American Communists, Zionists and Palestine, 1936–1946

Excerpt of the content: Jewish activist communities have historically been allies to communities of color in the fight for racial justice and equality in our country. Jews were among those who worked to establish the NAACP in 1909. In the early 1900s, Jewish newspapers drew parallels between the Black movement out of the South and the Jews' escape from Egypt, pointing out that both Blacks and Jews lived in ghettos, and calling anti-Black riots in the South "pogroms." Historically, Jewish leaders stressed the similarities rather than the differences between the Jewish and Black experience in America, and emphasized the idea that both groups would benefit the more America moved toward a society of merit, free of religious, ethnic, and racial restrictions. In more recent history, Blacks and Jews fought side by side in the Civil Rights Movement. The kinship and relationship between the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel has been regularly and continually celebrated. What has been less often discussed is the relevance of the social circumstances that created and, in some cases, still sustains a rift between Black activists and white Jewish anti-racism activists. In the late 1960s, the birth of the Black Power movement shifted the emphasis in Black activist communities toward self-determination, self-defense tactics, and racial pride. While this shift was crucial to the evolution of Black consciousness and identity in America, the expansion from the singular nonviolence and racial integration approach espoused by King left many white Jewish activists with little input in the Black community and an anti-racism movement that seemed to be moving on without them. Click for larger view "Blacks and Jews fought side by side in the Civil Rights Movement," the author writes. Here, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth march alongside Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, in March 1965. Since the 1960s, efforts at coalition building and solidarity work for justice between white Jewish and Black communities have suffered and never reached the pinnacle that was reached during the early days of the Civil Rights Movement. The rapid decline of American anti-Semitism since 1945 (alongside the nation's continuing and pervasive anti-Black racism) and the increasing gap in accumulated wealth and education between Black and Jewish communities have widened the rift of perceived shared interests between Black and Jewish activists. Many of the civil rights struggles that joined Blacks and Jews in the middle of the last century--i.e., anti-lynching, desegregation, voter registration, etc.--were typically organized around divisions in society that easily identified injustices between persecutors and their victims (a division in which Jews could also identify as victims). Between the late 1960s and the present, much of the anti-racism work that has galvanized Black activists has shifted and come to be concerned more specifically with disparities in access, privilege, and power between those with and without white skin privilege in our country. Click for larger view Members of Beyt Tikkun Synagogue pray alongside Rev. Dr. J. Alfred Smith Jr. of Allen Temple Baptist Church in Oakland, California, after the acquittal of Trayvon Martin's killer. Disappointingly few synagogues nationwide engaged in similar expressions of Jewish-Black solidarity. A Weakened Coalition In 2013, the lack of deep and abiding connections between Black and Jewish communities of activists became apparent to me in the disparate responses I encountered to the events surrounding the killing of Trayvon Martin and the subsequent acquittal of George Zimmerman. Here's a quick summary for any readers who need a reminder of what happened: in July 2013, after more than sixteen hours of deliberation, a jury of five white women and one Latina woman found George Zimmerman not guilty of second-degree murder and manslaughter. Previously, on a drizzly February night, Zimmerman had shot Martin, an unarmed seventeen-year-old, in a gated community in Sanford, near Orlando. Citing Florida's stand-your-ground law, Sanford police originally did not charge Zimmerman or take him into custody. Only after social media outrage and civil rights protests alleged racial profiling and discrimination did Governor Rick Scott appoint a special prosecutor, who brought the charges against Zimmerman six weeks after... Language: en

