Horace Kallen Confronts America

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew J. Kaufman
Keyword(s):  
Horace Kallen

Diaspora in Modern Jewish Thought

2021 ◽  
pp. 136-150
Author(s):  
Noam Pianko
Keyword(s):  
Franz Rosenzweig ◽  
Jewish Thought ◽  
Moses Mendelssohn ◽  
A Value ◽  
Theodor Herzl ◽  
Theoretical Evolution ◽  
Hermann Cohen ◽  
Horace Kallen ◽  
The Ideal ◽  
Modern Jewish Thought

This chapter explores the broad contours of concepts of diaspora in modern Jewish thought. Philosophers, intellectuals, religious thinkers, and non-Zionist nationalists who disagreed on the ideal political structure for Jewish collective life (including Moses Mendelssohn, Hermann Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig, Simon Dubnow, Hannah Arendt, Mordecai Kaplan, and Horace Kallen) shared a commitment to diaspora as a value, rather than just a fact, of modern Jewish life. Yet the emergence of the terminology of diaspora in tandem with the rise of nationalism and Zionism shaped the theoretical evolution of diaspora as the binary opposite to homeland and statist visions of Jewish identity. As a result, seminal Zionist theorists deeply critical of diaspora life, such as Theodor Herzl, Achad Ha’am, and David Ben-Gurion, also had a key role in framing the significance of diaspora. Modern theories of diaspora internalized and contested the privileged position of territory and sovereignty demanded by the rise of nationalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Normalization and Its Discontents

2020 ◽  
pp. 201-263
Author(s):  
Adam Sutcliffe
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Sigmund Freud ◽  
Reform Movement ◽  
Melting Pot ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Israel Zangwill ◽  
American Society ◽  
Horace Kallen

This chapter concentrates on the question of normalcy and its relationship to twentieth-century notions of Jewish distinctiveness and purpose. It describes how the idea of a special Jewish mission that initially thrived within the American Reform movement disintegrated as the urge to integrate within American society to gather strength among Jews prominently waned. It talks about Jewish exemplarity that was influentially presented in relation to specifics of the American context through the competing “melting pot” and “orchestra” metaphors of Israel Zangwill and Horace Kallen. The chapter illustrates the hope of Jewish normalization that was perceived by sharp observers, such as Karl Kraus, Theodor Lessing and Sigmund Freud in the first half of the twentieth century. It also mentions the horror of the Holocaust that cast a profound chill over the idea of Jewish instrumental purpose, but at the same time brought about a renewal of the idea on the ethical and historical lessons imparted by the Nazi genocide.

America’s melting pot ideal and Horace Kallen

Society ◽  
1999 ◽  
Vol 36 (6) ◽  
pp. 53-55 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen J. Whitfield
Keyword(s):  
Melting Pot ◽  
Horace Kallen

scholarly journals A imaginação nacional dos judeus norte-americanos: do pluralismo cultural liberal e sionista de Horace Kallen às incertezas do século XXI

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (33) ◽  
pp. e0202
Author(s):  
Flávio Limoncic
Keyword(s):  
Melting Pot ◽  
Israel Zangwill ◽  
Horace Kallen

No debate de inícios do século XX acerca da incorporação dos imigrantes europeus, duas perspectivas compartilhavam a visão de que a nação norte-americana se assentava sobre valores cívicos, mas divergiam quanto às formas da incorporação: de um lado, o melting-pot de Israel Zangwill; de outro, o pluralismo cultural de Horace Kallen. Ao elaborar a ideia de pluralismo cultural, Kallen propôs, ademais, que os judeus dos Estados Unidos construíssem sua identidade norte-americana articulando sionismo e liberalismo. No pós-Segunda Guerra Mundial, os judeus dos Estados Unidos teriam, portanto, construído uma imaginação nacional assentada nesses dois eixos culturais e políticos. Desde os anos 1970, porém, o consenso sionista dos judeus norte-americanos entrou em processo de erosão, o que, ao lado de mudanças demográficas, tem colocado novos desafios à sua imaginação nacional neste início de século XXI.

A Chosen People in a Pluralist Nation: Horace Kallen and the Jewish-American Experience

2006 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 161-193 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Greene
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Identity ◽  
Cultural Pluralism ◽  
Jewish American ◽  
American Democracy ◽  
American Jews ◽  
Positive Role ◽  
American Experience ◽  
American Jewish Identity ◽  
Ethnic Pluralism ◽  
Horace Kallen

AbstractThis article examines the ways that ethnic pluralism and Jewish exceptionalism coexisted in philosopher Horace M. Kallen’s thought from the time that Jewish identity began to play a significant and positive role in his own self-conception, roughly in 1900, until his coining of “cultural pluralism” in 1924. Kallen conceived of pluralism, in large part, to address concerns about American Jewish identity, but its conception created a vexing problem for Jews. If Jews were the “chosen people,” then how could they fit into a model of the nation that emphasized equality, or at least harmony, between many different groups? Kallen would solve the dilemma of pluralism and chosenness by advocating that American Jews maintain their particularity on the basis of cultural distinctiveness rather than of superiority. Interrogating Kallen's thought on this question illuminates how his enduring theory of cultural pluralism owed its origins, in part, to specific Jewish concerns and how it developed in conjunction with a sustained struggle to articulate a meaningful Jewish identity that would prove continuous across generations. Kallen’s solution to the dilemma of pluralism and Jewish exceptionalism also demonstrates one instance of how debates about Jewish particularity profoundly influenced understandings of cultural, racial, and religious difference within American democracy during the early twentieth century.

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