Nadia Malinovich

Une table ronde autour de Naim Kattan, grand ecrivain canadian d'origine juive iraquienne dédédé en 2021) Sous la direction de Simone Grossman et avec la participation de Yolande Cohen, Elizabeth Dahab, Simone Douek, Guy Hocquette, Sophie Jama, Nadia Malinovich, et Sayf Shems

Drawing on original interviews conducted between 2016 and 2018, this article explores understandings of Muslim-Jewish relations among Jews who immigrated from Morocco to France after 1945. These interviews suggest that the weight of currently circulating meta-discourses can lead to dissonances between individuals’ personal memories and the collective memories that they invoke in regard to Jewish-Muslim relations. As these interviews were conducted as part of a larger study of graduates of the schools of the Alliance Israelite Universelle in the MENA who immigrated to France, Canada and the United States after 1945, the author places these French findings in a larger comparative context, considering how the memories and perspectives of Moroccan Jews who immigrated to France converge and diverge from those who emigrated to North America.

This study of Jewish cultural innovation in early twentieth-century France highlights the complexity and ambivalence of Jewish identity and self-definition in the modern world. This stimulating and original book makes a major contribution to our understanding of modern Jewish history as well as to the history of the Jews in France and to the larger discourse about modern Jewish identities.

À la suite de l'Affaire Dreyfus, un nombre croissant de Juifs français ont commencé à remettre en question la définition de leur judaïté dans une société où ils bénéficiaient d'une émancipation politique complète. L'auteur explore cet essor culturel, que les contemporains eux-mêmes désignaient par le terme de " réveil juif ", caractérisé par de nombreux débats entre divers groupes : religieux et laïques, orthodoxes et libéraux, sionistes et assimilationnistes. À travers son analyse de la vie associative, de la presse et de la littérature juive en France entre 1900 et 1932, l'auteur montre que pour cette génération de Juifs français, il s'agissait de trouver de nouveaux moyens d'être " à la fois Juifs et Français ". Cette quête identitaire a aussi contribué à la reformulation du concept d'identité française.

This special issue of Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques (Volume 43, Issue 2, Summer 2017) explores the theme of essentialist discourses about languages , human collectivities, and human diversity during the interwar years, outside of explicitly racist or antisemitic perspectives. It grew out of a conference that Cécile Mathieu and I organized at the Université de Picardie Jules Verne in October 2013. Our original inspiration came from the discovery of thematic overlap in our research on the 1920s in our two quite disparate fields of history and linguistics. In particular, we were both struck by the contrast between contemporary associations of essentialized representations of human collectivities and practices of oppression, discrimination, and genocide, and the prevalence of these kinds of discourses across the political and ideological spectrums in the pre–World War II era. In our post-Holocaust and postcolonial world, progressive politics and an understanding of differences between human collectivities rooted in unchangeable biological realities do not marry well together. In an earlier period , in which theorizing about human difference was not associated with genocide and European colonialist domination was assumed by all but a few outliers to be the natural and rightful order of things, the borders between universalism, humanism, romanticism, and racism were much messier and intertwined. This volume brings together researchers in history, linguistics, and literary studies to reflect on these issues in order to explore the varied ways in which human difference was conceived of in the interwar years. We particularly emphasize the impact of World War I and the ideological and political shifts of the 1920s.

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After 1948, several upheavals—the creation of the State of Israel, decolonization and Arab nationalism—forced the vast majority of Jews from the Middle East, North Africa and the former Ottoman Empire to leave their lands of origin. While most of these Sephardic Jews went to Israel, and a substantial minority—especially those from the former French colonies in North Africa—resettled in France and Canada, a small number made their way to the United States. While Sephardim still comprise only a small fraction of an overwhelmingly Ashkenazic American Jewish population, their numbers have increased considerably in the post-World War II era.

