewhere in the region.13 It also emerged with renewed relevance for the United States, where, as of 2010, almost one child out of every five was living in an immigrant household.14 Despite anomalous disparities of chronology and circumstances, it may be pertinent to look at long-​term historical perspectives. I propose to do so by revisiting the case of Jewish migration to America from around the end of the 19th century to the 1920s. At least up to 1921, in the so-​called “Ellis Island immigration,” European immigrants, among them East European Jews, were freely admitted and were normally expected “to become Americans.” It was precisely that latter prospect, however, that aroused skepticism in American public opinion—​if not outright alarm—​and in that sense, the past indeed foreshadows more recent developments.

Social Data and Political Discourse Between 1870 and 1920, the foreign-​born population of the United States increased from 5.6 million to 13.9 million, although its percentage in the total population of the country changed only slightly, varying over that period between about 13 percent

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and 15 percent.15 Even more than their numbers, however, it was the immigrants’ countries of origin that prompted profound and fateful public debate.16 One author of a U.S.  government study noted in the mid-​1920s:  “Within the white race there are . . . important ethnic differences.” As he went on to explain: [Those] immigrants as are drawn from central, southern, and eastern Europe and the Levant—​and they are more than half of the present-​day foreign-​born population—​have little ethnic affinity with the descendants of the English, Welsh, Scotch, and Scotch-​Irish who predominated among the early settlers of this country. ... Whether or not these “new” immigrant stocks are inferior or superior to the original colonial element, they are most assuredly very different from it.17

The foreign-​born may have constituted only about 15 percent of the U.S. population, but they accounted for more than 20 percent among those old enough to vote, and more than 39 percent of such potential voters in the nation’s larger cities (over 250,000 inhabitants). The importance of the latter was that big-​city politics were considered to be the most problematic in terms of electoral corruption, with blocs of voters routinely “bought” by party machines, to the detriment of governmental reform. In addition, urban centers were where some of the nation’s worst socioeconomic, public health, and “moral” pathologies were apt to be most glaringly apparent. Still more significant, however, was the enlarging effect of the second generation when enumerated together with the first, foreign-​born generation. “[I]‌n the 25 principal cities of this country, nearly 7 in every 10 white persons of voting age are of foreign birth or parentage . . ., a large majority of whom are equipped for citizenship only by what they have acquired after migrating here from abroad, or by such assimilative opportunities as are open to the child of an immigrant.”18 As Joel Perlmann has recently shown, the immigrants’ socioethnic derivation and their listing according to a table of “races and peoples” not only had implications for regulating immigrant arrivals, but were also vital for assessing the ethnic and racial composition of American society. It was in the latter application that generational issues, once again, came to the fore. How long, for instance, was the supposed ethnic essence or character of the foreign-​born likely to persist? Was it transmitted to their children, and should those younger generations be similarly classified?19 Crucially, the immigration debate also coincided with a then-​new discourse in psychology and social science: that devoted to childhood development. It was a time when Ellen Key, a prominent Swedish sociologist, uttered her pronouncement that the 20th century would be “the century of the child.”20 In terms of public policy, child rearing and adaptation were pivotal issues. The pliability of children’s character, their potential for individual personality, and the supposedly contradictory effects of parents’ homes versus democratic institutions went to the core of all the contemporary discussions of that era concerning schooling and the prospects for Americanization of “foreign-​stock” youngsters. Such concerns fed directly, as well, into the early 20th-​ century discourse about progressive education and about the quality of civic education

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in an immigrant society, as in John Dewey’s seminal (though only marginally influential) Democracy and Education (1916).21

Jewish Immigrants and Their Children Between 1886 and 1898, children (under age 16) constituted nearly 34 percent of all Jewish immigrants arriving in New  York City, twice as many as the figure for minors in the total immigration of that time (16.5 percent). After 1899 (when Jewish newcomers first came to be tabulated as “Hebrews”), children under 14 continued to figure prominently: about 25 percent of the Jewish immigration from 1899 to 1914, as compared to 11 percent among the total population of immigrants. While, on average, the “new” immigrants coming from Southern and Eastern Europe (and also Mexico and Canada) included more women and children than had been common for the “old,” North and West European streams, this was even more the case with regard to the Jewish immigration.22 The presence of so many young children in the Jewish immigration stream might have borne some connection to the high rate of natural increase among East European Jews at that time, and, no less important, the lower-​than-​average rate of infant mortality in the Jewish population. These two trends were closely and apparently causally interrelated. Critically, by 1900, American authorities sought to prevent the entry of sick children and in some cases mandated their deportation. Considering that health statistics among Jewish infants and children were relatively favorable to begin with, this would have had positive implications for reducing the numbers of those deported, and raising the proportion of children who arrived in the United States. At the same time, it must be remembered that children, especially during times of epidemic outbreaks (such as cholera, in 1892), were invariably among those who fell victim to the disease and died while en route.23 The high proportion of Jewish children in the migration from Eastern Europe has prompted various scholars to ponder whether this “family migration” was completely “normal” (that is, voluntary, and engendered by changes in the world economy), or rather impelled by dire and unique circumstances—​in particular, the outbreak of anti-​ Jewish pogroms—​that might spur the wholesale flight of refugees. The disproportionate presence of children in the Jewish migration stream does not prove in itself that the migration took place under duress. Indeed, “economic migrants,” especially single young men, still constituted a slight majority even in this “family” migration. Put another way: the ratio of children under 14 in the migration stream (25 percent) was still lower than it was in the base population of Jews in Russia (38 percent, according to the Russian census of 1897).24 Thus, there was no mass exodus of an entire cross-​section of Russian and Polish Jewry. Rather, we may speak of a selective, voluntary migration that was heavily (though not entirely) composed of family units, and it expanded over time in a “normal,” predictable fashion. Immigrants’ individual choices about whether or when to leave, who among the household’s members was to lead the way, and who was to remain behind temporarily, were most likely made in accordance with pragmatic

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considerations and personal circumstances. Ever since the 1970s, when economist Simon Kuznets proposed this thesis, some scholars have argued that Jews frequently emigrated from Eastern Europe for reasons not exclusively related to the upsurge of anti-​Jewish violence in the region or to the repeated enactment of new legal and residential restrictions against them; rather, it is suggested, economic factors played a substantial role—​as indeed was the case for Polish Jews emigrating en masse during that time from pogrom-​free Austrian Galicia.25 At the public, macro level, however, speaking of reactions in real-​time, there was no doubt that anti-​Jewish discrimination, incitement, and violence lent the entire migration the aspect (along with the attendant stigma) of dislocation, flight, and mass exodus. In the public perception of the 1880s, 1890s, and on into the early 1900s, the Jewish emigration from Russia was continually portrayed as being fueled by an aggravated assault upon Jews by mobs and by the policies of a despotic regime. The Yiddish press in New York spoke of the United States as a place of deliverance where Jews, having been rescued from a modern Egyptian bondage, could finally fully appreciate the meaning of Passover. Russian Jewry’s foremost historian and public intellectual, Simon Dubnow, stated simply: “The Jewish emigration from Russia to the United States served as a barometer of the persecutions of the Jews.”26 If some of the motivations for leaving Russia might be only indirectly and tentatively inferred from the age and sex ratios among the migrant population, the positive correlation between Jewish migrants’ demographic profile and their high rate of permanent resettlement in America (with minimal return migration) seems much clearer. With so many women and children involved, the Jewish migrant population did not display the character of a transient group of people perched, as it were, on their suitcases. As I have written elsewhere, the demographic stability of Jewish immigrant households had significant repercussions in terms of long-​term histories of steady employment, which, in turn, correlated with immigrants’ occupational status and upward mobility.27 We can further appreciate the added importance of child immigrants in this historical context when we consider American demographics. In 1920, when the foreign-​born population in America represented just under 15 percent of the national population, their children (both foreign-​born and American-​born) accounted for fully 25.7 percent of children in the United States (similar to the situation today). Moreover, between 1900 and 1920, Americans under age 18 increased numerically, but not proportionally: their relative share in the general population actually dropped slightly, from 40.4 percent in 1900 to 38 percent in 1920. Thus, the arrival of so many immigrant children (and the subsequent births of their younger siblings in immigrant households) blunted an incipient demographic slide of the younger age cohorts—​a trend that became much more pronounced in the 1930s, following the cut-​off of free immigration and the onset of the Great Depression.28

Children at Work and School Child immigrants—​and certainly the older ones among them—​were active partners in their families’ economy. Jewish child immigrants formed part of the growing sector

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of child labor in urban manufacturing. (In 1900, according to a conservative estimate, there were 1.26 million boys and 486,000 girls between the ages of 10 and 15 in the American labor force, many of them working in the farming sector.)29 In New York City, for instance, almost half the members of the Jewish Union of Purse-​Makers around the turn of the century were children aged 12–​14. In a strike by 900 necktie factory workers in New York City in 1906, most of the employees were Jewish girls aged 13–​15.30 Child-​labor laws enacted during the Progressive Era swelled the number of children, especially immigrant children, who did not automatically enter the labor market and had to be accommodated in schools. The crusade that reformers waged against child labor did not go entirely smoothly, however. The New York Child Labor Committee reported, for instance, that it had reviewed numerous cases and appeals for exemptions for families who were dependent on their children’s wages. In most (75 percent) of those cases, the committee offered “advice,” and in the remainder it was able to offer financial assistance to replace the lost income.31 Nonetheless, it is important to point out that the choice between the school desk and the workbench was not necessarily either/​or. For one thing, this question has to be addressed in the context of the growth of vocational schools and other such training programs. Such urban, industrial-​oriented training recalled older apprenticeship models once commonly associated with crafts. Morris Pasternak, who came to America at age nine with his widowed mother and seven siblings, attended such a vocational training school and obtained work as a machinist. In the case of female immigrant youth, vocational tracks were often offered as a pathway to employment in domestic service. Vocational training for girls and young women also played a role in philanthropic projects to prevent the spread of prostitution.32 Second, after-​school work was a common feature of life in early 20th-​century households, and certainly in many immigrant households. Rebecca Epstein, who was too young to go to work alongside her older siblings, did piecework at home after school. In some New York City schools, even in the 1920s after the passage of child-​ labor laws, half of the pupils attending school were likely to be immigrant children who had after-​school jobs.33 The United States Immigration Commission reported in 1911 that there were at least two million immigrant children in American schools, the vast majority in public schools. The demographic effect of immigration was considerably greater in a place like New  York City, where fully 71.5  percent of the students in 1908 were either foreign-​born or born to immigrant parents. By 1910, well over half the public school students in Manhattan were Jewish. Some forty school buildings and annexes were required to serve the educational needs of Manhattan’s Lower East Side alone, where (in 1905) there were some 93,500 children enrolled in grades one through eight. Overall, during the years from the 1880s to the First World War, some 275,000 Jewish children attended public schools in New York City alone.34 The overcrowding of school facilities in specific school districts, such as that of the Lower East Side of Manhattan, was a well-​known phenomenon. In 1897, during school registration at one such public school (located on Norfolk Street), the principal was unable to admit at least 500 of the children seeking admission for the school year: the school building had a capacity of 1,500 and he had already admitted 2,000

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children. Parents (most likely, mothers), having waited outside for hours, burst into “a near riot.”35 One byproduct of inadequate facilities was that some children had to delay the start of their education until age eight, and many of them left school at age 12. However, when the Board of Education proposed (in 1905) to transfer some of those children out of their home district to available classrooms in the nearby tenement area of “Hell’s Kitchen”—​a notorious neighborhood populated mostly by poor Irish immigrants and bounded on its north side by a growing black ghetto—​Jewish parents vociferously and adamantly refused. One New York City health worker, Dr. S. Josephine Baker, reported that “the heat, the smells, the squalor made [Hell’s Kitchen] something not to be believed.” Elsewhere in the city, the lack of facilities was only partly alleviated—​ and in a manner not to the liking of parents—​by the inauguration of “part-​time” (half-​ day) schedules for some of the children (about 90,000 of them in 1904).36 Twenty years later, enrollment in New York City schools had increased again by 150 percent. Described as “bursting at the seams,” the public school system put children into “huge school buildings that housed over five thousand students [each], with average class sizes of forty students. Up to one-​third of the schools ran on complicated double or triple sessions.” Pupils sometimes sat three to a desk.37 Schools, no matter how dilapidated and overcrowded, were nonetheless the place where the vast majority of immigrant children spent significant parts of their lives and learned lasting lessons. The scholarly literature about American public education has gone through various contentious stages, in which the system has been by turns lauded and then berated for having usurped the cultural and social agency of immigrant families and their children. However, as eminent authorities in the field of children’s history now admonish us, it will no longer do to ignore the vitality of children at school and their powers to bend the system to their needs. “For too long,” laments the historian Paula S. Fass: schooling had been presented as [either] a story of educational success and of progressive developments . . . [or] a pinched tale of social control, where the schools became agencies of order following a middle-​class agenda. Too little attention had been paid to schools as social sites and lively arenas for experience.38

Schools, she points out, were “the realm of childhood,” and their role contrasted with other ubiquitous social institutions in the urban lives of immigrant families, such as the workplace or the house of prayer. “In this arena, the child’s separate fate and distinct destiny were inscribed.”39 The insights of scholars find echoes and vindication in adult reminiscences. One immigrant, who arrived from Russia in 1913 at age 10, later recalled that his parents had sent him to an Orthodox yeshiva; feeling dissatisfied with the quality and limited character of his education, he took action and then re-​enrolled (when he became 13) as a pupil in an American public school. Another recalled: “School was a place I wanted to go . . . . [It] was not a symbol of repression. It was a symbol of order.”40 Yet another immigrant child, Moishe Shapshelevich (Morris U. Schappes, later a journalist, writer, and historian), was seven years old when his family immigrated to America. Two months later, his mother enrolled him in the nearby public school. He

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knew no English, but he found that most of his classmates were, like him, Yiddish-​ speakers. It took him just five and a half years to complete eight grades of primary school, from which he went on to high school.41 Bella (Spewack) Cohen, who was only a toddler when she arrived in America, and who grew up in difficult domestic circumstances, later recalled: “Acutely conscious of the sordidness of the life about me . . ., I hid behind my books and built up a life of my own in the public school.”42 Schools are certainly crucial to understanding what an immigrant childhood was like in the Jewish immigrant milieu. Kindergartens, in particular, played an unprecedented role in the mass immigration period, and the number of kindergarten classes in New York City’s public schools mushroomed from just over 100 around 1900 to over 900 in 1914. Special preparatory classes were also opened in public schools to teach English to non-​English-​speaking children. One public school teacher cherished her memory of the creatively mixed speech that her immigrant pupils brought into the classroom, including such phrases as “she kickled me”—​a splendid hybrid of “tickled” and its Yiddish equivalent, gekitslt. Nevertheless, it was the rapidity with which children learned the new language that impressed her.43 Teachers of that era were reputed to have coined the adage that Jewish families “landed on Saturday, settled on Sunday, and their children appeared in the school room on Monday.”44 With due allowance for gross stereotyping and poetic excess, it is nonetheless true that relatively few immigrant children went uneducated; that most households chose public schooling for those children who could be spared from the world of work; and that children found their way in life with other children by virtue of the school. Seven-​year-​old Rose Globman (later Klein) marched off to school five days after her arrival at Ellis Island (very close, indeed, to the reputed third-​day enrollments mentioned in the teachers’ folklore). With young Moishe (Schappes), as noted, it took a bit longer, because his family arrived in New York during the summer break.45 Schools were spaces that the children shared with the teachers and with one another, though hardly ever with their parents, if this could be avoided. “No one could ask you, ‘Well, what did you learn?’ because they didn’t know themselves,” is a comment that complements other, similar ones, about the difficulty that some immigrant children faced when they reflected on the language and cultural barriers that they sensed. Lack of contact between home and school seems to have been more typical of Jewish families, compared with non-​Jewish ones. Children were not eager to breach this tacit boundary line: “You never told your parents about things [that were negative]. You never got your parents to go to school to complain or anything.”46 Even the sensational exceptions, in which parents did not stand aside, seemed only to prove how much misunderstanding divided the life of the school and the mental world of immigrant parents. One extreme incident is the one related by historian Gil Ribak, regarding a violent confrontation between Jewish mothers and school officials in New York City in late June of 1906. Apparently sparked by the introduction of routine adenoid removals for children, performed at certain schools by board of health physicians and nurses, a panic ensued in the wake of wild rumors that “eighty-​ two children were slaughtered” and that doctors were “cutting the throats” of innocent children. Several thousand Jewish parents stormed the schools in the immigrant

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districts in lower Manhattan and in Brooklyn, “smashed windows, broke down doors, and threw anything they could pick up.”47 Notwithstanding the children’s foreign birth and their difficult journey, and despite the culture gap and the children’s (and their parents’) inchoate anxieties, the schools conveyed a world of cultural literacy to these young new Americans. Children then relayed some of this to their parents—​further reinforcing the trope of the child who coaches and instructs, rather than remaining subordinate to her elders. One immigrant girl recalled how she brought home the lessons she had learned in home economics at her public school: I came home and made hot chocolate and corn bread and showed [my mother] how to make it. I taught her how to make toast, of course. I learned to cook “by the book,” following recipes, and for this I was teased by my mother and brother. But mother, if she had company [coming], asked me to “give there a look in your book.”48

Literacy as such, even when children brought up in Europe already knew how to read another language, was definitely a school-​acquired skill that empowered the young. Morris Raphael Cohen (later a prominent American philosopher and City College of New York professor) recalled that he was diligently taught by his maternal grandfather to read the traditional Jewish texts when he lived, as a young child, in Nesvizh (Nyasvizh, Belarus). Writing, however, was not part of the home study curriculum. “The trimmings can come later,” is what the venerable and learned tutor reportedly said to his daughter, Cohen’s mother. Although a competent reader, the bright youngster had to wait until he encountered American schools in order to conquer the art of writing.49

Other Institutional Environments The social history of children in the mass Jewish immigration to America before and after the turn of the last century thus touches upon an array of closely associated issues, including schooling, work, gender, motherhood, and the entire realm of parenting. Also relevant are such varied matters as the Progressive movement’s involvement in playground development; pasteurized milk distribution; public libraries; and summer camps. Space does not permit a survey of all these spheres—​instead, I will dwell briefly on orphanages (boarding homes) and foster care, as these played a distinctive role in this history. Institutional care, by which I  refer to all forms of sheltered or socially assisted housing and education, is one of the least-​discussed topics in the extant literature about immigrant children. The client population was certainly composed mainly of immigrant households, often with single-​parent (mostly widowed) mothers. The idea of turning children living in extreme poverty-​stricken circumstances over to institutional care was part of American public culture in the 19th century, and Jewish philanthropic activity in this field began by the Civil War era. In part, Jews (and Catholics, too) were spurred to make this a priority because they feared Protestant missionary influence in the public or nonsectarian children’s shelters. In part, as well, state authorities lent a

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helping hand when they mandated denominational appropriateness for institutionalized children, matching up these wards of society with their group-​appropriate sectarian homes, according to their parents’ religion.50 The period of separation could last as long as six to eight years, sometimes with lasting negative effects on family relations. Such children’s institutions as the Cleveland Jewish Orphan Asylum (JOA) functioned as boarding schools for children of indigent families, most, but not all of them, from single-​parent households. A survey of the years 1881–​1892 showed that the New York Hebrew Orphan Asylum (HOA) admitted 22 percent of its children based on family poverty alone, and an additional 38 percent had widowed mothers who could not afford to raise them. Four percent of the children were committed by the courts.51 Similar facilities were founded in other cities during the mass immigration era: in the city of Brooklyn, in 1879; in Rochester, New York in 1881; in Boston and Chicago in 1890 and 1893, respectively; and subsequently, in Philadelphia and elsewhere. In 1895, the New York Hebrew Infant Asylum was the first to begin offering care for children under the age of five. Altogether, by 1902, these children’s homes had provided care for nearly 20,000 children. The majority of them had one living parent, though some had two living parents. In 1907, the HOA had “nine half-​orphans to every full orphan,” whereas the ratio was 10–​1 at the Hebrew Infant Asylum. In some of the homes of this sort, on-​site schooling was replaced by enrollment of the resident children in local public schools.52 Orphanages could be daunting places. Infractions such as leaving the grounds of the orphanage were severely punished, as were any number of other offenses (including bed wetting, which resulted in confinement in upstairs attics and closets, shower dousing, or beatings). Yet it seems that the Jewish orphanages were considered comparatively less fixated on discipline, more focused on education, and more progressive than most other such institutions (which, if that is the case, must have been truly Dickensian).53 With the passage of time, and with a growing shortage of places as the Jewish immigrant population swelled, some of the professionals in the field began to speak of institutional care at orphanages as a last resort. What was preferable, in their view, was a direct charity subsidy for the mothers (“a good mother is far superior to the best institution”).54 Jewish immigrants applied to Jewish charity funds for relief in the form of clothing, shoes, furniture, and “pensions” (regular relief subsidies, mainly reserved for widows with children). These expenditures accounted for about $175,000 annually in New York alone (in 1904 dollars), according to reports of the city’s United Hebrew Charities. Of that sum, about $41,000 went for pensions to families “where the wage-​earner has died and where, unless such provision were made, no recourse would be left, except the breaking up of the family and the commitment of the children to orphanages and similar institutions.”55 It should be remembered that this was only one of many different social welfare organizations in the Jewish sector, and the figures simply give a rough idea of the extent of the need for family relief. Other options included foster care (“boarding-​out”). Foster homes for children “[were] secured, primarily, in response to advertisements in the daily newspapers—​ English, German and Yiddish,” reported one social work professional, who added that foster families were also recommended through an intracommunal vetting process

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mediated by active communal figures, landsmanshaftn (immigrant fraternal associations), and families already involved in providing foster care.56 Although subject to criticism, foster care was defended because supervised and certified “good boarding homes” provided the children with a better quality of life than they could have expected at home or in orphanages, especially for children under age seven. Foster homes were the solution of choice for “physical defectives:  children having heart trouble, crippled children or those suffering from any other physical ailment requiring hospital treatment [who were] ineligible for admission to most institutions, but can easily be cared for in a good private home.”57

Memory and Representation How might we expand on these disparate memories and assorted data in order to gain some insight into the inner world of the child immigrant? This may be an impossible task, insofar as we can never actually approach the mental world of those young people except indirectly. The closest approximations, when it comes to inferring what those children went through, include the memoirs recorded by them (or by others, to whom they spoke) at a later age. Some, though not all of these, might be regarded as anomalous or anecdotal, rather than representative in any strict sense. And, finally, there are literary representations, applying the adult writer’s narrative aims and adult sensitivities to the sketched image of children’s consciousness. Mary Antin’s The Promised Land is especially noteworthy for our purposes because of her extensive narration of her childhood experiences and education, on both sides of the ocean. (She composed her self-​portrait, using her letters and other writings, mostly between her 16th year and her late 20s.)58 Her account includes her father’s abrupt departure for America when she was eight years old; her rather harrowing journey with her mother and siblings three years later, in 1894; and her narrative of adolescent self-​discovery. Antin’s writing is also notable (in our context) for the self-​reflexive note that she penned, which appears in the Penguin edition of The Promised Land as an Appendix. “Granted that children’s minds work alike the world over, just what is the nature of childhood memories? . . . I see persons and objects, I hear sounds, songs, phrases, I mark movements and fleeting expressions on people’s faces; literally see and hear and take note.”59 Famous as a tale of a young girl’s triumphant emergence onto the stage of adolescence, with every prospect for a glowing future, Antin’s book is notable, too, as a narrative of self-​erasure. “I was born, I have lived, and I have been made over. Is it not time to write my life’s story? I am as much out of the way as if I were dead, for I am absolutely other than the person whose story I have to tell.”60 This claim, in turn, leads to her assertion of resurrection into a new life, with all the attendant chords of an American epiphany and tacitly Protestant nuances.61 Childhood, which overlaps in the text with descriptions and considerations of Jewishness, is represented here as the past that has inevitably been discarded. Indeed, as Werner Sollors points out, Antin had originally proposed to call her “character” in the memoir by a fictitious name, Esther Altmann—​ “Old Man/​Person”—​perhaps

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implying that the young “Esther” had been an “old (pre-​American) person,” whose childhood was being described by the “new (Americanized) person.” This consciousness of personal and cultural supersession—​the young and new world having made it possible for her to cast off the “old” world—​was carried forward into the published book even when the proposed pseudonym was discarded.62 “I began life in the Middle Ages, as I shall prove, and here I am still, your contemporary in the twentieth century, thrilling with your latest thought.”63 Nevertheless, it is exactly childhood that is at stake: the earliest version of the individual, portrayed as pliable, adaptable, and unencumbered by too much unwanted freight. That is not only the rationale of the book, but also the gist of its argument in favor of continued free immigration to America: The past was only my cradle, and now it cannot hold me  .  .  .  just as the little house in Polotzk [sic], once my home, has now become a toy of memory. ... America is the youngest of the nations . . . and I am the youngest of America’s children, and into my hands is given all her priceless heritage.64

Not all children are equal, however. In Antin’s memoir, she speaks several times of her relationship with her older sister, Frieda (Fetchke), whose age at the time of their migration marked her as ready to join the job market in the clothing manufacturing industry. Frieda becomes a foil in the narrative for Mary’s status as the youngster who is destined to attain an American school experience and, through it, a literary career.65 Rose Cohen’s memoir, too, reflected on this issue, which made a real difference in young immigrants’ lives: “A child that came to this country and began to go to school had taken the first step into the New World. But the child that was put into the shop remained in the old environment with the old people, held back by the old traditions, held back by illiteracy.”66 Birth order, age on arrival in the new land, and birth in America made all the difference in many other families. In one such household that included three daughters, the older sister, already an adolescent when the family had left Russia, was (like Mary Antin’s sister, Fetchke/​Frieda, and like Rose) “too old” for school and went immediately to work in a garment shop. Her life, as she related it, remained “unfulfilled.” She recalled being “miserable” at work and frustrated at home: saddled by her mother with housework and denied by her father the right to keep some of her wages or to socialize too often with friends. In contrast, the middle sister, who arrived as an eight-​year-​ old, reaped the benefits of her parents’ decision to immigrate. She attended American schools and felt comfortable with her new life, without feeling “ashamed” (as her youngest sibling did) of her immigrant parents. As this sister stated: “You would think that the three of us had different parents. And maybe we did.”67 Later in life, child immigrants recollected specific images and memories of their earliest experiences, both before and after their journey from Europe. One woman recalled having watched her first “Punch and Judy” show as a small child in her courtyard in Warsaw: “When we came to America and they talked about puppets, it was nothing new to me. I saw the performers do that in the courtyard.”68 Food items also scored high in the scale of childhood memory. Lee (Eli) Heller, a child of six, turned down his first taste of an orange (it was too alien to him) that was offered on board the

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steamship that brought him across the Atlantic. Wishing to try one on the following day, he was disappointed: none were left.69 Some food memories evoked early childhood in the “old country.” Esther Ginsburg, from Lithuania, recalled, “. . . the ice cream, where the man would come around with a little wagon, with a bell. I have never in my life, and I have eaten ice cream all over . . ., I have never tasted ice cream like that, that was sold to me as a child . . . nothing ersatz in it.”70 Joseph Heller, the novelist (Catch 22), who grew up in Brooklyn as the son of immigrants from Russia, had his own childhood memories of ice cream: But it’s ice cream that still tastes most wonderful and is richest in evocative associations extending backward in time almost to the formation of memory itself. . . . Like the evocations of the cookie to Proust, a meditation on ice cream soon takes me back to the age of eight or nine and into a family setting in which a small container is shared with bliss by the four of us, a mother, a sister, a brother, and me.71

Mary Antin, too, lingered in her memoir—​also à la Proust, though without mentioning him—​over the unique tastes of childhood treats, such as the cheesecakes her mother habitually made on Saturday nights in Polotsk: “You have nothing in your kitchen cupboard to give the pastry its notable flavor. It takes history to make such a cake . . . [Y]‌ou must eat it as a ravenous child, in memorable twilights.”72 In the New World, the distinctive snack foods that her father and his partner sold on the Boston waterfront were among her very first American delights: While we children disported ourselves like mermaids and mermen in the surf, our respective fathers dispensed cold lemonade, hot peanuts, and pink popcorn . . . , [Father] dished out ice cream with enthusiasm. .... [Mr. Wilner, the partner, made] potato chips. ... Such potato chips were not to be had anywhere else on Crescent Beach. Thin as tissue paper, crisp as dry snow, and salty as the sea.73

Those children who had lived at the Cleveland JOA had a very different sort of association with food memories, as they seemed to have been constantly foraging for more supplies. One lad used to crawl illicitly over the institution’s high, pointed fence to run back to his mother and brothers to consume home-​cooked Hungarian Jewish fare.74 Another reported: JOA boys often climbed over the eight-​ foot fence to go to Becker’s Bakery on Woodland Avenue, which they called Pushcart Boulevard. Five stale doughnuts cost two cents. . . . Sometimes seven orphans would come into the bakeshop at a time and while two of them pretended that they were at a stationer’s or a candy store, and asked for lead pencils, a copy book, ice-​cream cones or jawbreakers [candy], in order to exasperate old man Becker, the others would run out with a tray of cakes. . . . A lot of Becker’s stale cake parties took place in the toilet after the dormitory lights were out.75

The hard truth was that these children’s food fixation stemmed from the inadequate diet that the orphanage provided. Indeed, older children were known to bully younger ones to extort food rations from them. Parents attempted to smuggle food into the orphanages and were sometimes, though not always, successful.

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Some of the routines at the orphan home, however, were remembered through a fonder veil of nostalgia: My first task, when I was eight, was to get up, along with a dozen or more other girls, at 4:30 or 5:00 in the morning to go to the laundry building to . . . sort [the clean laundry] and fill large wicker baskets. ... The trees cast ghostly shadows [in the dark mornings], everything looked unfamiliar; we little girls with arms around each other scurried across the empty yard. . . . To bolster our courage, we sang hymns, instinctively choosing the Hebrew responses of our daily prayers—​thus feeling we were under God’s direct protection. The open door of the laundry drew us into the hot warmth where cheer, babble, and laughter rescued us again.76

Many memoirists as well as social historians have dwelt on street life, as it appeared in their early experiences as children.77 In her comparative study of immigrant women’s lives, Elizabeth Ewen opened her narrative with the recollections of Marie Ganz (a one-​time radical activist), who arrived in New York at age five, brought by her mother to join her father who was already there. The following episode, as recounted by Ganz, involved an adventure soon after her arrival, when her mother sent her out to the street to play and she ended up accepting an offer of an impromptu carriage ride uptown to see the sights of the city. Up into the farther reaches of Fifth Avenue, Ganz recalled sensing unease and incomprehension. Uptown was “weird and fantastic,” full of “crowds of people who are shadows” in a kind of “magician’s paradise.” Back in the early evening to the “tenements . . . with fire escapes hung with bedding and where groups of women and children huddled in the doorways,” safe in her “own world,” she was comforted to see “pushcart torches flare along the curbs . . .; mothers crouch gossiping together on tenement steps; to hurdy-​gurdy music little girls are dancing. ... I was beginning to know the meaning of poverty.”78 The assertion, “I was beginning to know the meaning of poverty,” is quite transparently a later abstraction as well as an evocation of Ganz’s left-​wing political education and her adult persona as a radical. Notwithstanding, Ganz’s account is noteworthy for its childlike evocation of the ubiquitous material environment (streets, stoops, pushcarts, tenements, fire escapes) in the daily geography of immigrant youngsters. Social historians’ descriptions of urban streets as children’s playgrounds concur with memoir literature. Here is one example: While [the boys] played handball, we played jacks. They played stickball in the street; we [girls] skipped rope on the sidewalk. We also took the sidewalk for our rhyming ball games and chalked it over for “potsy,” while they commandeered the street for ring-​ a-​levio. . . . The only thing that drew us together was the arrival of the ice man, who appeared every day with his dripping wagon filled with stacks of rectangular blocks of ice. . . . This was the moment we waited for, as we abandoned our games and scrambled onto his wagon, searching out delicious splinters of ice to suck on.79

Mary Antin, too, fondly recalled outdoor play and bragged of her abilities. Not only was she adept at self-​promotion, but she was also able to transgress the gender boundary at will:

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[W]‌ith all my studiousness, I had the will to play. My favorite playmates were boys. It was but mild fun to play theatre in Bessie Finkelstein’s back yard, even if I had leading parts, which I made impressive by recitations in Russian, no word of which was intelligible to my audience. It was far better sport to play hide-​and-​seek with the boys, for I enjoyed the use of my limbs.80

Perhaps no author painted a lovelier word-​picture of the carnivalesque atmosphere of the urban outdoors of immigrant children than did the popular Yiddish writer, Sholem Aleichem (Sholem Rabinovich), in a memorable passage in Motl, the Cantor’s Son. Shrewdly, he lifted his opening line (in a close paraphrase) from a well-​ known encomium for the Holy City, taken from the well-​stocked Judaic storehouse of such superlatives. The rabbis’ sacred image of a gloried, but now, alas, plundered and destroyed Jerusalem, is turned inside-​out, becoming an ode to the child-​thronged gutters and pavements of Manhattan. In the Yiddish original, the borrowed American word strit [street], replacing the correct word, gass, is a kind of vulgarism that alerts the reader to the raw, urban landscape via the medium of speech. It adds to the humoristic juxtaposition of plebeian New York with the ethereal beauty of Jerusalem, referenced in the first line quoted below. It also asserts the authenticity of the child’s speech, as the child-​narrator, Motl, holds forth in a patois that advertises his unschooled exposure to new cultures. Just as any child would, he parrots his environment and comments on novel words, sights, and objects: Whoever has not witnessed a New  York strit has never seen anything of true splendor. . . . Women sit on the stoops, chattering away. Babies doze in their prams: “kerridges” is what they’re called here and all of them look the same. Right out there on the street, the babies are fed milk out of little bottles. The bigger children play in the middle of the street. They seem to have thousands of games: games with marbles, buttons, hoops, wheels, balls, wagons, sleds, ropes, and “skates”—​wheels that they tie to their feet. . . . The racket they raise is terrific. But the street belongs to the children. Nobody dares to hit them or chase them away. America, overall, is a country entirely made for children. That’s why I like it. . . . Try not to love such a country!81

The street is also the place where Motl, the child-​artist, inscribes a cartoon: a visual pun involving the immigrant slang-​word, “greenhorn” (that is, a raw or “green” newcomer): “What’s a greenhorn? I dunno—​ask me a simpler question. But we heard them talking that way, so we said it, too.” Motl, the literalist, takes a bit of white crayon and makes a caricature of a man whose forehead sports a green horn, drawn with a bit of green crayon. Everyone laughs—​but Motl’s big brother has him wash the stick figure off the pavement, as otherwise a police officer might fine them for an act of defacement of public property. “It is very strict in America,” the narrator informs his readers; indeed, not all freedoms are vouchsafed to its children.82 The streets were never just benign environments, full of adventure and wonder. They could also be dangerous. The moral risk as well as physical dangers lurking in the streets were already a matter of note and concern for late-​19th-​century reformers

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who sought to improve children’s quality of life, fueling a progressive movement for parks and playgrounds.83 In New York City in the 1920s, around forty children a month did not return to school because they were killed in traffic accidents.84 Henry Roth’s novel, Call it Sleep, climaxes in David Schearl’s memorable near-​death by electrocution on the trolley tracks, which remains the classic literary event of this sort.85 There were other, more mundane threats. Rose Cohen’s memoir described the physical bullying of Jews—​children as well as adults—​by non-​Jewish men and boys.86 Others’ memories also touched on the violence of street life; often, these were embroidered by claims of boyish bravado and aggressive exploits: On my block, I  was the power.  .  .  .  We had gang fights. Rocks, bottles. Against the Irish. It was rough stuff. . . . [W]‌e loaded up the back of the yard with all kinds of junk, mainly broken bottles that we could throw, or use for stabbing. The plan was when they come we all act scared and let them get close . . . and we were waiting. We did a job on them. . . . They got the message to pick on some other gang on some other block.87

Kate Simon, born in Poland a year before her father took ship for America, later wrote about her girlhood as a new immigrant in New York, just after the First World War. As she described it, her street presented a drab if not forbidding landscape of rundown tenements, a garage, a few small shops, and one solitary tree (“the only street tree in the neighborhood. . . . It was my tree and I watched and touched it . . . carefully”). She would eventually conquer that street and regard it as her own “royal” domain, where each day she kept tally of all her neighbors’ affairs. That queenly self-​possession of pre-​adolescence would only emerge with the passage of time, however. Her earlier memories are not quite so breezy or buoyant. This is how she recalled her earliest encounter with her street: “[A]‌cross from the tall sinister stone wall where the . . . trains came to rest” was where “I began to know I would never get to America . . ., not the America promised me in Warsaw.”88 The street was public space where, unshielded by the protection provided by four walls, or, for that matter, unhindered by parental inhibitions, children came face to face with the changes that were overtaking their lives. One immigrant child recalled that children in her family broke eagerly into English whenever they went outside, whereas at home, their mother insisted that, “[t]‌his is a Jewish home and no gentile languages are going to be spoken here.”89 And in contrast: Rose Cohen recalled the shame and shock of an incident just after her arrival (at age 12) in New York, where she rejoined her father. On her first Saturday in her new home, Rose went for a walk with her father, whom she had remembered from home as a “most pious” Jew. Now, the newly minted, semi-​Americanized father went about dressed without his formerly habitual long kaftan; his sidelocks (peyess) were shorn, and his beard was trimmed. He cheerfully bought her a piece of melon from a street vendor, thus flagrantly violating the prohibition against handling money on the Sabbath. Rose threw the fruit to the ground in utter, disbelieving chagrin and ran away—​stopping only when she realized that she was very far from where she was meant to be.90

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Separations, Transitions, and Longings As in this last case, several memoirs of childhood and youth dwelt on sensitive and painful events that marked the emergent consciousness of the young child, fears of abandonment, and the effect of such events on family relationships. Two very young sisters from Chicago who entered the Cleveland JOA in the winter of 1894 recalled their sense of loss at the removal of their personal clothing and the prized shoes they brought from home (children at the orphanage dressed in uniforms). They grieved, as well, over the short, severe, “boyish” haircuts they were given (“I felt like we had lost our identity”), and tearfully wrote immediately to their mother, begging to be taken home.91 Although Arthur Hertzberg—​ scholar, rabbi, and American Jewish communal leader in the post-​Second World War era—​retained very few memories of his first years (he left Poland at age five), these few memories were vivid, becoming personal totems of his separation from his early childhood and his journey to a new country. He recalled being roughed up and called “dirty Jew” by Polish boys when he was on his way to school. He recalled the death from fever of his little brother when he himself was just three years old, and his mother’s grief. And he recalled parting from his grandfather, when the train that bore him and his mother away to their new lives, to join his father in America, left the station: I recall that I was wearing new shoes for this occasion. . . . My grandfather was crying because, as he said quite openly, he never expected to see us again. As the train pulled out, he was running beside it on the platform ... his black caftan was flying behind him . . . and his long grey beard was half over his left shoulder—​and the tears in his eyes were becoming wetter as he ran. I did not cry for him then, at the age of five, because I was so pleased with my new shoes and so eager to meet my father [in America]. But . . . the image that I see [now] is this Hasid trying to make his grandchild remember him.92

Adults’ memories of childhood are always ephemeral, selective, and constructed, sheltered or avoided, renounced or celebrated. Child immigrants become adults whose childhood memories seem to be all of these things, but in a particular way, split by divided geographies into continents of memory. In the end, we are left with a later (adult) depiction of the child immigrant’s self-​image as a time-​and-​space traveler, caught between two geographies and two lives. I will conclude, therefore, with a return to Mary Antin, followed by a postscript (in flash-​forward mode) to a child immigrant of a different era. Here, first, is Antin’s description of the psychic upheaval of having grown up as an immigrant child: [T]‌he emigration became of the most vital importance to me personally. All the processes of uprooting, transportation, replanting, acclimatization, and development took place in my own soul. I felt the pang, the fear, the wonder, and the joy of it. I can never forget, for I bear the scars. But I want to forget—​and sometimes I long to forget. . . . A long past vividly remembered is like a heavy garment that clings to your limbs when you would run.93

The text that serves as our postscript, and to which I leave the final word, belongs to Eva Hoffman (neé Wydra), in her memoir, Lost in Translation. Hoffman left Cracow,

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Poland for Vancouver, Canada in 1959, as a 13-​year-​old child of Holocaust survivors. She subsequently moved to the United States, where she attended university and became a journalist and writer of note. The perspective that she provides is doubly fitting for our conclusion: Hoffman has written of her admiration for and identification with the author of The Promised Land, despite the eminently different lives and ideas of these two women, shaped by such different times. Her words to that effect appear as an epigraph to Sollors’ introduction to The Promised Land.94 Moreover, with Hoffman we come closer in time to our own era, in which immigrants, refugees, and their children have once again become staples of public debates. Hoffman’s memoir is eloquently introspective:  this, perhaps, is what brings her closest to the kindred spirit she identified in Antin. But she has had at least one advantage over Antin, in the form of several more years of childhood in her home, prior to emigration. Her childhood and early youth in postwar Poland are related in the first part of her memoir, which she titles “Paradise”—​a title that not only evokes childhood as a proverbially innocent “garden” but also foreshadows the inevitable expulsion. “[W]‌hen it came time to leave, I . . . felt I was being pushed out of the happy, safe enclosures of Eden. . . . No wonder. But the wonder is what you can make a paradise out of . . . .”95 Part 2 of the book, opening upon the scenes of Hoffman’s arrival in Canada, indeed bears the title “Exile.” Hoffman spent her early years in a kind of constant inner migration, which presages, in slow motion, the physical migration that was to follow. The family regularly kept up a prophylactic display of Catholic customs and phrases that social conformity (and a precautionary sense) prescribed. This constituted a “boundary” that they regularly “crossed,” on the other side of which was the permeating “Jewishness” of their whole existence (a Jewishness that, inevitably, has an association with food: it “lives in that bread, which other people don’t seem to make”).96 Hoffman is our guide to the consternation of departure and separation, the 12-​day ocean voyage to Montreal, and the early stages of her new life. She writes letters home to a friend, describing the blooms in the garden outside (“Imagine! All this in the middle of a city. And . . . there are parties all the time.”) To us, her readers, she confides (upon adult reflection): I am repeating a ritual performed by countless immigrants who have sent letters back home meant to impress and convince our friends and relatives—​and probably even themselves—​that their lives have changed for the better. I  am lying. But I  am also trying to fend off my nostalgia. . . . I dream of Cracow perpetually . . . looking for a way home.97

Ultimately, the process of loss and replacement is mediated through the dimension of language (“lost in translation”): As I lie down in a strange bed in a strange house—​my mother is a sort of housekeeper here, to the aging Jewish man who has taken us in in return for her services—​I wait for that spontaneous flow of inner language which used to be my nighttime talk with myself. . . . Nothing comes. Polish, in a short time, has atrophied, shriveled from sheer uselessness. Its words don’t apply to my new experiences. . . . This interval before sleep used

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to be the time when . . . images and words rose up to consciousness, . . . adding the day’s experiences . . . spinning out the thread of my personal story. Now, this picture-​and-​word show is gone.98

Gone, but not forgotten. Looking at the various manifestations of childhoods marked by immigration and resettlement, we have seen examples that point to the difficulties of living in-​between; the long-​lasting recollections of young people’s witnessing and trying to make sense of their new lives; a wide array of disappointments and revelations; the cost of precocious assumption of adult responsibilities; and degrees of separation that interrupt the flow of life.

Notes 1. Oscar Handlin, The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations that Made the American People (Boston: 1973 [1951]), 240. 2. Anzia Yezierska, Children of Loneliness (New York: 1923), 123. 3. Lenelle Moïse, “The Children of Immigrants,” in idem, Haiti Glass (San Francisco: 2014), 13–​15; online at: poetryfoundation.org/​poems/​91753 (accessed 10 June 2020). 4. Irving Howe, World of Our Fathers: The Journey of the East European Jews to America and the Life They Found and Made (New York: 1976), 256–​280. 5. Naomi B. Sokoloff, Imagining the Child in Modern Jewish Fiction (Baltimore: 1992), 181. 6. Sholem Aleichem, Adventures of Mottel, the Cantor’s Son, bilingual ed. (2 vols.), trans. Tamara Kahana (New York: 1953); retranslated by Hillel Halkin in Sholem Aleichem, The Letters of Menakhem-​Mendl and Sheyne-​Sheyndl and Motl, the Cantor’s Son (New Haven: 2002); Henry Roth, Call It Sleep (New York: 1934). 7. Doris E. Fleischman, “Evolution of Americanization,” New York Evening Post (28 June 1919), cited by Curt Asher, “The Progressive Past: How History Can Help Us Serve Generation 1.5,” Reference and User Services Quarterly 51, no. 1 (2011), 46. 8. Mary Antin, The Promised Land (New York: 1997 [1912]), 1. 9. Rose Cohen, Out of the Shadow: A Russian Jewish Girlhood on the Lower East Side (Ithaca: 1995 [New York: 1918]), 150, 152–​154. 10. Florian Znaniecki and W.I. Thomas, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (Boston: 1958 [1918–​1920]), 1776; W. Lloyd Warner and Leo Srole, The Social Systems of American Ethnic Groups (New Haven: 1945). 11. Rubén G. Rumbaut, “Ages, Life Stages, and Generational Cohorts:  Decomposing the Immigrant First and Second Generations in the United States,” International Migration Review 38, no. 3 (2004), 1166–​1167; Rubén D. Rumbaut and Rubén G. Rumbaut, “Self and Circumstance:  Journeys and Visions of Exile,” in The Dispossessed:  An Anatomy of Exile, ed. Peter I. Rose (Amherst: 2004), 338; Larissa Remennick, “The 1.5 Generation of Russian Immigrants in Israel: Between Integration and Sociocultural Retention,” Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies 12, no. 1 (2003), 39–​66. 12. Karina Fortuny, Donald J. Hernandez, and Ajay Chaudry, Young Children of Immigrants:  The Leading Edge of America’s Future (brief no.  3, the Urban Institute) (Washington, D.C.: 2010); Marta Tienda and Ron Haskins, “Immigrant Children: Introducing the Issue,” The Future of Children 21, no. 1 (2011), 3–​ 18; cf. Rubén G. Rumbaut, Ethnicities: Children of Immigrants in America (Berkeley: 2001); Marjorie Faulstich Orellana, Barrie Thorne, Anna Chee, and Wan Shun Eva Lam, “Transnational Childhoods:  The Participation of Children in Processes of Family Migration,” Social Problems 48, no. 4 (2001), 572–​591; Alejandro Portes, The New Second Generation (New York: 1996). 13. UNHCR—​The UN Refugee Agency estimated in 2018 that, since 2011, over 13 million Syrian citizens had been displaced from their homes, with about 3 million finding refuge

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in Turkey, 6.6 million (among them, 2.6 million children) displaced internally in Syria, and the rest having become asylum seekers in other lands. Of the refugees and migrants currently seeking new homes in Europe, one third are children. For updated information, see online at: unhcr. org/​syria-​emergency.html; cf. unicef.org/​eca/​what-​we-​do/​refugee-​and-​migrant-​children; unicefusa.org/​mission/​emergencies/​child-​refugees/​syria-​crisis (accessed 10 June 2020). 14. Adrian Bailey, “Transnational Mobilities and Childhoods,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Childhood Studies, ed. Jens Qvortrup, William A. Corsaro, and Michael-​Sebastian Honig (New York: 2009), 409, citing data from Valerie Leiter, Jennifer Lutzy McDonald, and Heather T. Jacobson, “Challenges to Children’s Independent Citizenship: Immigration, Family and the State,” Childhood 13, no. 1 (2006),11. 15. United States Census Bureau, “The Foreign-​born Population in the United States,” online at: census.gov/​newsroom/​pdf/​cspan_​fb_​slides.pdf (accessed 14 June 2020); cf. Niles Carpenter, Immigrants and Their Children, 1920 (Washington, D.C.: 1927), 7. 16. Northern and Western Europe accounted for the countries of origin of 4.85 million arrivals in the United States as documented in 1870, including 2.63 million from the British Isles and 1.86 million from Ireland. Immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe accounted for only 93,824 of the total for that year. In contrast, between 1890 and 1920, nearly 16 million out of 18 million newcomers came from non-​English-​speaking lands. Southern and Eastern Europeans totaled 5.67 million in the immigration figures for 1920, nearly equivalent to the 6.24 million accounted for by Northern and West Europeans. See United States Census Bureau, Historical Census Statistics on the Foreign-​born Population of the United States: 1850-​1990, Table 4, online at: census.gov/​population/​www/​documentation/​twps0029/​tab04.html; cf. Joel Perlmann, “Historical Legacies: 1840–​1920,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 508 (1990), 34, citing Thomas J. Archdeacon, Becoming American: An Ethnic History (New York: 1983), 115–​119. For the classic study on American nativism and the so-​ called “new immigration,” see John Higham, Strangers in the Land:  Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–​1925 (New Brunswick: 1955). 17. Carpenter, Immigrants and Their Children, 1920, 298. 18. Ibid., 167–​168, 295. 19. Joel Perlmann, America Classifies the Immigrants: From Ellis Island to the 2020 Census (Cambridge, Mass.: 2018), 1–​8, 13–​40, 71–​79, 104–​149. 20. Ellen Key, The Century of the Child (New York: 1909). 21. Stephan F. Brumberg, Going to America, Going to School: The Jewish Immigrant Public School Encounter in Turn-​of-​the-​Century New York City (New York: 1986), 71–​94, 112–​114, 126–​136. 22. Simon Kuznets, “Immigration of Russian Jews to the United States: Background and Structure,” Perspectives in American History 9 (1975), 95–​99 (republished as Chapter 3 in idem, Jewish Economies: Development and Migration in America and Beyond, vol. 2, Comparative Perspectives on Jewish Migration, ed. Stephanie Lo and E. Glen Weyl [London: 2011]). Cf. Samuel Joseph, Jewish Immigration to the United States (New York: 1969 [1914]), 176–​177; Carpenter, Immigrants and Their Children, 171. 23. Gretchen A. Condran and Ellen A. Kramarow, “Child Mortality among Jewish Immigrants to the United States,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 22, no. 2 (1991), 224–​ 228; Melissa Klapper, Small Strangers: The Experiences of Immigrant Children in America, 1880–​1925 (Chicago:  2007), 38; Howard Markel, Quarantine! East European Jewish Immigrants and the New York City Epidemics of 1892 (Baltimore: 1997), 93, 101, 103. 24. Kuznets, “Immigration of Russian Jews to the United States,” 96–​97. 25. Yannay Spitzer, “Pogroms, Networks, and Migration:  The Jewish Migration from the Russian Empire to the U.S. 1881–​1914” (working paper, department of economics, Northwestern University, 2014), online at easteurotopo.org/​articles/​spitzer/​spitzer.pdf (accessed 14 June 2020); Gur Alroey, Hamahapekhah hasheketah:  hahagirah hayehudit mehaimperiyah harusit 1875–​1924 (Jerusalem:  2008), 23–​56; Kuznets, “Immigration of Russian Jews to the United States,” 83–​93; Arcadius Kahan, “Economic Opportunities and Some Pilgrims’ Progress:  The Jewish Immigrants from Eastern Europe in the U.S.,

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1890–​1914,” Journal of Economic History 38, no. 1 (1978), 235–​236, reprinted in idem, Essays in Jewish Social and Economic History, ed. Roger Weiss (Chicago: 1986), 101–​117. 26. Judisches Tageblatt (6 April 1898), quoted in Andrew Heinze, Adapting to Abundance:  Jewish Immigrants, Mass Consumption, and the Search for American Identity (New York: 1990), 81; Simon Dubnow, History of the Jews in Russia and Poland from the Earliest Times until the Present Day, trans. Israel Friedlaender (Philadelphia: 1918), 2:373. 27. Eli Lederhendler, Jewish Immigrants and American Capitalism, 1880–​1920:  From Caste to Class (New  York:  2009), 87–​ 88; idem, American Jewry:  A New History (New York: 2018),  84–​85. 28. Jeffrey S. Passel, “Demography of Immigrant Youth: Past, Present, and Future,” The Future of Children 21, no. 1 (2011), figs. 1–​2. In 1920, foreign-​born white children up to age 15 constituted 2.7 percent of the white population in U.S. cities of under 100,000 inhabitants; 2.9 percent in cities of between 100,000–​250,000 inhabitants, and 3.6 percent in cities of over 250,000 inhabitants. (Both Yiddish-​and Italian-​mother-​tongue children up to age 15 living in urban areas topped those average figures within their respective ethnic enclaves.) Children born in the United States to foreign-​born (or mixed, foreign/​native-​born) parents were, respectively, 39.3 percent, 41.7 percent, and 56.0 percent. Thus, taking all the children up to age 15 (whether born abroad or in America) who, in 1920, were living in immigrant households in the largest American cities (over 250,000 inhabitants), they represented 59.6 percent of the total. Carpenter, Immigrants and Their Children, Table 74 (p. 163); Table 78 (p. 173); Table 174 (pp. 405–​406). 29. Recent Social Trends in the United States: Report of the President’s Research Committee on Social Trends (New York: 1933), 277, 302–​303, 586; Don D. Lescohier, History of Labor in the United States, 1896–​1932, vol. 3, Working Conditions (New York: 1935), 41. 30. Bernard Weinstein, Di yidishe yunyons in amerike (New York: 1929), 484; Abraham Meyer Rogoff, Formative Years of the Jewish Labor Movement (Westport: 1979), 103; Charles Bernheimer, The Russian Jew in the United States (Philadelphia: 1905), 110–​111; Lederhendler, Jewish Immigrants and American Capitalism, 49, 161. Cf. Priscilla Ferguson Clement, Growing Pains:  Children in the Industrial Age (New  York:  1997); Ewa Morawska, For Bread With Butter: The Life-​Worlds of East Central Europeans in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, 1900–​1940 (New York: 1985), 117; Pamela Barnhouse Walters and Carl M. Briggs, “The Family Economy, Child Labor, and Schooling: Evidence from the Early Twentieth Century South,” American Sociological Review 58 (1993), 163–​181; Brian Gratton and Jon Moen, “Immigration, Culture, and Child Labor in the United States, 1880–​1920,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 34, no. 3 (2004), 355–​391. 31. Kathie Friedman-​Kasaba, Memories of Migration: Gender, Ethnicity, and Work in the Lives of Jewish and Italian Women in New York, 1870–​1914 (Albany: 1996), 121–​123. 32. Lederhendler, Jewish Immigrants and American Capitalism, 49; Melissa R. Klapper, Jewish Girls Coming of Age in America, 1860–​1920 (New  York:  2005), 130, 134–​138; Brumberg, Going to America, Going to School, 64; Linda Gordon Kuzmack, Woman’s Cause:  The Jewish Woman’s Movement in England and the United States, 1881–​ 1933 (Columbus:  1990), 59, 71–​74; Friedman-​Kasaba, Memories of Migration, 146, 155, 159–​ 163; Charlotte Baum, Paula Hyman, and Sonya Michel, The Jewish Woman in America (New York: 1976), 169–​175. 33. Lederhendler, Jewish Immigrants and American Capitalism, 49; Kate Rousmaniere, “Losing Patience and Staying Professional: Women Teachers and the Problem of Classroom Discipline in New York City Schools in the 1920s,” History of Education Quarterly 34, no. 1 (1994), 58. 34. Klapper, Small Strangers, 69; Brumberg, Going to America, Going to School, 3, 200; Selma Berrol, Immigrants At School: New York City, 1898–​1914 (New York: 1978 [1967]), Table 1 (p. 143). 35. Selma Berrol, “The Open City: Jews, Jobs, and Schools in New York City, 1880–​1915,” in Educating an Urban People: The New York City Experience, ed. Diane Ravitch and Ronald K. Goodenow (New York: 1981), 108.

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36. Berrol, “The Open City,” 105; idem, Immigrants At School, 109–​113; quotation from S. Josephine Baker, Fighting for Life (New York: 1939), 57–​60, reprinted in Children and Youth in America: A Documentary History, vol. 2, 1866–​1932 (Parts 1–​6), ed. Robert H. Bremner, John Barnard, Tamara K. Hareven, and Robert M. Mennel (Cambridge, Mass.: 1971), 16. 37. Rousmaniere, “Losing Patience and Staying Professional,” 56–​57. 38. Paula S. Fass, Children of a New World:  Society, Culture, and Globalization (New York: 2007), 3. 39. Ibid., 28. 40. Brumberg, Going to America, Going to School, 8, 128. 41. Ibid., 191. 42. Quoted by Klapper, Jewish Girls Coming of Age in America, 130, 260 (n. 85). 43. Berrol, “Open City,” 110; idem, Immigrants at School, Table  5 (p.  146); Brumberg, Going to America, Going to School, 6. 44. Quoted in Berrol, “Open City,” 104, citing Robert A. Woods, Americans in Process (Cambridge, Mass.: 1902), 292. 45. Quoted in Brumberg, Going to America, Going to School, 17. 46. Quoted in ibid., 136–​137. 47. Gil Ribak, Gentile New York: The Images of Non-​Jews among Jewish Immigrants (New Brunswick: 2012),  88–​89. 48. Rose (Globman) Klein, interviewed by Stephan Brumberg, quoted in idem, Going to America, Going to School, 129. 49. Quoted in ibid., 29, citing Morris Raphael Cohen, A Dreamer’s Journey (Glencoe: 1949), 31. 50. Reena Sigman Friedman, These Are Our Children: Jewish Orphanages in the United States, 1880–​1925 (Hanover: 1994), 1–​33, 53. 51. Ibid., 155. The rather doctrinaire, methodical, and stern director of the Cleveland JOA, Samuel Wolfenstein, became convinced that the proximity of the home to the neighborhood where the resident children had friends and family was the source of his charges’ misbehavior, and he urged further regimentation as well as moving the JOA to a more distant, countrified location. Gary Edward Polster, Inside Looking Out: The Cleveland Jewish Orphan Asylum, 1868–​1924 (Kent: 1990), 122, 134. 52. Lee K. Frankel, “Report of the Committee on Dependent Children” (Proceedings of the National Conference of Jewish Charities [1902]), reprinted in Trends and Issues in Jewish Social Welfare in the United States, 1899–​1958, ed. Robert Morris and Michael Freund (Philadelphia: 1966), 91–​93; Friedman, These Are Our Children, 47, 51–​52, 155. 53. Friedman, These Are Our Children, 41, 44–​46, 51–​53, 167–​168, 195. 54. Solomon Lowenstein, “Adequacy of Relief” (Proceedings of the National Conference of Jewish Charities [1904], 35–​41), reprinted in Morris and Freund (eds.), Trends and Issues in Jewish Social Welfare in the United States, 64; Friedman, These Are Our Children, 52. 55. Bernheimer (ed.), The Russian Jew in the United States, 68. 56. Solomon Lowenstein, “A Study of the Problem of Boarding Out Jewish Children and of Pensioning Widowed Mothers” (Proceedings, the Sixth Biennial Session of the National Conference of Jewish Charities in the United States [1910], 206–​211), reprinted in Bremner et al. (eds.), Children and Youth in America, 2:326–​327. Cf. Ludwig Bernstein, “The Problem of Boarding and Placing Out Jewish Dependent Children” (Proceedings of the National Conference of Jewish Charities [1906]), reprinted in Morris and Freund (eds.), Trends and Issues in Jewish Social Welfare, 103–​109. 57. Lowenstein, “A Study of the Problem of Boarding Out Jewish Children and of Pensioning Widowed Mothers,” 328. 58. By that time, Antin was in New York, a student at Columbia University’s Teachers’ College and Barnard College, and married (at age 18—​but professing to be two years older than her actual age). On Mary Antin’s age and its alteration on her school registration, see Mary Antin, “The Lie,” The Atlantic Monthly (August 1913); Sunny Yudkoff, “The Adolescent Self-​Fashioning of Mary Antin,” Studies in American Jewish Literature 32, no. 1 (2013), 26–​27

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(n. 22), citing Allan Mazur, A Romance in Natural History: The Lives and Works of Amadeus Grabau and Mary Antin (Syracuse: 2004), 139–​143. 59. Antin, The Promised Land, 296–​297. 60. Ibid., 1. 61. Keren R. McGinity, “The Real Mary Antin: Woman on a Mission in the Promised Land,” American Jewish History 86, no. 3 (1998), 285–​307. Cf. Joyce Antler, The Journey Home: How Jewish Women Shaped Modern America (New York: 1997), ch. 1. 62. Werner Sollors, “Introduction,” in Antin, The Promised Land, xiv–​xv; cf. Yudkoff, “The Adolescent Self-​Fashioning of Mary Antin,” 22; McGinity, “The Real Mary Antin”; Eli Lederhendler, “Re-​ reading the Americanization Narratives of Antin, Zangwill, and Cahan:  Imagining and Un-​imagining the Jewish Community,” in Imagining the American Jewish Community, ed. Jack Wertheimer (Hanover:  2007), 253–​270; idem, “Orphans and Prodigies: Rediscovering Young Jewish Immigrant ‘Marginals,’” American Jewish History 95, no. 2 (2009), 135–​155. 63. Antin, The Promised Land, 3. 64. Ibid., 286. 65. Ibid., 157–​158, 199, 200, 218–​219. 66. Cohen, Out of the Shadow, 246. 67. Sydney Stahl Weinberg, The World of Our Mothers (New York: 1988), 111. 68. Interview of Sadie Rehstock, quoted in Neil M. Cowan and Ruth Schwartz Cowan, Our Parents’ Lives: The Americanization of Eastern European Jews (New York: 1989), 6. 69. Joseph Heller, Now and Then:  A Memoir from Coney Island to Here (New  York: 1998), 38. 70. Cowan and Cowan, Our Parents’ Lives, 16. 71. Heller, Now and Then, 4. 72. Antin, The Promised Land, 74. 73. Ibid., 153–​154. 74. Polster, Inside Looking Out, 138. 75. Ibid., 137. 76. Ibid., 102. 77. Rebecca Yamin, “Children’s Strikes, Parents’ Rights:  Paterson and Five Points,” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 6, no. 2 (2002), 119, citing David Nasaw, Children of the City:  At Work and At Play (New  York:  1985), 22, 39, 198; Klapper, Small Strangers, 86–​87. Cf. Howe, World of Our Fathers, 256–​260. 78. Elizabeth Ewen, Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars:  Life and Culture on the Lower East Side, 1890–​1925 (New  York:  1985), 20–​21, citing Marie Ganz, Rebels:  Into Anarchy and Out Again (New York: 1920), 20–​25. 79. Ruth Gay, Unfinished People: Eastern European Jews Encounter America (New York: 1996),  92–​93. 80. Antin, The Promised Land, 203. 81. Sholem Aleichem, Adventures of Mottel, the Cantor’s Son, 2:110–​114. I have altered the translation slightly to accord more literally with the Yiddish original. For a longer discussion of Motl’s character and the functions of language in the novel, see Sokoloff, Imagining the Child in Modern Jewish Fiction,  43–​63. 82. Sholem Aleichem, Adventures of Mottel, the Cantor’s Son, 2: 276. 83. Philip Davis, Street-​Land: Its Little People and Big Problems (Boston: 1915); Robert W. DeForest and Lawrence Veiller (eds.), The Tenement House Problem, 2 vols. (New York: 1903), 1:xxi and 2:7; Roy Rosenzweig, “Reforming Working-​ Class Play:  Workers, Parks and Playgrounds in an Industrial City, 1870–​1920,” in Life and Labor: Dimensions of American Working Class History, ed. Charles Stephenson and Robert Asher (Albany: 1986), 150–​175. 84. Rousmaniere, “Losing Patience and Staying Professional,” 59. 85. Roth, Call It Sleep, 419–​441. 86. Cohen, Out of the Shadow, 100–​101.

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87. Interview of Sam Smilowitz, quoted in Cowan and Cowan, Our Parents’ Lives, 66. On street gangs and juvenile violence in the Jewish immigrant sector, see Howe, World of Our Fathers, 264. 88. Kate Simon, Bronx Primitive: Portraits of a Childhood (New York: 1982), 1–​2, 58–​59. 89. Quoted in Ewen, Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars, 197; original quote from Sydelle Kramer and Jenny Masur, Jewish Grandmothers (Boston: 1977), 130. 90. Cohen, Out of the Shadow, 78–​79; cf. Lederhendler, “Orphans and Prodigies,” 143–​144. 91. Polster, Inside Looking Out, 100. See, too, another essay in this symposium that discusses the trauma associated with hair being shorn: Nava Barazani, “Hide and Seek: The Tale of Three Girls in the Giado Concentration Camp in Libya (1942–​1943),” 103–120. 92. Arthur Hertzberg, A Jew in America: My Life and a People’s Struggle for Identity (San Francisco: 2002),  7–​9. 93. Antin, The Promised Land, 3. 94. Ibid., xi. 95. Eva Hoffman, Lost in Translation: A New Life in a New Language (New York: 1989), 5. 96. Ibid., 20–​37 (quoted phrase on 29). 97. Ibid., 116. 98. Ibid., 107.

Divided Unity: Jewish Writing for Children in the United States and Palestine at the Onset of the Second World War Yael Darr (TEL AVIV UNIVERSITY)

At the onset of the Second World War, two exceptionally morbid novels for young Jewish readers were published on opposite sides of the world. In blunt and graphic language, they presented the dire situation of the Jews in Germany and Austria and the urgency of saving them. The general storylines are similar: in both books, young readers follow the upheavals in the lives of two children who, brutally separated from their parents and forced to flee their secure and stable world, confront antisemitism and fascism, hunger and murderous violence. Nevertheless there was a discursive chasm separating the two works. Their target readerships, although similar in age (children between the ages of 10 and 12), were so remote from one another geographically, ideologically, and culturally that one could assume that neither had read the other. Yankev Glatshteyn’s Emil un Karl (Emil and Karl) was published in New York in 1940 and was written in Yiddish, which the Bund and Yiddishist movements viewed as the dominant Jewish language. The other, Levin Kipnis’ Bintiv hapele (The Miraculous Path), was published in Tel Aviv in 1939 and written in Modern Hebrew, the language of Zionism and of a people seeking to revive itself in Eretz Israel.1 Emil un Karl promotes the values of socialist solidarity and universal humanism. The plot is set in Vienna in the period following the Anschluss, the annexation of Austria to Germany (March 1938), against the background of the mass arrests and deportations of Jews from Germany and Austria, the events of Kristallnacht, and the severe maltreatment of the city’s Jews. At its center are two nine-​year-​old boys caught in the grips of the Nazi regime—​Karl, the son of non-​Jewish socialist parents opposed to the regime, and Emil, the son of Jewish parents forced to cope with Austria’s rapid decline into catastrophic Nazism. Both boys, who are cruelly orphaned, expelled from school, and torn from their familiar surroundings, find themselves alone in a hostile and dangerous environment. They are sheltered by two

Yael Darr, Divided Unity: Jewish Writing for Children in the United States and Palestine at the Onset of the Second World War In: No Small Matter: Features of Jewish Childhood. Edited by: Anat Helman, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197577301.003.0005

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dissident socialists who risk their lives to save them. The story ends with the boys waiting tensely for a train that will take them out of Austria. The uncertain ending is disturbing: Emil manages to squeeze himself onto the train, while Karl is left waiting on the platform. Bintiv hapele, in contrast, is a reassuring Zionist story about tragedy and rescue in Eretz Israel. The story describes the experiences of two German Jewish children, Hans, a boy of twelve, and Noga, a girl of three, who are sent to the forest by the Nazis, together with many other Jewish children, and left there to die. The two survive by digging a cave, rationing their scarce food, and fighting off wild animals and brutal Nazi soldiers. Eventually they find a miraculous path through which they reach the land of Israel, where they are warmly received by local “Hebrew children” and their families. The differing ideologies of Glatshteyn and Kipnis, which both guide the plots and determine how the difficult events of the time are to be understood, reflect the divergent ways in which the two authors perceived their target audience. However, in order to thoroughly understand the authors’ intentions to have a deeply affecting impact on their contemporary readers, the works will be examined for their unifying factor, namely, the close ties to European Jewry that each of the authors felt, in a personal and profound cultural sense, as first-​generation immigrants from Eastern Europe. The basic assumption of this essay is that, during this period, a multilingual and transnational paradigm of migration informed Jewish writing for children in both the United States and Palestine, despite the profound differences between them. The two works, written in such crucial times for European Jewry, will therefore be examined as extreme examples of two very different, yet intertwined literatures for children. By adopting this transnational perspective, I hope to shed light on the complexity of the Jewish secular intergenerational discourse within the Jewish immigrant societies in the United States and Palestine. I also wish to offer this inclusive research framework as a key to understanding Jewish secular writing for children in other destination countries of the great Jewish migration from Eastern Europe at the end of the 19th and throughout the first half of the 20th century.2

The Immigration Paradigm in Jewish Children’s Literature At the end of the 19th century and in the first decades of the 20th, Jewish society in Eastern Europe was undergoing rapid modernization, an overall process that included secularization, ideological radicalism, and massive emigration to new Jewish centers within and outside Europe. The vast emigration led to a numerical and cultural dominance of East European Jews among the Jewish populations in the United States and in Palestine.3 In both places, emigration became a formative experience for the immigrants themselves and for the Jews who had lived there for decades (and, in some cases, for generations). Immigration was given a vivid public voice through

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the Jewish press, radio, and literature, as well as in an unprecedented flow of secular writing for children.4 However, as opposed to writers and poets who wrote for fellow adults sharing the immense cultural and personal impact of emigration, children’s authors wrote for an essentially different audience. The children’s writers, even those who felt themselves part of the general culture, clearly perceived their young readership as an ultimate “other”—​that is, a generation of natives who were natural citizens in the new country. For these writers, the young readers’ inherent otherness exemplified not only the cultural assimilation they advocated, but also an emotional and cultural detachment from, and even disregard for, the old country. They had to define what and how much of the old country, its languages and culture, to present to a younger generation, and what emotional and ideological positions to promote with regard to the country of origin. There was therefore an inherent tension in their writing for children between the broad transnational Jewish perspective and the exclusive national and political viewpoint. The attitudes toward the old country and their part in the new narrative for children were influenced by the various circumstances of migration and the cultures of the new countries, along with the political factionalism within and between the various Jewish communities. Sometimes transnational ties were emphasized (in either a positive or negative sense), sometimes they were implied, and sometimes even denied. However, although this basic bond to European Jewry was not always immediately apparent in the various texts, it was alive in the minds of the children’s authors and implicit in their writing. They wrote and interpreted texts according to this multilingual and transnational paradigm of migration.

The Politics of Language in Jewish Secular Intergenerational Discourse In the interwar period, the attempt to impart a clear emotional and ideological stance regarding European Jewry to Jewish children born in the United States and Palestine yielded an unprecedented abundance of textbooks, children’s literature, and children’s newspapers of a secular (albeit not necessarily anti-​religious) character and clear political orientation. Their political affiliation was obvious from the publishing house in which they appeared, the messages they conveyed, and also from the very language of discourse. Most writers were immigrants themselves, or the children of immigrants, and they spoke, read, and wrote several languages with varying facility. Besides the current local language (English or Hebrew, respectively), they were familiar to a certain extent with the two Jewish languages used in the old country, Yiddish and Hebrew; moreover, writers who were themselves first-​generation immigrants likely possessed fluency in the national tongues of their former homeland (for instance, Polish, Russian, or German). The language of discourse was therefore a conscious choice, behind which stood personal and financial considerations as well as purely ideological motives. In the 1930s, Glatshteyn’s American Yiddish and Kipnis’ Eretz Israeli Hebrew were on opposite sides of a political/​national divide. They signaled two contrasting options

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of emigration and secular Jewish existence. Their target audiences could identify the linguistic politics of the text—​even before they were immersed in the content—​and politically identify with it.

American Yiddish: The Jewish Language of Solidarity The Yiddishist–​American intergenerational discourse had an overall socialist and humanistic orientation. Although considered a marginal and sectorial language in America, Yiddish was presented as belonging to the wider world. It crossed nationalities and challenged the bond between language and country. Its eclectic nature, the fact that it drew on several languages, including German, Hebrew and Aramaic, various Slavic languages, and English, reinforced its transnational inclusiveness.5 In the 1930s, Yiddish writing for children was seen as a vital educational supplement to the American books and press that young Jewish readers were exposed to. In light of the dominance of English in the lives of the younger generation, most of whom were educated in the public school system, Yiddish (and Hebrew) writing for children was an attempt to enhance their Jewish identity by preserving the Jewish multilingualism that characterized Jewish societies in Europe as well as that generation of writers. Yiddish thus reflected the attempt to establish continuity, in which the generation of the parents wrote for its children in the language of its childhood and about the place of its childhood. Most of the Yiddish intergenerational discourse in the United States in those years was initiated by the Yiddish secular school system and was intended for its pupils. The first secular Yiddish schools were established in the United States in 1910 by the Poalei Zion party and its affiliate, the Yidish natsyonaler arbeter farband (National Jewish Workers’ Union). They were first called the Natsyonale-​radikale shulen (National Radical Schools) to stress their secularism, but in 1918 the name was changed to the more neutral Yidishe folkshulen. These schools operated on Saturdays and Sundays and were located throughout the United States. In the following years, other Yiddish secular educational networks sprang up, using a similar format. Most had a socialist orientation, and were differentiated by their particular attitudes toward Zionism and Communism. The majority strongly opposed the integration of English texts into the curriculum.6 In the early years, many of the pupils were fluent in Yiddish and were able to read European editions of books that were appropriate for them in terms of content and language. In this period, teachers, writers, and publishers maintained professional and commercial ties with their colleagues in Europe, and schoolchildren were still exposed to texts that originated there.7 By the late 1920s, however, two separate audiences began to emerge. Books from Poland and Russia no longer suited the reading culture of native-​born American children. The physical format (in the main, the poor quality of the printing) was not appealing to young readers, and the changes that had gradually occurred in American Yiddish made East European Yiddish difficult for them to understand. This led to an increasing demand for a local Yiddish literature for children.8

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A great deal of the local texts for children had a clear political affiliation as a result of the increasing politicization of the American Yiddish school system. By the end of the 1920s, four separate secular Yiddish school systems had emerged:  the Labor Zionist Farband schools, which were socialist-​Zionist in orientation; Sholem Aleichem schools, which were considered apolitical; Workmen’s Circle schools, which preached universal socialism; and the Orden school network, which identified with Communism and supported the Soviet Union. Each of these four school systems published its own children’s periodicals.9 Considering this overt politicization of Yiddish American children’s culture, it is notable that Glatshteyn tried to avoid political affiliation. The little he wrote for children before Emil un Karl was published in Kinder-​zhurnal (Children’s Journal), issued by the Sholem Aleichem Folk Institute, the least political of the various educational networks.10 Emil un Karl was published by a private publisher, the Moshe Shmuel Shklarski Press.11 In other words, the book did not appear either as an educational book or as having a particular political orientation.

Hebrew in Palestine: The Language of the Land of Israel Whereas writing in Yiddish crossed national territories and established a common ground with European Jewry, writing in Hebrew in Palestine served the opposite trend: an exclusive ingathering within the land of Israel, while negating the cultural and physical space of the countries of origin and other target destinations. Thus, even though Hebrew, like Yiddish, was clearly a transnational Jewish language, in Palestine it was perceived as the national language of Eretz Israel and as the sole language of its younger generation. Unlike Yiddish, which assumed a dual sectoral audience (Jewish, pupils in the Yiddishist schools), Hebrew was aimed at all Jewish children in Palestine, including those who had originated from Islamic countries. Therefore, beside its exclusive, anti-​ diasporic role, Hebrew in Jewish Palestine also had an inclusive objective. The dominance of children’s writing in Hebrew was already evident in the first decades of the 20th century. This writing was seen as a critical part of the Hebrew nation-​building project and a key component in the process of creating a national Hebrew culture. As such, it was promoted by institutions, public figures, educators, intellectuals, authors, and poets, who viewed writing for children in Hebrew as a Zionist value in and of itself. Indeed, in the first decades of the 20th century, the struggle to establish Hebrew as the national language that would replace Yiddish, the main language of the immigrants, was at the forefront of the Zionist nation-​building project. The enforcement of Hebrew in the educational institutions was part of this struggle, and the children themselves played an important role in the task.12 Children who effortlessly spoke Hebrew were living proof of the success of the Zionist enterprise and a symbol of the promising national future. Their speech was the music of a unique community, the first indigenous generation growing up in the land of Israel.

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The Sephardic pronunciation distinguished it from the Ashkenazic Hebrew of the diaspora and its religious context. This lack of “foreign accents” also distinguished the children from their parents and teachers, most of whom still bore the accents of their countries of origin. Until the late 1920s, children’s literature was harnessed to the endeavor of transforming Hebrew from a “holy tongue” into a secular language of reading, writing, and speaking by children. It was supposed to “invent” a secular Hebrew for its young readers in which they would study, play, and dream. In these early years, the readership of original works in Hebrew and translations of children’s literature into Hebrew was not limited to Palestine but also included the children in the Hebrew educational institutions in Europe, mainly the pupils in the Zionist Tarbut system. Educators and publishers in Palestine maintained close contact with schools, teachers, and publishers in Europe: Hebrew books and textbooks printed in Europe were brought to Palestine and likewise, texts written in Palestine were read in Europe.13 By the 1930s, the children’s book market had increased dramatically. From what had been sporadic initiatives of educators, intellectuals, and private publishers at the beginning of the century, a vibrant field of institutionalized secular publishing for children emerged, propelled by the Hebrew educational system. The 1930s also marked a growing split between readers in Europe and those in Palestine, where Hebrew had transformed from a language that was being revived and needed defending into the indisputable national language. Thus, as in the case of Yiddish in the United States, in Palestine in those years a distinct local readership developed whose literary needs (content, forms, and language) differed from those in other Jewish communities. The children living in Palestine diverged from their European (and American) peers also in their deep involvement in local current events and politics. In the 1930s, the Hebrew child culture was extremely political. Most schools were affiliated with one of three distinct political educational streams: the general stream representing the center and right wing of the political map; the labor movement stream, which represented the Left (Mapai and the other workers’ parties); and the Mizrahi stream, which represented the religious Zionist parties (with a fourth stream added later, Agudath Israel, representing the ultra-​Orthodox). In addition, many children identified with political youth movements, belonged to politically affiliated sports groups, and subscribed to overtly political children’s magazines. As a result, a dynamic market for children’s books was created that was supported by political institutions interested in influencing a large community of readers. During those years, the hegemonic Mapai established a socialist Zionist agenda for children that fostered realistic literature about Zionist current events that was mostly limited to the Labor agricultural settlements, the kibbutz and the moshav. Describing the daily life of the first indigenous generation, these books emphasized the political commitment of children and their identity as an exclusive collective.14 At the heart of the Zionist intergenerational discourse was a diaspora-​negating binary, which compared the withering diaspora with the healthy Zionist enterprise whose sons and daughters were its crowning glory.15 This fierce opposition to the diaspora actually exposed the diaspora as a real threat to the Zionist endeavor. It also

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implied the diaspora’s dominance in the cultural consciousness of most of the adult writers, who had themselves been shaped by it.16 Levin Kipnis was one of the pioneers of the diaspora-​negating Zionist narrative and one of its most active voices. The children’s anthologies he edited and his own numerous works for children published in the journals he founded for kindergarten teachers and in children’s magazines and books (often written under various pseudonyms) were intended to replace the poems, stories, and traditions of the diaspora.17 However, Kipnis was not identified as a political writer in the full sense of the word, although he published from time to time in political platforms, including Davar liyladim, Mapai’s weekly for children. Bintiv hapele was published by Dvir, a nonpolitical publishing house whose founders were Hayim Nahman Bialik and Ahad Ha’am.18

From Political Exclusivity to Jewish Inclusivity In the late 1930s, the need to change the narrative about the European diaspora and evoke a new sentiment of brotherhood and commitment overcame political considerations. Both Glatshteyn and Kipnis aimed to change attitudes from the bottom up: to present older children, who read on their own without adult mediation, with forthright, firsthand accounts of the catastrophe unfolding in Europe. In both cases, the very choice of children as the target audience for these revelations increased the impact of these works, implying that it was not advisable to hide the magnitude of the disaster from children. It was vital that they feel—​just as the writers did—​that what was happening to Jews in faraway Europe was their calamity, as well. Glatshteyn and Kipnis were well suited to lead this narrative shift, given their positions as outstanding cultural figures in their communities. They had both emigrated from Eastern Europe in their teenage years. Glatshteyn (1896–​1971), born in Lublin (Poland), emigrated to the United States on the eve of the First World War and settled in New York. In 1920, he was one of the founders of the modernist Yiddish literary school, Di inzikhistn (The Introspectivists), which celebrated the poetry of the intimate voice of the individual. He was among the founders of the influential journal Inzikh (In the Self), which became the flagship of modernist Yiddish poetry,19 and he was also an acclaimed essayist and critic. By the 1930s, he was a central figure in Yiddish letters and was considered one of the leading modernist Yiddish poets of the time. Although most of his literary and journalistic work was published in the United States, he found an audience as well among the Jewish modernist literary circles in Europe.20 Kipnis (1894–​1990), born in the town of Ushomir (Ukraine), emigrated to Palestine in 1913. In 1914, he began writing poems and stories for preschoolers, with the aim of replacing those the teachers had brought with them from their homelands. In 1918, he founded the influential journal Gilyonot leganenot (Pages for Kindergarten Teachers), in which he regularly published stories and songs. By the 1930s, he was one of the most active writers for children in Jewish Palestine and an influential gatekeeper of the Hebrew child culture.21

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As prominent tastemakers, Glatshteyn and Kipnis now hoped to reach as large an audience as possible, without the mediation of the political educational institutions. To this end, they chose popular literary genres that allowed them to attract an enthusiastic readership and thereby gradually forge in them a newfound identification with and empathy for European Jews.22

The Jewish Languages as a Bridge In the same year that Emil un Karl appeared, Glatshteyn published his autobiographical novel for adults, Venn Yash iz gekumen (When Yash Arrived), with the same publisher. This novel, along with its predecessor Venn Yash iz geforn (When Yash Set Out) (1938), marked a turning point in Glatshteyn’s oeuvre. The two novels document his journey to Lublin to bid farewell to his dying mother, which took place twenty years after his emigration to the United States. The journey awakened in this “poet of the self” a deep feeling of compassion for the Jews of Eastern Europe and a sense of collective Jewish identity, which he felt he had repressed in America. These two autobiographical novels were a defining moment for him: an emotional return, albeit late, to a Jewish communal identity.23 According to Dan Miron, Glatshteyn’s transition from poetry to prose as a major creative path (in the aftermath of his visit to Lublin) is tied to this move. Prose writing was his way of expanding his poetic self to include people and places of his youth. Through prose, he could give voice to the diverse opinions of his fellow Jews and arouse in his readers a new attentiveness toward them. The choice of prose also extended his readership beyond the Jewish avant-​garde.24 All these factors were also involved in Glatshteyn’s decision to write Yiddish prose for children that dealt with the dire events in Europe. In Emil un Karl, Yiddish was not, realistically, the language spoken by the two protagonists: it is reasonable to assume that nine-​year-​old Karl, the son of a non-​Jewish socialist family, and his Jewish friend Emil, conversed together in German. Rather, Yiddish is used in the book as a mediating language between the German of its protagonists and the Jewish readers in the United States whose dominant language was English, as well as potential readers of Yiddish in the old world, who were currently living in the midst of the crisis. In other words, Glatshteyn used Yiddish as a way, at least potentially, of addressing a transnational, American–​East European Jewish readership for whom language was a common denominator. However, as the situation of European Jewry worsened in the late 1930s and contacts with it became more difficult, the notion of a transnational readership carried an ironic, even morbid, connotation. In Palestine, the sweeping negation of the diaspora made Kipnis’ task that much harder when he sat down, in 1939, to write a story of solidarity with the Jews of Europe. Like many writers and educators of his generation, Kipnis now became aware of the damage created by the rejection of the diaspora, which prevented the younger generation from identifying with the plight of European Jewry in those days of turmoil. He therefore aimed to replace his readers’ fundamental sentiment of distance and distaste toward the Jewish community in Europe with empathy and commitment.25

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In order to challenge the diaspora-​negating dichotomy so prevalent in his readers’ world, Kipnis depoliticized their national exclusive Hebrew by transforming it into the actual shared language of the two German protagonists. In the fictional world he created, Hebrew (and not German) functioned as the common language bridging two German options of Jewishness that, until Hitler’s rise to power, had been irreconcilable: the assimilated German Jewish family, represented by Hans, and the Zionist family, represented by Noga. Kipnis notes in the book that Hans’ Hebrew was not an ideological choice but rather the result of antisemitism. He first learned Hebrew and became exposed to Zionist values only after he was expelled from school because of the Nazi racial laws and had no choice but to attend a Jewish school (pp. 28–​30). Noga, in contrast, is the daughter of a longtime Zionist family, hence her Hebrew name. Kipnis depicts this three-​year-​ old speaking fluent Hebrew in her first meeting with Hans in the forest (p. 49). In the second part of the book, with the arrival of the two children in Eretz Israel, Hebrew becomes the common language that they share with the local children who welcome them. In fact, it was unlikely that the children of Zionist families in Germany spoke mainly in Hebrew at the time; in order to build new linguistic solidarity between them and the readers, Kipnis ignored this reality. Similarly, he chose to overlook the fact that both Zionist and assimilated German Jews struggled to learn and to speak Hebrew even after arriving and settling in Palestine.26

The Generational Bond Replaces Politics The shift from local politics to an inclusively Jewish sensibility is expressed in both works in an attempt to instill generational solidarity among children across political, geographic, and even ethnic borders. Emil and Karl, Hans and Noga—​the two pairs of protagonists, categorically different from each other and occupying different points on the prevailing political map—​are bound in a brotherhood of children in distress. Tragically missing from both books are the immediate caring elders of children’s literature: parents and teachers. Both books begin with a poignant scene of being torn away from a beloved mother and information that the children’s fathers have been killed (pp. 4–​5 and 9, respectively). The sharp transition from the orderly and protected world (familiar to the young readers) to disaster further extends the children’s brotherly bond to include young readers via their empathic reading. In the case of Emil un Karl, the protagonists themselves make the case that Emil and Karl’s tragedy is much larger than the two of them, and that their brotherly bond is therefore much wider. Matilda, the dissident socialist who takes in the children and cares for them, tells them: “You’re a little better off than the other Emils and Karls who don’t have a roof over their heads. They wander around, living from hand to mouth—​hungry, naked and barefoot” (p. 135). A bit later, the children reflect on her words: “There must be a lot of others like us. Don’t you remember? Aunt Matilda said that there were hundreds of kids like us, wandering around without any parents or friends. Let’s find them, and then we’ll all run away together” (p. 153). In Bintiv hapele, Kipnis’ generational solidarity included German Jewish children from all parts of the social and ideological spectrum. This was a new solidarity from

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the Zionist perspective, arising not from ideological fervor but from the external pressures of Nazi antisemitism. At the outset of the book, Kipnis stresses that the Nazis see all Jewish children as the enemy: Hitler’s followers, that hateful enemy of the Jews, seized masses of Jewish children, robbed them of their father’s homes, stole them from their mother’s lap, and sent them into a huge, dense forest; and placed guards around the perimeter, preventing the children from finding a way out of it. They said: Let the children be the prey for the wild animals; whoever escapes the wild beasts will die of starvation, and whoever survives starvation will die from cold. . . . Thus Hans was added to the hoards of children who were packed into freight cars and transported under cover of night to the huge, frightening forest—​and left there. . . . By morning, more and more camps had been added, until they had become a giant herd of boys and girls of all ages (pp. 7–​10).

Like Glatshteyn, Kipnis stresses that the brotherly friendship of Hans and Noga extends beyond them. In the last part of the book, he actually leaves the two heroes and turns his focus to the masses of children who, like them, miraculously arrive in Palestine (pp. 135–​144). In both cases, the “Jewish child” in the diaspora symbolize two new contradictory qualities: as a community of vulnerable innocents, children are the ultimate victims of murderous Nazi fascism. However, their vitality and commitment to one another demonstrate that their chances of survival and ability to make a new life for themselves are better than those of the adults. They therefore also signify hope.

Irony and Doubt Glatshteyn and Kipnis avoided shielding their young readers, assuming they would be able to absorb the disturbing information revealed in the texts. However, their books offer very different emotional interpretations of the events related. One author further defies the modern protective paradigm relating to children by introducing his young readership to irony and doubt. The other partially adheres to it, by leaving irony and uncertainty mostly to adult readers. In a climactic scene in Emil un Karl, the two children are about to participate in an underground resistance meeting taking place at the house where the two boys are hiding with their rescuers, Hans and Matilda. Hans is debating whether to reveal to the children the grim information that will be discussed at the meeting. Matilda answers: “There’s no harm in it. . . . They’ll remember it when they’re older. It will stay with them” (p. 144). Matilda’s position is in fact consistent with Glatshteyn’s poetic stance toward his readership. It was important for him that young readers would know and share with their parents not only the details of the terrible events, but also emotions, namely the deep concern, uncertainty, frustration, and even guilt they felt about the dire Jewish situation in Europe. He further hoped that this disturbing emotional position would “stay with them,” the readers, when they grew up, as a living collective history.

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With this in mind, Glatshteyn casts a heavy emotional shadow over the story by leaving the plot’s ending open. As noted, at the last minute the children are separated: one manages to leave Vienna, while the other is left behind. Glatshteyn thus splits the fictional space into two opposing emotional realms:  the realm of rescue (England, in this case), toward which Emil makes his way along with other lucky children, and the realm of disaster, where Karl remains with many other children awaiting rescue. These two realms are connected by the train, a metaphor for urgent rescue that may or may not come. This is the radical turn in Glatshteyn’s book: his willingness to share with children the full range of emotions experienced by the adults during this time of crisis. Like Glatshteyn, Kipnis strove to expand his readers’ circle of empathy and solidarity, in his case, by including non-​Zionist Jews. This was his radical move in terms of the children’s literature of his place and time. Nevertheless, he was more ambivalent than Glatshteyn about sharing with children the magnitude of the tragedy threatening the Jews of Europe. The dread and anxiety do exist in the text, but only as a possible interpretation for the adult readers. In contrast to Glatshteyn, Kipnis assigned different generational interpretations of the path to rescue, in this case the “miraculous path” of the book’s title. On a concrete level, the “miraculous path” is a hidden passage the two children dig, first as a means of defending themselves from the wild animals preying on them in the German forest, and then as a miraculous way (following a magical dreidel) of bringing them to the land of Israel. At this point, the harsh realistic Robinsonade located in Germany abruptly becomes fantasy: “They walk and do not walk . . . they seem to stand in one place and everything around them spins around and around. . . . The earth under their feet collapses, and rolls . . . as if it is rolling on wheels. Like a speeding train along stretches of steel tracks” (p. 131). The repeated use of the expression “gilgul meḥilot” (tumbling in underground passages) in the description of the miraculous journey opens an ironic gap between two contradicting interpretations of this fantasy—​the child’s and the adult’s. “Gilgul meḥilot” alludes to Midrash rabba (parasha 36), which deals with resurrection of the dead buried in the golah; according to the midrash, God creates tunnels (meḥilot) for the righteous so that, at the time of redemption, they can roll underground to the land of Israel and be resurrected. By alluding to this midrash, Kipnis suggested a morbid reading of this part of the story, which would have been understood only by adult readers who had received a traditional Orthodox education. For them, this sharp transition from reality to fantasy transforms the concluding section of the book, which takes place in Eretz Israel, into a chilling fantasy of the two heroes trapped in a cave, with Nazi soldiers lurking outside. For the young readers, however, the sharp transition to fantasy led to an allegorical reading at the center of which was the Eretz Israel of here and now. During those years, fantasy served as a popular tool for subversive, anti-​British intergenerational discourse whose aim was to mobilize children mentally and practically for the national cause. Hence, the very utilizing of this genre signaled to them the text’s activist interpretive nature.27 For them, “gilgul meḥilot” was allegorically understood in contemporary terms as a reference to the underground immigration movement

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(ha’apalah), which sought to bring Jews from Europe to Palestine in defiance of the British restrictions laid down in the 1939 White Paper. Kipnis embellished this allegorical link through a description of a book Hans finds in an abandoned suitcase that was left in the forest. Kipnis quotes from one of the stories in this book, “The Legend of Aliyah on the Hoped-​for Day,” which clearly refers to the fate of the Jewish illegal immigrants (ma’apilim) during the British Mandate: When the hoped-​for hour arrives, that is the hour of redemption, and the children of Israel will leave their exile, foes will come and close the way for them. All the roads and all the countries will be open for them to leave, save for one that will be closed, which is the path to enter one land: the land of Israel. First, the route by land will be closed to them. Sentinels will line the border, handcuffing any Jew who sets foot on the threshold (pp. 32-​33).

In other words, Kipnis intended a reinforcing and operative reading for his young readers. When the illegal immigrants reach Palestine, the local children will play a central role in their absorption, just as they do in the concluding section of Bintiv hapele.

From Divided Unity to Fragmentation: Conclusions Glatshteyn and Kipnis offered their young readers very different interpretations of the tragic events in Germany and Austria. However, during this period of crisis, the two authors made a similar radical decision to write about these events for children. They both challenged the trend in 20th-​century children’s literature to shield children from disturbing content. They also defied the prevalent assumption of the Jewish intergenerational discourse, according to which the younger generation growing up as natives in their new countries was fundamentally different from the generation of their parents and grandparents, for whom emigration from Europe had been a formative event. This drastic poetic move points to the central role played by the transnational paradigm of migration in the lives of Jewish immigrants in such different ideological climates as Palestine and the United States. At the onset of the Second World War, still bound by deep personal and cultural ties to the Jewish communities in their countries of origin, both Glatshteyn and Kipnis sought to set aside the divisive national and political ideologies that contemporary Jewish children’s literature had been promoting, in favor of fostering Jewish solidarity. Indeed, from recent research, we learn that this new phenomenon in fact continued and widened during the war years.28 Books and periodicals for Jewish children in the United States and Palestine undertook the task of providing children with copious information about the events in Europe. In both venues, most of the writers were first-​generation immigrants for whom Europe was the landscape of their childhood. Hence, the choice to make children aware of the situation in Europe was not just ideological, but also, perhaps primarily, personal. For these writers, children’s literature, which by its very nature dealt with childhood and family, was a valuable medium for presenting the catastrophe of the Jews in Europe.

