tag:theconversation.com,2011:/global/topics/jewish-history-7380/articlesJewish history – The Conversation2024-03-21T12:25:02Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2186772024-03-21T12:25:02Z2024-03-21T12:25:02ZPurim’s original queen: How studying the Book of Esther as fan fiction can teach us about the roots of an unruly Jewish festival<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/582875/original/file-20240319-24-z4q69e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C3%2C1022%2C699&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Esther denouncing Haman, who, according to the Purim story, attempted to have all Jews within the Persian Empire massacred. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/esther-denouncing-haman-haman-a-favourite-at-the-court-of-news-photo/929217364?adppopup=true">Hutchinson's History of the Nations/Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Once upon a time, in the ancient Near East, there was a beautiful queen.</p>
<p>Scribes wrote of her lovely form, her regal majesty and her fierce bravery. The people honored her in lavish celebrations marked by debauchery. She was linked to <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/327/oa_monograph/chapter/2616211#rfn55">the morning star</a>, and her name was “Ishtar” – or “Esther,” <a href="https://www.sefaria.org/Jastrow%2C_%D7%90%D6%B4%D7%A1%D6%B0%D7%AA%D6%B0%D6%BC%D7%94%D6%B7%D7%A8.1">as she was called in Hebrew</a>.</p>
<p>This is the story that inspires the Jewish holiday of Purim, which begins this year on the evening of March 23. Across the world, Jews retell the story of <a href="https://bibleodyssey.com/articles/esther/">Queen Esther</a> in <a href="https://theconversation.com/purim-spiels-skits-and-satire-have-brought-merriment-to-an-ancient-jewish-holiday-in-america-177700">lavish spectacles</a>, <a href="https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/purim-plays-and-carnivals/">called Purim spiels</a>, that feature costumes, jokes, satire, noisemakers and food and wine.</p>
<p>Purim is the only celebration in Judaism with an entire biblical book about its origins. <a href="https://www.sefaria.org/Esther?tab=contents">The Book of Esther</a> tells how she and her pious cousin, Mordecai, defeated the scheming Haman, a powerful royal adviser, thereby saving the Jewish people from annihilation.</p>
<p>Yet among researchers, the actual origins of the holiday – and of Esther herself – are still hotly contested. Few scholars interpret Esther’s story as a record of historical events, and they note a number of oddities surrounding the book. The text, sometimes called the Megillah, contains <a href="https://www.thetorah.com/article/megillat-esther-a-godless-and-assimilated-diaspora">no mention of God</a>, or of religious activities such as prayer or sacrifice; its narrative is colorful and suggestive.</p>
<p>When archaeologists began to dig up cuneiform texts in the 19th century, a further peculiarity emerged: Esther and her cousin Mordecai shared names <a href="https://referenceworks.brillonline.com/entries/dictionary-of-deities-and-demons-online/ishtar-DDDO_Ishtar">with Ishtar</a> and <a href="https://referenceworks.brillonline.com/entries/dictionary-of-deities-and-demons-online/marduk-DDDO_Marduk">her cousin Marduk</a>, two of the most prominent deities in ancient Mesopotamia. Ishtar, like Esther, was a divine queen associated with both eroticism and battle. Marduk, like Mordecai, <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/20182036">overcame a deadly enemy and celebrated his triumph with a banquet</a>. Moreover, the name Purim seems to derive from <a href="https://www.thetorah.com/article/on-the-origins-of-purim-and-its-assyrian-name">the Babylonian word “pûru</a>” – a “lot” in both the senses of “<a href="https://isac.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/uploads/shared/docs/cad_p.pdf">portion</a>” and “<a href="https://doi.org/10.2307/3209686">fortunetelling dice</a>.”</p>
<p><a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=kwcXAAAAIAAJ&lpg=PA94&ots=Oj4t1mFmis&pg=PA87#v=onepage&q&f=false">Earlier scholars of those cuneiform texts</a> concluded that the Book of Esther was retelling a Babylonian myth about Ishtar and Marduk. No such myth has been found to date, however, leading to an apparent historical dead end.</p>
<p>When I learned about these connections as <a href="https://udayton.edu/directory/artssciences/religiousstudies/brownsmith-esther.php">a young biblical scholar</a>, a modern parallel immediately came to mind: the genre of fan fiction. </p>
<h2>Fanfic, then and now</h2>
<p>In fan fiction, amateur writers create stories based on the characters and imaginative worlds of popular media.</p>
<p>Sites such as the <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/">Archive of Our Own</a>, <a href="https://www.fanfiction.net/">FanFiction.net</a> <a href="https://www.wattpad.com/">and Wattpad</a> host millions of “fics,” from short sketches to novel-length epics. The popularity of these stories has extended beyond the internet: “Fifty Shades of Grey” <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/hayleycuccinello/2017/02/10/fifty-shades-of-green-how-fanfiction-went-from-dirty-little-secret-to-money-machine/">was a fic of the teen series “Twilight</a>,” while the bestselling novel “The Love Hypothesis” <a href="https://www.cinemablend.com/star-wars/bestselling-romance-novel-inspired-by-fanfiction-about-star-wars-rey-and-kylo-ren-is-becoming-a-movie">began as a story about characters from “Star Wars</a>.”</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/582897/original/file-20240319-30-tbbvty.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A woman in a black shirt and red scarf stands in front of a sign that says 'Fifty shades.'" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/582897/original/file-20240319-30-tbbvty.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/582897/original/file-20240319-30-tbbvty.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/582897/original/file-20240319-30-tbbvty.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/582897/original/file-20240319-30-tbbvty.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/582897/original/file-20240319-30-tbbvty.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/582897/original/file-20240319-30-tbbvty.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/582897/original/file-20240319-30-tbbvty.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Author E.L. James attends a special fan screening of ‘Fifty Shades of Grey,’ the movie based on her books, in New York in 2015.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://newsroom.ap.org/detail/FiftyShades-GreyFanFiction/149d58f2e10f4e548709808c0573a816/photo?Query=fan%20fiction&mediaType=photo&sortBy=arrivaldatetime:asc&dateRange=Anytime&totalCount=71&currentItemNo=44">Charles Sykes/Invision/AP, File</a></span>
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<p>Fan fiction studies has become an established corner of academia: studying these texts, their creators and the factors that influence them.</p>
<p><a href="https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2021.2037">I am not the first scholar</a> to wonder whether ancient texts were the fan fiction of their time. Scholars and fans alike have noted the way that <a href="https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1024&context=anthos_archives">the Aeneid builds upon Homer’s compositions</a>, for example, and <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/20">John Milton’s epic “Paradise Lost</a>” mines the tales of the Bible.</p>
<p>I believe it makes sense to think of Esther, too, as the ancient equivalent of today’s fan fiction: a tale of familiar characters, re-imagined and repurposed to reflect the identities of their creators.</p>
<p>To begin, Esther and Ishtar had more in common than just their name. In fact, everything in my first paragraph describes them both, from the raucous celebrations held in their names to their legendary beauty. The author of the Book of Esther seems to have been describing a character already familiar to readers, just like a modern fan fiction writer does.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/582888/original/file-20240319-8674-pb38a9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="An open scroll shows text with a colored floral pattern at the top and bottom of the manuscript." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/582888/original/file-20240319-8674-pb38a9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/582888/original/file-20240319-8674-pb38a9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=442&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/582888/original/file-20240319-8674-pb38a9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=442&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/582888/original/file-20240319-8674-pb38a9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=442&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/582888/original/file-20240319-8674-pb38a9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=555&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/582888/original/file-20240319-8674-pb38a9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=555&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/582888/original/file-20240319-8674-pb38a9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=555&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">An 18th-century parchment scroll of the Book of Esther, preserved at the Mejanes Library in Aix-en-Provence, France.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/a-scroll-of-parchment-from-the-xviiith-century-preserved-at-news-photo/949696604?adppopup=true">Patrick Horvais/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images</a></span>
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<p>This comparison is not hindered by the fact that the plot of Esther did not derive from a known Mesopotamian myth; plenty of <a href="https://fanlore.org/wiki/Alternate_Universe">“alternate universe” fics</a> tell new stories in new settings, using the change of scenery to reveal new facets of their beloved characters.</p>
<p>Nor does the divide between Mesopotamian polytheism and Jewish monotheism pose a problem. For many authors, fanfic provides an opportunity to <a href="https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9781479811748.003.0009">transform and critique its source text</a>, adding elements that were glaringly absent from the original, such as queer relationships. </p>
<p>In short, thinking about the story of Esther as ancient “fanfic” could explain the striking parallels between her character and Ishtar. But the implications of this framework are more than simply academic. Calling Esther fan fiction can teach modern readers something about the celebration of Purim – and about storytelling itself.</p>
<h2>Writing ourselves into stories</h2>
<p>The first lesson is that, from ancient Jewish scribes to modern teenage girls, people have been <a href="https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2023.2441">rewriting other people’s stories</a> to reflect their own reality and identities.</p>
<p>Today, a fanfic author might compose a saga about how <a href="https://fanlore.org/wiki/Mary_Sue">a girl like her</a> won hearts and saved lives in male-dominated Middle-earth, the world of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” series. Back in ancient Babylon, Jewish scribes might have re-imagined a popular goddess as a Jewish heroine. Transformative writing is empowering and defiant, then as now.</p>
<p>The second lesson is that carnival and queerness and joy are built into ancient scripture; they are no modern development. Ishtar was <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/25683215">a gender-fluid queen</a> who <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/1062957">declared</a>, “I am a woman (but) verily I am an exuberant man.” Her followers included “<a href="https://doi.org/10.25162/9783515130974">assinnu” and “kurgarru</a>,” ranks of Mesopotamian priests who were famous for transgressing gender norms.</p>
<p>It should thus come as no surprise that Esther is a story that names and elevates a number of eunuch characters, ascribes <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/4139801">feminine and nonbinary traits</a> to the heroic Mordecai and imagines its heroine as sexual and daring. Purim’s long-standing tradition of <a href="https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/cross-dressing-on-purim/">cross-dressing</a> and <a href="https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2022-03-15/ty-article-magazine/why-do-jews-dress-up-for-purim/00000180-5bb4-d718-afd9-dfbccaa70000">flamboyant costumes</a> has a rich history.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/582895/original/file-20240319-8759-pb38a9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A woman in an orange bikini-style outfit and a large red headdress dances in the street near a tall stuffed bear figure." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/582895/original/file-20240319-8759-pb38a9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/582895/original/file-20240319-8759-pb38a9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=410&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/582895/original/file-20240319-8759-pb38a9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=410&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/582895/original/file-20240319-8759-pb38a9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=410&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/582895/original/file-20240319-8759-pb38a9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=515&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/582895/original/file-20240319-8759-pb38a9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=515&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/582895/original/file-20240319-8759-pb38a9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=515&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Dancers perform during a Purim parade festival in 2012 in Holon, Israel.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://newsroom.ap.org/detail/MideastIsraelPurim/295ac0e151b849e2886aa0ecf16a2a2e/photo?Query=purim&mediaType=photo&sortBy=arrivaldatetime:asc&dateRange=Anytime&totalCount=780&currentItemNo=139">AP Photo/Dan Balilty</a></span>
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<p>Likewise, fan fiction is a deeply queer practice. A disproportionate number of stories <a href="https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2022.2205">address gender and sexuality</a>, and its creators are themselves <a href="https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/fansplaining/viz/TheFansplainingShippingSurveyResults/SurveyDemographicsGenderandSexuality">disproportionately</a> <a href="https://www.flowjournal.org/2023/02/fan-demographics-on-ao3/">LGBTQ+</a>.</p>
<p>The third lesson is one that I strive to teach all my students: Scripture can be both relatable and startling when we look at it through fresh eyes. </p>
<p>The Bible instructs Jews to retell the story of Esther each Purim. But by <a href="https://urj.org/blog/get-act-yes-you-can-write-purim-spiel">creating themed Purim spiels</a> each year, drawing on sources from Motown to Moana, Jewish congregations clothe the familiar plot in exciting new garb.</p>
<p>Thinking about biblical stories as fan fiction invites readers today to imagine the ancient scribes as “fans,” brimming with emotional reactions and strong opinions. The Bible is a diverse library of texts created in manifold times and contexts, and its authors were passionately invested in the stories they told and retold – just like modern amateur authors.</p>
<p>This Purim, I invite you to approach the Bible’s tales as the result of a dynamic process, a panoply of voices that each sought to influence their tradition by adding their own words to it. In the hands of fan fiction writers and Purim spiel creators, that process continues today.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/218677/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Esther Brownsmith does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Whether thousands of years ago or right now, fans have always created new stories based on familiar characters, weaving their own experiences into the tale.Esther Brownsmith, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, University of DaytonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2209652024-01-12T12:45:18Z2024-01-12T12:45:18ZWhat One Life gets wrong about Nicholas Winton and the Kindertransport story<p>Barbara Winton self-published a <a href="https://www.hachette.co.uk/titles/barbara-winton/if-its-not-impossible/9781472148650/">biography</a> of her father, Nicholas Winton, in 2014, which has now become a new major biopic, One Life. Already dubbed “the British Schindler” for his role in the rescue of 669, mainly Jewish, children from Czechoslovakia in 1939, with this new film Nicholas Winton’s fame is firmly established.</p>
<p>The film has a quality cast, including Anthony Hopkins as an aged Winton (the humanitarian died in 2015 aged 106), Helena Bonham Carter as his impressive mother, Babette, and Johnny Flynn as the young Winton. Romola Garai and Alex Sharp star as Doreen Warriner and Trevor Chadwick, the workers for the Czech Refugee Committee, who did all the dangerous and extensive rescue work in Prague. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/6ethollg-PI?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">The trailer for One Life.</span></figcaption>
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<p>One Life is a useful beginners guide to the 1930s Jewish refugee crisis, of which few details are widely known. As late as 2002, former mayor of London Ken Livingstone, attending a Holocaust memorial event at Liverpool Street station where many of the refugee children arrived, was honest enough to <a href="https://manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9780719068836/">state that</a>: “Until today, I did not know that Jewish children had escaped to London before the second world war.” </p>
<p>Since then, the Kindertransport, through which 10,000 children came to the UK on temporary permits from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland, has become the most famous refugee movement in British history. The intended UK Holocaust Memorial next to the Houses of Parliament, which was confirmed in the <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-67351175">2023 king’s speech</a>, will feature it prominently. </p>
<p>There are, however, several elements of the Kindertransport story that have proved unpalatable, especially as they undermine the presentation of Britain as the saviour of the Jews during the Nazi era. </p>
<p>That reassuring narrative was at the forefront in 2015 when the <a href="https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/398645/Holocaust_Commission_Report_Britains_promise_to_remember.pdf">British government announced</a> the creation of a national Holocaust memorial: “Ensuring that the memory and the lessons of the Holocaust are never forgotten lies at the heart of Britain’s values as a nation. In commemorating the Holocaust, Britain remembers the way it proudly stood up to Hitler and provided a home to tens of thousands of survivors and refugees, including almost 10,000 children who came on the Kindertransports.”</p>
<h2>The reality of Kindertransport</h2>
<p>Recent <a href="https://assets.cambridge.org/97805215/34499/frontmatter/9780521534499_frontmatter.pdf">researchers</a>, <a href="https://manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9780719068836/">including myself</a>, have <a href="https://iupress.org/9780253042217/the-kindertransport/">highlighted</a> one particular and obvious flaw in the Kindertransport scheme: that the children were separated from their parents. </p>
<p>Many (perhaps the majority, though there are no definitive figures) would subsequently lose at least one parent through the Holocaust. Indeed, as home secretary at the time, Sir Samuel Hoare, <a href="https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/1938-11-21/debates/133ef530-1ea4-4835-839b-c9889e0481c0/RacialReligiousAndPoliticalMinorities">acknowledged</a> when announcing the scheme in the House of Commons in November 1938, it would create a terrible dilemma for the parents who were aware that they might never see their children again. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/568874/original/file-20240111-29-6il859.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="statue of a girl standing and boy sitting down." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/568874/original/file-20240111-29-6il859.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/568874/original/file-20240111-29-6il859.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=839&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/568874/original/file-20240111-29-6il859.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=839&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/568874/original/file-20240111-29-6il859.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=839&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/568874/original/file-20240111-29-6il859.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1054&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/568874/original/file-20240111-29-6il859.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1054&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/568874/original/file-20240111-29-6il859.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1054&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The kindertransport memorial at Liverpool Street station, by Flor Kent.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Für_das_Kind.JPG">Wiki Commons</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
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<p>The other major critique of the Kindertransport is there was insufficient care to make sure that the Jewish children kept their religious identity in the UK. Both problems are raised in One Life, but only fleetingly so. </p>
<p>When the young Winton asks a Prague rabbi to hand over lists of vulnerable Jewish children, the rabbi is reluctant. He asks: “What about the parents?” and queries the future Jewishness of the children who are entrusted to Winton. Rather than dwell further, the scene is used to present the Jewish past of the Winton family and Winton’s true British values.</p>
<p>In fact, in his desire to place the children somewhere, Winton accepted the offer from the Barbican Mission to the Jews to house a group of the Czech Jewish children. It took the efforts of <a href="https://ccj.org.uk/sites/ccj.hocext.co.uk/files/2020-06/Common%20Ground%202020.pdf">Reverend James Parkes</a>, a Church of England clergyman who worked ceaselessly against antisemitism, to rescue them from conversion.</p>
<h2>Unsung heroes</h2>
<p>Nicholas Winton was undoubtedly a decent man who insisted himself that he did not do that much and that others should get more credit. At least the film allows this, with some attention given to two humanitarians, the maverick Trevor Chadwick and the formidable Doreen Warriner. </p>
<p>It was these two young British refugee workers, among others, who looked after the children in Prague, arranging first their flights and then their train journeys and also gathering the necessary documentation for them to both leave Czechoslovakia and enter the UK.</p>
<p>Many others could have been included, but at least One Life makes a start. The film presents Winton as haunted by his failure to do more and frames his lifelong philanthropy as a way of not confronting the full horrors of the Holocaust. It would be better to see his supportive role in 1939 as a part of, rather than apart from, his other humanitarian work. </p>
<p>It was, very belatedly, the interest of others and the need for a secular saint in the rescue of the Jews that pushed Winton into the unwanted limelight and into mythical status as the British Schindler. What this fails to allow for is the agency of the former refugee children themselves. </p>
<p>In 1966, poet and former child refugee Karen Gershon curated <a href="https://archive.org/details/wecameaschildren00gers">We Came as Children</a>, a collective autobiography of the Kindertransport. It is one of the most important articulations of refugee status and its legacy ever published. </p>
<p>This was widely and positively received some 20 odd years before Nicholas Winton was “rediscovered” on the BBC television show That’s Life (1988). In two episodes, host Esther Rantzen introduced Nicholas Winton to many of the children he’d helped, now grown adults, in emotional scenes. </p>
<p>It is significant that while the alcoholic, womanising and child-abandoning Trevor Chadwick <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=vyKVuRfLiQ8C&printsec=copyright&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false">wrote an account</a> of his remarkable work in Prague and London in We Came as Children, Nicholas Winton was not mentioned. Ultimately I believe Chadwick would make a more fitting cinematic subject matter when dealing with the messy subject of Britain and the Holocaust – despite, or perhaps in part because of, his own messy private life. </p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Tony Kushner does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Recent researchers, including myself, have highlighted one particular and obvious flaw in the Kindertransport scheme: that the children were separated from their parents.Tony Kushner, James Parkes Professor of Jewish/non-Jewish Relations, University of SouthamptonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2180092023-12-07T18:29:49Z2023-12-07T18:29:49ZHolocaust comparisons are overused – but in the case of Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel they may reflect more than just the emotional response of a traumatized people<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/562232/original/file-20231128-17-5wy2xb.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=9%2C9%2C3285%2C2183&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">On Oct. 12, a sign in Tel Aviv says in Hebrew, 'No more words,' near candles lit both in memory of those killed in the Hamas massacres and for the hostages taken to the Gaza Strip. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/sign-saying-in-hebrew-no-more-words-near-candles-that-were-news-photo/1720743293?adppopup=true">Amir Levy/Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Many observers have referred to the massacre of Israelis by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023, as the deadliest attack against the Jewish people in a single day “since the Holocaust.” </p>
<p>As scholars who have spent <a href="https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C22&q=AJ+Patt&btnG=">decades studying the history</a> of <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=3-F0XCoAAAAJ&hl=en">Israel’s relationship with the Holocaust</a>, we have argued that the Holocaust should remain unique and not be compared with other atrocities. We have written against <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/06/19/holocaust-education-museum-greene/">simplistic Holocaust analogies</a>, like comparing mask and vaccine mandates during the COVID-19 pandemic to the Nazi persecution of the Jews, or the practice of labeling political opponents “Nazis.” Both seem to trivialize the memory of what is known as the Shoah, the Hebrew word for “catastrophe.”</p>
<p>But the <a href="https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R47754">Oct. 7 massacres perpetrated by Hamas</a> changed our thinking.</p>
<h2>Israeli identity and the Holocaust</h2>
<p>Over the past 75 years, the collective memory of the Shoah has assumed a central place in Israeli national identity. The memory of the Holocaust has increasingly become the prism through which Israelis understand both their past and their present relationships with the Arab and Muslim world. </p>
<p>Israelis saw the Holocaust’s threat of annihilation echoed in many situations. In 1967, there was the waiting period before the Six-Day War, when the Egyptian leader <a href="https://www.dw.com/en/the-1967-six-day-war-and-its-difficult-legacy/a-39117590">Gamal Abdel Nasser threatened to “wipe Israel off the map</a>.” It was there in the trauma of the Yom Kippur War in 1973 and the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/event/Yom-Kippur-War">unexpected, simultaneous attacks by Egypt and Syria</a>. When <a href="https://www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/israeli-raid-against-iraqi-reactor-40-years-later-new-insights-archives">Israel destroyed the Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981</a>, Prime Minister Menachem Begin justified it with the explanation that <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1981/06/10/world/prime-minister-begin-defends-raid-iraqi-nuclear-reactor-pledges-thwart-new.html">“there won’t be another Holocaust in history</a>.” </p>
<p>This association has only strengthened in the past 40 years with the <a href="https://www.bakerinstitute.org/events/2323/">1982 Lebanon war</a>, <a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/11/20/18080066/israel-palestine-intifadas-first-second">two Palestinian uprisings, known as intifadas</a>, and with the present <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/smoldering-iran-nuclear-crisis-risks-catching-fire-2023-05-05/">threat posed by a nuclear Iran</a>. </p>
<p>All these events evoke the memory of the Holocaust and are understood within the collective memory of threats of annihilation. This phenomenon represents, for many Israelis, an inability to separate their current situation from the vulnerability of the diaspora Jewish past. And this conflation of past and present continues to play a central role in <a href="https://doi.org/10.1386/iscc.7.2.123_1">Israeli politics, foreign policy and public discourse</a>. </p>
<p>The frequent comparisons between the Oct. 7 massacres and the Shoah are more, we believe, than just the default associations of a people submerged in <a href="https://cup.columbia.edu/book/the-generation-of-postmemory/9780231156523">Holocaust postmemory</a>, which refers to inherited and imagined memories of subsequent generations who did not personally experience the trauma. In seeking to describe the depths of evil they witnessed on Oct. 7, Israelis were making more than just an emotional connection between the Holocaust and the Oct. 7 massacres.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/562231/original/file-20231128-15-x8x3xx.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A man outside holding a placard that says that 7th October was the day that the most Jews have been killed since The Holocaust." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/562231/original/file-20231128-15-x8x3xx.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/562231/original/file-20231128-15-x8x3xx.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/562231/original/file-20231128-15-x8x3xx.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/562231/original/file-20231128-15-x8x3xx.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/562231/original/file-20231128-15-x8x3xx.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/562231/original/file-20231128-15-x8x3xx.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/562231/original/file-20231128-15-x8x3xx.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A protester holds a placard during a demonstration on Oct. 9 in London, outside of the prime minister’s residence.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/protester-holds-a-placard-which-states-that-7th-october-was-news-photo/1715821218?adppopup=true">Photo by Vuk Valcic/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images</a></span>
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<p>To help explain the logic of that connection, specific and reasonable comparisons can be made to better understand Hamas’ traumatic and devastating massacre of Israelis. Below are a few of the many parallels:</p>
<h2>1. Ideology and identification</h2>
<p>Just as the Nazis aimed to annihilate the Jews, Hamas and affiliated terrorist organizations share the same objective: the destruction of Jews. <a href="https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/hamas.asp">The 1988 Hamas charter</a> refers to “Jews” and not “Israelis” when calling for the destruction of these people.</p>
<p>While the <a href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/hamas-2017-document-full">2017 Hamas covenant</a> states that Hamas does not seek war with the Jews, but instead “<a href="https://www.wilsoncenter.org/article/doctrine-hamas">wages a struggle against the Zionists who occupy Palestine</a>,” the slaughter of Jews – many of whom were peace activists – in October has proven otherwise. </p>
<p>The national struggle of Hamas is predicated upon the conquest of land and elimination of the Jews. Hamas officials have subsequently promised to <a href="https://www.jpost.com/arab-israeli-conflict/article-771199">repeat Oct. 7 again and again</a> until Israel is annihilated.</p>
<h2>2. Indoctrination</h2>
<p>While the racial antisemitism of the Nazi regime differs from the antisemitism employed in the fundamentalist Islamic version of Hamas, <a href="https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/history/articles/the-nazi-roots-of-islamist-hate?ref=quillette.com">antisemitism is a key part of the struggle for both ideologies</a>. Indoctrination from an early age aimed at the dehumanization of the Jews is a key part of both how <a href="https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/indoctrinating-youth">Nazis taught young German students during the Third Reich</a> and in how <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/04/world/middleeast/to-shape-young-palestinians-hamas-creates-its-own-textbooks.html">Hamas educates children in Gaza</a>. </p>
<h2>3. Methods of killing and survival</h2>
<p>The horrors of Oct. 7 echo the brutal tactics Nazis used during the Holocaust, including not only murder but cruel humiliation of the victims. The testimonies of Oct. 7 survivors <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israeli-forensic-teams-describe-signs-torture-abuse-2023-10-15/">reveal the torture</a> of parents and children, sometimes in front of each other, including <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2023/11/17/world/israel-investigates-sexual-violence-hamas/index.html">rape and sexual violence</a>, mocking and lingering in the murder process as the terrorists <a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/idf-shows-foreign-press-raw-hamas-bodycam-videos-of-murder-torture-decapitation/">relished the atrocities</a> they committed.</p>
<p>When the <a href="https://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/exhibitions/warsaw_ghetto_testimonies/intro.asp">Jews in the Warsaw ghetto</a> realized that the end was near, they worked for months to prepare hiding places for themselves in their homes and created improvised bunkers, doing whatever they could to avoid capture and deportation. They did not imagine that the Nazis would come to eliminate the ghetto in a different way, entering the ghetto with flamethrowers and burning down one building after another. <a href="https://www.historytoday.com/archive/feature/warsaw-flames">Some Jews were burned alive</a>, while others fled outside and fell into the hands of the Nazis. </p>
<p>On Oct. 7, victims in the kibbutzim and communities near Gaza hid in fortified safe rooms designed to protect them from rocket attacks. Hamas terrorists went from house to house, burning one after the other so that inhabitants would be forced to flee from their protected shelters. Others were <a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/corpses-and-kids-bikes-burned-homes-and-death-in-kibbutz-where-hamas-butchered-100">burned in their homes</a>.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/562244/original/file-20231128-24-g2qbya.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Two hooded men burning a white and blue Israeli flag." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/562244/original/file-20231128-24-g2qbya.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/562244/original/file-20231128-24-g2qbya.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/562244/original/file-20231128-24-g2qbya.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/562244/original/file-20231128-24-g2qbya.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/562244/original/file-20231128-24-g2qbya.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/562244/original/file-20231128-24-g2qbya.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/562244/original/file-20231128-24-g2qbya.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Two hooded demonstrators burn a flag of Israel on the bridge linking Spain and France on Nov. 11, 2023.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/two-hooded-demonstrators-burned-a-flag-of-israel-at-the-news-photo/1779070556?adppopup=true">Javi Julio/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images</a></span>
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<h2>4. Using Jews in the killing process</h2>
<p>On Oct. 7, Hamas terrorists took a hostage from Nahal Oz, one of the kibbutzim in the south, and <a href="https://twitter.com/AvivaKlompas/status/1714100611572973893">forced him to go from house to house to knock on doors and lure his neighbors outside</a>. Afterward, they murdered him. Holocaust scholars have described such episodes from World War II in which Jews were forced to cooperate as “choiceless choices.”</p>
<h2>5. Terminology</h2>
<p>The word Shoah is used in the Bible to describe danger from neighboring nations, signifying distress, pain, torment, calamity and a <a href="https://www.haaretz.com/jewish/holocaust-remembrance-day/2019-05-01/ty-article/.premium/shoah-how-a-biblical-term-became-the-hebrew-word-for-holocaust/0000017f-dbbf-d3ff-a7ff-fbbf41b70000">“day of destruction</a>.” While it later came to define the total Nazi extermination of Jews in the 1940s, <a href="https://stljewishlight.org/news/israel-news/the-holocaust-all-over-again-the-massacre-at-the-israeli-rave-in-survivors-words/">multiple testimonies</a> collected from survivors of the Oct. 7 massacres use the <a href="https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/middle-east/felt-like-holocaust-terrified-israelis-recount-hamas-terror-after-surprise-invasion/articleshow/104261870.cms?from=mdr">term once again today</a>, echoing the biblical definition, to signal a day of desolation, darkness, destruction and gloom.</p>
<p>The words used to describe events are often loaded with emotional associations; the power and meaning of words that attempt to convey the depths of traumatic experiences cannot be discounted.</p>
<h2>Not the same</h2>
<p>There is a difference between pointing out similarities and creating shallow comparisons. We are aware of the tendency, especially in the political sphere, to resort to simplistic, symbolic and performative comparisons to the Holocaust – such as Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, Gilad Erdan, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/31/world/middleeast/israel-erdan-yellow-star-of-david.html#:%7E:text=Erdan%20vowed%20that%20he%20and,letters%20on%20his%20left%20breast.">donning a yellow star with the words “Never Again”</a> on Oct. 31.</p>
<p>Oct. 7 is not the same as the Holocaust. Even so, we can use the study of the Holocaust to understand the traumatic and devastating encounters between Hamas terrorists and their victims on Oct. 7.</p>
<p>It might be a trivialization of the Holocaust to simply label Hamas as the “new Nazis,” but our analysis reveals that recognizing their eliminationist antisemitism means there can be no return to the pre-Oct. 7 status quo, when <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/11/26/netanyahu-hamas-israel-gaza/">Israel’s policy was to accommodate Hamas’</a> control of the Gaza strip.</p>
<p>Despite the natural tendency to turn away from the most shocking and the most horrific manifestations of human evil, there are times when gazes must not be averted, when horror must be confronted in order to understand the motivations of the perpetrators and the responses of the victims and the survivors. </p>
<p>In this case, at what point do we ignore analogies that seem deliberate and intentional? As Holocaust scholars, we recognize why Israelis are stuck – and struck – by the traumatic nature of Oct. 7.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/218009/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The Holocaust is not just a memory in Israel. It’s part of how Israelis understand themselves and their country − and it’s playing a part in how the country responds to the Hamas massacres of Oct. 7.Avinoam Patt, Director, Center for Judaic Studies, University of ConnecticutLiat Steir-Livny, Associate Professor of Holocaust, Film & Cultural Studies, Sapir Academic CollegeLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2140452023-11-30T10:21:07Z2023-11-30T10:21:07ZKindertransport’s complex legacy: saving children from the Nazis while leaving their families behind<p>When 200 unaccompanied child refugees arrived in Harwich, Essex, in early December 1938, they did so through a new visa-waiver scheme. These children from Berlin were escaping Nazi persecution, and eventually more than 10,000 children – mostly from Jewish families – would arrive in Britain via the same process. </p>
<p>December 2 marks the 85th commemoration of the <a href="https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/kindertransport-1938-40">Kindertransport</a>. And compared to some of today’s anti-refugee rhetoric, the scheme looks like a successful official rescue mission. But is that true?</p>
<p>November 9 and 10 1938 saw state-sponsored <a href="https://www.pogromnovember1938.co.uk/viewer/">violence</a> perpetrated against Jewish citizens across the German Reich. The British government was subsequently put under <a href="https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/6-stories-of-the-kindertransport">pressure</a> from the public to help continental Jewish citizens.</p>
<p>But prime minister Neville Chamberlain’s government was <a href="https://www.sussex.ac.uk/library/speccoll/collection_catalogues/tclists/tc62.html">reluctant</a> to offer refuge to Jews, fearing for the UK’s security, the cost and the anti-foreign and antisemitic sentiments of some of the electorate. So, it came up with the compromise of only admitting unaccompanied children rather than whole families. Chamberlain also <a href="https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1938/nov/21/refugees-government-proposals">refused</a> to commit governmental financial or organisational help, saying: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>The number of refugees which Great Britain can agree to admit … is limited by the capacity of the voluntary organisations dealing with the refugee problem to undertake the responsibility for selecting, receiving and maintaining a further number of refugees. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>To only admit the children but not their families, is clearly one of the most controversial aspects of the Kindertransport. Some experts have <a href="http://www.jstor.org/stable/42943756">suggested</a> that parting from your own children was seen as more normal in the 1930s. However, home secretary Samuel Hoare that year <a href="https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1938/nov/21/racial-religious-and-political-minorities">discussed</a> the pain that the parents were likely to experience when parting from their children: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>I could not help thinking what a terrible dilemma it was to the Jewish parents in Germany to have to choose between sending their children to a foreign country, into the unknown, and continuing to live in the terrible conditions to which they are now reduced in Germany.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Without a doubt, it would have been better for all if the UK had admitted parents as well as children. My own <a href="https://issuu.com/acesupporthub/docs/aberystwyth_aces_and_child_refugees_report_eng__fi">research</a> has shown that child refugees were adversely affected by this separation. </p>
<p>Kindertransport refugee <a href="http://www.kindertransport.eu/">Eva Mosbacher</a> was a well-adjusted 12-year-old from Nuremberg who settled in successfully with her carers in Cambridge. Nevertheless, she continuously expressed her longing to be reunited with her birth parents in her letters. In 1942, her parents were deported with 1000 other Jews and murdered in the Belzyce ghetto in Poland. After the war, Eva stayed in the UK and worked as a nurse, but sadly took her own life in 1963. </p>
<p>The fact that the UK government did not financially and organisationally support the Kindertransport had undesirable consequences. Some MPs <a href="https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1938/nov/21/racial-religious-and-political-minorities">expressed</a> the view that only those children who would be of benefit to the UK should be admitted. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="A statue showing a group of children carrying suitcases." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/556867/original/file-20231031-27-v509p2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/556867/original/file-20231031-27-v509p2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/556867/original/file-20231031-27-v509p2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/556867/original/file-20231031-27-v509p2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/556867/original/file-20231031-27-v509p2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/556867/original/file-20231031-27-v509p2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/556867/original/file-20231031-27-v509p2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The bronze Kindertransport statue by sculptors Frank Meisler and Arie Oviada at Liverpool Street Railway Station in central London.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/london-uk-october-11-2014-bronze-263419583">Philip Willcocks/Shutterstock</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This was <a href="https://uclpress.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.14324/111.444.jhs.2020v51.005">reflected</a> in the selection criteria of the refugee children’s committee, an interdenominational umbrella organisation based in the UK and tasked with overseeing the Kindertransport. Largely staffed by volunteers, it tried to only admit children who did not have any special needs or health issues. This seems especially cruel as by 1938, many of youngsters had lived under the stressful conditions of discrimination and persecution for years. </p>
<p>The refugee children’s committee also <a href="https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10100969/">rejected</a> applications if any illnesses or additional needs were mentioned. Even children whose parents had mental health problems were rejected. Born on April 26 1926, <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9546261/">Herta Baumfeld</a> was not accepted for the Kindertransport because her mother was in a psychiatric institution. Herta was subsequently murdered at the Maly Trostinec concentration camp in Belarus on September 18 1942.</p>
<p>Financing the escape of the child refugees and their resettlement in the UK was especially difficult without the help of the UK government. In fact, the government <a href="https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/The_Kindertransport/ztrfEAAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0">demanded</a> that a “guarantee” of £50 per child was raised by volunteers to indemnify against any expense. This rule limited the number of children that could be given refuge.</p>
<h2>What made the Kindertransport possible?</h2>
<p>The Kindertransport happened because of the generosity and commitment of private citizens, charities and voluntary organisations in the UK. The majority of refugees were fostered by individual families who volunteered for the task. </p>
<p>Furthermore, the financial burden was shouldered by private sources. Former Prime minister Lord Baldwin had launched a <a href="https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/lords/1939/jul/05/refugee-problem">public appeal</a> raising more than £500,000 and the Anglo-Jewish community raised more than £5 million for refugees. </p>
<p>Some foster carers also managed to raise the £50 guarantee themselves. As my <a href="https://www.honno.co.uk/books/finding-refuge">research</a> shows, Lia Blum from Czechoslovakia was fostered by a teacher from Ynys Mȏn, north Wales, who put up the guarantee. </p>
<p>Others helped within their means. For example, the guarantee for <a href="https://www.nicholaswinton.com/the-list">Anneliese Adler</a> was raised by the Woodcraft Folk, a youth-led organisation for children and young people in Tooting, London. Anneliese was fostered by a woman near Bristol. However, the limited funds restricted the number of children that could be rescued.</p>
