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Call It English identifies the distinctive voice of Jewish American literature by recovering the multilingual Jewish culture that Jews brought to the United States in their creative encounter with English. In transnational readings of works from the late-nineteenth century to the present by both immigrant and postimmigrant generations, Hana Wirth-Nesher traces the evolution of Yiddish and Hebrew in modern Jewish American prose writing through dialect and accent, cross-cultural translations, and bilingual wordplay.

This paper examines the depiction of Jewish and Christian merchants in the medieval English Host miracle play, the Croxton Play of the Sacrament. This play is a critical illustration of religious racialization, effectively demonstrating the perpetuation of anti-Jewish stereotypes and legitimizing violence. Positioned within a broader scholarly debate, particularly in relation to Augustine’s doctrine of Jewish witness, the play portrays Jews as allegorical figures that validate Christian theological constructs. This paper delves into the representation and linguistic depiction of Jewish characters in the play, emphasizing their systematic dehumanization and instrumentalization in Christian narratives. A significant focus is placed on the coerced conversion of Jewish characters, which forces them into the archetype of the “Wandering Jew”, thereby highlighting motifs of symbolic aggression and unending diaspora. This paper also confronts contemporary scholarly perspectives that view the play as challenging religious boundaries, positing that such interpretations overlook the ingrained racialization and marginalization of Jewish identity during the European Middle Ages. It argues that the play’s transient disruption of power dynamics ultimately reinforces prevailing social hierarchies, thereby solidifying deep-seated anti-Jewish sentiments.

Shelleg talks about the emblems of diasporic returns. In the thick corm of causal, contingent, and incidental memories that animate Yaakov Shabtai's Past Continuous, one finds his older characters reverting to their previous, diasporic spaces. Through a syntactic flux that marries all tenses amid critical, elegiac, and nostalgic torrents, the road from Eastern Europe to Tel Aviv does not withstand the partitions erected by Zionist rhetoric, particularly its repression of Jewish diasporic cultures. Shabtai may have preserved both stereotypical and astereotypical imagery of Eastern European Jews--and all the more while meticulously depicting their physical decay in Israel of the 1970s--yet these earmarks of national Diasporism and their ethnic qualities were suppressed by their children in the name of Hebrew territorial nationalism.

In The Counterlife (1986), Philip Roth turns to postmodern innovation via an intricate web of counternarratives in order to examine the complexity of contemporary Jewishness, alongside its fluid relationship with space, memory, and public and private identity. This essay focuses on the truths residing on the fringes of The Counterlife, dwelling on the liminal spaces created by seemingly unimportant lines and episodes. The analysis is meant to prove that such liminal remarks or actions illustrate the depths of inborn and constructed bias concerning otherness and difference (preponderantly racial), significantly feeding the book's major acknowledged arguments. This essay argues that, in the context of the perpetual Jewish struggle for self-definition and self-understanding across geographical and ideological borders, Roth aims to deconstruct stereotypical representations and to challenge established versions of history by showcasing various overlooked and/or marginal(ized) positions and dilemmas.

The figure of the Daughter of Germany reflects a widespread phenomenon of writing in Israel and the diaspora, not just in Germany and Austria, where Jewish writers began in the 1990s to explore their fraught relations with their adopted, readopted, or abandoned Heimat. In the uneasy encounters with present-day Germans, who may have to deal with their suppressed family and national past, Jewish writers find it impossible to free themselves from a history not of their making. This article discusses what the staging of erotic fantasies says about the grappling with the traumatic past. The fetish of the German woman has to do more with sexual stereotypes in cinema and popular culture than with anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, but it projects social and cultural anxieties, in particular about ethnic and racial difference. The power relations at play here in the imagination of male and female Jewish writers reflect constructions of Jewish sexuality and masculinity. The German woman as an erotic object of love has a deep and complex history in German-Jewish writing and in the Jewish imaginary in general, which cannot be erased. Although newly arrived Israelis tried to think of Berlin in the 2010s as a place like any other, relations between Germans and Jews remain tainted by their entangled histories and the traumatic past.

