2018-05-28
Eva Schürmann
Kant taught us to think of the faculty of imagination as an ingredient of perception. Vision, thus, is not only opened to the present but also to the absent, for instance through expectations or memories. Our ways of seeing are literally formed by normative presumptions and culturally predetermined ideas. This makes visual perception a sort of an image-making activity in the context of a practice. It is the practice that regulates what can be perceived in which way or what is overlooked. As an activity it is neither solely a pure construction of individual viewpoints, nor a pure representation of the physically present world. Rather, it is the result of the reciprocal tension between the perceiver and the perceived.
2018-05-28
Grace Whistler
This article addresses Camus’s response to Christianity and the problem of suffering in the context of the early twentieth century. Owing to his association with the existentialist movement, it is often assumed that Camus, like many other French intellectuals of the period, rejected Christianity altogether. For this reason, his sympathy with Christian thought is overlooked, and it seems altogether bizarre that some theologians even claimed Camus to be a convert. Among these wildly conflicting claims, Camus’s philosophical response to Christianity has become somewhat muddied; in this article I attempt to rectify this. I argue that Camus’s entire philosophy is underpinned by his response to Christianity, and that he wanted to re-establish the position of morality in the face of the problem of suffering. I thus demonstrate how his writings manifest this struggle to achieve this goal, in what I refer to as Camus’s ‘poetics of secular faith’. Camus once claimed, ‘I do not believe in God and I am not an atheist’. This article aims to elucidate just what is meant by a statement like this, as well as to catalogue and analyse Camus’s innovative attempts at reconciling spirituality and suffering through philosophical literature.
2017-12-01
Jennifer Nyström
Efter femtio framgångsrika år i kölvattnet av Nostra Aetate (nr 4), publicerade The Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews (Kommissionen för religiösa relationer med judar) ett nytt dokument om judisk–kristna relationer. Denna artikel syftar till att presentera detta dokument med titeln ”The Gifts and the Calling of God are Irrevocable” (Rom 11:29): A Reflection on Theological Questions Pertaining to Catholic–Jewish Relations on the Occasion of the 50th Anniversary of Nostra Aetate (No. 4)” (”Gud tar inte tillbaka sina gåvor och sin kallelse (Rom 11:29)”). Som undertiteln antyder önskar kommissionen att detta skall vara en reflektion över teologiska frågor som är relevanta för en judisk–katolsk dialog med särskild hänsyn till förbund, frälsning och mission. Jag diskuterar min läsning av dokumentet och de frågor som uppstår vid läsning av denna långa och delvis svårgenomträngliga text. Det teologiska initiativ som dokumentet utgör är lovvärt, men det kvarstår problem, vilka de som är aktiva i dialogen även fortsättningsvis måste ta ställning till.
2017-12-01
Tanja Schult
I föregående artikel (publicerad i Nordisk judaistik 27(2)) visades hur minnet av Förintelsen gavs tidigt uttryck för i form av minnesstenar och monument, även i Sverige. Men trots dessa verk fanns det fortfarande ett behov inom den judiska minoriteten efter fler minnesmonument och en växande önskan att också majoritetsbefolkningen skulle minnas Förintelsen. Om detta kan ni läsa här, i del 2. Sammantaget speglar de olika monumenten ett skiftande, men ihållande behov hos i Sverige bosatta överlevande och deras barn som kommit hit i slutet av eller efter kriget och blivit en del av det svenska samhället, om än inte alltid av en judisk församling. De ville ha en plats att sörja och de ville också att deras lidande skulle erkännas som ett identitetsskapande element inom den grupp de var en del av och i det samhälle de levde i. De olika Förintelsemonumenten illustrerar hur minoritets- och majoritetssamhällets minne långsamt närmar sig varandra. Inte minst på grund av de överlevandes engagemang har Förintelsen varit en konstant referenspunkt i det judiska minoritetssamhället. Så småningom har folkmordet också i majoritetssamhället blivit en viktig referenspunkt, som så sent som på 1990-talet, inte minst av institutioner som Forum för levande historia, tagits som utgångspunkt för att värna om demokrati och förmedla vikten av mänskliga rättigheter.
2017-06-03
Claudia Benthien
Thomas Lehr’s novella Frühling ( Spring , 2001) presents the last seconds of the fifty-year-old protagonist’s life – between the moment he shoots himself and the advent of his death. As an adolescent he realised he was the child of a perpetrator father who conducted human experiments on inmates as a Nazi concentration camp doctor. Written in an extreme variant of autonomous inner monologue, the novella interlaces perceptions and memories without transition. The textual structure dissects these incidents, as the syntax is often destroyed by punctuation marks and irregular orthography. At one point, the first-person narrator chooses the formula ‘lightning flashes of my burning memory’, which aptly describes Lehr’s poetic technique, reminiscent of traumatic flashback. This article argues that the protagonist undergoes residual experiences of dissociation as a result of his insurmountable entanglement in the guilt of the father. Thus, Frühling is a radical and disturbing literary treatment of trauma.
