In the past fifty years, a number of works about Salman Schocken and his activities have appeared, including books on the Schocken Verlag and the Schocken department stores, all of which have been published in German, and an English-language biography. These studies range from specialized monographs to volumes for the general reader, but whatever their focus, they reflect the captivating drama of the Schocken story. A review of these studies illustrates important features of the historian’s enterprise, including the roles of archival and eyewitness sources, the transmission of the historian’s craft from one generation to the next, and the importance of knowledgeable reviewers for an accurate assessment of historical writing.</p>

This paper challenges binary approaches to social relationships in the field of Israel studies. It presents social practices undertaken by pre-1948 subjects situated between constructions of a Zionist self and of its “others”, i.e. between male, white, Eastern European, Hebrew speakers and Palestinian Arabs, Arab Jews, women, non-Eastern Europeans and non-Hebrew speakers. The article centers around a new analytical concept rooted in a poststructuralist interpretation of the biblical expression ezer ke-negdofrom Gen 2:18 in the context of its common Hebrew and Arab etymological heritage. Analyzing the experiences of Gerda Luft and Gabriele Tergit, two German immigrants to Palestine in the 1930s, the article points to their social locations within the New Yishuv in Palestine as ezer ke-negdo subjects, i.e. located between the power of the New Yishuv and Palestinian “others”, and applies the concept of ezer ke-negdo as a “local” analytical tool emerging from outside Western academia in order to grasp the distinctiveness of Jewish-Arab history.

This article analyzes the relationship between universalism and particularism in early Zionist discourse. Like every national movement, the Zionists saw themselves faced with the paradox between universalism and particularism that is inherent to nationalist theory. The Zionist response to this paradox is not only fruitful for the understanding of national ideology in general, but can also help us to understand the arguments put forward by movements of minoritized groups. In this context, the concept of hybridity is of major importance: for the Zionists, the idea of a nation—just as for other activist groups notions of ‘identity’, ‘culture’ or ‘essence’—rather than reflecting the aforementioned paradox, formed a hybrid entity consisting of both particularist and universalist aspects. The article further uncovers a fact research thus far has neglected: in support of their argument and for tactical reasons, German Zionists referred to other minority movements, such as the African American or Civil Rights movements, the Native American movement, and the women’s movement.