Y. Michal Bodemann

A problem of sociological praxis

Just as the economists are the scientific representatives of the bourgeoisie, so the socialists and communists are the theorists of the proletariat [...] But as history proceeds and as the struggle of the proletariat takes shape more clearly, (these theorists) need no longer look for science in their own minds; they only have to give account of what is happening before their eyes, and make themselves its voice. As long as they seek science and only create systems, as long as they are the beginning of the struggle, they see in misery nothing but misery, without recognising its revolutionary and subversive aspect which will overthrow the old society. But from this point on, science, produced by the historical movement and consciously associated with this movement, has ceased to be doctrinaire and has become revolutionary.

Class rule as patronage: Kinship, local ruling cliques and the state in rural sardinia

It is argued here that much of the literature on patron‐client relations is unsatisfactory because it tends to conceptualise the ruling classes of underdeveloped areas as individualised power brokers or ‘strong men’. Instead, one must identify those specific means of production which mark the class position of patrons, and which ultimately, are the basis of their power. Clientelism therefore not only refers to the economic position of the patrons, but also to a specific form of political power which is defined by the patrons relationship to the state. The paper addresses these questions by analysing the local ruling cliques of several communities in Central Sardinia. The pre‐World War II cliques differ markedly from those after the war, but they all have in common that they monopolise, at the local level, access to the state apparatus, that they are its local representatives, and that they are organised, and organise other classes, on the basis of kinship.

Learning Diaspora: German Turks and the Jewish Narrative

From the beginnings of sociology in North America, the literature on migration, ethnicity, citizenship and multiculturalism has looked at the ways in which migrant groups integrate: how they are being incorporated into particular nation-states, their economies and their social and class structures, the ways in which their opportunity structures are limited and how they assimilate over several generations. While the form of ethnic integration usually differs substantially from one country to the next, it has rarely if ever been asked how a nationally specific character of ethnos is shaped by the ethnic groups themselves — by their leaders and organizations — not merely in relation to the state and society at large, but in particular in relation to other minority or immigrant groups. Immigrant groups and minorities, often in close social proximity to one another, do not only orient their behaviour towards each other, but more recent immigrants take their predecessors’ narrative as a model; sometimes, in turn, the older immigrant group makes claims in relation to the more recent immigrants. Perhaps the best known case of one group adopting — and identifying with — the narrative of another group is the involvement of American Jews with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Civil Rights Movement in the US.1

The Organicity of Classes and the Naked Proletarian. Towards a New Formulation of the Class Conception

us almost nothing about the social and political forces at work in a society&dquo; (Hindess, 1982:1) and that, while ‘ ‘significant political struggle in the modern world has been ... organised ... in terms of classes&dquo;, the concept of class itself should be seen in terms of political discourse and calculation rather than in terms of concrete interests. Hindess therefore poses the question whether it is possible to sustain the Communist Manifesto’s &dquo;identification of classes as consisting of specific aggregates of individuals and classes as, or as represented by, social forces.&dquo; (1982:3, our emphasis). No doubt, few contemporary Marxists would go along with this position which reduces the class conception to little more than a device of political rhetoric. On the other hand, the vast bulk of Marxist writings does indeed view classes principally as &dquo;aggregates of individuals&dquo;: individuals characterised by little more than identical or similar production relations. What the bulk of the Marxist literature-with some notable exceptions-ignores, are the primordial relations, the particular ways of life and culture, the common outlook and the interpersonal ties within which individuals-in-classes are embedded; in short: it tends to ignore what we will call the organicity of classes. It is our contention in this paper that this neglect, especially in terms of theoretical conceptions-and despite numerous Marxistoriented historical studies on the subject, has a long tradition all the way back to Marx with his almost exclusive attention to the sphere of production and therefore his impoverished view of classes under capitalism, notably the proletariat. This lack of a full conception of the reproductive sphere must have serious consequences for a proper understanding of the political mobilisation of a given class and the politics of this class.

