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"Morris-Reich, Amos"
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Photography and imagination
\"As the prototypical exemplar of modern visual technology, photography was once viewed as a way to enable vision to bypass imagination, producing more reliable representations of reality. But as an achievement of technological modernity, photography can also be seen as a way to realize a creation of the imagination more vividly than can painting or drawing. Photography and Imagination investigates, from diverse points of view focusing on both theory and practice, the relation between these two terms. The book explores their effect on photography's capacity, through various forms and modalities of imaginative investments and displacements, to affect even reality itself\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Antisemitism as a Semiotic Problem: The Prehistory of the Definitions of Antisemitism
In an attempt to locate the roots of the curious idea that defining antisemitism can be a means of fighting it, this article unearths the post-1945 process by which antisemitism has evolved into a semiotic problem. Historically, this article locates the prehistory of the definitions in a broad but somewhat elusive change in post-1945 European culture and the emergence of ambiguous, but potentially negative, statements about Jews, without which the definitions cannot be understood. Conceptually, this discussion is intended to explain why the issue now takes the form of a semiotic problem. The first part of the article attempts to elaborate an Israeli perspective on antisemitism. The second part reconstructs Shulamit Volkov's influential conceptualization of antisemitism in Wilhelmine Germany as \"a cultural code\" in order to show that it is incapable of addressing the post-1945 situation. The concluding part of this article attempts to articulate a way out of the semiotic morass by distinguishing between ambiguity and ambivalence.
Journal Article
Return to Jewish History
In memory of my PhD student Yinon Fleischman, killed on the border with Lebanon on October 29, 2023, survived by a wife and a baby. From the eulogies that were given for Yinon at his graveside, perhaps the most moving one concerning Yinon as a scholar was given by one of his brothers, who described how every time he encountered him, Yinon was carrying some esoteric book that he was in the middle of reading. His brother said that he could not possibly understand what or why Yinon was reading. This is a beautiful refection on the breadth and depth of Yinons intellectual mind. His death is a loss to the world and a loss to the world of knowledge.
Journal Article
The Stranger as a Threshold Figure
Given its subject and Georg Simmel's background, one would think that Simmel's excursus \"The Stranger\" (1908) and Jewish history could easily be brought into sustained conversation. Widely thought to be the most original social thinker of the turn of the twentieth century in Germany, Simmel was of Jewish descent. In \"The Stranger,\" he refers to European Jews as the \"classic example\" of this social type. The excursus became a landmark in twentieth-century social theory and sociology. In practice, however, \"The Stranger\" and Jewish history have developed along two separate intellectual trajectories, and attempts to bring them together are frequently met by indifference or resistance by Jewish historians and Simmel scholars alike. While the former have no need for Simmel's short and indirect account to confirm the association between Jews and strangers, anyone minimally versed in Simmel's writings recognizes the impervious border between the social type of the stranger and actual Jews. Any suggestion to the contrary betrays an elementary misunderstanding of Simmel's perspective. Even when contextually expected or required--perhaps due to what each side takes as implied--this barrier remains impenetrable.
Journal Article
Project, Method, and the Racial Characteristics of Jews: A Comparison of Franz Boas and Hans F. K. Günther
This article compares the respective projects, methods, and racial characterization of Jews in the work of Franz Boas (the German Jewish founder of American cultural anthropology), and Hans F. K. Günther (the most prominent theoretician of race in Nazi Germany). Though diametrically opposed in many respects, these men shared the view that Jews were not a race but a people composed of different racial types. Employing the terms \"fixation of belief\" and \"de-fixation of belief,\" I compare their versions of science and their uses of science: I analyze the primacies between their projects, methods, and racial characterization of Jews. Boas deconstructed Jewish racial difference within the limits imposed by his own method; Günther transcended his own racialist method toward an antisemitic metaphysics.