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The inclusive discursive trend that had emerged in these two centers of immigration during the war did not continue in the postwar period. The destruction of European Jewry in the Holocaust, the isolation of the remaining Jews of Eastern Europe behind the Iron Curtain, and the establishment of the state of Israel meant that Jewish writing for children was no longer written on common ground, on assumed unity. The passage of time was also an important factor in the process of division into separate and diverging Jewish writings for children. As the shared migration experience became increasingly distant from the personal and communal biographies of the creators of children’s culture, the presence of the common old country—​with its languages and landscapes—​waned. Secular Jewish children’s literature thereby lost its vital unifying source and became national and monolingual.

Notes 1. Yankev Glatshteyn, Emil un Karl (New York: 1940); Levin Kipnis, Bintiv hapele: sipur (Tel Aviv: 1939). 2. On the multilingual and transnational aspect of modern Jewish culture, see Benjamin Harshav, Lashon biymei mahapekhah:  hamahapekhah hayehudit hamodernit uteḥiyat halashon ha’ivrit (Jerusalem: 2008); idem, The Polyphony of Jewish Culture (Stanford: 2007); Rebecca Kobrin, Jewish Bialystok and Its Diaspora (Bloomington: 2010); idem, “The Other Polonia:  The Responses of Yiddish Immigrant Writers in New  York and Buenos Aires to the New Polish State, 1920–​1925,” in Choosing Yiddish: New Frontiers of Language and Culture, ed. Lara Rabinovich, Hannah Pressman, and Shiri Goren (Detroit: 2012), 99–​119; idem, “‘When a Jew was a Landsman’:  Rethinking Jewish Regional Identity in the Age of Mass Migration,” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 7, no. 3 (November 2008), 357–​ 376; Hana Wirth-​Nesher, Call It English:  The Language of Jewish American Literature (Princeton: 2006). 3. According to Jacob Lestschinsky, between 1881 and 1939, 2,530,936 Jews immigrated to the United States, 151,050 to Canada, 217,040 to Argentina, 64,860 to Brazil, and 333,956 to Palestine. See “Jewish Migrations, 1840–​1956,” in The Jews: Their History, Culture, and Religion, vol. 2, ed. Louis Finkelstein (New York: 1960), 1554. From 1924, Jewish immigration to the United States diminished considerably as a result of legislation restricting immigration, although it did not cease altogether. See Eli Lederhendler, “The Interrupted Chain: Traditional Receiver Countries, Migration Regimes, and the East European Jewish Diaspora, 1918–​39,” East European Jewish Affairs 44, nos. 2–​3 (2014), 171–​186. Gur Alroey presents a similar biographical and cultural profile of immigrants to North America and Palestine in the first decades of the 20th century in his study An Unpromising Land: Jewish Migration to Palestine in the Early Twentieth Century (Stanford: 2014), 63–​128. 4. Hagit Cohen, Niflaot be’olam ḥadash: sefarim vekorim beyidish beartzot habrit, 1890–​ 1940 (Ra’anana: 2016), 135–​149; Zohar Shavit (ed.), Toledot hayishuv hayehudi beeretz-​yisrael meaz ha’aliyah harishonah, vol. 3, beniyatah shel tarbut ’ivrit, part 1 (Jerusalem: 1998), 87–​92, 123–​262. 5. In his book Hatarbut haaḥeret: yidish vehasiaḥ hayehudi (Jerusalem: 2006), Benjamin Harshav argues that modern Yiddish culture cannot be understood without Hebrew and the local languages that surrounded it. See also Saul Zaritt, “‘The World Awaits Your Yiddish Word’: Jacob Glatstein and the Problem of World Literature,” Studies in American Jewish Literature 43, no. 2 (2015), 175–​203. 6. Naomi Prawer Kadar, Raising Secular Jews: Yiddish Schools and Their Periodicals for American Children, 1917-​1950 (Waltham: 2017), 1–​23; Sandra Parker, “Yiddish Children’s Literature in the Yiddish Schools,” Jewish Children’s Literatures (1984), 29–​53.

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7. Hagit Cohen, “The USA-​Eastern Europe Yiddish Book Trade 1890s–​1930s and the Formation of an American Yiddish Cultural Center,” Jews in Russia and Eastern Europe 2, no. 57 (2006), 57–​83; idem, “Saḥar hasefarim hatrans-​atlanti vehitgabshuto shel merkaz sifrut hayidish beartzot habrit, 1890–​1939,” ’Iyunim bitkumat yisrael 20 (2010), 437–​466. 8. Cohen, Niflaot ba’olam heḥadash, 135–​149. 9. Kadar, Raising Secular Jews,  1–​23. 10. Jeffrey Shandler, “The Holocaust for Beginners: Yankev Glatshteyn’s Emil un Karl and Other Wartime Works for Young American Yiddish Readers,” MELUS: Multi-​Ethnic Literature of the U.S. 37, no. 2 (2012), 109–​130. 11. Moshe Shmuel Shklarski was a publicist and publisher. In the 1920s, he published a series of articles on Yiddish publishing in the United States and urged that American Yiddish literature be disseminated in Europe. See Cohen, Niflaot ba’olam heḥadash,  69–​81. 12. Zohar Shavit, “‘Can It Be That Our Dormant Language Has Been Wholly Revived?’ Vision, Propaganda, and Linguistic Reality in the Yishuv under the British Mandate,” Israel Studies 22, no. 1 (2017), 101–​138; idem, “Tel-​Aviv Language Police,” in Tel-​Aviv, The First Century:  Visions, Designs, Actualities, ed. Maoz Azaryahu and Ilan S. Troen (Bloomington:  2012), 191–​211. For the role of the younger generation in reviving the Hebrew language, see Yael Reshef, “The Role of Children in the Revival of Hebrew,” in this volume. 13. See Zohar Shavit, “Hitpatḥut sifrut hayeladim beeretz yisrael,” in idem (ed.), Toledot hayishuv hayehudi beeretz yisrael, 439–​444. See also Miriam Samet, “Hinukhayim vesiaḥ haḥinukh bayishuv ha’ivri, 1889-​1935” (Ph.D. diss., Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2017). 14. Yael Darr, The Nation and the Child: Nation Building in Hebrew Children’s Literature, 1930–​1970 (Amsterdam: 2018). 15. For the sources of negation of the diaspora and its manifestations in Mandate Palestine and the state of Israel, see Anita Shapira, “Lean halekhah shelilat hagalut?” Alpayim 25 (2003), 9–​54; and Eliezer Schweid, “The Rejection of the Diaspora in Zionist Thought: Two Approaches,” in Essential Papers on Zionism, ed. Jehuda Reinharz and Anita Shapira (New York: 1996), 133–​160. 16. Anat Helman reaches similar conclusions in her article “Hues of Adjustment: Landsmanshaftn in Inter-​War New York and Tel-​Aviv,” Jewish History 20 (2006), 41–​67. 17. Darr, The Nation and the Child, ch. 5. 18. Established in Europe, the publishing house moved to Palestine when Bialik emigrated there in 1924. 19. The Introspective poets adopted a post-​symbolist poetics with an emphasis on free rhythm and universalist themes, devoid of any collective Jewish context. The “Jewishness” of the text was manifested only by the Jewish language and the world of associations it embodied. See Harshav, Hatarbut haaḥeret, 191–​202. 20. For Glatshteyn’s potential transnational readership, see Zaritt, “ ‘The World Awaits Your Yiddish Word.’ ” Zaritt points to the global “world-​writing” aspects of Glatshteyn’s work. 21. For Kipnis’ intensive work as the main tastemaker in kindergartens, see Tsvia Walden, and Tzipora Shchori-​Rubin, Lo mibeten ela migan:  terumat gan-​hayeladim vehaganenot lehitḥadshut ha’ivrit kesfat em, 1899–​1936 (Beersheba: 2018), 131–​150. 22. For Glatshteyn, the preferred genre was the children’s group adventure (and detective) story—​see Shandler, “The Holocaust for Beginners,” 114–​115; for Kipnis it was a Robinsonian adventure story. 23. Glatshteyn intended to write a trilogy, but only the first two parts were eventually published. See Dan Miron, “Aḥarit davar: shirat hazamir be’avi haya’ar,” in the Hebrew translation of KesheYash higi’a (Tel Aviv: 2006), 251–​286. See also Avraham Novershtern, “The Open Suitcases: Yankev Glatshteyn’s Ven Yash Iz Gekumen,” in Arguing the Modern Jewish Canon: Essays on Literature and Culture in Honor of Ruth R. Wisse, ed. Justin Cammy, Dara Horn, Alyssa Quint, and Rachel Rubinstein (Cambridge, Mass: 2008), 225–​298. 24. Miron, “Aḥarit davar,” 264. 25. In these years, the period of the Fifth Aliyah, public discourse in Palestine shifted from a discussion of ideological Zionism to that of a “Zionism of rescue” among them immigrants

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from Germany and the Youth Aliyah children. For the changes in the Zionist leadership’s immigration policy in the 1930s, see Aviva Halamish, Bemerotz kaful neged hazeman: mediniyut ha’aliyah hatziyonit bishnot hasheloshim (Jerusalem: 2006); Brian Amkraut, Between Home and Homeland: Youth Aliyah from Nazi Germany (Tuscaloosa: 2006). 26. See for example, Anat Helman and Yael Reshef, “Kol ha’ir ha’ivrit letoshveha: moda’ot ’ironiyot beTel-​Aviv hamandatorit,” Yisrael 11 (2007), 61–​89. 27. See Yael Darr, Umisafsal halimudim lukaḥnu: hayishuv lenokhah shoah velikrat medinah basifrut hayeladim haeretz-​yisreelit, 1939–​1948 (Jerusalem: 2006), 143–​157. 28. Anita Norich, Discovering Exile:  Yiddish and Jewish American Culture during the Holocaust (Stanford: 2007); Kadar, Raising Secular Jews, 156–​176. In Umisafsal halimudim lukaḥnu, I point to similar trends in the Jewish children’s press in Palestine, showing how, during the years of war and Holocaust, the negation of the diaspora was replaced by sympathy toward its Jews and a sense of shared fate in face of disaster.

Mapping the History of Child Holocaust Survivors Joanna Beata Michlic (UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON)

In 1949, UNESCO published a small booklet, Children of Europe, illustrated with poignant photographs of non-​Jewish and Jewish children and teenagers taken in six countries: Germany, Austria, Italy, Greece, Hungary, and Poland. The photographer was David Seymour (Dawid Szymin), known as Chim, a nickname he acquired during his exhilarating career period in Paris in the early 1930s. As a photographer known for his powerful images of children and families who were civilian victims of the Spanish Civil War, Chim was assigned the UNESCO project to photograph the orphaned, abused, and destitute European children whom UNESCO recognized as the chief victims of the Second World War. It is not known how he felt about this assignment but it most likely touched a deep personal chord, given the fact that his parents, Benjamin and Regina Szymin, and his aunt, Malka Flint, had perished during the Holocaust in Nazi-​occupied Poland. Before the war, Malka Flint had owned a bed and breakfast in Otwock, a popular spa town in central Poland where the young Dawid, as with many other middle-​class Jewish children from Warsaw, spent his childhood years.1 After the war, Flint’s Otwock residence was the site of the first Jewish children’s home set up in central Poland by the Central Committee of Polish Jews (CKŻP).2 Children of Europe includes Chim’s photographs of his 1948 visit to this children’s home, though neither the images nor the accompanying commentary disclose his personal connection to the place and to his prewar homeland. Children of Europe opens with “A Letter to a Grown-​Up” in which the narrator speaks on behalf of “13,000,000 abandoned children in Europe who had their first experience of life in an atmosphere of death and destruction, and who passed their first years in underground shelters, bombed streets, ghettos set on fire, refugee trains and concentration camps,” without “ever having been ‘young.’ ”3 This poignant letter clearly aims to shake the conscience of adults by speaking from the point of view of child victims, a collective who, as a result of the war, lost or never experienced a regular, carefree childhood. The uniform, collective voice of children in which the letter is narrated serves as a powerful plea for material, educational, and moral assistance for the rehabilitation of young victims. Reading the letter, we get a sense of the Joanna Beata Michlic, Mapping the History of Child Holocaust Survivors In: No Small Matter: Features of Jewish Childhood. Edited by: Anat Helman, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197577301.003.0006

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collective tragedy of European children and youth, though not of unmediated groups or individual voices. We also get a sense of underlying cautious optimism that young survivors could overcome their wartime traumas and begin their lives anew. The letter is written in the spirit of universalism and humanitarianism, reflecting the Western liberal thinking of that time.4 As a result, it does not draw attention to the fact that, due to the systematic German extermination program, the cohort of Jewish child survivors was the smallest minority among groups of child victims in Nazi-​occupied Europe. According to reliable estimates, only 6 to 11 percent of Europe’s prewar Jewish population of children (numbering approximately between 1.1 and 1.5 million) survived, as compared with 33 percent of the adults.5 In Germany in July 1945, only 3.5 percent of the 22,400 Jewish Holocaust survivors in the British and American zones of occupation were under the age of 16.6 In the summer of 1945, the CKŻP was able to locate and register only five thousand Jewish child survivors of different ages, with the youngest born as late as 1942, 1943, or 1944.7 At that time, the CKŻP operated according to a broad definition of what constituted a child: those born from 1929 onwards. This meant that, in 1948 in Jewish children’s homes in Poland, one could come across young survivors who belonged to the youth category (up to the age of 18 or 19). As a result of the Holocaust, the majority of these younger and older children, teenagers and youth were in need of physical and emotional rehabilitation. All of them were denied schooling and the joys of learning during the war, so they were also in desperate need of catching up intellectually with their peer groups. The number of five thousand children was not final, as it did not include all the young survivors from Nazi-​occupied Poland, nor those Polish Jewish children and teenagers who had survived the war in the Soviet Union with their families.8 However, it reflected the overwhelming decimation of Polish Jewish youth. In 1946, Jacques Bloch of the Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants (OSE) in France estimated that only 175,000 European Jews under the age of 16 had survived the war, of whom 30,000 were in the Soviet Union during the Holocaust.9 This shocking statistic reveals that Jewish child Holocaust survivors constituted a specific group among the young victims of Nazi terror and destruction. Susan R. Suleiman, a Hungarian child Holocaust survivor and, later, an American literary scholar, refers to this group as the “1.5 generation.”10 An examination of this cohort reveals a multitude of children’s experiences, the consequence of factors such as geographical location during the war, the survival of close adult family members, the nature of relations with non-​Jewish rescuers, and interactions with the social environment during and in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Given the children’s varied ages—​the oldest, born in 1929, were likely to have some vivid, clear memories of their prewar life, whereas the youngest, born in 1942 or even as late as 1944, had no awareness of their prewar families and communities—​we can paint a rich history of sub-​generations of young Holocaust survivors: those born between 1929 and 1935; those born between 1936 and 1939; and the youngest born between 1939 and 1944. At the same time, what members of this “1.5 generation” have in common is the fact that it took them a long time to see themselves as a distinctive group and to be recognized as survivors. Because of their young age and interrelated inability to have an adult understanding of what had happened to them during the war, their voices were almost totally unnoticed till the early 1990s. In fact however, they had been speaking about their wartime experiences as far back as the end of the war. The collections of early postwar written testimonies of

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Jewish child survivors, some of which were published in two early postwar anthologies, Dzieci oskarżają (Children Accuse) in 1946, in Polish,11 and Eḥad me’ir ushenayim mimishpaḥah (One from a City and Two from a Family) in 1947, in Hebrew,12 reveal the children’s world of being, their nightmares and their dreams, just as they were emerging from the Holocaust. They provide us with the best documentation we could ever garner of the specificity of raw memories of childhood under genocidal conditions, presented from the perspective of children who were still chronologically children. In the early postwar period, child survivors also participated in making the first fully Yiddish-​language feature film about the plight of Jewish children during the Holocaust, titled Undzere kinder (Our Children). Nathan Gross, a survivor of the Krakow ghetto, made the film in 1948.13 In Undzere kinder, a group of child survivor-​ actors acted other child survivors’ wartime experiences, as selected from the 430 early postwar children’s testimonies collected by the Jewish Historical Commission in Poland.14 Rachel Auerbach (1903–​1976), one of the three surviving members of the underground Oyneg Shabes organization in the Warsaw ghetto, was in charge of selecting the testimonies for the child actors. These and other early postwar self-​ representations of Jewish child survivors were gradually rediscovered from the 1990s onwards. Over the past two decades, scholars and general audiences have also been paying more attention to wartime diaries of older Jewish children and teenagers—​the many “Anne Franks”15 and “Dawid Sierakowiaks”16 of Eastern Europe who, before they were murdered, had left poignant, adult-​like reflections about life, love, and the everyday struggles of young lives confined in the ghettos. These diaries, written from within the destruction, give us a unique gaze into the world of the young generation, a majority of whom perished voiceless, never having had a chance to leave their own testimony. This essay aims to discuss some key areas of the history of Jewish children and youth in Europe during and in the aftermath of the Holocaust, paying particular attention to the significant shifts in the field over the last decade. It discusses how the field has been changing and expanding as a result of historians’ recognition of children’s agency with the rise of child-​oriented historiography, the engagement with newly rediscovered archival collections pertaining to post-​1945 history, and the late postwar tsunami of the 1990s and 2000s of child survivors’ written testimonies and audio and video oral histories. Given the scope of the history of Jewish youth during the Nazi era, this essay discusses only selected aspects of that history, touching on a sample of the most recent avenues of research into Jewish youth during and in the aftermath of the Holocaust. It also underlines areas that historians have not yet fully investigated. Though it focuses on the history of Jewish children and youth in German–​occupied Poland, it is also informed by the history of Jewish children and youth in other countries of Nazi-​occupied Western and Eastern Europe.

The Emergence of the Voice of Jewish Children in the History of the Holocaust The literary scholar Lawrence Langer was one of the first to argue that, by dividing the history of the Holocaust into two histories—​that of perpetrators and that of

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victims—​conventional historians failed the victims by privileging official archival documentation of the Nazi regime over the personal testimonies of the victims and survivors. These historians regarded the official documentation of the perpetrators as an objective source for studying the machinery of destruction, whereas they mistrusted the personal testimonies as an unreliable historical source.17 To draw on Langer’s position, one can argue that the worst injustice was committed against the youngest victims and survivors, who were not only denied any form of agency but were also ignored as a subject of a crucial historical inquiry. Historians began to notice child Holocaust survivors only in the wake of new scholarly approaches of the 1980s and 1990s in the fields of oral history, everyday life history, women’s history, gender studies, and the history of emotions, alongside growing interest in the history of childhood. As a result, previously hidden subjects—​namely, Jewish women18 and Jewish children—​emerged in the historiography of the Holocaust. In particular, recognition of the validity of personal testimonies in the reconstruction of Jewish social history during the Holocaust contributed to greater understanding of the importance of children’s voices, as documented in the child survivors’ postwar testimonies. In the words of the historian Omer Bartov, “testimonies can save events from oblivion . . . and also provide very different perspectives of events known through conventional documents.”19 The works of Boaz Cohen, Rita Horváth, and Joanna Beata Michlic,20 among others, have contributed to the growing school of historical writing about children that recognizes the individual agency of children and views children as important historical co-​creators of everyday life.21 These scholars contend that children’s accounts contribute to the reconstruction of a fuller historical picture of the social landscape of the Holocaust, in spite of children’s cognitive and linguistic limitations and their different ways of making reference to time and space. Put somewhat differently, making use of early postwar child survivors’ testimonies is a means of countering what Peter Stearns has termed the “granddaddy issue”22 in childhood history, whereby scholars have no access to children’s voices or simply disregard them. The first pioneering studies of Jewish children in Nazi-​occupied Europe representing a child-​oriented historiography appeared in the 1990s and during the first decade of 2000. In 1991, Debórah Dwork published Children with A Jewish Star: Jewish Youth in Nazi-​occupied Europe, which gives a broad overview of the experiences of Jewish children during the Nazi era, utilizing their postwar testimonies and memoirs. Similarly, Nicholas Stargardt’s Witnesses of War: Children’s Lives under the Nazis (2005) demonstrates the merits of a history of children that is written from a child’s point of view and that places children’s experiences within broader social and cultural contexts of the Second World War. These salient scholarly works were followed by the publication of rich collections of primary sources in various languages on children during the Holocaust, such as Patricia Heberer’s Children during the Holocaust (2011). The last decade has witnessed a growing “boom” in the history of Jewish children in specific countries of Nazi-​occupied Europe during and in the aftermath of the Holocaust, and studies concerning memory, identities, and (self-​)representations of young survivors.

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Children in the World of the Ghettos and on the Aryan Side In October 1939, the German occupier established the first of what became more than 1,100 ghettos in German-​occupied Poland (the so-​called General Government) and in the occupied Soviet territories. Many of these ghettos became the destination of Jews from the Third Reich and other countries of Nazi-​occupied Western Europe. Children were the most vulnerable victims during the ghettoization process, which began with the establishment of the first ghetto in Piotrków Trybunalski in central Poland. In the ghetto environment, children suffered from hunger, malnutrition, and destitution and were denied the most basic features of childhood, whether carefree play and contact with nature, or formal schooling. In the first months after the establishment of ghettos, children were still visible on the streets, and they still engaged in play.23 Increasingly, however, their games reflected the harsh and frightening reality surrounding them—​ they “played” war; crossing the borders; ghetto; bombing; pogrom; or roundups of Jews. In the Warsaw ghetto, the largest ghetto of Nazi-​occupied Europe (established in November 1940), children quickly became accustomed to scenes of daily dying on the streets and would, on occasion, play with adult corpses out of curiosity. The historian Emanuel Ringelblum reported in May 1941: “The children are no longer afraid of death. In one courtyard, the children played a game tickling a corpse.”24 By the spring of 1941, a rapidly growing number of children had become lethargic from hunger and were dying of starvation, tuberculosis, and typhus. By early 1942, the Warsaw ghetto had turned into a world of unbearable daily suffering for both child and adult inhabitants. This was the cruel world into which children “had no right to be born,” in the words of Adina Blady-​Szwajger, a young Jewish pediatrician who worked in the Bersohn and Bauman Children’s Hospital in the Warsaw ghetto and who, following the ghetto uprising of April 1943, assisted with the burial of babies whose bodies had been dug out of the ruins.25 Traumatic experiences of the ghetto imprinted themselves on young survivors’ memories, in particular, the brutal round-​ups (Aktzia) that often ended in the deportation and killing of parents, other close relatives, and fellow children. In 1942, along with the sick and elderly, children were the first deportees to the concentration and death camps located in Nazi-​occupied Poland. While still in the ghetto, children had received aid from a number of social welfare organizations. The most important was CENTOS (the National Society for the Care of Orphans), which been established during the interwar period, and that continued to operate during the war as an underground relief agency under the sponsorship of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC). In addition, there were a variety of self-​help initiatives, some of them involving older children and youths. The multifaceted research on the subject of individual Jewish self-​help initiatives during the Holocaust has enabled scholars to view children as historical actors exercising varying degrees of agency. The broader subject of Jewish self-​help has risen out of research on Jewish non-​armed resistance (’amidah), which in turn is part of an ongoing process of redefining Jewish resistance.26 In a study of assistance efforts by older children and youths on behalf of families and other children in the ghettos and on the Aryan side, I have

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signaled the importance of charting a new map of the history of Jewish youth helping other Jews.27 With rare exceptions, young people lacked connections with underground Jewish and non-​Jewish organizations, and they did not own property that could provide hiding places for other Jews. Nonetheless, individual Jewish children helped each other, with their self-​help taking different forms inside the ghettos or outside, on the Aryan side. The best-​known images of young children—​usually between the ages of 5 and 13—​attempting to help their families are those of the food smugglers of the Warsaw ghetto; many of these images were taken prior to the great deportation (July 22, 1942–​September 21, 1942) in which approximately 265,000 of the Warsaw ghetto inhabitants were deported to the Treblinka death camp.28 Children who slipped out of the ghetto to beg for food on the Aryan side did so at the risk of losing their lives, and their activities were both acknowledged and praised. One of the best-​known tributes was written by a promising young poet, Henryka Łazowert, who, like other Warsaw Jews, was killed in the Treblinka death camp. In a poignant poem titled “The Little Smuggler” (or “To the Little Smuggler”), written sometime in 1941, she writes: Through walls, through holes, through sentry points, Through wires, through rubble, through fences: Hungry, daring, stubborn I flee, dart like a cat. At noon, at night, in dawning hours, In blizzards, in the heat, A hundred times I risk my life, I risk my childish neck.29 In a recent study, Joanna Sliwa details the survival strategies among children in the Krakow ghetto from the moment of its inception on March 3, 1941 until its final liquidation on March 13–​14, 1943.30 On the eve of the Second World War, the Jewish community of Krakow numbered 64,000 inhabitants,31 accounting for one third of the total population. According to Sliwa, Jewish youngsters in the ghetto understood the need for deception, evasion, and disobedience. Thus, smuggling goods and individuals out of the ghetto, and food into the ghetto, were two intertwined domains. Sliwa’s findings are echoed in a number of the late postwar recollections of child survivors. The Polish French filmmaker Roman Polanski, for instance, recalls his strategies of survival in the Krakow ghetto in a documentary film titled Roman Polanski: A Film Memoir (2011).32 Wartime diaries and newsletters (gazetki) written in various ghettos inform us that older children and teenagers also embarked on “spiritual and cultural rescue,” that is, protecting their peers from the ongoing psychological and moral degradation of the ghetto. One illustration of spiritual and cultural self-​help can be seen in the surviving (and fragmentary) issues of the gazetka that was put together by the Zionist youth group headed by Dawid Joskowicz in the infamous Lodz ghetto, the longest-​lasting ghetto in German-​occupied Poland.33 All of the Zionist and Communist youth groups in the Lodz ghetto were located in the Marysin neighborhood, where the so-​called

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Marysin Farm for approximately 14,000 younger children was also active between July 1940 and October 1941. Like other Zionist groups, Joskowicz’s organization was involved in ideological, educational, cultural, and social activities conducted in the spirit of the prewar Zionist vision of settlement in Palestine. On November 28, 1943, the group issued its first handwritten newsletter, which called upon others to join them: From the editors! Brothers and sisters! Today we are issuing our first Gazetka in which we wish to voice our thoughts. This Gazetka shows that in spite of the poverty and suffering in the Ghetto, we the youth desire to live above all that, and fight for a better tomorrow. We ask you to assist us in our work and send us your articles.34

Joskowicz and his team of writers, consisting mainly of female authors such as Genia Artykiewicz, Pola Szulsztajn, Sala Horn, and Hanka Kuperman—​along with some authors known only by their first names and initials, such as Zachawa A., Izrael G., and Chaim M.—​wrote short essays, poems, and stories for Gazetka. The last separate fragmentary entry of the newsletter, a poem dedicated to the famous Hebrew poet Hayim Nahman Bialik (1873-​1934), authored by Joskowicz, is dated June 10, 1944, less than two months before the final liquidation of the ghetto. The available database of the ghetto’s population allows us to infer that Joskowicz was born in 1929 and lived with his family first at Północna Street no. 26, and later at Wolborska Street no. 35. All the young female authors were pupils at No.10B School at Franciszkańska Street.35 Gazetka’s creative writing is imbued with Zionist dreams and the distinct self-​ image of the youth group vis-​à-​vis the rest of the ghetto inhabitants. The young writers’ enthusiasm for building a home in Palestine and their commitment to remaining morally strong are apparent in the following excerpt: The queue was formed in vain, nothing was distributed. And those are the ways of the Ghetto. The allocated portion of food provided for two weeks, lasts only for a few days, and the rest of the time one has to go about hungry and wait for the next portion of food. But we the youth, we do not think about the food, instead we dedicate our time to working on ourselves, on our characters and our souls in order to work for the goodness of our Homeland in the future.36

Postwar children’s testimonies also inform us that adolescents and teenagers of both genders were determined to protect their parents and younger siblings both inside the ghettos and outside, on the Aryan side. Some testimonies reveal cases of Jewish children acting as “sudden protectors” for other children, offering help in the form of critical advice about what to do in order to avoid death.37 For example, Rafał (Rafael) Shleger, born in 1931 in Brody in the Lviv province, explains how he owes his life to his friend’s instructions. He and his friend had been captured outside the Brody ghetto and brought back to an isolated building where other Jews were already awaiting their doom. The shooting began, and both boys fell down, but were uninjured. Shleger was terrified and did not know how to act. Instantly his friend, lying next to him, whispered

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to him not to move and not to say a word. When the brutal killings were finished, both boys managed to escape from the building to the nearby river.38 Living under constant fear of being abused, denounced, and killed, young Jewish fugitives matured fast on the Aryan side. Some children experienced living in pairs or in threesomes with other children their age; this was both emotionally beneficial and dangerous. An encounter with another Jewish child suffering from the same predicament invariably lightened the burden of loneliness and brought moments of happiness and feelings of security. Leaving the ghettos, Jewish children also quickly realized that certain attributes and skills enhanced one’s chances of survival. Most desirable were the right physical appearance (blond hair and blue eyes), fluency in Polish, and familiarity with Catholic texts and rituals, along with personal traits such as assertiveness and quick-​wittedness. A thorough understanding of the local Polish Christian community—​knowing who was sympathetic and who was apt to be dangerous—​was also essential, as was detailed knowledge of the geographical area in which one was hiding. In her video testimony of March 17, 1996, Chava (Chawa) Meir (born on November 2, 1931 as Ewa Wełna in Serock, in Legionowo County in Masovian Voivedship) recounts how her dreadfully lonely life as a beggar girl on the Aryan side became more bearable once she began to share it with two siblings: twelve-​ year-​old Bracha and six-​year-​old Israel Neimark (or Naimark).39 The children met toward the end of 1942. By that time, Chava had lost most of her adult relatives, either murdered by the Germans in the Warsaw and Legionowo ghettos or else, in the case of her father, by a Polish man with whom he had had financial dealings during the war. Though Chava spoke better Polish than the Neimarks, according to her recollections, they were more effective at begging and stealing food, and they always shared their portion with her. Chava and the Neimarks cared for one another’s hygiene, scavenged for rags to make into winter clothing, and slept together in dugouts in a forest near Legionowo. The children considered this forest the safest place for them to be at night. After the war ended, Meir and the Neimarks remained together and continued to care for one another. They moved into an empty house they had found in the town, and the two girls began to collect books, notebooks, and pencils to sell. They became the sole breadwinners of their tiny “family unit,” since by then Israel Neimark, the youngest of them, had lost his ability to walk and was forced to stay alone in the house. After two months of this new adult-​ like life, a Jewish woman called Mrs. Sokolov discovered them. She immediately took them with her to the newly formed Jewish Committee on Targowa Street in the Warsaw neighborhood of Praga, and from there the children were sent to the Jewish Children’s Home in Otwock, which, as noted, was the first Jewish children’s home set up in central Poland in the early part of 1945.40 Two pioneering scholars of the history of Jewish women in the Holocaust, Dalia Ofer and Lenore Weitzman, have written about the modes of parenthood and survival strategies in Jewish families in the major ghettos in Nazi-​occupied Eastern Europe. Their in-​depth studies have provided greater understanding of the complexities related to matters pertaining to status, treatment, and the role of children in everyday families’ existence in the ghettos.41

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Disabled Jewish Children in the Holocaust One of the most neglected subjects of the history of Jewish children during the Holocaust pertains to the experiences of disabled Jewish children. Such children belonged to two categories of people—​disabled and Jewish—​who were slated for destruction.42 Kinga Frojimovics’ recent research on the survival of a number of deaf-​mute or, in some cases, blind Hungarian Jewish children in the Budapest ghetto (most likely, they numbered between 15 and 20 children) offers a new way of exploring the subject.43 These children survived thanks to the efforts of a remarkable man, Dezső Kanizsai, a children’s speech therapist who served as the director of the National Institute for the Israelite Deaf-​Mute and the Blind in Budapest between 1926 and its closure at the end of the 1940s. The Institute was established in 1876, at a time when Jewish charity institutions were evolving throughout Central Eastern Europe, aimed at addressing the needs of orphaned, poor, and disabled Jewish children—​and often assisting disabled non-​Jewish children as well. Frojimovics delineates the wartime history of the children under the care of Kanizsai and his dedicated team of pedagogues and caregivers in the broader historical context, starting with the impact of anti-​Jewish legislation on the children’s lives and the German occupation of Hungary in March 1944. The Gestapo took over the Institute building in June 1944 and turned it into an internment camp; several months later, in October 1944, the homegrown Fascist Arrow Cross came to power. The children were once again relocated to a different building, where the staff continued to care for them in spite of daily terror and increasingly harsh conditions. The surviving members of the staff and their young charges welcomed the arrival of the Red Army in Budapest on January 18, 1945. Frojimovics tells the history of the Institute (focusing on one of the young survivors, Izráel Deutsch) and of Kanizsai, who could be regarded as the Hungarian Janusz Korczak (1878/​9–​1942),44 who similarly dedicated his life to the most needed children. Frojimovics puts the rescue of the Institute’s children in the wider context of the discussion on Jewish self-​rescue. According to her, the Institute staff made no distinctions between children in their care—​their aim was to look out for all of them, regardless of social background or position within the Hungarian Jewish community. This policy and practice stood in contrast to the goals and practices of self-​help Jewish organizations in Hungary that were formed during the Holocaust. Unlike the former, the latter were forced to define and redefine which groups or individuals they would attempt to assist and/​or rescue. Deaf or blind children would not have been high on the priority list of a community facing immense and rapidly unfolding catastrophe: over a period of eight weeks, starting in May 1944, some 424,000 individuals were deported to the Auschwitz-​Birkenau concentration and extermination complex.45 Frojimovics’ research invites scholars to conduct further comparative research on the subject.

Children in Concentration Camps and Death Centers Young children had almost no chance to survive in the Nazi system of concentration and extermination centers. Infants and toddlers who arrived with their parents to

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the extermination centers were immediately murdered. Likewise, even those children who were not immediately put to death rarely survived in the labor and concentration camps, or on the death marches that took place in the early months of 1945. In the rare cases of survival of individuals under the age of 16, the decisive factors were good fortune, everyday assistance, and the care provided by surviving parents, other relatives, or other adult prisoners, especially members of the underground organizations in the camps who shared with them food and medicine and who protected them from various dangers. The overwhelming loss of life in the concentration and extermination centers finds expression in the figures pertaining to the largest concentration/​death camp complex, Auschwitz-​Birkenau. The Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) deported more than 232,000 individuals under the age of 18 to Auschwitz-​Birkenau, 90 percent of whom were of Jewish origin.46 However, an estimated number of only 6,700 Jewish children were registered by the Auschwitz camp administration. The majority of youths who entered Auschwitz as prisoners fit to work were male; young females had almost no chance to become an Auschwitz prisoner. Until the destruction of the gas chambers in Auschwitz-​Birkenau in the fall of 1944, children entered Birkenau as prisoners only by means of claiming to be older than they were, or by some other form of trickery such as insisting they were well-​versed in certain, needed manual jobs. The only exceptions were two unique groups of children: the first, approximately 1,000 youngsters and adolescents from the Theresienstadt camp in Czechoslovakia, who arrived at Auschwitz in September 1943; and the second, children and adolescent Sinti and Roma who were part of a larger group of some 23,000 Sinti and Roma living in Germany who were deported to the camp in accordance with an order issued on December 16, 1942. Upon arrival at the camp, members of both groups were placed in temporary family camps with the rest of the adult deportees, which meant that they did not undergo the cruel selection process that would have led to their immediate deaths. The majority of them perished in the camp during the liquidation of the family camps in 1944. One of the most salient recent studies exploring the multiple connections between child forced-​labor, Nazi occupation policies, and the Holocaust is the work by British-​ German historian Johannes-​Dieter Steinert. Utilizing both official German documents and child survivors’ testimonies, Steinert details how forced labor, humiliation, hunger, sexual abuse, pseudo-​medical experiments, and forced sterilization shaped everyday experiences of children in the world of concentration and death camps.47 Other studies dedicated to this painful subject concentrate on the examination of children’s experiences in individual concentration camps such as Buchenwald. At age 4, Stefan Jerzy Zweig and Joseph Schleifstein were the youngest boys who survived this camp, protected by family members and other caring adults.48 In his works, Kenneth Waltzer, an American historian, documents the complexities of the situation of Jewish children in the Buchenwald concentration camp.49 He examines patterns of social behavior among a group of 304 young Jewish prisoners, 16 years old or under, who were evacuated from the Auschwitz-​Buna (Monowitz) camp and Birkenau, and taken on a death march to the west on January 19, 1945. They arrived at the Buchenwald concentration camp on January 26, 1945. The young prisoners were mostly of Slovak, Hungarian, Polish, and Romanian nationalities. Among them was Lazar (Eliezer) Wiesel (1928–​2016), who documented his ordeal

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in the most well-​known of Holocaust memoirs, Night, which was first written in Yiddish under the title Un di velt hot geshvign (And the World Was Silent).50 Waltzer offers a passionate critique of the Hobbesian vision of concentration camp prisoner society as being devoid of solidarity, human connection, and compassion. Drawing on Elmer Luchterhand’s sociological work from 1967,51 Waltzer argues that prisoner society featured small-​scale solidarities and connections between adult men and boys that enabled the latter to survive under extreme genocidal conditions. According to him, the social network of stable pairs and small groups such as the one in a special Buchenwald block, no. 66—​known as the kinderbarrack—​provides a good illustration of human reciprocity among the young prisoners and care for the youngest. In a study appearing in 2011, Verena Buser investigates two very different aspects of survival among young prisoners of concentration camps. On the one hand, there were adult women and men who assisted them, “schooling” them in how to increase their chances of daily survival and caring for them by means of providing food, medicine, and shelter, although such help could have resulted in hard penalties. On the other hand, young boys, the so-​called “Pipels,” had to “sell” their bodies to the adult men, especially the kapos, in order to survive.52 Steinert’s and Waltzer’s studies on youth in the world of concentration and death camps are also important contributions to the understanding of the “immediate aftermath”—​the despair, humiliation, and numbness of young survivors. Their works, along with that of Buser, invite historians to conduct further research on the small clusters of young survivors in the period after liberation. Such research would allow us to understand the short-​and long-​term impact of social bonding among young survivors in the aftermath of genocide. Another fruitful area for research is the self-​representations and memories of adult survivors versus those of children and teen­agers. One crucial difference between young and adult survivors of Nazi concentration camps is that, for the former, the Holocaust became a part and parcel of their individual development and childhood. Otto Dov Kulka poignantly alluded to this in his memoir of Auschwitz, Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death.53 Historians have learned about the long-​term repercussions of a “Holocaust childhood” thanks to the works of psychologists and psychiatrists and to the child survivors themselves. In memoirs written in adulthood, even at the age of 80 or older, child survivor authors reveal the painful process of working through the long-​term effects of experiencing ghettos, the loss of loving families, and living in hiding on the Aryan side. Their writing often focuses on the process of coming to terms with irredeemable ruptures in their lives and living with anxieties and fears that resulted from their unbearable wartime experiences. Through their writing, historians also came to discover the largest group of child survivors—​the hidden children.

The Emergence of the History of Hidden Children Hidden children, the youngest of them born during the first four years of the Second World War, are today among the last living Holocaust survivors. Hidden children’s wartime and postwar experiences and memories were barely acknowledged or utilized

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by historians until the early 1990s. However, with the initiative of psychologists such as Polish-​born Judith Kestenberg and Eva Fogelman, a member of the second generation, and with the help of Abraham H. Foxman, a former national director of the Anti-​ Defamation League and a child survivor from Poland, some 1,600 former hidden children from 28 countries met for the first time in late May 1991 in New York City, at the First International Gathering of Children Hidden during the Second World War.54 During the Holocaust, these children were concealed in rooms, attics, sewers, narrow underground bunkers, forests, or else were in “open hiding,” that is, not physically concealed but passing themselves off as (mostly) Christian children of different nationalities. Many of them, while still in the ghetto, learned a new cultural and religious identity with the assistance of their parents. Others were taught new cultural mores and Christian traditions by their wartime Jewish and non-​Jewish rescuers, and some older children, the streetwise youth, learned what they needed to know on their own on the Aryan side, driven by a strong urge to survive. What all of them have in common in the postwar period is a sense of split identity and complicated family history. The split self, marked by a lack of continuity, coherence, and unity between prewar self, wartime self, and postwar self, is the main feature of their postwar identities, which raises fundamental questions about the possibility of a recovered and united self. The first accounts in which the notion of a split self is expressed were written by child survivors who had just emerged from the war and were still under the age of 13. In the late 1940s, in the Jewish children’s homes in Poland and Hungary, in the DPs camps in Germany, and in children’s homes in Italy, children had to confront the enormous losses they had incurred during the war. Some of them poignantly expressed the split between their prewar self and the postwar self: essentially, the “death” of one’s original prewar self, which in many cases was that of a Jewish child who, until the outbreak of the Second World War on September 1, 1939, had enjoyed a happy childhood. As one survivor wrote in the immediate postwar period: “The days of childhood for little Joasia were full of joy and carefree. At present I think about this little Joasia as though she were a totally strange girl, with whom I was connected in the past, but now I have no connection at all, except for fuzzy unclear memories.”55 In the words of the doyen of Holocaust studies, Saul Friedländer (himself a child Holocaust survivor, born in 1932 in Czechoslovakia), such early postwar child survivors’ testimonies are “like lightning flashes that illuminate parts of a landscape: They confirm intuition; they warn us against the ease of vague generalizations. Sometimes they just repeat the known with an unmatched forcefulness.”56 Aging, and along with it the existential realization that one belongs to the last generation of living eyewitnesses, can definitely be seen as the main factor behind the almost global boom of late Holocaust testimonial memoirs in the 1990s and 2000s. For some, interrogations by grandchildren constituted another factor impelling them to finally open up and share their long-​buried memories of wartime. Not surprisingly, the psychological, moral, and intellectual urge to bear witness and speak up about one’s past as a legacy for the future is sometimes prompted by a specific event or change in professional or family status. Dori Katz, a child survivor from Belgium born in 1939 and the author of an acclaimed memoir, Looking for Strangers: The True Story of My Hidden Wartime Childhood (2013), acknowledged that she could find the time

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to write her memoir, in the sense of being emotionally ready to do so, only once she had retired from Trinity College.57 She also admitted that she could not write the book while her mother was still alive because her mother would have been appalled by her revealing intimate, painful, and challenging moments of family history. Finally, she explained that the memoir was born out of a story she had written earlier: I did not set out to write a book at first. The first chapter I wrote, as an independent story, was the one that became “Astrid and Dori in Hiding.” I don’t know why I felt the need to write it but several years prior to writing it, I had been in therapy. In one session I was encouraged to imagine “Astrid” there facing me, and the first thing that came out of my mouth, as Astrid addressing Dori, was: “I saved your fucking life.” That memory haunted me into writing the story.”58

The French historian Annette Wieviorka calls the boom of late postwar testimonies “the era of the witness.”59 Many child survivors have deposited their interviews and memoirs in major archives such as Yad Vashem, the Kestenberg Holocaust Child Survivor Archive at the Hebrew University, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the Imperial War Museum in London, as well as in smaller local archives and museums. Between 1981 and 1995, the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University garnered 34,000 testimonies, while Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Visual History Foundation collected 52,000 testimonies between 1994 and 2002.60 At the same time, it should be kept in mind that there are hidden children living today in the West, in post-​Communist Eastern Europe, and in Israel who still avoid giving public interviews and testimonies, and may never be ready to do so. Their silence and self-​censorship may stem from familial concerns such as protecting a living relative from painful revelations about the wartime past, issues connected with their personal life trajectories, or a reluctance to share details concerning their drastically violent memories of wartime and early postwar experiences, including emotional and sexual assaults. In some cases, child survivors have felt compelled to consult first with their children about the possibility of publishing war accounts that include troubling, vivid memories of coercion and rape by those who were supposed to protect them in hiding. Making their wartime experiences publicly known is a long process that involves a phase of getting accustomed to the thought of being vulnerable once again.61

Child Survivors in the Early Postwar Years The war forced young Jews to suppress pivotal aspects of their identity in order to survive. When that pressure abated, many pursued a sudden compelling search for their prewar and wartime selves while experiencing an overwhelming sense of the irreparable loss of their families and childhood. The process of revisiting one’s own past has sometimes continued over the course of decades. Late postwar memoirs and testimonies from young survivors are imbued with the realization that wartime experiences had a profound impact on their adult life, even in the case of those who were regarded as successful in their family lives and careers. These documents constitute a

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body of evidence that draws us as close as we can get to the former young survivors’ apprehensions regarding their identities, their continuous mourning of loved ones, and their explorations and interrogations of their own memories. They reveal the ongoing shadow of the Holocaust on their adult lives. Studies of child survivors’ testimonies challenge a number of assumptions and popular conceptions about the Holocaust. First, they shatter a commonly accepted notion that the Holocaust reached its definitive end in 1945: these accounts reveal that the Shoah is a history without a particular end, as keenly expressed by Thomas Buergenthal, a child survivor (the son of a Polish Jewish father and German Jewish mother) who later became an internationally acclaimed American human rights lawyer and judge: “That story, after all, continues to have a lasting impact on the person I have become.”62 Child survivors’ accounts also pose a challenge to heroic and martyrological traditions that tend both to sentimentalize Jewish children and to treat them as “voiceless victims,” thus denying them agency. Finally, these accounts reveal that young fugitives, especially those in East European countries, were extremely vulnerable even if given shelter. Some adult rescuers tormented the children or treated them as nothing more than as a source of free labor, though many others looked after their young Jewish charges as if they were their own children, with affection and care. The post-​genocide era did not bring an end to the children’s confusion and vulnerability. The key features of their early postwar experience were shattered dreams and a deeply felt sense of orphanhood. Many child survivors felt that their newly appointed guardians, including surviving family members, did not necessarily understand or agree with their own choices regarding education and career paths. In addition, children living in Western countries often experienced a lack of sympathy or understanding on the part of adoptive parents who expected them to be “regular kids” who could adjust with ease to different cultures and unfamiliar modes of social life. Despite obvious historical differences between the Holocaust and the current wars and global refugee crisis, these unsettling findings about Jewish youth in the aftermath of the Holocaust may have continuing relevance vis-​à-​vis the young victims of current conflicts. Among recent scholarly studies of young survivors, those focusing on Belgium reveal it to be a special case, since 94 percent of its pre-​Holocaust Jewish community (numbering approximately 56,000) were newcomers, many of them arriving in the 1920s and 1930s from Poland and other countries of Eastern Europe and as refugees from Nazi Germany. In her pioneering study on the rescue of Jewish children in Belgium, sociologist Suzanne Vromen, herself a Belgian child survivor, discusses the situation of Jewish children in the Catholic institutions that provided safe shelters for young Jews during the Holocaust.63 She also delineates the post-​ liberation battles over the “ownership” of child survivors between the Catholic church and Jewish welfare organizations. The protracted conflicts between Jewish and non-​Jewish organizations and institutions in Belgium were similar to those that took place in early postwar France, Holland, and Poland, though in each case there were specific internal dynamics and historical and national contexts. Diane L. Wolf’s sociological study, Beyond Anne Frank: Hidden Children and Postwar Families in Holland, painstakingly examines the difficult reconstitution of Jewish

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families and psychological problems with regard to regaining Jewish identity in postwar Holland through the lenses of adult, formerly hidden Dutch Jewish children.64 A similar sense of profound sadness, mourning, and anxiety typified the French Jewish community in the early postwar period. In France, 11,000 Jewish children were murdered in Nazi camps and 10,000 survived in hiding with French families. In his work of 2014, Daniel Lee examines the fate of Jewish children in Vichy France during the war,65 and in a masterly study of 2015, Daniella Doron investigates the reconstruction of Jewish families in early postwar France.66 Doron generally views the wartime survival of Jewish children in hiding as a positive experience. At the same time, she shows in rich detail that retrieving Jewish child survivors from the non-​Jewish environment was a complex process filled with protracted custody battles. These battles were particularly bitter with regard to orphaned children who were baptized during the war. The Finaly affair of 1945–​ 1953, a battle over custody of two baptized, orphaned Jewish child survivors, became the symbol of these bitter disputes; from the perspective of the French Jewish community, it called to mind the mid-​19th-​century Mortara affair in Italy, in which a Jewish child who had been secretly baptized by his nanny was taken into custody by church officials.67 Similar to Belgian, Dutch, and Polish Jewish organizations of the early postwar period, French Jewish organizations regarded every surviving hidden Jewish child in France as a precious addition to the community—​indeed, as a metaphor for the renewal of Jewish life. A recent study by Mary Fraser Kirsh paints a rather troubling picture of the ways in which Anglo-​Jewish relief organizations and the press, including the leading weekly Jewish Chronicle, portrayed child survivors from the war-​torn continent in the early postwar era.68 This is the first study focusing on the ways in which Anglo-​Jewry’s propaganda and fundraising campaigns manipulated the image of child survivors by portraying them as symbols of redemption and assimilation into middle-​class British society. Anglo-​Jewish relief organizations praised child and teenage survivors who had assimilated well into British society, offering them up as proof that, if granted a home, they would develop into good citizens. Accordingly, adolescent survivors were always portrayed as serious, studious, neatly dressed, and eager to learn a new trade—​an antithesis of the delinquent youth so prominent in postwar British imagination. Despite the physical and emotional trauma written on children’s bodies, social workers and journalists typically emphasized the attractive appearance and health of young survivors from the Bergen–​Belsen and Terezin camps. In consequence, the wartime experiences and agency of youth survivors were marginalized in favor of promoting narratives of Anglo-​Jewish heroes; it is thus understandable that the Anglo-​Jewish elite regarded with unease the enthusiasm of some young survivors for Zionism and the constructing of a Jewish homeland in Palestine/​Israel rather than opting to build their lives in Great Britain. There is a need for systematic investigation of how the tradition of invisibility and acculturation prevalent among Anglo-​Jewry affected the youth survivors, especially those from Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary—​the least well-​known and researched groups of Jewish youth survivors in Great Britain. The postwar identity of this entire latter group, as well as its cultural, social, scientific, and economic contributions to post-​1945 Great Britain, are subjects that remain to be fully studied.

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The catalog of scholarly works on the history of Jewish children in Nazi-​occupied Poland during and in the aftermath of the Second World War has been steadily growing over the last decade, starting with a pioneering study of Nahum Bogner, himself a child Holocaust from Poland, titled At the Mercy of Strangers: The Rescue of Jewish Children with Assumed Identities in Poland, followed by works by Emunah Nachmany-​Gafny, Jennifer Marlow, Joanna Beata Michlic, and Joanna Sliwa, among others.69 All these works reveal, in different ways, both the complexity of children’s wartime and postwar experiences, and agency among the older children and teenagers. However, to date, there have been no comparative studies of Western versus Eastern Europe concerning such key topics as the rescue of Jewish children, postwar reconstitution of Jewish families, recovery of hidden Jewish children, and the impact of wartime and early postwar experiences of antisemitism on young Jewish survivors. To take one example, that of Poland and Holland, there are certain obvious parallels concerning the painful reconstitution of Jewish families in the early postwar period (including many instances in which children were not reunited with their surviving parents) and the psychological problems that arose when hidden children attempted to regain their Jewish identity.70 At the same time, one should keep in mind the major differences in state-​level family policy and family legal law in the two countries. In contrast to early post-​1945 Poland, in which family legal law at least theoretically guaranteed the right of surviving Jewish parents to be reunited with children sheltered by individual Polish rescuers or in Catholic religious institutions during the Holocaust, in Holland, the legal system made it very difficult for Jewish child survivors to be reunited with parents who had returned from concentration camps. Parents were given only a short window of opportunity to regain their children, yet for those who had to undergo medical treatment or physical rehabilitation, it could be months before they were able to return to Holland and search for their surviving children. There is also a need for more comparative studies concerning the postwar modes of reconstruction of childhood experiences of Jewish and non-​Jewish children who were victims of Nazi policies of violence, discrimination, and persecution; the last decade has seen a growth of solid and deeply needed research concerning the latter group of non-​Jewish children. Such studies should examine in depth both the similarities and dissimilarities among different national and ethnic groups of children and youth. Another area inviting further comparative studies of Jewish and non-​Jewish children relates to the relief and resettlement of Europe’s unaccompanied and displaced children in the aftermath of the Second World War.71 One clear similarity that emerges from this research is the fact that all children were viewed as “national property” and thereby subject to complex battles involving competing notions of civic versus ethnic national identity.72 A further lacuna exists with regard to comprehensive studies concerning the cultural, social, and economic achievements of young East European Jewish survivors in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, though we do have an important sociological analysis of the socioeconomic achievements in the United States of young Jewish refugees from German-​speaking Central Europe who had arrived prior to the outbreak of the Second World War.73 The history of the reception and social and cultural integration of child Holocaust survivors into new homelands is not yet fully written, but thanks to the work of two Canadian oral historians, Anna Sheftel

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and Stacey Zembrzycki, we now know a great deal about the patterns of integration of East European child survivors who settled in Canada after the Holocaust.74 Sheftel and Zembrzycki’s research shows the means by which the young survivors created their own grassroots social institutions, and how these eased their absorption into the surrounding culture. Another study, that of Françoise S. Ouzan, focuses on the process of psychological and emotional rehabilitation of young survivors, based on 13 in-​depth interviews conducted in France, 10 in the United States, and 14 in Israel, of individuals who went on to achieve public recognition and professional success in their postwar lives.75 Another topic that has emerged in the last decade pertains to Jewish child survivors in the postwar Soviet Union. Notwithstanding some solid literature on the situation of Russian/​Soviet children before, during, and after the Second World War,76 we still do not know the number of Jewish children who survived the war in the USSR or how many of them were orphaned. Polly Zavadivker’s recent research points to some crucial paradoxes in the treatment of young Jewish survivors and orphans by the Soviet authorities: by honoring the principle of biological relationships, the Soviet civil judiciary acted to facilitate the placement of Jewish orphans with Jewish families during the early postwar years, even though this was a time of intense social and state-​sponsored antisemitism.77 Since the early 2000s, the history of Greek Jewish child survivors has also begun to be gradually uncovered, thanks to research by Greek social anthropologists, memory studies scholars, and historians of local Greek Jewish communities. This new research indicates that issues of “unknown birth parentage,” the history of rescue of the children, and the children’s new postwar biographies are in urgent need of further investigation, not only for scholars but for the Greek child survivors themselves. As in other cases of the youngest survivors from Eastern and Western Europe, many Greek Jewish survivors today are engaged with reconstructing their wartime and early postwar experiences. Their recollections reveal many previously unknown facts about their birth families’ trajectories during the war, along with illuminating the complex and conflicting roles of those who saved the children’s lives during the Holocaust.78 Finally, in light of demographer Sergio DellaPergola’s expansion of the definition of Holocaust survivors in 2004,79 the history of children of North African Jewish communities during the Holocaust and in its aftermath awaits further exploration. Nava Barazani’s essay in this volume is a welcome addition to the still sparse literature.80 Pressing and haunting questions—​“Where is home?” “Who am I?” “Where is my family?”—​preoccupied young survivors in the first days following liberation. These constitute a subject of new studies investigating the role of ideologies such as Zionism in the lives of the young survivors, and the role of Western Jewish organizations and individuals in adopting the child survivors. Access to archival collections in post-​Communist Europe, and to the Red Cross International Tracing Services (ITS) records at Bad Arolsen, Germany (which only recently was made available to the general public) has enabled historians to compile microhistories of children’s lives and of rehabilitation programs in displaced persons (DP) camps in occupied Germany in the early postwar period.81 Avinoam J. Patt, a historian of Zionism in Jewish DP camps, examines the patterns and nature of social relationships among teenagers who had joined the Hashomer Hatzair kibbutz groups created first in Poland almost

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immediately after the end of the war.82 Patt shows that the psychological, practical, and existential needs of survivor youth, rather than Zionism per se, were the primary reasons underlying their joining these groups. For the young orphan survivors, the kibbutz represented an attractive solution to their intense feelings of homelessness and loneliness, as it encouraged the growth of new loyalties, close social ties, and emotional bonding. It came to serve as a substitute for the large Jewish families the youths had lost. Patt probes how, and to what extent, young survivors internalized, utilized, or sometimes rejected Zionist ideology. New research into the relationship between Zionist organizations in the DP camps in early postwar Germany and Holocaust survivors of different nationalities also reveals how emissaries of the Jewish Agency’s relief units perceived the young cohorts of the “surviving remnant” (sheerit hapeletah): some were considered to be better than others as “human material” for building the future Israeli society.83 In the aftermath of the Second World War, a number of Jewish and non-​Jewish welfare organizations, such as the American Joint Distribution Committee, the National Council for Jewish Women, and the American Friends Service Committee, tackled crucial problems of well-​being and identity among child survivors. In Case Closed: Holocaust Survivors in Postwar America (2007), Beth B. Cohen looks at the complexities facing young survivors who were starting life anew in adoptive families in the United States. She investigates the activities of various American Jewish welfare organizations that were involved first in raising funds for the children still in Europe and then in finding them warm and secure homes in the United States. What emerges from Cohen’s study is that, in spite of the great efforts expended by these groups, the adoption program did not prove entirely successful, especially from the vantage point of older child survivors brought to the United States.84 Further studies comparing growing up in adoptive Jewish families of unknown relatives and strangers in the West to growing up in collective orphan youth villages and kibbutzim in Israel of the late 1940s and 1950s will enhance our understanding of the significance of the role of the peer group in helping young survivors adjust to a new life. The topic of the long-​term impact of the Holocaust on child survivors was originally explored by psychologists. More recently, social scientists have examined the dynamics of relationships among three generations of child survivors, alongside a new wave of publications by the children and grandchildren of child survivors. Two ethnographic studies of now aging Soviet Jewish child survivors, conducted in the first decade of the new millennium, offer new sources and evaluations of the long-​ term psychological impact of the Holocaust on these specific youths.85 Other studies examine the slow and complex process, on the part of child Holocaust survivors in various countries, of recollecting and remembering the Holocaust.86

Conclusions Today, historians of the Holocaust acknowledge the importance of both children’s subjectivity and their grasp of reality in the historical reconstruction.87 The mass of scholarly works on child survivors and youth during and in the aftermath of the

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Holocaust, and the studies of the ways young survivors remember the traumatic past, is constantly growing. Certain cases and topics are more explored than others, and some topics are only now being researched or are still awaiting a proper historical investigation. Nevertheless, thanks to the last decade and a half of historical, sociological, anthropological, literary, and ethnographic investigations, we now know much more about the world of thinking, being, and feeling of Jewish children and youth, alongside their daily experiences, both during and in the aftermath of the Holocaust. With the endorsement of the child-​centered historical methods and interdisciplinary approaches, the field will continue to thrive and bear new fruits. The history of Jewish youth, the smallest group of young survivors from Nazi-​occupied Europe, is worthy of further examination for its own intellectual, psychological, and pedagogical merits. But it can also offer a valuable template for historical and contemporary comparisons that, in turn, might advance our understanding of the plight and the impact of displacement—​the loss of families, communities, and local and national homes—​on young victims and survivor-​refugees of wars and genocides in the second half of the 20th century, and through the current decade. Jewish child survivors’ voices offer warnings about the long-​term implications of mistaken individual actions and policies with regard to child survivor-​refugees, which today’s social workers, humanitarians, pedagogues, and policymakers might do well to heed.

Notes 1. I  would like to thank Carole Naggar, a specialist on David Seymour’s photographic works, for providing me with details of Chim’s family history. 2. On the children and the Otwock Jewish Home, see Joanna Beata Michlic, “The Raw Memory of War:  Early Postwar Testimonies of Children in Dom Dziecka in Otwock,” Yad Vashem Studies 37, no. 1 (2009), 11–​52. 3. Children of Europe, photos by David Seymour (Paris: 1949), 6. 4. On the Western liberal perspective of professional caregivers, psychologists, and humanitarian workers with regard to children of post-​1945 Europe, see the important study by Tara Zahra, The Lost Children: Reconstructing Europe’s Families after World War II (Cambridge, Mass.:  2011). On collectivist thinking about children in Central Europe after 1945 (which stood in opposition to the individualist Western traditions of that time), see idem, Kidnapped Souls: National Indifference and the Battle for Children in the Bohemian Lands, 1900–​1948 (Ithaca: 2008); idem, “Lost Children: Displacement, Family, and Nation in Postwar Europe,” The Journal of Modern History 81, no. 1 (March 2009), 45–​86. 5. For a short overview of the history of Jewish children during the Holocaust, see, for example, Nili Keren, “Children,” in The Holocaust Encyclopedia, ed. Walter Laqueur (New Haven: 2001), 115–​119. 6. Zorach Wahrhaftig, Uprooted: Jewish Refugees and Displaced Persons after Liberation (New York: 1946), 53. 7. On the history of the reemergence of Jewish child survivors and Jewish organizations in the early postwar period, see Lucjan Dobroszycki, “Re-​emergence and Decline of a Community: The Numerical Size of the Jewish Population in Poland, 1944–​47,” YIVO Annual 21 (1993), 3–​32. See also Natalia Aleksiun, Dokąd dalej?Ruch syjonistyczny w Polsce (1944–​ 1950) (Warsaw: 2002); and August Grabski, Działalność komunistów wśród Żydów w Polsce (1944–​1949) (Warsaw: 2004). 8. For some basic observations about the differences between the situation of child survivors in Nazi-​occupied Poland and in the Soviet Union, see Irena Kowalska, “Kartoteka TOŻ z

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lat 1946–​1947 (Żydowskie dzieci uratowane z Holocaustu),” Biuletyn Żydowskiego Instytutu Historycznego 6/​7 (1995), 97–​106. 9. This data is cited in Zahra, The Lost Children, 11. 10. Susan Rubin Suleiman, Crises of Memory and the Second World War (Cambridge, Mass.:  2006). Suleiman first voiced this position in an article titled “The 1.5 Generation: Thinking about Child Survivors and the Holocaust,” American Imago 59, no. 3 (2002), 277–​295. 11. Maria Hochberg-​Marianska and Noe Grüss (eds.), Dzieci oskarżają (Krakow: 1947), in English, The Children Accuse, trans. Bill Johnston (London: 1996). 12. Benjamin Tenenbaum (ed.), Eḥad me’ir ushenayim mimishpaḥah: mivḥar meosef avtobiyografiyot shel yaldei yisrael bepolin (Merhavia: 1947). For an analysis of this anthology, see Boaz Cohen and Gabriel N. Finder, “‘I Will Not Be Believed’: Benjamin Tenenbaum and the Representation of the Child Survivor,” in Jewish Families in Europe, 1939–​Present: History, Representation, and Memory, ed. Joanna Beata Michlic (Waltham: 2017), 196–​208. 13. Gabriel N. Finder, “The Place of Child Survivors in Polish Jewish Collective Memory after the Holocaust: The Case of Undzere Kinder,” in Displaced Children in Russia and Eastern Europe, 1915–​1953, ed. Nick Baron (Leiden: 2017), 218–​247. On Undzere Kinder, see also Ian Biddle, “Music, Sound, and Affect in Yiddish-​Language Holocaust Cinema: The Posttraumatic Community in Natan Gross’s Unzere kinder (1948),” Music and the Moving Image 11, no. 3 (Fall 2018), 40–​59. 14. See Joanna B. Michlic, “The Children Accuse (Poland, 1946): Between Exclusion and Inclusion into the Holocaust Canon,” Newsletter, Society for the History of Children and Youth 9 (Winter 2007), online at: history.vt.edu/​Jones/​SHCY/​Newsletter9/​michlic.html (accessed 26 April 2020). 15. See, for example, Renia Spiegel, Renia’s Diary: A Young Girl’s Life in the Shadow of the Holocaust, trans. Anna Blasiak and Marta Dziurosz (London: 2019). 16. The Diary of Dawid Sierakowiak:  Five Notebooks from the Lodz Ghetto, ed. Alan Adelson, trans. Kamil Turowski (New York: 1996). See also the diary of Jerzy Feliks Urman, I’m Not Even a Grown-​up (London: 1991). 17. See the seminal work by Lawrence L. Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (New Haven: 1991). 18. On the challenges of inclusion of Jewish women into modern Jewish history and the Holocaust, see, for example, Shulamit Reinharz, “The Individual in Jewish History: A Feminist Perspective,” in The Individual in History: Essays in Honor of Jehuda Reinharz, ed. ChaeRan Y. Freeze, Sylvia Fuks Fried, and Eugene R. Sheppard (Lebanon, N.H.: 2015), 285–​300; Paula Hyman, “Feminist Studies and Modern Jewish History,” in Feminist Perspectives on Jewish Studies, ed. Lynn Davidman and Shelly Tenenbaum (New Haven: 1991), 120–​139. 19. Omer Bartov, “Testimony and History:  Setting the Record Straight,” Pastforward (Spring 2011), 24. See, too, idem, “Yameha haaḥaronim shel Buczacz: ’eduyot ’al ḥurbanah shel ’ayarah rav-​leumit,” Zmanim 98 (Spring 2007), 82–​91, previously published as: “Les relations interéthniques à Buczacz (Galicie orientale) durant la Shoah selon les témoignages d’après-​guerre,” in Cultures d’Europe Centrale, vol. 5, La destruction des confins, ed. Delphine Bechtel and Xavier Galmiche (Paris: 2005), 47–​67. 20. Boaz Cohen and Rita Horváth, “Young Witnesses in the DP Camps:  Children’s Holocaust Testimony in Context,” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 11, no. 1 (2012), 103–​ 125; Boaz Cohen, “And I Was Only a Child: Children’s Testimonies, Bergen-​Belsen 1945,” Holocaust Studies:  A Journal of Culture and History 12, nos. 1–​2 (2006), 153–​169; Rita Horváth, “Memory Imprints:  Testimonies as Historical Sources,” in Michlic (ed.), Jewish Families in Europe, 1939–​ Present, 173–​ 195; Joanna B. Michlic, “Rebuilding Shattered Lives:  Some Vignettes of Jewish Children’s Lives in Early Postwar Poland,” in Holocaust Survivors:  Resettlement, Memories, Identities, ed. Dalia Ofer, Francoise S. Ouzan, and Judy Tydor Baumel-​ Schwartz (New  York:  2011), 46–​ 87; idem, “The Aftermath and After:  Memories of Child Survivors of the Holocaust,” in Lessons and Legacies, vol. 10, Back to the Sources: Reexamining Perpetrators, Victims, and Bystanders, ed. Sarah Horowitz (Evanston: 2012), 141–​189; idem, ‘‘‘The War Began for Me after the War’: Jewish Children

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in Poland, 1945–​1949,” in The Routledge History of the Holocaust, ed. Jonathan Friedman (London: 2011), 482–​497. 21. See, for example, Benita Blessing, The Antifascist Classroom:  Denazification in Soviet-​occupied Germany, 1945–​1949 (New  York:  2006); Nicholas Stargardt, Witnesses of War: Children’s Lives under the Nazis (London: 2005) 1–​17; Hans-​Heino Ewers, Jana Mikota, Jürgen Reulecke, and Jürgen Zinnecker (eds.), Erinnerungen an Kriegskindheiten: Erfahrung sräume, Erinnerungskultur und Geschichtspolitik unter sozial-​und kulturwissenschaftlicher Perspektive (Weinheim: 2006); and Michlic, “The Aftermath and After.” 22. Peter N. Stearns, “Challenges in the History of Childhood,” The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 1, no. 1 (2008), 35. 23. On children’s resourcefulness in inventing toys, and the ways in which they played and used games in their daily survival in the ghettos, see George Eisen, Children and Play in the Holocaust: Games among the Shadows (Amherst: 1988). See also Joanna Beata Michlic, “Toys and Games,” YIVO Encyclopedia, online at:  yivoencyclopedia.org/​article.aspx/​Toys_​and_​ Games (accessed 4 May 2020). In light of the availability of new primary sources, this topic is now ripe for revisiting. 24. Emanuel Ringelblum, Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto:  The Journal of Emmanuel Ringelblum, ed. and trans. Jacob Sloan (New York: 1974), 174. 25. In her memoir, I więcej nic nie pamiętam (Warsaw: 2010), Adina Blady-​Szwajger matter-​ of-​factly recounts her daily duties in caring for children in the Warsaw ghetto (pp. 225–​246). 26. On the full definition of resistance as ’amidah, see Yehuda Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust (New Haven: 2001), 120. 27. Joanna Beata Michlic, “The Untold Story of Rescue Operations: Jewish Children in Nazi-​occupied Poland Helping Each Other,” in Jewish Resistance to the Nazis, ed. Patrick Henry (Washington, D.C.: 2014), 300–​318. 28. It is estimated that approximately 402,000 Jews lived in Warsaw (the city) by the end of 1940. There is a relatively large body of literature on the history of the Jewish community of Warsaw and Warsaw Province during the Second World War. See, for example, Israel Gutman, Resistance: The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (Boston: 1994); Ruta Sakowska, Ludzie z dzielnicy zamkniętej, 2nd expanded ed. (Warsaw: 1993); Barbara Engelking and Jacek Leociak, Getto warszawskie:  przewodnik po nieistniejącym mieście (Warsaw:  2001); and the salient work about the underground Jewish archive Oyneg Shabes (Oneg Shabbat) by Samuel Kassow, Who Will Write Our History? Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive (Bloomington: 2007). 29. See Wikipedia entry, en.wikipedia.org/​wiki/​The_​Little_​Smuggler#Text_​and_​translation (accessed 9 July 2020); according to this entry, the translation appears in Patricia Heberer, Children during the Holocaust (Lanham: 2011), 343. A different translation (from the Yiddish) appears in Kassow, Who Will Write Our History?, 182. 30. Joanna Sliwa, “Concealed Presence:  Jewish Children in German-​occupied Kraków” (Ph.D. diss., Clark University, 2016), 386. On strategies of survival in Jewish orphanages in Transnistria during the Second World War, see Ionela Ana Dascultu, “Jewish Orphans and Jewish Orphanages in Transnistria” (Ph.D. diss., University of Haifa, 2020). 31. Sean Martin, Jewish Life in Cracow, 1918–​1939 (London: 2004); cf. Stanisław Piech, who cites statistical reports from 1924–​1939 showing that Jews constituted 25.8 percent of the total population (idem, W cieniu kościołów i synagog [Krakow: 1999], 22–​25). 32. The film was directed by Laurent Bouzereau and produced by Andrew Braunsberg. 33. The ghetto was set up in April 1940 as a labor camp; its last inhabitants were deported to the Auschwitz death camp in August 1944. On the history of the Lodz ghetto, see Gordon J. Horowitz, Ghettostadt: Lodz and the Making of a Nazi City (Cambridge, Mass.: 2008); Michal Unger, Lodz:  aḥaron hagetaot bepolin (Jerusalem:  2005); Adam Sitarek, Otoczone drutem państwo. Struktura i funkcjonowanie administracji żydowskiej getta łódzkiego (Łódź: 2016); and Julian Baranowski and Sławomir M. Nowinowski ed., Getto łódzkie/Litzmannstadt Getto 1940-1944 (Łódź: 2009). 34. “From the Editors,” Gazetka 1 (28 November 1943), YIVO Archives, Julian Hirszhaut Papers, 1939–​1945, RG 720, box 2, folder 108, Dawid Joskowicz, 10.

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35. See Children of the Lodz Ghetto:  A Memorial Research Project, USHMM, online at: online.ushmm.org/​lodzchildren/​name_​list.php?letter=K (accessed 30 August 2011). As of May 2020, this link no longer existed. 36. Sala Horn, “Sytuacja getta,” Gazetka 1 (28 November 1943). 37. On “sudden protectors,” see Joanna B. Michlic, Jewish Children in Nazi-​occupied Poland:  Survival and Polish–​Jewish Relations during the Holocaust as Reflected in Early Postwar Recollections (Jerusalem: 2008) 81–​84. 38. Testimony of Rafal [Rafael] Shleger (undated, 3 pages), (Yiddish), YIVO Archives, the Central Jewish Historical Commission, Collection of Genia Silkes, RG 1187, series 2, box 2, folder 28, file no. 9. 39. Interview with Chava (Chawa) Meir (17 March 1996), USC Shoah Foundation, Petach-​ Tikva, Israel, Hebrew, file no. 12189, tape 3. 40. Ibid., tape 5. 41. Dalia Ofer and Lenore Weitzman (eds.), Women in the Holocaust (New Haven: 1998). See also Dalia Ofer, “Cohesion and Rupture: The Jewish Family in East European Ghettos during the Holocaust,” in Studies in Contemporary Jewry, vol. 14, Coping with Life and Death: Jewish Families in the Twentieth Century, ed. Peter Y. Medding (New York: 1998), 143–​165; idem, “Yeladim veno’ar bitkufat hashoah,” in Hashoah: historyah vezikaron: sefer yovel leYisrael Gutman (Jerusalem:  2001), 58–​92; idem, “Parenthood in the Shadow of the Holocaust,” in Michlic (ed.), Jewish Families in Europe, 1939–​Present, 3–​25; Lenore J.  Weitzman, “Resistance in Everyday Life:  Family Strategies, Role Reversals, and Role Sharing in the Holocaust,” in ibid., 46–​66. 42. On the treatment of mentally and physically disabled people in Nazi Germany, see, for example, Michael Burleigh, Death and Deliverance:  Euthanasia in Germany, 1900–​ 1945 (Cambridge:  1995); Götz Aly, Peter Chroust, and Christian Pross, Cleansing the Fatherland: Nazi Medicine and Racial Hygiene (Baltimore: 1994). 43. Kinga Frojimovics, “The National Institute for the Israelite Deaf-​Mute in Budapest, 1938–​ 1948:  A Case Study for the Rescue Strategy of Continuously Operating Jewish Communal Institutions,” in Michlic (ed.), Jewish Families in Europe, 1939–​Present,  67–​84. 44. On Janusz Korczak, see Betty Jean Lifton, The King of Children:  A Biography of Janusz Korczak (New York: 1988), see also Joanna Olczak-​Ronikier, Korczak: Próba biografii (Warsaw: 2011). 45. For English-​language works on the Holocaust of Hungarian Jews, see the seminal volumes by Randolph L. Braham, The Holocaust in Hungary:  A Selected and Annotated Bibliography, 1984–​2000 (Boulder: 2001); idem, The Politics of Genocide: The Holocaust in Hungary, 2 vols. (Boulder: 2001) 46. Helena Kubica, “Kinder und Jugendliche im K.L. Auschwitz,” in Auschwitz 1940–​ 1945, vol. 2, ed. Wacław Długoborski and Franciszek Piper (Oświęcim: 1999), 251–​351. 47. Johannes-​Dieter Steinert, Holocaust und Zwangsarbeit. Erinnerungen jüdischer Kinder 1938-​1945 (Essen: 2018). Steinert’s other important works explore the topic of Polish and Soviet children under the German occupation. See, for example, “Polish and Soviet Child Forced Labourers in National Socialist German and German Occupied Eastern Europe,” in Freilegungen: Rebuilding Lives—​Child Survivors and DP Children in the Aftermath of the Holocaust and Forced Labor, ed. Henning Borggräfe, Akim Jah, Steffen Jost, and Nina Ritz (Göttingen: 2017), 142–​159. 48. See, for example, the documentary film The Boys of Buchenwald, directed by Audrey Mehler (Canada, 2002). 49. Kenneth Waltzer, “Moving Together, Moving Alone: The Story of Boys on a Transport from Auschwitz to Buchenwald,” in Michlic (ed.), Jewish Families in Europe, 1939–​Present, 85–​109; idem, The Rescue of Children and Youths at Buchenwald (forthcoming). 50. On the discussion surrounding different versions of Night in Yiddish, French, and English, see, for example, Naomi Seidman, “Elie Wiesel and the Scandal of Jewish Rage,” Jewish Social Studies 3, no. 1 (n.s.) (Autumn 1996), 1–​19. 51. Elmer Luchterhand, “Prisoner Behavior and Social System in the Nazi Camp,” International Journal of Psychiatry 13 (1967), 245–​264. 52. Verena Buser, Überleben von Kindern und Jugendlichen in den Konzentrationslagern Sachsenhausen, Auschwitz und Bergen-​Belsen (Berlin: 2011).

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53. Otto Dov Kulka, Nofim mimetropolin hamavet (Tel Aviv: 2003); in English, Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death, trans. Ralph Mandel (Cambridge, Mass.: 2013). 54. The history of the Hidden Children’s annual gatherings is available online on the Anti-​ Defamation League website. The organization also publishes The Hidden Child magazine, online at: adl.org/​holocaust-​education/​hidden-​child-​foundation (accessed 17 May 2020). 55. Joanna (Joasia) Hercberg, diary without a title, but with a one-​page un​numbered introduction with a dedication “To my dearest Mrs. Luba [Lena Bielicka–​Blum] on her birthday,” in Księga Wspomnień, ed. Franciszka Oliwa, 1. This is a separate memoir (part 2) that was added to the Księga Wspomnień. In the first part Oliwa presents her own memoir; the second part is a collection of children’s memoirs. This work can be found in Yad Vashem Archives, file 037/​378, vol. 2; also cited in Joanna B. Michlic, “The Raw Memory of War: Early Postwar Testimonies of Children in Dom Dziecka in Otwock,” Yad Vashem Studies 37, no. 1 (2009), 11–​52. 56. Saul Friedländer, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–​1945 (New York: 2007), xxv. 57. Email interview with Dori Katz (25 February 2014). Looking for Strangers was a finalist in the National Jewish Book Council awards for 2013. 58. Ibid. 59. Annette Wieviorka, L’ère du témoim (Paris: 1998); in English, The Era of the Witness, trans. Jared Stark (Ithaca: 2006). 60. For a discussion of the revival of interest in the testimony of Holocaust survivors, see Geoffrey Hartman, The Longest Shadow:  In the Aftermath of the Holocaust (Bloomington: 1996); see also Wieviorka, The Era of the Witness, 107–​118. 61. Relli Robinson, Dolah or me’afar (Tel Aviv:  2011). I  wish to thank the author for sharing with me details of her wartime experiences, and the way she dealt with these matters in her memoir. 62. Thomas Buergenthal, A Lucky Child: A Memoir of Surviving Auschwitz as a Young Boy (New York: 2009). 63. Suzanne Vromen, Hidden Children of the Holocaust: Belgian Nuns and Their Daring Rescue of Young Jews from the Nazis (Oxford: 2008), 3. 64. See Diane L. Wolf, Beyond Anne Frank:  Hidden Children and Postwar Families in Holland (Berkeley: 2007). 65. Daniel Lee, Pétain’s Jewish Children:  French Jewish Youth and the Vichy Regime, 1940–​1942 (Oxford: 2014). 66. Daniella Doron, Jewish Youth and Identity in Postwar France: Rebuilding Family and Nation (Bloomington: 2015). 67. Joyce Block-​Lazarus, In the Shadow of Vichy: The Finaly Affair (Bern: 2008). On the Mortara affair, see David I. Kertzer, The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara (New York: 1998). 68. Mary Fraser Kirsh, “The Lost Children of Europe: Narrating the Rehabilitation of Child Holocaust Survivors in Great Britain and Israel” (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 2012). I would like to thank Dr. Kirsh for sharing this text with me. 69. See Nahum Bogner, At the Mercy of Strangers: The Rescue of Jewish Children with Assumed Identities in Poland (Jerusalem:  2009); Emunah Nachmany-​ Gafny, Dividing Hearts: The Removal of Jewish Children from Gentile Families in Poland in the Immediate Post-​Holocaust Years (Jerusalem:  2009); Jennifer Marlow, “Polish-​ Catholic Maids and Nannies: Female Aid and the Domestic Realm in Nazi-​occupied Poland” (Ph.D. diss., Michigan State University, 2014); Sliwa, “Concealed Presence”; Michlic, “Rebuilding Shattered Lives”; idem, “The Aftermath and After”; idem, “ ‘The War Began for Me after the War.’ ” 70. See Wolf, Beyond Anne Frank; idem, “Child Withholding as Child Transfer: Hidden Jewish Children and the State in Postwar Netherlands,” Journal of Human Rights 12, no. 3 (2013), 296–​308. 71. See, for example, the microhistories by Anna Andlauer, The Rage to Live:  The International D.P. Children’s Center Kloster Indersdorf 1945–​46 (Weichs: 2012); and Christian Höschler, Home(less): The IRO Children’s Village Bad Aibling, 1948–​1951 (Berlin: 2017). 72. See Lynne Taylor, In the Children’s Best Interests (Toronto:  2017); idem, “Unaccompanied DP Children in Germany, 1949-​1952:  Lost in the Shuffle,” in Beyond Camps and Forced Labour: Current International Research of Survivors of Nazi Persecution.

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Proceedings of the International Conference (London, 11-​13 January 2006), ed. Johannes-​ Dieter Steinert and Inge Weber-​Newth (Osnabruck, 2008); Susanne Urban, “Unaccompanied Children and the Allied Child Search: ‘The right [ . . . ] a child has to his own heritage,’” in The Young Victims of the Nazi Regime: Migration, the Holocaust and Postwar Displacement, ed. Simone Gigoliotti and Monica Tempian (London: 2016), 277–​297. 73. Gerhard Sonnert and Gerald Holton, What Happened to the Children Who Fled Nazi Persecution (New York: 2006). 74. Anna Sheftel and Stacey Zembrzycki, “‘We Started Over Again, We Were Young’:  Postwar Social Worlds of Child Holocaust Survivors in Montreal,” Urban History Review/​Revue d’histoire urbaine 39, no. 1 (2010), 20–​30. 75. Françoise S. Ouzan, How Young Holocaust Survivors Rebuilt Their Lives: France, the United States, and Israel (Bloomington: 2018). 76. For English-​language works on Soviet children’s wartime experiences, see Julie K. deGraffenried, Sacrificing Childhood: Children and the Soviet State in the Great Patriotic War (Lawrence: 2014); Olga Kucherenko, Little Soldiers: How Soviet Children Went to War, 1941–​ 1945 (Oxford: 2011); and Catriona Kelly, Children’s World: Growing Up in Russia, 1890–​1991 (New Haven: 2007). 77. Polly Zavadivker, “Jewish Orphans in Postwar Russia” (paper presented at the Association of Jewish Studies Annual Conference, 19 December 2016). 78. See, for example, the report by Giota Mirtsioti, “Untangling the Tale of a Jewish WWII Orphan in Thessaloniki,” Ekathimerini (27 April 2020), online at ekathimerini.com/​212055/​ article/​ekathimerini/​community/​untangling-​the-​tale-​of-​a-​jewish-​wwii-​orphan-​in-​thessaloniki (accessed 13 July 2020). 79. Sergio DellaPergola, “Jewish Shoah Survivors: Neediness Assessment and Resource Allocation,” in Ofer, Ouzan, and Baumel-​Schwartz (eds.), Holocaust Survivors, 294–​314. 80. See Nava Barazani, “Hide-​and-​Seek: The Tale of Three Girls in the Giado Concentration Camp in Libya (1942-​1943),” in this volume, pp. 103–120. 81. For an essay based on previously unevaluated records of UNRRA’s child tracing service in the Archives of the International Tracing Service (ITS), see Verena Buser, “Displaced Children 1945 and the Child Tracing Division of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration,” The Holocaust in History and Memory 7 (2014), 109–​123. On the general history of Jewish life in displaced persons camps in occupied Germany, see Atina Grossmann, Jews, Germans, and Allies:  Close Encounters in Occupied Germany (Princeton:  2007); Hagit Lavsky, New Beginnings: Holocaust Survivors in Bergen-​Belsen and the British Zone in Germany, 1945-​1950 (Detroit: 2002); and Zeev W. Mankowitz, Life Between Memory and Hope: The Survivors of the Holocaust in Occupied Germany (New York: 2002). 82. Avinoam J. Patt, “A Zionist Home:  Jewish Youths and the Kibbutz Family after the Holocaust,” in Michlic (ed.), Jewish Families in Europe, 1939–​Present, 131–​152; see also idem, Finding Home and Homeland: Jewish Youth and Zionism in the Aftermath of the Holocaust (Detroit: 2009). 83. Na’ama Seri-​Levi, “‘These People Are Unique’:  The Repatriates in the Displaced Persons Camps, 1945–​1946,” Moreshet 14 (2017), 49–​100. 84. Beth B. Cohen, Case Closed:  Holocaust Survivors in Postwar America (Piscataway: 2007). 85. Svetlana Shklarov, “Narratives of Resilience in Aging Soviet Jewish Child Survivors of the Holocaust” (Ph.D. diss., University of Calgary, 2009); Marina Shafran, “Soviet Holocaust Survivors: An Ethnographic Study” (Ph.D. diss., Western Michigan University, 2011). 86. See, for example, Sharon Kangisser Cohen, Child Survivors of the Holocaust in Israel: “Finding Their Voice”: Social Dynamics and Post-​War Experiences (Brighton: 2005); Kenneth Waltzer, “History and Memory: Children and Youths at Buchenwald and Belsen,” in Das soziale Gedächtnis und die Gemeinschaften der Überlebenden. Bergen-​Belsen in vergleichender Perspektiv, ed. Janine Doerry, Thomas Kubetzky, and Katja Seybold (Bergen-​ Belsen: 2013), 150–​167. 87. On the importance of historians’ considering the subjectivity of children, see, for example, Nicholas Stargardt, “German Childhoods: The Making of a Historiography,” German History 16, no. 1 (1998), 1–​15.

Hide-​and-​Seek: The Tale of Three Girls in the Giado Concentration Camp in Libya (1942–​1943) Nava T. Barazani (THE HEBREW UNIVERSITY) (THE DAVID YELLIN ACADEMIC COLLEGE OF EDUCATION)

The typhus epidemic that broke out in the Giado concentration camp in Libya in December 1942 constituted the major cause of death among the hundreds of Jews who did not survive their incarceration. Those who contracted typhus were placed in an improvised isolation room; the bodies of those who died were removed for burial in an ancient cemetery discovered by chance on one of the hills overlooking the camp. The epidemic spread because of poor sanitation, overcrowding, a severe shortage of water, poor nourishment, and a shortage of medications.1 Seeking to prevent its spread, the camp guards shaved the heads of the detainees who had lice in their hair.2 This essay relates the story of three women who, as children, were incarcerated in the camp. Of the approximately 90 individuals of Libyan origin whom I interviewed between 2009 and 2017 as part of my research on childhood in Libya before and during the Holocaust, 13 women and nine men were survivors of the Giado camp. In the interviews, only the women mention the shaving of heads and their desperate attempt to evade this fate. They do not speak about fear of the epidemic or of the deaths to which it led, but rather about their profound anxiety at the prospect of having their hair shaved off. During the course of the interviews I conducted, and these three interviews in particular, I made use of the agency of visual images linked to the memory of Libyan Jewry during the war and the Holocaust. During the first part of the interview I more fully explained the topic of the interview and its objective, and asked questions about the subject’s childhood and what games were played by children. About half an hour into the interview, I introduced one or more visual images, including a photo of the Giado camp that I showed to the women who had been there (Fig. 7.1). Most interviewees were also asked to draw a picture of places or objects that seemed to have particular significance for them. Visual images function as living representations of the Nava T. Barazani, Hide-and-Seek: The Tale of Three Girls in the Giado Concentration Camp in Libya (1942– 1943) In: No Small Matter: Features of Jewish Childhood. Edited by: Anat Helman, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197577301.003.0007

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Fig. 7.1  Giado concentration camp, Libya. Photograph courtesy Or-​Shalom Center for Libyan Jewish Heritage. past, reactivating the subject’s memory of past events, and they are also meant to aid in grappling with the horrors of the past in a more abstract manner.3 Aharon Appelfeld speaks of the difference between the pool of memory of someone who was an adult during the war, as opposed to that of someone who was a child. He maintains that the adult has absorbed, remembered, and thus continually retells the same details regarding wartime events. Among those who were children, by contrast, one finds a dual perspective—​that is, those who are now adults can look back at their past selves objectively, while also being able to conjure up their childhood memories of events at the time.4 This dual perspective generates a memory bank that changes and evolves over time. By means of a close reading of interviews I conducted many decades after the described events, in which the three women interviewees moved fluidly between their perceptions as children and their adult recollections, I  seek to plumb a gender-​related phenomenon that was peculiar to the girls of the Giado camp, focusing on two (apparently) unrelated components: the rules of a game, and the threat that one’s head might be shaved. First, however, I present a brief historical background of Libyan Jewry prior to and during the Holocaust.

Libyan Jewry at the Time of the Holocaust Libya is divided into three main geographical regions—​Tripolitania in the northwest, Cyrenaica in the northeast, and Fazzan, which lies south of Tripolitania. During the period of European rule between 1911 and 1951, most of Libya’s Jews resided in

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Tripolitania’s northern coastal plain and in Cyrenaica. In 1911, Libya was occupied and colonized by Italy. A decade later, Benito Mussolini came to power in Italy; at first, the Italian Fascist occupation had little direct impact on the Jewish community, and there were only isolated incidents of violence against Jews. However, in 1938, some of the race laws enacted in Italy—​which were reminiscent of the Nuremberg laws—​began to be applied to them.5 The situation of Libya’s Jews deteriorated in 1940, in the wake of Italy’s entry into the Second World War in alliance with Nazi Germany. Led by Erwin Rommel, the commander of the German forces in Africa, the German army landed at Tripoli in February 1941; within two months, it arrived in Benghazi in the region of Cyrenaica.6 In 1942, the race laws began to be enforced more strictly. Various edicts curtailed legal protections and limited Jews’ freedom in the realms of commerce and culture, and Jews also fell prey to violent attacks on the part of the Fascists. Following an order to expel Jews of foreign nationality, some of them were deported from Libya to detention and concentration camps in Tunisia, Algeria, or Italy.7 In September 1943, prisoners in the detention camps in Italy were transferred to the Bergen-​Belsen camp in northern Germany and to the Innsbruck-​Reichenau camp in western Austria.8 From December 1940 to January 1943, the rule over Cyrenaica passed between the Italians and the British five times.9 The Jews of the region regarded the British as liberators who released them from the burden of the race laws and other antisemitic measures, and their enthusiastic reception of the British was enhanced by their encounter with Jewish soldiers from Palestine who served in the British army. Mussolini consequently regarded Libyan Jews as a security risk and in 1942 issued an order to thin out Libya’s Jewish population.10 This was carried out in the deportation, between May and October 1942, of some 2,600 Cyrenaican Jews to the Giado concentration camp, a former military base that was located in the midst of the Tripolitanian plateau, roughly 235 kilometers south of Tripoli. Convoys of trucks from all over Cyrenaica arrived at the camp every fortnight after a journey lasting five days. Prisoners at Giado were housed in huts, under extremely crowded conditions. Each hut contained between 300–​350 people. Families were grouped together, with each family separated from those around them by improvised partitions of blankets or sheets. According to Rachel Simon, families were allowed to bring “a small quantity of personal belongings,” including food, clothing, and bedding.11 The families initially consumed the food they had brought along with them, but were soon obliged to make do with the few provisions they were given. In the wake of numerous appeals, the camp commander, Gen. Ettore Bastico, agreed that those with the means could purchase provisions from the local Arabs (at an exorbitant price). However, only a few of the camp inmates could afford this luxury. Bastico made no secret of his antisemitic views; together with an assistant, he would regularly walk the camp grounds with whip or club in hand, subjugating prisoners to threats and abuse. The Italian and Arab guards behaved in similar fashion. Male prisoners were assigned hard labor in cleaning, digging, and carrying earth, and were subject to punishment—​solitary confinement—​for real or alleged disciplinary infractions. Prisoners who were judged to be more serious disciplinary problems were transferred to a prison in Tripoli.12 As noted, as a result of the poor sanitation and the lack of proper nourishment, a typhus epidemic broke out in Giado, in which 562

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Jews lost their lives. In January 1943, the Italian guards vacated the camp; several weeks later, British forces arrived. Some sick prisoners were transferred to hospitals in Tripoli. Others, too sick to move, remained in Giado until they either recovered or succumbed to illness or malnutrition. The last of the prisoners left Giado in October 1943. 13

Play and Gender Scholars list various functions of game-​playing. As an activity that combines thought with action, game-​playing may serve as a defense mechanism, a way of relating to others, a means of expression, and a means of gaining enjoyment; it can also be a way to achieve emotional release, control, encouragement, imitation, and self-​ knowledge.14 These functions may well acquire an added importance among children who have confronted the horrors of the Holocaust. The findings that emerged from the body of interviews I conducted with women and men of the Libyan Jewish community in Israel and in Italy15 indicate that, in the various camps to which they were sent, female children chose to play games that furthered an adult orientation, derived from imitation of the home environment and its way of life. They sought the recognition and involvement of the adults, above all of their mothers. The male children, in contrast, employed imagination and fantasy in their play, which both represented an escape and a symbolic distance from the domestic sphere and encouraged assertiveness and independence.16 The men, for instance, spoke of games played with balls that they created from rags and of wrestling, and they also described other activities undertaken outdoors by large and uniform groups of male children. The women I interviewed told me about dolls that they fashioned from rags, about a concern for cleanliness, and about friendship between pairs or cooperative activity in small groups. Most of the men did not mention shared play among girls and boys. However, some of the women described playing that involved both sexes, such as yard games, shadow theater, and role playing. In games that involved role hierarchy or stereotypical gender differentiation,17 the male children played the “masculine” roles of facilitators, initiators, or even gravediggers. It should be noted that these gender distinctions are not peculiar to the children of Giado or to those from other camps in Europe and North Africa at the time of the Holocaust. They in fact constitute a prevalent phenomenon both during that period and thereafter. Numerous studies have shown that, even in early childhood, children tend to develop gender-​based stereotypical orientations that distinguish between games that are appropriate for male children and those that are fitting for female children. According to these studies, the male children are attributed with strength, risky behavior, competitiveness, and independence, whereas female children are attributed with qualities such as delicacy, weakness, a concern for neatness and good appearance, and domesticity. Within the patriarchal structure of the family, the parents serve as significant agents of gender socialization for their children and also constitute a model to be emulated in play. Although children’s preference for and choice of toys and games classified according to sexual stereotypes may be a congenital tendency,

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it is particularly prevalent among those whose parents take a traditional-​conservative approach to the distinction between male and female gender roles.18 Rachel Simon addresses the specific gender constructions among the Libyan Jewish community during the period under discussion. She notes that, despite some change and improvement in Libyan women’s occupational status that occurred alongside the spread of pioneering Zionism during the 1940s, women were still employed in occupations considered to be typically female, such as cleaning and cooking, rather than in farming and industry.19 One of the more significant changes had occurred during the 1930s, when Libyan Jewish women became more involved in educational matters. The male leadership of the Ben-​Yehudah organization and of the Hatikvah school in Tripoli believed that, by co-​opting women as educators, they would be better equipped to ensure the future of the Jewish people by shaping the character of the new generation. This initiative was discontinued when the race laws came into force, and Simon remarks that “during this period the community did not engage in educating girls, and Jewish girls therefore received no regular education in Libya between 1939 and 1943.”20 Boys, however, were educated by the community during the war, as before. I met with three women survivors of Giado—​Misa, Amira, and Rubina—​in 2011 and 2012.21 Various aspects of their childhood recollections serve as a model of a gender-​based phenomenon that frequently surfaced in the stories of the other ten women interned in the camp whom I interviewed.

