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This paper discusses Hannah Arendt's model of the Jewish pariah, developed in her study of Jewish assimilation. The argument is that Arendt's model represents her early efforts to move beyond Martin Heidegger's philosophy. The paper focuses on Arendt's concept of a conscious pariah as a model for political resistance, independence, and agency. It shows how Arendt infused elements of Heidegger's philosophy into her early vision of Jewish politics, while also transcending the limits of Heidegger's ontological project with her political vision. The paper suggests that Arendt's book on Rahel Varnhagen shares similarities with Heidegger's work on Mitsein in Being and Time, while her 1944 model of the conscious pariah, especially the focus on the pariah as a rebel, illustrates her concerns with Heidegger's work on the Volk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the implications of Judaism for politics, focusing on the historical and philosophical discussions surrounding Jewish politics from the Enlightenment to modernity. It examines how Jewish philosophy has sought to establish connections between universal reason and Jewish traditions and how these inquiries have influenced Jewish integration within European nation-states and the creation of the State of Israel.

This article examines how two central scholars based at the Hebrew University's Institute of Contemporary Jewry, Jonathan Frankel, and Ezra Mendelsohn, conceived, created, and codified the academic sub-field of modern Jewish politics. The article begins by discussing studies by earlier historians of the Jews like Salo W. Baron, Shmuel Ettinger, and Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi whose work often touched upon the intersection between Jews and politics. While Mendelsohn and Frankel's research was based upon key concepts developed by these scholars, their focus on the centrality of Jewish agency, the role of the Jewish intelligentsia, and the turn to "the (Jewish) people" helped create a new scholarly framework for imagining, analyzing, and researching modern Jewish politics. Despite their many achievements, they both overlooked several important topics in modern Jewish history including the role of religion, the activities of Jewish women, the experiences of Jews in North Africa and the Middle East, and the impact of Jewish politics on the Palestinians. By examining how these topics are dealt with in more recent works, the penultimate section in this article points to both the continuing influence of Mendelsohn and Frankel's scholarly paradigm as well as some of its inherent limits. In doing so, this analysis of modern Jewish politics makes for an intriguing case study regarding the organization, construction, and production of a particular field of knowledge while simultaneously raising critical questions regarding the very nature, limits, and future of Jewish studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Jewish community of Palestine (the Yishuv) began its transformation to a semi-autonomous entity shortly after the arrival of the Second Immigration to Palestine, from 1900-1914. During those years, the building blocks of a secular national governing framework were organized, and as WW I began, Ashkenazi leaders attained hegemony over the millet. During the war, the Jewish Diaspora's munificent financial transfers underwrote the survival and development of the millet. By 1918, the Yishuv , as a state-within-a-state, was poised to further expand its economy and militarize under British auspices. In 1920, only two years after the end of the war, the Jewish community selected the members of its internal governing body, the Va'ad HaLeumi (National Council) and as it gained in political and economic strength, bolstered by waves of immigration, the Va'ad HaLeumi prepared to establish a Jewish State. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Argument: The article builds a case for the Society for the Protection of the Health of the Jewish Population (Obshchestvo Okhranenia Zdorov'ia Evreiskogo Naselenia [OZE]) as a project of medicalized modernity, a mass politics of Jewish self-help that relied on a racialized and medicalized vision of a future Jewish nation. Officially registered in 1912 in St. Petersburg, it created the space for a Jewish politics that focused on the state of the collective Jewish body as a precondition for Jewish participation in any version of modernity. OZE futurism survived the years of World War I and the Russian Civil War, when the organization had to concentrate on rescue and relief rather than on facilitating the development of new bodies and souls. New archival evidence reveals how race science, medical statistics, and positive eugenics became composite elements of the Jewish anticolonial message and new subjectivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What kind of country are we talking about when we speak of Poland from the perspective of the organized Jewish political leadership in Poland? What should the scope and characteristics of the new Polish state in their view be? What kind of relations should Poland have with neighbouring states, as well as within, among its various populations and societies? The paper explores the changing answers given by different political Jewish leadership in a period of liminality - the interval between two stages and two distinct situations: the imperial order (Austrian and Russian) and the Polish national state. It examines Galicia and the Congress Poland from 1914 to 1918 when the territory was disputed among different empires and nations and its fate was far from clear. The article claims that the different visions of Poland presented by the Jewish leadership were grounded in two assumptions. The first was that the Jews as an integral part of society were legitimately entitled to express their own vision of the future state, the second - that the Jews, as an