The article examines the various presentations of Ashkenazi Jews in Israeli fiction. Ashkenazi identity in Israel is controversial both in everyday life and in fiction. However, the literary and artistic manifestations of Ashkenazi Jews are quite different from their political and social image. Ashkenazi Jews are usually portrayed as the intellectual, economic, and professional elite, and also as those who were responsible for the inequality between Jews who immigrated to Israel from Europe and Jews from Arabic countries. They are depicted by the Israeli media as those who forced the oriental Jews to settle in remote towns in Israel, thus denying them the ability to move up the social ladder.

The arrogant, upper-middle-class Ashkenazi is often absent from Israeli literature. Israeli artists of Ashkenazi origin present themselves in autobiographical literature as “weak” or “problematic” and they add a “fragile” aspect to the Ashkenazi identity. The Ashkenazi Jew is depicted as an insecure figure who agonizes over fears and childhood traumas. The image of the “fragile Ashkenazi,” appears in some of the most prominent Israeli writing: Amos Oz’s A Tale of Love and Darkness, David Grossman’s A Horse Walks into a Bar, and Gila Almagor’s book and film Avia’s Summer.

In 1902, Theodor Herzl, a prominent Jewish thinker and founder of political Zionism, published a utopian novel entitled Altneuland, in which he envisioned, based on ideas of egalitarianism, modern Jewish society in Palestine. In 2011, more than a hundred years after the utopia of Herzl was published, the contemporary Israeli writer Eshkol Nevo, in a way referring to the book of the Zionist ideologist, wrote a moving Israeli family saga entitled Neuland. Since the establishment of the State of Israel, Israeli literature has developed, expressing the experiences and expectations of the young society. Modern Israeli literature developed from realism and a strong Zionist character, through revaluation of the Zionist myth up to the representatives of postmodernism focusing on the personal experiences of the protagonists, detached from the socio-political reality. Modern Israeli literature and in particular Eshkol Nevo’s novel, propose new approaches to literature in general and to Jewish and Israeli identity in particular.

The Sinai Peninsula remains a vital security, strategic, and political focus of Israel. In addition to the Palestinian population residing there is Hamas, an Iran-backed militant group that actively commits acts of terror. Since 1979 and the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt, peace returned to the peninsula after decades of conflict between the two nations over this territory; and since 2015, Israel has conducted air strikes in conjunction with Egypt against elements of the Islamic State in the Sinai. The Golan Heights remains of contemporary relevance for Israeli security, strategy, and politics. Seized by Israel from Syria in the closing stages of the 1967 Six-Day War, the territory is an important buffer zone against the terrorist group Hezbollah. Additionally, its relevance is daily displayed in the direction and consequences of the ongoing Syrian civil war, and recognition of the Golan Heights as under Israeli sovereignty by the Trump Administration in March 2019. The following paper is a case study of these two geographic areas and how both hold political, security and geographic value for Israel, offering justification for Israeli strategic and security actions within each.

This article examines the immigration policy in Israel 70 years after the nation’s Declaration of Independence. Israel was established in an attempt to create a shelter for Jews in the Diaspora. Therefore, the policy of Israel towards immigrants has been sometimes criticized as being racist, discriminatory, or undemocratic. But is there a coherent immigration policy in Israel? In fact, aside from the Law of Return of 1950, which refers exclusively to Jewish immigrants, Israel still lacks a proper legal framework that can regulate foreign immigration. In many cases, immigration policy in Israel seems to be unclear and incoherent. With today’s reality of the global migration crisis, this legal vacuum represents a dangerous gap that prevents the State of Israel from effectively coping with the problem with respect to international law and humane standards.

This paper will critically review the major features of current immigration policies, such as the policy of “direct absorption,” the expulsion of African immigrants, and the new procedures of the asylum seekers’ process in Israel. 

The necessity of creating new curricula for teaching foreign languages (including Hebrew) and adjusting them to the requirements of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFRL) is a result of implementing the Bologna Process in the Polish system of higher education. The whole approach to teaching Hebrew to Polish students, as well as methods of assessment, had to be changed according to the new requirements.