The American Friends of the Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU), a non-profit organization created in New York City in 1947 to garner funds for the AIU’s then extensive network of schools in the Arab world, provides a window into the evolution of Sephardic integration, identity and self-representation in the post-World War II United States. While it was primarily a fundraising group, the Friends also functioned as a vehicle for Sephardic expression and community building in the United States, as well as a space where Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jews worked together—and were sometimes at odds with one another. As such, a study of the Friends—the personal histories and perspectives of the people who founded and maintained it, the tactics it used in its attempts to solicit funds, as well as the reasons for its limited success and its ultimate demise—is a particularly interesting vantage point from which to explore the evolution of both Ashkenazic-Sephardic relations and each groups’ perceptions of each other in the United States over the past 60 years.

Scholarship on immigration to the United States in the postwar era has emphasized the diversity of geographical, religious, cultural and class backgrounds of the “new new immigrants.” This diversity, combined with a shift in American popular culture and government policy away from assimilation and toward multiculturalism, argue sociologists Rubén G. Rumbaut, Alejandro Portes and others, has splintered the notion of what it means to “become American.” Rather than integrating into an undifferentiated “America society,” post-World War II immigrants have experienced “segmented integration” into any number of particular American subcultures.

In a similar vein, rather than using terms such as “Jewish culture” or “Jewish diaspora” in the singular, scholars such as Moshe Rosman and David Biale have used these terms in the plural, thus drawing our attention to the range of Jewish experiences in a wide variety of historical contexts. This focus on diversity has been particularly important within the field of Sephardic studies, as scholars such as Jonathan Ray and Aviva Ben-Ur have pointed out that “Jewish” has often been equated with “Ashkenazic” among contemporary historians. They have suggested that the Sephardim have functioned as a “subethnic” group in the contemporary Jewish world. As a “minority within a minority,” American Jews of Sephardic origins have thus faced not only the challenge of integration into American life in general, but also that of integration into an overwhelmingly Ashkenazic Jewish mainstream community.

The story of the American Friends of the AIU is a story of competing and overlapping identities. On the one hand, the Sephardic Jews who were the driving force behind the organization saw the group as an opportunity to forge a new network of Sephardic Jews in the United States and, in so doing, to educate both American society as a whole and American Jews in particular, about the history, culture, and material needs of Jews in the Arab world and the former Ottoman empire. On the other hand, these individuals naturally sought out connections with members of the larger American Jewish community as they integrated into American society and moved up the economic ladder. As we shall see, this “push and pull” of post-World War II Sephardim toward the American Jewish majority shaped the motives of Sephardim who joined the Friends, as well as relations between Sephardim and Ashkenazim within the organization.

Sephardic Jews who became involved with the Friends represented a particular stratum within the modern Sephardic—and Sephardic American—world.

This article is a study of the emergence of American Muslim identity in the 1980s and 1990s through analysis of debates on education and child-rearing in the magazine Islamic Horizons. This Journal, created in 1983, is the oldest Muslim press organ still in existence today in the United States. The efforts of Islamic Horizons to bridge the cultural gap, as well as the numerous debates published between immigrants and second-generation Muslims, make it a particularly interesting venue to study tensions between the desires for integration and communal cohesion among American Muslims prior to September 11th.

Among the Jewish reviews born in France in the wake of the “ Jewish Revival ” in the twenties, Menorah was one of the first as well as one of those which lasted fot the longest time. Originally financed by the World Zionist Organization, it was created by Jacques and M. O. Camhy, and had been managed since 1924 by Gustave Kahn. The analysis of its editorial politics and its choice of themes reveal the tendencies of the French Zionism in those years, and more specifically of the coming together between Jewish nationalism and the progressist ideals of Justice and Peace dear to the “ Geneva generation ” and of the Jewish culture and identity.

In the twenties, Jews occupied an increasingly visible place in the French public sphere. More than ever before, they felt free to explore the particularities of Jewish identity and culture in the mo-dern world in literature, theatre and debating clubs. Both Jewish authors’ choice of themes and contemporary criticism of their writing reveal many of the tensions and conflicts that the Jewish “revival” of the 1920s raised within the French Jewish community. Some French Jews saw no need for self-censorship and welcomed what they saw as an opportunity to counter stereotypes and share the reality of Jewish life, with all its diversity and contradictions. Others, by contrast, expressed concern that this literary “revival” was popularizing dangerously sensationalist, stereotyped images of Jews and Judaism to the French public. These concerns were heightened by the fact that many Jewish authors of the day conveyed an image of Jewishness as an indelible “racial” trait not dissimilar to that of the antisemitic movement, which, critics portentously suggested, had perhaps not had its final word in France.

