Jewish Studies Commons^™

[Review Of The Book Jews, Food, And Spain: The Oldest Medieval Spanish Cookbook And The Sephardic Culinary Heritage, By H. J. Piner.], Martha Daas

World Languages and Cultures Faculty Publications

[Introduction] Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you who you are. This should be the motto of any book that examines the medieval food culture of Iberia. In her new book entitled Jews, Food, and Spain, Hélène Jawhara Piñer seeks to demonstrate both the process through which the Jewish cuisine of the Iberian Middle Ages acted as a cultural identifier, and how this culinary culture has been maintained in the modern Sephardic communities. Piñer's book aims to fill the gap in Spanish culinary history by "reintegrating Jewish cuisine into the historically transmitted food heritage of …

An Early Byzantine Ecclesiastical Complex At Ashdod-Yam: Correlating Geophysical Prospection With Excavated Remains, Yaniv Darvasi, Alexander Fantalkin, Paul Brindza, Amotz Agnon

Physics Faculty Publications

In this study we show the successful deployment of Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) together with Electrical Resistivity Surveys (ERS) in guiding the archeological excavations at Ashdod-Yam (southern coast of Israel). This approach enabled the precise identification of excavation targets relating to an Early Byzantine ecclesiastical complex located in a residential neighborhood of the modern city of Ashdod. Applied over the course of five years, the combined use of GPR and ERS, interspersed with phases of archeological excavation, not only facilitated an efficient exploration but also ensured the preservation of valuable historical structures. The geophysical data, corroborated by drone images of …

Seeking Sabbath In Annie Dillard's Holy The Firm, Olivia Grace Dycus

English Theses & Dissertations

Annie Dillard’s third-ever publication, Holy the Firm, asks why an omniscient God allows natural evil to occur. In this deeply poetic and mystical series of essays, Dillard explores the relationship between time, artistry, and God in the face of devastating chaos. This thesis argues that Dillard’s emphasis on the importance of time reflects a Jewish notion of Sabbath as defined by Jewish theologian Abraham Heschel. Dillard offers time and creation as medium through which to commune with God just as Heschel does in his book, The Sabbath: Its Meaning for Modern Man. Heschel defines Sabbath as the coming …

The Aki Yerushalayim Corpus: A Study Of Loanwords In Ladino, Rachel Mccullough

College of Arts and Letters Posters

Ladino (or Judeo-Spanish) is a Diasporic Jewish language spoken by Sephardi Jews. There is little existing scholarly research on Ladino, nor does it have many language learning materials. These two factors compelled me to create the Aki Yerushalayim Corpus. The initial Aki Yerushalayim Corpus of Modern Written Ladino (currently ~7,000 words) was not created to act as a reference corpus of Modern Ladino. Rather, it was created to study the composition of Ladino prose and demonstrate the utility of this type project in the subdiscipline of language documentation. In addition, the project’s focus on cultural essays and narrative prose allow …

Creating Jewish Mothers: A Feminist Ethnographic Investigation Of The Mothers Circle Of Coastal Virginia And The Interfaith Parents Circle, Amy K. Milligan

Women's & Gender Studies Faculty Publications

This feminist ethnographic investigation of the Mothers Circle of Coastal Virginia and the Interfaith Parents Circle utilizes the lens of feminist folkloristics to analyze the role that women have had in the foundation and evolution of the groups. Ultimately, this essay argues that the Mothers Circle of Coastal Virginia / Interfaith Parents Circle create a space for women to navigate the tensions faced by southern Jews; that they center Jews-by-choice and non-Jewish mothers parenting Jewish children by creating safe spaces for caregivers; and that, through a horizontal peer education model, these groups offer a sustainable and transferable model of programing …

"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 …

Juristische Und Epische Verfremdung. Fritz Bauers Kritik Am Frankfurter Auschwitz-Prozess (1963–1965) Und Peter Weiss’ Dramatische Prozessbearbeitung Die Ermittlung. Oratorium In 11 Gesängen (1965), Kerstin Steitz

World Languages and Cultures Faculty Publications

Beginning with the influences of Schiller's humanist ideals on Hessian Attorney General Fritz Bauer's expectations of the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial as legal working through of the past, this article compares the Holocaust narrative created by the West German criminal trial to Peter Weiss's reworking of the transcripts Die Ermittlung. Oratorium in 11 Gesangen. The article aims to show that literature is able to convey and commemorate aspects of the Holocaust that German criminal law misrepresents and omits.

Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow: Upsherin, Alef-Bet, And The Childhood Navigation Of Jewish Gender Identity Symbol Sets, Amy K. Milligan

Women's & Gender Studies Faculty Publications

In this essay, I introduce the theoretical framework of hairlore, discussing its challenges when applied to the hair of infants and very young children. I contextualize the ritual of upsherin, reviewing its history, describing contemporary applications, and discussing variations of the practice. Finally, I offer an analysis of upsherin, considering its role in the shifting relationship between mother and son, as well as in the maintenance of a gendered Orthodox symbol set, and discuss the possibility of egalitarian parallels for young girls. I ultimately argue that upsherin is ripe for adaptation by liberal Jewish communities in its celebration of …

Leaving Iran: Between Migration And Exile, Farideh Goldin

English Faculty Bookshelf

In 1976, at the age of twenty-three, Farideh Goldin left Iran in search of her imagined America. While she settled uneasily into American life, the political unrest in Iran intensified and in 1979, Farideh's family was forced to flee. They arrived in Israel as refugees. Farideh's father was a well-respected son of the chief rabbi and dayan of the Jews of Shiraz. During his last visit to the United States in 2006, he handed Farideh his memoir that chronicled the years of his life after exile. Leaving Iran knits together his story of dislocation and loss with Farideh's own experience …

Introduction: Memory And Reflection, Annette Finley-Croswhite

OUR Journal: ODU Undergraduate Research Journal

During the spring semester of 2014, Old Dominion University offered a Study Abroad course called “Paris/Auschwitz” that I designed with funding from the Curt C. and Else Silberman Foundation and the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Over spring break, I led a group of eighteen students to France and Poland to study sites of Holocaust memory along with faculty team member, Dr. Brett Bebber. Dr. Bebber and I are both professors in the Department of History. The Study Abroad course was part of my attempt to create more Holocaust courses at Old Dominion …

Auschwitz As A Site Of Memory, Emma Needham

OUR Journal: ODU Undergraduate Research Journal

Auschwitz is known as the most substantial site of the Holocaust namely because Auschwitz-Birkenau was the largest concentration camp in Europe, and it is estimated that about 960,000 Jews and 125,000 others were murdered there.¹ Not only was the process of creating the memorial at Auschwitz filled with controversies, but the site also remains questionable today with regards to dark tourism, or thanatourism, “the tourism of death.”² For some, the thought of traveling to a place subsumed in death and despair sounds troubling as the consumption of dark tourism involves a process of “confronting, understanding and accepting death.” …

Sites Of Memory, Tonya Schmehl, Sherry Dixon

OUR Journal: ODU Undergraduate Research Journal

Photo Essay.

Auschwitz-Birkenau: A Memorial, Nichole Delasalas

OUR Journal: ODU Undergraduate Research Journal

In the 1940s, Nazi Germany was an unstoppable force spreading throughout Europe. Hitler’s agenda was to take control of Europe and make it part of his pure Aryan race. As a result of his actions and his “final solution”, many people suffered. The concentration camp of Auschwitz I was created out of an old Polish military compound for three main reasons. The first was to incarcerate real and perceived enemies of the Nazi regime and the German occupation authorities in Poland for an indefinite amount of time.¹ The second was to have available a supply of forced labor for …

The Golems Take New York: The Resurgence Of The Golem In The Work Of Cynthia Ozick And Thane Rosenbaum, Peter Schulman

World Languages and Cultures Faculty Publications

The late twentieth and early twenty first centuries have seen a resurgence of the golem in several major American novels. What factors might lead to such a re-imagining of the golem in American fiction? Cynthia Ozick's The Puttermesser Papers (1997) and Thane Rosenbaum's The Golems of Gotham (2002) re-invent golems no longer anchored in vengeance but in healing, as vehicles for the kabbalistic notion of Tikkun Olam ("repairing the world"). Ozick creates the first female golem to help the lonely protagonist become a reformist mayor; in The Golems of Gotham, the golem is transformed into a team of literary …

What Is Talmud? The Art Of Disagreement, David Metzger

English Faculty Publications

Review of What is Talmud? The Art of Disagreement, by Sergey Dolgopolski. New York: Fordham University Press, 2009.

