European Judaism

This article argues that Albert Friedlander's edited book, Out of the Whirlwind (1968), should be recognised as pathbreaking. Among the first to articulate the idea of ‘Holocaust literature’, it established a body of texts and contextualised these as a way to integrate literature – as well as historical writing, music, art and poetry – as critical to an understanding of the Holocaust. This article also situates Out of the Whirlwind through the personal history of Friedlander and his wife Evelyn, who was a co-creator of the book, his colleagues from Hebrew Union College, and the illustrator, Jacob Landau. It explores the work's connection to the expansive, humanistic development of progressive Judaism in the United States, Britain and continental Europe. It also underscores Friedlander's study of Leo Baeck as a means to understand the importance of mutual accountability, not only between Jews, but in Jews’ engagement with the wider world.

Albert Friedlander's writings were part of a generational struggle to find a language in which to speak of the experience of the Holocaust. This struggle was, in part, a response to the ‘unspeakability’ of the Holocaust, the silence and denial of its perpetrators. As such, in the postwar period, the perpetrators of the Holocaust also struggled to find the words to speak of what they had done. This short article goes on to speculate on the implications of the unspeakability of the Holocaust and other genocides. It suggests that this unspeakability is beginning to break down as desires are spoken of more openly. As such, it is possible that current and future generations will have to embark on a different struggle to that of Albert Friedlander. While he could count on an assumed moral consensus that the Holocaust was wrong, current and future generations may no longer be able to rely on this assumption.

This article outlines intersections between Albert Friedlander and two other Berliners of the 1920s: the Sass brothers, Berlin's most daring and beloved crooks, and the Jewish crime writer Walter Serner. It attempts to read their stories as ‘prayers’ or ‘poetry’ in Friedlander's sense.

The work of Rabbi Albert Friedlander is less known in US contexts than it should be, especially since it still has much to contribute to both Jewish communal relationships and dialogue between Jews and Christians. From the perspective of an American academic, this article focuses on his chaplaincy work in the context of competing forms of Jewish orthodoxy and orthopraxy; the impact of the Shoah on his understanding of and response to US racism; his approach to Jewish–Christian relations by celebrating accomplishment rather than bewailing what is left to be done; and his concern for reconciliatory rather than agonist learning in which one seeks insights even in work with which one disagrees.

The World War II Jewish ghetto at Theresienstadt, forty miles northwest of Prague, was the site of an uncommonly active cultural life. Survivor testimony about the prisoners’ theatrical performances inspired a question: why were almost all of the scripts written in the ghetto comedies? The recent rediscovery of several scripts has made possible a detailed analysis that draws from recent research on the psychological effects of different types of humour. This analysis reveals that, regardless of age, language or nationality, the Theresienstadt authors universally drew upon two potentially adaptive types of humour (self-enhancing and affiliative humour) rather than two potentially maladaptive types (aggressive and self-defeating humour). Perhaps instinctively, they chose the very types of humour that have a demonstrated association with psychological health and that may have helped them preserve their psychological equilibrium in the potentially traumatising environment of the ghetto.

This article explores the personal experience of the Leo Baeck College librarian encountering Albert Friedlander, teacher and dean of the college, through his writing, the books he owned and his presence in the institution's library and archival material. It explores how readers and writers are in relationship with one another and argues that a broad concept of reading and what can be read can offer new ways of being in relationship with the living and dead.

This article addresses the transgenerational consequences of the Second World War and the Holocaust for the descendants of the Nazi perpetrators and bystanders. Using the example of her own family, the author traces the external obstacles and the psychological difficulties arising from working through a legacy of crime, compounded by the fact that an atmosphere of taboos, silence and denial has persisted within German families – in spite of all the research and enlightenment in the academic and political spheres. The author argues that the patterns of feeling, thinking and action are often passed down when they are not scrutinised. Meaningful dialogues with the survivors and their descendants, as well as authentic remembrance, the author claims, can only take place if descendants of the victimisers break away from those generationally transmitted narratives which continue to evade the entire truth about the crimes committed by the Nazis and their accomplices in Europe.

As a study of corporate and individual behaviour in the context of Nazi Germany, my research concerning Ernst Leitz of Wetzlar – the manufacturer of the Leica camera – is situated and seeks to build on the insights of scholars writing histories of businesses during this period. Leitz's highly unusual activities to help approximately eighty Jews and non-Jews, throughout the duration of the Nazi regime, involved training, employment, financial aid, and assistance both to leave Germany and when abroad. Where necessary, Leitz also intervened to help employees subjected to criminal prosecution. Ambivalence is present when discussing Leitz's increasingly conformist public face and producing sophisticated armaments, designed and built by in-house experts. Leitz also relied on forced labourers brought from Ukraine. These ambivalent activities, along with maintaining an extensive range of critical relationships with those holding authority, crucially enabled Ernst Leitz to survive and retain ownership of his firm.

Until recently, scholars have assumed that Liberal Judaism's pre-war stance against Zionism was motivated primarily by a desire to assimilate into bourgeois English cultural mores. This article argues to the contrary: that the founders of Liberal Judaism were expressly trying to combat secular assimilation. Focusing on speeches and writings from Liberal Judaism's three primary founders, Lily Montagu, Claude Montefiore and Rabbi Israel Mattuck, I find they took a nuanced and principled approach to opposing Jewish nationalism. Their opposition to Zionism stemmed, instead, from a desire to contest definitions of Jewishness. In particular, they were concerned that national conceptions of Jewishness undermined their ethical and spiritual project. I conclude that many of their concerns anticipate problems in modern-day Israel, so that their arguments are worth revisiting.

A Piyyut for Hoshana Rabbah presents a modern piyyut designed for the last day of the Sukkoth festival. It focuses on the ushpizin that we invited under the sukkah during the festival, presenting not only the male ushpizin mentioned in the Zohar, but also female ones, following the list given in the Machzor Forms of Prayer for Jewish Worship: II Prayers for the Pilgrim Festivals. The goal of this piyyut is to value the biblical characters invited as ushpizin during Sukkoth and their specific destiny in the context of the festival, as well as the progressive value of gender equality.

Jewish texts, both Biblical and post-Biblical, depict the Divine as fickle, fallible, imbued with human characteristics. This article attempts to establish a typology of Divine fallibility, categorising examples and seeking to explain them through literary and theological-anthropological lenses. Somewhat similar trends are seen in Ancient Greek myths about the behaviour and interactions of Greek gods, who are shown betraying, plotting against and envying each other just as humans do. The article explores the literary possibilities of a polytheistic system – where deities can display fallible pettiness among their own while maintaining a front of infallibility in their interactions with humankind – over a monotheistic system.

Tony Bayfield, Being Jewish Today: Confronting the Real Issues, Bloomsbury Continuum, 2019, £18.99

Marika Henriques, The Hidden Girl: The Journey of a Soul, Shepheard-Walwyn Publishers Ltd., 2018, £25.00

Marc Saperstein, Agony in the Pulpit: Jewish Preaching in Response to Nazi Persecution and Mass Murder 1933–1945, Hebrew Union College Press, 2018, $95.00