Judah M. Cohen. Through the Sands of Time: A History of the Jewish Community of St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands. Hanover, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2004. xxvi, 298 pp.

AJS Review ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 382-384
Author(s):  
Alan F. Benjamin
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Community ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
Temporal Structure ◽  
Virgin Islands ◽  
Small Community ◽  
The Core ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
History Of ◽  
Chronological Sequence

Immediately following his acknowledgments, Cohen begins his volume with an invitation that aims to evoke our interest in the Jews of St. Thomas. This chapter structure—in which the volume commences with what is in essence a justification for its publication—elicits an intriguing question about the study of Jewish life. Cohen is asking us to consider why one should be interested in this (and by implication, any?) small community of Jews. His subsequent introductory chapter poses a second fundamental question. It asks whether, in an age in which prevailing historical models have been subject to critical reexamination, a history that is organized by chronology rather than by theme can have scholarly value. The core of his response to these questions is that the St. Thomas Jewish community is an unusual instance of “accumulative ethnicity” (xxii) and thus constitutes a pattern in Jewish ethnicity worthy of scholarly attention. The narrative is arranged in chronological sequence to convey this pattern. Its unfolding temporal structure allows the reader to watch Jewish ethnicities emerge both from, and in place of one another. In raising these questions, Cohen brings a reflexive stance to the narrative. Yet, socially constructed memory seems to lie at the heart of the notion of accumulative ethnicity. Most Jews currently living on St. Thomas are transplants from the American mainland. Might the volume's framework also represent an American search for roots, and for roots that are special?

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Joshua Teplitsky
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Life ◽  
Intellectual Culture ◽  
The Core ◽  
Local Courts ◽  
Life Politics

This introductory chapter provides a background of David Oppenheim and his Jewish library. At the core of Oppenheim's identity and activity as a rabbi, intellectual, and communal leader stood his library. His library gained renown among Jewish colleagues and Christian contemporaries. It thus informed the decisions of local courts and distant decisors. He possessed highbrow scholarly material alongside popular pamphlets and broadsides, and he preserved diplomatic exchanges and communal ordinances in manuscript—an archive of contemporary Jewish life. Oppenheim's intellectual authority made him a much-sought-after source for endorsements for newly written books. This book then tells the story of premodern Jewish life, politics, and intellectual culture through an exploration of a book collection, the man who assembled it, and the circles of individuals who brought it into being and made use of it.

scholarly journals Laws, doctrines and practice: a study of intermarriages and the ways they challenged the Jewish Community of Helsinki from 1930 to 1970

2019 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-54
Author(s):  
Mercédesz Viktória Czimbalmos
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Community ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
Religious Tradition ◽  
Religious Congregations ◽  
History Of ◽  
Secular Society

The identities, customs and habits of religious congregations are tightly connected to the history of these congregations and to the specific religious tradition or denomination they consider themselves to be a part of. They are also shaped by the legislative and bureaucratic regulations and processes of the secular society that is surrounding them. The aim of this study is to further our knowledge of some of these aspects of Jewish life as they relate to the Jewish Community of Helsinki in the period 1930–70 by showcasing two examples that emerged as a result of the rising number of intermarriages in the congregation.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
John M. Chenoweth
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Virgin Islands ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
Background Information ◽  
The Political ◽  
Society Of Friends ◽  
British Virgin Islands ◽  
History Of

This introductory chapter sketches the questions and goals of the overall project and the needed background information about Quakerism. It introduces the Tortola Monthly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (“Quakers”) which formed in the British Virgin Islands about 1740 and addresses how archaeology can approach the study of religion and religious communities. This chapter also serves as an introduction to Quakerism itself, including its ideology based on individual, un-mediated communion with God, and a brief history of the group from its foundation in the political and economic turmoil of mid-seventeenth-century England, to the “Quietism” of wealthy “Quaker Grandees” in Philadelphia, to a nineteenth and twentieth century history of schism and reunion around pacifism. The Quaker structure of Monthly, Quarterly, and Yearly meetings is introduced, and connected to both community oversight and support structures. Finally, this chapter introduces three main Quaker ideals—simplicity, equality, and peace—which will be interrogated throughout the work as they change in their interactions with Caribbean slavery and geography.

A Work for the Jewish Soul of Warsaw, Old and New

2017 ◽  
Vol 27 ◽  
pp. 57-58
Author(s):  
Lukas Ligeti
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Community ◽  
Computer Technology ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
Site Specific ◽  
Interactive Performance ◽  
History Of ◽  
Polish Jews ◽  
A Site ◽  
The City

In 2015, Lukas Ligeti created a site-specific, audience-interactive performance work while in residence at the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw. Based on interviews with residents of Warsaw, the piece examined aural memories of Jewish life in the city, tracing the extermination and re-emergence of the Jewish community through speech and songs as well as creative musicians’ reimaginings of these memories, with computer technology as a mediator.

