Jeffrey Green
Jeffrey Green
Adjunct assistant professor
Department of English and Humanities
greenj@farmingdale.edu
Jeffrey Green is an adjunct assistant professor in the English Department of Farmingdale State College. He has an undergraduate degree in political philosophy, an MA/ABT in Holocaust studies/literature from the University of Texas at Dallas, and an M.A. in Holocaust and Genocide Studies with a concentration in Holocaust literature from Gratz College. He taught in the Program in Writing & Rhetoric at Stony Brook University from 2010 to 2014 and began teaching at FSC in 2015.
Before entering academe and while continuing his graduate studies in Holocaust studies and literature, Green was a staffer in the U.S. House of Representatives and an editor and writer at several global organizations where he specialized in information technology, virtual reality, and issues in technology and culture. He studied hypertext authoring at the New School and medieval intellectual history with Dr. Bede Lackner at The University of Texas-Arlington. Green was assistant to the director of the Center for Translation Studies at The University of Texas at Dallas, senior editor in the UTD College of Engineering, managing editor of two national trade publications, and senior writer/editor for a federal program that insured emergency health care for undocumented aliens.
Green’s research interests include the German writers W. G. Sebald and Grete Weil, post-1945 literature by American and European Jewish writers (especially works by post-war German-Jewish authors). He is also interested in American cultural criticism and the rhetorical analysis of political communications. Green is currently at work on a book about Weil’s novels and short stories as acts of mourning.
Jeffrey Green is married to translator and North African francophone literature scholar Dr. Rita Shabnam Nezami, who teaches in the Stony Brook University Program in Writing & Rhetoric. They live on the North Shore of Long Island.
Jeffrey Green blogs at http://avinor.tumblr.com/.
Supervisors: Dr. Michael Steinlauf
Adjunct assistant professor
Department of English and Humanities
greenj@farmingdale.edu
Jeffrey Green is an adjunct assistant professor in the English Department of Farmingdale State College. He has an undergraduate degree in political philosophy, an MA/ABT in Holocaust studies/literature from the University of Texas at Dallas, and an M.A. in Holocaust and Genocide Studies with a concentration in Holocaust literature from Gratz College. He taught in the Program in Writing & Rhetoric at Stony Brook University from 2010 to 2014 and began teaching at FSC in 2015.
Before entering academe and while continuing his graduate studies in Holocaust studies and literature, Green was a staffer in the U.S. House of Representatives and an editor and writer at several global organizations where he specialized in information technology, virtual reality, and issues in technology and culture. He studied hypertext authoring at the New School and medieval intellectual history with Dr. Bede Lackner at The University of Texas-Arlington. Green was assistant to the director of the Center for Translation Studies at The University of Texas at Dallas, senior editor in the UTD College of Engineering, managing editor of two national trade publications, and senior writer/editor for a federal program that insured emergency health care for undocumented aliens.
Green’s research interests include the German writers W. G. Sebald and Grete Weil, post-1945 literature by American and European Jewish writers (especially works by post-war German-Jewish authors). He is also interested in American cultural criticism and the rhetorical analysis of political communications. Green is currently at work on a book about Weil’s novels and short stories as acts of mourning.
Jeffrey Green is married to translator and North African francophone literature scholar Dr. Rita Shabnam Nezami, who teaches in the Stony Brook University Program in Writing & Rhetoric. They live on the North Shore of Long Island.
Jeffrey Green blogs at http://avinor.tumblr.com/.
Supervisors: Dr. Michael Steinlauf
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Bernstein was spared because, in Huberman’s opinion, he had the sufficiently fine talent and technical mastery that would make of the early Palestine band a world-class symphony. He was right; the Israel Philharmonic is its successor.
The integrity of Huberman’s achievements as a musician, a supporter of Eretz Israel, and as a humanitarian is unimpeachable. As a violinist, he established himself as an artist of unquestioned global stature. He exhausted himself continuously traveling for concerts and recordings, and later by devoting himself to getting German (and other) musicians out of Europe; each had lost his or her orchestral job because they were Jewish. As a rescuer (or saver; rescuer and saver need disambiguation) of some 1,000 Jewish musicians and members of their families from the Nazis and their collaborators, he is deservedly revered.
There appears in some the more hagiographic literature that I have reviewed that Huberman was driven by fear that Jewish musicians faced existential threats unless he acted, that their lives were in immediate danger. Every European Jew’s life became contingent after 1933, but, during the time that Huberman recruited and auditioned instrumentalists, i.e., 1934 and 1935, no one in Europe could have imagined a future mass campaign of extermination; more likely, they speculated, would be “categories of persecution and pogroms.” It was to prevent this suffering that Huberman acted. Hitler’s decision about killing all the Jews did not come until after he made up his mind to invade Russia. It was not until March 1941 that the top echelon of the Chancellery knew that Hitler had made up his mind.
But, arguendo, Huberman’s aspirations for a Palestine orchestra and his desperation to save fine Jewish talents and minds from Nazism’s vulgarities created an intractable ethical dilemma that can only be probed and thought and rethought, and, I would argue, grieved, but not resolved. It is this dilemma – saving the lives of otherwise doomed Jewish musicians on the basis of merit – that I want to begin thinking through in this paper.
Passing is a survival strategy; its tactics vary with the context, but they are danger-fraught. What I hope to show here is that passing meant something more profound than trying to hide whom one is, although that is, of course, the main idea. But pausing at that level of analysis fails to capture the more profound, existential meaning of passing. I want to suggest that more difficult questions must be asked to gain access to the fuller, more harrowing nature of passing.
