Suchergebnisse

"Portrait of Jewish American philosopher and historian Hans Kohn"--

In the writing of historian Hans Kohn (1891—1971) East and West were never geographic locations, but rather geographic metaphors. They were ideas, which served as his major tool of analysis throughout his career: in Habsburg Prague as a young spiritual Zionist; in Jerusalem in the 1920s as a 'bi-national Zionist'; as comparative historian of nationalism as of the second world war; and finally as an American Cold Warrior. This article situates the evolution of Kohn's notions of East and West in a primarily Jewish context, and toward a Cold War horizon. It also seeks to illuminate the genealogy of the ideas he propagated as a notable purveyor of Cold War ideology, particularly the need for a 'New West'.

This article explores the forgotten manifesto The City of Man: A Declaration on World Democracy, which was composed in 1940 by a group of prominent American and European anti-isolationist intellectuals, including Thomas Mann, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Hermann Broch. Written in response to the victories of Nazi Germany, the manifesto declared that the United States had a new global responsibility not only to lead the war against fascism and Marxism, but also to establish a global order of peace and democracy under U.S. hegemony. Moreover, the authors of the manifesto claimed that such an order would have to be based on the rejuvenation of conservative values; in their view, the collapse of Western democracies under the weight of totalitarian aggression was the consequence of inner moral and intellectual degeneration. The City of Man therefore called on the United States to lead the spiritual transformation of democracy into a modern political religion, which would bring about the intellectual and political unity of humanity under one state and one creed. This article analyzes the manifesto as a rare window into the difficulty intellectuals faced as they tried to conceptualize the totalitarian challenge prior to the United States' entry into the war. Moreover, it claims that The City of Man expressed the emergence of postwar conservatism and Cold War ideology, as well as the unique role played by European émigrés in this process.

Highlighting the seminal role of German Jewish intellectuals and ideologues in forming and transforming the modern Jewish world, this volume analyzes the political roads taken by German Jewish thinkers; the impact of the Holocaust on the Central and East European Jewish intelligentsia; and the conundrum of modern Jewish identity. Several of German Jewry's most outstanding figures such as Scholem, Strauss, and Kohn are discussed. Inspired by Steven E. Aschheim's work, several contributors focus on the fraught relationship between German and East European Jews (the so-called Ostjuden) and between German Jews and their non-Jewish neighbors. More generally, this book examines how Central European Jewish thinkers reacted to the terrible crises of the twentieth century—to war, genocide, and the existential threat to the very existence of the Jewish people. It is essential reading for those interested in the triumphs and tragedies of modern European Jewry