<h2>Reliance on volunteers</h2>
<p>In recent years, the UK government has once again relied on the support of volunteers to look after refugees. Following the <a href="https://www.unhcr.org/uk/news/stories/2015-year-europes-refugee-crisis">refugee crisis of 2015</a>, it launched the <a href="https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/694051/Community_Sponsorship_LA_guidance.pdf">community sponsorship scheme</a>, which relied on volunteers to raise £4500 per adult they wished to sponsor. </p>
<p>And after the invasion of Ukraine by Russia in 2022, the UK government once again looked for volunteer hosts via the <a href="https://www.gov.uk/register-interest-homes-ukraine">homes for Ukraine</a> scheme. </p>
<p>Given what happened 85 years ago, it’s time we learned the lessons of the past and created a stable government scheme to assist refugees of all ages.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/214045/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Andrea Hammel received funding from the National Heritage Lottery Fund via the Second World War Partnership Programme led by the IWM. She has also received funding from the Adverse Childhood Experiences Support Hub and receives funding from the Association of Jewish Refugees (AJR). She is affiliated with Aberaid, a charity that assists refugees in Ceredigion, and internationally.. </span></em></p>10,000 children, from mostly Jewish families, were saved from the Nazis by the Kindertransport visa-waiver scheme, which started in 1938.Andrea Hammel, Professor of German, Aberystwyth UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2179082023-11-23T19:02:36Z2023-11-23T19:02:36ZThe long, dark history of antisemitism in Australia<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/560632/original/file-20231121-4588-fh4wbs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=223%2C50%2C6539%2C4451&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Author provided</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>Readers are advised this essay contains historical terms and images which are now considered outdated and offensive.</em></p>
<p>Antisemitic incidents have spiked in Australia since the October 7 attack by Hamas militants on Israeli communities outside Gaza and the subsequent Israeli war against Hamas inside the coastal strip.</p>
<p>According to the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, there were 368 anti-Jewish incidents reported in Australia between October 8 and November 19. This compares to a total of 478 antisemitic incidents for the entire year from October 2021–22.</p>
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<p>As Liberal MP Julian Leeser, who is Jewish, <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/it-s-off-the-charts-how-antisemitism-surged-after-october-7-20231116-p5ekm0.html">said</a>: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>We’re seeing things that I haven’t seen before in my lifetime – Jewish children afraid to wear their uniforms to school, people afraid to wear their Magen David [Star of David], afraid to wear their kippah. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Yet, antisemitism is not a new phenomenon in Australia. In fact, it has a <a href="https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-History-of-Antisemitism/Weitzman-Williams-Wald/p/book/9781138369443">long history</a>, which I have spent a half century researching. And this history is almost as long as European settlement itself.</p>
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<h2>Emergence of prominent anti-Jewish voices</h2>
<p>There have been Jews in Australia from the time of British settlement. As <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Australian-Genesis-Jewish-Convicts-Settlers/dp/0522847773">research</a> has shown, they arrived as convicts in chains, yet with the absence of institutional antisemitism in the colonies, they were able to thrive. In fact, a Jew was elected to the Legislative Assembly in Western Australia in 1848, a full decade before the first Jew was elected to Britain’s parliament.</p>
<p>Australia, however, was not immune from what the historian Robert Wistrich has <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Antisemitism-Longest-Robert-Solomon-Wistrich/dp/0805210148">described</a> as “the longest hatred”.</p>
<p>Open antisemitism started to become prevalent in the 1880s with the emergence of Australian nationalism and the campaign for federation. It was further fuelled by fears of an influx of Jews fleeing the pogroms in Russia.</p>
<p>Despite the small numbers of Russian refugees who did arrive, trade unions, politicians and the media decried their presence. The Bulletin (Sydney) and the sensationalist weekly Truth (Sydney) both gave voice to anti-Jewish and other racial prejudices of the day. The Bulletin <a href="https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-History-of-Antisemitism/Weitzman-Williams-Wald/p/book/9781138369443">commented</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Even the Chinaman is cheaper in the end than the Hebrew […] the one with the tail is preferable to the one with the Talmud every time. We owe much to the Jew – in more sense than one – but until he works, until a fair percentage of him produces, he must always be against democracy.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>By the late 19th and early 20th centuries, anti-Jewish sentiments could be <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Edge-Diaspora-Centuries-Settlement-Australia/dp/0841914249">found</a> across the political spectrum.</p>
<p>The Labor Party figure Frank Anstey, for instance, republished his anti-Jewish newspaper articles as a pamphlet in 1915 entitled <a href="https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/anstey-francis-george-frank-5038">The Kingdom of Shylock</a>. <a href="https://halloffame.melbournepressclub.com/article/john-norton">John Norton</a>, a nationalist publisher and NSW parliamentarian, expressed similar prejudices in his Truth newspaper. This undercurrent of antisemitism led to the exclusion of Jews from sporting and social clubs and some businesses. Yet, very few eastern European Jews actually settled in Australia during this time.</p>
<p>The <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Edge-Diaspora-Centuries-Settlement-Australia/dp/0841914249">largest wave of Jewish refugees</a> occurred from 1938 to 1939, just before the second world war, and again from 1946 to 1954 with Holocaust survivors. They were again met with an antisemitic outcry in Australian newspapers, as well as in statements by members of parliament. Resolutions were also passed against Jewish migration by pressure groups, such as the forerunner of the Returned and Services League of Australia (RSL), the Australian Natives’ Association (a group advocating for federation and later the White Australia policy) and various unions.</p>
<p>In May 1939, Sir Frank Clarke, president of the Victorian Legislative Council, <a href="https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-History-of-Antisemitism/Weitzman-Williams-Wald/p/book/9781138369443">proclaimed</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Hundreds of weedy East Europeans […] slinking, rat-faced men under five feet in height and with a chest development of about 20 inches […] worked in backyard factories in Carlton and other localities in the north of Melbourne for two or three shillings a week pocket money and their keep.</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Anti-Zionist agenda influenced by Soviet propaganda</h2>
<p>After the war, The Bulletin, in particular, continued its anti-Jewish immigration campaign with cartoons depicting Jewish stereotypes. The sentiments around immigration were summed up by Henry (“Jo”) Gullett, a Liberal member of federal parliament, who <a href="https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-History-of-Antisemitism/Weitzman-Williams-Wald/p/book/9781138369443">said</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We are not compelled to accept the unwanted of the world at the dictate of the United Nations or anyone else. Neither should Australia be a dumping ground for people whom Europe itself, in the course of 2,000 years, has not been able to absorb.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In response to the anti-Jewish hysteria, Arthur Calwell, the newly appointed minister of immigration, <a href="https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-History-of-Antisemitism/Weitzman-Williams-Wald/p/book/9781138369443">introduced</a> administrative policies that ensured the Jewish community remained a tiny minority (0.5%) of the population. These restrictions included a 25% limit on Jewish passengers on ships bound for Australia, which was later extended to planes.</p>
<p>Locally organised antisemitism also emerged in the 1950s and 60s. A young journalist, Eric Butler, promoted the <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/138098">Douglas Social Credit movement</a>, which blamed the banking system for the Great Depression and, by implication, the Jews. </p>
<p>After the war, Butler formed a far-right organisation called the <a href="https://catalogue.nla.gov.au/catalog/1302663">Australian League of Rights</a>, which became a major force in promoting antisemitic libels, including the fraudulent <a href="https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/protocols-of-the-elders-of-zion">Protocols of the Elders of Zion</a>. By 1960, the league had become a nationwide movement.</p>
<p>Alongside the nativists were supporters of various eastern European fascist movements. They had slipped through the refugee selection process after the war and migrated to Australia as displaced persons. Some established branches of the antisemitic organisations they had belonged to in Europe, such as the <a href="https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/hungarian-nazis-arrow-cross-party">Hungarian Arrow Cross</a> and the <a href="https://www.theholocaustexplained.org/resistance-responses-collaboration/collaboration-outside-of-germany/croatia/">Ustaša, a Croatian fascist movement</a>. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/nazi-orders-for-jews-to-wear-a-star-were-hateful-but-far-from-unique-a-historian-traces-the-long-history-of-antisemitic-badges-199654">Nazi orders for Jews to wear a star were hateful, but far from unique – a historian traces the long history of antisemitic badges</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>After the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, some on the far left in Australia began promoting an anti-Israel agenda, particularly on <a href="https://fathomjournal.org/the-monash-soviet-and-israel-a-case-study-of-how-the-australian-campus-far-left-lost-its-way-after-the-1967-six-day-war/">university campuses</a>. This anti-Zionist agenda was deeply <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=glEz1s_yW2A">influenced by Soviet propaganda</a>. From the late 1950s onwards, the Soviets had tried to infiltrate the Middle East and developed an antisemitic and anti-Zionist propaganda machine to facilitate this. </p>
<p>In 1963, Trofim Kichko, a Ukrainian history professor, <a href="https://ukrainianjewishencounter.org/en/honored-antisemite-how-trofim-kichko-became-the-star-of-anti-zionism/">published</a> a vitriolic antisemitic booklet titled Judaism Without Embellishment, which included attacks on Zionism. After an international outcry, the booklet was withdrawn. However, following Israel’s victory in the 1967 war, Kichko was rehabilitated and some of his venomous images were republished. </p>
<p>In 1969, the Sovetskaya Rossiya newspaper <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books/about/Let_My_People_Go.html?id=iJR5DwAAQBAJ&redir_esc=y">compared</a> Zionism with fascism, implying Jews were Nazis. It also published an article saying “Zionism is the ideology that justifies war, killing and oppression”. The official Soviet newspaper, Pravda, referred to “the Israeli barbarians” and “a reactionary Zionist doctrine”.</p>
<p>The narrative that Israel was a racist colonial state was also reinforced by the Soviet Union, which the Australian Jewish leader Isi Leibler once <a href="https://www.jpost.com/magazine/leiblers-legacy-426036">described</a> as “the evil empire”. </p>
<p>The impact of this anti-Zionist rhetoric often morphed into antisemitism on Australian campuses. The Australian Union of Students, for example, had come under Trotskyist and Maoist influences in the early 1970s and proposed anti-Israel resolutions. Members of the Jewish Students movement who campaigned against these resolutions were physically attacked. </p>
<p>After the Hamas attacks on October 7, this anti-Israel narrative developed by the Soviets decades ago has again become part of the antisemitic discourse we’ve seen both in Australia and around the world. It coalesces with the theme that Zionism is the new Nazism. These issues have <a href="https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2023-10-29/antisemitism-college-campus-israel-hamas-palestine">again</a> been <a href="https://dallasexpress.com/education/zionism-nazism-painted-on-college-grounds/">magnified</a> on <a href="https://dallasexpress.com/education/zionism-nazism-painted-on-college-grounds/">university campuses</a>. </p>
<h2>How antisemitism is evolving today</h2>
<p><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Changing-Face-Anti-Semitism-Ancient-Present/dp/019534121X">Research</a> into current antisemitism has demonstrated it takes three principal forms. It begins with religious anti-Judaism, then mutates into racial antisemitism, and, most recently, political antisemitism associated with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in which ostensible criticisms of Israel can <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2023/11/04/us/us-students-impacted-by-israel-hamas-war/index.html">morph</a> into an irrational hatred of Jews. </p>
<p>Often referred to as the “new antisemitism”, this third manifestation constitutes a virulent strain in both high schools and universities. </p>
<p>As in other parts of the world, antisemitism in Australia has been prevalent among those on the radical right and radical left, as well as with extremist Islamic groups, beginning in the 1980s. Spikes in antisemitism are often associated with events in the Middle East and relate to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/we-tracked-antisemitic-incidents-in-australia-over-four-years-this-is-when-they-are-most-likely-to-occur-154728">We tracked antisemitic incidents in Australia over four years. This is when they are most likely to occur</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>The resurgence of extreme nationalist and white supremacist movements has been another major factor behind antisemitism in recent years. In Australia, organisations such as <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/religion/antipodean-resistance-the-rise-and-goals-of-australias-new-nazis/10094794">Antipodean Resistance</a> and Geelong Chemtrails have emerged recently, propagating Holocaust denial and replacement ideologies, especially on <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/apr/27/holocaust-denial-leaflets-at-australian-universities-spark-confrontation">university campuses</a>. </p>
<p>Since 1989, the Executive Council of Australian Jewry has monitored the level of antisemitism in Australia. The number of reported incidents has <a href="https://www.ecaj.org.au/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/ECAJ-Antisemitism-Report-2022.pdf">risen steadily</a> since then, although Australia’s population has also grown. These incidents include abusive emails, mail and phone calls; graffiti; verbal harassment and abuse (including the <a href="https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/education-department-ordered-to-pay-compensation-over-brighton-secondary-college-antisemitism-20230914-p5e4l8.html">bullying of Jewish children</a> at schools); and physical violence against individuals and institutions. </p>
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<p>Online harassment is the greatest concern today. During the brief <a href="https://www.brandeis.edu/crown/publications/crown-conversations/cc-10.html">Israel-Hamas conflict</a> in May 2021, Australia saw an increase in verbal abuse online, particularly targeting Jewish students at universities.</p>
<p>The medium may be new, but the sentiments are not. Those with antisemitic beliefs continue to <a href="https://theconversation.com/gaza-and-ukraine-are-separate-conflicts-but-conspiracy-theorists-are-trying-to-link-the-two-on-social-media-new-research-215803">propagate</a> traditional anti-Jewish stereotypes, such as the “international Jewish conspiracy” and “Jewish-Nazi analogy”, linked to Holocaust denial. Conspiracy theories emerged again during the COVID pandemic, with some right-wing groups claiming it was a Jewish plot.</p>
<p>I hope a new narrative that is both pro-Israel and pro-Palestine will emerge from the current conflict, which seeks dialogue and compromise between the two sides. </p>
<hr>
<p><em>This piece is based partially on a chapter written by the author that was published in <a href="https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-History-of-Antisemitism/Weitzman-Williams-Wald/p/book/9781138369443">The Routledge History of Antisemitism</a>.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/217908/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Suzanne Rutland has received an Australian Research Council grant for her research on the Australian Jewry and funding from the Pratt Foundation, as well as an Australian Prime Ministers Centre (APMC) fellowship for her research on Soviet Jewry and Australia. She is also involved with numerous NGOs, including the Australian Jewish Historical Society (patron), the Australian Association for Jewish Studies (past president and committee member), and the Australian government’s expert delegation to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. In addition, she is a board member of the Freilich Project for the Study of Bigotry at ANU; she is on an academic advisory committee at the Sydney Jewish Museum; and she is an Australian board member for Boys Town Jerusalem. These roles are all undertaken in an honorary capacity. She is also writing the history of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry in an honorary capacity.</span></em></p>There have been 368 reported anti-Jewish incidents in Australia since the Gaza war began. But antisemitism has been a running theme in the country since the mid-1800s.Suzanne Rutland, Professor of Hebrew, Biblical and Jewish Studies, University of SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2164112023-10-30T12:31:49Z2023-10-30T12:31:49ZIn the Israel-Hamas war, children are the ultimate pawns – and ultimate victims<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/556367/original/file-20231027-21-3x41x9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=20%2C20%2C1862%2C1020&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Both Palestinian children in Gaza, as shown on left, and Israeli children, as seen on the right, have been hurt, killed and kidnapped in the Israel-Hamas war.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Mahmud Hams/AFP via Getty Images/Roy Rochlin/Getty Images </span></span></figcaption></figure><p>In 1903, a local mob killed <a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/how-a-small-pogrom-in-russia-changed-the-course-of-history/">49 Jews</a>, including several children, and raped and wounded 600 others, in the city of <a href="https://yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/kishinev">Kishinev</a>, then part of the Russian Empire. These three days of violence later became known as the <a href="https://history.stanford.edu/publications/pogrom-kishinev-and-tilt-history">Kishinev pogrom</a>.</p>
<p>A few days later, the Jewish-Russian poet <a href="https://yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/bialik_hayim_nahman">Hayim Nahman Bialik</a> published a Hebrew poem that every Israeli school child still knows today.</p>
<p>I am a <a href="https://vivo.brown.edu/display/obartov">scholar of the Holocaust</a> and genocide. When thinking about the unfolding Israel-Hamas war, I am reminded of this Bialik poem, “<a href="https://allpoetry.com/On-The-Slaughter">On the Slaughter</a>.” It laments Jewish helplessness and victimhood – and condemns apathy to violence, including the murder of children. </p>
<p>Bialik writes: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>“And damned be he who says: Avenge!<br>
Such vengeance, for the blood of a small child,<br>
Satan has yet to devise.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Hamas militants killed <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/10/unicef-cost-gaza-war-children/675780/">approximately 30 Israeli children</a> when they attacked civilians on Oct. 7, 2023, killing more than 1,400 people altogether. At least 20 Israeli children remain hostage in Gaza.</p>
<p>Since Oct. 7, Israeli airstrikes have killed more than <a href="https://www.unicef.org/press-releases/child-casualties-gaza-growing-stain-our-collective-conscience">2,000 Palestinian children</a> and more than <a href="https://us18.campaign-archive.com/?e=b22c3309fa&u=d3bceadb340d6af4daf1de00d&id=f900f2ffa4">8,000 people overall</a>, according to the Hamas-run Ministry of Health in Gaza. </p>
<p>Israel’s attacks on Gaza began intensifying on Oct. 28, as Israeli <a href="https://apnews.com/article/israel-hamas-war-news-10-28-2023-c9bd7ecc5f4a9fe9d46486f66675244c">ground forces entered Gaza</a>.</p>
<p>Both sides in this war have focused on the <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-67206277">deaths and kidnapping</a> of children, sharing images and videos of the children as a testament to the other side’s cruelty.</p>
<p>Particularly, Hamas’ <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/nato-ministers-shown-horrific-video-hamas-attack-2023-10-12/">slaughter of Israeli children</a> evokes collective Jewish memories of pogroms and the Holocaust – and the attempt to annihilate the Jewish people. </p>
<p>For Palestinians, too, the <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/24/middleeast/israel-hamas-gaza-war-tuesday-intl-hnk/index.html">killing of their children</a> represents both the injustice of Israeli rule and occupation, and the perceived attempt to stop Palestinians from having their own country. The collective Palestinian memory of <a href="https://www.un.org/unispal/about-the-nakba/">the Nakba in 1948</a>, when Israeli forces killed thousands of Palestinians and pushed out 750,000 people from their homes, is replete with tales of children who lost both their homeland and their parents.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/556365/original/file-20231027-29-p52xjj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Photos of children are seen sitting in empty baby strollers in a green field." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/556365/original/file-20231027-29-p52xjj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/556365/original/file-20231027-29-p52xjj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/556365/original/file-20231027-29-p52xjj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/556365/original/file-20231027-29-p52xjj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/556365/original/file-20231027-29-p52xjj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/556365/original/file-20231027-29-p52xjj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/556365/original/file-20231027-29-p52xjj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Baby strollers with images of young Israeli children taken hostage by Hamas are shown during a demonstration calling for their release in Paris on Oct. 26, 2023.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/baby-strollers-with-images-of-young-hostages-bibas-ariel-news-photo/1745589782?adppopup=true">Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>A new kind of protection</h2>
<p>Bialik ended up emigrating to what was then called Palestine in 1924, and today he is considered Israel’s national poet. </p>
<p>Bialik wrote a longer poem, titled “<a href="https://faculty.history.umd.edu/BCooperman/NewCity/Slaughter.html">In The City of Slaughter</a>,” in 1904, after he visited the site of the Kishinev pogrom. Bialik fumed against Jewish men for hiding, instead of protecting their wives and daughters from rape.</p>
<p>Bialik called for a new type of warlike Jewish manhood. If neither God nor the authorities could protect them from slaughter, Jews had to create a state of their own – and Jewish men had to learn to fight and kill.</p>
<p>Over the next four decades, <a href="https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250116253/inthemidstofcivilizedeurope">the numbers of slaughtered Jews</a>, including children, piled up. </p>
<p>In the Holocaust, Nazis and their collaborators killed an estimated 1.5 million <a href="https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/children-during-the-holocaust">Jewish children</a>. </p>
<p>It was this kind of violence against defenseless innocents that the establishment of <a href="https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/state-of-israel-proclaimed">Israel in 1948</a> was supposed to prevent. </p>
<h2>‘Never again’</h2>
<p>Most Jews who emigrated to Israel in the late 1940s were <a href="https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/106.1.299">Holocaust survivors</a>. They had experienced precisely the kind of defenselessness that Israel said it would never allow to happen again. Their sense of vulnerability and their memory of victimization were transmitted from one generation to another.</p>
<p>The popular slogan “<a href="https://www.neveragain.com">never again</a>,” referring to the Holocaust, meant what Bialik had intended: not only the prevention of violence against Jewish people, but a new breed of tough and brave Jewish fighters, prepared to die for their <a href="https://academic.oup.com/hgs/article-abstract/23/3/501/609753">new homeland</a>.</p>
<p>Israel’s failure to protect its people is partially why the Oct. 7 attacks were so shocking to the Israeli public. </p>
<p>The Israeli military’s <a href="https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/many-israelis-are-furious-at-their-governments-chaotic-recovery-efforts-after-hamas-attack">delayed response</a> left people in the attacked communities feeling utter helplessness. The intentional cruelty of Hamas’ killings, often <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/israel-video-of-hamas-terror-attacks-war-in-gaza/">videotaped and live-streamed</a>, reminded Israelis of past anti-Jewish violence. </p>
<h2>Children in Gaza</h2>
<p>In the Gaza Strip, meanwhile, <a href="https://www.npr.org/2023/10/19/1206479861/israel-gaza-hamas-children-population-war-palestinians">half of the population is younger than 18</a>.</p>
<p>In 2014, Israel airstrikes, coming in response to intense rocket fire from Gaza, killed <a href="https://www.btselem.org/press_releases/20160720_fatalities_in_gaza_conflict_2014">over 500 Palestinian children</a>. <a href="https://www.gov.il/en/Departments/General/israel-protection-and-hamas-exploitation-of-civilians-in-operation-protective-edge-july-2014">The Israeli government described</a> the children’s deaths as unfortunate, but unavoidable. The reasoning is that bombing presumed Hamas targets was much less risky and costly, in terms of Israeli lives, than a ground incursion into Gaza.</p>
<p>Since Oct. 7, Israel has carried out <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/25/world/middleeast/israel-gaza-airstrikes.html">unprecedentedly massive aerial bombardments</a> of Gaza.</p>
<p>The images of <a href="https://www.unicef.org/press-releases/child-casualties-gaza-growing-stain-our-collective-conscience">dead and mutilated Palestinian children</a> have served to mute some people’s criticism of Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks on Israelis – and to heighten other people’s sense of Palestinian innocence and Israeli brutality.</p>
<p>There are two major difference between this round of killing and previous ones, most prominently in 2014. </p>
<p>First, this time the violence began with the slaughter of over 1,400 Israelis.</p>
<p>Second, Israel’s current bombing campaign has killed more Palestinians, including children, than at any other time in the past. </p>
<p>Hamas’ slaughter of Jewish children is now being reciprocated by what the Israel Defense Forces <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/23/doctors-poets-families-babies-victims-of-israels-war-on-gaza">says are unintended</a> – but certain – killings of even larger numbers of Palestinian children.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/556366/original/file-20231027-21-agbqd6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Two men wearing orange vests carry the body of a dead boy. They are surrounded by other people who are yelling and crying." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/556366/original/file-20231027-21-agbqd6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/556366/original/file-20231027-21-agbqd6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/556366/original/file-20231027-21-agbqd6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/556366/original/file-20231027-21-agbqd6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/556366/original/file-20231027-21-agbqd6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/556366/original/file-20231027-21-agbqd6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/556366/original/file-20231027-21-agbqd6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Palestinians carry a dead boy following Israeli strikes on Gaza on Oct. 26, 2023.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/palestinian-members-from-the-civil-defence-carry-a-dead-boy-news-photo/1748763956?adppopup=true">Ahmed Zakot/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Children are the ultimate victims</h2>
<p>Both sides in the Israel-Hamas war are now flaunting and weaponizing their child victims to support their political causes. </p>
<p>For the Israelis and their supporters, the murder and kidnapping of children shows the <a href="https://www.axios.com/2023/10/17/israel-university-presidents-letter">inhumanity of Hamas</a> and its supporters – and fuels calls for violent retribution. </p>
<p>For Palestinians and their supporters, Israel’s killing of even more children in Gaza helps wipe away Hamas’ crimes and exposes Israel’s alleged <a href="https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/2023-10-25/ty-article/.premium/walkouts-protesting-gaza-genocide-planned-on-campuses-across-u-s/0000018b-66b9-d326-a39b-66b9b8130000">intent to kill all Palestinians</a>. </p>
<p>Many people have flooded social media with images and videos of killed Palestinian and Israeli children, as well as <a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/netanyahus-office-releases-horrifying-images-of-infants-murdered-by-hamas/">bloody crime scenes</a> where they were killed. </p>
<p>People have plastered <a href="https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2023-10-27/artists-kidnapped-from-israel-posters-being-torn-down-by-some">posters of kidnapped Israeli children</a> across the streets in American and European cities – and have <a href="https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/haaretz-today/2023-10-26/ty-article/.highlight/why-are-americans-tearing-down-posters-of-children-held-hostage-by-hamas/0000018b-6cce-d90b-a7df-7eceff960000">videotaped those who tear</a> them down. </p>
<p>But in Israel, at least, the media has mostly avoided showing images of both Jewish and Palestinian child victims. Showing kidnapped or killed Israeli children is considered demoralizing, and showing killed Palestinian children is considered to be enemy propaganda. In Gaza, people have been <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/palestinian-children-death-trauma-israel-bombing-hamas-rcna122113">photographed and recorded carrying and mourning dead children</a>, wrapped in <a href="https://twitter.com/Timesofgaza/status/1716127851613761715">blood-stained white cloth</a>.</p>
<p>Is this Satan’s vengeance for the violence of men? In his deepest hour of despair, Bialik never hoped for more violence as a response to a massacre. As <a href="https://benyehuda.org/read/6243">he wrote</a> 120 years ago:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“If there is justice – May it appear at once!<br>
But if it appears<br>
Only after I had been eradicated under the sky -<br>
May its throne be toppled forever!<br>
And may Heaven rot in everlasting evil.”</p>
</blockquote><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/216411/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Omer Bartov does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>For Jewish people, Hamas’ violence against children was reminiscent of the Holocaust. For Palestinians, The Israel Defense Force’s killing their children reminds them of a painful past, too.Omer Bartov, Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Brown UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2136352023-09-22T12:30:15Z2023-09-22T12:30:15ZNazi Germany had admirers among American religious leaders – and white supremacy fueled their support<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/549198/original/file-20230919-19-unvudq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=3%2C1%2C1019%2C789&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Thousands of people attend a pro-Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden in New York in May 1934, with counterprotestors outside. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/approximately-20-000-people-attend-a-pro-nazi-germany-rally-news-photo/2961927?adppopup=true">Anthony Potter Collection/Hulton Archive via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Each September marks the anniversary of <a href="https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-nuremberg-race-laws">Nazi Germany’s Nuremberg Laws</a>, whose passage in 1935 stripped Jews of their German citizenship and banned “race-mixing” between Jews and other Germans. </p>
<p>Eighty-eight years later, the United States is facing <a href="https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/antisemitic-incidents-on-rise-across-the-u-s-report-finds">rising antisemitism</a> and <a href="https://www.americanprogress.org/article/white-supremacy-returned-mainstream-politics/">white supremacist ideology</a> – including two <a href="https://www.newsweek.com/florida-neo-nazis-chant-above-freeway-sickening-frightening-video-1825481">neo-Nazi demonstrations</a> in Florida <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/neo-nazi-groups-spew-hate-disney-world-orlando-officials-say-rcna103186">in September 2023 alone</a>.</p>
<p>The Nuremberg Laws were a critical juncture on the Third Reich’s path toward bringing about “<a href="https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691172422/hitlers-american-model">the full-scale creation of a racist state … on the road to the Holocaust</a>,” according to <a href="https://law.yale.edu/james-q-whitman">legal historian James Whitman</a>. Yet across the Atlantic, many Americans were unconcerned, and even admiring – including some religious leaders.</p>
<p>As <a href="https://abroad.gmu.edu/profiles/mgarrit2">a political scientist</a> and <a href="https://sociology.sas.upenn.edu/people/melissa-wilde">a sociologist</a>, we wanted to examine what Americans thought about Hitler and the National Socialist Party before the U.S. entered World War II – and see what lessons those findings might hold for our country today. <a href="https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-4446.13020">Our recent research</a>, which focused on religious publications, suggests that Americans’ support for Nazi Germany is best explained by belief in white supremacy.</p>
<h2>View from the pulpit</h2>
<p>In 1935, Adolf Hitler entered his third year in power and legally solidified the Nazi regime’s racist policies. During this period, Jews, Romani, homosexuals, the mentally or physically disabled and African-Germans were all targets of Hitler’s wrath. Thousands of refugees fled the country in search of safety – <a href="https://exhibitions.ushmm.org/americans-and-the-holocaust/how-many-refugees-came-to-the-united-states-from-1933-1945">many to U.S. shores</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/549199/original/file-20230919-21-i48mvg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A faded chart shows many small circles in varying percentages of black and white." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/549199/original/file-20230919-21-i48mvg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/549199/original/file-20230919-21-i48mvg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=418&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/549199/original/file-20230919-21-i48mvg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=418&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/549199/original/file-20230919-21-i48mvg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=418&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/549199/original/file-20230919-21-i48mvg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=525&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/549199/original/file-20230919-21-i48mvg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=525&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/549199/original/file-20230919-21-i48mvg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=525&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Chart from Nazi Germany showing the regime’s racial categorizations under the Nuremberg Laws of 1935.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/chart-from-nazi-germany-explaining-the-nuremberg-laws-of-news-photo/113494189?adppopup=true">Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Individual public opinion data about Nazi Germany is not available for this period; Gallup’s first survey on the topic <a href="https://news.gallup.com/opinion/polling-matters/232949/american-public-opinion-holocaust.aspx">was conducted in 1938</a>. Instead, we used a database of periodicals from religious organizations that one of us, Wilde, had originally compiled for a book on <a href="https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520303218/birth-control-battles">views of contraception</a> in the early 20th century. Using these periodicals, <a href="https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-4446.13020">we examined the views</a> of leaders in 25 of the United States’ most prominent religious groups.</p>
<p>In the 1930s, the U.S. was a far more religious country than it is today, with around 95% of Americans claiming membership in a religious denomination. The groups in our sample include <a href="https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/7MAKH">82% of Americans who reported religious membership</a> at the time. Most are white Protestant denominations, but our sample also included Roman Catholics, three Jewish groups, Black churches, and smaller groups like Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. </p>
<p>We argue that while these texts are not necessarily representative of individual members’ views, they are evidence of the views religious elites tried to cultivate in large segments of the American population.</p>
<h2>‘Unequaled in cruelty’</h2>
<p>These periodicals dispel the notion that Americans did not know, or understand, the gravity of the situation in Germany at the time. A third of the denominations <a href="https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-4446.13020">in our sample</a> were critical of Hitler, and their alarm demonstrates that ample information was available about the escalating situation in Nazi Germany. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/549196/original/file-20230919-21-q820hy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A yellow and white illustration of a man's head next to a swastika, with his eyes covered by the phrase 'business as usual.' The bottom says 'America open your eyes!'" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/549196/original/file-20230919-21-q820hy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/549196/original/file-20230919-21-q820hy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=755&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/549196/original/file-20230919-21-q820hy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=755&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/549196/original/file-20230919-21-q820hy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=755&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/549196/original/file-20230919-21-q820hy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=949&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/549196/original/file-20230919-21-q820hy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=949&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/549196/original/file-20230919-21-q820hy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=949&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A poster designed by Jean Carlu for Fortune magazine in 1941.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/america-open-your-eyes-poster-by-jean-carlu-news-photo/526779530?adppopup=true">swim ink 2 llc/Corbis Historical via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>These groups, which were both Christian and Jewish, wrote about “the omnipresent terror that grips every town and hamlet”; the German concentration or “education camps”; and the number of people jailed, sent to camps, killed or sterilized. Leaders of Conservative Judaism warned that “German Jewry is on the way to extinction.” The Universalist General Convention described the situation in Germany as “unequaled in cruelty and brutality even by the Spanish Inquisition.”</p>
<p>On the other end of the spectrum, religious leaders from the Norwegian Lutheran Church, which has long since merged with other denominations, emphasized that Hitler was <a href="https://archive.nytimes.com/learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/19/aug-19-1934-german-voters-approve-hitler-as-fuhrer/">legitimately elected</a> and enjoyed strong support among the German people. Another article recounted a recent trip to Germany, writing that “what we interpret as militarism” is a manifestation of support for “the program of Hitler” and “the common good.” The Presbyterian Church in the U.S. – a white Southern denomination that later merged with other Presbyterian denominations – wrote of Hitler’s regime <a href="https://archive.org/details/sim_presbyterians-today_1935-05_25_5/page/262/mode/2up">making “effort[s] toward social justice”</a> with reforms for illegitimate children.</p>
<p>And while some religious elites sympathetic to Hitler acknowledged that the Nazis’ tactics were unsavory, they suggested “the means do not, taken by themselves, condemn the end.”</p>
<h2>Finding the pattern</h2>
<p>As we analyzed the periodicals, we classified leaders’ writings into four categories. Beyond groups that clearly sympathized with Hitler or criticized him, the largest number were ambivalent, with mixed views. Others were “distant,” barely commenting on events in Europe. </p>
<p>We found that two main factors <a href="https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-4446.13020">explain religious elites’ views of Hitler in 1935</a>. The first is whether their group embraced white supremacist ideas. The second is whether they were atop the religious hierarchy – that is, mainstream Protestant denominations whose members would not have been at risk of persecution in Germany.</p>
<p>Groups that consistently criticized Hitler had members that were marginalized because of their race or ethnicity. They regularly spoke out against prejudice, segregation and lynching. In contrast, denominations that were well established and mostly white tended to be ambivalent toward Nazism, even those that spoke out against anti-Black racism in the U.S. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/549195/original/file-20230919-17-92dpkb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A black and white photo shows a row of pushcarts on a sidewalk, their wares covered up by cloths." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/549195/original/file-20230919-17-92dpkb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/549195/original/file-20230919-17-92dpkb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=404&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/549195/original/file-20230919-17-92dpkb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=404&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/549195/original/file-20230919-17-92dpkb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=404&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/549195/original/file-20230919-17-92dpkb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=507&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/549195/original/file-20230919-17-92dpkb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=507&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/549195/original/file-20230919-17-92dpkb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=507&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Jewish pushcart workers on New York’s Lower East Side participated in a two-hour protest in 1933, refusing to make sales, during a day of mass demonstrations against the persecution of German Jews.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/on-the-day-of-gigantic-mass-demonstrations-in-many-american-news-photo/515129434?adppopup=true">Bettmann via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>But a few groups, five in total, did more than express ambivalence – they openly sympathized with Hitler. What united these groups were white supremacist beliefs. Their periodicals included articles titled “The Fitness of the Anglo-Saxon” and “Why the Anglo Saxon,” emphasizing “men are born equal in their rights, but they are not equal in their fitness and ability to serve … God needed the white Anglo-Saxon race.”</p>
<p>Importantly, the groups that supported Hitler were also antisemitic and eugenicists, believing human beings could be “perfected” through selective breeding. </p>
<p>However, antisemitism <a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/0031322X.1998.9970245">was rampant at the time</a>, even among groups that were ambivalent about Hitler. Similarly, <a href="https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/eugenics">support for eugenics</a> was too broad to explain why certain religious groups in the U.S. sympathized with the Nazis. There were even religious leaders who criticized Hitler yet had connections to <a href="https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520303218/birth-control-battles">the American Eugenics Movement</a>, which promoted forced sterilization laws and, later, the legalization of birth control.</p>
<p>Instead, what most strongly differentiated Hitler’s sympathizers in this era was <a href="https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-4446.13020">their belief in white supremacy</a> vis-a-vis African Americans. These groups published literature claiming that African Americans were physically and mentally inferior, and one wrote positively of the Ku Klux Klan. A Southern Baptist bishop wrote, “The Negro is not like the white man … there are striking differences physical and mental,” going on to claim, “the white race … assumes its superiority in strength and capacity.”</p>
<h2>Fast-forward</h2>
<p>Although 1935 is nearly a century behind us, U.S. politics has been awash in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/11/us/donald-trump-nazi-comparison.html">comparisons to the Third Reich</a> for several years now. Former President Donald Trump recently <a href="https://newrepublic.com/post/174773/trump-whines-nazi-germany-third-indictment">compared his indictments to Nazi Germany</a>, obfuscating the mass atrocities of Hitler’s regime. </p>
<p>But such comparisons do prompt reflection on what drove American support for Nazi Germany in the 1930s, as Trump campaigns with <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/elections/2023/04/21/trump-agenda-policies-2024/">an authoritarian vision</a> for his second term, and as <a href="https://www.brookings.edu/articles/white-nationalism-remains-major-concern-for-voters-of-color-and-appears-to-be-connected-ideologically-to-the-growing-christian-nationalism-movement/">white nationalism</a> remains a major aspect of U.S. politics.</p>
<p>In 1935, Europe was not at war, and concern about mass killings would have seemed alarmist. Yet just a few years later, a global conflagration began. On the anniversary of the Nuremberg Laws, what motivated American support for Hitler’s authoritarianism in the 1930s still resonates today.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/213635/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Melissa Wilde received funding from the Louisville Foundation and the University of Pennsylvania for the data connected to this research.
