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Jewish Girls Coming of Age in America, 1860-1920
by Melissa R. KlapperJewish Girls Coming of Age in America, 1860--1920 draws on a wealth of archival material, much of which has never been published--or even read--to illuminate the ways in which Jewish girls' adolescent experiences reflected larger issues relating to gender, ethnicity, religion, and education.Klapper explores the dual roles girls played as agents of acculturation and guardians of tradition. Their search for an identity as American girls that would not require the abandonment of Jewish tradition and culture mirrored the struggle of their families and communities for integration into American society.While focusing on their lives as girls, not the adults they would later become, Klapper draws on the papers of such figures as Henrietta Szold, founder of Hadassah; Edna Ferber, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Showboat; and Marie Syrkin, literary critic and Zionist. Klapper also analyzes the diaries, memoirs, and letters of hundreds of other girls whose later lives and experiences have been lost to history.Told in an engaging style and filled with colorful quotes, the book brings to life a neglected group of fascinating historical figures during a pivotal moment in the development of gender roles, adolescence, and the modern American Jewish community.
Jewish Glass and Christian Stone: A Materialist Mapping of the "Parting of the Ways" (Routledge Studies in the Early Christian World)
by Eric C. SmithIn recent years scholars have re-evaluated the "parting of the ways" between Judaism and Christianity, reaching new understandings of the ways shared origins gave way to two distinct and sometimes inimical religious traditions. But this has been a profoundly textual task, relying on the writings of rabbis, bishops, and other text-producing elites to map the terrain of the "parting." This book takes up the question of the divergence of Judaism and Christianity in terms of material--the stuff made, used, and left behind by the persons that lived in and between these religions as they were developing. Considering the glass, clay, stone, paint, vellum, and papyrus of ancient Jews and Christians, this book maps the "parting" in new ways, and argues for a greater role for material and materialism in our reconstructions of the past.
Jewish Gold Country (Images of America)
by Jonathan L. FriedmannThe discovery of gold at Sutter's Mill in Coloma on January 24, 1848, initiated one of the largest migrations in US history. Between 1849 and 1855, hundreds of thousands of migrants arrived in Northern California hoping to find gold in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. The rapid population growth and economic prosperity led to boomtowns, banks, and railroads, making California eligible for statehood in 1850. An international cast of gold-seekers, merchants, and tradespeople arrived by land and through the port of San Francisco, which was transformed from a small village to a cosmopolitan metropolis. Jewish pioneers, many of whom had been merchants in Europe, opened stores and businesses in small towns and mining camps in and around the Mother Lode. They established benevolent societies and cemeteries, founded synagogues and companies, held public office and positions of influence, and contributed greatly to the multicultural fabric of the Gold Country.
The Jewish Gospels: The Story Of The Jewish Christ
by Jack Miles Daniel BoyarinIn July 2008 a front-page story in the New York Times reported on the discovery of an ancient Hebrew tablet, dating from before the birth of Jesus, which predicted a Messiah who would rise from the dead after three days. Commenting on this startling discovery at the time, noted Talmud scholar Daniel Boyarin argued that "some Christians will find it shocking-a challenge to the uniqueness of their theology."Guiding us through a rich tapestry of new discoveries and ancient scriptures, The Jewish Gospels makes the powerful case that our conventional understandings of Jesus and of the origins of Christianity are wrong. In Boyarin's scrupulously illustrated account, the coming of the Messiah was fully imagined in the ancient Jewish texts. Jesus, moreover, was embraced by many Jews as this person, and his core teachings were not at all a break from Jewish beliefs and teachings. Jesus and his followers, Boyarin shows, were simply Jewish. What came to be known as Christianity came much later, as religious and political leaders sought to impose a new religious orthodoxy that was not present at the time of Jesus's life.In the vein of Elaine Pagels's The Gnostic Gospels, here is a brilliant new work that will break open some of our culture's most cherished assumptions.
The Jewish-Greek Tradition in Antiquity and the Byzantine Empire
by James K. Aitken James Carleton PagetThe Jewish-Greek tradition represents an arguably distinctive strand of Judaism characterized by use of the Greek language and interest in Hellenism. This volume traces the Jewish encounter with Greek culture from the earliest points of contact in antiquity to the end of the Byzantine Empire. It honors Nicholas de Lange, whose distinguished work brought recognition to an undeservedly neglected field, in part by dispelling the common belief that Jewish-Greek culture largely disappeared after 100 CE. The authors examine literature, archaeology, and biblical translations, such as the Septuagint, in order to illustrate the substantial exchange of language and ideas. The Jewish-Greek Tradition in Antiquity and the Byzantine Empire demonstrates the enduring significance of the tradition and will be an essential handbook for anyone interested in Jewish studies, biblical studies, ancient and Byzantine history, or the Greek language.