2017-06-03
Diana Isidora Popescu
This article addresses the performative dimension of the post-1989 Polish memorial culture of the Holocaust, characterised by a collaborative and audience-participatory model of remembering the Jewish victims. In this model participants are invited to become creators and owners of public memory, rather than silent observers or witnesses to commemorations performed by others. The article offers a critical and theoretical understanding of performativity in Holocaust commemoration through the examples of educational memorial actions Listy do Henia (‘Letters to Henio’) and Kroniki sejneńskie (‘The Sejny Chronicles’) led by the Polish grassroots institutions Ośrodek Brama Grodzka (‘Grodzka Gate-NN Theatre Centre’) in Lublin and Ośrodek Pogranicze (‘Borderland Foundation’) in Sejny. Drawing mainly on Polish perspectives on memory, the article examines the aesthetic and ethical value of these actions. It further probes how a performative model of engagement can serve to expose the complex past of Polish–Jewish relations, to bring the historical past vividly into current consciousness, and to facilitate a sense of belonging to a moral community of memory among younger generations of Poles.
2017-06-03
Miriam Volmert
The article discusses the commemorative concept of Gunter Demnig’s ongoing art project Stolpersteine , which is considered one of the world’s largest decentralised Holocaust memorials . Stolpersteine are small, cobblestone-size memorial stones in urban spaces which are dedicated to individual victims of Nazism; it is the project’s aim to install the stones in the pavement in front of an individual’s last-known place of residence. The article aims to analyse the commemorative facets of the project’s spatial dimension in relation to the concept of the ‘residential’ . The value of dwelling, presented in Demnig’s project as a common ground for the commemoration of all victims as individual citizens, forms a predominant component in public reception. It contributes to a synthesising perception of each stone as being part of a vast commemorative landscape. This landscape, however, is semantically marked by an immanent concept of border, which suggests a polarising separation between included civil spaces and excluded heterotopias. By deviating from the project’s general principles of placement and inscription, certain individual stones render visible this implicit borderline, thereby also critically reflecting on concepts of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’.
2017-06-02
Göran Rosenberg
'Memory, shame and dignity' is a presentation given by the Swedish journalist and author Göran Rosenberg at the Centre for the Study of Jewish Thought in Modern Culture, Copenhagen, 5 May 2015.
2016-12-04
Denisa Nestakova, Eduard Nižňanský
This article describes a largely unknown Swedish effort to intervene in deportations of Jews of Slovakia between 1942 and 1944. Swedish officials and religious leaders used their diplomatic correspondence with the Slovak government to extract some Jewish individuals and later on the whole Jewish community of Slovakia from deportations by their government and eventually by German officials. Despite the efforts of the Swedish Royal Consulate in Bratislava, the Swedish archbishop, Erling Eidem, and the Slovak consul, Bohumil Pissko, in Stockholm, and despite the acts taken by some Slovak ministries, the Slovak officials, including the president of the Slovak Republic, Jozef Tiso, revoked further negotiations in the autumn of 1944. However, the negotiations between Slovakia and Sweden created a scope for actions to protect some Jewish individuals which were doomed to failure because of the political situation. Nevertheless, this plan and the previous diplomatic interventions are significant for a description of the almost unknown Swedish and Slovak efforts to save the Jews of Slovakia. Repeated Swedish offers to take in Jewish individuals and later the whole community could well have prepared the way for larger rescues. These never occurred, given the Slovak interest in deporting their own Jewish citizens and later the German occupation of Slovakia.
2016-12-04
Ruth Illman, Karin Hedner Zetterholm
Ledare för nummer 27/2 av Nordisk judaistik. Editorial for issue 27/2 of Scandinavian Jewish Studies
2016-06-26
Morten Thing
I Danmark er der de sidste femten år udkommet en hel del bøger om jødernes historie, ikke mindst om deres trængsler. Morten Thing gennemgår i denne oversigtsartikel de vigtigste indenfor forskning og formidling. * * *Books on Jewish history in Denmark the last 15 years • The most spectacular work about Jewish culture is without doubt Martin Schwarz Lausten’s six-volume work about the attitude of the Danish Lutheran church towards the Jews and Judaism. It is a work of great precision and with the use of many new sources. Although it is a work on church-history it has a lot to say on Jewish reactions to the church and the state. The volumes are: Kirke og synagoge,De fromme og jøderne, Oplysning i kirke og synagoge, Frie jøder?, Folkekirken og jøderne og Jødesympati og jødehad i folkekirken. Antisemitism has also been in focus and Sofie Lene Baks work on the history of antisemitism in Denmark is probably the most central: Dansk antisemitisme 1930–45. The rescue of the Danish Jews in WWII is without doubt the most researched topic in Danish Jewish history. Many new works have been published. Sofie Lene Baks book on what happened to the Jews when they came back from Sweden I 1945, Da krigen var forbi. It turned out that the municipality of Copenhagen had taken care of many flats and possessions. The history of the Jewish minority has been more in focus than ever. Many new books have been published. Arthur Arnheim’s Truet minoritet søger beskyttelse is the biggest book on the history from seventeenth century until today.
1974-12-31
The editors
The Scandinavian Society for Jewish Studies, founded 1973, hereby presents the first issue of a quartetly, Nordisk Judaistik / Scandinavian Jewish Studies. Jewish studies is understood to be knowledge and research relating to the Jewish people, its history, religion, culture and social conditions.