The Interviews Misa My interview with Misa, a native of Benghazi, took place in 2011 in her home in central Israel. In 1942, when Misa was nine years old, she and her family were sent to Giado. In the following excerpt, Misa speaks about the children’s fear of encountering the Italian Fascist guard (ellipses in the text indicate pauses on her part; those in brackets indicate places in which the text has been shortened): He would yell at us . . . and we were little kids [smiling], all the children would hide, hide together in some . . . some hut [pointing to a corner], and begin to tell all kinds of stories and things, and all that.22 We hear him, in . . . you know, there are huts here, huts there, like in an emergency room, and . . . we hear him with this thing . . . he’s cursing, and the . . . flashlight, bukh bukh bukh bukh. . . like so [indicating a hand gripping a flashlight]. [ . . . ] he didn’t know [smiling and whispering], we would lie one on top of the other and keep quiet, ’cause we were afraid he’d catch us.

In addition to smiling and whispering, Misa bends toward the floor, her expression conveying the sharing of a secret, when demonstrating how the children concealed themselves in their corner.

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Misa now recalls a similar game the children played. She calls it “real hide-​and-​ seek,” and relates that, when the Italian guards left their watch, only the Jewish kapo remained in place, and he would allow the children to play outside the hut in which her family was housed. It is interesting that “real hide-​and-​seek” refers to a game rather than the real-​life situation of hiding from the guard. In her account, there seems to be a blurring of boundaries between the game of hide-​and-​seek and the appearance of numbing reality (in the form of the guard) from which the children hid. It is as if the usual distinction between the fear that symbolizes horror and the playful tension that may be found in play in general, and in the game of hide-​and-​seek in particular, have been erased. When playing the social and competitive game of hide-​and-​seek, children share the action among themselves and faithfully cooperate with one another. In competitive play, and in hide-​and-​seek in particular, children understand that it is far more important to stick to the rules and to play fairly than to win.23 Hide-​and-​seek requires one to maintain friendly relations with the others and demands that all participants begin at the same place. However, when hiding from the reality of the camp, Misa and her companions were unable to follow the familiar rules. They were unable to control events, contrary to the way they felt when playing the “real” children’s game of hide-​and-​seek. As she warms to the subject of the hide-​and-​seek game, Misa seemingly shifts gears as she shares another recollection: There were lice all right . . . the lice, you can’t imagine, once they took an old person [ . . . ] each louse was like rice—​you know, white, and thick—​and it would drink all his blood, poor guy. And [the guard] says to him, “take off your clothes,” and he didn’t want to. [The guard repeated:] “take off your clothes!”—​and he forced him to take off his clothes, and he burned them and you hear katkatkatkatkat, all the lice. And then came the point where heads had to be shaved [long pause].

In recounting moments of play that are intertwined with specific events, Misa presents a tale woven from seemingly unrelated associative memories: a game, a hiding place, lice, bald heads. Gradually, however, the connection between the game and the shearing of hair becomes more apparent: [ . . . ] and then the time came when a barber arrived, they caught every[one] . . . my grandmother was old and blind, they took her, too, and took out her hair, bald heads, bald heads everywhere, I and the kapo’s daughter ran off, she too, her hair is longer than mine and I, I have long hair, curly like that and pretty. . . we hid and all the time we’re hiding until they caught us and took it off. What crying, what crying. [...] When I  see them in . . . in . . . films of the Holocaust, I remember myself, I was like that.

Here lies a possible explanation of the children’s fear of the guard who searched with his flashlight for the silent, hidden children. Misa recalls that no exception was made for her old and blind grandmother. She then proceeds to describe the shocking moment at which she and her friend were caught and robbed of their long hair. The Holocaust films she has seen illustrate a present-​day memory picture of her past: “I remember myself, I was like that. I remember everything as if I were there now.” Her

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memories evoke an account of the past that is reminiscent of the present, bringing to the surface feelings and images from “there” that are also valid “here.” I ask Misa if the same Italian guards were on duty each day and if the children got to know them, and she replies in the negative. She describes once again the sense of foreboding that permeated the moment at which the children who are “playing, enjoying themselves, and laughing” stop their play upon hearing the heavy footsteps of the guard in his boots, and discern the flashlight he waves around. She relates that they would lie in a heap and keep very still: “until it was over, and God forbid anyone should laugh, then they’d discover [us].” She illustrates the moment by bodily movements as well, crouching down and putting her hand to her mouth to denote the absolute silence that they maintained. And yet Misa smiles when she recalls how the guard with the flashlight didn’t know where the children were. In her description, there is an oscillation between play and reality, amusement and horror. In his book Homo Ludens, Johan Huizinga notes that one of the characteristics of the game is its inherent tension and the opportunity to release it. Every game has its rules, which apply to all the players; if these rules are broken, the game can no longer be an “intermezzo or interlude” and the players perforce return to the regular world. Huizinga makes a distinction between play and reality, maintaining that “play is not ‘ordinary’ or ‘real’ life. It is rather a stepping out of ‘real’ life into a temporary sphere of activity with a disposition all of its own.”24 He believes that play is something powerful and inescapable, while at the same time being distinguishable from reality and confined within a temporary sphere contained in the regular world. In the case of Misa and her companions, however, reality penetrated the temporary sphere “until [the game] was over,” in her words. Unlike Huizinga, who emphasizes the disengagement from reality, George Eisen—​ who specifically addresses play during the Holocaust—​shows how children made use of real-​life situations as a means of coping with horror. According to Eisen, “play and games made a completely irrational reality more rational and, perhaps, more bearable.”25 This insight fits Misa’s recollection of a game that was cut short, but where there was also a continuation of a certain feeling of mischievousness. Confronted with a menacing reality, Misa and her companions employed rules and content intrinsic to play, even if the game itself had gone awry. At another point in the interview, after being shown a photograph of the Giado camp (Fig. 7.1), Misa recalls the door at the entrance to the hut in which her family was housed. This in turn leads to a somewhat confusing recollection pertaining to the kapo who used to stand at the door: He has a family. Like us. His daughter, I told you, she had hair longer than mine, and me, too, they said I was pretty, my hair was down to here [signaling the length], it doesn’t grow now. It hurt us then, she ran away, I said to her, why you? Because your dad is a kapo, and I’m not? We would hide in all sorts of places.

Previously, Misa had recalled how she and her friend, the kapo’s daughter, had run away and hidden when the barber came to shave their heads. In that account, both girls were caught and had their heads shaven. But here, the recollection shifts: Misa’s friend, it turns out, had escaped her fate, and had therefore remained pretty. Decades

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later, as an elderly woman, Misa is still marked by the trauma:  in her telling, her hair—​and, by extension, her beauty—​was permanently destroyed.26 Moreover, in this revised account, it is only the friend who runs away. Yet Misa says that “it hurt us then,” using the plural. Perhaps she is referring to other members of her family who shared her pain? Or perhaps this is the shared pain of being separated from her friend, as each becomes aware that she has been left to fend on her own? Continuing to pore over the photograph, Misa returns to her memories of children playing: [ . . . ] we played there in the yard, there. I remember there were rocks the size of the table, we would hide behind the table [the rock], playing hide-​and-​seek, hiding, and actually we didn’t feel so bad because we’re kids and our parents are like that, we’re all the same, without hair, barefoot, tattered clothes, we thought . . . maybe we thought that’s the way it should be.

Misa here describes a “real”—​and enjoyable—​children’s game in the yard, which contrasts with the general atmosphere of suffering and the parents’ distress that she has previously described. She suggests that the children who continued to play hide-​ and-​seek had internalized the realization that this would be their life from then on and had accepted their fate. Up to this point, Misa’s recollections of moments of play have been interspersed with descriptions of intense fear felt by the children, yet after perusing the photograph she describes an experience of playing in which the children seem to be more or less unaffected by their situation. In addition, Misa’s comment that “our parents are like that, we’re all the same” conveys her assessment that everyone suffered the same indignities—​in this sense, it contradicts her previous depiction of the kapo’s daughter (unfairly) escaping the fate of having her head shorn. The depiction of Giado is a bit more nuanced here, and perhaps for this reason, in order to reconcile conflicting elements of her memory, Misa offers a solution in the form of the children’s lack of awareness and capacity for adaptation. Misa called me the day after the interview to express her concern that her account may have given the impression that life in Giado was good for the children, or even for the prisoners in general. After stressing her concern, she once again described terrible moments of suffering in the camp. Huizinga’s observations on the characteristics of play may help illuminate Misa’s statements both during our phone conversation and during the course of the interview: “Here we come across another, very positive feature of play: it creates order, is order. Into an imperfect world and into the confusion of life it brings a temporary, a limited perfection.”27 Huizinga addresses play as an uplifting activity that facilitates the introduction of order into chaos, and he regards it as an essential element, without which people cannot function in this world. Perhaps, then, by virtue of the games they played within “life’s confusion,” a modicum of order was created in the children’s world, which helped them feel “not so bad.” Back during the interview, after putting the photograph aside, I ask Misa to draw the area of the camp as she remembers it. She appears embarrassed by my request, protesting that she can’t draw—​but then takes the pencil and draws a few simple lines that serve as a trigger for further memories. Rather than drawing the camp, she goes back to the scene of the children’s interrupted game:

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We’re sitting in one of the rooms, in the middle, several children, laughing, talking, until the fascist with the flashlight comes . . . we’re hiding, sitting one on top of the other, lying down so no one sees, no one hears [us], until he moves away, and then we come to life. Always living in fear [ . . . ].

Time and again, Misa tells the story of how the guard interrupts the children, shattering any illusion of their being able to play. Or even worse—​when she says, “and then we come to life,” she appears to be emphasizing that he had drained the moment of life itself. Gazing at her drawing, Misa offers an associative memory: A dress, it’s brown (laughs and indicates with her hands a long dress), the material’s thick with dirt. A dress like that [because] in those days the girls didn’t wear pants. And the boys, they had three-​quarter length pants. Like what you’ve seen in the Holocaust, neglected children, two sticks for hands, two sticks for legs, shaven head. I remember there were plenty of lice, on grownups you’d see those lice. Our clothes are falling apart from all the dirt, they’re already like plywood, you touch it (laughing), it can break. And barefoot, one pair of shoes and after that, that was it.

By this point in the interview, Misa has twice mentioned dirty clothes; later, she will make a third, similar allusion. However unpleasant her description is, it is less distressing than the account of the loss of her hair. Perhaps this is because dirt is extraneous to the body whereas hair is one of the body’s most visible manifestations, closely linked with a person’s self-​perception and identity.28 In addition, dirty clothing is unlinked to gender. Hair, however, especially long hair, has traditionally been regarded as a female’s “crowning glory.” Thus the trauma, for a nine-​year-​old girl, of having her hair violently shorn—​an act from which Misa has never fully recovered.

Amira Amira, also a survivor of the Giado camp, did not have her head shaven during her incarceration, but she, too, took part in a form of hide-​and-​seek. In the course of my interview with her, she recounts that she was the younger child in her family and also “sort of sad.” She explains that in the wake of her experience in the camp she became an apprehensive girl; the fear, so she says, “has remained until now.” Born in 1936, Amira was six years old when her family was evicted from their home in Benghazi. Along with her mother, aunt, and nine-​year-​old sister, she was transported to Giado. Several months earlier, with the help of forged documents, her father had migrated to Palestine, where he enlisted in the British army. His sister, Razala, promised Amira’s mother that she would help take care of the two young daughters, and once they were in Giado, she took on the task of trying to lift Amira’s spirits. Amira recalls how, at bedtime, lying on her aunt’s stomach, the two of them would softly sing a song whose name and melody Amira can no longer recall. They would sing until they heard the kapo approaching:

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And suddenly we hear the kapo’s shoe, bum bum, so we know he’s coming on inspection to see if everyone’s quiet in bed, so there was already no time, I right away lay on my aunt’s stomach and she covered us both with the blanket, so they wouldn’t know we weren’t sleeping. If not, we would’ve been punished.

In this description, a playful moment is transformed into something far more sinister, though a trace of mischief remains. Amira hides under her aunt’s blanket; they share their secret, pretending to be a single sleeping figure. This comes across as a kind of hide-​and-​seek, in which elements of fun leaven the numbing necessity to remain concealed. Nonetheless, once the guard has left, she and aunt do not go back to their song, “because the fear was already there.” To the extent that Amira experienced the moment as a game, she was able to collaborate with her aunt in confronting the threat. Yet the threat was real, and concealment was an imperative, and this reality put an end to the playful moment preceding the guard’s arrival. I show Amira the photograph of the camp, and it clearly stirs her emotions. She smiles, and points to the hills and the sand dunes that are clearly visible. She next mentions the camp’s fence, which does not appear in the photograph. She elaborates further, describing a game she would play with her companions, far from the fence, in which two girls would hold hands and each would take turns to twirl around, going lower and lower. “It’s a kind of dance, it’s wonderful,” she says—​but here a more disturbing memory intervenes, and she tells of how, whenever a guard was spotted, the girls would run off to hide. The guards, Amira explains, would threaten to pull the girls’ hair, and this in fact happened at least once, when Amira was caught by her “two long braids.” She managed to wiggle free and run off, but the constant threat forced Amira and her friends to remain invisible when they played, keeping far away from the fence and the menacing eyes of the guards. Here, too, as in the story featuring her aunt, Amira had to hide from reality. She does not as yet divulge what they intended to do to her hair. This emerges in her subsequent account. Daniel Feldman writes about the murderous, Holocaust version of the game of hide-​and-​seek, noting that whereas Germans and Jewish children played with equal fervor, the former were guilty of breaking the rules.29 To be captured in Giado did not spell certain death, as it did elsewhere. Nonetheless, Amira and her friends experienced a palpable threat on the part of the Italian guards. Whereas Amira frequently describes her everyday activities in Giado in terms that characterize games (hiding, catching, running away, whispering) all of these actions stem from the necessity of coping with the disparity in power in a hostile sphere. The cruel, twisted “game” between the girls and the guards is more akin to what Huizinga defines as total war, in which there is no equality between the two sides, and where “the last vestige of the play-​element” is extinguished.30 Amira and her companions would play near adult family members, in particular her mother. As she speaks of playing in the yard under her mother’s watchful eye, she is led by that memory, as it were, and tells me about a small room in the camp clinic where a nurse (Amira notes that she may have been Italian) used small sticks to check the prisoners’ heads for lice.31 Amira’s description of play thus merges, by association, with the fear she felt as a child lest lice be found on her and her hair be cut off. She goes on to relate how she was spared this fate:

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Never did we have lice, myself and my sister, never! [Our] poor mother, day and night she’d sit and search [our heads for lice], and that’s because anyone who has [lice] they shave off their hair, you understand? And I and my mother and my sister [ . . . ] they would see we were okay and let us go. We had this nightmare of them making us bald [. . . .] They’d be catching [people] each time, I think once a week they’d check everyone.

Amira’s mother was able to spare her daughters and herself the trauma of being shorn and the consequent “nightmare” of being bald. Amira reiterates: “There were married women with kids who had their heads shaved,” thereby underscoring the stinging attack on femininity and perhaps also on motherhood. And when she notes that “they’d be catching” people, she indicates the necessity to hide so as not to be “caught.” Amira adds: Whoever had lice or nits, they would shave them bald so that everyone wouldn’t be infected, you understand? Yes, that’s something I remember. They did that, but I, and my sister, and [our] mother we were truly saved from that. Mother every. . . day would grab hold of us for hours, even if we’d cry—​it was quite painful—​“quiet,” she says, and she was scared, yes, I remember that as well.

Amira underscores the effectiveness of her mother’s surreptitious hygiene regimen. Thanks to her mother, Amira and her sister were “truly saved” from the distress of having their heads shaven. Yet remaining free of head lice did not merely spare the girls a shaven head; it was also regarded as an important factor in protecting them from typhus. Considering the severity of an epidemic that led to hundreds of deaths, one might think that the threat of a shaven head would be a relatively minor concern. This, however, was not the case. How is this apparent anomaly to be explained? In a work titled Powers of Horror, Julia Kristeva argues that rotting, pollution, and disease represent a threat that lies beyond one’s identity, something external that threatens the “I.”32 In line with this thinking, it appears that Amira internalized baldness as a signifier of the difference between the sexes, and thus as an inherent threat to her sexual identity. Amira continues with her description of her mother, commenting that “Mother was like a hen. She was afraid for her two daughters. She would hover around us all the time, with food, and [asking] where are we? And also the head, that there shouldn’t be lice.” In the oppressive camp environment, there was no real independence for the young girls whose mother watched over them “all the time.” One might draw a parallel between the situation described here and the attributes of the early childhood game of peek-​a-​boo. In this interactive game of concealment, the mother figure at first generates an element of fear and horror, and then offers the infant consolation in the form of her reappearance. Peek-​a-​boo aids the infant in controlling his or her fear of parting and fear of strangers.33 In Giado, Amira’s mother constantly remains close to her daughters, “like a hen,” watching them carefully and concealing them while she checks their hair in order to protect them both from being shorn of their hair and from being parted from her. Unlike peek-​a-​boo, the mother and her daughters do not play out a staged parting and an amusing return; in the reality of Giado, there is a real

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danger that, if either the mother or one (or both) of her daughters disappear, they may never return. When Amira’s husband comes home during the interview, she shows him the photograph of the camp. She reminds him that she once told him about the very hills and dunes that appear in the photograph. She calls the landscape “the end of the earth,” and remarks: “Here, this, this concrete building, so big it was hiding . . . this big thing, we were in it.” Amira’s comments indicate that, apart from actively concealing themselves from the guards, their entire life in the camp was taken up by hiding in the hills, the dunes, and in the concrete building. The building itself is in plain view, but as Amira gazes at the photograph and her memories of the past are activated, she claims that the building, too, is hiding. It is located at “the end of the earth,” and despite its size, it offers nothing in the way of shelter or protection. “We were in it,” she says, as if penetrating the photograph with her gaze. Her description evokes the voice of a little girl who, long ago, sought someone who would expose this awful hiding place and lead her to safety. Prior to this point in the interview, Amira had told me about her father’s plan to arrange for his family’s migration to Palestine. The plan was foiled when his wife, sister, and children were unexpectedly deported to Giado. Amira never saw her father after he left for Palestine. Following their release from Giado, Amira and her family returned to Benghazi. One day, a telegram arrived at the house, informing them that Amira’s father had died when the British ship on which he was traveling sank after being bombed by German planes.34 In Amira’s words: “It was a trauma on top of a trauma.”

Rubina Rubina was seven years old when she and her family were taken from their home in Benghazi and transported to Giado. In response to my asking her whether she remembers the journey from her home to the camp, she replies: “To Giado? Of course,” but she describes only its end, when the family reached the internment camp. “I remember that we were in . . . when we got off the trucks they put us into, like an army camp, a real camp, and each family [had] a blanket, a blanket, a blanket, everyone,” she says, as she mimes with her fingers the blankets that were turned into partitions. I ask her to stop for a moment in order to talk about her own family’s blanket, but Rubina doesn’t hear me and instead tells me that her father had two wives. The first was barren and he therefore married a second wife who bore their children. Rubina relates that the two women behaved like sisters to their dying day and says: “once I had two mothers [ . . . ].” Apart from serving as a partition, the blankets provided a source of income for the family. Rubina’s father exchanged them for commodities with the local Arabs. Among these were food items used to prepare dishes for the Sabbath, including ḥamin.35 One Sabbath eve in the camp, when her stepmother (as Rubina refers to her) went to check on the ḥamin she had prepared, one of the officers called out to her:

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The tall officer motioned with his eyes like this [laughing and making a beckoning gesture with her right hand], he took her and stood her in the center [of the open area between the huts]. I can still remember that place with its electricity poles. My mother gets up, she can’t find [the stepmother]: “Where is she, where is she?” [The officer] grabbed her as well. They were there until the end of the Sabbath.

According to Maurice Roumani, inmates of Giado were subject to degrading and humiliating treatment on the part of the officers. Officers would kick at pots of food, particularly that prepared for the Sabbath; sometimes they would pour the contents on the ground, and on occasion would even urinate into the pot.36 Rubina doesn’t say what, if anything, the two women were being punished for—​only that, watching from afar, she cried unceasingly until her mother and stepmother were finally allowed to return to the hut after spending the entire Sabbath outside, exposed to public view instead of being with their families. “We calmed down,” she continues, and moves on to a different memory dealing with that part of the camp: And one day they took all the girls [banot, which here refers to both women and girls] and shaved their heads. They placed them, I still remember, with the chair like this, and all the girls [were shaven] bald. Now, my sister has a long braid—​she’s one of [my] sisters, she’s the eldest—​so they said, “Where’s the missing daughter?” and my stepmother had put her under the mattresses [laughs and demonstrates something akin to a hiding place], and they looked for her, they found her and did the same to her.

Rubina’s description is similar to those of Misa and Amira; notwithstanding the lighthearted tone in which she speaks, her recollection evokes both fear and anguish. “How did you feel about having a bald head?” I ask, and she smiles and replies: “Not easy, not easy [ . . . ] a bald head—​a bald head—​everyone with a bald head.” She recounts one event after another, as if plucking episodes from a familiar and repetitious story, telling each one from beginning to end, without pause. She either ignores my questions or else answers them briefly, repeating things she has said already, not in order to clarify or to emphasize points, but only to allow herself to continue the familiar flow of the narrative. At a certain point, I ask her to draw the hut. As she does so, she explains: “You enter a large corridor and then there’s a corridor like this, here are the blankets, here’s the building, houses, rooms [ . . . ] and we’re inside these huts, blankets, just blankets, each family [with] a blanket, each family, and we’re . . .” Continuing to draw blankets that create imagined rooms, she falls silent. From her drawing, I gather that Rubina and her family were placed at the entrance. As her memory takes her back into the hut, I ask her if she used to play there with other girls or boys and she replies: “No, no, not with anyone. Each with his own family, we didn’t move from here to there.” “Then what did you do all day long?” I persist, and Rubina says: “Nothing. We were afraid even to go outside. That one with the whip, the one in charge, God help anyone who went out or spoke, or whatever. I still remember his eyes, like so,” Rubina says, making blinking motions with her hands and eyes. Each family, she says, remained in the hut, hiding and constricting themselves behind the blanket. “Only blankets,” she

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says, clearly indicating that only a thin covering stood between them being seemingly concealed and protected and being revealed and exposed to attack. Rubina surveys her drawing and elaborates on her terrible fear of the guard, whom she has described as being tall and carrying a whip. She suddenly laughs and stoops down to illustrate how she hid from his menacing figure. She then repeats her account of the two defining events—​the time her two mothers were detained in the yard, and the time the women and girls had their heads shaven—​that had instilled such paralyzing fear. Repeating the story of how the girls had their heads shaven, Rubina says: “They even put . . . they put us on a chair, we didn’t speak, didn’t complain, or else we cried, like . . .,” and here Rubina constricts her body, as if making herself smaller, and says simply: “We’re afraid.” Fear, it seems, is what prevented them from responding to what was happening to them. I show her the photograph of the camp Rubina says: “I remember where I was, a camp this long,” and here she repeats her account almost word for word: “there was this corridor, you enter like this [ . . . ] long like this, and . . . blankets, blankets, blankets.” Her gaze extends beyond what she sees in the photograph and beyond the blankets that cover and conceal her memories. And now she describes something she hasn’t mentioned previously: two dresses, one red, the other yellow, that were “just to play with,” which had been sent by Rubina’s uncles in Tripoli.37 According to Rubina, the dresses had originally been worn in henna ceremonies. These memory traces of snatches of play, until now buried in the past under the blankets, as it were, resurface as Rubina gazes at the photograph of the camp and tells (and retells) her experiences there. Her uncles had originally sent the dresses to be used as costumes, “not for going out or for beauty,” but rather “to give us something to do.” Perhaps this “something” enabled them to express their femininity in a manner that afforded them hope as they contemplated their future as women: something beyond the bald heads, the blankets, and the dunes of Giado. Before seeing the photograph, Rubina had mentioned more than once that she had not played in the camp (“no, no, not with anyone”), and stressed the paralyzing fear she had felt (“we were afraid even to go outside”; “We didn’t do a thing, only talk, chat, things like that, we were afraid of him”). The photograph serves, at least for a moment, to draw the protective blanket partition aside, revealing the memory of the colorful dresses. “What the ‘others’ do ‘outside,’ ” writes Huizinga, “is no concern of ours at the moment”; there is a “temporary abolition of the ordinary world.” Moreover, in the specific game of dressing up, “the disguised or masked individual ‘plays’ another part, another being. He is another being.”38 In Rubina’s story, fear is met with hiding and, at times, with disguise. The dresses afford a bit of respite, allowing the girls to escape reality in the course of playing a game in which the “I” is disguised. Rubina’s story is full of themes relating to covering and exposure. There are the two mothers who are forced to stand outside for an entire day, whose defenseless appearance is etched on her heart. Rubina also frequently speaks about the blankets that separated one family from another in the hut, and often repeats the word “blanket” in her stories (interestingly, on one occasion, she refers to the blanket as a door). She speaks about her shaven head, which deprived her of another form of protective covering; when her hair was taken from her she lost the strength to grieve for it. As she views the photograph, she says: “[ . . . ] they brought us [begins to say semikhot,

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“blankets”] . . . dresses, dresses with these long sleeves . . . .,” and for a moment the comforting dresses (semalot) in which she would surreptitiously wrap herself seem to blend into the protective semikhot. Rubina shows me a photograph taken in 1944, roughly a year after her release from Giado camp. There are many children in the photo, and I ask her if they were with her in the camp. She replies: “Every . . . one, everyone . . . no, in the camp not everyone, Rajiniano I think not.” (Rajiniano, she says, was deported to a camp in Germany, but was later released). The children in the photo are in costumes. Rubina, standing in the foreground, is smiling—​she is dressed as Queen Esther, with a silver crown topping her brown, shoulder-​length hair.

Epilogue Ah and . . . one of those I think who went there, Lydia’s daughter, Lydia’s daughter, her name was . . . Lola. [ . . . ], she was a young girl of sixteen, more or less. [ . . . ] [They] caught all the . . . women there and shaved their heads and [this] girl. . . she had long hair and [ . . . ] poor thing, she passed away because of that [ . . . ], they caught her, they wanted to shave her head, she had run away, and from that she got a kind of shock, “here they come, here they come” (imitating Lola’s voice), “here they come, here they come,” all the time “here they come,” she passed away. [ . . . ] I hid in . . . a coal pit. In this segment, Gina, another interviewee who was a girl at Giado, speaks about an instance in which there was a direct link between loss of hair and loss of sanity. She relates that Lola, would lie “in one of the rooms . . . on ah . . . like wood, a bed with wood in the middle, and everyone was around her . . . I was a small girl but I remember the . . .,” and here she falls silent and sinks into thought. Perhaps she was thinking about herself: Gina, who had hidden in a coal pit, was also caught, and she, too, ended up with a bald head like everyone else. Over a period of months in 1942 and 1943, the camp in Giado became a place where several hundred Libyan Jewish children lived and, at times, played. The children played with reality and in relation to it. Whenever possible, they played real games. Yet most of the time the real need to hide overshadowed their childish games, both then, in their actual experiences, and in the stories they recount many years later. Among those who were girls in Giado, the shaving of heads is described as an extreme act that deeply affected them—​perhaps the strongest illustration of how their childhood was cruelly disrupted. The girls speak only occasionally about the hunger and the severe shortage of water. Moreover, they do not speak about the threat of death that hung over the camp, but rather focus on their terrible fear that their heads would be shorn, or else describe the moment in which their apprehensions became fact. The forced shaving of one’s head and the resulting baldness was imposed on all the camp’s inmates, but it does not feature in the recollections of the men who were boys at the time of their internment. It thus appears that the relative impact of forced

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shaving of heads is powerfully associated with gender. In the women survivors’ testimony, there is an expression of intense fear, not only the fear of experiencing the actual shaving, but that of becoming bald—​a fear that, once deprived of their hair, their crowning glory, their identity would be permanently scarred. The loss of their hair is portrayed in terms of the destruction of their beauty; something that mars their femininity; a crushing blow to their sense of self-​worth. Hide-​and-​seek was a means of avoiding this bitter fate. Few girls, however, were victorious in the playing of this particular game.



Notes 1. Irit Abramski-​Bligh, Pinkas hakehilot—​Luv, tunisiyah (Jerusalem:  1997), 120–​121; Rachel Simon, “Yehudei luv ’al saf shoah,” in Luv, ed. Haim Saadon (Jerusalem: 2007), 76. 2. There is abundant evidence that body lice can transmit typhus and other diseases. Most health professionals agree that head lice do not transmit disease (see, for instance, cdc.gov/​parasites/​lice/​head/​disease.html; accessed 23 October 2019; for a different view, see Abdul Karim Sangaré et al., “Detection of Bartonella quintana in African Body and Head Lice,” American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene 91, no. 2 [2014], 294–​301). The distinction between the two types of lice is not always apparent, and the practice of shaving heads in order to prevent the transmission of disease was not uncommon at the time. 3. For more details on this method, see Nava T. Barazani, “Timunot zikaron shel kehilat yehudei luv bitkufat hamilḥamah vehashoah, bein hashanim 1937–​1945” (Ph.D.  diss., The Hebrew University, 2020). 4. Aharon Appelfeld, Sipur ḥayim (Jerusalem: 1999), 85. 5. Renzo De Felice, Yehudim beeretz ’aravit: yehudei luv bein kolonizatziyah, leumiyut ’aravit vetziyonut 1835–​1970, trans. Menahem Emanuel Hartom (Tel Aviv: 1980), 194–​195; Abramski-​Bligh, Pinkas hakehilot, 61, 117. 6. Abramski-​Bligh, Pinkas hakehilot, 118–​119. 7. Some 1,600 Jews of French and Tunisian nationality were deported to concentration and detention camps in southern Tunisia and Algeria (ibid., 120). Approximately 120 Jews of British nationality were transported in January 1942 to concentration camps in northern Italy. See Hanna Yablonka, Harḥek mehamesilah: hamizraḥim vehashoah (Beersheba: 2008), 29. 8. According to Abramski-​Bligh (Pinkas hakehilot, 63–​64), 370 internees were transferred to Bergen-​Belsen, and one hundred were transferred to Innsbruck. 9. The British drove the Italians out of Libya for short periods. The first British conquest lasted from December 9, 1940 to April 3, 1941, and the second conquest lasted from November 18, 1941 to January 28, 1942. 10. De Felice, Yehudim beeretz ’aravit, 202–​208; Abramski-​Bligh, Pinkas hakehilot, 63–​ 67, 119; Harvey Goldberg, “Haaretz viyhudehah,” in Sa’adon (ed.), Luv, 15–​20. De Felice takes a somewhat different view, noting that the Jews’ sympathy toward the British may have merely reinforced existing tendencies within the Italian regime, which were exacerbated by the influence and presence of the Germans. 11. Simon, “Yehudei luv ’al saf shoah,” 76. 12. Abramski-​Bligh, Pinkas hakehilot, 120; Yaacov Haggiag-​Liluf, Yehudei luv bashoah (Or Yehudah: 2012), 112. 13. Timeline at:  yadvashem.org/​yv/​he/​holocaust/​timeline/​description.asp?cid=204&wi dth=650&height=240 (accessed 23 October 2019); see also Irit Abramski-​Bligh, “Hashpa’at milḥemet ha’olam hasheniyah ’al yaḥasei yehudim–​’aravim beluv uvetunisiyah,” in Shorashim bamizraḥ: kevatzim leḥeker hatenu’ah hatziyonit vehaḥalutzit bearatzot haislam, vol. 3, ed. Yitzhak Avrahami (Tel Aviv: 1991), 233–​252; idem, Pinkas hakehilot, 120–​121.

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14. See, for example, Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens:  A Study of the Play-​Element in Culture (London: 1998); Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (New York: 1961); Donald Woods Winnicot, Playing and Reality (London: 1971); Peter K. Smith, “Training in Fantasy Play,” Early Child Development and Care 11 (1983), 217–​226; Brian Sutton-​Smith, Toys as Culture (New York: 1986). 15. I interviewed women and men who were deported to camps in Europe, Tunisia, and Libya in their youth. I also met with witnesses who were forced to flee their homes, or who experienced the peril and horror of the bombing of Tripoli. 16. See, for example, Carol Lynn Martin and Richard A. Fabes, “The Stability and Consequences of Young Children’s Same-​Sex Peer Interactions,” Developmental Psychology 3, no. 3 (2001), 431–​446; Judith E. Owen Blakemore and Renee E. Centers, “Characteristics of Boys’ and Girls’ Toys,” Sex Roles 53 (2005), 619–​633. 17. On the meaning of “gender” and its study, see, for example, Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, vol. 2, Lived Experience, trans. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-​ Chevallier (New York: 2011); Pierre Bourdieu, Masculine Domination, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford:  2001); Raewyn Connell, Masculinities (Berkeley:  1995); Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (Berkeley: 1978); Albert Key Bandura, “Social Cognitive Theory of Gender Development and Differentiation,” Psychological Review 106, no. 4 (1999), 676–​713; Jon Swain, “‘The Money’s Good, the Fame’s Good, The Girls Are Good’: The Role of Playground Football in the Construction of Young Boys’ Masculinity in a Junior School,” British Journal of Sociology of Education 21, no. 1 (2000), 95–​109; Veronique Mottier, “Masculine Domination: Gender and Power in Bourdieu’s Writings,” Feminist Theory 3, no. 3 (2002), 345–​359; Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Inversion of Identity (New York: 1999). 18. See Monica McGoldrick, “Women through the Family Life Cycle,” in Women in Families: A Framework for Family Therapy, ed. Monica McGoldrick, Carol M. Anderson, and Froma Walsh (New York: 1989), 200–​226; A.M.A. Carvalho, P.K. Smith, T. Hunter, and A. Costabile, “Playground Activities for Boys and Girls: Developmental and Cultural Trends in Children’s Perceptions of Gender Differences,” Play and Culture 3 (1990), 343–​347; Rita Shell and Nancy Eisenberg, “The Role of Peers’ Gender in Children’s Naturally Occurring Interest in Toys,” International Journal of Behavioral Development 13, no. 3 (1990), 373–​388; Carol O. Eckerman, and Mark R. Stein, “How Imitation Begets Imitation and Toddlers’ Generation of Games,” Developmental Psychology 26, no. 3 (1990), 370–​378; Martin and Fabes, “The Stability and Consequences of Young Children’s Same-​Sex Peer Interactions,” 431–​434; Blakemore and Centers, “Characteristics of Boys’ and Girls’ Toys,” 619; Sarah K. Murnen, Claire Greenfield, Abigail Younger, and Hope Boyd, “Boys Act and Girls Appear: A Content Analysis of Gender Stereotypes Associated with Characters in Children’s Popular Culture,” Sex Roles 74, nos. 1-​2 (2016), 78–​91. 19. Rachel Simon, “Temurot bema’amadan shel nashim yehudiyot beluv,” in Shorashim bamizraḥ, 4 (1998):183–​198; idem, “Between the Family and the Outside World: Jewish Girls in the Modern Middle East and North Africa,” Jewish Social Studies 7 (1) (2000), 81–​108. It should be noted that women in rural Libya performed a variety of tasks considered to be masculine work, such as the drawing of water and the collection of firewood. This work, however, was linked to their households. See Simon, “Temurot bema’amadan shel nashim yehudiyot beluv,” 185. On traditional, clear-​cut, rigid, and hierarchical gender-​defined roles in North Africa, see Tali Lahav, “Haishah mimotza mizraḥi betipul mishpaḥti,” in Lihiyot shonah beyisrael: motza ’adati, migdar vetipul, ed. Claire Rabin (Tel Aviv: 1999), 209–​210; Blakemore and Centers, “Characteristics of Boys’ and Girls’ Toys,” 619–​620. 20. Simon, “Temurot bema’amadan shel nashim yehudiyot beluv,” 193–194. 21. All the names of interviewees mentioned in the article have been changed. 22. It appears that, notwithstanding the extremely crowded conditions of the huts, children managed to find corners in which to play. 23. See Sara Smilansky and L. Shefatya, Hamisḥak hasotziyo-​dramati:  emtze’i lekidum limudi, ḥevrati verigushi shel yeladim tze’irim (Kiryat Bialik: 1993); Jean Piaget, The Moral

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Judgment of the Child (London: 1932); Lili E. Peller, “Libidinal Phase, Ego Development, and Play,” Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 9 (1954), 178–​198. 24. Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 8. 25. George Eisen, Children and Play in the Holocaust:  Games among the Shadows (Amherst: 1988), 110. 26. Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth:  How Images of Beauty Are Used against Women (London:  1990); see also Dalia Bachar, Lefarek et hamitos:  hitnagedut ledimuyei Venus kemodel shel yofi nashi beomanut feministit (Tel Aviv: 2016), 21, 32, 35, 210–​211, 215. Bachar notes that luxuriant female hair symbolizes vitality and good health, while its absence signifies barrenness and, accordingly, constitutes both a defect and a disability. 27. Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 10. 28. Ruth Lorand notes that, while dirt may detract from one’s appearance and hide one’s beauty, it “is not considered something essentially ugly” since, as opposed to disease or physical defect, it can be easily removed. See idem, Hayofi berei hafilosofiyah (Haifa: 2007), 420. 29. Daniel Feldman, “Reading Games in Auschwitz: Play in Holocaust Youth Literature,” The Lion and the Unicorn 38, no. 3 (2014), 360–​380. 30. Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 90. 31. The clinic is not mentioned by scholars. In December 1942, epidemics of typhoid and typhus broke out in the camp. As the epidemic spread the Italian authorities gathered all the patients into a single hut, where they were attended by two Italian physicians and three to four nurses assisted by the women detainees. See Abramski-​Bligh, Pinkas hakehilot, 121; Simon, “Yehudei Luv al saf shoah,” 76. 32. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror:  An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon. S. Roudiez (New York: 1982), 58. 33. Peller, “Libidinal Phase, Ego Development, and Play,” 178–​198; John D. McDevitt, “Separation-​Individuation and Object Constancy,” American Psychoanalytic Association 23, no. 4 (1975), 713–​742; Anni Bergman, “To Be or Not to Be Separate: The Meaning of Hide-​ and-​Seek in Forming Internal Representations,” Psychoanalytic Review 80 (1993), 361–​375; Rita V. Frankiel, “Hide-​and-​seek in the Playroom: On Object Loss and Transference in Child Treatment,” Psychoanalytic Review 80, no. 3 (1993), 341–​359. 34. On April 29, 1943, the 462nd Jewish transport company sailed on the Erinfora from the port of Alexandria in Egypt to the island of Malta, in preparation for the Allies’ invasion of Italy. One hundred and forty men of the company died in the German bombing, among them Amira’s father. See Shlomo Boneh, Bintivei yamim so’arim (Tel Aviv: 1991); Moshe Sharett, Pulmus hashilumim (Tel Aviv: 2007), 432, 471. 35. The term ḥamin (plural of ḥam, meaning “hot”) refers to a kind of stew that is put up before the Sabbath and left to simmer overnight. Among Ashkenazic Jews, the dish is known as cholent. 36. Maurice M. Roumani, The Jews of Libya:  Coexistence, Persecution, Resettlement (Eastbourne: 2008), 35. 37. On supplies sent to the deportees in Giado, see Abramski-​Bligh, Pinkas hakehilot, 120–​ 121; Simon, “Yehudei luv ’al saf shoah,” 76. According to Abramski-​Bligh, the authorities at Giado—​after numerous appeals—​allowed for the weekly shipment of a number of food items, and there also a one-​time shipment of clothing. Several of the interviewees claimed that such assistance was never received, or only to a very limited extent. 38. Huizinga, Homo Ludens,  12–​13.

The Children of Kfar Etzion: Resilience and Its Causes Amia Lieblich (THE HEBREW UNIVERSITY) (THE ACADEMIC COLLEGE OF SOCIETY AND THE ARTS)

What makes some individuals capable of sustaining stress or trauma, thus enabling them to develop normally? What characterizes children who grow up under adverse conditions and yet become healthy, productive adults? The concept of resilience, borrowed from ecological literature, has been offered by psychologists to describe the phenomenon; it is generally used to refer to the ability of humans to “bounce back” from traumatic events.1 Resilience can protect the individual from the potential negative effects of encountered stressors. However, the question remains as to what factors, circumstances, or characteristics make some individuals resilient, and others—​not. While, in the last 40 years, much psychological and medical research has been dedicated to this and related questions, there is little agreement as to the correct answers.2 The present essay, summarizing a relevant case study on the second generation of survivors of Kfar Etzion,3 points to several factors that may have contributed to their exceptional resilience and coping. Life stories collected in the framework of this study provide a rich, “thick” description of the participants’ childhood; these reveal several commonalities that might have contributed to their overall wellbeing in spite of their traumas. My thesis is that collective upbringing, coupled with a well-​ integrated system of meanings based on religious and patriotic values, fortify the individual against adversity and may help him or her cope with highly tragic and stressful life circumstances.4

Brief History of the Group Kibbutz Kfar Etzion, located in the hills between Jerusalem and Hebron, was founded by a group of religious Jewish pioneers in 1943. The settlement belonged to Kibbutz Hadati, the religious kibbutzim movement, whose ideology combined socialist-​ Zionist and religious Jewish values. The common history of the first-​generation Amia Lieblich, The Children of Kfar Etzion: Resilience and Its Causes In: No Small Matter: Features of Jewish Childhood. Edited by: Anat Helman, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197577301.003.0008

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members started about a decade earlier, in the mid-​1930s, when they formed training groups for collective farming and started their communal existence as Kvutzat Avraham—​a commune of religious agricultural workers. For five years they prepared themselves, grew in number, and waited for the allocation of land for their permanent settlement. This turned out to be a piece of land on top of an isolated, rocky mountain, surrounded by Arab villages. Notwithstanding, members of the group managed to form a highly successful collective based on the dual values of a Jewish way of life and manual work, as formulated in the slogan “Torah va’avodah” (Torah and work). In the aftermath of the Second World War, the group was augmented by a number of Holocaust survivors. The kibbutz founded by this group, Kfar Etzion, existed for a mere five years. In May 1948, during the early stages of the War of Independence, Kfar Etzion was conquered and completely destroyed by the Arabs. Among the 240 casualties of these bloody days, 70 members of the kibbutz, most of them men, were killed in battle as they attempted to defend their settlement.5 Many others were murdered after their surrender.6 The subjects of my study, members of the second generation of the kibbutz, continue to this day to refer to themselves as “the children of Kfar Etzion.” They consisted originally of 60 men and women, the oldest of them born in 1939 and the youngest—​ in 1948. Four months before the kibbutz was overrun, when life in the kibbutz had already become extremely dangerous, a painful decision was made to evacuate all noncombatants:  children, their mothers, and a number of pregnant women.7 They were sent from the kibbutz to the Ratisbonne monastery in Jerusalem, which sheltered them. Most of them never saw their fathers or husbands again. Following the fall of Kfar Etzion, and several relocations, the life of the survivors as a commune of mostly widowed mothers and children continued for a while in Jaffa, where they were allocated temporary housing by the newly established state of Israel. In accordance with their former way of life, they founded a kibbutz—​that is, a collective community—​of 33 widows, 60 children, and seven men who, for different reasons, had escaped the fate of their comrades. In order to support their families, most of the women began some kind of vocational training or started to work outside the commune. The children were cared for by members of the collective and slept, as a group, in a dormitory in the compound that was known as “the children’s house”—​the same term used in most kibbutzim. In 1952, the collective way of life was given up, with each family (the great majority were households headed by women) going its own way. About half of the widows eventually remarried, while others raised their children alone. Some moved to other parts of Israel, whereas some remained in Jaffa, in the same location, for 15 years or more. This brief history of the community has an additional important chapter, namely the resettlement of Kfar Etzion in its original site after the Six-​Day War of 1967. However, only about a dozen of the second-​generation group joined the new kibbutz and settled there permanently as members. The remaining “children,” except for two who live abroad, are in various urban or rural locations in Israel. Additional information about this group will be provided in the relevant sections below. However, it goes without saying that this group of adults and children who experienced danger, severe losses, and forced relocation can be considered traumatized

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and might have been expected to manifest some or all of the trauma outcomes noted in the psychiatric literature.8

The Research Study—​A Narrative Inquiry Fifty-​five years after these tragic events of loss and dislocation, I was invited to study the story of the second generation of Kfar Etzion, whose members at that time ranged in age between 55 and 65. I  was approached as a senior researcher and professor known in Israel for specializing in community and individual life story research.9 The study conducted with this group was both qualitative and based on a narrative approach.10 As usual in this research method, I did not start off with particular hypotheses, but rather had two general aims in mind: from a psychological perspective, to explore life after a major loss and trauma as experienced by members of this group; and, from a cultural perspective, to study their construction of collective and personal memory.11 The present essay will deal mainly with the first aim. During the years 2003–​2004, I met for long, individual life story interviews with 51 of the surviving 56 members of the original group of the second generation of Kfar Etzion. Each conversation lasted between 1.5 to 4 hours, taking place over the course of one or two meetings, and was fully recorded and transcribed. At the onset of the interview, I usually wrote down certain demographic details such as age, address, family status, and profession of the participant. Following this, I inquired about the fate of the interviewee’s father: that is, whether he was killed in 1948, or survived. This question sometimes led to a long narrative about the father and other past events. The next request concerned each interviewee’s earliest memory. Following these different beginnings, I tried to cover the following topics in each of the interviews:

• • • •

Personal life history from childhood onwards, until the present; Family history, including country of origin and early years of the parents; The common history, namely the story of Kfar Etzion and its destruction; The meaning of being a “Kfar Etzion child” for the participant’s present identity.

The length and order of these topics varied among the different interviewees. In performing the role of life story interviewer, I tried my utmost to be nondirective, nonjudgmental, and compassionate. The narratives obtained were sincere, detailed, and expressive.

Group Members’ Mental Health Forty-​three of the 51 research participants had lost their fathers (in one instance, both mother and father) during the battles of 1948. All of them had lost their home and had experienced dislocation and exile. In addition, several members of the research group were the children of Holocaust survivors, another factor that could have influenced their narratives.12 In fact, some of the narratives provided in the interviews were very

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sad. However, in general, my impression of the respondents was that, as a group, they could be characterized as mentally healthy and well-​adjusted, as might be judged by accepted criteria such as marital status, professional achievements, and social activities. They conveyed a sense of well-​being and optimism. It has been my impression that in spite of its multiple losses, the studied group would be considered normal or even “super-​normal” by any accepted mental health standard. The following details pertain to the time of the study (2003–​2004): All of the participants were married and had children and grandchildren. One of the men had been divorced and was remarried. One of the women was trying to get a divorce from her husband of 35 years. Two of the participants had been widowed and then remarried. All of them had large families, with between 3 to 11 children (median=5), and a large number of grandchildren. They maintained close contacts with their parents (if alive) and with their offspring. Regarding professional attainments, many of the interviewees had academic degrees. All of them held regular jobs, some owned their own business, and some were employed in private firms or by the government. Many of the women were teachers, social workers, or psychologists. A number of the participants were kibbutz members. In addition to their family and work obligations, many of the individuals described voluntary commitments and activities for local or national social organizations. All of them seemed to be highly conscientious citizens in their communities. Some were active in the “Kfar Etzion Society” and its archive, some took part in Holocaust commemoration, and others were involved in various charity projects for children or adults in need. Finally, many described a lifestyle of ongoing learning, especially in Jewish studies. Although the tragic events of their past formed a key part of their narratives, the vast majority of interviewees described a happy childhood, especially with regard to the period they had lived in the Jaffa collective. In fact, their recollections regarding this chapter in their lives accounted for the most elaborated and detailed section of the interviews, including many funny stories about their adventures as a group of children living together. All in all, the participants were inclined to characterize their history as “heroic” rather than “traumatic.” That is, they talked about their “loss” and “tragedy,” both as individuals and as a community, emphasizing the great sadness of their mothers and their own regrets about the loss of their fathers and the kibbutz. Moreover, as adults and parents, they realized that they had missed a great deal by not having fathers to raise and educate them. At the same time, their discourse very rarely made use of the popular psychological terms of trauma and recovery. Their reports never included references to what is considered post-​traumatic stress disorder.13 Moreover, several of the men said explicitly in our interview: “I hope you don’t write about our childhood events as a big trauma for us, because that would be a grave error of misrepresentation.” Others noted: “In fact, we had a very happy childhood.”14 Resilience in the face of multiple disasters can be epitomized in the life story of Yossi Ron, at the time aged 57, who as a child experienced a tragic chain of events yet grew up to become an extremely well-​functioning man. His life story is summarized below. Yossi’s parents, Zipora and Yehiel, were Holocaust survivors who immigrated to Palestine in 1946 after meeting and getting married in a refugee camp in Europe the

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previous year. Both of them were sole survivors of their families. Yossi was about a year old when it was decided to evacuate all mothers and children from Kfar Etzion. Zipora, however, who was 20 years old at the time, refused to be separated from her young husband and decided to remain as one of the defenders of the kibbutz, sharing the fate of the men and the single women. She asked her best friend (also named Zipora), who was evacuated with her daughter, to care for Yossi in Jerusalem until they could be reunited. As things turned out, the situation worsened, and by the time Zipora (the caretaker) wrote to her friend in the besieged kibbutz that her son Yossi was already calling her “Mommy,” the road between Kfar Etzion and Jerusalem had been cut off. A few weeks later, both of Yossi’s parents were killed. Yossi is the only individual of this group (and indeed, the only individual on the Jewish side of the War of Independence) who lost both his parents. This, however, does not complete the list of tragedies that befell him. When the commune settled in Jaffa, a kibbutz assembly decided that it was not fair to leave Yossi in Zipora’s care. The reasoning was as follows: Zipora already had one child and her husband had survived, so there was a good chance she would have additional children in the future, whereas another female member, Haviva, was both a widow and childless. The decision was thus made to have Yossi transferred to Haviva. It is not difficult to imagine the pain and dismay of a two-​year old boy who had already been given from the care of one woman (his mother) to another within the same community, and who now had to adjust to a third mother. Yossi narrated his story to me as a well-​integrated narrative that consisted of a set of uniquely tragic facts,which he understood and accepted as a given. He expressed no anger toward his biological mother who had abandoned him, nor toward his second mother who, acceding to the decision of the commune, had given him up. Moreover, he had nothing but praise for his third mother, Haviva, who had died some years before. Yossi grew up to become an extremely successful, friendly, and cheerful individual. He was married and had six children and many grandchildren. He owned a flourishing high-​tech business. However, in 1997, his resilience was severely tested when his eldest daughter—​Zipora—​was killed in a car accident exactly at the age of his late mother, after whom she had been named. Yossi coped with this tragic event heroically, as evident in interviews he has given over the years.15

Protective Factors The questions emerging from these collective and individual materials are evident: How can we explain the resilience or unusual coping of the children of Kfar Eztion with their losses? How did they escape the fate of regarding their lives as dominated by trauma, of having to re-​experience its post-​traumatic effects? Two clusters of factors seem to provide answers to these riddles. The first concerns the collective nature of the survivors’ community, and the second relates to the system of meanings that governed their existence, which is subdivided into two components—​the religious lifestyle of the group and its patriotism. These three

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interconnected factors were often proposed by the interviewees themselves whenever our conversations touched on the subject of their group’s coping and resilience. In the following sections, the mechanisms of collective upbringing, religious lifestyle, and patriotism will each be elaborated.

Collective Upbringing During the infancy and childhood years of the second generation of Kfar Etzion, beginning in 1939 (for the oldest among them) and lasting until 1952 (when the collective framework in Jaffa was disbanded), communal education and lodging were still the unquestioned framework for child rearing in the kibbutzim. This innovative socialization practice and its underlying ideology, developed in Jewish Palestine at the beginning of the 20th century, has been extensively described.16 In brief, the education and upbringing of kibbutz children was regarded as a communal responsibility; accordingly, children—​from infancy onwards—​were reared in separate “children’s houses” with a group of their same age peers. Originally, this practice was designed to inculcate values of egalitarianism and collectivism. It was meant to create a new type of individual: the “New Jew,” a physical laborer attached to the land.17 In practice, children of all ages were lodged in the children’s houses, each under the care and supervision of a professional educator known as a metapelet (caretaker). They visited their biological parents only for a couple of hours every afternoon, hours dedicated to pleasure and play, the so-​called “love hours.” The traditional role of the parents as socializers was reduced, with a corresponding augmentation of importance of the children’s peer society and the community at large. Although in the latter part of the 20th century most of the kibbutzim gave up the practice of communal sleeping, the participants of this study spent a significant part of their childhood within the total communal system, both in Kfar Etzion before its destruction and, during the succeeding five years, in their temporary settlement in Jaffa. Essentially, the kibbutz educational system provided the children with company and continuity in the years following their loss. In analyzing their life stories, four outcomes can be traced to this fact: • The children were relatively independent of their parents; • They formed an extremely cohesive society among themselves, characterized by strong bonds of attachment; • Other adults emerged as significant parental figures for the children, replacing the physically or psychologically absent parents; • The maintenance of former kibbutz frameworks and practices, in spite of the extreme changes in the make-​up of the families and the community, and their uprooting, produced a sense of security and continuity in the children’s lives. Indeed, as already noted, the participants’ early memories, especially those connected with the period they spent in Jaffa after most of them had lost their fathers,

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abound with vivid recollections of what they labeled “their happy childhood,” which was anchored in a caring and highly interactive community of children. They created their own games, adventures, songs, and language in the social world they shared within the secure space of “the big common courtyard,” providing day-​and-​night entertainment and security for one another. To this day, they reminisce about their childhood community whenever they meet. The following quotation from the interview with Mordechai, one of the children, is illustrative: I remember very well my pre-​school years. My peer group was large—​we were about 20 kids who lived together in our “children’s home.” We were awakened every morning in our dormitory by the metapelet, and she helped us dress and eat our breakfast. We then had daylong activities, usually starting with a walk in the neighborhood. Then we played games and heard stories till our lunch arrived from the main dining hall. The food was never very tasty, but we had to finish it all up. We coped with the problem together: when the metapelet wasn’t looking, those of us who were better eaters helped the poor eaters, especially the girls, clean their plates, so that we could all go out to play in the courtyard. When we reached school age, we went together to a public school nearby, but we had a driver who took us all together, and we had our own uniform. People who saw us remarked: “Look, those are the children from the kibbutz.” No one dared bother any of us, for some of the older kids from our kibbutz would immediately come to our rescue. We had a slogan: “one for all and all for one.” As school children, we played every afternoon in the big courtyard of the compound for hours! All the children participated in the games, small and big together. I could talk to you for hours about the fantastic games we invented!

Being a child without a father in this community of children was not unusual; in fact it was “normalized.” Almost all of the children shared the same fate and were familiar with each other’s family situation. According to the narrators’ recollections, there was no shame or secrecy associated with having lost a parent. The opposite was true—​those children whose fathers had survived were a small minority, and were often jealous of the prestigious “orphans.” As we will see below, fatherless children were considered sons and daughters of glorious heroes, which added to their status, and the children’s games often reenacted their parents’ battles, which culminated in imagined victory against their enemies. A major outcome of the collective educational system was that the children’s contact with their mothers, some of whom were highly distraught at the time, was limited mostly to the afternoons. Only minor maternal or parental roles (such as a minimal supervision of school work) were in fact carried out by the mothers. When the mothers were too emotionally impoverished and physically exhausted, the children had their peer group as major sources of love and attachment. Furthermore, the female and male adults who took care of the children were mostly described as extremely warm and caring. They provided a surrogate family for the children, especially those whose mothers were often gloomy or volatile. The collective community governed the children’s lives in many ways, which in general removed them from the direct, intense influence of their mourning families, and it seems to have been beneficial to their well-​being. At the same time, the fact that many of the children’s fathers

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had been killed, and that all of them had lost their home, was not silenced, denied, or repressed.

Religious Lifestyle The life stories constructed by the second generation elaborate the role of religion in producing resilience and eliminating or minimizing possible post-​traumatic effects. As noted, the original Kfar Etzion was founded by Jewish pioneers who belonged to the religious kibbutz movement. The synagogue where the community gathered for prayers, especially on the Sabbath and on holidays, was the central institution of the group. Jewish values and traditions were coupled with the kibbutz ideology of equality and commonality to construct a cohesive value system of child ​rearing and education. At the time of my research, about 80 percent of the narrators from the second generation were religious, that is, believing Jews who led their daily lives in accordance with religious Jewish law (halakhah). It is interesting to note that of the very few interviewees (no more than 5 out of the 51) who described their childhood circumstances as traumatic, all but one are presently non-​religious adults. In the narratives, deceased fathers are described as ardent believers and deeply religious in their way of life. This is clearly manifested in the following quotation from one of the second-​generation male participants, Hanan, who is talking about the father of Y., one of his friends:18 And there is another story about Y’s father, may he rest in peace, that I wanted to share with you. Later that winter of ’48, when the siege became quite bad, [there was] no coming or going out of the kibbutz, trenches all around, [and] the agricultural work in the fields of course had to be stopped. In the evenings, between their guard duty shifts, the men would gather in one of the rooms to pray and to study the daily portion of the Talmud, taking turns in leading the lesson. There were great scholars and teachers among our fathers, as you know. So Y’s father suggested one day: “Why don’t we study Maimonides’ thesis about martyrdom (kidush Hashem).” And so the group started to study this topic: Under what circumstances would it be justified to sacrifice oneself for God or the Torah? And later at night, when the group finished its lesson and the men went back to their guard duties, Y’s father would take his gun, and a small backpack with his volume of Maimonides, and quietly sneak out of the kibbutz grounds through the fence toward the neighboring kibbutz, Masuot Yitzhak, to teach the same lesson there—​so that all of them would be truly prepared for what might happen.

The construction of the fathers’ death as kidush Hashem has the highest religious significance, the idea being that, through the process of dying, one sanctifies God’s name. The Hebrew word kidush is derived from the word “holy,” and kidush Hashem, martyrdom for God’s sake, or dying as a sacrifice to God, refers to dying (willingly?) in the name of a Jewish cause. In using this term, the narrators connected their history to that of the long chain of tzadikim, pious Jewish people who sacrificed their lives for their faith. The use of this phrase emphasizes the common fate of the victims of the Holocaust, on the one hand, and the heroes of the defense of Kfar Etzion, on the other.

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Although, according to Jewish tradition, God’s ways are not always understandable to humans—​this issue was brought up and pondered by many of the interviewees—​their religious beliefs helped them maintain that there was some godly purpose underlying their parents’ fate. In addition to the religious meaning that could be attributed to the disaster, Jewish religious mourning rituals and practices provided public and private frameworks both for the daily lives of the bereaved and for mourning and commemoration of the deceased, thus helping the individual in his or her progress from calamity to routine. In Jaffa, as in Kfar Etzion, the community observed and celebrated the Jewish calendar in a way that provided a sense of rhythm, continuity, and confidence to its members. A clear distinction was made between other days of the week and the Sabbath. People did not work on the Sabbath, and the children did not go to school. Communal prayers were held, and the festive Sabbath meals were undertaken in the common dining hall. These religious communal activities were carried out by the community under all circumstances, even in the immediate aftermath of the tragedy. While many traditional Jewish rituals are usually performed by the male adults, having communal celebrations and rituals provided all children, including the fatherless, with the opportunity to participate in the prayers or holiday services performed by the seven males who had survived the battle (plus a few younger men who joined the community). These men served as religious role models for the entire community, in particular for the boys who had lost their own fathers. In Jaffa, a separate room in the compound was designated as the synagogue. In the beginning it had very little equipment, since even the Torah scrolls were not rescued from the original kibbutz. Notwithstanding, the assembly of the entire community in the synagogue was described by many of the interviewees as being extremely important and meaningful for the children (and probably the adults, too). Yefet, for instance, said the following: In the beginning it was strange to pray to God, since all these prayers are full of expressions of praise and gratitude. I remember I told my mom that I couldn’t pray, but we joined the congregation just the same, of course. Gradually these prayers became meaningful again; I don’t know how it happened. The music, the melody in which we had always chanted the prayers in Kfar Etzion, was terribly moving in these circumstances.

In the narrators’ memories, the synagogue, as the center of the community, was a “safe place” for their personal development, a site allowing all forms of emotional expression. Deep sadness in the synagogue was recalled tearfully by Rachel: The synagogue was the place where the absence of my father was mostly experienced by me. It was terrible to sit there on the bench for Friday night prayers, next to my mother, surrounded by all these women and children and almost no men. I missed my father terribly there. I was envious of the few friends whose fathers remained alive. I remember how I noticed younger children who clung to the few men who had survived, thirsty for an embrace, as if they needed a masculine touch.

Others, mostly men, referred to another aspect of this communal loss, as, for example: “It was very difficult to conduct public prayers in the synagogue, since all our

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best cantors were killed in the war. The men who replaced them were not as musical, but they did their best.” The religious system of beliefs and practices partly compensated the children for the lack of their fathers. Moreover, the synagogue and its rituals constituted a “safe place,” a container of the participants’ pain, where sadness did not have to be hidden, denied, or repressed.19 The children’s mourning, sadness, and pain were shared and legitimized, thus empowering them in spite of their multiple losses. Somber memories of the synagogue and religious practices balance the detailed stories about the children’s games and adventures, and provide their experience with authenticity and depth.

Patriotism Patriotic values provided the children with an additional, related system of meanings whereby they could understand and accept their individual losses. It gave them a reason to feel proud of their tragedy and identity as “war orphans,” the sons and daughters of great heroes, instead of feeling ashamed (a common phenomenon among children who feel that having a dead parent is somehow dishonorable or a mark of failure). According to the participants’ narratives, the long and desperate battle of Kfar Etzion, which resulted in the death of so many of their fathers, was a significant factor in defending Jerusalem, securing the city as Israel’s capital, and preventing its capture by the Arab forces. Thus, the fathers’ heroic death was a contribution—​ the greatest contribution any individual could make—​for the benefit of the state. This understanding was reinforced in the famous eulogy made by David Ben-​ Gurion for the fighters of Kfar Etzion and the three neighboring kibbutzim of Masu’ot Yitzhak, Ein Tzurim, and Revadim at their collective funeral in November 1950: “The citizens of Jerusalem owe their thanks not only to those who brought in food at night to the besieged city, under constant shelling and shooting, and not only to the military units who liberated the city at long last, but first and foremost to those who fell at Kfar Etzion. Their sacrifice saved Jerusalem more than the entire military effort.”20 The interviewees often repeated these ideas regarding the massive number of deaths among their fathers’ generation. Hana, 60 years old at the time of the interview, said: “I am sad that I never knew my father. But I know he died for a purpose. There was a meaning to his death—​defending Jerusalem and paving the way for the declaration of the state.21 From childhood, every time I heard the stories about the War of Independence and the establishment of the state in school, I knew that it was about me, about us, and I felt very proud.” Similar sentences appeared in many of the interviews conducted for the study. Many of the research participants mentioned patriotism as one of their core values. When I directly asked them, at the end of our open interview, about which part of their identity they viewed as stemming from their particular past, more than half of them answered promptly: “My love for this land.”

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The three factors outlined above, namely community, religion, and patriotism are naturally linked and interact in multiple ways, amplifying their intensity in the narrators’ past and present lives. Two annual events—​one that occurs every year up to the present day, and another that belongs to the participants’ childhood memories—​ demonstrate this interactive power. In the first five years after the fall of Kfar Etzion, the community organized summer camps for its children, dedicated mostly for fun and scouting, and allowing the mothers to take a break of ten to fifteen days away from their parental duties. The camps were designed to emphasize two educational goals: preserving the memory and history of Kfar Ezion (patriotism), and reinforcing the religious beliefs and practices of the boys and the girls; in this regard, the camps were a stand-​in for the fathers who, according to Jewish tradition, were supposed to be the children’s chief educators. Life in the camps emphasized the common identity of Kfar Etzion children and reinforced the close relationships among them even when families started to disperse and to find their independent livelihood in various parts of Israel. The location of the camps was chosen to resemble the original landscape of Kfar Etzion, which made it possible to reproduce the kibbutz and its battles in various games and activities. Religious rituals were an important part of the daily routine. One of the boys recalls: “We had no minyan for prayers in our small synagogue in Jaffa, the community had the time to meet only on the Sabbath. I really didn’t know the daily prayers until I came to camp, and there I learned them.” The second community annual event, which continues to this day, is the annual memorial service for the deceased that takes place at Mount Herzl, the main military cemetery in Jerusalem, where the mass grave of the defenders of Kfar Etzion is situated. This was mentioned by all interviewees as the occasion for the yearly meeting of all people who were related to the history of the kibbutz, in particular, the spouses, children and grandchildren of those who were killed in the last battle. In accordance with Jewish tradition, prayers are recited in memory of the dead, whose full names are read one by one by the cantors, and kaddish is recited by the male descendants. This ceremony is collective, religious, and highly patriotic in its form and content. The number of people attending (as I witnessed myself in the last couple of years) grows every year, with generations of newborn and married partners added to the crowd. It is not a sorrowful occasion, but rather a formal, ritualistic gathering of a community sharing a common history. For many interviewees, their unquestionable presence in this social-​religious ceremony is an expression of their core identity. It epitomizes a continuation of their collective upbringing and history to the present moment.

A Redemption Narrative It is much more common to read in psychological literature about negative and pathological outcomes of adverse conditions, probably because such cases demand intervention and treatment. However, cases in which harsh and painful events have not resulted in post-​traumatic mental outcome are of great interest and significance for understanding human beings and for the prevention of severe individual and social

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consequences. The major question with which many theoreticians and practitioners have grappled is this: How can we characterize those cases in which highly stressful events apparently have no ill effects on an individual’s psychological development, behavior, and identity? In other words, what are the protective factors that enable some individuals to thrive even under extremely difficult life circumstances? For this question, the case of the second generation of Kfar Etzion may be of highest academic and applied value. When I set out to interview the second generation of Kfar Etzion I was familiar with scholarship dealing with transgenerational transmission of trauma22—​in particular, those studies focusing on the second generation of Holocaust survivors.23 I was also generally informed about the tragic events surrounding the fall of Kfar Etzion, and I conceived the second generation of Kfar Etzion as “survivors” or “victims.” I was more than prepared to hear stories about trauma, ongoing suffering, and the psychological long-​term aftermaths of such antecedents. As I got to know the participants, however, I was surprised to discover that very rarely did they use the discourse of trauma and coping, nor did they regard themselves as survivors of any kind. They mourned their fathers and their old way of life. They were often very sad when they shared their own and their parents’ stories. As adults, they were empathetic toward their mothers and their experience of loss and pain. But if anything general can be formulated, they constructed themselves as offspring of mythical, virtuous heroes. They were keen to participate in my study because they felt that the noble deeds and history of their fathers were not as well-​known as they should be. The collective story of Kfar Etzion as told by the participants more than 50 years after its tragic demise is a typical redemption narrative. According to Dan McAdams, the redemptive self is manifested in a story about how a “blessed” protagonist, equipped with morality and values, traverses life’s dangers, overcomes pain and trouble, and deeply cares about future generations.24 This description fits members of Kfar Etzion’s second generation very well. They did not repress their pain, but they also accepted the past, integrated it into their lives, and vowed to remember it. Most of them did not see their own past as traumatic, although they often used this term to describe their mothers’ reaction to their calamity. Starting from a situation of loss and exile, the narrators described a happy childhood followed by an adult life of competence, achievement, and satisfaction. They regard their childhood in the old kibbutz, before its destruction, as a period when they were all showered with love and admiration. Later on, their peer group and communal framework protected them against the transmission of trauma from their bereaved mothers. Their education emphasized values and morality, and they became highly productive adults. The fateful victory of the 1967 war, which allowed the offspring of Kfar Etzion to “return home” and rebuild their parental collective, provided additional reinforcement to the redemption myth, even though only a small minority of the “children” actually used the opportunity to rebuild their childhood haven. Moreover, in accordance with McAdams’ claim about the association between the redemption myth and generativity,25 the participants of the study indeed seemed to be healthy citizens in society, contributing to their families and the community at large, and manifesting traits of what Erik Erikson26 or McAdams would call “generative adults.” Or, in

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terms of the present essay, this was a group of men and women that could be understood in terms of resilience. When studying individuals who manifest resilience, and especially children who experienced tragic events and/​or grew up in hazardous conditions, two focal points need to be addressed: whether the past circumstances consist of a threat or developmental hazard, and whether the present personality manifests adaptation, good health, and well-​being in spite of those risk factors.27 Regarding the children of Kfar Etzion, we may ask: Did the narrators indeed confront in their childhood conditions that may be experienced as traumatic, and can they be characterized as well-​adjusted adults? Although much controversy exists about the exact definitions of terms such as “trauma” and “resilience,”28 the answers to these questions are clearly affirmative, and the lesson of the present case may offer some ideas regarding the basic question: When is resilience likely to take place? As the reported case of the second generation of Kfar Etzion implies, ongoing group support, on the one hand, and available systems of meaning, on the other hand, are two factors that may promote resilience. These two broad factors create conditions that enable individual adjustment and continuous normal development during and after adversity. Moreover, when child survivors are involved, such mitigating factors may indeed overcome or decrease the effects of negative experiences of loss and suffering, so that they may grow up to be normal adults. It is probably more difficult to overcome similar hardships in adulthood, when the individual personality is not as flexible. Although I did not study directly the mothers of my narrators, they were frequently depicted in the children’s stories as being much more troubled than the children. Similar conclusions appear in studies of survival during the Holocaust. Anna Orenstein, for example, a child psychoanalyst who is herself a Holocaust child survivor, elaborated on the importance of a “secure base” for a child, an experience of security and stability that contributes to resilience and coping with most difficult life situations.29 Secure attachment, according to this view, provides a key to positive development. In a discussion of children who survived the Holocaust, Orenstein puts special emphasis on the “relational advantages” of children who stayed with one or both of their parents; with another benevolent adult; or with a cohesive peer group, as in the famous case of the child survivors studied by Anna Freud in England.30 This idea also underlay the successful rehabilitation efforts of the Russian educator Anton Makarenko in his orphan children collectives.31 The actual collective child rearing of Kfar Etzion can be regarded as an additional clear example of the beneficial contribution of community to normal development under adverse conditions. Moreover, while childhood may be a period of relatively high personal flexibility, obviously group support is a powerful factor for adjustment in all ages.32 This important factor should be added to what Viktor Frankl argued many years ago, namely that a system of values and meanings, such as patriotism and Judaism in the present case, are essential for individual survival despite adversity.33 Other studies have also identified belief systems (in addition to group support) as protective factors for individuals in life-​threatening conditions.34 Apparently, if difficult life circumstances such as untimely death or forced exile can be somehow justified and

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sanctified, they lose all or some of their negative psychological influences. The present study abounds with examples of this idea, focusing on the transformation of “death in combat” to “historical mission” or “martyrdom” in the children’s narratives. Through these combined processes, the beneficial contribution of community, patriotism, and religion, the individuals who belong to the second generation of Kfar Etzion, who may be termed child survivors, transformed their tragic, potentially traumatic past history, into a heroic, religious narrative. It can be assumed that such mental transformation, from the catastrophic to the heroic, may be easier to achieve in childhood. To the factors mentioned so far, I would propose adding as a meta-​factor the ample opportunities that the interviewees have had for narrating their experiences and history. This has been evident in their group memorial services, at shiva gatherings, and at more joyous social occasions, as well as in the personal interviews conducted with them, the resulting book,35 and the many public events which followed its publication. Providing opportunities for people who have undergone suffering to talk about their experiences, whether to an understanding other or to a larger audience, is, after all, the essence of all psychotherapy. Telling, retelling, and sharing memories, as part of the ongoing life and practices of a community or at special interpersonal moments, have far-​reaching healing effects. Finally, the present study directs our attention to the claim that trauma is not an event, measured by objective criteria. Rather, it is a state of mind, an individual response to events, which cannot be directly predicted from the mere historical facts and their apparent severity. Very bad life circumstances may be mentally transformed with the aid of social-​psychological means, the support of significant others, and the provision of appropriate meaning systems. This view allows for the development of hope for people who have encountered calamities of various kinds in their lives, as so well exemplified by the children of Kfar Etzion.

Notes 1. C.S. Holling, “Resilience and Stability in Ecological Systems,” Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 4 (1973), 1–​23. 2. See, for instance, Michael L. Rutter, “Implications of Resilience Concepts for Scientific Understanding,” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1094 (2006), 1–​2; Sarah Forbes and Deniz Fikretoglu, “Building Resilience: The Conceptual Basis and Research Evidence for Resilience Training Programs,” Review of General Psychology 22, no. 4 (July 2018), 452–​468. 3. In a departure from normal practice, the participants in this study asked me to use their true names (in many cases, first names only were given, as this is how the participants referred to one another) and the correct name of their home (Kfar Etzion) instead of pseudonyms. A complete list of the full names of the participants of the study was added, by their own request, as an appendix to the book. See Amia Lieblich, Yaldei Kfar Etzion (Haifa: 2007); idem, “The Second Generation of Kfar Etzion: A Study of Collective Memory,” in On Memory: An Interdisciplinary Approach, ed. Doron Mendels (Oxford: 2007), 213–​230; idem, “The Place of Religion in the Experience of War-​Orphans as Constructed in Their Life-​Stories,” in Autobiography and the Psychological Study of Religious Lives, ed. Jacob A. Belzen and Antoon Geels (Amsterdam: 2008), 239–​253. 4. On the benefits of collective upbringing, see, for instance, Anna Freud and Sophie Dann, “An Experiment in Group Upbringing,” Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 6 (1951),

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127–​168; Anton S. Makarenko, The Road to Life: An Epic of Education (Moscow: 1951); and Sarah Moskovitz, Love despite Hate: Child Survivors of the Holocaust and Their Adult Lives (New York: 1983). On systems of meaning, see, for instance, William James, The Variety of Religious Experience (New York: 1902, rpt. 1958), and Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (Boston: 1959). 5. This is the number of Jewish casualties. The number of Arab casualties is unknown. 6. Yochanan Ben-​Yaacov, Gush Etzion:  ḥamishim shenot maavak vitzirah (Alon Shvut: 1983). 7. As will later be discussed, one mother refused to be separated from her husband and sent her baby boy away with her closest friend. She is the only mother who died in battle. (There were other women among the fighters who were killed, but none of them was a mother). The specific case of her son, Yossi Ron, is the clearest example of the thesis developed in this essay. 8. Judith L. Herman, Trauma and Recovery (New York: 1992); American Psychological Association (APA), Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 3rd ed. (Washington, D.C.: 1994). 9. See, for example, Amia Lieblich, Seasons of Captivity:  The Inner World of POWs (New York: 1994). 10. Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln (eds.), Handbook of Qualitative Research (Newbury Park: 1994); Amia Lieblich, Rivka Tuval-​Mashiach, and Tamar Zilber, Narrative Research: Reading, Analysis, and Interpretation (Thousand Oaks: 1998). 11. See Lieblich, “The Second Generation of Kfar Etzion.” 12. On intergenerational transmission of trauma, see Laurie Leydic Harkness, “Transgenerational Transmission of War-​ related Trauma,” in International Handbook of Traumatic Stress Syndromes, ed. John P. Wilson and Beverley Raphael (New York: 1993). 13. American Psychological Association (APA), Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. 14. All quotations in this paper are verbatim translations from Hebrew, appearing in Lieblich, Yaldei Kfar Etzion or in original transcripts that were not included in the book. 15. See, for instance, Noam (Dvul) Devir, “‘Ani hayaḥid sheibed shenei horim bakrav,’” Ynet (15 April 2013), online at:  ynet.co.il/​articles/​0,7340,L-​4366562,00.html; Mabat, “Yetomei Gush Etzion,” (television broadcast, 12 May 2016), online at:  youtube.com/​ watch?v=PDgropA9Dwg (accessed 30 March 2020). 16. Main publications on this subject are Melford E. Spiro, Children of the Kibbutz (Cambridge, Mass.: 1958); Bruno Bettelheim, The Children of the Dream: Communal Child-​ Rearing and Its Implications for Society (London: 1969); and A(lbert) I. Rabin and Benjamin Beit-​Hallahmi, Twenty Years Later: Kibbutz Children Grown Up (New York: 1982). 17. Oz Almog, The Sabra:  The Creation of the New Jew, trans. Haim Watzman (Berkeley: 2000). 18. Y. is among the very few “children” who refused to be interviewed for the study. He explained that he was planning to write his own family history and wanted to save his memories for his book. Hanan, a close friend of his, provided the story quoted here. 19. Margaret S. Stroebe, Wolfgang Stroebe, and Robert O. Hansson (eds.), Handbook of Bereavement: Theory, Research, and Intervention (New York: 1993). 20. Ben-​Yaacov, Gush Etzion. 21. Kibbutz Kfar Etzion was conquered on May 13, 1948, one day before Ben Gurion’s declaration of the establishment of the independent state of Israel. 22. Harkness, “Transgenerational Transmission of War-​related Trauma.” 23. Aaron Hass, In the Shadow of the Holocaust: The Second Generation (New York: 1996). 24. Dan P. McAdams, The Redemptive Self: Stories Americans Live By (New York: 2006). 25. Ibid., 24. 26. Erik H. Erikson, Childhood and Society, 2nd ed. (New York: 1963). 27. Ann S. Masten, “Ordinary Magic: Resilience Processes in Development,” American Psychologist 56, no. 3 (2001), 227–​238. 28. Emmy E. Werner and Ruth S. Smith, Overcoming the Odds: High-​risk Children from Birth to Adulthood (New York: 1992); Suniya S. Luthar, Dante Cicchetti, and Bronwyn Becker,

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“The Construct of Resilience: A Critical Evaluation and Guidelines for Future Work,” Child Development 71 (2000), 543–​562. 29. Anna Orenstein, “Parental Abilities to Cope with Stress.” Lecture delivered at conference titled, “Taking Care of Parents,” The Hebrew University (14 June 2007). 30. Freud and Dann, “An Experiment in Group Upbringing.” 31. Makarenko, The Road to Life. 32. In a totally different setting, my own previous study of Israeli POWs and their coping with captivity clearly demonstrated the importance of group support for individual coping. See Lieblich, Seasons of Captivity. 33. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning. 34. See, for instance, Werner and Smith, Overcoming the Odds; Masten, “Ordinary Magic”; John T. Cacioppo, Louise C. Hawkley, Edith M. Rickett, and Christopher M. Masi, “Sociality, Spirituality and Meaning-​making: Chicago Health, Aging and Social Relations Study,” Review of General Psychology 9 (2005), 143–​155. 35. Lieblich, Yaldei Kfar Etzion.

Catskills Idyll: Children of Holocaust Survivors and the Bungalow Colony Experience, 1950s–​1960s Hannah Levinsky-​Koevary (JERUSALEM)

It’s an early Sunday morning at the beginning of July, and our father is loading up the car. He’s carrying heavy cartons of food, dishes, and other household items from our first-​floor Brooklyn apartment. The pavement is already emitting its summer heat, but soon we’re leaving our wretched neighborhood behind for a better place. My younger sister and I are keeping guard by our shiny blue Dodge, while my mother is in the kitchen, cleaning up and preparing food for the three-​hour trip. My father flits in and out, getting the remainder of our belongings. He’s buoyant, whistling as he brings down the bedding, pillows, and towels and lays them on the back seat of the car. My sister and I jump in eagerly and settle ourselves in the soft cushioning. Holding her bulging pocketbook, a large paper bag of sandwiches, and a thermos of iced tea, my mother slides into the front seat and emits a long sigh. “Gegangen,” my father says, and we’re off, heading down Knickerbocker Avenue until it becomes a mass of potholes, abandoned streets, warehouses, and empty lots. We turn onto the Brooklyn–​Queens Expressway leading to the Kosciuszko Bridge (most New  Yorkers pronounce it “Kos-​ki-​OS-​ko”; my Polish parents, slightly sneering, say the name correctly: “Kush-​TYUSH-​ko”). In the background are large cylindrical gas tanks. The wind is blowing through the open windows on our faces; we turn and see the Manhattan skyline, the Empire State Building towering over the city. The roads are clear and we’re flying, passing through the Bronx and watching the city turn into suburban Westchester. Once we hit the Tappan Zee Bridge, we’re already somewhere else, the memory of home and Brooklyn far away. America is a big place, my parents always tell us; we children have no idea how big it is. For us, the trip to the Catskill Mountains is the great American dream, and each time we travel, it seems like the first time. The sensation is physical. We’re still too young to understand the complexities of life, but one thing we do know: summers are different, and we are going to the best place on earth. Hannah Levinsky-​Koevary, Catskills Idyll: Children of Holocaust Survivors and the Bungalow Colony Experience, 1950s–1960s In: No Small Matter: Features of Jewish Childhood. Edited by: Anat Helman, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197577301.003.0009

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For much of my childhood during the 1950s, my family spent summers in the bungalow colonies of the Catskill Mountains in upstate New York. This short span of time left a deep imprint. Over the years, I would return in memory to those summers and try to understand what anchored me to that time and place. Was it simply “nostalgia”—​a term that seems to reduce experiences or feelings to nothing more than superficial recollections of a bygone period, for which, because we can’t go back, we harbor a “wistful” or “excessively sentimental yearning?”1 When I think of those summers, I picture myself running free in the mountain air, feeling enveloped and safe among friends and family, the kind of feeling I never had in our non-​Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn. What was this sensation of safety and freedom? Why was this period so important for me? Was I alone in these thoughts, or were there others like me? The more I spoke to people who had spent their childhood in bungalow colonies, the more I realized it was not my own personal childhood story (“When I can’t fall asleep and I don’t want to think about anything else, I think about the bungalow colony,” one friend told me).2 We were children who had grown up in the shadow of the Holocaust, whose parents had undergone unspeakable wartime horrors just a few years before we were born. For us, the Catskills bungalow colony was not just an escape from the hot and muggy New York summer, but a respite from the daily struggles of living as refugees and new immigrants. In the Catskills, we were among inserer—​our own.3 It was a place where we could easily live with being different while learning how to become more American. The bungalow colony is a chapter in two larger stories about the Catskills. The first, and far better-​known, tale relates to the wider phenomenon popularly known as the “Borscht Belt”: the Catskills summer resorts and hotels, with their almost exclusively Jewish clientele and Yiddish-​inflected entertainment culture, which (like the bungalow colonies) had their heyday in the 1950s and early 1960s.4 This essay will focus on the second story, that of Holocaust survivors who arrived in the United States, settled in New York, and spent their summers in modestly priced rental units in Jewish bungalow colonies in the Catskills. As reflected in the memories of the survivors’ children, the bungalow colonies were a kind of micro-​society, both a natural buffer and a means of social and psychological transition to the New World.

“It Looked Like a Shtetl and It Felt Like Home” According to Irwin Richman, who grew up in a bungalow colony his parents owned, “bungalow is a very Jewish word to people who grew up in the New York City Borscht Belt sphere.”5 Californians might picture a one-​level suburban home, but the Catskills bungalow was more akin to a summer camp bunk. It was made out of painted pine wood, and while some bungalows were better equipped than others, they were usually small. Generally there was an enclosed front porch. More often than not, bungalows were laid out around a common lawn, and because the units were not far apart, other people were always in sight. The setting might have been rural, but the feeling was communal: “It looked like a shtetl, and it felt like home.”6

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Although the physical properties, the kinds of facilities, and the size of the colony varied, the essence was the same: a self-​contained, miniature enclave of Jewish families from mostly working-​class neighborhoods in New York who shared their summers together. In many bungalow colonies, there was a mix of American-​born (or raised) and European-​born Jews. Almost all contained a core of people or groups who knew each other back in the city: they were relatives, friends, members of the same landsmanshaft, or labor union.7 In addition, many families returned to the same colonies year after year. As a result, their children grew up together, reuniting during the summer and forming close bonds that often lasted a lifetime. My own family didn’t exactly follow this pattern. We went each year to a different bungalow colony, though we, too, found ourselves with a core group of survivor friends and landslayt (from my father’s hometown of Dzialoszyce, Poland), or from the displaced persons (DP) camp in Landsberg, Germany, where my parents met and married, and where I was born. In fact, I used to think that the entire country (everyone referred to the Catskills either as “the country” or as “the mountains”) was populated by people like my parents, who spoke Yiddish and came from Europe. In the bungalow colonies we went to, most of the adults were survivors, or grine, as they more commonly referred to themselves. Harkening back to earlier waves of immigration, grine identified the survivors as immigrants (as in greenhorns). My mother made a distinction between grine in general and the recently arrived immigrants, who were insere grine. Somehow I realized, without it ever being said, that the bonds between my parents and their friends were a substitute for those they had lost. In most cases, we children had no grandparents, aunts, or uncles: “Being Jewish meant having an accent and not having grandparents. Grandparents were for the goyim”—​unlike the “Americans” who seemed to have an endless stream of relatives dropping over.8 But, as a kind of compensation, my parents’ friends became family. (This was true for others as well. Paula Fass, for instance, recalls that her parents got to know a number of fellow survivors while they were still in Hannover, Germany. A group of them emigrated at about the same time, and “these friends were always known to me as ‘oncle’ and ‘tante,’ a kind of pretend family that made us feel less alone.”)9 In the city, the reality that we lacked an extended family was more keenly felt. Bungalow colonies were sited along the rural country roads that crisscrossed the portion of the lower Catskill Mountains located in Sullivan County and part of Ulster County, approximately 100 miles from New York City. Among the nearby towns were Liberty, Monticello, Woodridge, and Fallsburg. Interspersed among the bungalow colonies were the hotels, both large and small. There was also a scattering of farms and private houses. Many of the year-​round residents were employed in the hotel industry.10 The first hotels in the Catskills, established by Gentiles in the early 19th century, were off-​limits to Jews.11 Things began to change beginning in the 1880s, when the large influx of immigrant Jews arrived from Eastern Europe and Russia to the United States. A majority of the immigrants settled in New York City, in particular, the Lower East Side, where they lived in crowded tenements and worked as peddlers, day laborers, or in sweatshops.12 Some of them, however, decided to try their fortune in the Catskills, where land was both available and cheap. Abraham Lavender and Clarence Steinberg note that, by 1908 (according to a report compiled by the Jewish

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Agricultural and Industrial Aid Society), there were 684 Jewish farms in New York State, 500 of them in Sullivan and Ulster counties.13 The idea was to work the land, but Jewish farmers soon discovered that the terrain was too rugged for the usual crops. Thus, in the course of time, some of them began taking in boarders in order to supplement their income.14 For instance, the Tamarack Lodge, which eventually became a well-​known Catskills hotel, was established by Max and Dora Levinson, who immigrated to the United States from Minsk in 1885. After fifteen years in New York City, they decided to buy some land in Greenfield Park. “Pop was visiting some friends in Woodridge and thought it was healthier up there than in New York—​the air was clean and good,” his son recalled. Levinson bought a dairy farm, complete with a small house and some two dozen cows. A few years later, in 1903, he built six bedrooms off the main house “and went into the boarding house business.”15 Like the farmers, the boarders were East European Jews from the Lower East Side. They were seeking an affordable vacation in the fresh mountain air16—​with people of their own background, culture, and traditional values. Their needs were minimal; so, too, were the accommodations they took: entire families stayed in one large room. And yet, spartan as they were in terms of physical comfort, the Catskills boarding facilities were homey (or, as the guests would say, “haymish”) offering hearty, kosher home-​cooked meals made from the farmers’ fresh produce, poultry, and dairy products. Hosts and guests shared the same origins and language, and this made for an informal style of hospitality that, over time, became a hallmark of the region.17 For most of the farmers, taking in boarders proved to be more profitable than growing crops or raising chickens, and by the beginning of the 20th century, Jewish-​ run boarding establishments had become the farmers’ major source of income. Increasingly, farmhouses became boardinghouses, buildings were expanded and improved upon, and more amenities were added—​in some places, in addition to guests enjoying campfires, hayrides, and singing around the piano, there was also entertainment arranged by a “tummler,” a kind of precursor to what later became known as a social director.18 Greater demand resulted in more competition. The larger hotels became luxury resorts for those who could afford them, and some of the other boarding houses turned into more modest small or medium-​sized hotels, or kukhalayns (literally, “cook on your own”), a no-​frills vacation option that offered rooms to sleep alongside a communal bathroom, kitchen, and dining facilities. Another unique feature of the Catskills was its wide array of options, which allowed people of all income levels—​and Jews, in particular—​to partake in an “American vacation” in the mountains. Indeed, “the Catskills would come to represent the long Americanization process, the place where Jews participated in rituals of the broader culture, in leisure and consumption.”19 The bungalow colonies were an outgrowth and upgrade of the kukhalayns, which were phased out in the 1950s. According to a Hotel Association census of 1952, there were 509 hotels and boarding houses in Sullivan County, and an equal number of bungalow colonies.20 Bungalows provided separate accommodations and more privacy, along with the same kind of informal, less structured kind of vacation. Meanwhile, the “Jewish” hotels were also expanding in size and number. By the 1950s, hotels such as Grossingers, Kutchers, and the Concord (a relatively “late” arrival, established in 1939), served as the model for the “all-​inclusive” vacation, featuring top-​of-​the-​line

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entertainment, a lavish style of Jewish cuisine, and a wide range of daytime and nighttime activities. Apart from the clear socioeconomic division between those frequenting bungalow colonies as opposed to those going to the hotels, there was a difference in the kind of experience such families were seeking.21 A summer stay in the bungalow colony was most often a two-​month, do-​it-​yourself family affair (though fathers, as will be seen, were not often around except on weekends and perhaps for a week or so of vacation), as opposed to a much shorter stay (of, say, one or two weeks) in the hotel. The atmosphere and physical set-​up of the bungalow colony invited close contact between people. Everyone seemed to know each other’s business—​it was hard not to, as the walls were paper-​thin and the windows were wide open. More often than not, the country “sounds” consisted not only of rustling leaves and singing birds, but of loud conversations between family members or friends that were heard by all. There were no secrets in a bungalow colony.

The Weekday/​Weekend World of the Bungalow Colony My family, as well as other survivor families we knew, went to the cheaper bungalow colonies. Even $300 a summer was a stretch for some of us, and the extra $25 in either direction made a huge difference for those who lived close to the edge. Each year before the start of the season, my family would set out with a group of friends and their children to search for the best prospect in terms of price and living conditions. In the end, budget won out, and a less expensive place was selected. Among my memories are those of tenants arguing with bungalow colony owners who skimped on everything, including the kind of light bulbs they provided; on one occasion, an argument between two women, the owner’s wife and one of the renters, came to blows, and the police were called in to intervene. No matter where we went, our bungalow became a miniature version of our Brooklyn apartment, with its familiar accessories and utensils. We and our friends had one-​bedroom bungalows, and children often slept in the same room with their parents, on lumpy mattresses of rusty springs that sank in the middle. (My father would find a piece of plywood and stick it underneath.) The bathrooms had makeshift showers and small sinks with low water pressure. The floors were covered in uneven linoleum, or old slats of wood. We children never complained about these and other primitive conditions. They were what made it “the country,” a place full of adventure. Except for rainy days, when we could play on the porch, we spent most of our time outdoors. Our living room was the front lawn, where we socialized, barbequed at night when our fathers were around, or ate lunchtime sandwiches brought over to us by our mothers. The slamming of rickety wooden screen doors was the constant sound of summer—​going into the bungalow to change our clothes (several times a day, due to the changing mountain weather), going out to friends who were calling to us, or opening the door to visitors. Whatever we children needed was provided for within the boundaries of our colony.