The Jewish Heritage in British History: Englishness and Jewishness
by Tony Kushner'In the contemporary British context, ‘heritage’ is a highly politicized and contentious term', Tony Kusher writes in his introduction to this edited collection of essays on the subject of Jewish heritage, thus setting the tone for a book as much interested in the preservation as it is the understanding of this culture. This book provides a more theoretical framework for the pursuit of Jewish historiography and heritage preservation in Britain. The essays collected here look both to the past and to the future, discussing the nature of the Jewish heritage that has already been produced and looking toward possibilities of future development. Kushner has collected a wide range of subjects from social history to architecture to the question of Jewish women. This book will be of interest to students of social history and ethnic studies, particularly Jewish history in London and Manchester. It will be also of some use to those interested in architecture.
The Jewish Heroes of Warsaw: The Afterlife of the Revolt
by Avinoam PattThe Jewish Heroes of Warsaw: The Afterlife of the Revolt by Avinoam J. Patt analyzes how the heroic saga of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was mythologized in a way that captured the attention of Jews around the world, allowing them to imagine what it might have been like to be there, engaged in the struggle against the Nazi oppressor. The timing of the uprising, coinciding with the transition to memorialization and mourning, solidified the event as a date to remember both the heroes and the martyrs of Warsaw, and of European Jewry more broadly. The Jewish Heroes of Warsaw includes nine chapters. Chapter 1 includes a brief history of Warsaw from 1939 to 1943, including the creation of the ghetto and the development of the Jewish underground. Chapter 2 examines how the uprising was reported, interpreted, and commemorated in the first year after the revolt. Chapter 3 concerns the desire for first-person accounts of the fighters. Chapter 4 examines the ways the uprising was seized upon by Jewish communities around the world as evidence that Jews had joined the struggle against fascism and utilized as a prism for memorializing the destruction of European Jewry. Chapter 5 analyzes how memory of the uprising was mobilized by the Zionist movement, even as it debated how to best incorporate the doomed struggle of Warsaw’s Jews into the Zionist narrative.Chapter 6 explores the aftermath of the war as survivors struggled to come to terms with the devastation around them. Chapter 7 studies how the testimonies of three surviving ghetto fighters present a fascinating case to examine the interaction between memory, testimony, politics, and history. Chapter 8 analyzes literary and artistic works, including Jacob Pat’s Ash un Fayer, Marie Syrkin, Blessed is the Match, and Natan Rapoport’s Monument to the Ghetto Fighters, among others. As this book demonstrates, the revolt itself, while described as a "revolution in Jewish history," did little to change the existing modes for Jewish understanding of events. Students and scholars of modern Jewish history, Holocaust studies, and European studies will find great value in this detail-oriented study.
Jewish High Society in Old Regime Berlin (Modern Jewish History Ser.)
by Deborah HertzDuring the quarter century between 1780 and 1806, Berlin's courtly and intellectual elites gathered in the homes of a few wealthy, cultivated Jewish women to discuss the events of the day. Princes, nobles, upwardly mobile writers, actors, and beautiful Jewish women flocked to the salons of Rahel Varnhagen, Henriette Herz, and Dorothea von Courland, creating both a new cultural institution and an example of social mixing unprecedented in the German past. In this book, Deborah Hertz offers the first detailed history of these salons, using rich narrative as well as analytic social history to explain why such an institution arose and what it meant to those involved. Hertz reconstructs the cultural and social context that nurtured salon life, describing how the salons emerged out of courtly society, commercial leisure institutions, and the city's new intellectual clubs. Using a collective biography of one hundred participants in sixteen salons, Hertz shows that there were complex social and personal motives for salon participation. Noblemen, for example, needed Jewish financiers for private loans, but they also wanted access to more progressive cultural currents. For Jewish women, salon leadership offered not only an escape from a restricted home life but also social and personal power, power that was frequently consolidated in their upwardly mobile marriages to noblemen. However advantageous and stimulating these salons were for their participants, they were the product of a transitory convergence of social and cultural structures. Hertz concludes by exploring how both underground antisemitic gossip and the new patriotism unleashed by the upheavals in Prussia after 1806 destroyed Jewish salon life in Berlin.