The "Place" Of Rhetoric In Aggadic Midrash, David Metzger, Steven B. Katz

English Faculty Publications

An essay is presented on the examination of Aggadic midrash as a particular mode of Jewish rhetoric. It offers a discussion of the utility and merit of aggadah within rabbinic literature which require a cluster of analysis of a larger collection of imagery to identify the dominant themes. The author explores on how textualization is treated as steps in the establishment of discursive spaces, which is limited by scripture, tradition, or the authority of the rabbis.

Shulchan Arukh, Amy Milligan

Women's & Gender Studies Faculty Publications

[First Paragraph] The Shulchan Arukh, literally translated as "The Set Table," is a compilation of Jewish legal codes. Written in the sixteenth century, it represents the first codification of Jewish law that is universally accepted by religiously observant Jews. It encompasses laws observed by both Ashkenazic Jews, those with German and eastern European roots, and Sephardic Jews, those with Spanish and Middle Eastern roots. Rabbi Yosef Karo composed the work in an effort to provide an authoritative legal text that would help to guide Jews in properly observing religious obligations. Although he composed the text before subdivisions of Judaism existed, …

An Exploration Of The Use Of Expressive Writing To Reduce Physical And Emotional Symptoms Associated With Stress In A Sample Of Orthodox Jewish Wives Preparing For A Religious Observance, David Jay Richels

Counseling & Human Services Theses & Dissertations

The purpose of the study was to determine the effects of a short-term expressive writing intervention using a value-laden topic and neutral topic on the physical and psychological well-being of a group of Orthodox Jewish wives preparing for a religious observance. Participants (N = 42) were assigned to the experimental group (n = 22) and to the control group (n = 20) on a rotating basis, in the order of which they first logged into the survey website. The physical well-being of participants was measured by reduced scores on the PILL for physical symptoms associated with stress. …

My Iranian Sukkah, Farideh Dayanim Goldin

English Faculty Publications

(First paragraph) Every year after Yorn Kippur, my husband Norman and I try to bring together the pieces of our sukkah, our temporary home for a week, a reminder of our frailty as Jews. Every year we wonder where we had last stored the metal frame, the bamboo roof, and the decorations. Every year we wonder about the weather. Will we have to dodge the raindrops and the wind once again this year for a quick bracha before eating inside? Will our sukkah stand up? Will there be a hurricane?

The Ghosts Of Our Mothers: From Oral Tradition To Written Words—A History And Critique Of Jewish Women Writers Of Iranian Heritage, Farideh Goldin

English Faculty Publications

Throughout the 2,000 years of Iranian Jewish history, women usually were either illiterate or silenced. Iranian Jewish women in exile have been making up for their foremothers by creating prose literature at a fast pace in the last two decades. Through their poetry, novels and memoirs, they validate the claim that with financial security, access to education, and freedom of speech—rarely accessible to Iranian women until the twentieth century—they can shine. This article explores the history and background of Jewish women writers of Iranian heritage.

Surviving To Excel: The Last German Jewish Autobiographies Of Holocaust Survivors Ruth Klüger, Marcel Reich-Ranicki, And Paul Spiegel, Frederick Lubich

World Languages and Cultures Faculty Publications

(First paragraph) Ruth Klüger’s Weiterleben: Eine Jugend (1992) is one of the first narratives of a series of testimonials of the last members of the generation of Holocaust survivors, which began to appear toward the end of the twentieth century.1 The author was born in 1931 in Vienna, where her first years of socialization were already marked by a rapidly growing discrimination against the city’s Jewish population. In 1942 she was deported together with her mother to Theresienstadt and eventually to Auschwitz, whose death machinery she survived by shear luck and her determination to live. At the age of sixteen, …

On Linzer, Schnall, And Chanes' A Portrait Of The American Jewish Community, Rob K. Baum

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

A Portrait of the American Jewish Community seems at first a contemporary, informed attempt to answer the old-and, for Jews, imperative-question, What is a Jew? And in the leading chapter Norman Linzer does project the changing nature of Jewish identity, with what he calls the postmodern decline of dissonance, a euphemism for the experience of Jewish difference. The beginning is suggestive of the philosophical treatise on the collapse of modern Jewish identity formulated in such work as Rabbi Michael Goldberg's Why Should Jews Survive? (NY: Oxford, 1998). But the book's carefully detailed chapters on Jewish American federations, social …

Feathers And Hair, Farideh Dayanim Goldin

English Faculty Publications

(First paragraph) Plucking chickens the kosher way is quite an art. According to the laws of kashrut) a chicken should not be cooked or even brought close to a source of heat until it is kashered-bled, salted, and rinsed. The use of fire to sear feathers or hot water to loosen quills is absolutely forbidden. Poultry processors today use the force of air to pluck feathers for kosher markets; but when I lived in Iran, during the '60s and '70s, this job had to be done manually.

