Aaron David Gordon (1856-1922) was a Zionist ideologue who immigrated from Vilna in Lithuania to Palestine in 1904. He was a member of the pre-Zionist movement Lovers of Zion, who advocating revival of Jewish life in the Eretz Yisrael, and formulated a philosophy of physical work where he expressed that only through labor could the Jews regain national rebirth and unity as a people. In this paper I shall study a broad selection of Gordon’s essays to show how Gordon establishes the ideal of working the land in the Yishuv by using and reinforcing the collective memory of the Zionist movement about the Diaspora. By building on the Zionist discourse which negates the Diaspora, Gordon establishes a negative Jewish identity of the past as a contrast to the positive identity, he envisions for the Jewish people in the future. Gordon’s ideal of working the land functions to emphasize the desolate existence of the Jews in the Diaspora, where he claims they were estranged from labor and nature. Simultaneously, the image of the weak Jews in the Diaspora consistent in Zionist rhetoric of the time, enforces Gordon’s vision of a strong Jewish people in the Yishuv.
Coming from a religiously observant family, Gordon studied with the local rabbi, yet simultaneously became proficient in several languages and studied secular topics such as the philosophy of Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Marx and Tolstoy (Schweid 1985: 157). He remained Orthodox all his life, yet during his years in Palestine he moved away from traditional Judaism to form his own philosophy about the connection between the nation, nature and labor. His views on the necessity of manual labor is grounded in his religious views, and thus have been named the “religion of labor”. In thi...
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...lized, empowered and disempowered. The most basic binary pair in identity creation is the distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’. The ‘other’ is an essential component of any group’s project of self-definition (Barth: 15). Most sociological studies of groups self-identity an boundary creation deals with the relationship between two different groups within the same period and vicinity. However, in Gordon’s essays the binary pair is between the ‘us’ of the future and the ‘them’ of the past; As will be evident further on in my analysis Gordon establishes the Jewish diasporic past as an anti-thesis to the Jewish future in the Yishuv. Gordon builds his creation of the Jewish diasporic identity on the discourse used within Zionism, and establishes the future as the opposite. Throughout my analysis I will show how Gordon effectually establishes these two opposing identities.
Elias Chocour’s novel, Blood Brothers, represents his point of view on the contemporary Palestinian position regarding the holy land of Israel. The book traces the transformation of Chocour’s life, from a Melkite Christian Palestinian boy into a powerful spiritual leader and innovative agent in facilitating better race relations in the region. He shows how Palestinian’ needs were left out during the formation of the State of Israel, and how their plight is highly misunderstood, and often grossly distorted because of ignorance. Chocour’s depiction of the problem facing non-Jews is highly illuminating, and Blood Brothers will dispel many illusions and fallacies that cloud the facts surrounding the status of Israel’s inhabitants.
Stavans, I. (2005). Assimilation and Jewish Ethnic Identity. The Jewish Identity Project: New American Photography, Rpt. In Race and Ethnicity. Ed. Uma Kukathas. Detroit: Greenhaven Press, 2008. Contemporary Issues Companion. Retrieved Apr 4, 2014, from http://ic.galegroup.com.proxy.hvcc.edu:2048/ic/ovic/ViewpointsDetailsPage/ViewpointsDetailsWindow?failOverType=&query=&prodId=OVIC&windowstate=normal&contentModules=&mode=view&displayGroupName=Viewpoints&limiter=&currPage=&disableHighlighting=false&displa
One of the significant features of Jewish history throughout many centuries was migration. From the ancient pre-Roman times to medieval Spain to the present days the Jews were expelled from the countries they populated, were forced out by political, cultural and religious persecution, and sometimes were motivated to leave simply to escape economic hardship and to find better life for themselves and for their children. One of the interesting pages of Jewish history was a massive migration from Eastern Europe to America in the period between 1870 an 1920. In that period more than two million Jews left their homes in Russia, Poland, Galicia, and Romania and came to the New World. The heaviest volume of that wave of Jewish emigration came between 1904 and 1908, when more than 650 thousand Jewish emigrants came to the US. The Eastern European Jews fled from pogroms, religious persecution and economic hardship. We can learn about those times from history text books, but a better way to understand the feelings and thoughts of the struggling emigrants is to learn a story from an insider, who herself lived there and experienced first hand all the challenges and hardships of the emigrants' life. Anzia Yezierska's novel "Bread Givers" is a story that lets the reader to learn about the life of Jewish Emigrants in the early Twentieth Century on Manhattan's lower East Side through the eyes of a poor young Jewish woman who came from Poland and struggled to break out from poverty, from tyrant old traditions of her father, and to find happiness, security, love and understanding in the new country. The book is rich with symbolism. Different characters and situations in the novel symbolize different parts of the emigrants' community and challenges that they faced. The characters range from the father, the symbol of the Old World, to the mother who symbolizes struggles and hopelessness of the women of the Old World, to the sisters and their men, who together represent the choices and opportunities that opened before the young generation of the Jewish emigrants in the New World.
This book begins by analyzing industrial dependency through the lens of the worker and his negatives. The authors discussed the Protestantism valued work of ethic because of discipline and labor. While reading this section of the book I realized that wage labor developed a progressively more
The Jewish Community. Publication Society, 1996. http://www. Wiesel, Elie. A.
