Serious Jews: Cultural intimacy and the politics of Yiddish

2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 151-169
Author(s):  
Joshua B Friedman
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Jewish Community ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Language Ideologies ◽  
The United States ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
American Jewish Community ◽  
Intensive Study ◽  
Ethnoracial Identity ◽  
American Jewish

This article shows how the concept of cultural intimacy can help scholars better analyze ethnoracial identity politics in the United States. It draws on ethnographic research with Yiddish language activists, or “Yiddishists.” Yiddishists define their engagement with the language through a discourse of “seriousness”—marked by hard work and intensive study. Seriousness, as a kind of affective orientation and cultural aspiration, offers Yiddishists a powerful, if subtle, resource to contest power relations in the American Jewish community. Through everyday discourses and performances of seriousness, Yiddishists set themselves apart from an American Jewish “mainstream,” or “establishment,” while simultaneously critiquing the grounds on which mainstream American Jewish institutions and individuals claim to speak on behalf of the community. Seriousness does this, I contend, by resignifying dominant American Jewish language ideologies about Yiddish as signs of American Jewish cultural intimacy—specifically, communal embarrassment over perceived deficits in knowledge about Jewishness.

Bernhard Kahn

1979 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-31
Author(s):  
C. Jacobowsky
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Jewish Community ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Executive Director ◽  
The United States ◽  
Secretary General ◽  
American Jewish Community ◽  
International Network ◽  
Full Activity

In this article, the author presents Bernhard Kahn (1876–1955) born in Oskarshamn, Sweden. During his career he grew an extensive international network, which made him one of the most known Swedish Jews abroad of the 20th century. Towards the end of 1904, Kahn was employed as secretary-general of Hilfsverein der Deutschen Juden which had been founded in 1901 and commenced its full activity in 1903, after the progrom in Kishinev. As secretary general of HV, Kahn worked hard to give constructive assistance to the Jews in Eastern Europe, among other things. Later he worked in Berlin as European director of the Joint. Kahn perceived that his position as JDC’s European director was untenable as long as he remained in Berlin. His connections with the hated American Jewish community were unpopular in Berlin. In the end of March 1933 he prepared his departure and moved his office to Paris. In 1938, during Kahn’s last active year in Europe before he moved to the United States, there were 687 loan societies with 191,000 members, small businessmen, farmers and craftsmen. JDC’s Reconstruction Foundation, with Kahn as its executive director, was not only active among the Jews in Poland, but also in Belgium, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Czechoslovakia and Turkey.                                

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.

Ethnohistory's Ethnohistory

2010 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 113-128
Author(s):  
Michael E. Harkin
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Ethical Issues ◽  
Theoretical Orientation ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
The United States ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
European Contact ◽  
Documentary Sources ◽  
Research Areas ◽  
Foundational Work

This article examines the first decades of the field of ethnohistory as it developed in the United States. It participated in the general rapprochement between history and anthropology of mid-twentieth-century social science. However, unlike parallel developments in Europe and in other research areas, ethnohistory specifically arose out of the study of American Indian communities in the era of the Indian Claims Commission. Thus ethnohistory developed from a pragmatic rather than a theoretical orientation, with practitioners testifying both in favor of and against claims. Methodology was flexible, with both documentary sources and ethnographic methods employed to the degree that each was feasible. One way that ethnohistory was innovative was the degree to which women played prominent roles in its development. By the end of the first decade, the field was becoming broader and more willing to engage both theoretical and ethical issues raised by the foundational work. In particular, the geographic scope began to reach well beyond North America, especially to Latin America, where archival resources and the opportunities for ethnographic research were plentiful, but also to areas such as Melanesia, where recent European contact allowed researchers to observe the early postcontact period directly and to address the associated theoretical questions with greater authority. Ethnohistory is thus an important example of a field of study that grew organically without an overarching figure or conscious plan but that nevertheless came to engage central issues in cultural and historical analysis.

scholarly journals Retirement Without God: Activism and Community Among Secular People Over 60

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (Supplement_1) ◽  
pp. 441-441
Author(s):  
Joseph Blankholm
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Older Adults ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
Generational Differences ◽  
Crucial Role ◽  
National Level ◽  
The United States ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Vast Literature

Abstract There are more than 1,400 nonbeliever communities in the United States and well over a dozen organizations that advocate for secular people on the national level. Together, these local and national groups comprise a social movement that includes atheists, agnostics, humanists, freethinkers, and other kinds of nonbelievers. Despite the fact that retired people over 60 dedicate most of the money and energy needed to run these groups, the increasingly vast literature on secular people and secularism has paid them almost no attention. Relying on more than one hundred interviews (including dozens with people over 60), several years of ethnographic research, and a survey of organized nonbelievers, this paper demonstrates the crucial role that people over 60 play in the American secular movement today. It also considers the reasons older adults are so important to these groups, the challenges they face in trying to recruit younger members and combat stereotypes about aging leadership, and generational differences that structure how various types of nonbeliever groups look and feel. This paper reframes scholarly understandings of very secular Americans by focusing on people over 60 and charts a new path in secular studies.

Conflicting Identities: An Ethnographic Account of Conflict and Schism in an Episcopal Parish

2016 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 210-230
Author(s):  
Joyce Ann Mercer
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Congregational Study ◽  
Practical Theological ◽  
Religious Landscape ◽  
Interacting Features

This paper draws upon a congregational study of an Episcopal parish in the United States in conflict over sexuality issues. Based on ethnographic research, the paper tells the story of a small Northern Virginia church’s internal struggles, schism, and continuing post-schism conflicts, in the context of its changing external social and religious landscape. A practical theological analysis of these conflicts explores the existence of different theological and political ecclesiologies shaping the conflict, as well as utilizing the work of peace scholars Marie Dugan 1 and John Paul Lederach 2 to consider conflict’s multidimensional, interacting features.

scholarly journals immigration of Argentinean Jews to Winnipeg : Emigration and Successful Settlement

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Reuben Covshoff
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Labour Market ◽  
Jewish Community ◽  
Free Market ◽  
Currency Crisis ◽  
The United States ◽  
Provincial Government ◽  
Jewish Federation ◽  
Market Approach ◽  
Jewish Immigrants

Manitoba has strategized from 2002 onwards to incorporate a free-market approach into Manitoba's Provincial Nominee Programme in order to fulfill its labour market goals. In the grand scheme of attracting new Argentinean Jewish immigrants, it was an opportunity for these people to leave their homeland that was suffering under an economic depression and a currency crisis. Both the provincial government (through the Manitoba Provincial Nominee Programme) and an ethno-cultural institution (the Jewish Federation of Winnipeg) forged a partnership that matched these immigrants with jobs and also helped integrate them into the Winnipeg Jewish community. Seventeen interviews of Argentinean Jews now living in Winnipeg explained how they had a choice of emigrating to Spain, Israel or the United States but they selected Winnipeg and they give their reasons for doing so.

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