Angels, Monsters, and Jews: Intersections of Queer and Jewish Identity in Kushner's Angels in America

PMLA ◽  
1998 ◽  
Vol 113 (1) ◽  
pp. 90-102 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Freedman
Keyword(s):  
Identity Formation ◽  
Jewish Identity ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Jewish Experience ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
American Jewish ◽  
Angels In America

The discursive ligature between the Jew and the sexually transgressive is crucially revised in Tony Kushner's Angels in America. Kushner creates a powerful series of metonymies between the queer and the Jew that suggest their affinities but refuse to reify a unitary queer-Jewish identity. The center of this imaginative project is Kushner's Roy Cohn, who both illustrates and transforms the image of the queer Jewish power broker that circulated in American anti-Semitic discourses of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But Cohn's fate in the play suggests that the author's attitude toward Jewishness is conflicted, and the play's turn to Christian imagery confirms the suggestion. To fulfill laudatory political ends, Kushner deploys a typological vision common in American imaginative production and fulfills a pattern of assimilation equally common in American Jewish experience. I conclude by turning to Walter Benjamin, one of Kushner's sources, for a different model of identity formation that might avoid this fate.

Motherhood as Motivation: American Jewish Women in Action, 1890–1940

2017 ◽  
pp. 207-224
Author(s):  
Melissa R. Klapper
Keyword(s):  
Gender Difference ◽  
Jewish Identity ◽  
Peace Movement ◽  
Ethnic Identities ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
Jewish Women ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
American Jewish ◽  
Crucial Ingredient ◽  
Collective Belief

This chapter discusses maternalism as a collective belief in gender difference based on motherhood as the foundation for reform. It argues that maternalism was a crucial ingredient in the activism of Jewish women of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It also mentions Der Fraynd, the socialist Workmen's Circle monthly publication that linked the origins of the women's rights movement to prehistoric matriarchal societies in the fight for suffrage. The chapter analyses the peace movement that exhorted Jewish mothers to pass on the value of peace to their children and instruct them about the evils of war. It looks at how maternalism provided a framework and language for maintaining Jewish identity within a wider societal sphere as Jewish women moved into more public arenas and joined with women of different ethnic identities.

Diana L. Linden, Ben Shahn’s New Deal Murals: Jewish Identity in the American Scene. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2015. xi + 170 pp.

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Identity ◽  
New Deal ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
State University ◽  
Jewish American ◽  
Wayne State University ◽  
Jewish Experience ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Jewish ◽  
Easel Painting

This chapter reviews the book Ben Shahn’s New Deal Murals: Jewish Identity in the American Scene (2015), by Diana L. Linden. Ben Shahn’s New Deal Murals is about Ben Shahn, whom Linden considers an American Jew rather than a Jewish American. Linden studies a few of Shahn’s murals and a related easel painting, all conceived or completed between 1933 and 1943. She focuses on four large projects (one unrealized) from the vantage point of Shahn’s Jewish identity and leftist politics, contextualizing the art alongside the history of the American Jewish experience. Working first and foremost as an art historian, she explores Shahn’s iconography and the desires of his patrons. According to Linden, Shahn’s art is “neither solely American nor solely Jewish but rather an alchemic combination of the two.”

From Integration to Survival: American Jewish Anxieties in Transition

1985 ◽  
Vol 480 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-88 ◽  
Author(s):  
STEVEN M. COHEN ◽  
LEONARD J. FEIN
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Identity ◽  
Jewish History ◽  
American Jewish History ◽  
Dominant Theme ◽  
Jewish Experience ◽  
And Behaviors ◽  
American Jewish

Until roughly 1967, the dominant theme of American Jewish history was integration. Could the Jews find here in America the safety that had eluded them everywhere else in their wanderings? And, if so, at what cost to their Jewish beliefs and behaviors? From 1967 onward the theme has shifted. Greater concern is now focused on the maintenance of Jewish identity and commitment. With the shift from the integration of Jews to the survival of Judaism has come a renewal of interest in the meanings and implications of the Jewish experience.

Ellis Island to Ebbets Field: Sport and the American Jewish Experience.

1993 ◽  
Vol 98 (5) ◽  
pp. 1673
Author(s):  
Elliott J. Gorn ◽  
Peter Levine
Keyword(s):  
Ellis Island ◽  
Jewish Experience ◽  
American Jewish

How Shabbat Cholent Became a Secular Hungarian Favorite

2020 ◽  
pp. 235-250
Author(s):  
Katalin Franciska Rac
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Identity ◽  
Ashkenazi Jewish ◽  
One Pot ◽  
The World ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The One

Cholent is just one variation of the one-pot dish Jews all over the world consume on the weekly holiday of Sabbath. Hence, it is considered a culinary signifier of Ashkenazi Jewish identity. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however, cholent became incorporated into Hungarian cuisine; in the eyes of Christian Hungarians, it ceased to be a Jewish dish. This chapter highlights that in modern Hungary, shared ingredients and cooking techniques shaped the cuisines of the Jewish minority and the Christian majority equally. Subsequently, a shared culinary repertoire evolved, exemplified by cholent. The culinary dynamic that produced the “Hungarian cholent” mirrors the broader process of Jewish integration in modern Hungary.

Re(de)fining Modernity in Jewish History

2008 ◽  
pp. 133-146
Author(s):  
Gershon David Hundert
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Identity ◽  
Political Change ◽  
Jewish History ◽  
Inner Core ◽  
Eastern European ◽  
Self Evaluation ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Jewish Experience ◽  
Modern Era

This chapter emphasizes how 80 per cent of world Jewry who lived in Poland and Lithuania during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries had to de-Westernize and 'de-teleologize' the modern period in Jewish history. It defines the modern era that span the last several hundred years. It also cites the critiques of the anti-essentialists and the vitality of contemporary Jewishness that was embodied in the “magmatic” level of Jewish experience and was somehow beneath or beyond cultural, religious, and political change'. The chapter discusses the source of the inner core of Jewish identity as a continuing positive self-evaluation of Jews that derives from eastern European Jewry. It contends that the criteria for dividing Jewish history into periods should be drawn from majority of the Jewish experience itself.

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