Jewish History: The Big Picture
by Gila Gevirtz Jonathan B. KrasnerThis lively and accessible volume presents the full range of Jewish history, from biblical to contemporary times. Adapted from the two-volume award-winning work, The History of the Jewish People by Professors Jonathan Sarna and Jonathan Krasner, this single volume treats readers to a fast-paced account of Jewish history that is grounded in scholarship and brimming with information on topics as diverse as the development of Christianity beyond its Jewish roots into a new religion and the revival of Hebrew as a spoken language. The text is filled with colorful anecdotal detail about Jewish communities throughout history and around the world, such as how Passover was celebrated on the Civil War battlefield and the origins of Beta Israel, the Ethiopian-Jewish community.
The Jewish Holidays: A Guide & Commentary
by Michael StrassfeldThe coeditor of the enormously popular Jewish Catalog "help[s] readers understand more fully the meaning of our holidays and thereby to observe these festivals . . . with a greater devotion and joy."--Rabbi Alexander M. Schindler
Jewish Honor Courts: Revenge, Retribution, and Reconciliation in Europe and Israel after the Holocaust
by Gabriel N. Finder Laura JockuschIn the aftermath of World War II, virtually all European countries struggled with the dilemma of citizens who had collaborated with Nazi occupiers. Jewish communities in particular faced the difficult task of confronting collaborators among their own ranks--those who had served on Jewish councils, worked as ghetto police, or acted as informants. European Jews established their own tribunals--honor courts--for dealing with these crimes, while Israel held dozens of court cases against alleged collaborators under a law passed two years after its founding. In Jewish Honor Courts: Revenge, Retribution, and Reconciliation in Europe and Israel after the Holocaust, editors Laura Jockusch and Gabriel N. Finder bring together scholars of Jewish social, cultural, political, and legal history to examine this little-studied and fascinating postwar chapter of Jewish history. The volume begins by presenting the rationale for punishing wartime collaborators and purging them from Jewish society. Contributors go on to examine specific honor court cases in Allied-occupied Germany and Austria, Poland, the Netherlands, and France. One essay also considers the absence of an honor court in Belgium. Additional chapters detail the process by which collaborators were accused and brought to trial, the treatment of women in honor courts, and the unique political and social place of honor courts in the nascent state of Israel. Taken as a whole, the essays in Jewish Honor Courts illustrate the great caution and integrity brought to the agonizing task of identifying and punishing collaborators, a process that helped survivors to reclaim their agency, reassert their dignity, and work through their traumatic experiences. For many years, the honor courts have been viewed as a taboo subject, leaving their hundreds of cases unstudied. Jewish Honor Courts uncovers this forgotten chapter of Jewish history and shows it to be an integral part of postwar Jewish rebuilding. Scholars of Jewish, European, and Israeli history as well as readers interested in issues of legal and social justice will be grateful for this detailed volume.
Jewish Hospital & Cincinnati Jews in Medicine, The (American Heritage)
by Frederic KromeCincinnati Jewish Hospital has remained a beacon of service to the city for more than a century and a half. Although it always accepted patients regardless of their heritage or faith, the institution maintains its Jewish identity. Founded in 1850, the Hospital weathered depressions and wars while reflecting changes that occurred within the Jewish community and the city. Cincinnati's Jewish health professionals pioneered medical education, new treatments for polio and the introduction of new psychological treatments for children. Author Frederic Krome explores the fascinating history of the Cincinnati Jewish Hospital and the many contributions Cincinnati Jews made to the field of medicine.
Jewish Hungarian Orthodoxy: Piety and Zealotry (Routledge Jewish Studies Series)
by Menachem Keren-KratzBeginning with the informal establishment of Jewish Orthodoxy by a Hungarian rabbi in the early nineteenth century, this book traces the history and legacy of Jewish Hungarian Orthodoxy over the course of the last 200 years. To date, no single book has provided a comprehensive overview of the history of Hungarian Orthodoxy, a singularly zealous, fundamental, and separatist faction within Jewish circles. This book describes and explains the impact of this strand of Jewish Orthodoxy – developed in Hungary in the second half of the nineteenth century – across the Jewish world. The author traces the development of Hungarian Orthodoxy in the “new” Jewish territories created in the wake of Hungary’s dismantlement following its defeat in World War I. The book also focuses on Hungarian Orthodoxy in the two spheres where it continued to develop after the Holocaust, namely Israel and the United States. The book concludes with a review of Hungarian Orthodoxy’s legacy in contemporary communities worldwide, most of which are known for their radical anti-Zionist and anti-modernistic strands. The book will prove vital reading for students and academics interested in religious fundamentalism, Hungarian history, and Jewish studies generally.
The Jewish Husband
by Lia Levi Antony ShugaarWinner of the Moravia Prize for fiction, <i>The Jewish Husband</i> is a bittersweet story of passion and hatred, cruelty and oppression. It is an account of a country and a time about which too little has been written, and the terrible consequences of that period's race laws. Above all, however, it is a tender love story set at a time in which the world and its inhabitants appeared to have completely lost their ability to show tenderness.
