Michael Berkowitz – författare

It has long been known that Hollywood was actively involved in shaping US public opinion during World War II. Less well documented are the ways in which Washington sought to work behind the scenes, subtly obliterating the boundaries between “studio” and “government” films. Michael Berkowitz studies the contributions of humorist and best-selling author Leo Rosten (The Joys of Yiddish, The Education of H*Y*M*A*N* K*A*P*L*A*N) and writer, producer, and screenwriter Budd Schulberg (On the Waterfront, A Face in the Crowd) in order to examine the elusive story of Jewish Hollywood’s role in World War II. Hollywood’s Unofficial Film Corps shows that Rosten, Schulberg, and others—including Garson Kanin, George Cukor, Stanley Kramer, and Jules Buck—created movies that were both entertaining and politically expeditious for US war aims. At the same time, in an effort to unify the American public, they avoided focusing on the fate of European Jews, even while addressing racism and antisemitism in the United States. Jewish themes were often downplayed, and Jewish directors, writers, and other contributors frequently went uncredited. As Berkowitz writes, “Rosten’s cohort changed feature films forever.” Thanks to his research, we now have a better understanding of how and why.

"The Crime of My Very Existence" investigates a rarely considered yet critical dimension of anti-Semitism that was instrumental in the conception and perpetration of the Holocaust: the association of Jews with criminality. Drawing from a rich body of documentary evidence, including memoirs and little-studied photographs, Michael Berkowitz traces the myths and realities pertinent to the discourse on "Jewish criminality" from the eighteenth century through the Weimar Republic, into the complex Nazi assault on the Jews, and extending into postwar Europe.

This 1996 study of the Zionist movement in Germany, Britain, and the United States recognizes 'Western Zionism' as a distinctive force. From the First World War until the rise of Hitler, the Zionist movement encouraged Jews to celebrate aspects of a reborn Jewish nationality and sovereignty in Palestine, while at the same time acknowledging that their members would mostly 'stay put' and strive toward acculturation in their current homelands. The growth of a Zionist consciousness among Western Jews is juxtaposed with the problematic nurturing of the movement's institutions, as Zionism was consumed increasingly by fundraising. In the 1930s, Zionist images assumed a progressively greater share of secular Jewish identity, and Zionism became normalized in the social landscape of Western Jewry, but the organization faltered in translating its popularity into a means of 'saving the Jews' and 'building up' the national home in Palestine.

This 1996 study of the Zionist movement in Germany, Britain, and the United States recognizes 'Western Zionism' as a distinctive force. From the First World War until the rise of Hitler, the Zionist movement encouraged Jews to celebrate aspects of a reborn Jewish nationality and sovereignty in Palestine, while at the same time acknowledging that their members would mostly 'stay put' and strive toward acculturation in their current homelands. The growth of a Zionist consciousness among Western Jews is juxtaposed with the problematic nurturing of the movement's institutions, as Zionism was consumed increasingly by fundraising. In the 1930s, Zionist images assumed a progressively greater share of secular Jewish identity, and Zionism became normalized in the social landscape of Western Jewry, but the organization faltered in translating its popularity into a means of 'saving the Jews' and 'building up' the national home in Palestine.

Focusing on the cultural invention of Zionism, the author of this study explores how and why the Jewish nationalist movement was embraced by assimilated Jews of Westerm Europe before World War I. He pays particular attention to the symbolism, artistic representations and mythology which attracted European Jews to Zionism, which co-existed equally with the nationalisms of their home countries. The book was originally published in 1993.