This article outlines the basic contours of the development of Reform Judaism in Western Europe and the United States, and looks at historians’ debates as to the reasons for the successes and failures of Reform in particular national contexts. For much of the twentieth century, Reform Judaism received little attention from scholars of Jewish history, who understood the movement first and foremost as part of the assimilatory bent of Jews in the Western World. More recent scholarship, by contrast, has looked to a complex array of ideological, cultural, and political motivations that led nineteenth century Jews down the path of religious reform. It has also highlighted the many factors, including a country’s particular religious and political culture, Jewish legal status, and the extent of governmental authority over religious institutions, which must be taken into consideration to account for why the Reform movement was more successful in some countries than in others.

In both the United States and France, Jewish fiction writers of the 1920s often invoked the idea of Jewish racial unity as a non-rational, uncontrollable force that separates Jews from the mainstream society irrespective of their conscious desire for integration. This genre of fiction reveals an ambivalent attitude towards  race-thinking. On the one hand, the notion that there are  intractable physical differences between groups threatened the Jews’ status as fully privileged co-citizens. On the other hand,  a racialized self-understanding provided them with a way to articulate the intangible bonds of community that their official status as a purely “religious” group normally held them back from openly expressing. The common trope of the failed Jewish-Gentile romance best expresses French and American Jews’ dual desire for acceptance and  distinctiveness. A sense of racial identity often leads protagonists to reject a non-Jewish lover or spouse and draw strength from a renewed sense of connection with the Jewish people. More often than not, however, these figures are left with feelings of ambivalence and regret, as they realize that their universalist dream of uniting with someone from a different “racial” background is not possible in the real world, where their Jewish particularism inevitably dooms such relationships to failure.

This paper explores the image of the Jew as Oriental in French Jewish literature and political discourse in the fin-de-siècle and inter-war years. During the nineteenth century, French Jews sought to distance themselves from their alleged ‘Oriental’ origins in order to facilitate their integration into the larger society. Beginning in the early twentieth century, by contrast, certain French Jews began to describe their imagined connection to the Orient as an aspect of the Jewish personality of which to be proud. This reinvention of the Jew as Oriental, however, was often linked to feelings of loss and alienation, a theme which many Jewish authors emphasised in their novels, plays and poetry. For many of these same figures, embracing Zionism provided a way to overcome this sense of alienation. By linking Zionism to the kind of ‘humanist orientalism’ prominent in French progressive circles during this period, they were able to give validity to their sense of ‘feeling different’ while at the same time expressing their complete devotion to France and to a universalist world perspective.

In both the United States and France, Jewish fiction writers of the 1920s often invoked the idea of Jewish racial unity as a non-rational, uncontrollable force separating Jews from mainstream society irrespective of their desire for integration. This genre of fiction reveals an ambivalent attitude towards race-thinking. The notion that there are intractable physical differences between groups threatened the Jews' status as fully privileged co-citizens. Yet a racialized self-understanding provided them with a way to articulate the intangible bonds of community, which their official status as a purely " religious " group normally held them back from expressing openly. The common trope of the failed Jewish-Gentile romance best expresses the dual desire of French and American Jews for acceptance and distinc-tiveness. A sense of racial identity often leads protagonists to reject a non-Jewish lover or spouse and draw strength from a renewed sense of connection with the Jewish people. More often than not, however, these figures are left with feelings of ambivalence and regret, as they realize that their universalist dream of uniting with someone from a different " racial " background is not possible in the real world, where their Jewish particularism inevitably dooms such relationships to failure.

