American Jewish Organizational Efforts to Combat Antisemitism in the United States Since 1945

2021 ◽  
pp. 302-312
Author(s):  
Leonard Dinnerstein
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Jewish

Omri Asscher, Reading America, Reading Israel: The Politics of Translation between Jews. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2020. 256 pp.

2021 ◽  
pp. 281-283
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Jewish People ◽  
The United States ◽  
Stanford University ◽  
Jewish Literature ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Meanings ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
American Jewish ◽  
Jewish Writers

This chapter studies Omri Asscher's Reading America, Reading Israel: The Politics of Translation between Jews (2020). This book employs translation to think about how two groups — American and Israeli Jews — understand and relate to one another. It stresses how adoption of different everyday languages and residence in distinct territories produced two collectives possessing divergent modern Jewish identities: when Jewish people and institutions came to mediate, manage, and regulate the social meanings of translated texts in the United States and Israel, they employed translations to define their center in contradistinction to its perceived antipode. Asscher also convincingly demonstrates how Israeli critics of the 1950s through the 1980s took pride in the literary successes of American Jewish writers, while dismissing the contents of their writing on ideological grounds. In contrast with his points about American Jewish translations of Israeli literature and Israeli translations of American Jewish literature from the 1950s to the 1980s, Asscher's broader claim about translation lacks effective substantiation.

The American Jewish Intelligentsia, the Claims of Humor—and the Case of Lenny Bruce

2021 ◽  
pp. 232-250
Author(s):  
Stephen J. Whitfield
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Codes Of Conduct ◽  
The United States ◽  
Communal Life ◽  
Stand Up Comedy ◽  
Key Characteristics ◽  
The Social ◽  
Jewish Humor ◽  
American Jewish

Several major American Jewish scholars and intellectuals have addressed the vitality and the pertinence of Jewish humor, seeing in it an entrée not only into key characteristics of communal life but also into the texture of reality itself. These academicians and critics have exposed the encounter between stand-up comedy and the social and political peculiarities of Jewish life in the United States. No comedian attracted more sustained attention than Lenny Bruce, whose career enlarged the contours of what could explored in night clubs and on long-playing records. Perhaps no satirist took greater risks, or exposed himself to greater legal danger, in both subject matter and in language. No predecessor was more willing to flaunt his own Jewish sensibility, or to present with such cynicism the hypocrisies inherent in the codes of conduct by which respectable America professed to live—which is what made Bruce the object of serious interest.

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.

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.

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.

Hebrew learning ideologies and the reconceptualization of American Judaism: Language debates in American Jewish schooling in the early 20th century

2016 ◽  
Vol 2016 (237) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sharon Avni
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
American Judaism ◽  
Educational Philosophies ◽  
American Jewish ◽  
American Society

AbstractThis article examines the ways in which Hebrew education was construed in the United States by tracing the Hebrew ideology debate of the early and mid-1900s, when dramatic changes were made to modernize Jewish schooling and its place within American society. Focusing on the Hebrew learning ideologies and educational philosophies of Samson Benderly and his followers, it examines how the

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