This book collects groundbreaking research on displaced persons (DPs) in Europe in the period after World War II and before the establishment of Israel. By the spring of 1947, less than two years after Nazi Germany's defeat, some 250,000 Jewish refugees remained in the displaced persons camps of Germany, Italy, and Austria. Yet many Jews did not know whether to return to their home countries or move on to someplace else. As a result, these stateless displaced persons (DPs) created a unique space for political, cultural, and social rebirth that was tempered by the complications of overcoming recent trauma. In ""We Are Here,"" editors Avinoam J. Patt and Michael Berkowitz present current research on DPs between the end of the war and the creation of the State of Israel in order to present a more complete and nuanced picture of the DP experience, challenging many earlier assumptions about this group. Contributors to this volume analyze art, music, and literature of the DPs, as well as historical records of specific DP communities to explore the first reactions of survivors to liberation and their understanding of place in the context of postwar Germany and in Europe more generally. A number of the contributions in this volume challenge prior interpretations of Jewish DPs and Holocaust survivors, including the supposedly unified background of the DP population, the notion of a general reluctance to confront the past, the idea of Zionism as an inevitable success after the war, and the suggestion that Jews, despite their presence in Germany, strenuously avoided contact with Germans. Far from constituting a monolithic whole, then, ""We Are Here"" demonstrates that the DPs were composed of diverse groups with disparate wartime experiences. Responding to burgeoning scholarship on DPs and related issues, ""We Are Here"" sifts through the copious records DPs left behind to shed light on the many facets of a vibrant DP society. Scholars of the Holocaust and all readers concerned with the Jewish experience immediately after World War II will be grateful for this volume.

From horned devils to greedy money lenders, images have been used as weapons against Jews for thousands of years. Even photojournalist social reformers of the early twentieth century reinforced derogatory stereotypes of Jews as wretched, immoral, and dirty. Little attention has focused, however, on the ways in which Jews themselves have attempted to counteract these views and to construct their own ethnic and political identities. In The Jewish Self-Image in the West, Michael Berkowitz examines dozens of visual renderings from the fin-de-siecle to the beginning of the Second World War to argue that Jews have exercised some control over representations of their own national communities and aspirations. In the decades before the Holocaust, organized segments of Jewry enthusiastically appropriated modern media in order to exert a greater influence over their public images. Presenting photographs and graphic images by Jews as attempts to disrupt or undermine prevailing perceptions, Berkowitz reconstructs the development of the Jewish self-image in the West over a crucial half-century.

From the 1850s to the 1950s, photography was one of the most open avenues for Jews in Britain to make a living, as well as to contribute to mainstream culture. If one’s picture was snapped for a price in Britain, the person behind the lens was more than likely born a Jew. Through the 1970s, Jews were prime movers behind nearly all things photographic in Britain, including photojournalism, portrait studios, collecting, applications of photography to the fine arts, and the emergence of photography criticism and history as distinct fields. Yet despite Jews having played such remarkable roles, far out of proportion to their number and in all facets of photography, little attention has been paid to ethnic-religious difference in studies of British photography.Richly illustrated with both color and black-and-white images, Jews and Photography in Britain is the first-ever historical investigation of this topic, ranging from the mid-nineteenth century to Queen Elizabeth’s controversial photo shoot with Annie Leibovitz in 2007. Michael Berkowitz explores subjects such as the attempts of H. W. Barnett to unsettle portrait conventions, the spectacular photo editing of Stefan Lorant, the influence of Erich Salomon on Fleet Street, the inception of the “Gernsheim Corpus” (a seminal resource for art historical research) conceived by Walter and Gertrud Gernsheim, the innovative photography practices at London’s Warburg Institute under Fritz Saxl, and the pioneering efforts at collecting and publishing about photography as history and art by Helmut and Alison Gernsheim.

Forging Modern Jewish Identities illuminates facets of modern Jewish identity through engagement with diverse historical moments, political and social currents and literature as an aspect of popular culture. This volume is distinctive, and it can be enjoyed by the general reader as well as having potential as a teaching tool, as the experience of Jewry in the United States, Britain, Central and Western Europe, Russia and the Soviet Union is addressed by experts in each of these fields. Its introduction places the volume within the burgeoning genre of anthologies that constitutes a significant - but little noticed - development in Jewish and ethnic-national historiography. Cutting across disciplinary and national boundaries, the articles highlight Jewry's encounter with modernity from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. While acknowledging the power of acculturation, each of the contributions details how Jews transformed themselves, individually and communally, while reshaping notions of Jewish community and what it means to be a Jew in the modern world.