This chapter provides a typology of themes in the Jewish press and discusses Zionism as the most important influence on French Jewish discourse in the 1920s. It explains how Zionism and Jewishness were often equated with values held in high esteem in French society in the Zionist-oriented press. It also explores the idea of the Jew as a 'link' between East and West, which provided a way for Jews to express their difference while simultaneously reinforcing the idea that they formed a vital and necessary element in Western culture. The chapter mentions Zionist advocates in France who remained committed to the idea of Zionism as a secular 'replacement' for a religiously based Jewish identity. It then looks at a common discourse that emphasized the spiritual and religious aspects of Zionist ideology by extending the idea that the visions of Judaism should not be posed in oppositional terms.

De l’Égypte des Fatimides à l’Allemagne médiévale, de la péninsule Ibérique à l’Empire ottoman, de la Russie tsariste à l’Éthiopie contemporaine, de New York à Berlin ou Paris, ce numéro de Clio propose une traversée de l’histoire du judaïsme sous le signe du genre. La « tradition religieuse juive » assigne aux femmes et aux hommes des rôles, des obligations et des droits tout à fait différents. Non seulement les Écritures et leurs interprétations, les gestes quotidiens et les rituels festifs, mais encore les coutumes et le droit rabbinique (halakha) se conjuguent pour proposer des règles, des conceptions et des représentations des relations entre les sexes. Mais cette tradition s’est aussi épanouie dans des contextes historiques multiples, laissant place à des évolutions, des influences et des contestations : c’est cette diversité des « arrangements de genre » au sein du judaïsme qui est ici restituée

This study of Jewish cultural innovation in early twentieth-century France highlights the complexity and ambivalence of Jewish identity and self-definition in the modern world. Following the Dreyfus affair, French Jews increasingly began to question how Jewishness should be defined in a society where Jews enjoyed full political equality. Writers began to explore biblical themes, traditional Jewish folklore, and issues of identity and assimilation. A plethora of new journals focusing on Jewish religion, history, and culture came into being, as did a multitude of associations that emphasized Jewish distinctiveness. This book explores this blossoming of Jewish cultural life in France. It shows that the interface between the various groups was as important as the differences between them: it was the process of debate and dialogue that infused new energy into French Jewish identity and culture. The book analyses the Jewish press and literature to develop a typology of themes, providing a...

This study of Jewish cultural innovation in early twentieth-century France highlights the complexity and ambivalence of Jewish identity and self-definition in the modern world. Following the Dreyfus affair, French Jews increasingly began to question how Jewishness should be defined in a society where Jews enjoyed full political equality. Writers began to explore biblical themes, traditional Jewish folklore, and issues of identity and assimilation. A plethora of new journals focusing on Jewish religion, history, and culture came into being, as did a multitude of associations that emphasized Jewish distinctiveness. This book explores this blossoming of Jewish cultural life in France. It shows that the interface between the various groups was as important as the differences between them: it was the process of debate and dialogue that infused new energy into French Jewish identity and culture. The book analyses the Jewish press and literature to develop a typology of themes, providing a panoramic view of how Jewish identity and culture were discussed and debated among Jews and non-Jews of varying ideological, cultural, and political orientations. The analysis also provides a vantage point from which to explore the complex ways in which French national identity was re-negotiated in the early twentieth-century. During this period, French Jews in effect reshaped the category of Frenchness itself, and in so doing created new possibilities for being both French and Jewish.

My dissertation explores the emergence of a new kind of Jewish consciousness in France in the first three decades of the twentieth century. During this period, issues of integration and assimilation worked out by French Jews in the aftermath of the Revolution once again became an important site of debate, and a blossoming of Jewish communal life and literary expression led many contemporary observers to speak of a Jewish renaissance on French soil. My project explores this phenomenon on two levels. First, I describe the creation of new forms of Jewish associational life between the Dreyfus affair and the early 1930s, identifying the principle actors and the networks that they formed. Secondly, I develop a typology of themes in the Jewish press and literature of the period. My study of this blossoming of Jewish cultural life and self-reflection deepens our understanding of the particularities of both Jewish and French identity in the modern period. Discussions of Jewish identity in the early twentieth century have often been framed around an assumed opposition between Zionist and assimilationist Jews. As my reading of the Jewish press and literature in France between the Dreyfus affair and the early 1930s shows, however, many French Jews integrated an ethno-cultural self-understanding while at the same time maintaining a strong belief in integration and sense of identification with France. This project also provides a vantage point from which to explore the complex ways in which French national identity was re-negotiated in the early twentieth century. More so than in any other western country, to be French is to conform to a particular set of cultural and ideological norms. As I show, however, French Jews did not simply conform Judaism to fit with a prescribed understanding of what it means to be French. Rather, they reshaped the category of Frenchness itself in order to suggest new possibilities for being both French and Jewish at a time when respect for cultural or ethnic difference was becoming increasingly acceptable in liberal, republican circles.Ph.D.Cultural anthropologyEuropean historyModern historyPhilosophy, Religion and TheologyReligious historySocial SciencesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/132829/2/9990932.pd

