Download or read book Jabotinsky s Children written by Daniel Heller and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2017-08-07 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How interwar Poland and its Jewish youth were instrumental in shaping the ideology of right-wing Zionism By the late 1930s, as many as fifty thousand Polish Jews belonged to Betar, a youth movement known for its support of Vladimir Jabotinsky, the founder of right-wing Zionism. Poland was not only home to Jabotinsky’s largest following. The country also served as an inspiration and incubator for the development of right-wing Zionist ideas. Jabotinsky’s Children draws on a wealth of rare archival material to uncover how the young people in Betar were instrumental in shaping right-wing Zionist attitudes about the roles that authoritarianism and military force could play in the quest to build and maintain a Jewish state. Recovering the voices of ordinary Betar members through their letters, diaries, and autobiographies, Jabotinsky’s Children paints a vivid portrait of young Polish Jews and their turbulent lives on the eve of the Holocaust. Rather than define Jabotinsky as a firebrand fascist or steadfast democrat, the book instead reveals how he deliberately delivered multiple and contradictory messages to his young followers, leaving it to them to interpret him as they saw fit. Tracing Betar’s surprising relationship with interwar Poland’s authoritarian government, Jabotinsky’s Children overturns popular misconceptions about Polish-Jewish relations between the two world wars and captures the fervent efforts of Poland’s Jewish youth to determine, on their own terms, who they were, where they belonged, and what their future held in store. Shedding critical light on a vital yet neglected chapter in the history of Zionism, Jabotinsky’s Children provides invaluable perspective on the origins of right-wing Zionist beliefs and their enduring allure in Israel today.

Download or read book The Expulsion of Jews from Communist Poland written by Anat Plocker and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2022-03 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In March 1968, against the background of the Six-Day War, a campaign of antisemitism and anti-Zionism swept through Poland. The Expulsion of Jews from Communist Poland is the first full-length study of the events, their precursors, and the aftermath of this turbulent period. Plocker offers a new framework for understanding how this antisemitic campaign was motivated by a genuine fear of Jewish influence and international power. She sheds new light on the internal dynamics of the communist regime in Poland, stressing the importance of middle-level functionaries, whose dislike and fear of Jews had an unmistakable impact on the evolution of party policy. The Expulsion of Jews from Communist Poland examines how Communist Party leader Wladyslaw Gomulka's anti-Zionist rhetoric spiraled out of hand and opened up a fraught Pandora's box of old assertions that Jews controlled the Communist Party, the revival of nationalist chauvinism, and a witch hunt in universities and workplaces that conjured up ugly memories of Nazi Germany.

Download or read book The Road to September 1939 written by Jehuda Reinharz and published by Brandeis University Press. This book was released on 2020-03 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Preface: "The Birds Left Early"--"A Million Superfluous Jews" -- and More -- "The Dream of a Jewish State" -- "The Wailing Wall in Évian" and Kristallnacht -- Funeral March at St. James's Palace: "They Betrayed Czechoslovakia, Why Should They Not Betray Us as Well?" -- A Bridge Over the White Paper? -- The Forgotten Congress (Geneva, August 16-25, 1939) -- Will War Break Out? -- "So early, no one has seen death yet" -- Epilogue

Download or read book My Life as a Radical Jewish Woman written by Puah Rakovsky and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Autobiography of Puah Rakovsky, who broke from traditional upbringng to become a professional educator, Zionist activist, and feminist leader in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century Poland.

Download or read book The Emergence Of Modern Jewish Politics written by Zvi Gitelman and published by University of Pittsburgh Pre. This book was released on 2010-06-15 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Emergence of Modern Jewish Politics examines the political, social, and cultural dimensions of Zionism and Bundism, the two major political movements among East European Jews during the first half of the twentieth century.While Zionism achieved its primary aim—the founding of a Jewish state—the Jewish Labor Bund has not only practically disappeared, but its ideals of socialism and secular Jewishness based in the diaspora seem to have failed. Yet, as Zvi Gitelman and the various contributors to this volume argue, it was the Bund that more profoundly changed the structure of Jewish society, politics, and culture.In thirteen essays, prominent historians, political scientists, and professors of literature discuss the cultural and political contexts of these movements, their impact on Jewish life, and the reasons for the Bund's demise, and they question whether ethnic minorities are best served by highly ideological or solidly pragmatic movements.