In this paper, I wish to study some challenges and difficulties which might be faced by Hebrew instructors in Europe and by the authors of Hebrew certificate exams. First, I will present the main assumptions of CEFRL and its certification system. Then, I will compare it with the Hebrew language curriculum and methods of assessment, as developed and applied in ulpanim (Hebrew language schools) in Israel. Next, I will present some challenges which might be faced by teachers preparing course participants to pass their certificate exams at appropriate levels, adjusting the curriculum’s goals to the assumptions of the CEFRL, strongly modifying the learning resources, or even developing them from scratch.

In conclusion, I will try to evaluate both the European and the Israeli systems of Hebrew language teaching and testing, in view of contemporary assumptions of glottodidactics. 

This article analyses the economic structure and partnerships of the Vilnius Jewish community from the second half of the 17th until the end of the 18th centuries. The article focuses on the economic partnerships and patronages formed by Jews in Vilnius. It also highlights the importance of the immediate hinterland for their business opportunities.

* This article was supported by a GEOP Research Fellowship at POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews and the Emanuel Ringelblum Jewish Historical Institute, within the POLIN Museum Global Education Outreach Program, funded by the William K. Bowes Jr. Foundation, Taube Philanthropies, and the Association of the Jewish Historical Institute of Poland. The statements made and views expressed herein, however, are solely the responsibility of the author. 

This paper presents the reception of Heinrich Heine’s “Deutschland. Ein Wintermärchen” in Yiddish translation. For many of his younger colleagues he was “der grester liriker fun 19tn jorhundert, der sharfster humorist und biterster satiriker in der daytsher literatur” [the greatest poet of the 19th century, the sharpest humorist and bitterest satirist in the German literature]. My aim is to show on the example of Deutschland. Ein Wintermärchen [Germany. A Winter’s Tale] (1844) how Heine’s subversive drawing on Romantic ideas and language is rendered into Yiddish in the first half of the 20th century by Moyshe-Leyb Halpern and Moyshe Khashtshevatsky.

In the Second Polish Republic, from the mid-1930s, manifestations of antisemitism became more and more pronounced, and were met with protest from Jewish people. The Union of Jews Participants of Combat for Polish Independence, functioning in 1929–1939, was one of the organizations that fiercely opposed antisemitism. It was the only combatant organization in Poland that represented a national minority. While intensely fighting against the manifestations of antisemitism that encompassed various aspects of life, they condemned antisemitic riots in cities, towns and in universities, while also declaring and manifesting their loyalty and commitment to Poland itself.

This article discusses the early life of Maksymilian Boruchowicz (1911–1987), a Jewish writer, publicist, and literary critic known in interwar Kraków, who changed his name to Michał Borwicz after the Second World War. Biographical information on his life before the outbreak of the war focuses mainly on his studies of Polish language and literature at the Jagiellonian University, where he was actively involved in student literary and cultural circles, as well as political journalism. During his studies and immediately thereafter, Borwicz published prolifically in various magazines and literary journals, and before the war published the novel Miłość i rasa (Love and Race), which was received positively by literary critics.

The Jewish Autonomous Oblast known as Birobijan in the USSR attracted the interest of the British diplomacy. This is reflected in the correspondence between British missions in the USSR and Israel and the Foreign Office. This analysis covers five documents from 1952–1958 kept in the National Archives in London. The documents pertain to two matters: (1) a discussion about the current status of the Jewish Autonomous Oblast (whether rumours of its disappearance were true) and (2) reflections on the actual character of the oblast (to what extent it was Jewish and autonomous). The significance of these documents can be analysed on several levels – from the viewpoint of Birobijan’s history, the nature of British-Soviet relations, and the operating methods of diplomatic services. Reading the documents leads to several questions: why was Great Britain interested in the oblast? How was it perceived in the West? How did the Foreign Office obtain information about it? 

This paper analyses the image of Poland and gentile Poles in the texts of Jewish immigrants and their descendants in French-speaking Belgium. The centre of interest are its literary forms, as well as its historical roots. If the geographical and cultural Polish space appears alternatively as locus amoenus and locus horribilis, the inhabitants of the country are quite clearly represented as populus horribilis. Their antisemitism appears as one of their main features, although sometimes it is problematized. Jewish immigrants and their descendants distance themselves from Poland and gentile Poles. They mainly create a negative image, very different from the traditional image of Poland and Poles in Belgian literature.

* L’auteur de cette étude bénéficie d’un financement octroyé par le Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique Polonais (National Science Centre, Poland, research project 2018/30/M/HS3/00153).