Yosef Gorny - Böcker

Yosef Gorny examines the attitudes of Jewish settlers and Zionist intellectual and political leaders towards the Arab population in the period when Jewish settlement began in Palestine, and shows that the ideological principles of Zionism were a decisive influence throughout the world.

The first comparative study of two major Jewish labor movements.Converging Alternatives provides the first comparative study of the national ideology of two rival Jewish socialist movements: the Bund party and the Zionist Labor movement in Eretz-Israel (Palestine). Yosef Gorny traces the concept of the Jewish nation from the foundation of the Bund and the first Zionist Congress in 1897 until the remains of the Bund decided to join the Jewish local and world institutions in 1985. The following events from those years are covered: the Soviet Revolution, the Balfour declaration, the founding of the Polish Republic, the British Mandate on Palestine, the rise of the Nazi party in Germany, the Jewish-Arab conflict, the Holocaust, and the gradual disappearance of the two movements from the historical stage. This innovative approach to the Bund and Zionist movements helps explain the connection between nationalism and multiculturalism in the Jewish modern tradition.

The first comparative study of two major Jewish labor movements.Converging Alternatives provides the first comparative study of the national ideology of two rival Jewish socialist movements: the Bund party and the Zionist Labor movement in Eretz-Israel (Palestine). Yosef Gorny traces the concept of the Jewish nation from the foundation of the Bund and the first Zionist Congress in 1897 until the remains of the Bund decided to join the Jewish local and world institutions in 1985. The following events from those years are covered: the Soviet Revolution, the Balfour declaration, the founding of the Polish Republic, the British Mandate on Palestine, the rise of the Nazi party in Germany, the Jewish-Arab conflict, the Holocaust, and the gradual disappearance of the two movements from the historical stage. This innovative approach to the Bund and Zionist movements helps explain the connection between nationalism and multiculturalism in the Jewish modern tradition.

During the past two generations, Jewish public thought and discourse has differed dramatically from that of the era between the Emancipation and the Second World War. The chasm of the Holocaust and the watershed establishment of a Jewish state has radically changed the Jewish intellectual landscape. With their two largest concentrations in Israel and the United States, the Jews are no longer a European nation. Above all, the Jews, for the first time since they went into exile, have become free individuals, with the right to choose between the land of their birth and their ancestral homeland in Israel. Are the Jews then a religious community dispersed among other nations? A community of equal citizens of various countries with their own cultural and historical identity? Or are the Jewish people a nation with its own homeland? However one answers this question, the political, socio-economic and cultural ramifications are enormous.Moreover, since world Jewry is now crisscrossed by divisions between religious and secular Jews, between groups of different cultural backgrounds, and between those living in a sovereign Jewish state and those who are citizens of other countries, it is the link between Israel and the Diaspora which confers a collective identity on this multiform entity. Yosef Gorny's central theme is Jewish public thought concerning the identity and essence of the Jewish people from the Holocaust and the establishment of the State of Israel up to the present day. Chapters address such topics as The Zionist Movement in Search of a National Role, The Zionist Movement in Quest of its Ideological Essence, The Intellectuals in Search of a Jewish Identity, The Diminishing Status of Israel as a Jewish State, Revolutionary RadicalismThe Left-Wing Jewish Student Movement, 1967-1973, Neo-Conservative Radicalism, The Alternative Zionism of Gush-Emunim, The Conservative Liberalism, and In Defense of Perpetual Zionist Revolt. Reflecting the collective thinking of Jewish intellectuals, this is a volume of interest to anyone concerned with issues of Jewish identity.

This book represents comprehensive research into the world's Jewish press during the Second World War and explores its stance in the face of annihilation of the Jewish people by the Nazi regime in Europe. The research is based on the major Jewish newspapers that were published in four countries - Palestine, Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union - and in three languages - Hebrew, Yiddish and English. The Jewish press frequently described the situation of the Jewish people in occupied countries. It urged the Jewish leaders and institutions to act in rescue of their brethren. It protested vigorously against the refusal of the democratic leadership to recognize that the Jewish plight was unique because of the Nazi intention to annihilate Jews as a people. Yosef Gorny argues that the Jewish press was the persistent open national voice fighting on behalf of the Jewish people suffering and perishing under Nazi occupation.

This book represents comprehensive research into the world's Jewish press during the Second World War and explores its stance in the face of annihilation of the Jewish people by the Nazi regime in Europe. The research is based on the major Jewish newspapers that were published in four countries - Palestine, Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union - and in three languages - Hebrew, Yiddish and English. The Jewish press frequently described the situation of the Jewish people in occupied countries. It urged the Jewish leaders and institutions to act in rescue of their brethren. It protested vigorously against the refusal of the democratic leadership to recognize that the Jewish plight was unique because of the Nazi intention to annihilate Jews as a people. Yosef Gorny argues that the Jewish press was the persistent open national voice fighting on behalf of the Jewish people suffering and perishing under Nazi occupation.

The central issue in this book is the federal ideas in the Zionist political thought during seventy years, from the early 1920s to the late 1990s. These ideas and plans had a double meaning and purpose: to find a suitable political bi-national structure for the Jews and Arabs in Palestine, which will enable both of them to fulfill their national goals, and to enable the Jewish people in the world to make Palestine their homeland by free immigration. The Zionist federative ideas were carried by different and even rival political parties and leaders, ranging from right-wing nationalists to Social-Democrats and liberal humanists. But despite this diversity all of them were based on the liberal and democratic political tradition in Europe before World War I. These ideas were renewed in the State of Israel at the end of the last century.

This volume addresses key conceptual issues and case studies dealing with contemporary Jewish identities amidst globalization processes, with special emphasis on Latin American socio-political, communal, and cultural milieu.The book brings together a variety of disciplinary and theoretical approaches that range from political science to sociology and from art and literature to demography in order to offer the reader a multidimensional and multifocal analysis of the diverse constitutional elements of the Jewish experience. Using as its point of departure the wide horizon of historical trajectories and current challenges, the articles analyze the transnational, regional and local processes that inform the different Jewish Diasporas and Israel. Simultaneously, its content provides a snapshot of the current state of research on collective identity building processes and a lively analysis of the challenges posed by cultural diversity and primordial and civic belongings in the framework of political transitions, as well as new and old forms of expressing through cultural creativity individual and collective identities.

This is a book about Klal Yisrael, the worldwide commonwealth of the Jewish people. The main question asked, is whether one can still speak of 'one' Jewish people, encompassing all Jews in the world.The Jewish collective identity stands at new crossroads of multicultural ideologies and transnational diasporism. Jewry is experiencing an existential problem in today's changing society, shifting between convergence and unity on the one hand and divergence and division on the other hand. Quo vadis, O Jewish people? Rather than fully answering this question, researchers from Israel, the United States, Brazil, Argentina, Ukraine, Russia, France and Belgium try to open up the discussion in this book.

Are Jews today still the carriers of a single and identical collective identity and do they still constitute a single people? This two-fold question arises when one compares a Hassidi Habad from Brooklyn, a Jewish professor at a secular university in Brussels, a traditional Yemeni Jew still living in Sana’a, a Galilee kibbutznik, or a Russian Jew in Novossibirsk. Is there still today a significant relationship between these individuals who all subscribe to Judaism? The analysis shows that the Jewish identity is multiple and can be explained by considering all variants as “surface structures” of the three universal “deep structures” central to the notion of collective identity, namely, collective commitment, perceptions of the collective’s singularity, and positioning vis-à-vis “others.”