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.

Strangers in the City: Transmigration from Eastern Europe and its Impact on Berlin and Hamburg 1880–1914

2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 223-246
Author(s):  
Tobias Brinkmann
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
The United States ◽  
Urban Traffic ◽  
European Cities ◽  
Massive Growth ◽  
Transit Migration ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The City

This article examines the impact of transit migration from the Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires on Berlin and Hamburg between 1880 and 1914. Both cities experienced massive growth during the last three decades of the nineteenth century, and both served as major points of passage for Eastern Europeans travelling to (and returning from) the United States. The rising migration from Eastern Europe through Central and Western European cities after 1880 coincided with the need to find adequate solutions to accommodate a rapidly growing number of commuters. The article demonstrates that the isolation of transmigrants in Berlin, Hamburg (and New York) during the 1890s was only partly related to containing contagious disease and ‘undesirable’ migrants. Isolating transmigrants was also a pragmatic response to the increasing pressure on the urban traffic infrastructure.

Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry Volume 11

1998 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
Religious Tradition ◽  
The United States ◽  
Jewish Tradition

Addressing various aspects of Jewish life and religion, particularly in the last two centuries, this book examines different aspects of the Hasidic tradition; present-day contacts between Bobower Hasidism in New York and Bobowa in Poland; and how a rabbi trained in the Lithuanian tradition adapted to the very different conditions of the United States. The modifications of Jewish religious tradition practiced in the modern pre-war synagogues in Warsaw, Lódz, and Lwów are considered, as is the attempt by Hillel Zeitlyn to re-interpret Jewish tradition in the interwar years.

Legacies of War

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Howard G. Wilshire ◽  
Richard W. Hazlett ◽  
Jane E. Nielson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Military Service ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Military Training ◽  
The United States ◽  
Military Operations ◽  
Foreign Wars ◽  
The U.S

Since 1900, United States troops have fought in more foreign conflicts than any other nation on Earth. Most Americans supported those actions, believing that they would keep the scourge of war far from our homes. But the strategy seems to have failed—it certainly did not prevent terror attacks against the U.S. mainland. The savage Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 and the 11 September 2001 (9/11) attacks on New York and Washington, D.C. were not the first to inflict war damage in America’s 48 contiguous states, however—nor were they the first warlike actions to harm innocent citizens since the Civil War. Paradoxically, making war abroad has always required practicing warfare in our own back yards. Today’s large, mechanized military training exercises have degraded U.S. soils, water supplies, and wildlife habitats in the same ways that the real wars affected war-torn lands far away. The saddest fact of all is that the deadly components of some weapons in the U.S. arsenal never found use in foreign wars but have attacked U.S. citizens in their own homes and communities. The relatively egalitarian universal service of World War II left a whole generation of Americans with nostalgia and reverence for military service. Many of us, perhaps the majority, might argue that human and environmental sacrifices are the price we must be willing to pay to protect our interests and future security. A current political philosophy proposes that the United States must even start foreign wars to protect Americans and their homes. But Americans are not fully aware of all the past sacrifices—and what we don’t know can hurt us. Even decades-old impacts from military training still degrade land and contaminate air and water, particularly in the arid western states, and will continue to do so far into the future. Exploded and unexploded bombs, mines, and shells (“ordnance,” in military terms) and haphazard disposal sites still litter former training lands in western states. And large portions of the western United States remain playgrounds for war games, subject to large-scale, highly mechanized military operations for maintaining combat readiness and projecting American power abroad.

‘The Time of Vishniac’: Photographs of Pre-War East European Jewry in Post-War Contexts

2003 ◽  
pp. 313-334
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Shandler
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Jewish Community ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
The United States ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
East European ◽  
European Jewish ◽  
Post War ◽  
Second World

This chapter investigates how pictures taken by photographers from outside the east European Jewish community became widely familiar throughout the post-war period, none more so than the work of one photographer, Roman Vishniac. Taken during a series of trips he made to Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Romania from the mid-1930s until the start of the Second World War, some of these photographs have been republished frequently, including in five books devoted solely to the photographer's work. Vishniac's images figured prominently in the first exhibitions and books of photographs of pre-war east European Jewish life to appear in the United States after the Second World War, and not a decade has passed since without some of these photographs being published or exhibited there, as well as abroad. Although these pictures are the product of a limited phase in Vishniac's career, they are his best-known accomplishment. For many post-war Americans, in particular, some of his images have served as key visual points of entry into the culture of pre-war east European Jewry.

“The Hora Staccato in Swing!”: Jascha Heifetz's Musical Eclecticism and the Adaptation of Violin Miniatures

2012 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 405-431
Author(s):  
JOSHUA S. WALDEN
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
The United States ◽  
Popular Song ◽  
Tin Pan Alley ◽  
Popular Songs ◽  
History Of

AbstractJascha Heifetz (1901–87) promoted a modern brand of musical eclecticism, recording, performing, and editing adaptations of folk and popular songs while remaining dedicated to the standard violin repertoire and the compositions of his contemporaries. This essay examines the complex influences of his displacement from Eastern Europe and assimilation to the culture of the United States on both the hybridity of his repertoire and the critical reception he received in his new home. It takes as its case study Heifetz's composition of the virtuosic showpiece “Hora Staccato,” based on a Romany violin performance he heard in Bucharest, and his later adaptation of the music into an American swing hit he titled “Hora Swing-cato.” Finally, the essay turns to the field of popular song to consider how two of the works Heifetz performed most frequently were adapted for New York Yiddish radio as Tin Pan Alley–style songs whose lyrics narrate the early twentieth-century immigrant experience. The performance and arrangement history of many of Heifetz's miniatures reveals the multivalent ways in which works in his repertoire, and for some listeners Heifetz himself, were reinterpreted, adapted, and assimilated into American culture.

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.

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.                                

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