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Fig. 9.1.  Author (on left) with her sister, leaning on an Adirondack chair in front of their bungalow. Some colonies had day camps; the smaller, or cheaper, ones did not. And so, what did the children do all day? We spent much of our time “hanging out,” sitting on Adirondack or metal chairs in a circle, or lying on blankets, talking for hours, especially in the evenings, surrounded by fireflies and mosquitos. When we got to be a bit older—​say, 10 or 11, when we were allowed to stay outside even after it was dark—​we would take walks on the country roads. A group of us would traipse down the roads, the huge trees casting shadows in the moonlight, the boys often frightening the girls with their stories of bears and other creatures. On rainy days, Brenda Bacon recalls, “we sat on the porch and looked out at the rain,” and we also colored in coloring books, played with cut-​outs, read library books brought from the city or a stack of circulating comic books.22 The bungalow colony was where I was introduced to “love comics” with their romantic plots and predictable fairy-​tale endings. Once the rain abated, we put on our boots and joined the boys to roam near the edge of the woods in search of salamanders. We’d pick them up by their thin, orangey-​red tails and place them in jars we had carefully prepared, with a bed of stones and grass on the bottom and perforated metal tops. Boys, especially, liked to wander in the woods. Carl Fraiman remembers going into the woods on his own, sometimes with a homemade bow-​and-​arrow; one day, he says, “I hit a beehive and was bitten.” During the rest of the year, Fraiman lived in Brownsville, a tough neighborhood in Brooklyn. There, he says, “I had kids after me. I was outside a lot, fighting all the time. The bungalow colony was a place I could relax. I didn’t have to watch my back, like a jungle.”23 The casino, a barn-​like social hall, was a center for rainy-​day and evening activities. It had a jukebox with a variety of songs, including rock and roll hits, with Elvis

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Fig. 9.2.  Author and her mother standing in front of the handball court in their bungalow colony. The name of a colony was often painted in letters that were large enough to be seen from the road. dominating the summers of the 1950s. Sometimes joined by the boys, we girls learned to dance the cha-​cha and the mambo (the latter, to Latin dance music), as well as the lindy and the twist, and we also learned the words to the Jewish and Yiddish songs our parents loved—​among their favorite performers were the New York-​born Barry Sisters. Our mothers came to the casino with us for mid-​weekly bingo games and movie nights. We “produced” talent shows for our parents on the built-​up stage and huddled around the older kids while they played the pinball machine we never had money for. During the sunny days of the week, the swimming pool was the central attraction of the bungalow colony. We’d go there around mid-​day, once the water got warm

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enough, and we were still there when our mothers called us in for lunch or brought us sandwiches. Following lunch, we needed to wait at least half an hour before going back into the pool—​it was common knowledge that it was dangerous to swim on a full stomach. Another, more well-​founded concern, had to do with polio; the Salk polio vaccine became available only in the mid-​1950s. If there was no filter in the pool and the water went unchanged, the pool season could come to an early end when the water became too dirty. However, this being the country, there were always nearby streams and lakes. The boys, especially, liked to fish, catch frogs, and jump from stone to stone. With less housework and shopping to do, our mothers had more time to relax, although this didn’t stop most of them from cooking fresh meals every day: “Everyone was cooking, so it always smelled good.”24 Mothers, too, spent a fair amount of time by the pool, even if they didn’t swim; they, like their children, enjoyed sitting with friends and socializing. Some of them played cards or mah-​jongg, the Chinese tile game adopted by American Jewish women of the Catskills.25 Four or five players would sit around a bridge table on the front lawn or at the pool, dressed in shorts and halter tops, or bathing suits. Some of the people I interviewed remembered mah-​jongg as more of an “American” activity. According to Esther Lapian, for instance: “My mother loved mah-​ jongg—​she found the game challenging. As a bonus, the women in our building [in Queens] were ‘Amerikaner.’ She found them to be more easy-​going than the grine, less burdened. She played with them as often as twice a week.”26 Similarly, Elaine Epstein noted that, “in our bungalow colony, [those in] the mah-​jongg group were all American.” Her mother, she added, was outgoing, and wanted to make friends; mah-​jongg was an entrée into the American women’s social circles in the bungalow colony.27 My own mother, in common with some of the other survivor women, never played mah-​jongg, and when she referred to the kurtn shpilers, those playing cards (this was the more popular activity among the European women), the phrase was more derisive than descriptive. I knew that she disdained what she considered any frivolous activity, anything that wasn’t somehow useful. Still, I liked seeing the women having fun, and I was fascinated by the sound of the clicking mah-​jongg tiles. The women chattered and (in the case of some of them) smoked cigarettes. I loved their hearty laughter and how they seemed to revel in their game. My own mother was a sociable woman, and she, too, enjoyed chatting with her friends. But unlike the card players, she preferred quieter forms of relaxation—​for instance, sitting and reading the Forverts, a copy of which was circulated and read from cover to cover. This, of course, had the added value of being a worthwhile activity, as was mending our torn clothing. Brenda Bacon’s mother, too, “didn’t believe in idle hands. She would cook or sit on a beach chair and embroider a lot, or crochet, or knit.”28 The weekday world of the mothers was broken up by another kind of specifically American entertainment—​shopping. A steady stream of vendors came to the bungalow colony to sell a variety of wares, from the bakery man with his cupcakes, sweet rolls, or cinnamon buns (with their soft sugary topping), to the fish man with all kinds of herring and lox. There were also the men who sold women’s and children’s clothing or shoes at cheap prices.29 What we children delighted in the most were the 1950s fast-​food treats: the Chow-​Chow cup (an American Jewish adaptation of the Chinese American dish), or the potato-​and kasha-​filled delicacies sold by the legendary

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Ruby the Knish Man, who seemed to have traveled every road of the Catskills.30 The vans and station wagons would come to the gate or the parking lot of the bungalow colony, and out would come the kids and their mothers, purses in hands. I especially remember the August visits of the clothing vendors; once they came around, I caught a whiff of the end of the summer (which we all dreaded), as this was when my mother often bought Rosh Hashanah dresses and shoes for my sister and me. One New York Times columnist characterized these bungalow colony visitations as “Lower East Side pushcart culture transferred to the country, full of bantering and bargaining. . . . The P.A. system would constantly be announcing the arrival of yet another peddler in the parking lot.”31 The slow and easy weekday routine was transformed on Fridays, when the entire bungalow colony geared up in anticipation both of our fathers’ arrival from the city and, of course, the upcoming Sabbath, which we always referred to as Shabes. There was a general feeling of bustle before the impending day of rest, starting as early as Friday morning, when mothers began cooking. The bungalow colony was permeated with the aroma of chicken soup, gefilte fish, kugel, and roasted chicken as well as cakes and cookies. Women would appear outside with rollers in their hair—​there they were, polishing their nails: “What stands out in my mind was the men coming on Friday. It was such a big thing for the mothers. ‘The men are coming, the men are coming!’ They had to wash their hair, look good for the men.”32 In our colony, as well as in many others with a large survivor population, there was a prevailing sense of yidishkayt, a fundamental commitment to, and respect for, the traditional past. At the same time, there was a relaxed attitude with regard to religious practice, a tolerance for people’s varying levels of observance: “On Shabbat, we and another religious family didn’t go swimming. The others, who weren’t religious, did. That’s just the way it was.”33 Yet almost everyone, including the “Americans” (many of whom had European parents or grandparents), maintained at least a minimal level of Sabbath observance. Almost all of the women lit Shabes candles (my mother would set her candles on top of two cans of vegetables, with a small tray underneath), and anyone looking inside the bungalows on a Friday night could see kitchen tables covered with a fresh, festive tablecloth. Only much later was I able to appreciate the fact that most of my parents’ friends, like themselves, came from religious homes, and that their war experiences, and the chaos, upheavals, and later sense of instability and flux in the immediate postwar years—​all this, followed by immigration and resettlement, had a great effect on their observance, and perhaps on their deeper beliefs and attitudes. We, as children, couldn’t yet comprehend the more complex theological issues surrounding Jewish belief after the Holocaust:  that would come later, when we were adolescents and adults.34 In the meantime, our paths were set by our parents’ practices and by the education we received inside and outside the home. In my own family I grew up accepting at face value the fact that my father worked on Shabbat and that my mother created a Shabes environment and obeyed most of its rules. In the current religious Jewish world, this lack of “consistency” might come under criticism, but it wasn’t really that. Rather, the survivors that I knew seemed to have a deeper, more solid belief that, after the war, external or fine distinctions weren’t important. By Friday afternoon, anticipation was palpable as children took an early shower, put on their Shabes clothes, and lined up near the front gate. There came the fathers,

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one by one, appearing like royal figures who happened to be dressed in sweaty work clothes. They would embrace their clean, excited children while the mothers waited on or near the porches of their bungalows. Unfortunately, my father wasn’t among them—​he could come up only the following day, after he finished a full day’s work—​ a situation that deeply distressed my mother and made my sister and I jealous of everyone else. My father “had to work” my mother always told us, not really convinced. But in fact, his job as a mover didn’t allow for Saturdays off, and my father was the sole breadwinner in our family. In compensation, he would stay an “extra” day, until Monday evening or Tuesday morning, and when he did arrive late Saturday afternoon, it seemed as though all the children were waiting for him and for the candy treats he brought up from the city, which he generously distributed. The human topography was altered on the weekend. The atmosphere was different, exciting. Saturday night, when the bungalow colony was at its fullest, was when our parents got oysgeputst, all decked out for the weekly party at the casino, which featured entertainment along with food and drink. The larger, more luxurious bungalow colonies would hire the leftover talent from the hotels, often a band, comedian, or singer. In the smaller ones where we stayed, there was more modest, in-​house entertainment, most often listening and dancing to American and Yiddish songs from the jukebox, with the occasional professional performer coming by from one of the nearby hotels. I remember that the highlight of the summer’s entertainment was a carnival-​like mock wedding, where the men and women would switch roles and some would get a bit drunk.35 We children, of course, were not allowed to attend, but some of us dared a peek through the casino windows. It was wonderful to see our fathers shed their workweek clothing and join the rest of us. There was a pervasive feeling of wholeness and completion: this is what it was like to have a family, an extended family. On Sundays, we’d see our fathers mingle with other men at the card table, taking very seriously their one-​and two-​cent poker games (or the more “daring” 5-​and 10-​cent games), munching on the sweets their wives brought out, lest they should go hungry. I loved standing next to my father at these card games, absorbing the tricks he deployed and feeling like a co-​conspirator as he let me in on his strategies. The men would be laughing a lot, and also reminiscing about der heym or talking about lager—​I was never sure whether lager referred to the DP camps or the concentration camps—​as they shuffled cards and placed bets. From them I learned a different way of communication, one emanating from the easy comfort of their khavershaft. That word, which my parents taught me early on, meant more than friendship. It encompassed all that was created “back there,” and “through all that.” When I was much older, my father shared more of his wartime experiences with me; I learned about the miraculous escapes from death of some of those men from the card table, and how one of them had saved my father’s life at war’s end, carrying him on his back to a farmhouse where he could nurse him back to health. Most of our fathers did hard physical work at semi-​skilled jobs that didn’t allow them free time. Back in the city, they would come home from work tired and often depressed. Joseph Berger describes how, for his father, “this burst of freedom in the Catskills, this break from the unrelenting six-​day cycles of predawn risings, obstacle-​ course commutes, and the evening daze of exhaustion, was all he could have asked for. A vacation for two on the Riviera could not have made him happier.”36 It made

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us feel good to see our fathers in the pool or hanging around with our mothers or with their friends. They also found time to be with their children and to do what, for us, were unusual things—​taking us fishing, or teaching us how to swim or to whittle sticks (something my younger sister spent hours doing, with a pocket knife my father gave her), or just going into “town” and walking up and down the busy main street, having an egg cream or an ice-​cream cone. Or blueberry picking. Everyone I interviewed had rapturous memories of going into the woods on a blueberry expedition, usually with their fathers. This would be sometime in August, when the berries were at their ripest. We would attach a piece of rope to an aluminum pot or milk carton and tie it around our waist or neck. With the sun above our heads, we’d fill our containers until overflowing, staining our clothing with purple juice, and then head back to our waiting mothers, who would empty our stash into the sink. A few hours later, the entire bungalow colony would smell of that American staple, fresh-​baked pie—​along with blueberry hamentashn, a summer version of the Purim treat. “My whole family seemed to thrive in the Catskills,” Jack Ehrenreich writes. “Somehow the fresh air and the freedom of the setting made everything and everybody just seem happier—​more joyful and carefree. It was a time when the nightmares of the war years were somehow put aside for another day.”37 Indeed, our parents were different up in the country, less tense, more relaxed and seemingly more themselves. And because of this, we children could also relax, not having to worry about their happiness, as we so often did. “For short periods during those fabulous youthful summers,” Ehrenreich notes, “it almost seemed as if we could just be normal.”38 The bungalow colony, usually (though not always) surrounded by a fence, was a safe, enclosed environment. The colony’s layout, its open spaces and activities that took place on the front lawn or in nearby places such as the pool or the casino, made it easy for parents to keep track of their children. A mother could socialize, play games, or even bury her head in a book: “My mother rarely kept tabs on us because we were always on the premises, there was always someone looking out for us. Someone else’s mother was like family to us.”39 This secure, enveloping feeling extended to us children as well. “When I think of my safe place in the world,” Ann Bar-Neder reminisces, “I think of South Fallsburg and the pine trees, the smell of pine trees and just being in the Catskills.”40 In fact, we had the best of both worlds. We were safe—​even if our mothers weren’t in sight, they weren’t more than a shout or two away. But we were also free. We could go out for hours at a time, far more independent than we ever could be in the city: “My mother was more relaxed, we were more relaxed. She wasn’t hanging out the window all the time, she wasn’t going crazy looking for us.”41 The proximity to our parents coupled with the freedom to roam made for the best possible environment for any child, and certainly for the children of survivors.

Coming to America My parents were two of approximately 140,000 survivors of the Holocaust who arrived in the United States between 1945–​1952, mostly from the DP camps of

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Germany and Austria as well as other parts of Europe where they had temporarily resided.42 Both were the sole survivors of their immediate families and had endured the war years in ghettos, labor and concentration camps; they came to the United States (rather than Israel) because my mother had an aunt living in Brooklyn.43 During the postwar chaos, they, like many others, took their first steps of a new life in the DP camps. There, with the assistance of Jewish organizations, survivors initiated a wide range of social activities and endeavors: sports, newspapers and periodicals, cultural events, and training programs designed to equip the mostly young population with skills that would benefit them in their new countries of immigration.44 Photos of that period are often marked by optimism.45 As a child, my parents would show me the photos taken during their four-​year stay at Landsberg. Many of them were group shots of happy young people taking hikes throughout the German countryside, and these puzzled me a bit, even back then, when I had little real knowledge of what my parents had gone through. Perhaps something in my child’s mind registered a mixed emotion or message that would later intensify. In the meantime, here were Rosh Hashanah postcards with pictures of a newly married couple, and later, with a child (at the time, the DP camps had an explosively high birthrate).46 Other postcards were decorated with Zionist symbols of palm trees or kibbutz-​type houses. There were photos of weddings, often showing snow in the background, and others of baby carriages—​so many carriages and babies, always surrounded by friends and smiling faces. The subliminal message was that, in spite of their broken lives, my parents and their friends had a great capacity for living. Upon arriving in the United States, the survivors were taken in hand by an array of Jewish welfare organizations and agencies (for instance, the veteran Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society [HIAS]). A  new organization, the United Service for New Americans (USNA), affiliated with the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), was founded in 1946 with the specific aim of providing assistance for the Jewish survivors; a branch of this organization, the New York Association for New Americans (NYANA), aided those—​the majority—​who settled in New York.47 The emphasis was on providing material assistance, and the aim, as indicated in the names of two of the organizations, was to facilitate the transformation of refugees into “New Americans.” This goal was shared by the survivors, who, after years of war and waiting, were determined to become fully independent. Indeed, numerous reports and articles written for public consumption during the first postwar years stress the ways in which survivors successfully integrated into their new home. An article in the New York Times in April 1951, for instance, quoted the proud claim made by the head of NYANA: “31,000 who received temporary assistance ‘have been wholly absorbed into the economy of our democratic society.’ ”48 Yet despite the “enormous bureaucratic efforts,” including the raising of funds for resettlement, there was very little understanding, much less empathy, for what survivors had endured. Writing about American Jews, Beth Cohen explains: Some claimed they could not confront survivors because of guilt. They distanced themselves from this tangible reminder that they had been safe in America, had been spared Hitler’s wrath, while European Jewry burned. Others simply did not believe the depths of

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the Holocaust’s atrocities. Some simply did not want the burden of relatives they did not know or care to know.49

In brief, survivors were essentially told to “put the past behind.” This, however, resulted both in psychological and social barriers to their full integration and in a turning inward toward family and friends who shared their background and better understood their pain.50 Over the course of the 1950s and 1960s, the survivors’ inner lives and losses were mostly invisible to U.S. society at large as well as to the American Jewish community. The Holocaust was not yet firmly established as a collective Jewish tragedy (the term “Holocaust” was not widely used until the late 1960s) and “bearing witness”—​ which, later, was so often mentioned by survivors as providing their main motivation to survive—​was confined to a narrow circle of family and friends. But survivors could not simply put the past behind. It invaded their daily lives. As Shlomo Breznitz, who survived the war in a Catholic orphanage, explains: Such entries into a trauma-​related state of mind can happen to us several times a day without our awareness. This frequency, however, does not preclude their emotional impact, which may linger for a while. Thus we may feel anxious without knowing why, or have the sudden urge to check to see if the children are safely sleeping in their beds. It is by virtue of such automatic entries that Holocaust-​related memories often become an omnipresent companion that will stay with us forever.51

It took time for the psychiatric community to become aware of the longstanding effects of the war on Holocaust survivors. “In the classical psychoanalytic model dominant during the Cold War era,” Arlene Stein notes, “trauma was considered to be a temporary malady, after which one would return to ‘normal.’ Survivors could transcend their experiences and ‘adjust.’ ”52 By the early 1960s, however, research into the short-​and long-​term effects of wartime trauma was beginning to emerge. The initial psychiatric research focused on identifying symptoms of what was termed “survivor syndrome” and this, in turn, became the basis for further research that was almost exclusively centered on the pathology of survivors.53 It would take another war—​the Vietnam War of the early 1960s–​1973—​to bring about more widespread awareness concerning the long-​term psychological effects of wartime trauma. Americans were already familiar with terms such as “shell shock” (dating back to the First World War) or “combat/​battle fatigue” (Second World War), which related to short-​lived traumatic episodes in the wake of combat. Yet among some Vietnam War veterans, symptoms of trauma persisted even years later. In 1980, a new term, “post-​traumatic stress disorder” (PTSD), was formally defined and categorized by the DMS-​III, the manual of psychiatric disorders.54 By this point, it was also understood that anyone who had suffered extreme or long-​lasting trauma was potentially at risk for PTSD. With this realization, the term “trauma” lost much of its stigma, and research on Holocaust survivors became more nuanced. The late 1960s and early 1970s were years of extensive social ferment, marked by student and worker protests, the beginnings of a modern feminist movement, and increased awareness of issues pertaining to self-​identity. It was also the time we

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children of survivors came of age as adolescents and young adults, and joined the other seekers of personal and group identity. Studies began to be published that focused on “common motifs” among children of survivors: feelings of guilt, for example, or an unusually strong desire to please parents.55 This was puzzling since, according to conventional thinking, only those who had a firsthand experience of trauma would be expected to suffer from its aftermaths. In time, a new subcategory of trauma—​ that which was inherited from parents—​was defined and referred to as “secondary trauma” or “transgenerational trauma.” As with the research concerning survivors, the growing number of studies looking at children of survivors (who were increasingly being referred to, and referring to themselves, as “the second generation”) were mostly of pathological orientation—​understandably, as most of them were based on clinical data gleaned from individuals who were sent for (or who sought) psychological counseling or treatment. Alongside organized activities and group meetings, children of survivors began to articulate their experiences more extensively, publishing their thoughts about issues connected with the Holocaust and, on a more personal level, about their relationship with their parents.56 Particularly noteworthy in this regard was the essay by Helen Epstein, “The Heirs of the Holocaust,” which appeared in the New York Times magazine in June 1977.57 I was married and the mother of an infant by then, and thus able to have an “adult” discussion with one of my mother’s neighbors, herself a survivor, who took issue with Epstein’s depiction of a troubled childhood. In the years following the publication of Epstein’s expanded account, the critically acclaimed Children of the Holocaust, there was an outpouring of second-​generation accounts in numerous memoirs and fictional accounts.58 An awareness of the psychological, social, and cultural developments of the late 1960s and beyond allows for a deeper understanding of the “pre-​period” of the 1950s and early 1960s. Now that Holocaust survivors are no longer defined in sweeping generalizations as being “irreparably damaged,” or their children as being “wounded via transmission,” we can better appreciate the ways in which bungalow colonies provided safety and stability. In Trauma and Recovery, Judith Herman points to three key factors in the recovery process: the establishment of safety, the need for remembrance and mourning, and the reconnection with ordinary life.59 As has been seen, for many Holocaust survivors, the first signs of recovery took place back in the DP camps of Europe; once they were settled in a more permanent home, they continued to invest their energies into repairing their lives. Their efforts were successful to greater or lesser degrees, as they struggled with numerous cultural, social, and material difficulties. Notwithstanding, they were far from being mere victims of their fate. My parents and their friends were the products of an upbringing full of history and tradition, and instead of focusing on those things that were missing, they lived their lives as best they could, passing down the very solid values they themselves had been raised with. A psychologist, Jeffrey Janowitz, expresses the views of other survivor children when he says: “The most foundational part of who I am is tied to my parents. From them I have a sense of right and wrong, and justice, and rooting for the underdog. I learned from my parents through osmosis; [I also learned] that the world is a dangerous place, but I didn’t learn not to trust.”60

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Today, as most children of survivors have become parents and grandparents, the passage of time has enabled us to take a broader look at the lives of our parents in their entirety. “I used to think that the American parents were better because they were educated and knew psychology,” reflects Esther Lapian. “It took me a long time, until about the 12th grade, to realize that my parents were just as good, and often even better, parents.”61 To be sure, for some families, trauma triumphed over the more positive aspects of living—​but for many more, there was a mixture of bad memories alongside good ones, difficult struggles together with good times. The bungalow colony is an important exemplar of how both extremes could exist together. This was a place where survivors could talk about their memories while sitting around a card or mah-​jongg table; listen to mournful Yiddish songs of the war and then go off to dance at Saturday night casino parties. To summon an old Yiddish expression, theirs was “laughter through tears,” with the laughter often winning out, at least during summers in the Catskills.

Back to the City Labor Day weekend marked the end of the summer, with evenings already getting cooler. This was the last, long weekend in the bungalow colony. Some families, hoping to avoid traffic, left on Sunday, but others, like us, wanted to squeeze out every last drop of summer and stayed the extra day. My father pulled his car up to the bungalow and, while he loaded it up, my mother swept and gathered the leftover food from the refrigerator. We children, as if on cue, found our way to the central lawn and bid each other tearful goodbyes, vowing to write during the year. Athough I didn’t know it at the time, the summer I turned 12 was our last summer in the bungalow colony. My parents had already been seriously thinking about moving, and the increasing antisemitism in our neighborhood, especially in my new junior high, made the matter that much more pressing. The following year, instead of packing for the bungalow colony, we stuffed cartons for the movers who were taking us to our new home, a small, attached house in an all-​Jewish residential section of Queens. My parents could not afford both a mortgage and a summer’s stay in a bungalow colony—​and anyway, didn’t we now have some grass of our own, a patio, and even air-​conditioning? I began a new phase of my life as an American Jewish teenager, with Jewish friends all up and down my block and in school. Still wearing my mother’s expertly made clothing, I now wanted to be like the other girls with their matching skirts, cardigans, and knee socks. I was no longer ensconced in my parent’s world of survivors and their immediate lives, no longer buffered by our summers in the country. My parents, too, were adapting to a new, American way of life: my father mingled with some of the men on the block, becoming their Sunday car fixer-​upper, while my mother’s days were filled not only with house-​related matters but, over time, with Hadassah meetings and synagogue sisterhood activities. When we first came to the neighborhood we were still the “refugees.” Eventually, however, my parents would be recognized and

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honored as “Holocaust survivors” who were asked to light a candle from the bimah of their synagogue in memory of the six million. That last summer, when we finally pulled out of the bungalow colony over the graveled road, we could see our friends waving to us. My longing for them, for our bungalow, and for the next summer, had already begun. In my lap rested the glass jar with the holes on top containing a salamander I had caught a couple of days before. Noticing the jar, my father said in Yiddish, “you can’t bring the salamander home—​it will die, like the last time.” Disregarding our pleas, he backed up the car. “Go, let it loose under the bungalow. You’ll catch plenty more next year.”

Notes I would like to thank Dalia Ofer and Anat Helman, who helped me conceptualize this essay; and a special thanks to Laurie Fialkoff, my longtime colleague and friend, who made sure it got written. Trudy Gewirtzman Malmut, administrator of the “People Who Went to Catskill Bungalow Colonies” Facebook group, helped me locate other members of the bungalow colony cohort. I’d like to express my appreciation to her, and also to Geane Pollak, Brenda Morgenstin, and all those named below in the notes, whose recollections appear in the text. 1. See online definition at:  merriam-​webster.com/​dictionary/​nostalgia (accessed 23 June 2020); for more in-​depth discussion on the specific connection between nostalgia and leisure-​ time activities, see Heetao Cho, “Importance of Leisure Nostalgia on Life Satisfaction and Leisure Participation,” The Service Industries Journal 40, nos. 1–​2 (2020), 90–​109. 2. Interview with Elaine Epstein (24 December 2018). 3. The Yiddish transliterations in this essay reflect the pronunciation of my parents. 4. Phil Brown, Catskill Culture: A Mountain Rat’s Memories of the Great Jewish Resort Area (Philadelphia: 1998), 41, 45. 5. Irwin Richman, Borscht Belt Bungalows: Memories of Catskill Summers (Philadelphia: 1998), 8. 6. Interview with Marilyn Hertz (21 November 2018). See also Brown, Catskill Culture, 50. 7. On landsmanshaftn, the communal societies of Jewish immigrants from the same villages, towns, and cities in Central and Eastern Europe, see, for instance, Hannah Kliger (ed.), Jewish Hometown Associations and Family Circles in New York (Bloomington: 1992); Daniel Soyer, Jewish Immigrant Associations and American Identity in New York, 1880–​1939 (Cambridge, Mass.: 1997). 8. Interview with Marilyn Hertz. 9. Paula S. Fass, Inheriting the Holocaust: A Second-​Generation Memoir (New Brunswick: 2009), 77. 10. According to Phil Brown, the hotel industry “was the third largest employer of Sullivan County’s 15,500 workers” (idem, Catskill Culture, 42). 11. The first summer resorts that Gentiles frequented in the Catskills were located in Greene, Delaware, and northern Ulster counties; this region was north of what later became known as the Borscht Belt. The most famous of these resorts was the Catskill Mountain House, established in 1824, which was considered to be “America’s first grand resort hotel” (see Stephen M. Silverman and Raphael D. Silver, The Catskills: Its History and How It Changed America [New York: 2015], 216–​224; reviewed by Nicholas Lemann, New York Times [4 December 2015]). 12. See, for instance, Irving Howe, World of Our Fathers: The Journey of the East European Jews to America and the Life They Found and Made (New York: 1976); Moses Rischin, The Promised City: New York’s Jews 1870–​1914 (Cambridge, Mass.: 1962); Hasia Diner, Lower East Side Memories: A Jewish Place in America (Princeton: 2000); Andrew R. Heinze, Adapting to Abundance: Jewish Immigrants, Mass Consumption, and the Search for American Identity

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(New York: 1990); Eli Lederhendler, American Jewry: A New History (Cambridge: 2017), esp. chs. 2, 3. 13. Abraham Lavender and Clarence Steinberg, “Jewish Farmers of the Catskills,” quoted in In the Catskills: A Century of the Jewish Experience in “The Mountains,” ed. Phil Brown (New York: 2002),  29–​30. 14. According to David Stradling in his book, Making Mountains: New York City and the Catskills (Seattle: 2007), the conversion of farmhouses into guesthouses for tourists, which became popular among non-​Jewish farmers in the Catskills in the late 19th and early 20th century, was adopted as well by Jewish farmers seeking “desperately needed cash income, when lower middle-​class New Yorkers sought inexpensive vacations away from the sweltering city” (ibid., 94). On the growth of tourism in the Catskills as the result of the expansion of railroad lines in Sullivan County, see Virginia Scheer, “Farmhouses That Became Boarding Houses in the Catskill Mountains of New York State” (Master’s thesis, Western Kentucky University, 1999), 21. Similarly, there was an increase in the number of farmhouse facilities for tourists in the Green Smoky Mountains region of Tennessee and North Carolina in the wake of railroad development in the early 20th century. See Michael Ann Williams, “Selling Domestic Space: The Boarding House in the Southern Mountains,” Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture 12 (2005),  1–​10. 15. Dave Levinson, quoted in It Happened in the Catskills: An Oral History in the Words of Busboys, Bellhops, Guests, Proprietors, Comedians, Agents, and Others Who Lived It, ed. Myrna Katz Frommer and Harvey Frommer (Madison: 2004), 8. 16. In the 1890s, the Catskills also became the site of a number of tuberculosis sanatoria. The Loomis sanatorium was built in 1896, with money from J.P. Morgan (whose first wife had died of tuberculosis), in Liberty, N.Y. In 1910, the Workmen’s Circle built a sanatorium in the same area. See Stephan Kanfer, A Summer World: The Attempt to Build a Jewish Eden in the Catskills, from the Days of the Ghetto to the Rise and Decline of the Borscht Belt (New York: 1989), 51–​53; Silverman and Silver, The Catskills, 233–​237. 17. Brown, Catskills Culture, 80–​82; Silverman and Silver, The Catskills, 286–​287. 18. See David Boroff, “The Catskills: Still Having a Wonderful Time,” Harper’s Magazine (July 1958), 58. 19. Stradling, Making Mountains, 179. See also Heinze, Adapting to Abundance, 116–​132. 20. Brown, Catskill Culture, 42. Phil Brown is the founder of The Catskill Institute, perhaps the preeminent source of information about Jews and the Catskills. The Institute has an ongoing project to track how many hotels and bungalow colonies are to be found; in its most recent updates, the number of hotels was listed as 1,172 (March 2009) and the number of bungalow colonies as 849 (March 2010). See online at: catskills.brown.edu/​hotelsbungalows.shtml (accessed 21 July 2020). 21. Boroff, “The Catskills,” 62. 22. Interview with Brenda Bacon (12 December 2018). 23. Interview with Carl Fraiman (27 October 2019). 24. Interview with Miriam Klager (28 October 2019). Several other interviewees made similar comments. 25. According to Meredith Lewis (in an undated online article titled “Is Mah-​Jongg a Jewish Game?”), Jewish women have been playing this game since the 1920s, when it was a “popular craze” imported from China, perhaps by American businessman Joseph Babcock; Lewis also mentions other theories about its origin. A decade later, after its popularity among Americans in general had declined, Jewish women continued to play the game, apparently spreading it from “friend to friend, mother to daughter.” Lewis recounts several anecdotes about mah-​jongg in the bungalow colonies; see online at: myjewishlearning.com/​article/​mah-​jongg (accessed 2 August 2020). On the popularity of mah-​jongg among Chinese American women and how the game was adopted by a wider group of American women (notably Jewish women), see Annelise Heinz, “Performing Mahjong in the 1920s: White Women, Chinese Americans, and the Fear of Cultural Seduction,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 37, no. 1 (2016), 32–​65; idem, “‘Maid’s Day Off’: Leisured Domesticity in the Mid-​Twentieth-​Century United States,” American Historical Review 124, no. 4 (October 2019), 1316–​1331.

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26. Interview with Esther Lapian (18 December 2018). 27. Interview with Elaine Epstein. 28. Interview with Brenda Bacon. 29. A Walk on the Moon (dir. Tony Goldwyn, 1999) is one of the few film depictions of a Catskills bungalow colony. Set in the year 1969 (the year of the first manned landing on the moon, and also the Woodstock music festival, which was held on a Jewish-owned farm in Sullivan county), the movie features a character known as “the blouse man,” with whom the main character has an affair. 30. On Chinese food and the Jews, see, for instance, Gaye Tuchman and Harry Gene Levine, “New York Jews and Chinese Food: The Social Construction of an Ethnic Pattern,” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 22, no. 3 (October 1993), 382–​407. On the origins of the iconic knish, see Laura Silver, Knish: In Search of the Jewish Soul Food (Waltham: 2014). 31. Andrew Jacobs, “We All Scream for  .  .  .  Kosher Socks,” New  York Times (19 August 2005). 32. Interview with Brenda Bacon. 33. Ibid. 34. See Samuel Juni, “Theistic Dissonance among Religious Jewish Holocaust Survivors: A Psychodynamic Perspective,” Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment and Trauma 25, no. 8 (2016), 854–​ 872; idem, “The Failed Education of Jewish Second-​ Generation Holocaust Survivors,” online at: jewishideas.org/​article/​failed-​education-​jewish-​second-​generation-​holocaust-​survivors (accessed 2 August 2020). I would like thank Prof. Juni for sharing his thoughts with me in the course of a personal meeting. 35. It appears that mock weddings were a feature of all the bungalow colonies, and even some of the hotels. See Boroff, “The Catskills,” 62. 36. Joseph Berger, Displaced Persons:  Growing Up American after the Holocaust (New York: 2001), 255. 37. Jake Ehrenreich, A Jew Grows in Brooklyn:  The Curious Reflections of a First-​ Generation American (Deerfield Park, Fla.: 2010), 74. 38. Ibid., 71. 39. Interview with Shirley Freiberg Offman (17 October 2019). 40. Interview with Ann Bar-Neder (3–4 November 2019). 41. Interview with Marilyn Hertz. 42. See Leonard Dinnerstein, America and the Survivors of the Holocaust (New  York: 1982), 288. 43. On survivors’ reasons for choosing to come to the United States rather than Israel, see Beth B. Cohen, Case Closed: Holocaust Survivors in Postwar America (New Brunswick: 2007), 33; William Helmreich, Against All Odds: Holocaust Survivors and the Successful Lives They Made in America (New York: 1992), 26–​27. 44. See Zeev W. Mankowitz, Life between Memory and Hope:  The Survivors of the Holocaust in Occupied Germany (Cambridge: 2002); Avinoam J. Patt and Michael Berkowitz (eds.), “We Are Here”: New Approaches to Jewish Displaced Persons in Postwar Germany (Detroit:  2010); see also Gabriel Finder, “‘Boxing for Everyone’:  Jewish DPs, Sports and Boxing,” in Studies in Contemporary Jewry, vol. 23, Jews and the Sporting Life, ed. Ezra Mendelsohn (New York: 2008), 36–​53; Hagit Lavsky, New Beginnings: Holocaust Survivors in Bergen-​Belsen and the British Zone in Germany, 1945-​1950 (Detroit: 2002); idem, “In the Wake of Starvation: Jewish DPs and Food in Post-​Holocaust Germany,” in Studies in Contemporary Jewry, vol. 28, Jews and Their Foodways, ed. Anat Helman (New York: 2015), 28–​45. 45. See, for instance, the photo titled “Young Mothers Take Their Babies for a Stroll in the Landsberg DP camp,” online at:  collections.ushmm.org/​search/​catalog/​pa1114193; see also “The Return to Life in the Displaced Persons Camps, 1945–​1954: A Visual Retrospective,” online at: yadvashem.org/​yv/​en/​exhibitions/​dp_​camps/​index.asp (accessed 2 August 2020). 46. See “10,000 Jewish Babies Counted in DP Camps,” New York Times (17 November 1947); “1,000th Baby Born at Belsen DP Camp; Birthrate Now Averages One Per Day,” Jewish

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Telegraphic Agency (JTA) (5 February 1948); Kurt R. Grossman, The Jewish DP Problem: Its Origin, Scope and Liquidation (New York: 1951), 18–​19. 47. According to Dinnerstein, approximately 60–​65  percent of the survivors settled in New York (idem, America and the Survivors of the Holocaust, 288). See also Cohen, Case Closed: “The DPs’ desire to remain in New York was contrary to the mandate of the Displaced Persons Act: the avoidance of a large concentration of refugees in major urban areas” (ibid., 35). Cohen notes as well that “there was a fear among the New York Jewish community that New  York would become a dumping ground for the majority of newcomers, significantly increasing antisemitic sentiment” (ibid., 18). 48. See “Aid to Immigrants Cost $16,526,267,” New York Times (6 April 1951). A 1953 report by USNA notes that less than less than 2 percent of survivors who arrived in the United States needed financial assistance (see Helmreich, Against All Odds, 109). See also a later article in the New York Times, “Jewish Refugees Adjusting to U.S.” (24 May 1964), which discusses a NYANA report concerning the “outstanding adjustment to [N.Y.] city’s life” of 100,000 Jews since 1949. 49. Cohen, Case Closed, 175. 50. See Arlene Stein, Reluctant Witnesses:  Survivors, Their Children, and the Rise of Holocaust Consciousness (New York: 2014), 51; see also Helmreich, Against All Odds, 75; Anna Ornstein, Sharone Ornstein, and Jeffrey Halperin, “Survival, Recovery, Mourning and Intergenerational Transmission of Experience:  A Discussion of Gomolin’s Paper,” The Psychoanalytic Quarterly 88, no. 3 (2019), 553. 51. Shlomo Breznitz, “The Advantages of Delay:  A Psychological Perspective on Memoirs of Trauma,” in Obliged by Memory:  Literature, Religion, Ethics:  A Collection of Essays Honoring Elie Wiesel’s Seventieth Birthday, ed. Steven T. Katz and Alan Rosen (Syracuse: 2006), 49. 52. Stein, Reluctant Witnesses, 53. On the development of psychoanalytic thought concerning trauma in general and Holocaust trauma in particular, see Michael Dorland, Cadaverland:  Inventing a Pathology of Catastrophe for Holocaust Survival:  The Limits of Knowledge and Medical Memory in France (Waltham: 2009). 53. On the psychoanalyst William Niederland, who coined the term “survivor syndrome,” see Robin Pollack Gomolin, “The Intergenerational Transmission of Holocaust Trauma:  A Psychoanalytic Theory Revisited,” The Psychoanalytic Quarterly 88, no. 3 (2019), 465. 54. See Marc-​Antoine Crocq and Louis Crocq, “From Shell Shock and War Neurosis to Posttraumatic Stress Disorder:  A History of Psychotraumatology,” Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience 2, no. 1 (March 2000), 47–​ 55, online at:  ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/​pmc/​articles/​ PMC3181586 (accessed 2 August 2020). I would like to thank Elad Koevary-​Levi for our many valuable discussions concerning post-​traumatic stress disorder. 55. See Aaron Hass, In the Shadow of the Holocaust: The Second Generation (Ithaca: 1990), 36; also see Dina Wardi, Memorial Candles: Children of the Holocaust (Abingdon: 1992). 56. In 1975, for instance, Response magazine dedicated an issue to “Reflections by the Post-​ War Generation in America,” which featured essays by a number of children of survivors. This collection was later expanded and published as a book: see Lucy Y. Steinitz with David M. Szonyi (eds.), Living after the Holocaust: Reflections by the Post-​War Generation in America (New York: 1976). 57. Helen Epstein, “The Heirs of the Holocaust,” New York Times magazine (19 June 1977). 58. See Helen Epstein, Children of the Holocaust: Conversations with Sons and Daughters of Survivors (New  York:  1979); among other noteworthy memoirs are Art Spiegelman, Maus: A Survivor’s Tale: My Father Bleeds History (New York: 1986) and idem, Maus II: A Survivor’s Tale: And Here My Troubles Began (New York: 1991); Berger, Displaced Persons; Diane Wyshogrod, Hiding Places: A Mother, a Daughter, an Uncovered Life (Albany: 2012); Fass, Inheriting the Holocaust; Eva Hoffman, After Such Knowledge: Memory, History, and the Legacy of the Holocaust (New York: 2004). Novels include Thomas Friedmann, Damaged Goods (Sag Harbor: 1984); Barbara Finkelstein, Summer Long-​a-​Coming (New York: 1987);

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Thane Rosenbaum, Second-​hand Smoke (New York: 1999); Melvin Jules Bukiet, While the Messiah Tarries: Stories (New York: 1995). 59. See Judith Herman, Recovery and Trauma: The Aftermath of Violence—​From Domestic Abuse to Political Terrorism (New York: 1992). 60. Interview with Jeffrey Janowitz (2 January 2019). 61. Interview with Esther Lapian.

Growing Up in the Shadow of the Past: Second-​Generation Holocaust Survivors’ Childhoods as Depicted in Israeli Documentary Films Liat Steir-​Livny (SAPIR ACADEMIC COLLEGE) (OPEN UNIVERSITY OF ISRAEL)

As far back as the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, Holocaust survivors became a presence in Eretz Israeli documentary cinema. They continue to appear in Israeli cinema until the present. In the initial period from 1945 until the 1960s, films, as was the case for other facets of Eretz-​Israeli/​Israeli culture, emphasized the Zionist lessons of the Holocaust and centered on the national collective transformation of Holocaust survivors from “ashes to renewal.”1 Events such as the Eichmann trial of 1961 and political and social upheavals in the twenty years that followed led to a change in the way survivors were depicted.2 Documentaries produced in the 1960s and 1970s began dealing with the Jewish past in the diaspora and with the Holocaust itself in greater depth; by the late 1980s, they were exploring such issues as how survivors dealt with post-​trauma and the transgenerational transfer of trauma to survivors’ children.3 This essay will focus on the representation of second-​generation Holocaust survivors in Israeli documentary cinema from the 1980s onwards. It will first introduce the major psychological schools regarding second-​generation Holocaust survivors and will then show how the films reflect only those schools that highlight the separate and unique features of children growing up in families of Holocaust survivors.

The “Second Generation” in Psychological Research The term “second generation” was coined by Canadian psychoanalysts as a clinical concept,4 and today is commonly used to denote the children of Holocaust survivors. Liat Steir-​Livny, Growing Up in the Shadow of the Past: Second-​Generation Holocaust Survivors’ Childhoods as Depicted in Israeli Documentary Films In: No Small Matter: Features of Jewish Childhood. Edited by: Anat Helman, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197577301.003.0010

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In the 1960s, when the issue was first studied, it seemed apparent that the second generation shared certain unique mental health problems that unified them as a group. Since then, hundreds of articles have been written on the question of intergenerational transmission of Holocaust trauma from survivors to their children. In the last few decades, the perception that they are a separate group has been questioned—​ specifically, whether this group has unique and/​or more substantial psychological disorders compared with other populations.5 Opinions on the matter can be divided into several schools of thought. The first suggests that second-​generation individuals have clear, unique characteristics that distinguish them from other groups. These include suspicion, fear, overprotectiveness, interpersonal problems, anger, social detachment, and a constant and haunting preoccupation with the Holocaust. For example, Dina Wardi argues that survivors and their children have common experiences and unique modes of expression such as profound feelings of grief and guilt, separation difficulties, anxiety, mutual overprotectiveness, identity issues, and emotional overload; although there are minor differences across families, intergenerational transmission generally takes very similar forms.6 Carol Kidron has examined second-​generation support groups, analyzing their cultural and social identity construction mechanisms. Her findings are that second-​generation individuals are aware of both their legacy and the unique intergenerational transmission they experienced as children. In consequence, they have a sense of responsibility that, in many cases, becomes burdensome enough to interfere with their ability to construct an independent identity.7 Julia Chaitin notes that even when second-​generation individuals deliberately avoid a profound examination of their parents’ lives, the Holocaust nonetheless has an impact on a deep, subconscious level, which inevitably leads to symptoms and characteristics that distinguish them from the general population.8 By contrast, the second school of thought holds that the second-​generation cohort has no significant psychological disorders, and that the Holocaust had no long-​term consequences on survivors’ offspring. Yoram Hazan, for instance, argues that survivors and their descendants, as a group, are as large and diverse as other groups and populations.9 Hillel Klein found that post-​traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is not passed down from one generation to the next. Rather, a transmission of certain common motifs, myths, themes, and vulnerabilities takes place within the family and between generations. The fact that some second-​generation individuals undergo therapy for their problems does not justify generalizing to the entire group; each case must be examined individually.10 Studies by Abraham Sagi-​Schwartz and his colleagues have shown that there is no empirical proof of intergenerational transmission from survivors to the second generation that results in the latter being a distinguishable group in the general population: supposedly “unique” symptoms are in fact characteristics found throughout the population. In their view, the notion of intergenerational transference to the second and third generations is a misconception, because the findings of such transference are based on case studies that do not represent the vast majority of the second-​generation population. In many instances, researchers studied participants undergoing treatment in mental health facilities and associations for Holocaust survivors and the second generation, who do not represent the norm among survivors or their children.11

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The third school of thought acknowledges a form of interaction between parents and children that is unique to the relationship between Holocaust survivors and their offspring, but which is expressed in many different ways, varying from family to family.12 Eva Hoffman, for instance, believes that the term “second generation” attributes homogeneous features to what is a very diverse group.13 Dan Bar-​On, who interviewed three generations of five families of Holocaust survivors, described the survivors’ vacillations between fear (associated with the past) and hope (associated with the future). He showed how different survivors distribute along this axis from the need to move forward and the feeling of being pulled backward, the need to remember, and the will to live despite the unspeakable. According to Bar-​On, this oscillation is also characteristic of the second and third generations.14 Finally, a fourth school of thought argues that it is necessary to look at subgroups among Holocaust survivors in order to determine whether there is secondary traumatization among the survivors’ descendants—​and if so, to what extent and what are its specific characteristics.15 During the 1980s, Holocaust awareness intensified in Israel. The Holocaust was made a permanent feature of high school curricula and matriculation exams. The first high school delegations to the former concentration camps in Poland began in 1988; according to sociologist Jackie Feldman, such trips have become one of the most intensive and popular means of transmitting Holocaust memory to future generations.16 Another factor strengthening Holocaust awareness during the 1980s was the growing number of survivors who, reaching retirement age, sought to communicate their stories to the next generations. More and more Holocaust survivors began to publish their memoirs. Concurrently, members of the second generation began to discuss the ways in which the trauma had affected their lives, and to depict their relationships with their parents in a range of cultural fields.17 The international acclaim for Claude Lanzmann’s seminal documentary Shoah, along with technological advances that lessened the expense of producing documentaries, prompted a burst of Holocaust documentaries in Israel from the late 1980s onward. These documentaries highlight individual stories rather than a collective narrative, discussing the various ways the children were influenced by their parents’ trauma, and the way in which the Holocaust was intertwined with their lives as they grew up.

Education, Past Stories, and Atmosphere: Childhood Recollections The films discussed in this essay have a common element in that they all highlight the separate and unique features of children growing up in families of Holocaust survivors. In addition, they feature two main categories of families: those in which parents were communicative about their experiences and those in which they were silent, or nearly silent. In each case, the parents’ trauma was transferred to their children, shaping their childhood and their identity as adults. Orna Ben-​Dor Niv’s Because of That War (Biglal hamilḥamah hahi) (1988), tells the story of two families of Holocaust survivors: that of Halina Birenbaum and her son Ya’akov Gilad (a song writer and music producer), and that of Jaco Poliker and his son Yehuda Poliker (a popular singer who frequently collaborated with Gilad).

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In the film, Jaco describes his deportation from Thessaloniki to Auschwitz in cattle cars and his futile attempts to save members of his family. Halina, for her part, talks about the deportation of Warsaw’s Jews to Treblinka, Majdanek, and Auschwitz, and the death that awaited them at every turn. Interspersed with their accounts and the sons’ descriptions of how their parents’ experiences affected their own lives are songs from what became a profoundly influential Israeli music album, Ash and Dust (’Efer veafar; 1988). A majority of songs on this album (with music by Poliker and lyrics by Gilad) relate explicitly or implicitly to the Holocaust. Contrary to the assumption that most Holocaust survivors chose silence, the two parents in this film are compulsive talkers, bursting with stories. Both, it becomes apparent, engaged in continual exposure of their children to Holocaust stories without weighing the ability of the child to comprehend or process them. In one scene, Ya’akov Gilad is shown sitting next to his mother as he tells the camera that his mother told him stories from a very young age. Halina confirms this, saying that when her son was three years old, she already felt that he was a “big boy,” adding: “He asked and I answered. I didn’t know that these stories were so frightening.” Gilad is silent. Later in the film, he claims that the way his mother raised him, “the dead were more alive than the living” and that he had heightened feelings of guilt every time he misbehaved, since his mother regularly inserted the Holocaust into every little detail of everyday life. For example, if he received a bad grade in school she would shout at him: “Is that why I survived Auschwitz? To see you get such grades?” In Jaco’s case, trauma is expressed in some of his recurring behavior. Every day when he came home from work, Jaco says, he would go out to see where his children were. They were used to his sudden arrivals at, say, basketball practice; they would wave to him, and he would move on. In a scene featuring all four subjects of the film, Jaco talks about the way his past ruined his son Mordechai’s bar mitzvah. The tables were set, the guests had arrived, and suddenly he was overwhelmed by memories of his murdered family. “They took over my mind,” he says, and he began to rant, yelling and throwing dishes on the floor. Two decades later, Moshe Zimerman’s documentary, Pizza in Auschwitz (Pizza beAuschwitz) (2008) follows Holocaust survivor Danny Chanoch and his two children, Shraga (Sagi) and Miri, during a six-​day journey to Lithuania and Poland. In the course of the journey, Miri tells of how her father’s past as a child survivor of the Kovno ghetto, and later, of Auschwitz influenced the manner in which he brought up his children. He taught them to trust no one, to always do the opposite of what they were told. Dani feels that he has been successful in raising strong children. Miri, however, does not agree. In her view, her father’s experiences—​and especially, his stories about them—​had a negative effect on his children. For instance, his stories about walking barefoot in the snow became a realistic substitute for the story of Hansel and Gretel, and apparently caused Miri and her brother to have horrible nightmares. Miri explicitly criticizes the telling of stories like these to such young children. Having been burdened with details of the Holocaust, she became frightened by every knock on the door, thinking it might be the SS, and these fears continue to accompany her as a grownup. In a number of documentaries, children of survivors discuss food obsession on the part of parents. This features in Hugo (1989), and its sequel Hugo 2 (2008),

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documentaries by Yair Lev that focus on his difficult relationship with his Holocaust survivor father, Hugo, and in Nitza Gonen’s Second Generation (Dor sheni) (1994), which features a discussion among a group of second-​generation artists and public figures who discuss their experiences growing up in the shadow of their parents’ trauma. In Because of That War, Yehuda Poliker tells of how his father used to wolf down his food. One day, he recounts, Jaco choked on a piece of bread. Yehuda, traumatized by the event, began to stutter, and to this day, the only time he doesn’t stutter is when he is singing on stage. Both in Because of That War, and in Second Generation, children of Holocaust survivors discuss the need to protect their parents and the issue of guilt. The artist Aliza Olmert relates how, at a young age, she understood that it was the number tattooed on her father’s arm that caused him to cry, so she took him into the shower and tried to wash it away. Another popular Israeli singer, Shlomo Artzi, talks about the guilt his parents implanted in him every time he didn’t obey them (“Mengele didn’t kill me, you will!”). Several of those who are interviewed claim that parents transferred their depression to their children. In Second Generation, for instance, writer Yoni Lahav says that his pessimism and terrible moods are traits he inherited from his parents. The ways the Holocaust affected the childhood and growing up of the second generation is to be found in other documentaries. For example, Hugo Lev, echoing Jaco Poliker’s anxiety for his children, tells his son Yair that, when he and his brother were sick, he (Hugo) was crazed with anxiety, often checking their pulse. Yet Yair, for his part, speaks of how his father never showed physical affection—​a theme that appears as well in Second Generation, in which Aliza Olmert recounts how, in her family, there were no hugs and kisses, and where Shmuel Vilozny speaks of being angry that his parents didn’t hug him. My 100 Children (100 yeladim sheli, directed by Amalia Margolin and Oshra Schwartz) (2003), tells the story of Lena Kichler, a psychologist who, in the aftermath of the Second World War, took charge of several dozen Jewish orphans, eventually spiriting them from Poland to Israel. The film, which portrays her life story and her devotion toward the children, also hints at a complicated relationship between herself and Shira, her biological daughter. In the film, Shira does not refer to her deceased mother as “Mom” and says that she deliberately avoided listening to Lena’s stories, and was not interested in hearing any of the children’s stories when the latter came to visit her mother in Israel. In her words: “I’ve had enough. . . . My life and this saga were separate.” It appears that Shira feels Lena had deserted her, preferring the children she had rescued, and the daughter therefore distances herself from the stories that were an integral part of her mother’s life. Oy Mama, directed by Noa Maiman and Orna Ben-​Dor Niv (2010), presents the story of Maimon’s elderly grandmother, Fira, a Holocaust survivor who is seeking to prevent the deportation of her Peruvian caregiver and the caregiver’s young daughter. In one scene, Fira’s daughter Michelle tells her niece that the dead were always an integral part of the children’s lives. She describes how Fira’s anxiety about unexpected events had been transferred both to her and to her brother. As children, they were preoccupied with planning escape routes in the event of a disaster, and this, in turn, drove them to learn various languages—​one never knew when one might have to flee to

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another country and start over. Similarly, they were taught by Fira not to get attached to property (“Good education you can take with you when you need to escape, houses and dolls you can’t”). In addition, although they always had private lessons, these did not include dancing classes or frivolous activities that “waste your time.” Yossi Maiman (the director’s father) is also interviewed. From the time he was a child, he says, he molded himself as the antithesis of the beaten and humiliated “diasporic Jew.” He speaks of his “burning self-​esteem . . . it’s a terrible feeling of anger and frustration. . . . I feel that my people and my family were humiliated, and the anger is so deep and doesn’t dissolve.” According to Yossi, his Holocaust survivor father’s story, how he felt “like a bird whose wings were chopped off,” was “tattooed in my soul.” Yossi promised himself that he would never be like this, that there would never be someone who would be able to have control over him. In that way, Yossi says, “it won’t happen again.”

Postmemory: The Imagined Past Literature scholar and cultural theorist Marianne Hirsch discusses the indirect affinity of second-​generation Holocaust survivors to the trauma. “Postmemory,” as she terms it, is structured on imagination—​inherited, rather than actual, memories that are nonetheless quite powerful. Postmemory characterizes the experience of those controlled by events that happened before they were born.18 Making use of this notion, cinema researcher Yosefa Loshitzky calls the category of second-​generation documentaries “postmemory cinema.” In her view, these films are governed by a diasporic aesthetic. The films represent an imagined collectivity of ghosts and shadows, expressing loss and ambivalence toward both their real Israeli homes and their imagined homes (whether cherished or despised) in the diaspora.19 In One, Two, Three, Four, Adolf Hitler at My Door (Eḥad, shetayim, shalosh, arba’, migermanyah Hitler ba) (2002), the co-​director, Tammy Gross, describes growing up with parents who had succeeded in escaping Germany before the war, but whose own parents had been killed. The Holocaust was discussed behind closed doors in her house—​yet it was very much present. Gross intersperses scenes depicting her present-​day encounters in Germany with a number of reenactments of her childhood. In one of these, a little girl is standing in front of a mirror. In a voiceover, Gross recalls how, as a child, she used to stare in the mirror for hours, imagining that an SS officer was standing behind her, deciding whether she was pretty enough. This connection between the Holocaust and sexuality appears as well in another scene filmed in a forest. The scene shifts from the forest to the little girl, who is now shown reading Little Red Riding Hood: “In this book in our home, Little Red Riding Hood had a yellow badge and the wolf had a small moustache like Hitler’s.” In yet another reenactment, the little girl is shown jumping rope as she paraphrases a well-​ known children’s song, changing the words to “One, two, three, four, Adolf Hitler at my door.” Nitza Gonen’s Daddy, Come to the Fair (Abbaleh, bo lalunah park) (1993), follows the journey made by the Vilozny family—​the Holocaust survivor father, his

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son, and his daughter, back to the realms of the father’s childhood in Poland and his memories of murdered family members. The film focuses especially on the relationship between the father, Mordechai, and his son, the actor and stand-​up comedian Shmuel Vilozny. Shmuel uses black humor as a defense mechanism against the transgenerational transfer of horror. Thus, within the grim context of his father’s search for the dead, he appears in flashy red trousers, often wearing a clown’s nose as well, and his commentary on the Polish scenery is marked by sarcasm and vulgarity. In the course of the trip, however, this façade cracks, and it becomes apparent just how much of Shmuel’s childhood—​and identity—​has been shaped by associations with the Holocaust. As they arrive in Auschwitz–​Birkenau, Shmuel breaks down, his defense mechanism disintegrating. The person who went around Poland dressed like a clown, mocking his environment, is now seen crying. He confesses to the camera that the Holocaust was an integral part of his life since childhood. Walking on the gravel of Auschwitz, Shmuel confesses that, “as a child, this is the sound I  always imagined. Without having been here, I  always imagined it. The sound of stones, boots stepping on stones. This is what I imagined. Like this, steps like this. I heard them at night without having been here....” Still crying, he tells the camera that, as a child, he used to walk on railroad tracks, as he was “always drawn to them.” The camera follows him as he walks alongside the barbed wire fence, focusing on his footsteps on the ground, in this way visually highlighting the postmemory of the child.

Growing up with a Double Wall of Silence There are Holocaust survivors who rarely talked about the trauma they or their families experienced. For the sake of their mental survival, they needed to put the past behind them.20 Some survivors did not talk with their children about the past as a means of protecting them and sparing them from feelings of fear. Avoiding the past was meant to distance their children from the trauma.21 Many children, however, responded to this “wall of silence” by not asking questions, thus creating a “double wall” of silence.22 In There and Here (Sham vekan) (2014), directed by Avida Livny, survivors who became pilots in Israel during the 1950s recall that they never spoke about the Holocaust. Their friends in the Air Force didn’t know about their past, and their children never heard their stories. “The air in our house was dense,” says Aya Biran-​Nir, daughter of survivor Izhak Biran, who tells in tears how, as a child, she felt that their house was different and that her father was not a “regular” pilot like the fathers of her sabra girlfriends. In Second Generation, children of Holocaust survivors talk about the silence in their homes, and the distress this silence carried for them as children. Like the proverbial elephant in the room, the Holocaust “was inside the house” but not spoken about. Shlomo Artzi explains his need to perform, to be on stage, to be heard, as a kind of response, “because you cannot live in this silence.” In One, Two, Three, Four, Adolf Hitler at My Door, Tammy Gross says in her voiceover that once, when she was a child, a relative came to the house and asked to talk to her mother. From

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behind the closed door, Tammy could hear sobbing. But her mother never discussed what was said, and Tammy didn’t ask, instead imagining what had not been told to her. In The Flat (Hadira) (2011), director Arnon Goldfinger reveals a family secret: his grandparents, Kurt and Gerda Tuchler, maintained close contacts with a Nazi couple, the von Mildensteins, both before and after the Holocaust. The Flat begins after his grandparents have passed away and the family members begin to empty out the apartment. The plot of The Flat is akin to a detective story in that items found in the apartment slowly reveal this secret. Viewers gradually learn that Goldfinger’s mother, Hannah, the second generation, was born in Berlin and raised in Israel. Her parents never talked about the past. They never told her basic parts of the family’s history, such as the fact that her grandmother Susanna had been murdered in the Holocaust, and Hannah never asked. The emptying of the apartment, the sorting of the pictures, documents, books, and clothes opens the door to the past, as Hannah tells her son about the way she had been brought up. She says that, in her youth, there were clear dividing lines between what she could ask about and what was taboo. In fact, “they didn’t tell us anything, and I didn’t ask.” Moreover, this unspoken “agreement” did not come to an end with the parents’ death. As Hannah clears the apartment, she feels no need to rummage, to look at family pictures, or to try to discover hidden clues to the stories that had not been told. Arnon is the one who investigates. From the Der Angriff newspapers found among the artifacts in the apartment, he discovers that, in the 1930s, a Nazi officer named Leopold von Mildenstein, who had supported the emigration of Jews to Palestine as a solution to the “Jewish problem,” toured Palestine for about six months with his wife. Arnon’s grandparents accompanied them and a friendship flourished between the two couples. Digging deeper, Goldfinger finds out that the friendship between them resumed in secret after the Second World War. David Fisher’s Six Million and One (Shisha milyon ve’ehad) (2011) deals with childhood recollections of another type of silence. In the film, four of the five children of Holocaust survivors Yosef and Mali Fisher travel to Europe several years after their father’s death, making use of a diary he had written in the last years of his life (which they discovered only after his death) in order to track his whereabouts during the Holocaust. During his lifetime, Yosef had told only fragmented stories about the past (“we were deported from the village in trains. . . hunger, thirst, suffering, agony. . . Auschwitz, Mengele. . . left-​right. . . I and my sister were the only ones who survived”).23 The diary reveals that he had been imprisoned in Auschwitz for only a week, and that for most of the war he had been a prisoner in two Austrian labor camps, Gusen and Gunskirchen. He never spoke of his time in these camps, but in the diary he wrote of having been worked nearly to death and of having witnessed horrifying events. David, the eldest of the brothers, was the only one who dared to break the double wall of silence. He first went to Europe on his own and then persuaded two of his brothers and his sister to accompany him to the camps in which their father had been imprisoned. During the journey, the siblings learn from their father’s diary that maintaining silence about the vast majority of his experiences was the only way Yosef could hang on to life and raise a family. Only when the children grew up and left home could he begin to reminisce. David says that, in reading the diary, he came to realize how he had missed knowing his father as a child. His siblings do not agree.

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They defend the wall of silence, claiming that Yosef’s horrific stories could not be told and that it was probably better that he hadn’t spoken. In the course of their journey, the siblings discuss the various ways the silenced trauma had shaped their childhood. As in many other Holocaust documentaries, a geographical journey of the survivor’s past becomes the catalyst for the children’s discussion of their complex childhoods; they refer to it as “family therapy.” The film consists of three trajectories of time and revelation: the father’s trauma in the 1940s, the children’s relationships with their Holocaust survivor parents when they were young, and the way they, as adults, comprehend the transgenerational transfer of the trauma. At the beginning of the film, Yosef’s writings from the diary (read by an actor) are heard in a voice-​over as a series of family portraits appear on the screen. The first is a photo of Yosef as a young man looking at the camera. This is followed by an image of him as an adult, and as the voice-​over speaks about “deterioration and lack of sleep,” the frame opens to show a larger family portrait. In this fashion, even before Yosef’s children begin to speak, the film makes it clear that trauma was an integral part of their childhood. Estee, the eldest of the children, describes herself growing up with the Holocaust as “an open wound.” In an outpouring of feeling, she exclaims that she doesn’t need this journey in order to know what her parents went through, and she doesn’t need to know the exact experiences of her father as described in the diary in order to appreciate him more: “I live it my entire life. [ . . . ] Every day I bleed. Do I look normal to you? Do I look like a normal person who grew up in a normal family??? I’m Holocaust from head to toe.” In her outburst she also exposes her postmemory, claiming she didn’t need to travel to Mauthausen in order to “feel the Holocaust.” In her words: “I knew exactly how it looks. I wasn’t there before but I knew exactly what it looks like.” Unlike one of the brothers, Gideon, who sees their father as a hero and who has no negative perception of the past, Estee won’t let go, shouting as she describes what her growing up was like: I want to be cruel and tell you the truth. I grew up without a father, honey, and so did you. [ . . . ] Did you have a father growing up? Did you have a father like other children who would do math homework with you, [ . . . ] who puts his hand on your head? Did you have that kind of normal father? We had a father who loved us and gave us life [ . . . ] but it pisses me off that someone or something prevented me from having parents who love me like parents are supposed to love their girl. Why?? Why?? [ . . . ] My childhood with these parents was not normal, and was fucked up and screwed up, like growing up inside a freezer [ . . . ] I was screwed up.”

She describes how she grew up as a child without love or physical warmth (“Mom didn’t touch me. She couldn’t touch me”). Another brother, Ronel, corroborates her claim by saying that he, too, wasn’t hugged. Estee accuses Gideon of repressing the harsh past, and Ronel agrees with her. He describes his childhood as one of growing up with a cold and detached father; a man without feeling, a man of numbers and lists (“everything for him was technical”). Gideon disagrees. His words reflect the discrepancies that exist within families of Holocaust survivors regarding childhood and parental figures: “I didn’t have a freezer at home. I had an oven. I had a father who

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took us for weekends. He devoted his free time to us. He never let us feel that he was a broken, miserable person who dwells in sadness.” David, the film’s director, does not take sides in this argument. Instead he exposes viewers to the different perceptions of the father, which highlights the complexity of the wall of silence and of growing up in a family of Holocaust survivors. The tense exchange between Estee and her brothers takes place in one of the tunnels in which their father had worked as a slave laborer. The closed frame and dark surroundings—​the darkness interrupted only by the light of flashlights being passed among the siblings as they make their way through the tunnel—​contribute to the charged conversation among them. Six Million and One exposes the repercussions of silenced trauma on the complex dynamics between offspring of Holocaust survivors: the pettiness, the jealousy, and the sense of deprivation.24 Throughout the film, Gideon is shown defending his father (“our emotional scars are nothing compared to what he went through”), portraying their childhood in totally different colors and bringing up stories the others neglect. He specifically states that he adores his father and always did, describing him as a strong person who, even after undergoing everything he did, still succeeded in acting normal “against all odds.” He reminds his siblings how the silenced, distant, detached father of their description was in fact always there for them, spending hours on their hobbies. He reminds Ronel, for instance, that although Yosef worked hard and was very often away from home, he was aware of Ronel’s keen interest in birds, and took him bird-​watching and fishing. “He really loved you,” Gideon insists, adding: “Ronel wants to learn how to play a guitar—​Dad buys him a guitar [and] enrolls him in the conservatory. He wants to wrestle? [Dad] buys him a punching bag.” In an interview conducted after the film came out, he insists that Ronel was the father’s favorite.25 Both in the film and in interviews, Gideon’s siblings express their disagreement with this assessment. They claim that Gideon was the only one who knew how to demand love (according to Ronel, he was the one who went and sat in his parents’ laps) and therefore grew up differently; the joke among them is that Gideon may not even belong to the family, as his relationship with his parents is so different from theirs. Estee has an additional explanation. She says that the alienation between the parents and the children in their family lessened as time went by. She, the eldest, was born after two previous babies had died and “this is why Mom couldn’t love me,” whereas Gideon, who was born more than a decade later, received more attention. Ronel, however, claims that, with time, things only became worse, and if anybody received something from their parents, it was Estee. In an interview, he explains that, so far as he is concerned, his parents finished their work as parents when he turned 14, and “since then, nothing they said interested me anymore.”26 The varying reactions of second-​generation children to their parents’ silence is also on display in Daddy, Come to the Fair. In contrast to Six Million and One, this film portrays a successful penetration of the double wall of silence while the survivor is still alive. As noted, the film follows Mordechai Vilozny and his two children on a journey to Poland. As with the Fisher family, the father had not spoken about the trauma he experienced, and from conversations between Mordechai and his son, it becomes apparent that this wall of silence created a detachment between the father and son. As a child, Shmuel felt that he could not connect with a silent father who

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did not play or laugh with him. During the journey, however, Mordechai opens up, both talking about his past and expressing his emotions. In one scene in which he tells about his childhood, he and Shmuel pick up sticks from the ground and imitate a sword game Mordechai used to play as a child. Shmuel confesses that this is the father he craved for as a child—​one who was laughing, playing, and sharing experiences with him. Yael, Shmuel’s sister, also comes along on the trip to Poland. Although her role in the film is relatively minor, with her voice rarely heard, the few scenes in which she talks to Shmuel about their experiences indicate that she, as opposed to her brother, has a positive and warm relationship with their father. These scenes are important because they dismantle the image of second-​generation Holocaust survivors as a homogenous group, showing that children brought up in the same house can have different relationships, perceptions, and coping mechanisms. After Shmuel’s breakdown in Auschwitz, there is a distinct warming between him and his father. Toward the end of the film, the two men are shown seated close to one another on a park bench, in an open space that highlights the feeling of freedom and release. Shmuel confesses how his father’s silence had shaped his own identity: “I can understand it [the silence]. Nothing else could be done. No matter how I tried to run away from you, I couldn’t, I’m like you. For years, I couldn’t stand it [ . . . ] but now I love it. I learned from you. So if often I was silent and hostile and closed, it’s because I imitated you. As hard as I tried not to, I found myself doing it.” The journey ends with mutual understanding, with Shmuel acknowledging that his outlook on life has changed. Yet, as with many Holocaust documentary films, the film does not end with full closure. Although Mordechai’s entry into the realm of the past does help him break free of his silence, and while the journey indeed brings reconciliation and closeness between father and son, the film’s message is that the detachment of the child from the silenced father cannot be erased so easily. In the last scene, Shmuel attempts to sing the children’s song, “Daddy, Come to the Fair,” which he dedicates to his father, but finds himself choking with tears. His tears illustrate how, in spite of the journey, in spite of his humoristic defense mechanism, the disturbing memories of the past and the former years of silence cannot be undone. There is no compensation: the childlike need for his father to come and be with him will probably remain with him forever.

Conclusions Despite the debate within the psychological literature regarding whether the second generation constitutes a separate group with its own psychopathological characteristics, Israeli documentaries tend to represent children of survivors as a distinct group suffering from secondary traumatic stress. These films, which also discuss the parents’ trauma and the various coping mechanisms they developed, depict the ways in which children were affected by their parents’ experiences. Trauma was incorporated within their identities, and they, too, were forced to develop various coping mechanisms. Notwithstanding the differences among the families, there are various recurring themes in the documentaries. The past lives in the present; trauma

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was (and continues to be) a part of the children’s lives and postmemory has molded their identities.

Filmography 1. Because of That War (Biglal hamilḥamah hahi), Orna Ben-​Dor, 1988. 2. Daddy, Come to the Fair (Abbaleh, bo lalunah park), Nitza Gonen, 1993. 3. The Flat (Hadira), Arnon Goldfinger, 2011. 4. Hugo, Yair Lev, 1989. 5. Hugo 2, Yair Lev, 2008. 6. My 100 Children (100 yeladim sheli), Amalia Margolin and Oshra Schwartz, 2003. 7. One, Two, Three, Four, Adolf Hitler at My Door (Eḥad, shetayim, shalosh, arba’, migermanyah Hitler ba), Tammy Gross and Yuval Cohen, 2002. 8. Oy Mama, Noa Maiman and Orna Ben-​Dor Niv, 2010. 9. Pizza in Auschwitz (Pizza beAuschwitz), Moshe Zimerman, 2008. 10. Second Generation (Dor sheni), Nitza Gonen, 1994. 11. Six Million and One (Shisha milyon veeḥad), David Fisher, 2011. 12. There and Here (Sham vekan), Avida Livny, 2014.

Notes 1. See Liat Steir-​Livny, Shetei panim bamarah: yitzug nitzolei hashoah bakolno’a hayisreeli (Jerusalem: 2009). 2. There is an ongoing debate regarding the historical, political, and social events that altered Holocaust consciousness in Israel. Among these events were the Kastner trial (1954), the Eichmann trial (1961), the interim period before the Six-​Day War (May 1967), the Yom Kippur War (1973), and the political upheaval following the Likud party victory in the elections of 1977 (for the first time since the establishment of Israel), which resulted in Menachem Begin’s becoming prime minister. See Tom Segev, The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust, trans. Haim Watzman (New York: 1993); Anita Shapira, Yehudim ḥadashim, yehudim yeshanim (Tel Aviv: 1997); Hanna Yablonka, Survivors of the Holocaust: Israel after the War, trans. Ora Cummings (New York: 1999); idem, The State of Israel vs. Adolf Eichmann, trans. Ora Cummings with David Herman (New York: 2004); Idith Zertal, Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood, trans. Chaya Galai (Cambridge: 2005); Dina Porat, Kafeh baboker bereaḥ ha’ashan: mifgashim shel hayishuv vehaḥevrah hayisreelit ’im hashoah venitzolehah (Tel Aviv: 2011). 3. See, for instance, Yosefa Loshitzky, “Postmemory Cinema: Second-​Generation Israelis Screen the Holocaust,” in idem, Identity Politics on the Israeli Screen (Austin: 2002), 32–​71; Nurith Gertz, Makelah aḥeret:  nitzolei shoah, zarim vaaḥerim bakolno’a uvasifrut hayisreelim (Tel Aviv: 2004); Moshe Zimerman, Al tig’u li bashoah: hashpa’at hashoah ’al hakolno’a vehaḥevrah beyisrael (Haifa: 2002); Michal Friedman, “The Double Legacy of Arbeit Macht Frei,” Prooftexts 22, nos. 1–​2 (Winter–​Spring 2002), 200–​220; Régine-​Mihal Friedman, “Witnessing for the Witness: ‘Choice and Destiny’ by Tsipi Reibenbach,” Shofar 24, no. 1 (Fall 2005), 81–​93; Steir-​Livny, Shetei panim bamarah, 96–​127, 150–​165.

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4. Vivian Rakoff, “A Long Term Effect of the Concentration-​camp Experience,” Viewpoints 1 (1966), 17–​21; Bernard Trossman, “Adolescent Children of Concentration Camp Survivors,” Canadian Psychiatric Association Journal 13, no. 2 (April 1968), 121–​123. 5. See, for instance, Natan Kellerman, “Ha’avarah shel traumot hashoah,” in Yaldut betzel hashoah: yeladim nitzolim vedor sheni, ed. Zahava Solomon and Julia Chaitin (Tel Aviv: 2007), 286–​303. 6. Dina Wardi, Nosaei haḥotam:  dialog ’im benei hador hasheni leshoah (Jerusalem: 1990), 14. 7. Carol Kidron, “Hahavnayah haḥevratit shel nitzolim benei hador hasheni: narativim shel kevutzot temikhah lenasaei zikaron pigu’im,” in Solomon and Chaitin (eds.), Yaldut betzel hashoah, 261–​285. 8. Julia Chaitin, “Yeladim venekhadim shel nitzolim mitmodedim ’im hashoah: relevantiyut paradoksalit,” in ibid., 418–​435. 9. Yoram Hazan, “Dor sheni leshoah:  musag besafek,” Sihot—​ Israeli Journal of Psychotherapy 1, no. 2 (1987), 104–​107. 10. Hillel Klein, “Haḥipus aḥar zehut umashma’ut bekerev nitzolei hashoah,” in Maḥanot harikuz hanatziyim:  mivneh umegamot, demut haasir, hayehudim bamaḥanot, ed. Israel Gutman and Rachel Manber (Jerusalem: 1980), 425–434 11. Abraham Sagi-​Schwartz, Marinus H. van IJzendoorn, and Marian J. Bakermans-​ Kranenburg, “Does Intergenerational Transference of Trauma Skip a Generation? No Meta-​ Analytic Evidence for Tertiary Traumatization with Third Generation Holocaust Survivors,” Attachment and Human Development 10, no. 2 (June 2008), 105–​121. 12. Iris Milner, Kir’ei ’avar:  biografiyah, zehut vezikaron basiporet hador hasheni (Tel Aviv: 2003),  19–​35. 13. Eva Hoffman, After Such Knowledge: A Meditation on the Aftermath of the Holocaust (London: 2004), 28. 14. Dan Bar-​On, Bein paḥad letikvah: sipurei ḥayim shel ḥamesh mishpaḥot nitzolei shoah, sheloshah dorot bamishpaḥah (Tel Aviv: 1994); see also Milner, Kir’ei ’avar,  23–​25. 15. Yael Aviad and Diana Cuhenca, “The Effects of Gender and Survival Situation of the Parent Holocaust Survivor on Their Offspring: An Attachment Perspective,” The Israel Journal of Psychiatry and Related Sciences 55, no. 2 (2018), 15–​22. 16. Jackie Feldman, Above the Death Pits, Beneath the Flag: Youth Voyages to Poland and the Performance of Israeli National Identity (New York: 2008), xv. 17. For more on these issues, see for example:  Porat, Kafeh baboker bereaḥ ha’ashan, 357–​378; Steir-​Livny, Shetei panim bamarah, 96–​204; Milner, Kir’ei ’avar, 19–​35; Loshitzky, “Postmemory Cinema”; Dalia Ofer, “The Past That Does Not Pass:  Israelis and Holocaust Memory,” Israel Studies 14, no. 1 (Spring 2009), 1–​35; Gulie Ne’eman Arad, “Israel and the Shoah: A Tale of Multifarious Taboos,” New German Critique 90 (Autumn 2003), 5–​26. 18. Marianne Hirsch, “Past Lives: Postmemories in Exile,” Poetics Today 17, no. 4 (Winter 1996), 659–​667. 19. Loshitzky, “Postmemory Cinema.” 20. Milner, Kir’ei ’avar,  19–​35. 21. Aaron Hass, In the Shadow of the Holocaust: The Second Generation (Ithaca: 1990), esp.  25–​50. 22. Bar-​On, Bein paḥad letikvah. 23. Nirit Anderman, “Hayoman shehovil leseret “shishah milyon veeḥad,” Ha’aretz (19 March 2012), online at: haaretz.co.il/​1.1666762 (accessed 12 November 2019). 24. Ibid. 25. Chen Kotz-​Bar, “Pitz’ei bagrut: mishpaḥto shel Ronel Fisher neḥsefet beseret ḥadash” (25 March 2012), online at: https://​www.makorrishon.co.il/​nrg/​online/​47/​ART2/​348/​852.html (accessed 12 November 2019). 26. Ibid.

Rites of Passage: Jewish Representations of Children and Childhood in Contemporary Cinema Nathan Abrams (BANGOR UNIVERSITY)

In an essay from 1999 titled “Children on Film,” Stuart Hanson notes that “[f]‌ilms about and representing children, in which children play a key part in the narrative, have existed in the cinema almost since it began in the last years of the nineteenth century.”1 In similar fashion, Neil Sinyard argues that “childhood is the great universal theme and it is not surprising that some of the greatest films in the history of cinema . . . have focused on it. Clearly one of its attractions is its appeal to common experience.”2 It is surprising, therefore, that childhood is a curiously overlooked topic in Jewish film and television studies, despite the growing scholarship in those areas and despite the great importance Judaism places on children, as evidenced in child-​ centered Jewish rituals such as circumcision (brit milah), the redemption of a firstborn son (pidyon haben), and the bar/​bat mitzvah ceremony. This essay proposes to begin filling the gap by exploring how the universal theme of childhood has been represented in more specific ways, focusing on Jewish cinema in particular. It will examine a series of Jewish constructions of children and childhood up to and including the age of 13—​looking at films dealing with the child en route to adulthood through the key rite of passage of bar/​bat mitzvah; the child as vulnerable and in need of protection, but whose childhood is brutally cut short during the Holocaust; and films in which childhood is not explicitly Jewish but can be read as such. All in all, these representations consider the condition of children and childhood as a comment on the Jewish condition in contemporary society.

Bar Mitzvah Boys/​Bat Mitzvah Girls The bar mitzvah and, to a lesser extent, the bat mitzvah have provided fertile material on both the big and small screen in the depiction of Jewish childhood, particularly in the form of coming-​of-​age stories. Many movies contain important bar mitzvah Nathan Abrams, Rites of Passage Rites of Passage: Jewish Representations of Children and Childhood in Contemporary Cinema In: No Small Matter: Features of Jewish Childhood. Edited by: Anat Helman, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197577301.003.0011

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scenes, such as that in which Marjorie Morgenstern (Natalie Wood) catches the eye of Sandy Lamm (Edd Byrnes) at her brother’s bar mitzvah in Marjorie Morningstar (1958) or where Yussel Rabinovitch (Neil Diamond) coaches boys for their bar mitzvah in the 1980 version of The Jazz Singer. In Woody Allen’s Deconstructing Harry (1997), Allen lampoons the lavish bar mitzvah party that has a Star Wars theme (“May the force be with you, Donald”). There are also multiple television episodes in which the bar or bat mitzvah is central to the plot, as in The Wonder Years (ABC, 1988–​1993), Touched by an Angel (CBS, 1994–​2003), Curb Your Enthusiasm (HBO, 2000–​), and Entourage (HBO, 2004–​2011). However, not only have these tended to focus on the male experience (reflecting the predominance of Jewish men in the television and film industries), but they are also usually about the experience of the fathers rather than the sons.3 Childhood, as Sinyard points out, is “an essentially adult construction.”4 Possibly the first film to put a bar mitzvah at its heart is Bar Mitzvah, a 1935 Yiddish melodrama starring Boris Thomashefsky and directed by Henry Lynn. But one of the first to treat this rite of passage seriously, and to present it from the bar mitzvah boy’s point of view, is Jack Rosenthal’s British film, Bar Mitzvah Boy (1976). The gendered dimension of the bar mitzvah is emphasized during the film’s opening sequence: when a character asks, “What’s he mean? ‘Marks his passage’? Is it rude?” the explanation is, “It’s something Jewish. What Jewish boys do. You wouldn’t understand.” “It sounds rude,” comes the response. The 13-​year-​old protagonist, Eliott Green (Jeremy Styne), hails from a suburb of northeast London. Eliott is apprehensive over his bar mitzvah, which is to take place the following day. That evening and the next morning, he considers the men in his family, deciding he does not wish to emulate them by following any of them into manhood, as he does not respect them. Thus, when he is called up to read from the Torah, instead of going up to the bimah to recite his portion, which is what will mark his passage into adulthood in the eyes of the community, he walks out and goes to the park, where he meets Denise (Kim Clifford), a non-​Jewish girl from his school. When Eliott explains a bar mitzvah to her, she compares it to wearing a bra or getting her period. In the end, Eliot performs the reading of the law in the park, outside of the community—​ standing on his head and reciting his Torah portion, with his sister as witness. A contemporary retelling of Bar Mitzvah Boy is another British film, Sixty Six (dir. Paul Weiland, 2003). Bernie Rubens (Gregg Sulkin) is a studious, bespectacled, dopey, asthmatic, and un-​athletic boy, with bad teeth to boot, who is planning his own bar mitzvah and party, divorced from the wishes and indeed the financial concerns of his father. To make matters worse, this takes place in the context of the 1966 World Cup soccer tournament. As England’s soccer team progresses through the tournament, it is increasingly likely that the team will make it to the final, which, unfortunately for Bernie, falls out on the same date as his bar mitzvah. Sixty Six retreats into affectionate nostalgia in a semi-​autobiographical mode, befitting what is called a “kitchen sink drama,” that is, a realistic depiction of a drab or sordid working-​class domestic setting that was characteristic of 1950s British cinema. Thus, the look and mood of the film is gloomy, especially as it becomes clear that Bernie’s big day will most likely be ruined, as most of his friends will presumably be watching the game instead of attending his afternoon bar mitzvah party. Bernie has his bar mitzvah ceremony in the synagogue

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and then returns home. There he practices his planned bar mitzvah party speech in the confines of his bedroom; unfortunately, he never gets to deliver it in public. This speech articulates what one might describe as a very downbeat British way at looking at the world: “I’d like to thank you all for coming here today. You have helped make this one of the worst bar mitzvah celebrations ever. I think the only person who could say that they had a worse party than me would be Rabbi Userfs, who had to strangle a Nazi on his bar mitzvah.” Together, both Bar Mitzvah Boy and Sixty Six represent atypical and British experiences of boyhood a world away from the typical American Jewish fare. By contrast, the bar mitzvah in Keeping Up with the Steins (dir. Scott Marshall, 2006) is a means by which to critique an American Jewish culture of excess and conspicuous consumption. A Hollywood agent, Adam Fiedler, played by Jeremy Piven (in the television series Entourage [HBO, 2004-​2011], he played a similar role), wants to plan the largest and most lavish party to upstage his former business partner and arch-​rival, Arnie Stein (Larry Miller) and his new wife Raylene (Sandra Taylor), the eponymous Steins of the title. Keeping Up with the Steins uses the Jewish rite of passage as a means of lampooning and gently criticizing the contemporary state of Reform and Conservative Judaism in the United States, on the one hand, and an American Jewry that uses bar/​bat mitzvahs as excuses for “grotesque displays of wealth and crass consumerism taken to comic extremes,” on the other.5 Cheryl Hines plays a manic bar mitzvah party coordinator who specializes in playing to her clients’ hubris and competitiveness with over-​the-​top celebrations such as the one we glimpse at the opening, in which the bar mitzvah boy enters the room on a mock-​up of The Titanic, complete with a Kate Winslett look-​alike, and announces to the assembled guests, “I’m king of the Torah!” In scenes reminiscent of earlier films such as Goodbye Columbus (dir. Larry Peerce, 1969), the children are shown gluttonously attacking the copious amounts of food. Jewish childhood, per se, is not really the subject under examination. Whereas Benjamin Fiedler (Daryl Sabara) achieves a comfortable resolution with his Judaism at the end of Keeping Up with the Steins, Bernie Rubens, in Sixty Six, ends up with his father at Wembley stadium for the closing moments of the World Cup final, dressed in his tallit (which he uses as a scarf) and kipah. Skillful editing places Bernie and his father in the crowd as England’s team goes up to collect its World Cup trophy. Thus, by the end of the movie, Bernie is able to reconcile his Englishness and his Jewishness, but only at the expense of the latter; even if he uses his tallit in place of a football scarf, he leaves his house and abandons his own bar mitzvah party. Benjamin, in comparison, settles for a bar mitzvah that is very much rooted in home, being held in his back garden and featuring his mother’s and grandmother’s cooking—​a party that rejects his family’s bickering and in-​fighting, as well as offering an alternative to the culture of excess championed by his father. Nonetheless, although both films are narrated from the perspective of the bar mitzvah boys, essentially, they are more about their respective fathers than they are about the sons. In Sixty Six, Manny Rubens is hopeless, failing at his job, plagued by obsessive compulsive disorder and chronic humorlessness. He is a manic depressive, riddled with neuroses and anxieties, who refuses to drive more than 25 miles an hour and who hides his money in a box in the attic rather than putting it into a bank.

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Adam Fiedler, in contrast, is successful, wealthy, confident, and seemingly suffers only those problems that come with being rich. Whereas Manny is emotionally weak and vulnerable, Adam is the exact opposite—​arrogant and self-​assured. Thus, while Keeping Up with the Steins presents an American Jewish childhood that is forward-​ looking, upwardly mobile, and obsessed with status, Sixty Six depicts a British Jewish childhood that is downbeat and backward-​looking, rooted in class and the lack of socioeconomic mobility. This view of the fathers is also reflected in the films’ respective styles. Keeping Up with the Steins is brightly lit, set in the present and exuding an outlook of confidence and optimism, whereas Sixty Six is pessimistic, gritty, and features much more emotional and physical suffering. The Coen Brothers’ A Serious Man (2009) also revolves around a dysfunctional family getting ready for a bar mitzvah. Set in Minnesota in the 1960s, it shows Danny Gopnik (Aaron Wolff) preparing for his passage into Jewish manhood while his mother is carrying on an extramarital affair, his physics professor father is attempting to secure tenure while going through a midlife crisis, his somewhat unhinged uncle has moved into their house, and his sister is vying with the uncle for time in the bathroom. While A Serious Man is much more about the travails of his father, it does devote time to Danny and his childhood experiences. For one thing, we learn, he has no interest in Judaism. As befitting the 1960s counterculture in which the movie is set, he prefers to listen to Jefferson Airplane rather than his droning Hebrew teacher. His indifference is manifested by his decision to smoke a joint and get high before his bar mitzvah ceremony. This sequence is shot from Danny’s perspective, using expressionistic sound to code his inebriated state. He recites his portion stoned, which ironically gives the ritual, as Adam Nayman points out, “the very air of mysticism and wonder it’s meant to contain as a rite of passage.” 6 Despite his clear intoxication, Danny recites his portion beautifully, much to his parents’ evident pride. Ultimately, the film tells us much more about the Coen Brothers’ views of their childhood in a semi-​a utobiographical mode than it does about childhood on film. By contrast to the bar mitzvah, the bat mitzvah has been virtually ignored by Hollywood. This has been left to an Australian film, Hey Hey, It’s Esther Blueburger (dir. Cathy Randall, 2008), which is unusual not only in its exploring Jewish girlhood but in doing so in a non-​American context. The eponymous protagonist, a conspicuous outcast at her drearily non-​ethnic, sadistically hierarchal private high school, is ambivalent about her Jewishness. While the film explores her childhood, the Jewishness is incidental and never really explored in any detail. To be sure, Esther is on the cusp of celebrating her bat mitzvah, but she views this as no more than a rite of obligation coupled with an anticipated source of humiliation, as she is expected to invite—​and be rejected by—​her classmates. Moreover, she has no particular say in her bat mitzvah, especially given that the ceremony will be shared with her twin brother, Jacob. Whereas Jacob will have a tallit wrapped around him as he is about to read from the Torah, Esther will have a necklace placed around her neck by her father. This clear gender binary is the beginning of Esther’s alienation from Judaism. Significantly, however, unlike her male counterparts in Sixty Six, Keeping Up with the Steins, and, to a lesser extent, A Serious Man, where the bar mitzvah is the point of the

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story, Esther’s bat mitzvah is just one element—​and not even a major one, at that—​in the story of her childhood.

Nostalgic Childhoods Apart from the Coen Brothers’ A Serious Man, the use of childhood as a blank screen for the projection of adult anxieties and concerns can be found most readily in the work of Woody Allen. Children rarely exist in his films in their own right, possibly because their absence allows Allen and his characters to have existential discussions about life and its future unburdened by familial responsibilities. Where they do appear in his films, they tend to be in flashback scenes that are typically narrated from the subjective, and likely distorted, perspective of an adult. Allen’s Annie Hall (1977) is indicative in this regard. In one scene, the protagonist, Alvy Singer (played by Allen), says: My analyst says I exaggerate my childhood memories, but I swear, I was brought up underneath the roller coaster in the Coney Island section of Brooklyn. Maybe that accounts for my personality, which is a little nervous, I think. You know, I have a hyperactive imagination. My mind tends to jump around a little, and uh I I I have some trouble between fantasy and reality. My father ran the bumper car concession. Th-​there he is, and there I am. Right. I I used to get my aggression out through those cars all the time. I remember the staff at our public school. You know, we had a saying, uh but, “Those who can’t do, teach, and those who can’t teach, teach gym.” And uh, of course, those who couldn’t do anything, I think, were assigned to our school. I must say, I always thought my schoolmates were idiots. Melvyn Greenglass, you know, his fat little face and Henrietta Farrell, just Miss Perfect all the time and uh Ivan Ackerman, always the wrong answer. Always.

Later, little Alvy explains that he has stopped doing his homework on account of his being depressed because there is no point to life, because the universe is expanding, and “someday it will break apart, and that will be the end of everything.” All of this is narrated by the adult Alvy and serves as comic humor rather than any deep and meaningful portrayal of what a Jewish childhood was like for Allen. Among Allen’s movies, however, two stand out for their portrayals of children, and childhood in particular: Radio Days (1987) and Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989). In Radio Days, Allen looks back to the period of 1938 to 1944 to suggest that it was a simpler time in which the national community was held together by a shared sense of values. He described it as “a nostalgic comedy without a plot, just sort of a part documentary, part plot account of certain years of my childhood, unrelated little incidents that I happen to know about either secondhand, or that I remember firsthand.”7 Childhood here is retold partly through the unseen narrator’s memory of his own Brooklyn childhood. The young boy, Joey (Seth Green), recalls his school days, his friends, teachers, and first love, but from the perspective and memories of the adult, focusing on how that adult came to be. Thus, it is not so much an examination of childhood but rather uses the child as a vehicle to project the concerns of the mature adult.

