This chapter is the first of two that examine the legal encounter with Jewishness in public space by focussing on the Orthodox practice of the eruv. The eruv is a distinctly Orthodox practice and fault lines here do not run simply between Jews and non-Jews but also between different Jews. In the modern secular legal arena, questions of non-establishment and the boundaries of religious freedom serve as the dominant legal frames, turning the eruv into a matter of excessive religiosity to be contained by law. Yet underneath the lofty language of constitutional separation often lurk concerns about national and local identity as well as sovereignty and ownership. Moreover, while circumcision has often galvanised Jews of different denominations, the eruv exposes internal Jewish rifts about Jewish identity and difference in contemporary societies. Indeed, some Jews themselves have not shied away from mobilising the authority of secular law to enforce their vision of what they consider the acceptable boundaries of Jewishness today.

This interview with Julia Pascal reveals the philosophy behind the concept and creation of her 2007 production of The Merchant of Venice/The Shylock Play at the Arcola Theatre, London. The Ghetto-on-Ghetto framing device is explored as a central motif. Vital to this re-vision of the text is the living presence of Polish Ghetto escapee, the actor Ruth Posner. Posner challenges the representation of the malevolent, male Jewish figure of Shylock that has historically dominated the image of Jews in the European imagination. The staging of the script, through Posner’s gaze, is explained as a provocative act to spotlight neglected female Shoah experience and to interrogate the view of the creation of Shylock as an example of Shakespeare’s humanism and philosemitism. Pascal discusses her reasons for heightening the experience of Black and Jewish characters to hint at a critical reading of the role of the Outsider figure at the birth of the British Empire. The interview reveals the decision to confront a text from rehearsal to critical reception. Included are questions surrounding the context of daring to add to and investigate the play within a climate of growing antisemitism in Britain.

This chapter lays out key questions and concepts in the book. It discusses the author’s concept, the atrocity of hunger, the intentional starvation of a group through the denial of access to food, and it includes more than just the embodied experience of starvation: the physical and mental suffering that humans undergo due to the physiological effects of starvation, as well as the transformation and breakdown of families, communities, and individuals whose lives and core beliefs are shaped by starvation. It is also the process as experienced by individuals, households, and communities as they move from food insecurity to a state of starvation. It outlines that the coping mechanisms employed by the Jews during this experience provide a window into their everyday life during the Holocaust. This chapter lays out the role of food access as a key factor of survival and frames this question squarely within the framework of genocidal famine. It lays out the differences between the three cities under consideration: Lodz, Warsaw, and Krakow.

The chapter explores deportations into the ghetto from surrounding towns and western Europe. It examines the food security issues for the newly arrived, particularly as they were displaced from the places of origin and social networks. This chapter also discusses the deportations out of the ghettos and the end of the ghettos. It examines how hunger drove some onto deportation trains, how deportations impacted food prices on the black market, and the cancelation of ration cards to force those directed for deportation onto trains. It also discusses how food resources were needed to avoid deportation, particularly if one wanted to go into hiding in the ghetto. This chapter also explores food and the Warsaw ghetto uprising.

This chapter explores the pre-war Jewish leadership, pre-war attributes, and political compositions of the three cities: Warsaw, Lodz and Krakow. It examines how the wartime Jewish leadership of these cities were selected shortly after the German invasion from the remaining pre-war prominent community members., the challenges they faced during the early occupation, and the changes in their roles after the creation of the ghettos. This chapter discusses the abuse and violence suffered by the Jewish communal leadership from German authorities while simultaneously enduring an erosion of power to protect their communities. This chapter also examines the creation and closing of each of the ghettos.

This chapter explores the various ways that those in the ghetto at the communal and individual level tried to support the poorest of the ghetto. This chapter discusses how charitable groups, Jewish communal organizations, Judenrat, individuals and informal networks attempted to employ many means to support those who were most economically fragile. It examines how foreign aid was able to continue to enter the ghetto albeit at a far reduced rate. It discusses how Judenrat established formal public welfare programs and encouraged the creation of private charitable programs. It also discusses private individual efforts to provide support for the most vulnerable.

Chapter 4, “The Warsaw Ghetto: A People Set Apart,” considers how Polish elites grappled with Jewish victimhood in their midst and differentiates between Nazi targeting of Polish elites and the better known targeting and murder of Polish Jews. It traces initial Nazi persecution of Warsaw’s Jewish community, ghettoization in 1940, persecution within the ghetto, and its liquidation to the death camp at Treblinka in 1942, and the outbreak of violent resistance in 1943. This is contextualized against Polish antisemitism before and during the war and particular Polish elite reactions to the developing Holocaust. A handful of intelligentsia figures who reacted strongly to antisemitic persecution in various ways demonstrate the complexity of Polish response to the Nazi Holocaust and how prewar and wartime antisemitism widened gulfs between ethnic Poles and the Polish-Jewish community. It argues that, because of a combination of targeted Nazi violence and native antisemitism, Polish elite response to Jewish persecution arose very late, typically only in 1943 with the outbreak of the ghetto uprisings, which captured the attention of resistance-minded Poles.

Chapter 6 addresses the “black ghetto”-the persistent concentration of African-American poverty in the country's inner cities. The interwar Chicago School's race-agnostic paradigm was challenged by a handful of high-profile sociologists and economists in the mid-1940s in works that, though they documented a discriminatory thicket, failed to win public or policy traction. Only with the televised urban riots of the mid- to late 1960s, in the midst of Johnson's Great Society, did the black ghetto attain full-fledged problem status. Social scientists registered the new stakes in a wave of studies that established the battle lines for decades. Works that stressed the spatially concentrated legacy of racial discrimination were pitted-in a highly charged political climate-against culture-of-poverty accounts. The research lines, in turn, informed competing remedies, notably geographic dispersal, community development, and-in a reflection of the country's rightward drift-outright disengagement. The broad if uneven patterns in the post-1960s scholarship are a de-emphasis of race, on the one hand, and the strengthening of individualistic frames, on the other. There is, moreover, a rough disciplinary divide: Sociologists, he shows, have tended to highlight spatial and social factors, with economists and political scientists favoring, for the most part, more individualist and class-based accounts.