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Amalgamation and Regeneration

Visions of Future Jewish Inclusion

Jakob Egholm Feldt

Abstract

This article discusses Israel Zangwill's play The Melting Pot (1908) and Horace M. Kallen's essay ‘Democracy versus the Melting Pot’ (1915) as two different visions of future Jewish inclusion. Zangwill's play and Kallen's response reflect social changes at the time, and both visions consider Jewish history exemplary for the world-to-come. Both show how conceptions of Jewishness were turned into universalist teleologies, but of different kinds. Zangwill's play opened in Washington at the height of immigration, urbanisation and social change, and it swiftly exemplified a vision of the American nation in the making, emphasising concepts of amalgamation more than old historical identities. In opposition, Kallen's response in 1915 emphasised historical identities and rejected the metal melting metaphors, replacing them with a Darwin-inspired spontaneous ‘symphony’. Zangwill and Kallen both imagined the future world as profoundly shaped by Jewishness, albeit with different consequences.

Open access

Anthropology in Action in Vanuatu

Troubleshooting Disaster Relief in the Wake of Tropical Cyclones Judy and Kevin

Harvey Whitehouse and Jamie Tanguay

In March 2023, Vanuatu was struck by two category 4 tropical cyclones, dubbed Judy and Kevin, in rapid succession. As the planet heats up and extreme weather events become fiercer and more frequent, disaster response teams will face ever greater challenges to restore vital infrastructure and help the people living on Pacific islands to repair their homes and feed themselves. Based on the information gathered for this article using well-established anthropological techniques of in-depth open-ended interviews and long-term immersive fieldwork, we argue that effective responses to natural disasters may be strengthened by engaging more fully with local and traditional institutions, utilising the best available data and coordinating the efforts of more diverse stakeholders.

Open access

The Biopolitics of COVID-19

Thinking through, with and ‘beyond’ Foucault

Charles Amo-Agyemang

Abstract

This article is heavily inspired by Michel Foucault's lectures on biopolitical power over life as a starting point for thinking about contemporary global response to COVID-19. The article examines how the government of Ghana deployed biopolitical interventions in response to the pandemic. COVID-19 pandemic laid bare the biopolitics of the current moment, demonstrating the levels of intrusiveness that state power structures have on biological life of the population. The article theorises that the government of Ghana's response to the pandemic indicates that the biopolitical critique of the extension of regulatory governance of life has become blurred in our contemporary times. In conclusion, the article investigates the biopolitics of the pandemic governance from the perspective of conceptualising a ‘beyond’ of such biopolitics, arguing that a critique of existing biopolitics needs to account for its embeddedness in the affirmative modes of biopolitics.

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Book Review

Frank Dabba Smith

Abram Leon, The Jewish Question: A Marxist Interpretation, Pathfinder Press, 2020, £15.00

Open access

Book Reviews

Eddy M. Souffrant and Vanessa A.C. Freerks

Andrew Fiala, Tyranny from Plato to Trump: Fools, Sycophants, and Citizens, 2022. London: Rowman & Littlefield, 256pp. ISBN: 978-1-5381-9806-3 (pbk)

Alan N. Shapiro, Decoding Digital Culture with Science Fiction. Hyper-Modernism, Hyperreality, and Posthumanism, 2024. Transcript Independent Academic Publishing, 374pp. ISBN 978-3-8394-7242-2 (e-book PDF)

Free access

Editorial

Jonathan Magonet

When Bryan Cheyette approached the Editorial Board with the proposal of putting together a selection of studies on Israel Zangwill, we were delighted to accept and welcome him as a guest editor. Zangwill fits into the topic of British-Jewish literature that has been featured from time to time from the early days of the journal but has had greater coverage in recent years.1 Bryan uses his introduction to give an overview of the contributors and their articles while discussing the influence of Zangwill's writings in France, America and Israel and his continuing significance.

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German-Jewish Resistance and Gestapo Research

The Example of the Herbert Baum Group

Eric Brothers

Abstract

It was just four days after the botched, amateurish and poorly executed sabotage attack on the anti-Soviet and anti-Semitic ‘Soviet Paradise’ mass exhibition in Berlin's Lustgarten (18 May 1942) that the Gestapo began arresting members of the Herbert Baum group. Resistance historiography has basically ignored the important role that resistance-Gestapo interaction has played within Nazi Germany. This article uses Robert Gellately's important 1991 essay as a starting point in order to begin correcting that omission. Post-war interrogation reports and other primary source material on leading Gestapo figures provide insights into Gestapo interactions with and attitudes towards the German resistance. Primary sources are interpreted in order to recreate an interrogation session at the hands of the Gestapo. Torture methods used by the Gestapo on Baum group members are discussed.

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Israel's Zangwill; or, The Return of the King of Schnorrers

Eitan Bar-Yosef

Abstract

This article explores Israel Zangwill's posthumous presence in Israeli culture, as reflected in various media and discursive arenas: press coverage of his death and Yahrzeits; trends in the translation, publication and staging of his works; the inauguration of streets bearing his name; and references to his views and legacy in various political debates. Demonstrating how the tensions and contradictions so typical of Zangwill's persona were interpreted by cultural commentators or appropriated by opposing political camps, the first part of the article traces and contextualises Zangwill's gradual disappearance from the Israeli cultural mainstream. The second part then moves on to consider Zangwill's unexpected comeback in 2021, when a musical production of The King of Schnorrers, adapted by Nati Brooks, was staged in Tel Aviv. While the renewed interest in Zangwill's work is rooted specifically in the playwright's Anglo-Jewish background, the production employs Zangwill's 1790s Jewish London to consider ethnic tensions in present-day Israel.

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Israel Zangwill

Past, Present and Future – An Introduction

Bryan Cheyette

Abstract

Israel Zangwill (1864–1926) was the best-known Jewish anglophone writer and public intellectual during his lifetime. There has been a contemporary resurgence of interest in Zangwill's life and work in Britain, France, America and Israel, which will be discussed in the introduction and is illustrated by the articles in the special issue. I focus on the legacies of Zangwill both locally and globally. At the heart of the introduction is the way that Zangwill's legacy varies in different national cultures. It explores how Zangwill reuses the idea of the ghetto from the German tradition of ghetto literature; radicalises Herzl's political Zionism in the form of Jewish territorialism; and refashions President Roosevelt's idea of the melting-pot for popular consumption.

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The Melting-Pot and Its Legacies

Meri-Jane Rochelson

Abstract

This article examines Israel Zangwill's 1908 play The Melting-Pot as a document in American immigration history, and the role of its most contested tropes – interfaith marriage and the melting-pot itself – in his efforts to rescue suffering Jews of Europe. Through close readings of the play and with reference to other works by Zangwill in the early twentieth century, the article looks at the play as a pragmatic work in a time of international upheaval and American nativism. A discussion of the play's reception by critics and audiences indicates that what was most controversial at the time of its production was not necessarily what Zangwill was most desirous to convey. But a look at its varied meanings over time reveals the persistence of the melting-pot metaphor in discussions of immigration, identity, ethnicity and nationhood, especially in the American imaginary.