Bøger i The Modern Jewish Experience serien

An exploration of how American Jewish thinkers grapple with the notion of being the isolated "e;Chosen People"e; in a nation that is a melting pot.What does it mean to be a Jew in America? What opportunities and what threats does the great melting pot represent for a group that has traditionally defined itself as "e;a people that must dwell alone?"e; Although for centuries the notion of "e;The Chosen People"e; sustained Jewish identity, America, by offering Jewish immigrants an unprecedented degree of participation in the larger society, threatened to erode their Jewish identity and sense of separateness.Arnold M. Eisen charts the attempts of American Jewish thinkers to adapt the notion of chosenness to an American context. Through an examination of sermons, essays, debates, prayer-book revisions, and theological literature, Eisen traces the ways in which American rabbis and theologians-Reconstructionist, Conservative, and Orthodox thinkers-effected a compromise between exclusivity and participation that allowed Jews to adapt to American life while simultaneously enhancing Jewish tradition and identity."e;This is a book of extraordinary quality and importance. In tracing the encounter of Jews (the chosen people) and America (the chosen nation) . . . Eisen has given the American Jewish community a new understanding of itself."e; -American Jewish Archives"e;One of the most significant books on American Jewish thought written in recent years."e; -Choice

At the end of World War II, French Jews faced a devastating demographic reality: thousands of orphaned children, large numbers of single-parent households, and families in emotional and financial distress. Daniella Doron suggests that after years of occupation and collaboration, French Jews and non-Jews held contrary opinions about the future of the nation and the institution of the family. At the center of the disagreement was what was to become of the children. Doron traces emerging notions about the postwar family and its role in strengthening Jewish ethnicity and French republicanism in the shadow of Vichy and the Holocaust.

In the aftermath of World War I, the largely Hungarian-speaking Jews in Slovakia faced the challenge of reorienting their political loyalties from defeated Hungary to newly established Czechoslovakia. Rebekah Klein-Pejsova examines the challenges Slovak Jews faced as government officials, demographers, and police investigators continuously tested their loyalty. Focusing on "e;Jewish nationality"e; as a category of national identity, Klein-Pejsova shows how Jews recast themselves as loyal citizens of Czechoslovakia. Mapping Jewish Loyalties in Interwar Slovakia traces how the interwar state saw and understood minority loyalty and underscores how loyalty preceded identity in the redrawn map of east central Europe.

Rivke Zilberg, a 20-year-old Jewish woman, arrives in New York shortly after the Nazi invasion of Poland, her home country. Struggling to learn a new language and cope with a different way of life in the United States, Rivke finds herself keeping a journal about the challenges and opportunities of this new land. In her attempt to find a new life as a Jewish immigrant in the US, Rivke shares the stories of losing her mother to a bombing in Lublin, jilting a fiance who has made his way to Palestine, and a flirtatious relationship with an American "e;allrightnik."e;In this fictionalized journal originally published in Yiddish, author Kadya Molodovsy provides keen insight into the day-to-day activities of the large immigrant Jewish community of New York. By depicting one woman's struggles as a Jewish refugee in the US during WWII, Molodovsky points readers to the social, political, and cultural tensions of that time and place.

When American Jewish men intermarry, goes the common assumption, they and their families are "lost" to the Jewish religion. The author shows that it is not necessarily so. She looks at intermarriage and parenthood through the eyes of a post-World War II cohort of Jewish men and discovers what intermarriage has meant to them and their families.

Makes a powerful contribution to modern Judaism and to contemporary American religious thought.

How Jewish students promoted diversity in American culture

The compelling memoir of a Polish-Jewish woman who was an educator, Zionist activist, and feminist leader

Tells the history of Orthodox Jews in America, from the 17th century onwards, and examines how Orthodox Jewish men and women coped with the personal, familial, and communal challenges of religious freedom, economic opportunity, and social integration. This title is suitable for those seeking to understand the American Jewish experience.

Orientalizing the Jew shows how French travelers depicted Jews in the Orient and then brought these ideas home to orientalize Jews living in their homeland during the 19th century. Julie Kalman draws on narratives, personal and diplomatic correspondence, novels, and plays to show how the "e;Jews of the East"e; featured prominently in the minds of the French and how they challenged ideas of the familiar and the exotic. Portraits of the Jewish community in Jerusalem, romanticized Jewish artists, and the wealthy Sephardi families of Algiers come to life. These accounts incite a necessary conversation about Jewish history, the history of anti-Jewish discourses, French history, and theories of Orientalism in order to broaden understandings about Jews of the day.

Jewish life was changed fundamentally as Jews joined the Bolshevik movement and populated the front lines of the revolutionary struggle. Andrew Sloin's story follows the arc of Bolshevik history but shows how the broader movement was enacted in factories and workshops, workers' clubs and union meetings, and on the Jewish streets of White Russia. The protagonists here are shoemakers, speculators, glassmakers, peddlers, leatherworkers, needleworkers, soldiers, students, and local party operatives who were swept up, willingly or otherwise, into the Bolshevik project. Sloin stresses the fundamental relationship between economy and identity formation as party officials grappled with the Jewish Question in the wake of the revolution.

