Issue 13, Summer/Autumn 2010
Editorial
Welcome to the 13th issue of the University of Sussex Journal of Contemporary History (USJCH). After a long period of stillness we are now happy to provide a new edition. Meanwhile the structure of responsibility in the journal has changed and now Romy Langeheine, a third year DPhil student in Modern European History and Rico Langeheine, MPhil student in Modern European History, volunteered as the new editors. First of all our main objective is to express our gratitude to the former editor team and their successful perpetuation of the long USJCH tradition as an independent postgraduate students journal with most rigorous standards of research. We hope to contribute in the same successful manner in the future and therefore integrated into our first journal two articles of significant quality.
Firstly Jed Fazakarley intends in his essay “Racisms ‘Old’ and ‘New’ at Handsworth, 1985” to demonstrate how far the critisicm to Martin Bakers” new racism” paradigm is eligible. By taking up Phil Cohens critique on Martin Blake it tries to examine an elite racism within the specific context of the violence acts in 1985 in Handsworth, Birmingham. Jed Fazakarley argues that the discourses surrounding Handsworth are indeed of great historical interest and can provide a deeper understanding of the nature of racial ideologies.
Nadja Janssen in her article deals with the question to which extent the Second World War and the Holocaust impacted on the self-conception of Jewish New York intellectuals. Examining their articles in Commentary Magazine she demonstrates how these intellectuals equilibrated an ensured collective Jewish survival and being Americans in light of the Cold War.
Last but not least, we would like to thank our contributors and also all our referees who maintained with their detailed and high standard selection procedure a decent level of historical research quality.
The editors, Romy Langeheine and Rico Langeheine
We must begin to build for permanence: New York Jewish Intellectuals, Commentary Magazine and the Legacy of the Second World War, 1945-1959 Nadja A. Janssen
Racisms Old and New at Handsworth, 1985 Jed Fazakarley
