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Full-Text Articles in Jewish Studies

By And For Jewish Women Only: The Musical Film "The Heart That Sings", Celia E. Rothenberg Mar 2021

By And For Jewish Women Only: The Musical Film "The Heart That Sings", Celia E. Rothenberg

Journal of Religion & Film

The musical film, “The Heart that Sings” (2011), written and directed by Robin Saex Garbose, is part of a genre of films created by and for Orthodox Jewish women. Heart provides a case study that illustrates the depth and breadth of Lubavitch Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson’s (1902-1994) influence on Jews and Jewish life well beyond his own community members. Schneerson’s outreach work via his shlichim, or emissaries, to unobservant Jews is well-recognized. The extent and nuance of his influence on a broad cross-section of Jews, however, has yet to be fully traced. Heart tells its viewers that Jewish women …


Fascist Aesthetics From 1940 To Contemporary Times, Anna M. Gellerman Apr 2020

Fascist Aesthetics From 1940 To Contemporary Times, Anna M. Gellerman

Publications and Research

Movies and literature all over the world share some common aesthetics: militarization, romanticization of death, beauty of perfection, and even purity. What most don't think about is how these tropes rose to popularity due to Nazi Germany's propaganda films. This work describes these fascist aesthetics, and uses famous publications from the 1940s until now to paint just how common these themes are.


Passing Illusions: Jewish Visibility In Weimar Germany, Kerry Wallach Aug 2017

Passing Illusions: Jewish Visibility In Weimar Germany, Kerry Wallach

Gettysburg College Faculty Books

Weimar Germany (1919–33) was an era of equal rights for women and minorities, but also of growing antisemitism and hostility toward the Jewish population. This led some Jews to want to pass or be perceived as non-Jews; yet there were still occasions when it was beneficial to be openly Jewish. Being visible as a Jew often involved appearing simultaneously non-Jewish and Jewish. Passing Illusions examines the constructs of German-Jewish visibility during the Weimar Republic and explores the controversial aspects of this identity—and the complex reasons many decided to conceal or reveal themselves as Jewish. Focusing on racial stereotypes, Kerry Wallach …


"No Innocent Victim"?: Sexual Violence Against Jewish Women During The Holocaust As Trope In Zeugin Aus Der Hölle, Kerstin Steitz Jan 2017

"No Innocent Victim"?: Sexual Violence Against Jewish Women During The Holocaust As Trope In Zeugin Aus Der Hölle, Kerstin Steitz

World Languages and Cultures Faculty Publications

This essay addresses how in the film Zeugin aus der Hölle, (1965, Witness out of hell) fictional sexualized violence against a female Jewish Holocaust survivor functions as a trope that exposes and rejects patriarchal and misogynist discourses of victimhood, perpetration, survivor shame, and guilt, which reviewers and scholars rightly have critiqued for such discourses’ re-victimizing and re-traumatizing effects upon victims. I argue that as a filmic trope sexualized violence served specific functions for its contemporaneous audience—Germans in the postwar 1960s. By means of the trope of sexualized violence, Zeugin aus der Hölle confronted contemporaneous West German audiences with gender-specific …