Becoming Cleopatra
The forgotten Zionism of Raphael Lemkin
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 6197376 |
|---|---|
| Authors | James Loeffler (0000-0001-5079-090X, University of Virginia, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2017 |
| Volume | 19 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 340-360 |
| Publication date | 2017-07-03 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Genocide Research (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1462-3528 • E-ISSN: 1469-9494 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/14623528.2017.1349645 |
| OpenAlex | W2738069700 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 10 |
The biography of Raphael Lemkin has emerged of late as a highly contested lieu de memoire in charged political debates in Europe, the United States and the Middle East about the meaning, past and present, of the Holocaust and genocide. At the same time, scholars have attempted to demythologize Lemkin by reinscribing his life into its pre-World War II Polish context. Yet thus far no one has identified the precise political activities and affiliations that shaped Lemkin’s concept of genocide. In this article, I show that Lemkin, far from being a Jewish Bundist, a Polish nationalist or an apolitical cosmopolitan, was an active member of the interwar Polish Zionist movement, from which he drew the ideas that inspired his idea of the crime of genocide. In the first part of this article, I use his published writings from the 1920s and 1930s in Hebrew, Yiddish and Polish to recover a rich Jewish political framework in which his concepts of barbarism and genocide first began to emerge. In the second section, I ask how this crucial dimension of Lemkin’s life and thought vanished from the historical record, and why it has yet to be recovered in spite of the boom in biographical scholarship. Finally, I suggest how the recovery of Lemkin’s Zionism helps to reframe the current political impasse in the historiography of Holocaust and genocide studies
Archaeology · Art · Genocide · Judaism · Literature · Manifesto · Political science · Politics · The Holocaust · Eastern European Communism and Reforms · European history and politics · Historical Geopolitical and Social Dynamics · History · Law
The Complicated Cases of Soghomon Tehlirian and Sholem Schwartzbard and Their Influences on Raphaël Lemkin’s Thinking About Genocide
Raphaël Lemkin in Stockholm – Significance for his Work on “Axis Rule in Occupied Europe”
Legible Testimonies
Raphaël Lemkin’s Derivation of Genocide from His Analysis of Nazi-Occupied Europe
Retour à Lemberg, retour de Lvouv
Raphael Lemkin
Indigenous Epistemologies and Decolonising Genocide Research on Palestine
Genocide and permanent security
International Law for a Time of Monsters
Cultural Genocide and Restitution
| Citations per year | 1.43 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2019 - 2026 (8) |
| Highly cited | No |