New Book: Baron, Obligation in Exile

Baron, Ilan Zvi. Obligation in Exile: The Jewish Diaspora, Israel and Critique. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press 2015.

 

Combining political theory and sociological interviews spanning four countries, Israel, the USA, Canada and the UK, Ilan Zvi Baron explores the Jewish Diaspora/Israel relationship and suggests that instead of looking at Diaspora Jews’ relationship with Israel as a matter of loyalty, it is one of obligation.

Baron develops an outline for a theory of transnational political obligation and, in the process, provides an alternative way to understand and explore the Diaspora/Israel relationship than one mired in partisan debates about whether or not being a good Jew means supporting Israel. He concludes by arguing that critique of Israel is not just about Israeli policy, but about what it means to be a Diaspora Jew.

 

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Preface

• Introduction
• 1. the Limits of Political Obligation
• 2. Power and Obligation
• 3.Between Zion and Diaspora: Internationalisms, Transnationalisms, Obligation and Security
• 4. From Eating Hummus to the Sublime
• 5. Obligation and Critique
• Conclusion: Obligation in Exile, Critique and the Future of the Jewish Diaspora

Appendix
Notes
Bibliography
Index

 

 

New Book: Kotef, Movement and the Ordering of Freedom

Kotef, Hagar. Movement and the Ordering of Freedom: On Liberal Governances of Mobility. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015.

 

We live within political systems that increasingly seek to control movement, organized around both the desire and ability to determine who is permitted to enter what sorts of spaces, from gated communities to nation-states. In Movement and the Ordering of Freedom, Hagar Kotef examines the roles of mobility and immobility in the history of political thought and the structuring of political spaces. Ranging from the writings of Locke, Hobbes, and Mill to the sophisticated technologies of control that circumscribe the lives of Palestinians in the Occupied West Bank, this book shows how concepts of freedom, security, and violence take form and find justification via “regimes of movement.” Kotef traces contemporary structures of global (im)mobility and resistance to the schism in liberal political theory, which embodied the idea of “liberty” in movement while simultaneously regulating mobility according to a racial, classed, and gendered matrix of exclusions.

 

Table of Contents

Preface
Acknowledgements

• Introduction
• 1. Between Imaginary Lines: Violence and Its Justifications at the Military Checkpoints in Occupied Palestine / Hagar Kotef and Merav Amir
• 2. An Interlude: A Tale of Two Roads—On Freedom and Movement
• 3. The Fence That “Ill Deserves the Name of Confinement”: Locomotion and the Liberal Body
• 4. The Problem of “Excessive” Movement
• 5. The “Substance and Meaning of All Things Political”: On Other Bodies
• Conclusion

Notes
Bibliography
Index

 

HAGAR KOTEF is based at the Minerva Humanities Center at Tel Aviv University.

 

 

New Book: Jockusch & Finder, eds. Jewish Honor Courts

Jockusch, Laura, and Gabriel N. Finder, eds. Jewish Honor Courts. Revenge, Retribution, and Reconciliation in Europe and Israel after the Holocaust. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2015.

 

 

In the aftermath of World War II, virtually all European countries struggled with the dilemma of citizens who had collaborated with Nazi occupiers. Jewish communities in particular faced the difficult task of confronting collaborators among their own ranks—those who had served on Jewish councils, worked as ghetto police, or acted as informants. European Jews established their own tribunals—honor courts—for dealing with these crimes, while Israel held dozens of court cases against alleged collaborators under a law passed two years after its founding. In Jewish Honor Courts: Revenge, Retribution, and Reconciliation in Europe and Israel after the Holocaust, editors Laura Jockusch and Gabriel N. Finder bring together scholars of Jewish social, cultural, political, and legal history to examine this little-studied and fascinating postwar chapter of Jewish history.

The volume begins by presenting the rationale for punishing wartime collaborators and purging them from Jewish society. Contributors go on to examine specific honor court cases in Allied-occupied Germany and Austria, Poland, the Netherlands, and France. One essay also considers the absence of an honor court in Belgium. Additional chapters detail the process by which collaborators were accused and brought to trial, the treatment of women in honor courts, and the unique political and social place of honor courts in the nascent state of Israel. Taken as a whole, the essays in Jewish Honor Courts illustrate the great caution and integrity brought to the agonizing task of identifying and punishing collaborators, a process that helped survivors to reclaim their agency, reassert their dignity, and work through their traumatic experiences.

For many years, the honor courts have been viewed as a taboo subject, leaving their hundreds of cases unstudied. Jewish Honor Courts uncovers this forgotten chapter of Jewish history and shows it to be an integral part of postwar Jewish rebuilding. Scholars of Jewish, European, and Israeli history as well as readers interested in issues of legal and social justice will be grateful for this detailed volume.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Revenge, Retribution, and Reconciliation in the Postwar Jewish World / Laura Jockusch and Gabriel N. Finder — Why Punish Collaborators? / David Engel — Rehabilitating the Past? Jewish Honor Courts in Allied-Occupied Germany / Laura Jockusch — Judenrat on Trial: Postwar Polish Jewry Sits in Judgment of its Wartime Leadership / Gabriel N. Finder — An Unresolved Controversy: The Jewish Honor Court in the Netherlands, 1946-1950 / Ido De Haan — Jurys d’honneur: The Stakes and Limits of Purges Among Jews in France After Liberation / Simon Perego — Viennese Jewish Functionaries on Trial: Accusations, Defense Strategies, and Hidden Agendas / Helga Embacher — “The Lesser Evil” of Jewish Collaboration? The Absence of a Jewish Honor Court in Postwar Belgium / Veerle Vanden Daelen and Nico Wouters — Jews Accusing Jews: Denunciations of Alleged Collaborations in Jewish Honor Courts / Katarzyna Person — “I’m Going to the Oven Because I wouldn’t Give Myself to Him”: The Role of Gender in the Polish Jewish Civic Court / Ewa Kozminska-Frejlak — Revenge and Reconciliation: Early Israeli Literature and the Dilemma of Jewish Collaborations with the Nazis / Gali Drucker Bar-Am — Changing Legal Perceptions of “Nazi Collaborators” in Israel, 1950-1972 / Dan Porat — The Gray Zone of Collaboration and the Israeli Courtroom / Rivka Brot.

Laura Jockusch is Martin Buber Society Fellow in Jewish History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is the author of Collect and Record! Jewish Holocaust Documentation in Early Postwar Europe. She teaches in the International M.A. Program in Holocaust Studies at the University of Haifa.

Gabriel N. Finder is Ida and Nathan Kolodiz Director of Jewish Studies and an associate professor in the Department of Germanic Literatures and Languages at the University of Virginia. He is coeditor of Making Holocaust Memory.

Cite: Jacobson, Why did Arendt Reject the Partition of Palestine?

Jacobson, Eric. “Why did Hannah Arendt Reject the Partition of Palestine?” Journal for Cultural Research 17.4 (2013): 358-81.

URL: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14797585.2013.768472

Abstract

The political philosopher Hannah Arendt actively engaged in the problem of a Jewish homeland and the politics of Zionism in the years 1941–1948. She advocated a Binational solution to Palestine – a single political commonwealth with two national identities, Jewish and Arab, integrated in a federation with other countries in the region. In the crucial period leading up to the establishment of the State of Israel, Arendt became increasingly disillusioned with the Jewish Agency and the Zionist movement for failing to organize a Jewish response to Nazism (a Jewish Army) and rejecting the Palestinian right to a homeland.