Judaism and Jewishness in Histories of American Jewry

2021 ◽  
pp. 253-260
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Jewish History ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Jews ◽  
American Jewish History ◽  
American Jewry ◽  
Key Points ◽  
Religious Dimensions ◽  
American Jewish

This chapter reviews five books on American Jewish history, written by Joyce Antler, Jessica Cooperman, Kirsten Fermaglich, Rachel Kranson, and Jack Wertheimer. Reading these books together is challenging because they present substantially different interpretations of American Jews. If no definitive single interpretation of 20th-century American Jewish history emerges from these five books, what can be learned about American Jews by reading them together? Two key points emerge. Judaism proves a highly contested arena of American Jewish life. Yet despite the importance of religion, this fractious domain involves only a small portion of American Jews. Cooperman, Kranson, and Wertheimer all explore limits that confound efforts to promote Judaism in the United States among ordinary Jews. By contrast, “Jewishness” opens a valuable window into the complexity of life among Jews in the United States. Fermaglich focuses on how New York Jews coped with rising discrimination that impeded their ambitions for social and economic mobility. In her exploration of Jewish women's politics, Antler illuminates varied components of Jewish identity only occasionally influenced by religious dimensions.

American Jewish History

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hasia Diner
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Jewish History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Economic Security ◽  
First Century ◽  
American Jewish History ◽  
Modern Jewish History ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Jewish ◽  
Scholarly Inquiry

American Jewish history as a field of scholarly inquiry takes as its subject-matter the experience of Jews in the United States and places it within the context of both modern Jewish history and the history of the United States. Its practitioners see their intellectual project as inextricably connected to both histories. At the beginning of the twenty-first century the enterprise of American Jewish history enjoys a condition of robust health. By the 1990s American immigration history had generally declined in favour within the ranks of American historians. That Jews, outsiders to American culture upon their arrival in the United States, were able to penetrate barriers and enter the mainstream clashes with the way historians want to see the American past. As a group who craved both economic security and respectability, their story lacks the dramatic punch of resisters and rebels to the American ethos.

scholarly journals Le Yiddishland newyorkais: la mémoire enracinée (The Yiddishland New Yorker: the Ingrained Memory)

2015 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Annie Ousset-Krief
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Jewish History ◽  
Lower East Side ◽  
East Side ◽  
American Jews ◽  
New Yorker ◽  
American Jewish History ◽  
The Usa ◽  
American Jewish

More than two million Jews emigrated from Eastern Europe to the USA between 1880 and 1910. Most of them settled in New York City, in the immigrant district of the Lower East Side. As they were uprooted, they tried to recreate a new version of their shtetl, the villages in which most Jews had been forced to reside in Eastern Europe. The Lower East Side thus became their new Yiddishland, their home, where most institutions were modeled after the original ones. Though American Jews had already provided for most necessary institutions like synagogues or schools, what they had established did not match Russian Jews’ habits – besides the fact that Yiddish played a major part in their lives, and was totally ignored by most American Jews. Thus the new immigrants built their own synagogues, schools, and mutual benefit societies. Yiddish culture was vibrant, thanks to Yiddish theatre and the Yiddish press that flourished for decades. Today, though most Jews left the Lower East Side long ago, there remain a few synagogues and shops that have become the symbols of an everlasting Jewish identity, traces of a cherished past, marked by hardship but also the joy of having finally found freedom after centuries of persecution. The Lower East Side has become the place where part of American Jewish history took place, and as such, is a sacred place. Hasia Diner called it the ‘Jewish Plymouth Rock’, underlining the idea that it is the foundation of the American Jewish community, that combines both American and Jewish identities. Jewishness in Europe has been wiped out in many countries, and the descendants of these Russian immigrants can no longer turn to their ancestors’ European ‘home’. It is the Lower East Side that plays the part of the alte heime (the old country), and as such, makes up part of their identity. Memory and identity are deeply rooted in the ‘sacred geography’ of the Lower East Side.

