Judaism and Jewishness in Histories of American Jewry

This chapter reviews five books on American Jewish history, written by Joyce Antler, Jessica Cooperman, Kirsten Fermaglich, Rachel Kranson, and Jack Wertheimer. Reading these books together is challenging because they present substantially different interpretations of American Jews. If no definitive single interpretation of 20th-century American Jewish history emerges from these five books, what can be learned about American Jews by reading them together? Two key points emerge. Judaism proves a highly contested arena of American Jewish life. Yet despite the importance of religion, this fractious domain involves only a small portion of American Jews. Cooperman, Kranson, and Wertheimer all explore limits that confound efforts to promote Judaism in the United States among ordinary Jews. By contrast, “Jewishness” opens a valuable window into the complexity of life among Jews in the United States. Fermaglich focuses on how New York Jews coped with rising discrimination that impeded their ambitions for social and economic mobility. In her exploration of Jewish women's politics, Antler illuminates varied components of Jewish identity only occasionally influenced by religious dimensions.

Snowbirds Spotted in Cuba: Canadian Jewish Congress on The Global Stage in the 1960s

The American Jewish community has historically overshadowed Canadian Jewry. In population size, political prestige, and global influence, the power imbalance between American- and Canadian-Jewish organizations throughout the twentieth century has anchored popular understandings of North American Jewish affairs as one dominated by the U.S. Whereas the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) shepherded international Jewish causes throughout this period, its Canadian analogue, the Canadian Jewish Congress (CJC), never achieved such stature. However, on an island ninety miles from the U.S. coast, the fragile geopolitics of the Cold War conspired to recast this relationship. The Castro Revolution initiated a process which culminated in the severing of U.S.-Cuban ties in 1961, leaving a precarious Cuban Jewish community vulnerable. Canada’s geographic proximity and close institutional ties with American Jewry transformed the CJC’s role as the primary caregivers of Cuban Jewry. Consequently, the sundering of American-Cuban relations elevated the CJC to a position of strategic prominence on the international stage ultimately overshadowing its larger, and more illustrious, cousin to the south in Cuba. La communauté juive américaine a historiquement éclipsé la communauté juive canadienne. En termes de population, de prestige politique et d’influence mondiale, le déséquilibre de pouvoir entre les organisations juives américaines et canadiennes tout au long du XXe siècle a ancré la compréhension populaire que les affaires juives nord-américaines étaient dominées par les États-Unis. Alors que le American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) a dirigé des causes juives internationales tout au long de cette période, son analogue canadien, le Congrès juif canadien (CJC), n’a jamais atteint une telle stature. Cependant, sur une île située à quatre-vingt-dix milles des côtes américaines, la fragile géopolitique de la guerre froide a contribué à modifier cette relation. La révolution de Castro a lancé un processus qui a abouti à la rupture des liens américano-cubains en 1961, laissant une communauté juive cubaine précaire vulnérable. La proximité géographique du Canada et les liens institutionnels étroits avec la communauté juive américaine ont transformé le rôle du CJC en tant que principal allié de la communauté juive cubaine. Par conséquent, la rupture des relations américano-cubaines a élevé le CJC à une position d’importance stratégique sur la scène internationale, éclipsant finalement à Cuba son plus grand et plus illustre cousin du sud.

Struggling with anxiety: demographic statistics and an emotionalised American Jewish public sphere

Over the last three decades, the American Jewish communal public sphere has been flooded with sociodemographic concerns about numerical decline, and a sense of threatened ability to maintain a vibrant collective life. This article argues that this discursive site functions as a means, or technique, for the emotionalisation of Jewish identity and citizenship in the community.The article shows that public discourses on what is known by now as ‘the Jewish continuity crisis’ are shaped by an emotionalising feature of anxiety. Anxiety serves, all at once, as a tone-setter, an anchor of communal identity, and an object of debate: it sets an intensified volume, assigns its interlocutors particular emotionalised tags, and has also provoked its own fire as an emotional style. On the one hand, the organised community struggles with – that is, it suffers from – deeply entrenched anxieties about how to secure the future of American Jewry. On the other hand, the organised community struggles with having anxiety as such a defining position from which to work towards continuity and to articulate Jewishness. Ultimately, continuity is often taken as a communal struggle, with demographic and affiliation trends, but anxiety is in itself a source of struggle as well. I analyse this double-edged public dynamic, and argue that emotionality in itself constitutes a key component of involvement in the Jewish community. This component develops not only along and against the grain of anxiety, but also against the grain of indifference.