</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Meghan Garrity does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Two social scientists analyzed periodicals from US religious leaders in 1935 to determine what factors influenced groups’ sympathy, ambivalence or outrage about Hitler and Nazi Germany.Meghan Garrity, Assistant Professor of International Security & Law, George Mason UniversityMelissa J. Wilde, Professor and Chair of Sociology, University of PennsylvaniaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2131282023-09-12T12:27:15Z2023-09-12T12:27:15ZAntisemitism on Elon Musk’s X is surging and dredging up many ancient, defamatory themes of blaming Jews<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/547548/original/file-20230911-22-zstdy0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=367%2C22%2C3460%2C2346&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Elon Musk has both sparked and permitted antisemitism on X, the social media platform he now owns.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/chief-executive-officer-of-spacex-and-tesla-and-owner-of-news-photo/1499013102">Chesnot/Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Since buying Twitter, rebranded as X, billionaire Elon Musk, who calls himself a “<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/10/opinion/musk-free-speech.html">free speech absolutist</a>,” has welcomed hatemongers to the platform, including one who recently coined the <a href="https://twitter.com/KeithWoodsYT/status/1700091804677280041?s=20">trending hashtag #BanTheADL</a>. </p>
<p>The ADL, the Jewish Anti-Defamation League, was founded in 1913 during <a href="https://theconversation.com/what-the-leo-frank-case-tells-us-about-the-dangers-of-fake-news-75830">the trial of Leo Frank</a>, a Jewish factory manager wrongly convicted of murdering one of his young workers. After Georgia Gov. John Slaton commuted Frank’s death sentence to life imprisonment, <a href="https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/history-archaeology/leo-frank-case/">Frank was lynched</a>. Since then, the ADL has aimed to fight antisemitism and secure “justice not only for <a href="https://www.adl.org/who-we-are/history">Jews but for all people</a>.”</p>
<p>Musk attacked the ADL on Sept. 4, 2023, saying that “Our US advertising revenue is still down 60%, <a href="https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1698755938541330907">primarily due to pressure</a> on advertisers by @ADL.”</p>
<p><iframe id="ya6mD" class="tc-infographic-datawrapper" src="https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/ya6mD/2/" height="400px" width="100%" style="border: none" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p>As #BanTheADL trended on X, users tweeted that it is “<a href="https://twitter.com/KeithWoodsYT/status/1699595933678223817?s=20">anti-Christian</a>.” One said, “<a href="https://twitter.com/rj1299599/status/1700336247926083694?s=20">When you say #BanTheADL</a>, what you really mean is #BanTheJews from power and organizing against white western civilization.”</p>
<p>The tweets may be new; <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=EPN4PGAAAAAJ&hl=en">as a scholar of Jewish history</a>, I know the ideas they contain are not. </p>
<h2>Religious antisemitism</h2>
<p>The belief that Jews are “anti-Christian” comes from the Gospels, where Jews are blamed for <a href="https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/antisemitism-in-history-from-the-early-church-to-1400">the crucifixion of Jesus</a>. As Christianity became the dominant faith in the Roman Empire in the late fourth century, Jews, condemned by the church for their treachery, <a href="https://www.ushmm.org/research/about-the-mandel-center/initiatives/ethics-religion-holocaust/articles-and-resources/christian-persecution-of-jews-over-the-centuries/christian-persecution-of-jews-over-the-centuries">faced discrimination</a>. Beginning with restrictive legislation, it led eventually to locked ghetto walls and brutal attacks.</p>
<p>Immigrants to America carried ideas about Jewish enmity along with their rucksacks. In 1654, New Amsterdam Gov. <a href="https://www.pbs.org/jewishamericans/jewish_life/">Peter Stuyvesant tried to expel 23 Jews</a> fleeing persecution who had just landed in the colony. He called them a “deceitful race – such hateful enemies and blasphemers of the name of Christ.” </p>
<p>In October 2022, when white supremacists hung banners over Highway 405 in Los Angeles, some <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/banner-kanye-right-los-angeles-freeway-antisemtic-group-rcna53653">news sites blurred one</a>. That particular banner pointed to the Gospel of John, where Jesus tells the Jews, “<a href="https://www.biblindex.org/en/bible/new-revised-standard-version-including-apocrypha/jn-8:44">You are from your father the devil</a>.” </p>
<p>And a few days after Musk blamed the ADL for ad revenue losses, a user of X posted a video of ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt and wrote, “<a href="https://twitter.com/BasedTorba/status/1700193521288765693?s=20">Watch his demonic face</a> recoil when he says the word Christian.” </p>
<h2>Jews and money</h2>
<p>The antisemites attacking the ADL dredged up old stereotypes falsely depicting the Jews as a people interested only in money, malevolently employing their wealth to undermine the political order.</p>
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/GoyimNewsNet/status/1700522066363969620?s=20">A maliciously false tweet on Sept. 9, 2023, proved</a> that #BanTheADL was not just about attacking one Jewish organization, which no one could accuse of being “the richest group in the world.” It expanded beyond the ADL and targeted all Jews: “The richest group in the world, who owns 99% of the media, controls the monetary system and started every war on Earth – is portrayed as the *victims* … under assault by ‘antisemitism.’” </p>
<p>Since Judas betrayed Jesus for 30 pieces of silver in 33 C.E. – depicted in <a href="https://www.bible.com/bible/1/MAT.26.14-15.KJV">Matthew 26:14-15</a> – Christians have cast Jews as venally corrupted by money. Judas, the Greek version of Judah, refers to the tribe of ancient Israelites who became known as Jews. Shakespeare propelled that idea forward with the <a href="https://www.bl.uk/shakespeare/articles/a-jewish-reading-of-the-merchant-of-venice">wicked moneylender Shylock</a> in his 16th-century play “The Merchant of Venice.”</p>
<p><a href="https://antisemitism.adl.org/greed/">Shylock’s name has come to signify Jewish greed and villainy</a>, a charge that spills over to other wealthy Jews. Mississippi Gov. Alexander Gallatin McNutt raged in 1841 about the power of the British Baron Rothschild, a member of the international Jewish banking family: “The blood of Judas and of Shylock <a href="https://www.vqronline.org/essay/those-southern-repudiated-bonds">flows in his veins</a>.”</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/547602/original/file-20230911-22847-mgmn6z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A cartoonish image of slyly smiling Jewish bankers, passing dead soldiers while holding their money bags." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/547602/original/file-20230911-22847-mgmn6z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/547602/original/file-20230911-22847-mgmn6z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=428&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/547602/original/file-20230911-22847-mgmn6z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=428&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/547602/original/file-20230911-22847-mgmn6z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=428&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/547602/original/file-20230911-22847-mgmn6z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=537&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/547602/original/file-20230911-22847-mgmn6z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=537&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/547602/original/file-20230911-22847-mgmn6z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=537&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Slyly smiling Jewish bankers, passing through a red sea of dead soldiers while holding their money bags, depicted in this section of ‘The Way Of The Red Sea Is A Way Of Blood,’ a 1944 Italian poster.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn544978">United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection, Gift of the Katz Family</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Money buys power</h2>
<p>After Musk’s targeting of the ADL, contemporary antisemites jumped to targeting the Hungarian Holocaust survivor and billionaire philanthropist George Soros, with a <a href="https://twitter.com/bambkb/status/1699770247081865247?s=20">Sept. 7, 2023, post on X quoting</a> Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban saying that Soros “has an ARMY at his service, MONEY, #NGO’s, Universities, research institutions and he OWNS half the bureaucrats in BRUSSELS!!”</p>
<p>Conspiracy theories about Jewish leaders using their money to acquire political power predated the notorious forgery, “<a href="https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/protocols-of-the-elders-of-zion">The Protocols of the Elders of Zion</a>.” First published in an obscure newspaper in Russia in 1903, it was brought to America by a Russian émigré determined to restore the Romanov monarchy. It described an imagined meeting of Jewish elders who reported on their progress in fomenting revolutions to destroy western Christian civilization and seize control of the world. </p>
<p>In the early 1920s, this version of antisemitism – claiming a world Jewish conspiracy – found a home in America thanks to the publication of “<a href="https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/quot-the-international-jew-quot">The International Jew – The World’s Foremost Problem</a>.” A compilation of the articles that ran for 91 weeks in the newspaper <a href="https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/2013218776/">Dearborn Independent</a>, “The International Jew,” <a href="https://perspectives.ushmm.org/item/the-international-jew-the-worlds-foremost-problem">financed and published by Henry Ford</a>, charged that Jews exercised outsize influence in America, that they controlled the world’s finances and that they were the “power behind many a throne.”</p>
<p>The Protocols’ antisemitic fantasies of Jewish leaders plotting to destroy Christianity and control the world also <a href="https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/protocols-of-the-elders-of-zion">inspired Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf</a>,” written in 1924 while he was in jail for trying to overthrow Germany’s government. There, referring to World War I, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2004/feb/06/race.usa">Hitler said if</a> “during the War twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the people had been held under poison gas … the sacrifice of millions at the front would not have been in vain.” </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/300153/original/file-20191104-88399-3o10lb.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/300153/original/file-20191104-88399-3o10lb.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/300153/original/file-20191104-88399-3o10lb.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=571&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/300153/original/file-20191104-88399-3o10lb.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=571&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/300153/original/file-20191104-88399-3o10lb.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=571&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/300153/original/file-20191104-88399-3o10lb.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=718&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/300153/original/file-20191104-88399-3o10lb.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=718&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/300153/original/file-20191104-88399-3o10lb.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=718&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Dearborn Independent front page, May 22, 1920.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/2013218776/1920-05-22/ed-1/seq-1/">Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Library of Congress</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Victim blaming: Jews cause antisemitism</h2>
<p>Elon Musk has tweeted that ADL’s aggression against antisemites posting on X makes them the “<a href="https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1698615533170557116?s=20">biggest generators of anti-Semitism</a> on this platform.” </p>
<p>Blaming Jewish behavior for triggering antisemitism also has deep roots. The second-century <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Melito-of-Sardis">Greek Bishop Father Melito of Sardis</a> made it clear that the Jews had not only killed Jesus, they had stubbornly <a href="https://ehrmanblog.org/melito-and-arly-christian-anti-judaism/">failed to recognize that he was God</a>. Over the centuries, his words would be used to justify violence against the Jews. </p>
<p>During the Civil War, when Union Gen. <a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2018/12/17/this-day-in-politics-december-17-1063364">Ulysses S. Grant expelled Jews</a> from his military district, called the Department of the Tennessee, which stretched from the southern tip of Illinois to the Gulf of Mexico, he charged that <a href="https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/ulysses-s-grant-and-general-orders-no-11.htm">the punishment fit their crime</a>: “The Jews, as a class, [were] violating every regulation of trade established by the Treasury Department.”</p>
<p>In 1890, the editors of the New York Jewish newspaper the American Hebrew were so distressed by the prevalence of antisemitism that they asked more than 50 American leaders about <a href="https://singermanja2.exhibits.library.upenn.edu/items/browse?tags=PREJUDICE+AGAINST+THE+JEW">antisemistism</a>, collected in a volume entitled, “<a href="https://singermanja2.exhibits.library.upenn.edu/items/show/29635">Prejudice against the Jews</a>: Its Nature, Its Causes and Remedies. A Consensus of Opinion by non-Jews.” Rev. Morgan Dix, minister of Episcopal Trinity Church, made it clear in his response that, if only Jews would stop being so obstinate and convert to Christianity, antisemitic persecution would end. </p>
<p>In 1938, on the eve of the Holocaust, when Germany’s Jews were being targeted with antisemitic regulations but had not yet experienced the horror of the death camps, 65% of Americans told the polling firm Gallup that these victims were either <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/09/musk-antisemitism-anti-defamation-league-twitter/675235/">“partly” or “entirely”</a> responsible for the persecution they faced.</p>
<p>The hashtag #BanTheADL recycles variations on old antisemitic themes. X’s users write nothing new. What is new is the bigger megaphone X gives them.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/213128/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Pamela S. Nadell receives funding from National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar Award to write a book on the
history of American antisemitism.</span></em></p>Antisemitism on X recycles ancient tropes falsely blaming Jewish people for a wide range of social and political ills, and for their own victimization.Pamela S. Nadell, Professor and Patrick Clendenen Chair in Women's & Gender History and Director of the Jewish Studies Program, American UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2119342023-08-30T15:27:34Z2023-08-30T15:27:34ZJewish creators are a fundamental part of comic book history, from Superman to Maus – expert explains<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/544021/original/file-20230822-25-qglktb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=40%2C8%2C5422%2C3628&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://unsplash.com/photos/8SeJUmfahu0">Erik Mclean/Unsplash</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Jewish writers and artists have been <a href="https://www.jewishbookcouncil.org/pb-daily/comic-books-are-jewish-literature">a fundamental part of</a> comic book creation since the early days of the industry. </p>
<p>Comic books used to be formatted like books or newspapers, but in 1934 Max Gaines, a Jewish New Yorker, and his colleague Harry Wildenberg, created the first half tabloid-sized comic book – the format that became the standard.</p>
<p>Their Famous Funnies comic book sold 90% of the 200,000 printed copies. This led to numerous imitators, including New Fun Comics from National Allied Publications (<a href="https://culturefly.com/blogs/culture-blog/dc-comics-history">later renamed DC Comics</a>), which published its first issue in 1935.</p>
<p>Gaines was a former schoolteacher and channelled this into his work. He <a href="https://www.jewage.org/wiki/en/Article:Max_Gaines_-_Biography">named his company Educational Comics</a>, with such titles as Picture Stories from the Bible. However, when his son <a href="https://eccomics.fandom.com/wiki/Bill_Gaines">William took over E.C. Comics</a> in the 1940s it became notorious as a publisher of horror comics and <a href="https://library.missouri.edu/news/special-collections/banned-books-week-comics-and-controversy">these were banned</a> in the following decade. </p>
<p>In the 1930s, comic books reprinted comic strips that had previously appeared in newspaper humour sections. Famous Funnies, for example, <a href="https://majorspoilers.com/2020/11/08/retro-review-famous-funnies-1-july-1934/">included the popular serial Mutt and Jeff</a>. But by the end of the decade, they featured entirely new content in a variety of genres, including <a href="https://comicalopinions.com/birth-of-superheroes-golden-age-of-comics/">superheroes</a>. </p>
<p>The first, and most famous, of these was <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/superman-jewish-origins-film-adaptations-curse-jerry-siegel-christopher-reeve-henry-cavill-a8344461.html">Superman</a>. The character was created by <a href="https://ohdannyboy.blogspot.com/2012/06/1933s-reign-of-superman-first-superman.html">Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster in 1933</a> in a self-published comic. They tried to find a professional publisher to take on their character and – <a href="https://www.comicconnect.com/item/1009847?tzf=1">after Gaines took too long to reply to them</a> – found a home for <a href="https://nerdist.com/article/history-legacy-characters-dc-comics-action-comics-first-superman-comic-introduces-zatara-national-comics/">Superman at National in 1938</a>. </p>
<p>Siegel and Shuster were sons of Jewish European immigrants, leading some modern comic book writers to compare Superman’s alien immigrant identity to <a href="https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2017/09/21/superman-ultimate-immigrant-may-have-been-eligible-daca/688590001/">other émigrés in America</a>. The <a href="https://www.rescue.org/article/superman-refugees-success-story">International Rescue Committee noted</a> the importance of the character for the antisemitic era of the 1930s: “Superman’s story is the ultimate example of an immigrant who makes his new home better.”</p>
<p>Some researchers believe that Siegel and Shuster were specifically inspired by a famous Polish bodybuilder called <a href="https://jewishchronicle.timesofisrael.com/the-jewish-muscleman-who-likely-inspired-the-creators-of-superman/">“the Jewish Superman”</a>, who toured America in the 1920s. Writer Roy Schwartz also sees elements of Jewish mythology in the character, as noted in his 2021 book <a href="https://forward.com/culture/470859/its-a-bird-its-a-plane-its-a-book-about-superman-jewish-history/">Is Superman Circumcised?</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="A superman comic and badge." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/545524/original/file-20230830-15-et4sy5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/545524/original/file-20230830-15-et4sy5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/545524/original/file-20230830-15-et4sy5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/545524/original/file-20230830-15-et4sy5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/545524/original/file-20230830-15-et4sy5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/545524/original/file-20230830-15-et4sy5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/545524/original/file-20230830-15-et4sy5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Superman was created by Jewish comic book writers.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://unsplash.com/photos/QJlg2KSl0fU">Daniel Álvasd/Unsplash</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>A year later, another iconic DC character, Batman, was created by Bob Kane and Bill Finger. They were also children of immigrants and were half of a quartet of famous <a href="https://forward.com/culture/483808/batman-jewish-bob-kane-bill-finger-dc-comics-robin-superman/">Jewish comic creators</a> who went to the same school in the south Bronx, including <a href="https://www.comic-con.org/awards/will-eisner">Will Eisner</a> and Marvel’s <a href="https://theconversation.com/100-years-of-stan-lee-how-the-comic-book-king-challenged-prejudice-196761">Stan Lee</a>. </p>
<p>While Batman doesn’t have any obvious Jewish characteristics, Bruce Wayne’s cousin, Kate Kane (aka Batwoman) was later depicted as <a href="https://www.jpost.com/j-spot/dc-comics-batwoman-receives-jewish-funeral-in-latest-episode-663697">a Jewish woman</a>.</p>
<p>Known for working with Stan Lee, another Jewish creator is considered the <a href="https://www.denofgeek.com/comics/jack-kirby-comics-greatest-storyteller/">“greatest storyteller”</a> of superhero comics. Artist Jack Kirby was responsible for co-creating not only some of the most memorable Marvel characters – including The Avengers and The X-Men – but also had an acclaimed run as a solo creator in the 1970s, first on <a href="https://www.marvel.com/articles/comics/10-most-kirby-pages-in-jack-kirby-eternals">Marvel’s Eternals</a> and then on DC Comics’ <a href="https://www.cbr.com/jack-kirby-fourth-world-new-gods-movie-new-chance-dcu/">Fourth World titles</a>.</p>
<h2>Other genres</h2>
<p>Alongside superheroes, Kirby was renowned for his work on comics written by Sandman’s Joe Simon. Together, they brought <a href="https://kirbymuseum.org/blogs/simonandkirby/archives/41">romance to the medium in 1947</a> and made <a href="https://www.cbr.com/monsters-unleashed-jack-kirbys-15-craziest-marvel-monsters/#x-the-thing-that-lived">memorable monster comics in the 1960s</a>. Another popular genre was mystery comics. Will Eisner’s <a href="https://comicvine.gamespot.com/the-spirit/4005-33297">The Spirit</a> (1940) included elements of superheroes and horror. The <a href="https://www.cosmicteams.com/quality/profiles/spirit.html">main character</a> was an undead private detective who wore a mask.</p>
<p>Eisner was also the <a href="https://jmof.fiu.edu/exhibitions-events/exhibitions/will-eisner-comic-creator,-illustrator-and-innovator/">child of Jewish immigrants</a> and towards the end of his career, turned his upbringing into <a href="https://blogs.loc.gov/picturethis/2020/03/cartoonists-comment-on-the-lasting-impact-of-will-eisner-1917-2005/">semi-autobiographical comics</a> that depicted the downtrodden existence of people in poor Hassidic communities in New York. </p>
<p>Eisner’s works, including <a href="https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/ComicBook/AContractWithGod">A Contract with God</a> (1978) and several <a href="https://libraryguides.mdc.edu/GraphicNovels/WillEisner">follow-ups in the 1980s</a>, not only popularised the term <a href="https://theportalist.com/history-of-graphic-novels">“graphic novel”</a>, but also added to the increasing trend of turning Jewish lives in comics.</p>
<p>In the 1970s, a number of notable female Jewish creators first had their work published in <a href="https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/comics-and-graphic-narratives">Underground Comix</a>, including <a href="https://womenincomics.fandom.com/wiki/Trina_Robbins">Trina Robbins</a>, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/11/arts/diane-noomin-dead.html">Diane Noomin</a> and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/03/arts/aline-kominsky-crumb-dead.html">Aline Kominsky-Crumb</a>.</p>
<p>The only graphic novel to win a Pulitzer prize – <a href="https://okcomics.co.uk/products/maus-complete-collection-by-art-spiegelman">Maus</a> – tells the story of author <a href="https://libraries.mit.edu/150books/2011/05/12/1986/">Art Spiegelman’s</a> father’s experience in a concentration camp, and started to be serialised in 1980.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="The cover of Maus" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/545528/original/file-20230830-23-e4sj79.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/545528/original/file-20230830-23-e4sj79.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/545528/original/file-20230830-23-e4sj79.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/545528/original/file-20230830-23-e4sj79.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/545528/original/file-20230830-23-e4sj79.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/545528/original/file-20230830-23-e4sj79.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/545528/original/file-20230830-23-e4sj79.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Maus is the only graphic novel to have won a Pulitzer Prize.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/lviv-ukraine-april-11-2023-art-2289174103">marhus/Shutterstock</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Modern Jewish comics</h2>
<p>Today, many Jewish creators are making graphic novels and cartoons. Comics editor Corinne Pearlman drew a popular strip <a href="https://jwa.org/blog/graphic-details-opens-in-toronto">Playing the Jewish Card</a> in the 1990s and now <a href="https://www.brokenfrontier.com/corinne-pearlman-myriad-editions-gareth-brookes-jade-sarson-ottilie-hainsworth/">edits graphic novels</a>. She and other creators were featured in the 2011 exhibition and book <a href="https://www.thejc.com/culture/features/is-it-a-bird-is-it-a-plane-no-it-s-the-real-life-superheroine-1.30661">Graphic Details: Confessional Comics by Jewish Women</a>, curated by graphic novelist <a href="https://www.royaldrawingschool.org/artists/faculty/sarah-lightman/">Sarah Lightman</a>. </p>
<p>Lightman is one of the editors of a new follow-up anthology, <a href="https://press.syr.edu/supressbooks/5160/jewish-women-in-comics/">Jewish Women in Comics: Borders and Bodies</a>. Other British female creators include <a href="https://positivenegatives.org/artist/karrie-fransman/">Karrie Fransman</a>, who makes comics about refugees and victims of gender-based violence, and musician and cartoonist <a href="https://dannyskagal.wixsite.com/mysite">Danny Noble</a> who has illustrated children’s books by Adrian Edmondson.</p>
<p>Until September 3, <a href="https://www.jw3.org.uk/zoom">The Jewish Community Centre London</a> in Hampstead has a solo exhibition of caricatures of Jewish celebrities such as Nigella Lawson and Daniel Radcliffe by <a href="https://www.islingtontribune.co.uk/article/zoom-meeting">Zoom Rockman</a>. Rockman started his career as one of the youngest published cartoonists in the UK, with his own self-published comic, before going on to draw strips for The Beano and Private Eye.</p>
<p>Other creators have had their autobiographical comics animated, such as cartoonist and musician Carol Isaacs’ <a href="https://www.jpost.com/must/article-713390">The Wolf of Baghdad</a> and the life of Charlotte Saloman, author of proto-graphic novel <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/dec/07/charlotte-review-salomon-keira-knightley-german-jewish-painter-grandfather">Life? or Theatre?</a>.</p>
<p>With attention being brought to the work of numerous Jewish comic creators through film adaptations, books and exhibitions like these, it seems that their contribution to the medium is <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/aug/17/art-spiegelman-golden-age-superheroes-were-shaped-by-the-rise-of-fascism">finally being recognised</a>.</p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Alex Fitch receives funding from UKRI Centre for Doctoral Training, Design Star. </span></em></p>The history of comics is closely tied to the involvement of Jewish creators, who have had an enormous impact on the medium over the last 90 years.Alex Fitch, Lecturer and PhD Candidate in Comics and Architecture, University of BrightonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2072972023-06-15T12:49:27Z2023-06-15T12:49:27ZJewish denominations: A brief guide for the perplexed<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/531466/original/file-20230612-248839-aos7wu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=27%2C0%2C3024%2C2005&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">From Reconstructionism to ultra-Orthodoxy, Judaism is richly diverse.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/torah-ark-royalty-free-image/160368465?phrase=torah&adppopup=true">MendyHechtman/iStock via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>As <a href="https://jewish.cofc.edu/documents/jewish-studies-faculty-and-staff-bios/joshua-shanes,-associate-director.php">a scholar of modern Jewish history</a>, religion and politics, I am often asked to explain the differences between Judaism’s major denominations. Here is a very brief overview:</p>
<h2>Rabbinic roots</h2>
<p>Two thousand years ago, Jews were divided between <a href="https://www.wjkbooks.com/Products/0664239048/from-the-maccabees-to-the-mishnah-third-edition.aspx">competing sects</a> all based on the Jewish scriptures, but with different interpretations. After the Romans <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-a-2-500-year-old-hebrew-poem-still-matters-81442">destroyed the Jerusalem Temple</a> in 70 C.E., one main group, who called themselves “rabbis” – sages or teachers – began to dominate. What we now know as “Judaism” grew out of this group, technically called “Rabbinic Judaism.”</p>
<p>Rabbinic Judaism believed that God gave Jewish teachings and scriptures to Moses at Mt. Sinai, but that they came in two parts: the “written law” or “written Torah” and the “oral law” or “oral Torah.” The oral Torah is a vast body of interpretations that expands upon the written Torah and is the source for most of <a href="https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/making-gods-word-work-9780826415578/">the rules and theology</a> of Rabbinic Judaism.</p>
<p>Fearful that these traditions might be lost, the early rabbis began the process of writing them down, culminating in two texts called <a href="https://www.sefaria.org/texts/Mishnah">the Mishna</a> and <a href="https://www.sefaria.org/texts/Talmud">the Talmud</a>. This corpus became the foundation of rabbinic literature.</p>
<p>The rabbis assured the Jews that although the temple’s destruction was devastating, <a href="https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/judaism-after-the-temple/">Jews could continue to serve God</a> through study, prayer and observing God’s commandments, called “mitzvot.” Someday, they promised, God would send the Messiah, a descendant of King David who would rebuild the temple and return the exiled Jews to the land of Israel. </p>
<h2>Historic turning point</h2>
<p>There were tensions in Rabbinic Judaism from the outset. For example, starting in the Middle Ages, a Jewish group called the Karaites <a href="https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/display/document/obo-9780199840731/obo-9780199840731-0090.xml">challenged the rabbis’ authority</a> by rejecting the oral Torah. </p>
<p>Even within the rabbinic tradition, there were regular disagreements: <a href="https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=6634">between mystics</a> <a href="https://store.behrmanhouse.com/index.php/maimonides-guide-for-today-s-perplexed.html">and rationalists</a>, for example; debates over people <a href="https://yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Messianism">claiming to be the messiah</a>; and differences in customs between regions, from medieval Spain to Poland to Yemen.</p>
<p>Still, Rabbinic Judaism remained a more or less united religious community for some 1,500 years – until the 19th century.</p>
<p>Around that time, Jews began <a href="https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691164946/jewish-emancipation">to experience emancipation</a> in many parts of Europe, acquiring equal citizenship where they had previously constituted a separate, legal community. Meanwhile, thousands – eventually millions – of Jews <a href="https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/haventohome/haven-century.html">moved to the United States</a>, which likewise offered equal citizenship.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/531756/original/file-20230613-19-52vpff.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A black and white photo of long lines of people with luggage in an old-fashioned arrival hall." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/531756/original/file-20230613-19-52vpff.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/531756/original/file-20230613-19-52vpff.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=474&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/531756/original/file-20230613-19-52vpff.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=474&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/531756/original/file-20230613-19-52vpff.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=474&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/531756/original/file-20230613-19-52vpff.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=596&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/531756/original/file-20230613-19-52vpff.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=596&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/531756/original/file-20230613-19-52vpff.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=596&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Jewish immigrants arriving at the immigration office on Ellis Island in New York City, around 1910.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/jewish-immigrants-arriving-at-immigration-office-in-ellis-news-photo/89857923?adppopup=true">Apic/Getty Images</a></span>
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<p>These freedoms brought opportunity, but also new challenges. Traditionally, <a href="https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691160139/how-judaism-became-a-religion">Judaism</a> was based on Jewish autonomy – communities governed by rabbinic law – and taking the truth of its beliefs for granted. Political emancipation challenged the first, while Enlightenment ideas <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Heretical_Imperative.html?id=wgk9AAAAIAAJ">challenged the second</a>. Jews were now free to choose what to believe and how to practice Judaism, if at all, at a time when they were experiencing widespread exposure to competing ideas.</p>
<h2>Three major groups</h2>
<p>Competing Jewish denominations emerged, each one attempting to negotiate the relationship between Jewishness and modernity in its own way. Each group claimed that they followed the best or most authentic traditions of Judaism. </p>
<p>The <a href="https://www.wsupress.wayne.edu/books/detail/response-modernity">first modern denomination</a> to organize was Reform – first in Germany in the early 19th century, but soon in America as well. Reform Judaism is based on the idea that both the Bible and the laws of the oral Torah are divinely inspired, but humanly constructed, meaning they should be adapted based on contemporary moral ideals. Reform congregations tend to emphasize prophetic themes such as social justice more than Talmudic law, though in recent years many <a href="https://urj.org/press-room/survey-confirms-trend-toward-reform-embrace-ritual">have reclaimed some rituals</a>, such as Hebrew liturgy and stricter observance of Shabbat.</p>
<p>Orthodox Judaism soon organized in reaction to Reform, rallying to defend the strict observance of Jewish customs and law. Orthodox leaders often blurred the distinction between these categories and put particular emphasis on the 16th-century legal code called <a href="https://yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Shulhan_arukh">the Shulchan Aruch</a>. Orthodoxy insists that both the written and oral Torah have divine origins. Contrary views in pre-modern sources are often <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/changing-the-immutable-9781904113607?q=changing%20the&lang=en&cc=us">censored</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/531759/original/file-20230613-15-ltthcv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A group of people gather around a table with several menorahs on it." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/531759/original/file-20230613-15-ltthcv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/531759/original/file-20230613-15-ltthcv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=404&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/531759/original/file-20230613-15-ltthcv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=404&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/531759/original/file-20230613-15-ltthcv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=404&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/531759/original/file-20230613-15-ltthcv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=508&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/531759/original/file-20230613-15-ltthcv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=508&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/531759/original/file-20230613-15-ltthcv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=508&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Members of a Reform congregation in Pennsylvania gather for a menorah-lighting ceremony during Hanukkah.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/wyomissing-pamembers-of-the-congregation-during-the-menorah-news-photo/1315680463?adppopup=true">Ben Hasty/MediaNews Group/Reading Eagle via Getty Images</a></span>
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<p><a href="https://masortiolami.org/resource/emet-vemunah-statement-of-principles-of-conservative">Conservative Judaism</a>, which did not arrive in the U.S. until the mid-1900s, shares many of Reform Judaism’s views, such as equal religious roles for men and women. However, Conservative Jews argue that the Reform movement pulled too far away from Jewish tradition. They insist that Jewish law remains obligatory, but that the Orthodox interpretation is too rigid. In practice, most Conservative Jews tend not to be strict about even major rituals, like observing Sabbath restrictions or kosher food practices.</p>
<p>There are also smaller but still influential Jewish movements. For example, <a href="https://www.reconstructingjudaism.org/article/who-reconstructionist-jew/">Reconstructionism</a>, created by Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan in the 1930s and 1940s, emphasizes community over ritual obligations. And the <a href="https://aleph.org/what-is-jewish-renewal/">Jewish Renewal</a> movement, born out of the late 1960s counterculture, seeks to incorporate insights from Jewish mysticism with an egalitarian perspective, and without necessarily following the minutiae of Jewish law.</p>
<p><iframe id="YKida" class="tc-infographic-datawrapper" src="https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/YKida/1/" height="400px" width="100%" style="border: none" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p>What makes Jewish identities even more complex is that for many Jewish people, being “Jewish” is more of a cultural or ethnic identity than a religious one. Over <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2021/05/11/jewish-americans-in-2020/">a quarter of Americans who describe themselves as Jewish</a> say they do not identify with the Jewish religion at all, though Jewish culture or their family’s Jewish background may be very important to them.</p>
<p>It’s also important to keep in mind that Jewish groups evolved in different ways <a href="https://katz.sas.upenn.edu/resources/blog/what-do-you-know-sephardi-vs-mizrahi">in the Middle East and Northern Africa</a>. Jews from the Muslim world, <a href="https://nyupress.org/9780814797051/sephardic-and-mizrahi-jewry/">often called Sephardic or Mizrahi Jews</a> – a minority of American Jews, but over half of Israeli Jews – did not experience the kind of abrupt emancipation that they did in much of Europe. Different Sephardic traditions developed, which are often described as “Masorti” or “traditional” <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2016/03/08/israels-religiously-divided-society/">Judaism in Israel</a>, although many of their adherents have become Orthodox in recent years.</p>
<h2>From Orthodox to ultra-Orthodox</h2>
<p>Of all the Jewish denominations, the Orthodox groups are perhaps most misunderstood. They all share a commitment to Jewish law – especially regarding gender roles and sexuality, food consumption and Sabbath restrictions – but there are many divisions, generally categorized on a spectrum from “modern” to “ultra” Orthodox.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9781618117502-010/html?lang=en">Modern Orthodoxy</a> celebrates secular education and integration into the modern world, yet insists on a relatively strict approach to ritual observance and traditional tenets of belief. They also tend to see Zionism – the modern movement calling for Jewish national rights, today connected to support for Israel – as part of their religious worldview, rather than just <a href="https://theconversation.com/on-its-75th-birthday-israel-still-cant-agree-on-what-it-means-to-be-a-jewish-state-and-a-democracy-204770">a political belief</a>. </p>
<p>The <a href="https://www.harediresearchgroup.org/report/">ultra-Orthodox</a>, on the other hand – sometimes <a href="https://www.harediresearchgroup.org/report/">called “Haredim</a>” or Haredi Jews – advocate segregation from the outside world. Many continue to speak Yiddish, the traditional language of Jews in Eastern Europe, or to dress as traditional Jews did in Europe before the Holocaust.</p>
<p>This is especially true of Hasidic Jews, who make up about half of the ultra-Orthodox population worldwide. Hasidism is a mystical movement <a href="https://yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Hasidism">born in 18th-century Ukraine</a>, but today mostly concentrated in New York and Israel. Hasidic Jews are known for being particularly strict about shunning secular culture and education, but they remain also a mystical movement focused on God’s close presence. They are divided into subgroups named after cities in Eastern Europe, and they follow leaders known as “Rebbes,” who wield enormous power in their communities. </p>
<p>Haredim are particularly committed to gender segregation, separating men and women beyond what previous Jewish traditions called for, and tend toward the strictest interpretation of Jewish law, even when traditional understanding of a rule has been more lenient.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/531762/original/file-20230613-26-bmom89.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Four teenage boys in black coats and black, broad-brimmed hats study a book while standing outside." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/531762/original/file-20230613-26-bmom89.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/531762/original/file-20230613-26-bmom89.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/531762/original/file-20230613-26-bmom89.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/531762/original/file-20230613-26-bmom89.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/531762/original/file-20230613-26-bmom89.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/531762/original/file-20230613-26-bmom89.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/531762/original/file-20230613-26-bmom89.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Ultra-Orthodox boys prepare for Yom Kippur, the most important day in the Jewish calendar, in the Israeli city of Netanya.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/ultra-orthodox-jewish-men-and-children-perform-the-tashlich-news-photo/1243700909?adppopup=true">Jack Guez/AFP via Getty Images</a></span>
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<p>Whether modern or Haredi, Orthodox Judaism sees itself as “traditional.” However, it is more accurate to say <a href="https://www.academia.edu/43682607/Jacob_Katz_Orthodoxy_in_Historical_Perspective_in_Peter_Y_Medding_ed_Studies_in_Contemporary_Jewry_vol_2_The_Challenge_of_Modernity_and_Jewish_Orthodoxy_Bloomington_Indiana_University_Press_1986_3_17">it is “traditionalist</a>.” By this I mean that Orthodoxy is attempting to recreate a pre-modern religion in a modern era. Not only has Orthodox Judaism innovated many rituals and teachings, but people today have greater awareness that other types of life are available – creating a firm break with the traditional world Orthodoxy claims to perpetuate.</p>
<h2>Becoming a nation</h2>
<p>Jewish groups are often described as “Zionist.” What is Zionism, and where does it fit in to all these terms?</p>
<p><a href="https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/Z/bo43636872.html">The first Zionists</a> were mostly secular Jews from Eastern Europe. Inspired by nationalist movements around them, they claimed that Jews constituted a modern nation, rather than just a religion. Traditions and prayers connected to the land – often reinterpreted through a secular, nationalist lens – became all-important for Zionists, while many other rituals and traditions were abandoned.</p>
<p>Most Jews <a href="https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo3627929.html">opposed Zionism for decades</a>. Reform Jews and even some early Orthodox Jews worried that defining Jews as a “nation” would undermine their claim to equal citizenship in other countries. Orthodox Jews, meanwhile, opposed Zionists’ staunch secularism and emphasized that Jews must wait for the Messiah to lead them back to the land of Israel.</p>