Download or read book An Unchosen People written by Kenneth B. Moss and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2021-12-14 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A revisionist account of interwar EuropeÕs largest Jewish community that upends histories of Jewish agency to rediscover reckonings with nationalismÕs pathologies, diasporaÕs fragility, ZionismÕs promises, and the necessity of choice. What did the future hold for interwar EuropeÕs largest Jewish community, the font of global Jewish hopes? When intrepid analysts asked these questions on the cusp of the 1930s, they discovered a Polish Jewry reckoning with Òno tomorrow.Ó Assailed by antisemitism and witnessing liberalismÕs collapse, some Polish Jews looked past progressive hopes or religious certainties to investigate what the nation-state was becoming, what powers minority communities really possessed, and where a future might be foundÑand for whom. The story of modern Jewry is often told as one of creativity and contestation. Kenneth B. Moss traces instead a late Jewish reckoning with diasporic vulnerability, nationalismÕs terrible potencies, ZionismÕs promises, and the necessity of choice. Moss examines the works of Polish JewryÕs most searching thinkers as they confronted political irrationality, state crisis, and the limits of resistance. He reconstructs the desperate creativity of activists seeking to counter despair where they could not redress its causes. And he recovers a lost grassroots history of critical thought and political searching among ordinary Jews, young and powerless, as they struggled to find a viable future for themselvesÑin Palestine if not in Poland, individually if not communally. Focusing not on ideals but on a search for realism, Moss recasts the history of modern Jewish political thought. Where much scholarship seeks Jewish agency over a collective future, An Unchosen People recovers a darker tradition characterized by painful tradeoffs amid a harrowing political reality, making Polish Jewry a paradigmatic example of the minority experience endemic to the nation-state.

Download or read book Parting Ways written by Judith Butler and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2012-07-24 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Judith Butler follows Edward Said's late suggestion that through a consideration of Palestinian dispossession in relation to Jewish diasporic traditions a new ethos can be forged for a one-state solution. Butler engages Jewish philosophical positions to articulate a critique of political Zionism and its practices of illegitimate state violence, nationalism, and state-sponsored racism. At the same time, she moves beyond communitarian frameworks, including Jewish ones, that fail to arrive at a radical democratic notion of political cohabitation. Butler engages thinkers such as Edward Said, Emmanuel Levinas, Hannah Arendt, Primo Levi, Martin Buber, Walter Benjamin, and Mahmoud Darwish as she articulates a new political ethic. In her view, it is as important to dispute Israel's claim to represent the Jewish people as it is to show that a narrowly Jewish framework cannot suffice as a basis for an ultimate critique of Zionism. She promotes an ethical position in which the obligations of cohabitation do not derive from cultural sameness but from the unchosen character of social plurality. Recovering the arguments of Jewish thinkers who offered criticisms of Zionism or whose work could be used for such a purpose, Butler disputes the specific charge of anti-Semitic self-hatred often leveled against Jewish critiques of Israel. Her political ethic relies on a vision of cohabitation that thinks anew about binationalism and exposes the limits of a communitarian framework to overcome the colonial legacy of Zionism. Her own engagements with Edward Said and Mahmoud Darwish form an important point of departure and conclusion for her engagement with some key forms of thought derived in part from Jewish resources, but always in relation to the non-Jew. Butler considers the rights of the dispossessed, the necessity of plural cohabitation, and the dangers of arbitrary state violence, showing how they can be extended to a critique of Zionism, even when that is not their explicit aim. She revisits and affirms Edward Said's late proposals for a one-state solution within the ethos of binationalism. Butler's startling suggestion: Jewish ethics not only demand a critique of Zionism, but must transcend its exclusive Jewishness in order to realize the ethical and political ideals of living together in radical democracy.

Download or read book The Reconstruction of Nations written by Timothy Snyder and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2004-07-11 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Yet he begins with the principles of toleration that prevailed in much of early modern eastern Europe and concludes with the peaceful resolution of national tensions in the region since 1989.".

Download or read book The Tragedy of a Generation written by Joshua M. Karlip and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2013-06-01 with total page 399 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Tragedy of a Generation is the story of a failed ideal: an autonomous Jewish nation in Europe. It traces the origins of two influential strains of Jewish thought—Yiddishism and Diaspora Nationalism—and documents the waning hopes and painful reassessments of their leading representatives against the rising tide of Nazism and the Holocaust.

Download or read book The Last Generation of Jews in Poland written by Efraim Shmueli and published by Academic Studies PRess. This book was released on 2021-11-23 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book, based on memories of a native son and the research of a scholar, is an amalgam of descriptions and discussions, peppered with conversations, personal observations and an acute observer’s reflections, focused on the fabric of life in the city of Lodz and its vicinity. The author describes the “court” of the Hasidic Rabbis of Aleksander, with which his family was affiliated, the rival camps of Hasidim and Zionists, industrialists and laborers, struggles with the Polish authorities, and more. Detailed chapters are dedicated to a description of studies at a modern Jewish-Zionist high school (Gymnasium) – its exhilarating goals, directors and teachers, to the Lodz poet Yitzhak Katzenelson before and during the Holocaust, and to life in a small Polish shtetl. The concluding chapter “Return to Poland” examines the cities and towns described earlier in the book, as well as Breslau-Wroclaw, where the author had completed his rabbinic and university studies in 1933, as they appeared to him during his visit in 1982, nearly fifty years after his departure from Europe for Israel. The author's aim was to produce a portrait, sympathetic, intimate, but also knowledgeable and critical, of a generation that did not have the time to take stock of itself before its obliteration. He has thus rendered palpable the experiences and quandaries of many of his contemporaries.

