Ofira Seliktar. Divided We Stand: American Jews, Israel, and the Peace Process. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002. xvi, 272 pp.

AJS Review ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 412-413
Author(s):  
Harold M. Waller
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
Peace Process ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Jews ◽  
Jewish State ◽  
Central Importance ◽  
Israeli Government ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Run Up

Israel, and before that the idea of a Jewish state in the traditional homeland, has long captured the imagination of many, if not always most, American Jews. The close connection between Jews in Israel and the United States intensified as the events of the last century unfolded, especially the Holocaust, the struggle for Israel's independence, and then the unending effort to safeguard that independence and ensure security. The 1967 Six-Day War, the run-up to which conjured up images of another calamity, had a profound effect in the Diaspora, driving home the reality of Israel's precarious security and the state's central importance in modern Jewish life. That watershed produced a relatively short-lived period when it seemed that American Jews were united in their support for Israel. But, since 1977, that “sacred unity” has been called into question as sharp divisions have appeared—exacerbated by controversial Israeli government decisions and the pressures of the peace process since 1991.

A New World Babylonia

2021 ◽  
pp. 252-275
Author(s):  
Deborah Dash Moore
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New World ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
Church And State ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Jews ◽  
Jewish Culture ◽  
Profound Impact ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Creation

This chapter discusses the distinctive rise of American Jews as a new center of Jewish culture. It focuses on the conditions in the United States, especially separation of church and state, which encouraged religious creativity, and the genocide of the Holocaust that spurred the transfer of aspects of European religious and intellectual Jewish life. It argues that feminism encouraged women to contribute in vital ways to the creation of Jewish culture that had a profound impact throughout the Jewish world. America has exemplified a new Babylonia, one that would produce influential forms of Judaism shaped by women as well as men.

A Time to Gather

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason Lustig
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
Birth Certificate ◽  
The United States ◽  
Historical Records ◽  
Jewish Culture ◽  
Communal Life ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
And Control

A Time to Gather: Archives and the Control of Jewish Culture examines Jewish archives in Germany, the United States, and Israel/Palestine and argues that historical records took on potent value in modern Jewish life as both sources of history and anchors of memory, precisely because archives presented one way of transmitting Jewish culture and history from one generation to another. Creating archives was one means for Jews to take control of their history, especially after the Holocaust, when efforts at archive restitution removed looted archives from the hands of perpetrators. Such efforts also raised complex questions of who could actually “own” this history. This book contends that twentieth-century Jewish archival efforts served as a proxy for wide-ranging struggles over the meaning and control of Jewish culture: whether in Israel’s claims to be a successor to European Jewry, the reality of American Jewry’s rising prominence, or the question of the continued vitality of Jewish life in Germany after the Holocaust, gathering archives was a means to assert dominance over Jewish culture by making claims of ties to the past and constituting a kind of “birth certificate” or legitimization of communal life. A Time to Gather presents archive making as a metaphor with the dispersion and gathering of documents falling in the context of the Jews’ long diasporic history. In the end, a rising urgency of archival memory in Jewish life and the importance of history’s traces meant archives were powerful but contested symbols of control of the past, present, and future.

So What Are Jews For?

2020 ◽  
pp. 264-290
Author(s):  
Adam Sutcliffe
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New World ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
European Jewish ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

This chapter reviews the question on what Jews are for. It talks about the anxiety over the long-term viability of Judaism that threatened to overwhelm the question across much of the Jewish world in the late twentieth century. It describes the European Jewish life in the aftermath of the Holocaust that was shadowed by a sense of dutiful traditionalism and anxiety over the continued presence of antisemitism. The chapter also analyzes the temptation and increasing ease of assimilation that was perceived as a threat to Jewish continuity in Europe, in the United States, and elsewhere in the New World. It points out how it was clear to some Jewish leaders, while faced with the prospect of a “vanishing diaspora,” that the postwar focus on communal survival lacked the inspirational power to renew Jewish life.

Embodying Musical Heritage in a New–Old Profession: American Jewish Cantorial Schools, 1904–1939

2017 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-52
Author(s):  
JUDAH M. COHEN
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
The United States ◽  
Training Models ◽  
Digital Repositories ◽  
Historical Materials ◽  
Musical Tradition ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
American Jewish

AbstractCurrent scholarship on music in Jewish life generally views American cantorial training as a postwar process of transplantation, translating a culture decimated by the Holocaust into a higher education program in the United States. Recently available digital repositories of historical materials, however, show at least five organized efforts to establish American cantorial schools between 1904 and 1939. I closely examine these efforts here, which reveal during this period a complicated and active negotiation surrounding the role of the cantor—and music more generally—in American Jewish life. Organizers of these schools engaged in active dialogue with cantorial colleagues in central and eastern Europe, subsequently creating institutional training models that imbued the cantor with a character, history, musical repertoire, and professional lifecycle compatible with the United States’ religious marketplace. Understanding the urge to establish these schools in the first half of the twentieth century, and the tendency to forget or minimize these efforts after World War II, offers insight into the flexibility of musical tradition as it sought to reassert itself on American soil.