<p>Within a decade or two of Israel’s establishment as a modern state, however, most Jewish denominations integrated Zionism into their worldview. Still, most ultra-Orthodox Jews today continue to oppose Zionist ideology, even as they hold right-wing political views on Israel. <a href="https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691168999/trouble-in-the-tribe">Young liberal Jews</a>, too, are increasingly emphasizing the distinction between Zionism and their own Jewish identity.</p>
<p>Today, <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2021/05/11/jewish-americans-in-2020/">most U.S. Jews</a> are either unaffiliated with any particular denomination or Reform. However, the percentage of Jews who are Orthodox – especially ultra-Orthodox, whose members tend to have very large families – is growing rapidly. Almost 10% of American Jews and nearly 25% of <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2016/03/08/israels-religiously-divided-society/">Israeli Jews</a> are Orthodox today, although attrition from these communities is also rising.</p>
<p>This trend may continue, or that sector may see mass defections, as it did a century ago. Either way, Orthodoxy is going to continue to play a very important role in Jewish life for many years to come.</p>
<p><em>This article has been updated to correct a chart caption and include information about Masorti Judaism.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/207297/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Joshua Shanes does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Jewish communities have always followed some different customs in different parts of the world, but the 19th and 20th centuries brought much more dramatic divisions.Joshua Shanes, Associate Professor of Jewish Studies, College of CharlestonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2059152023-06-01T12:29:34Z2023-06-01T12:29:34ZIsraeli protesters fear for the future of their country’s precarious LGBTQ rights revolution<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/528676/original/file-20230527-15-3k7zwo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=1%2C4%2C1017%2C676&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Demonstrators lift Israeli flags and LGBTQ pride flags during a protest against the proposed judicial overhaul in Tel Aviv in May 2023. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/demonstrators-lift-flags-and-banners-during-a-protest-news-photo/1256499783?adppopup=true">Ahmad Gharabli/AFP via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Demonstrations against the Israeli government’s efforts to <a href="https://theconversation.com/israels-judicial-reform-efforts-could-complicate-its-relationship-with-us-but-the-countries-have-faced-other-bumps-along-the-road-203104">radically overhaul the country’s judicial system</a> have become a weekly occurrence. Often rainbow pride banners pop with color amid the sea of blue and white national flags.</p>
<p>LGBTQ allies are hardly the only groups protesting the new government: Secular Jews, liberals and people concerned that the plan will erode democracy have come out to the streets in droves since early 2023. But among other concerns, many Israelis fear that hard-line conservative ministers will <a href="https://www.jta.org/2023/01/17/politics/israel-has-been-an-lgbtq-haven-in-the-middle-east-its-new-government-could-change-that">roll back LGBTQ rights</a>. And LGBTQ issues are a potent symbol of a chasm fueling debate over the judicial overhaul: <a href="https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2018-07-26/ty-article-opinion/.premium/the-secret-of-the-lgbt-protests-success/0000017f-dc5c-d856-a37f-fddc43a30000">secular and religious Israeli Jews’</a> very different visions of the Jewish state.</p>
<p>Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s governing coalition is the <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/netanyahus-government-takes-a-turn-toward-theocracy">most religious</a> and <a href="https://www.vox.com/world/2023/1/20/23561464/israel-new-right-wing-government-extreme-protests-netanyahu-biden-ben-gvir">nationalist</a> in the country’s history. His supporters claim that Israel’s Supreme Court, whose rulings guaranteed many of the rights LGBTQ people have today, is interventionist and <a href="https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/politics-and-diplomacy/article-732567">needs to be reined in</a>. Opponents, however, fear that Israel’s <a href="https://theconversation.com/on-its-75th-birthday-israel-still-cant-agree-on-what-it-means-to-be-a-jewish-state-and-a-democracy-204770">balance of being a democratic state and a Jewish one</a> is tipping away from democracy.</p>
<p>But how did Israel become relatively accepting of LGBTQ people in the first place – especially given the ways religion and state are <a href="https://main.knesset.gov.il/en/activity/pages/basiclaws.aspx">entangled in its laws</a>? The answer does not rest solely with the Supreme Court. The legislature, popular culture and activist organizations were key – <a href="https://nyupress.org/9781479810031/queer-judaism/">including Orthodox groups known as the Proud Religious Community</a>, a focus of <a href="https://www.fordham.edu/info/20855/faculty/4979/orit_avishai">my ethnographic research</a>. I believe the lack of separation between law and religion has at times actually helped advance LGBTQ Jews’ rights. Activists’ carefully picked agenda and its convergence with national interests have also aided the movement.</p>
<h2>The ‘gay decade’</h2>
<p>Chronicles of Israel’s LGBTQ rights often focus on changes that occurred during the so-called “gay decade” that began in 1988, when the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, <a href="https://www.upi.com/Archives/1988/03/23/Parliament-legalizes-homosexuality-in-Israel/1523575096400/">repealed sodomy laws</a>. The groundwork for that, however, began decades earlier.</p>
<p>Israel’s first LGBTQ organization, <a href="https://www.lgbt.org.il/english-new">The Aguda</a>, was founded in 1975 as a grassroots, volunteer-based human rights nonprofit. In its early years, many members were closeted, but by the early 1980s some LGBTQ activists were willing to put a public face on the movement by sharing their stories in interviews, public hearings and lobbying efforts. A groundbreaking 1983 Aguda pamphlet appealed to scientific evidence and international legal precedents to make the case for <a href="https://www.mako.co.il/pride-news/local/Article-16dfa68babbbf71027.htm">ending prejudice and discrimination</a>. </p>
<p>A dizzying array of rights were achieved during the gay decade and beyond. Sexual orientation was declared a protected employment category in 1992, and openly gay women and men were <a href="https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=127131403">allowed to serve in the military</a> in 1993. Same-sex partners were recognized for welfare in 1994, national insurance benefits in 1999 and pension benefits in 2000. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/529132/original/file-20230530-21-opja7d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A woman in sunglasses and a tan military uniform smiles and holds a rainbow-striped flag." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/529132/original/file-20230530-21-opja7d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/529132/original/file-20230530-21-opja7d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=874&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/529132/original/file-20230530-21-opja7d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=874&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/529132/original/file-20230530-21-opja7d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=874&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/529132/original/file-20230530-21-opja7d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1098&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/529132/original/file-20230530-21-opja7d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1098&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/529132/original/file-20230530-21-opja7d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1098&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">An Israeli soldier during the 2007 Gay Pride Parade in Jerusalem, with heavy police presence to prevent clashes with protesters.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/an-israeli-female-soldier-holds-the-multi-colored-gay-pride-news-photo/74847632?adppopup=true">Gali Tibbon/AFP via Getty Images</a></span>
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<p>Because religious authorities have monopoly over marriage and divorce in Israel, <a href="https://slate.com/human-interest/2013/11/israel-wont-legalize-gay-marriage-heres-why.html">same-sex marriage is not legalized</a>. Nevertheless, over the past 20 years, same-sex couples and their families have won many other legal protections, <a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/committee-okays-inheritance-between-same-sex-partners/">including inheritance</a>, stepchild adoption, <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/israeli-court-grants-gay-divorce-even-though-same-sex-marriage-flna1c7425785">divorce</a> and <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-news/israel-lifts-restrictions-sex-surrogacy-rcna10859">surrogacy rights</a>.</p>
<h2>Uneven gains</h2>
<p>Beyond the law, LGBTQ Israelis have also benefited from increasing cultural visibility and public acceptance. Municipal and state investments have made the Tel Aviv Pride Parade a <a href="https://www.afar.com/magazine/the-worlds-biggest-lgbtq-pride-celebrations">top destination</a> for Pride month travelers around the world. Israeli <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/may/10/viva-la-diva-how-eurovisions-dana-international-made-trans-identity-mainstream">transgender singer Dana International</a> won the Eurovision contest in 1998, and gay characters began to appear in <a href="https://www.wsupress.wayne.edu/books/detail/soldiers-rebels-and-drifters">mainstream movies</a> and popular TV by the turn of the millennium. The late 1990s and the aughts also saw a <a href="https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228637.013.1295">significant expansion</a> of organizations to support LGBTQ people and their families.</p>
<p>Still, access to protections has always been uneven. The early gay “revolution” was predominantly secular, and remains so. It is mostly an urban, Jewish, Ashkenazi affair – referring to <a href="https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/who-are-ashkenazi-jews/">Jews whose families were from Europe</a>. Transgender people won <a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/in-lgbt-victory-court-bans-transgender-workplace-prejudice/">employment protections</a> and <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/israel-s-first-openly-transgender-soldier-paves-way-others-n742876">the right to serve in the military</a> more than a decade after gays and lesbians won the same rights.</p>
<p>Attitudes toward LGBTQ Israelis have been slower to change in conservative religious communities, and same-sex relationships remain taboo in ultra-Orthodox circles. Since the turn of the 21st century, however, Orthodox activists have begun to organize, as I document in my recent book “<a href="https://nyupress.org/9781479810031/queer-judaism/">Queer Judaism</a>.”</p>
<h2>Path to acceptance</h2>
<p>Although a minority, religious conservatives have been power brokers and members of government coalitions for most of the state of Israel’s history. Yet certain aspects of the country’s political landscape help explain the LGBTQ movement’s successes – as do activists’ strategic choices.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/529135/original/file-20230530-21-j68l6j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Two men embrace as they stomp drinking glasses on the ground. One wears a black suit and one wears a white suit." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/529135/original/file-20230530-21-j68l6j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/529135/original/file-20230530-21-j68l6j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/529135/original/file-20230530-21-j68l6j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/529135/original/file-20230530-21-j68l6j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/529135/original/file-20230530-21-j68l6j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1130&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/529135/original/file-20230530-21-j68l6j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1130&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/529135/original/file-20230530-21-j68l6j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1130&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Yohay Verman and Yotam Ha'Cohen smash glasses during their marriage during the 2016 Jerusalem Gay Pride Parade.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/israeli-gay-couple-yohay-verman-and-yotam-hacohen-smash-news-photo/578336518?adppopup=true">Gali Tibbon/AFP via Getty Images</a></span>
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</figure>
<p>First, the lack of separation of state and religion means that Israel does not offer a civil marriage option, even for opposite-sex couples. The legal system developed alternatives for heterosexual Jewish couples who did not want to or could not marry through the Jewish rabbinate, such as extending many of marriage’s civil benefits to cohabitating couples. These alternatives were relatively <a href="https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3065040#">easy to extend</a> to same-sex couples.</p>
<p>Second, the goals that <a href="https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-2717-0_101-1">the Israeli LGBTQ movement</a> has prioritized – equal rights to parenthood, family and military service – aligned well with Jewish Israeli common values and national priorities. They often <a href="https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3065040#">avoided alliances</a> with other causes that were considered controversial, especially Palestinian rights.</p>
<p>Third, Tel Aviv’s fun façade as a thriving gay scene served national interests. Politicians from across the political spectrum have used Israel’s liberal record on LGBTQ rights to bolster its democratic credentials while ignoring criticism over systemic human rights violations toward Arab citizens of the state and Palestinians in the occupied territories – <a href="https://www.dukeupress.edu/israelsolpalestine-and-the-queer-international">a phenomenon sometimes called “pinkwashing</a>.”</p>
<h2>Pivotal moment?</h2>
<p>The same forces that facilitated Israel’s LGBTQ rights revolution, however, may now undo hard-won gains.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/529134/original/file-20230530-19-fnmyth.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Angry-looking men holding signs in Hebrew shout during a protest." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/529134/original/file-20230530-19-fnmyth.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/529134/original/file-20230530-19-fnmyth.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/529134/original/file-20230530-19-fnmyth.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/529134/original/file-20230530-19-fnmyth.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/529134/original/file-20230530-19-fnmyth.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/529134/original/file-20230530-19-fnmyth.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/529134/original/file-20230530-19-fnmyth.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Israelis take part in a protest against the Gay Pride parade in Jerusalem on July 21, 2016.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/israeli-right-wing-religious-jews-take-part-in-a-protest-news-photo/578328184?adppopup=true">Ahmad Gharabli/AFP via Getty Images</a></span>
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</figure>
<p>Jewish religious conservatives have long viewed acceptance of LGBTQ people’s rights <a href="https://apnews.com/article/politics-israel-middle-east-jerusalem-religion-260e59484c89b5f19cee67a5ca0ceb50">as an affront to the state’s Jewish character</a>. In the past, ruling coalitions with both political moderates and Orthodox parties guaranteed some modicum of compromise, including on LGBTQ rights. But the current ruling coalition rests on the support of religious ultranationalists, including ministers who have <a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/smotrich-my-voters-dont-care-im-a-homophobic-fascist-but-my-word-is-my-word/">openly opposed LGBTQ rights</a>. </p>
<p>Another factor is the current right-wing government’s unambiguous territorial ambitions. <a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/judicial-reform-boosting-jewish-identity-the-new-coalitions-policy-guidelines/">Its guiding document</a> declares that “The Jewish people have an exclusive and inalienable right to all parts of the Land of Israel,” and one senior minister has even <a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/smotrich-appears-to-post-support-for-expulsion-of-arab-israelis/">hinted at his support for Arab expulsion</a>. With such <a href="https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-05-20/ty-article-magazine/.highlight/israel-is-hurtling-toward-a-new-kind-of-illiberal-regime/00000188-35a8-d7fd-adec-ffebca370000">nationalistic aims</a> out in the open, the state may no longer feel as much of a need to use LGBTQ rights to defend its human rights record.</p>
<p>During research for my book about Orthodox LGBTQ activism in Israel, I noticed how efforts to change conservative communities’ ideas about equality and acceptance were grounded in claims of a shared Jewish experience. However, LGBTQ activists I talked to did not challenge other aspects of far-right politics.</p>
<p>Critics of LGBTQ activists’ approach warn that <a href="https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228637.013.1295">prioritizing narrower interests</a>, rather than a broader social justice platform, fails to rein in <a href="https://www.brandeis.edu/crown/publications/middle-east-briefs/pdfs/101-200/meb150.pdf">Israel’s broader shift</a> away from liberal democratic norms – which could jeopardize their own hard-won gains as well.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/205915/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Orit Avishai receives funding from the Association for the Sociology of Religion, The Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation, The Hadassah-Brandeis Institute, Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, The Global Religion Research Initiative (Notre Dame and Templeton Trust), Fordham University</span></em></p>LGBTQ rights are not the main issue bringing Israeli protesters to the streets, but they do symbolize the country’s stark divide.Orit Avishai, Professor of Sociology, Fordham UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1973852023-05-22T12:26:08Z2023-05-22T12:26:08ZShavuot: The Jewish holiday that became all about children<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/526632/original/file-20230516-34490-yfyflx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C392%2C313&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A confirmation class in 1924 in St. Paul, Minnesota. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Temple_of_Aaron_confirmation_class,_St._Paul_(4418752781).jpg">Jewish Historical Society of the Upper Midwest/Wikimedia Commons</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>For most American Jews today, Shavuot is not exactly a big-ticket holiday. Observance lags behind <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-is-passover-different-from-all-other-nights-3-essential-reads-on-the-jewish-holiday-202678">springtime Passover</a>, and it pales in comparison to Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, <a href="https://theconversation.com/what-are-the-jewish-high-holy-days-a-look-at-rosh-hashanah-yom-kippur-and-a-month-of-celebrating-renewal-and-moral-responsibility-166079">the fall “high holidays</a>.”</p>
<p>But 150 years ago, Shavuot was the one day when everybody wanted to be in synagogue: It was a day to celebrate children.</p>
<p>As <a href="https://people.cal.msu.edu/yareslau/">a scholar of American religion and Judaism</a>, I have written about how <a href="https://www.degruyter.com/document/isbn/9781479822300/html?lang=en">the history of religious education</a> reveals the changing ways that American Jews have imagined Judaism itself. The history of Shavuot, which begins at sundown on May 25 in 2023, offers a fascinating illustration of these dynamics. </p>
<h2>The ‘milk’ of Torah</h2>
<p>In ancient times, Shavuot was an agricultural pilgrimage festival, a time to <a href="https://theconversation.com/shavuot-a-jewish-holiday-of-renewing-commitment-to-god-182717">bring offerings of first grains</a> and fruits to the temple in Jerusalem. </p>
<p>After the Romans destroyed the temple in 70 C.E., Jewish leaders redesignated Shavuot as a holiday that would primarily <a href="https://theconversation.com/shavuot-a-jewish-holiday-of-renewing-commitment-to-god-182717">commemorate the revelation of the Torah</a>. According to Jewish tradition, God gave these teachings to Moses on Mt. Sinai as he led the Israelites through the desert.</p>
<p>Jews have traditionally described the Torah as the word of God – a text potent with significance. Shavuot became a time to celebrate the study of the Torah and its many rabbinic commentaries, including <a href="https://mass.pbslearningmedia.org/resource/sotj14.socst.world.mishnahtalmud/the-mishnah-and-the-talmud/">the Mishnah and the Talmud</a>. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/526629/original/file-20230516-24-ofmndq.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A dimly colored painting of a man holding a large scroll aloft as he stands on a flight of steps inside a synagogue." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/526629/original/file-20230516-24-ofmndq.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/526629/original/file-20230516-24-ofmndq.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=708&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/526629/original/file-20230516-24-ofmndq.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=708&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/526629/original/file-20230516-24-ofmndq.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=708&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/526629/original/file-20230516-24-ofmndq.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=889&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/526629/original/file-20230516-24-ofmndq.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=889&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/526629/original/file-20230516-24-ofmndq.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=889&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">‘Shavuot (Pentecost),’ painted around 1880 by Moritz Daniel Oppenheim.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Moritz_Daniel_Oppenheim_-_Shavuot_(Pentecost)_(Das_Wochen-_oder_Pfingst-Fest)_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg">Jewish Museum/Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
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<p>Shavuot has long been marked by customs that include “<a href="https://www.sefaria.org/sheets/3093?lang=bi">Tikkun Leil Shavuot</a>,” gathering with others to study Torah late into the night. And it has been celebrated with <a href="https://www.jccdenver.org/2017/05/29/why-is-cheesecake-such-a-popular-treat-on-shavuot/#:%7E:text=There%20are%20a%20number%20of,Torah%20provides%20our%20spiritual%20nourishment.">dairy-based foods</a> like blintzes and cheesecakes – treats that signify, among other ideas, that the Torah is the “milk” that nourishes the Jewish people.</p>
<h2>Old holiday, new world</h2>
<p>Jews began <a href="https://pluralism.org/colonial-synagogue-community">to establish communities in North America</a> beginning in the 17th century. On Shavuot, they continued the long-standing custom of celebrating the revelation of the Torah with synagogue services and late-night study.</p>
<p>By the mid-late 19th century, however, many American Jews had begun to neglect these traditional observances. Some felt increasingly uneasy with a holiday that rested on the premise of biblical revelation. At the time, <a href="https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/display/document/obo-9780195393361/obo-9780195393361-0066.xml#:%7E:text=The%20term%20%E2%80%9Cbiblical%20criticism%E2%80%9D%20refers,of%20assessing%20their%20historical%20accuracy">an academic field called biblical criticism</a> was growing and gaining influence. These academics analyzed the Bible’s development as a historical text, identifying it as an anthology of human writers. This left many religious people wrestling with the traditional idea of scripture as the divine word of God.</p>
<p>What, then, to do with Shavuot? A new ceremony introduced by Jews in Europe in the early 1800s offered a promising alternative: confirmation.</p>
<p>Beginning in the mid-19th century, American Jews began to reimagine Shavuot as the time for grandiose celebrations of children’s graduation from Jewish Sunday Schools. On the morning of Shavuot or the closest weekend to it, the students being confirmed, usually 12 or 13 years old, would dress up in fine clothes and parade to the front of their synagogue sanctuaries. </p>
<p>Each child would typically carry <a href="https://doi.org/10.5703/shofar.35.4.0001">elaborate bouquets of flowers</a>, which were essential to the pageantry. Different blooms symbolized religious virtues of the children. White lilies, for example, symbolized innocence and purity, and were often incorporated into the children’s bouquets, as well as into elaborate floral decorations that bedecked the synagogue interior. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/526634/original/file-20230516-21-bahqs0.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A yellowed invitation with a photo of a young boy and brightly colored American flags on top." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/526634/original/file-20230516-21-bahqs0.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/526634/original/file-20230516-21-bahqs0.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=833&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/526634/original/file-20230516-21-bahqs0.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=833&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/526634/original/file-20230516-21-bahqs0.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=833&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/526634/original/file-20230516-21-bahqs0.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1047&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/526634/original/file-20230516-21-bahqs0.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1047&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/526634/original/file-20230516-21-bahqs0.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1047&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A confirmation announcement from 1922.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Confirmation_(Bar_Mitzvah)_invitation_(3718071006).jpg">Center for Jewish History, NYC/Yeshiva University Museum/Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
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<p>Participants would recite declarations of their belief in the one God of the Jewish people and give speeches that confirmed their commitments to Judaism. They would be <a href="https://doi.org/10.1353/ajh.2022.0035">tested on their “catechisms</a>,” short books that recorded questions and answers about religion that children were expected to memorize. To mark the children’s coming of age, rabbis would confer a blessing, welcoming them as adult members of the congregation. </p>
<p>The ceremony would conclude with parties and celebrations and elaborate gifts, particularly for the offspring of wealthier families.</p>
<h2>‘Fitting in’ with Christianity</h2>
<p>For many American Jews, confirmation was appealing as a gender-inclusive coming-of-age ritual. In some congregations, it replaced the bar mitzvah, a ceremony that was traditionally restricted to boys when they reached age 13. In other synagogues, confirmation was introduced as a supplemental ceremony held at the end of the school year. </p>
<p>Confirmation was not, however, a traditionally Jewish practice. It was <a href="https://brill.com/view/journals/jyt/aop/article-10.1163-24055093-bja10036/article-10.1163-24055093-bja10036.xml">a Christian ceremony</a> for coming of age that <a href="https://doi.org/10.1093/mj/kjr005">Jews adopted</a> in the 19th century – first in Europe and then across the Atlantic.</p>
<p>In the U.S., confirmation ceremonies appealed to Jews because they offered a prime moment to show outsiders that Judaism could “fit in” to an American culture dominated by Protestant Christianity. The American <a href="https://religyinz.pitt.edu/pittsburgh-platform/">Jewish Reform movement</a>, which in the 19th century became the largest American Jewish denomination, believed that Judaism should be adapted so that it was more relevant to contemporary life.</p>
<p>Reform Jews celebrated confirmation with spectacular floral displays, musical accompaniments and <a href="https://doi.org/10.1353/sho.2017.0022">extravagant decorations</a>. These grand spectacles were designed to draw huge crowds to the synagogue – not only Jews, but non-Jewish visitors as well. Jews were sensitive to how Christian outsiders perceived their religion, and Shavuot became a day to show that Jewish ceremonies could rival the grandest holiday celebrations put on by Christian churches.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/526628/original/file-20230516-21-wdhfzx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="An older woman and a young boy balancing on a railing arrange greenery inside a Jewish synagogue." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/526628/original/file-20230516-21-wdhfzx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/526628/original/file-20230516-21-wdhfzx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=471&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/526628/original/file-20230516-21-wdhfzx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=471&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/526628/original/file-20230516-21-wdhfzx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=471&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/526628/original/file-20230516-21-wdhfzx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=592&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/526628/original/file-20230516-21-wdhfzx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=592&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/526628/original/file-20230516-21-wdhfzx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=592&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Esther Zolkowitz, 90, passes green branches imported from Israel to 7-year-old Allen Mayer as they decorate for Shavuot in 1952.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/tomorrow-at-sundown-begins-the-traditional-holiday-of-news-photo/516560616?adppopup=true">Bettmann via Getty Images</a></span>
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<p>Not only that, but confirmation also quelled American Jewish anxieties about the future. By putting children promising their commitments to the Jewish people at the center of the stage, confirmation ceremonies reassured American Jews that the next generation was committed to Jewish life. </p>
<h2>Confirmation today</h2>
<p>As the 20th century dawned, the concerns of American Jewish educators began to shift. Over 2.5 million Jewish immigrants <a href="https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/haventohome/haven-century.html">arrived in the U.S.</a> between 1881 and 1924, including many who were committed to traditional Jewish practice. The demographics of American Judaism were changing, and American Jewish education began to change, too.</p>
<p>In the Reform movement, educators re-embraced aspects of Jewish tradition that they had previously rejected. They put down their English-language catechisms and returned to teaching Hebrew. They returned to the bar mitzvah too, expanding the ceremony so that girls too could have <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-first-bat-mitzvah-was-100-years-ago-and-has-been-opening-doors-for-jewish-women-ever-since-178946">their own special Jewish day</a>. </p>
<p>Confirmation <a href="https://www.jewishtimes.com/what-are-confirmation-ceremonies-a-reform-tradition-explained/">didn’t go away</a>, but it was reorganized as a ceremony for older children. By deferring confirmation so that it aligned more with graduation from high school, Jewish educators sought to incentivize children to remain in Jewish education throughout their teenage years.</p>
<p>Today, many American synagogues still celebrate confirmations around Shavuot, though they are no longer billed as the highlight of the Jewish year. The echoes of the 19th century still linger, however, in every American synagogue where Shavuot is a time for young people to don white robes and confirm their commitments to Judaism – and not only a holiday to study Torah and enjoy a cheesecake buffet.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/197385/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Laura Yares has received funding for her research from The American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati, Ohio</span></em></p>Shavuot, which was originally an ancient pilgrimage festival, has gone through many changes over the years – as has Judaism itself.Laura Yares, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, Michigan State UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2013362023-05-10T12:29:19Z2023-05-10T12:29:19ZJudaism’s rituals to honor new mothers are ever-rooted, ever-changing – from medieval embroidery and prayer to new traditions today<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/523694/original/file-20230501-1446-1rui3z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C1024%2C672&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Jewish mothers have created ways to celebrate childbirth with rituals old and new.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/young-indian-jewish-child-naomi-is-carried-by-her-mother-as-news-photo/76710231?adppopup=true">Pal Pillai/AFP via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Reading the Torah, there is no doubt about motherhood’s important role in Jewish literature and life.</p>
<p>The Hebrew Bible is replete with stories of women who feel incomplete without children, although Orthodox interpretation holds that <a href="https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/1005203/jewish/Be-Fruitful-and-Multiply.htm">only men</a> are commanded to “<a href="https://www.sefaria.org/Genesis.1.29?lang=bi&aliyot=0">be fruitful and multiply</a>.” Unable to bear children, Sarah <a href="https://www.sefaria.org/Genesis.16?lang=bi&aliyot=0">offers her handmaid Hagar</a> to her husband, Abraham, so he can father a child. Rachel <a href="https://www.sefaria.org/Genesis.30.2?lang=bi&aliyot=0">longs for deliverance from infertility</a>, saying “Give me children or I shall die,” and Hannah provides a model for Jewish personal prayer when she <a href="https://www.sefaria.org/I_Samuel.1.13?lang=bi">fervently prays for a child</a> on the steps of the Temple in Jerusalem. </p>
<p>Women are not, however, expected to place motherhood ahead of their own well-being. For example, Jewish law not only permits but requires that <a href="https://www.brandeis.edu/jewish-experience/social-justice/2022/june/abortion-judaism-joffe.html">a pregnancy be terminated</a> when it jeopardizes the life of the mother. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/523696/original/file-20230501-757-a8daie.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A colored illustration of two women in robes, one of whom holds a child, while the other looks downcast." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/523696/original/file-20230501-757-a8daie.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/523696/original/file-20230501-757-a8daie.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=873&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/523696/original/file-20230501-757-a8daie.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=873&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/523696/original/file-20230501-757-a8daie.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=873&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/523696/original/file-20230501-757-a8daie.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1097&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/523696/original/file-20230501-757-a8daie.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1097&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/523696/original/file-20230501-757-a8daie.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1097&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">An illustration of Rachel, right, next to her sister Leah and one of Leah’s children.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/biblical-illustration-news-photo/90008983?adppopup=true">Buyenlarge/Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Of course, many stories in Jewish sacred texts celebrate women for reasons that have nothing to do with parenting – from Queen Esther’s bravery in <a href="https://www.sefaria.org/Esther.1?lang=bi">the Book of Esther</a> to <a href="https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/deborah-bible#:%7E:text=Deborah%20is%20one%20of%20the,as%20performing%20a%20judicial%20function.">the powerful judge Deborah</a> in the Book of Judges and <a href="https://www.sefaria.org/sheets/269955?lang=bi">wise women like Beruriah</a>, who is quoted in the Talmud. Yet the value placed on motherhood is clear – not only in Jewish texts, but also in Jewish traditions. For centuries, ritual practices have celebrated the birth of children. Yet they have not always given new mothers an opportunity to celebrate on their own terms or share their own feelings. As <a href="https://www.brandeis.edu/facultyguide/person.html?emplid=5582082465f93a9a0dfd4438912f554a0f5856bc">a scholar of Judaism and gender</a>, though, I have seen how this is changing, as Jewish women reinvent meaningful traditions or develop new ones.</p>
<h2>Medieval mothers</h2>
<p>According to <a href="https://en.jewish-history.huji.ac.il/people/elisheva%C2%A0-baumgarten">historian Elisheva Baumgarten</a>, <a href="https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691130293/mothers-and-children">medieval Jewish women in northern and eastern Europe</a> observed a monthlong period of lying-in after the birth, where they were cared for at home by friends. </p>
<p>Upon its conclusion, the new mother would then go to synagogue on the Sabbath to say prayers of thanks and have special tunes sung in her honor. If she had borne a boy, she might <a href="https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691130293/mothers-and-children">craft an embroidered wimpel</a> – a band used to bind a Torah scroll closed when it is not being read – made from a strip of the cloth used to swaddle her son during his circumcision ceremony, often called a bris or brit milah.</p>
<p>In her book “<a href="https://uncpress.org/book/9781469660639/painted-pomegranates-and-needlepoint-rabbis/">Painted Pomegranates and Needlepoint Rabbis</a>,” <a href="https://religion.cas.lehigh.edu/content/dr-jodi-eichler-levine">religion scholar Jodi Eichler-Levine</a> analyzes this practice as a way for new mothers, confined to the women’s section of the synagogue, to insert themselves into what is otherwise an all-male ritual space. </p>
<p>Describing the emergence of a modern <a href="https://uncpress.org/book/9781469660639/painted-pomegranates-and-needlepoint-rabbis/">Jewish crafting movement</a>, Eichler-Levine also notes that “in recent years, the wimpel has made a comeback,” created by mothers and grandmothers <a href="https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/community/articles/new-life-for-wimpels">to honor the birth of children</a> regardless of their sex. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/524684/original/file-20230505-25-ai89q6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Women arrange a baby on a white pillow one of them is holding, amid a crowd in a large tent." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/524684/original/file-20230505-25-ai89q6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/524684/original/file-20230505-25-ai89q6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/524684/original/file-20230505-25-ai89q6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/524684/original/file-20230505-25-ai89q6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/524684/original/file-20230505-25-ai89q6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/524684/original/file-20230505-25-ai89q6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/524684/original/file-20230505-25-ai89q6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A woman places her newborn son on a pillow held by her mother during a brit milah, a Jewish circumcision ceremony, in Israel.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://newsroom.ap.org/detail/IsraelMixedCityViolence/de321d0e9906401281ee6a9125b0a537/photo?Query=jewish%20son&mediaType=photo&sortBy=arrivaldatetime:desc&dateRange=Anytime&totalCount=459&currentItemNo=49">AP Photo/David Goldman</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Behind the mehitza</h2>
<p>When my oldest child was born 26 years ago, options for celebrating her birth in the Jewish community in Johannesburg, South Africa, were limited. After we brought her home from the hospital, my husband and I attended Shabbat services at the Orthodox synagogue he had grown up in. </p>
<p>As I looked on from behind the mehitza, the screen that separates men’s and women’s areas in Orthodox congregations, he was honored by being called up to the Torah during the service, and our daughter’s name was announced to the community. </p>
<p>I, on the other hand, was encouraged to privately “<a href="https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/115308/jewish/Birkat-Hagomel.htm">bentsch gommel</a>”: recite the prayer for having survived an illness or a perilous journey. </p>
<p>Then we went home. And that was it. This seemed an underwhelming way to acknowledge her arrival and my having given birth to her. </p>
<p>Elsewhere, Jewish feminists had begun creating new rituals to mark moments in women’s and girls’ lives – but in the late 1990s, that innovation was not yet felt in Johannesburg.</p>
<p>I located a copy of “<a href="https://anitadiamant.com/books/the-new-jewish-baby-book/">The New Jewish Baby Book</a>,” imported from the United States. Written by essayist and novelist Anita Diamant, the guide included sample rituals for welcoming the birth of a girl. </p>
<p>Together with my mother-in-law, a psychoanalyst who loved to cater a stylish celebration, and my sister-in-law, a journalist with a gift for powerful public speech, we crafted a ritual to take place in my in-law’s home that announced our daughter’s name and offered the women in our family a more significant role. It was an opportunity for me, as her mother, to acknowledge the beloved grandmothers and biblical figures for whom she was named and to express my hopes that a life of meaning, connection and community lay ahead of her.</p>
<h2>Tradition for the 21st century</h2>
<p>Though we didn’t realize it at the time, the ritual we created reflected many themes of contemporary Jewish feminist innovation. </p>
<p>In the book “<a href="https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/jps/9780827608344/">Inventing Jewish Ritual</a>,” anthropologist <a href="https://jewishstudies.as.virginia.edu/faculty/profile/vanessa">Vanessa Ochs</a> describes how a movement among liberal Jews to engage in ritual innovation began in the 1970s.</p>
<p>Alongside secular do-it-yourself texts like “<a href="https://www.ourbodiesourselves.org/about-us/our-history/">Our Bodies, Ourselves</a>,” which urged women to take ownership over their sexual and reproductive health, Jewish women began to design novel rituals that marked <a href="https://www.mayyimhayyim.org/ceremonies/">transformative moments in women’s lives</a>. These included moments that had long gone unremarked in Jewish public life, including the onset of menstruation, pregnancy, birth, miscarriage, infertility, abortion and menopause.</p>
<p>Our family ritual shared many features with those being developed by other Jewish parents around the world. My daughter’s naming ceremony was created from a template that allowed for improvisation and personalization. It enabled a new shared experience, and it took place outside the synagogue, in the less regulated space of a private home. </p>
<p>Rituals to mark the birth of girls are now widely accepted across all Jewish denominations. Templates and sample prayers are available in books like Israeli professor and politician Aliza Lavie’s anthology, “<a href="https://www.jta.org/2008/12/08/lifestyle/new-prayer-books-revive-forgotten-womens-liturgy">A Jewish Woman’s Prayer Book</a>,” and websites like <a href="https://ritualwell.org/">ritualwell.org</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/523664/original/file-20230501-1435-frdgx6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Stone steps in a high, vaulted, narrow passageway lead to arched windows with sunlight streaming in." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/523664/original/file-20230501-1435-frdgx6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/523664/original/file-20230501-1435-frdgx6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/523664/original/file-20230501-1435-frdgx6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/523664/original/file-20230501-1435-frdgx6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/523664/original/file-20230501-1435-frdgx6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/523664/original/file-20230501-1435-frdgx6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/523664/original/file-20230501-1435-frdgx6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A medieval mikveh, a bath used for ritual immersion in Judaism, in Speyer, Germany.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/ancient-mikvah-a-jewish-ritual-bath-in-speyer-royalty-free-image/1283727309?phrase=mikvah&adppopup=true">Rudolf Ernst/iStock via Getty Images Plus</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>More recently, new rituals have been created to allow a woman to reflect upon the impact that becoming a mother has on her life. The mikveh, or ritual bath, plays a central role in <a href="https://www.benyehudapress.com/books/chanahs-voice/">observance of Jewish laws relating to family purity</a>, which may involve women immersing after menstruation and after giving birth.</p>