<p>This chapter focuses on the beginnings of the Zionist movement and Reform Judaism in France. It provides a close study of the activities and publications of the Fédération Sioniste de France, which was created at the turn of the century that reveals French and east European cultural and political sensibilities. It suggests how Zionism may have had a broader influence on the outlook of French Jews even before the First World War. The chapter discusses the 1905 separation of church and state that paved the way for the founding of the first Reform congregation in France in 1907. It describes the modernization of Jewish liturgy and Jewish religious practice along the lines of the German and English Reform movements.</p>

This chapter highlights the impact of the First World War and the changes in French Jewish society that paved the way for the expansion of Jewish associational and cultural life in the 1920s. It discusses how the war marked an important moment at which antisemitism subsided and Jewish belonging to the French nation was confirmed. It also talks about how Jewish participation in the war helped to popularize the notion that Jews were no less French for proudly affirming their unique spiritual and cultural heritage. The chapter outlines the link between issues of Jewish identity and national minority rights at the 1919 Peace Conference, the growth of the Zionist movement, and increase in Jewish immigration from eastern Europe. It describes the diversity within French-speaking natives and impoverished, Yiddish-speaking immigrants.

This chapter covers a set of concerns surrounding the emergence of a modern Jewish literature in the French language. It explains what the novelty of a few maverick intellectuals in the pre-war years that became a recognized genre of writing in the 1920s. It identifies Jewish writers who began to publish novels, plays, poems, collections of folklore, and short stories about different aspects of Jewish life and the issues of assimilation and acculturation in modern society. The chapter discusses Jewish literature in translation that comprised important components of literary renaissance. It also details how French readers were introduced to the world of east European and North African Jewry through novels and short stories written in French by writers who had migrated to France.

This chapter provides a background on Jewish social and cultural history in the nineteenth century and describes the complex impact of the Dreyfus affair on French Jewry. It looks at the first generations of post-revolutionary Jewish intellectuals and communal leaders that had been primarily concerned with promoting Jewish integration and acculturation. It also recounts how the emergence of ethnic nationalism and the modern antisemitic movement forced French Jews to negotiate between a commitment to universalist Enlightenment principles and the racialized discourses of identity. The chapter investigates the explosion of the Dreyfus affair that openly questioned Franco-Judaism and confronted the complexity of Jewish identity in the modern world head-on. It looks at the antisemitism in France, the affair prompted more sympathetic attitude towards Jews in French leftist circles.

Among the Jewish journals that emerged in France in the wake of the Jewish Revival in the 1920s, Menorah Journal was one of the first as well as one of those that lasted the longest time. Originally financed by the World Zionist Organization, it was created by Jacques and M. O. Camhy  and was managed from 1924 by Gustave Kahn. An analysis of its editorial policies and choices of themes reveals dominant trends within French Zionism during those years, and more specifically the coming together of Jewish nationalism and the progressive ideals of Justice and Peace dear to the “Geneva Generation” and of Jewish culture and identity.

Among the Jewish reviews born in France in the wake of the “ Jewish Revival ” in the twenties, Menorah was one of the first as well as one of those which lasted fot the longest time. Originally financed by the World Zionist Organization, it was created by Jacques and M. O. Camhy, and had been managed since 1924 by Gustave Kahn. The analysis of its editorial politics and its choice of themes reveal the tendencies of the French Zionism in those years, and more specifically of the coming together between Jewish nationalism and the progressist ideals of Justice and Peace dear to the “ Geneva generation ” and of the Jewish culture and identity.

