Articles

As consumer culture permeates politics, the man-in-the street has slipped beyond the control of his creators and taken on a life of his own. According to Alek Popov, this ubiquitous character has performed his role in history and now needs to be removed from circulation.

I keep reading in newspapers and on the Internet that the worst thing you can call someone is “racist”. Lately it has become very popular to say that you can’t say anything anymore without being labelled racist – and that is dangerous for “the real racism”.

Often, the memory of one nation contradicts that of another. If these disparities are recognized and understood, the historical awareness of each society is enriched. If not, they can be exploited for political ends. Eurozine republishes a call by the “The International Memorial Society” for the creation of a platform upon which such a dialogue can be conducted.

In Ukraine, once a centre of eastern European Jewish life, the Jewish population and its culture all but perished during the Holocaust. During the Soviet period, that culture slipped yet further into oblivion. Today, Ukraine’s official politics of remembrance omits the country’s Jewish heritage, leaving it to private organisations to try to embed Jewish culture and history into national consciousness.

In public perception, eastern European Jewish thought is shrouded in mysticism. The intellectuals Martin Buber, Joshua Heschel, and Emmanuel Levinas shared the eastern European Jewish experience, an education in existential philosophy in Germany, and the ordeal of witnessing the mass murder of Europe’s Jews. They share a universalistic ethic aimed at promoting direct human responsibility. Above all, it is Levinas to whom we owe an appreciation of what one could call “eastern European Jewry”.

Before WWII, over 3 million Jews lived in Poland. Almost all of them were killed during the Shoah. The Communist regime forbade commemoration of Jews as a special group of victims. That has changed since 1990, but remembrance of Jews still polarises Polish society. That is shown by the debate over Jedwabne and the post-war pogroms. There exists a competition of victims between Jews and Poles. A mythological and symbolic figure of “the Jew” is still at work in Polish memory. Moreover, a “virtual Jewry” has come into being at former sites of Jewish life.

Important centres of eastern European Jewish life used to be lo-cated on the territory of modern Lithuania. Almost all Jews living there were murdered by the Nazis and their Lithuanian accomplices. In the Soviet Union, commemoration of the Jews and the preservation of their heritage were taboo. This changed with Lithuanian independence. However, the acceptance of co-responsibility for the murder of Lithua-nia’s Jews has met with resistance within the political world. Neverthe-less, the place of Lithuanian Jewish heritage is increasingly secure in the view of history now found in society at large and among young people in particular.

Knowledge about the life of the east European Jews and the Shoah has grown in past decades. But the appropriate transmission of east European Jewish history and culture poses great challenges. On the one hand, there is a danger of remembrance of the Holocaust sliding into commercialism and kitsch; on the other hand, treating Jewish life as a museum artefact runs the risk of forgetting its renaissance. Here, academics, educators and curators explain the conclusions they have drawn from attempting this balancing act.

A lingua franca is a means of sidestepping linguistic isolation, yet it limits expression to the mere conveyance of information. Clarisse Herrenschmidt considers the mixed blessings of global English and suggests playing a game to overcome the barriers of language.

While translation is indispensable, simply building bridges between the dominant languages is not enough, writes Edouard Glissant. “There is a spiritual revolution to defend in the world against the identity of single roots. What actors are more destined to engage in this revolution than journals?”

Jan Bloch is a classic example of an upwardly-mobile, nineteenth century Jew. Bloch worked his way up from humble eastern European Jewish origins in central Poland to become one of the Russian Empire’s leading entrepreneurs. However, Bloch’s initiatives to overcome war represent his greatest service. He lent impetus to the Hague Peace Conference. In his standard work “The Future of War”, he called for a departure from Clausewitz and advocated arms control as well as an international court of justice. This book deserves its place as a classic work of historical peace research.

Rising energy costs and the eco-social consequences of climate change are causing anxieties about the future to increase, while trust in the ability of political elites to solve these problems is evaporating. Reaching eco-political targets calls for more participation of citizens as active architects of their society, write Claus Leggewie and Harald Welzer.

Banks collapsing, homes repossessed, jobs disappearing… no wonder the world is in despair. Steven Lukes turns to Emile Durkheim to make sense of the real depression.

This year the world has seen the power of money to socialise the costs of capitalist crisis, but are prices going to go on rising to Weimar-like levels? Jon Amsden explores the origins of the crisis and discerns something worse than inflation on the horizon.