The micro‐organisation of backwardness in Central Sardinia: A reappraisal of Luxemburg's ‘three phases’ of underdevelopment 1

It is argued here that unlike theories which view underdevelopment from the ‘world system’ perspective, Rosa Luxemburgs critical elaboration of the concept of primitive accumulation is a key contribution to the understanding of dependency and backwardness at the local level. Luxemburg outlines three phases in the destruction of pre‐capitalist formations by capitalism: the separation of the producer from the traditional bonds and hierarchies; introduction of a commodity economy and the separation of handicraft from agriculture; the separation of the producer from the means of production. In contrast to Luxemburg, it is argued that this final phase has not often been fully achieved and that it has been replaced by a partial/temporal separation of peasant producers from their means of production. Luxemburgs approach nevertheless shows how economistic interpretations which deal neither with the transformation of the class structure nor the internal political structure of dependent societies can be overcome....

Deutsche Türken, jüdische Narrative und Fremdenangst: Strategien der Anerkennung

Seit den Anfangen der Soziologie in Nordamerika wurde in der Literatur uber Migration, Ethnizitat, citizenship, Fremdenangst und Multikulturalismus untersucht, wie sich Einwanderer integrieren, wie sie sich in einzelne Nationalstaaten einfugen, in deren Wirtschaft, deren Gesellschafts- und Klassenstrukturen. Auch ging man den Fragen nach, in welcher Form ihre Aufstiegschancen begrenzt werden und wie sie sich uber mehrere Generationen assimiliert haben. Obwohl sich die Form der ethno-kulturellen Integration aber in der Regel grundlegend von Staat zu Staat unterscheidet, wurde nur selten danach gefragt, wie eine typische Eigenart der eingewanderten Ethnie durch die Gruppe selbst geformt wird – durch ihre Fuhrer und Organisationen –, und zwar nicht blos im Verhaltnis zu Staat und Gesellschaft, sondern insbesondere im Verhaltnis zu anderen Minderheiten oder Einwanderergruppen. Dabei orientieren sich Einwanderergruppen und Minderheiten, haufig in unmittelbarer gesellschaftlicher Nahe zueinander verortet, nicht nur aneinander, sondern die Neu-Einwanderer nehmen in ihrem Verhalten die „Erzahlungen”, die Narrative ihrer Vorganger zum konkreten Vorbild; manchmal stellt die altere Einwanderergruppe im Gegenzug Anspruche an das Verhaltnis zu jungeren Einwandergruppen. Der bekannteste Fall, in dem sich eine Gruppe die Narrative einer anderen Gruppe aneignete und sich mit ihr identifizierte, ist wohl die Einbeziehung der amerikanischen Juden in die NAACP und die Burgerrechtsbewegung der USA.

The case of Holocaust Education Week in Toronto

How does one explain the extraordinary success of Torontos Holocaust Education Week (HEW), 2004, in its 23rd year? This article sketches three distinct time periods of the development of this annual event and argues that the increasingly dominant role of “survivors” and of the “second generation” in these events has played a major role in its success, as well as the involvement of women. The nature of Christian‐Jewish relations and the ways in which HEW fits into a Canadian national narrative will be discussed. The article concludes that the success of HEW can best be understood if one sees its evolving practices as a popular religious movement that bridges gaps between some, but not all, streams of Judaism, of different generations and diverse geographical and class origins.