integral part of society, were entitled to equality on all levels of social life. That is the reason, the article claims, behind the demands for a fair distribution of the state's resources regardless the mother tongue, religion, or ethno-national identification. The efforts the leaders of the Polish Jewry made to include the Jews as a minority group equal to others in the Polish state took place in the framework of the ethno-national ethos as the constitutive principle of state-building. The changing political circumstances and the growing hegemonic discourse based on the nation and nationality brought, claims the article, to the raising of a new Jewish national leadership during World War I. This leadership became convinced that, in the light of the discriminatory policies and growing anti-Jewish violence, only a mechanism of minority rights could guarantee Jewish existence in Poland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article interrogates the question of what it means to be a scholar-commentator in the digital age. Deploying an autoethnographic style, the essay asks about the role of power and responsibility in teaching, research, and public commentary, particularly in the context of studying and engaging in Jewish politics. The article addresses questions about the proper role of the scholar in the academy and the role of subjectivity and political commitments in structuring scholarship, pedagogy, and public engagement. It also examines how one's view of the profession can seem to shift through the emergence of new writing outlets and new forums for public engagement. Finally, the author investigates how a scholar's own political commitments can shift over time, how one seeks to shore up identification on social media while trying to change hearts and minds through the op-ed pages, and how community identification can serve as a buffer and motivator for particular forms of research and political action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hannah Arendt’s critique of the Judenräte (Jewish Councils) famously sparked a major controversy after her 1963 publication of Eichmann in Jerusalem. This article locates Arendt’s position in the context of her earlier thinking about modern Jewish leadership and conceptions of leadership in Western political thought. Both themes demonstrate her longstanding radical democratic leanings. Thus, this article shifts our understanding of Arendt and the Judenräte beyond the narrow limits to which the debate has largely been confined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers a new account of a late imperial elite Jewish politics, examining the lives of Rachel Ezra (1877-1952) and David Ezra (1871-1947), a Baghdadi Jewish couple from British India, through the lens of two sites of political formation: first, a memorial campaign led by David Ezra to have his Baghdadi community classified as European in the Bengali electorate; and second, the quotidian practices and affective ties that shaped the Ezras' embeddedness in elite Indian and Jewish cultures. These two sites each generated distinctive political vocabularies, categories, and concerns. However, both were informed by a single political horizon: a growing uncertainty about Jewish futures in India amidst the rise of Indian nationalism and the changing terms of British rule. Examining Jewish politics in the British Empire sheds critical light on the history of Zionism, Jewish politics, and the Jewish experience at the crossroads of imperialism and nationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examining the presentation of sicarii in Flavius Josephus's Judean War from a rhetorical perspective, this article argues that each reference to sicarii alludes to the clauses of a Roman law concerning sicarii, which Josephus has used as a commonplace for rhetorical vituperation against particular groups. Three literary-rhetorical tendencies of War are highlighted to show how this vituperation, as well as the connection between War's sicarii and the so called Fourth Philosophy, is part of a general rhetorical strategy to shift the blame for the outbreak of the violent conflict to one particular rebel group. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dipesh Chakrabarty's Provincializing Europe uses Martin Heidegger's Being-with to ground his defence of a decolonial historiography. In this essay I show that Heidegger's broader aims within Being and Time nullify Chakrabarty's hopes for recovering fragile political spaces. In contrast to Heidegger, I propose Hannah Arendt's writings on Jewish politics as an alternative for students of decolonisation. Arendt's focus on plurality and new beginnings complement Chakrabarty's critiques of historicism and political belonging in a way that more fully realises the broader ambitions of Provincializing Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Israeli foreign policy is a complex process comprising national and Jewish dimensions, whereby the government has often to strike a delicate balance between the desire to protect Israel’s national interests and the need to consider the interests of diaspora Jews. This problem becomes particularly pronounced with regard to national security issues as the security echelons tend to interfere in pure foreign policy issues in total disregard of the Jewish dimension of this policy, and nowhere was this phenomenon more starkly demonstrated than the Lavon and Pollard affairs of the 1950s and 1980s. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the threats to the internal struggle on the existence of a Jewish State in Palestine, especially the struggle between Orthodox and secular Jews, that began toward the end of the 19th century. Topics covered include Messianism and Zionism as two opposing views of how and by whom that State should be established, the history of Messianism and Zionism in the country, and the internal and external challenges to the existence of Israel as a nation.