After the late 1930s, American Jews became an increasingly significant part of the international Jewish arena and of the Zionist movement as a result of the United States' mounting international importance, its grow ing intervention in the Middle East, and the destruction of European Jewish communities in the Holocaust. The process intensified in the late 1940s, when American Jews in general and Zionists in particular made decisive economic and political contributions to the establishment of the State of Israel.1 Despite fears of growing antisemitism in the late 1930s due to the Great Depression and to propaganda from Nazi Germany, broad sectors of the American Jewish community were conspicuously more ready than before to engage in Jewish and Zionist activity. From the beginning of the decade substantially more money was contributed to Jewish philanthro pies and to Zionist collections. Hadassah membership increased as did enrollment in the Zionist movement in general, and more Jews attended Zionist gatherings. Jewish solidarity grew in response to the worsening plight of German Jewry, growing antisemitism in central and eastern Europe, and the rift between Britain and the Zionist movement, finding expression in Zionist activity. American Jews' willingness to act on the American scene as an ethnic group with a political agenda grew markedly stronger following the Allies' victory in Europe, as news of the Holocaust reached the United States. The resulting individual and collective shock led American Jews and their leadership to exert their full powers to ensure that a Jewish state would emerge from postwar international negotiations and agreements. As a result, Zionism became the strongest ideological, political, and organizational force among American Jews. The full force and significance of American Zionism in the 1940s and 1950s is to be understood in the light of the identification of American Jews with Zionist goals and with the state of Israel. This identification far exceeded formal membership in the Zionist Organization of America and Hadassah; Jews

Reviewed by: The Jewish Oregon Story, 1950 – 2010 by Ellen Eisenberg Jeanne Abrams (bio) The Jewish Oregon Story, 1950 – 2010. By Ellen Eisenberg. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2016. 336 pp Regional histories help broaden our understanding of the wider American Jewish experience beyond the East Coast. The Jewish Oregon Story, 1950–2010, is, therefore, a welcome companion to Ellen Eisenberg’s earlier book, Embracing a Western Identity: Jewish Oregonians, 1849–1950 (2015). In that volume, Eisenberg examined the stories of the state’s Jewish pioneers and later residents from the perspectives of commerce, politics, social welfare, and interethnic and interracial relationships. Like Jewish citizens throughout the West, Jews in Oregon often arrived during the region’s formative years. Early arrival frequently conferred respected pioneer status on Jewish westerners that allowed them to enter business, politics, and civic endeavors with more ease than they had encountered in Europe and other areas of the United States. While there were some incidents of anti-Semitism, Jews were generally accepted as full members into the broader Oregon community, viewed as “white” residents in frontier communities that included Native Americans and Asians. In The Jewish Oregon Story, Eisenberg explores the transformation of Jewish identity in the state post-1950 and the influence of Jewish ethnicity in tandem with the progressive ethos that has come to be associated with the state of Oregon. The American West has always loomed large in the American imagination, and this phenomenon again took center stage in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century as young, well-educated adults from a variety of ethnic and religious groups moved to Oregon, part of a general migration to the Pacific West. According to Eisenberg, starting in the 1970s, they were attracted to Oregon’s increasing “reputation for progressivism, thoughtful development, and an environmental ethos” (xv). Early Jewish residents of Oregon populated hamlets throughout the state, but today’s Jewish population is centered primarily in Portland, Oregon’s largest city, though some smaller communities experienced a revival beginning in the 1970s. This population influx included younger Jews who helped boost Oregon’s modest Jewish population of only around 9,000 in the late 1970s to an estimated 36,000 in Portland [End Page 405] and over 40,000 statewide in 2010. Throughout the book, Eisenberg emphasizes the theme of dramatic change and reflects on how national trends in both the general and Jewish American communities centering on the subjects of liberal politics, enlarged roles for women, environmentalism, increasing secularism, and diversity interacted with the local Oregon progressive outlook and the traditions of the earlier Oregonian Jewish community. Given Oregon’s reputation for progressiveness, it is unsurprising that a plurality of Jews in Portland who were surveyed in 2009 asserted that “promotion of civil rights and tolerance” should be the highest priority for the local Jewish community (161). Between 1950 and 2010, Oregonian Jews moved toward stronger focus on broader external rather than specifically Jewish issues. As a result, early united support of Israel and the plight of Soviet Jewry and other Jewish causes of the 1960s and 1970s, when the Jewish community had “turned inward,” began to fragment in the late 1980s (xv). Eisenberg contends that in this trend Jews in Oregon was somewhat ahead of the curve within the American Jewish community. In terms of religion, Eisenberg asserts that “Even with the addition of the Orthodox congregation in Eugene and the expanding Chabad presence, the affiliation choices of Jewish Oregonians tend firmly toward the progressive/liberal end of the Jewish spectrum, and set them apart from Jews in other regions” (231). The last chapter in the book centers mostly on the diverse Jewish religious experience available in the state, with an emphasis on the Jewish renewal movement. Eisenberg is an engaging writer, and she incorporates the skills of a trained historian with good use of both primary and secondary sources, including a large collection of oral histories that help enliven the narrative. However, writing about recent history is often a tricky enterprise, and sometimes the book reverts to a celebratory style highlighted by generalized platitudes. For example, at the end of Chapter Two, titled “What Happened to Old South Portland,” the...