<p>Jewish feminists have sought to reclaim the practice of ritual immersion to mark other developments in women’s lives, including becoming a mother, and to shift the focus of ritual from the moment of transition in status to the shift in perspective brought by occupying a new role. </p>
<p>The poet Hila Ratzabi, for example, created “<a href="https://ritualwell.org/ritual/rebirth-mikveh-ritual-mothers/">A Rebirth Ritual for Mothers</a>” to be used at any time after a birth, providing an opportunity to reflect on how becoming a mother has transformed one’s life. The ritual includes sharing reflections on the challenging and empowering moments in the birth, the experience of motherhood and the experience of immersion, and includes these touching words:</p>
<p><em>As I step toward these healing waters, I acknowledge the great transitions I underwent in becoming a mother.</em></p>
<p><em>I come to the mikveh to acknowledge that these powerful birth experiences made me a mother, and I choose to step into my power.</em></p>
<p><em>I come to the mikveh to remind myself that I am always loved, always held, always growing, always whole.</em></p>
<p>Editor’s note: This article has been updated to correct the name of the author of “Inventing Jewish Ritual.”</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/201336/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Lisa Fishbayn Joffe does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Recent generations of Jewish women have looked to reinvent rituals marking the most meaningful moments in their lives, especially childbirth and motherhood.Lisa Fishbayn Joffe, Director of the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute, Brandeis UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1987222023-04-11T12:04:25Z2023-04-11T12:04:25ZDefying the Holocaust didn’t just mean uprising and revolt: Remembering Jews’ everyday resistance on Yom HaShoah and year-round<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/519969/original/file-20230407-3779-73o8pm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=7%2C22%2C4995%2C3513&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Samuel Willenberg, the last survivor of the Treblinka uprising, poses for a picture at his art studio in Tel Aviv, Israel, in 2010. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://newsroom.ap.org/detail/MideastIsraelHolocaust/761dbacc01df4c75ac290d2f73100256/photo?Query=samuel%20willenberg&mediaType=photo&sortBy=arrivaldatetime:desc&dateRange=Anytime&totalCount=21&currentItemNo=12">AP Photo/Oded Balilty</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Richard Glazar insisted that no one survived the Holocaust without help. To this Prague-born Jewish survivor, who endured Nazi imprisonment at Treblinka and <a href="https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/theresienstadt">Theresienstadt</a>, plus years in hiding, it was impossible to persevere without others’ support. Glazar conceded that some of his fellow Treblinka survivors were “loners,” but <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/164058/into-that-darkness-by-gitta-sereny/">he nevertheless believed</a> that they “survived because they were carried by someone, someone who cared for them as much, or almost as much as for themselves.”</p>
<p>Carrying someone else took many forms. For fellow Treblinka prisoner <a href="https://karentreiger.com/">Samuel Goldberg</a>, a Polish Jew born in a small town called Bagatelle, it was the moment the women of his work detail stood up to a guard to save Goldberg’s life. For <a href="https://nupress.northwestern.edu/9780810111691/trap-with-a-green-fence/">those around Glazar</a>, it was the times he brought them more to eat because his position as a fence builder gave him chances to buy food outside the camp. <a href="https://www.worldcat.org/title/744548519">Still more prisoners</a> benefited from a friend willing to literally hold them up during roll call so no guard would notice they were sick – a near-certain death sentence.</p>
<p>In a place meant to destroy all Jewish life, the smallest acts of support and comfort were resistance.</p>
<p>On Aug. 2, 1943, the Treblinka II extermination camp in Nazi-occupied Poland was the site of <a href="https://www.hmd.org.uk/resource/2-august-1943-uprising-of-prisoners-at-treblinka/">one of the most dramatic acts of armed rebellion</a> throughout the Shoah, as the Holocaust is called in Hebrew. Several hundred prisoners managed to escape, though most were recaptured and killed. Nonetheless, at least 70 people survived to recount what happened there. Without their actions, the camp might have continued to operate, and we would likely know next to nothing of its history. </p>
<p>In <a href="https://jewish.cofc.edu/documents/jewish-studies-faculty-and-staff-bios/chad-gibbs.php">years of research on this extermination camp</a>, I’ve come to place as much importance on the long trail of smaller acts as on the famous day itself. Long before the revolt, resistance was commonplace at Treblinka. It had to be. Here and elsewhere, prisoner revolt would have been impossible without those everyday acts of support that laid foundations for more.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/519972/original/file-20230407-16-xh4te7.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A black and white photo shows a huge smoke cloud rising across a field." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/519972/original/file-20230407-16-xh4te7.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/519972/original/file-20230407-16-xh4te7.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=476&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519972/original/file-20230407-16-xh4te7.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=476&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519972/original/file-20230407-16-xh4te7.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=476&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519972/original/file-20230407-16-xh4te7.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=599&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519972/original/file-20230407-16-xh4te7.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=599&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519972/original/file-20230407-16-xh4te7.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=599&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A clandestine photograph of the burning death camp Treblinka II, taken by eyewitness Franciszek Ząbecki during the uprising on Aug. 2, 1943.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Treblinka_uprising_(Z%C4%85becki_1943).jpg">Franciszek Ząbecki/Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Defiance and dignity</h2>
<p>Between July 1942 and November 1943, Nazi Germany killed as many as 925,000 people at <a href="https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/treblinka">Treblinka II</a>. The vast majority of these victims were Jews, though the regime also murdered several thousand Romani people there. </p>
<p>This terrible place was unlike most other Nazi camps in that its sole purpose was <a href="https://iupress.org/9780253025418/the-operation-reinhard-death-camps-revised-and-expanded-edition/">the destruction of life</a>. There were no slave labor industries or construction projects. The Jews responsible for the revolt were among the several hundred men and women kept alive to maintain facilities, sort the belongings of the dead, and dispose of the bodies. As <a href="https://www.aju.edu/faculty/michael-berenbaum">the historian Michael Berenbaum</a> put it, Treblinka was “<a href="https://www.kcet.org/shows/treblinkas-last-witness/episodes/treblinkas-last-witness">a factory whose end product was dead Jews</a>.” </p>
<p>In such a hell, life itself is resistance, but those held at Treblinka pushed back against Nazi designs for their destruction in every way possible. Early organized efforts took the form of escapes to warn other Jews. <a href="https://muzeumtreblinka.eu/en/informacje/krzepicki-abram-jakub/">Abraham Krzepicki</a>, for example, escaped Treblinka and went back to the Warsaw Ghetto to tell of what the camp really was – and later died there, fighting in <a href="https://www.yadvashem.org/holocaust/about/combat-resistance/warsaw-ghetto.html#narrative_info">the ghetto’s 1943 uprising</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/519974/original/file-20230407-20-vejhd2.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A black and white photo shows women and children in coats walking beside cattle cars." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/519974/original/file-20230407-20-vejhd2.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/519974/original/file-20230407-20-vejhd2.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=751&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519974/original/file-20230407-20-vejhd2.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=751&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519974/original/file-20230407-20-vejhd2.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=751&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519974/original/file-20230407-20-vejhd2.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=943&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519974/original/file-20230407-20-vejhd2.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=943&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519974/original/file-20230407-20-vejhd2.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=943&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Deportation to Treblinka from the Jewish ghetto in Siedlce, Poland, in 1942.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Deportation_to_Treblinka_from_ghetto_in_Siedlce_1942.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>These messengers of truth helped expose Nazi lies and give others the chance to try to go into hiding, fight or jump from trains. </p>
<p>Still, most people targeted by the Third Reich could not avoid transport to Treblinka or other camps even if they knew what awaited them there. For some, resistance was the way they carried themselves on the way to a certain death, such as saying prayers like <a href="https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/the-shema/">the Shema Yisrael</a>. Condemned for being Jewish, they steadfastly remained so to the end.</p>
<p>Samuel Willenberg, who was <a href="https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/rivlin-at-funeral-for-last-treblinka-revolt-survivor-samuel-willenberg-was-a-symbol-of-heroism-445734">the last survivor of the Treblinka revolt</a> when he died in 2016, remembered how a young woman named Ruth Dorfmann asked only if the gas would hurt, and calmly acted with such unshakable dignity that he felt compelled many years later to <a href="https://www.yadvashem.org/articles/interviews/willenberg.html">sculpt her final moments</a>.</p>
<h2>‘Choiceless choices’</h2>
<p>Court testimonies, oral histories, survivors’ memoirs and <a href="https://iupress.org/9780253025418/the-operation-reinhard-death-camps-revised-and-expanded-edition/">other sources</a> show that over months of concerted planning, Treblinka prisoners’ “Organizing Committee” laid the groundwork for the August rebellion by building a network of trusted men and women. Organizers found ways to place them in jobs that gave prisoner planners complete access to the camp. </p>
<p>That process was a winding and perilous road. Three earlier plans failed, and Nazi guards killed many Jews they suspected of resistance. It took at least eight months of concerted effort to finally <a href="https://iupress.org/9780253025418/the-operation-reinhard-death-camps-revised-and-expanded-edition/">pull off the revolt</a>.</p>
<p>Though resistance at Treblinka eventually meant armed revolt, it could not have achieved that end without the countless little rebellions that came before. The same was true in Warsaw and throughout Nazi-controlled Europe. At its core, resistance is the way a person or a people chooses to stand against the challenges thrown at them. That holds true even if those options are what <a href="https://fortunoff.library.yale.edu/film/langer/">Holocaust scholar Lawrence Langer</a> called “<a href="https://sunypress.edu/Books/V/Versions-of-Survival">choiceless choices</a>” between one terrible outcome and another. </p>
<p>In <a href="https://www.yadvashem.org/holocaust/about/ghettos/warsaw.html">the Warsaw Ghetto</a>, where hundreds of thousands of Jews were crammed into inhumane conditions, residents held each other up by establishing soup kitchens and clandestine schools, organizing the removal of waste to prevent disease, and setting up everyday events to help people feel normal, even for one moment. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/519968/original/file-20230407-21-lfycr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="People look at a museum display. In the foreground, a single slice of bread sits on a table." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/519968/original/file-20230407-21-lfycr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/519968/original/file-20230407-21-lfycr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=411&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519968/original/file-20230407-21-lfycr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=411&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519968/original/file-20230407-21-lfycr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=411&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519968/original/file-20230407-21-lfycr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=517&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519968/original/file-20230407-21-lfycr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=517&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519968/original/file-20230407-21-lfycr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=517&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">A piece of bread, equivalent of a daily food ration in the Warsaw Ghetto, displayed during a commemoration of residents’ suffering in the ghetto.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/piece-of-bread-equivalent-of-a-daily-food-ration-in-the-news-photo/149037070?adppopup=true">Wojtek Radwanski/AFP via GettyImages</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Warsaw Jews worked <a href="https://portal.ehri-project.eu/units/us-005578-irn507312">to archive what they endured</a> and <a href="https://theconversation.com/warsaw-ghettos-defiant-jewish-doctors-secretly-documented-the-medical-effects-of-nazi-starvation-policies-in-a-book-recently-rediscovered-on-a-library-shelf-182726">documented the medical effects</a> of the starvation they faced. Both acts demonstrated hope for a future that would remember their suffering and use its lessons to ease the pain of others.</p>
<p>Yom HaShoah, the annual day of remembrance for the Holocaust established by the Israeli government, occurs on the 27th of Nisan in the Hebrew calendar: the start of major fighting during <a href="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/holocaust-uprising/">the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising</a>. Thousands died in the Germans’ brutal retaliation.</p>
<h2>A more complete picture</h2>
<p>The full name of Yom HaShoah is “Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day” – which, along with its tie to the Warsaw Ghetto, links remembrance with resistance in no uncertain terms. This pairing held great importance <a href="https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780805066609/theseventhmillion">for Israel’s identity as a new state</a> and for a people so deeply wounded by years of terror.</p>
<p>Whenever we remember the Holocaust, we should remember the small rebellions, the individual stands, and the little acts of caring that Glazar found so important. Only in seeing that wider picture of everyday struggles can we understand the true variety and scope of resistance.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/198722/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Chad Gibbs does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Yom HaShoah, which falls on April 17-18, 2023, pointedly commemorates Jewish resistance to the Nazis.Chad Gibbs, Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies, College of CharlestonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2003442023-03-16T19:11:19Z2023-03-16T19:11:19ZFor Australian Jews in the 1940s and 1950s, remembering the Holocaust meant fighting racism and colonialism<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/511555/original/file-20230221-23-8a55wp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=33%2C1119%2C1832%2C2025&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-2707491263/view?partId=nla.obj-2707505174#page/n0/mode/1up">National Library of Australia</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>Readers are advised this piece contains some racist terminology.</em></p>
<p>Today, the Australian public mostly sees a conservative Australian Jewish communal leadership that has, since the 1990s, rarely spoken out on anything unrelated to Israel or the Holocaust.</p>
<p>Both issues are often drawn together. <a href="https://www.zfa.com.au/zionist-federation-of-australia-welcomes-the-un-resolution-condemning-holocaust-denial/">Arguments for Israel’s defence</a> are often bolstered by the memory of the Holocaust. That the Holocaust is an inevitable cause of conservatism and Zionism has become part of a commonsense idea of, and about, Australian Jews.</p>
<p>But as I argue in my book, <a href="https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-10123-6">Jewish Antifascism and the False Promise of Settler Colonialism</a>, the seemingly natural connection made between Israel and Holocaust memory has shifted over time. </p>
<p>In fact, Australian Jewish communities have long fought internally over the best strategy to achieve Jewish safety. </p>
<p>The memorialisation of the Holocaust was key to the ideas and practice of the popular Australian Jewish antifascist left in the 1940s and 1950s.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/how-covid-has-shone-a-light-on-the-ugly-face-of-australian-antisemitism-154743">How COVID has shone a light on the ugly face of Australian antisemitism</a>
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<h2>A popular Jewish antifascist left-wing movement</h2>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/511553/original/file-20230221-28-lflp5d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="The Jewish Council produced leaflets calling on Australians to oppose fascism." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/511553/original/file-20230221-28-lflp5d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/511553/original/file-20230221-28-lflp5d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=1013&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/511553/original/file-20230221-28-lflp5d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=1013&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/511553/original/file-20230221-28-lflp5d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=1013&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/511553/original/file-20230221-28-lflp5d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1273&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/511553/original/file-20230221-28-lflp5d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1273&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/511553/original/file-20230221-28-lflp5d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1273&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Jewish Council to Combat Facism and Anti-Semitism produced many leaflets in Australia calling on Australians to oppose fascism.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-2707491263/view?partId=nla.obj-2707505174#page/n0/mode/1up">National Library of Australia</a></span>
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<p>In the 1940s and 1950s, I found, Holocaust memory was key to a popular Jewish antifascist discourse that was left-wing, non-nationalist and universalistic. </p>
<p>For these Jewish antifascists, memorialising the Holocaust meant fighting fascism and racism. These were seen as ongoing international threats that could only be defeated through solidarity with progressive forces and other oppressed people.</p>
<p>The main organisation of the Jewish antifascist left in Australia was the Jewish Council to Combat Fascism and Anti-Semitism, sometimes shortened to “the Jewish Council”.</p>
<p>Formed in Melbourne in 1942, the Jewish Council represented, in the words of <a href="https://cat2.lib.unimelb.edu.au/search%7ES30?/arechter/arechter/1%2C12%2C23%2CB/frameset&FF=arechter+david&1%2C%2C2">historian David Rechter</a></p>
<blockquote>
<p>in institutional form the broad-based antifascist leftism enjoying considerable vogue both within the Jewish community and in society at large.</p>
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<p>It monitored and responded to incidents of antisemitism and actively linked the threats of antisemitism and fascism. Its strategy was to fight these threats by allying the Jewish community with progressive political forces. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/511878/original/file-20230223-1458-v5en8j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A Jewish Council pamphlet from the 1950s." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/511878/original/file-20230223-1458-v5en8j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/511878/original/file-20230223-1458-v5en8j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=918&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/511878/original/file-20230223-1458-v5en8j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=918&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/511878/original/file-20230223-1458-v5en8j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=918&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/511878/original/file-20230223-1458-v5en8j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1153&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/511878/original/file-20230223-1458-v5en8j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1153&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/511878/original/file-20230223-1458-v5en8j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1153&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">A Jewish Council pamphlet from the 1950s warns of the threat of Nazism to Australia.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-43361144/view?partId=nla.obj-43361153#page/n0/mode/1up">National Library of Australia</a></span>
</figcaption>
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<p>By 1943 the Jewish Council was popular enough for the Victorian Jewish Advisory Board (the official representative body for Victorian Jewry) to vote to give it “full moral and financial support”. It was given responsibility for all official Jewish community public relations activities.</p>
<p>Throughout the 1940s, the Jewish Council had widespread support. It had hundreds of members and many committees (including special committees of doctors and lawyers and, later, a very active ladies auxiliary committee and youth section).</p>
<p>The philosophy and practice of the Jewish Council is summed up in a 1950 editorial in the popular Jewish left-wing magazine <a href="https://catalogue.nla.gov.au/Record/2066914">Unity</a>, which warned that:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Goebbels’ spectre is still alive. Hitler’s lies and exploded theories are being refurbished.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>It raised alarm about the widespread distribution of propaganda in Melbourne from a white supremacist organisation known as the “All Aryan World Movement”.</p>
<p>The editorial continued:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Shall we ignore such ridiculous and poisonous material? Some people in the community because of their sheltered lives in Australia have never really felt or understood the impact of Nazism on the Jewish people. They are advocates of silence. Their counterparts in Hitler’s Germany only learned the folly of their inactivity on the threshold of the gas chamber […] The spreading of fascist and anti-Semitic doctrines threatens us not only as Jews but strikes at the very foundations of our democracy.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In the late 1940s, the Jewish Council was especially focused on the alarming numbers of Nazis and Nazi collaborators migrating to Australia under the <a href="https://catalogue.nla.gov.au/Record/1778528">Displaced Persons scheme</a>.</p>
<p>Some were infamous Nazis and had harassed Jews in migrant reception centres.</p>
<p>In one dramatic <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books?id=lwAAEAAAQBAJ&pg=PT291&lpg=PT291&dq=Sam+Goldbloom+bonegilla+SS+tattoos&source=bl&ots=ACOszp4Lu5&sig=ACfU3U1OTutb4aP_UtJwWUwl3RarvFzI3Q&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjni5Tqtqr9AhUPwzgGHU9RCcwQ6AF6BAgHEAM#v=onepage&q=Sam%20Goldbloom%20bonegilla%20SS%20tattoos&f=false">incident</a> of intelligence gathering, the Jewish Council’s Sam Goldbloom disguised himself as a plumber and sneaked into the shower block at the <a href="https://www.bonegilla.org.au/">Bonegilla migrant reception centre</a>. He photographed the scars under migrants’ left armpits, where they had removed their SS tattoos.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1364848044794019842"}"></div></p>
<h2>The broader fight against racism and colonialism</h2>
<p>For the Jewish Council, the struggle against antisemitism was connected to fighting racism and colonialism more generally.</p>
<p>In 1947, during a period of <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14443050309387852?journalCode=rjau20">persistent attack by the press and conservative forces on Jewish refugees</a>, Jewish Council activist Norman Rothfield <a href="https://catalogue.nla.gov.au/Record/1765472">proclaimed</a>: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>We must attack reaction, no matter whence it comes. Dutch aggression against the Indonesia Republic is our concern, as is also the lynching of negroes [sic] in America, or the maltreatment of Aborigines [sic] in Australia […] We Jews can only be secure in a secure world. It is a world situation of conflict and strife together with a situation in Australia of intense class conflict which lays the ground for a campaign of anti-Semitic prejudice greater than any previous attacks in this country against a racial or religious minority.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The Jewish Council frequently compared the Holocaust with other instances of colonialism and racism.</p>
<p>A 1952 editorial from the Jewish Council-affiliated magazine The Clarion criticised Australia’s allies’ involvement in the Korean War, suggesting:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The Master Race theory of Nazism has reached a new peak in the war circles of America and Britain: for what is the difference between exterminating “Gooks” [sic] in Korea and “Yids” [sic] in Europe? Both are fruits from the same tree of evil.</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Yosl Bergner, antifascist artist</h2>
<p>The famous artist Yosl Bergner (1920-2017) presents another example of Jewish antifascist Holocaust memorialisation. </p>
<p>The war years saw the emergence of <a href="https://catalogue.nla.gov.au/Record/3298450">a new pan-Aboriginal movement</a> led by Aboriginal activists <a href="https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/nicholls-sir-douglas-ralph-doug-14920">Doug</a> and <a href="https://www.firstpeoplesrelations.vic.gov.au/lady-gladys-nicholls">Gladys Nicholls</a>. </p>
<p>Bergner encountered this movement through Jewish antifascists and left cultural organisations, as well as his membership of the Communist Party of Australia. </p>
<p>He frequently painted urban Aboriginal people, rejecting the typical settler artist imagery of Aboriginal people as a “dying race”. Instead, his work depicts Aboriginal people as complex modern subjects, displaced and dispossessed in a world of urban poverty inseparable from the wider social relations of Australia. </p>
<p>In the mid-1940s, Bergner often exhibited these works along with his paintings of Polish Jews. He sought to suggest strong connections between the plight of the two oppressed peoples.</p>
<h2>‘A Nazi Writes Home’</h2>
<p>Another example is a short satirical story titled “A Nazi Writes Home”, written under the initials “L.F.” and published in Unity magazine in July 1951. </p>
<p>In this fictional letter of furious irony, a Nazi in Australia named “Fritz” writes his Nazi friend back in Germany. </p>
<p>He describes initially fearing Australia was “a spineless democracy-loving country, rotten with worship of the masses”. He changed his mind, however, after seeing how brutally Aboriginal people were treated. He goes on to celebrates Australia as an exemplary country of white supremacy – “the true Aryan theory”. </p>
<p>After seeing a white child racially abuse an older Aboriginal woman, Fritz suggested:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Australia is a land where the principles of National-Socialism are not altogether foreign.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The writer isn’t just drawing a clear link between the ongoing fascist threat and the racism of Australian colonialism. The story also links discrimination against Aboriginal people with the plight of Jews in the Holocaust and racial segregation laws in the United States. </p>
<p>“A Nazi Writes Home” places the oppression of Aboriginal people within an international antifascist context. It suggested antifascists needed to fight the entrenched structural racism of Australia. </p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/this-jewish-womans-story-of-surviving-the-holocaust-by-passing-as-catholic-and-sheltering-with-nazis-is-rightly-hard-to-read-191003">This Jewish woman's story of surviving the Holocaust by passing as Catholic and sheltering with Nazis is (rightly) hard to read</a>
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<img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/200344/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Max Kaiser has received funding from the Commonwealth government for his PhD research. </span></em></p>The memorialisation of the Holocaust was key to the ideas and practice of the popular Australian Jewish antifascist left in the 1940s and 1950s.Max Kaiser, Adjunct lecturer, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1996542023-03-14T12:23:04Z2023-03-14T12:23:04ZNazi orders for Jews to wear a star were hateful, but far from unique – a historian traces the long history of antisemitic badges<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/513504/original/file-20230305-4678-9f7vc4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C1%2C1020%2C660&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The Nazis made the yellow badge infamous around the world, but its roots are much older.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/jews-wearing-the-yellow-badge-news-photo/92425374?phrase=jewish%20badge&adppopup=true">Roger Viollet/Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Growing up in Belgium, I’d hear the story of how my grandparents married during <a href="https://www.brusselstimes.com/67366/the-year-of-silence-belgiums-darkest-moments-during-wwii">the Nazi occupation</a>. It was not a time for celebrations, particularly for Jewish families like theirs. Naively, though, they thought marriage would protect them from being separated should they be deported. So in June 1942, they went to city hall with their loved ones – “decorated,” as my grandmother would say, with yellow stars. </p>
<p>Hearing that story as a child, I imagined them in dark clothes with shiny stars, each one a human Christmas tree – a celebratory image that only existed in my brain. Her most vivid memory of that day were the looks in people’s eyes: stares of curiosity, pity and contempt. The yellow star had transformed them, in onlookers’ eyes, from joyous newlyweds into miserable Jews.</p>
<p>Decades later, I completed a Ph.D. on <a href="https://history.wustl.edu/people/flora-cassen">the history of forcing Jewish people to wear a badge</a>. My grandmother called to congratulate me – and, I soon understood, to unburden herself of a story she’d never told before. </p>
<p>When <a href="https://www.antwerpcommemorates.be/timeline">the Nazis issued the law</a> forcing Jewish Belgians to wear a yellow star in May 1942, my grandmother’s future father-in-law declared that he would not wear it. The whole family tried to persuade him otherwise, fearing the consequences. But it was in vain, and in the end, my grandmother stitched the star on his coat.</p>
<p>I could hear her voice trembling on the phone as she told me she still could not forgive herself. Their wedding two weeks later would be the last time she saw him: He died in 1945 after being released from a transit camp and a detention home for elderly Jews, spending two years in terrible conditions.</p>
<p>Although the yellow badge has come to symbolize Nazi cruelty, it was not an original idea. For many centuries, communities throughout Europe had forced Jewish residents <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/marking-the-jews-in-renaissance-italy/CE7EA6694B6917F086767A7626BE9217">to mark themselves</a>.</p>
<h2>Yellow wheels and pointed hats</h2>
<p>In lands under Muslim rule, non-Muslims had been required to wear <a href="https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/jewish-badge-origins">identifying marks</a> since the <a href="https://www.bu.edu/mzank/Jerusalem/tx/pactofumar.htm#:%7E:text=THE%20Pact%20of%20Umar%20is,had%20to%20subscribe%20to%20it.">Pact of Umar</a>, a ruling attributed to a seventh-century caliph, though scholars believe it originated later. These were usually a yellow belt, <a href="https://press.princeton.edu/books/ebook/9781400844333/under-crescent-and-cross">called “zunnar</a>,” or a yellow turban.</p>
<p>In Europe, forced markings for Jews and Muslims <a href="https://history.hanover.edu/courses/excerpts/344latj.html">were introduced by Pope Innocent III</a> at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215. The pope explained that it was a means to prevent Christians from having sex with Jews and Muslims, thereby protecting society from “such prohibited intercourse.” </p>
<p>However, the pope did not specify how Jews’ or Muslims’ dress had to be different, resulting in various distinguishing signs. <a href="https://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/2317-badge">Ways to make Jews visible</a> in the cities and towns of medieval Europe abounded: from yellow wheels in France, blue stripes in Sicily, yellow pointed hats in Germany and red capes in Hungary to white badges shaped like the Ten Commandments tablets in England. Since there were no large Muslim communities in Europe at the time, except for Spain, the regulation only applied to Jews in practice.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/513489/original/file-20230305-28-wspgok.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A yellowed manuscript shows one figure with a stick threatening three others; all wear robes and head coverings." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/513489/original/file-20230305-28-wspgok.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/513489/original/file-20230305-28-wspgok.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=435&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/513489/original/file-20230305-28-wspgok.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=435&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/513489/original/file-20230305-28-wspgok.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=435&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/513489/original/file-20230305-28-wspgok.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=546&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/513489/original/file-20230305-28-wspgok.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=546&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/513489/original/file-20230305-28-wspgok.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=546&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A manuscript illustration of England’s expulsion of Jews in 1290 shows figures wearing badges shaped like the Ten Commandments tablets.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:BritLibCottonNeroDiiFol183vPersecutedJews.jpg">British Library/Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p><a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt6wq397.8">In northern Italy</a>, Jews had to wear a yellow, round badge in the 15th century and a yellow hat in the 16th century. The reason typically given was that they were unrecognizable from the rest of the population. For Christian authorities, unmarked Jews were like gambling, drinking and prostitution: All represented the moral failings of Renaissance society and needed to be fixed. </p>
<h2>Pretext for persecution</h2>
<p>However, as I explain in my book, Jews were often arrested for not wearing <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/marking-the-jews-in-renaissance-italy/strangers-at-home/7A80F5E8C92E4EE9732A634A82B4910D">the yellow badge or hat</a>, sometimes while traveling away from home in places where no one knew them.</p>
<p>Clearly, then, Jews were recognizable from Christians in other ways. The true aim of forcing Jews to wear emblems was not merely to “identify” them, as authorities claimed, but to target them.</p>
<p>My research showed that laws imposing a badge or hat functioned as means <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/marking-the-jews-in-renaissance-italy/CE7EA6694B6917F086767A7626BE9217">to threaten and extort</a> Jewish communities. Jews were willing to pay considerable sums to retract such laws or soften their provisions. For example, Jews requested exemptions for women, children or travelers. When communal negotiations failed, wealthy individual Jews tried to negotiate for themselves and their families.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/513505/original/file-20230305-18-l4qiep.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A black and white illustration of a group of people with pointed hats receiving a document from a king on horseback." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/513505/original/file-20230305-18-l4qiep.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/513505/original/file-20230305-18-l4qiep.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=469&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/513505/original/file-20230305-18-l4qiep.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=469&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/513505/original/file-20230305-18-l4qiep.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=469&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/513505/original/file-20230305-18-l4qiep.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=589&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/513505/original/file-20230305-18-l4qiep.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=589&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/513505/original/file-20230305-18-l4qiep.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=589&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Jews in pointed hats receive confirmation of their privileges from Holy Roman Emperor Henry VII, in the Codex Trevirensis from around 1340.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/henry-vii-receives-a-deputation-of-the-jews-after-the-news-photo/1277806635?phrase=italian%20jews&adppopup=true">Bildagentur-online/Universal Images Group via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p><a href="https://www.cuapress.org/9780813235691/marks-of-distinction/">Badge laws</a> were frequently reissued, which has led scholars to conclude that <a href="https://www.seuil.com/ouvrage/histoire-de-l-antisemitisme-leon-poliakov/9782757872086">their enforcement was inconsistent</a>; after all, a legal directive that is steadily applied does not need to be reimposed. But with the risk of arrest and extortion hanging over the heads of Jewish communities, and their willingness to pay or negotiate to avoid these consequences, badge laws had adverse effects on Jewish life even when not enforced. </p>
<p>In the Duchy of Piedmont in modern-day Italy, for example, Jewish communities <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/marking-the-jews-in-renaissance-italy/from-black-to-yellow/7E4A965561FB589051284B2025A5C855">banded together</a> to pay additional taxes, sometimes several times in the same year, to receive exemptions from wearing the Jewish badge. Although the Jews’ cohesion was remarkable, it had a high cost, as these communities ended up ruined and leaving the duchy.</p>
<p>When Italian Jews asked authorities to cancel or at least amend badge laws, they were not primarily worried about being recognized as Jews. The problem was being mocked or attacked. Violence had accompanied badge laws since their inception: Just a few years later, Pope Innocent III wrote to French bishops that they needed to take every possible measure to ensure that the badge did not expose the Jews to the “<a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/marking-the-jews-in-renaissance-italy/origins-and-symbolic-meaning-of-the-jewish-badge/735D03C41AE842D90E5466D966D1A9D4">danger of loss of life</a>.”</p>
<p>Yet harassment continued. Sometime in the 1560s, for example, the governor of Milan received a a letter from Lazarino Pugieto and Moyses Fereves, bankers from Genoa, explaining that <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/marking-the-jews-in-renaissance-italy/strangers-at-home/7A80F5E8C92E4EE9732A634A82B4910D">bandits had robbed them</a> after recognizing them as Jews. In 1572, Raffaele Carmini and Lazaro Levi, representatives of the communities of Pavia and Cremona, wrote that when Jews wore the yellow hat, <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/marking-the-jews-in-renaissance-italy/from-black-to-yellow/7E4A965561FB589051284B2025A5C855">youngsters attacked and insulted them</a>. And in 1595, David Sacerdote, a successful musician from Monferrato, complained that he could not play with other musicians <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/marking-the-jews-in-renaissance-italy/no-jews-in-genoa/5BDE8C0E2999D546E0C03AD890B5250D">when wearing a yellow hat</a>.</p>
<h2>‘In the past, no one noticed me’</h2>
<p>Centuries later, the yellow star had the same effect.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/max-jacob">Max Jacob</a>, a French-Jewish artist and poet, wrote of experiencing a vision of Christ, and he converted to Christianity in 1909. During the Nazi occupation of France, he was nonetheless classified as a Jew and forced to wear the yellow star. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/513506/original/file-20230305-1969-zitq6f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A black and white photograph of a bald man in a suit holding a painting." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/513506/original/file-20230305-1969-zitq6f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/513506/original/file-20230305-1969-zitq6f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=755&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/513506/original/file-20230305-1969-zitq6f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=755&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/513506/original/file-20230305-1969-zitq6f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=755&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/513506/original/file-20230305-1969-zitq6f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=949&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/513506/original/file-20230305-1969-zitq6f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=949&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/513506/original/file-20230305-1969-zitq6f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=949&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Max Jacob, French poet and painter.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/max-jacob-french-poet-and-painter-news-photo/2629376?phrase=max%20jacob&adppopup=true">Sasha/Hulton Archive/Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In the prose poem “<a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=25477">Love of the Neighbor</a>,” he wrote about the deep shame he experienced. </p>
<p>“Who saw the toad cross the street?” he asked. No one had noticed it, despite his clownish, grimy appearance and weak leg. “In the past, no one noticed me in the street either,” Jacob added, “but now kids mock my yellow star. Happy toad! you do not have a yellow star.” </p>