Jewish Identities: Nationalism, Racism, and Utopianism in Twentieth-Century Music
by Klara MoriczKlara Moricz scrutinizes concepts of Jewish identity and reorders ideas about twentieth-century "Jewish music" in three case studies: first, Russian Jewish composers of the first two decades of the twentieth century; second, the Swiss American Ernest Bloch; and third, Arnold Schoenberg.
Jewish Identities in Postcommunist Russia and Ukraine: An Uncertain Ethnicity
by Zvi GitelmanBefore the USSR collapsed, ethnic identities were imposed by the state. This book analyzes how and why Jews decided what being Jewish meant to them after the state dissolved and describes the historical evolution of Jewish identities. Surveys of more than 6,000 Jews in the early and late 1990s reveal that Russian and Ukrainian Jews have a deep sense of their Jewishness but are uncertain what it means. They see little connection between Judaism and being Jewish. Their attitudes toward Judaism, intermarriage and Jewish nationhood differ dramatically from those of Jews elsewhere. Many think Jews can believe in Christianity and do not condemn marrying non-Jews. This complicates their connections with other Jews, resettlement in Israel, the United States and Germany, and the rebuilding of public Jewish life in Russia and Ukraine. Post-Communist Jews, especially the young, are transforming religious-based practices into ethnic traditions and increasingly manifesting their Jewishness in public.
Jewish Identity and Civil Rights in America
by Kenneth L. MarcusGiven jurisdiction over race and national origin but not religion, federal agents have had to determine whether Jewish Americans constitute a race or national origin group. They have been unable to do so. This has led to enforcement paralysis, as well as explosive internal confrontations and recriminations within the federal government. This book examines the legal and policy issues behind the ambiguity involved with civil rights protections for Jewish students. Written by a former senior government official, this book reveals the extent of this problem and presents a workable legal solution.
Jewish Identity in Early Modern Germany: Memory, Power and Community
by Dean Phillip BellAlthough Jews in early modern Germany produced little in the way of formal historiography, Jews nevertheless engaged the past for many reasons and in various and surprising ways. They narrated the past in order to enforce order, empower authority, and record the traditions of their communities. In this way, Jews created community structure and projected that structure into the future. But Jews also used the past as a means to contest the marginalization threatened by broader developments in the Christian society in which they lived. As the Reformation threw into relief serious questions about authority and tradition and as Jews continued to suffer from anti-Jewish mentality and politics, narration of the past allowed Jews to re-inscribe themselves in history and contemporary society. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including chronicles, liturgical works, books of customs, memorybooks, biblical commentaries, rabbinic responsa and community ledgers, this study offers a timely reassessment of Jewish community and identity during a frequently turbulent era. It engages, but then redirects, important discussions by historians regarding the nature of time and the construction and role of history and memory in pre-modern Europe and pre-modern Jewish civilization. This book will be of significant value, not only to scholars of Jewish history, but anyone with an interest in the social and cultural aspects of religious history.
Jewish Identity in Modern Art History
by Catherine M. SoussloffIn the first comprehensive study of Jewish identity and its meaning for the history of art, eleven influential scholars illuminate the formative role of Jews as subjects of art historical discourse. At the same time, these essays introduce to art history an understanding of the place of cultural identity in the production of scholarship.Contributors explore the meaning of Jewishness to writers and artists alike through such topics as exile, iconoclasm, and anti-Semitism. Included are essays on Anselm Kiefer and Theodor Adorno; the effects of the Enlightenment; the rise of the nation-state; Nazi policies on art history; the criticism of Meyer Schapiro, Clement Greenberg, and Aby Warburg; the art of Judy Chicago, Eleanor Antin, and Morris Gottlieb; and Jewish patronage of German Expressionist art.Offering a new approach to the history of art in which the cultural identities of the makers and interpreters play a constitutive role, this collection begins an important and overdue dialogue that will have a significant impact on the fields of art history, Jewish studies, and cultural studies.
Jewish Immigrant Associations and American Identity in New York, 1880-1939: Jewish Landsmanshaftn in American Culture (American Jewish Civilization Series)
by Daniel SoyerLandsmanshaftn, associations of immigrants from the same hometown, became the most popular form of organization among Eastern European Jewish immigrants to the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Jewish Immigrant Associations and American Identity in New York, 1880-1939, by Daniel Soyer, holds an in-depth discussion on the importance of these hometown societies that provided members with valuable material benefits and served as arenas for formal and informal social interaction. In addition to discussing both continuity and transformation as features of the immigrant experience, this approach recognizes that ethnic identity is a socially constructed and malleable phenomenon. Soyer explores this process of construction by raising more specific questions about what immigrants themselves have meant by Americanization and how their hometown associations played an important part in the process.