Ethnic Identity and Culture.’ New Tribalisms: The Resurgence of Race and Ethnicity. New York University Press. 1998
After reading Henry Ford, "The International Jew: The World's Problem," one may find that Ford's attitude towards Jews is not very different from those attitudes expressed within Chapter VII of The Jew in the Modern World. Ford considers Jews to be greed driven "swarms...and the world's enigma" (513). The comments and arguments of Bauer, Marx, Wagner, Stoecker, Treitschke, and Mommsen all recognize those qualities of the Jews that give them economic and political advantage within the countries they populate; lifestyles, morals, and traditions.
Most people think Israel always belonged to the Jews but it wasn’t always a safe, holy place where Jews could roam freely. Along with Palestine, it was actually forcefully taken from the Arabs who originated there. The main purpose of this novel is to inform an audience about the conflicts that Arabs and Jews faced. Tolan’s sources are mainly from interviews, documentations and observations. He uses all this information to get his point across, and all the quotes he uses is relevant to his points. The author uses both sides to create a non-biased look at the facts at hand. The novel starts in the year 1967 when Bashir Al-Khairi and his cousins venture to their childhood home in Ramallah. After being forced out of their homes by Jewish Zionists and sent to refuge for twenty years. Bashir arrives at his home to find a Jewish woman named Dalia Eshkenazi. She invites them into her home and later the...
In the face of increasing anti-Semitism during the interwar periods Jewish identity often came into conflict with societal pressures to assimilate. Irving Howe’s, A Memoir of the Thirties, written in 1961, depicts his experiences as a Jew in New York City. In his memoir Howe describes the living and social conditions during this decade that pushed many New York Jews to become involved in some type of socialist movement. Although the memoir is primarily about political activities, his description of the social conditions and the Jewish community provides ...
“Death Marches”. Jewish virtual library everything you need to know about anti Semitism to Zionism. 2014 American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise .Web. 7 February 2014.
The delineation of human life is perceiving existence through resolute contrasts. The difference between day and night is defined by an absolute line of division. For the Jewish culture in the twentieth century, the dissimilarity between life and death is bisected by a definitive line - the Holocaust. Accounts of life during the genocide of the Jewish culture emerged from within the considerable array of Holocaust survivors, among of which are Elie Wiesel’s Night and Simon Wiesenthal’s The Sunflower. Both accounts of the Holocaust diverge in the main concepts in each work; Wiesel and Wiesenthal focus on different aspects of their survivals. Aside from the themes, various aspects, including perception, structure, organization, and flow of arguments in each work, also contrast from one another. Although both Night and The Sunflower are recollections of the persistence of life during the Holocaust, Elie Wiesel and Simon Wiesenthal focus on different aspects of their existence during the atrocity in their corresponding works.
In her work, “Identity,” Carla Kaplan frames the difficulty of defining the term “identity.” She argues that identity is a tension because personal identity conventionally arbitrates taste and lifestyle, while social identity is regarded as a constellation of different and often competing identifications or “cultural negotiations” (Kaplan, 2007). In addition, she argues that identity politics has caused “suspicion and criticism” by limiting new democratic possibilities by encouraging narrow solidarities rather than broader identification resulting in the struggle for recognition becoming a questioning of recognition (Kaplan, 2007). Lastly, she argues that “A realistic identity politics” is needed to recognize that identities are multiple/dynamic
When lines of identity inevitably blend, relative jurisprudence must be exercised. Lines make excluding circles and methods of excluding people from asylum; our international community divides into unwelcome and welcome nations. As discourse, cultural identity means translating beliefs and feelings from one culture to another. In the process of translation, a screen of cultural values filters understanding of the values and experience of the “other.” The simple word “refugee” evokes images and stories particular to a collectively defined identity, invoking “an image of the radicalized other” (Daniel 272).
Edward Said “States” refutes the view Western journalists, writers, and scholars have created in order to represent Eastern cultures as mysterious, dangerous, unchanging, and inferior. According to Said, who was born in Jerusalem at that time Palestine, the way westerners represent eastern people impacts the way they interact with the global community. All of this adds to, Palestinians having to endure unfair challenges such as eviction, misrepresentation, and marginalization that have forced them to spread allover the world. By narrating the story of his country Palestine, and his fellow countrymen from their own perspective Said is able to humanize Palestinians to the reader. “States” makes the reader feel the importance of having a homeland, and how detrimental having a place to call home is when trying to maintain one’s culture. Which highlights the major trait of the Palestinian culture: survival. Throughout “States”, Said presents the self-preservation struggles Palestinians are doomed to face due to eviction, and marginalization. “Just as we once were taken from one habitat to a new one we can be moved again” (Said 543).
The economic and political changes that occurred across Europe in the nineteenth century made it inevitable for the inhabitants of Palestine and the Jews of Europe to become nationalists. Through the emergence of nationalism, we see the reversal of old practices of empire. Cultures of nationalism developed as the world adopted the the idea that nation’s strength rested in unity and loyalty of its people. To secure unity and loyalty, the concept of a common identity was invented. This concept however, proved to be capable of causing divisions as well. While the spread of cultures of nationalism proved unstoppable, starting a nationalist movement was not. Nationalist movements emerge, when the pressures from existing nations push for the construction