Studying the Jewish Future

In the recent decades, just as American Jewry has been experiencing astounding economic, cultural, and social success, plaintive voices bemoaning the “vanishing American Jew” have multiplied in book titles and numerous articles, both scholarly and popular. That gloomy perspective was extended to other Jewish diasporas, such as Bernard Wasserstein’s 1996 Vanishing Diaspora: The Jews in Europe Since 1945. These studies focus on Jewish demographics and find that with the dissolution of the social and cultural ghettoes, and especially the rapidly rising intermarriage rate, the future of Jewish communities is doomed: within another three generations or so, Jewry outside Israel will have shrunk to tiny remnants of ultra-orthodox haredim. It is an argument, Goldscheider points out, that goes back to the early years of Jewish demography and sociology, such as that by Arthur Ruppin in Germany who, as a dedicated Zionist, could only foresee a viable future for Jewry in Palestine; too many of these demographic studies, then, were ideologically driven. Goldscheider, distinguished demographer at Brown University’s Population Studies and Training Center, disagrees with such “lachrymose” views of diasporic Jewish life. His argument is straightforward: Neither mixed marriages nor their offspring need result in losses to the Jewish community; indeed, they might attract non-Jews to Jewish community life. The pessimistic voices, on the other hand, have not abandoned essentialist conceptions of Jewishness where the intrusion of non-Jewish blood somehow leads to the dissolution of the community and where the only solution for Jewish survival lies in immigration to Israel. In these essays, Goldscheider presents us with a refreshing alternative vision, moving away from conventional demography and individualcentered projections of current developments into the future. Schumpeterian in spirit, he insists that in order to understand future developments, not the individual but the family must be the unit of analysis: the ways in which families are embedded in social networks, the Jewish community, and Jewish culture. He opposes the snapshot approach in demography that draws conclusions from one moment in time, and he stresses changing inner family dynamics over time instead. Jewish commitment and identifications might lie dormant in one stage of the family cycle, only to reemerge at a later point in time. Some of this, the ups and downs of Jewish commitment and changing Jewish orientations, Goldscheider demonstrates in his ethnography—unusual enough for a demographer—of Shmuel, a Jew from Tarnow in Poland who lost his family in the genocide, was stranded in Italy after the war, then remarried, left for Australia, and finally ended up in Israel where he died in a kibbutz, surrounded by a new family. In order to attempt any predictions about the future, Goldscheider argues, we have to focus on fundamental Jewish communal structures and values that may variously shape one of many possible Jewish futures. For some, this may be ritual observance, for others, Jewish philanthropy, for others again, ethical and moral values, or the State of Israel. I would add here Jewish artistic expressions from music, dance, and theater, to painting and literature. Without perhaps recognizing the full heuristic value of the ethnographic case study that he is presenting, Goldscheider points us to another insight when we look at possible future trajectories. After the war, when Shmuel returned to his native Tarnow, a city with rich Jewish culture, he found that Jewish space had been utterly erased: Private homes, like his family’s, were now occupied by Polish families, with the old furniture still in place; communal buildings and synagogues had been converted to other uses. Shmuel’s space had disappeared, the ultimate compelling reason to leave his home town. The book, then, emphasizes the individual’s embeddedness in the Jewish sociocultur-

Economic Origins of Antisemitism: Poland and its Jews in the Early Modern Period.

In this exploration of the economic roots of anti-semitism, the author traces the position of Jews in Poland from the end of the 16th century to the demise of the Polish State in 1795. The book explains why Poland was not able to modernize its backward social, economic and political system at a time when Western European countries were rapidly evolving, and shows that Jews were blamed for this failure to modernize, fueling an economic antisemitism that contributed to the Holocaust and is with us still.

Staat und Minorität

Der mittlerweile uppigen Literatur zu Rassismus, rassistischen Vorurteilen und Antisemitismus ist mit wenigen Ausnahmen eines gemeinsam: Sie richtet das Augenmerk auf die Trager des Rassismus; die Objekte des Hasses—in unserem Falle die Juden — spielen dabei im wortlichen Sinne „keine Rolle“ und immer noch zu oft werden auch die gesellschaftlichen und politischen Koordinaten, innerhalb derer sich die Trager des Rassismus bewegen, vernachlassigt. Selbst seit Hannah Arendts brillianter Arbeit uber den Antisemitismus (Arendt, 1951/68) hat sich daran nichts geandert. Arendt hatte ja argumentiert, das der Antisemitismus drei weit verbreitete Erklarungsmuster finde. Das erste assoziiert ihn mit erstarkendem Nationalismus. Dem setzt Arendt entgegen, das Antisemitismus, wenn uberhaupt, so nur historisch — z.B. in Frankreich, Deutschland oder Osterreich — mit dem Niedergang des Nationalismus assoziiert werden konne und dieser zumindest als monokausale Erklarung ungenugend sei.