Articles

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.

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”.

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.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights has been criticised from all sides since its inception sixty years ago. Conor Gearty calls for a fresh definition of this most humanist value.

Despite talk of a “unified European plan” to combat recession, the motto among EU member states seems to be “each to his own”. The financial crisis is reimposing the divide between eastern and western Europe, writes Mircea Vasilescu.

Advertising in Bulgaria has always been tied to the national. In the late nineteenth century, it capitalized on the concern about the rapid invasion of western goods; during socialism, advertising took on the role of educator of the new socialist citizen; and since the 1990s, economic patriotism has attached itself to national mythology. Nevertheless, writes Milla Mineva, in Bulgarian political discourse, to talk of the nation means to talk non-politically. Advertising makes visible this depoliticization of the national.

When Ivan Klíma and fellow writers spoke out against censorship in Czechoslovakia at the 1967 Writers’ Congress, the literary weekly Literární noviny was taken out of the hands of the writer’s union and its editorial board dismissed. Yet the seed was sown for the Prague Spring of 1968.

The reaction to the Kundera allegations in the Czech Republic was largely one of doubt. Unlike during the 1990s, when “Cibulka’s lists” prompted a witch-hunt against informers, today the need to lay blame has receded. Miroslav Balastík wonders whether the incident signifies the end of a phase of post-communism in the Czech Republic.

Central organizing principles such as “community” have been redefined by globalization, notes Krystian Woznicki. Art faces the question of the representability of community ­ or rather, its unrepresentability. The latter includes the community of the excluded. Referring to photographs by Bruno Serralongue, Woznicki suggests that the excluded are best represented as zombies: they appear as a community that wants to force its way into society. Their goals are unclear.