This article recovers a forgotten episode in the history of human rights: the 1944 ‘Declaration on Human Rights' sponsored by the American Jewish Committee. With an unprecedented media campaign and endorsements from ‘1300 distinguished Americans of all faiths,' the 1944 ‘Declaration' at first glance appears to be a prime example of wartime pluralist consensus and liberal internationalism in the USA. Yet as a closer examination of the document’s genesis and reception reveal, the document actually generated a striking array of polar-opposite reactions, including support from conservative isolationists, criticism from civil libertarians, and sharply split reactions from fellow Jewish groups and Catholic organizations. In recapturing this story of political conflict and ideological confusion, I propose to disentangle the stories of liberal internationalism and human rights. Rather than view mid-twentieth-century human rights history as a tale of the 1940s emergence of global civil society and US ethical cosmopolitanism before the arrival of Cold War politics, we do better to see it more as a story of faltering attempts to forge a language of US universalism that would appeal to the moral imagination of the USA. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the emergence of a vocal and influential pro-Palestinian campaign within the Labour Party in the 1960s and 1970s. In particular, it focuses upon the work of the Labour Middle East Council established by Christopher Mayhew in 1969. The article argues that Mayhew succeeded in laying the foundations for a network of pro-Palestinian organizations in the 1980s but that the note of anti-Zionist radicalism which he introduced provided a foothold for more controversial forms of activism within the mainstream Labour movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Religious Zionism has undergone a political transformation, but it is not to be understood as a linear development from moderation to extremism, neither is it the product of partisan considerations nor of a single dramatic event. Admittedly, the Six-Day War played a significant role in the political radicalization of religious Zionism, but it mainly precipitated a process of change that had begun before the War and went on after it. It was influenced by various factors, some of which paved the way to the rise of messianic ideology of a radical political kind. Rabbi Zvi Yehuda was preaching this ideology long before 1967, but only after the War did his disciples manage to propagate his ideas among the wider circles of religious Zionism. In this they were helped by the establishment and expansion of a new system of 'nationalist Yeshivot', in which many of them served as educators. The developments in religious Zionism have also been greatly influenced by the factor of leadership. The moderate policies pursued by the NRP before the Six-Day War reflected the political stance of its senior leadership, headed by Chaim Moshe Shapira, rather than the views of the wider ranks of the party. Even after the War, as long as Shapira continued to lead the NRP he managed to restrain the radicalized attitudes of its members and to prevent their implementation in the operative policies of the party. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An obituary is presented for the French-born Palestinian Jew, internationalist, correspondent for the French newspaper "Libération" and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) representative to the United Nations Human Rights Committee Ilan Halevi.

This article discusses the political philosophy of Karl Marx, known as Marxism, and its relationship with human rights. The author comments on the essay written by Marx titled "On the Jewish Question," which analyzes liberalism, human rights, and the attempts by Jews to achieve political freedom. He also considers a critique of Marxism by other contemporary political philosophers, including Miguel Abensour and Claude Lefort. The role of democracy in the application and defense of human rights is also examined.