The Bible and Judaism in America

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan D. Sarna
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Hebrew Bible ◽  
The United States ◽  
Jewish Communities ◽  
The Bible ◽  
American Jewish Identity ◽  
Jewish Scriptures ◽  
Four Books ◽  
American Jewish

The Jewish Holy Scriptures have long served as a defining symbol of American Jewish communal life and culture. A copy of the Torah first arrived in what is now New York City in 1655, and ever after the presence of the Jewish scriptures has helped identify and coalesce Jewish communities throughout the colonies and then the United States. American Jewish communities have continued to privilege the first five books of the Bible, but there are twenty-four books in the Hebrew Bible. The Hebrew Bible (and its several American translations) continues to be a mainstay in American Jewish identity, helping give shape and define the character of Jewish adherents and their communities throughout the United States.

DAVID MITTELBERG, The Israel Connection and American Jews (London and Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1999.) Pp. 209. $55.00 cloth.

2001 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 137-138
Author(s):  
J. ALAN WINTER
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Jewish Education ◽  
Jewish History ◽  
American Foreign Policy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Special Relationship ◽  
American Jews ◽  
Political Activities ◽  
American Jewish Identity ◽  
State Of Israel

The Israel connection whose impact on American Jews David Mittelberg examines is that engendered by a visit to Israel by an American Jew, not that of any special relationship between the nation-state of Israel and of the United States. The book's conclusions, then, are not offered with an eye toward Israeli or American foreign policy. Instead, they are offered as a possible contribution to those “formulating strategies and allocating resources which will have an impact on Jewish education and community survival” (p. 2) in the United States. Mittelberg advises those engaged in such activities that the survival of an American Jewish identity requires not only a religious component, but also an ethnic one based in a Jewish community. Moreover, that community “must choose to exist not mainly for the sake of philanthropic, social welfare, and political activities, but as an end unto itself [whose] boundaries include all of Jewish history and Jewish peoplehood” (p. 133).

A New American Jewish World

1998 ◽  
pp. 294-297
Author(s):  
Sefton D. Temkin
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Jewish Community ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
The United States ◽  
Reform Judaism ◽  
American Jewish

This chapter shows how the battles over the Pittsburgh Platform were being fought over a terrain which other factors were already transforming. Large-scale migration from Eastern Europe had begun. The number of Jews in the United States, estimated at 250,000 in 1880, reached the million mark in 1900, the year of Wise’s death. The acculturated community, speaking English albeit with a German accent, largely middle class, reformed in religion, was outnumbered by one that spoke Yiddish, belonged to the proletariat, and was untouched by Reform Judaism. The processes which Wise saw at work when he arrived in 1846 had to begin over again; but although many of the factors were similar, the answers were not necessarily the same. Incidentally, the presence of a second and larger Jewish community enhanced the importance of New York in American Jewish life and diminished the significance of Cincinnati and other Midwest communities where Wise had held sway.

Prologue

Hadassah ◽  
2011 ◽  
pp. 1-8
Author(s):  
Mira Katzburg-Yungman
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Jewish Women ◽  
Rare Combination ◽  
American Jewry ◽  
American Jewish ◽  
Zionist Organization

This introductory chapter is a brief overview of Hadassah, the Women's Zionist Organization of America. It briefly describes the organization's founding, as well as its leader, Henrietta Szold (1860–1945) — a woman who personified a rare combination of spirit, vision, idealism, and an extraordinary organizational and practical ability. Szold, who was both the spiritual and the organizational progenitor of Hadassah, envisioned it as a way to harness the unique capabilities of American Jewish women to the Zionist enterprise in Palestine. Here, the chapter discusses Hadassah's parallel history with that of American Jewry in general, and reviews the extent of scholarship regarding the organization. It places the study within the context of the circumstances prevailing both in the United States and in the Yishuv and Israel.

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