Are Practitioners Equipped to Work With and Advocate for Members of the American Jewish Community? An Analysis of Discourse-Shaping Periodicals

American Jews represent a culturally distinct community that is increasingly victimized by hate crimes and other antisemitic acts. To determine the degree to which social work practitioners are equipped to work with, and advocate for, members of the American Jewish community, this study analyzed 10 years of content appearing in nine discourse-shaping periodicals. Manual and electronic searches were conducted, with two coders independently reviewing and analyzing the obtained literature in each search arm. The analysis yielded six articles that focused on Jews (four in an Israeli context). No articles featured the voice of American Jews, focused on culturally competent practice with American Jews, or addressed contemporary antisemitism. The results suggest that American Jews are largely invisible in social work discourse, which raises questions about the profession’s ability to comply with its ethical standards.

Jewish identity, social capital and giving

[Paragraph 1 of Introduction] : Marketers and marketing researchers have become accustomed to thinking about consumption behaviors as expressions of personal identity embedded in social networks. This paper argues that philanthropic behaviors (whether to donate or not, amount to donate, portfolio of donations) may likewise express personal identity in the service of, or resulting from, networks of social ties – that is may be mediated by social capital. The paper examines the relationship between Jewish identity, religious practice, social capital and philanthropy in the North American Jewish community. Using social capital theory the paper argues that Jewish identity gives rise to binding social capital. This network structure, in turn, induces members to support the network through philanthropic behavior, and makes networkmediated benefits available to members. Keywords: CVSS, Centre for Voluntary Sector Studies, Working Paper Series,TRSM, Ted Rogers School of Management Citation:

Jewish identity, social capital and giving

[Paragraph 1 of Introduction] : Marketers and marketing researchers have become accustomed to thinking about consumption behaviors as expressions of personal identity embedded in social networks. This paper argues that philanthropic behaviors (whether to donate or not, amount to donate, portfolio of donations) may likewise express personal identity in the service of, or resulting from, networks of social ties – that is may be mediated by social capital. The paper examines the relationship between Jewish identity, religious practice, social capital and philanthropy in the North American Jewish community. Using social capital theory the paper argues that Jewish identity gives rise to binding social capital. This network structure, in turn, induces members to support the network through philanthropic behavior, and makes networkmediated benefits available to members. Keywords: CVSS, Centre for Voluntary Sector Studies, Working Paper Series,TRSM, Ted Rogers School of Management Citation:

Divide and Rule: Discursive Authority, Identity Dissonance, Ethnic Lobbies, and US Foreign Policy, or How President Obama Defeated AIPAC over the 2015 Iran Deal

This article addresses the influence of diaspora lobbies on US foreign policy by analyzing the failure of the paradigmatic lobby—AIPAC—to block the 2015 Iran deal. The literature on the efficacy of diaspora lobbies focuses on structural material factors. In contrast, this study introduces an agency-orientated constructivist approach focused on ideational factors. While the material institutional setting contributed to AIPAC's defeat by establishing a high bar to overcome, this was not insurmountable. Consequently, such material factors must be combined with ideational factors to fully explain AIPAC's defeat. In this vein, the prevalence of negative affective partisanship generated a “cultural opportunity structure” for the President to wield party loyalty to obtain the support of Congressional Democrats. Yet, this too was not insurmountable for AIPAC, had opposition to the deal not become tainted by partisanship. However, the “Republican first” strategy pursued by the public face of the campaign, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, undermined AIPAC's “discursive authority.” This generated “identity dissonance” within the American Jewish community and for other Democratic supporters of Israel, by casting their identification with Israel against their identification with the Democratic Party. In contrast, President Obama successfully framed the issue to minimize identity dissonance.

Serious Jews: Cultural intimacy and the politics of Yiddish

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.

Eli Lederhendler, American Jewry: A New History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. xxiv + 331 pp.

In composing his important, one-volume synthesis—what he calls a “new history of American Jewry”—Eli Lederhendler has benefited from many of the recent monographic works that have rethought basic themes and issues in this dynamic area of Jewish studies. What makes this discipline exciting is that its historians constantly rethink conceptualizations that once were regnant in the field, offering new understandings of both the sweep and the details of the American Jewish community saga. Lederhendler has a firm grip on these historiographical developments and has adroitly brought much of this provocative scholarship into an erudite and accessible study. Readers also gain from his extensive on-the-page notes, which guide those who are interested to the books and articles that informed his observations, and from his learned excurses for future consideration....

Star power: Kirk Douglas, celebrity activism and the Hollywood-Israel connection

This article scrutinizes the actor Kirk Douglas’s pro-Israeli advocacy over six decades, both on the screen and off it, setting this within the contexts of the Arab-Israeli conflict and the links between Hollywood and Zionism. It looks at why and how Douglas supported Israel and considers what the star’s advocacy says about the history of celebrity activism and the interconnections between the American Jewish community, Hollywood and Israel. The article argues that Douglas was a major player in the special relationship that developed between Hollywood and Israel after 1948, one that, despite recent troubles, endures to this day.

The Specter of Dwindling Numbers: Population Quantity and Jewish Biopolitics in the United States

Over the last three decades, the organized American-Jewish community has preoccupied itself with sociodemographic concerns regarding maintenance of a viable Jewish life in the United States. In this article, I study a key dimension of this preoccupation with population trends: the quantity of the Jewish population, that is, the number of Jews. I show the centrality of this dimension in shaping a cluster of anxious discourses and interventionist engagements directed toward stemming numerical decline. Analyzing this policy world in terms of a “Jewish biopolitics,” I assess how the voluntary nature of American Jewry has shaped a distinct biopolitical field, reliant on “making Jews” by both biological and cultural reproduction, enmeshing dimensions of quantity and quality. Juxtaposing this Jewish biopolitical engagement with the one exercised by the Israeli state, I flesh out broader considerations and contributions, and introduce the exploratory concept of “minority community biopolitics.” The article is grounded in an anthropological study of policy, including fieldwork, interviews, and a review of the flurry of archival and public materials related to the topic.