Did passing not mean the terrifying comprehension that the self as expressed as a physical embodiment was lethal, i.e., that one was one’s own indictment? Was it not true that the embodiment of Jewishness made the Jew’s body and all that made it visible and identifiable its own most likely betrayer? The obvious objection is that all European Jews knew that their crime was Jewishness. But I want to contend that the experience of Jews’ own selves’ lethality was fundamentally different for Jews who opted to leave contexts where there was no question of people’s Jewishness and attempt playing the part of a non-Jew in full awareness that the slightest miscue would doom them.
I will contend, not surprisingly, that there is a constructive, symbiotic relationship between primary and secondary sources in rescue-related research not unlike that in other disciplines. My point of departure is the claim that the secondary literature exists solely to advance accessibility to and understanding of the source text (the primary source).
Weil mourns Europe, the Jewish graveyard. She mourns her husband, Edgar (Waiki), a playwright murdered at Mauthausen, her fraught relationship with Jewish identity, the children thrown violently into the backs of Nazi death trucks in Amsterdam, the German language, her dog, her hijacked country, the Kulturnation and its classical, humanist traditions of intellect and art. She grieves that she was forced to confront her Jewishness by the Third Reich when her life as a fully secular and assimilated Berliner had been lovely. She grieves her old age and incapacitation, ugly streets, and the pain of no longer being able to look forward to a new Gide or Mann that she must read the moment it comes out. She mourns her unstructured days that are shot through with brutal memories that are not just recollections, but the stuff of her life, the ground of her consciousness and identity. “Weil implicitly and explicitly poses questions that explore the difficulties of her own case history. What does it mean for a person to insist on national identity after fleeing that country and being pursued in exile? What do the terms ‘Jew’ and ‘Jewish’ signify to a woman with no belief in the God of the Old Testament and no stake in the success of a post-Holocaust Jewish nation, yet whose husband was murdered because he was Jewish?”
Bernstein was spared because, in Huberman’s opinion, he had the sufficiently fine talent and technical mastery that would make of the early Palestine band a world-class symphony. He was right; the Israel Philharmonic is its successor.
The integrity of Huberman’s achievements as a musician, a supporter of Eretz Israel, and as a humanitarian is unimpeachable. As a violinist, he established himself as an artist of unquestioned global stature. He exhausted himself continuously traveling for concerts and recordings, and later by devoting himself to getting German (and other) musicians out of Europe; each had lost his or her orchestral job because they were Jewish. As a rescuer (or saver; rescuer and saver need disambiguation) of some 1,000 Jewish musicians and members of their families from the Nazis and their collaborators, he is deservedly revered.
There appears in some the more hagiographic literature that I have reviewed that Huberman was driven by fear that Jewish musicians faced existential threats unless he acted, that their lives were in immediate danger. Every European Jew’s life became contingent after 1933, but, during the time that Huberman recruited and auditioned instrumentalists, i.e., 1934 and 1935, no one in Europe could have imagined a future mass campaign of extermination; more likely, they speculated, would be “categories of persecution and pogroms.” It was to prevent this suffering that Huberman acted. Hitler’s decision about killing all the Jews did not come until after he made up his mind to invade Russia. It was not until March 1941 that the top echelon of the Chancellery knew that Hitler had made up his mind.
But, arguendo, Huberman’s aspirations for a Palestine orchestra and his desperation to save fine Jewish talents and minds from Nazism’s vulgarities created an intractable ethical dilemma that can only be probed and thought and rethought, and, I would argue, grieved, but not resolved. It is this dilemma – saving the lives of otherwise doomed Jewish musicians on the basis of merit – that I want to begin thinking through in this paper.
Passing is a survival strategy; its tactics vary with the context, but they are danger-fraught. What I hope to show here is that passing meant something more profound than trying to hide whom one is, although that is, of course, the main idea. But pausing at that level of analysis fails to capture the more profound, existential meaning of passing. I want to suggest that more difficult questions must be asked to gain access to the fuller, more harrowing nature of passing.
Did passing not mean the terrifying comprehension that the self as expressed as a physical embodiment was lethal, i.e., that one was one’s own indictment? Was it not true that the embodiment of Jewishness made the Jew’s body and all that made it visible and identifiable its own most likely betrayer? The obvious objection is that all European Jews knew that their crime was Jewishness. But I want to contend that the experience of Jews’ own selves’ lethality was fundamentally different for Jews who opted to leave contexts where there was no question of people’s Jewishness and attempt playing the part of a non-Jew in full awareness that the slightest miscue would doom them.
I will contend, not surprisingly, that there is a constructive, symbiotic relationship between primary and secondary sources in rescue-related research not unlike that in other disciplines. My point of departure is the claim that the secondary literature exists solely to advance accessibility to and understanding of the source text (the primary source).
Weil mourns Europe, the Jewish graveyard. She mourns her husband, Edgar (Waiki), a playwright murdered at Mauthausen, her fraught relationship with Jewish identity, the children thrown violently into the backs of Nazi death trucks in Amsterdam, the German language, her dog, her hijacked country, the Kulturnation and its classical, humanist traditions of intellect and art. She grieves that she was forced to confront her Jewishness by the Third Reich when her life as a fully secular and assimilated Berliner had been lovely. She grieves her old age and incapacitation, ugly streets, and the pain of no longer being able to look forward to a new Gide or Mann that she must read the moment it comes out. She mourns her unstructured days that are shot through with brutal memories that are not just recollections, but the stuff of her life, the ground of her consciousness and identity. “Weil implicitly and explicitly poses questions that explore the difficulties of her own case history. What does it mean for a person to insist on national identity after fleeing that country and being pursued in exile? What do the terms ‘Jew’ and ‘Jewish’ signify to a woman with no belief in the God of the Old Testament and no stake in the success of a post-Holocaust Jewish nation, yet whose husband was murdered because he was Jewish?”