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The journal Der Yid was the first Yiddish periodical officially tied to a Zionist body. This article follows the shared genealogy of early Zionism and diasporic nationalism as expressed in Der Yid, and offers a revision to common notions on Yiddish cultural and political revival around the turn of the twentieth century. In contrast with a tendency to highlight a sharp divide between these movements, this article emphasizes the points of intimacy and convergence between the ostensibly opposing ideological and lingual choices of Hebraism-Zionism and Yiddishism-diasporism. More specifically, it analyses a controversy between Yiddishists and Hebraists, particularly Ahad Ha'am, generated by the very title of the journal during its first year of publication: Who is Der Yid – the Jew? Who is the ultimate imagined national readership and national collective of a Yiddish-language journal? By probing the populist, sentimentalist discourse that the journal produced, this article argues for a renewed evaluation of the presumably dichotomous constructions of Hebrew versus Yiddish, or Zionism versus diasporic nationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article traces the attempts in 1907–1913 by the Jewish Territorial Organization to set up an autonomous Jewish entity in West Africa. The Territorialists laid down three criteria for the choice of a territory: (1) A tract of land that must be large enough in size to allow for the absorption of mass Jewish migration. (2) A fertile territory that could provide a livelihood for the Jews who went there. (3) A sparsely populated territory so that no ethnic tensions would be created between the Jews settling there and the local residents. One likely territory was Angola, which at the beginning of the twentieth century was under the protection of the Portuguese government. The plan failed. However, the importance of the “Angola Plan” was to highlight the position of the Territorialists towards Africa in general and Angola in particular. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The twentieth century witnessed an array of fresh models of Jewish women's educational and religious leadership. Quite understandably, the majority of the scholarly focus has been on burgeoning egalitarian trends featured in the new roles for women within liberal Jewish denominations and among the Modern Orthodox. Yet increased appreciation for gendered perspectives within Jewish studies has also led to recognition that seemingly conventional female roles, once viewed as purely supportive in nature, have evolved into platforms for voicing uniquely feminine styles of Jewish authority. This article offers an initial portrayal and analysis of a relatively new phenomenon: the American female non-hasidic Haredi outreach activist. It does so, first, by locating these figures within overall trends of American Haredi Jewry as well as in relation to the broader phenomenon of Orthodox feminism. The central contention is that inasmuch as American Haredi Orthodoxy vehemently opposes many of the changes advanced by the Modern Orthodox sector, a “silent” revolution is actually taking place within its own elite frameworks. The instigation for the emergence of new religious leadership roles for Haredi women is the increasing focus of this sector on outreach to the non-observant, and the recognition that woman can be especially effective in these capacities. Yet such activities demand types of public behavior, often in mixed gender settings, that are inconsistent with the messages of strict modesty put forward within Haredi female education. Moreover, some of the female Haredi figures have begun to advance the notion that their functions are not merely vehicles for increasing engagement with Judaism, but actually represent a new empowered model of Orthodox women's leadership and activism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The movement known as Modern Orthodox Judaism is often distinguished from “ultra-Orthodoxy” (or Haredi Judaism) in terms of openness. While adherents of the latter form of Judaism typically live together in isolated communities and seek to seal themselves off from secular books and learning (and, in our own age, such potentially malign influences as television, movies, and the internet), Modern Orthodox Jews are generally characterized by a more open attitude toward such things, and toward outsiders and outside ideas in general. The present article seeks to argue that the tendencies represented by these two movements are in fact dyed in the wool—that, from the very beginning, Judaism has endorsed and incorporated both isolationism and openness. This contention is illustrated with examples from the Hebrew Bible itself as well as from the extensive literature of the Second Temple period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Post-secularism in Israel is expressed, among other ways, by the growing public acceptance of identities that are neither religious nor secular. This paper is predicated on research of individuals located on the boundaries of Orthodox Religious Zionism. It explores their attitudes on a range of issues and argues that they reflect their post-secularist identities. In-depth qualitative interviews were conducted with young men and women who chose to abandon the strictures of a Religious Zionist lifestyle as well as those who still remain within its bounds. Various late-modern and post-secular modes of thought and expression were identified in interviewees’ narratives. These included pluralism, relativism, egalitarianism, the personalization of relationships with God, and a disregard for theological arguments based upon scientific findings. It is argued that these attitudes are related to two late-modern social processes: (1) the rise of individual expressivism and (2) the belief in the liberal human-rights ethic. These tendencies cut across the social divide between interviewees who left Religious Zionism and those who chose to remain within the fold, traversing the previously dominant religious–secular social divide and thus serving as yet another indication for the blossoming of new post-secular spaces in Israeli Jewish society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the relationship between identity and security through an investigation into Jewish diasporic identity. The paper argues that the convention of treating identity as an objective referent of security is problematic, as the Jewish diaspora experience demonstrates. The paper presents a new way of conceptualizing identity and security by introducing the concept of diasporic security. Diasporic security reflects the geographical experience of being a member of a trans-state community, of having a fluid identity that is shaped by sometimes contradictory discourses emanating from a community that resides both at home and abroad. In introducing the concept of diasporic security, the paper makes use of literature in Diaspora Studies, Security Studies, recent works in contemporary political theory and sociology, and Woody Allen's film,Deconstructing Harry(1997). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since ancient times, the collective “People of Israel” has been depicted as God's female consort. This mystical, female image of the People of Israel has been challenged by the masculine discourse of religious Zionism. Spurred by post-modern tendencies and ideological disillusionment, the redemptive theology of religious Zionism has suffered a process of de-legitimization accompanied by the reactivation of the “feminine” messianic narrative. This paper focuses on an example of such redemptive feminine theology, one whose creator explicitly promotes it as an alternative to the male narrative of religious Zionism. The theology in question belongs to Rabbi Yitzchak Ginsburgh, one of the most controversial figures on the Israeli religious scene. Ginsburgh's messianic narrative is overwhelmingly feminine and is sceptical about rationalism. It offers an unusual synthesis of New Age spirituality, nationalistic rhetoric, and extreme political nihilism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The paper focuses on the influence of the modern ideologies of nationalism and race on the formation of Jewish identity within Central European Judaism at the turn of the twentieth century. I examine the attempts of Neolog Hungarian Jews to re-invent themselves in the racially infused language of Hungarian society by histories of the Orient that demonstrated a racial compatibility. The article argues that in order to provide a foundation for their acceptance into Hungarian society Neolog Hungarian Jews engaged in Oriental Studies to argue that a separate Jewish race did not exist. The paper analyses the writings of Neolog intellectuals, based on archival materials, such as correspondence, rare documents, and journal articles from the Országos Szécsényi Library and the Magyar Tudományos Akadémia Library in Budapest, Hungary (which have been translated into English for the first time). Jewish race theories based on Orientalism are particular to Hungary but were not discussed because the experience of Jews in Vienna and Prague was considered to be the norm throughout the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In order to have a fuller exposure to the Central European Jewish experience of the past we need to address the distinct Hungarian Jewish situation. This paper attempts to fill this void. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The title, as the study itself, has been inspired by four theoretical contributions: first, Stuart Hall's essay “Introduction: Who Needs ‘Identity’” (in Questions of Cultural Identity, ed. Stuart Hall and Paul Du Gay. London: Sage, 1996); second, Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, which opens with the sentence: “Striving to be both European and black requires some specific forms of double consciousness. But saying this, I do not mean to suggest taking on either or both unfinished identities necessarily exhausts subjective resources of any particular individual” (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993, 1). Third, Diane Davis's question: “Is there a way to activate a sense of solidarity among singularities – a way to say ‘we’ – that doesn't automatically exclude, that doesn't just ask for trouble by simultaneously feeding this craving for … Gemeinschaft (in the name of which any number of ‘we's have committed the most horrific atrocities in recorded history)?” (“‘Addicted to Love’; Or, Toward an Inessential Solidarity,” in Jac: A Journal of Composition Theory 19.3 (1999), 639); and fourth, Giorgio Agamben's The Coming Community (Minneapolis: Minnesota Press, 1993). The article consists of four sections, the first is a short theoretical background to the notion of identity. The second section is an examination of four major collective processes, two of them collective exclusionary operations and erasure, which Arabized Jews have undergone. The third section deals with the globalization and the search for inessential solidarities among Arabized Jews. The fourth section is the conclusion to the study, in which the notion of Arab-Jewish identity is revisited. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the ideas of a number of leading Israeli intellectuals on basic questions of secularism and the link between secular Jews and their Jewish heritage. The secular Jews at the focus of the intellectuals' thinking are individualists, men and women of outstanding personality and aptitude. Most of the article discusses their trend towards individualism (which is often only implied). The last part of the article tries to classify the reasons for that trend—some of which are rooted in the political tension inherent in questions of identity and tradition in Israeli society, and others that are the apolitical legacy of spiritual Zionism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article tackles the multifaceted question of why Israel adopted an open immigration policy in 1948 and adhered to that policy in spite of the proven difficulties it inflicted on the state. The main supposition made is that the immigration policy of the young State of Israel did not constitute a drastic change from earlier Zionist approaches and practices. It was, rather, the implementation of Zionist policy that emerged in the 1930s and heightened in the 1940s, but could not be carried out as long as the Zionist Organization lacked sovereignty and the British controlled the gates of Palestine. The article elaborates on the motivation for the futile attempt made at the end of 1951 to employ some measures of regulation in immigration. It suggests that they stemmed not only from the lessons of the mass immigration of 1948-1951, but also from the fact that in late 1951 the Jewish people and Zionism were not suffering a period of national emergency as the very existence of Israel was no longer in jeopardy and no Jewish community around the world was under acute threat. Finally the article interprets the criticism of the attempts at regulation as utilizing a Zionist rationalization, expecting Israel to act differently from other immigrant states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The films Moishe Ventilator and The Blaumilch Canal are the vehicles for an examination of the writing of the Israeli territory through the symbolic representation of that space: a map. At the centre of the plot of both films is a detective who pursues a missing map and, in doing so, reveals the dialectic between a territory and the writing of this territory, or between homeland and the "correct" map. All this is at the pivotal period of time in Israel's history just prior to and following the Six Day War. Using observations on space and power by Foucault, Marin, Mitchell, and Aitkin and Zonn, among others, the paper introduces a socio-semiotic and visual analysis of the dialectic between imaginary and symbolic practices of Israeli territory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines Ahad Ha'am's attempt to create a Hebrew compendium of Jewish knowledge, Otsar hayahadut belashon `ivrit (A Treasury of Judaism in the Hebrew Language). at the end of the nineteenth century. Although his proposal was never realized, it represents an important moment in the history of Jewish nationalism, both because of the influence it exerted on Hebrew writers and scholars active in the Zionist movement and, eventually, on the political culture of the yishuv. Ahad Ha'am's effort to publish a Hebrew encyclopedia reveals his faith in the power of books to spark a national revival; he believed that the entire Jewish heritage could be contained within one authoritative book or set of books, and that such a project had the power to rehabilitate and preserve a weak, divided and scattered people, and to provide it with a unified, homogenous national identity. His vision was later modified and transformed by the Hebrew poet Hayim Nahman Bialik and survived in altered form as the primary impulse behind Bialik's ambitious attempt to gather, translate and edit the classical works of Judaism into modern anthologies, and after Bialik's death in 1934 as one of the organizing principals of the Zionist movement during the period of the British Mandate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]