All in the Family: Brandeis University and Leonard Bernstein's “Jewish Boston”

2009 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-100
Author(s):  
SHERYL KASKOWITZ
Keyword(s):  
Faculty Member ◽  
Jewish Community ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
Jewish Immigrant ◽  
The Family ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of The University ◽  
Immigrant Experience ◽  
The University

AbstractThis article examines Leonard Bernstein's affiliation with Brandeis University, where he served as a faculty member from 1951 to 1956, a Fellow from 1956 to 1976, a Trustee from 1976 to 1980, and a Trustee Emeritus from 1980 until his death in 1990. In particular, the article explores why Bernstein chose to spend his time in Waltham. By the early 1950s he had already achieved celebrity and was busy with multiple conducting and composition projects; why did he commit to teaching at Brandeis and supporting the school until the end of his life? Bernstein's commitment to Brandeis appears to have been a manifestation of his ongoing connection and sense of duty to the Boston Jewish community of his childhood and, more specifically, to his father. This article summarizes Bernstein's activities at Brandeis, gives a brief history of the university, and discusses the ways in which Brandeis can be understood as an expression of Bernstein's ties to Boston's Jewish life, as well as to the Jewish immigrant experience of his parents and their generation.

Leeds and its Jewish community

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Derek Fraser
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Community ◽  
Small Community ◽  
Entrepreneurial Success ◽  
Supportive Environment ◽  
Economic Progress ◽  
Class Society ◽  
Cultural Life ◽  
Northerly Direction ◽  
History Of ◽  
Urban Demography

The book is a comprehensive and definitive history of the Leeds Jewish community, which was – and remains – the third largest in Britain. It is organised in three parts: Context (history, urban, demography); Chronology (covering the period from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1940s); and Contours (analysing themes and aspects of the history up to the present time). The book shows how a small community was affected by mass immigration, and through economic progress and social mobility achieved integration into the host society. It is a story of entrepreneurial success which transformed a proletarian community into a middle-class society. Its members contributed extensively to the economic, social, political and cultural life of Leeds, which provided a supportive environment for Jews to pursue their religion, generally free from persecution. The Leeds Jewish community lived predominantly in three locations which changed over time as they moved in a northerly direction to suburbia.

scholarly journals After the Holocaust: The History of Jewish Life in West Germany

2005 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 403-413 ◽  
Author(s):  
MICHAEL L. MENG
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Community ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
West Germany ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Tradition ◽  
Federal Republic Of Germany ◽  
East European ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
History Of

In July 1945, Rabbi Leo Baeck remarked that the Third Reich had destroyed the historical basis of German Jewry. ‘The history of Jews in Germany has found its end. It is impossible for it to come back. The chasm is too great’. Heinz Galinski, a survivor of Auschwitz who led West Berlin’s Jewish community until his death in 1992, could not have disagreed more strongly. ‘I have always held the view’, he observed, ‘that the Wannsee Conference cannot be the last word in the life of the Jewish community in Germany’. As these diverging views suggest, opting to live in the ‘land of the perpetrators’ represented both an unthinkable and a realistic choice. In the decade after the Holocaust, about 12,000 German-born Jews opted to remain in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and comprised about half of its Jewish community. Rooted in the German language and typically married to non-Jewish spouses, they still had some connections to Germany. xSuch cultural and personal ties did not exist for the other half of West Germany’s Jewish community – its East European Jews. Between 1945 and 1948, 230,000 Jews sought refuge in occupied Germany from the violent outbursts of antisemitism in eastern Europe. Although by 1949 only 15,000 East European Jews had taken permanent residence in the FRG, those who stayed behind profoundly impacted upon Jewish life. More religiously devout than their German-Jewish counterparts, they developed a rich cultural tradition located mostly in southern Germany. But their presence also complicated Jewish life. From the late nineteenth century, relations between German and East European Jews historically were tense and remained so in the early postwar years; the highly acculturated German Jews looked down upon their less assimilated, Yiddish-speaking brothers. In the first decade after the war, integrating these two groups emerged as one of the most pressing tasks for Jewish community leaders.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-34
Author(s):  
Sarit Kattan Gribetz
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Life ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
Temporal Aspects ◽  
History Of ◽  
Historical Contextualization ◽  
Political Dimensions

This introductory chapter provides an overview of how the rabbis used time-keeping and discourses about time to construct crucial social, political, and theological difference. As the rabbis fashioned Jewish life and theology in the Roman and Sasanian worlds, they articulated conceptions and structures of time that promoted and reinforced new configurations of difference in multiple realms. The chapter then reflects on the categories of “time” and “difference” and the interrelationship between the two. It discusses three interrelated cultural and political dimensions of the rabbis' late antique world. Rather than set within a conventional historical contextualization, however, the story is told as a history of time, highlighting specifically temporal aspects of the Jewish, Greco-Roman, and Christian contexts in which the rabbinic movement emerged and developed.

“Forty Acres and a Mule”: Horace Mann Bond and the Lynching of Jerome Wilson

1997 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
ADAM FAIRCLOUGH
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Black Education ◽  
Early Years ◽  
University President ◽  
Small Community ◽  
Fisk University ◽  
The Core ◽  
Distinguished Career ◽  
History Of ◽  
Black Man

In 1934 Horace Mann Bond, an African American, was in the early years of a distinguished career as an historian and university president when the lynching of a young black man, Jerome Wilson, impinged on his life, shaking him to the core. Already, at age twenty-nine, a professor at Fisk University with an armful of publications, his expertise as an authority on black education had taken him to a small community near Franklinton, in Washington Parish, Louisiana, where the lynching took place. Bond knew the victim's family, and he wrote an account of the lynching that traced the history of the Wilson family from the days of slavery.

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