Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs, in its first publication with Routledge, is pleased to announce a new issue:
From the Editor
Dr. Laurence Weinbaum, Chief Editor
pages 1-2
Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs, in its first publication with Routledge, is pleased to announce a new issue:
From the Editor
Dr. Laurence Weinbaum, Chief Editor
pages 1-2
Šmok, Martin. “‘Every Jew is a Zionist, and Every Zionist is a Spy!’ The Story of Jewish Social Assistance Networks in Communist Czechoslovakia.” East European Jewish Affairs 44.1 (2014): 70-83.
URL: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13501674.2014.904586
Abstract
This article explores some of the major operations of the Czechoslovak secret police (State Security Forces, StB) against individuals involved in organising Jewish social assistance networks during the 1950s, as documented by fragments of case files preserved in the Security Services Archive in Prague. While there is much focus on victims of the Prague show trial of the so-called “Conspiracy Centre,” all of whom were members of the top echelons of the Communist Party, the individuals who tried to revive Jewish life and secure the well-being of the needy in a country swept by anti-Jewish sentiment raked up by that trial remain largely unknown. In this work, we learn who these people were and what they did, and how the Communist regime punished them for their involvement. As an original contribution, the article details the search for safe methods of delivering humanitarian aid to Czechoslovak Holocaust survivors after the expulsion of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) in 1950, from the initial attempts to use Israeli channels to the gradual legalisation of JDC aid under Swiss cover organisations.
Lichtenstein, Tatjana. “Jewish Power and Powerlessness: Prague Zionists and the Paris Peace Conference.” East European Jewish Affairs 44.1 (2014): 2-20.
URL: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13501674.2014.904583
Abstract
This article explores how perceptions of Jewish power shaped the negotiations between Czechoslovak leaders and Jewish minority representatives at the time of the Paris Peace Conference. In the aftermath of the First World War, Prague-based Zionists embarked on a mission to convince Czechoslovak elites that attacks on Jews were detrimental to the internal stability of the new state and to Czechoslovak interests abroad. As Edvard Beneš, the head of the Czechoslovak delegation in Paris, worked to cultivate an image of the new state as more “Western” and “civilised” than other successor states – a strategy meant to garner international support for Czechoslovak territorial demands and its projected absorption of large minority populations – Jewish activists encouraged his uncertainty with regard to Jews’ influence on Western audiences and statesmen. They did so in order to convince him to accept their demands for special protection clauses for the new country’s Jews. The paper thus shows that the unprecedented victimisation of Jews and the upsurge in antisemitism during and after the war coexisted with a new bold and public Jewish activism. Yet, Jewish leaders did not in the end have the ability to convince Beneš and his colleagues to give in to international Jewish demands for special protection. Instead, they sought to cultivate a strategic alliance between the state’s Czech elite and the Jewish minority which centred on the claim that Czechoslovakia was a particularly welcoming and tolerant place for Jews, an image that would evolve into a significant component of the myth of Czechoslovakia as an island of democracy in Eastern Europe.