The article is devoted to the problem of the influence of Jews on the development of the Belarusian national movement in the late 19th -- early 20th centuries. The author analyzes the materials published in the Belarusian national newspaper Nasha Niva (1906-1915). The article is shows that the newspaper strongly condemned anti-Semitism, covered the legal and economic situation of the Jews in Belarus and Lithuania. The leaders of the Belarusian national movement regarded the Jews as an integral part of ethnic and cultural landscape of Belarus and as allies in the political struggle against the tsarist regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how and why the Bund and the Polish Socialist Party (PPS) cooperated on the local level in Tarnów in the interwar period. Besides the ideological rapprochement of the two parties, there was an intrinsic logic to the relations between the Bund and the PPS in Tarnów, which may be measured in the successes oyf der yidisher gas (such as common protest actions on the streets) and in municipal institutions, and in the contact between both local leaders and their outlooks. The relations of the party members in daily life and everyday encounters generate new insights from a micro-historical perspective. The fact that working together yielded real outcomes and that some changes were palpable in daily life encouraged further collaboration. Particular attention is devoted to work in a joint Socialist Club within the city council of Tarnów between 1934 and 1939 and to the trials and successes of this club. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Is there such a thing as a “Jewish foreign policy”? This article argues that Jewish foreign policy does in fact exist. It is not Israeli foreign policy, nor is it an aggregation of American Jewish political power and interests. Jewish foreign policy is not controlled by the Israeli Prime Minister, nor is it led by the myriad of Jewish communal organizations in the United States or elsewhere. It defies the traditional ‘Israel-diaspora’ dichotomy that all too often defines Jewish political discourse. Jewish foreign policy, like other systems of foreign policy, has its own distinctive set of interests and actors. It is a complex, informal, and de-centralized system of ethno-nationalist foreign policy. This article maps out the Jewish foreign policy system. In doing so, the following questions are addressed: Who are the actors involved? What are its interests? What are the challenges and problems facing the system? [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Based on declassified reports in the Central Zionist Archives, this article brings to light a virtually unknown disinformation project implemented by the Jewish Agency (the governing body of the Yishuv before 1948) in the Arab world during the 1936-39 Palestinian revolt. Operating via a JA front organization—an Arabic-language news agency set up in Cairo—and out of the Jerusalem-based JA Political department's intelligence services, the project involved inter alia the planting of fabricated articles in the Lebanese and Syrian press with the aim of influencing public opinion. Whatever the project's impact, the article provides insights into the Zionist leadership's thinking internal debates, and operating methods, and shows the degree of corruption that existed in certain segments of the Arab elite. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers author's insights on the importance of having better understanding on the Jewish education. The author states that Jewish education implies the development of relationship with elements of Jewish religious, cultural and political traditions. He mentions that the availability of information through technological innovation shapes the structure, culture and content of Jewish education and starts to explore alternatives to their traditional settings.

The article focuses on the collaboration of Jewish private associations with the League of Nations, an intergovernmental organization, after the first world war. Topics mentioned include the work of those associations to protect the rights of Jews, their influence on the political debates, and the work of Lucien Wolf, member of the Joint Foreign Committee of British Jews (JFC).

The article offers the author's insights on his concerns when he wrote the book "What Is a Palestinian State Worth?" The author says that his Palestinian readers were not provoked by his proposals that Israel's call for a national or Jewish state be removed by taking in Palestinians into its political system. He argues on the comments to his book regarding the significance of states, specifically a Jewish one.