In recent years, responding to new challenges and rising costs, local Jewish community studies have increasingly moved to eliminate a Random Digit Dial (RDD) component or functional equivalent thereof. Using the Jewish Community Study of New York 2011, this paper contrasts RDD respondents with those appearing on the expanded Federation lists (Fedlist) and Distinctive Jewish Name (DJN) respondents. The analysis demonstrates wide differences separating Fedlist from other respondents. Hence, conducting studies of the Jewish population that omit a significant RDD component are quite often deficient and distorted. They ignore and downplay important population groups. The biases are far from random, but systematic and overlapping, as many features of Jewish marginality are underplayed. Without sufficient caveats, such studies can also become deceptive and destructive. They are deceptive in that they feed and reinforce understandable yet misleading stereotypes of the Jewish population. All such studies need to be publicized with huge warning labels prominently displayed on the press releases and report. They are destructive in that they would seduce leadership into feeling self-satisfied in seeing a Jewish population that is relatively well-connected Jewishly and not all that needy socially and economically. Ideally, all Jewish community studies should contain a Random Digit Dialing component so as to allow \"unknown\" Jews to be known and visible. In the event that such is not the case, researchers should strongly and repeatedly reinforce the message that their results and analyses pertain only to those Jews most connected and most visible to the organized Jewish community.

The current study examines the extent and correlates of ignorance regarding the size of the American Jewish population. Using the 2000 General Social Survey, I examine how large the non-Jewish respondents perceive the Jewish population to be in both the country as a whole and in their local community. Individuals of all backgrounds are found to express high levels of Jewish population innumeracy, with the vast majority overestimating. I then attempt to understand variation in estimates using hypotheses based on heuristic decision-making. Larger size estimates at the country level are most often associated with media exposure, gender, and education. At the community level, larger estimates are related most strongly to interpersonal contact with Jews. Surprisingly, size estimates are largely unrelated to stereotypes or negative attitudes toward Jews. This unique finding suggests that, contrary to the existing literature, inflated perceptions are not uniformly problematic for intergroup relations. Rather, innumeracy regarding US Jews appears to be largely innocuous and without basis in anti-Semitism.

The popular, stereotype perception of Russian anti-Semitism is marred by a number of misconceptions. It is generally believed that it originated among the peasants, partly as a result of religious bigotry and partly as a reaction against an alleged Jewish exploitation. In actual fact, pogroms almost invariably started in towns and cities, and the main instigators were artisans and merchants and other people who plied the same trade as the Jews, later also professionals such as lawyers. Hence, economic competition rather than exploitation was the most important driving force. This is reflected in the writings of Russian anti-Semites and is also how most contemporary Jews understood their causes behind their ordeals. The Jews could be targeted for persecution because they were a diaspora group and did not enjoy the same protection as the indigenous population. Thus, even though the tsarist regime can be cleared of any suspicion that they deliberately whipped up the pogroms, they contributed to them by failing to give the Jews the same rights as other subjects of the empire.

In the decades before the First World War (1880-1914), as thousands of Jews from Russia and Poland crowded into London’s East End, journalists, politicians, and anti-immigrant agitators introduced a vocabulary blending racial identity and criminality. ‘Jewish criminality’, embodied in the Jewish prostitute and trafficker, represented a ‘category in the making’. Looking back at this period not only affords an understanding of an early episode of the racialisation of crime, but insight into the response of a racialised population. The London-based Jewish Association for the Protection of Girls and Women (JAPGW), founded in 1885 by members of Anglo-Jewry’s leading families, carried out an extensive anti-trafficking campaign. To understand why they chose to promote public awareness of Jewish involvement in the international sex trade despite the uses to which their efforts would be put by anti-Semites, it is necessary to see their outlook against the historical period in which they lived. The JAPGW countered the racialisation of crime using a conceptual vocabulary common to the era; their outlook reflected ethno-religious commitment, Victorian social convention, and faith in social science knowledge.

The essay looks at three spheres in which ideological bias and political activism work to delegitimize the State of Israel by maligning Israel and Zionism in mainstream British public discourse. Postcolonial theory is one weight against any objective treatment of the Jewish state. The demonization of Israel in the press draws on conspiracy theories and stereotypes familiar from anti-Semitic tropes. British Jews are fairly supportive of Israel, though divided on solutions to the Arab-Israel conflict, however a small group of anti-Zionist Jews assert their moral stance \"as Jews\" by defaming Israel's allegedly criminal activities. The analysis of public discourse in Britain in the first decade of the twenty-first century raises disturbing questions about the complex relationship between the anti-Israel campaign and latent anti-Semitism on the left and the right, and draws attention to the local context of race relations as well as the global Jihad against Israel and the West.