Blood Lines, Farideh Dayanim Goldin

English Faculty Publications

(First paragraph) The salty ocean air was pleasantly mixed with smoke rising from gas grills using volcanic stones, plain old-fashioned ones using regular coals, and smokers using mesquite wood chips. As my American husband and I stepped out of our car and walked around to the back yard of the Bechars, the only African Sephardi family in Virginia Beach that Fourth of July, the aroma of sizzling hot dogs and hamburgers stirred our appetite. In her all- American neighborhood, Sonia welcomed us with a platter of spicy Tunisian meat and herbs rolled in phyllo dough and fried to perfection. I …

A Wedding Song, Farideh Dayanam Goldin

English Theses & Dissertations

I left Iran on July 4, 1975, returned the following year for a visit, not realizing that I would never return. The Islamic Revolution toppled the government of Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi in 1979, forcing most of the Iranian Jewish community to leave a country we had called home for over 2000 years.

Undoubtedly, the exile has allowed the Iranian Jews to sharpen our sense of pride and belonging to our heritage. Having lived on the fringes of often anti-Semitic populations, we had rarely believed in our own strength, rarely been allowed to study our history. In Iran, we tried …

Only Friendship, Farideh Dayanim Goldin

English Faculty Publications

(First paragraph) My Jewish daughter befriended a Muslim woman in her Islam class last Fall. She asked me where she could buy rosewater, saffron, and cardamom to make halwa. My kosher daughter was celebrating the end of Ramadan, Eide-fetr, with her first Iranian, her first Muslim friend.

Money Versus Morality: The Failure Of The Joint Boycott Council And The Anti-Nazi Boycott Movement In The United States, Michelle D. Ward

History Theses & Dissertations

The Nazis' wise to power elicited responses from a multitude of Jewish and non- Jewish organizations around the world. Like their respective counterparts, American Jewry adopted a variety of strategies both in the United States and abroad to combat Nazism. The purpose of this study is to examine the boycott movement instituted by the Joint Boycott Council. Although the boycott had a limited short-term effect on the German economy, it failed in its overall goals. It never contributed to an economic collapse in Germany or forced the Nazis to turn away from discriminatory practices and decrees targeting Jews and other …

Freud's Jewish Science And Lacan's Sinthome, David Metzger

English Faculty Publications

In chapter nine of Seminar XVII, Lacan writes that the position of the analyst cannot be separated from Jewish history (158). More particularly, the invention of analytic discourse is part and parcel of a Hebraic tradition--represented by the Book of Hosea--in which one's god underscores the fact that even if everyone is speaking (let's say about sexual knowledge) this does not mean everyone is saying something. One of the defining moves of a Jewish Science, in this specific frame of reference, would be to situate the knowledge, "There is no Other," precisely where other intellectual and religious traditions establish their …

Russophobia And Judophobia Backlash In Extremist Russian Nationalism, 1987-1990, Connie Moray

Graduate Program in International Studies Theses & Dissertations

In the late 1980s the former Soviet Union witnessed an increase in Russian nationalist extremist activity. Russian nationalist extremism was a backlash against a perceived decline in Russian status and a re-evaluation of such basic concepts as what it means to be Russian. Two manifestations of this backlash were russophobia and judophobia.

This thesis employs concepts used by American sociologists Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab in their study of right-wing extremist groups in the United States to gain new insight into the nature of Russian nationalist extremism. Primary sources used include the writings of important Russian nationalists including Igor …

Jewish-Non-Military Resistance During The Holocaust, Debra J. Simmonds

History Theses & Dissertations

The purpose of this study is to examine the issue of Jewish "passive " resistance during the Holocaust. Its main objective is to determine if in fact the majority of the Jews did "passively" resist the Nazis, and whether or not this was resistance.

Based on past Jewish responses during waves of persecution, specific Jewish responses during the Holocaust, and previous definitions of resistance, one can arrive at a definition describing this type of resistance. This definition shows that Jews did resist the Nazis with acts of non-military resistance. However, due to a lack of supportive evidence, one cannot assess …