Journal Article
Anthropology, standardization and measurement: Rudolf Martin and anthropometric photography
Recent scholarship on the history of German anthropology has tended to describe its trajectory between 1900 and the Nazi period as characterized by a paradigmatic shift from the liberal to the anti-humanistic. This article reconstructs key moments in the history of anthropometric photography between 1900 and 1925, paying particular attention to the role of the influential liberal anthropologist Rudolf Martin (1864–1925) in the standardization of anthropological method and technique. It is shown that Rudolf Martin's primary significance was social and institutional. The article reconstructs key stages in Martin's writing on and uses of photography and analyses the peculiar form of scientific debate surrounding the development of anthropometric photography, which centred on local and practical questions. Against the political backdrop of German colonialism in Africa and studies of prisoners of war during the First World War, two key tensions in this history surface: between anthropological method and its politicization, and between the international scientific ethos and nationalist impulses. By adopting a practical–epistemic perspective, the article also destabilizes the conventional differentiation between the German liberal and anti-humanist anthropological traditions. Finally, the article suggests that there is a certain historical irony in the fact that the liberal Martin was central in the process that endowed physical anthropology with prestige precisely in the period when major parts of German society increasingly came to view ‘race’ as offering powerful, scientific answers to social and political questions.
Journal Article
Photography in Economies of Demonstration: The Idea of the Jews as a Mixed-Race People
Photographs played an important role in the development of the idea of the Jews as a mixed-race people. This article tracks the trajectory of this idea from the 1880s, when it was first introduced by the liberal Austrian anthropologist and archaeologist Felix von Luschan, through the works of American Jewish physician Maurice Fishberg and German Jewish linguist Sigmund Feist, to its appropriation and inversion by the prominent Nazi theoretician of race Hans F. K. Günther in the 1920s. By tracing the circulation of one photograph, analyzing the roles of photographs in argumentation, comparing their status with other types of empirical sources, and arguing that the key to their analysis is performative, pertaining to the relationships photographs form, I argue for the essential contingency of ideas that in retrospect have been identified as fundamental to antisemitic arguments.
Journal Article
Jews between Volk and Rasse
Focusing on three Central and Eastern European Jewish authors, this chapter aims to provide a central cross section of the scholarly classification of Jews in terms of Volk and Rasse in the final decade of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth. Academic models of human affinity and kinship such as Volk and Rasse are never devoid of a political dimension or entirely separable from cultural and political discourses. This is because the terms, or signifiers, on which they are based derive from and are entwined with the shifting meanings of natural language semantics. The definition of
Book Chapter
Three Paradigms of \The Negative Jew\: Identity from Simmel to Žižek
[...]even when he has Jews speak about themselves, they arc often merely a parody of the antisemitic image.86 The force and consistency of Zizek's concept of identity formation is that it closes the epistemological \"gap\" that Simmel and Sartre left open between the signifier \"Jew\" and actual human objects. [...]Sartre shifts the emphasis away from the Jews' own properties to society in accounting for the persecution of the Jews. [...]the human object designated as Jew is entirely passive. [...]there is nothing mutual in the process of designating the Jew, and language's identity-conferring signifiers are anything but neutral.102 Since the symbolic order is stable, the signifier \"Jew\" (or any other) is not going to disappear, nor is it possible to force a change on language. All three decline to employ a collective let alone biological notion of identity and Jewish identity. [...]in all three cases one observes a correlation between viewing the Jew in collective and positive terms and viewing the Jew in individual and negative terms.
Journal Article
Race, color, identity
Advances in genetics are renewing controversies over inherited characteristics, and the discourse around science and technological innovations has taken on racial overtones, such as attributing inherited physiological traits to certain ethnic groups or using DNA testing to determine biological links with ethnic ancestry. This book contributes to the discussion by opening up previously locked concepts of the relation between the terms color, race, and \"Jews\", and by engaging with globalism, multiculturalism, hybridity, and diaspora. The contributors-leading scholars in anthropology, sociology, history, literature, and cultural studies-discuss how it is not merely a question of whether Jews are acknowledged to be interracial, but how to address academic and social discourses that continue to place Jews and others in a race/color category.
eBook