Continuity and change in Arab-Jewish youth groups: the legacy of Gisela Warburg Wyzanski

• In Event: Thinking and Writing Across the Jewish-Arab Divide

Abstract

For many years small projects that bring Arab and Jewish young people together have flourished. Some have existed briefly, others for decades; some focus on youth within Israel, others have a wider scope. With the recent victory of Netanyahu and the news that most Israeli youth are moving rightward in their politics, what shifts in rhetoric, practices, outreach and goals are taking place as such projects and their funders seek to sustain and energize these endeavors?
To create a basis for looking at contemporary projects, this study focuses on the unusual trajectory of Gisela Warburg Wyzanski (1912-1991), who as a young German Jewish woman became involved in Youth Aliyah and in the 1930s led groups of young Jews out of Germany to Mandate Palestine. Years after the war, having settled in Massachusetts, she founded Fellowship in Israel for Arab-Jewish Youth, a Boston-based interfaith group that raised money in the 1970s and 1980s for programs for young Jews and Arabs within Israel. These programs were intended to build a generation commited to peaceful coexistence. Her coexistence rhetoric and goals, expressed through Fellowship, grew out of her Zionism and out of a guardedly hopeful view of the future.
Sources on Fellowship can include the organization’s archive at Radcliffe’s Schlesinger Library, interviews with surviving board members, and materials on interaction with some grantees. For Gisela Warburg Wyzanski’s development as an activist and philanthropist, there are family-held materials and a rich trove of scholarship on the Warburgs. Neither she nor the organization she led, an important predecessor of grantors like the Abraham Fund and the New Israel Fund, have been investigated by scholars seeking to shed light on how Arab-Jewish youth projects and their supporters seek to maintain continuities of purpose amid dramatic, challenging, sometimes violent activity in the surrounding milieu.
To close this presentation, the language of promotional and planning materials of several contemporary youth projects will be scrutinized for continuities and changes in their own recent evolution and also in relation to Wyzanski’s decades-earlier exhortations.

Author

• Harriet A. Feinberg, Independent Scholar