Download or read book The Jews of Poland Between Two World Wars written by Yisrael Gutman and published by Tauber Institute Series for th. This book was released on 1989 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Original essays by distinguished scholars explore Jewish politics, religion, literature, and society in Poland from 1918 to 1939.

Download or read book Jewish Poland Revisited written by Erica T. Lehrer and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2013-07-19 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: National Jewish Book Award Finalist: “A fresh and delightful portrait of Jewish renewal in Poland . . . Highly recommended.” —Choice Since the end of Communism, Jews from around the world have visited Poland to tour Holocaust-related sites. A few venture further, seeking to learn about their own Polish roots and connect with contemporary Poles. For their part, a growing number of Poles are fascinated by all things Jewish. In this book, Erica T. Lehrer explores the intersection of Polish and Jewish memory projects in the historically Jewish neighborhood of Kazimierz in Krakow. Her own journey becomes part of the story as she demonstrates that Jews and Poles use spaces, institutions, interpersonal exchanges, and cultural representations to make sense of their historical inheritances.

Download or read book Orthodox Judaism and the Politics of Religion written by Daniel Mahla and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-26 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Investigates traditionalist struggles about Zionism and the emergence of national-religious Judaism and ultra-Orthodox in the early twentieth century.

Download or read book Everyday Zionism in East Central Europe written by Jan Rybak and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-08-05 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Everyday Zionism examines Zionist activism in East-Central Europe during the years of war, occupation, revolution, the collapse of empires, and the formation of nation states in the years 1914 to 1920. Against the backdrop of the Great War—its brutal aftermath and consequent violence—the day-to-day encounters between Zionist activists and the Jewish communities in the region gave the movement credibility, allowed it to win support and to establish itself as a leading force in Jewish political and social life for decades to come. Through activists' efforts, Zionism came to mean something new: Rather than being concerned with debates over Jewish nationhood and pioneering efforts in Palestine, it came to be about aiding starving populations, organizing soup-kitchens, establishing orphanages, schools, kindergartens, and hospitals, negotiating with the authorities, and leading self-defence against pogroms. Through this engagement Zionism evolved into a mass movement that attracted and inspired tens of thousands of Jews throughout the region. Everyday Zionism approaches the major European events of the period from the dual perspectives of Jewish communities and the Zionist activists on the ground, demonstrating how war, revolution, empire, and nation held very different meanings for people, depending on their local circumstances. Based on extensive archival research, the study shows how during the war and its aftermath East-Central Europe saw a large-scale nation-building project by Zionist activists who fought for and led their communities to shape for them a national future.

Download or read book Anti Jewish Violence in Poland 1914 1920 written by William W. Hagen and published by . This book was released on 2018-04-19 with total page 571 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first scholarly account of massive and fateful pogrom waves, interpreted through the lens of folk culture and social psychology.

Download or read book The Jews of Eastern Europe 1772 1881 written by Israel Bartal and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2011-06-07 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the nineteenth century, the largest Jewish community the modern world had known lived in hundreds of towns and shtetls in the territory between the Prussian border of Poland and the Ukrainian coast of the Black Sea. The period had started with the partition of Poland and the absorption of its territories into the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires; it would end with the first large-scale outbreaks of anti-Semitic violence and the imposition in Russia of strong anti-Semitic legislation. In the years between, a traditional society accustomed to an autonomous way of life would be transformed into one much more open to its surrounding cultures, yet much more confident of its own nationalist identity. In The Jews of Eastern Europe, Israel Bartal traces this transformation and finds in it the roots of Jewish modernity.

Download or read book Sources on Jewish Self Government in the Polish Lands from Its Inception to the Present written by François Guesnet and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page 726 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This source-reader invites you to encounter the world of one thousand years of Jewish self-government in eastern Europe. It tells about the beginnings in the Middle Ages, delves into the unfolding of communal hierarchies and supra-communal representation in the early modern period, and reflects on the impact of the partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and of growing state interference, as well as on the communist and post-communist periods. Translated into English from Hebrew, Latin, Yiddish, Polish, Russian, German, and other languages, in most cases for the first time, the sources illustrate communal life, the interdependence of civil and religious leadership, the impact of state legislation, Jewish-non-Jewish encounters, reform projects and political movements, but also Jewish resilience during the Holocaust"--