Browsing by Author "Mendelsohn, Adam"

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    Perception and Politics: Chinese South Africans in 1980 and 2008
    (2022) Suitt, William; Mendelsohn, Adam
    In 2008, Chinese South Africans achieved inclusion in the efforts of the government's Black Economic Empowerment policy, following their inclusion was criticism accusing the Chinese of being adjacent to whiteness and therefore undeserving of their victory. This work examines past perceptions of Chinese South Africans to track the shape of the discourse and the later perceptions of Chinese South Africans by their critics in the late 2000s. In engaging with newspapers of 1980 and 1981, non-Chinese can be seen to place Chinese South Africans in an invidious space between apartheid era categorizations of “white” and “non-white.” The conversation on Chinese South African classification intersects in 1980 with an increase in economic ties between the Republic of South Africa and the Republic of China. Association with Japanese through visual similitude in the eyes of non-Chinese, and several special privileges held by the Chinese during apartheid are seen to influence the perceptions held of Chinese South Africans, the boundaries to their perceived status, and the alterations in their status by the 21st century. The Chinese South African community has been featured numerous times over the last half century in articles debating their place in South African society. In the years during and after apartheid, the Chinese South African community was subject to much discussion by nonChinese as to the nature of their identity and that identity's place in a post-apartheid nation. This minor dissertation engages with the language of the discourse on Chinese South African status as it appeared in popular print media in the early 1980s and the late 2000s. Examined in detail was the relationship between perceptions towards Chinese South Africans in 1980 to those in 2008. Language used in 1980 and 2008 tracks the shifting Chinese status in relation to “white” and “non-white” categorizations and displays the role of past perceptions in defining later ones as Chinese space transformed over time. Chinese in South Africa occupied a space neither clearly white or non-white during apartheid and continued to occupy this space in the post-apartheid years. Their amorphous space and visual similarity to other peoples of East Asian descent allowed for Chinese South Africans to be depicted as having been oppressed and having benefitted from apartheid. Chinese South African space, regardless of questions on the nature of their legal classifications over the decades, has been utilized as a tool to depict them in different and opposite ways, all depending on the perspective of the wielder. This minor dissertation displays important elements of the print discourse around Chinese South Africans and their existence between two racial categorizations at points during and after apartheid and details the way that perceived status had been utilized by those featured in print.
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    Reporting on the Holocaust in South Africa: An Examination of Press Coverage and Memorialization in the Aftermath of World War II
    (2025) Abrahams, Dmitri; Mendelsohn, Adam
    Until recently, little scholarly work has focused on the development of Holocaust memory in South Africa, particularly regarding the extent to which the Holocaust has been ‘domesticated' – refracted through a local lens – in this country. This dissertation seeks to add to a broader scholarly effort to explain how a country with its own fraught racial politics engaged with the Nazi past. This study provides a detailed analysis of how different newspapers in South Africa reacted, transmitted, and engaged with the news of the liberation of the Nazi Concentration camps, the subsequent Belsen Trial, and the International Military Tribunal. It also uncovers how the Jewish community established commemorative practices and disseminated knowledge of the Holocaust between 1945 and 1960. This is achieved by examining the most widely circulated newspapers marketed towards different segments of South African society, as well as Jewish community records, and archival material. Newspaper coverage of the Holocaust in South Africa reflected the ethos of each publication and their stance on the war. How these publications reacted to and reported on the Holocaust greatly influenced how they engaged with and understood the Belsen Trial and the International Military Tribunal. Early Jewish commemoration of the Shoah reflected the community's need to rebuild its communal identity in the wake of social and political upheaval both locally and abroad.
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    Tradition, accommodation, revolution and counterrevolution: a history of a century of struggle for the soul of orthodoxy in Johannesburgs Jewish community, 1915-2015
    (2022) Fachler, David; Mendelsohn, Adam
    Over the past century, South African Jewry has undergone significant changes in its religious makeup. This dissertation provides the first comprehensive study of Orthodox Judaism within Johannesburg, the dominant religious movement within the single largest Jewish population centre in South Africa. From a splintered and largely immigrant community in 1915 with weak religious and educational institutions, and a pattern of religious laxity, Orthodox Jewry has transformed into a highly organized and structured community with high levels of religious observance. These processes of change accelerated from 1970 with the arrival of imported religious revival movements. Notwithstanding considerable emigration and political instability, Johannesburg Jewry today boasts high levels of religiosity with almost half its members labelling themselves Orthodox. Contrary to the conventional wisdom that Johannesburg was a united and largely homogenous community prior to the arrival of the revival movements, this study finds that already by the 1930s the Orthodox community was ideologically divided. While the Federation of Synagogues and Board of Jewish Education were led by academically trained rabbis with an inclusive interpretation of Orthodoxy, the religious Zionist Mizrachi movement and its affiliates sought to reintroduce East European traditions and advocated strict levels of observance that were unpopular with the majority of the community. Over the decades, and in alliance with the sometimes rival revival movements, the latter camp has come to dominate the Johannesburg religious landscape. The receding influence of the rabbis with a more inclusive orientation – partly because of retirements and emigration – is visible in the decreasing numbers of Jews in Johannesburg who describe themselves as “traditional.” This dissertation traces these developments through the decades and explains how and why the character of Johannesburg Jewry has changed.
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    Two far South: the responses of South African and Southern Jews to Apartheid and Segregation in the 1950s and 1960s
    (2003) Mendelsohn, Adam; Shain, Milton; Phillips, Howard
    This dissertation uses the comparative historical method to compare and contrast the responses of Southern and South African Jews to apartheid and segregation in the 1950s and 1960s. It focuses on the interrelationship of the two communities with reform rabbis and international Jewish organizations. The dissertation argues that the nature of individual and institutional responses was significantly shaped by exposure to a set of factors common to the South and South Africa. The dissertation is thematic, employing a variety of case studies. The dissertation begins by examining the effect of frontier conditions on reform rabbis. The author argues that the dispersed reform pulpits prevalent in these two contexts, and the type of rabbi that they generally attracted, served to inhibit civil rights activism. Differential exposure to these conditions, together with the presence of various liberating features, determined the risks and opportunities that frontier rabbis encountered. Thereafter, the dissertation analyzes the interactions of the Southern and South African Jewish communities with northern-based national Jewish organizations (in the case of the former) and international Jewish organizations (in the case of the latter). The author compares the interplay of the Southern lodges of the B'nai B'rith with the Anti-Defamation League, and the interrelationship of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies with various overseas Jewish groups. Whereas in the first section, rabbinical responses in the South Africa and the South are analysed together, here the two communities are dealt with separately. The author argues that the responses of external organizations were shaped by pressure from constituencies in the South and South Africa. These pressures competed with other philosophical and political considerations in determining policy towards segregation and apartheid.