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Moreover, it is highly subjective and colored; indeed, the narrator confesses, “Now it’s all gone except for the memories . . . [F]‌orgive me if I tend to romanticize the past.” Crimes and Misdemeanors operates in a similar fashion. Ophthalmologist Judah Rosenthal (Martin Landau) recalls his childhood, during which he was “raised quite religiously,” noting that “some of that feeling must have stuck with me.” He recalls how his father told him: “The eyes of God are on us always.” The view of childhood in the film, like Radio Days, is mediated entirely through the eyes and memories of the adult man. In one key sequence, Judah returns to the family home of his youth and asks its current owner if he may look around. He hears a Passover seder emanating from the dining room. As he stands in the doorway, his memories recreate a seder from his childhood, during which his extended family argue about the nature of morality and evil. However, it is not entirely clear if this memory is authentic or an imaginative reconstruction designed to assist Judah to reset his own moral compass. A different kind of autobiographical film is Wondrous Oblivion (2003), directed by Paul Morrison. Set in South London in 1960, Wondrous Oblivion is a coming-​ of-​age story. The film focuses on David Wiseman (Sam Smith), the 11-​year-​old son of a Polish Jewish father and a German Jewish mother. David lives in an overwhelmingly white England and in a world of casual antisemitism, in which the Wisemans—​referred to as “you people” or “Yids”—​straddle the boundary between being immigrants and being “white” English. David, “wondrously oblivious” to these not so latent racial tensions, is a passionate cricket fan who lives in a fantasy world in which he is the master of an ever-​expanding cast of cricket celebrities represented by his cigarette card collection (these, in a subtle, fairy-​tale manner, are shown moving within their frames). He imagines himself as a “tactical genius,” a “fearless batsman,” and “potentially the greatest all-​rounder in the world.” In fact, David is wondrously oblivious to his complete lack of cricketing talent, for which he is derided by his schoolmates at a posh English prep school, who themselves are mostly white, Protestant, and middle-​class. This is emphasized by the title sequence, which depicts him standing alone on the cricket boundary, far away from the other fielders. Behind him is open country, increasing the sense of his isolation, as well as alienation from his urban Jewish roots. In fact, the original title of the film was “Outfielder,” simultaneously denoting David’s position on the cricket field and his being a social outsider. The plot takes a turn when a family from Jamaica moves in next door to the Wisemans and the father erects a cricket net in his back garden in order to practice with his two daughters. When David befriends the Samuel family, the father agrees to coach him. This serves as a backdrop to the process in which the Wisemans, in stark contrast to the Samuels (whose racial fixity is already determined) shift from being Jewish immigrants to being “almost the same, but not quite.”8

Children of the Holocaust Another key area for exploring Jewish children and childhood is the Holocaust. Films dealing with the Holocaust have been the subject of numerous scholarly articles,

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several of which have looked more specifically at the depiction of Jewish children and childhood.9 In general, films about the Holocaust focus on the innocence of Jewish children whose childhoods are violently ended. For instance, cinema has made use of the iconic image of the young boy wearing a cap and yellow star and raising his hands at gunpoint that was taken during the Nazi destruction of the Warsaw ghetto in 1943. The photograph is reproduced in Alan Resnais’ documentary Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog) (1956), as well as in Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966).10 One of the most famous, and earliest, of the films dealing with the Holocaust is The Diary of Anne Frank (dir. George Stevens, 1959), whose director was among the first to film the liberation of concentration and death camps in Western Europe. The Franks are presented as an “All-​American family” in order to increase audience empathy with them at a time when “the Holocaust” was not yet cemented into the public consciousness. According to Yvonne Kozlovsky Golan, it was not until Sophie’s Choice (dir. Alan J. Pakula, 1982) that cinema began “to hint at the fate of Jewish children” (this, despite the fact that Sophie and her children are Catholic).11 In the wake of Sophie’s Choice, Golan argues, images of child victims and survivors of the Holocaust “captured the imagination of filmmakers worldwide, since they are perceived as a reliable reflection of the war and its horrors.”12 This fits in with Sinyard’s observation that “using the fate of children as an amplification of the horror” is “characteristic of a war film’s strategy,” and with Karen Lury’s comment that, “[i]‌n films involving war, children are often ciphers for adult anxieties, fantasies and fears.”13 Sinyard notes that children avoid becoming the victims of war “at a certain cost: their innocence is compromised.”14 In the more specific context of films dealing with the Holocaust, Jewish children are required to demonstrate adaptability and resilience. As such, they undergo “drastic changes of identity, often more than once, in order to survive. These works suggest the profound effects such transformations had on their subsequent lives or . . . the lives of those who knew them.”15 One such planned film—​which was never completed—​was based on Louis Begley’s semi-​ autobiographical novel, Wartime Lies (1991). The story centered on a young Jewish boy and his aunt who were hiding in Poland under false Aryan identities. Stanley Kubrick was in the course of adapting the book into a movie to be titled Aryan Papers; at a certain point, however, he learned that Steven Spielberg was working on a film based on Thomas Keneally’s novel Schindler’s Ark (1982), and this may have been a factor in causing him to abandon the project. It would have been interesting to see how a director who had spent his career considering, yet delaying, making a movie about the Holocaust, as well as never having made a film from a child’s perspective, would have succeeded in combining both genres. A more unusual portrayal of childhood during the Holocaust is that appearing in X-​Men (dir. Bryan Singer, 2000). Erik (Bill Milner), a young Jewish boy, is forcibly separated from his parents at the gates of a Nazi death camp in Poland in 1944. As it happens, Erik is a genetic mutant who possesses superhuman, mind-​based powers. As his family is led away, he demonstrates his telepathic ability to generate a magnetic field with which he can manipulate, bend, or deflect metal objects, here the camp gates. In a later film, X-​Men: First Class (dir. Matthew Vaughn, 2011), viewers learn that Erik’s parents were murdered and that he was experimented upon medically. Significantly, however, these childhood flashbacks are peripheral to the main plot of

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both movies: their function is to explain Erik’s adult pathologies. Magneto, as he is known, does not want to witness the persecution of his or any other minority group. Jewish childhood during the Holocaust rarely figures as a subject in its own right. As Lury explains, “one child’s experience, or more accurately their presence as a small, emotive figure, can be used to ‘stand in’ for many deaths. In these instances, the child’s narrative function is effectively to act as a metonym for wider suffering.”16 Kerner refers to the “innocent child motif.”17 In films such as Saul Fia (Son of Saul) (dir. László Nemes, 2015), The Grey Zone (dir. Tim Blake Nelson, 2001), and Schindler’s List, a child is represented “as a symbolic figure, standing in for the millions of nameless victims of the Holocaust.”18 In Schindler’s List, which is perhaps the most well-​known instance of this phenomenon, a little Jewish girl wears a red coat—​the only color in the film’s otherwise monochromatic cinematography. In this way, she is demarcated from the undifferentiated mass of Jewish victims: although who she is, what she feels and the details of what actually happen to her are never fully realized. Her presence and function is akin to the obligatory shot of a child’s doll, often captured in news footage or in fictive reconstructions of the aftermath of disasters such as aeroplane crashes or terrorist bombs. In these sequences, the doll’s body is a substitute for the child’s body, whereas the body of the little girl in Schindler’s List is used to remind the audience of the individuality of all the bodies destroyed in the Holocaust. Yet since it is the coat that is as important as the girl herself—​her significance is that we can see her because she wears a red coat—​ironically it is the individuality of the little girl herself which is sacrificed.19

Spielberg, together with screenwriter Steven Zaillian, conceived of the child in the red coat as a “Rosebud” symbol in the vein of Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941)—​ that is, she provides the key to unlocking the motivation behind the decision made by Oskar Schindler, a German war profiteer and playboy, to save all the Jews who worked for him.20 In addition, she symbolizes the lack of action on the part of the Allies in preventing the genocide of the Jews. The black and white cinematography is intended to symbolize the world’s partial blindness to the extermination of Europe’s Jews, against which the girl in red stands out in stark contrast.21 As Adrian Schober notes: She is both visible and invisible, present and not present, as these unspeakable horrors unfold around her; she connotes the idiomatic “elephant in the room.” But it’s telling that Spielberg chooses to individualize the mass murder of six million Jews in the figure of this one child, whose death signals not only the death of innocence for childhood but the world entire.”22

A similar metonymic function occurs in The Grey Zone, although in that movie (which is filmed in color) the little girl is clothed in a white dress. The little girl in the red coat is not the only child appearing in Schindler’s List. In a scene taking place in the Płaszów concentration camp, a young Jewish inmate attempts to remove the stains in the commandant’s bathtub but makes the mistake of using soap instead of lye. The commandant, Amon Göth (Ralph Fiennes), at first forgives the boy but later changes his mind and shoots him dead. In another scene, other children hide, literally, in the shit, in order to escape being rounded up and selected

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for the gas chambers. A very young boy, looking for a place to hide, jumps down through the hole of the wooden latrines into the sewage. There, covered in feces, he is confronted by a group of four other children who tell him: “Get out. This is our place. Get out.” Overall, such images of childhood have the effect of underlining and intensifying the general sense of inhumanity and brutality. Although it deals with the Holocaust, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas (dir. Mark Herman, 2008), does little to explore Jewish childhood. Instead, the film’s perspective is that of a lonely eight-​year old German boy, Bruno (Asa Butterfield), whose family has been relocated to the Polish countryside, where the father serves as commandant of a nearby concentration camp. Disobeying his parents’ instructions not to stray from the family home, Bruno goes wandering in the woods and winds up at the wire fence surrounding the camp. There he spots a young Jewish inmate named Shmuel (Jack Scanlon), one of the eponymous “boy[s]‌in the striped pajamas.” The two boys, who are of equal age but from vastly dissimilar backgrounds, develop an unlikely friendship. Failing to fully comprehend the gravity of Shmuel’s situation, Bruno yearns to join his friend on the other side of the wire fence. One day, Shmuel smuggles out a set of striped pajamas; Bruno digs a hole under the wire fence and dons the pajamas, leaving his own clothes, and wanders about the camp. That day, however, there is a roundup, and both boys—​since they are indistinguishable—​are sent to the gas chambers, where, as Gentile and Jew, they suffer the same death. Bruno’s parents, desperately searching for him, are grief-​stricken and inconsolable when they realize what has happened. In this way, the film suggests that Bruno (and his parents) are as much victims as is Shmuel. Another film presenting a non-​Jewish German perspective on the Holocaust is Jojo Rabbit (dir. Taika Waititi, 2019). The eponymous character, played by Roman Griffin Davis, is Johannes “Jojo” Betzler, a ten-​year old who is on the cusp of joining the Hitler Youth. He is a fanatical Nazi. As he says, “I’m massively into swastikas.” He is so avid that his imaginary friend is none other than Hitler. Jojo earns the nickname “Rabbit” when he attends his first Hitler Youth camp. Tasked with killing a rabbit, he cannot bring himself to do it. Learning that he is not a killer, Jojo’s Nazi beliefs are further tested when he discovers that his mother, Rosie (Scarlett Johansson) is hiding a teenage Jewish girl, Elsa Korr (Thomasin McKenzie), his late sister’s former classmate, in their attic. A friendship forms between them and the film gradually shifts and widens its focus, also giving a Jewish child’s perspective on the war and ridiculing Nazi stereotypes of Jews. A number of additional films have depicted the Holocaust from the viewpoint of children. As Tatiana Prorokova points out, such films are typically framed, at least in part, as fairy tales, whereby the genocide becomes a supernatural evil over which good must triumph.23 Apart from those films that have already been mentioned, one may add to the list René Clément’s Jeux Interdits (Forbidden Games) (1952), Louis Malle’s Au Revior Les Enfants (1987), Roberto Benigni’s La vita è bella (Life is Beautiful) (1997), Peter Kassovitz’s Jakob the Liar (1999), Donna Deitch’s The Devil’s Arithmetic (1999), Gérard Jugnot’s Monsieur Batignole (2002), Jochen Alexander Freydank’s Spielzeugland (Toyland) (2007), Gilles Paquet-​Brenner’s Elle s’appelait Sarah (Sarah’s Key) (2010), Roselyne Bosch’s The Round Up (2010), and Brian Percival’s The Book Thief (2013).

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Within the fantasy rubric, several films that are not immediately recognizable as being explicitly about the Holocaust can be interpreted as dealing with the Jewish experience during the Shoah. Kate Marrison and Nigel Morris, for instance, show how Spielberg’s The BFG (2016), an adaptation of the Roald Dahl novel about an orphaned girl named Sophie (Ruby Barnhill) and a “big friendly giant” (voiced by Mark Rylance), functions as a children’s Holocaust film in that it follows the framework set out by Prorokova. Sophie, a ten-​year old orphan, is befriended by a benevolent giant—​the Big Friendly Giant (BFG) of the title—​who transports her to Giant Country, where they attempt to thwart the human-​eating giants who are threatening to invade the human world. Marrison and Morris pinpoint the motif of a Gentile with a conscience—​here the giant—​who comes to the aid of the Jewish child—​Sophie. In light of the allusive and intertextual nature of Spielberg’s cinema, the BFG cannot but help refer back to his Schindler’s List. Thus, Marrison and Morris suggest that “BFG’s Sophie becomes literally a girl in a red coat, but with her own story, no longer swamped in the adult experience.” Spielberg’s utterances about the film, they add, warrant this interpretation, such as when he said, “I am searching for the souls of all the children who were murdered because of what Schindler’s List is about.”24

(Implicitly) Jewish Children Another area awaiting further exploration is the construction of childhood by Jewish directors in films featuring a child who is not explicitly Jewish (or is explicitly non-​ Jewish), but which nonetheless betray a Jewish sensibility. Here we might usefully consider much of the work of one of the Jewish giants of 20th-​century cinema, Stanley Kubrick (1928–​1999). The interrelated themes of children abandoned by their fathers or whose fathers are absent; an innocent child confronted by an adult world of danger; and childhood abuse have always been at the heart of Kubrick’s work, as far back as his earliest photography, documentaries, and feature films. Kubrick, it seems, was particularly interested in exploring traumatized children who had experienced some form of mental and/​or physical torture. In certain cases, even though the children are not identified as Jewish (or are clearly not Jewish), Kubrick nonetheless “codes” them as Jewish. Perhaps the earliest example is Kubrick’s intended adaptation of Stefan Zweig’s 1911 novella, Burning Secret. This short story is told from the perspective of a young Jewish boy who is befriended by an older philandering man who wishes to seduce the boy’s married mother. Eavesdropping on them, the boy misunderstands their flirtatious struggle as an attempted murder. Ultimately, the boy opts not to betray his mother and keeps the secret of her infidelity from his father. While Kubrick removed the explicit Jewishness from his screenplay, which was written for MGM, its palimpsestic traces remain, for not only does the screenplay closely follow the original (albeit with some updating to a 1950s American idiom), but also one cannot completely whitewash such a Jewish author as Zweig. The project never came to fruition and was abandoned. Another example is the epic movie Spartacus (1960), in which children are enslaved, abused, and eventually massacred by the Romans. Given the film’s

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desert setting, Spartacus has a “biblical” feel —​a feature perhaps enhanced by the almost simultaneous release of another epic film, Otto Preminger’s Exodus—​and it can be read as a kind of retelling of the biblical story of the exodus from Egypt in which slaves are liberated by a Moses-​like figure. Kubrick’s next film, Lolita (1962) can also be interpreted, at least in part, in a Jewish light. Its eponymous twelve-​year old girl, Dolores “Lolita” Haze (Sue Lyon) is seduced by a middle-​aged professor, Humbert Humbert (James Mason), and then by a television screenwriter, Clare Quilty (Peter Sellers).25 Her mother is played by the Jewish actor Shelley Winters, who had won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for The Diary of Anne Frank only three years earlier. Given the casting of Winters in this key role, and her clearly Jewish ethnicity (highlighted by her previous role in The Diary of Anne Frank), which is reinforced by certain aspects of her character’s stereotypical behavior—​her vulgarity, lack of decorum and manners—​it is possible to read Lolita, as well, as Jewish.26 Two of Kubrick’s subsequent films invoke child sacrifice in either a figurative or more literal sense. The eponymous protagonist of Barry Lyndon (1975) loses his son in his attempt to advance within a closed English aristocratic society to which he does not belong. His son is figuratively sacrificed on the altar of his ambitions, tragically dying after falling off a horse that Barry buys for him with his newfound wealth (Barry’s own father having died in a duel resulting from an argument over the purchase of some horses). In The Shining (1980), which has been read as a reworking of Genesis 22, a father seeks to sacrifice his son at the bidding of a higher power.27 In this film, Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson), hired as a hotel caretaker, takes his family up a high mountain in Colorado during the winter. Suffering from a severe case of “cabin fever,” Jack begins to hallucinate and seeks to “correct” his son Danny (Danny Lloyd) with an ax. Recalling his namesake, the biblical Daniel, Danny can “shine”—​ namely, see events in the future or back in the past—​and thus can foresee his father’s actions; in a scene reminiscent of the disembodied writing hand in Dan. 5:5, he writes the word “murder” backwards on a wall. At the same time, it is revealed that Danny is a victim of physical abuse by his alcoholic father. The underlying Jewish properties of The Shining are also indicated by what Geoffrey Cocks argues are allusions to the Holocaust, including, but not limited to, repeated references to the number 42 as a code for the implementation of the Final Solution.28 By the time of his death, Kubrick had been working on what would have been his most child-​centered film, A.I. Artificial Intelligence. An adaptation of Brian Aldiss’ short story, “Super-​Toys Last All Summer Long” (1969), it tells the story of David, a humanoid robot who seeks the love of his human parents, only to be rejected by them when their biological son recovers from a coma. David is abandoned in a forest by his mother—​a typical trope of the fairy tale—​and must then fend for himself in an adult world in which humanoid robots (“mecha”) like him are hunted down, tortured, and “murdered,” often for human (“orga”) pleasure and entertainment. In scenes reminiscent of the Holocaust novel Wartime Lies (which, as noted, Kubrick seriously considered adapting as a film), David evades capture alongside an android prostitute named “Gigolo Joe” (Jude Law). Screenplay drafts at the Kubrick Archive indicate that Holocaust imagery played a key role in the conceptualization of this section of the

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story. David is envisioned as being prematurely inducted into an adult world of death and sexuality, as well as serving as a “super-​toy” to be exploited by humans. When Kubrick died, the project was taken over by that other Jewish giant of American cinema of the 20th and 21st centuries, Steven Spielberg. As Peter Krämer has pointed out, “in addition to being a great admirer of Kubrick’s work, Spielberg had long been on a career path that closely paralleled that of the older filmmaker, exploring very similar themes along the way and indeed modelling several of his films on those of Kubrick.”29 Spielberg significantly reduced the abusive aspect in his treatment of A.I., sentimentalizing it by converting it into a fairy tale updating of Pinocchio. Linda Ruth Williams describes the film as “the story of an artificial child rejected by and then eternally seeking out the mother.”30 The finished film thus fit more into line with Spielberg’s oeuvre, which, by contrast to Kubrick’s, is more heavily focused on children. For Spielberg, children are “innocent or damaged.”31 According to Richard Corliss, “the story of a stranded or abandoned child searching for signposts to home, for the reunion of the nuclear family” is “pure Spielberg.”32 Unlike many of the directors discussed here, Spielberg often put the child’s perspective at the heart of his films. Typically, this perspective tapped into his own autobiographical experiences as a child growing up with an absent father, often bullied because he was Jewish. In his words: “I use my childhood in all my pictures, and all the time. I go back there to find ideas and stories. My childhood was the most fruitful part of my entire life. All those horrible, traumatic years I spent as a kid became what I do for a living today, or what I draw from creatively today.”33 This is most evident in E.T.:  The Extra-​Terrestrial (1982). Analysis of the film suggests that it is reflective of Spielberg’s own feelings about his parents’ divorce. As noted by Richard Corliss, “what is that little parchment-​pated E.T. but a precocious kid, light-​years from home, looking for a cell phone?”34 Spielberg confessed that “E.T. was about the divorce of my parents, how I felt after my parents broke up. I responded by escaping into my imagination to shut down all my nerve endings crying, ‘Mom, Dad, why did you break up and leave us alone?’ I dreamed about going to space or having space come to me.”35 Adrian Schober explains how the film’s central character, Elliott (Henry Thomas), “as a lonely child of divorce, is thus a surrogate for the director, as is the alien, one of Spielberg’s double figures, for the child (as signified in the names E.T./​Elliott).”36 It might also be added that the theme of an extra-​ terrestrial creature representing an alien Other, abandoned and exiled far from home, chimed with Spielberg’s own sense of Jewish history and his own Jewish childhood.

Horrifying Children The horror genre offers additional examples of Jewish directors who have put children and childhood at the heart of their films. Here, too, while none of these children is explicitly Jewish—​in fact, many of them are pointedly not Jewish—​the films betray a Jewish sensibility. The trend began with Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby in 1968, followed by a cycle of money-​making movies mimicking the success of that film,

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among them Spielberg’s Something Evil (1972), William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973), Richard Donner’s The Omen (1976), Robert Wise’s Audrey Rose (1977), Kubrick’s The Shining, David Cronenberg’s The Brood (1979), and Spielberg’s screenplay for The Poltergeist (dir. Tobe Hopper, 1982). In these films, children are either confronted by a world of danger or else are the source of the danger, or are both. Kathy Merlock Jackson refers to the “child-​as-​monster film” in which rather than being merely “vulnerable,” children are “vulnerable to becoming evil” or perhaps are even evil in the first place.37 Rosemary’s Baby is worthy of further discussion, not only because it initiated this cycle of “new” horror films that placed children at the center, but also because it had a Jewish director and was based on a best-​selling novel by a Jewish author (Ira Levin). Its eponymous heroine, however, is a lapsed Roman Catholic, Rosemary Woodhouse (Mia Farrow), who is married to Guy (John Cassavetes), an aspiring actor. Unbeknownst to Rosemary, her husband has made a pact with a coven of Satanists who live next door: he has traded the use of her body to carry the son of the Devil in return for a successful artistic career. Rosemary conceives after she is drugged and rendered unconscious; when she discovers she is pregnant, she does not realize she is carrying Satan’s baby but rather believes there is a plot against her unborn child. She lives in fear, not knowing whom to turn to or to trust, trying to evade the clutches of her neighbors, her husband, and the society doctor (suggestively named Dr. Abe Sapirstein) who is looking after her. Several scholars have noted the ways in which Rosemary’s Baby is informed by Polanski’s own traumatic childhood experiences. As a Jewish child in Nazi-​occupied Poland, Polanski evaded capture and death in a manner similar to that outlined in Louis Begley’s Wartime Lies and in Polanski’s own film The Pianist (2002).38 While the film does not explicitly dwell on childhood or children—​indeed, Rosemary’s child is never seen on screen—​it does provide a reflection, in a fashion echoing the Holocaust films described above, of a Jewish childhood under Nazi occupation. It further obliquely invokes notions of child experimentation.39 As with Rosemary’s Baby, William Friedkin’s The Exorcist does not reflect on Jewish childhood per se. A young non-​Jewish girl, Regan MacNeil (Linda Blair), is possessed by a demon who, befitting the title, is the subject of an excruciating exorcism. The child undergoes a dramatic transformation after being possessed:  she screams obscenities, has fearsome rages, masturbates with a crucifix, and murders a colleague of her mother’s. But again, reflecting the title of the film, the story does not focus on the young girl’s inner life or her perspective of the world. Rather, the film is about Father Karras (Jason Miller), the priest who is sent to carry out the ritual. The priest is shown to have his own inner religious struggles, whereas the child is no more than a vessel; in one scene, Regan’s mother, Chris (Ellen Burstyn), declares: “That thing upstairs is not my daughter.” Later, the words “HELP ME” appear on Regan’s stomach as a clear cry from the child trapped within the possessed body, drawing a distinction between the vulnerable child and the evil and powerful demon inhabiting her.40 In fact, Father Karras discovers that Regan is “‘possessed’ by countless evil presences—​all of them projections of other characters’ cracking psyches and hidden guilts.” Thus, she is

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really inhabited by “no one,” a discovery the priest makes only by playing a tape of the “voices” backward, as if detecting an aural version of the child’s mirror image . . . [T]‌he possessed child in The Exorcist obscenely displays the nothings at the heart of the film’s horror by revealing that what is inside her is exactly what is inside her society: a spiritual and imaginative void.41

Where a Jewish character does appear, he is ironically called Lt. William Kinderman (and played by Jewish actor Lee J. Cobb). Another successful demonic film, The Omen, draws inspiration both from Rosemary’s Baby and from The Exorcist. When Robert Thorn (Gregory Peck) is told that his baby has died at birth, he adopts a different baby—​Damien—​from a hospital priest. What Thorn does not know is that this baby is the Antichrist. Once Damien (Harvey Spencer Stephens) reaches the age of five, strange occurrences happen, resulting in a series of horrible deaths. Fitting the pattern outlined above, Damien occupies very little screen time. The film is not about him per se. However, unlike The Exorcist, in which the child is a vehicle for evil, Damien himself is evil, suggesting that no one can be trusted, not even a seemingly innocent child. Here evil is not banal; rather, it is born. As with other films discussed in this essay, The Omen focuses more on the role of the father and his failures: Robert Thorn unwittingly adopts the Antichrist, raises him, and refuses to heed any warnings until it is too late.42 As with the biblical patriarch Abraham (albeit for different reasons), Thorn readies himself to kill his son, but ultimately fails.43 In the body horror films of Jewish director David Cronenberg (known as the “baron of blood”) children are either absent or represent trauma—​whether seen, discussed, or merely implied. Cronenberg’s The Brood (1979), in which a psychiatric patient spawns a brood of murderous infants, was written in the slipstream of the director’s own bitter divorce and custody battle for his daughter, providing a startling contrast to the same year’s Oscar-​laden (and similarly themed) Kramer vs. Kramer (by Jewish director Avery Corman), a film Cronenberg found far too saccharine and simplistic in its examination of the psychological effects of divorce on the individual(s) concerned.44 In The Dead Zone (1983), a child is used as a protective shield during a climactic assassination attempt. In a flashback, neurologist Dr. Sam Weizak (played by Jewish actor Herbert Lom) is shown as a child being separated from his mother as they try to escape Nazi soldiers during the Second World War. An unborn baby can use its telepathic powers in Scanners (1981). In The Fly (1986), another unborn baby represents the last vestiges of humanity in Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum), as he gradually but inexorably metamorphosizes into a fly; in a dream sequence, the baby is transformed into a green, maggoty pupa. Thematically, Dead Ringers (1988) is about lost childhood and/​or children—​the inability of Claire Niveau (Geneviève Bujold) to conceive brings her into contact with the twin gynecologists (both played by Jeremy Irons) who are at the heart of the film. In Spider (2002), Dennis “Spider” Cleg (Ralph Fiennes) pieces together an apparently fateful childhood event, recreating in memory a period of his childhood in 1950s London. A History of Violence (2005) opens with the murder of a child, while Eastern Promises (2007) revolves around the mystery of the orphaned child of an abused prostitute. Finally, the children in A Dangerous Method (2011) restrict the professional ambitions of the intellectual male patriarchs.

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What all these films have in common is their theme of a poisoned domestic space. Whereas families “should be a place of refuge, with relationships that provide safety and security,” in the world created by these Jewish directors, “the ties that bind become perverse, even lethal.”45 This theme appears as well in a recent film, Ari Aster’s Hereditary (2018). As Aster noted in an interview: “The family is great fodder for drama ... and . . . it’s a no-​brainer for an artist who is looking to cut deep. Because as far as relationships go, there’s nothing more insidious or elemental than our relationship to our children or our parents, the people we’re closest to. A betrayal in a family is much more devastating than a betrayal among friends, or even lovers.”46 These directors often manifest a fascination with Sigmund Freud, in particularly his essay “Das Unheimliche” (The Uncanny), which explores how familiar things—​ people, places, objects, and the home—​can suddenly appear to be strange. (Kubrick, for example, was explicit in citing Freud’s essay on the uncanny, which he read in preparation for making The Shining, as an influence on the film.)47 Other undoubted influences are the directors’ personal experiences of grief and misfortune. Finally, while there is nothing obviously “Jewish” about the horror films of Jewish directors such as Polanski, Friedkin, Donner, Cronenberg, and Aster, the manner in which their domestic spaces become increasingly unheimlich (literally, un-​homelike), and the family relationships increasingly hostile, can be interpreted as reflecting post-​ Holocaust anxieties about the possibility of society suddenly rounding on Jews, and the feeling, as another Jewish filmmaker, Jon Spira once put it, that “the idea you can build a comfortable home in a country is tenuous at best.”48 Such an attitude emanates from what Ari Aster called “a pessimism about the world and an understanding of how cruel people can be to each other.”49 It is no surprise, then, that these films do not end on a hopeful note. Their endings are ambiguous and ambivalent: evil is not definitively defeated. Such films are also clearly influenced by the world of European fairy tales in which “innocents” (for example, Hansel and Gretel, Snow White, and Little Red Riding Hood) are lured to their doom by forces craving young blood. In Rosemary’s Baby, characters make references to unsavory incidents in the Bramford apartment building: a few years before, a dead infant wrapped in newspaper had been discovered in the basement, and the building was also home to the notorious Trench sisters, who cooked and ate children. Similarly, Kubrick’s The Shining talks about cannibalism and the murder of twin girls in the hotel in which the father is serving as caretaker. In addition to Freud, Kubrick read Bruno Bettelheim’s Freudian reading of nursery rhymes, The Uses of Enchantment:  The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (1976), in preparation for making The Shining.50 Significantly, all of these horror films concern parenthood and/​or parenting. Kathy Merlock Jackson notes how, by the late 1960s, there was a clear “cultural uneasiness about having children, one that no doubt increased as the birth rate in America fell and people began contemplating alternative life-​styles to parenting.”51 Another worry was family breakdown. Given the many Jewish directors of these films, such fears clearly afflicted Jewish parents as well. In some instances, children are sacrificed by their fathers at the bidding of a higher, yet largely unseen, power; as noted, this is suggestive of the story of the biblical Binding of Isaac (Gen. 22). Alternatively, as Jackson observes, such fathers are either absent (The Exorcist) or ineffectual (The Omen).52

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In general, except for The Shining and Hereditary, the inner life of the child is not a matter of much concern, and we do not see events through children’s eyes. Again, they are merely blank slates for the depiction of the horror, ambivalence, and uncertainties of parenting, in which parents either spawn unholy monsters or the parents themselves are the unholy monsters. Nor are they about Jews or Judaism, at least not on the surface. Rather, this series of secular and agnostic films reflect upon the problem of evil in a post-​Holocaust world. It was not until 2009 that the twin genres of horror and the Holocaust film were conjoined in a film titled The Unborn (dir. David S. Goyer)—​ and significantly, a child appeared at its heart. In this film, a dybbuk created as a result of Mengele’s medical experimentation at Auschwitz uses the body of a dead Jewish child to haunt the film’s adolescent protagonist.

Conclusion We can establish several generalizable trends from this initial survey of a variety of film genres—​including the bar/​bat mitzvah, autobiographical/​nostalgic, Holocaust, and horror movies—​and the films of two key Jewish directors (Stanley Kubrick and Steven Spielberg). Children appear in many Jewish films and Jewish children appear in many non-​Jewish films. While sometimes, as has been seen, these children are not explicitly Jewish, the films in which they appear betray a certain Jewish sensibility. Generally speaking, however, children are not considered on their own terms, most likely because they do not make films. “In depicting childhood,” Neil Sinyard notes, “the cinema has generally excluded, creatively speaking, the voice that could speak with first-​hand authority on the subject: namely, the child him or herself.”53 Consequently, where they do appear, Jewish children are part of the background, mainly present in order to carry the burden and concerns of their parents. Even when Jewish childhood is the subject of the film, such as in the rite-​of-​passage bar/​bat mitzvah movie, the Jewish child’s experience is typically subordinated to parental concerns and anxieties. This is what Lury describes as the “erasure of the individual child’s subjectivity” in which children act “as a screen for the project of adult emotions and fears (making the child ‘like’ the adult and somehow ‘other’).”54 Also noteworthy is that fact that, by the late 1960s, Jewish directors were at the forefront of transforming the image of the child from something almost sacred—​that is, innocent, vulnerable, wholesome, and untouchable—​to something that “could now be defiled and tortured any way the director saw fit—​and audiences responded with enthusiasm.”55 No doubt this was, in part, the result of a growing Holocaust consciousness, as well as the violence of the second half of the 20th century, continuing into the 21st. The anxieties of Jewish parents are projected onto the large screens not only concerning the fate of their children but also with regard to their own parenting. At the same time, one must also bring into consideration commercial factors: child-​centred films offer good financial returns, as demonstrated by Steven Spielberg, in particular, and also by the Harry Potter films (who has also been read as Jewish, though that is another story). Overall, there is still much work to be done on the topic of Jewish children and childhood in cinema (and television), especially outside of the Holocaust

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genre and in films in which Jewishness is implied but not explicit; it is hoped that this initial survey will help to kickstart the process.

Notes 1. Stuart Hanson, “Children on Film,” in Childhood Studies: A Reader in Perspectives of Childhood, ed. Jean Mills and Richard Mills (London: 1999), 146. 2. Neil Sinyard, Children in the Movies (London: 1992), 7. 3. Eric Goldman, “Thirteen Films that Capture the Jewish Coming of Age,” The Jewish Standard (30 January 2015). 4. Sinyard, Children in the Movies, 11. 5. “Keeping Up With The Steins,” The A.V. Club (Film), online at https://​film.avclub.com/​ keeping-​up-​with-​the-​steins-​1798201719 (accessed 26 February 2020). 6. Adam Nayman, The Coen Brothers:  This Book Really Ties the Films Together (New York: 2018), 247. 7. Woody Allen, quoted in Sinyard, Childhood in the Movies, 161. 8. See Nathan Abrams, “Jewish Cricket:  Black–​Jewish Relations in Wondrous Oblivion (2003),” Jewish Culture and History 20, no. 3 (2019), 234–​247. 9. Tatiana Prorokova, “The Holocaust in Film: Witnessing the Extermination through the Eyes of Children,” Holocaust Studies 24, no. 3 (2018), 377–​394. See also Jessica Gildersleeve and Beata Batorowicz, “‘He Is Telling Us Fairy Tales’:  Parental Anxiety and Wartime Childhood in Life is Beautiful, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas and Fairy Tales from Auschwitz,” Holocaust Studies 24, no. 1 (2018), 26–​44. 10. Vicky LeBeau, Childhood and Cinema (London: 2008), 138. 11. Yvonne Kozlovsky Golan, “‘Au revoir, les enfants’: The Jewish Child as a Microcosm of the Holocaust as Seen in World Cinema,” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 30, no. 1 (Fall 2011), 53–​75; 53. 12. Ibid., 53. 13. Sinyard, Children in the Movies, 35; Karen Lury, The Child in Film: Tears, Fears and Fairy Tales (London: 2010), 106. 14. Sinyard, Children in the Movies, 37. 15. Omer Bartov, The “Jew” in Cinema: From The Golem to Don’t Touch My Holocaust (Bloomington: 2005), 138. 16. Lury, The Child in Film, 107. 17. Aaron Kerner, Film and the Holocaust: New Perspectives on Dramas, Documentaries and Experimental Films (New York: 2011), 133. 18. Axel Bangert, “Changing Narratives and Images [of] the Holocaust: Tim Black Nelson’s film The Grey Zone (2001),” New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film 6, no. 1 (2008), 17–​32;  21. 19. Lury, The Child in Film, 107. 20. Douglas Brode, The Films of Steven Spielberg (New  York:  1995), 230–​231; Adrian Schober, “Introduction,” in idem and Debbie Olson, Children in the Films of Steven Spielberg (Lanham: 2016), 1–​17; 9. 21. Richard Schickel, Steven Spielberg:  A Retrospective, foreword by Steven Spielberg (New York: 2012), 230–​231; Schober, “Introduction,” 9; Golan, “ ‘Au revoir, les enfants,’ ” 60. 22. Schober, “Introduction,” 10. 23. Prorokova, “The Holocaust in Film,” 377–​394. 24. Kate Marrison and Nigel Morris, “Sophie’s Voice? Dark Intertexts of The BFG,” Jewish Film and New Media: An International Journal 7, no. 2 (Fall 2019), 119–​160; Steven Spielberg, quoted in Franciszek Palowski, Witness: The Making of Schindler’s List, trans. Anna and Robert G. Ware (London: 1999), 172. 25. Although Sue Lyon was aged 14 when she was cast in the film, and hence looks more mature than the nubile nymphet of Nabokov’s novel, as Kathy Merlock Jackson points out, “the

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message remains the same.” Kathy Merlock Jackson, Images of Children in American Film: A Sociocultural Analysis (Metuchen: 1986), 138. 26. See Nathan Abrams, “A Jewish American Monster: Stanley Kubrick, Anti-​Semitism and Lolita (1962),” Journal of American Studies 49, no. 3 (2014), 1–​16; idem, Stanley Kubrick: New York Jewish Intellectual (New Brunswick: 2018). 27. Nathan Abrams “‘A Double Set of Glasses’:  Stanley Kubrick and the Midrashic Mode of Interpretation,” in De-​Westernizing Film Studies, ed. Saër Maty Bâ and Will Higbee (London: 2012), 141–​151. 28. Geoffrey Cocks, The Wolf at the Door:  Stanley Kubrick, History and the Holocaust (New York: 2004). 29. Peter Krämer, “Spielberg and Kubrick,” in A Companion to Steven Spielberg, ed. Nigel Morris (Oxford: 2017), 195–​211; 196. 30. Linda Ruth Williams, “ ‘Who Am I, David?’: Motherhood in Spielberg’s Dramas of Family Dysfunction,” in ibid., 243–​257; 243. 31. Ibid., 245. 32. Richard Corliss, “Review of A.I.: Artificial Intelligence,” Time (25 June 2001), 60. 33. Andrew Yule, Steven Spielberg: Father of the Man (London: 1996), n.p. 34. Corliss, “Review of A.I.: Artificial Intelligence.” 35. Steven Spielberg, quoted in Wayne Maser, “The Long Voyage Home,” Harper’s Bazaar (February 1994), 139. 36. Schober, “Introduction,” 6. 37. Jackson, Images of Children in American Film, 137, 141. 38. See Joe McElhaney, “Urban Irrational: Rosemary’s Baby, Polanski, New York,” in The City That Never Sleeps: New York and the Filmic Imagination, ed. Murray Pomerance (New Brunswick: 2007), 201–​213; Maximilian Le Caen, “Into the Mouth of Madness: The Tenant,” in The Cinema of Roman Polanski:  Dark Spaces of the World, ed. John Orr and Elzbieta Ostrowska (London: 2003), 121–​132. 39. See Nathan Abrams, “The Banality of Evil:  Polanski, Kubrick, and the Reinvention of Horror,” in Religion in Contemporary European Cinema, ed. Costica Bradatan and Camil Ungereanu (New York: 2014), 145–​164. 40. Jackson, Images of Children in American Film, 143. 41. Allison Graham, ‘ “The Fallen Wonder of the World’: Brian De Palma’s Horror Films,” in American Horrors: Essays on the Modern American Horror Film, ed. Gregory A. Waller (Urbana: 1987), 129–​144; 133. 42. Jackson, Images of Children in American Film, 143. 43. Significantly, when seeking to cast the central character of Damien, casting agencies contacted Jewish schools. I am grateful to Rabbi Dr. Raphael Zarum for this information. 44. I am grateful to my Ph.D. student, Sean Alexander, for pointing this out to me. 45. Stephen Applebaum, “The Comfort of Horror (Films): We Talk to Ari Aster,” Jewish Chronicle (14 June 2018). 46. Ari Aster, quoted in ibid. 47. Aljean Harmetz, “Kubrick Films ‘The Shining’ in Secrecy in English Studio,” New York Times (6 November 1978). 48. Jon Spira, quoted in Stephen Applebaum, “Looking Behind the Star Wars Masks,” Jewish Chronicle (17 November 2016). 49. Aster, quoted in Applebaum, “The Comfort of Horror (Films).” 50. Harmetz, “Kubrick Films ‘The Shining’ in Secrecy in English Studio.” 51. Jackson, Images of Children in American Film, 141. 52. Ibid., 146. 53. Sinyard, Children in the Movies,  11–​12. 54. Lury, The Child in Film, 107. 55. Jackson, Images of Children in American Film, 148.

The Transformation of the Bar Mitzvah Ceremony, 1800–​2020 David Golinkin (SCHECHTER INSTITUTE OF JEWISH STUDIES)

In 1928–​1929, the Hebrew writer A.A. Kabak (1880–​1944) published a well-​ received trilogy titled Shlomo Molkho, whose eponymous character is based on the false messiah Solomon Molkho (ca. 1500–​1532) of Lisbon. The first volume offers an account of Solomon’s life as a child. At age five, his parents are killed by the Inquisition for practicing Judaism, whereupon he is placed in a monastery. Years later, the family’s faithful servant Ferdinand comes to the monastery; there, in secret, he gives the boy nightly lessons in Hebrew and Torah: “Thus Ferdinand prepared the boy for the day when he would become Bar Mitzvah. On that day, [he] would enter the sacred covenant of his people . . . The night before the big day, Ferdinand reviewed all the prayers and blessings of the Bar Mitzvah ceremony.” When the day arrives, Solomon is taken by a wealthy man to his palace. There they enter a pit leading to a large cellar, where Solomon finds a congregation of crypto-​Jews wrapped in tallitot. He is called up to the Torah: “Rise, Solomon, son of Meshulam Molkho!” Later, the prayer leader makes a short speech, which sounds like what a rabbi would say to a bar mitzvah boy today. It’s a very moving story, which is why Azriel Eisenberg included an English translation in his popular The Bar Mitzvah Treasury in 1952.1 There is only one problem—​such a story could never have happened, because Sephardic Jews did not begin to observe what we call a bar mitzvah ceremony until the 20th century.2 One of the challenges of studying any Jewish custom is that we tend to view it in an anachronistic fashion: we think that what we do today is what was always done. Therefore, in this essay we shall begin with the prehistory of the bar mitzvah ceremony followed by an overview of the four basic components of the bar mitzvah ceremony before the year 1800, as suggested by Michael Hilton,3 and then a description of six major changes that occurred in modern times. At the conclusion, we will list a series of other changes that have occurred in recent decades, all of which require further study.

David Golinkin, The Transformation of the Bar Mitzvah Ceremony, 1800–​2020 In: No Small Matter: Features of Jewish Childhood. Edited by: Anat Helman, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197577301.003.0012

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The Pre-​History of Bar Mitzvah Originally, the mishnaic tractate Avot had five chapters; the sixth, titled “Perek kinyan Torah,” was added later in order to provide six chapters for recitation and study in the interval between Passover and Shavuot.4 At the very end of the tractate Avot (5:21), R. Yehudah ben Teimah is purported to have said: “Five years old for Mishnah, ten years old for Bible, thirteen years old for mitzvot . . . .” This passage caused numerous rabbis and scholars over the course of many centuries to believe that the source for a boy becoming a bar mitzvah at age 13 is the Mishnah, which was edited in Eretz Israel some 1,800 years ago. Yet, in truth, this passage is a very late addition to the tractate. The rabbis quoted in Ketubot 50a are unaware of it; it appears after the standard “Yehi ratzon” ending of many tractates; and it’s missing from four of the most important manuscripts of Avot. Many medieval rabbis such as Maimonides (d. 1205), R.  Menahem Hameiri (d. ca. 1315), R.  Yitzhak Abarbanel (d. 1508), R.  Shlomo Ha’adeni (d. ca. 1624), and R.  Yom-​Tov Lipmann Heller (d. 1654)  did not have this passage in their copies of Avot or stressed that it was a late addition. Indeed, all modern Talmud scholars have reached the same conclusion.5 Furthermore, in a classic article published in 1990, Yitzhak Gilat provided conclusive evidence that this appendix to Avot could not possibly have been part of the Mishnah, since the statement “thirteen years old for mitzvot” is contradicted by numerous passages both in the Mishnah and elsewhere in Tannaitic literature.6 According to the Tannaim (ca. 70–​200 C.E.), certain mitzvot are required in infancy, others as soon as a minor (katan) is old enough to properly understand or perform what is required, others at age 12 (girls) or 13 (boys), and others at age 20. For example, “a minor who knows how to speak, his father teaches him Torah, keriyat Shema, and Hebrew” (Tosefta Hagigah 1:2, ed. Lieberman, p. 375). “A minor who no longer needs his mother is obligated to dwell in a sukkah”; Shammai the Elder required his newborn grandson to dwell in the sukkah (Mishnah Sukkah 2:8). A young boy who can ride on his father’s shoulders or hold his hand is obligated to ascend to Jerusalem with his father on the three pilgrim festivals (Mishnah Hagigah 1:1). Furthermore, two of the standard features of today’s bar mitzvah ceremony are that a bar mitzvah boy begins to put on tefillin at or shortly before age 13 and that he has his first aliyah to the Torah right after turning 13. These later customs are directly contradicted by well-​known passages in Tannaitic literature: “a minor . . . who knows how to take care of his tefillin, his father buys him tefillin” (Tosefta Hagigah 1:2); “A minor reads from the Torah [in public] and translates [the Torah reading] into Aramaic [in public]” (Mishnah Megillah 4:6); “Our Sages have taught: All go up for the count of seven [who read from the Torah], even a minor . . .” (Megillah 23a). In other words, not only does “13 years old for mitzvot” contradict numerous passages in Tannaitic literature, but two of the standard features of the bar mitzvah ceremony are in direct opposition to Tannaitic halakhah. Throughout the centuries, various rabbis and scholars have adduced sources to “prove” that age 13 is the age of mitzvot and that our modern bar mitzvah ceremony is of ancient lineage. Here are two well-​known examples.

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According to some editions of the tractate Soferim, there was “a good custom in Jerusalem [for parents] to teach their minor sons and daughters [to fast on Yom Kippur], eleven years old [to fast part of the day], twelve to fast the entire day” (Soferim 18:7, ed. Higger, pp. 318–​319). Furthermore, some editions of this tractate even have the reading “thirteen” instead of “twelve.” Saul Lieberman, however, has pointed out that six manuscripts of Soferim have the reading “one year old [to fast part of the day], two years old to fast the entire day.” This agrees with the approach of Shammai the Elder that even minors are required to fast on Yom Kippur.7 Thus, this source actually contradicts the claim that boys should start fasting at age 13. Similarly, Rabbeinu Asher (Germany and Spain, 1250–​1327) states in a responsum that the age of 13 for bar mitzvah is “halakhah leMoshe misinai,” “a law from Moses at Sinai.” This assertion has no ancient basis.8 Other “proofs” for the age of 13 are equally problematic.9

Four Standard Characteristics of the Bar Mitzvah Ceremony prior to 1800 In order to understand how the bar mitzvah ceremony changed after the year 1800, we must first delineate what existed beforehand. As Michael Hilton has pointed out, four standard features of the bar mitzvah ceremony developed over the course of the centuries.10 These are presented below in chronological order.

Barukh sheptarani mei’onsho shel zeh The blessing “Barukh sheptarani mei’onsho shel zeh” (Blessed is He who has absolved me of the punishment of this one”) is based on a passage in Bereishit Rabbah (63:10, ed. Theodor-​Albeck, pp.  692–​693).11 R.  Elazar b”r Shimon learns from Genesis 25:27 that “a person should take responsibility for his son for 13 years; from that point forth, he should say: ‘Blessed is He who has absolved me from the punishment of this one.’ ” Although it is not clear that R. Elazar b”r Shimon intended this as a legal ruling, medieval rabbis thought that he did. The following rabbis ruled that a father should recite this blessing when his son reaches the age of 13: R. Yehudah ben Barukh (Germany, ca. 1075); R. Yehudah ben Yakar (Provence, France, Barcelona, ca. 1175); R. Yitzhak ben Abba Mari (Provence, d. 1193); “The rulings of the rabbis of France” (ca. 1250); Rabbeinu Avigdor Tzarfati (France, ca. 1260); R.  Shimshon b”r Tzadok (Germany, ca. 1300); R.  Aharon Hakohen of Lunel (Provence, ca. 1300); R. Ya’akov Moellin (Maharil) (Germany, d. 1427); glosses on the Custom Book of R. Isaac Tyrnau (Germany, ca. 1425ff.); R.  Yisrael Isserlein (Austria, d.  1460); R.  Moshe Isserles (Cracow, d.  1572); the Christian Hebraist Johannes Buxtorf (Basel, 1603); R. Yosef Yuzpa Hahn (Frankfurt, d. 1637); and R. Yosef Yuzpa Kashman Segal (Frankfurt, d. 1759).12 The sources above differ as to the wording of the blessing and as to whether one should recite just “Barukh” or the normal formula “Barukh atah hashem eloheinu

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melekh ha’olam.” Some of them say that the blessing should be recited after the son reaches the age of 13 years without saying where or when this should be done. But some of the early sources say that the blessing was recited “the first time that his son stood up in public to read from the Torah.” Rabbeinu Avigdor says that a father must recite the blessing when the son is thirteen years and one day old, when he stands up to read from the Torah, and that the father needs to place his hands on the son’s head while reciting the blessing. The Maharil and the glosses to R. Isaac Tyrnau talk about a boy who is “bar mitzvah,” the boy reading Torah for the first time, and the blessing barukh sheptarani. It is clear from the above sources that this blessing was widely used in Germany, France, and Provence from ca. 1075 until it was codified by R. Moshe Isserles (Rema) in the Shulhan Arukh ca. 1570, after which it became a standard custom of German and East European Jews.13

The Aliyah to the Torah As mentioned above, according to the mishnah in Megillah and other talmudic sources, a minor may read from the Torah in public. Indeed, José Faur published an exhaustive study in 1985 in which he showed that Yemenite and some other Jewish ethnic groups continue to call children up to read from the Torah and to recite the Torah blessings.14 In Germany and Eastern Europe, the halakhic authorities slowly but surely did away with this practice and ruled that only a boy aged 13 years and one day may read from the Torah and recite the blessings. Ya’akov Gartner uses this fact to explain some of the sources mentioned above regarding the blessing of barukh sheptarani: “Because of this new practice of not calling a minor up to the Torah, the Ashkenazic custom (minhag) found in the first aliyah of the young man who reached the age of 13 an appropriate opportunity to recite a blessing whose purpose was to signify that the young man is now a bar mitzvah.”15 In other words, Ashkenazic Jews in Germany and France decided to connect the father’s blessing for a child who just turned 13 to the child’s first aliyah after turning 13. The 13th-​century description of Rabbeinu Avigdor already sounds like a dual ceremony, while the 15th-​century descriptions of the Maharil and the glosses on R. Isaac Tyrnau include both items—​the barukh sheptarani blessing and the aliyah—​along with the term “bar mitzvah.” As time went on, this first aliyah occurred on Shabbat morning, with the boy leading the opening formula (zimun) for the Grace after Meals and serving as the prayer leader (sheliaḥ tzibur) the night before or on Shabbat morning. This was the custom of R. Yisrael Isserlein (Austria, d. 1460) and R. Yosef Yuzpa Hahn (Frankfurt, d. 1637).16 R. Yuzpa Shamesh (Worms, 1604–​1678) has left us a full-​blown description of a “classic” Ashkenazic bar mitzvah: A thirteen-​year-​old young man is called bar mitzvah. . . . On the Shabbat right after he is thirteen and one day, most of the bar mitzvah boys are the ḥazanim during the reading, to read the weekly portion in public [= as Torah readers]. . . and the young man is obligated

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to be called to the Torah [= to recite the blessing]. And when the ḥazan . . . makes a “mi sheberakh” [prayer] for the young man, his father goes up to the [Torah reading] tower, and places his hands on the head of the young man, his son, the bar mitzvah, and says: “Barukh atah hashem eloheinu melekh ha’olam shepotrani me’onsho shel zeh”  . . .  silently, and then the father returns to his place in the synagogue. And there are some bar mitzvah young men who have a good voice and are proficient to pray in public, and they pray at the beginning of Shabbat “Barekhu” and the Shabbat morning service [shaḥarit] and the additional service [musaf], either all of them, or whichever services they can . . . 17

As time went on, various Jewish communities enacted rabbinic ordinances (takanot) regarding whether bar mitzvah boys could read from the Torah and whether the aliyah of a bar mitzvah boy takes precedence over that of a bridegroom or the father of a newborn child.18

A Festive Meal There are three early sources that might indicate an obligatory festive meal (se’udat mitzvah) in honor of a bar mitzvah. However, each of these sources is problematic: • In 1981, Arnaldo Momigliano published an English translation of a Latin autobiography by Judah ben David the Levite, who was born in Cologne ca. 1107 and converted to Christianity at the age of 20, whereupon he took the name Hermannus. At the beginning of his autobiography, Hermannus recounts a dream he had at age 13 in which the “Roman Emperor Henry V” gives him gifts and hosts him at a banquet at his palace. Momigliano suggests that this could be the earliest evidence for a bar mitzvah party in Germany, as it includes a banquet, presents, and maybe even a speech. However, as Hilton points out, the dream was designed simply to give a Christological message.19 Furthermore, the first solid description of a bar mitzvah party in Germany is from ca. 1550 (see below). Therefore, Momigliano’s theory is anachronistic, explaining a dream from ca. 1120 with a custom first described in 1550. • Rabbeinu Avigdor mentioned above (France, ca. 1260)  makes an enigmatic statement in his commentary to Genesis 21:8: “to make a party for his son on the day when he is thirteen years old.” However, it is not at all clear what he is talking about, since this statement appears as a comment on the “great feast” (mishteh gadol) made by Abraham when his son Isaac was weaned. Therefore, this text requires further study.20 • The “Zohar Ḥadash” says that “from 13 years old and upwards, it is incumbent upon tzadikim to be joyous of heart as on the day of entering the ḥupah.”21 It also relates that R. Shimon bar Yohai made “a great feast” for his son R. Elazar when he turned 13.22 Indeed, these two passages have been discussed by many modern scholars.23 The problem is that, according to Gershom Scholem and most scholars, “the Zohar” was written by Moses de Leon, who died in Spain in 1305. But how could the Zohar describe a special se’udah for a bar mitzvah if there is no evidence that the bar mitzvah existed in Spain at all, or even among the descendants

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of Spanish Jews, until the 20th century! Yisrael Ta-​Shema asserts twice that these two passages reflect German-​French influence on the Zohar in the 13th century, and his theory was repeated by Ivan Marcus and Michael Hilton.24 I do not find this theory convincing. In order for the Zohar to reflect a German-​French custom of having a bar mitzvah feast, we would need evidence of such a feast in the 13th century, yet the only evidence given by Ta-​Shema is the one enigmatic sentence by Rabbeinu Avigdor cited above. Therefore, I would like to suggest a different explanation: “Zohar Ḥadash” was first printed in Salonika in 1597 on the basis of various additional manuscripts of Zoharic material. By 1597, the idea of a se’udat mitzvah at a bar mitzvah was probably already well-​known (see below). Therefore, it could be that these two passages reflect the late 16th century, not the late 13th century in Spain.25 Five major texts led to the great popularity of the se’udat mitzvah for a bar mitzvah, beginning in the 16th century. The first is the aforementioned Zohar Ḥadash. The second is the Yam shel Shlomo, written by R. Shlomo Luria in Poland in 1546 (he died in 1574) and first published in Prague in 1616–​1618. In his comments on Bava Kama 7:37, he notes that the Ashkenazim—​that is, the Jews of Germany as opposed to Poland—​make a se’udat bar mitzvah. He adds, however, that he is not sure this is a good custom since, while the child might have reached the age of 13, he might not yet be at the age of puberty as defined in the Talmud.26 The third text is the Yalkut ḥadash by R. Yisrael ben Binyamin of Belsitz, which was first published in Lublin in 1648 and subsequently reprinted many times. In the Likutim section (no. 29), he says that it is an obligation (ḥovah) to make a se’udah for a bar mitzvah, just as on the day one enters the ḥupah, and he refers to the Zohar Ḥadash. In the Magen Avraham commentary on the Shulhan Arukh (Oraḥ ḥayim 225, subparagraph 4), R. Avraham Gombiner (Poland, d. 1683) quotes the Yalkut ḥadash verbatim as well as the Yam shel Shlomo. Finally, R. Tzvi Hirsch Kaidanover (Vilna and Frankfurt, d. 1712) quotes the Zohar Ḥadash in his Kav hayashar, published in Frankfurt together with a Yiddish translation in 1705. He adds that it is a “great obligation [ḥiyuv gadol] to make a se’udat mitzvah and a joyous occasion [simḥah]” on the day of a bar mitzvah.27 Since four of these works were bestsellers, especially the Magen Avraham and Kav hayashar (the latter was printed at least 84 times, frequently with the Yiddish translation), they helped spread the importance of the se’udat mitzvah at a bar mitzvah. Indeed, the popularity and excesses of this se’udat mitzvah in Poland, Germany, Lithuania, and Italy can be traced in the “sumptuary laws” designed to limit lavish expenditure, which are found in the takanot of 21 different communities between 1595 and 1793.28

The Bar Mitzvah Sermon The first to mention the bar mitzvah sermon (derashah) was R. Shlomo Luria mentioned above. Indeed, as Hilton suggests, he may be the source for the derashah.29

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Following an involved discussion as to whether it is legitimate to hold a se’udat mitzvah for a 13-​year-​old boy who might not have reached puberty, he comes up with a solution: “And in any case it appears that where they teach the young man lidrosh [= to give a derashah] on the meal related to the event [of bar mitzvah] it is no worse than the dedication of a new house” [which he had proved, in a previous passage, to be an occasion marked by a se’udat mitzvah]. In other words, if the boy gives a derashah, then the feast will be considered a se’udat mitzvah even if he has not reached puberty. R. Avraham Gombiner, in his Magen Avraham, summarized this ruling of R. Luria. We know from Isaac Rifkind’s bibliography of 229 printed bar mitzvah derashot or books of derashot from 1585 until 1940 that such sermons were very popular.30 The general style, even to a certain extent until the Holocaust, was pilpul, a very learned and complicated disquisition on Talmud, halakhah, and the Shaagat Aryeh by R. Aryeh Leib Ginzburg (d. 1785). Indeed, the involved allegorical derashah on Genesis 14 published by R.  Ephraim Lunshitz in Lublin in 1590 still managed to arouse the wrath of R. Leopold Löw in 1875.31 This type of derashah, often given at home by the bar mitzvah boy, was captured in a beautiful painting created by Moritz Oppenheim in 1869.32

Six Major Changes in the Bar Mitzvah Ceremony after the Year 1800 Now that we have seen the four basic components of the bar mitzvah ceremony in Germany, France, Eastern Europe, and Italy, we are in a position to see what changed after the year 1800, and why.

From Bar Mitzvah to Confirmation Back to Bar/​Bat Mitzvah In general, over the course of 200 years—​from 1817 until the present—​the Reform movement went from bar mitzvah to Confirmation and back to bar/​bat mitzvah.33 In the Conservative movement, Confirmation was practiced alongside bar mitzvah, probably from the early 1900s until the 1980s. In Orthodox synagogues, Confirmation was adopted as early as the 1820s, but bar mitzvah remained the dominant custom. The Reform movement adopted this custom from the Lutheran Protestant church. In addition to the general tendency in early Reform to imitate Christian practices, the leaders of Reform wanted an alternative to bar mitzvah because they did not believe in the binding nature of mitzvot. They wanted the children to confirm a religious creed as opposed to committing to observe mitzvot. They also wanted to develop a ceremony for girls, and bat mitzvah had not yet been invented.34 The Confirmation ceremony underwent a long development. The first Jewish Confirmation was held at the new Jewish Free School in Dessau in 1803. At the beginning, it took place in Jewish Free Schools for boys or in private homes. Leopold Zunz—​one of the most important modern Jewish scholars—​was confirmed in this fashion in 1807, at the Jewish Free School in Wolfenbuttel, when he was 13 years old. Originally, the ceremony was done at the age of 13 in lieu of bar mitzvah, and it

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took place at the end of the school year as a form of graduation. The purpose was to initiate boys and, later, girls as a group into the Jewish faith. It consisted of learning a Jewish catechism, being tested on the catechism, and a group ceremony. Reform leaders began to confirm girls in Berlin in 1817 and in Hamburg in 1818.35 By 1822, the ceremony was moved to Reform temples. Beginning in 1811, the preferred time for Confirmation was Shavuot, “the time of the giving of the Torah.” In a typical ceremony, the synagogue was decorated with flowers. Sometimes the children marched into the sanctuary carrying flowers and offered those flowers as bikurim (first fruits). The boys wore black and the girls wore white. The ceremony consisted of a brief oral examination, a declaration of faith by the children, a reading of the Ten Commandments from a Torah scroll, the rabbi blessing the children with the Priestly Blessing, impressive music and choral singing, a sermon by the rabbi, and a speech by one of the children.36 The ceremony spread from Germany to Copenhagen in 1817; to Charleston, South Carolina in 1825; to France in 1841, where it was called initiation religieuse; to St. Thomas (then part of Denmark) in 1843; to Italy in 1844, where it was modeled on the Catholic Confirmation; and to New York in 1846. R. Ya’akov Ettlinger, a leading Orthodox rabbi, was originally opposed to Confirmation in 1830. He later changed his mind and gave the central sermon at the Confirmation held at the Great Synagogue of Altona in 1866, since the ceremony was now enforced by Prussia, which had recently annexed the province of Schleswig-​Holstein.37 Confirmation was adopted by Orthodox synagogues in Italy, England, and France, beginning in 1844.38 According to a survey done in 1932, 74 percent of Conservative synagogues in the United States held Confirmation ceremonies on or near Shavuot. By 1948, “virtually all” Conservative congregations held Confirmation ceremonies on the first day of Shavuot or very close to it.39 In some Conservative synagogues, it was called Consecration, but that name never really caught on.40 In some Orthodox synagogues, Confirmation for girls was called Consecration or Bat ḥayil.41 As time went on, the age was moved up to 14–​15 and then to 16–​17. This was done because older children could learn and understand more, and also as a way of keeping children in Jewish schools as long as possible, since most children stopped their Jewish schooling after bar mitzvah.42 In 1890, Rabbi David Philipson fought to abolish bar mitzvah and to adopt Confirmation in all Reform temples in the United States, as did Rabbi Kaufmann Kohler in 1913.43 The Central Conference of American Rabbis (CCAR) manual of 1928 and 1959 devoted 19 pages to Confirmation and one page to bar/​bat mitzvah. In 1941, Isaac Landman could still write in The Universal Jewish Encyclopedia: The Confirmation ceremony, which generally attracts congregations that overflow the synagogues, is one of the chief contributions that Reform Judaism has made to the evolution of Jewish education and Jewish religious ceremonies in the American synagogue.44

However, bar mitzvah began to return to Reform Judaism in the United States by popular demand. Between the end of the First World War and 1950, many Reform temples reintroduced the bar mitzvah ceremony, and Reform rabbis began to debate the pros and cons of the issue.45 Hilton relates that when he was confirmed in England in

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1966, there were no bar mitzvah ceremonies in the British Liberal movement, but by 1982, every Liberal synagogue had reintroduced bar mitzvah along with the new bat mitzvah option.46 By 1979, the Reform movement’s Gates of Mitzvah: A Guide to the Jewish Life Cycle devoted three paragraphs to bar/​bat mitzvah, followed by two paragraphs about Confirmation. In that same year, Rabbi Walter Jacob and the CCAR Responsa Committee wrote a responsum in favor of bar/​bat mitzvah, while continuing to endorse Confirmation. The responsum begins as follows: “Bar and Bat Mitzvah are, virtually, universally observed by Reform Jews.”47 By 2001, Rabbi Mark Washofsky’s Jewish Living devoted four pages to bar/​bat mitzvah and less than one page to Confirmation. Finally, in 2015, the new CCAR rabbi’s manual devoted eight pages to bar/​bat mitzvah and one page to Confirmation. Where Confirmation has survived, it is sometimes called kabalat torah, receiving the Torah, based on an article by Abraham Joshua Heschel, but it appears that this ceremony will eventually disappear altogether.48 Why did the pendulum swing from Confirmation back to bar mitzvah? I believe there are four reasons: • The Reform movement started moving back toward the observance of mitzvot with the Columbus Platform of 1937 and the San Francisco Platform of 1976, so that bar mitzvah now made sense. • As we shall see, a new celebration—​that of bat mitzvah—​developed in the United States, starting in 1922, and spread quickly. By the 1970s–​1980s, bat mitzvah girls in the Conservative and Reform movements could have the exact same ceremony as bar mitzvah boys, including having an aliyah, reading the Torah and haftarah, leading the services, and giving a derashah. Thus, there was no longer a need for an egalitarian Confirmation service.49 • Modern, Western Jews preferred the individual bar/​bat mitzvah ceremony to the group Confirmation.50 • Finally, as we shall see, the bar/​bat mitzvah celebration often included endless presents, elaborate parties, and trips abroad. This probably led many children to tell their parents that they too wanted a bar/​bat mitzvah.

Bat Mitzvah There is a vast amount of literature on the topic of bat mitzvah.51 I have chosen here to focus on four specific aspects: the pre-​history of the bat mitzvah ceremony before 1922; the “first” bat mitzvah ceremony; the rapid spread of the ceremony, first in the Conservative movement and then in the Reform movement; and finally, how bat mitzvah was adopted by Orthodox Jews beginning in 1944, despite opposition from some very influential halakhic authorities (poskim). In Bar Mitzvah: A History, Hilton devotes all of Chapter 4 to bat mitzvah, yet almost all of the ceremonies he describes, beginning in 1817, are group Confirmation

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ceremonies for girls, usually on Shavuot, as described above, rather than individual bat mitzvah ceremonies in which the girl has a se’udah or reads from the Torah or haftarah on a Shabbat in close proximity to her 12th birthday.52 As far as I know, there are only five sources that discuss something akin to bat mitzvah before 1922, but most of them do not hold up to careful scrutiny. As I have explained elsewhere, R. Avraham Musafiyah (Split?, mid-​19th century?), wrote in an unpublished responsum: He who makes a se’udah on the day that his daughter reaches the age of mitzvot, namely, 12 years and one day, it seems to me that it is a se’udat mitzvah as for a boy at 13 years and one day, for what is the difference? And this is a correct custom, and so do they make a se’udat mitzvah and a day of joy in the cities of France and other towns for a boy and also for a girl, and the practical halakhic implication is that if you are invited, you should go.53

Since there is no evidence of a bat mitzvah ceremony in France in the mid-​19th century, whereas there is ample evidence of Confirmation ceremonies for boys and girls beginning in 1841, as shown above, I now believe that R. Musafiyah was referring to a Confirmation party rather than a bat mitzvah party. A second source from the 19th century—​much more well-​known and widely quoted—​is that of R. Yosef Hayim of Baghdad (1833–​1909) in his very influential Ben ish Ḥai. This book of halakhic sermons was first printed in 1899–​1904, but the author explains in his introduction that it contains sermons from 1870 onwards. In his derashah on parashat Reeh, he states that a boy is obligated to perform mitzvot at age 13 plus one day, at which time his father should recite barukh sheptarani. The father should try to make a se’udat mitzvah for his friends and family. The most important of the invitees should put their hands on the boy’s head and bless him with the Priestly Blessing (birkat kohanim), and the boy or the father or a scholar should give a derashah. The boy should wear a new garment and recite the sheheḥeyanu blessing, and if he cannot afford new clothing, then he should recite the blessing on a new fruit. And also a girl, on the day she is obligated to observe mitzvot [namely, 12 years and one day], even though they are not accustomed to make her a se’udah, even so, she should be happy that day and wear Shabbat clothes, and if she can afford it, she should wear a new garment and recite sheheḥeyanu and also intend [the blessing] to include her entry into the yoke of commandments.54

It should be stressed that R. Yosef Hayim is not reporting about an existing custom; he is inventing a new custom, which includes joy, Shabbat clothing, and reciting sheheḥeyanu on a new garment. In 1893, R. Meir Friedmann (Ish Shalom, 1831–​1908), a leading midrash scholar of the 19th century and one of Solomon Schechter’s teachers, wrote a responsum in German on “Participation of Women in Worship.” After discussing the halakhic sources on women singing and on aliyot for women, he expresses his opposition to Confirmation for girls. He writes: “Wouldn’t it be better to call our girls as bar mitzvah [sic] to the Torah exactly like the boys?... It goes without saying that one must erect a covered staircase directly from the women’s gallery to the bimah, so that those called

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up can ascend and descend without being seen.”55 I am not aware of anyone actually trying to implement this specific suggestion, but within a few decades, there were bat mitzvah girls in the United States having aliyot on the Shabbat of their bat mitzvah. In 1902, Dr. Yehezkel Caro, the Reform rabbi in Lvov (Lemberg), held some sort of celebration for girls at his temple—​an innovation that was adamantly opposed by the local Zionists. Dov Sadan, who published a Hebrew article about this episode based on an account that appeared in the Russian-​language Jewish periodical Voskhod, called it a “Bat Mitzvah.” However, Hizky Shoham points out that the original Russian text uses the word “Confirmation.”56 The earliest bat mitzvah in which a girl actually read from the Torah might have been that of Ida Blum (born 1908) in Calumet, Michigan ca. 1920. She recalled later in life being tutored by her father and reading a section from the Torah scroll at her Bat Mitzvah.57 On March 18, 1922, Judith Kaplan, the eldest daughter of Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan (1881–​1983), had what is often referred to as the first bat mitzvah. There are conflicting accounts as to what exactly transpired. Judith was 12 and a half at the time. Although people were invited in advance, the actual ceremony was only improvised on Friday night. On Shabbat morning, after the regular Torah and haftarah reading, Judith, who was sitting in the men’s section with her father, stood up below the bimah after the lifting of the Torah, recited the blessing before the Torah reading, read part of the portion of Kedoshim (Leviticus 19–​20) from a printed Bible (ḥumash), and then recited the blessing after the Torah reading.58 Purists argue that, technically, this was not a bat mitzvah ceremony since Judith did not read from a Torah scroll and did not read the actual weekly portion of that Shabbat. I believe they are missing the point. Other than the little-​documented example of Ida Blum, this might have been the first time that an individual girl aged 12+ stood before a congregation and read publicly from a ḥumash with the Torah blessings. In any case, even if the ceremony was not technically a bat mitzvah ceremony, it became an important precedent, given that Mordecai Kaplan was both a leading intellectual and a professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary who was regarded as a role model by many rabbinical students. In 1933, Rabbi Kaplan complained in his diary that there had not been “a single Bas Mizvah” at his synagogue for two years, until the one that had taken place that morning.59 Yet what began as a trickle soon became a mighty stream within the Conservative movement, which quickly spread to the Reform and Orthodox movements. At the Rabbinical Assembly convention held in 1932, Rabbi Morris Silverman reported on a “Survey of Ritual” that he had conducted among 110 Conservative rabbis: In regard to the question of the Bas Mitzvah ceremony, the ceremony should have been explained [in the survey] in view of the fact that some know nothing of its existence and had confused it with the Confirmation ceremony. The Bas Mitzvah is an individual ceremony for the girl and corresponds to the Bar Mitzvah ceremony of the boy. After a year of training and study of Hebrew, the girl, upon reaching the age of 12 or 13, is called up to the pulpit after the Haftara, reads in Hebrew and English the prayer “Make pleasant we therefore beseech Thee, etc.,” then reads a portion of the Bible in Hebrew and English, which

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in some congregations is followed by a brief original address which the Bas Mitzvah has written herself. Then she is welcomed by the Rabbi. In some cases, a certificate is given the Bas Mitzvah or the Bas Mitzvah signs a pledge in advance. The benediction by the Rabbi concludes the ceremony. Prof. Kaplan has originated this ceremony and it is now followed in 6 congregations according to the replies. Three plan to introduce it in the near future, and 2 others intend to use it at the Friday Night Services.60

This is a very important report. On the one hand, we learn that ten years after the first bat mitzvah ceremony, most Conservative rabbis did not yet know what it was and only 6 out of 110 rabbis who filled out the survey (5 percent) conducted a bat mitzvah ceremony, as opposed to 74 percent who did Confirmation.61 On the other hand, three more planned to introduce it on Shabbat morning and two on Friday night. The report also supplies a number of important details regarding the bat mitzvah ceremony in the 1930s. By the time of Rabbi Morris Goodblatt’s “Survey of Ritual” in 1948, more than 33 percent of Conservative synagogues had a bat mitzvah ceremony, and according to Marshall Sklare in his classic work Conservative Judaism (1955), 51 percent of synagogues had instituted the ritual, even though, usually, only a small group of families in those synagogues availed themselves of the ceremony.62 By 1962, when Rabbi Aaron Blumenthal published a detailed survey based on 264 Conservative synagogues, 85  percent conducted individual bat mitzvah ceremonies, 7 percent held group bat mitzvah ceremonies, 4.5 percent held both, and 3.5 percent held none. Of the individual ceremonies, 66 percent were held on Friday nights, 11 percent on Shabbat mornings, 13 percent on both Friday night and Shabbat mornings, and the rest on Sunday evening, weekday afternoon (minḥah) services, or Festivals.63 By 1995, it appears that all Conservative synagogues held Shabbat morning bat mitzvah ceremonies.64 The ceremony itself was also transformed over the course of time. As hinted in Rabbi Silverman’s report, in many Conservative synagogues the bat mitzvah girl read the haftarah on Friday night. This was done because women and girls did not have aliyot in Conservative synagogues until the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards issued a ruling allowing the practice in 1955. It is worth stressing that the 1955 responsum by Rabbi Aaron Blumenthal allowed aliyot for all women, whereas the responsum by Rabbi Sanders Tofield allowed aliyot only for bat mitzvah girls. When one reads the discussion at the Rabbinical Assembly convention that year, one gets the distinct impression that the main impetus for writing these responsa was to allow bat mitzvah girls to have aliyot and read from the Torah on Shabbat morning.65 The transformation of the ceremony in Conservative synagogues is epitomized by North Suburban Synagogue Beth El in Highland Park, Illinois, which was the basis of Marshall Sklare’s Lakeville Studies done in the 1950s. The synagogue was founded in 1948, and on Friday evening, October 20, 1950, Beverly Joyce Rubinstein celebrated the first “Bas Mitzvah.” In 1952, Rabbi Philip Lipis formed the first bat mitzvah class of three girls, and in 1954 he founded a Bat Mitzvah Club to provide activities similar to the boys’ Tephilin Club. In January 1974, Rabbi Samuel Dresner eliminated the Friday night bat mitzvah, thereafter to be celebrated on Shabbat morning.66

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As shown above in the section on Confirmation, the bat mitzvah ceremony moved from the Conservative movement to the Reform movement and gradually pushed aside the Confirmation ceremony. More surprisingly, the bat mitzvah ceremony was also slowly but surely adopted by Orthodox rabbis and synagogues, though it took different forms due to halakhic restraints and opposition. Hilton relates that Rabbi Jerome Tov Feinstein instituted the Friday night bat mitzvah ceremony at Anshe Emes in Brooklyn in 1944. It consisted of the girl lighting candles and answering questions about what she had learned.67 One of the best ways of tracing the development of a halakhic issue in the Orthodox world is to follow the trail of responsa written on the subject. Many of these responsa have been summarized in various articles.68 The responsa can be divided into three categories: One group of poskim, mostly Ashkenazic, opposed any form of bat mitzvah party. In a responsum addressed to the Rabbinic Association of London in 1927, R. Aharon Walkin expressed fierce opposition to Confirmation ceremonies for girls as a transgression of the commandment “not to go in the ways of the Gentiles” (Leviticus 18:3); because it’s a Reform innovation; and because it’s forbidden to do anything new. In 1960, R. Moshe Stern of Brooklyn maintained that there is no “bat mitzvah” celebration since there is no change in the girl’s pattern of observance. He then opposed the custom for the same three reasons as R. Walkin. In 1988, R. Eliezer Waldenberg of Jerusalem opposed a bat mitzvah party at a hall, or even as a public party at home, since it could lead to licentiousness. Furthermore, he had never heard of anyone “among the camp of those who fear God’s word” (bein maḥaneh haḥaredim lidvar hashem) who did this or even suggested the practice. R. Moshe Malka, one of the few Sephardic rabbis to oppose bat mitzvah, argued in 1980 that it was an imitation of Reform and Conservative Jews, and had the scent of Catholicism. The latter comment probably indicates that he confused bat mitzvah with Confirmation. The next two rabbis appear to be opposed to any bat mitzvah party, but, in fact, allowed it. In 1956, R. Moshe Feinstein forbade any bat mitzvah celebration in a synagogue, even at night, but allowed a “simḥah” at home; this would not be a se’udat mitzvah, but merely a birthday party. He termed the bat mitzvah ceremony in the synagogue an optional activity and “mere foolishness” (hevel be’alma), since it originated with Reform and Conservative Jews. In a later responsum, he explained that one does not make a se’udah for a girl since there is no difference in her actions before and after age 12. Yet, in a third responsum from 1959, he relented quite a bit and allowed the bat mitzvah girl to say a few words at the kiddush in the synagogue after the service, but not on the bimah. In 1958, R. Meshulam Rath of Bnai Berak wrote a responsum to Dr. Sh. Z. Kahana, Director General of the Ministry of Religion, regarding a plan for bat mitzvah celebrations. He ruled that the father cannot say the blessing barukh sheptarani since he is not required by the Talmud to educate his daughter. Even so, he ruled that the day could be celebrated at home or in the school for girls where the daughter studies, together with relatives and friends, and that the teacher, male or female, could give a lecture to explain the obligations of a Jewish girl who has reached the age of mitzvot. As for the more lenient camp, the main Ashkenazic rabbi to defend the bat mitzvah party was R. Yechiel Ya’akov Weinberg in 1963. He asserted that the bat mitzvah was

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not a Gentile practice. As for its being a new custom, he argued that, today, when girls receive a secular education, both logic and pedagogy almost require us to celebrate a girl’s reaching the age of mitzvot, as discrimination was an insult to the girls. He, agreed, however, with R. Feinstein that the celebration should take place at home or in the hall next to the sanctuary. Similarly, R. Ephraim Greenblatt permitted a party at home in 1966, while in 1973, R. Hanokh Zundel Grossberg allowed a small family party at home, accompanied by words of Torah. A series of well-​known Sephardic poskim ruled, in the footsteps of R. Avraham Musafiyah and R. Yosef Hayim of Baghdad quoted above, in favor of a bat mitzvah celebration at home, which included the girl wearing a new dress and reciting sheheḥeyanu over both the dress and the occasion. These poskim included R. Ovadia Hadaya in 1955, R.  Yitzhak Nissim in 1964, R.  Amram Aburbiya in 1965, and R. Hayim David Halevi in 1976. R. Ovadia Yosef ruled in 1976 and 1978 that the bat mitzvah party was a good custom, and that it was appropriate that divrei torah and songs of praise to God be recited there. He did not restrict the party to a private home. In addition, R. Aburbiya ruled that it’s worthwhile for the father to recite the barukh sheptarani blessing, while R. Yosef ruled that there is no apprehension (ḥashash) for a father to do so. Thus, many Orthodox rabbis ruled from 1956–​1978 that a bat mitzvah party may be held at home, along with words of Torah. Some allowed the father to recite barukh sheptarani and some even allowed marking the occasion at a kiddush in the synagogue building. In the 1980s, Orthodox rabbis and laypeople became more liberal in their practices. In a liberal Orthodox synagogue in Montreal ca. 1987, the rabbi called the ceremony bat ḥokhmah (a daughter of wisdom) instead of bat mitzvah. The ceremony could be held on Shabbat morning, Friday night, Saturday evening, or Sunday. If held on Shabbat morning, it took place after the service ended; the men and women sat together in the synagogue in order to indicate that it was after the service. The girl stood on the bimah and gave a devar torah she had prepared, which was not related to the weekly portion.69 In other words, everything was done to indicate that this was not like a regular bar mitzvah. Beginning in the 1970s, some Orthodox women began to hold separate “Women’s Tefillot” (prayer services) that included reading the Torah and haftarah. This enabled girls to have a bat mitzvah in which they read the Torah and haftarah portions and gave a devar torah. There are detailed descriptions of such bat mitzvah ceremonies as early as 1981.70 In addition, Modern Orthodox women and rabbis developed other alternatives, such as the bat mitzvah girl doing a siyum of a tractate of Mishnah or Talmud, or reading the Book of Esther from a scroll on Purim or the Song of Songs on Pesach.71 Notwithstanding, the Orthodox bat mitzvah ceremony was frequently accompanied by halakhic tension, as the family struggled with issues pertaining to tradition versus change.72

The Transformation of the Derashah As we have seen, the classic derashah delivered by the bar mitzvah boy from the 16th century, and in Eastern Europe until the Holocaust, consisted of a learned talmudic

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pilpul meant for rabbis and scholars.73 According to Hilton, relying on a master’s thesis by Meir Sered, the classic talmudic bar mitzvah speech in the 17th century lasted 30–​60 minutes. Later on, this was replaced by a maamar (speech) lasting about 10 minutes. Toward the end of the 18th century, the maamar was replaced by a devar torah in the vernacular. In Eastern Europe, a teacher was frequently paid to write the speech in Yiddish, German, Polish, Hungarian, or another local language. Frequently, the child himself—​as in the case of Sholom Aleichem in 1872—​did not understand the hour-​long speech he had memorized. As East European Jews transitioned to America, the teacher was replaced by manuals in Yiddish, English, and Hebrew. These manuals included S. Druckerman’s Bar Mitzvah:  A Selection of Confirmation Speeches in Hebrew, Yiddish, English (1907); George Selikovitch’s The Jewish-​American Orator (1908), which included 517 choice speeches, toasts, and sermons in Yiddish, English, and Ancient Hebrew; and Simon Glazer’s The Bar Mitzvah Pulpit: Sermonettes for Bar Mitzvah Boys and Others (1928). The last such manual was published in 1954. Finally, in more recent decades, the children have increasingly been writing a speech or devar torah with the help of a teacher, rabbi, or parent in which they discuss the weekly portion or haftarah and its meaning to them.

The Transformation of the Se’udah We have seen above that even before the year 1800, there was a tendency to hold fancy bar mitzvah se’udot, which led to sumptuary laws seeking to limit the excess. In Eastern Europe, however, the celebration tended to be very modest, including some herring, kichel and schnapps.74 Beginning in the late 19th century, especially in England and in North America, rabbis and educators faced a growing problem of elaborate and expensive parties. Joselit, Marcus, and Hilton have documented some of these excesses.75 They included purchasing a bar mitzvah suit and hat, as well as studio photos. In the late 19th–​early 20th centuries, printed invitations and newspaper ads invited the guests to home receptions on Saturday or Sunday afternoon or evening. After the First World War, people began to hold lavish, catered affairs at hotels, including special napkins, matchbooks, place cards, an orchestra, and a five-​to six-​course dinner to which family, friends, and business associates were invited and expected to bring gifts. There was also a cake and a “Candle Lighting Ceremony,” which sometimes took the place of the synagogue ceremony. These new excesses were spoofed by Sam Levinson in a comic sketch recorded in the 1940s titled “The Story of a Bar Mitzvah Boy”; and skewered by Mordecai Richler in The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1959) and by Herman Wouk in Marjorie Morningstar (1955) and This Is My God (1959). They were attacked by Mordecai M. Kaplan in 1935 and Norman Podhoretz in 1956. They were also opposed by rabbinic organizations, especially in the Conservative and Reform movements. Other rabbis tried to direct the gift-​giving to Jewish items or subscriptions to Jewish magazines and to include blessings, Jewish songs, and Jewish dances at the parties. In more recent years, rabbis and educators have succeeded in channeling some of the gift-​ giving to worthwhile mitzvah projects chosen by the bar/​bat mitzvah child.

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The Adoption of the Ashkenazic Bar Mitzvah Ceremony by Sephardic, Oriental, and Yemenite Jews To the best of my knowledge, Sephardic, Oriental and Yemenite Jews did not have what we today call a bar mitzvah ceremony at age 13 before the 20th century. Indeed, I think that many of them encountered this ceremony for the first time when they made aliyah to the state of Israel or migrated to Europe or North or South America. The halakhic reasons for this were stated above. According to talmudic law, a minor may read from the Torah and have an aliyah, and a father purchases tefillin for his son as soon as the boy knows how to take care of them. Since most of these Jewish communities followed talmudic law regarding these two practices, the age of 13 might have had a legal meaning, but it could not have been an occasion for celebrating the first aliyah or putting on tefillin for the first time. Indeed, the big celebration among Sephardic and Oriental Jews was in honor of putting on tefillin on a weekday at age 11 or 12 and not for having an aliyah on Shabbat at age 13. Thus, in general, if we want to know what Sephardic and Oriental Jews did in the past, we need to consult 19th-​century sources. Books written in the late 20th century in Israel or the United States already show a marked influence of Ashkenazic bar mitzvah customs. In the past, Yemenite Jews did not have any kind of bar mitzvah ceremony; they first encountered this ceremony when they made aliyah to Israel. This is the consensus of R. Yosef Kafih, Yehudah Ratzhabi, Yosef Shalom Habara, Shimon Garidi, Zohar Amar, and S.D. Goitein.76 In contrast, Erich Brauer and A.Z. Idelsohn maintained that Yemenite Jews did have a bar mitzvah ceremony,77 but the testimony of two Ashkenazic scholars cannot set aside the testimony of all the others, most of whom are Yemenites who were born and raised in Yemen. R. Kafih emphasized that, in Yemen, a father would buy tefillin for his son at age 8 or, at the latest at age 11, following talmudic law. Furthermore, they did not recite barukh sheptarani because it contradicts the Rambam—​and Yemenite Jews decide Jewish law according to the Rambam. Space does not allow us to present separate sources for each ethnic group (’edah) within the wider community of Sephardic and Oriental Jews. I shall therefore give a composite description of their customs, and readers can consult the sources listed in the endnote. This composite is based on sources from London, Amsterdam, Gibraltar, Libya, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Jerusalem (Sephardim), Salonika, Caucasus, Baghdad, Zaku (Kurdistan), and Afghanistan. The main differences from Ashkenazic practice were as follows: the ceremony took place well before the boy’s 13th birthday; the main event was putting on tefillin for the first time on a weekday and not the aliyah on Shabbat; the blessing barukh sheptarani was not recited; and in some ’edot, the ceremony did not include a derush (derashah). The following components were usually included in a Sephardic/​Oriental bar mitzvah before the 20th century: The main event was the hanaḥat tefilin ceremony, which took place at age 11, 12, or 12 and a half. The ceremony took place on a Monday or Thursday, or even on a day when the Torah was not read. The boy frequently had a special haircut and was dressed in special clothes like a bridegroom (ḥatan). Moreover, as with a ḥatan, he was frequently accompanied to or from the synagogue by a procession. A rabbi and the father and some elders helped wrap the tefillin on the

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boy’s arm and head; various relatives, especially women, removed the tefillin after the service. In some ’edot, the boy gave a derush; in others not. There were special foods right after the ceremony and/​or large se’udot in the boy’s house either before or after the event. Tzedakah (alms) was often given to the poor, or else money was collected to pay the teacher. On a Monday or Thursday, the boy might have an aliyah. On the Shabbat after the tefillin ceremony, the boy might read the Torah or have an aliyah as the mosif (additional aliyah), or read the haftarah. Special piyutim (liturgical poems) were sung. At age 13, wealthy families made an additional se’udah.78 In the 20th century, and especially after 1948, when hundreds of thousands of Sephardic and Oriental Jews were expelled from or forced to flee their places of birth and made aliyah to Israel or migrated to Europe, North and South America, they were strongly influenced by the Ashkenazic elite in Israel or by the Ashkenazic majority in other countries. They quickly adopted what we call a bar mitzvah: on Shabbat morning, at age 13, with the blessing barukh sheptarani and with a derashah by the boy. This can be seen today at the Kotel or in Sephardic/​Oriental synagogues throughout the world. It is also evident from two important anthologies that include Sephardic/​Oriental customs. In most cases, the ethnic customs such as the haircut, special foods and clothing, wrapping and unwrapping the tefillin, and the like remain in these books, but three major halakhic changes have occurred. The boy no longer begins to wear tefillin at age 11 or 12 but shortly before his 13th birthday; he can no longer read Torah at age 7 and up but only at age 13 and one day; and the entire focus has shifted from the tefillin ceremony to the Shabbat morning bar mitzvah. In other words, Sephardic/​Oriental bar mitzvahs have become “Ashkenazified.”79 This is unfortunate, but it’s a trend that will be difficult to reverse.

The Secular Bar/​Bat Mitzvah Given the original meaning of the term “bar mitzvah,” a “secular bar/​bat mitzvah” seems like a contradiction in terms.80 Nonetheless, there are at least three examples of this phenomenon in the 20th century, and one of them is still very common. The first type of secular bar mitzvah was the kibbutz bar mitzvah. From the Mandate period until today, a large percentage of Israeli boys have a bar mitzvah in a synagogue, even if it is the only time they ever enter a synagogue. During the Mandate period, some of the kibbutzim and moshavim developed a secular group ceremony in addition to what boys did as individuals. At settlements such as Kfar Giladi, the boys and girls had a group “bar mitzvah” in which they received a handgun after practicing in secret and were sometimes assigned a specific security-​ related task. Sometimes, they were handed a Bible, not a gun; and sometimes a Bible, a hoe, and a rifle.81 In the 1940s, this ceremony morphed into the kibbutz bar mitzvah, which spread to most kibbutzim by the late 1950s in the form of a year of special tasks that culminated in a group ceremony. During the bar mitzvah year—​namely, when both boys and girls were in seventh grade—​the children were initiated into adult life by working in areas such as immigrant absorption, teaching first grade, doing guard duty, and doing agricultural labor.82

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The second type of secular bar/​bat mitzvah is most of the bat mitzvah parties held in Israel from ca. 1945 until today. Hizky Shoham has shown that, from its inception, the Israeli bat mitzvah was “a birthday party, only a little bigger,” as one woman recalled in 1966. It developed from the grassroots at the initiative of the girls themselves, as an extension of the bourgeois custom of birthdays. For the most part, it was simply a glorified birthday party at age 12, devoid of any Jewish or Zionist content. It was not a rite of passage, nor was it imported from American Jewry.83 This explains the startling statistic in Shmuel Rosner and Camil Fuchs’ new book, Yahadut yisreelit, which is based on an in-​depth survey of 3,000 Israeli Jewish adults. Ninety percent of them replied that they have done/​will do a bat mitzvah for their daughter, the highest percentage of any ritual or custom surveyed.84 To an American ear, this means that the girl had or will have a synagogue bat mitzvah ceremony, but it really means that 90 percent of Jewish Israelis will hold a big party for their daughter at age 12. True, Modern Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform Jews in Israel will hold a synagogue-​ based bat mitzvah service or a party with a devar torah or other Jewish content. But the majority will simply hold an elaborate birthday party, devoid of any Jewish or Zionist content. The third type of secular bar mitzvah was that developed by secular Yiddishists in the United States before and after the Second World War. Rifkind’s book includes a Hebrew translation of a Yiddish article from 1939 describing such an event. It sounds from the description that the family and friends were Labor Zionists. The party was in place of a synagogue service and the focus had shifted from God and the mitzvot to Zionism, Yiddish, and the Jewish people. It was held in a large hall. On the head table there was a large candelabrum and a cake with 14 candles. When the bar mitzvah boy entered with his parents, the guests sang a Yiddish song of greeting. The opening speech stressed the boy’s duties to his people and to the worker’s party. They sang songs of the pioneers (ḥalutzim) in Yiddish and Hebrew. The bar mitzvah boy read passages from Isaiah 2, Ezekiel 37, and Isaiah 66—​which was that week’s haftarah—​from the Yiddish translation by Yehoash. The boy spoke for six minutes and promised that he would continue to attend public school and would continue his Jewish education. His parents then spoke and gave him a Hebrew Bible (tanakh), a Hebrew novel written by Avraham Mapu, and a collection of folktales by I.L. Peretz in Yiddish. The master of ceremonies then announced that he was accepting the bar mitzvah boy as a comrade (ḥaver) with equal rights, after which he gave him a ring with the inscription “Our people is one people.” There was then a candle lighting ceremony, with each candle-​lighter blessing the boy. Following this, a story by Peretz, “The Three Gifts,” was read in the original Yiddish. The audience then stood up to sing the Zionist song “Teḥezaknah.”85 I do not know how common this type of ceremony was. Leibush Lehrer (1887–​ 1966) sometimes held group bar/​ bat mitzvah ceremonies at the Yiddish Camp Boiberik, which he directed from 1923–​1964.86 In a recent posting on YouTube, Martin Broder describes his Yiddish bar mitzvah, which was held in June 1949 at the Workman’s Circle building on a weekday. It consisted of Yiddish readings and speeches, including his own, and was attended by his classmates from the Arbeter Ring school. It had no religious content, but it had a significant effect on his character and marked an important transition in his life.87

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Some Additional Bar Mitzvah Innovations In addition to the six major changes in the bar mitzvah ceremony described above, many new bar/​bat mitzvah customs have developed in recent decades. Space does not allow us to describe them, but I will mention them here with the hope that they will be studied in years to come. They include: standards and requirements for the child; bar mitzvah certificates; throwing candies, lifting the child on a chair and making use of a canopy (ḥupah) as is done for weddings; mitzvah projects carried out by the bar/​ bat mitzvah child; changes in the barukh sheptarani blessing; physically passing the Torah from grandparents to parents to the child; official presents from the synagogue; bar/​bat mitzvah ceremonies at the Kotel and at Masada; being inscribed in the JNF bar mitzvah book; dual bar mitzvahs on the same day; Shabbat minḥah or havdalah bar/​ bat mitzvah ceremonies; attempts to move the ceremony to age 15–​16; bar mitzvah for uncircumcised boys; speeches by the parents; ceremonies for children with special needs; bar/​bat mitzvah for interfaith families; adult bar/​bat mitzvah; and a second bar mitzvah at age 83.

Conclusion The bar mitzvah ceremony began some 950 years ago in Germany with the barukh sheptarani blessing. By the 16th century, the aliyah, the se’udat mitzvah and the derashah had become standard features, spreading throughout Germany, France, Eastern Europe, and Italy until the year 1800. Beginning in 1800, the bar mitzvah ceremony was transformed in six ways: Confirmation pushed aside the bar mitzvah in the Reform movement and was widely observed in Conservative and Orthodox synagogues, until the pendulum swung back to bar/​bat mitzvah in the 1970s. The bat mitzvah was invented by Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan in 1922 and quickly spread to the Conservative, Reform, and Orthodox movements. The derashah was transformed from a lengthy talmudic pilpul to a short speech or devar torah in the vernacular written by the child, in which he/​she related the Torah or haftarah readings to his/​ her life and values. Elaborate parties began to proliferate in the late 19th century and slowly but surely became the norm throughout the Jewish world. Originally, Yemenite Jews had no bar mitzvah ceremony at all, while Sephardic and Oriental Jews had a hanaḥat tefilin ceremony at age 11 or 12. When they made aliyah or migrated to the West, they adopted Ashkenazic bar mitzvah customs. Secular Jews in Israel and secular Yiddishists in the United States tried to develop secular bar mitzvah ceremonies, but these did not last. The only such custom that has continued to flourish is the Israeli bat mitzvah, which, for the most part has no Jewish or Zionist content. When the Jews of Medieval Ashkenaz innovated the custom of reciting barukh sheptarani some 950 years ago, little did they know that that custom would eventually morph into the elaborate bar/​bat mitzvah celebrations held today. Similarly, the long list of recent bar/​bat mitzvah customs listed above indicate that this beautiful custom will continue to change and adapt into the future.