<p>The Nazi context differed significantly from Renaissance Italy’s: There were no negotiations or exceptions, not even for large payments. But the mockery by children, the loss of status, and the shame remained.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/199654/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Flora Cassen does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Badges and other wearable markings had a long history of being used to target Jewish people in Europe.Flora Cassen, Chair and Associate Professor of Jewish, Islamic, and Middle Eastern Studies, Washington University in St. LouisLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2010382023-03-06T13:35:42Z2023-03-06T13:35:42ZWhat is a pogrom? Israeli mob attack has put a century-old word in the spotlight<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/513291/original/file-20230302-14-u09672.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=94%2C23%2C5128%2C3444&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Palestinians look out from a damaged building next to scorched cars in the town of Hawara, near the West Bank city of Nablus, on Feb. 27, 2023.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://newsroom.ap.org/detail/IsraelPalestinians/b86627dc8b494251a271b1aa0a4f4ec6/photo?Query=west%20bank&mediaType=photo&sortBy=&dateRange=Anytime&totalCount=25904&currentItemNo=42">AP Photo/Nasser Nasser</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Following the murder of two Israeli brothers in the West Bank on Feb. 26, 2023, a mob of around <a href="https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-02-27/ty-article/.highlight/why-no-one-should-be-surprised-by-settlers-rampaging-through-a-west-bank-town/00000186-939a-d9b3-a587-bfbea51c0000">400 Israelis attacked</a> the <a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/settlers-said-to-rampage-in-huwara-after-deadly-attack-set-fire-to-cars-and-homes/">Palestinian town of Huwara</a>. They <a href="https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-02-26/ty-article/.premium/following-deadly-west-bank-shooting-israeli-settlers-rampage-town-of-hawara/00000186-8ed8-d525-a9ef-9ef8f87f0000">torched dozens of homes and cars</a>, leaving one dead and hundreds wounded before being stopped by Israeli security forces. </p>
<p>Though some government leaders – including the <a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/police-to-probe-far-right-mk-for-remarks-backing-violent-west-bank-settler-rampage/">head of the parliament’s National Security Committee</a> – praised the mob or <a href="https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-03-01/ty-article/.premium/palestinian-village-of-hawara-needs-to-be-wiped-out-israels-finance-minister/00000186-9d56-df48-ab96-bd576aac0000?fbclid=IwAR2MgEVZAfnW2rPVlBaYq9auXvnTlZqYf_64NPVnuZq5cDZaPKoBZ7xcfUg">called</a> for the state itself to erase the town’s existence, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu condemned them for “taking the law into their own hands.” Others – including the <a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog-february-28-2023/">top Israeli general</a> in the West Bank – used even stronger language, calling the attack a “pogrom,” as did a <a href="https://twitter.com/IsraelHistSoc/status/1630565499045019649/photo/1">statement against the attack</a> by the Israeli Historical Society, signed by some of Israel’s most renowned historians. </p>
<p>According to historian of Russian Jewry <a href="https://www.historians.org/research-and-publications/perspectives-on-history/december-2007/in-memoriam-john-doyle-klier">John Klier</a>, <a href="https://yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Pogroms">a pogrom is</a> “an outbreak of mass violence directed against a minority religious, ethnic or social group [that] usually implies central instigation and control, or at minimum the passivity of local authorities.” </p>
<p>In other words, it is an explosion of mob violence by members of a majority group against a minority, with at least passive support of the state. Pogroms remind the minority of their lower place in the social order.</p>
<p>As a <a href="https://jewish.cofc.edu/documents/jewish-studies-faculty-and-staff-bios/joshua-shanes,-associate-director.php">scholar of modern Jewish history</a>, I am very aware that the use of this term is highly contentious. Because of their pivotal role in modern Jewish history in general – and the birth of Zionism and Israel in particular – pogroms have an oversize place in Jewish collective memory. </p>
<h2>Russian origins</h2>
<p>The Russian word was first <a href="https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/pogroms">made infamous</a> around the world after a series of such attacks broke out against Jews across Russian-controlled Ukraine <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/history/russian-and-east-european-history/russians-jews-and-pogroms-18811882?format=HB&isbn=9780521895484">in 1881 and 1882</a> in response to the assassination of Czar Alexander II, which was blamed on “the Jews.” The 250 pogroms <a href="https://yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Pogroms">killed dozens of people</a> and caused extensive property damage. </p>
<p>Despite the relatively low death toll compared with 20th-century pogroms, these first pogroms played a pivotal role in Jewish history. Millions of Jews abandoned hope in Russia and moved to the United States, while a small cadre considered Jewish national options in Palestine instead. In other words, the pogroms partially gave birth to modern Zionism. </p>
<p>One lone pogrom in 1903 in <a href="https://yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Kishinev">Kishiniv</a>, Moldova, which killed 49 Jews, had a particularly powerful effect on Jewish politics at the time. It received worldwide condemnation, including by the renowned Russian authors Leo Tolstoy and Maksim Gorky, and was the subject of a powerful Hebrew poem, “<a href="https://wwnorton.com/books/9781631495991">The City of Slaughter</a>,” that galvanized support for militant Zionism. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/513294/original/file-20230302-2048-ey7yz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A man wearing a black jacket holding loose sheets of papers with lists of names on them." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/513294/original/file-20230302-2048-ey7yz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/513294/original/file-20230302-2048-ey7yz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/513294/original/file-20230302-2048-ey7yz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/513294/original/file-20230302-2048-ey7yz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/513294/original/file-20230302-2048-ey7yz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/513294/original/file-20230302-2048-ey7yz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/513294/original/file-20230302-2048-ey7yz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A list of all 187 victims of a 1919 pogrom in the Ukrainian town of Dubova.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://newsroom.ap.org/detail/Documents1919Pogrom/9427339e04d94dfab7032cdd817113f4/photo?Query=pogrom%20jews%20&mediaType=photo&sortBy=&dateRange=Anytime&totalCount=72&currentItemNo=25">AP Photo/David Karp</a></span>
</figcaption>
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<p>Often the government was in fact not behind the violence and sometimes even opposed it. This was particularly <a href="https://upittpress.org/books/9780822985259/">the case in 1881</a>, for example, when Russian forces even occasionally fired on the rampaging mob. </p>
<p>Critically, however, the dominant ethnic groups, which included Ukrainians and Russians, assumed that the Russian government was on their side. After all, there was extensive, legal discrimination against the Jewish minority and constant incendiary rhetoric by government officials.</p>
<p>In subsequent decades, the level of violence in Eastern Europe dramatically increased, often with the open support of the Russian authorities. Thousands were killed during two years of unrest following the first Russian Revolution in 1905, while over 100,000 Jews were killed in <a href="https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250116253/inthemidstofcivilizedeurope">Ukrainian pogroms</a> from 1918 to 1921. Pogroms continued throughout the interwar period, leading up to the Holocaust, and <a href="https://yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Kielce">beyond it</a>.</p>
<h2>From Russia to Israel</h2>
<p>Although the word pogrom today has grown beyond its initial Russian Jewish setting – it can describe white violence against African Americans like the <a href="https://forward.com/culture/470529/the-tulsa-massacre-wasnt-a-race-riot-it-was-a-pogrom/">1919 Tulsa race massacre</a> – it is still widely associated with those East European events. Using it to describe this week’s attack on Huwara – or <a href="https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/editorial/2021-09-30/ty-article-opinion/a-pogrom-and-silence/0000017f-e3d0-d7b2-a77f-e3d7bac80000">other similar attacks</a> in Israel or Palestine – effectively puts Israel in the place of the Jews’ historic persecutors. This is a highly uncomfortable position for many Jewish people, particularly in Israel. </p>
<p>It is not surprising, then, that critics on social media have argued that this cannot be a pogrom because it was not directed by the state, or because it is the result of a two-sided ethnic conflict, not an act of one-sided oppression. </p>
<p>However, these comments are neither historically accurate nor fair to the current situation. In today’s Israel, minority rights have been suppressed as well, particularly in the West Bank. Palestinians in the West Bank, unlike the Jewish settlers next to them, face violence and discrimination in nearly every aspect of their lives. In other words, Israeli Jews and Palestinians are today not equal partners in an ethnic rivalry. </p>
<p>Moreover, as in czarist Russia, the state has also suggested its sympathy for violence through incendiary rhetoric and failure to prosecute violent Jews. In fact, historical records show far more rioters <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/history/russian-and-east-european-history/russians-jews-and-pogroms-18811882">were arrested and punished by Russia in 1881</a> than in Huwara this week, where only <a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/israel-frees-all-settler-suspects-arrested-during-huwara-rampage/">eight of the 400 Jewish offenders were arrested</a>, only to be quickly released. </p>
<p>This failure to punish any of the perpetrators sends a message of state support for the violence even clearer than the open support in statements by leaders of the government security apparatus. Some Israeli government officials <a href="https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-03-02/ty-article/.premium/no-such-thing-as-settler-violence-far-right-israeli-minister-excuses-hawara-rampage/00000186-a2cd-d45a-a9ef-beef9ee40000">even argue</a> that by definition there can be no such thing as Jewish pogrom. </p>
<p>As to why the Israeli general, the Israeli Historical Society, or the <a href="https://twitter.com/FoxmanAbraham/status/1630028668788408320">former head of the Anti-Defamation League, Abe Foxman</a>, among others, would use the term if it is so charged? Perhaps precisely because Jewish people using the word to describe the attack on Huwara know that it’s deeply uncomfortable, and that it might shock Israelis to address the violence more appropriately.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/201038/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Joshua Shanes does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>A scholar of Jewish history explains how the term ‘pogrom’ lives in Jewish collective memory and why its use can be highly contentious.Joshua Shanes, Associate Professor of Jewish Studies, College of CharlestonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1987272023-02-02T13:22:27Z2023-02-02T13:22:27ZHow the ancient Jewish ‘new year for trees’ became an Israeli celebration of nature<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/507434/original/file-20230131-4203-2rgplu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The cultural significance of Tu BiShvat has taken on new meaning in modern Israel.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://gpophotoeng.gov.il/fotoweb/Grid.fwx?search=tu%20bishvat#Preview121">Teddy Brauner/National Photo Collection, Government Press Office (Israel)</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>As <a href="https://www.binghamton.edu/history/faculty/profile.html?id=rabineau">a professor</a> who researches <a href="https://iupress.org/9780253064547/walking-the-land/">Israel’s extensive network of hiking trails</a>, I’ve spent many days and nights in the field, walking long-distance routes and sleeping under the stars. Like many Israelis, the fellow hikers I meet are passionate about venturing out into nature – and at no time is that passion more visible than the Jewish holiday of Tu BiShvat.</p>
<p>Thousands of people will take to Israel’s trails during the holiday sometimes described as “the Jewish Arbor Day.” The history of Tu BiShvat goes back to ancient times, but <a href="https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/zionism-and-tu-bishvat/">its meaning has been transformed</a> – especially in Israel, where it has become a celebration of the land that is tightly tied to national identity.</p>
<p>In Israel, after all, it’s difficult to talk about land <a href="https://doi.org/10.2979/israelstudies.19.2.162">without talking about politics</a>. Control over land has been at the center of Israel’s conflicts with Palestinians and its neighboring countries – meaning the love of nature can be <a href="http://perspectives.ajsnet.org/the-land-issue-spring-2014/hiking-in-israel-why-are-these-trails-different/">closely connected</a> with politics and religion.</p>
<h2>Ancient roots</h2>
<p>The name Tu BiShvat refers to the 15th day of the month of Shvat on the Hebrew calendar. In 2023, it starts on the evening of Feb. 5. Over the next 24 hours, Jewish communities around the world will hold special services, and observant families will eat special foods mentioned in the Bible, like dried fruits and nuts. In Israel, schools and civic institutions <a href="https://www.nli.org.il/en/discover/judaism/holidays/tu-bishvat">will celebrate</a> the country’s plants and trees.</p>
<p>Tu BiShvat began as the “new year for trees” <a href="https://www.sefaria.org/Mishnah_Rosh_Hashanah.1.1?lang=bi&with=Sheets&lang2=en">in the Mishnah</a>, a text of <a href="https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/mishnah/">Jewish religious law</a> that was written down almost 2,000 years ago. The Bible states that a tree’s fruit <a href="https://www.sefaria.org/Leviticus.19.23?lang=bi&aliyot=0">cannot be harvested</a> until its fourth year, and that people cannot eat it until the fifth. Rather than make everyone keep track of exactly when every tree was planted, the Mishnah established Tu BiShvat as a sort of birthday for all trees: On that date, every tree was regarded as entering its next year.</p>
<p>After the <a href="https://rpl.hds.harvard.edu/faq/destruction-second-temple-70-ce#:%7E:text=In%2070%20CE%20the%20Romans,a%20sacred%20site%20for%20Jews.">destruction of the Jewish temple</a> in Jerusalem in the first century and the dispersion of the Jewish people around the world, Tu BiShvat evolved to become a remembrance of Israel. </p>
<p>Jewish mystics in the 16th century observed the “new year for trees” by eating fruits and nuts mentioned in the Bible as the country’s native produce: almonds, figs, dates, olives and so on. Their practices <a href="https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/eating-fruit-on-tu-bishvat/">spread to Jewish communities around the world</a>. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="A boy arranges plates full of fruit on a table." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/507448/original/file-20230131-11-tln02j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/507448/original/file-20230131-11-tln02j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/507448/original/file-20230131-11-tln02j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/507448/original/file-20230131-11-tln02j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/507448/original/file-20230131-11-tln02j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/507448/original/file-20230131-11-tln02j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/507448/original/file-20230131-11-tln02j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A boy prepares food for his family’s Tu BiShvat celebration in London.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/mendel-wallenberg-arranges-15-different-fruits-on-plates-as-news-photo/1299120906?phrase=tu%20bishvat%20israel&adppopup=true">Dan Kitwood/Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>From sacred to secular</h2>
<p>Starting in the late 19th century, <a href="https://yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/zionism_and_zionist_parties">Zionism emerged as a political movement</a>: the effort to establish a Jewish state in Palestine, which was then under Ottoman control, to help Jews escape antisemitism. Though most Zionists were secular, they saw Tu BiShvat as a tradition that could support their ideological goals.</p>
<p>This was particularly true for the radical youth who came to be known as Israel’s “pioneer” generation. Many of their leaders were revolutionary socialists who came <a href="https://yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/economic_life">from Eastern Europe</a>, where Jews had historically been denied the ability to own and farm land. They saw connection with the soil as a key component of national life and believed that for Jews, <a href="https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/a-d-gordon-the-religion-of-labor/">this connection needed to be restored</a>. </p>
<p>These young leaders devoted themselves <a href="https://mosaicmagazine.com/observation/israel-zionism/2018/02/the-self-actualizing-zionism-of-a-d-gordon/">to agricultural work</a> and came to be known as Labor Zionists. They moved to rural areas, built roads, dug wells, plowed fields and built villages. But these “pioneers” were also mystics in their own way, who created what came to be described as a “religion of labor.” They sought to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMz7i00797o&t=1810s">become one with the land of Israel</a> through their work, but also more intimately through acts like walking barefoot in the dirt, immersing themselves in lakes and streams, and watching their sweat drip into the Earth. </p>
<p>Labor Zionists’ veneration of nature shocked their religious contemporaries, who saw their practices as <a href="https://www.worldcat.org/title/8845455">verging on paganism</a>. But these young activists hardly spent all of their time worshipping the country’s soil and flora and fauna. They were engaged in state-building and <a href="https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/zionism-and-tu-bishvat/">helped recast Tu BiShvat as a national holiday that highlighted nature</a> </p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="A man with tufts of white hair, wearing a suit, watches children plant a small tree in a black and white photo." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/506947/original/file-20230129-35581-8lbfyv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/506947/original/file-20230129-35581-8lbfyv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/506947/original/file-20230129-35581-8lbfyv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/506947/original/file-20230129-35581-8lbfyv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/506947/original/file-20230129-35581-8lbfyv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/506947/original/file-20230129-35581-8lbfyv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/506947/original/file-20230129-35581-8lbfyv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">David Ben-Gurion, the first prime minister of Israel, watches children plant a tree on Tu BiShvat in 1963.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://gpophotoeng.gov.il/fotoweb/Grid.fwx?search=tu%20bishvat#Preview65">Moshe Pridan/National Photo Collection, Government Press Office (Israel)</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>After the State of Israel was established as an independent state in 1948, the holiday was added to the country’s official calendar and marked with huge tree-planting initiatives and hikes for schoolchildren. Amid the early state’s conflicts with its Arab neighbors, one of the holiday’s implicit lessons was that Israelis should love the land enough to be willing to fight for it. </p>
<p>But Tu BiShvat remained centered on love for nature. When <a href="https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520234284/pollution-in-a-promised-land">Israel’s environmental movement</a> was born in the early 1960s, it organized hikes on Tu BiShvat to raise public awareness of ecologically sensitive areas and to protest state plans for large-scale construction there. Participants viewed hiking not merely as a recreational activity, but as a means of raising environmental awareness. </p>
<h2>National or universal?</h2>
<p>Many Jewish communities around the world, including in the United States, continue to observe Tu BiShvat <a href="https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/615205/jewish/Tu-BiShvat.htm">in traditional ways</a>. But the holiday’s nationalist lessons handed down by early Zionists still resonate with generations of Israelis, including the hundreds of thousands of hikers who use <a href="https://iupress.org/9780253064547/walking-the-land/">Israel’s 10,000-kilometer (6,200-mile) trail system</a> to walk the length and breadth of their country.</p>
<p>Meron Benvenisti, an Israeli scholar who grew up organizing youth hikes and planting trees on Tu BiShvat, wrote that even after he became disillusioned with Zionism, its lessons still defined his relationship with nature. “This land is part of me and I am part of it,” <a href="https://www.worldcat.org/title/13087962">he wrote</a>. “My American friends laugh when I tell them that the flowering trees in Central Park seem fake to me.” His deep connection to land in his home country made him feel that Israel was the only place worth living in, or living for. </p>
<p>This sense that some Israelis have of a unique, almost mystical relationship with the land is important to understand in the context of ongoing struggles between Israelis and Palestinians. The West Bank is part of what many Israelis view as the biblical land of Israel. But it is also the homeland of millions of Palestinians who love their land as well and whose presence there is <a href="https://mpp-dc.org/gallery/palestine-relationship-with-rootedness-to-the-land/">deeply rooted</a>. When <a href="https://doi.org/10.2979/israelstudies.19.2.162">the land is endowed with such significance</a>, the stakes in the conflict can only be high.</p>
<p>Yet the use of Tu BiShvat to promote nature preservation also creates space for discussing more universal concerns. Each year, Jewish communities hold events addressing global issues like <a href="https://www.jewishboston.com/events/tu-bshvat-climate-change-panel-global-and-local-solutions/">climate change</a>. </p>
<p>Many Jews embrace a traditional concept called “<a href="https://www.reformjudaism.org.uk/tikkun-olam/">tikkun olam</a>,” which calls on people to help God “repair the world.” Tu BiShvat has become a day to do this in the most literal sense.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/198727/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Shay Rabineau does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Tu BiShvat has religious roots, but early Zionists embraced the day in new, more secular ways.Shay Rabineau, Associate Professor of Israel Studies, Binghamton University, State University of New YorkLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1947802022-11-30T16:01:54Z2022-11-30T16:01:54ZAncient DNA from the teeth of 14th-century Ashkenazi Jews in Germany already included genetic variations common in modern Jews<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/498055/original/file-20221129-11920-w79ymf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=38%2C31%2C2036%2C1406&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Partial layout of the graves discovered during the excavation at the medieval Jewish cemetery of Erfurt.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Thuringian State Office for Heritage Management and Archaeology/Karin Sczech + Katharina Bielefeld</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>About two-thirds of Jews today – or about 10 million people – are <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashkenazi_Jews">Ashkenazi</a>, referring to a recent origin from Eastern and Central Europe. They reside mostly in the United States and Israel. Ashkenazi Jews carry a particularly high burden of <a href="https://www.jewishgeneticdiseases.org/jewish-genetic-diseases/">disease-causing genetic mutations</a>, such as those in the <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/cancer/breast/young_women/bringyourbrave/hereditary_breast_cancer/jewish_women_brca.htm">BRCA1</a> gene associated with an increased risk of breast and ovarian cancer.</p>
<p>This genetic burden suggests that the population was shaped by what geneticists call a <a href="https://evolution.berkeley.edu/bottlenecks-and-founder-effects/">founder event or a bottleneck</a>. In other words, a small number of foremothers and forefathers contributed much of the modern gene pool. As the population grew and the descendants of these founders had many children, disease mutations that were carried by the few founders became widespread.</p>
<p>One of the most striking features of Ashkenazi Jews today is <a href="https://doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msr133">how genetically homogeneous</a> they are, with almost no discernable differences in ancestry between Ashkenazi Jews across the world. Were Ashkenazi Jews equally similar to each other in the past? What were their origins? To what extent was the gene pool shaped by intermarriage with non-Jews?</p>
<p><a href="https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-genom-083117-021749">New technology</a> has made it practical to economically sequence whole genomes from skeletal remains. <a href="https://scarmilab.org">We</a> <a href="https://reich.hms.harvard.edu">and</a> 30 colleagues mostly from Israel, Germany and the U.S. investigated these questions by <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2022.11.002">sequencing the centuries-old remains of Ashkenazi Jews</a> from the medieval Jewish community of Erfurt, Germany.</p>
<h2>Sequencing DNA from a medieval cemetery</h2>
<p>Previous studies of genomes of Ashkenazi Jews living today made it clear that the <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ajhg.2012.08.030">founder event occurred in medieval times</a>. But the earlier geographic origins of the Ashkenazi ancestors are poorly understood.</p>
<p>The first historical records of Ashkenazi Jews are from the Rhineland in Western Germany in the 10th century. In the hundreds of years that followed, an increasing proportion lived in Eastern Europe. Despite periodic persecution, the <a href="https://www.bjpa.org/content/upload/bjpa/dell/DellaPergola%20Some%20Fundamentals.pdf">number of Ashkenazi Jews grew</a> and peaked at more than 10 million in the mid-20th century, before about <a href="https://www.worldcat.org/title/33397139">six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/498052/original/file-20221129-22-c2soy0.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="four story medieval building with excavated dirt in foreground" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/498052/original/file-20221129-22-c2soy0.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/498052/original/file-20221129-22-c2soy0.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=901&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/498052/original/file-20221129-22-c2soy0.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=901&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/498052/original/file-20221129-22-c2soy0.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=901&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/498052/original/file-20221129-22-c2soy0.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1132&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/498052/original/file-20221129-22-c2soy0.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1132&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/498052/original/file-20221129-22-c2soy0.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1132&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Archaeologists worked to recover medieval remains from a graveyard. The granary building is in the background.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Thuringian State Office for Heritage Management and Archaeology/Martin Sowa</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">CC BY-ND</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The <a href="https://juedisches-leben.erfurt.de/jl/en/middle-ages/index.html">medieval Ashkenazi Jewish community of Erfurt, Germany</a> existed between the late 11th century and the mid-15th century. After a gap following a 1349 massacre, the Erfurt Jewish community became one of the largest in Germany – in fact, one of the <a href="https://juedisches-leben.erfurt.de/jl/en/middle-ages/old_synagogue/index.html">oldest intact Jewish synagogues</a> in Central Europe is in Erfurt – but Jews were expelled in 1454. After that, the city built a granary on top of the Jewish cemetery.</p>
<p>In 2013, the granary was converted into a parking garage. Prior to construction, the state led a rescue excavation that uncovered 47 graves, most of which we sampled for DNA before the skeletons were reburied in the 19th-century Jewish cemetery.</p>
<p>Our study required review from the local Jewish community, because traditional Jewish law prohibits disturbing the dead under most circumstances. But <a href="https://din.org.il/2021/09/11/%d7%93%d7%92%d7%99%d7%9e%d7%95%d7%aa-%d7%93%d7%a0%d7%90-%d7%9e%d7%a9%d7%9c%d7%93%d7%99%d7%9d-%d7%a2%d7%aa%d7%99%d7%a7%d7%99%d7%9d-%d7%a1%d7%95%d7%92%d7%99%d7%95%d7%aa-%d7%94%d7%9c%d7%9b/">recent rabbinical scholarship</a> suggested that ancient DNA research is permissible if scientists use loose teeth from already excavated remains. We followed this approach with the aim of being <a href="https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-04008-x">sensitive to community perspectives</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/497959/original/file-20221129-12-puyzlr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="tooth next to ruler and labelled plastic bag" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/497959/original/file-20221129-12-puyzlr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/497959/original/file-20221129-12-puyzlr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=468&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/497959/original/file-20221129-12-puyzlr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=468&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/497959/original/file-20221129-12-puyzlr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=468&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/497959/original/file-20221129-12-puyzlr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=589&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/497959/original/file-20221129-12-puyzlr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=589&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/497959/original/file-20221129-12-puyzlr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=589&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">In accordance with rabbinical ruling, researchers collected DNA from teeth that were already loose in the remains of people who lived during the 1300s.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">David Reich/Harvard Medical School</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">CC BY-ND</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Today’s population is a blend of past groups</h2>
<p>We sequenced 33 individuals who lived in the 14th century. Among them were two families: a mother and two children, and a father, who had likely been killed by a sword blow to the head, and his daughter.</p>
<p>Our first question was: Do medieval Erfurt Jews and modern Ashkenazi Jews belong to the same genetic population? On average, yes. There has been almost no incorporation of genes from non-Jewish European populations over the last 600 years. </p>
<p>But the biggest surprise was that Erfurt Jews were noticeably more diverse than modern Ashkenazi Jews.</p>
<p>Some medieval individuals had greater Middle Eastern ancestry; they were genetically most similar to modern Ashkenazi Jews with origins in France and Germany.</p>
<p>Others had greater Eastern European ancestry, consistent with historical evidence that a number of people living in Erfurt between 1350 and 1400 had surnames indicating origins in the East, as well as Slavic given names.</p>
<p>The two groups – those with more Middle Eastern or more Slavic origins – also had distinct levels of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CE%9418O">oxygen isotopes</a> in their teeth, indicating they used different water sources in childhood, and thus, at least one of the groups must have included migrants. </p>
<p>Nevertheless, individuals from both groups were buried side by side, suggesting no social segregation.</p>
<p>Non-genetic research suggested that in the Middle Ages, Ashkenazi Jews were <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/origins-of-yiddish-dialects-9780198739319">culturally divided into two major groups</a>. Western Jews lived in the Rhineland, where Ashkenazi Jews first settled. They may correspond to the Erfurt group with the greater Middle Eastern ancestry. Eastern Jews, from eastern Germany, Austria, Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia, may correspond to the Erfurt group with the greater Eastern European ancestry.</p>
<p>Erfurt was at the geographic boundary between the two medieval Jewish communities, and in the 14th century, it was likely a home to Jews belonging to both. This may explain our detection of two genetically distinguishable groups in one place.</p>
<p>Modern Ashkenazi Jews don’t show the medieval genetic heterogeneity. Instead, their genomes look like a nearly even mixture of the two Erfurt groups. Our genetic results fit with <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/origins-of-yiddish-dialects-9780198739319">studies of names, dialects and religious rites</a>, which suggest that the Western and Eastern groups eventually merged and formed a single Ashkenazi culture.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/498061/original/file-20221129-18-uoe4mi.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="a man kneeling on pad on dirt works on something buried in the ground" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/498061/original/file-20221129-18-uoe4mi.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/498061/original/file-20221129-18-uoe4mi.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=375&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/498061/original/file-20221129-18-uoe4mi.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=375&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/498061/original/file-20221129-18-uoe4mi.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=375&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/498061/original/file-20221129-18-uoe4mi.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=472&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/498061/original/file-20221129-18-uoe4mi.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=472&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/498061/original/file-20221129-18-uoe4mi.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=472&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">In advance of construction, archaeologists carefully excavated medieval remains so they could be respectfully reburied in a 19th century cemetery.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Thuringian State Office for Heritage Management and Archaeology/Ronny Krause</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">CC BY-ND</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>A founder event left its genetic mark</h2>
<p>Our next question was whether Erfurt Jews show signs of the founder event so evident in the genes of modern Ashkenazi Jews.</p>
<p>They do. A stretch of genetic material called <a href="https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/mtdna-and-mitochondrial-diseases-903/">mitochondrial DNA</a> is inherited only from mothers. Different people around the world today carry subtly different variations of it. One variant of mitochondrial DNA is found in 20% of modern Ashkenazi Jews and is nearly absent in non-Jewish populations. We identified it in 35% of the Erfurt individuals.</p>
<p>In other words, a third of the people we sampled from the graveyard descended, via their maternal line, from a single woman. That so many people share the same ancestral mother implies that the population must have been extremely small in the centuries before.</p>
<p>In the Erfurt individuals, we also found mutations common in Ashkenazi Jews today but extremely rare elsewhere, including 16 disease-causing mutations, one of them in the well-known BRCA1 gene. Another research group sequenced the genomes of <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2022.08.036">six Ashkenazi Jews from 12th-century Norwich, England</a> and identified other disease mutations that are also still seen in Ashkenazi genomes today.</p>
<p>What was most striking about the founder event was how strongly the Erfurt Jews were affected. We estimate that the degree of relatedness of <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ajhg.2012.08.030">modern Ashkenazi Jewish genomes to each other</a> is about what would be expected if they descended from a population that had been persistently small throughout the second half of the Middle Ages. How small? We calculated that a core of only 1,000-2,000 reproducing people during this time would be responsible for most descendants today.</p>
<p>When we repeated a similar calculation using the Erfurt data, we encountered a surprise. Based on the medieval DNA, our estimate of the size of the founding population was about 3-fold smaller, only around 500 people. </p>
<p>How could it be that we were detecting the same founder event – responsible for the same disease-causing mutations in the Erfurt and in the modern Ashkenazi Jewish communities – and yet its impact on the Erfurt Jews was larger? </p>
<p>To address that, we proposed there were additional medieval Ashkenazi communities that inherited much less DNA from the core group of reproducing people we identified for Erfurt. We don’t yet know who these communities were, but our modeling suggests that they must have existed and later mixed with Erfurt-like communities, averaging together to form today’s Ashkenazi Jews.</p>
<p>So sometime after the 14th century, genetic barriers between Ashkenazi Jewish communities must have broken down, and the archipelago of scattered early Ashkenazi Jewish populations collapsed into the homogeneous group seen today. This was accompanied by extremely rapid population growth, which then continued for centuries. The Ashkenazi Jewish community, which had originally been demographically peripheral in the Jewish world, with its center of gravity around the Mediterranean and the Middle East, eventually became the largest world population of Jews.</p>
<h2>A template for future studies</h2>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/497962/original/file-20221129-16-tumege.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="view of an old stone building through a stone arch" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/497962/original/file-20221129-16-tumege.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/497962/original/file-20221129-16-tumege.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=688&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/497962/original/file-20221129-16-tumege.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=688&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/497962/original/file-20221129-16-tumege.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=688&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/497962/original/file-20221129-16-tumege.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=865&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/497962/original/file-20221129-16-tumege.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=865&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/497962/original/file-20221129-16-tumege.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=865&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Old Synagogue of the medieval Jewish community of Erfurt is now a museum documenting past Jewish life in Erfurt.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Stadt Erfurt Marcel Krummrich</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">CC BY-ND</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Erfurt and Norwich are just two locations. A richer picture of medieval Ashkenazi Jewish history will require sampling additional sites. How Ashkenazi Jews relate to Sephardi Jews and the many other living Jewish communities, and how all of these communities relate to Roman-period Judeans, are mysteries that ancient DNA research may also one day address. Any such research would need to take into account modern community sensitivities, and we think our work in Erfurt is a good model.</p>
<p>More broadly, this work provides a template for how ancient DNA, even from individuals who lived relatively recently, can reveal aspects of history that are otherwise invisible. By carrying out such studies, scholars can help reveal the roots of modern groups, enriching people’s understanding of themselves and each other.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/194780/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Shai Carmi received funding for this study from the Israel Science Foundation and the United States-Israel Binational Science Foundation. He is a paid consultant at MyHeritage.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>David Reich receives funding for his research from the US National Institutes of Health, the Allen Discovery Center program (a Paul G. Allen Frontiers Group advised program of the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation), the John Templeton Foundation; a private gift from Jean-François Clin, and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.</span></em></p>A German town needed to relocate a medieval graveyard to build a parking garage. A positive side effect: Scientists got to sequence the DNA of Ashkenazi Jews who lived more than 600 years ago.Shai Carmi, Associate Professor of Population and Statistical Genetics, Hebrew University of JerusalemDavid Reich, Professor of Genetics and of Human Evolutionary Biology, Harvard UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1910032022-11-24T00:20:51Z2022-11-24T00:20:51ZThis Jewish woman’s story of surviving the Holocaust by passing as Catholic and sheltering with Nazis is (rightly) hard to read<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/491231/original/file-20221024-12-ht0ihu.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=29%2C5%2C3964%2C1988&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">images provided by Pieter van Os</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><a href="https://scribepublications.com.au/books-authors/books/hiding-in-plain-sight-9781922585035">Hiding in Plain Sight</a> tells the Holocaust story (and post-Holocaust life) of Mala Rywka Kizel – or Marilka Shlafer, as she became known later in life. But these are only two of the names by which she has been known. </p>
<p>Mala, a Polish Orthodox Jewish woman, was born in 1926, in Warsaw. She was just 13 when the second world war began. She spent the beginning of the war in the <a href="https://theconversation.com/warsaw-ghettos-defiant-jewish-doctors-secretly-documented-the-medical-effects-of-nazi-starvation-policies-in-a-book-recently-rediscovered-on-a-library-shelf-182726">Warsaw Ghetto</a>, participating in smuggling ventures, before escaping and going into hiding, passing as a Catholic. </p>
<p>She moved around, worked as a farmhand, was looked after by a committed Nazi family, the Mollers, became friends with <a href="https://theconversation.com/we-tracked-antisemitic-incidents-in-australia-over-four-years-this-is-when-they-are-most-likely-to-occur-154728">antisemites</a>, and fell deeply in love with Erich, a German plane engineer she met on a train platform who “was not a committed Nazi”, although he “wore the badge of Hitler’s <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_Party">NSDAP</a> on his lapel”. She told Pieter van Os that Erich was “the love of my life” – a fact her Jewish husband, who she met at a shelter for Jews after the war was over, knew and accepted.</p>
<hr>
<p><em>Review: Hiding in Plain Sight: How a Jewish Girl Survived Europe’s Heart of Darkness – Pieter van Os, trans. David Doherty (Scribe)</em></p>
<hr>
<p>When going outside the ghetto walls to smuggle in food, Mala had “one distinct advantage” to help her avoid getting caught: her appearance. </p>
<blockquote>
<p><em>Dobry wyglad</em>, “good looks”, was the expression Poles used to describe Jews who did not look Semitic. Mala was fair-haired, and her eyes were blue with a hint of green. It also helped that she was a girl. Any boy with a suspect appearance or a Yiddish accent risked having his pants pulled down to see whether he had been circumcised. If a girl was stopped by the Polish police, they would make her recite a Polish prayer, something Mala could do without a trace of an accent.</p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/490256/original/file-20221018-8454-w2yf76.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="the pale face of a beautiful young woman" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/490256/original/file-20221018-8454-w2yf76.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/490256/original/file-20221018-8454-w2yf76.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=908&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/490256/original/file-20221018-8454-w2yf76.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=908&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/490256/original/file-20221018-8454-w2yf76.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=908&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/490256/original/file-20221018-8454-w2yf76.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1142&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/490256/original/file-20221018-8454-w2yf76.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1142&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/490256/original/file-20221018-8454-w2yf76.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1142&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The oldest existing photograph of Mala, probably from 1946.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">provided by Pieter van Os</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Her escape from the ghetto was followed by years spent travelling, escaping, relying on some, evading others. This is not a Holocaust story of life in the camps, but one that follows the twists and turns of a young woman’s journey of trying to survive, and the necessary connections she made. </p>
