Gross Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies

The Slánský Affair of 1952 introduced a specific matrix of ideas about Jewish power and the danger that Jews posed to the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. These ideas, with roots in earlier discourses, conditioned Jewish-state relations for decades, providing party-state officials and even Jewish functionaries with a language for articulating demands of the government and a framework for understanding the place of Jewish citizens in the socialist nation. Inter-and intraministerial conflicts reveal that differences in purview and philosophy often led officials to prioritise different aspects of the Jewish power-danger matrix. The paternalistic responsibility to protect domestic Jewry from the negative influences of foreign "Zionists" frequently clashed with the objective of appeasing Western Jewry, whose influence in the US Czechoslovak communists overestimated. While the latter considerationand othersoften moved the Ministry of Culture to advocate in favour of the Czechoslovak Jewish communities, the former concerntaken remarkably seriouslyled the secret police to oppose them at every turn, often in the most conspiratorial of ways. To that end, this article introduces new information and perspective on the murder of Charles Jordan in 1967 and its repercussions and political uses in the years that followed.

Questions arose after 1945, and have persisted since, about the ownership of properties which had belonged to Jews and Jewish communities before WWII; to victims of the Holocaust, to survivors, and to Jewish refugees from Middle Eastern and North African countries. This included thousands of cemeteries in various states of repair as well as former synagogues, many already repurposed. Studies of these “Jewish” properties often examine their symbolic or nostalgic value, their place in cultures of memory and identity. These properties, however, have always had worth as material asset as well, just as they have always imparted financial liabilities and other responsibilities to their owners. These factors, often determined by national and transnational contexts, conditioned the claims that various actors made to “Jewish” properties, the outcomes of their conflicts, and even how owners and would-be owners understood their relationship and responsibilities to their properties. Local, national, and transnational political economies thus influenced the articulation and reception of the moral, political, and philosophical claims to Jewish material legacies. A comparative study of these political economies offers an opportunity to re-explore important themes in Jewish history, including the relationships between Jews, non-Jewish majority populations, and states.

Organizer: Jacob Ari Labendz, Center for Research on Antisemitism
Keynote: Michael Meng, Clemson University

Host: Center for Research on Antisemitism, TU-Berlin
Sponsor: Volkswagen Foundation

The Jewish communities of communist Czechoslovakia enjoyed the right to receive in restitution property which had belonged to their interwar predecessors and which had been lost or stolen during the Second World War. The efforts to recover, manage, and dispose of these properties brought the interests of the Council of Jewish Religious Communities in the Czech Lands into alignment with those of their minders at the State Office of Ecclesiastical Affairs and its successor institutions. Their collaboration in the sale of surplus synagogues and the protection of cemeteries (as a class of properties) helped them develop a close working relationship characterized by limited mutuality. This, in turn, contributed to the context which gave rise to an efflorescence of Jewish cultural life in the 1960s. While self-consciously revisionist, this article in no way seeks to deny the prevalence of state and popular antisemitism in the postwar years, which often came in the guise of anti-Zionism. It seeks, rather, to show that Jewish-state relations were complex through a focus on specific institutions, instead of Jewish-state relations in the aggregate. Doing so helps account for apparent inconsistencies in party-state policy and practice without assuming the normalcy of antisemitism and the exceptionality of its absence. Jewish communal properties in postwar Czechoslovakia 1 During the first postwar quarter century, the Jewish religious communities of the communist Czech lands and the state offices that managed ecclesiastical affairs benefited together, albeit differently, from the recognition and defense of Jewish-communal property rights and from the sale of synagogues without congregations. The modus operandi that developed between these two bodies for dealing with such matters played a structuring role in the evolution of Jewish-state relations more broadly. Specifically, an alignment of interests and years of close cooperation between Jewish leaders and a specific cohort of central state administrators in Prague helped produce the context which made possible an efflorescence of Jewish life in that city in association with the political and cultural liberalizations of the 1960s. Beginning in 1945, Jewish survivors and returnees reestablished between 57 and 59 Jewish communities across the Czech lands. 2 Unlike in Poland and, more complexly, the