Jewish Immigrants in London, 1880–1939 (Perspectives in Economic and Social History #31)
by Susan L TananbaumBetween 1880 and 1939, a quarter of a million European Jews settled in England. Tananbaum explores the differing ways in which the existing Anglo-Jewish communities, local government and education and welfare organizations sought to socialize these new arrivals, focusing on the experiences of working-class women and children.
Jewish Internationalism and Human Rights after the Holocaust (Human Rights in History)
by Nathan A. KurzNathan A. Kurz charts the fraught relationship between Jewish internationalism and international rights protection in the second half of the twentieth century. For nearly a century, Jewish lawyers and advocacy groups in Western Europe and the United States had pioneered forms of international rights protection, tying the defense of Jews to norms and rules that aspired to curb the worst behavior of rapacious nation-states. In the wake of the Holocaust and the creation of the State of Israel, however, Jewish activists discovered they could no longer promote the same norms, laws and innovations without fear they could soon apply to the Jewish state. Using previously unexamined sources, Nathan Kurz examines the transformation of Jewish internationalism from an effort to constrain the power of nation-states to one focused on cementing Israel's legitimacy and its status as a haven for refugees from across the Jewish diaspora.
Jewish Ireland in the Age of Joyce: A Socioeconomic History
by Cormac Ó GrádaJames Joyce's Leopold Bloom--the atheistic Everyman of Ulysses, son of a Hungarian Jewish father and an Irish Protestant mother--may have turned the world's literary eyes on Dublin, but those who look to him for history should think again. He could hardly have been a product of the city's bona fide Jewish community, where intermarriage with outsiders was rare and piety was pronounced. In Jewish Ireland in the Age of Joyce, a leading economic historian tells the real story of how Jewish Ireland--and Dublin's Little Jerusalem in particular--made ends meet from the 1870s, when the first Lithuanian Jewish immigrants landed in Dublin, to the late 1940s, just before the community began its dramatic decline. In 1866--the year Bloom was born--Dublin's Jewish population hardly existed, and on the eve of World War I it numbered barely three thousand. But this small group of people quickly found an economic niche in an era of depression, and developed a surprisingly vibrant web of institutions. In a richly detailed, elegantly written blend of historical, economic, and demographic analysis, Cormac Ó Gráda examines the challenges this community faced. He asks how its patterns of child rearing, schooling, and cultural and religious behavior influenced its marital, fertility, and infant-mortality rates. He argues that the community's small size shaped its occupational profile and influenced its acculturation; it also compromised its viability in the long run. Jewish Ireland in the Age of Joyce presents a fascinating portrait of a group of people in an unlikely location who, though small in number, comprised Ireland's most resilient immigrant community until the Celtic Tiger's immigration surge of the 1990s.
Jewish-israeli National Identity And Dissidence
by Katie AttwellThis unique book provides a critical perspective on identity in questioning how Israeli Jews manage and manifest their concern for the Palestinian Other, eschewing presenting identities as concrete and, rather, examines their creation through discourse. Zionism and the Israeli state have constructed a Jewish national identity premised on demonisation of the Other. This book explores how internal critics use alternative discourses of identity to re-imagine this Jewish-Israeli national identity, and considers how they might fail. It combines a rigorous theoretical analysis of nationalism with an engaging examination of the identifications and contradictions of eleven Jewish-Israeli individuals. Featuring, among others, high profile journalist Gideon Levy, veteran maverick Uri Davis and literary novelist Dorit Rabinyan, Attwell provides a revealing insight into national identity, political dissent, conflict and resistance.
The Jewish Jesus: How Judaism and Christianity Shaped Each Other
by Peter SchäferHow the rise of Christianity profoundly influenced the development of Judaism in late antiquityIn late antiquity, as Christianity emerged from Judaism, it was not only the new religion that was being influenced by the old. The rise and revolutionary challenge of Christianity also had a profound influence on rabbinic Judaism, which was itself just emerging and, like Christianity, trying to shape its own identity. In The Jewish Jesus, Peter Schäfer reveals the crucial ways in which various Jewish heresies, including Christianity, affected the development of rabbinic Judaism. He even shows that some of the ideas that the rabbis appropriated from Christianity were actually reappropriated Jewish ideas. The result is a demonstration of the deep mutual influence between the sister religions, one that calls into question hard and fast distinctions between orthodoxy and heresy, and even Judaism and Christianity, during the first centuries CE.