This book presents an unconventional history of minority nationalism in interwar Eastern Europe. Focusing on an influential group of grassroots activists, Tatjana Lichtenstein uncovers Zionist projects intended to sustain the flourishing Jewish national life in Czechoslovakia.The book shows that Zionism was not an exit strategy for Jews, but as a ticket of admission to the societies they already called home.It explores how and why Zionists envisioned minority nationalism as a way to construct Jews' belonging and civic equality in Czechoslovakia.By giving voice to the diversity of aspirations within interwar Zionism, the book offers a fresh view of minority nationalism and state building in Eastern Europe.

The compelling history of ten Jewish families rebuilding their lives in Warsaw after the Holocaust';amply illustrated... the book reverberates with hope' (Jewish Book Council). Warsaw, Poland, once described as the ';Paris of the East,' had been transformed into a landscape of ruin by the ravages of World War II. Among the few areas of the city center that escaped Nazi decimation was Ujazdowskie Avenue, where German officials lived during the occupation. In the late 1940s, while most surviving Polish Jews were making their homes in new countries, ten Jewish families reclaimed a once elegant building at 16 Ujazdowskie Avenue and began reconstructing their lives. These families rebuilt on the rubble of the Polish capital and created new communities as they sought to distance themselves from the memory of a painful past. Based on interviews with family members, extensive archival research, and the families' personal papers and correspondence, Karen Auerbach presents an engrossing story of loss and rebirth, political faith and disillusionment, and the persistence of Jewishness.

An ';endlessly rewarding' contribution to the study of Jewish life in the Soviet Union: ';Fascinating... nuanced and respectful of human limitations' (Slavic Review). Minsk, the present capital of Belarus, was a heavily Jewish city in the decades between the world wars. Recasting our understanding of Soviet Jewish history, Becoming Soviet Jews demonstrates that pre-revolutionary forms of Jewish life in Minsk maintained continuity through the often violent social changes enforced by the communist project. Using Minsk as a case study of the Sovietization of Jews in the former Pale of Settlement, Elissa Bemporad reveals the ways in which many Jews acculturated to Soviet society in the 1920s and 1930s while remaining committed to older patterns of Jewish identity, such as Yiddish culture and education, attachment to the traditions of the Jewish workers' Bund, circumcision, and kosher slaughter. This pioneering study also illuminates the reshaping of gender relations on the Jewish street and explores Jewish everyday life and identity during the years of the Great Terror. ';Highly readable and brimming with novel facts and insights... [A] rich and engaging portrayal of a previously overlooked period and place.' H-Judaic

Howard Fast's life, from a rough-and-tumble Jewish New York street kid to the rich and famous author of close to 100 books, rivals the Horatio Alger myth. Author of bestsellers such as Citizen Tom Paine, Freedom Road, My Glorious Brothers, and Spartacus, Fast joined the American Communist Party in 1943 and remained a loyal member until 1957, despite being imprisoned for contempt of Congress. Gerald Sorin illuminates the connections among Fast's Jewishness, his writings, and his left-wing politics and explains Fast's attraction to the Party and the reasons he stayed in it as long as he did. Recounting the story of his private and public life with its adventure and risk, love and pain, struggle, failure, and success, Sorin also addresses questions such as the relationship between modern Jewish identity and radical movements, the consequences of political myopia, and the complex interaction of art, popular culture, and politics in 20th-century America.

Looks beyond this young girl's words at the numerous ways people have engaged her life and writing

Russian Jews were first conscripted into the Imperial Russian army during the reign of Nicholas I in an effort to integrate them into the population of the Russian Empire. This book traces the conscription theme in novels and stories by some of the best-known Russian Jewish writers such as Osip Rabinovich, Judah-Leib Gordon, and others.

Examines how sports entered the lives of American Jewish men and women and how the secular values of sports threatened religious identification and observance. This title uses the experience of sports to illuminate an important mode of modern Jewish religious conflict and accommodation to America.

Profiles the personal and professional lives of 460 Jewish women who studied at Central European universities in the four decades before World War II.

For more than a century, the Lower East Side of New York City has been recognised and scrutinised as having been the largest and most vibrant immigrant Jewish neighbourhood in America when East European Jews flocked to American shores. This book explores the dynamics of Lower East Side memory.

A portrait of family and community life among Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. This study discusses the social and benevolent activities of hometown associations, their constitutions and souvenir journals, the East European background of the Jewish family, preferences in reading and recreational activities, standards of living, and more.

Through its focus on representative American Jewish institutions such as the synagogue and the rabbinate and on the sacred ritual life of Orthodox women, New York's Jewish Jews reveals how a self-consciously modern, American, and decidedly middle class Orthodoxy evolved before 1945.