... Quant à savoir pourquoi une orthodoxie « réformée » continua de dominer la scène dans l'Angleterre victorienne, la raison peut en être attribuée en partie ... Vicki Caron, « French Jewish Assimilation Reassessed : A Review of the Recent Literature », Judaism, n° 2/42, 1993, pp. ...

... [ 17] See, for example, Riaz Khan, “Averting Teenage Tempations,” (May/June 1996) 29; Cynthia R, Sulaiman, “The S ... Nadia Malinovich « The Americanization of Islam in the Contemporary United States », Revue française d'études américaines 3/2006 (n o 109), p. 100-112. ...

Note on Transliteration and Conventions Used in the Text Introduction 1 Setting the Stage: Jewish Identity in the Nineteenth Century and the Impact of the Dreyfus Affair 2 The Beginnings of a French Jewish Literature 3 Between Religion and Ethnicity: Zionism and Reform Judaism before the First World War 4 The First World War and the Shifting Landscape of French Jewry 5 Enlivening the Public Sphere: Jewish Sociability in the 1920s 6 Press Culture, Art, Music, the Inter-Faith Movement, and Debates on the Significance of the Renaissance Itself 7 Jewish Literature in France, 1920-1932 8 Reshaping Franco-Judaism, 1920-1932 Conclusion Bibliography Index

after 1948, several upheavals—the creation of the State of israel, decolonization and arab nationalism—forced the vast majority of Jews from the Middle East, North africa and the former ottoman Empire to leave their lands of origin. While most of these Sephardic Jews went to israel, and a substantial minority—especially those from the former French colonies in North africa—resettled in France and canada, a small number made their way to the United States.1 While Sephardim still comprise only a small fraction of an overwhelmingly ashkenazic american Jewish population, their numbers have increased considerably in the post-World War ii era.2 The american Friends of the alliance israélite Universelle (aiU), a non-profit organization created in New York city in 1947 to garner funds for the aiU’s then extensive network of schools in the arab world, provides a window into the evolution of Sephardic integration, identity and self-representation in the post-World War ii United States. While it was primarily a fundraising group, the Friends also functioned as a

... grande diversité des thèmes qui avaient trait à la culture, à l'histoire et à l'identité juives, les ... était pourtant déraisonnable, aux yeux des certains critiques, d'offrir au grand public des imagessubjectives susceptibles d ... [7] Anne-Marie Thiesse, « Le mouvement littéraire régionaliste ...

In recent years the controversy surrounding "I'affaire du foulard" the barring of Muslim girls from attending public school with headscarves has brought the issue of respect for group difference versus an ideal of Republican universalism to a head in France. For the girls' families and their supporters, the wearing of the scarves is an exercise of religious liberty deserving respect by French society and state. For their critics, by contrast, allowing such a display of religious particularism, which visibly sets Muslim girls off from their non-Muslim schoolmates, is contrary to the principle of a universal, secular public sphere. This debate has largely been understood as emblematic of the issues raised by the wave of immigration from France's former colonies that began in the post-World War II years. As immigrants from the Magreb and Africa changed the face of France, the cultural revolution of the 1960s and 1970s and the cry of "le droit a la difference" challenged the assumption that they should be rapidly and completely assimilated into France at the expense of their own cultural traditions and sense of group identity. In fact, balancing the rights of particular ethnic and religious groups with an understanding of the nation as a universal political entity has been

In the 1930s, Walter Benjamin described Paris as ‘the capital of the nineteenth century’, the hub of cultural transformations precipitated by the rise of industrial capitalism. For good reasons, Jewish historians have followed suit in identifying Paris as the focal point for studies of political, social, cultural, demographic and economic change in France during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Moreover, native French Jewish religious and cultural administrative structures, implemented during Napoleon I's reign and further entrenched by reforms in the Third Republic, are centred in Paris. These conditions have rendered an abundance of source material documenting the rest of the country from the centre, a phenomenon that places even more weight on the capital as a locus for national processes that occur in its image.