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Sznaider, Natan

doi:10.1023/a:1007132510819

“…118 It lies at the root of the conflicted questions of the Jew as cosmopolitan in imperial Germany. 119 No Jew in imperial Germany better represented the conflicts mirrored by Du Bois than did a young Walter Rathenau, the scion of one of the wealthiest Jewish families in Berlin and by 1897, shortly after Du Bois left Berlin with a failed dissertation, one of the most extraordinary commentators on the problems of Jewish cosmopolitanism. In an anonymous essay, "Hear O Israel," published in Maximilian Harden's radical periodical, The Future, Rathenau addressed his Jewish and Christian contemporaries in what has come to be one of the most problematic accounts of Jewish rootedness.…”

Section: Berlin: Another Empirementioning

confidence: 99%

Cosmopolitanisms and the Jews

2018

Modern Language Review

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This book represents a collaboration between two scholars whose interests overlap for both personal and academic reasons. Cathy S. Gelbin was born in the German Democratic Republic, the daughter of a Jewish-American father and a German mother. Educated in Wall-time West Berlin and the United States, where she received her doctorate, she has taught in Germany and the United Kingdom and is now at Manchester University. Sander L. Gilman, of Russian Jewish descent, was her doctoral supervisor at Cornell and now teaches at Emory University in Atlanta. He has taught at numerous universities in North America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. Both are Jewish, both are self-labeled cosmopolitans, and both are actively engaged in trying to understand what such a status means for their work in light of their biographical trajectories. This project has brought them together to examine the history into which they, in complex and fragmentary ways, fit.The title of this volume evokes the multiple meanings of both cosmopolitan and Jew in the discourse about cosmopolitanism. Indeed, the term cosmopolitan is oftentimes contested as to exactly what type of cosmopolitanism can be denoted by that term. We can only speak of cosmopolitanisms as it is impossible easily to bring the distinctions between a "moral" cosmopolitism, such as that advocated by Martha Nussbaum, and the "utilitarian" cosmopolitanism of Peter Singer into the same conceptual category. The multiple, contradictory meanings of Jews constitute a well-known problem in postmodern theory since at least 1988 when Jean-François Lyotard published Heidegger et "les juifs," evoking the jew (lowercased in the English translation) as the mark of ineffable alterity rather than lived experience. Thus we write of "cosmopolitanisms and the Jews."We do not seek to provide an exhaustive exploration of the oftcontradictory meanings of these two categories but rather to provide both a historical framework for their multiple meanings through detailed analyses of viii Preface cultural products-novels, plays, poetry, philosophical essays-that illustrate the radical conceptual shifts associated with the notion of global mobility. Both authors are not only mundivagant but also define themselves as rooted in a specific national culture (or see themselves as suspended between these two experiential poles) and explored the complexity of cosmopolitanism in their works. Thus, we have taken the position that one of the functions of literature is to serve as a thought experiment for authors dealing, in our cases, with the questions of globalization, acculturation, migration, exile, national identity, and the like. We are quite aware that literature can have many other functions and can also be read in ways radically different than we have undertaken. Our project is a literary as well as a historical one. We hope that we have shown how relatively close readings of literary texts can be used to help frame the simultaneous contradictions and ambiguities of conceptual history, such as the history of the cosmo...

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Cosmopolitanisms and the Jews

2017

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This book represents a collaboration between two scholars whose interests overlap for both personal and academic reasons. Cathy S. Gelbin was born in the German Democratic Republic, the daughter of a Jewish-American father and a German mother. Educated in Wall-time West Berlin and the United States, where she received her doctorate, she has taught in Germany and the United Kingdom and is now at Manchester University. Sander L. Gilman, of Russian Jewish descent, was her doctoral supervisor at Cornell and now teaches at Emory University in Atlanta. He has taught at numerous universities in North America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. Both are Jewish, both are self-labeled cosmopolitans, and both are actively engaged in trying to understand what such a status means for their work in light of their biographical trajectories. This project has brought them together to examine the history into which they, in complex and fragmentary ways, fit.The title of this volume evokes the multiple meanings of both cosmopolitan and Jew in the discourse about cosmopolitanism. Indeed, the term cosmopolitan is oftentimes contested as to exactly what type of cosmopolitanism can be denoted by that term. We can only speak of cosmopolitanisms as it is impossible easily to bring the distinctions between a "moral" cosmopolitism, such as that advocated by Martha Nussbaum, and the "utilitarian" cosmopolitanism of Peter Singer into the same conceptual category. The multiple, contradictory meanings of Jews constitute a well-known problem in postmodern theory since at least 1988 when Jean-François Lyotard published Heidegger et "les juifs," evoking the jew (lowercased in the English translation) as the mark of ineffable alterity rather than lived experience. Thus we write of "cosmopolitanisms and the Jews."We do not seek to provide an exhaustive exploration of the oftcontradictory meanings of these two categories but rather to provide both a historical framework for their multiple meanings through detailed analyses of viii Preface cultural products-novels, plays, poetry, philosophical essays-that illustrate the radical conceptual shifts associated with the notion of global mobility. Both authors are not only mundivagant but also define themselves as rooted in a specific national culture (or see themselves as suspended between these two experiential poles) and explored the complexity of cosmopolitanism in their works. Thus, we have taken the position that one of the functions of literature is to serve as a thought experiment for authors dealing, in our cases, with the questions of globalization, acculturation, migration, exile, national identity, and the like. We are quite aware that literature can have many other functions and can also be read in ways radically different than we have undertaken. Our project is a literary as well as a historical one. We hope that we have shown how relatively close readings of literary texts can be used to help frame the simultaneous contradictions and ambiguities of conceptual history, such as the history of the cosmo...

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Fiction's Archive: Authenticity, Ethnography, and Philosemitism in John Hersey's <em>The Wall</em>

Sinkoff¹

2011

Jewish Social Studies

2

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In 1950, John Hersey, a Pulitzer prize-winning American author, published The Wall, an immediate best seller and one of the first English-language novels of the Holocaust. Quickly superseded by literature written by Jewish survivors, The Wall nonetheless deserves reconsideration as a major work of Jewish ethnography that introduced the English-reading public to Polish Jewish culture in the immediate postwar years. This article gauges the public's adoring and grateful reaction to The Wall through an analysis of the scores of letters penned to Hersey while also examining the American English-and Yiddish-language presses' criticism of Hersey's novel. The book's success was assured by Hersey's sensitive interlocution into a culture not his own, illustrating the significance of the author's gentile provenance and philosemitism in the postwar years.

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Cosmopolitanisms and the Jews

Cosmopolitanisms and the Jews

Cosmopolitanisms and the Jews

Fiction's Archive: Authenticity, Ethnography, and Philosemitism in John Hersey's <em>The Wall</em>

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