<p>Pieter van Os – a journalist – interviewed Mala, at her Amsterdam home, several times (“welcomed […] with coffee and biscuits”) over the four years it took to put the book together. She also gave him access to her unpublished memoir, which he drew on, along with his own investigations.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I transcribed our recorded conversations, and then – with the transcripts and her memoir to hand – I set out on a journey through time, tracking down the cities, towns, and villages, the people and the buildings that figure in her story, looking for documents, books, and eyewitness accounts to provide more context.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>He weaves together stories of Mala, her extended family and the people she encounters, with stories of the town, the community, and national events. Towards the end, he describes this as choosing “which side streets to wander down”. These wanderings provide context and depth. They remind us of the many journeys taken by many others.</p>
<p>He says:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Recalling events that expose the deepest abysses of human nature, she speaks with remarkable lightness, a tone I have never really encountered in writings or discussions about the Holocaust. […] Yet she trivialises nothing: her story traverses the abyss.</p>
</blockquote>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/new-research-shows-few-australians-know-about-our-own-connections-to-the-holocaust-175325">New research shows few Australians know about our own connections to the Holocaust</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Always a foreboding</h2>
<p>In this book, and others about the Holocaust we read now (in its aftermath), there is always a foreboding. We might not know exactly what will happen, but we know we are on the path to encountering brutal violence. This is heightened – or perhaps exploited – when we come to descriptions of how fluent Mala was in Polish, but that: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Yiddish was not only her mother tongue, but the language she spoke in her sleep when she was younger. In the story of her survival, this seemingly unimportant detail would put her life in the balance. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>For we know that during the Holocaust, the seemingly unimportant or inconsequential could play a determining role in someone’s life or death. </p>
<p>There were so many ways to be murdered. “Of the 35,000 Jews who lived in Lublin before the war, only 230 survived the occupation,” van Os writes, describing how Jews were able to live relatively freely there until the <a href="https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/einsatzgruppen">Einsatzgruppen</a> came through in 1942. </p>
<p>Reading these words when I did, a few hours before Kol Nidre – the evening service that begins <a href="https://theconversation.com/yom-kippur-what-does-judaism-actually-say-about-forgiveness-189514">Yom Kippur</a>, or the Jewish Day of Atonement, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar – tore at me a little bit. </p>
<p>In Judaism, we say that to save a life is to save a whole world. Tonight I will stand in a community of Jews and attempt to account for my personal and collective errors, pondering how I and we can do better. Today I am reading about the murder of so many Jews, whose whole worlds I will never know. Stories of the war, of what people could not endure, never stop being painful.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/490254/original/file-20221018-15481-y4hu8g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A man and an older woman, smiling at the camera. He is in a white shirt and she wears a sequinned top under a cardigan" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/490254/original/file-20221018-15481-y4hu8g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/490254/original/file-20221018-15481-y4hu8g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/490254/original/file-20221018-15481-y4hu8g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/490254/original/file-20221018-15481-y4hu8g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/490254/original/file-20221018-15481-y4hu8g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/490254/original/file-20221018-15481-y4hu8g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/490254/original/file-20221018-15481-y4hu8g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Author Pieter van Os with Mala Rivka Kizel.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">provided by Pieter van Os</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This book is a meditation on evidence, history and memory. This is reflected by how Mala manages to live, the stories she can weave – and the truths, partial truths and mistruths she tells. </p>
<p>At one point, while hiding her Jewishness, the reader’s earlier foreboding is realised: Mala is heard speaking Yiddish in her sleep and dobbed in as a Jew by a man she had already distrusted. She is imprisoned in a camp for a few weeks while an investigation is carried out – but she is found to be German, not Polish or Jewish. </p>
<p>She is released to become a worker for the man who directed the camp; the two of them take a tram to an office in the city centre. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Mala filled in forms and was given a document that granted her temporary status as a stateless person. A racial assessment at a later date would determine whether she was actually an ethnic German. An immediate consequence of her new status was that she no longer had to wear a purple “P”. Mala had gone from Jewish to Polish to stateless.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Through stories like this, we learn the vagaries of national definition: the ways they are mutable and changeable – in certain circumstances. They are certainly never natural. But of course, Germany and its <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/SS">SS forces</a> tried to naturalise and racialise nationality. </p>
<p>During the investigation into her nationality, Mala had to attend a testing centre where her blood was taken and she was quizzed on her family background by eight SS assessors. She spun them a tale. They found her – incorrectly – to be a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volksdeutsche"><em>Volksdeutsche</em></a>, an ethnic German. It seems she may have been the only case of such an occurrence. </p>
<p>This was what led to her being placed with the German family (under the name Anni Gmitruk): as a <em>Volksdeutsche</em>, she was considered racially too superior to return to work as a forced labourer. The Mollers had lost two sons on the Eastern Front, so were glad to “do their part” and take her in.</p>
<p>After the war, Mala left the Mollers and returned to Poland, where she learned her family and friends had all been murdered. There, she enrolled (under her given name) at a shelter for Jews, where she met her future husband, Nathan. They were married by a rabbi on her 20th birthday, February 22 1946.</p>
<p>Together, with their young son, they emigrated to Israel in November 1948, quickly settling in <a href="https://www.palestine-studies.org/en/node/1651427">Lydda (soon renamed Lod</a>), a city that Israeli intellectual (and Zionist) Ari Shavit has called “the epicentre of the conflict over the existence of Israel”, <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/10/21/lydda-1948">claiming that</a> “Zionism carried out a massacre in the city of Lydda” on July 12 1948 – just months before Mala and her family arrived there. “I was astounded that Mala had yet again found herself in the thick of ethnic cleansing,” writes van Os. </p>
<p>Nathan’s job with the local police was short-lived, after he was horrified by an assignment to patrol one of two segregated areas:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Barbed wire separated them from the rest of the city, and the 500 or so people fenced in were virtual prisoners. These were Christians and Muslims who had refused to leave when Lydda fell to the Jews, in addition to the inhabitants of local villages cleared by the Israeli army in the days that followed.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>He refused. “Nathan had not survived the Lodz ghetto only to patrol the barbed-wire fences of the Lod ghetto.” Instead, with two friends, he tried to set up a cooperative to repair and renovate houses. This led to an ongoing job with the airline El Al.</p>
<p>He and Mala had their second child, a daughter, soon after arriving in Israel. They moved permanently to the Netherlands in 1979, after their daughter finished her military service and married a Dutchman. Mala died in 2020, at the age of 94 – five years after Nathan died, in an “old folks’ home”.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/490279/original/file-20221018-23092-ap4t2c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Jewish people being escorted from the Warsaw ghetto by German soldiers" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/490279/original/file-20221018-23092-ap4t2c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/490279/original/file-20221018-23092-ap4t2c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/490279/original/file-20221018-23092-ap4t2c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/490279/original/file-20221018-23092-ap4t2c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/490279/original/file-20221018-23092-ap4t2c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/490279/original/file-20221018-23092-ap4t2c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/490279/original/file-20221018-23092-ap4t2c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Jewish people being escorted from the Warsaw Ghetto, from which Mala escaped, by German soldiers.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">AP</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/moral-ambiguity-and-the-representation-of-genocide-is-there-a-limit-to-what-can-be-depicted-177537">Moral ambiguity and the representation of genocide – is there a limit to what can be depicted?</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Testimonies of trauma</h2>
<p>Hiding in Plain Sight ponders evidence and historical narrative in other ways too. Every chapter ends with a section, “Instead of footnotes”, where van Os provides information about his research and hints at references. </p>
<p>Throughout the book we have moments such as: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Even by Polish standards, Mala recalls, the poverty in the region was abject. Research confirms this, although only scant historical data survive.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Of course, we all rely on numerous different types of evidence to tell our stories or create our arguments. But this way of setting it out – that “research”, presumably of papers and archives, confirms the testimony – works intriguingly not to support Mala as a truth-teller, but to undermine the power of her story as evidence in its own right. </p>
<p>Similarly, in talking about a scene Mala described having seen in a <a href="https://theconversation.com/what-nazi-exhibitions-tell-us-about-how-the-far-right-engages-audiences-today-97381">Nazi propaganda</a> film, van Os writes, “Mala is mistaken. There is no such scene in the surviving copies” of the film. He then describes the film and its antisemitism. The more interesting and generous question, I think, is – why did Mala remember the film in this way? What did that scene do for her, whether it “really” existed or not?</p>
<p>When Mala hears stories after the war ends, she finds it hard to believe some of the atrocities. This is a problem many survivors have discussed: when they reported what had happened, what they had endured, they were disbelieved. This is always described as a unique kind of pain. </p>
<p>“Mala could not or did not want to believe” the story of babies being thrown from the third-floor windows of a hospital in the <a href="https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/lodz">Lodz ghetto</a>, van Os reports. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Germans would never do such a thing. She knew that; she had lived with a German family. It took her years to accept that this had really happened, after hearing the accounts of others and seeing them printed in black and white.</p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/490258/original/file-20221018-15124-tn4i1e.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="an old photograph of a German couple" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/490258/original/file-20221018-15124-tn4i1e.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/490258/original/file-20221018-15124-tn4i1e.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/490258/original/file-20221018-15124-tn4i1e.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/490258/original/file-20221018-15124-tn4i1e.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/490258/original/file-20221018-15124-tn4i1e.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=565&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/490258/original/file-20221018-15124-tn4i1e.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=565&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/490258/original/file-20221018-15124-tn4i1e.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=565&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Otto and Emma Moller, the ‘committed Nazi’ family who took Mala in and loved her.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">provided by Pieter van Os</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Famously, in his <a href="https://www.routledge.com/Testimony-Crises-of-Witnessing-in-Literature-Psychoanalysis-and-History/Felman-Laub/p/book/9780415903929#">work on trauma, testimony and the Holocaust</a>, alongside Shoshana Felman, Dori Laub recounts a moment when a woman who was in <a href="https://theconversation.com/auschwitz-women-used-different-survival-and-sabotage-strategies-than-men-at-nazi-death-camp-132296">Auschwitz</a> testified (in an interview for the Yale Fortunoff Archive) about seeing “four chimneys going up in flames, exploding […] It was unbelievable.” </p>
<p>At a later conference where this testimony is discussed, Laub recounts that some historians asserted that</p>
<blockquote>
<p>the testimony was not accurate […] the number of chimneys was misrepresented. Historically, only one chimney was blown up, not all four.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This meant, for them, her testimony was “fallible”. But Laub – a psychoanalyst who had interviewed the woman for her testimony and who was present at this conference – “profoundly disagreed” and asserted instead that </p>
<blockquote>
<p>the woman was testifying […] not to the number of chimneys blown up, but to something else, more radical, more crucial: the reality of an unimaginable occurrence […] The number mattered less than the fact of the occurrence. The event was almost inconceivable. The woman testified to an event that broke the all compelling frame of Auschwitz […] She testified to the breakage of a framework. That was a historical truth. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>This is the pressing task for any of us listening to testimonies: to hear what they are saying, what they are testifying to, what truths they can hold. And also what they can never say, because some things will remain unsaid. As van Os writes, for instance, in his mention of the one woman from the town of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zerbst">Zerbst</a> – the town where Mala ended the war:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>she returned from a women’s internment camp in May 1945, unable to relay any information about the fate of the town’s other Jews. She had lost her mind. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>The question of how to understand, how to write about, and how to approach testimonies of <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-its-hard-to-just-get-over-it-for-people-who-have-been-traumatized-71764">trauma</a> is an important one. It is forever unsettled. Van Os does well in pushing us to continue to think about these questions, and not take anything for granted. </p>
<p>Hiding in Plain Sight is an utterly immersive book, bringing readers into lives and places and communities, into their loss and (re)building. It is a hard book to read. As it should be.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/191003/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jordana Silverstein does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Mala, a Polish Orthodox Jewish woman, escaped the Warsaw ghetto early in the second world war and survived by passing as a Catholic. A new book tells her story.Jordana Silverstein, Historian, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1943262022-11-15T13:21:01Z2022-11-15T13:21:01ZNorth Africans’ experiences of World War II often go unheard<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/495150/original/file-20221114-21-pmhw1p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=1%2C3%2C1020%2C726&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">German troops marching through Tunis in 1943.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/tunisia-german-troop-marching-through-tunis-in-north-africa-news-photo/107427560?phrase=tunisia%20german&adppopup=true">Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>In November 1942, the Nazis occupied Tunisia. For the next six months, Tunisian Jews and Muslims were subjected to <a href="https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=29530">the Third Reich’s reign of terror</a>, as well as its antisemitic and racist legislation. Residents lived in fear – “under the Nazi boot,” as Tunisian Jewish lawyer Paul Ghez wrote in his diary during the occupation.</p>
<p>One of us is <a href="https://sarahastein.com/">a historian</a>; one of us is <a href="https://anthro.ucla.edu/person/aomar-boum/">an anthropologist</a>. Together, we have spent a decade <a href="https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=32119">gathering the voices</a> of the diverse peoples who endured World War II in North Africa, <a href="https://www.worldreligionnews.com/issues/the-triangular-affair-between-muslims-france-and-jews-interview-with-ethan-b-katz/">across lines of</a> race, class, language and region. Their letters, diaries, memoirs, poetry and oral histories are both defiant and broken. They express both faith and despair. All in all, they understood themselves to be trapped in a monstrous machine of fascism, occupation, violence and racism. </p>
<hr>
<iframe id="noa-web-audio-player" style="border: none" src="https://embed-player.newsoveraudio.com/v4?key=x84olp&id=https://theconversation.com/80-years-ago-nazi-germany-occupied-tunisia-but-north-africans-experiences-of-world-war-ii-often-go-unheard-194326&bgColor=F5F5F5&color=D8352A&playColor=D8352A" width="100%" height="110px"></iframe>
<p><em>You can listen to more articles from The Conversation, narrated by Noa, <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/topics/audio-narrated-99682">here</a>.</em></p>
<hr>
<p>When most Americans think of the nightmares of the war or the Holocaust, they think strictly of Europe. Hate has a shifting color wheel, however – and we learn something new when we watch its spin in wartime North Africa.</p>
<h2>Crossing the sea</h2>
<p>The history of Jews settling in North Africa begins as early as the sixth century B.C., after the First Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed. Another significant wave of immigrants followed the Spanish Inquisition. At the start of World War II, <a href="https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/jews-of-the-maghreb-on-the-eve-of-world-war-ii">a diverse North African Jewish population</a> of roughly 500,000 coexisted with Muslim neighbors.</p>
<p>North Africa’s Jews spoke many languages, reflecting their many different cultures and ethnicities: Arabic, French, Tamazight – a Berber language – and Haketia, a form of Judeo-Spanish spoken in northern Morocco. While a large number of North African Jews, particularly in Algeria, enjoyed the privileges of French and other Western citizenship, the majority remained subjects of local leaders. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="An old, black and white postcard shows a group of girls standing outside a doorway in skirts and kerchiefs." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/495144/original/file-20221114-20-wgqeeo.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/495144/original/file-20221114-20-wgqeeo.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=377&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/495144/original/file-20221114-20-wgqeeo.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=377&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/495144/original/file-20221114-20-wgqeeo.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=377&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/495144/original/file-20221114-20-wgqeeo.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=474&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/495144/original/file-20221114-20-wgqeeo.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=474&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/495144/original/file-20221114-20-wgqeeo.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=474&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A group of Jewish girls in Debdou, Morocco, around 1915.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Debdou_Fillettes_Juvies.jpg">D Millet E/Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>During the Second World War, however, those who held French citizenship had it stripped away. Three European powers ruled North Africa during the war, all brutally.</p>
<p>Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia were, for most of the conflict, in the hands <a href="https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/france">of Vichy France</a>. This authoritarian government, which collaborated with Nazi Germany, was formed in July 1940 by armistice, after Germany’s successful invasion of France. It was ruled by Marshal Henri Philippe Pétain, a French hero of the First World War, out of the southern city of Vichy.</p>
<p>All <a href="https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/anti-jewish-legislation-in-north-africa?parent=en%2F54497">antisemitic and racist laws and policies</a> the Vichy regime imposed upon continental France were extended to its colonies in North and West Africa, pushing Jews out of professional sectors, stripping them of citizenship – if they had it to begin with – and seizing Jewish property, businesses and assets. </p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="A black and white photo shows a man and woman standing while another woman sits between them. They all wear long robes or skirts and have their heads covered." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/494965/original/file-20221113-16-dnvkcu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/494965/original/file-20221113-16-dnvkcu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=690&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/494965/original/file-20221113-16-dnvkcu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=690&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/494965/original/file-20221113-16-dnvkcu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=690&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/494965/original/file-20221113-16-dnvkcu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=868&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/494965/original/file-20221113-16-dnvkcu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=868&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/494965/original/file-20221113-16-dnvkcu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=868&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A Jewish family in Tangier, Morocco, in 1885.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/jewish-family-tangier-by-1885-news-photo/55757507?phrase=jewish%20morocco&adppopup=true">LL/Roger Viollet via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The Vichy regime also continued racist policies begun by France’s Third Republic, which pushed young Black men from the empire into forced military service – and the most dangerous wartime posts. These forced recruits included soldiers <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-time-has-come-for-france-to-own-up-to-the-massacre-of-its-own-troops-in-senegal-35131">from Senegal</a>, French Guinea, Ivory Coast, Niger and Mauritania; French territories in present-day Benin, Gambia and Burkina Faso; and Muslim men from Morocco and Algeria.</p>
<p>In these ways, the French carried on a wartime campaign of anti-Blackness and Islamophobia, pairing these forms of racialized hatred from the colonial era with antisemitism. Antisemitism had deep roots in French and colonial history, but it <a href="https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2022-06-27/ty-article-opinion/.highlight/how-north-african-jews-have-been-erased-from-holocaust-history/00000181-a4fe-dcbe-a19b-a5ff8fc40000">found new force</a> in the era of fascism.</p>
<p>Antisemitic and anti-Black policy was also a bedrock of Benito Mussolini’s fascist Italian government, which ruled over Libya during the war. Italy first tested its <a href="https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lseih/2020/08/25/in-plain-sight-black-lives-matter-and-italys-colonial-past/">racist policies</a> in its colony of Italian East Africa, segregating local Black populations from Italian settlers. Mussolini’s regime then reshaped these policies of racialized hatred for Libya, where it pushed Jews out of the professions and the economy, seized property from thousands and <a href="https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2021-10-31/ty-article/.highlight/a-childhood-in-benghazi-a-bar-mitzvah-in-bergen-belsen/0000017f-f0ea-df98-a5ff-f3ef381e0000">deported them to labor and internment camps</a>. Jewish children, women and men died from starvation, disease, <a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/short-takes/famine-wartime-north-africa-ukraine/">hunger</a> and forced labor. </p>
<h2>Camps on African soil</h2>
<p>Nazi Germany occupied Tunisia from November 1942 to May 1943. <a href="https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=32119">During this period</a>, the SS – the elite guard of the Nazi regime – imprisoned some 5,000 Jewish men in roughly 40 forced labor and detention camps on the front lines and in cities like Tunis. German troops also terrorized Muslim and Jewish girls and women who remained behind.</p>
<p>The Third Reich did not set out to deport Jews from North Africa to its death camps in Eastern Europe, but hundreds of Jews of North African heritage and some Muslims who were living in France <a href="https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2022-06-27/ty-article-opinion/.highlight/how-north-african-jews-have-been-erased-from-holocaust-history/00000181-a4fe-dcbe-a19b-a5ff8fc40000">did meet this fate</a>. They were deported first to the <a href="https://www.yadvashem.org/holocaust/this-month/december/1942.html">internment camp of Drancy</a>, on the outskirts of Paris, and sent from there to concentration and death camps. Many died in Auschwitz.</p>
<p>There were <a href="https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/labor-and-internment-camps-in-north-africa">camps in North Africa and West Africa, too</a>. In addition to those the Italian fascists built in Libya, Vichy France and Nazi Germany ran penal camps, detention camps and labor camps. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="A black and white photo shows a shirtless man in shorts pushing a heavy metal cart over a track." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/494777/original/file-20221110-26-gnvub5.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=1%2C3%2C1020%2C695&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/494777/original/file-20221110-26-gnvub5.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=411&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/494777/original/file-20221110-26-gnvub5.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=411&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/494777/original/file-20221110-26-gnvub5.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=411&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/494777/original/file-20221110-26-gnvub5.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=516&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/494777/original/file-20221110-26-gnvub5.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=516&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/494777/original/file-20221110-26-gnvub5.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=516&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Rosenthal, a German Jewish prisoner, pushes a cart in the stone quarry of the Im Fout labor camp in Morocco.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/pa1172894">United States Holocaust Memorial Museum</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The Vichy regime alone built nearly 70 such camps in the Sahara, <a href="https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1941/03/30/85472142.html?pageNumber=107">breathing new life</a> into a colonial ambition of building a trans-Saharan railway to connect the Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts. The Vichy regime saw it as a conduit for supplying the front lines with forcibly recruited, Black Senegalese soldiers.</p>
<p>In these camps, as in the Nazi camps of Eastern Europe, the complex racist logic of Nazism and fascism took vivid form. Muslims arrested for anti-colonial activities were pressed into back-breaking labor alongside Jews and Christians who had fled war-torn Europe, only to find themselves arrested in North Africa.</p>
<p>These men broke bread with other forced workers from around the world, including <a href="https://spanishcivilwarmuseum.com/the-virtual-spanish-civil-war-museum/an-international-war/international-brigades/">fighters who had volunteered for Spain’s Republican Army</a> during its civil war. These Ukrainians, Americans, Germans, Russian Jews and others had been arrested, deported and imprisoned by the Vichy regime after fleeing Franco’s Spain. There were political enemies of the Vichy and Nazi regimes, too, including socialists, communists, union members and North African nationalists. Children and women were imprisoned as well. </p>
<p>Among this hodgepodge of prisoners, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SvM32zM7-g">many were refugees who fled Europe</a>, whether because of their Jewishness or because they were political enemies of the Third Reich. Inmates were overseen by French Vichy soldiers as well as <a href="https://www.rfi.fr/en/africa/20200707-french-mayors-urged-to-acknowledge-outstanding-contribution-of-african-soldiers-during-wwii">forcibly recruited indigenous Moroccan and Black Senegalese men</a>, who were often <a href="https://www.cheminsdememoire.gouv.fr/en/colonised-soldiers-french-empire">little more than prisoners</a> themselves. Sometimes the camp prisoners interacted with local populations: Saharan Muslims and Jews who provided them medical care, burial grounds, and food and sex for money. </p>
<p>Nazism in Europe was underlaid by an intricate matrix of racist, eugenicist and nationalist ideas. But the war – and the Holocaust – appears even more complex if historians take into account the racist and violent color wheel that spun in North Africa.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/194326/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>People across much of North Africa were subject to racist laws and suffering at the hands of European powers during the Second World War.Sarah Abrevaya Stein, Professor of History, University of California, Los AngelesAomar Boum, Professor of Anthropology, University of California, Los AngelesLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1912402022-10-03T12:06:47Z2022-10-03T12:06:47ZHolocaust comparisons are frequent in US politics – and reflect a shallow understanding of the actual genocide and the US response<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/486927/original/file-20220927-2496-g99721.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=4%2C1%2C1017%2C680&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A woman holds a sign denouncing COVID-19 vaccine mandates, with syringes in the shape of a swastika, during a 2021 rally at the Kentucky Capitol in Frankfort. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/woman-holds-a-sign-denouncing-covid-19-vaccine-mandates-news-photo/1234925521?adppopup=true">Jon Cherry/Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Robert Keith Packer, a 57-year-old Virginian, achieved a measure of infamy at the Jan. 6 Capitol riot when <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/jan-rioter-wearing-camp-auschwitz-sweatshirt-sentenced/story?id=89973329">he was photographed</a> wearing a sweatshirt emblazoned with a skull and crossbones along with the words “Camp Auschwitz.” “Work Brings Freedom,” the front said, a translation of the notorious motto “Arbeit macht frei” that <a href="https://www.auschwitz.org/en/museum/news/the-original-arbeit-macht-frei-inscription-is-back-in-place-at-the-auschwitz-gate,91.html">appeared on the gates of Auschwitz</a> and several other Nazi concentration camps. On the back was the word “Staff.”</p>
<p>Packer was sentenced <a href="https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/defendants/packer-robert-keith#:%7E:text=Pleaded%20guilty%201%2F26%2F22,days%20in%20jail%2C%20%24500%20restitution.">to 75 days in prison</a> on Sept. 16, 2022, for his role in the riot – he was tried for his actions, not his clothing. But his sweatshirt was far from the only <a href="https://theconversation.com/a-scholar-of-american-anti-semitism-explains-the-hate-symbols-present-during-the-us-capitol-riot-152883">Holocaust reference</a> on Jan. 6 or in its aftermath. </p>
<p>Rioters have <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/capitol-rioter-compares-attacks-treatment-jews-germany-rcna10162">compared their arrests</a> to <a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/capitol-riot-supporter-compares-insurrectionists-to-jews-under-nazi-rule">the persecution of Jews</a>, and commentator Candace Owens <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2021/04/07/candace-owens-reichstag-fire-tucker-carlson/">compared Jan. 6 to the Reichstag fire</a>, which Adolf Hitler used as pretext to consolidate power in 1933.</p>
<p>It is a reminder of something that is all too apparent to scholars of the Holocaust, like <a href="https://liberalarts.tamu.edu/history/profile/adam-seipp/">myself</a>: Americans are willing to <a href="https://www.facinghistory.org/resource-library/holocaust-trivialization-and-distortion-what-are-implications-comparing-current">trivialize the genocide</a> by turning it into a tool for their own political goals. </p>
<p>As a historian who has written about the American role in <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/288236277_Buchenwald_Stories_Testimony_Military_History_and_the_American_Encounter_with_the_Holocaust">liberating concentration camps</a> at the end of World War II, I have spent a great deal of time thinking about how Americans have – and have not – talked about the Holocaust in the decades since. There is little evidence that outright denial of the Holocaust is widespread. Instead, the problem is a <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2020/01/22/what-americans-know-about-the-holocaust/">poor understanding of the tragedy</a>, including this country’s response – the focus of a remarkable documentary series, “<a href="https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/us-and-the-holocaust/">The U.S. and the Holocaust</a>,” which recently premiered on PBS.</p>
<h2>Forgetting exclusion</h2>
<p>The contemporary American story of the Holocaust focuses on the U.S. role in helping to bring the Nazi regime of terror to an end. A more nuanced understanding of America’s reaction is less comforting.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="A black and white photo shows two young girls looking through a ship porthole." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/486907/original/file-20220927-26-ty30x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/486907/original/file-20220927-26-ty30x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=839&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/486907/original/file-20220927-26-ty30x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=839&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/486907/original/file-20220927-26-ty30x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=839&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/486907/original/file-20220927-26-ty30x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1055&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/486907/original/file-20220927-26-ty30x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1055&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/486907/original/file-20220927-26-ty30x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1055&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Two German-Jewish refugees on the MS St. Louis arrive in Antwerp, Belgium, after the ship was refused entry to Cuba and Miami.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/two-young-german-jewish-refugees-at-the-porthole-of-the-news-photo/2644200?adppopup=true">Gerry Cranham/Hulton Archive via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p><a href="https://forward.com/news/516589/ken-burns-pbs-documentary-the-u-s-holocaust-americans-jews/">The PBS series</a>, produced by acclaimed filmmakers Ken Burns, Lynn Novick and Sarah Botstein, traces what Americans knew about the vast and murderous campaign against civilians in Nazi-occupied Europe in the 1930s, as a flood of Jewish refugees attempted to flee Hitler’s Germany.</p>
<p>The U.S. did not enter the war to stop Nazi persecution of Europe’s Jews. In fact, <a href="https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/great-debate#:%7E:text=In%20January%20of%20that%20year,war%20to%20help%20the%20British.">a majority of Americans</a> opposed entering the war at all until 1940, a year before the Pearl Harbor attack brought the U.S. into the conflict.</p>
<p>Many Americans had no interest in protecting the rights of religious or ethnic minorities at home or abroad. <a href="https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/charles-e-coughlin">Antisemitism and anti-foreign prejudice</a> was a core element of American society in the early 20th century, just as white supremacy was. These forms of hatred and exclusion drew from the same well of supposedly “<a href="https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/antisemitism-in-history-racial-antisemitism-18751945">scientific” beliefs</a> about racial hierarchy. </p>
<p>While the U.S. allowed almost <a href="https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/immigration-to-the-united-states-1933-41">125,000 Jewish refugees</a> to enter the country during the years between Hitler’s rise to power and the start of the war, many more were <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-27373131">denied entry</a> or <a href="https://www.annefrank.org/en/about-us/news-and-press/news/2018/7/6/research-otto-franks-attempts-emigrate-united-stat/#:%7E:text=Otto%20Frank%20had%20been%20working,Rotterdam%20consulate%20issued%20immigration%20visas.">left in limbo</a>.</p>
<h2>Remembering liberation</h2>
<p>This part of the country’s response has been largely forgotten, in favor of a story where the U.S. plays a more heroic part.</p>
<p>The liberation of the concentration camps in the spring of 1945 plays a central role in public memories of the war today, along with <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-military-power-economics-and-strategy-that-led-to-d-day-27663">the Allied landings in Normandy</a> on “D-Day” in 1944. The hall through which millions of visitors have entered the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington <a href="https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/pa1093242">is lined with flags of the “liberator divisions</a>” of the U.S. Army.</p>
<p>There is no question that the arrival of American forces at Buchenwald, Dachau and other camps across western and southern Germany saved thousands of prisoners facing murder or death by starvation and sickness. In reality, however, the systematic murder of Europe’s Jews had largely concluded, and primarily took place <a href="https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2009/07/16/holocaust-the-ignored-reality/">hundreds of miles to the east</a> in what is today Poland, Ukraine, Russia and the Baltic states. By the time American forces landed in western Europe, Europe’s Jewish population had already been reduced to a few small pockets.</p>
<p>Within weeks of the arrival of American troops at Buchenwald, Americans saw images and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-6tCERMLv4">newsreel film</a> of the horrors of the camps. However, it took decades for the story of camp liberation to become the most important act of the war in Europe in Americans’ minds. It would not be until the 1980s, when the liberators and survivors were entering old age, that the Holocaust was firmly entrenched in American school curricula and popular culture.</p>
<p>One important consequence of this long wait was that the stories told by and about liberators changed in the intervening decades. As Americans became more familiar with the events of the Holocaust through <a href="https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/177328">television</a> and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/dec/06/schindlers-list-25th-anniversary-steven-spielberg-holocaust">films</a>, liberator stories began to grow more similar to each other and merged into a general story of the Holocaust, which increasingly focused on the horrors of the death camps in German-occupied Poland. <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/288236277_Buchenwald_Stories_Testimony_Military_History_and_the_American_Encounter_with_the_Holocaust">Liberators of Buchenwald</a> describing the event decades afterward, for example, thought they remembered gas chambers at the camp, when in fact there were none at that location.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="A black and white photo shows soldiers looking at bodies strewn in a courtyard." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/486910/original/file-20220927-26-tqffj3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/486910/original/file-20220927-26-tqffj3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=431&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/486910/original/file-20220927-26-tqffj3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=431&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/486910/original/file-20220927-26-tqffj3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=431&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/486910/original/file-20220927-26-tqffj3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=541&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/486910/original/file-20220927-26-tqffj3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=541&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/486910/original/file-20220927-26-tqffj3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=541&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">General Dwight D. Eisenhower and soldiers discover 70 prisoner bodies at the Ohrdruf concentration camp, near Buchenwald, who had been executed by the fleeing Nazis.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/ohrdruf-concentration-camp-near-buchewald-germany-the-news-photo/104404170?adppopup=true">Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland – the most infamous camp facility, with its gates saying “Arbeit macht frei” – came to represent all concentration camps in American memory, and even in family stories. In 2008, for example, then-presidential candidate Barack Obama told a crowd about his <a href="https://archive.nytimes.com/thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/27/obamas-staff-corrects-wwii-story/">great-uncle’s participation in the liberation of Auschwitz</a>. Auschwitz was actually liberated by the Soviet army in January 1945. Obama’s campaign later clarified that his great-uncle, Charles Payne, participated in the liberation of Ohrdruf, a subcamp of Buchenwald. </p>
<h2>Talking about the Holocaust today</h2>
<p>The centrality of camp liberation to the American story of the Holocaust has real consequences. It turns the Holocaust into a story of American triumph over evil and overlooks the country’s refusal to do more to save the victims.</p>
<p>This simplistic version of a complex history has allowed many Americans to use “the Holocaust” and “Nazism” as <a href="https://www.adl.org/blog/holocaust-analogies-frequently-used-as-fodder-for-social-and-political-commentary">shallow symbols</a> for any kind of government action they oppose and deem oppressive, particularly public health measures during the COVID-19 pandemic. Opponents <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-59485508">have compared</a> infectious disease specialist Dr. Anthony Fauci to SS physician and torturer Dr. Josef Mengele. Representative Marjorie Greene has <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/rep-greene-apologizes-for-comparing-face-masks-to-holocaust-but-stands-by-comparison-of-democrats-to-nazi-party/2021/06/14/552869f8-cd6a-11eb-8cd2-4e95230cfac2_story.html">compared face mask rules</a> to forcing Jews to wear Star of David badges, and Capitol police agencies <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/feb/09/marjorie-taylor-greene-gazpacho-police">to the Nazi-era Gestapo</a>.</p>