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Notes 1. Quotations from Shlomo Molkho are taken from The Bar Mitzvah Treasury, ed. Azriel Eisenberg (New York: 1952), 264, 267. The translation was prepared by Sora Eisenberg, his daughter. 2. In this article, we shall refer to the following basic literature: Binyamin Adler, Halakhot vehalikhot bar mitzvah (Jerusalem: 5734 [1974]); Ya’akov Gartner, “Ḥagigat bar ha­mitzvah: harek’a lehithavut haminhag,” in idem, ’Iyunei tefilah: minhagim vetoladot (Alon Shevut: 5775 [2015]), 266–​289; David Golinkin, “The Participation of Jewish Women in Public Rituals and Torah Study 1845–​2010,” in idem, The Status of Women in Jewish Law:  Responsa (Jerusalem:  2012), 1–​29; Michael Hilton, Bar Mitzvah:  A History (Philadelphia:  2014); Jenna Weissman Joselit, The Wonders of America:  Reinventing Jewish Culture, 1880–​1950 (New York: 1994); Ivan G. Marcus, Rituals of Childhood: Jewish Acculturation in Medieval Europe (New Haven:  1996), 117–​124, 158–​160; idem, The Jewish Life Cycle:  Rites of Passage from Biblical to Modern Times (Seattle: 2004), 82–​123, 274–​282; Isaac Rifkind, Leot ulezikaron:  toledot bar mitzvah vehitpatḥuto beḥayei ha’am vetarbuto (New  York:  1942); Byron Sherwin, “Bar Mitzvah, Bat Mitzvah,” in idem, In Partnership with God: Contemporary Jewish Law and Ethics (Syracuse:  1990), 150–​168, 249–​255; Yisrael Ta-​Shema, “Ve’od liv’ayat hamekorot haashkenaziyim besefer hazohar,” Kabbalah 3 (1998), Hebrew section, 261; idem, “Tekes hahaniḥah,” Tarbitz 68, no. 4 (5759 [1999]), 591–​595; Asher Wassertil (ed.), Yalkut minhagim, 3rd ed. (Jerusalem: 1996). Many of the statements made about the history of bar mitzvah in a variety of books, including standard reference works, are incorrect. In general, I will not point out these mistakes because they could easily fill up an entire monograph. 3. Hilton, Bar Mitzvah, xii–​xiii, passim. 4. See the literature cited by David Golinkin, ’Aseh lekha rav:  sheelot uteshuvot (Jerusalem: 2019), 402 (n. 1). 5. For the medieval rabbis mentioned, see their commentaries to the end of Avot, ­chapter 5. As for modern scholars, see Y.N. Epstein, Mavo lenusaḥ hamishnah (Jerusalem: 1948), 978; Hanokh Albeck, Shishah sidrei mishnah, 4:351; Yitzhak Gilat, “Ben shelosh ’esrei lemitzvot?” in Meḥkarei Talmud, vol. 1 (5750 [1990]), 39–​41 = idem, Perakim behishtalshelut hahalakhah (Ramat Gan: 1992), 19–​20; Shimon Sharvit, Masekhet Avot le’dorotehah (Jerusalem: 2004), 217–​222, 273–​276; Hilton, Bar Mitzvah, 7. 6. Gilat, “Ben shelosh ’esrei lemitzvot?” 39–​ 53  =  idem, Perakim behishtalshelut hahalakhah,  19–​31. 7. Saul Lieberman, “Masekhet soferim,” Kiryat sefer 15 (5698–​5699 [1938–​1939]), 56–​ 57 = idem, Meḥkarim betorat eretz yisrael (Jerusalem: 1991), 579–​580. Lieberman’s approach was accepted by Gilat, “Ben shelosh ’esrei lemitzvot?” 44–​45 = idem, Perakim behishtalshelut hahalakhah, 23–​24; Marcus, The Jewish Life Cycle, 86–​87; and Hilton, Bar Mitzvah, 11. 8. Responsa of the Rosh (Rabbeinu Asher), 16:1; cf. pseudo-​Rashi to Avot, end of ­chapter 5; Responsa of the Maharil, no. 51. 9. For other “proofs,” see Adler, Halakhot vehalikhot bar mitzvah, 53–​54; R. Shlomo Yosef Zevin, “Hamispar shelosh ’esreh bahalakhah uvaagadah,” Sinai 49 (5721 [1961]), 151–​ 152; Entziklopedia talmudit, 4:165–​166; Zvi Kaplan in Encyclopaedia Judaica, 4:243–​244; Hilton, Bar Mitzvah, 10. 10. See n. 3. 11. This section is based on David Golinkin, Teshuvot va’ad hahalakhah shel knesset ha­rabinim beyisrael 5 (5752–​5754 [1992–​1994]), 101–​107; Yitzhak Gilat, “Barukh sheptarani mei’onsho shel zeh,” Sinai 118 (5756 [1996]), 176–​186; Marcus, The Jewish Life Cycle, 87–​93; Hilton, Bar Mitzvah, 12–​26; Gartner, “Ḥagigot bar hamitzvah,” 268ff.; cf. Ta-​Shema, “Ve’od liv’ayat hamekorot haashkenaziyim besefer hazohar”; idem, “Tekes hahaniḥah.” I am presenting the facts in a telegraphic fashion; for the sources, discussion, and disagreements, see the five scholars listed. I disagree with Marcus, who repeatedly claims that this was a rare

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custom primarily found in Germany, and with Hilton, who argues that it began in France in the 13th century. 12. The sources are R.  Yehudah b”r Barukh, quoted in Piskei rabeinu Yeḥiel miParis vehoraot mirabanei tzorfat, ed. Pines (Jerusalem: 5733 [1973]), 82 (par. 23) and by R. Aharon Hakohen of Lunel, Orḥot ḥayim, hilkhot berakhot (Florence ed.), par. 58 (fol. 40c) (where it mistakenly says “Hagaon R.  Yehudai” instead of “Hagaon R.  Yehudah b”r Barukh”); R. Yehudah ben Yakar, Perush hatefilot vehaberakhot, ed. Yerushalmi (5739 [1979]), part 2:72; R. Yitzhak ben Abba Mari, Sefer ha’itur (Vilna ed.), part 2, section 3, Hilkhot milah, fol. 53a; Piskei rabeinu Yeḥiel miParis vehoraot mirabanei tzorfat, loc. cit.; Rabbeinu Avigdor Tzarfati, Sefer peirushim ’al hatorah, ed. Herskovitz (Jerusalem: 1996), 8; R. Shimshon b”r Tzadok, Sefer Tashbatz (Jerusalem: 5771 [2011]), 219 (par. 390); R. Ya’akov Moellin, Sefer minhagei Mahari”l, ed. Spitzer (Jerusalem:  5749 [1989]), 453; glosses on R. Isaac of Tyrnau, Sefer haminhagim, ed. Spitzer (Jerusalem: 5739 [1979]), 25; R. Yisrael Isserlein, quoted by R. Yosef b”r Moshe, Sefer leket yosher, ed. Freimann (Berlin: 5663 [1903]) 1: 40–​41; R. Moshe Isserles, Darkehi Moshe to Tur oraḥ ḥayim 225 and in his glosses to Shulḥan arukh, Oraḥ ḥayim 225:2; Johannes Buxtorf, quoted by Hilton, Bar Mitzvah, 67–​68; R. Yosef Yuzpa Hahn, Sefer yosef ometz (Frankfurt am Main: 5688 [1928]), 94 = ed. Kinarti (Shalabim: 5776 [2016]), 126 (par. 452); R. Yosef Yuzpa Kashman Segal, Sefer noheig katzon Yosef, ed. Kinarti (Shalabim: 5778 [2018]), 71 (par. 4). 13. For some of the poskim who codified this blessing after the time of the Rema, see Tashbatz (n. 12) and Gilat, “Barukh sheptarani,” 179. For some of the prayer books that include this blessing, see Hilton, Bar Mitzvah,  25–​26. 14. José Faur, “’Aliyat katan likro batorah,” in Sefer hazikaron laRav Yitzhak Nissim: halakhah umishpat, ed. Benayahu (Jerusalem: 1985), 113–​133. 15. Gartner, “Ḥagigat bar hamitzvah,” 269, and cf. 274–​ 276; also see Rifkind, Leot ulezikaron, 33. 16. Sefer leket yosher, 1:41; Sefer yosef ometz, ed. Frankfurt, 357 = ed. Kinarti, 454. 17. R. Yuzpa Shamesh, Minhagim d’kehilat kodesh Wermeiza, vol. 2 (Jerusalem:  5752 [1992]), 164–​166; also quoted by Gartner, “Ḥagigat bar hamitzvah,” 271–​272 and in translation by Hilton, Bar Mitzvah, 42. 18. See Rifkind, Leot ulezikaron,  29–​36. 19. See Arnaldo Momigliano, “A Medieval Jewish Autobiography,” in History and Imagination:  Essays in Honour of H.R. Trevor-​ Roper, ed. Hugh Lloyd-​ Jones et  al. (London: 1981), 30–​36 = idem, On Pagans, Jews and Christians (Middletown: 1987), 222–​ 230, 319–​320. Marcus (Rituals of Childhood, 160 [n. 77]) calls this theory “farfetched,” but in his later book (The Jewish Life Cycle), 98, he seems to accept the theory. S.D. Goitein, in A Mediterranean Society, vol. 5 (Berkeley: 1988), 512 (n. 83), accepts the theory, while Hilton, Bar Mitzvah, 27–​29, rejects it. I agree with Marcus (in Rituals of Childhood) and Hilton. 20. Tzarfati, Sefer peirushim upesakim ’al hatorah, 4. See discussions by Ta-​Shema, “Ve’od liv’ayat hamekorot haashkenaziyim besefer hazohar,” 261 and “Tekes hahaniḥah beyisrael,” 594; Marcus, The Jewish Life Cycle, 99; Hilton, Bar Mitzvah, 28–​29; and Gartner, “Ḥagigat bar hamitzvah,” 286–​287. The main problem is that this sentence has been preserved in the index to Sefer peirushim upesakim ’al hatorah, but the paragraph itself is missing from the manuscript. Ta-​Shema refers to him as “Rabbi Avigdor of Vienna” in both his articles, but Herskovitz, who published his writings, proves in his introduction that Rabbeinu Avigdor was from France. 21. Zohar Ḥadash (Margaliot ed.), fol. 15d. 22. Ibid., fol. 10c. 23. Rifkind, Leot ulezikaron, 47–​48; Sherwin, “Bar Mitzvah, Bat Mitzvah,” 162; Ta-​Shema, “Ve’od liv’ayat hamekorot haashkenaziyim besefer hazohar,” 261 and “Tekes hahaniḥah beyisrael,” 594; Marcus, The Jewish Life Cycle, 99 and n. 47; Gartner, “Ḥagigat bar hamitzvah,” 288, n. 113; Hilton, Bar Mitzvah,  29–​32. 24. See the previous note. Although Ta-​Shema claims that he was the first to notice these passages in Zohar Ḥadash, he was actually preceded by others, among them Rifkind and Sherwin and R. Ya’akov Hayim Sofer (d. 1937), in Sefer kaf haḥayim to Oraḥ haḥayim 225, par. 11.

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25. This theory can be proved only by checking manuscripts of these two specific passages in Zohar Ḥadash. My thanks to Prof. Daniel Abrams of Bar-​Ilan University, who explained to me the fluid nature of “the Zohar” and “Zohar Ḥadash,” which, in his opinion, were simply anthologies created by the respective printers in Venice and Salonika. 26. On this passage in Yam shel Shelomo, see Rifkind, Leot ulezikaron, 47; Hilton, Bar Mitzvah, 36–​40; and Gartner, “Ḥagigat bar hamitzvah,” 288. 27. Quoted by Rifkind, Leot ulezikaron, 48 (n. 6), and see ibid. for another quote; cf. Gartner, 288 (n. 113). For a description of the bar mitzvah se’udah by R. Yuzpa Shamesh, see Rifkind, Leot ulezikaron, 65 = R. Yuzpa Shamesh, Minhagim d’kehilat kodesh Wermeiza, 2:166–​167. For a modern justification of the bar mitzvah feast as a se’udat mitzvah, see R. Ovadia Yosef, Responsa yabi’a omer, part 1, Oraḥ ḥayim, no. 27, par. 8. 28. They are summarized by Rifkind, Leot ulezikaron, 48–​57 and by Hilton, Bar Mitzvah, 56–​62. They both stress that the takanot in Italy began only in 1765, which indicates that lavish se’udot arose in Italy at a later date. In 1683, Gulio Morosini (who converted to Christianity in Italy) noted that after the aliyah, etc. in the synagogue, “a party is held in the home for the public” (quoted in Gartner, “Ḥagigat bar hamitzvah,” 286). 29. Hilton, Bar Mitzvah, 47. 30. Rifkind, Leot ulezikaron, 105–​136. For general discussions regarding derashot, see ibid., 40–​46, 69–​70; Hilton, Bar Mitzvah,  47–​53. 31. Leopold Löw, Die Lebensalter in der judischen Literatur (Szegedin: 1875), 216–​217. Regarding the Shaagat Aryeh and Löw, see Rikind, Leot ulezikaron, 42 and 40 (n. 2). 32. Georg Heuberger and Anton Merk (eds.), Moritz Daniel Oppenheim: Jewish Identity in 19th Century Art (Frankfurt am Main: 1999), 233, 285. The painting, titled “Bar-​Mizwa-​ Vortrag” (Bar Mitzvah Speech), was one of the twenty famous “Bilder” painted by Oppenheim. See the discussions by Andreas Gotzmann, ibid., 232–​250 and Ismar Schorsch, From Text to Context: The Turn to History in Modern Judaism (Hanover, N.H.: 1994), 93–​117. This painting was reproduced in many books, such as Rifkind, Leot ulezikaron, 44. 33. This section is based on the following literature, in chronological order:  Löw, Die Lebensalter in der judischen Literatur, 218–​222; R. David Philipson, Year Book of the CCAR 1890–​1891, 43–​58, Max Landsberg and Kaufmann Kohler, “Confirmation, the Rite of,” in The Jewish Encyclopedia, vol. 4 (New York: 1903), 219–​220; Rabbi’s Manual: edited and published by the CCAR (New York: 1928 and 1959), 13–​27 and 148–​151; R. Morris Silverman, “Report of Survey on Ritual,” Proceedings of the Rabbinical Assembly 4 (1930–​1932), 335–​337; Isaac Landman, “Confirmation,” The Universal Jewish Encyclopedia (New  York:  1941), 3:329–​ 330; Rifkind, Leot ulezikaron, 85 (who refers to two bibliographies that list 111 Confirmation speeches); Hayyim Schauss, The Lifetime of a Jew (New York: 1950), 120–​121; Theodor Gaster, The Holy and the Profane (New York: 1955), 74–​75; W. Gunther Plaut, The Rise of Reform Judaism: A Sourcebook of Its European Origins (New York: 1963), 171–​177; idem, The Growth of Reform Judaism: American and European Sources until 1948 (New York: 1965), 311–​316; Isaac Klein, A Guide to Jewish Religious Practice (New York: 1979), 152–​153; Simeon Maslin, Sha’arei Mitzvah, Gates of Mitzvah: A Guide to the Jewish Life Cycle (New York: 1979), 21–​ 22; Michael A. Meyer, Response to Modernity: A History of the Reform Movement in Judaism (New York: 1988), Index, s.v. Confirmation ceremony; Walter Jacob (ed.), American Reform Responsa, 79–​94; Sherwin, “Bar Mitzvah, Bat Mitzvah,” 165–​167; Joselit, The Wonders of America, 105–​118 (Reform) and 118–​127 (Conservative); Mark Washofsky, Jewish Living: A Guide to Contemporary Reform Practice (New York: 2001), 149–​153; Avraham (Rami) Reiner, “Hayaḥas letiksei bat-​mitzvah: ’iyun mashveh bifsikah modernit,” Netu’im 10 (5763 [2003]), 55–​64, summarized in Golinkin, The Status of Women in Jewish Law, 3–​4; Marcus, The Jewish Life Cycle, 110–​116; Hilton, Bar Mitzvah, xiii–​xiv, 74–​105, 109–​125; Lakol Zeman V’eit: For Sacred Moments—​The CCAR Life-​Cycle Guide (New York: 2015), 5–​12, 14; Jenna Weissman Joselit, “How Confirmation Came of Age,” Tablet (7 June 2019). 34. For Reform justifications of Confirmation, see Philipson, Year Book of the CCAR 1890–​ 1891; Landsberg and Kohler, “Confirmation, the Rite of”; Rabbi’s Manual CCAR (1928); Landman, “Confirmation”; Plaut, The Rise of Reform Judaism; Jacob (ed.), American Reform Responsa.

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35. For a good timeline of Confirmations around the world from 1803–​1906, see Hilton, Bar Mitzvah, 86–​88. Regarding Confirmation for girls, see ibid., 111ff. 36. For typical ceremonies, see Philipson, Year Book of the CCAR 1890–​1891, 55–​56; Rabbi’s Manual CCAR (1928); Silverman, Proceedings of the Rabbinical Assembly 4. Many have stressed that the flowers are based on bikurim. However, they may be based on the widespread Ashkenazic custom of decorating the synagogue with flowers, branches, and trees on Shavuot. See David Golinkin, Responsa in a Moment, vol. 4 (Jerusalem: 2017), 94–​103. 37. See Reiner, “Hayaḥas letiksei bat-​mitzvah,” including 57 (n. 3) for the historical background. Cf. the English summary by Golinkin, The Status of Women in Jewish Law, 3–​4; and Hilton, Bar Mitzvah, 89. 38. Hilton, Bar Mitzvah, 96ff., 113–​115. 39. According to ritual surveys conducted by R. Silverman, Proceedings of the Rabbinical Assembly 4, 335–​337, in 1932; and R. Morris Goodblatt, “Synagogue Ritual Survey,” ibid. 12 (1948), 107. Different statistics are given by Joselit, The Wonders of America, 118–​119, 122–​123. 40. Ibid., 119, 123. 41. Hilton, Bar Mitzvah, 125–​126. 42. Ibid., 99. According to R. Silverman, in 1932, 32 percent of Conservative synagogues held Confirmation for children aged 15–​16. 43. American Reform Responsa, no. 30 (pp. 79–​82). 44. Landman, “Confirmation,” The Universal Jewish Encyclopedia, 330. 45. Joselit, The Wonders of America, 114ff; cf. Hilton, Bar Mitzvah, 100–​102, 124–​125. Joselit and Hilton give very different statistics as to how many Reform temples had reintroduced bar mitzvah. According to Joselit, the figure was 92 percent by 1945, while according to Hilton, it was 25 percent by 1950. 46. Hilton, Bar Mitzvah, xiii–​xiv. 47. American Reform Responsa, no. 33 (pp. 86–​89). 48. Hilton, Bar Mitzvah, 103–​105. 49. Ibid., 102. 50. Joselit, The Wonders of America, 114. 51. This section is based on the following literature, in chronological order: R. Silverman, Proceedings of the Rabbinical Assembly 4, 331; R. Goodblatt, Proceedings of the Rabbinical Assembly 12, 107; Dov Sadan, “Bat Mitzvah,” in Dat yisrael umedinat yisrael:  yalkut maamarim ’al sheelot hadat bimdinat yisrael (New York: 1951), 136–​139; Aaron Blumenthal, “A Questionnaire on Aliyot for Women and Bat Mitzvah” (unpublished typescript., ca. 1962); Jules Harlow, Likutei Tefillah: A Rabbi’s Manual (New York: 1965), 18–​25; Adler, Halakhot vehalikhot bar mitzvah, 76; J. David Bleich, Contemporary Halakhic Problems, vol. 1 (New York: 1977), 77–​78; Elyakim Elinson, Haishah vehamitzvot, sefer rishon: bein haishah leyotzrah, 2nd expanded ed. (Jerusalem: 5737 [1977]), 171–​180; Walter Jacob (ed.), American Reform Responsa, (New  York:  1983), 79–​94; Alfred S. Cohen, “Celebration of the Bat Mitzvah,” Journal of Halacha and Contemporary Society 12 (Fall 1986), 5–​16; Sherwin, “Bar Mitzvah, Bat Mitzvah,” 163–​165; Aharon Cohen, Zeved habat (Jerusalem: 1990), 10–​12, 26–​ 29; David Golinkin, An Index of Conservative Responsa and Practical Halakhic Studies 1917–​ 1990 (New York: 1992), 16, 73; Yael, Talya, and Yonina Penkower, “Bat Mitzvah: Coming of Age in Brooklyn,” in Daughters of the King: Women and the Synagogue, ed. Susan Grossman and Rivkah Haut (Philadelphia: 1992), 265–​270; Joselit, The Wonders of America, 116–​131; Simcha Fishbane, “A Female Rite of Passage in a Montreal Modern Orthodox Synagogue: The Bat Mitzvah Ceremony,” in Renewing Our Days:  Montreal Jews in the Twentieth Century, ed. Ira Robinson and Mervin Butovsky (Montreal: 1995), 119–​131; Reuven Bulka, The RCA Lifecycle Madrikh (New York: 1995), 64–​67; Gilat, “Barukh sheptarani mei’onsho shel zeh,” 184–​186; David Golinkin (ed.), Proceedings of the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards 1927–​1970 (Jerusalem:  1997), 1595, s.v. “Bat Mitzvah”; Perry Raphael Rank and Gordon Freeman, Moreh Derekh: The Rabbinical Assembly Rabbi’s Manual, vol. 1 (New York: 1998),

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section B; Erica Brown, “The Bat Mitzvah in Jewish Law and Contemporary Practice,” in Jewish Legal Writings by Women, ed. Chana Safrai (Jerusalem: 1998), 232–​258; Barry Kosmin, “Coming of Age in the Conservative Synagogue:  The Bar/​Bat Mitzvah Class of 5755,” in Jews at the Center: Conservative Synagogues and Their Members, ed. Jack Wertheimer (New Brunswick:  2000), 249–​253; Tova Hartman Halbertal, “Maneuvering in a World of Law and Custom:  Maternal Transmission of Ambivalence,” Nashim 3 (2000), 139–​163; Daniel Tuito, “Ḥagigat bat hamitzvah—​ ’iyun bedarkhei pesikatam shel ḥakhmei doreinu” and Aharon Ahrend, “Ḥagigat bat-​mitzvah befiskei harav Yitzhak Nissim,” in Bat mitzvah: kovetz maamarim, ed. Sara Friedland Ben Arza (Jerusalem: 2002), 40–​68, 109–​115; Nancy Wolfson-​ Moche (ed.), Toward a Meaningful Bat Mitzvah (Aventura:  2002); Norma Baumel Joseph, “Ritual, Law and Praxis:  An American Response/​a to Bat Mitsva Celebrations,” Modern Judaism 22 (2002), 234–​260; Ora Wiskind Elper (ed.), Traditions and Celebrations for the Bat Mitzvah (Jerusalem: 2003); Reiner, “Hayaḥas letiksei bat-​mitzvah,” 64–​77; Jonathan Sarna, American Judaism: A History (New Haven: 2004), 287–​288, and the sources listed on 411 (n. 35); Marcus, The Jewish Life Cycle, 105–​112, 115–​116; Aharon Ben-​Tziyon Shurin, “Tzi megen frume yidn praven bas-​mitzvah?” Forverts (24 June 2005), 9; reprinted in ibid. (7–​13 November 2008), 4; Norma Baumel Joseph, “Bat Mitzvah,” Encyclopaedia Judaica (2nd ed.), 3:165–​166; articles in the JOFA Journal 9, no. 1 (Fall 2010); Viva Hammer, “New-​Age Bat Mitzva,” Jerusalem Post Magazine (10 December 2010); Golinkin, The Status of Women in Jewish Law, 4–​7, 9–​11; Carl Astor, “Bar Mitzvah and Bat Mitzvah,” in The Observant Life: The Wisdom of Conservative Judaism for Contemporary Jews, ed. Martin S. Cohen and Michael Katz (New  York:  2012), 251–​254; Barbara Vinick and Shulamith Reinharz (eds.), Today I Am a Woman: Stories of Bat Mitzvah around the World (Bloomington: 2012), with a review by Brenda Bacon in Nashim 24 (2013), 152–​155; Hilton, Bar Mitzvah, 106–​134, 244–​249; Gartner, “Ḥagigat bar hamitzvah,” 289 (n. 115); Simcha Fishbane, The Rabbinic Discussions about Bat Mitzvah Celebrations (Lewiston:  2017); Morton M. Steinberg, Tradition by the Lake: A Historical Outline of North Suburban Synagogue Beth El (Highland Park, Ill.: 2018), 13, 19, 34, 61, 83. 52. Hilton, Bar Mitzvah, 106–​120. 53. Golinkin, The Status of Women in Jewish Law, 4–​5, later quoted by Hilton, Bar Mitzvah, 115–​116, though Hilton attributed the dates of R. Avraham’s father to R. Avraham. The father died in 1837, so the son probably died in the mid-​19th century. 54. Golinkin, The Status of Women in Jewish Law, 6. 55. Ibid.,  6–​7. 56. Ibid., 7; Marcus, The Jewish Life Cycle, 105 and 280 (n. 58); Hilton, Bar Mitzvah, 119 and 246 (n. 63); Hizky Shoham, “‘A Birthday Party, Only a Little Bigger’: A Historical Anthropology of the Israeli Bat Mitzvah,” Jewish Culture and History 16, no. 3 (2015), 283. 57. Hilton, Bar Mitzvah, 121 and 246 (n. 70). 58. See Golinkin, The Status of Women in Jewish Law, 9–​10; Marcus, The Jewish Life Cycle, 106–​109; Hilton, Bar Mitzvah, 106–​107; Bacon review of Today I Am a Woman, 154. 59. Marcus, The Jewish Life Cycle, 109. 60. Silverman, Proceedings of the Rabbinical Assembly, 331; cf. Golinkin, The Status of Women in Jewish Law,  10–​11. 61. Silverman, Proceedings of the Rabbinical Assembly, 335. 62. Goodblatt, Proceedings of the Rabbinical Assembly, 107; Marshall Sklare, Conservative Judaism: An American Religious Movement (Glencoe: 1955), 155, 309 (n. 46); cf. Hilton, Bar Mitzvah, 123, 247 (n. 80). 63. See Blumenthal, “A Questionnaire on Aliyot for Women and Bat Mitzvah.” With regard to the transition from Friday night to Shabbat morning, my father, Rabbi Noah Golinkin, z”l, instituted the Shabbat morning bat mitzvah at the Arlington–​Fairfax Jewish Center in the 1950s, but when he assumed the pulpit of Heska Amuna in Knoxville, Tennessee in 1970, some bat mitzvah girls still read the haftorah on a Friday night. Regarding an individual versus a group bat mitzvah, in 2011, Marianne Kane (née Weiss) gave me a copy of the invitation to her

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group “Bas Mitzvah Service” on Shavuot 1956, conducted by Rabbi Sidney Kleiman at the Conservative Congregation Talmud Torah Adereth El on East 29th Street in New York City. This was clearly part of the transition from Confirmation to bat mitzvah. 64. See Kosmin, “Coming of Age in the Conservative Synagogue,” 251, which shows that girls also led some part of the service in 97 percent of the 112 synagogues surveyed. 65. David Golinkin (ed.), Proceedings of the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards of the Conservative Movement 1927–​1970, 1:339 (from 1951) and 385–​389 (from 1955); ibid., 3:1086–​1108 (the two responsa from 1955). 66. Steinberg, Tradition by the Lake, 13, 19, 61, and 83; also see 48 (n. 84), where he states that Beth El was the site of The Lakeville Studies. 67. Hilton, Bar Mitzvah, 123. 68. See Adler, Bleich, Elinson, Jacob, Cohen, Sherwin, Brown, Tuito, Ahrend, Reiner, Shurin, Joseph and Fishbane—​all cited in n. 51. Here is a partial list of Orthodox responsa regarding bat mitzvah arranged by the author’s last name: R. Amram Aburbia, Sefer netivei ’am, minhagim vehalakhot (Petah Tikvah: 5729 [1969]), 225:2 (p. 130); R. Hananya Yom Tov Lipa Deitsch, Tohorat Yom Tov, part 9, no. 40 (quoted by Bleich, 77); R. Moshe Feinstein, Igrot Moshe, Oraḥ ḥayim, part 1, no. 104; ibid., part 2, no. 30 (last par.) and no. 97; ibid., part 4, no. 36; ibid., Yoreh de’ah, part 3, no. 14, par. 4; R. Ephraim Greenblatt, “He’arot be’inyanim shonim,” Noam 9 (5726 [1966]), 361–​363; R. Hanokh Zundel Grossberg, “Se’udat bat mitzvah,” Hama’ayan 13, no. 2 (5733 [1973]), 41–​42; R. Ovadia Hadaya, Yaskil ’avdi, part 5, Oraḥ ḥayim, no. 28; R. Moshe Malka, Mikveh hamayim, Oraḥ hayim, part 4, no. 63; R. Avraham Musafiya, quoted from a manuscript by R. Yitzhak Nissim, No’am 7 (5724 [1964]), 1–​5 = idem, Or hamizraḥ 13, nos. 3–​4 (Tishrei 5724 [1963]), 35 = idem, Yein hatov (Jerusalem: 5739 [1979]), part 2, no. 6; R. Meshulam Rath, Kol mevaser, part 2, no. 44; R. Moshe Stern, Be’er Moshe, part 1, no. 10 (p. 22); R. Moshe Sternbuch, Teshuvot vehanhagot, part 1, no. 156; R. Eliezer Waldenberg, Sefer sheelot uteshuvot tzitz Eli’ezer, part 18, no. 33 (par. 1); R. Aaron Walkin, Sefer sheelot uteshuvot zekan Aharon, part 1, no. 6; R. Yehiel Ya’akov Weinberg, Hapardes (Nisan 5723 [1963]) = idem, Seridei esh, part 3, no. 93; R. Yisrael Weltz, Sheelot uteshuvot divrei Yisrael, part 2, Lekutei teshuvot, no. 7; R. Ovadia Yosef, Yabi’a omer, part 6, Oraḥ ḥayim, no. 29, par. 4; idem, Yehaveh da’at, part 2, no. 29; R. Yosef Hayim of Baghdad, Ben ish Ḥai, shanah rishonah, parashat reeh, no. 17 (as quoted above, n. 54). 69. Fishbane, “A Female Rite of Passage in a Montreal Modern Orthodox Synagogue.” 70. Penkower, “Bat Mitzvah: Coming of Age in Brooklyn”; Wolfson-​Moche, “Toward a Meaningful Bat Mitzvah”; articles in JOFA Journal 9, no. 1. 71. See articles in JOFA Journal 9, no. 1. 72. Halbertal, “Maneuvering in a World of Law and Custom.” 73. This section is based on Hilton, Bar Mitzvah, 47–​53 (based on an unpublished master’s thesis by Meir Sered) and Joselit, The Wonders of America, 92–​93. On Sholem Aleichem, see the excerpt from his memoir in Eisenberg (ed.), The Bar Mitzvah Treasury, 278–​282. For recent examples of derashot written by rabbis for a bar mitzvah boy to recite, including one written by R. Ovadia Yosef for his son, see R. Yitzhak Yosef, Sefer yalkut Yosef: dinei ḥinukh katan uvar mitzvah (Jerusalem: 5758 [1998]), in the appendix, 1–​14. 74. Joselit, The Wonders of America, 90 (testimony from Romania, 1932). 75. Ibid., 89–​105; Marcus, The Jewish Life Cycle, 118–​120; Hilton, Bar Mitzvah, 143–​144, 170–​178. 76. R. Yosef Kafih, Ketavim, vol. 1 (Jerusalem: 1989), 38–​46 and vol. 3 (Jerusalem: 2002), 1426–​1428 and in his commentary to the Mishneh Torah (Jerusalem: 1993), Hilkhot teshuvah 6:2 (n. 7); Yehudah Ratzhabi, Bema’agalei teiman (Tel Aviv: 1988), 21 (he writes that boys read from the Torah from age seven; he does not mention bar mitzvah at all); Yosef Shalom Habara, Bitlaot teiman virushalayim (Jerusalem: 1970), 300 (a father buys his son tefillin as soon as he can read with understanding and can observe the mitzvot); Shimon Garidi in Wassertil (ed.), Yalkut minhagim, 552; Zohar Amar, Sefer haḥilukim bein benei teiman levein benei hatzafon (Neveh Tzuf: 2017), 110, par. 525; S.D. Goitein, Hateimanim: historiyah, sidrei ḥevrah,

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ḥayei haruaḥ, ed. Menahem Ben-​Sasson (Jerusalem: 1983), 241–​248; idem, A Mediterranean

Society, 28 and 512 (n. 83). 77. Erich Brauer, quoted by Rifkind, Leot ulezikaron, 68–​69; Idelsohn, quoted ibid., 60–​61. 78. On London, Amsterdam, and Jerusalem (1934), see R. Shemtov Gaguine, Keter shem tov (Kaidan: 1934), 12–​14; on Gibraltar (20th century), see Hilton, Bar Mitzvah, 64; on Morocco (1839), see Allegemeine Zeitung des Judentums 3 (1839), 278–​279, which is quoted in various ways in The Jewish Encyclopedia, 2:510; Schauss, The Lifetime of a Jew, 119; Rifkind, Leot ulezikaron, 65–​66 (cf. 19, n. 6); on North Africa ca. 1850, see Israel Joseph Benjamin II, Acht Jahre in Asien und Afrika von 1846 bis 1855 (Hannover: 1858), 275–​276, translated by Rifkind, Leot ulezikaron, 66–​67 and partially quoted by Hilton, Bar Mitzvah, 136; on Algiers (1889), see R. Eliyahu Guedj, Zeh hashulḥan (Algier: 1889), part 2, fols. 29a–​b and n. 6; on Algeria (20th century), see R. Yosef Mashash, Sefer mayim ḥayim, part 2, no. 1; on Tunisia (2010), see R. David Setbon, ’Alei hadas, 2nd ed. (Kiryat Sefer: 2010), 730–​731; on the Sephardim of Jerusalem (1882), see A.M. Luncz, “Minhagei aḥeinu beeretz hakodesh bedat uveḥayei ’am,” Yerushalayim 1 (5642 [1882]), 5–​6, also quoted by Rifkind, Leot ulezikaron, 68 and by Schauss, The Lifetime of a Jew, 119; on Ladino-​speaking Jews in the Caucasus (1947), see the novel by Yehudah Burla, ’Aliyot ’akavyah (Tel Aviv: 1947), excerpted in Eisenberg (ed.), The Bar Mitzvah Treasury, 273–​277; on Baghdad (1870s), see R. Yosef Hayim of Baghdad, Ben ish ḥai (quoted above, n. 54); on Zaku (Kurdistan, date unknown), see Mordechai Yona, Haovdim beeretz ashur (Jerusalem: 1989), 65; on Afghanistan (before 1948), see Wassertil, Yalkut minhagim, 56. 79. Wassertil, Yalkut minhagim, 229, 258, 335, 360–​361, 450–​451, 465, 495, 518. The only descriptions in that book that seem to describe authentic pre-​1948 customs are those of Yemen (see above, n. 76) and Afghanistan (see previous note). Similarly, in Herbert Dobrinsky’s A Treasury of Sephardic Laws and Customs (Hoboken: 1986), 30–​38, it appears that two of the Sephardic groups in the United States have lost any vestige of Sephardic practice, while in the case of Syrian and Moroccan Jews, one can see that some Ashkenazic customs have encroached on the Sephardic. For example, there is an internal contradiction on pp. 30–​31 regarding the permissible age for reading Torah, and on p. 35, Moroccan Jews seem to have adopted the Ashkenazic blessing of Barukh sheptarani. 80. This section is based on the following:  Shoham, “ ‘A Birthday Party, Only a Little Bigger,’ ” 275–​292; idem, “The Bar and Bat Mitzvah in the Yishuv and Early Israel:  From Initiation Rite to Birthday Party,” AJS Review 42, no. 1 (April 2018), 133–​157; Rifkind, Leot ulezikaron, 62–​66, 72–​73; Hilton, Bar Mitzvah, 128–​129, 144–​147. 81. Shoham, “ ‘A Birthday Party, Only a Little Bigger,’ ” 279–​280; idem, “The Bar and Bat Mitzvah in the Yishuv and Early Israel,” 144. 82. Shoham, “The Bar and Bat Mitzvah in the Yishuv and Early Israel,” 152–​156. 83. Shoham, “ ‘A Birthday Party, Only a Little Bigger’ ”; idem, “The Bar and Bat Mitzvah in the Yishuv and Early Israel.” 84. Shmuel Rosner and Camil Fuchs, Yahadut yisreelit: diyukan shel mahapekhah tarbutit (Hevel Modiin: 2018), 220–​221. 85. Rifkind, Leot ulezikaron, 72–​73, translated from Yiddishe derzeiung 3/​6 (1939), 46. The passage from Rifkind was then translated into English by Hilton (Bar Mitzvah, 141), with one major error: he translated the Yiddish writer Yehoash as the book of Joshua. 86. Hilton, Bar Mitzvah, 142. 87. Martin Boder, “My Secular Yiddish Bar Mitzvah” (25 March 2014), online at youtube.com/​watch?v=yFMSU2hhyMQ (accessed 13 January 2020). According to Boder, his bar mitzvah was written up in the Yiddish Forverts in June 1949.

Essays

The Child Who Cannot Ask: The Holocaust Poetry of Moisei Teif Anna Shternshis (UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO)

The poet Moisei Teif referred to himself as an “alpinezl,” a made-​up word roughly translated from Yiddish as “saved by a miracle.”1 He came up with this name for himself when he was a young child growing up in Minsk. By his reckoning, he had already survived longer than he should have—​when he was just eight months old, his mother, holding him in her arms, had managed to protect him from the street violence of the Russian Revolution of 1905. Little did he know that this was the first of numerous near-​death situations and traumas that he would encounter, among them the bloody Russian Revolution of 1917, which resulted in his family’s losing all their possessions; the brutal Russian Civil War; imprisonment in Stalin’s gulag in 1938, a divorce soon thereafter; military service (including being wounded) in the Red Army during the Second World War; another round of imprisonment in the gulag from 1948 to 1956; and, most devastating of all, the loss of his little son, Tolya, who was murdered by the Germans in the ghetto either of Grodno or of Minsk in 1941, at the age of seven or eight. According to his friends, his second wife, Ester Bluschinskaya, and his stepdaughter, Leah Dar, Teif never got over the death of his son. He always carried a photograph of Tolya pictured in a furry hat, and an enlarged copy of the photograph was featured prominently on his desk.2 In 1964, two years before his own death, Teif wrote a poem, “Mayn yingele” about a little boy wearing such a hat, who appears in the imagination of a man who is unable to sleep: Ven halbnakht pavolye-​shalvedik Nemt fun turem klingen, In a peltsl mit a shalekhl, Vayzt zikh a kleyn yingl.

When in the middle of the night There comes a ringing from a tower, A little boy appears, Wearing a furry hat and scarf.

Shmayst der vint in nakn mir, Un, vi ikh, er fibert. Kh’ze, vi kinder nakete Shist men ba di griber . . . 

The wind hits my neck, And, like me, it shivers I see how naked children Are shot by the ravines . . . 

Anna Shternshis, The Child Who Cannot Ask: The Holocaust Poetry of Moisei Teif In: No Small Matter: Features of Jewish Childhood. Edited by: Anat Helman, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197577301.003.0013

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The raw pain underlying this poem resonated throughout Teif’s life. He could not forget what had happened, could not switch it off, could not change the subject—​and he also refused to separate the Holocaust from the Soviet Union, as had so many of his colleagues among Soviet Yiddish writers. Other writers placed their literary victims in Poland or Romania,3 separated communal from personal pain, universalized the victims of war (as Teif’s editor had suggested),4 or at least allowed their characters either not to dream or, if sleep eluded them, not to linger on painful thoughts. Teif, however, persisted in brooding about a topic most people would choose to avoid: the senseless murder of children. At first, there seems to be nothing noteworthy about his choice. Today, images of children dying at the hands of German soldiers readily come to mind when thinking about the Holocaust. The most famous Holocaust text, The Diary of Anne Frank, was written by a young girl, and the most powerful room of the Yad Vashem permanent exhibit is the Children’s Memorial, an underground cavern filled with portraits of children and the continuous recitation of names of more than one million child victims of the Holocaust. In the Soviet context, talking about children as targets of war had a different meaning. I argue that, in his poems, Teif found a way to address the taboo subject of the massive loss of Jewish children during the Second World War, a trauma that almost every Soviet Jewish family experienced, but often lied or kept silent about. Teif’s poems, in Russian translation, provided a means for the Soviet Jewish community to commemorate the history of the Holocaust in the Soviet Union. In contrast to the relatively well-​known story of the tragic fate of Jewish children in Poland, that of Jewish children in the Soviet Union remains to be written.5 We know that about 2.8 million children under the age of 14 died in the Soviet Union during the Second World War, mostly because of famine and disease, but we do not know exactly how many of these children were Jewish.6 Among the little that is known is that Jewish children who were evacuated with their parents to the interior of the Soviet Union, or otherwise escaped, shared fates similar to those of other Soviet children. This was not the case with children who remained in Belarus, eastern Ukraine, Rostov on Don, Crimea, or other European areas of the Soviet Union. In fact, it was much safer for Jewish soldiers to serve in the Red Army than for their children (or other relatives) to stay behind. Of the 440,000 Jews who enlisted in the Red Army, about 300,000 came back home alive, whereas the survival rate of Jews under the German occupation was less than 5 percent.7 Jewish children, like their civilian parents and grandparents, were specifically targeted once they ended up under German or Romanian occupation. Many were murdered during mass shootings in places such as Kiev, Kamenets-​Podolsk, Bogdanovka, Kharkov, Minsk, Kerch, Rostov-​on-​Don, and Odessa. Some died from starvation and disease in Romanian-​controlled ghettos and camps; others perished in combat, usually with partisan units. Simply put, Soviet Jewish children falling under the German occupation in 1941 faced almost certain death. The case of Moisei Teif’s son was both tragic and common. After Teif was convicted of anti-​Soviet activity in 1937, his wife, the Yiddish singer Roza Plotkina, filed for divorce.8 In June 1941, Plotkina sent the boy to her mother, who lived in

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a village a few hundred kilometers east of Minsk. Like many other Soviet parents, Plotkina believed that the boy would benefit from the fresh air, fruit, and company of his grandmother. However, a few days after she kissed Tolya goodbye, the German army invaded. The trains stopped going West, and she never saw her son again. Both Plotkina and Teif eventually found out that Tolya and his grandmother had been killed sometime later that year, probably in August 1941. By and large, such stories were not readily discussed among Soviet Jewish families. They were simply too painful to remember; almost all of them involved impossible choices, devastation, and death.9 The fact of losing a child during the war often remained a dark secret, a skeleton in the closet that very few people shared. Paradoxically, however, numerous artistic works, produced during the time of the war and in the early postwar period, took up the theme, rendering the destruction wrought upon the Jewish community through images of children being snatched from their mothers’ arms and slaughtered. Such images appear in the poem “I Saw It,” by Ilya Selvinsky (1942), the stories “The Old Teacher” (1943) and “Treblinka Report” (1945), by Vasily Grossman, and the film “Unvanquished” (1945) directed by Mark Donskoy. A number of Yiddish folksongs that documented atrocities against children were written as early as 1941.10 As is true of all wars, Soviet fathers drafted into the army were separated from their children when they were sent off to fight, and in many cases heard infrequently, if at all, from their families. Many of the Jewish soldiers had no inkling of the atrocities that were taking place. Thus, when Teif served in combat, he, too, was homesick, missing his son—​without being aware of the fate awaiting him. In a short memoir written in the third person sometime after 1961, he cryptically described his last moments with Tolya: It was 1937. A three-​year-​old son was unhappy that his father woke him up so early, so that he could kiss him before armed men took him. . . . Fortunately, the separation was a short one. When he came back, the poet remembered his own childhood nickname “Alpinezl—​al pi nes.” Indeed, he came back for a few days to spend some time with his boy in a remote shtetl in the Gomel region [of Belarus]. The war separated them forever. The boy and his grandma were killed under the fascist occupation in a ghetto near Grodno. The boy’s parents got divorced. . . . 11

It was, indeed, a miracle that Teif got to see his son after his liberation from a Soviet jail in April 1941. Because of the divorce he was able to stay only for a few days, rather than a few months, before he was drafted into the Red Army. It was probably sometime later that year that he learned about Tolya remaining with his grandmother under the German occupation. Sometime in 1944, Teif wrote a poem in which he documented the point at which letters from his son stopped coming, but when the news of his child’s death had not yet reached him. He called this piece “A Soldier’s Poem”: In mayn soldatskn rukzekl Iz vos du vilst faran Oy iz er nit oysgeven,

My soldier’s rucksack Has everything one could want A never-​emptied rucksack, it’s traveled with me everywhere,

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In feld, in vald, in ban. [ . . . ] Oy neyn, s’iz nit keyn feygele . . .  In rukzak, in paket Fir yor hob ikh bahaltn dort mayn yingeles portret.

In fields, in forests, in trains. [ . . . ] Oh no, it’s not a bird... In my rucksack, in a parcel, For four years, I hid my boy’s portrait.

Iz efsher veyst ir feygelekh, Tsi efsher veystu, vint, Avu iz er, mayn yingele? Avu iz er, mayn kind? 12

Maybe you, birds, know, Maybe you know, the wind, Where is my boy? Where is my child?

Soldiers’ backpacks have featured in many war poems and songs, and the theme of soldiers treasuring their photographs of children, sweethearts, and parents is also quite common. Although Teif never mentions the ethnicity of his protagonist, the concern about not knowing where one’s child is acquires additional poignancy in the specifically Jewish context, in which losing a child was more likely than the father’s dying in combat. As noted, other Soviet Jewish poets and journalists, including Ilya Selvinsky, Ilya Ehrenburg, Leyb Kvitko, Der Nister, Shira Gorshman, and Vasily Grossman, portrayed situations like this in artistic works created during the war. Written at times in Yiddish but more often in Russian, these works, like Teif’s poem, did not mention the ethnicity of their protagonists, yet they described a shared experience of parents who had lost children in the war.13 Following the end of the Second World War, Soviet Jews went through fifteen turbulent years. During this time, the government launched an anti-​cosmopolitan campaign in which Jews were accused of undermining the Soviet economy, politics, culture, and, at a later stage, the medical system. Some Jewish intellectuals—​in particular, those who were affiliated with the Jewish Anti-​Fascist Committee—​were arrested on the suspicion of espionage. Some of them were sentenced to death and shot in August 1952.14 Others, including Teif and hundreds of other Jewish writers, poets, journalists, and scholars, were arrested and sentenced to ten years in prison, and in most cases had their property confiscated. Early in 1953, a group of elite doctors was accused of trying to poison Joseph Stalin, and thousands of Jewish doctors around the country were harassed and sometimes fired.15 It remains to be discovered how many people successfully managed to hide their Jewish origins. Even when Stalin died in March 1953 and Jewish doctors were officially acquitted, there remained discrimination, harassment, and general hostility toward Jews. In an atmosphere in which Jews were perceived as being just short of criminals, speaking openly about Jewish Holocaust victims, including children, was risky. Although some communities worked privately to erect local memorials and to document lists of those killed during the war, the majority of Soviet Jews resorted to the best strategy available to them: silence.16 It was only during the political thaw of the 1960s, a few years after “Stalin’s cult of personality” had been exposed and condemned, that public discussion about various formerly taboo topics, including Jewish victims of the Holocaust, became permissible.17 In 1961, Teif, who had been out of jail for five years and had remarried, was invited to move from Minsk to Moscow

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to head the poetry department of the new Yiddish literary magazine, Sovetish heymland. There he composed a new poem, titled “Kikhelekh and Zemelekh” (Cookies and Buns). Although he had discovered the fate of his son at the end of 1945, it was only now that a poem on the topic could be published. Although similar in some ways to “A Soldier’s Poem”—​it, too, has a father asking about the location of his son—​ “Kikhelekh and Zemelekh” offers no hope of an eventual reunion: Sheyn iz moskve ovnt tsayt, Ven es falt a shneyele, Gey ikh oyf der gorki-​gas Mit der yugnt freyen zikh.

Moscow is lovely in the twilight when snow is falling, I stroll onto Gorky Street To enjoy the young people.

In a kleyt hob ikh derzen Kikhelekh un zemelekh—​ Bin ikh oyf der gas aroys Mit a lid –​a zemerl.

In a shop window I see kikhelekh and zemelekh So I go into the street singing a song—​a melody.

Shteyt! Shteyt! Shteyt! Nit aylt azoy, nit loyft, Geyt arayn aher in kleyt Koyft far ale kinder, koyft Kikhelekh un zemelekh, Kikhelekh un zemelekh.

Stop! Stop! Stop! Don’t hurry so, don’t run! Come here into the shop buy for the children, buy them kikhelekh and zemelekh! Kikhelekh and zemelekh!

Shlept mikh op a yingele, Fregt mikh epes shemevdik: Chto takoe kikhelekh? Chto takoe zemelekh? Kuk ikh oyf dem yingele Glet zayn futer-​hitele, Un es vert mir troyerik, Nor ikh zing mayn lidele:

A young boy stops me, asking somewhat shyly Chto takoe? What is kikhelekh? Chto takoe? What is zemelekh? I look at this little boy, pat his little fur hat and I become sad, But keep singing my song.

Shteyt! Shteyt! Shteyt! Nit aylt azoy, nit loyft, Geyt arayn aher in kleyt Koyft far ale kinder, koyft Kikhelekh un zemelekh, Kikhelekh un zemelekh.

Stop! Stop! Stop! Don’t hurry so, don’t run! Come here into the shop, Buy for the children, buy them kikhelekh and zemelekh! Kikhelekh and zemelekh!

Zing ikh, un mir dakht, ikh her, Vi es bet mayn yingele: Tate, koyf a kikhele, Koyf a zemele.

I sing and think I hear My own small boy asking me: Daddy, buy me a kikheleh, buy me a zemeleh.

Vu bistu, mayn yingele? Vu bistu, mayn tayerer? Dakht zikh, az du shrayst tsu mir Fun di geto-​fayern:

Where are you, my little boy? Where are you, my dearest? I think I hear you calling me from the fire of the ghetto.

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Shteyt! Shteyt! Shteyt! Nit aylt azoy, nit loyft, Geyt arayn aher in kleyt Koyft far ale kinder, koyft Kikhelekh un zemelekh, Kikhelekh un zemelekh.

Stop! Stop! Stop! Don’t hurry so, don’t run! Come here into the shop, buy for the children, buy them kikhelekh and zemelekh! Kikhelekh and zemelekh!

Sheyn iz moskve ovnt tsayt, Ven es falt a shneyele, Gey ikh oyf der gorki-​gas Mit der yugnt freyen zikh. Ze ikh kinder, gib ikh zey Kikhelekh un zemelekh, Un mir dakht, di gantse velt Zingt mayn lid –​mayn zemerl.

Moscow is lovely in the evening, when snow is falling I stroll onto Gorky Street To join the happy youngsters. Seeing children all about, I give them kikhelekh and zemelekh. It seems to me the whole world Sings my song—​my melody.

Shteyt! Shteyt! Shteyt! Nit aylt azoy, nit loyft, Geyt arayn aher in kleyt Koyft far ale kinder, koyft Kikhelekh un zemelekh, Kikhelekh un zemelekh.

Stop! Stop! Stop! Don’t hurry so, don’t run! Come here into the shop, buy for the children, buy them kikhelekh and zemelekh! kikhelekh and zemelekh!18

“Kikhelekh and Zemelekh” became Teif’s most famous poem. Its emotional power transcended the boundaries of the language in which it was written, the time during which it was created, and even the genre of poetry. In Russian translation, it acquired an audience of millions, eventually becoming a popular song that was later incorporated into a play directed by Mark Rozovsky, an up-​and-​coming young director of that time. Something about its combination of simple rhymes and a deceptively cheerful opening (“I stroll onto Gorky Street/​To enjoy the young people”), followed by a horrifying, blood-​chilling fragment of story, made this poem impossible to get out of one’s mind, both in the 1960s and then in the early 1990s when public conversation about the Holocaust was resurrected in the former Soviet Union. For all its seeming simplicity, “Kikhelekh and Zemelekh” was the poem that became a living monument for Soviet Jewish victims of the Holocaust. First, Teif calls, cries out, for active commemoration of the innocent victims of the war, and he focuses exclusively on Jewish children and Jewish families. In the context of contemporary Western Holocaust education, in which the history of the Second World War is somewhat marginalized, such an approach does not seem noteworthy, but within the Soviet frame of reference it was quite unusual. Even Yevgeny Yevtushenko, who wrote about Jewish victims in his poem “Babi Yar” (1961), addresses the fact that people of all ethnicities were killed during the war. When it comes to killing Jews, Yevtushenko placed the Holocaust in Bialystok, Amsterdam, and other places outside of the Soviet Union.19 Teif, however, breaks away from these patterns: he speaks about the losses of his own family and does not mention non-​Jews,

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situating the Holocaust on Soviet soil and showing how it devastated Soviet Jewish families. Moreover, Teif’s passion is both communal and personal. It is impossible not to know that the poet was touched by the war in a very personal way. But he refuses to limit the loss of a child to a personal loss. Instead, he draws our attention to kikhelekh and zemelekh. In Yiddish, kikhelekh and zemelekh simply mean “little cookies” and “little buns,” but in Russian, they are understood to be the names of specific baked goods, as opposed to generic types. Indeed, long after public displays of Jewishness were eliminated from the Soviet Union, kikhelekh, zemelekh, and challah were openly sold in better bakeries, as will be seen. When the poet sees kikhelekh and zemelekh, he immediately associates them with the sweetness of childhood, his own, presumably, and with a distinctly Jewish heritage. He encourages readers to stop, to smell, and to take a moment and buy themselves a moment of respite from their daily routine. Then comes a turning point. A boy asks him in Russian: What is kikhelekh? What is zemelekh? The boy, we soon realize, reminds him of his son. He is shy, and he is wearing a fur hat (just like Tolya). But unlike his son, he cannot ask the question in Yiddish. I look at this little boy pat his little fur hat and I become sad [ . . . ] It is clear that the poet is sad because he is thinking about his son (“my own small boy”). But in addition, he may be thinking of all the children who once knew how to ask questions in Yiddish. Where are they? Moscow, home to one of the largest Jewish communities in the Soviet Union, is no longer the home of Yiddish-​speaking children. They were all killed. One can see the parallel with the famous Jewish story, recited during the Passover seder, about the fourth son, the one who “does not know how to ask.” According to Jewish tradition, even if a child is unable to ask, one should tell him the story so that is transmitted to the next generation. This is the task that Teif takes upon himself. As the poem continues, the poet’s sense of loss becomes almost cosmic in scale as he screams “Stop! Stop!” and “it seems to me the whole world sings my song—​my melody.” People need to stop, Teif insists, and to acknowledge their dead, to teach their children to ask the question in Yiddish, or at least recognize that kikhelekh and zemelekh are remnants of a lost Yiddish world, the world of his son who used to like these treats, but can no longer ask for them. The question “where are you, my little boy?” is almost identical to Teif’s earlier cry, “Where is my boy?” in “A Soldier’s Poem.” Here, however, the question is no longer hopeful—​nor solely rhetorical. The boy does not have a resting place his father can visit, since his body was burned and dumped in an unknown mass grave. Moreover, Teif does not even know in which ghetto his son was killed, in Minsk or in Grodno, on which date it happened, and who was with him. The pain is all the worse because there is no possibility of closure. This personal tragedy is not unique. Teif here represents an entire generation of Jews, mostly fathers, whose children were killed. Far from home, they were unable to protect their own families. Their sense of loss is thus intensified by guilt, as well as

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by their inability to properly commemorate their dead. In other poems, Teif expresses a wish that someone—​some boy—​will recite kaddish for him after his death.20 He himself cannot publicly say kaddish for his dead son, as religion is no longer part of his life. Instead, he suggests, in “Kikhelekh and Zemelekh,” that teaching a random Jewish or non-​Jewish child the meaning of the Yiddish word for “cookie” has a potential for redemption, an ability to repair the broken world. Teif recited this poem on numerous occasions. According to Yiddish writer Mishe Lev, he cried almost every time he did so.21 Sweat covered his face, his voice trembled, and it seemed as though he was reliving the actual event each time he performed it. According to Lev: “Before the recitation, Teif looked as if he was breathing the aroma of freshly baked bread in a bakery. He did it when he performed for listeners in Moscow, Kiev, Kishenev, Beltsy, and even when he performed for one listener only.”22 The path to mainstream popularity began with the poem’s reiteration, “the authorized translation” into Russian, that was done by a famous Russian poet of Jewish heritage, Yunna Morits (born in 1937).23 Morits, who in a personal communication suggested that Teif was the “greatest Yiddish poet who ever lived,” worked with the Russian podstrochnik (word by word translation into Russian) that Teif provided for her. However, the Russian result is quite different from the Yiddish original. Teif’s stepdaughter, Leah Dar, recalls that Morits and Teif fought “over every line, every word,” but also acknowledges that Teif got unbelievably lucky with his translator.24 If we consider the popularity of the poem, she is, of course, right. If we think about the content, the “luck” can be debated. Here is my English translation of the Russian version: The city smells fresh, Windy and tender. I walk on Gorky [Street], Towards Manezhnaya Square. Kikhelekh and zemelekh, I see them in the bakery. And I stand there, lost In the turmoil of the street. All, All, All, All children love sweets. Their joyful sounds of happiness Resound in the peaceful weekday evening Kikhelekh and zemelekh Buy them in the bakery. A girl runs towards me. She asks me quietly: “What is zemelekh? What is kikhelekh?”

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I explain to the girl The meaning of these words: “Kikhelekh and zemelekh—​ Are sweet cookies.” My boy who once loved To eat these cookies, Was burned in Hitler’s ghetto. I stand And it seems I hear My son’s quiet voice: “Oy, buy me today zemelekh, Oy, buy me today kikhelekh!” Where are you, my boy? Oh, your sweet tooth, where is it? Poppies are burning Where the ghetto used to be. Poppies are burning On the flammable earth. All, All, All, All children love sweets. For their uninhibited joy, On a peaceful weekday evening Kikhelekh and zemelekh Buy them in the bakery!25 The differences in Russian translation and Yiddish original go beyond changing the boy into a girl; getting rid of Yiddish connotations (the questions are asked in Russian, the same as the language of the poem, and the reader has no idea that the poet thinks and tells a story in a different language); and deleting the lines in which “the whole world sings my song” in commemoration of the children who were killed. In the Russian version, the poem focuses on the present. It creates different Jewish symbols, a different non-​Jewish environment, and asks for different actions. The word Jew is not mentioned, and neither is the ethnicity of the child. In the Yiddish original, the poet asks everyone to stop and—​by implication—​to remember. In the Russian version, all he asks is for passersby to buy cookies and remember what are the cookies’ origins. In other words, he asks us not to forget that Jews, as well, died in the war. I would argue that the poem in fact has a more pronounced Jewish spirit in Russian than it does in Yiddish. Merely translating it from Yiddish into Russian would have failed to express the Jewish sense of loss, which is understood in Yiddish without elaboration. In Yiddish, the Russian-​speaking boy does not get an answer to his

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question “What is kikhelekh, and what is zemelekh?” Instead, this question provokes the sadness of the poet, who does not reply but instead delves into his own thoughts. In Russian, however, the answer is given, and this answer has significance: it brings Jewish content to what would otherwise be “yet another” kind of cookie sold at a bakery. (Here it is important to note that the bakery in question was not an ordinary, run-​of-​the-​mill Soviet bakery. The reference is to the Philipovskaya bakery on Gorky Street, built in the late 19th century, which featured a lit-​up window and—​unlike almost all other bakeries in Moscow—​a large variety of breads, sweets and cookies, including cinnamon sugar cookies labeled, in Russian letters, as kikhelekh, and simple yeast buns, covered with powdered sugar, labeled as zemelekh.) Morits, who is not a Yiddish speaker, is fascinated by Yiddish sounds and emphasizes these as Jewish symbols, thus leading to another important part of Jewish identity—​the tragedy of the ghettos. Essentially, the poem celebrates Jewish humanity from a distance, encouraging the reader to sympathize with Jews and even hinting at a Jewish solidarity (though very, very subtly). The two versions of the poem fit into the long-​existing tradition of different Jewish cultures existing in the Soviet Union—​in Russian and in Yiddish. Before 1941, the Yiddish language was the expression of mainstream Yiddish culture for the majority of Soviet Jews. After 1945, Yiddish culture became the possession of a few enthusiasts and survivors, and by the 1960s, it had become much less relevant as a vernacular and in addition had acquired a symbolic (and largely negative) connotation for the assimilated Jewish public, with the exception of the small circle of writers and readers of Sovetish heymland. For Russian Jewish culture, which was less relevant in the 1930s but very important for Russian Jews at the start of the 1950s, the situation was reversed. Authors mentioning a Jewish name of a character, or a specifically Jewish place of residence (for instance, Berdichev) or occupation (for instance, a doctor, a shoemaker, a violinist) were signaling “Jewishness” indirectly for Jewish readers who were eager and ready to read between the lines. Starved for any open discussion of the Holocaust, the Jewish audience craved poems like Teif’s in Russian translation. “Kikhelekh and Zemelekh” had everything these readers wanted: an acknowledgement of Jewish suffering and ongoing trauma, as well as the attempt to universalize the tragedy, making it relevant to Jews and non-​Jews alike. From the point of view of Soviet censorship, the poem did not seem to belong to the larger, non-​Yiddish-​speaking audience. It was published without trouble in irrelevant Yiddish; it was only the later Russian version that proved troublesome. In Russian, the poem went against unwritten Soviet rules regarding discussion of the Holocaust. “Kikhelekh and Zemelekh” offered no mention of Jewish resistance to the Germans, nor did it equate the suffering of Jews with that of non-​Jews. It also made no mention of rescuers, but instead subtly criticized the lack of commemoration of Jewish victims of the war. In this regard, Morits’ insertion of poppies, the bright red flowers “burning /​Where the ghetto used to be,” was not accidental. These delicate flowers have long been used as an emblem of sleep and death—​as, for instance, in The Wizard of Oz, where Dorothy falls asleep among the poppies. Following the First World War, it became a widespread practice (though not in the Soviet Union) to wear cotton or paper pins

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in the shape of poppies at memorial ceremonies for soldiers. Soviet architect Iosif Karakis (1902–​1988) even suggested that poppies should cover the bottom of the ravine in Babi Yar to symbolize the spilled blood.26 Although the idea was ultimately rejected in 1965, poppies as symbols of blood probably circulated in the Soviet Union, and the image was likely to have resonated with the Kiev-​born Morits. In the poem, the line about burning poppies implies that there is no monument to those murdered. Essentially, the poem states that the Jewish victims are forgotten, even more so than others. Whereas the Soviet Union had an abundance of monuments of the Second World War, Jewish victims, if commemorated at all, were only mentioned as peace-​ loving Soviet citizens, never as Jews and, of course, never in Yiddish. Soon after the Russian version of the poem was published in 1965, it caught the attention of Mark Rozovsky (born in 1937), then a young director of the first Soviet semi-​independent student theater, which later became a celebrated professional theater. Rozovsky, who was also a playwright and composer, set the poem to music, and in 1967, a year after Teif’s death, he included the song into one of his plays. It did not really fit the plot, but was sung in the middle, by a sad clown. The music, incorporating klezmer elements, emphasized the Jewish nature of the suffering—​the clown’s performance included his crying in the middle of the song. Although popular with the public, the play ran on stage for less than two years before being canceled by the censors. The cancellation was not surprising, given the Soviet climate of the time; it is actually more surprising that the play was ever allowed to be performed. Decades later, Rozovsky wrote an account of how he had successfully navigated the system to order to receive permission to have “Kikhelekh and Zemelekh” sung on stage: In my play, The Legend of Tsar Max-​Emelyan, there was one song, called “Kikhelekh and Zemelekh,” written by Moisei Teif, the poet, war veteran, and gulag prisoner. I created the tune for this poem because I was literally stunned by the beauty of Yunna Morits’ Russian translation. I was told: “Take the song out! The play will not be allowed if the song is in it.”    I asked:    “But why? This is an anti-​fascist, anti-​Hitler song!”    “Yes, it is anti-​fascist, but we do not need to stress this topic.”    I was surprised:    “Why not?”    “Because this is a Jewish topic. Yes, it is anti-​fascist, but it is also Jewish.”    “So? Is a Jewish anti-​fascist topic prohibited in our country?”    “Who says ‘forbidden’? We say ‘Do not stress,’ which means something else!”    “It means the same thing!”    “Comrade Rozovsky, we do not prohibit. We advise. We recommend. But if you do not hear our advice, if you do not try to accommodate us, it means you are against us. It means you do not understand the Party politics, do not share our views.”

Rozovsky left with nothing in hand, but a few months later, he requested permission from a different Party boss. Finally, after much back and forth, permission to perform the piece was reluctantly granted, in the sense that no official prohibition was issued. Rozovsky remembers the phone call that he received:

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“You can stage the play,” the official said. “Can we sing “Kikhelekh” too? “They did not say. If they did not say, it means—​you can!” “Are you sure?” “Yes, I am sure. If it was not allowed, they would have specifically said so.” This is how “Kikhelekh” was performed for the first time.27

As noted, the play ran for less than two years before being taken off the stage, probably because the political climate changed. But the song continued to circulate through the repertoire of countless amateur performers who sang it at home, accompanied by their guitars. The collapse of Soviet ideology, even before the collapse of the Soviet Union, brought the song back into a public sphere. In fact, according to Mishe Lev, the song was performed at the first public meeting of Soviet Holocaust survivors and their families in Moscow, in 1988: At the beginning of “perestroika,” during the time of Gorbachev [during the late 1980s], Jews who miraculously survived the ghettos and Nazi concentration camps formed a union. Most of these people were children during the war. Without noticing it, they gradually switched to the language of their mothers and fathers. For the first time in 40 years, an audience like this got together. Normally, they speak Russian. They only speak Yiddish when they want their grandchildren not to understand them. But here, among people who lived through the ghetto experience, it is impossible to use any other language. It seems as though they mourn their mother tongue and at the same time enjoy it, too. [ . . . ] Toward the end of the evening, a special guest, a renowned director, composer, performer, and singer named Mark Rozovsky, went on stage. A violinist and a pianist accompanied him. He announced: “Now we will sing a song, once prohibited for a performance in my play.” He began: “The city smells fresh . . . ” [ . . . ] After he finished, the room went completely silent. Not even a whisper, a whimper, a peep. Then someone in the audience said, in a quiet voice:  “oy, please buy today, kikhelekh and zemelekh.” Then people started clapping, it was as if water pressure had broken a dome or if thunder had opened the sky. Next to me sat a man, who called out: “We want to see the author!!” How could this assimilated Jew know that the author, Moisei Teif, has by now been dead for more than 20 years . . . 

That evening, according to Lev, Teif’s poem succeeded in doing what the poet himself had hoped to accomplish—​it brought together people belonging to the generation of Soviet Jews who had lost their children during the war, but who were unable (or not allowed) to speak about it. Teif had written his poem because his personal pain was too much to bear in silence. Now, at a time when the political climate had become more permissive, those who listened to his poem, and sang along with it, could begin to share their own stories of life-​shattering trauma, and might in this way find a measure of comfort. This public performance of “Kikhelekh and Zemelekh” was the first of many. Wherever Russian Jews lived, the song followed them. Amateur and professional performers included it in their repertoire, sometimes singing of a “brother” or a “little sister.” In a complicated way, the song itself became an embodiment of post-​ Soviet nostalgia, harkening back to a time when it was performed in small circles

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of like-​minded people behind closed doors, a community of those who could read between the lines of Soviet society. It was about the secrets that Soviet Jewish families kept with regard to lost siblings, children, and grandchildren. Individual histories were too painful to share, yet the song helped to keep the memory alive. Svetlana Boym has argued that if a pain is not cured by medication, it can be eased by articulating it in art. Poetry, paintings, music, prose—​each of these, by addressing the impossibility of return, serves to ease the burden and provide a language for coping.28 Russian Jews have yet to reconcile the facts of what happened to young Jewish children in the 1940s, and in many cases, they will never learn the exact facts. But at least they have begun to understand the pain their grandparents kept quiet about for so long, thanks to artists such as Moisei Teif. “Kikhelekh and Zemelekh,” a Yiddish poem by a talented writer who had a tragic life, easily crossed the borders of languages, countries, ideologies, political systems, and generations. In one form or another, it survived for decades without losing its appeal, speaking to generations of Soviet Jews who, for years, lacked the language (or means) to talk about the traumatic events they had undergone. As for Teif, while he was unable to say goodbye to his beloved son, he succeeded in immortalizing him in a poem expressing one father’s boundless love. This was a small miracle, yet another instance of the way in which the poet’s childhood nickname, Alpinezl, proved to be prophetic.

Notes 1. Moisei Teif, “Alpinezl,” Korni 22 (April–​June 2004), 12. The word in Yiddish is a play on nes (miracle) and nezl (little nose). 2. Leah Dar, “Ryadom s Teifom, v odnoi semye,” ibid., 61. 3. See Olga Gershenson, The Phantom Holocaust: Soviet Cinema and Jewish Catastrophe (New Brunswick:  2013). See also Pinkhas Kahanovitsh, known as Der Nister, who set his Holocaust stories in Poland, in Regrowth: Seven Tales of Jewish Life before, during, and after Nazi Occupation (Evanston: 2011). My own analysis of articles appearing in Eynikayt suggests that there was a prioritizing of reports about atrocities in Poland compared to those in Ukraine, Russia, or Belarus. 4. Aron Vergelis, “Tsu der frage vegn dem natsionaln kharakter fun der yanttsaytiker yidisher literature,” Sovetish heymland 1 (1964), 145. 5. For an overview, see online at:  encyclopedia.ushmm.org/​content/​en/​article/​children-​ during-​the-​holocaust (accessed 26 May 2020); for longer accounts, see Laurel Holliday, Children in the Holocaust and the Second World War: Their Secret Diaries (New York: 1996); Joanna Beata Michlic, Jewish Children in Nazi-​Occupied Poland: Early Post-​War Recollections of Survival and Polish–​Jewish Relations during the Holocaust (Jerusalem: 2008); idem (ed.), Jewish Families in Europe, 1939–​Present: History, Representation, and Memory (Lebanon, N.H.: 2017). 6. Julie K. deGraffenried, Sacrificing Childhood: Children and the Soviet State in the Great Patriotic War (Lawrence: 2014). 7. Yitzhak Arad, The Holocaust in the Soviet Union (Lincoln: 2009). 8. Esfir Bluschinskaya-​Teif, “Poslednie gody zhizni i tvorchestva Moiseia Teifa (vospominaniya vdovy),” Korni 22, 55. 9. Anna Shternshis, “Between Life and Death: Why Some Soviet Jews Decided to Leave and Others to Stay in 1941,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 15, no. 3 (2014), 477–​504; see also idem, When Sonia Met Boris: An Oral History of Jewish Life under Stalin (New York: 2018).

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10. See Yiddish Glory: The Lost Songs of WW II (2018), online recording at yiddishglory. com (accessed 7 June 2020). 11. Teif, “Alpinezl,” 27–​28. 12. Russian State Archive (GARF), P-​8114/​1/​185, 82–​83 (accessed in the United States Holocaust Museum, reel 183). 13. See Harriet Murav, Music from a Speeding Train: Jewish Literature in Post-​revolution Russia (Stanford: 2011); Maxim Shrayer, I Saw It: Ilya Selvinsky and the Legacy of Bearing Witness to the Holocaust (Boston: 2013). 14. For more on the trials of the members of the Soviet Jewish Anti-​Fascist Committee, see Joshua Rubenstein and Vladimir P. Naumov, Stalin’s Secret Pogrom: The Postwar Inquisition of the Jewish Anti-​Fascist Committee (New Haven: 2001). 15. For more on the “doctors’ plot,” see Louis Rapoport, Stalin’s War against the Jews: The Doctors Plot and the Soviet Solution (New York: 1990); also see Jonathan Brent and Vladimir P. Naumov, Stalin’s Last Crime: The Plot against the Jewish Doctors, 1948-​1953 (New York: 2003). 16. For an in-​depth study on grassroots initiatives for dealing with Holocaust memory in the Soviet Union, see Arkadi Zeltser, Unwelcome Memory: Holocaust Monuments in the Soviet Union (Jerusalem:  2018); reviewed in this volume, pp. 278–280. See also Kiril Feferman, Soviet Jewish Stepchild: The Holocaust in the Soviet Mindset, 1941–​1964 (Saarbrücken: 2009). 17. Mordechai Altshuler, “Jewish Holocaust Commemoration Activity in the USSR under Stalin,” Yad Vashem Studies 30, no. 2002 (2002), 271–​296; Zeltser, Unwelcome Memory. 18. Moisei Teif, Oysderveylts, trans. Shirley Kumove (Moscow: 1965), 44–​46. 19. These lines appear in “Babi Yar”: I see myself a boy in Belostok Blood spills, and runs upon the floors, The chiefs of bar and pub rage unimpeded And reek of vodka and of onion, half and half. It seems to me that I am Anna Frank, Transparent, as the thinnest branch in April, And I’m in love, and have no need of phrases, But only that we gaze into each other’s eyes. How little one can see, or even sense! Leaves are forbidden, so is sky, But much is still allowed—​very gently In darkened rooms each other to embrace. (trans. Benjamin Okopnik, online at:  remember.org/​ witness/​ babiyar (accessed 7 June 2020). 20. Moisei Ratner, “Pismo Moiseyu Teifu,” Korni 22, 79–​81. 21. Mishe Lev, “Slovo o Moisee Teife i ego stikhotvorenii ‘Vozle bulochnoi na ulitse Gorkogo,’ ” ibid., 99–​104 (here 101). 22. Ibid. 23. The transliterated Russian version reads as follows: Gorod pakhnet svezhest’iu Vetrenoi i nezhnoi. Ya udi po Gor’kogo K ploshchadi Manezhnoi. Kikhelekh i zemelekh Ya uvidel v bulochnoi I stoiu rasteryannyi V sumatokhe ulichnoi.

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The Child Who Cannot Ask Vse, Vse, Vse, Vse deti liubyam sladosti. Radi zvonkoi radosti V mirnyi vecher budnichnyi Kikhelkekh i zemelekh Pokupaite v bulochnoi! Podbegaet devochka, Sprashivaet tikho: Chto takoe zemelekh? Chto takoe kikhelekh? Ob’yasnyaiu devochke Etikh slov znachen’e: Kikhelekh i zemelekh –​ Vkusnoe pechen’e. I liubil kogda-​to Est’ pechen’e eto Mal’chik moi, sozhzhennyi V gitlerovskom getto. ..... Ya stoiu, i slyshitsa Syna golos tikhii: Oi, kupi sevodnya Zemelekh i kikhelekh... Gde zhe ty, moi mal’chik, Sladkoezhka, gde ty? Polykhaiut maki Tam, gde bylo getto. Polykhaiut maki Na goriuchikh zemlyakh... Pokupaite detyam Kikhelekh i zemelekh!

24. Dar, “Ryadom s Teifom, v odnoi semye,” 65. 25. Moisei Teif, Rukopozhatie: stikhi i poėma, trans. Yunna Morits (Moscow: 1964), 8. 26. Tatiana Estafyeva, “K istorii ustanovleniya pamyatnika v Babyem Yaru,” online at jewukr.org/​observer/​jo11_​30/​p0102_​r.html (accessed 7 June 2020). I thank Ilya Kukulin for this reference. 27. Mark Rozovsky, “Evreiskaya tema ili kak ya byl grekom,” Dialog: Rossiisko-​Izrail’ski almanakh evreiskoy kul’tury 2, nos. 7-​8; online at: almanah-​dialog.ru/​archive/​archive_​7-​8_​2/​ av1/​av1_​4 (accessed 7 June 2020). 28. Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: 2008).

The American Jewish Intelligentsia, the Claims of Humor—​and the Case of Lenny Bruce Stephen J. Whitfield (BRANDEIS UNIVERSITY)

In 1925, when Arthur James Balfour delivered the inaugural lecture at the founding of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, he envisioned the intellectual powers of the Jewish people as flourishing in this new setting. Lord Balfour mentioned three living “scientific” exemplars of those powers: Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, and Henri Bergson.1 These thinkers helped give a tiny minority outsized influence in Christendom, enabling the Jewish intelligentsia to punch above its weight. It was clear that Balfour had in mind the three luminaries’ accomplishments in physics, psychology, and philosophy. Yet has anyone noticed that two-​thirds of Balfour’s trio of thinkers published classic works on humor (and published them within five years of each other)? Freud’s Der Witz (1905) and Bergson’s Le Rire (1900) may well be the most famous modern works on the theory of comedy. Einstein’s connection to comedy is admittedly far more limited. But Philip Roth, the most lavishly gifted of modern American novelists of the Jewish experience, makes Einstein a character in a short story titled “On the Air” (1970), published in the New American Review. In that story, a talent scout named Milton Lippman tries to recruit the New Jersey-​based physicist for an Information Please radio program called “The Jewish Answer Man.” The show would click with audiences, and given Einstein’s evident braininess, it would decisively rebuke antisemitism. He is a natural for stardom, Lippman reassures the physicist—​even his hairdo works, as it gives him an uncanny resemblance to Harpo, one of the wildly popular Marx Brothers. What happens to Lippman’s inspired idea need not detain us here, but Einstein’s own sense of humor revealed an equivocal relation to the codes of manners. Quite at home in a curved universe, he was a bit of a stranger to the rules of gentility and cackled with delight when engrossed in Emily Post’s etiquette book, which he read for fun.2 Stephen J. Whitfield, The American Jewish Intelligentsia, the Claims of Humor—​and the Case of Lenny Bruce In: No Small Matter: Features of Jewish Childhood. Edited by: Anat Helman, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197577301.003.0014

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Jewish intellectual history thus displays some convergence with the phenomenon of humor, even though the authoritative 16-​volume reference work, the Encyclopaedia Judaica, lacks any entry on “wit,” “humor,” or even “comedy.”3 That omission upends a moment in late-​night television when an interviewee mentioned the Jewish Encyclopedia and drew a laugh from the studio audience, even though the discussion had been serious and no joke had been intended. That audience, which evidently believed there to be something funny about Jewish words or about Yiddish inflections, can be identified as heir to F. Scott Fitzgerald, who frequently visited a Jewish delicatessen in Los Angeles. His companion Sheilah Graham recalled that “he would ask the names of things. I think ‘knish’ just floored him. He would ask again and again for it, just to hear it pronounced.” Robert Klein built on this linguistic appreciation in recounting the jokes that got big laughs in the Catskills, ending with punch lines in a faux-​Yiddish, which—​though senseless—​sounds funny. Sociologist Sig Altman inferred that Jewishness in itself can be understood as a comic condition.4 No wonder then that 42 percent of American Jews told pollsters in 2013 that “having a good sense of humor” constituted “an essential attribute of what it means to be Jewish.” The percentage matched that of Jews (43  percent) who considered “caring about Israel” as essential. Even the highbrow National Foundation for Jewish Culture recognizes the value of humor by giving an annual award (named for Alan King) to an American Jewish comedian. In 2016, when Studies in Contemporary Jewry devoted a symposium to humor, the editors conjectured that it “is probably the most prolific and most democratic manifestation of popular or mass culture among Jews across the globe,” with the comic vision “created, told, and retold both from below and by intellectuals and literati.”5 This essay highlights the ease with which leading American Jewish intellectuals and writers, in particular, incorporated humor into their consideration of mid-​20th-​century culture and politics in the United States. Several of these thinkers and critics have especially grasped the satire of Lenny Bruce (1925–​1966) as an index of the caliber of their society. The patrimony of Jewish jokes has long intrigued leading American Jewish intellectuals, a list that includes Irving Kristol, Irving Howe, Daniel Bell, and Robert Alter, plus the American-​born Israeli Hillel Halkin. All of them published illuminating articles on the topic, to which the Harvard Yiddishist Ruth R. Wisse devoted an entire book. Leon Wieseltier served as a key consultant to the locus classicus of the subject, The Big Book of Jewish Humor (1981), which Moshe Waldoks, an ordained rabbi, and William Novak edited and annotated. Waldoks and Novak thus completed a project that Freud had wanted to achieve, which was to compile an anthology of Jewish jokes.6 Bergson himself was too distant from normative Jewish life to include the subcategory of Jewish humor in Le Rire. But even other assimilated intellectuals can be summoned to testify to the value of Jewish humor. Take Bernard Berenson, for example. So fiercely did the Lithuanian-​born connoisseur of Renaissance art drive himself away from his origins that he converted to the Episcopalian faith to make his way more easily in New England society. Then, to make his way more easily in Italian society, he converted to Roman Catholicism. Berenson referred to himself as an “Anglo-​Saxon.” When he once went too far by

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invoking “our Puritan forebears,” the art historian Meyer Schapiro quipped that rabbis must have been aboard the Mayflower. And yet, while conversing with the likes of Sir Isaiah Berlin and Sir Lewis Namier, Berenson loved trading Yiddish jokes with them.7 That segment of his Jewish sensibility remained intact. Jewish humor itself may be so enduring and inescapable because it is so capacious. It may not be comprehensive; it may not embrace everything. But it does get tantalizingly close to the tensions between piety and assimilation, between the sacred and the profane, and between shtetl and suburb, while hardly ignoring conflicts within the family and with the Gentiles. Indeed, the authoritative texts on Jewish humor highlight dualisms. Wisse, for instance, took as her subject the “rifts between the religious and agnostics, elites and masses, and especially warring impulses of loyalty and restiveness within individual Jews and their communities. . . . Jews who found cognitive security in tradition or revolution may not have needed humor to reconcile their contrarieties, but they became the unwitting butt of the conflicted Jews who did.” She has depicted the paradox of a “people exiled from a promised land and the chosen people of an elusive God. They were untroubled by such contradictions. They required forms of speech that incorporated incongruity and sought out expressions that bordered on absurdity.”8 For Daniel Bell, who delivered the commencement address at Brandeis University in 1991 on “Some Serious Thoughts on Jewish Humor,” the gap between the cosmic and the comic stretches no wider than a consonant. Mind the gap: “Jewish humor is wit, the play of words, the compression of language to reflect the compression chamber of life,” Bell argued. “Jewish humor often drains the charge of cosmic significance from suffering, by grounding it in the world of everyday realities.” One of his examples has “a man . . . seen lying on a railroad track. ‘What are you doing?’ he is asked. Committing suicide, he replies wearily. But then what are you doing with a loaf of bread in your hand? In this country, he complains, before the train comes, you could starve to death.”9 This joke also substantiates the generalization that Irving Kristol offered in 1951. Then the managing editor of the liberal Commentary and later co-​founder with Bell of the neo-​conservative Public Interest, Kristol opined that “Jewish humor dances along a knife-​edge that separates religious faith from sheer nihilism. It ‘knows’ that the material world is the only true reality, but it also finds that this world makes no sense in its own terms and is impossible to live in.” An attendee at a Hillel Academic Festival, held in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1980, reported that Bell managed to tell jokes that were funnier than Woody Allen’s Side Effects, published earlier that year.10 The approach taken by Bell and Kristol hints at something metaphysical that is occasionally lurking within the interstices of such humor. At its eeriest, it raises ontological questions, rubs up against the mysteries of reality itself, and operates rather precariously on what might be called a “field of being.” (Were that phrase translated into German, the result would be Seinfeld.) Bell and Kristol had both graduated from the City College of New York; its most renowned teacher at the time was the philosopher Morris Raphael Cohen. Once, when Cohen was lecturing on Bishop Berkeley, who propounded the doctrine of solipsism, an undergraduate dared to ask: “Professor Cohen, how do you know I  exist?” The philosopher batted away the question by asking another:  “Who is asking?”11 It is no surprise to learn from the memoir of

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Cohen’s daughter that “he could swap Yiddish jokes for hours on end.”12 The lineage from Cohen to Columbia University’s Sidney Morgenbesser, an ordained rabbi as well as a philosopher, took a linguistic turn. He was once asked about the Maoist claim that something can be both true and false. Did Morgenbesser accept that logic? “I do and I don’t.” In grammar, a double negative produces a positive, but somehow a double positive doesn’t result in a negative. Is that right? Morgenbesser was skeptical: “Yeah, yeah.” Such philosophers were legatees of a comic tradition that, according to Bell, emphasized “the verbal aggression, the put-​down, [and] the assertion of superior wit.”13 No sharp division between the serious and the side-​splitting, between the portentous and the playful can be detected in this inheritance. Saul Bellow recalled his friend, the novelist and critic Isaac Rosenfeld, as “a playful man. He loved hoaxes, mimicry, parody. . . . With Isaac, the gravest, the most characteristic, the most perfect strokes took a comic slant.” Woody Allen, who confessed to having been caught cheating on a philosophy exam after having looked into the soul of the boy sitting next to him, wanted to know why are our days are numbered rather than, say, lettered. After all, the letter K would do rather nicely. Franz Kafka “laughed so much” when he first read aloud to his friends the opening chapter of The Trial that “there were moments when he couldn’t read any further.” His closest companion and literary executor, Max Brod, recalled that “we friends of his laughed immoderately” as well.14 Although forests have been chopped down so that articles can be published on the relation of Death of a Salesman to the Aristotelian conception of tragedy, Arthur Miller once “confess[ed] that I laughed more during the writing of this play than I have ever done, when alone, in my life.” Laughter-​through-​tears is frequently noted as one of the integral features of Jewish humor, where the masks of comedy and tragedy are side by side.15 Playwright Herb Gardner realized this while watching a rehearsal of A Thousand Clowns (1962), when the actor playing Murray Burns, a comedy writer, became tearful. He told Gardner: “This is very painful stuff. Do you know how sad all this is?” Gardner realized that “most funny stuff is born of a certain kind of pain. But when you ask me why things keep coming out like that in my plays, the honest answer is, I don’t know.”16 Harold Pinter, whose father had been an East London tailor, expressed annoyance when audiences tended to miss the amusing moments in plays that are celebrated primarily for their menacing silences and their sinister, subterranean emotions. If, during the performance, “someone laughs, there’s a tendency for people to turn around and say, ‘Shhhhh!’ ” Pinter grumbled. “The solemnity that tends to obtain I find quite baffling. I think a lot of what I write is quite funny,” the Nobel laureate insisted.17 Though intellectuals and serious artists have been known to appreciate even the broadest sort of humor, as the admiration of T.S. Eliot and Eugene Ionesco for the Marx Brothers attests, the career of Lenny Bruce shows even more of an overlap, although he had a limited formal education; he had dropped out of high school. Unlike Woody Allen, Bruce showed little interest in mocking the pretensions of intellectuals or in parodying their lingo, but he nevertheless became something of a Jewish culture hero, buoyed by a credo that made him sound like a postwar existentialist: “All my humor is based on destruction and despair.”18 Né Leonard Alfred Schneider, he grew up on Long Island, the child of divorced parents. After serving in the Navy during the

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Second World War, Bruce began his career as a comedian by working in burlesque clubs, tasked with silencing drunkards and with introducing strippers—​one of whom, Honey Harlowe, he married in 1951. They had one daughter, Kitty, but were divorced in 1957, as his singular career as a satiric hipster took off. Increasingly uninhibited in the targeting of taboos, and inventing a stream-​of-​consciousness style laced with profanity (and occasional Yiddish), Bruce assumed a bitter, searing, and even prophetic stance. Several arrests followed; he was charged with obscenity and with possession of narcotics. Although Bruce’s recording albums sold well, growing difficulties with the law robbed him of engagements on television and limited most options in nightclubs, too. His defenders placed him “in the tradition of Swift, Rabelais and Twain”;19 yet, at forty years old, Bruce died in Los Angeles of a heroin overdose. Although he became something of a martyr to the First Amendment, Bruce was not a liberal, unlike the overwhelming majority of Jews of his era. He had no explicit political perspective when he defined American society as sick, although he professed to be its doctor. Bruce offered a diagnosis, but no cure, when he called himself “a surgeon with a scalpel for false values.”20 He was devoid of sentimentality or even thwarted idealism, and he lacked appreciation of the value of progressive social betterment. Unlike most Jews of his era, Bruce could not even be categorized as a champion of civil rights. He once claimed that he stopped going to such rallies for racial justice, because Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder kept bumping into him. Doubling down, Bruce thus managed to mock two groups of victims. Yet he attracted the support of Jewish luminaries. The signatories on the 1964 petition that Allen Ginsberg submitted on behalf of Bruce included Woody Allen, Theodore Bikel, Bob Dylan, Jason Epstein, Jules Feiffer, Robert Frank, Harry Golden, Albert Goldman, Robert Gottlieb, Joseph Heller, Lillian Hellman, Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin, Max Lerner, Norman Mailer, Jonathan Miller, Paul Newman, William Phillips, Norman Podhoretz, Meyer Schapiro, and Susan Sontag. Ginsberg’s eminent teacher at Columbia, Lionel Trilling, had never attended any of Bruce’s performances. Yet after reading transcripts of them, the mandarin Trilling considered the comedian to be a “very remarkable and pointed satirist.” Theater critic Robert Brustein, who signed the petition and had also been a student of Trilling’s, regarded Bruce as “one of the few performing geniuses of the postwar period.” His monologues “were designed less to arouse prurient interest than to de-​sanctify ritualized objects and to deflate hypocritical ideals.”21 The petition characterized the unprecedented range and frequency of Bruce’s profanity as his habit of making “use of the vernacular in his nightclub performances.” Nat Hentoff, whom Commentary had designated in 1961 as a leading young Jewish intellectual, praised Bruce the following year for expressing “nakedly moral rage at the deceptions all down the line in our society.”22 That is why Bruce’s fatal overdose in a bathroom hit Leslie A. Fiedler so hard. In also lamenting the death, at the age of 38, of Isaac Rosenfeld, who promised to become a kind of American Kafka, Fiedler felt compelled to note that 1966 was a “black year for the Jews.”23 Think about that. Fiedler, a major contributor to the Partisan Review—​and therefore a certified member of the New York intellectuals—​mourned an ill-​educated nightclub comedian with little command of Judaic learning. In linking Bruce’s demise to the passing of a close friend and Yiddishist collaborator of Bellow’s,

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Fiedler made such a juxtaposition seem unremarkable. (Bellow himself had attended a night club performance of Bruce’s in Chicago.) Of course an intellectual did not have to be Jewish—​or even an American—​to admire Bruce’s brand of comedy. In the course of Christopher Hitchens’ polemic against religion, he noted the liberation of Jews from rabbinic authority, resulting in “a flowering of talent such as has seldom been seen in any epoch.” Unlike Lord Balfour, Hitchens did not limit himself to three names, though he inevitably mentioned Freud and Einstein among the dozen exemplars of secular creativity. These included Karl Marx, Franz Kafka, Arthur Koestler, and Isaac Babel—​as well as Lenny Bruce. That list put the comedian in very fast company. Another British intellectual, Kenneth Tynan, served as Sir Laurence Olivier’s closest collaborator at the National Theatre (1963–​1973) and wrote much-​admired drama criticism for the Spectator, the Evening Standard, and other British publications. Tynan not only regarded Bruce as “extremely funny,” but also as a performer who, by the end of a show in London, “has crashed through frontiers of language and feeling that I had hitherto thought impregnable.” Tynan predicted in 1965 that, by presenting himself as an “original, free-​speaking, wild-​thinking gymnast of language,” Bruce “would deserve more than a footnote in any history of modern Western culture.” To have met and known Bruce, he added, put him “in a state of apoplectic veneration.”24 That Bruce appears in the top row of mostly artistic figures featured on the cover of the most important rock music album of all time, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967), further testifies to his iconic status. Affectation was once the signature of popular entertainment. Its denizens earlier in the 20th century aimed no higher than to put on a show. Its signature was artifice. Groucho Marx’s moustache was, for instance, fake—​at least until he hosted You Bet Your Life on NBC television in the 1950s. When the director of the Brothers’ first talkie, The Cocoanuts (1929), had wanted him to grow a moustache because the audience would not believe the greasepaint version, Groucho’s rebuttal was revelatory: “The audience doesn’t believe us anyhow.” Even the most recognizably Jewish figures were fundamentally performers. Fanny Brice, for example, did not know Yiddish. “When she spoke with a Yiddish accent,” her biographer has written, “she used it as a comic contrast to the parts she played. The accent was a device, a mask like blackface.” Although Myron Cohen spoke an unaccented English offstage, Yiddish inflections punctuated his standup routines.25 The Ivy League-​educated Gertrude Berg, who also spoke an unaccented English and confessed to lacking what she called “Jewish training,” was no Molly Goldberg. Bruce, however, was decisive in forcing standup comedy to switch from artifice to authenticity, enabling him to generalize that “today’s comic is not doing an act.”26 Astonishingly enough, the major phase of his career lasted barely a decade, if that. In 1957, according to historian David Kaufman, Bruce began “working ‘straight’ (that is, non-​strip) clubs with his new material and delivery.”27 Largely repudiating the impersonations that marked his genesis in show business, Bruce began to offer personal commentary of his own in a way that no other standup comedian had ever done—​except for Mort Sahl, who was two years younger. Expressive opportunities were beginning to widen; the barriers to savage satire became a little easier to surmount. In 1957, Senator Joseph R. McCarthy—​that eponym for remorseless

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conformism—​died. In the same year, Allen Ginsberg’s epic Howl was cleared of charges of obscenity; and the Supreme Court decided in Roth v. U.S. to weaken the law of obscenity. In Justice William J. Brennan’s famous formulation, a work could be considered obscene only if “to the average person, applying contemporary community standards, the dominant theme of the material taken as a whole appeals to prurient interest.” Also in 1957, Playboy publisher Hugh M. Hefner backed Harvey Kurtzman, a defector from Mad magazine, to start a publication that historian Stephen Kercher calls a “glossy, full-​color, adult satire magazine.” (Though it died quickly, the title of the magazine deserves mention: Trump.)28 The Wolfenden Committee Report was also released in 1957. It examined the status of England’s sex laws and recommended changes in them, implemented a decade later; in consequence, both prostitution and homosexual acts between consenting adults ceased to be crimes. The major phase of Bruce’s career needs this kind of contextualization to be fully appreciated. For in the immediate postwar era, other American Jews were succeeding in a new genre: the long-​playing record. It brought fame to performers such as Shelley Berman, as well as to a young mathematician named Tom Lehrer, whose career showed that comedy could be congruent with intelligence. Lehrer entered Harvard at the age of fourteen, and later taught mathematics there and at MIT. Without benefit of publicity, but merely by word of mouth, he achieved enormous sales with his songs, which were first released in 1953.29 In that same year Sahl launched his own career as a satirist, performing at a club called the hungry i (the lonely lower-​case vowel stood for “intellectual”). Though Sahl jumped ahead of Berman in cutting a long-​playing record—​he was the first standup comic to do so—​Inside Shelley Berman (1960) became the first comedy album to sell a million copies. A sequel to The Songs of Tom Lehrer, More Songs of Tom Lehrer, came out in 1959.30 The first album of Carl Reiner interviewing Mel Brooks, The 2000 Year Old Man, was released in 1960. Between 1958 and 1961, the Fantasy label also released four of Bruce’s long-​playing comedy records. Something unusual was evidently happening. Bruce “was a phenomenon that only the 1950s could have created,” the literary critic Sanford Pinsker commented, “and only the 1960s could have loved.” Jews were transforming not only the nation’s aural culture but the visual arts as well. At the New Yorker, Saul Steinberg was re-​imagining the gag cartoon. At the Village Voice, Jules Feiffer was reinventing the comic strip. At the Washington Post, Herbert Block (whose father was Jewish) was injecting sting into the genre of the political cartoon. (It was “Herblock” who coined the pejorative term “McCarthyism.”) By the early 1960s, the New York Review of Books was giving David Levine the opportunity to enrich the art of caricature.31 Two alumni of the University of Chicago, Mike Nichols and Elaine May, burnished improvisational comedy with wit and sophistication; and in 1959, Viola Spolin and her son, Paul Sills, co-​founded (with Bernard Sahlins) the Second City improvisational theater troupe. Sills and Sahlins were also University of Chicago alumni. In a typical Second City routine, the atheist Jean-​Paul Sartre (Richard Kind) is disappointed to discover that there is an afterlife. When he tells God, “It’s not what I expected,” and the deity asks, “What did you expect,” the author of Huis Clos (No Exit) replies: “Nothing.”32 The heterodox goal of these creative artists and their audiences was to avoid being considered square. Thus, by the end of the Fifties, the birth pangs of the Sixties could

