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This book examines how Israeli and American Jewish literatures share commonalities and affinities.
Articulates a new, post-ethnic American Jewishness
An exploration of how American Jewish thinkers grapple with the notion of being the isolated “Chosen People” in a nation that is a melting pot. What does it mean to be a Jew in America? What opportunities and what threats does the great melting pot represent for a group that has traditionally defined itself as “a people that must dwell alone?” Although for centuries the notion of “The Chosen People” sustained Jewish identity, America, by offering Jewish immigrants an unprecedented degree of participation in the larger society, threatened to erode their Jewish identity and sense of separateness. Arnold M. Eisen charts the attempts of American Jewish thinkers to adapt the notion of chosenness to an American context. Through an examination of sermons, essays, debates, prayer-book revisions, and theological literature, Eisen traces the ways in which American rabbis and theologians—Reconstructionist, Conservative, and Orthodox thinkers—effected a compromise between exclusivity and participation that allowed Jews to adapt to American life while simultaneously enhancing Jewish tradition and identity. “This is a book of extraordinary quality and importance. In tracing the encounter of Jews (the chosen people) and America (the chosen nation) . . . Eisen has given the American Jewish community a new understanding of itself.” —American Jewish Archives “One of the most significant books on American Jewish thought written in recent years.” —Choice
Challenging the assumption that modernist writer Gertrude Stein seldom integrated her Jewish identity and heritage into her work, this book uncovers Stein's constant and varied writing about Jewish topics throughout her career. Amy Feinstein argues that Judaism was central to Stein's ideas about modernity, showing how Stein connects the modernist era to the Jewish experience. Combing through Stein's scholastic writings, drafting notebooks, and literary works, Feinstein analyzes references to Judaism that have puzzled scholars. She reveals the never-before-discussed influence of Matthew Arnold as well as a hidden Jewish framework in Stein's epic novel The Making of Americans. In Stein's experimental "voices" poems, Feinstein identifies an explicitly Jewish vocabulary that expresses themes of marriage, nationalism, and Zionism. She also shows how Wars I Have Seen, written in Vichy France during World War II, compare the experience of wartime occupation with the historic persecution of Jews. Affirming the importance of Jewish identity and modernist style to Gertrude Stein's legacy as a writer, this book radically changes the way we read and appreciate Stein's work.
The subject of Jewish identity is one of the most vexed and contested issues of modern religious and ethnic group history. This interdisciplinary collection draws on work in law, anthropology, history, sociology, literature, and popular culture to consider contemporary and historical responses to the question �Who and what is Jewish?� These essays are focused especially on the issues of who creates the definitions, and how, and in what social and political contexts. The ten leading authorities writing here also look at the forces, ranging from new genetic and reproductive technologies to increasingly multicultural societies, that push against established boundaries. The authors examine how Jews have imagined themselves and how definitions of Jewishness have been established, enforced, challenged, and transformed. Does being a Jew require religious belief, practice, and formal institutional affiliation? Is there a biological or physical aspect of Jewish identity? What is the status of the convert to another religion? How do definitions play out in different geographic and historical settings? What makes Boundaries of Jewish Identity distinctive is its attention to the various Jewish �epistemologies� or ways of knowing who counts as a Jew. These essays reveal that possible answers reflect the different social, intellectual, and political locations of those who are asking. This book speaks to readers concerned with Jewish life and culture and to audiences interested in religious, cultural, and ethnic studies. It provides an excellent opportunity to examine how Jews fit into an increasingly diverse America and an increasingly complicated global society.
The topics of Edward Shapiro's book span the gamut of the American Jewish experience: from the politics of American Jews, the nature of American Jewish identity, relations between Jews and blacks, and Jews and American capitalism. He discusses writer Herman Wouk; Patrick Buchanan and the Jews; John Higham's interpretation of American anti-Semitism, Nathan Glazer's view of American Orthodoxy, and the Jewishness of Sidney Hook. Of particular interest is the author's exploration of how American Jews have reconciled their dual identities as Americans and as Jews. These solutions has shaped the way Jews have voted, prayed, earned a living, married, and chosen a profession. America, Shapiro argues, has truly been different for Jews, but this difference has shaped the history of America's Jews in unexpected and ironic ways. The fact that Jews have risen rapidly up the economic and social ladder and have become politically influential has not eliminated their insecurity and the sense they have of themselves as a marginal group.
This book traces the emergence and development of an organized, institutionalized Jewish social science, and explores the increasing importance of statistics and other modes of analysis for Jewish elites throughout Europe and the United States. The Zionist movement provided the initial impetus as it looked to the social sciences to provide the knowledge of contemporary Jewish life deemed necessary for nationalist revival. The social sciences offered empirical evidence of the ambiguous condition of the Jewish diaspora, and also charted emancipation and assimilation, viewed as dissolutions of and threats to Jewish identity. Liberal, assimilationist scholars also utilized social science data to demonstrate the continuing viability of Jewish life in the diaspora. Jewish social science grew out of a sustained effort to understand and explain the effects of modernization on Jewry. Above all, Jewish scholars sought to give the enormous transformations undergone by Jewry in the nineteenth century a larger meaning and significance
The French tradition: 1789 and the Jews -- The German tradition: capitalism and the Jews -- The American tradition: the city and the Jews
This book explores the fraught aftermath of the German Jewish conversionary experience through the story of one family as it grapples with the meaning of its Jewish origins in a post-Holocaust, post-conversionary milieu. Utilizing archival family texts and multiple interviews spanning three generations, beginning with the author’s German Jewish parents, 1940s refugees, and engaging the insights of contemporary scholars, the book traces the impact of a contested Jewish identity on the deconstruction and reconstruction of the Jewish self. The Holocaust as post-memory and the impact of the German Jewish culture personified by the author’s parents leads to a retrieval of a lost Jewish identity, postmodern in its implications, reinforcing the concept of Judaism as ultimately a family affair. Focusing on the personal to illuminate a complex historical phenomenon, this book proposes a new cultural history that challenges conventional boundaries of what is Jewish and what is not.