<p>As Burns’ documentary emphasizes, the U.S. is once again in a time of national reckoning about race, discrimination and histories of oppression. In the final minutes of “The U.S. and the Holocaust,” viewers see marchers in Charlottsville, Virginia, chanting “<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2017/08/14/jews-will-not-replace-us-why-white-supremacists-go-after-jews/">Jews will not replace us</a>,” television pundits opining about the threat of cultural decline through immigration, the 2018 <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/27/us/active-shooter-pittsburgh-synagogue-shooting.html">attack on the Tree of Life congregation</a> in Pittsburgh, and the Jan. 6 riot. There in the crowd, wearing his sweatshirt, is Robert Keith Packer.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/191240/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Adam R. Seipp does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Many Americans know a simple version of Holocaust history, in which their country played the savior. The reality isn’t so comfortable, a historian writes.Adam R. Seipp, Professor of History, Texas A&M UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1890902022-08-25T13:47:29Z2022-08-25T13:47:29ZJews are leaving Russia again – is history repeating itself?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/480920/original/file-20220824-24-bne6ch.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Russia's oldest synagogue in Irkutsk: around 20,000 Russian Jews have left the country since the war with Ukraine started.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/irkutsk-russia-february-23-2021-oldest-2038224560">Shutterstock</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>It’s not the first time that <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-62564122">Jews have felt it necessary to flee Russia</a>, but the invasion of Ukraine has resulted in the fourth wave of exiles in the past hundred years. </p>
<p>Since Vladimir Putin became president for the second time in 2012, the authorities have become increasingly <a href="https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2021/12/10/russias-mass-protests-10-years-on-finding-hope-in-apparent-defeat-a75781">repressive</a> towards <a href="https://www.csis.org/analysis/why-putin-targets-minorities">minorities</a>, as well as cracking down on freedom of speech and getting rid of <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/aug/24/russia-detains-opposition-leader-yevgeny-roizman-over-criticism-of-ukraine-war?amp;amp;amp">any opposition</a> figures. But it was the 2022 invasion of Ukraine that was the <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2022/07/14/russians-flee-putins-regime-after-ukraine-war-in-second-wave-of-migration.html">final straw</a> for many Jewish people.</p>
<p>With anti-Jewish crackdowns between 1880 and 1906, about 2 million people left the Russian empire for the US; many were <a href="https://www.pbs.org/destinationamerica/usim_wn_noflash_6.html">Jews</a>. From 1970-88 around <a href="https://www.rbth.com/history/331342-jewish-people-ussr-antisemitism">291,000</a> Jews left the Soviet Union and in the 1990s a further <a href="https://library.fes.de/libalt/journals/swetsfulltext/15286778.pdf">128,000</a> left for Germany. The new Jewish exodus has been sudden, and many are still trying to leave. Out of 165,000 Jews in Russia at the beginning of the war, reports suggest that <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-62564122">20,500</a> have left in the past six months. </p>
<p>Since the war began in February 2022, the authorities have <a href="https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2022/07/22/russian-special-services-from-political-to-mass-repressions-a78384">doubled down</a> on repression, changing it from a targeted practice to mass repression. An example is the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/02/moscow-police-arrest-children-for-laying-flowers-at-ukrainian-embassy">arrest of children</a> for placing flowers outside the Ukrainian embassy in Moscow in March. This is something that the Russian authorities have not done before. At the same time, the economy appears to be spiralling beyond the control of <a href="https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2022/08/17/the-russian-economy-failing-to-plan-planning-to-fail-a78592">the authorities</a>. </p>
<p>Historically, when economies tank, governments often look for minorities to <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/762DB27C97507AFB5A35BF1B6625BE87/S0007123420000514a.pdf/governmental-responses-to-terrorism-in-autocracies-evidence-from-china.pdf">blame</a> – and Russian Jews know this could be the <a href="https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/10.4324/9781315036205/jews-jewish-life-russia-soviet-union-yaacov-ro?context=ubx&refId=352f2d81-b45a-4594-9f33-c992c91f9b0a">case again</a>.</p>
<p>Data from the International Monetary Fund in early August 2022 suggested that the Russian economy would only contract by 6% in 2022, rather than the predicted <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2022/08/02/russia-faces-economic-oblivion-despite-short-term-resilience.html">8.5%</a>. Although the economy has not collapsed – as predicted by many western <a href="https://www.russiamatters.org/blog/crippling-sanctions-russias-economy-afloat-now">specialists</a> – businesses are leaving or have curtailed operations in <a href="https://som.yale.edu/story/2022/over-1000-companies-have-curtailed-operations-russia-some-remain">Russia</a>, and sanctions are beginning to cripple the <a href="https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4167193">economy</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/481062/original/file-20220825-20-bpp6gz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A room with many people gathered in a square looking forward." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/481062/original/file-20220825-20-bpp6gz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/481062/original/file-20220825-20-bpp6gz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/481062/original/file-20220825-20-bpp6gz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/481062/original/file-20220825-20-bpp6gz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/481062/original/file-20220825-20-bpp6gz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/481062/original/file-20220825-20-bpp6gz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/481062/original/file-20220825-20-bpp6gz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">People gather at Moscow’s Beis Menachemn synagogue on International Holocaust Remembrance Day in 2012. Today many Russian Jews are worried about their future.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Pavel L Photo/Shutterstock</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Although Russia’s Jewish population is very small at 165,000, compared to the whole Russian population (145.2 million), it makes up a disproportionate number of the Russian <a href="https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2010/06/a-rippling-effect-of-the-holocaust/">middle class</a>. This group has been in decline for a while, but the possibility of mass conscription, a failing economy and increased restrictions over the few independent areas of life have led to about <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-60697763">200,000 middle-class</a> Russians leaving during the Ukraine war for Georgia, Turkey, Armenia and beyond.</p>
<p>Significantly, Moscow’s chief rabbi, Pinchas Goldschmidt, left Russia in July after the authorities put pressure on him to support the war in <a href="https://twitter.com/avitalrachel/status/1534232104824975360?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1534232104824975360%7Ctwgr%5E428faa615301db9e2eca18cb08bfab47ef5c118e%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fworld%2F2022%2Fjun%2F08%2Fmoscows-chief-rabbi-in-exile-after-resisting-kremlin-pressure-over-war">Ukraine</a>. In late July, the ministry of justice of the Russian Federation announced it would shut down the Moscow office of the Jewish Agency, which organises <a href="https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2022/07/29/russia-threatens-to-close-jewish-agency-office-in-moscow_5991902_4.html">migration</a> to Israel, after Israeli prime minster, Yair Lapid, condemned the <a href="https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20220809-why-did-moscow-shut-down-the-jewish-agency-office/%20%22%22.%20This%20organisation%20had%20a%20long%20history%20of%20helping%20Jews%20get%20visas%20to%20leave%20the%20Soviet%20Union%20%E2%80%93%20and%20later%20Russia%20%E2%80%93%20to%20Israel">war</a>.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1534232104824975360"}"></div></p>
<p>Both of these actions put many Russian Jews on high alert. In an interview after he left Russia, Goldschmidt said that the sanctions and pressure to support the war changed Russia from a modern country <a href="https://www.jns.org/moscows-rebel-rabbi-says-russian-jewish-community-being-held-hostage/">back</a> to one echoing the Soviet Union. </p>
<h2>History of Jewish repression</h2>
<p>Sadly, antisemitism has a long and painful history in Russia. The expansion of Muscovy – a name given to combine the Grand Duchy of Moscow (1263-1547) and the Tsardom of Russia (1547-1721) – to the east and west, culminating in the pronouncement of the Russian empire in 1721, saw Russia incorporate a large Jewish population.</p>
<p>The partitions of Poland between 1772 and 1795 and victory over the Ottomans in the 17th century gave Russia a large Jewish minority. The <a href="https://www.britannica.com/place/Pale-of-Settlement">Pale of Settlement</a>, an area where Jews were forced to live, was created in 1791 to keep most Jews in the newly annexed territories and away from <a href="https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/the-pale-of-settlement">inner Russia</a>.</p>
<p>Throughout the period of the Russian empire (1721-1917) the Jewish population experienced <a href="https://www.history.com/topics/russia/pogroms">numerous pogroms</a> (organised massacres). In the late Tsarist period (1905-1917), famine and state support of nationalist groups, such as the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Black-Hundreds">Black Hundreds</a>resulted in the need to locate an “enemy” to blame for Russia’s woes. The Jews served this purpose and pogroms, like the one in <a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/how-a-small-pogrom-in-russia-changed-the-course-of-history/">Kishinev in 1903</a> (present day Chișinău, capital of Moldova) were widespread across the empire.</p>
<p>The Tsarist regime was imbued with a <a href="https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2018/05/long-roots-russian-anti-semitism">deep antisemitism</a>, epitomised by the <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-the-protocols-of-the-elders-of-zion-is-still-pushed-by-anti-semites-more-than-a-century-after-hoax-first-circulated-145220">deep fake</a> publication <a href="https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/protocols-of-the-elders-of-zion">the Elders of Zion</a>. This document was created by the Tsarist secret police – Okhrana – to justify this antisemitism and create the conspiracy that the Jews were trying to <a href="https://www.brandeis.edu/now/2020/september/whitfield-conversation.html">control the world</a>.</p>
<p>This antisemitism continued into the Soviet Union, which was anything but the egalitarian society it claimed to be. Jewish schools and <a href="http://www.bu.edu/law/journals-archive/international/volume23n1/documents/159-176.pdf">cultural institutions</a> were closed, Jewish leaders <a href="https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110820805.485/html">murdered</a> and antisemitic plots were created by the Soviet system to justify crackdowns. The 1953 <a href="https://yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/doctors_plot">doctors plot</a>, where Jewish doctors were accused of murdering Stalin is the most famous example of these fake creations.</p>
<p>This persecution, combined with Israel being a key ally of the US in the cold war, put Jews in a difficult position. Facing discrimination at school and in the <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13501678508577476">workplace</a> many Russian Jews chose to leave the Soviet Union. This led to the term <a href="https://refusenikproject.org/history/#historical-overview">refusenik</a>, where many Soviet Jews had “refused” stamped in their visa applications.</p>
<p>Claims circulated that Soviet Jews were a fifth column, a set of organisations aiming to undermine the national interest, and in cahoots with the US. This led to <a href="https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/10.4324/9781315036205/jews-jewish-life-russia-soviet-union-yaacov-ro?context=ubx&refId=352f2d81-b45a-4594-9f33-c992c91f9b0a">further persecution</a>, more Soviet Jews fleeing and further accusations.</p>
<h2>Soviet similarities</h2>
<p>While Russia is not the Soviet Union, the Putinist system is increasingly <a href="https://theconversation.com/putins-not-a-fascist-totalitarian-or-revolutionary-hes-a-reactionary-tyrant-179256">reactionary</a> and autocratic – some would say <a href="https://theconversation.com/yes-putin-and-russia-are-fascist-a-political-scientist-shows-how-they-meet-the-textbook-definition-179063">fascist</a>. Autocracies generally need an enemy to put the public on their side and show that they are fighting instability and protecting the population.</p>
<p>The phrase came up recently, during a state-sponsored rally in the Luzhniki Stadium in Moscow in March 2022, when Putin spoke about a <a href="https://thebell.io/en/putin-rails-against-fifth-column-and-traitors/">fifth column</a> and national traitors. Authoritarian leaders often like to cite an internal enemy as well as an external enemy. </p>
<p>The fear of Russian history repeating itself doesn’t go away. Past and present Russian regimes have always <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-62564122">blamed</a> Jews for their problems. Many Russian Jews are not waiting around to find out if Russia is about to take this dark path, again.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/189090/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Stephen Hall does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The Ukraine war has prompted thousands of Russian Jews to flee the country, an expert investigates why.Stephen Hall, Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Politics, International Relations and Russia, University of BathLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1879542022-08-11T12:14:50Z2022-08-11T12:14:50ZRussia’s threats to shut down Jewish Agency raise alarm bells for those who remember the past<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/477976/original/file-20220808-68796-8pl6q9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=15%2C9%2C2101%2C1400&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">During the Cold War, Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union was tightly restricted. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/male-hand-holds-israeli-and-russian-international-royalty-free-image/1389932182?adppopup=true">Dzurag/iStock via Getty Images Plus</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Russia’s <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-did-russia-invade-ukraine-178512">invasion of Ukraine</a> in February 2022 sparked a surge of refugees fleeing the war zone, but political repression and economic uncertainty have also prompted <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2022/07/14/russians-flee-putins-regime-after-ukraine-war-in-second-wave-of-migration.html">emigration from Russia itself</a>. Among the emigrants are Russian Jews, 16,000 of whom <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jul/26/russia-closure-israel-migration-jewish-agency-ukraine">have left for Israel</a> in the nearly six months since the war’s start.</p>
<p>Now, Russia’s Justice Ministry is threatening the organization that helps the emigrants leave. A Moscow court held <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/29/russia-jewish-agency-israel-ukraine/">a preliminary hearing</a> on July 28, 2022, about the ministry’s application to dissolve the Russian branch of <a href="https://www.jewishagency.org/">the Jewish Agency for Israel</a>.</p>
<p>The Jewish Agency, a nonprofit with government ties that is older than the country itself, helps Jews around the world who want to immigrate to Israel. The <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/29/russia-jewish-agency-israel-ukraine/">move to shut down</a> its <a href="https://www.jewishagency.org/ru/">operations in Russia</a> has <a href="https://www.thejc.com/news/world/get-out-now-soviet-refusenik-natan-sharansky's-warning-to-russia's-jews-as-crackdown-fears-grow-5VS51v8pkfWI9EkwdYv0wO">raised alarm</a> – particularly among people who see it as turning back the clock to a time, not so long ago, when Soviet Russia forced Jews to endure state-sponsored antisemitism while <a href="https://www.harpercollins.com/products/when-they-come-for-us-well-be-gone-gal-beckerman?variant=39934628429858">trampling on their right to emigrate</a>.</p>
<h2>Soviet antisemitism</h2>
<p>On paper, the Soviet Union vowed to create an egalitarian society. In reality, it <a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/713677598">denied rights to minority populations</a>, including Jews. </p>
<p>The government <a href="http://www.bu.edu/law/journals-archive/international/volume23n1/documents/159-176.pdf">closed down Jewish schools and cultural institutions</a>, criminalized the <a href="https://www.upi.com/Archives/1983/05/06/Soviets-arrest-Hebrew-teacher/1764421041600/">teaching</a> <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1985/02/05/world/soviet-said-to-sentence-popular-hebrew-teacher-to-labor-camp.html">of</a> <a href="https://www.jta.org/archive/jewish-section-blamed-for-the-hebrew-language-persecutions-in-russia">Hebrew</a>, <a href="https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110820805.485">murdered</a> <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1998/01/14/theater/a-jew-stalin-killed-now-symbolizes-rebirth.html">Jewish leaders</a>, orchestrated <a href="https://yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/doctors_plot">anti-Jewish campaigns</a> in the <a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/13501677208577110">press</a> and in the <a href="https://yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Economic_Trials">courts</a> and created glass ceilings that blocked Jews’ ability to advance at <a href="https://doi.org/10.1177/001312457801000206">school</a> and in the <a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/13501678508577476">workplace</a>. In 1966, during a telephone address to Jewish Americans, <a href="https://digipres.cjh.org/delivery/DeliveryManagerServlet?dps_pid=IE1094744">Martin Luther King Jr. called it “a kind of spiritual and cultural genocide</a>.”</p>
<p>Cold War politics made the predicament worse. The Soviet government’s domestic persecutions of Jews were bound up in its <a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/13501677808577276">foreign policy toward Israel</a>. When the country declared independence in 1948, the U.S. and USSR each raced to secure its allegiance. After Israel aligned with the West, however, the Soviet Union became patron of the Arab states and <a href="https://www.wilsoncenter.org/publication/the-soviet-union-and-the-six-day-war-revelations-the-polish-archives">broke diplomatic ties</a> with Israel in 1967.</p>
<p>During the string of Arab-Israeli wars from the 1950s to 1970s, the USSR accompanied military support for Egypt and Syria with anti-Jewish campaigns at home. Using “<a href="https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/soviet-anti-semitic-cartoons">anti-Zionism” as a dog whistle</a>, Soviet propaganda <a href="https://fathomjournal.org/soviet-anti-zionism-and-contemporary-left-antisemitism/">resurrected classic antisemitic stereotypes</a> of <a href="https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/protocols-of-the-elders-of-zion">Jewish conspiracies for global domination</a>.</p>
<h2>International pressure</h2>
<p>In the 1960s, Soviet Jews began trying to escape their predicament by applying for exit permits to emigrate. A movement for emigration rights sprang up among Jews in the USSR, led by activists who sought to go to Israel. <a href="https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights">Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights</a> gives all people the right to leave their country, but the Soviet government refused the applications for emigration permits and heaped more troubles on those who had dared to ask.</p>
<p>Stuck in the Soviet Union, these “<a href="https://refusenikproject.org/history/#historical-overview">refuseniks</a>,” as they came to be known, lost their jobs and housing and were harassed by the secret police. Leaders of the emigration rights movement – including <a href="http://content.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19780724,00.html">Natan Sharansky</a>, who went on to become <a href="https://archive.jewishagency.org/executive-members/natan-sharansky-honorary-member">chairman of the Jewish Agency</a> and deputy prime minister of Israel – were arrested and sent to prison camps or Siberian exile.</p>
<p>As Soviet Jews fought to emigrate, <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/40207022">a global human rights campaign</a> mobilized on their behalf – a movement I have <a href="https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9780429201127-6/foreign-tourists-domestic-encounters-shaul-kelner">written</a> <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/685280">about</a> as <a href="https://as.vanderbilt.edu//jewishstudies/people/faculty/shaul-kelner/">a scholar of modern Judaism</a>. Marching under slogans like “Let them live as Jews, or let them leave” and “<a href="https://mjhnyc.org/events/let-my-people-go-lessons-we-learned-from-the-soviet-jewry-movement/">Let my people go</a>,” political leaders, clergy, civil rights activists, labor unions and <a href="https://blog.nli.org.il/en/ingrid_bergman_35/">celebrities</a> joined Jewish people in embracing the cause.</p>
<p>On a congressional delegation to Russia in 1979, then-Sen. <a href="https://digital.bentley.umich.edu/djnews/djn.1979.09.21.001/8">Joe Biden</a> <a href="https://digital.bentley.umich.edu/djnews/djn.1979.09.21.001/8">visited Leningrad’s synagogue</a> to meet Soviet Jewish emigration-rights activists. In December 1987, at the start of the summit between U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, a quarter-million Americans gathered on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., to demand freedom for Soviet Jewry. Republican Vice President <a href="https://www.c-span.org/video/?c5026758/user-clip-vp-george-hw-bush-addressing-1987-freedom-rally-soviet-jews">George H.W. Bush</a> and Democratic U.S. Rep. <a href="https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4893792/user-clip-rep-john-lewis-addresses-freedom-rally-soviet-jewry-washington-dc-december-7-1987">John Lewis</a> shared the podium.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="A black and white photo shows a closely packed crowd at a protest, with a large sign that says 'Their fight is our fight.'" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/478133/original/file-20220808-20-un4tsx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/478133/original/file-20220808-20-un4tsx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/478133/original/file-20220808-20-un4tsx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/478133/original/file-20220808-20-un4tsx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/478133/original/file-20220808-20-un4tsx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=504&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/478133/original/file-20220808-20-un4tsx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=504&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/478133/original/file-20220808-20-un4tsx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=504&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Tens of thousands of people gather in front of the United Nations in New York in 1975 to call for more rights for Jewish people in the Soviet Union.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/these-are-some-of-the-estimated-100-000-persons-who-news-photo/515296322?adppopup=true">Bettmann via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>A trickle, then a flood</h2>
<p>The human rights campaign succeeded, but not all at once. In 1964, <a href="https://www.routledge.com/Let-My-People-Go-The-Transnational-Politics-of-Soviet-Jewish-Emigration/Peretz/p/book/9780367598266">the USSR let only 537 Jews emigrate</a>. In the 1970s, it let around <a href="https://daviscenter.fas.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/files/2021-04/Tolts%20M.%20A%20Half%20Century%20of%20Jewish%20Emigration%20from%20the%20Former%20Soviet%20Union%20-%20Harvard4%20_0.pdf">25,000 out on average each year</a>, bending to the international outcry and hoping to advance détente with the West. But in the early 1980s, the Cold War chilled, and the Soviet Union closed the gates again.</p>
<p>With Gorbachev’s liberalizing reforms in the late 1980s, however, the USSR walked back its anti-Jewish policies, <a href="https://tass.com/politics/1112015">reestablished ties with Israel</a> and opened the gates to unrestricted Jewish emigration.</p>
<p>Once Jews were free to leave, most chose to go. About 400,000 left in 1990 and 1991, when the USSR collapsed, and the flow continued afterward. All told, between 1970 and 2022, <a href="https://daviscenter.fas.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/files/2021-04/Tolts%20M.%20A%20Half%20Century%20of%20Jewish%20Emigration%20from%20the%20Former%20Soviet%20Union%20-%20Harvard4%20_0.pdf">almost 2 million Jews emigrated</a> – mostly to Israel, but also in the hundreds of thousands to the U.S., Canada and Germany. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="A man in a suit smiles and holds a young girl in a white jacket, who waves at the camera." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/477977/original/file-20220808-23-p87hi4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/477977/original/file-20220808-23-p87hi4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=396&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/477977/original/file-20220808-23-p87hi4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=396&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/477977/original/file-20220808-23-p87hi4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=396&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/477977/original/file-20220808-23-p87hi4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=497&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/477977/original/file-20220808-23-p87hi4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=497&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/477977/original/file-20220808-23-p87hi4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=497&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Soviet refusenik Yuri Balovlenkov, who had to wait nearly a decade for an exit visa to leave the USSR, holds his daughter after arriving in the U.S. in 1987.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/soviet-refusenik-yuri-balovlenkov-with-his-daughter-and-news-photo/50682904?adppopup=true">Cynthia Johnson/The Chronicle Collection via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Emigration has ticked upward since the Ukraine war began. Fewer than <a href="https://www.jewishdatabank.org/content/upload/bjdb/2019_World_Jewish_Population_(AJYB,_DellaPergola)_DataBank_Final2.pdf">150,000</a> Jewish people remain in Russia today. <a href="https://www.thejc.com/news/world/get-out-now-soviet-refusenik-natan-sharansky%27s-warning-to-russia%27s-jews-as-crackdown-fears-grow-5VS51v8pkfWI9EkwdYv0wO">Another 450,000 or so</a> who do not necessarily consider themselves Jewish but have Jewish ancestry are also <a href="https://archive.jewishagency.org/first-steps/program/5131">eligible for immediate Israeli citizenship</a>.</p>
<h2>Political dance</h2>
<p>Throughout all these decades, the Jewish Agency for Israel has been the main organization helping Russian Jews emigrate – working in Russia itself since 1989, and before then, when Israel and the USSR did not maintain diplomatic ties, from transit stations in <a href="https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/camp-tale">Austria</a> and <a href="https://cis.org/Report/Refugee-Resettlement-and-Freedom-Choice-Case-Soviet-Jewry">Italy</a>.</p>
<p>For most of the post-Soviet period, Israel and Russia have maintained cautiously friendly ties, and the Jewish Agency’s work has proceeded smoothly. This, and <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-02-11/israel-says-u-s-not-in-syrian-game-as-russia-seen-dominant#xj4y7vzkg">Russia’s military presence</a> <a href="https://www.wilsoncenter.org/article/coping-the-russian-challenge-the-middle-east-us-israeli-perspectives-and-opportunities-for">in Syria</a>, along Israel’s northern border, have <a href="https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-712561">muted the Israeli response</a> to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. </p>
<p>Nevertheless, the war has <a href="https://www.jpost.com/international/article-705688">stoked tensions</a> between Moscow and Jerusalem. Increasingly isolated, Russia has also <a href="https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/07/20/putin-meeting-iran-turkey-russia-middle-east-syria-ukraine/">drawn closer to Iran</a>. As a result, a new relationship between Russia and Israel may be taking shape.</p>
<h2>An old technique, made new?</h2>
<p>Russia’s Justice Ministry claims that the Jewish Agency’s collection of data about Russian citizens <a href="https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/europe/2022-07-05/ty-article/.premium/russia-threatens-to-bar-jewish-agency-operations-in-the-country-cites-law-violations/00000181-cf10-d982-abb3-efb726380000">violates Russian law</a> and denies the case is political. The next hearing is scheduled for Aug. 19, 2022.</p>
<p>Outlawing the Jewish Agency is unlikely to end Jewish emigration, since people are still able to leave the country. The gates are still open, for now. Passing through them may become a bit harder. </p>
<p>During the Cold War, the Soviet Union knew that Jewish emigration symbolized something important to the West. It used that to its advantage, <a href="https://jewishstudies.ysu.edu/?page_id=733">treating Jews as “pawns</a>,” in the words of historian <a href="https://en.jewish-history.huji.ac.il/people/jonathan-dekel-chen">Jonathan Dekel-Chen</a>. The Kremlin <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/07/putin-russia-jewish-agency-emigration-israel/670948/">let them go or held them back</a> as a way of telegraphing its interest or lack thereof in good relations with the West. </p>
<p>Now, it seems Vladimir Putin’s Russia has found the old telegraph from the Cold War attic, dusted it off, and discovered that it still works for tapping out signals today.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/187954/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Shaul Kelner has received funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and Brandeis-Genesis Institute for Russian Jewry. He has consulted and contributed writings to research and education projects supported by the Jewish Agency for Israel.</span></em></p>During the Cold War, Russia’s refusal to allow Jews to leave the country reflected its political aims. The same is likely true today, a Jewish studies scholar explains.Shaul Kelner, Associate Professor of Sociology and Jewish Studies, Vanderbilt UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1805032022-04-13T13:50:28Z2022-04-13T13:50:28ZHow a coffee company and a marketing maven brewed up a Passover tradition: A brief history of the Maxwell House Haggadah<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/457781/original/file-20220412-13-uv7znj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=13%2C4%2C1008%2C741&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A Jewish family welcomes home their Navy man and gathers for a Passover Seder at their home in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1943.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/jewish-family-welcomes-home-their-navy-man-and-gathers-for-news-photo/576825922?adppopup=true">Minnesota Historical Society/CORBIS/Corbis Historical via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>For <a href="https://www.jewishbookcouncil.org/pb-daily/a-brief-history-of-the-haggadah">more than a millennium</a>, the haggadah has been <a href="https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/the-haggadah/">the centerpiece of the Jewish holiday of Passover</a>. The book sets out the ceremony for the Seder meal, when families tell the biblical Exodus story of God delivering the ancient Israelites from slavery in Egypt.</p>
<p>Today, thousands of different haggadahs exist, with prayers, rituals and readings tailored to every type of Seder – from <a href="https://www.keshetonline.org/resources/ma-mishtana-a-gay-lesbian-bisexual-transgender-questioning-ally-haggadah/">LGBTQ+-affirming</a> to <a href="https://www.rac.org/sites/default/files/Earth%20Justice%20Seder%20Haggadah%20Mar%202016.pdf">climate-conscious</a>. But for decades, one of the most popular and influential haggadahs in the United States has been a simple version with an unlikely source: the Maxwell House Haggadah, dreamed up in 1932 by the coffee corporation and a Jewish advertising executive.</p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="The cover page of the Maxwell House Haggadah, in English and Hebrew." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/457786/original/file-20220412-37887-8dyi95.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/457786/original/file-20220412-37887-8dyi95.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=799&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/457786/original/file-20220412-37887-8dyi95.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=799&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/457786/original/file-20220412-37887-8dyi95.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=799&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/457786/original/file-20220412-37887-8dyi95.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1004&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/457786/original/file-20220412-37887-8dyi95.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1004&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/457786/original/file-20220412-37887-8dyi95.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1004&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Maxwell House Haggadah, first published in 1932.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Joseph Jacobs Advertising</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Its history reflects how Jews modernized and <a href="https://cup.columbia.edu/book/adapting-to-abundance/9780231068536">adapted to their new country</a>, while also upholding traditions. But coffee has no ritual ties to Passover. So what explains the Maxwell House Haggadah’s sustained popularity?</p>
<h2>Coffee competition</h2>
<p>One explanation is advertising: a field so pervasive and powerful in people’s lives that it becomes almost invisible. As <a href="https://www.otis.edu/faculty/kerri-steinberg">a scholar of American Jewish visual culture and communication</a>, I have researched how marketing can <a href="https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/jewish-mad-men/9780813563756">influence Americans’ religious and cultural identities</a>.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/jewish-mad-men/9780813563756">The story</a> of the Maxwell House Haggadah begins with the meeting of two marketing masterminds. The first, Joseph Jacobs, grew up on <a href="https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691095455/lower-east-side-memories">the Lower East Side</a> in New York at the turn of the 20th century, amid a wave of Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe. He went on to establish his advertising company in 1919. The second was Joel Owsley Cheek of the Cheek-Neal Coffee Company, who hailed from the South. Cheek-Neal was then the parent company of Maxwell House coffee, with its famous slogan “<a href="https://www.basicbooks.com/titles/mark-pendergrast/uncommon-grounds/9781541646421/#module-whats-inside">good to the last drop</a>.”</p>
<p>Jacobs’ quest to familiarize companies with <a href="https://cup.columbia.edu/book/adapting-to-abundance/9780231068536">the buying power of the growing population of Jewish Americans</a> led him to talk with Cheek in 1922 about placing ads for Maxwell House coffee in Jewish journals. There was only one problem: American Jews of Eastern European descent believed that coffee beans, like other legumes, were forbidden for Passover, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/local/amp-stories/what-is-kosher-for-passover/">when certain foods must be avoided</a>, so they drank tea during the weeklong holiday.</p>
<p>Consulting a rabbi from the Lower East Side, who declared that technically coffee beans were like berries and therefore kosher for Passover, Jacobs <a href="https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/jewish-mad-men/9780813563756">secured a rabbinical stamp of approval</a> for Maxwell coffee in 1923.</p>
<p>During the Great Depression of the 1930s, when a major grocery chain <a href="https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/jewish-mad-men/9780813563756">discounted their own brand of coffee</a>, Maxwell House turned to Jacobs’ firm to help them stay competitive. The Maxwell House Haggadah was born when he suggested distributing a book for free with each purchased can of coffee.</p>
<p>Beyond its appeal as a giveaway, however, the content of the haggadah needed to earn Jewish customers’ trust. The front cover relied upon a classical design of centered text in Hebrew, but also English. Inside, pen and ink illustrations of biblical stories continued the sense of tradition. The pages of the haggadah turned from right to left, as is typical of Hebrew texts.</p>
<p>It worked. According to <a href="https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.36019/9780813563770-005/pdf">a market report</a> commissioned by the Joseph Jacobs Organization to guide its marketing efforts, Maxwell House became the coffee of choice for Jewish households around New York City.</p>
<h2>Modernizing the haggadah</h2>
<p>The Maxwell House Haggadah remained largely the same through the 1940s and ‘50s, and soon achieved the status of a Passover classic. Yet <a href="https://www.ebay.com/itm/334394335130">the 1965 version</a> marked a definitive break with the past. As 1960s culture introduced more minimalist, graphic art, raging against the classicism of the past, the haggadah’s images changed to reflect the times. And though the written text remained largely the same, the addition of English transliterations of blessings and prayers hinted at <a href="https://jps.org/books/jps-the-americanization-of-jewish-culture-1888-1988/">Americanizing Jews’</a> loss of Hebrew reading skills.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="An advertisement for Maxwell House Coffee." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/457787/original/file-20220412-14-n3dmll.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/457787/original/file-20220412-14-n3dmll.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=775&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/457787/original/file-20220412-14-n3dmll.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=775&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/457787/original/file-20220412-14-n3dmll.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=775&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/457787/original/file-20220412-14-n3dmll.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=974&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/457787/original/file-20220412-14-n3dmll.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=974&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/457787/original/file-20220412-14-n3dmll.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=974&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">An ad for Maxwell House coffee, themed for Passover.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Joseph Jacobs Advertising</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>For the next 30 years, very little changed in the haggadah. But in 2000, it finally received a visual makeover, as seen in an advertisement that year. Stark graphics, popular since the mid-‘60s, were replaced with nostalgic photos depicting an intergenerational family at a Seder. This tender imagery invoked tradition at a time when <a href="http://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/national-jewish-population-survey-1990/">many Americans had grown more distant from their Jewish communities</a>, prompting concern from Jewish leaders. </p>
<p>In 2009, the haggadah achieved worldwide fame when President Barack Obama used it to conduct <a href="https://www.thefoodsection.com/foodsection/2009/04/scenes-from-a-white-house-seder.html">his first White House Seder</a>. Shortly after, it underwent a complete <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/09/nyregion/09haggadah.html">overhaul</a> for the 21st century. Maxwell House’s version was now less illustrated and included more written text, like the haggadahs used by more religious Jews. By eliminating antiquated words like “thee” and “thine,” along with gender-specific pronouns for God, the new version felt more relevant for a younger and more <a href="https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691168043/not-in-the-heavens">secular Jewish population</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="President Obama and guests sit around a dinner table at the White House." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/457778/original/file-20220412-9671-9c8arl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/457778/original/file-20220412-9671-9c8arl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/457778/original/file-20220412-9671-9c8arl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/457778/original/file-20220412-9671-9c8arl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/457778/original/file-20220412-9671-9c8arl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/457778/original/file-20220412-9671-9c8arl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/457778/original/file-20220412-9671-9c8arl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">In this image released by the White House, President Barack Obama and the first family mark the Jewish holiday of Passover with a Seder at the White House in 2010.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://newsroom.ap.org/detail/ObamaPassover/2d8cf33f0d094d7cb6b0b47192c8eeba/photo?Query=obama%20seder&mediaType=photo&sortBy=arrivaldatetime:desc&dateRange=Anytime&totalCount=1&currentItemNo=0">AP Photo/The White House, Pete Souza</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>And in 2019, when “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” the television show about a mid-century Jewish housewife-turned-comedian, was at its height of popularity, Maxwell House published a special <a href="https://www.thekitchn.com/maxwell-house-mrs-maisel-haggadah-268520">Mrs. Maisel edition of its haggadah</a>. A throwback to the haggadah’s heyday in the late ‘50s, this <a href="https://www.kveller.com/theres-now-a-marvelous-mrs-maisel-maxwell-house-haggadah/">television tie-in</a> represented yet another marketing effort to retain American Jews’ affection for Maxwell House coffee in a crowded market. </p>
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<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="The pink cover of the " src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/457795/original/file-20220412-8252-ve7ex9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/457795/original/file-20220412-8252-ve7ex9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/457795/original/file-20220412-8252-ve7ex9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/457795/original/file-20220412-8252-ve7ex9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/457795/original/file-20220412-8252-ve7ex9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/457795/original/file-20220412-8252-ve7ex9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/457795/original/file-20220412-8252-ve7ex9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.amazon.com/Marvelous-Limited-Passover-Haggadah-Maxwell/dp/B07PGGXVGG">Maxwell House/Amazon</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In a sea of <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/01/opinion/sunday/why-a-haggadah.html">thousands of haggadahs</a>, it is Maxwell House’s that has become the <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=imeID66v8gIC&q=balin#v=snippet&q=%22good%20to%20the%20last%20drop%22&f=false">de facto representative of American Jewish life</a>. The story of its place within U.S. households points to marketing’s key role in shaping a yearly tradition.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/180503/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Kerri Steinberg does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>A collaboration between advertiser Joseph Jacobs and the famous coffee company produced the classic U.S. haggadah. The book sets out the ceremony for the Seder meal.Kerri Steinberg, Department Chair of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Otis College of Art and DesignLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.