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be felt. The crimson tide of Communist advance, which was so feared immediately after the Second World War, was beginning to recede in the national imagination. “We were members of a comic underground,” Feiffer recalled, “meeting in cabarets and cellar clubs, making startlingly grave and innovative jokes about virginity, Jewish mothers, HUAC [the House Un-​American Activities Committee] and J. Edgar Hoover.” Yet Bruce was unique among these figures in publicly exploring the meaning of Jewishness.33 Soon, even the nation’s unofficial Minister of Culture, Ed Sullivan, was introducing CBS television audiences to the likes of Shelley Berman. But Bruce was singular in his audacity. “In a time of blandness and conformity, Lenny was the ultimate hipster who took it all—​literature, politics, religion, sex, race—​and ran with it,” Feiffer declared. “Lenny spoke the unspeakable.”34 He would pay a high price, but he made it possible for others to speak, too. That the major phase of Bruce’s career ended four years before his death makes his impact on other and later comedians all the more striking.35 Bruce and Sahl benefited from the sponsorship and encouragement of Hugh Hefner, who founded Playboy magazine in 1953. The black standup comedian Dick Gregory benefited too, and once claimed that the United States produced only three comic geniuses. One was Mark Twain, who “probably leads the whole field. And then Lenny Bruce. He just went out and said things that no one would dare say and many were scared to even listen to.” (The third was Richard Pryor.) What dazzled Gregory about Bruce was that “here’s a man [who] can do three hours on any subject.”36 He “was the greatest human being I ever met,” another black comedian, Redd Foxx, declared. He elevated Bruce into a Christ figure. “He was honest. . . . He was crucified for telling the truth.”37 Though the Canadian comic novelist Mordecai Richler demurred, insisting that Bruce “didn’t die for my sins,”38 such recusals are rare. The performances of Robert Klein, for instance, consist of building “comic riffs like a jazz musician, circling back on tonic phrases,” with the “self-​referencing” that literary scholar Donald Weber calls “vintage Klein.” Yet his act was not created ex nihilo. Instead, Klein’s chief influences have been Jonathan Winters, Laurel and Hardy, the Three Stooges—​and Lenny Bruce, thanks to his “liberating use of language and wicked parodic spirit,” plus “a mode of free association.”39 Other accolades can be added to amplify Bruce’s posthumous stature as a Jewish culture hero. Joan Rivers watched him perform in 1962. What struck her was his manner of delivery and his capacity to draw from the intimate aspects of his own life to generate the shock of recognition. “He started it all. Everything we do now, he did first,” she claimed in 1983. Rather than artifice, rather than performative technique, “personal truth can be the foundation of comedy.” So haunting was his example that she staged a racy, one-​woman play (co-​written with Erin Sanders and Lonny Price) based on the colorful life and show-​business career of Bruce’s mother, Sally Marr. Reviewing Sally Marr . . . and her escorts (1994), Robert Brustein nevertheless complained that its value derived mainly from Marr’s identity as “the mother and mentor of a celebrated son.” Lewis Black (incidentally, a former student of Brustein’s at the Yale School of Drama) has praised Bruce as highly as Rivers did. In the preface to the most recent edition of Bruce’s autobiography, How to Talk Dirty and Influence People (1965), Black wrote that he could not imagine “a comic who has worked since Lenny who doesn’t owe him a debt of gratitude.” Echoing Kenneth Tynan, Black asserted that Bruce “didn’t just push the boundaries; he obliterated them.”40

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Comedians were hardly alone in recording their admiration. Mischief-​maker Paul Krassner (1932–​2019) founded a raunchy magazine, The Realist, at the end of the 1950s. That launch occurred about a decade and a half after his bar mitzvah ceremony, in which—​at least according to apocrypha—​his Judaically ignorant father, called to the bima but unaware that the rabbi conducting the service stammered, faithfully repeated the stuttered Hebrew phrases. It is therefore no surprise that Krassner would grow up vulnerable to the influence of Lenny Bruce, whose autobiography he edited. In 1967, Krassner co-​founded the Youth International Party (YIP); other founding members of the “Yippies” included Abbie Hoffman, who dedicated Woodstock Nation (1969) to Bruce’s memory, and Jerry Rubin. “When I met Abbie Hoffman,” Krassner recalled, “I told him that he was the first person who made me laugh since Lenny died (the previous year), and Abbie said, ‘Really? He was my god.’ ”41 When singer-​ songwriter Paul Simon was asked to identify his “heroes,” he named four: in politics, John F. Kennedy; in music, Elvis Presley; in comedy, Lenny Bruce; and in sports, Mickey Mantle.42 Among urban if not necessarily urbane Jews of a certain age, across the political spectrum, detractors of Lenny Bruce are hard to find. In Woody Allen’s Manhattan (1979), when Yale (Michael Murphy) and Mary (Diane Keaton) dismiss Bruce as “overrated,” Isaac Davis (Woody Allen) disagrees, and calls him “terrific.”43 The major dissenter was Mort Sahl. It was he, not Bruce, who made the cover of Time (on August 8, 1960), when such recognition really mattered at the newsstands. When one of Bruce’s defense attorneys, Martin Garbus, tried to recruit the liberal political satirist to testify in behalf of the beleaguered fellow comedian, Sahl refused. (A standup comedian need not be a standup guy.) Garbus realized that Sahl resented “the adulation and respect accorded Bruce by the liberal intellectual community, an audience he felt did not take him [Sahl] seriously enough.” Even the scholarly anthology Der jüdische Witz: Zur unabgegoltenen Problematik einer alten Kategorie (2015), edited by Burkhard Meyer-​Sickendiek and Gunnar Och, devotes a chapter to Bruce rather than to Sahl. To be fair, Sahl’s grievances were not directly solely at Bruce. Early in the 1960s, Ed Sullivan wondered whether his CBS variety program, The Ed Sullivan Show, might showcase a satirist like Sahl. A hesitant Sullivan didn’t think that Sahl was as funny as “the little red-​headed guy.” (His name was Woody Allen.) “Why can’t you do what he does?” Sullivan demanded of Sahl, who objected to the comparison and therefore asked: “Why didn’t you hire him?” As to Bruce, Sahl conceded that, in the comic’s early years, he “was pretty damn funny. Ad-​libbed a lot.” But “I did not find him profound.” According to Sahl, Bruce “was wholly ignorant politically,” whereas Sahl had supplied jokes to the Kennedy presidential campaign in 1960.44 Other comparisons may be apt. Sahl very rarely alluded to his own ethnic origins, though he once sneaked in a pro-​Zionist wisecrack in saying of Palm Springs: “You’ve got to admire those people, carving out a nation in the desert.” Bruce, by contrast, was almost defiantly open about his own Jewishness, and probably picked up his smattering of Yiddish from its pervasive use in American show business. Henry L. Mencken once noted, for example, that Yiddish words were scattered in fields in which East European Jews were numerous; and an edition of The American Language, published three years before Bruce’s death, noted that mass media provided “the most fruitful sources of Yiddish loans” into English.45 Bruce’s bilingualism was akin to

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that of Philip Roth’s Alexander Portnoy, who admitted to knowing only two dozen Yiddish words—​“half of them dirty, and the rest mispronounced!”46 Both Bruce and Sahl punctured the pieties of show business,47 though neither eluded its hold on them. Both came into maturity when jazz was dominant, and were not young enough to appreciate rock music. Both pushed beyond the boundaries of what once counted as standup comedy; Bruce was its id, Sahl its superego. By the end, however, Bruce had repudiated his own vocation, denying that he was still a comedian (“I’m Lenny Bruce”).48 He had become sui generis. By the mid-​1960s, Sahl, too, had changed. He moved past zingers about follies in Washington and instead hawked conspiracy theories about the Kennedy assassination. In 1954, Sahl wanted humor to address “reality—​which in our time is funny enough to kill you.” Only six years later, he told reporters: “I never said I was a [comedian]. I just sort of tell the truth.”49 Though he liked to ask audiences, “Are there any groups here I haven’t offended yet?”50 that query was of course far more applicable to Bruce. Moreover, whereas Sahl has continued to perform over half a century after he achieved mid-​century success, he has no real descendants. Bruce, by contrast, spawned acolytes both at home and abroad (in France, for example).51 Ronnie Marmo’s one-​man political play, I’m Not a Comedian . . . I’m Lenny Bruce, sold out for fifteen straight weeks when it debuted in Los Angeles in 2017; and Bruce’s persona has haunted the Emmy-​winning television comedy from Amazon, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.52 An aura of persecution does hover over both careers, however. Sahl’s only book, the grudge-​laden Heartland (1976), recounts how “the show business elite” expelled him from various forums and media because of his ornery politics, and how the handful of men who determine what Americans see and hear ensure that anyone who notices his own victimization is then accused of paranoia. Bruce, too, had enemies—​and that list certainly should include Lenny Bruce. As the defendant in a series of cases titled People v. Bruce, he ran afoul of the Roman Catholic church. Neither its clergy nor its faithful cops looked kindly on sacrilege and blasphemy, or on his mockery of the pope, Francis Cardinal Spellman, and Bishop Fulton Sheen. Bruce made the mistake of provoking the Church in an era when no unofficial institutional opponent was more dangerous. A literary critic such as Edmund Wilson could bear witness to the “impudent nuisance” that Catholicism represented—​“intolerant, unscrupulous and tyrannical”—​in the struggle for free expression.53 The significance of this enmity to Bruce’s career is admittedly open to dispute. But some top Jewish comedians did tell one researcher that Bruce’s nemesis was ecclesiastical, that the Church was blocking him from getting nightclub bookings and also worsening his legal problems. Attorney Martin Garbus thought so as well.54 Even Woody Allen, a far more benign comedian, could speculate on the danger that the majority faith might pose. While filming Manhattan, Allen was asked to “imagine how different history would be if a Jewish lawyer saved Jesus.” The interlocutor was such an attorney—​Alan M. Dershowitz, who observed that, in that case: “They couldn’t accuse us of killing their Lord.” The comedian rebutted: “But he wouldn’t have been their Lord, if you had won. He wouldn’t have been crucified. And without crucifixion, there’s no Christianity, so if you had won they’d be blaming the Jews for destroying Christianity.” Dershowitz pushed the counterfactual history further

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by replying: “But there wouldn’t be any ‘they’ to blame us.” Allen got in the last word: “There’s always a ‘they.’ ”55 “They” represented a defense of respectability that Bruce most famously resisted, and his impact upon public speech distinguishes him from every other comedian in American history. Perhaps no single person effectuated so great a change in the decades of the mid-​20th-​century, and here, too, context is a necessary reminder of what he helped to transform. When Bruce’s career took off, Hollywood films had to satisfy the moral rigidities of the Motion Picture Code. The decade of the 1960s began with the reign of Doris Day as the most popular female movie star on the planet, thanks to three films that sought to defend the delay of sexual relations until marriage: Pillow Talk (1959) and Lover Come Back (1961), co-​starring Rock Hudson, and That Touch of Mink (1962), in which Day was paired with Cary Grant. Her films became synonymous with an anodyne portrayal of what had to be called “physical relations,” as the independent producer and director Stanley Kramer learned in making Judgment at Nuremberg (1961). Off-​screen sex, religion, and even politics were not deemed appropriate topics for conversation in the upper reaches of “polite society” —​ a phrase that Bruce, in his unshackled assault on the delusions that harm male–​female relations, helped to make sound quaint.56 Indeed, had Bruce not been compelled to challenge the laws against obscenity, the steady stream of foul language pouring over popular culture is scarcely imaginable. Of course, the impact of Portnoy’s Complaint, which appeared three years after Bruce’s death, should be acknowledged as well; a case might be made that Roth’s novel might not have been released were it not for Bruce. This bestseller stirred opposition from intellectuals, such as Gershom Scholem, who had ignored Bruce. Scholem admired Jewish humor in such forms as the “magnificent” collection of Hermann Noël’s Jüdische Witze, in his parents’ home in Berlin.57 But the author of “Redemption through Sin” (in Hebrew, 1937) loathed Portnoy’s Complaint, fearing that it would encourage antisemitism, though these fears proved unwarranted. Yet even iconoclasm can become dated. “Bruce’s best work was live,” Sanford Pinsker concluded. It is mostly dead on arrival on the printed page, “with a stilted, sophomoric ring if read aloud today.”58 If his legacy now looks historically contingent, especially when compared—​perhaps unfairly—​to great writing, fascination with his career appears to have peaked as well. The pinnacle occurred in 1974. Director Bob Fosse’s Lenny, starring Dustin Hoffman, was nominated for six Oscars. This biopic also inspired one of Pauline Kael’s most famous reviews, “When the Saints Come Marching In.” From her perch at the New Yorker, the most influential film critic of her era found Lenny cloying and misleading, in that it made Bruce too sympathetic and genial a figure. Also in 1974, historian Frank Kofsky’s Lenny Bruce: The Comedian as Social Critic and Secular Moralist appeared. That short volume extended the scholarly paper that Kofsky delivered at the 1971 conference of the American Historical Association, a session organized by Berkeley’s Leon Litwack, an expert on 19th-​ century race relations and another fan of Bruce’s. More importantly, 1974 marked the publication of the massive biography Ladies and Gentlemen—​Lenny Bruce!! Its author, Albert Goldman, had been a student of Trilling’s and had also taught English at Columbia. Though Goldman had long advocated the importance of his subject, his posthumous view was a bit more jaundiced than, say, Leslie Fiedler’s: “Live, Lenny

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was a problem. Dead, Lenny is a property.”59 So sudden and untimely a death, other cynics added, proved to be a good career move. The New York Times Book Review picked Wallace Markfield to review Ladies and Gentlemen—​Lenny Bruce!! Markfield had once intended to do standup comedy himself, while also hoping to sign up with the New York intellectuals. Along with Roth, Markfield had been among the 31 Jewish intellectuals under the age of 40 who had responded to Commentary’s questions about Jewish identity over a decade earlier. But he soon realized a glum truth: “I can write better than Lionel Trilling, but I can’t think better than Lionel Trilling.”60 Instead, Markfield worked as a speechwriter and publicist for the Anti-​Defamation League and other Jewish organizations. Other than Goldman, perhaps no one was more haunted by the dramatic rise and fall of Bruce’s career. Markfield published his third novel, You Could Live If They Let You, in 1974, as well. His profane, self-​destructive protagonist, a comedian named Jules Farber, probably would not have been invented without the inspiration of Bruce’s persona and routines. Except for an extensive monograph about Bruce’s legal difficulties, the works of Kofsky, Goldman, and Markfield proved to be among the very last books devoted to him. The sense of Bruce’s historical importance was consolidated two years later, when Irving Howe published his magisterial history of the resettlement of East European Jewry in urban America, World of Our Fathers. Howe incarnated the highbrow critic—​ at once a modernist and a socialist, a prolific author, an embattled co-​founder and editor of Dissent, a translator from the Yiddish. World of Our Fathers opens with the massive Jewish immigration from the Pale of Settlement to the United States, beginning in the 1880s, though just moments earlier, the team of Bert & Leon had emerged as perhaps the nation’s first “Hebrew” comedians. In the late 1870s, while Ulysses S. Grant was serving as President, this duo perpetrated rapid gags and patter,61 inaugurating a tradition that ended, according to World of Our Fathers, with Lenny Bruce. That lineage Howe identified as a “momentum of fury which had been gathering in the work of some Jewish performers—​comic simulations, but sometimes real fury.” Bruce was “a performer intent upon leaping out of performance, a prophet corrupted who ranted against corruption, a lacerated nihilist at once brilliant and debased. . . . The laughter he won was a nervous laughter, tingling with masochism.” Howe added that “humor of this kind bears a heavy weight of destruction; in Jewish hands, more likely self-​destruction, for it proceeds from a brilliance that corrodes the world faster than, even in imagination, it can remake it.” In the final four years of Bruce’s career, “his performances sputtered out in dry rage, quasi-​legal ramblings against district attorneys who were persecuting him. He became a magid (preacher) without a message, a martyr without a cause. He fell back, deeply back, into a Jewish past that neither he nor his audiences could know much about—​a reborn Sabbatai [Tzvi] as stand-​up comic.”62 Howe failed to explain what made Bruce into a false messiah, nor what was false about a messiah without a message. But in locating him at the terminus of a “journey outward” from the Old World shtetlakh to the New World neighborhoods and beyond, and in classifying him as an entertainer who refused to sublimate all the buried resentment at the psychic cost of the diaspora, no brief summation of Bruce’s significance was more astute or more lapidary than the portrayal offered in World of Our Fathers.

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Bruce’s place in the heritage of Jewish humor must nevertheless be deemed equivocal. Freud famously noticed that Jewish jokes often consisted of “stories which were invented by Jews themselves and which are directed against Jewish peculiarities.” He wondered whether any other people had ever made so much fun of characteristics that stemmed from outside enmity. Since Freud, self-​deprecation has been understood to be so pivotal to Jewish humor that the observation now qualifies for a senior citizens’ discount; and extreme assaults on alleged Jewish traits led cultural historian Joseph Boskin to detect “a masochistic component,”63 which Freudians like Theodor Reik have pounced on as well. At least in the early years of the state of Israel, what Howe called “this persistent self-​criticism of Jewish humor, [which] sometimes verges on self-​denunciation,”64 could be found even when sovereignty had been achieved. Consider the joke in which David Ben-​Gurion offers a political ally the post of minister of colonies. The nominee protests: “But we have no colonies.” The Prime Minister responds: “So what? Isn’t [Eliezer] Kaplan minister of finance?” Yet Bruce’s routines were alien to this tradition of self-​mockery. Consider two routines about Jesus. Mel Brooks, as “The 2000 Year Old Man,” is an ordinary shopkeeper in Nazareth who has no idea of the transcendent character of his customer: “Thin lad, wore sandals, long hair, walked around with eleven other guys. Always came into the store, never bought anything. Always asked for water.”65 Bruce’s routine, in contrast, took the perspective of the Christ-​killers, accepting on behalf of the Jewish people the crime of deicide—​even as the Vatican was announcing that the statute of limitations had expired (in 1965). According to Bruce, a note discovered in the basement of an ordinary Jewish family’s home was a confession: “We killed him. Signed, Morty.” Bruce’s routine has the Crucifixion occurring because the party got out of hand, and also because Jesus “didn’t want to become a doctor.”66 The comedian also vowed that, were Christ to return to earth, the Jews were determined to kill him again. This shtick is far removed from habits of self-​deprecation. Instead, Bruce belongs to a lineage that isn’t even comic, namely, taking revenge upon Christendom. He also associated himself with the effort—​often of Jewish provenance—​to puncture the codes of gentility that writers (rather than comedians) historically revised in the shadow of censorship. In America this struggle was inaugurated a century ago, and cultural historian Josh Lambert has adroitly traced its arc among Jews. Ludwig Lewisohn, whom Lambert considers “by far the most prominent Jewish writer in interwar America,” generated controversy by producing fiction highlighting the primacy of desire over the norms of propriety. His most controversial novel in that vein was The Case of Mr. Crump (1926). The notoriety of Ben Hecht’s second novel, Fantazius Mallare (1922), was assured even though it was sold only to subscribers. Hecht was prosecuted for a work deemed “lewd, obscene and lascivious,” and was convicted and fined $1,000.67 When Tin Pan Alley first made Jewish songwriters conspicuous during the Jazz Age, the English novelist Aldous Huxley responded by condemning “the yammering amorousness and clotted sensuality which have been the characteristic Jewish contributions to modern popular music.”68 After the Second World War, when Norman Mailer published The Naked and the Dead (1948), he had to avoid a word that soldiers commonly used while fighting the Good War. (Mailer’s cousin, an attorney named Charles Rembar, proposed “fug,” which he suggested “was phonetically closer than was the classic spelling to the prevailing G.I.  gutturals.”)69 Mailer’s third novel, The Deer

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Park (1955), was initially rejected by seven publishers who feared that it would run afoul of the statutes prohibiting obscenity. Rembar himself would go on to argue the landmark courtroom cases that permitted Constance Chatterley and Fanny Hill, in particular, to cavort according to explicit accounts of sexual desire and fulfillment. In defeating the legal efforts to uphold modesty in literature, the hapless Samuel Roth, a former Zionist poet who became a pornographer, lost his appeal to the Supreme Court but forced it to reconsider the definition of obscenity. (Roth’s appeal [354 U.S. 476] turned on the constitutionality of obscenity statutes, not on the suitability of particular works to be published.) Such Jews were notable for engaging in the systemic repudiation of the values to which an entire culture once subscribed. That so many Jewish authors and publishers were convicted of various versions of erotica (and could rely on Jewish attorneys) cannot be ascribed to a haphazard process by which randomly plucked citizens find themselves trapped in the courtroom, or at least in the court of public opinion. Instead, a powerful impulse to revise the culture itself can be discerned. That Jews have exerted an impact in the eclipse of puritanism might be explained by a thesis that political scientist Lawrence H. Fuchs first advanced in 1956. In his influential monograph on the political profile of American Jews, Fuchs argued that their liberalism owes much to their secularism, to their “non-​ ascetic” sense that satisfaction and security in this world matter more than the prospect of salvation in the next. Insofar as Judaism has diverged from contemporary Christendom, a reluctance to be intimidated by accusations of enjoying “Smut” (the gleeful title of Tom Lehrer’s 1966 song) represents part of a larger aim: to replace the austere demands of duty with the pursuit of happiness. In the course of a dramatic transvaluation of values, Jews were less likely than others to recoil from the danger of sin. As an ethno-​religious minority, they were quicker than Christians to appreciate the rights of nonconformists, and to object to the moralism of the majority. In this respect a line can be drawn, however sinuously, all the way back to Spinoza, who argued that “the rights of rulers in sacred, no less than in secular, matters should merely have to do with actions, so that every man should think what he likes and say what he thinks.”70 Much of this liberation from inhibition was healthy, and Bruce can be credited with accelerating the tempo by which malign barriers began to crumble. When he used the word “nigger,” for instance, he asserted that “the word’s suppression gives it [its] power.” He thus proposed what Harvard Law School professor Randall Kennedy called “a strategy of subversion through overuse.” Were the word to become a commonplace, Bruce asserted, “you’d never hear any four-​year-​old nigger [sic] cry when he came home from school.” To ban the word entirely, Kennedy warned, “cedes too much power to bigots.” (So that they might nevertheless be enlisted in “advertising my book,” Dick Gregory titled his autobiography Nigger.)71 A Bruce routine such as “How to Relax Your Colored Friends at Parties” also rubbed raw the wounds of the nation’s racial history. The monologue starts out as a comedy of manners, exposing the awkwardness of whites socializing with guests then politely known as Negroes. The white man whom Bruce pretends to be steadily but dangerously descends into rancor, which makes as little sense as the opposite process in playwright LeRoi Jones’s Dutchman (1964). The point of Bruce’s routine is the fragility of the membranes that hold civilization together.

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Yet a downside can be noted to the expansion of what can be said in public. A price has been paid for the transgressive candor that Bruce did so much to activate. Subtlety has been lost. Billy Wilder admired his Hollywood mentor, Ernst Lubitsch, who specialized in sophisticated boudoir comedy, because he “could do more with a closed door than most of today’s directors can do with an open fly.”72 But how to weigh the cultural cost—​what historian Rochelle Gurstein has called “the repeal of reticence”—​ against the benefit is the sort of calculation that is beyond the ambition of this essay.

Notes An early version of this essay was presented at a conference on “American (Jewish) Humor in an Era of Ethnic Sensitivity and Cultural Competence,” held at the University of South Carolina at Columbia. I appreciate the help of Laura Hibbler and Donald Altschiller with the research for this essay, which is dedicated to Steve Krief. 1. Arthur James Balfour, Speeches on Zionism, ed. Israel Cohen (London: 1928), 82–​83. 2. Philip Roth, “On the Air,” New American Review 10 (August 1970), 10, and in “Letters to Einstein,” in The Big Book of Jewish Humor, ed. William Novak and Moshe Waldoks (New  York:  1981), 36; John Murray Cuddihy, The Ordeal of Civility:  Freud, Marx, Lévi-​ Strauss and the Jewish Struggle with Modernity (New York: 1974), 233. 3. Elliott Oring, review of Chaim Bermant, What’s the Joke: A Study of Jewish Humor through the Ages, Humor 1, no. 1 (1988), 81. 4. Sig Altman, The Comic Image of the Jew: Explorations of a Pop Culture Phenomenon (Rutherford, N.J.: 1971), 11; Nancy Milford, Zelda (New York: 1971), 413. 5. A Portrait of Jewish Americans, in Pew Research Survey of U.S. Jews (1 October 2013), 55, online at:  pewforum.org/​2013/​10/​01/​jewish-​american-​beliefs-​attitudes-​culture-​ survey (accessed 6 July 2020); Lawrence J. Epstein, The Haunted Smile: The Story of Jewish Comedians in America (New  York:  2001), 276; Gabriel N. Finder and Eli Lederhendler, “Preface,” Studies in Contemporary Jewry, vol. 29, A Club of Their Own: Jewish Humorists and the Contemporary World, ed. Gabriel N. Finder and Eli Lederhendler (New York: 2016), viii, x. 6. Marthe Robert, From Oedipus to Moses: Freud’s Jewish Identity, trans. Ralph Manheim (Garden City: 1976), 181, 184. 7. Meryle Secrest, Being Bernard Berenson: A Biography (New York: 1979), 395. 8. Ruth R. Wisse, No Joke: Making Jewish Humor (Princeton: 2013), 24, 99; Finder and Lederhendler, “Preface,” vii–​viii. 9. Daniel Bell, “Some Serious Thoughts on Jewish Humor,” New Oxford Review 58 (September 1991), 10, 11. 10. Irving Kristol, “Is Jewish Humor Dead? The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Joke,” Commentary 12 (November 1951), 435, rpt. in Mid-​Century: An Anthology of Jewish Life and Culture in Our Times, ed. Harold U. Ribalow (New York: 1955), 436; Stephen Schiff, “Jewish Humor 101,” Boston Phoenix (2 December 1980), III, 2. 11. Bell, “Some Serious Thoughts on Jewish Humor,” 11. 12. Leonora Cohen Rosenfield, Portrait of a Philosopher:  Morris R.  Cohen in Life and Letters (New York: 1962), 235. 13. Quoted in Douglas Martin, “Sidney Morgenbesser, 82, Kibitzing Philosopher, Dies,” New York Times (4 August 2004), and in Jonathan Lieberson, “Introduction,” in How Many Questions? Essays in Honor of Sidney Morgenbesser, ed. Leigh S. Cauman, Isaac Levi, Charles D. Parsons, and Robert Schwartz (New  York:  1979), 1; Bell, “Some Serious Thoughts, on Jewish Humor,” 11.

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14. Saul Bellow, “Foreword,” in Isaac Rosenfeld, An Age of Enormity: Life and Writing in the Forties and Fifties (Cleveland: 1962), 12–​13; Stephen J. Whitfield, “Comic Echoes of Kafka,” American Humor: An Inter-​Disciplinary Newsletter 9 (Spring 1982), 1–​5; Max Brod, Franz Kafka: A Biography, trans. G. Humphreys Roberts (New York: 1960), 120, 178. 15. Arthur Miller, “The Salesman Has a Birthday” (1950), in idem, Death of a Salesman:  Text and Criticism, ed. Gerald Weales (New  York:  1967), 148; Finder and Lederhendler, “Preface,” viii. 16. Quoted in Leslie Bennetts, “Most Funny Stuff Is Born of Pain,” New York Times (2 June 1985). 17. Leslie Bennetts, “On Film, Pinter’s ‘Betrayal’ Displays New Subtleties,” New  York Times (27 February 1983). 18. Quoted in William Keough, Punchlines:  The Violence of American Humor (New  York:  1990), 177; John Cohen (ed.), The Essential Lenny Bruce (New  York:  1967), 112; Sanford Pinsker, “Lenny Bruce:  Shpritzing the Goyim/​Shocking the Jews,” in Jewish Wry: Essays on Jewish Humor, ed. Sarah Blacher Cohen (Bloomington: 1987), 104. 19. Quoted in Albert Goldman, Ladies and Gentlemen—​ Lenny Bruce!! (New York: 1974), 538. 20. Quoted in Ronald K.L. Collins and David M. Skover, Lenny Bruce: The Fall and Rise of an American Icon (Naperville: 2002), 21. 21. Lionel Trilling to the editors of The New York Review of Books (4 October 1966), in Life in Culture: Selected Letters of Lionel Trilling, ed. Adam Kirsch (New York: 2018), 361–​ 363; Robert Brustein, “A New Conspiracy Theory:  Lenny” (1971), in idem, The Culture Watch: Essays on Theatre and Society, 1969–​1974 (New York: 1975), 16, 17; Thomas Buckley, “100 Fight Arrest of Lenny Bruce,” New York Times (14 June 1964); Stephen E. Kercher, Revel with a Cause:  Liberal Satire in Postwar America (Chicago:  2006), 534 (n. 69); Goldman, Ladies and Gentlemen—​Lenny Bruce!!, 539–​540. 22. Quoted in Keough, Punchlines, 184, and in Collins and Skover, Lenny Bruce, 68, 223. 23. Leslie A. Fiedler, To the Gentiles (New York: 1972), 186. 24. Christopher Hitchens, God is Not Great:  How Religion Poisons Everything (New York: 2007), 273; Kenneth Tynan, The Sound of Two Hands Clapping (New York: 1975), 65, 67, 68, 69, 170. 25. Quoted in Gary Giddins, “There Ain’t No Sanity Claus,” New York Times Book Review (18 June 2000), 6; Epstein, The Haunted Smile, xix, 159; Barbara W. Grossman, Funny Lady: The Life and Times of Fanny Brice (Bloomington: 1991), 27, 226. 26. Quoted in Donald Weber, “Memory and Repression in Early Ethnic Television: The Example of Gertrude Berg and The Goldbergs,” in The Other Fifties: Interrogating Midcentury American Icons, ed. Joel Foreman (Urbana:  1997), 152; Cohen (ed.), The Essential Lenny Bruce, 111. 27. David E. Kaufman, Jewhooing the Sixties:  American Celebrity and Jewish Identity (Waltham: 2012), 113. 28. Kercher, Revel with a Cause, 114–​115. 29. Kaufman, Jewhooing the Sixties, 113; Joseph Boskin, Humor and Social Change in Twentieth-​Century America (Boston: 1979), 90, 91; Jeremy Bernstein, Cranks, Quarks, and the Cosmos: Writings on Science (New York: 1993), 167, 170, 171–​172, 174. 30. Epstein, The Haunted Smile, 168, 184; Kercher, Revel with a Cause, 100–​101. 31. Pinsker, “Lenny Bruce,” 101; Michael Kimmelman, “Starting with Lines, but Ending with Truth,” New York Times (31 December 2009), C1. 32. Quoted in Richard Lacayo, “Still Crazy After All These Years,” Time 127 (4 March 1985), 86. 33. Quoted in Kercher, Revel with a Cause, 174; Kaufman, Jewhooing the Sixties, 101, 118. 34. Quoted in Tony Hendra, Going Too Far (Garden City:  1987), 84; Keough, Punchlines, 179. 35. Kaufman, Jewhooing the Sixties, 100. 36. Quoted in “Dick Gregory is Back,” New York Times (6 June 1993), and in Larry Wilde, The Great Comedians (Secaucus: 1973), 259.

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37. Albert Goldman, “What Lenny Bruce Was All About,” New York Times Magazine (27 June 1971), 16, 18, 19, 20, 22; Redd Foxx and Norma Miller, The Redd Foxx Encyclopedia of Black Humor (Pasadena: 1977), 235. 38. Quoted in Novak and Waldoks (eds.), Big Book of Jewish Humor, 214. 39. Donald Weber, “On HBO, Klein’s Bronx Boomer Humor,” Forward (1 December 2000), 19. 40. Quoted in Frank J. Prial, “For the ‘Tonight Show,’ Joan Rivers Is the Next Best Thing to Johnny Carson,” New York Times (31 July 1983), and in Jeremy Dauber, Jewish Comedy: A Serious History (New York: 2017), 240; Epstein, The Haunted Smile, 258; Robert Brustein, Cultural Calisthenics: Writings on Race, Politics, and Theatre (Chicago: 1998), 87–​88; Lewis Black, “Preface,” in Lenny Bruce, How to Talk Dirty and Influence People (Boston: 2016), vii, viii. 41. Perry Garfinkel, “Paul Krassner Still Takes on the Establishment with Humor,” Northern California Jewish Bulletin (3 May 1985), 34; Paul Krassner, Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut: Misadventures in the Counter-​Culture (New York: 1993), 63–​64, 74, 91, 150. 42. Quoted in Richard Ben Cramer, DiMaggio: The Hero’s Life (New York: 2000), 476. 43. Woody Allen, Four Films of Woody Allen (New York: 1982), 193. 44. Martin Garbus, with Stanley Cohen, Tough Talk: How I Fought for Writers, Comics, Bigots, and the American Way (New York: 1998), 37; Mort Sahl, Heartland (New York: 1976), 24, 62–​63, 112. 45. H.L. Mencken, The American Language: An Inquiry into the Development of English in the United States (New York: 1937), 217; see also the first abridged edition of this work, ed. Raven I. McDavid, Jr. with the assistance of David W. Maurer (New York: 1963), 253–​256, 260–​264. 46. Philip Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint (New  York:  1969), 224; Arie Kaplan, “Wizards of Wit: How Jews Revolutionized Comedy in America, Part I,” Reform Judaism 30 (Winter 2001), 22. 47. Irving Howe, with Kenneth Libo, World of Our Fathers (New York: 1976), 573. 48. Quoted in Keough, Punchlines, 173, and in Collins and Skover, Lenny Bruce, 23. 49. Dauber, Jewish Comedy, 84–​85; Cohen (ed.), The Essential Lenny Bruce, 111. 50. Quoted in Kercher, Revel with a Cause, 207, 242. 51. Steve Krief, “Lenny Bruce’s Influence in the Country of Charlie Hebdo,” Society 54 (September–​October 2017), 466–​469; Théophile Larcher, “Guy Bedos, 85, Comic Who Made France Laugh,” New York Times (7 June 2020), 27. 52. Laura M. Holson, “Lenny Bruce Is Still Talking Dirty and Influencing People,” New York Times (17 October 2018). 53. Sahl, Heartland, 15, 100, 102; Krassner, Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut, 65–​ 66; Edmund Wilson to Allen Tate (5 January 1951), in idem, Letters on Literature and Politics, 1912–​1972, ed. Elena Wilson (New York: 1977), 495. 54. Samuel S. Janus, “The Great Jewish-​American Comedians’ Identity Crisis,” American Journal of Psychoanalysis 40, no. 3 (1980), 263; Garbus, Tough Talk, 31. 55. Alan Dershowitz, Taking the Stand: My Life in the Law (New York: 2013), 377. 56. Jennifer Frost, Producer of Controversy: Stanley Kramer, Hollywood Liberalism, and the Cold War (Lawrence: 2017), 159–​160; Jennifer Kaplan, “The Changing Image of American Jewish Masculinity Post-​Holocaust,” in Laughter After: Humor and the Holocaust, ed. David Slucki, Gabriel N. Finder, and Avinoam Patt (Detroit: 2020), 140–​144, 149–​150. 57. Gershom Scholem, From Berlin to Jerusalem:  Memories of My Youth, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: 1980), 40–​41; Melody Barron, “Philip Roth: Life in the Shadow of Portnoy,” online at: blog.nli.org.il/​en/​philip_​roth (accessed 6 July 2020). 58. Pinsker, “Lenny Bruce,” 100. 59. Kaufman, Jewhooing the Sixties, 143, 144, 145; Pauline Kael, “When the Saints Come Marching In” (1974), in idem, Reeling (Boston: 1976), 371–​374; Albert Goldman, Freakshow (New York: 1971), 209. 60. [Eric Breitbart] “Interview:  Wallace Markfield,” Shmate:  A Journal of Progressive Jewish Thought 1 (Summer 1983), 31, 32.

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61. Louis Harap, The Image of the Jew in American Literature: From Early Republic to Mass Immigration (Philadelphia: 1974), 220. 62. Howe, World of Our Fathers, 572–​573; Kaufman, Jewhooing the Sixties, 131–​132. 63. Sigmund Freud, Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious, in The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. A.A. Brill (New York: 1938), 705; Boskin, Humor and Social Change, 51. 64. Irving Howe, “The Nature of Jewish Laughter” (1951), in Cohen (ed.), Jewish Wry, 17, 22. 65. Quoted in Kristol, “Is Jewish Humor Dead?” 433–​434, and in “A Shtick with a Thousand Lives,” New York Times (15 November 2009), 19; “God Talk,” in Novak and Waldoks (eds.), Big Book of Jewish Humor, 214. 66. Cohen (ed.), The Essential Lenny Bruce, 40–​41, and “One Who Killed Our Lord,” in Novak and Waldoks (eds.), Big Book of Jewish Humor, 219. 67. Josh Lambert, Unclean Lips:  Obscenity, Jews, and American Culture (New  York: 2014), 33. 68. Aldous Huxley, “Silence is Golden,” in idem, Complete Essays, 1926–​1929, ed. Robert S. Baker and James Sexton (Chicago: 2000), 2:21. 69. Charles Rembar, The End of Obscenity (New York: 1968), 17n. 70. Lawrence H. Fuchs, The Political Behavior of American Jews (Glencoe: 1956), 182–​ 183, 184, 186–​187; Joseph Ratner (ed.), The Philosophy of Spinoza (New York: 1927). 344. 71. Quoted in Kaufman, Jewhooing the Sixties, 134–​135; Randall Kennedy, Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word (New York: 2003), 31, 147; Dick Gregory, with Robert Lipsyte, Nigger: An Autobiography (New York: 1965), iii. 72. Quoted in Maurice Zolotow, Billy Wilder in Hollywood (New York: 1977), 327.

Review Essay

Judaism and Jewishness in Histories of American Jewry Joyce Antler, Jewish Radical Feminism:  Voices from the Women’s Liberation Movement. New York: New York University Press, 2018. viii + 453 pp. Jessica Cooperman, Making Judaism Safe for America: World War I and the Origins of Religious Pluralism. New  York:  New  York University Press, 2018. vii + 209 pp. Kirsten Fermaglich, A Rosenberg By Any Other Name: A History of Jewish Name Changing in America. New York: New York University Press, 2018. v + 245 pp. Rachel Kranson, Ambivalent Embrace: Jewish Upward Mobility in Postwar America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. xiv + 216 pp. Jack Wertheimer, The New American Judaism: How Jews Practice Their Religion Today. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018. xvi + 379 pp. The study of American Jewish history is flourishing. These five stimulating books attest to its breadth. All but one of the five books were published in 2018. The strength of the field appears in the diversity of methodologies employed. Only Kirsten Fermaglich, in her study of name-​change petitions, employs social history, once the dominant methodology in the study of American Jews. Jessica Cooperman writes a fine-​grained institutional history of the Jewish Welfare Board (JWB) during the First World War. The book explores efforts to provide religious and recreational programs for Jewish soldiers. Rachel Kranson approaches the topic of suburbanization through sermons and journalism, examining attitudes among Jews toward social and religious change in the postwar decades. Joyce Antler uses biography to explore the significance of Jewishness in the lives of radical Jewish women, whereas Jack Wertheimer looks at Jewish religious life in the 21st century from a religious studies perspective. These volumes cover the history of American Jews in the past century and up to the present. The time frame ranges from the First World War, the context of Cooperman’s Making Judaism Safe for America, to Wertheimer’s The New American Judaism, which analyzes Jewish denominationalism in the past two decades. Fermaglich’s A Rosenberg By Any Other Name traverses the longest chronological period, from the 1920s to the 2010s. Both Ambivalent Embrace by Kranson and Radical Jewish Women by Antler explore the years after the Second World War, albeit with very different points of view.

Deborah Dash Moore, Judaism and Jewishness in Histories of American Jewry In: No Small Matter: Features of Jewish Childhood. Edited by: Anat Helman, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197577301.003.0015

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Reading these books together is challenging. They present substantially different interpretations of American Jews. Wertheimer chooses religious denominations as his vehicle to understand American Jews and their lived religion; Antler presents diverse feminist Jewish voices, very few of whom engaged Jewish religious denominations. Kranson describes the fears and hopes of denominational rabbis and other observers regarding Jews who were moving to suburbia. Cooperman presents the perspectives of Jewish chaplains and secular leaders as well as the concerns of Jewish soldiers. Fermaglich places ordinary Jewish men and women at the heart of her story—​ religious leaders and movements are largely peripheral to her compelling account of name-​change petitions and the reasons Jews offered for wanting a different surname. Yet if no definitive single interpretation of 20th-​century American Jewish history emerges from these five books, what can be learned about American Jews by reading them together? Two key points emerge. Judaism proves a highly contested arena of American Jewish life. Yet despite the importance of religion, this fractious domain involves only a small portion of American Jews. Cooperman, Kranson, and Wertheimer all explore limits that confound efforts to promote Judaism in the United States among ordinary Jews. By contrast, “Jewishness” opens a valuable window into the complexity of life among Jews in the United States. Fermaglich focuses on how New York Jews coped with rising discrimination that impeded their ambitions for social and economic mobility. In her exploration of Jewish women’s politics, Antler illuminates varied components of Jewish identity only occasionally influenced by religious dimensions. Both Judaism and Jewishness figure in Cooperman’s account of the Jewish Welfare Board. During the First World War, Jewish leaders did their best to champion Judaism’s religious equality with Protestantism and Catholicism. They secured marginal recognition from the War Department on the grounds of religious pluralism only to stumble when it came time to gain the enthusiastic embrace of their efforts by Jewish men in uniform. Nevertheless, Cooperman contends, important steps toward a modicum of religious pluralism in the United States were achieved by the JWB. Its leaders succeeded in placing rabbis in the military chaplaincy and providing sites of relaxation for soldiers stationed in training camps in the United States. Still, what seemed to be attractive to Jewish leaders, and acceptable to Christian Americans, encountered criticism and rebuff from some Jewish doughboys who preferred more robust opportunities for socializing among Jews, as well as greater recognition of Jewish religious requisites. Cooperman astutely analyzes controversies over kosher meat, using them as a means to clarify the transformation of Judaism into an American religion. Provisioning Jewish soldiers with kosher meat in the American military was feasible, especially at a number of large training camps located not far from New York City. By 1917, several successful Jewish firms that sold kosher meat conceivably could have secured government contracts to feed soldiers. While Orthodox rabbis on the JWB executive committee urged action, others, including such key figures as Cyrus Adler, worried that a request for kosher food would be interpreted as a form of special treatment for Jewish soldiers by the U.S. military. The JWB tried to explain to Christians that Jews would make better fighters if their religious practices were respected and maintained. However, the dominance of Protestant modes of religious understanding

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ultimately doomed requests for such distinctive Jewish religious requirements. Both Zionists and Orthodox Jews did their best to circumvent the JWB’s acquiescence in the military’s decision not to provide kosher food. They attacked the JWB as autocratic and uncaring in the Yiddish press, and they attempted to deal directly with the Secretary of War. However, they failed to dislodge the JWB’s primacy as the one Jewish organization recognized by the armed forces. Kosher food fell outside JWB’s nonsectarian understanding of “a practical Judaism that stressed the need to behave like other Americans over an adherence to Jewish law or an embrace of Jewish separatism” (p. 84). By the time a new generation of upwardly mobile Jews moved en masse to the suburbs after the Second World War, they had absorbed such religious compromises along with an understanding of religious pluralism as promoted by military service. Jewish builders of tract housing included space for religious structures; Jewish buyers of new homes built synagogues. Rabbis and lay leaders recruited unprecedented numbers to join and support congregations. Their efforts proved successful. In these years, Kranson notes, a majority of American Jews became synagogue members for the first time. But even as their leaders encouraged membership and crafted extensive programs of congregational activity, including education for children and social clubs for adults, they worried out loud about the superficial character of suburban Jewish religious life. Rabbis frequently lambasted their congregants and contrasted suburban Judaism’s inadequacy with their ideas of authentic Judaism. They drew unfavorable comparisons with the spirituality of working-​class Jews in some American cities or impoverished shtetl Jews murdered during the Holocaust. Jews embraced the suburbs, Kranson argues, but with profound ambivalence, if their rabbis are to be believed. Wertheimer uses these postwar years as his high-​water mark for Jewish religious revival, charting a steady decline over the course of the following fifty years. At least Jews joined congregations in the postwar decades even if they didn’t bother to worship in them more than a couple of times a year. Wertheimer charts significant changes in three major Jewish denominations—​Reform, Conservative, and Modern Orthodox. He also pays attention to the robust diversity within Orthodox Judaism, including not just hasidic and haredi groups but also various outreach organizations. In addition, he devotes a chapter to smaller movements such as Reconstructionism and Renewal. In each chapter he asks: What has a denomination accomplished? How has it changed? What are its prospects? In Wertheimer’s view, only contemporary versions of Orthodox Judaism, and especially Orthodox outreach endeavors, demonstrate sufficient resilience to offer hope for the future. He assesses harshly Reform Judaism’s innovations (among them, the incorporation of such ritual practices as prayers for healing, and the welcome extended to converts to participate as leaders of congregations). Given Reform Judaism’s lack of emphasis on serious Jewish education, he is not sanguine regarding these efforts to remain relevant to congregants. In contrast, he has compassion for the apparent decline and possibilities of renewal of Conservative Judaism, in whose seminary he has made his career. In many ways, this recent volume updates Wertheimer’s 1993 book, A People Divided:  Judaism in Contemporary America, with additional bad news. The new book’s appealing cover photograph of participants hanging from a geodesic dome

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dubbed Camp Sukkat Shalom at the Burning Man Arts Festival in the Black Rock Desert proves deceptive. Such unusual Jewish religious activity partakes of a type of Judaism for “peak moments” of crisis or celebration typical of contemporary Jews. Wertheimer sees neither genuine revival in these modes of lived religion nor any basis for enduring reinvigoration of Judaism in the new century. Jews remain divided. Judaism, except in its Orthodox incarnations, struggles to retain the allegiance of American Jews. In short, Judaism does not fare well in the United States. The future of Jews depends upon the future of Judaism. As Wertheimer writes, “aside from anti-​ Semitic persecution, nothing is likely to play a larger role in determining the future of Jewish life in this country than the lived religion of ordinary Jews” (p. 21). When historians shift their gaze away from Judaism and religious change, they contextualize Jewish behavior differently. It turns out that the study of secular Jews, radical Jews, and assimilating Jews ultimately provides a rather optimistic view of 20th-​century American Jewish history. Both Fermaglich and Antler examine Jews who either consider their visible Jewishness a burden or simply ignore their Jewishness. How can the history of these Jews offer an optimistic perspective? In part, the positive outlook stems from changes that have occurred in American society. Fermaglich builds her book around the justifications proffered by Jews who petitioned to change their surnames. She draws on petitions in Manhattan civil court to illuminate the discrimination Jews faced in the most Jewish city in the world. As she charts the arguments Jews presented to support their legal request, she explicates the types of prejudice haunting Jewish New Yorkers: their desire to find work, to attend college, to not stand out in military service during the Second World War. Yet she also discovers that most of these Jews did not seek to leave the Jewish community. Rather, they integrated their name changes into their family lives as Jews. Name changing, in short, was not necessarily a secular ticket out of Jewish life, a form of secular “conversion.” Instead, an ethnically unmarked surname helped Jews to take advantage of all of the economic, social, and cultural benefits accorded “whites” in American society. A minority of Jews did use name changing to facilitate a mode of assimilation and as a means of blending into Christian America. However, Fermaglich argues that most name changers retained their Jewish identity and continued to live as Jews. Name changing was an open secret among fellow Jews in the community, “a way,” she writes, “of hiding in plain sight” (p. 86). Given the mostly pragmatic reasons for name changes, Fermaglich persuasively interprets the decline in the number of Jewish petitions in the 1960s and 1970s as evidence of more widespread acceptance of Jews. By the 1960s, following Fermaglich’s timeline, radical feminists were among those who no longer needed to be self-​conscious about their Jewish identities. They could work for substantial changes in American society and for the liberation of women without worrying about the fact that they were Jewish. As feminists, they were ideological outsiders striving to transform the United States, demanding extensive changes in American cultural assumptions, social structure, and economic opportunities. Their Jewish identities only enhanced their outsider position. Antler examines their struggles and successes. She chronicles as well their personal transformations. Through a series of biographies of women liberationists, she limns their diverse Jewish backgrounds. The book’s endpapers consist of photographs of forty Jewish women who

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remade aspects of American society: it represents only a fraction of the many Jewish women involved in the feminist revolution. Antler seeks to complicate histories of feminist activism by revealing the presence of Jewishness in the backgrounds of dozens of influential radical women. Fortunately, she chose an ideal moment, when many of these women were willing to reflect upon their activism as feminist Jews. Initially in a conference in 2011, and then subsequently in the pages of her book, Antler brought Jewish feminists who sought to provoke change within the Jewish community together with feminist Jews who targeted the injustices of the larger society. The first half of her 453-​page book (really an entire book in itself) looks at women’s collectives in Chicago, New York, and Boston. It discusses feminist theorists as well as protest tactics of activists. The second half focuses on Jewish feminists, both straight and gay, who made demands of the Jewish community. They pushed for substantial changes in Jewish communal and religious organizations. Antler avoids explaining how Jewishness motivated either cohort of women, how it shaped their activism and prompted them to take enormous risks. She does not propose a theory of radicalization facilitated by a Jewish upbringing but rather emphasizes the enormous diversity of Jewish experiences behind the feminist movement in the United States. She also does not posit that, within the intimacy of women’s consciousness-​raising groups, unspoken Jewishness fostered a measure of commonality beyond a common feminism. In fact, a gendered perspective on American Jews in the postwar decades would illuminate the significance of Jewishness. Jewish women coped during these years with versions of middle-​class femininity that left them frustrated and rebellious. Betty Friedan was not the only Jewish woman dissatisfied with suburban American life. Some Jewish women conveyed elements of their critique of bourgeois American society to their daughters. The mere fact that feminists didn’t bother to talk about being Jewish suggests how normative and unselfconscious that identity had become. Confronting antisemitism spurred radical Jewish women to analyze racism as one of the scourges they had to fight. No one thought to change her name to get by. The only name change Antler mentions involves the adoption by Nancy Hawley of the name Miriam to signify “the bond she felt with one of the Jewish tradition’s most iconic heroines” (p. 178). Hawley participated in the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, which produced the extraordinarily influential Our Bodies, Ourselves (1971). Kranson clearly addresses the gendered character of suburbanization. In a chapter titled “Hadassah Makes You Important,” she discusses debates over middle-​class femininity that flourished among Jewish women in the suburbs. She argues that Jewish women leaders, such as those who headed Hadassah and other national Jewish women’s organizations, resisted efforts by Jewish men (and some women) to restrict women to a private world of homemaking and child rearing. Instead, these women leaders encouraged their members to “defy postwar gender norms and to engage, fully and deeply, in the public sphere” (p. 114). In her account of these debates, it is possible to glimpse the constraints that fueled rebellion by a generation of feminists as well as the resistance and defiance that characterized some of their mothers. Reading Kranson and Antler together (alongside Fermaglich) with an eye to the gendered history of these postwar decades makes possible an understanding of

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continuities in addition to changes engulfing Jewish women. Both mothers and daughters drew upon an unselfconscious Jewishness that enhanced their ability to confront new norms of middle-​class femininity. Riv-​Ellen Prell, in her 1999 book Fighting to Become Americans: Jews, Gender and the Anxiety of Assimilation, focused attention on shifting gender roles and representations among Jews in the postwar period. Kranson builds upon Prell’s work. The five chapters of Ambivalent Embrace include two that are explicitly devoted to gender, one on views of suburban Jewish American masculinity and the other on femininity. Gender is largely absent from Wertheimer’s analysis of American Judaism. The book includes no index entry for women or feminism, despite their ongoing significance in the past two decades. Both categories deserve attention in an index beyond reference to two Orthodox organizations—​the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance and Jewish Women’s Renaissance Project. Debates regarding the roles of women have roiled Jewish denominations in this century, as Wertheimer observes. Decisions to ordain women as rabbis by the Reform, Conservative, Reconstructionist, and Renewal movements, and the ongoing controversy attending efforts by liberal Orthodox rabbis to ordain women, have decisively split American Judaism. By contrast, Wertheimer does reference the work of Charles Liebman, an American-​born political scientist who lived for many years in Israel. Liebman introduced the concept of ambivalence into American Jewish history in his 1973 book, The Ambivalent American Jew: Politics, Religion and Family in American Jewish Life. In this work, Liebman argued for a framework of stakes at issue for American Jews as they tried to combine a desire for assimilation, on the one hand, with group survival, on the other. Liebman maintained that survival was impossible based on mere ethnic identification. His book does not appear in Kranson’s bibliography, although it should, because it sums up many of the points she makes in her book, albeit with different emphases. Liebman was not interested in suburbanization per se. Rather, he opposed various strategies for defining American Jews ethnically, which for some Jews took the form of a misplaced nostalgia for the authenticity of Jewish folk religion. He detailed the ways that American Jews’ ethnic folk religion radically disrupted the priorities and values of Judaism. Liebman was both insightful about and angry with American Jews. He linked changes—​in particular, their lack of Judaic knowledge, and their socioeconomic mobility—​to the fact that they were several generations removed from immigration. Writing in 1973, Liebman did not anticipate the transformation of American Jews into “whites” because neither politics nor scholarship had yet to enshrine “whiteness” as a key feature of American society and an aspiration for American ethnic groups. Writing in 2018, Fermaglich is particularly conscious of the significance of whiteness for Jewish name changers and civil rights activists. She links the two, especially in the postwar years, as sharing a common enemy, namely discriminatory application forms and the employers, admissions officers, and bureaucrats who used these forms. She argues that both activists and name changers sought a similar goal: “to erase the markers that racialized Jews, limiting them from upward mobility” (p. 122). Their success fundamentally redefined Jews as white in the United States. While civil rights activists had a larger goal than name changers, the achievement of the former

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in transforming American society helped reduce name change petitions in the 1960s. Levels then stabilized for another two decades. The decline of name changing accompanied a general amnesia among American Jews about the entire process. This may explain the prevalence of myths about name changing at Ellis Island. Rather than acknowledging that Jews sought to change their surnames, these stories remove agency from Jewish immigrants and their children. Instead, it was said that immigration officials representing the state took the initiative to assimilate Jews by changing their names. Fermaglich’s history brings back to consciousness the importance of name changing for Jews as well as its range of meanings. It restores agency to Jews and introduces a previously ignored dimension of Jewish relations with the state. Antler, too, helps to re-​evaluate an important segment of American Jewish history through her biographies of Jewish women activists. She brings feminists focused on secular concerns and feminists interested in Jewish issues back into dialogue, as they were during the 1960s and 1970s. In this way she amplifies an important article by Paula Hyman, “Jewish Feminism Faces the American Women’s Movement:  Convergence and Divergence.”1 Antler’s book enriches accounts of American feminism and provides a vital background to understanding later successes of Jewish women in politics (among them, the two California senators, Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein). One of the challenges facing a reviewer of these volumes is to square the circle: focusing on secular or religious aspects of Jewish life. Cooperman comes closest to bringing both perspectives into conversation by recognizing the blend of accommodation and resistance that characterized efforts to promote Judaism in the American military during the First World War. Even as the JWB gave up on kosher food, it secured separate Jewish “huts” where soldiers could congregate and relax. These versions of a Jewish home were gendered spaces that accommodated women as hostesses as well as men. They provided Jewish soldiers a measure of separation grounded in ethnic concerns about socializing and preserving “a vital American Jewish manhood” (p. 155). That the solution was only partially satisfying to the JWB reflects limitations of viewing Jews solely within the framework of religion. Such a rich array of new books is a tribute to the accomplishment of Hasia Diner and the Goldstein-​Goren Center for American Jewish History that she has built at New York University. Three of the authors—​Cooperman, Fermaglich, and Kranson—​received their doctoral training with Diner, and Joyce Antler held her conference on “Women’s Liberation and Jewish Identity” under Goldstein-​Goren auspices. Furthermore, three of the volumes appeared as part of the series Diner oversees at New York University Press. Diner has nurtured a rich variety of work that continues to shape the contours of American Jewish historical scholarship in rewarding ways. Deborah Dash Moore University of Michigan

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Note 1. Paula E.  Hyman, “Jewish Feminism Faces the American Women’s Movement: Convergence and Divergence,” David L.  Belin Lecture, University of Michigan (17 March 1997), republished in American Jewish Identity Politics, ed. Deborah Dash Moore (Ann Arbor: 2008), 221–​240.

Book Reviews

Antisemitism and Holocaust

Aomar Boum and Sarah Abrevaya Stein (eds.), The Holocaust and North Africa. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019. 352 pp.

In 1983, the Israeli historian Michel Abitbol published a pioneering work that provided a comprehensive picture of the history of North African Jews under the Vichy government. More than three decades later, this intersection of space (North Africa) and time (1939–​1945) has become the focal point of an increasing number of studies, as evidenced by this collection of 15 essays edited by Aomar Boum and Sarah Abrevaya Stein. Worthy of special note is the difference between the title of Abitbol’s work—​The Jews of North Africa during the Second World War—​and that of the volume under review. The transition from a text that refers to the “Second World War” in general to one that also bears directly on the “Holocaust” is significant. In many places, including Israel, the combination of “Holocaust and North Africa” may still sound inflated, disconcerting, or perhaps even sacrilegious. And yet, as this collection makes clear, the Holocaust did not target European Jewry exclusively. North African Jews of Tunisian, Algerian, Moroccan, and Libyan origin were also subjected to German, French, or Italian occupation; the Mediterranean Sea separating Africa from Europe was not an iron wall reining in the flames of the Holocaust. To be sure, geographical separation served to mitigate its horrors for North African Jews. Yet even if they were on the margin of events, North African Jews suffered as well, and they deserve not to be overlooked. To their credit, the editors of this volume have kept this balance in mind. While the focus is on North Africa, no attempt is made to remove it from the geographical margins of Holocaust history. Instead, almost all of the essays point to what was clearly unique to North Africa: the link between antisemitism and colonialism. The book is divided into four sections, with the first two parts examining the interface between the Holocaust and colonial North Africa. Topics covered include the application of race laws, the expropriation of Jewish property, and the internment of Jews in forced labor camps. The regions studied are Algeria, Libya, Tunisia, rural villages of Morocco, and even French West Africa. Particularly noteworthy is Ruth Ginio’s contribution, which identifies the antisemitic obsession and the immediacy with which French officials in French West Africa implemented the Vichy Laws, harassing the small number of Jews who were under their rule. Daniel Lee’s essay, in contrast, demonstrates that the case of one North African geographical unit does not necessarily apply to all. In Tunisia, local bureaucrats rejected the intervention of the French emissary of the Committee for Jewish Affairs, not because they objected to the actual policies being implemented but because of the

Book Reviews In: No Small Matter: Features of Jewish Childhood. Edited by: Anat Helman, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197577301.003.0016

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manner in which he dictated to local officials. The emissary was finally called back to France without being replaced, though French policy remained in place. A third piece, by Jens Hoppe, provides a reliable and complex picture of the bitter fate of Jews in Libya between 1938 and 1945. Among them were both native-​born Libyan Jews and Jewish foreigners who were subjected to the arbitrary rule of Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and Imperial Britain. Another essay, by Daniel J.  Schroeter, examines the connection between the colonial way of thinking and antisemitic legislation. Schroeter focuses on the controversial figure of General Henri Giraud, who, upon taking up his position in 1943 after the Americans deposed the Vichy government in Algeria, cancelled the Race Laws but also ratified the 1940 annulment of the Crémieux decree that, in 1870, had conferred French citizenship on Algerian Jews. Giraud tried to justify the latter decision by claiming that, with the repeal of the Race Laws, Jews were no longer unequal to Muslims. Schroeter, however, argues convincingly that the real fear was that a renewal of Algerian Jews’ French citizenship would exacerbate Muslim demands for the same. One question unasked by Schroeter (and also by others in the volume) pertains to the mix of colonialism and antisemitism: why is it that this combination did not lead to an exacerbation of oppressive measures against North African Jews that, in theory, could have resulted in a cataclysm even worse than what occurred in Eastern Europe? Essays in the third part of the book look at the aftermath of the Holocaust in North Africa. The stand-​out in this section is Lia Brozgal’s outstanding piece on the diaries written by Jews who were interned in labor camps. These, she shows, are marked by the authors’ “aesthetics of restraint,” that is, an awareness that their experiences are not comparable to what happened in the concentration camps, and certainly not in the death camps. Concluding the volume is a research workshop featuring (in order of appearance) six senior researchers—​Omer Bartov, Susan Rubin Suleiman, Susan Gilson Miller, Haim Saadoun, Michael Rothberg, and Todd Presner—​each of whom examines the implications of including North African Jewry in the Holocaust paradigm. The underlying agenda of The Holocaust and North Africa is to encourage further, in-​ depth research in this hitherto neglected area of study. Even at this relatively late stage of Holocaust historiography, there are archives and testimonies waiting to be examined and deciphered. As shown in these essays, comparative research does not imply the drawing of similarities between situations, but rather a deeper understanding of the complex mosaic of the Holocaust—​confined neither to Europe nor to European Jews. Denis Charbit The Open University of Israel  

Havi Dreifuss (Ben-​ Sasson), Relations between  Jews and Poles during  the Holocaust:  The Jewish Perspective, trans. Ora Cummings. Jerusalem:  Yad Vashem, 2017. 304 pp.

Relations between Jews and Poles during the Holocaust, an English translation of Havi Dreifuss’ Hebrew-​language doctoral dissertation (completed in 2005), is a

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unique scholarly examination of Polish–​Jewish relations during the Holocaust from a perspective of Jewish views. It is not a history of Polish–​Jewish relations per se but rather a history of changing Jewish perceptions of Poland and the Poles from the beginning to the end of the Second World War. Based largely on unpublished wartime diaries and writings preserved in Yad Vashem as well as some materials from other archives, it also contains wartime photographs and a sizable, 60-​page appendix of documents. The appendix itself, a rich collection of previously unpublished wartime testimonies, makes Dreifuss’ book a valuable addition to any Holocaust library. The decision to include 60 pages of original archival material is a reflection of the author’s objective: “to elucidate the relations between Jews and Poles during the Holocaust, based on contemporary Jewish sources from that period” (p. 17). That is to say, Dreifuss aims to present the Jewish view of Polish society, in contrast to the bulk of previous published studies that focus entirely on Polish attitudes and behavior. Dreufuss’ primary focus is on Jewish attitudes toward Poland and the Poles during the Holocaust, and in four chronological chapters, she traces dramatic changes in these views. In the course of her research, Dreifuss discovered enormous shifts in the Jewish perspective. Whereas collective Jewish memory perceives the Poles as uniformly hostile, Dreifuss found that, in the first few years of the war, “a large number” of Jewish diary entries and writings expressed a positive view of Poland and the ethnic Polish surroundings (p. 10). For instance, in one anonymous testimony written at the end of 1940, the writer states: “Their souls were softened. It was enough [for them] to witness a persecuted Jew in order to invite him into their huts, even though they didn’t know him and were seeing him for the first time” (p. 99). In another instance, a Jew who has just been deported from Brzeźnio in May 1942 writes in his diary that the attitude of the local non-​Jewish population, “and especially the Poles, was very sympathetic toward the Jews . . .” (p. 159). But by the end of the war, the Jewish view “was first and foremost one of disappointment” (p. 206). As evidence, Dreifuss again cites diary entries that serve as real-​ time windows into these changing views. In one diary entry written before war’s end, in April 1944, a Polish Jew laments the collapse of Polish–​Jewish solidary that he had experienced at the beginning of the war. “I see that now, in these terrible times, I have to fear Poles more than Germans,” he writes, adding: “It is a greater pain than the pain the Germans are causing us, because it is caused by those whom I had the right to trust” (p. 205). One of Dreifuss’ important findings is that this sharp, negative Jewish view of Poles was confined to the later years of the war “on the ruins of the benevolent image” that had taken root in the first three months of the war. In the early period of the war, Dreifuss maintains, “most of Poland’s Jews harbored a sympathetic image of Poland and the Polish people based on episodes they had witnessed and/​or experienced first-​hand” (p. 206). This attitude, according to Dreifuss, persisted even after the German occupation of eastern Poland in the summer of 1941, the only exception being a change in views among Jews in the Belarusian region. But with the shift in German policy from ghettoization to mass deportation and annihilation, the Jewish image of Poles dramatically changed. Dreifuss makes the extremely important point that “Jewish accounts from later years that describe the onset of the war tend to impose the later, negative, Polish image on the earlier years, and depict the relations

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between Jews and Poles from the earlier war years as extremely hostile.” This view is “in contrast to the gradual but consistent strengthening of the positive Polish image in contemporary accounts” from 1939–​1941 (p. 207). And here, Dreifuss addresses the methodological challenge to the historian of the Holocaust, namely “the relationship between documentation and memory and the difference between then-​contemporary sources and testimonies collected after the war ended” (p. 213). By tracing the erosion of the sympathetic Polish image that Jewish writings expressed in the first two years of the war, Dreifuss makes an important contribution to our understanding of how Jewish perception of Poland and the Poles varied and changed throughout the war. Joshua D. Zimmerman Yeshiva University  

Otto Dov Kulka, German Jews in the Era of the “Final Solution”: Essays on Jewish and Universal History. Berlin:  Walter de Gruyter; Jerusalem:  The Hebrew University Magnes Press, 2020. xv + 341 pp.

During his distinguished scholarly career, Otto Dov Kulka has illuminated critical elements of Nazi Germany through discovery and analysis of new sources. He has participated in historiographical debates related to the Holocaust. But he has never been comfortable with the term “Holocaust,” given its original Greek meaning of “burnt offering.” In teaching his first course on the subject at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, he used broader descriptions such as history of the Jews in Nazi Germany, or the Nazi euphemism “Final Solution” (p. 1). The title of this book blends these terms, but the subtitle indicates the broader range of Kulka’s writings from 1961 on (his first publication examined Richard Wagner’s antisemitism). Readers interested in the significance of antisemitism in modern European history, the centrality of antisemitism in Nazi ideology, the reaction of German Jews to Nazi persecution, and the influence of the German public’s attitudes toward Jews on Nazi policies will find this collection a rich source of information. Several historiographical essays are stimulating intellectually and engaging on a personal level. Kulka is probably best known among scholars for his work on the secret reports about attitudes among the German people that were compiled mainly by the domestic branch of the SD but also by other Nazi organs. The SD-​Lageberichte include dissident opinions and show variations over time, allowing Kulka to avoid oversimplified generalizations about the German public. Somewhat counterintuitively, he has made the case that SD officials really wanted to measure, and did roughly measure, the hearts and minds of the Germans; officials did not simply ignore discouraging reports or relate what their superiors wanted to hear. Nor did Nazi leaders blindly implement their own ideological agenda. Ideology frequently interacted dialectically with popular opinion, as in the case of the release of the Nuremberg Laws in September 1935

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(p. 121). Readers will appreciate from Kulka’s presentation of the evidence that these sources indicate a high level of popular antisemitism. Kulka takes pains to show that key organizations of German Jewry such as the Reichsvertretung and its successor, the Reichsvereinigung, managed to preserve their essential functions under the Nazis; they did not become tools of the regime. In general, German Jews were able to resist the process known as coordination (Gleichschaltung). If anything, they became more dedicated to their own organizations and more democratic as persecution increased. The introductory essay on Jewish studies and the research of the Jerusalem School is particularly interesting because Kulka succeeds in combining historiography with personal reflections. Although the first generation of Israeli scholars of Europe was motivated in part by the Holocaust, they generally avoided direct study of it, leaving the task for the generation of the 1980s, which included Kulka himself and Saul Friedländer, among others. One of the aims of this second generation was to create an integrative history, blending external ideological and political factors affecting the Jews, popular attitudes toward the Jews, and careful study of the Jewish community itself. Kulka later turns to West German scholarship, with occasional detours abroad (one to give credit to the work of Ian Kershaw). He praises Eberhard Jäckel for his path-​ breaking work on Hitler’s ideology and his establishment of the importance of Nazi ideology. Kulka offers a mixed appraisal of the work of Martin Brozsat and summarizes his own involvement in the Historikerstreit.1 He initially praised Ernst Nolte’s Three Faces of Fascism, but he became more and more distressed as Nolte’s later works appeared to relativize the Holocaust and, to some degree, to blame Jews themselves. Nolte’s transformation over time is indeed important, but there is considerable repetition in the discussion of Nolte in three different essays in this collection. Kulka does not have the same level of involvement in the intentionalist–​functionalist controversy or show much interest in it here. The last, very personal selection covers Kulka’s own experience of miraculous survival in the family camp at Auschwitz and his return visit to Auschwitz in 1978. As he acknowledges, he had always sought a certain level of detachment in his scholarly work, which forced him to avoid literary or artistic descriptions of Auschwitz or to deal directly with the final violent stage of Nazi persecution. He asks rhetorically whether others will be able to enter the gate that existed for him alone, which he opened here with his description (p. 324). They will indeed. Richard Breitman American University

Note 1. Historikerstreit refers to a dispute during the 1980s between prominent conservatives and left-​of-​center scholars over how to incorporate Nazi Germany and the Holocaust into German historiography and European history.

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Hannah Pollin-​Galay, Ecologies of  Witnessing:  Language, Place, and Holocaust Testimony. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018. 335 pp.

There is a plethora of oral history projects involving Holocaust survivors, many of which are valuable sources for researchers who come at the Holocaust from various fields. Analysis of such interviews began in the late 1980s with Lawrence Langer, a literature professor. Langer worked with the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University, analyzing the interviews and doing a number of re-​ interviews, with the aim of focusing on different forms of memory and how these influenced the ways in which the survivor perceived him-​or herself. These memory forms, argued Langer, informed the survivor’s self-​perception as a “buried self” or a “diminished self,” among other descriptions. Langer bemoaned the failure of witnesses to give testimony that enabled a coalescence of the years of persecution with their lives after the Holocaust. Other archives, such as the Jerusalem-​based Kestenberg Holocaust Child Survivor Archive, have been examined by researchers in order to analyze the early interviews given by child survivors in Poland, in this way gaining a better understanding of how families reconstituted themselves. Researchers have also used the material in these archives in examining such issues as “symbolic revenge,” resilience, and the aftereffects of the Second World War on non-​Jewish children who lived during the war. Most recently, Hannah Pollin-​Galay, a historian by training, has written a watershed book exploring the connection between place and historical imagination in Holocaust testimony. In Ecologies of Witnessing: Language, Place, and Holocaust Testimony, she contextualizes the differences between the personal narratives of Lithuanian Jews who remained in Lithuania and those who immigrated to Israel or the United States. Pollin-​Galay does not merely compare the situational variances of the different places; in addition, she addresses the nuances in the language in which survivors gave their testimony—​English, Hebrew, or Yiddish. For her analysis, she made use both of existing oral history collections and of interviews she conducted: the differences in interviewing approaches were then factored into her analysis of the data. Pollin-​Galay probes numerous topics raised by the interviewees, including relationships, community, justice, and how the survivor self was transformed as a result of dehumanization, persecution, and multiple losses. Analysis of these variables is illustrated with poignant and, at times, heart-​wrenching narratives drawn from the interviews. Ecologies of Witnessing offers a unique comparison of the Fortunoff Video Archive and the Shoah Foundation at the University of Southern California, both of which emphasize personal experience and emotions. Interviewers at these archives make every effort to dissuade generalizations and rumors. In addition, they often insert an “allegorical” component that links the present to the past—​as, for instance, the suggestion that a survivor may have chosen to have many children in order to “replace” other family members who were killed. In contrast, the Israeli interviews used by Pollin-​Galay concentrate more on factual details rather than the psychological life of the interviewee. Thus, Pollin-​Galay argues, the testimonies of Israeli witnesses include a “communal” element reflecting the various political, national, educational,

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and religious institutions to which the interviewees belong, with this element evident in a certain pride they exhibit when telling their life stories. This distinction in testimonies is not surprising, since the initial Fortunoff protocols were designed by psychoanalyst Dori Laub, who conducted interviews along with a reporter, Laura Vlock. The Israeli interviews, in contrast, were planned by historians. As for the Yiddish survivor interviews conducted in Lithuania, “an informal collective” identity—​a salient identity connected to place—​veers in the direction of “forensic accusation”—​ negative feelings and emotions vis-​à-​vis the local Lithuanian perpetrators (rather than the Germans) —​in the course of testifying. Pollin-​Galay raises an issue left unaddressed by other researchers, namely, the conflicts that sometimes arise between interviewer and interviewee. This was the case in a Lithuanian interview in which the survivor who started the process of giving testimony subsequently decided that giving the testimony was a useless endeavor. Other examples of conflict have to do with the interviewer asking a factual question, such as “How many people were in the Kovna ghetto?” In such a case, the interviewer may be interested in a response that goes beyond a simple number (that is, the question is conceived as a starting point for a wider account of the interviewee’s experience in the ghetto), whereas the interviewee prefers to stick to statistics—​or vice versa. Pollin-​Galay also discusses how the Yiddish interviews reveal survivor’s previously undisclosed life choices. At bottom, Yiddish is a language that signifies foreignness, and these interviewees feel like foreigners. In a few instances, Lithuanian Jews report how they find it unimaginable to live in the shtetl they grew up in before the German invasion, a place where many of their family members were killed. Thus, they have chosen to live in a larger city such as Vilna or Kovna (Kovno), a choice that “allows for gradual rebuilding.” In other instances, she notes, the opposite holds true. For instance, “Israel B.” returned to the village where he grew up; he “rationalizes his choice by saying, ‘All those who shot (Jews) ran away into the forest’ ” (p. 257). Pollin-​Galay astutely explains how the geography of the Lithuanians does not facilitate a personal transformation from victim to liberated individual. When the Lithuanians testify about their tormented experiences, their testimony tends to evoke “anger, accusation, dissatisfaction or clever endurance [rather than] personal or political reinvention” (p. 265). The listener needs to be attuned to the crucial shift from perceiving the perpetrator as the murderer of the family to being just an “unpleasant neighbor.” When does the landscape of murder and starvation move from being a place of massacre to that of daily habitation? As for the American and Israeli witnesses, there is a dichotomy between “here”—​Israel or America—​and “there”—​the place where mass murder took place. A painful past can be somewhat mitigated by geography; the further one is from the place of persecution, the more the acute pain is diminished. Moreover, Pollin-​Galay points out, Hebrew and English are languages of explanation, whereas Lithuanian is a language of reliving the dehumanization and loss. For the “Hebrew-​Israeli” there is a transformation in the survivor’s life. At the same time, Pollin-​Galay argues, “the optimistic vision of Jewish self-​reinvention through political sovereignty” coincides with the painful history of persecution and loss. In contrast, English-​language American survivors look to the family as a vehicle for healing, a means of mitigating the trauma of the Holocaust. This group does not blame the

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individual Lithuanian for the Holocaust, but rather the antisemitism that was endemic in Lithuania both before and during the Holocaust. In this “era of the witness,” Pollin-​Galay demonstrates how researchers ought to consider a multitude of dimensions in the interview process, as well as in the analysis of the testimonies. We are well aware that time is running out for interviewing the few remaining survivors. Wherever possible, scholars will find it valuable to re-​interview Holocaust survivors, or to search for those who have never been interviewed. For all those who wish to interview family members, community members, or other historically traumatized survivors, Ecologies of Witnessing is essential. The most significant conclusion in Ecologies of Witnessing is that there is “no universality to victimhood.” We may know this well, but Pollin-​Galay teaches us that there are abundant, and enriching, nuances to consider as new researchers embark on similar journeys in different locales. Eva Fogelman New York

Dan Porat, Bitter Reckoning: Israel Tries Holocaust Survivors as Nazi Collaborators. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2019. 276 pp.

Around twenty years ago, I  became interested in the subject of Jewish honor courts in Europe after the Holocaust. These form the backdrop to Dan Porat’s important book, Bitter Reckoning:  Israel Tries Holocaust Survivors as Nazi Collaborators. In the aftermath of the war, Jewish honor courts were established in Jewish displaced persons’ (DP) camps and in Poland, the Netherlands, Germany, and other countries; their function was to try suspected “traitors to the nation”—​namely, alleged Jewish collaborators with the Nazis—​in a court of their peers. The strong urge of European Jewish communities to hold suspected collaborators accountable found its parallel in the nascent state of Israel’s criminal justice system. In later years, particularly in the 1970s and 1980s, Jewish “collaboration” with the Nazis became a taboo subject in Jewish circles (I myself was advised by an eminent scholar to avoid the topic, as it would be “washing dirty laundry in public”), and it still makes many Jews squirm. But it wasn’t always so. After the Holocaust, it was discussed openly and often vehemently among survivors; it was also a theme explored by Jewish writers. Many Jews—​not only survivors—​wanted suspected collaborators to be judged, be it in a communal court or a court of law. As Porat shows, the presence of Jews with dirty hands among them troubled survivors and sabras alike in the Yishuv and then, after 1948, in the newly established state of Israel. Porat vividly describes numerous occasions when survivors resettled in Israel unexpectedly encountered fellow new immigrants in the streets, on buses, or in cafes whom they both recognized and held responsible, at least in part, for their suffering in ghettos and camps. Hundreds of such confrontations occurred, frequently resulting in complaints

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lodged with the police. (On occasion, aggrieved survivors even assaulted the alleged culprits before fingering them.) In the academic world, the topic of Jewish accommodation with the Nazi regime was rendered legitimate by Primo Levi’s landmark essay “The Gray Zone,” published in the late 1980s. Levi’s adumbration of the inescapable tension between the perceived guilt of Jews who, themselves victims, cooperated with the Nazis, and the unenviable, if not well-​nigh impossible, task of judging them undergirds Porat’s narrative. The focus of Porat’s book is the so-​called kapo trials (approximately 40 in all) that were conducted in Israel between 1951 and 1972. In fact, many of the defendants were not alleged former kapos in Nazi concentration camps but rather former Judenrat (Jewish Council) members and Jewish policemen in ghettos. The legislative authority for the kapo trials derived from the Nazi and Nazi Collaborators (Punishment) Law promulgated by the Knesset in 1950. This is the law on the basis of which Adolf Eichmann was tried and convicted in Jerusalem in 1961. But, as Porat points out, when the Knesset debated and then passed the legislation, first and foremost in legislators’ minds were survivors in Israel who were suspected of cooperation with the Nazis. Unlike the proceedings in Jewish honor courts, which resorted to deontological criteria—​that is, whether the accused had a duty to refrain from lending a hand to the Nazis’ persecution and murder of other Jews—​the Israeli trials, conducted under state authority, were bound by the rules of criminal law to determine the guilt or innocence of the accused. Porat identifies four phases in the development of the kapo trials between 1950 and 1972. In the first phase (1950–​1952), Knesset legislators, in sync with the Israeli public (particularly survivors), created a law that, in their minds, placed Nazis and Jews who served the Nazi administration on an equal footing without taking into account the fact that these Jews, too, were victims. In this phase, Jewish defendants could be found guilty of crimes against humanity and war crimes, and could be sentenced to death. In the second phase (1952–​1957), the Supreme Court overturned the death sentence of Yehezkel Jungster, a convicted former kapo, ruling that, unlike Nazis, Jewish defendants could not be charged with crimes against humanity or war crimes. In all other respects, however, the legal system continued to view Jewish functionaries as equivalent to Nazis. Over time, Israeli society began to question whether alleged collaborators should even be prosecuted. In the third phase (1958–​1962), the legal system increasingly regarded Jewish defendants as functionaries who, even if they had committed wrongs, had done so with the intention to mitigate Nazi genocidal ambitions and to save Jews to the extent possible. In line with this approach, prosecutors filed charges only against Jewish defendants who they believed had aligned themselves with the Nazis’ aims. During this phase, some survivors decided to consign the vexing subject of Jewish collaborators to the past, while others still pressed for trials. The Eichmann trial in 1961 and the trial of Hersh Barenblat, a former Jewish police commander accused of assisting the Nazis in deporting Jews from the Bedzin ghetto (in Poland) to Auschwitz, heralded an almost complete reversal in policy during the final phase (1963–​1972). During this phase, Jewish functionaries came to be seen as ordinary victims of evil Nazis. If in the earlier phases, Jewish defendants on trial were, for all intents and purposes, presumed guilty until proven innocent, by the time of the

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Supreme Court’s decision in Barenblat’s case in 1964, Jews accused of cooperation with the Nazis were presumed innocent until proven guilty. In his concurring opinion in the Supreme Court’s decision overruling the district court’s conviction of Barenblat, Justice Moshe Landau, quoting from the lower court’s verdict, wrote: [I]‌t is also the bitter truth that “in the atmosphere of [the] extraordinary pressure of those days, moral concepts and values changed.” But it would be hypocritical and arrogant on our part—​on the part of those who never stood in their place and on the part of those who succeeded in escaping from there [...] to make this truth a cause for criticizing those “little men” who did not rise to the heights of moral supremacy when mercilessly oppressed by a regime whose first aim was to remove the human image from their faces.

As Porat observes: “The Supreme Court determined that there was no justification for judging normal people who served in the Jewish Councils or police for their choices and actions in an abnormal time” (p. 208). By this time, a significant number of Israelis agreed with Justice Landau. Indeed, this is Primo Levi’s position in “The Gray Zone.” With the exception of the trial in 1972 of Lube Gritzmacher, a particularly cruel female kapo who was sentenced to three months in prison, Barenblat’s trial essentially marked the conclusion of this vexing chapter in Israel’s confrontation with the repercussions of the Holocaust. Porat has written a compelling account of the kapo trials. Anyone interested in this subject, which has implications for our understanding of Israeli ideology in the first decade and a half of the state’s existence, from “the negation of the diaspora” to the heroic image of the sabra, and Holocaust memory (in the sense of the glorification of armed Jewish resistance) must now start with Porat’s book. In this context, it would be remiss of me not to mention the Hebrew-​language book by Rivka Brot, Ba’ezor ha’afor: hakapo hayehudi bemishpat (In the Gray Zone: The Jewish Kapo on Trial).1 Whereas Jewish honor courts in Europe set the stage for the Israeli trials in Porat’s book, Brot’s book is a comparative study of trials of alleged Jewish collaborators in DP honor courts and in Israel. In Brot’s view, there was no essential difference between trials in the Jewish honor courts, in which judicial panels utilized an ethical yardstick to measure guilt or innocence, and in Israeli courts, which, she argues, resorted ultimately to the same extrajudicial criteria, even though Israeli judges were formally bound by criminal law standards. She traces this continuity between the proceedings in honor courts and the kapo trials in Israel up through Barenblat’s trial. As a result, Brot concludes that Barenblat’s trial demonstrates the intransigent condemnation, both in Israeli society and in the country’s judicial system, of Jews suspected of collaboration, at least as far as the mid-​1960s. Because these two books, taking different approaches, make different but, on their face, plausible and thought-​provoking arguments, it pays to read them side by side. Gabriel N. Finder University of Virginia

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Note 1. Rivka Brot, Ba’ezor ha’afor: hakapo hayehudi bemishpat (Raanana: 2019).  

Liat Steir-​Livny, Remaking Holocaust Memory:  Documentary Cinema by  Third-​ Generation Survivors in Israel. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2019. 376 pp.

The traumatic memories from the Shoah are not only a crucial part of the Israeli social fabric; they also constitute a central topic of many Israeli documentary films. Since the late 1980s, an increasing number of filmmakers, many of them descendants of Holocaust survivors, have dealt with the Shoah in non-​fictional films, often offering new and different perspectives. This is especially true of young filmmakers belonging to the third generation of Israelis born after the end of the war. Seeking to avoid making just “another Holocaust documentary,” they present the history of the Shoah as a matter of complex, entangled, and twisted memory. Films such as The Flat (dir. Arnon Goldfinger, 2011), Farewell Herr Schwarz (dir. Yael Reuveny, 2014), A Film Unfinished (dir. Yael Hersonski, 2010), and The Decent One (dir. Vanessa Lapa, 2014) explore the aftermath of traumatic memories both in and beyond Israeli society, focusing not only on Jewish survivors and their descendants but also on other victims of the war—​and even on the Nazi perpetrators. Liat Steir-​Livny’s Remaking Holocaust Memory is the first comprehensive English-​language study of the Israeli third-​generation engagement with the history of the Shoah in documentary films. In analyzing “how third-​generation documentaries provide new ideas and concepts to commemorate and preserve the memory for future generations” (p. 247), Steir-​Livny contrasts third-​generation documentary films with the works of second-​generation directors and explores an extensive number of films in five key areas, each covered in a separate chapter. She first focuses on the role of gender in second-​and third-​generation documentaries, as this “provides yet another lens through which life and death in the Holocaust can be examined” (p. 26). Following this, she devotes a chapter to changing attitudes toward Germany. This topic was largely absent in earlier films, whereas many third-​generation documentaries “make Germany their main destination” (p. 67). Prominently featured in this chapter is a detailed analysis of The Flat, which illustrates many significant characteristics of third-​generation documentaries. From there, Steir-​Livny analyzes the use and exploration of historical film footage in third-​generation documentary films, which often “reflexively discuss the complexity of the image, its (mis)representations [ . . . ], and the relationship between image and viewers” (p. 113). An illustrative example is A Film Unfinished, which traces the making of a German propaganda film in the Warsaw ghetto. Steir-​Livny subsumes the film Numbered (dir. Dana Doron and Uriel Sinai, 2012) under this category although it does not contain any historical footage. Nevertheless, the tattooed

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numbers that are in the center of the film serve as “a visual reminder of victimization and suffering” (p. 139) and constitute (in the sense of Pierre Nora) a “site of memory.” Steir-​Livny’s fourth area of discussion deals with the function of testimonies that feature in third-​generation documentaries “in more complex ways” (p. 152). Many second-​generation documentaries are characterized by the very intimate relationship between the filmmakers and their parents, and these often seek to provoke memory processes and to preserve traumatic recollections of the past. Third-​generation filmmakers have gone further, digging into family myths and evaluating written and visual traces from the past. In so doing, they reexamine “the relationship between testimony and fact” (p. 162)—​not with the intention of rejecting or invalidating the importance of commemoration, but rather in order to explore its individual and collective functions. In addition, these films shift attention from the survivors to their descendants as future caretakers of their grandparents’ memories. In her concluding chapter, Steir-​Livny looks at the representation of perpetrators and bystanders in third-​generation films. An exemplary case, “the first time that an Israeli film provided access to the mind of a high-​ranking Nazi” (p. 222), is The Decent One, which centers around the figure of Heinrich Himmler. Steir-​Livny reconstructs the fascinating background of the film and analyzes, in very convincing manner, both its editing and other stylistic decisions connected with the film. Throughout her study, Steir-​ Livny discusses the documentaries against the background of documentary film theories, on the one hand, and Israeli/​Zionist Holocaust memory, on the other. Each chapter compares selected documentaries by second-​generation filmmakers with those of third-​generation filmmakers. Second-​ generation filmmakers are closely tied to what Israeli film scholar Mihal Friedman once described as the “age of testimony,” in which the second generation functioned as a “witness through imagination” (p.  16), whereas third-​generation Israeli directors grew up in a different memory ecology in which “Holocaust awareness was undergoing significant changes” (p. 16). Steir-​Livny focuses on films directed by “grandchildren of German Jews who fled to Eretz-​Israel after the rise of Nazism but before World War II, the grandchildren of Holocaust survivors who lived in Nazi occupied Europe during World War II. And Jewish Israelis who were born between the late 1960s and the early 1980s” (p. 24). In many of these films, the directors themselves perform as agents of memory (often investigating family histories) and, in numerous cases, they also challenge the dominant victim perspective and highlight hybrid identities, as with the brother of Yael Reuveni’s grandmother in Farewell Herr Schwarz, who integrated into postwar Communist Germany, or the disturbing ongoing friendship of Arnon Goldfinger’s grandparents with former Nazi officials in The Flat. Some of these second-​and third-​generation films, which date from the year 2000 and beyond, were released at about the same time. Steir-​ Livny, however, does not engage with the question of whether any of them had an influence on one another—​that is, how strong is the tie between a given film and a specific generation; how important is the social and cultural context? A good example not discussed in the book is You Only Die Twice (2017), directed by Yair Lev, a second-​generation documentary filmmaker (Steir-​Livny does address two of Lev’s earlier films, Hugo [1989] and Hugo 2 [2008]). As with two other films, The

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Flat and Farewell Herr Schwarz, You Only Die Twice explores a hidden and twisted Holocaust riddle and travels between Israel and Austria in order to show the complex and complicated relationships between former victims and perpetrators. The question thus arises: should this film be considered a third-​generation documentary, as its topic and investigative style indicate, or is it a second-​generation film, since this is the cohort to which its director belongs? In her conclusion, Steir-​Livny states that third-​generation documentary filmmakers “do not construct a competitive memory or a demolition model of memory, in which new memory eradicated the previous one and emerges at the expense of the other. They adhere to the notion of multidirectional memory, which allows different forms of commemoration to coexist simultaneously and different representations to merge and meld together” (p. 247). Here, Michael Rothberg’s concept of multidirectional memory would have been a helpful tool to describe the specific, multi-​ perspective approach of third-​generation documentary filmmakers. Unfortunately, Steir-​Livny refrains from a deeper, more detailed discussion. As a result, she misses the opportunity to develop a more complex conceptualization of this particular group of films. The notion of multidirectional memory as well as Astrid Erll’s “traveling memory” would have greatly contributed to the triad of terms (“postmemory,” “after postmemory” and “prosthetic memory”) that Steir-​Livny employs. In addition, the interaction between the second and third generation of Israeli documentary directors deserves more attention, especially with regard to those films that deal with the challenges of commemorating the past at a time when the survivors themselves are passing away. Finally, a more thorough examination of the intersections between generations in the films discussed in this book, as well as between Israeli and non-​Israeli filmmakers, producers, and protagonists—​especially in the case of co-​productions—​would further complicate and clarify contemporary Israeli approaches to the history and memory of the Shoah in documentary cinema. Such further research would augment the detailed case studies Steir-​Livny provides in this important work. Tobias Ebbrecht-​Hartmann The Hebrew University  

Claus-​Christian W. Szejnmann, Paula Cowan, and James Griffiths (eds.), Holocaust Education in Primary Schools in the Twenty-​First Century: Current Practices, Potentials and Ways Forward. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. xxii + 278 pp.

The place and purpose of Holocaust education in primary schools is an under-​theorized and under-​researched field, at least in Anglophone literature. This collection, based in part on papers presented at an international conference on Holocaust education held at Loughborough University in July 2016, goes a long way in bringing together

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perspectives from a variety of countries (Germany, Austria, Israel, Switzerland, the Netherlands, the United States, Canada, Australia, and the UK) and educational contexts. As such, it should be of interest to anyone involved in Holocaust education, whether teachers, teacher trainers, or museum educators, as well as Holocaust education organizations. The volume is organized into four parts. In Part I, Simone Schweber and Irene Ann Resenly look at the impact of teaching the Holocaust to primary school students, focusing on a young woman, Lila, who is re-​interviewed 12 years after she first learned about the Holocaust in third grade. This essay points to the stark absence of empirical studies on Holocaust learning in the early grades (with the exception of Schweber’s seminal study of 2008). Part II looks at pedagogical approaches toward teaching about the Holocaust in primary schools. Overall, the essays in this section argue that successful teaching approaches for young pupils are those based on survivors’ testimonies (Amy Carnes, Kori Street, and Claudia Ramirez Wiedeman), or on interdisciplinary and cross-​ curricular approaches involving literacy and art (Graham Duffy and Paula Cowan) and religious education (Alasdair Richardson). Yael Richler-​Friedman offers a particularly interesting essay dealing with Yad Vashem’s “spiral” pedagogical approach in teaching about the Holocaust. This approach calls for revisiting the subject from different angles, and at increasingly deeper levels, at various stages of the child’s development. Richler-​Friedman does a very good job explaining the unique Israeli Jewish context—​in Israel, the Holocaust is a component of identity for most of the Jewish population, and children are exposed to the subject from an early age via the media. This context should be taken into account when the principles are transferred into other contexts. Another essay of particular interest is Paula Cowan’s “There’s No ‘J’ in (the) Holocaust: Perceptions and Practice of Holocaust Education,” which discusses the significant issue of the “de-​Judaization” of the Holocaust. In her analysis of a study conducted among student teachers and primary teachers in Scotland, Cowan calls for serious consideration of “what students’ first learning outcomes should be” and argues that priority should be given to “an age-​appropriate, accurate, historical understanding of the primary victims of the Holocaust” (p. 45). The third section of the book consists of five essays dealing with encountering the Holocaust in museum settings. Among the topics discussed in this section are the challenges faced by museums in developing resources for primary school pupils (Lisa Phillips) and the need both for partnerships between teachers and museums and for additional research regarding the practice of museums and teachers (Cornélia Stickler and Sabrina Moisan). In an analysis of how two heritage institutes in the Netherlands construct distance, proximity, and engagement in their educational resources, Pieter de Bruijn raises questions about the role of museums in Holocaust education as opposed to Holocaust remembrance and commemoration. Indeed, the issue of how affective learning can overshadow cognitive understanding of the Holocaust is one that warrants serious consideration by all those involved in teaching primary school pupils. The stand-​out contribution in this section is Madene Shachar’s essay dealing with the educational philosophy and pedagogical approach of Yad Layeled, the children’s

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Holocaust memorial museum in Israel (part of the Ghetto Fighters’ House Museum). The museum’s answer to the challenge of creating educational programs that engage young learners both cognitively and affectively—​without traumatizing them, but also without compromising authenticity and a nuanced understanding of historical events—​is noteworthy. The museum uses a combination of media and authentic materials, namely, diaries, testimonies, artifacts, and photographs “as pedagogical tools to evoke empathy in young visitors while constructing their personal and collective memory of the Holocaust via survivor testimonies” (p. 167). Student perspectives are the subject of the volume’s final section, beginning with an essay by Rebecca Hale that discusses a seminal, large-​scale study of English secondary school students. The study indicated that 28.5 percent of the respondents had first learned about the Holocaust when they were of primary school age. Hale points to some of the many questions that need to be confronted about what is actually happening in English primary schools and what impact this teaching is having on students’ knowledge and understanding. In another essay, Christian Mathis investigates Swiss pupils’ preconceptions of the Holocaust in order to inform the question of whether the topic should be taught at primary level. Similar to Philipp Mittnik’s work in Austria (which is presented in the second section of this volume), Mathis’ research determined that “children aged eleven to twelve years have acquired some kind of knowledge in the subject outside school” and, for this reason, “the Holocaust should be an issue for primary schools, particularly if children broach the subject at school themselves” (p. 248). The volume’s concluding essay, by Detlef Pech and Christine Achenbach, places Holocaust education within the broader context of teaching contemporary history. Collectively, the contributions in this volume point to the importance of narrative:  namely, personal stories through which historical events and their impact on individuals can be explored. Another theme explored by various contributors is the need for multiple perspectives that allow pupils to see individuals not in polarized good or evil frames, but rather as complex beings facing conflicting forces and moral dilemmas. There also seems to be a consensus on the advantages of adopting a cross-​curricular approach that transcends traditional subject divisions. Finally, this volume initiates a much-​needed dialogue between museum educators and teachers, offering valuable insights into how museums view their role and approach their educational tasks. Perhaps inevitably, the contributions in this volume vary in quality. Some provide informed arguments based on empirical evidence and sound theoretical understandings, whereas others seem to advocate a particular perspective that is based mostly on assumptions or anecdotal evidence. Furthermore, some of the arguments made in favor of Holocaust education in primary schools are not entirely convincing. Students may have the intellectual ability to engage in critical or historical thinking, or may be at an appropriate age to develop sensibilities for equality and tolerance, or may already hold stereotypes about certain groups of people—​yet these, in my opinion, are not sufficient reasons to be teaching about the Holocaust at the primary school level. By this, I do not mean to imply that the topic should be taboo, but rather to stress that more and better theorizing is needed, alongside more research into individual contexts.