This essay takes a comparative approach to the question of politics in the work of Emmanuel Lévinas. Oona Eisenstadt finds political potential in Lévinas's idea of the Jewish "stubbornness" that refuses a utopian messianic age and persistently devotes attention to the present. But how can this capacity for stubborn persistence be developed? Twelfth-century Zen Master Dōgen grapples with the question of whether Zen's emphasis on enlightenment in the present moment encourages an uncritical acceptance of the world as it is. His notion of "practice-enlightenment" neither defers enlightenment to a future state nor reduces it to the simple acceptance of reality. Rather, enlightenment is the very exertion of effort necessary for practices such as meditation. Here, practice-enlightenment becomes a model for strategies--embodied ritual practices--that develop our capacity for compassionate mindfulness and thereby train us to maintain the urgency of the face-to-face relation in political contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There was no Slovak Jewry before the creation of Slovakia from the former northern counties of the pre-World War One Kingdom of Hungary. The emergence of both is tied to conditions created by the movement from empire to nation-state following the Habsburg Monarchy's collapse. Both are phenomena of interwar state building. Jews in Slovakia remapped their belonging to the territory through postwar self-defense and economic adaptation to the new environment, the development of Jewish national political strategies for negotiating the Jewish relationship to the state and surrounding society, and a transformation of the built Jewish communal landscape. Slovak Jews defined themselves geographically rather than nationally, as belonging to the territory of Slovakia within the liberal Czechoslovak state and the specific set of opportunities and challenges that reality presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the last three decades of the nineteenth century Czech nationalist politicians sharply criticized the cultural choices and political allegiances of the Jewish population of the Bohemian lands. The Jews' linguistic practices, educational strategies, and voting patterns--the critics charged--demonstrated that they had taken sides in the increasingly heated struggle for power between Czech and German activists, lending their support to a presumed project for German linguistic and cultural hegemony. This article examines the origins of Jewish political culture in the Bohemian lands in the context of the late-Enlightenment imperial project that aimed to modernize Jewish institutions and create Jewish imperial subjects through education to the high culture of the state. This acculturation was assumed to require a German linguistic complexion, but its political ideology and loyalties were imperial--and liberal--not national. What ethnic politicians of the late nineteenth century were demanding of Jews in their midst amounted to a reduction of perspective, a shift from the imperial to the local and from state to nation. Many Jews in the Bohemian lands, in fact, met this demand, having learned the need to articulate individual and collective identity in national terms. The Czech Jewish movement was one result; so, too, was Prague Zionism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After the Second World War, the Czechoslovak state redrew the boundaries around its national/ethnic community, defining anew who belonged and who did not. This process primarily involved the redefinition of the criteria for citizenship. Jewish survivors were among those who negotiated for the recognition of their citizenship. Since the Czechoslovak government did not grant Jews legal status as a national minority, Jewish survivors could be freely classified as Slovaks, Czechs, Germans, or Magyars. The latter two translated into refusal of citizenship and expulsion. This article discusses how Magyar-speaking Jews in Slovakia struggled to secure Czechoslovak citizenship through dialogue and conflict between their representatives, local administrations, and the central government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between early 1947 and May 1948, the Zionist movement went from being a non-state actor representing the minority population within the territory of the British Mandate of Palestine to establishing the State of Israel, which would be recognised almost instantaneously by the world's two Superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union. Such a result, however, was never a given. What processes allowed a non-state actor, the Zionist movement, to secure international acceptance for the creation of a Jewish state in highly ambiguous circumstances? This analysis explores the dual-track adopted by the Zionist movement, whereby it worked to create facts on the ground within Palestine whilst securing support for its state-building project at the international level. By establishing state-like institutions in Palestine whilst building international support, the Jewish Agency was able to secure for itself a unique place from which to declare statehood. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article focuses on the history of the Hungarian Communist Party (HCP) and the struggle between Jews and non-Jews within the party. The author discusses the post-World War II role of the HCP in relation to the Jewish community, notes that efforts to expand the party’s social base were hampered by widespread antisemitism and ethno-nationalism, and the political attitudes and tensions in Hungarian society during the first few years following the liberation of Jews. The works of scholars Róbert Győri Szabó and Éva Standeisky are also analyzed.

This short study discusses archival material related to Jewish socialist parties during the 1905 Russian Revolution which is held by the Lithuanian State Historical Archives in Vilnius. Although these organisations were short-lived, the evidence they have left behind provides insight into their ideology, and their attempts to take advantage of the revolutionary situation and draw the allegiance of the Jewish masses. Archival material also indicates the extent to which their activities were monitored by the Tsarist authorities. By 1907, all these organisations had been effectively suppressed by the regime. Yet, in spite of their fleeting presence on the Jewish political scene in the Russian Empire, these parties carried import for the future. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]