Jewish Political Studies Review 22:3-4 (Fall 2010)
This issue opens with an essay by Laurence Weinbaum about the forgotten Polish Jewish historian Ruben Feldschu. Only fragments of his diary written in the Warsaw Ghetto, which contains more than eight hundred pages of entries, have been deciphered and published. Feldschu’s writings have never found a place in the mainstream historiography of the Holocaust.
Elisabeth Kuebler analyzes the emergence of Holocaust remembrance at the European level. She points out that the Council of Europe places significant emphasis on the perspectives of the victims and the rescuers. Its educational effort targets the eradication of ideologies that led to the crimes against humanity committed by Germans, Austrians, and their European collaborators. However, perpetrators are barely named and shamed in the respective Council of Europe publications. The Council’s fight against anti-Semitism is institutionally separated from its Holocaust remembrance and education portfolio.
Mladenka Ivanković discusses the postwar use of the former death camp Sajmište in Belgrade. In recent years the key feature of the area has become a nightclub called Posejdon. There are no clear plans for the future of the location.
Leslie Wagner reviews the pro-Israeli academic watch organizations. The continuing growth of anti-Israeli activity on campus since 2002 has given them much to do. Wagner considers that in this environment, watching and monitoring may no longer be enough and a more explicit campaigning role may be necessary.
Lesley Klaff discusses whether the anti-Zionist expression on UK campuses should be considered free speech or hate speech. She notes that the last few years have witnessed an explosion of anti-Zionist rhetoric on university campuses across the United Kingdom. The hostile environment for Jewish students has jeopardized their educational opportunities. University codes of conduct and UK law recognize that an important university goal is the promotion of equality of opportunity for minority students and their protection from discrimination, including harassment. Given the growing consensus that anti-Zionism is in fact anti-Semitism in a new guise, this goal is flouted with respect to Jewish students every time that anti-Zionist expression takes place on a university campus.
Among the seventeen books reviewed in this edition one can find that of Judge Aharon Barak who makes a case for the place of the court in democratic society as he sees it. Melanie Phillips laments the demise of rational thought in the West. Norman Podhoretz tries to explain the attraction of the Democratic Party for American Jews, and Ambassador Yosef Govrin deciphers and explains what Stalin and Hitler hoped to gain from their mutual cooperation.