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Indeed, what becomes obvious from reading this volume is that Holocaust education in the primary schools is in desperate need of more—​much more—​empirical research. There are still many assumptions that need to be explored, challenged, or confirmed. In this sense, the contributions by Schweber and Resenly, by Claus-​Christian Szejnmann and his colleagues Gary Mills, James Griffins, and Bill Niven (describing an evaluation undertaken by the National Holocaust Centre and Museum in the UK) and by Carnes, Street, and Wiedman (presenting an evaluation of a lesson developed by the Institute of Visual History and Education of the USC Shoah Foundation) are examples of exactly the kind of work that needs to be done in the field. Robust evaluations of what effect various programs and practices in different countries and contexts have on pupils’ emotional and cognitive development are still urgently needed. The evaluations need to inform the question of whether the Holocaust should be taught to primary school pupils—​in various contexts—​as well as the question of how is addressed. Eleni Karayianni University College London  

Arkadi Zeltser, Unwelcome Memory:  Holocaust Monuments in  the Soviet Union. Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2018. 386 pp.

The extermination of Jews in the occupied Soviet territories occupies a special place in Holocaust history. The Soviet Union was the only case in which the Wehrmacht did not succeed in fully subduing the enemy. As a result, the death toll among Soviet Jews, albeit enormous, was far from being complete. Masses of Soviet Jews fled in advance of the German army, while others were conscripted in the Red Army. In addition, a significant number of Jews lived in areas that were never occupied by the Wehrmacht. Finally, in many cases, Jewish families were dispersed over the enormous Soviet space, partly reflecting prewar demographic mobility trends, and partly as a result of wartime evacuation. As a result, from the ashes of the Holocaust there emerged many Jews whose relatives had been killed by the Germans and their collaborators in the occupied territories. This situation was far from unique. What distinguishes the Soviet case is the fact that its Holocaust death toll was quite compatible with the number of survivors. This created a singular demand for Holocaust memorialization on the part of a relatively large number of surviving family members. Moreover, this process was unfolding against the background of a very special postwar Soviet setting. Individual and ethnic memory, state memory policy, and Holocaust memorialization activities and strategies pursued by Jews thus developed in a manner that was quite different from other countries that had suffered massive losses during the Holocaust. Until recently, a number of factors combined to discourage historians from turning the spotlight on this particular corner of East European Jewish history, most specifically the fact that the Soviet regime kept archival materials securely under lock and key. Since the 1990s, the archives have gradually been opened. Arkady Zeltser’s

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innovative research has made full use of the available archival holdings and old and new photographs, alongside numerous testimonies, mostly of recent vintage, amassed by Yad Vashem, where Zeltser heads the Center for Research on the Holocaust in the Soviet Union. The book consists of five chapters. The first two deal with theoretical approaches toward Soviet Jewish identity, embedded into larger issues of Jewish historical memory and the evolution of Soviet memory policy. In the third chapter, Zeltser comes to terms with the core issue of Soviet authorities’ behavior vis-​à-​vis the Holocaust, in particular, the issue of erecting Holocaust monuments on the sites of mass killings—​that is, the very possibility of such monuments being erected by individuals, as well as what inscriptions could be placed on them. Local authorities who were formally in charge of these questions found it very difficult to formulate definitive guidelines. In part, this was because they were operating without clear directives from above, but also, it seems, because they sensed that Holocaust memorialization fell into a gray area between “the Jewish question” (itself a thorny issue par excellence), war memory, and state (versus local) politics. Zeltser closely follows changes in policies at the state level and their impact on local decision-​making processes. The bans on Holocaust memorialization on the ground ebbed and flowed with every new reconfiguration of high Soviet policies. In Chapter 4, Zeltser painstakingly reconstructs the story of Jews who attempted to find a delicate balance between ambiguous government policy with respect to Holocaust memorialization and their own duty as people, as Jews, and as relatives to their fallen bretheren. Many of them, especially those raised in the prewar Soviet Union who had imbibed the logic of Soviet state paternalism, had to first overcome a natural reluctance to confront the regime by venturing into Holocaust memorialization activities, whether on a personal or on a larger scale. Once embarked on the project, they had to carefully navigate their way in the murky waters of Soviet bureaucracy, trying to pay tribute to Holocaust victims without irritating and alienating authorities. This was a difficult enterprise, but many Jews persisted in order to achieve the goal of commorating those who did not survive. Zeltser shows how, in the immediate postwar period, events of the war were still strongly engrained in the contemporary consciousness. However, during the late Stalinist period (1948–​1953), the government’s attitudes toward Jews and everything identified with them became increasingly strained. In following years—​beginning with Nikita Khrushev’s “thaw” and Leonid Brezhnev’s “stagnation,” government policies with regard to Holocaust monuments remained profoundly ambigous, albeit presumably less dangerous for the Jews involved in Holocaust memorialization. The author is at his best in Chaper 5, which is devoted to investigating the issue of how Holocaust-​themed monuments were viewed by Soviet Jews as a means of expressing identity. Contrary to what has hitherto been a frequently accepted view, Zeltser convincingly demonstrates that some Soviet Jews were able to express their Jewishness via Holocaust memorialization, in the absence of other venues allowing for their ethnic grievances to be heard. Unwelcome Memory also offers rich opportunities to reflect upon the vexed issue of the postwar state response toward Holocaust legacy. To what extent was Soviet exceptionalism responsible for the state’s response? It appears that owing to a unique

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alignment of circumstances, such as ebbs and flows in anti-​Jewish bias at the state and local levels, and evolution of the general approaches toward war legacy and remembrance, Jews were occasionally able to find loopholes in the seemingly indifferent and omnipotent bureaucratic Soviet state. To properly assess the magnitude of this leeway, Zeltser’s analysis might have benefited from a comparative framework focusing on attitudes toward Holocaust memorialization on the part of other states, whether authoritarian or democratic. However, this task was beyond the purview of this otherwise finely crafted volume. Despite its modest title, Unwelcome Memory is a profoundly serious study that successfully engages with the many aspects of Jewish–​Soviet relations in the postwar period, showing how both the Soviet regime and Soviet Jews came to terms with Holocaust memorialization. Zeltser’s understanding of the complexitities of this relationship is truly remarkable and this, coupled with the book’s many illuminating photographs, makes it essential reading for students of Soviet and Soviet Jewish history. Kiril Feferman Ariel University  

Cultural Studies and Literature Omri Asscher, Reading America, Reading Israel: The Politics of Translation between Jews. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2020. 256 pp.

Many people view translation as a bridge enabling a source culture’s enrichment of a target culture. Omri Asscher, however, approaches translation differently. He asserts that one cannot truly know an “other.” Therefore, efforts to convey knowledge about an other, including through translation, merely create a discourse that reveals how individuals or communities define themselves in relationship to that specific other. Previous scholars have studied translations from a specific source culture to understand a particular target culture. Asscher’s book stands out in that it is bidirectional. It employs translation to think about how two groups—​American and Israeli Jews—​understand and relate to one another. Since East European immigrants played integral roles in the two dominant contemporary Jewish centers’ development, the East European Jewish center long served as a common point of reference; translations from Hebrew into English for American Jewish readers and translations from English into Hebrew for Israeli Jewish readers have long been viewed as avenues for greater mutual understanding between them. Asscher, however, stresses how adoption of different everyday languages and residence in distinct territories produced two collectives possessing divergent modern Jewish identities: when Jewish people and institutions came to mediate, manage, and regulate the social meanings of translated texts in the United States and Israel, they employed translations to define their center in contradistinction to its perceived antipode. By focusing his study on translations produced from the 1950s up until the early 1980s, Asscher selects an historical period highly conducive to his claim that translations reflect self-​absorbed target cultures looking to source cultures’ literatures to express themselves. Following the Second World War, social barriers to Jews fell; they entered the American mainstream and experienced increasing economic success. Yet this left a native-​born generation of Jews searching for meaning. Many American Jews found such meaning in the prophetic tradition’s message of social justice, and subsequently participated in the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, and the struggle for Soviet Jewry. This enabled them to voice their Jewishness according to what they perceived as a distinctly “Jewish” moral imperative. Thus, these mainstream American Jews contributed to the production of translated Israeli literature that depicted Jews struggling with moral issues. Understandably, they downplayed or dismissed Israeli literature that represented immoral Jewish behavior and satirized figures like Elie Wiesel who were lionized within the American Jewish community

Book Reviews In: No Small Matter: Features of Jewish Childhood. Edited by: Anat Helman, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197577301.003.0024

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as moral exemplars. With exhaustive examples of how American Jewish needs led to translated Israeli texts’ manipulation, Asscher effectively makes his case. Asscher also convincingly demonstrates how Israeli critics of the 1950s through the 1980s took pride in the literary successes of American Jewish writers such as Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, and Bernard Malamud, while dismissing the contents of their writing on ideological grounds. During much of this period, Israelis dedicated their lives to settling hundreds of thousands of immigrants, assiduously building the infrastructure of a modern state, and repeatedly battling neighboring armies. No matter how aesthetically depicted, uprooted diasporic male protagonists who were unable to maintain long-​term relationships with women and unwilling to commit to meaningful paternal or communal Jewish roles—​all the while solipsistically celebrating their alienation—​struck Israeli critics as hopelessly juvenile. Rather than representing a viable form of Jewish existence for Israeli critics, such figures evoked early 20th-​ century problems that Zionists looked to overcome through nationalist action. In contrast with his points about American Jewish translations of Israeli literature and Israeli translations of American Jewish literature from the 1950s to the 1980s, Asscher’s broader claim about translation lacks effective substantiation. He purposely concludes his study when challenges were being mounted both to the “Jewish” moralism championed by the American Jewish counterculture and to center-​left Zionist orthodoxies, and thereby effectively ignores a time when Israeli and American Jews became increasingly receptive to what each other had to offer. Even if they were unable to fully understand the other Jewish center’s culture, those involved in the translation process examined the opposing source culture much more rigorously with attention to how shared dilemmas were expressed and how different responses were contemplated. Translation began to serve as a more serious form of dialogue. Indeed, serious engagement with more contemporary developments would have introduced findings more in line with the assertion that translation can serve as a bridge between cultures. Nonetheless, it would have rendered this study more compelling for those who have witnessed the granting of American National Jewish Book Awards to translated Israeli fiction—​something that denies Asscher’s claim concerning the impossibility of bridging between the two cultures. The conceptualization of Asscher’s study constitutes an additional limitation. Asscher asserts that the Israeli and American centers defined themselves in relationship with each other, but the East European center was the primary other against which both defined themselves during much of the period his study covers. Before Alexander Portnoy’s visit to Israel in Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), Eli faces off with an East European Holocaust survivor in haredi garb in “Eli, the Fanatic” (1959); before Bellow travels To Jerusalem and Back (1976), he translates Singer’s “Gimpel Tam;” before Malamud features an Israeli expatriate in Pictures of Fidelman (1969), his novel The Fixer (1966) depicts Jewish experience in Czarist Russia through the prism of the Beilis case.1 Similarly, as Asscher explains, when the Committee for Israeli Jewish Consciousness was established in the 1950s, its proposed school curriculum eschewed “American Jewish cultural creation and thought” in favor of “traditional and historical sources of Judaism” that clearly privileged East European Jewry. When did the two modern centers start perceiving themselves primarily in relationship to one another?

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Finally, Asscher’s final chapter claims that Israeli Jews still cannot appreciate their American brethren, because Israeli intellectuals view American Jewish culture as inauthentic. This claim is a canard. What actually disturbs Israeli intellectuals is how ignorance of the Hebrew language has severed American Jews from 3,000 years of Jewish culture and frequently led to shallowness. Rather than distinguishing Israeli intellectuals, this claim links them to American Jewish intellectuals who have long beckoned American Jews “back to the sources.” Furthermore, discussion regarding the importance of the “Jewish bookshelf” and the development of secular yeshivas occurred after secular Israeli Jews were critiqued for similar disconnection; renewed engagement with Jewish sources unites the two cultures and points to dialogue that Asscher chooses to tune out. Philip Hollander Cornell University

Note 1. Philip Roth, “Eli the Fanatic,” in idem, Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories (Boston:  1959), 247–​298; Isaac Bashevis Singer, “Gimpel the Fool,” trans. Saul Bellow, Partisan Review 20, no. 3 (1953), 300–​313; Bernard Malamud, Pictures of Fidelman:  An Exhibition (New York: 1969).  

Batya Brutin, Holocaust Icons in  Art:  The Warsaw Ghetto Boy and Anne Frank. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter; Jerusalem: The Hebrew University Magnes Press, 2020. xvi + 213 pp.

Gazing at the large number of images Batya Brutin has published in this volume, which document the engagement of artistic creativity with the photographs of the boy with raised hands in the Warsaw ghetto (1943) and those of Anne Frank, one is struck by the ability of these figures to continually provoke imagination and discourse. Prior to this book, attention of exceeding proportions had been granted to the anonymous boy and the famous young diarist in a variety of media. Now Brutin has added a further dimension to this cultural preoccupation by her assiduous accumulation of a panorama of representations that can be found in museums, parks, private collections, galleries, and archives around the world. Visual culture in relationship to the Holocaust has garnered considerable scholarly attention in the last four decades, ranging from the study of memorials and museums to paintings, photography, cinema, cartoons, and digital creations. Anne Frank and the boy from the Warsaw ghetto are certainly part of this development; they have indeed become “visual icons of the Holocaust in art today” (p. 202). This book attempts to uncover how this has come to be. In the six chapters detailing the various ways in which artists from different cultures and countries integrated these iconic figures into

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their oeuvre, Brutin acquaints the reader with dozens of artists who, at some point in their artistic development, opted to “express their thoughts, emotions and perceptions of the Holocaust” (p. 191). Some of these artists, among them Samuel Bak, Avner Bar Hama, Michael Knigin, Susan Keeter, and Iris Anne Berger, are discussed in various chapters, as their work touches on various themes elaborated upon by Brutin: the fate of Jewish children in the Holocaust; personal identification with the iconic figures; their use to represent Jewish identity and universal human situations; their uniqueness; their imaginative connection with the state of Israel; and their “facelessness,” “disappearance,” and “disintegration.” Thus the photographs have been used for decades by artists to perform a function in their art. What makes these images so pliable and engaging for artists who continually return to them? What accounts for their remarkable communicative value? Brutin provides us with minimal insight into the way an artist’s biography and overall creativity helped form their interest in these icons. Take, for example, the case of the very prolific Israeli artist Ruth Schloss, who in 1981 created an exhibition of fifty works dedicated solely to Anne Frank in a wide array of images. Schloss is quoted (pp. 50–​51) to explain what brought her to dedicate a project to the young diarist, citing a coincidence that aroused a “dormant nerve.” But surely this is only a partial explanation. Reviewing the artist’s life work, one discerns her never-​ending preoccupation with the lives of downtrodden individuals (Jews, Arabs, and others) as portrayed in moving portraits illustrating Schloss’ socialist realism, alongside her sundry depictions of the young. Schloss’ turning to Anne Frank certainly reflected an identification based on their shared German background, yet beyond this, the girl’s fate fit well with Schloss’ socialist commitment to evoke worlds of the dispossessed. In this spirit we can see why these iconic images could easily be converted into political statements of one sort or another. For artists who are critical of Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians, nothing could be more provocative than replacing the image of the Warsaw boy and the Nazi soldiers with a Palestinian boy and Israeli soldiers. Brutin offers a variety of such illustrations (pp. 134–​146) by Israeli and foreign artists in a dispassionate manner, similar to the way she includes artistic expressions that link these iconic figures to “positive” depictions related to Israel (pp. 120–​130). Indeed, the author appears relatively unconcerned with delving deeply into the cultural and historic contexts of a particular work, or its relationship to other works by the artist or those created by other artists using the same popular figures. Rather it seems that the goal was to accumulate the largest possible number of artistic depictions incorporating the figures. By working within this methodological orientation, Brutin often leaves us wondering how significant a particular work was for the artist—​for example, whether the work done by David Tartakover (p. 125) reflects his oeuvre or was merely a moment in his life when he more fully identified with Zionist symbols. In contrast, the many images of Anne Frank and the boy in the Warsaw ghetto depicted by Samuel Bak over many years, and by Avner Bar Hama over the course of a decade, demonstrate how central these figures have become to these two artists’ consistent engagement with the Holocaust. This is not the case with regard to artists who made one-​time use of the iconic figures. Brutin has done a fine service by arranging the images under the general topics cited above, and has proved without a doubt that the boy from Warsaw and Anne Frank are

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Holocaust icons. She has left room for further interpretive research that will inquire into the redundant use of these images above all other depictions of the Holocaust, their place within the artists’ overall oeuvre, and their continuing ability to serve such a wide range of contexts and ideologies. Richard I. Cohen The Hebrew University  

Shalom Goldman, Starstruck in the Promised Land: How the Arts Shaped American Passions about Israel. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. 244 pp.

Scholarship relating to the cultural and political foundations of the Israel–​U.S. relationship (and its pre-​1948 predecessor) is in a state of methodological and normative disarray, and has quite possibly become irretrievably polemicized. Much of the problem results from controversies relating to the academic study of Israel-​related issues on campuses in North America and Europe, and, more generally, to the divisive character of Israel’s post-​1967 realities. Yet some part of the problem can be attributed to academic gatekeepers in Israel, not excluding the current journal and its institutional basis at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Through the mid-​1980s, the presumptive academic cornerstone in this field was the America–​Holy Land project sponsored by the university’s Institute of Contemporary Jewry. Institute founder Moshe Davis, a distinguished scholar of Conservative Judaism who invested prodigious labors in the development of this U.S.–​Israel subfield, presented a thesis identifying philosemitism and pro-​Zionism among American Christians as the bedrock of America’s special relationship with Israel. The theory percolated and inspired some readable popular works (for instance, Peter Grose’s Israel in the Mind of America [1983]), but it also spawned some intellectually stagnant scholarship that had a thinly veiled propagandistic agenda. As though to fine-​tune and supplement this religion-​based thesis, the Institute and this journal sponsored a few significant efforts to identify other sorts of institutional and sociopolitical processes germane to the U.S.–​Israel relationship, but these works implicitly viewed the subject as a strategic sacred cow, one that was off-​limits to “post-​Zionist” sorts of critiques that applied to many other Israel-​related subjects (an example here would be Peter Medding’s 1987 Studies article, “Segmented Ethnicity and the New Jewish Politics,” which shied away from probing cultural and normative implications of the new pro-​ Israel lobbying practices it insightfully identified). As might have been predicted, after a time-​lag of a decade or two, there emerged a series of differently spirited works pivoted around the antithetical premise, namely, that the post-​1970s U.S.–​Israel special relationship has no meaningful, deep religious-​ cultural footing in Christian America’s abiding interest in Jewish restoration and the Holy Land, but rather results from a praxis of brute lobbying and correlative manipulation in the arts, media, and other spheres. To date, the work of greatest notoriety

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in this revisionist effort is John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt’s 2007 volume, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. Yet in the past two decades there have also been a number of interesting and argumentative books that have challenged the idea of the special relationship’s harmoniously organic core, with many of these relating at length to the use and abuse of the “arts,” the topic referred to in the subtitle of Shalom Goldman’s book. Among these works are Melani McAlister’s Epic Encounters (2005), Amy Kaplan’s Our American Israel (2018), and Shaul Mitelpunkt’s Israel in the American Mind (2018). Goldman’s bibliography is not conversant with these and similar volumes, perhaps because he believes their authors have crossed a line by implicitly or explicitly endorsing BDS-​type initiatives. This is ironic, and not only because Goldman’s writing in this new volume will strike many readers as being hypercritical of Israel and insufficiently substantiated. More significantly, specific topics treated by both Goldman and these other authors (for instance, the photographer Frank Capra’s work in Israel) receive a more nuanced and methodologically sophisticated treatment in works written by the latter, as writers such as Kaplan, Mitelpunkt, and McAlister have experience in relevant fields such as gender studies and post-​ colonialism theory. In sum, the U.S.–​Israel relationship has become an incoherent branch of academic study, wherein one scholar writes from a “gee whiz” standpoint, exclaiming about Leonard Bernstein’s indelible and positive impact upon the development of the arts in Israel, while another scholar grouses about how the red carpet invitations extended to American Jewish superstars imperialistically stifled local creativity in Israel and reflected double standards in the young state’s cultural policies, which were unfavorable to local film directors, musicians and other creative artists. Despite its title, Starstruck in the Promised Land has surprisingly little to say about how “the arts shaped American passions about Israel.” The exposition of its “arts” examples—​for instance, Johnny Cash’s In the Holy Land recording—​is more lucid in the book’s introduction than in its body. More than two-​thirds of the volume convey insufficiently researched or inaccurate reports about Israeli history, often focusing on issues that have nothing to do with the ostensible topic of the arts’ presumptive “soft power” in the shaping of the U.S.–​Israel relationship. There is also an untoward amount of autobiographical memoir writing crisscrossed with sweeping, questionable allegations about the two Jewish cultures under study (witness, for example, the contention about the Anti-​Defamation League’s circulation of blacklists over the course of “decades” in order to intimidate critics of Israel’s control of the post-​1967 territories [p. 140]). Goldman presents no theory that would persuasively connect his discussion of 19th-​century Christian American investigations and enthusiasms concerning Ottoman Palestine with the Israel-​related activity of post-​Second World War Gentile cultural superstars. He seems so unconcerned about delivering on his promise to write about American cultural icons and Israel, and he produces such a short roster of these icons (Frank Sinatra, Madonna and a few others), that the book inculcates a contrary, and possibly correct, impression suggesting that, on a celebrity cultural level at least, America has never really been “starstruck” about the promised land. The book’s list of outright errors, misleading claims, and debatably formulated factoids is astonishing. The author is mistaken or insufficiently informed about such diverse matters as the Agranat Commission following the Yom Kippur War (p. 133);

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the number of evacuated Gaza settlements (p. 177); the nature and extent of culpability assigned to Ariel Sharon after the First Lebanon War (p. 175); the impact, or lack thereof, of Benzion Netanyahu on Likud party ideology (p. 130); Johnny Cash’s popularity in Israel (p. 123); Judah Magnes’ relationship with the Brit Shalom circle (pp. 45–​47); the origins of the term “Revisionist Zionism” (p. 42); and circumstances surrounding the establishment of Jerusalem’s YMCA building (pp.  37–​41)—​this being no more than a partial list. Unpleasant and pedantic as it is to dwell upon the matter, questions of accuracy are significant when the book is one that indulges in sweeping assertions. To take just one example, Goldman has a section titled “Jerusalem Syndrome and Its American Consequences” (in which he characterizes Misgav Ladach Hospital, where two of my children were born, as a “psychiatric hospital” [p. 147]). Making reference to the cult leader David Koresh and the Waco siege of 1993 that resulted in dozens of deaths, Goldman draws a link between this tragic event and Koresh’s fascination with Jerusalem, which, he claims, is “emblematic of the power of end-​time ideas in American culture” (p. 147). This statement, I think, casts an insidiously indiscriminate shadow of potential mass violence over Evangelicals and other “end-​time” devotees. An academic book should have its ducks in a row before offering such an assertion, and too often this one does not. M.M. Silver Max Stern Yezreel Valley College  

Naomi B. Sokoloff and Nancy E. Berg (eds.), What We Talk About When We Talk about Hebrew (And What It Means to Americans). Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2018. x + 238 pp.

Drawing on Raymond Carver’s classic story “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” and Nathan Englander’s subsequent narrative riffing on the same title, the essays in this collection address the diminishing role of Hebrew in American Jewish communal identity and practice. The volume constitutes a plea, confession, justification, and blueprint all in one, as well as a love song to Hebrew in diverse voices. All of the contributors—​whether novelist, essayist, poet, scholar, or teacher—​are bound together by both profound commitment and intense resistance. On the one hand, each writer demonstrates passionate commitment to the Hebrew language, in many cases offering moving testimony of Hebrew’s role in their personal and communal lives. Consequently, they propose diverse strategies for boosting the presence of Hebrew among Jewish Americans. On the other hand, they all resist romantic concepts of Hebrew drawn from Johann Gottfried Herder’s conflation of language, nation, and folk, which inevitably leads to a valorization of authenticity. To put it another way, modern Israeli Hebrew poses particular challenges to Hebraists elsewhere, despite the longstanding role of Hebrew in Jewish civilization. The great strength of this volume lies in its successful severing of devotion to Hebrew (whether

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intellectual, emotional, or cultural) from allegiance to “authenticity” in its diverse meanings. The first two sections, “Hebrew and the Creative Imagination” and “Hebrew and the Academy,” suggest an opposition, yet dovetail in compelling ways. By tracing the sources and versions of an Agnon story, novelist Dara Horn, who also has scholarly training in Jewish literature, records her journey from believing that “Agnon was authentic, and that I could never be” (p. 27), to her realization that Agnon’s creativity relies on spinning an intertextual, interlingual web that renders authenticity irrelevant. Ilan Stavans, who has written extensively on Hebrew, stresses its uniqueness among other languages and alphabets by paradoxically investing it with a universal meaning:  “Hebrew for me symbolizes the marriage of the earthly and the divine” (p. 38). For Stavans, Hebrew simultaneously binds together a particular community while also serving as a conduit to mystery. The scholars in the section titled “Hebrew in the Academy,” Nancy Berg, Naomi Sokoloff, and Wendy Zierler, offer teaching strategies that emerge from an acute awareness of being Americans in an Israeli-​dominated field. For Berg, insider and outsider status, like authenticity, is context-​bound, and therefore she draws on Israeli controversies about these labels with regard to Mizrahim and Ashkenazim as a point of entry into teaching Hebrew literature in America. Sokoloff employs language memoirs to point out how the idea of a “native speaker” is only a “convenient fiction,” and how the non-​native speaker position can also be considered privileged in important ways. Wendy Zierler calls for a “resacralizing” of Hebrew in the academy in order “to show American students that Hebrew is not merely a spoken language like any other, that it is a portal and connector to an entire library of Jewish civilization” (p. 92). In the section dedicated to the topic of “Hebrew and Community,” the contributors all emphasize how teaching Hebrew requires close attention to the needs of specific communities. For Hannah Pressman, online platforms provide new opportunities for bringing Hebrew to large audiences. Sarah Bunin Benor argues that aiming for Hebrew proficiency for American Jews who cannot devote numerous instructional hours toward that goal is counter-​productive. Instead, she advocates making use of a longstanding Jewish cultural practice, the incorporation of fragments of Hebrew into an environment where another language is spoken, such as in summer camps and synagogues, a strategy she terms “Hebrew infusion.” “Hebrew and the Cross-​Cultural Context” begins with the specific challenges of teaching poetry either to vastly different students or in translation. Both Adam Rovner and Adriana X. Jacobs demonstrate how to make a virtue of necessity. For Rovner, an American Israeli who has classroom experience in both Denver and Jerusalem, exposing the master narratives that underlie his students’ allegorical readings in each of these places invigorates and deepens analysis. In America, this means discussing his students’ inclination to read Jewish literature for universalist lessons or American exceptionalism, in contrast to his Israeli students’ insistence on Jewish historical particularity. For Jacobs, “the entangled nets of affiliation” that attend translated texts actually expand interpretive possibilities for reading Hebrew literature, “both in translation and in Hebrew” (p. 160). To illustrate how teaching a translation can be an advantage as well as a limitation, she offers a multifaceted reading of a Hebrew poem by a Druze Israeli poet whose native language is Arabic. In this case, teaching Hebrew

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literature requires critical thinking about “the relation between language, place, and identity.” This section ends with the unique achievement of a contemporary non-​ native speaker, American Hebrew poet Robert Whitehill-​Bashan, both a reflection in his words about the performative dimension of his writing, and an illuminating analysis of one of his recent poems by Michael Weingrad. In his brief memoir, “Hebrew in America,” Alan Mintz’s embrace of the term “near native” eloquently sums up this special volume. Mintz, who died shortly before the publication of this volume, was a luminary in Hebrew literary studies and an ardent believer in American Hebraism, who reconciled his passion for Hebrew with his American accent and indigeneity once he realized that “when it comes to Hebrew . . . nativeness is an invention . . . . A particular style of orientalized Hebrew spoken in the youth movements in the Yishuv” (p. 222). All of the American authors of these essays offer answers to the question “what do we talk about when we talk about Hebrew” by posing further questions about the terms authentic, outsider, and native with regard to language, and by restoring Hebrew to its intricate linguistic, social, and historical webs. Contributors testify to the ways that Hebrew has enriched their lives in America—​intellectually, culturally, and spiritually. Moreover, every essay, implicitly or explicitly, laments the impoverishment of American Jewish life by the abandonment of this age-​old portal to global Jewish experience. “I am grateful that Hebrew is my daily bread,” writes Alan Mintz on the last page, and in those simple words he conveys the sustenance, humility, and joy that these diverse voices talk about in this timely volume. Hana Wirth-​Nesher Tel Aviv University  

History, Biography, and Social Science

Jerold S.  Auerbach, Print to  Fit: The New  York Times, Zionism and Israel 1896–​2016. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2019. xii + 309 pp.

The New York Times is set up to produce disappointment. No daily newspaper ever committed itself more emphatically to the ideal of objectivity, a goal that is unachievable. No journalistic enterprise ever vowed to be comprehensive in its presentation of the news, even calling itself the Paper of Record. In consequence, no newspaper allowed itself to be more vulnerable to accusations of failure to live up to such lofty and asymptotic standards. Deborah E. Lipstadt’s Beyond Belief (1986) and Laurel Leff’s Buried by The Times (2005) have already demonstrated the shocking inadequacy of the coverage of the Holocaust in the nation’s most admired newspaper. Now Jerold S. Auerbach charges that the Times consistently slanted its treatment of Israel in ways that discredited its struggle for survival and instead sympathized with the enemies of Zionism. Contrary to the disinterest to which the Times has aspired, he argues that it has usually voiced “a chorus of disapproval of . . . one of the world’s liveliest democracies” (p. 247). Having assiduously combed through close to a century of articles, editorials, and op-​ed pieces, Auerbach has discovered, especially in recent decades, a “preoccupation with Palestinian victimization—​even when Israelis were the victims” (p. 227). He advances this j’accuse with some authority, having published close to a dozen books on American legal, political, and social history, as well as on Israeli and American Jewish history. But Print to Fit is a misfire. The author berates the Times for its biases but, strikingly enough, rarely for its inaccuracies. Despite the notorious fallibility of the press, Auerbach has located few factual errors in the pieces through which he has sifted. Nor does he try to show what an impartial account of news events from Mandatory Palestine and the state of Israel might look like. He offers no counter-​ narrative, nor any indication what a fair-​minded editorial might resemble. Auerbach hits hard, again and again, in citing coverage that seems to show little regard for the targets of Arab terrorism, and which underestimates the depth of the relentless enmity that Israel has historically faced. Should the applicable journalistic ideals be objectivity, or judiciousness, or comprehensiveness? What standard should be applied to the Times’ coverage? This book does not say. Instead it is, quite unabashedly, the case for the prosecution. Virtually no one is spared. The two publishers who put the Times on the Parnassus of the world’s press—​Adolph S. Ochs (1858–​1935) and his son-​in-​law, Arthur Hays Sulzberger (1891–​1968)—​feared the charges of dual loyalty that have long dogged Book Reviews In: No Small Matter: Features of Jewish Childhood. Edited by: Anat Helman, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197577301.003.0028

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Jews living in an age of nationalism. The two owners thus propelled themselves far away from the claims of peoplehood. The Paper of Record needed to wriggle its way out of a reputation as a Jewish journal, which is why crackerjack reporters whose parents had named them Abraham got bylines like A.M. Rosenthal, A.H. Raskin and A.H. Weiler. Print to Fit is especially harsh in its treatment of two of the Times’ stars, the late Anthony Lewis (two Pulitzer Prizes) and Thomas L. Friedman (three Pulitzer Prizes) for having so often conveyed their own disenchantment with what they held to be the moral and political failings of Israel—​in particular, the extension of Jewish settlements into the West Bank. Lewis is dismissed in a couple of places as a “self-​appointed” moralist who was all too eager to sniff out Israel’s sins (pp. 94, 109), though of course it was the New York Times that “appointed” him. Nor was he any more “self-​appointed” than the journalists who sprang to Israel’s defense; and on Auerbach’s own evidence, the record is more mixed that he seems willing to concede. For example, Auerbach praises the very favorable stances taken by Rosenthal, who served as managing editor and executive editor of the Times as well as a columnist, plus Jerusalem bureau chief David Shipler and columnist William Safire. None of them was shackled. The tendentiousness of Print to Fit, in a series that its publisher calls “Antisemitism in America,” is certainly bound to stir doubts. The book often fails to distinguish editorial policy (as reflected in the unsigned editorials) from, say, letters to the editor, which may reflect nothing more than an effort to include a wide spectrum of views. Auerbach sometimes faults the very existence of an op-​ed, as though there were something sinister in having “welcomed” Karen Armstrong, an ex-​nun who converted to Islam, to propose that the Muslim world weigh in on the status of Jerusalem (p. 170). On June 13, 1994, the Times published Ruth R.  Wisse’s compelling vindication of Israel’s efforts to defeat Palestinian terrorism and to resist the hostility of the Arab states. But that op-​ed, for instance, goes unmentioned in Print to Fit. The distinction between a nation and the policies of its government is elemental. Yet Auerbach commonly blurs that line, as when he identifies Lewis as “an incessantly hectoring Jewish critic of Israel,” when the previous paragraph quoted him as lamenting the leadership of American Jewry for its “uncritical support for Israel government policy” (p. 91; emphasis added). Nor is executive editor Max Frankel cut much slack. He too condemned Israeli policies toward the Palestinians, though he also claimed “affection for Israel” as well as “sentimentally faithful feelings” for his fellow Jews (p.  88). Though Print to Fit identifies Frankel as the Times’ “first Jewish editorial page editor” (1977–​1986), his immediate predecessor was Adolph Ochs’s nephew, John B. Oakes, who served as a trustee of Manhattan’s Temple Emanu-​ El, where he had celebrated his bar mitzvah. Print to Fit encourages the inference that its author finds diplomatic attempts to achieve a two-​state solution misguided and fruitless, and indeed a defiance of the biblically sanctioned right of the Jewish people to the entire Promised Land. Even when Ariel Sharon himself orchestrated the withdrawal of Jewish settlers in Gaza, Auerbach was troubled by the loss of the real estate. Nowhere does he acknowledge that a two-​ state solution can represent something other than the newspaper’s awkwardness with Israel’s continued presence in the Middle East. A political compromise between two

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peoples has been the bipartisan goal of American foreign policy, and has long guided the agenda of the American–​Israel Public Affairs Committee as well. In Auerbach’s most original contribution to American Jewish historiography, Rabbis and Lawyers (1990), he showed that some of the nation’s most prominent Zionists prioritized their own aspirations for success and status in the diaspora over devotion to Jewish revitalization and autonomy in the Near East. He found even Louis D.  Brandeis and Stephen S.  Wise harboring insufficient Zionist zeal. Print to Fit invokes a different standard—​right-​wing Zionism—​and thus faults the views not only of such explicit believers in the dream as Friedman but even of the progressive Israelis who have influenced him, such as Rabbi David Hartman and Yaron Ezrahi. Written from the political periphery of American Jewish life, Print to Fit therefore risks overstating its case by simplifying it. Stephen J. Whitfield Brandeis University  

Yaacov Falkov, Meragelei haye’arot:  pe’ilutam hamodi’init shel hapartizanim hasovyetim 1941–​1945 (Forest Spies: The Intelligence Activity of the Soviet Partisans 1941–​1945). Jerusalem: Magnes Press and Yad Vashem Press, 2017. 496 pp.

Forest Spies:  The Intelligence Activity of the Soviet Partisans 1941-​ 1945 is a thoughtful, wide-​ranging, and politically unbiased study, based on the author’s analysis of archival documents, of an extremely important element of the Second World War:  the Soviet partisan movement. Yaacov Falkov examines various aspects of the emergence, formation, and development of this movement, beginning with the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, and up to the last days of the war in Europe in the spring of 1945. Unlike previous studies written by Soviet, post-​ Soviet, and Western scholars, Falkov does not focus exclusively on the analysis of combat and sabotage activities on the part of partisans, though he does not neglect this important subject. He rather deals with the equally important issue of the partisan movement as a key source of intelligence on matters ranging from the mood of the population in the occupied territories of the USSR to operational details with regard to Nazi troops. The first partisan groups emerged spontaneously as a result of the stunning defeat, and subsequent retreat, of the Red Army in the summer and autumn of 1941. They were created by the staff of the local party apparatus, and also by military and security officers who suddenly ended up behind the frontlines in the Nazi-​occupied territory. It was only at the end of 1941 that organizational structures for the development of large-​scale partisan resistance were established within the framework of the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD). The Central Headquarters of the Partisan Movement (CHPM), which came into being in May 1942, was directly subordinated to the Supreme Command Headquarters and the Central Committee of the Communist Party. Joseph Stalin stood at the head of the two structures. The first head

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of the CHPM (serving until March 1943) was the First Secretary of the Communist Party of Byelorussia, Panteleimon Ponomarenko—​a high-​ranking member of the Soviet leadership who also had close ties to Stalin. As Falkov shows, the delay in setting up Soviet partisan units resulted in the loss of tens of thousands of lives. What caused this delay? The author presents a convincing and well-​documented answer: the problem was not due to a lack of preparedness on the part of the Soviet military, but was rather the outcome of political processes in the Soviet Union in the period preceding the war. During the 1920s and early 1930s, the Soviets had developed modernized methods of intelligence and sabotage techniques, and these had been put to the test by Soviet intelligence specialists taking part in the Spanish Civil War (1936–​1939). The main proponent of the “theory of deep operation”—​distraction of the enemy’s rear and logistics network, and use of partisan detachments as a source of intelligence and reconnaissance—​was Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, the first deputy of the People’s Commissar of Defense. In June 1937, in the course of Stalin’s “Great Terror” purge, Tukhachevsky was executed as an “enemy of the people.” Consequently, the theory he promoted was discredited, units of the special forces he had set up were disbanded, and the cadres of these units were purged. The dominant military doctrine shifted to exclusively offensive operations in enemy territory. Over the course of 11 chapters, Falkov details the theoretical and practical difficulties faced by organizers of the partisan movement, especially during the first phase of the war. There was a lack of trained professional cadres, and little in the way of experience in collecting, processing, and juxtaposing items of intelligence. There was insufficient special equipment. There were no communication systems in place, leading to a lack of coordination between partisan detachments and battlefront headquarters. These and other severe logistical problems are fully documented and described by Falkov. Chapter 12, the final chapter in the book, is devoted to the extremely interesting topic of the role of the partisan movement in providing information concerning the Holocaust to the Soviet leadership. Back in June 1941, while still serving as the First Secretary of the Communist Party of Byelorussia, Ponomarenko reported to Stalin about Nazi antisemitic propaganda. Archival material clearly shows that the Soviet Supreme Command Headquarters did not instruct partisan detachments to provide information concerning the specific situation of Jews under the Nazi occupation. Rather, they were ordered to collect information about acts of mass extermination and robbery of the general civilian population. Notwithstanding, this is how the first information about the mass extermination of Jews came to Ponomarenko’s attention by the end of 1941. By the summer of 1942, such material was being reported on a regular basis. However, by this time, the overwhelming majority of the Jews were already exterminated in the Nazi-​occupied territory of the USSR. Ponomarenko not only collected information about the Holocaust but also conveyed it in speeches he made at meetings of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Byelorussia, as well as in the course of numerous lengthy conversations with Georgy Malenkov (a member of both the Central Committee of the Communist Party and the State Defense Committee) and with Stalin himself. Unfortunately, it is difficult to determine the exact details provided by Ponomarenko; some of this material

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is presumably to be found in the Presidential Archive of the Russian Federation, to which access is limited. From Falkov’s research, we can conclude that, by early 1942, if not before, the highest levels of Soviet leadership knew about the mass annihilation of the Jews in occupied territories of the USSR, from the outskirts of Leningrad to the North Caucuses. It is unclear whether they deliberately chose to ignore it—​certainly, no steps were taken to prevent it from continuing. Forest Spies: The Intelligence Activity of the Soviet Partisans 1941–​1945 is a work of broad-​spectrum research based on primary and secondary sources drawn from 14 archives in Russia, Germany, Ukraine, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Belarus, and Israel, accompanied by a well-​thought-​out analysis of the historical materials. Researchers specializing in the history of the USSR, the Second World War, the various partisan movements, intelligence services, and the Holocaust will undoubtedly find interest in the materials and conclusions of the book. Samuel Barnai The Hebrew University  

Viktor Kel’ner, Shchit:  M.M. Vinaver i evreiskii vopros v Rossii v kontse XIX–​ nachale XX veka (Shield: M.M. Vinaver and the Jewish Question in Russia at  the End of  the Nineteenth–​ Beginning of  the Twentieth Century). St. Petersburg: Evreiskii Universitet v Sankt Peterburge. 508 pp.

This work by Viktor Kel’ner, the leading historian of Russian Jewry, can be seen as the capstone to a brilliant scholarly career. In earlier days, Kel’ner served in the State Library in Leningrad (St. Petersburg), where he grew acquainted with the full bounty of sources on Russian Jewry. This privileged position made him the ideal person to offer new facts and interpretations. Indeed, Kel’ner has done more than anyone to explicate Russian liberalism from the middle of the 19th century to the first quarter of the 20th. Shchit, the title of this volume, means “shield” or “defense,” and refers here not to the famous 1915 volume devoted to the defense of Jews edited by Leonid Andreyev, Maxim Gorsky, and Fyodor Sologub, but to Maksim Moiseevch Vinaver’s central goal, the defense of Russia’s Jews. Vinaver deserves this biography because his life illuminates the great events of the epoch. In his time, he was a well-​known Jewish lawyer and Kadet (Constitutional Democratic Party) leader, the editor of important Russian and Jewish newspapers, a civic leader as well as a political consultant. Vinaver was there at the Blondes blood libel trial in 1902. He was a major player in the Revolution of 1905 and in the years leading up to 1917. After the Bolshevik victory, he joined the anti-​Bolshevik coalition and became foreign minister of the second independent Crimean government in 1919. Following his evacuation from Crimea, he retreated to France, where he helped establish Poslednie Novosti (Latest News) with other émigré intellectuals, and Evreiskaia Tribuna (Jewish Tribune), a Russian-​language newspaper. In France, as in Russia,

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he united his Jewish and general all-​Russian work under one umbrella. He died in France in 1926. As Kel’ner tells the fuller story chronologically, so will I.  Vinaver was born in Warsaw in 1863, where he grew up and attended university. After graduating from the University of Warsaw, he moved to St. Petersburg, where he became an assistant to V.D. Spassovich, an eminent liberal lawyer. This was the time when lawyers began to look to the courts to promote political reforms such as winning an expansion of rights for the underprivileged. In the capital, Vinaver became a widely known public figure, both through his editing of Vestnik Prava (Messenger of Law) and his involvement in high-​profile cases. He also took an interest in Jewish education and scholarship. His star began to truly shine in 1905, when he became a leader of the Kadet Party. A penetrating writer, Vinaver played a major role in drafting the Duma’s response to the Throne Speech, which refers to Nicholas II’s grudging consent to the establishment of the Duma, a consultative legislative body. Vinaver also largely penned the Vyborg Appeal, a document of protest addressed to the Russian people after the tsar unilaterally dismissed the Duma in July 1906. Kel’ner makes several strategic choices that frame the biography. First and foremost is the focus on Vinaver and Russian society. Kel’ner’s approach emerges from his belief that Vinaver’s main contribution was the idea, in theory and praxis, that only by embracing Russian liberalism would Jews gain their rights. This viewpoint is articulated early and repeated. Kel’ner writes in his introduction: “At the beginning of the twentieth century, M.M. Vinaver embodied Russian liberalism. He was a person who considered his duty [to be] the defense of the rights of Russian Jewry and [he] viewed it as tightly connected with the victory of Russian democracy” (p. 28). This viewpoint became a fundamental truth for Vinaver and was realized in his professional, political, and personal life, as well as in his lifelong attachment to the Kadet Party and its ideals. Fittingly, the biography hones in on Vinaver in Russian and Russian Jewish political life. His broad involvement in Jewish cultural and historical activities receives less attention. Kel’ner emphasizes the concept of lobbirovanie (lobbying). The word itself is a calque from English and refers to a democratic system in which a person imposes pressure, or offers inducements, to attain friendly legislation. Kel’ner contrasts it with traditional Jewish shtadlanut, which reflects the subordinate position of the person who makes the request before an autocrat or other undemocratically elected power. Is Vinaver really lobbying before the tsarist government? Since he used the press, speeches at trials, and the Duma platform to win public support, these efforts differ from traditional shtadlanut and reflect a modernizing tendency in Jewish political life in Russia. Where the shtadlan was formerly the richest Jew, it was now a lawyer who served as the representative of the Jewish community. This situation reflected the use of Russia’s (relatively) independent courts to win rights for Jews; it also indicates the effectiveness of public opinion and the press. Perhaps for Jews, his most important role was that of helping to establish the League for the Attainment of Full Rights among the Jews of Russia (1905–​1907). The League’s purpose was to unite all the Jewish representatives in the Duma with regard to legislation on Jews. Although Vinaver waxed eloquent on the need for discipline and pragmatism (namely, by following the Kadet lead), the League’s members

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had conflicting goals. The factions included cultural nationalists (Semyon Dubnov), Zionists (Shmarya Levin and Vladimir Jabotinsky), and a left-​center worker’s party, Trudoviki (Leon Bramson). Vinaver attempted to unify them, but ultimately party loyalty took precedence. The League fell apart. Zionists articulated their go-​it-​alone approach at a policy conference in Helsingfors in November 1906; Vinaver formed the Jewish Folk Group and was involved with the Kovno conference in 1908. In the period before the First World War, when antisemitism heated up intensely, Vinaver found himself attacked on nearly all sides. Zionists claimed that he forsook Jewish interests, Bundists saw him as too conservative, and antisemites maintained that he represented an alien spirit in Russian politics. Vinaver continued his defense of the victims of government political and economic repression with the Political Bureau, an organization he established in 1903. His aid to the defense during the Mendel Beilis trial demonstrated his ability to fight tsarist oppression through mastering the levers controlling public opinion. During these years, Vinaver’s ability to affect change was stymied by the decree (from the time of the first Duma) that he could not run for Duma office. As a signer of the Vyborg Appeal, which called for a boycott of elections and non-​payment of taxes, Vinaver was sentenced to three months in prison and prohibited from running for a subsequent Duma. Over the course of the war, Vinaver devoted himself to helping refugees and drawing attention to the forced evacuation of Jews in the Western borderlands. In February 1917, he helped the Kadet members of the Provisional Government formulate legislation, notably the critical decree granting equal rights to members of the non-​Russian nationalities, thereby ending some 150 years of anti-​Jewish oppression. Vinaver was elected to the Constituent Assembly, but was forced to flee with other Kadet leaders in early 1918. Kel’ner’s biography is a treasure trove for scholars because, like all his work, it is chock-​full of rare bibliographical references and archival material (quoted at length). The focus on the Russian context offers a wide lens on the intelligentsia as a whole; this is not a narrow story of one life, but a panoramic portrait of an epoch. The rare material that Kel’ner found regarding Vinaver in his French period is particularly valuable. Viktor Kel’ner is famous for his empirical studies of the Russian Jewish intelligentsia, and this work lives up to the level of quality to which we, his readers, are accustomed. Like his other works, this volume has nothing in the way of theories of history or the main approaches of race, gender, and class that dominate historiography in American scholarship. The book therefore has a 19th-​century feel. If you like intellectual history as practiced in Russia of the 19th century—​I do like it!—​you will enjoy this book. If not, check the footnotes carefully and take advantage of the enormous material basis offered by Kel’ner. The notes and text represent nothing less than a half century of tireless digging for knowledge. Brian Horowitz Tulane University  

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Laura Limonic, Kugel and Frijoles: Latino Jews in the United States. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2019. 264 pp.

Jews who claim a Latina or Latino identity or, in the now preferred gender-​neutral terminology, a Latinx identity, remain an anomaly in the Americas. Laura Limonic’s fascinating sociological study, Kugel and Frijoles: Latino Jews in the United States, seeks to explain why. Limonic builds her analysis on several layers of scholarship. She draws on the academic literature about immigration and transnationalism, as well as theories of race, ethnicity, identity politics, and white privilege. Her study is anchored in ethnographic research as she uses the method of participant observation to examine interactions, rituals, and relationships among Latinx Jews. The book is peppered with the voices of 85 Latinx Jewish interlocutors. Though quoted selectively and given pseudonyms, these first-​person voices emerge vividly and provide balance whenever sociological explanations threaten to become too dry. Crucially, there is a personal dimension to this research. The project was not simply an intellectual exercise but a passionate quest for a deeper understanding of an “in-​between” identity. Limonic was born in Argentina, and identifies as Jewish and Latina. She describes herself as forming part of the “1.5 generation,” having immigrated as a young person to the United States with her family and feeling a dual connection to both her country of birth and her country of residence. Her bilingualism and biculturalism and her lived experience as a Latinx Jew allowed her to delve, often painfully, into questions of liminality and identity. She was also able to gain rapport with a range of Latinx Jews who spoke frankly to her of their own dilemmas in trying to “fit in” within the racial hierarchy of the United States. Limonic focuses on Latinx Jews who have migrated to the United States since 1965, largely from Argentina, Mexico, and Venezuela. She establishes that the earlier migration of Cuban Jews to Miami in the early 1960s created a precedent for other Latin American Jews to search for a new home and a new sense of identity as “Latino Jews” in the United States. Fleeing the turn to Communism after Fidel Castro came to power in 1959, thousands of Cuban Jews arrived in Miami hoping to be welcomed into the American Jewish communal and religious institutions of the day. Instead, they discovered that their Cubanness made their Jewishness suspect at a time when multiculturalism wasn’t yet in vogue. As a result, they had to build their own religious and social spaces, constructing an Ashkenazi synagogue, the Cuban Hebrew Congregation of Miami, and a Sephardic synagogue, Temple Moses. (There was, however, an important exception, not mentioned by Limonic, to that cold shoulder. Cubans Jews received a warm welcome from Rabbi Mayer Abramowitz of Temple Menorah, who offered to let these new immigrants attend synagogue and send their children to Hebrew school at no cost until they were properly settled. To this day, the memory of Rabbi Abramowitz is sacred among many in the Cuban Jewish community in Miami, and members of the community who prospered continue to faithfully support Temple Menorah.) These three Cuban heritage synagogues left a key legacy

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for future Jews of Latin American background: their unique language, cuisine, and culture needed to be preserved and cherished. With this precedent set by Cuban Jews, the Latinx Jews who have arrived since, seeking stability in the wake of political, economic, and social upheavals in their home countries, have likewise sought to build or recreate new Jewish synagogues, schools, and community centers in which they can maintain their unique blend of religious and ethnic identity. They have settled in hubs with significant Jewish and Latinx populations. One of the interesting aspects of Limonic’s study is that her research is multi-​ sited. She follows Latinx Jews to all the places where they have resettled. Her study moves nimbly between South Florida (in particular, the Aventura region of Miami–​ Dade County); southern California (in particular, the San Diego area); New York City (both the Upper West Side and the Upper East Side, where the Jewish Latin Center, a Chabad-​led religious organization with a young Brazilian rabbi, brings people together); and the Boston suburbs of Newton and Brookline. Limonic also traveled to Argentina to examine the way group belonging is forged in the Jewish community and to probe into the factors leading Jews to migrate to the United States. Among Limonic’s key findings, I’d highlight her assertion that Latinx Jews strategically use their “in-​betweenness” to move between Latinx and Jewish social contexts in the United States. In the Latin American countries from which they emigrated, their sense of belonging to the larger nation was often tenuous; they were perceived primarily as Jews, even if native born, and to varying degrees experienced antisemitism. This led to the creation of Jewish community centers, such as the Centro Deportivo Israelita (CDI) in Mexico City, a multi-​purpose cultural and athletic space for Jewish Mexicans, serving to preserve their identity and separate them from the mainstream. These Jewish bubbles proved comforting, but they could also be suffocating to those who longed for contact with the wider world. Curiously, upon arriving in the United States, their Latin Americanness stood out. Still, their white phenotype has allowed Latinx Jews to climb the social ladder in a society where whiteness still confers privileges. On the one hand, we learn that Latinx Jews spice up the American Jewish experience—​“they dance salsa at bar mitzvahs, eat kugel with frijoles, spice the brisket with jalapeños, and end Passover seders with a tango” (p. 200). But on the other hand, sadly, rather than interrogate the ethno-​racial hierarchy, they choose to occupy the position of privileged Latinos, standing apart and away from working-​ class Latinos, except when exchanging cordialities in Spanish with Latinx nannies, waiters, and service workers. This is a pioneering study that opens the door to a Latinx Jewish identity that is still evolving and defining itself. Future researchers will build upon the foundation that Limonic has laid to address many other nuances of intersecting Jewish and Latinx identities in the United States, including such important topics as Ashkenazi and Sephardic differences, the role of gender and women’s position, the literary expression of identity, or even the meaning of food within this diversely Jewish and diversely Latinx community, which is hinted at by her book’s alluring title, Kugel and Frijoles. To readers seeking to understand the peculiar Jewish hybridity that emerged from the diaspora to the “other America” and that has now rerouted to the United States, Limonic’s book offers a superb guide. Ruth Behar University of Michigan  

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Daniel J. Walkowitz, The Remembered and Forgotten Jewish World: Jewish Heritage in Europe and the United States. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2018. xv + 281 pp.

This book is in part a family history with a pronounced political twist, and in part a travel narrative intended to reflect upon the author’s family’s journey from Russia–​ Poland through Western Europe and then to the United States. It is, in addition, a reflection on heritage installations in major sites of Jewish settlement where the Jewish presence has often disappeared either through emigration, genocide, or social mobility and dispersion. To some degree, Walkowitz’s project simply reviews intellectual terrain well combed by others—​New York’s Lower East Side, for instance, and Krakow’s Kazimierz. But throughout the book, Walkowitz brings a persistent and unique critical gaze eschewing the nostalgic sentiments of so much Jewish heritage tourism, along with the false lachrymosity that laments abandoned synagogues or the absence of observant Jews, or the persistent focus on famous men and the well-​to-​do at the expense of ordinary Jews. Walkowitz is interested in working people, in unions and strikes, in socialism and communism—​matters that were very much part of his family’s history, whose stories he interweaves throughout the book. He is concerned with those typically overlooked in historical narratives, women especially, and he notes their represented presence or absence in the sites he visits. The author’s observations are most original and compelling with regard to the less well-​known sites he visits, and also in his review of three different walking tours of London’s Whitechapel neighborhood, where he invokes a comparative methodology harnessed to an educated and a critical eye. His comparative analysis touches on a number of issues. First, the power of place. Physical remains enable visitors to connect to the past, but in their absence, a creative guide can make use of photos or even “the sense of a place” for purposes of interpretation. Second, the notion of “problematizing” identity—​in Walkowitz’s view, the inclusion of prominent men (or women) in a historical account of a group can be more useful and truthful if the complexity of their identity as Jews is acknowledged rather than glossed over. In other words, not all famous Jews were, indeed, Jews. Third, there is the question of how inclusive such tours are. As Walkowitz notes, an emphasis on the rich and famous removes working people from the narrative, while a focus on the Orthodox marginalizes those who are secular, Yiddishists, or Bundists (ironically, the walking tour that billed itself as a “radical tour” was the most inclusive of the three, as its story of labor struggles did not cast aside religiously observant Jewish Londoners). Finally, Walkowitz compares the three tours with regard to their use of melodrama, for which historical accuracy is often sacrificed for the salacious and the focus is on entertainment rather than pedagogy. Overall, Walkowitz concludes, class and gender bias dictate what is included in the narrative and what is not. Captains of industry, the wealthy, and politicians are invariably included, whereas “members of the organized and unorganized working class were reduced to anecdote or melodrama” (p. 104). At the same time, since what sells is anecdote and melodrama, tourists are “more inclined to seek stories of an exoticized Jewish past of gangsters and prostitutes than of working people” (p. 133).

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Hence the frequent sense that the author’s search for an inclusive Jewish past in heritage tourism is an exercise in futility. Given Walkowitz’s interests, it’s not surprising that, in visiting Poland, a certain primacy is given to Lodz, a major industrial city. With regard to heritage, certain erasures are at work here, as well. The enormous textile factory founded by Jewish industrialist Izrael Poznanski has been converted by a French developer into an upscale mall. Indeed, even the name of the complex, “Manufaktura: At the Very Heart of Dreams,” as well as its self-​promotion as “a multifaceted cultural extravaganza” (p. 57), speaks to the erasure of class, ethnic, and labor conflicts that were so closely intertwined with Poznanski’s enterprise, and of textile manufacturing in general throughout 19th-​ and early-​20th century Lodz and its outlying townships. Poznanski’s nearby mansion is now a museum of the city of Lodz that mostly celebrates “the long history of Polish entrepreneurship” (p. 59) Here, too, there is a certain erasure. And why not? Off the beaten path for most Jewish tourists, Lodz has to promote itself to domestic or Polish diasporic visitors, few of whom would care about the Jewish role in Poland’s industrialization. Manufaktura can be considered a reanimation of the past, a physical installation of some of what transpires on walking tours generally. But it’s also a commercial reanimation, a phenomenon not uncommon today. To my mind, the most outrageous example of a reanimation is one that Walkowitz witnesses in Ukraine’s Lviv. In the city there is a chain of fifteen restaurants, bars, and cafes established by a flamboyant Ukrainian entrepreneur, many of which market Jewish heritage via kitsch, stereotypes, and Ukrainian nationalism. One restaurant has a basement bar designed to look like a bunker used by Ukrainian insurgents to fight Russian troops. Entrance is restricted to those who spout the patriotic slogan, “Glory to Ukraine.” Another establishment bills itself as Jewish Galician rather than Ukrainian. As part of its Jewish atmosphere, clients are invited to put on peyes and wear hats while they eat traditional Jewish foods. To underline the theme, there are no prices. To pay, clients have to haggle with the staff. One final note about the irony that’s sometimes present within the Jewish heritage industry. In Budapest, developers are seeking to gentrify an old Jewish neighborhood in Pest. The developers are Israelis. Walkowitz concludes: “Thus, the development renaissance of Jewish Budapest finds Jews fighting Jews to create an ‘authentic,’ old Jewish neighborhood fit for tourist consumption” (p. 182)—​the city rebranded in cahoots with state politicians, minus any mention of Hungarian complicity in the extermination of its Jews. Jack Kugelmass University of Florida

Martina L. Weisz, Jews and Muslims in Contemporary Spain: Redefining National Boundaries. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2019. 189 pp.

This engaging, well-​written, important book aims to analyze “the place granted to Jews and Muslims in the construction of contemporary Spanish national identity,

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with a special focus on the transition from an exclusive, homogeneous sense of collective self toward a more pluralistic, open and tolerant one, in a European context” (p. 3). This narrative of progress, however, is challenged by the excellent information provided in the book itself, which shows how these processes have been filled with contradictions and deep ambivalence, both historically and in the present, and how exclusionary nationalism has not been left behind. One of the book’s richest contributions is its Jewish/​Muslim comparative framework, which, as the author argues, is not usually undertaken. The book consists of a short introduction and four chapters. “The Consolidation of Spanish Democracy and the National Identity Debate” explains how 19th-​century Spanish intellectuals of the whole ideological spectrum—​including liberal anticlerical thinkers—​saw Jews and Muslims as “others” from a Spain still conceived as essentially Catholic. The chapter describes gradual changes in this conceptualization of Spanish history and national identity following the death of dictator Francisco Franco in 1975, during Spain’s process of transition to democracy and the consolidation of the “State of the Autonomies.” It also acknowledges the persistence of a nationalist, essentialist historiography and conception of Spain in which “the only real Spaniards are those who strove for the construction of a Christian, European and Western civilization in the Iberian Peninsula” (p. 17). The section on education provides an informative overview of the debates over the teaching of history and religion in the 1990s and 2000s, in which Spain’s conservative, right-​wing party, the Partido Popular (PP), sought to reverse the timid education reforms introduced by the Socialist (PSOE) government. The resurgence of traditional nationalist ideas is exemplified by the writings of PP leader José María Aznar, especially his 2007 book proclaiming Spain as “a nation constituted against Islam” (p. 33). The following chapter is dedicated to foreign relations, describing the establishment of diplomatic relations between Spain and Israel in 1986 during the Socialist government of Felipe González, and the consequent development of cultural exchanges between the two. The chapter examines the highs and lows of this relationship, influenced by the Arab–​Israeli conflict. It also describes the historical contradictions of the Spanish–​Arab “traditional friendship,” its strategic use by Franco, and the different approaches toward this relationship by Spain’s two political parties, the PP and the PSOE, in recent years. An explicitly comparative moment of this chapter mentions the “contrasting approaches” to Muslims and Jews in contemporary Spain, arguing that Muslims are excluded while Jews are included. The evidence provided are quotes from former Socialist Prime Minister Felipe González and from the Spanish ambassador to Israel. The section, and this important point, could have been strengthened by more evidence. We might also ask: What are the terms of this strategic Jewish inclusion? An essential ingredient to understand this issue is the long history of Spanish philosephardism and its connection to Spanish colonialism in Morocco. The book would be enriched with a discussion of how this philosephardi “inclusion” coexists with the view of Jews as “others” in Spain (see the work of Isabelle Rohr, Joshua Goode, Maite Ojeda-​Mata, and Michal Friedman).1 The chapter “Spain and the Jews” contains important information about the current composition of Spain’s Jewish communities, the milestones that have marked the “return” of Jews and Judaism to Spain in the 20th century, and interesting insights from interviews with members of these communities. It addresses Spanish antisemitism

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and provides a content analysis of articles related to Jewish issues in three leading Spanish newspapers: El País, ABC, and El Mundo, between 1997 and 2006. This analysis, divided into three sections, one for each newspaper analyzed, provides useful information on the recurrence of certain concepts (terrorism, Holocaust, antisemitism), the association of these concepts with Jews and Israel, and their relationship with domestic and international events, especially the Middle East conflict. These sections contain perceptive contributions from which the author draws important conclusions, such as the fact that the accusation of antisemitism has become a political tool used by different political camps, at the same time that classic antisemitic myths are “often considered as a given” (p. 108) in the three newspapers. The last chapter, “Spain and the Muslims” provides a highly useful overview of the deep contradictions that have permeated Spain’s relationship with the Arab world, its relationship with its own Muslim past, its colonial presence and ambitions in Morocco, and debates and conflicts related to present-​day Muslim immigrants in Spain. As in the previous chapter, the analysis of both the content of newspaper articles and trends (frequency of certain topics or conceptual relationships established by different articles) produces rich insights. It also illuminates the chronology of how, for example, the conservative daily ABC went from displaying a “sympathetic attitude towards Muslims and Islam” in the late 1990s (p. 148) to becoming a powerful instrument in the articulation of the Spanish right’s anti-​Muslim position after the terrorist attacks of September 2001 in the United States and March 2004 in Madrid. The chapter does an excellent job explaining, for example, the hypocrisy of ABC’s becoming “a fervent advocate of women’s rights” (p. 153) and arguing for the separation of church and state at the same time that it channeled and elevated the claims of the Catholic church in Spain and decried secularization efforts (pp. 154–​155). In sum, this excellent book contains an abundance of useful information and insights for all those interested in Spain’s relationship with its Muslim and Jewish minorities, the political and cultural negotiations of multiculturalism in Spain, and the way these relationships are affected by international events and diplomatic concerns. Daniela Flesler Stony Brook University

Note 1. Isabelle Rohr, The Spanish Right and the Jews, 1898–​ 1945:  Antisemitism and Opportunism (Brighton:  2007); Joshua Goode, Impurity of Blood:  Defining Race in Spain, 1870–​1930 (Baton Rouge:  2009); Maite Ojeda Mata, Identidades ambivalentes:  sefardíes en la España contemporánea (Madrid:  2013); Michal Friedman, “Reconquering ‘Sepharad’:  Hispanism and Proto-​ Facism in Giménez Caballero’s Sephardist Crusade,” Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 12, no. 1 (special issue: “Revisiting Jewish Spain in the Modern Era”), 35–​60.  

Zionism, Israel, and the Middle East

Rachel S.  Harris (ed.), Teaching the  Arab–​Israeli Conflict. Detroit:  Wayne State University Press, 2019. xxxiii + 434 pp.

For decades, universities and colleges around the world have served as extensions of the conflict still taking place on the ground in the Middle East. As a rookie junior college teacher in Montreal in 1973, I  created a course titled “Zionism and the Arabs: Dimensions of Conflict.” For nearly thirty years, my course’s role-​playing and carefully staged class debates went smoothly enough, without incident. Whenever I began a new semester, I would wrap up the first class with a special plea for maintaining an atmosphere of mutual respect in the classroom: by attempting to insulate the classroom from the noise of outside politics, I felt that students would be better able to develop their analytical skills, weighing evidence and drawing conclusions without fear of mockery or intimidation by some of their more politically active peers. While teaching at Concordia University during the mid-​2000s I  concluded—​ incorrectly, it turned out—​that students were growing weary of highly polarizing extracurricular activities. Instead, the coming years witnessed a striking deterioration in the quality of discussion about the Middle East conflict on many college campuses. Professional advocacy organizations ramped up their mobilization of student activists, arming them with talking points designed to win arguments by means of clever rhetoric and the systematic denigration of the adversary. This dynamic, which exploits student idealism and youthful energy, became especially pronounced with the rise of Israel Apartheid Week and the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, on the one side, and the Israel on Campus Coalition, Campus Watch, and Canary Mission, on the other. Today, anyone planning to teach a course on the Arab–​ Israeli conflict must be prepared to be caught in the crossfire of these extracurricular battles. A non-​threatening climate for calm and open-​minded debate has become an increasingly rare commodity on many campuses. As illustrated in Kenneth Stern’s new study, The Conflict over the Conflict (2020), activism and advocacy continue to propel indoctrinated pro-​Palestinian and pro-​Israeli groups into bitter, dead-​end confrontations. As an unfortunate by-​product, it seems no longer possible to isolate course teaching, learning, and discussion from what goes on in student meeting rooms or along campus corridors. Inside their classrooms, faculty members sometimes face orchestrated disruptions and challenges to their professional integrity, including accusations of bias or partisan (mis)behavior, in some cases with unhappy, career-​ending results. Often the larger issues of academic freedom and McCarthyistic denunciation Book Reviews In: No Small Matter: Features of Jewish Childhood. Edited by: Anat Helman, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197577301.003.0034

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become interwoven.1 Some professors, burnt by their experiences, deliberately avoid dealing with this subject altogether. Happily, there have been a few heartening exceptions and responses to the bleak picture described above. Several non-​confrontational campus initiatives have been reported at New York University, Harvard, Brandeis, University of California–​Irvine, University of Pennsylvania, and Wellesley College.2 In the region itself, the Peace Research Institute in the Middle East (PRIME) has crafted a pioneering curriculum that presents children on both sides with parallel Israeli and Palestinian historical narratives in Hebrew and Arabic.3 In Britain, the “Parallel Histories” project provides materials and strategies that promote the nuanced teaching of multiple narratives.4 Barnard College’s “Reacting to the Past” method has also been used to create a simulation game in which students role-​play historical characters set in Palestine during the late 1930s.5 In this regard, the publication of Teaching the Arab-​Israeli Conflict is a major cause for rejoicing. Its 37 contributors include both veteran specialists in the field, such as Donna Robinson Divine, Alan Dowty, and Joel S. Migdal, as well as a number of innovative novices. The book is divided thematically and intelligently into six sections: 1) “Teaching Skills, Facing Challenges: What Happens in the Classroom”; 2)“Empathy, Access, Language, and Education:  Learning to See the Other”; 3)  “Competing Interpretations and Multiple Narratives: Teaching Diversity”; 4) “History, Politics, and Religion:  Putting the Class(room) in Context”; 5)  “The Personal and the Political:  When the Outside World Intrudes on the Sacred Class Space”; and 6)  “Thinking Differently and Creating New Paradigms:  Teaching Israel/​Palestine without Repeating History.” Editor Rachel Harris has done a marvelous job in setting out a thoughtful template that most of her contributors have closely followed. The result is a fascinating variety of short essays that are well focused and accessible. Each begins with a description of course objectives and/​or content, the institutional framework and local culture, and the socioeconomic and/​or ethno-​religious make-​up of the class. After this, many of the contributors go on to provide insightful reflections on how they grapple with the challenges of teaching about this conflict, facing a wide variety of student populations. An essay by Mira Sucharov radically upends the very notion of keeping the classroom insulated from ongoing outside politics. Other contributors describe their careful use of campus politics as “resources” for their students’ assignments. The editor’s preface and essays by Russell Berman and Ari Ariel are the only pieces that deal directly with the campus conflicts generated by the BDS movement and its opponents. It is the fact of not dwelling inordinately on this aspect that makes the book as a whole a welcome antidote to the toxic side effects of those strident debates. In their own ways, all the contributors are aiming to increase their students’ appreciation for complexity while discrediting dogmatic certainty, and to maximize empathy for the “other” while disarming zealotry. Most of the authors implicitly or explicitly view and teach the conflict as a “clash of narratives” between two legitimate national movements; only one, poet and activist Philip Metres, openly frames his pedagogy within the popular colonial settler–​state model. Missing from the volume is a critical discussion of the implications of choosing one of these two paradigms rather than the other. A number of teachers illustrate

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the importance of maps in their pedagogy; however, the maps supplied for this volume leave something to be desired, especially the “Territory of Israel/​Palestine” in four panels, the first incorrectly labeled “1937 plan.”6 Essays by Umut Uzer, P.R. Kumaraswamy, Husam Mohamad, and Menna Abukhadra describe their teaching about the conflict to students in Turkey, Cyprus, India, Qatar, and Cairo—​ recalling similar international experiences brilliantly recounted by Carlos Fraenkel in his Teaching Plato in Palestine (2015). Susan Jacobowitz, Mya Guarnieri Jaradat, and Rolin Mainuddin offer refreshingly frank disclosures about how teaching this subject, which intersects with their personal histories, has changed them, and how their ethnic identity has affected their encounters with course materials and students.7 Readers of Teaching the Arab-​Israeli Conflict, especially those actively involved in curriculum development, will discover abundant evidence of how the conflict can be successfully taught outside the traditional frameworks of international relations, history, or political science. Teachers across many disciplines will benefit from the book’s selected bibliography, annotated filmography, and excellent index—​but above all from the creativity, professionalism, and sensitivity shown by so many of the contributors to this outstanding volume. Neil Caplan Concordia University

Notes 1. See Neil Caplan, Israel-​ Palestine Conflict:  Contested Histories, 2nd ed. (Hoboken: 2019), 248–​257; Andrew Pessin and Doron S. Ben-​Atar (eds.), Anti-​Zionism on Campus: The University, Free Speech, and BDS (Bloomington: 2018); Cary Nelson, Israel Denial:  Anti-​Zionism, Anti-​Semitism, and the Faculty Campaign against the Jewish State (Bloomington: 2019). 2. See, for instance, New York University, “Of Many Institute for Multifaith Leadership,” online at: nyu.edu/​students/​communities-​and-​groups/​student-​diversity/​spiritual-​life/​of-​many-​ institute-​for-​multifaith-​leadership.html, and its 2014 film, “Of Many: Then and Now,” online at: ofmanyfilm.com (accessed 6 September 2020); Seth Berkman, “Grassroots Student Groups Calmly Tackle Israeli-​Palestinian Conflict,” Forward (10 February 2013). 3. Dan Bar-​On and Sami Adwan, “The Psychology of Better Dialogue between Two Separate but Interdependent Narratives,” in Israeli and Palestinian Narratives of Conflict, ed. Robert I. Rotberg (Bloomington: 2006), 205–​224; Nathan Jeffay, “Banned Textbook Offers a Lesson in Mideast Politics,” Forward (3 December 2010); Sami Adwan, Dan Bar-​On, Elie Naveh, and PRIME (eds.), Side by Side: Parallel Histories of Israel-​Palestine (New York: 2012); Peace Research Institute in the Middle East (PRIME) website at http://​vispo.com/​PRIME. 4. See the website for “Parallel Histories: A New Way to Study Conflict” at: parallelhistories.org.uk; cf. J. Waldron, “Brave Spaces,” New York Review of Books (28 June 2018). 5. Barnard College, “Reacting to the Past,” online at: https://​reacting.barnard.edu/​ (accessed 6 September 2020). See also David Austin Walsh, “Can ‘Reacting to the Past’ Help Students Learn about the Israel/​Palestine Conflict?” (6 June 2010), online at: https://​historynewsnetwork.org/​article/​127624 (accessed 6 September 2020); Natasha Gill, Inside the Box: Using Integrative Simulations to Teach Conflict, Negotiations and Mediation (Zurich: 2015); Kenneth

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S. Stern, The Conflict over the Conflict: The Israel/​Palestine Campus Debate (Toronto: 2020), 181–​182. 6. On the uses and misuses of maps, see also Caplan, Israel-​Palestine Conflict, 2nd ed., 7–​12. On conflicting paradigms, see ibid., 37–​38, 265–​268, and idem, “Historiography,” in Routledge Companion to the Israeli-​Palestinian Conflict, ed. Asaf Siniver (forthcoming). 7. For a similarly revealing introspective essay, see Daniel A. Segal, “Teaching Palestine–​ Israel: A Pedagogy of Delay and Suspension,” Review of Middle East Studies 53, no. 1 (2019), 83–​88. See also the confessions of two “activists”: Sara Roy, “Humanism, Scholarship, and Politics: Writing on the Palestinian–​Israeli Conflict,” Journal of Palestine Studies 36, no. 2 (2007), 54–​65; Joel Doerfler, “An Answer to the Question, ‘Why Do You Care So Much about Israel/​Palestine?’” Mondoweiss (21 May 2019), online at: https://​mondoweiss.net/​2019/​05/​answer-​question-​palestine/​ (accessed 6 September 2020).  

Brian J. Horowitz, Vladimir Jabotinsky’s Russian Years, 1900–​1925. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020. 231 pp.

In this interesting and original book, Brian J.  Horowitz focuses on Vladimir Jabotinsky’s transformation from a supporter of liberalism in Russia to a Zionist who advocated extreme conservatism in the mid-​1920s. Most leaders of Zionism—​who were committed either to democratic socialism or simply to a democratic state in Palestine—​were appalled by his support of policies that, in certain respects, seemed to resemble fascism. Horowitz seeks to explain Jabotinsky’s dramatic ideological changes by raising the following questions: “Was [he] a liberal posing as a reactionary with liberal residue, a democrat with dictatorial leanings, or a dictator with nostalgia for democracy?” (p. 2). In presenting these questions, Horowitz indicates the complexity of Jabotinsky’s political career and, in consequence, the difficulty in categorizing his political convictions. No one familiar with Jabotinsky’s upbringing in Odessa, Ukraine, would have thought that he was destined to emerge as a leader of a Zionist party and as an intellectual well-​versed in Jewish history and in the Hebrew language. His parents, who belonged to the middle class, were not observant Jews, though they did not disavow their Jewish roots. His father died when his son was six years old, but Vladimir’s mother saw to it that the boy would study Hebrew, and in 1893, he celebrated his bar mitzvah. However, at that early stage in his life he showed no interest in Jewish affairs. His interests lay elsewhere: in a few years, it became clear that Jabotinsky was an extraordinarily gifted person with an astonishing ability to master foreign languages. He was also a talented and prolific writer, authoring articles and books on political subjects as well as highly regarded novels and a considerable number of poems. Surprisingly, he achieved all this without ever finishing high school. At the age of 17, he left school and moved to Switzerland. Shortly thereafter, he moved to Rome, where he studied law for several years and also published numerous articles on political issues. In 1901, at the age of 21, he returned to Odessa. Two years later, he was appalled by accounts of the vicious pogrom in Kishinev, an event that explains Jabotinsky’s commitment to Zionism. According to Horowitz, he tried to “give himself a longer

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Zionist pedigree,” but “his Jewish feelings before 1903 were unformed, generalized, and spliced with others; after 1903, they took shape and became his life credo” (p. 30). That year he attended the Sixth Zionist Congress in Basel, where he met Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism. Jabotinsky greatly admired Herzl even though he did not support his Uganda project. Two years later, the Revolution of 1905 broke out in Russia, and for about nine months it seemed that the country would be transformed into a liberal state, a development that Jabotinsky strongly supported. He now committed himself to two causes, the liberalization of Russia and the defense of Jewish rights, which were endangered by the outbreak of some 1,400 pogroms, in large measure a reaction to the revolution that seemed to have achieved many of its goals. But by the end of 1905 it was clear that the tide had turned; the revolution had been defeated, a development that encouraged Jabotinsky to focus on his two remaining interests, Zionism and the publication of articles and books on a wide range of subjects. Horowitz has not written a full biography of Jabotinsky, who died in 1940. As the title indicates, his book ends in 1925, by which time Jabotinsky had undergone a fundamental change of views about Zionism. He had abandoned his commitment to democracy and now favored a series of right-​wing policies. His change of mind, according to Horowitz, was the result of various factors. The most important was the growth of antisemitism in Europe, as evidenced by the small number of Jews elected to the second Duma in Russia; in Poland, most of which was still part of the Russian Empire, not one Jew was elected to the legislature. “The result in Poland,” Horowitz noted, “diminished Jabotinsky’s belief in representative democracy” (p. 80). That belief diminished even more sharply in the years from 1911 to 1913, during the time of the Mendel Beilis blood libel trial. Jabotinsky’s first significant political achievement occurred in 1917, when his attempt to form a Jewish legion of 10,000 men to fight on the side of Britain in the First World War was realized. He himself had voluntarily joined the British army as a private in 1914, but he was convinced that it would serve the interests of world Jewry if a larger contingent of Jews played a role in the war. As Horowitz put it, even if the “force had limited military value” its formation meant that for “the first time in nearly two thousand years, Jews were fighting in a Jewish military unit for Jewish national interests” (p. 146). After the end of the First World War, Jabotinsky made Palestine his home—​he was now convinced that Jews had no alternative but to devote all their energies to political Zionism, and Palestine was to become the home of his family. Over the next two decades, until he died in 1940, he led a new political movement known as the Revisionist Zionist Alliance (Brit hatziyonim harevizionistim), which rejected the liberal ideas he had favored for over two decades. Jabotinsky also severed his relationship with Chaim Weizmann, whom he now dubbed “the symbol of everything wrong with Zionism” (p. 170). In June 1922, Jabotinsky formally resigned from the Zionist Executive and from the World Zionist Organization. He had given up on democracy and, in Horowitz’s words, “saw the successful rise to power of the strongman in the Soviet Union (Lenin) and then Italy (Mussolini) and realized that he could attain his goals by mimicking their political style” (p. 157). His proposals on how to deal with the Arabs who lived in Palestine were heartless: he considered it appropriate to curtail their rights because of the “cultural superiority” of the Jews. If the Arabs resisted the

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policies of Jews, it was appropriate to “use force against a stubborn enemy.” It is also worth mentioning that Jabotinsky had an expansive view of the future state of Israel: it would include both sides of the Jordan River. Jabotinsky was a remarkably gifted man, but his political views, as critically analyzed by Horowitz, may not have been the wisest. Had they been adopted by leaders of Zionism, the United Nations probably would not have voted in 1948 for the creation of an independent Jewish state, as the Zionist demands would have been considered too one-​sided. This, in turn, would have made it much more difficult for Jews to recover from the horrors of the Holocaust. Horowitz is right to emphasize the impact of political developments in Russia in the years after 1905 on Jabotinsky’s conception of Zionism; in particular, his abandonment of democracy in favor of some form of authoritarianism, a cardinal principle of the political movement he founded. But by ending the book with a very brief chapter on Jabotinsky’s last 15 years, during which he led the right-​wing party, readers of this very fine study are left wondering about Jabotinsky’s views and actions during the period when Fascism in Italy and Nazism in Germany exerted major influence in Europe. A second volume by Horowitz that focuses on Jabotinsky’s last 15 years would deepen our understanding of his influence or lack thereof on Israel’s history in the late 1970s and beyond. Abraham Ascher The Graduate Center, City University of New York  

Pnina Motzafi-​Haller, Concrete Boxes:  Mizrahi Women on  Israel’s Periphery. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2018. 360 pp.

This ethnographic study is the outcome of four years of field work, during which Penina Motzafi-​Haller visited the town of Yeruham, in Israel’s southern district, several times a week. During these visits, Motzafi-​Haller conducted in-​depth interviews with five Mizrahi women: Nurit, Efrat, Rachel, Esti, and Gila. Four of them were raised in Yeruham and live there to this day; the fifth was also raised in the town but left it later. The life choices and social position of each of these women represent different coping strategies vis-​à-​vis the reality of life on the Israeli margins. Motzafi-​Haller sensitively details their daily lives and provides us with a fascinating look at Mizrahi women positioned at the center of this particular social space. Yeruham is a southern desert town that, more than any other Israeli development town, is considered to be synonymous with remoteness, backwardness, and neglect. Motzafi-​Haller contrasts the “peripheral space,” as commonly discussed in Israeli discourse, with the reality of these five women’s lives. At the outset, she declares her intent to refute the common assertion that residents of Israel’s southern region development towns are victims of institutional neglect, and are therefore essentially passive. The question that preoccupied her in the study was not who was to blame for their condition of social marginalization, but rather how people who are affected by such external limitations shape their lives.

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As noted in the introduction written by Virginia Dominguez, a Cuban-​ born American anthropologist, Motzafi-​Haller’s case study is informed by the fact that she, too, grew up in a development town and thus can readily identify with the women she interviewed. The author addresses this point as well, spelling out her research method: “My aim is to show that every story, every interview excerpt, every quote from a research subject is always a product of the unfolding relationship between that subject and the researcher. I am never an objective researcher, nor do I simply record the authentic words of my research subject and thereby document that person’s clear, original, too-​often-​silenced voice” (p. 21). Of the book’s five heroines, one (Efrat) is married and one (Esti) is single and childless, while the other three are divorced mothers. Each woman is the center of her family unit; none is dependent on a husband or partner. As Motzafi-​Heller makes clear, these women do not constitute a representative sample. Nurit, a single mother who had been married to a drug addict, struggles to escape social isolation and to extract her children from the cycle of poverty and dependence she is locked into. Efrat has chosen a life of increasing religiosity. Rachel navigates between various social and cultural codes, whereas Esti, “the rebel,” insists that “no one will speak for her” (p. 210). Gila, the only one of the five who has left Yerucham, obtained a university degree and is a school principal. In fact, the book has six heroines: the five women and the sixth protagonist: the periphery, which is characterized as a space that is fixed in its marginality and lacking significant mechanisms for change and development. Through the behaviors she presents, Motzafi-​Haller highlights the perspective of women living in the periphery and examines questions regarding social mobility in Israel. She also discusses insights regarding the psychological mechanisms that characterize women living in the periphery. She challenges the hackneyed stereotype of the peripheral Mizrahi woman’s identity, presenting active female characters who shape their life paths within the severely limiting space of their small-​town lives. Throughout the book, the admiration of the author for her heroines is keenly felt, especially regarding their resourcefulness, creativity, and perseverance. Indeed, the stories shared by Yeruham’s residents over the years evince not only a powerful poetic and humane beauty, but also significant social insights that go beyond the small, mundane details they describe. Motzafi-​Haller is convinced that the stories people tell about themselves and their lives are “explanations of themselves” (p. 295), capable not only of motivating them to act but also of shaping their self-​ perceptions. Thus, even if women such as Nurit, Efrat, Rachel, and Esti are unable to break through the “concrete boxes” of social and economic marginality, they have at least some room to maneuver within the intersecting circles of center–​periphery–​gender–​social status–​ethnicity. Motzafi-​Haller shows the elaborate system of choices and decisions these women face, and the ways in which they demonstrate self-​awareness and motivation to change. Focusing on one specific development town, her nuanced account is valuable in its furthering our understanding of social structures in general, and, in particular, the ways in which women take decisions and shape their worldviews. Hila Shalem Baharad Ben-​Gurion University  

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Hanna Yablonka, Yeladim beseder gamur:  biyografiyah dorit shel yelidei haaretz 1948–​1955 (Children by  the Book, Biography of  a Generation:  The First Native Israelis Born 1948–​1955). Rishon Letziyon: Miskal, 2018. 430 pp.

As Israel passes seventy years of independence, we have finally received the first comprehensive book about the history of the generation of Israelis who were born, raised, and educated in the young state that came to be called “Little Israel” after the victory in 1967. The heart of the collective story presented in the book is constructed around interviews with several dozen people of a distinct group: those born on the fifth of Iyar 1948, the day when David Ben-​Gurion proclaimed the establishment of the state of Israel. This core is expanded by the shared story of hundreds of thousands of other Israelis who were born between the late 1940s and the early 1950s. Yablonka traces the generational biography of these “children of the state,” combining critical research with the personal stories of members of the generation—​of which she is one. Historians, sociologists, and scholars of culture have been dealing for several decades with the riddle of the formation of Israeli society, a prolonged and tension-​ridden process of encounter between groups of immigrants and native populations. Within this encounter, which began in the late Ottoman period, girls and boys were born for whom the country was a fact of life, whereas the experience of the diaspora reached them only indirectly, through the intermediary of their parents’ memories and those of teachers, authors, and politicians. At the end of the British mandate in Palestine, in the decade when the Holocaust ended and the sovereign state of Israel arose, the cohort of veteran natives was joined by hundreds of thousands of children born into the emerging state. In appearance, according to wishful thinking or ideologically biased interpretations that seeped into the writing of history from politics, the new Israeli society was formed in the spirit of a cluster of prophetic visions and by dint of semi-​messianic expectations. In the view of partisans of Jewish nationalism, these were fulfilled in the throes of constant struggle in a territory that was not kind to its settlers. However, in the local collective memory as well as in literature and scholarship, the story is riven between two contrary plot lines. The plot that is enlisted willingly or by default in the narrative of modern Jewish nationalism leads the reader toward the establishment of a kind of earthly paradise in this difficult Mediterranean land, a paradise of which generations of suffering Jews dreamt in the darkness of exile; whereas the alternative plot, anti-​Israel in spirit, militates in the opposite direction, revealing how the deceitful aspirations of Zionism bequeathed only bitter disappointment to the society and brought ruin down upon its victims. Hanna Yablonka’s book is unique in that it is neither politically committed to nationalist political slogans that are thrown daily into the arena of Israeli politics in the days of Netanyahu nor connected to the one-​dimensional, sweeping condemnation of critics of the Israeli enterprise on the Right and Left. Instead, it suggests to set aside, even if only for a moment, what Yablonka calls “the current Israeli discourse, which furiously shatters everything that has happened in the state since it was established, brutally erasing all the achievements of Little Israel” (p. 11). How “children by the book”—​some of them from Iraqi, Libyan, Syrian, and Yemenite families who had recently arrived in the fledgling state—​coped with the so-​called “ethnic problem”

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(habe’ayah ha’adadit) has nothing to do with what one hears today from Israeli politicians: “Yig’al Levi Dali, of Aleppo origin, who studied in a state-​sponsored elementary school in the Hatikvah neighborhood of Tel Aviv [a slum neighborhood mostly populated by Middle Eastern Jews] tried hard to remember if there were Ashkenazi kids in his class. After a while he recalled two girls, and responded to my question: ‘No, no! We never talked about Sepharadim–​Ashkenazim, never!’ Another person, Eldad Harat, whose family came from Yemen, said:  “in our school there were Ashkenazi, Persian, and Kurdish teachers, [it was] a multi-​cultural school [. ...] I didn’t know we were different from one another’ ” (p. 158). Yablonka, a historian, offers a lesson here regarding the gap between the real-​time experiences of any group and what is anachronistically claimed by politicians to be its “collective memory.” Yabonka is guided by Karl Mannheim’s concept of a “historical generation”: a group in which there is a shared historical consciousness derived from historical experience. With sensitivity, she recalls chapters in the collective biography of those who were born and raised between the world of the parents (the pre-​state period, under the threatening shadow of the Holocaust), and that of the grandchildren, who were born after the great trauma of the 1973 war. This biography (which is simultaneously the author’s autobiography—​as well as that of the author of this review) is constructed in chronological order and presents a developing fabric of social, cultural, personal, and collective experience. The reader follows girls and boys during the first years of the state, accompanies them on their way to kindergarten, primary school, and then to high school and military service. Yablonka evokes their daily schedule, their games, their hobbies, what they read, and how they experienced the fundamental events in the history of Little Israel. Yablonka shows how the state educational system fashioned the image of the new Israeli, endowing children with a local, native identity and imbuing them with the consciousness of belonging both to the people and to the land: “The identity of the people of my generation was thus formed in school by the Bible as a national book, by the landscapes of the country, its flora, the Jewish calendar, connection with the earth and with the seasons of the year—​with emphasis on cyclicity and on the ancient past”(p. 64). The school, along with youth movements and their respective political parties, the society of children in urban neighborhoods, children’s newspapers with political, didactic messages, the two radio stations (which were a kind of “tribal campfire” for hundreds of thousands of Israelis), and formative events with a decidedly national character (for instance, the tenth anniversary of the state, and the first Bible Contest), provided young girls and boys with a common discourse that crossed ethnic and geographic boundaries, connecting city children with kibbutzniks, veteran neighborhoods with development towns. This discourse was strengthened within family life, where the personal and private dimension was combined with various versions of the national ethos: “At home the image of the children of the state was formed by deeply internalizing the message that was transmitted by the adults [ . . . ] The axiom that was formulated and accepted without challenge was that the parents and teachers, the government, and the army knew best what was correct and what was incorrect. And they were always right” (p. 71). For at least two decades, Israeli culture was imprinted with the stamp of voluntary conformism. During this time, the cultural isolation of Little Israel—​a poor country that was still governed by pre-​statehood political and cultural networks—​prevented

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the penetration of the Western capitalist culture of consumerism. An anachronistic middle European political and cultural discourse prevailed, though the influences of popular Western culture did seep in gradually—​to the chagrin of educators, political leaders, and journalists. These came with movies and pop music (who remembers today that the Beatles were denied entry in 1966 because their musical performances allegedly aroused “feelings of aggression imbued with sexual arousal” [p. 226]?) And yet, even in the 1960s, discussion of sex in the young state took place according to conceptions and beliefs that had been brought to the country from early 20th-​century Europe. For “children by the book,” the boundaries on matters of sex and family were still set by the parents and educators of the previous generation. Conformism and boundaries are two axes in this collective biography. From the sober (and anachronistic) viewpoint of an observer during the third decade of the 21st century, these axes are likely to appear innocent, artificial, or even imaginary. However, historically speaking, they are the very roots of the stability and durability of Israeli society in the face of the difficult conditions prevailing at the beginning of the new state, and they were also the sources of its vitality and flourishing farther on, following the horrifying experience of the Yom Kippur War. The conformism of the children of the state, and the boundaries within which their identity was formed, enabled them to combine consciousness of continuity and deep connection with the Jewish past with the experience of renewal, and even revolution. Theirs was the generation of unprecedented Israeli identity. In Yablonka’s opinion, the conflict between refusal to walk the line (or outright rebellion) and conformism was one of the decided identifying traits of this first generation of the state; in my view, it is a factor in this generation’s strength and stability. In retrospect, Yablonka regards the shared story of the women and men who were born together with the state during the 1948 war, and who grew up in a country used to wars, as an exceptional chapter in the long history of the Jewish people. Many of them were the children of Holocaust survivors, and as such represented “a memorial to the families [that had perished], and also a hope for the future of the family, a seedling planted in the new land” (p. 35). Yet the painful awakening caused by the Yom Kippur War deprived them of their shared dream of normalcy, which until then had been the embodiment of life. The trauma they experienced brought them back to the longue durée of Jewish history. This book is an original and enlightening contribution to Israel studies and an important link between modern Jewish history and the history of Israel. It is simultaneously a work of scholarship and also a historical document of a unique social and cultural phenomenon in Jewish history: the rise and fall of a political experiment in nation-​building, whose roots lay in the culture of one continent, but whose growth and flourishing took place in another. Indeed, the deeper one delves into Yablonka’s fascinating document, the more one is aware of fundamental strata of the old Israeli political culture that have been forgotten in recent decades, including moderate nationalism within the boundaries of Little Israel and the modest patriotism fostered by those who are called “good children of Israel.” Israel Bartal The Hebrew University

Note on Editorial Policy

Studies in Contemporary Jewry is pleased to accept manuscripts on subjects generally within the contemporary Jewish sphere (from the turn of the 20th century to the present) for possible publication. Please address all inquiries to: [email protected] Essays that are submitted undergo a review process.

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