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.

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.

Rediscovering Traces of Memory

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Webber ◽  
Chris Schwarz ◽  
Jason Francisco
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Life ◽  
Small Towns ◽  
Local People ◽  
Jewish Culture ◽  
The Past ◽  
Jewish Heritage ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Set Up ◽  
Bear Witness

The present-day traces of the Jewish past in Poland are complex. Jewish life lay in ruins after the Holocaust. Much evidence of ruin remains, but there are also widespread traces that bear witness to the elaborate Jewish culture that once flourished there, even in villages and small towns. One also sees places where Jews were murdered by the Germans in the war: not only in death camps and ghettos, but also in fields, forests, rivers, and cemeteries. After the war, forty years of communism suppressed even the memory of the destroyed Jewish heritage. Today, by contrast, the historic Jewish culture of Poland is increasingly being memorialized, by local Poles as well as by foreign Jews. Synagogues and cemeteries are being renovated, monuments and museums are being set up. There are festivals of Jewish culture, hasidic pilgrims, and Jewish tourists; and local people who rescued Jews during the war are being honoured. In rediscovering the traces of memory one also finds clear signs of a local Jewish revival. This extensively revised second edition includes forty-five new photographs and updated explanatory texts. Together they suggest how to make sense of the past and discover its relevance for the present. This book will appeal to everyone concerned with questions of history, memory, and identity.

The Revival of Jewish Life

2018 ◽  
pp. 162-182
Author(s):  
Jonathan Webber ◽  
Chris Schwarz ◽  
Jason Francisco
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Life ◽  
Holocaust Survivors ◽  
Jewish Culture ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Past ◽  
Jewish Heritage ◽  
Holocaust Memorial ◽  
The People ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Democratic Freedom

This chapter talks about the people who are creating and maintaining projects that memorialize both the Jewish life that existed in Polish Galicia for centuries and the enormity of the Holocaust during which it was destroyed. It discloses the public acknowledgment of the Jewish heritage that has been ongoing since Poland regained its democratic freedom in 1989, which led to the revival of Jewish life. It also describes the main Holocaust memorial in Kraków, which is comprised of symbolic abandoned chairs scattered through an entire city to highlight the Jewish absence. The chapter mentions non-Jewish Poles who have become aware of the past in Poland that included Jews and Jewish culture. It details post-Holocaust Poland in the 1970s that was severely restricted and in danger of facing extinction as 90 percent of Holocaust survivors had emigrated.

Conclusion

2021 ◽  
pp. 174-179
Author(s):  
Jason Lustig
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural Capital ◽  
Information Society ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
The United States ◽  
Community Based ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of

This chapter considers the overall impact of the twentieth-century proliferation of archive activities in Jewish life and the rising paradigm of total archives in particular. By looking at the development of Jewish archiving in Germany, the United States, and Israel/Palestine, we see the concrete manifestation of the impulses of a “time to gather” in Jewish cultures around the world. These efforts represent a kind of community-based archives, but also the internal tensions: What happens when there is a widespread understanding of the value of archives, and they represent resources of cultural capital worth fighting for? This conclusion also places the history of Jewish archives and the struggles to “own” the past in the broader context of the emerging information society. Altogether, this history indicates contentious struggles over what it means to have control over history in its most practical terms.

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.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Jason Lustig
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Jewish History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Community Based ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Future ◽  
Modern Jewish History ◽  
History Of

The introduction presents the book’s core argument that twentieth-century Jewish archives were not just about the past but also about the future: We can look to a process whereby Jews turned increasingly toward archives as anchors of memory in a rapidly changing world. Jews in Germany, the United States, and Israel/Palestine all sought to gather the files of the past in order to represent their place in Jewish life and articulate a vision of the future. It situates these projects in the history of community-based archiving and archival theory and methodology, as well as Jewish history at large. It also dives into the ways we can see archive making as a metaphor for the broader patterns in modern Jewish history, as Jews sought to gather the sources and resources of their culture both before the Holocaust and especially in its aftermath.

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.

Identification of the Root Maggots (Diptera: Anthomyiidae) Attacking Cruciferous Garden Crops in Canada, with Notes on Biology and Control

1951 ◽  
Vol 83 (5) ◽  
pp. 109-120 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. R. Brooks
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Life History ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
Cultivation Methods ◽  
Hylemya Brassicae ◽  
Cabbage Maggot ◽  
And Control ◽  
Cruciferous Plants

A great number of papers and notes have been written on the root maggots attacking cabbage, cauliflower, turnip, and radish in Canada and the United States during the past 75 years. These deal chiefly with the occurrence, life-history, and control of the cabbage maggot, Hylemya brassicae (Bouché), or species which have been misidentified as that species. The Canadian work has followed the lead of Gibson and Treherne (1916), but in spite of the accumulation of information on the life-history of the species, on cultivation methods, and on insecticides, the pests of these cruciferous plants remain as noxious as ever.

UNITED STATES HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL MUSEUM (WASHINGTON, D.C.)

2021 ◽  
pp. 127-139
Author(s):  
Mariya M. Sirotinskaya ◽  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
The United States ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
The Past ◽  
Holocaust Memory ◽  
Holocaust Memorial ◽  
German Ideology ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Age Appropriate

The article is aimed at examining how the United States Memori- al Museum in Washington, D.C., preserves the memory of the Holocaust, what educational technologies are recommended for teachers. Transmission of the Holocaust memory is still very important, as even nowadays attempts are made to deny the fact of systematic persecution and destruction of Jews or underrate its scale. The museum communicates, in the historical context, traditional nar- rative – Hitler’s rise to power, Nazi Jewish policy. Emphasis is put on German ideology and propaganda. Great attention is paid to the historical sources, not only official ones, – to the diaries, letters, memoirs, photographs, interviews with the camp prisoners who have survived, as well as to the artifacts, audio- and video materials. The online exhibition “Americans and the Holocaust” reveals events in Germany as seen through the lens of different U.S. periodi- cals. Concrete recommendations are made to the educators – to avoid simple answers to complex questions and the comparison of suffering, to show that the Holocaust was not inevitable, to take into consideration an age-appropriate approach, etc. The author shares the views of the researchers who come to the conclusion: the reconstruction of the Holocaust in the museum determines our perception of the past and, therefore, deepens our understanding of the present.

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