“The Edge of the Abyss”: The Origins of the Israel Lobby, 1949–1954

2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Doug Rossinow
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
The United States ◽  
Public Affairs ◽  
American Jews ◽  
The West ◽  
American Jewish ◽  
Main Components ◽  
State Of Israel ◽  
Israeli Soldiers

The main components of the Israel lobby in the United States were organized in the spring of 1954, six years after the State of Israel declared independence, in response to a crisis in U.S.–Israel diplomacy that erupted in October 1953. Israeli soldiers had massacred more than sixty Palestinian villagers in Qibya, on the West Bank, eliciting widespread condemnation; American Jews, in reply, mobilized to defend Israel in new ways. The American Zionist Committee for Public Affairs (later renamed AIPAC) and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, established at this time, displayed two outstanding features. They were Jewish united front organizations that brought together Zionist with “non-Zionist” groups. They also emerged from transnational contacts with Israeli leaders and realities. A staunch near-consensus in defense of Israel in the most trying circumstances established a lasting framework in American Jewish life.

Israel-Egypt Agreements of 1974–1975 in the Context of Regional and International Relations: A New Perspective

2021 ◽  
pp. 149
Author(s):  
Alek Epstein
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
International Relations ◽  
The United States ◽  
Sinai Peninsula ◽  
Jewish State ◽  
Peace Agreement ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Israeli Government ◽  
New Perspective

After the October 1973 War president Sadat had come to realize the United States alone could lead to an Israeli withdrawal from the territories it occupying during the June 1967 War. For although the Soviet Union supplied Egypt with the desirable types and amounts of weapons, Moscow had no impact on Israeli policy. US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger saw the United States gaining clout in the Middle East while pushing the Soviet Union out of the region. Kissinger succeeded to bring about the signing of two separation of forces agreements between Israel and Egypt, in January 1974 and in September 1975; the second Disengagement Agreement even placed American troops in the Sinai Peninsula to monitor the demilitarized zones established between the two countries. In both cases the United States had resorted to exerting pressure on the Israeli government lead by Golda Meir (in 1974) and Yitzhak Rabin (in 1975) by denying financial aid and holding no discussions on weapon transactions. Neither in 1974 nor in 1975 president Sadat was willing to recognize Israel or to sign a peace agreement with the Jewish state. In fact, he was involved in a “step-by-step peace process” with the United States rather than with Israel. American administration had no doubt that Israel would have no choice but “to pay the bills”, whatever they would be.

Out of the Whirlwind Reconsidered

2020 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Michael Berkowitz
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Personal History ◽  
Historical Writing ◽  
Holocaust Literature ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
History Of ◽  
Mutual Accountability ◽  
Union College

This article argues that Albert Friedlander’s edited book, Out of the Whirlwind (1968), should be recognised as pathbreaking. Among the first to articulate the idea of ‘Holocaust literature’, it established a body of texts and contextualised these as a way to integrate literature – as well as historical writing, music, art and poetry – as critical to an understanding of the Holocaust. This article also situates Out of the Whirlwind through the personal history of Friedlander and his wife Evelyn, who was a co-creator of the book, his colleagues from Hebrew Union College, and the illustrator, Jacob Landau. It explores the work’s connection to the expansive, humanistic development of progressive Judaism in the United States, Britain and continental Europe. It also underscores Friedlander’s study of Leo Baeck as a means to understand the importance of mutual accountability, not only between Jews, but in Jews’ engagement with the wider world.

Raanan Rein, Fútbol, Jews and the Making of Argentina, trans. Marsha Grenzeback. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014. 166 pp.

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Jewish Identity ◽  
The United States ◽  
Orthodox Jewish ◽  
Literary Representations ◽  
Stanford University ◽  
Common Theme ◽  
American Jews ◽  
The Common ◽  
The One

This chapter reviews the books Fútbol, Jews and the Making of Argentina (2014), by Raanan Rein, translated by Marsha Grenzeback, and Muscling in on New Worlds: Jews, Sport, and the Making of the Americas (2014), edited by Raanan Rein and David M.K. Sheinin. Rein’s book deals with the “making” of Argentina through football (soccer), while Muscling in on New Worlds focuses on the “making” of the Americas (mainly the one America, called the United States) through sports. Muscling in on New Worlds is a collection of essays that seeks to advance the common theme of sport as “an avenue by which Jews threaded the needle of asserting a Jewish identity.” Topics include Jews as boxers, Jews and football, Jews and yoga, Orthodox Jewish athletes, and American Jews and baseball. There are also essays about the cinematic and literary representations of Jews in sports.

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