This volume reflects the studied intuition that Jewish veganism and vegetarianism have come of age. Jewish vegans and vegetarians have formed organizations and online forums to advocate within their communities and beyond and to develop, debate, and promote animal-product-and meat-free Jewish cultures. 1 One finds no shortage of Jewish vegan and vegetarian cookbooks, blogs, and other resources. Articles appear frequently in the Jewish press and have crossed over into mainstream publications, such as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. 2 Jewish communities across denominations and around the world are renegotiating their food practices and implementing policies to reflect their new or renewed ethical commitments. 3 By some counts, up to 5 percent of the Israeli population has gone vegan. This includes Jews of all backgrounds, from secular Jews to Haredim, as well as Muslim, Christian, and nonreligious Palestinians, and others. Even the Israeli Defense Forces have had to accommodate the demands of vegan soldiers. 4 Jewish people have also counted among the most prominent vegan activists, such as Mayim Bialik, a founding member and senior leadership consultant at the Shamayim V'Aretz Institute, and Academy Award-winning actor Natalie Portman. This collection of essays by scholars, rabbis, activists, and community leaders explores the history, contours, and scope of veganism and vegetarianism among Jews and presents compelling new directions in Jewish thought, ethics, and foodways. As ever more Jews adopt vegan and vegetarian lifestyles, and thereby join movements that transcend the porous boundaries of Jewish communities, this volume asks what distinguishes Jewish veganism and vegetarianism as Jewish. It offers opportunities to meditate on the varied intellectual, cultural, and religious roots of these movements across centuries and continents. Jewish Veganism and Vegetarianism asks how Judaism, broadly considered, has inspired Jews to embrace such practices and how those lifestyles in turn have enriched and helped define Jewishness. This collection of essays tests the boundaries of Jewish veganism and

The New York Times sparked acrimonious debate when it reported misleadingly, on 10 December 2019, that President Donald Trump would sign an executive order against antisemitism that "will effectively interpret Judaism as a race or nationality, not just a religion […]" (Baker and Haberman; Burack; Trump). Even observers, like me, who insist that Jewish particularity exceeds the religious sphere, worried that Trump sought to change prevailing attitudes and legal norms related to the social position of Jews in the USA. The depth of concern reflected an association of Trump with the far right and with rhetoric that has led to mass-shootings in US synagogues. More fundamentally, it derived from heightened tensions around the nature of Americanness and the place of Jews and religion therein. Trump's politics with respect to Jews-popular on the mainstream rightparticipate in a global retreat from multiculturalism and in a tendency towards retrenchment in the construal of national boundaries, which have blurred in recent decades. Trump's hyper-focus on Jews and Israel, as bounded lynchpins in a national and global drama, aligns with the objectification of Jews and Israel by Christian Zionists (O'Donnell). 1 On the one hand, Trump presents himself as a defender of Jews, fulfilling an expectation for anti-antisemitism that transcends the divides of normative US political culture; a commitment which can enshrine notions of essential Jewish difference. On the other hand, Trump and many of his allies have repeatedly invoked (partially) dejudaized conspiracy theories to account for and repudiate social change; discourses with analogues in other national settings. In doing so, Trump has emboldened far right extremists. This chapter offers perspective on Trump's attitude towards Jews by drawing on the history of nationalism in nineteenth-and twentieth-century Europe. I argue that Trump and his associates-in some ways-construe Jews, collectively, as a national minority associated with the State of Israel; a belief which implies that Jewish citizens, regardless of race, belong differently to the "American" nation than do their white Christian compatriots. Trump referred to Israel as "your country" when speaking to US Jews at the 2018 White House Hanukkah party (JTA and TOI Staff). Addressing an audience of Jewish conservatives in 2019, he called Benjamin Netanyahu "your prime minister" (TOI Staff and AP). Trump has also accused Jews who vote for Democrats of disloyalty both to Israel and to him, despite the fact that, as of 2013, seventy percent of US Jews either identified with the Democratic Party 1 In this research, I have arrived at many of the same conclusions as did S. Jonathon O'Donnell in their study of Christian Zionism and antisemitism, from which I draw liberally but also depart.