Beginning with well-deserved personal praise for Professor Yehuda Bauer celebrating his 95th birthday, this article then examines Bauer's brief but important work Could the US Government Have Rescued European Jewry?, in which he challenges the preferred narrative of American and Israeli Jews: that American Jews were silent, ineffective, divided, timid, self-absorbed, weak, and incapable of bringing a Judeo-centric request to the American political establishment and did not effectively come the aid of their European brethren; that American Jew had the power to do something significant, if only they had tried to use it; and that the American government was antisemitic or, at best, unconcerned about Jews. The article then examines Bauer's contentions regarding the US government's and American Jews' capabilities, interest, and responsibility in saving European Jews. Bauer's consideration is divided into four periods: from 1933 until the Reich's November Pogroms in 1938; from Kristallnacht until the onset of the war in September 1939; from the war until the beginnings of the systematic murder of the Jews, which coincided with the German invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941; and finally during the period of the mass murder, which only ended at the war's end on 8 May 1945. Bauer reconsiders the controversial issue of the bombing of Auschwitz, which he examines from the perspective of the Yishuv in Palestine and the British and American bombing capabilities and wartime priorities as well as the effectiveness of aerial bombardment. The paper also considers Elie Wiesel's challenging of multiple US presidents regarding the decision not to bomb and questions Wiesel's depiction of his discussion with President Jimmy Carter on this issue. Ultimately Bauer's conclusion is that US was not powerful or well-positioned enough to save European Jews, and the Jewish community in the United States did not have the power to impose its will even if it had tried.

Why My Jewishness Compels Me to Stand for Justice in Palestine

Guest Editors’ Introduction

Recent Works on Jewish American Modernism Sarah Ponichtera Stephen Fredman . A Menorah for Athena: Charles Reznikoff and the Jewish Dilemmas of Objectivist Poetry. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2001. 216 pp. Hana Wirth-Nesher . Call It English: The Languages of Jewish American Literature. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006. 224 pp. Maeera Shreiber . Singing in a Strange Land: A Jewish American Poetics. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 2007. 278 pp. Ranen Omer-Sherman . Diaspora and Zionism in Jewish American Literature. Brandeis University Press, 2002. 341 pp. The last few years have seen a renewal of interest in Jewish American modernism, a field that offers new ways to explore the Jewish experience in the United States. Though often lacking the presumed authenticity and connection to tradition characteristic of the first wave of immigrants, Jewish American modernists provide a window onto the Jewish community's mature and informed engagement with American culture. The majority of Jewish American writing in English was influenced by modernism for chronological reasons: by the time the vast immigrant waves of the 1880s had produced a generation of American-educated, financially secure, native speakers of English in the 1920s, modernism was on the rise in the United States. Even while influencing [End Page 116] Jewish American writers, however, the movement also opened itself to their influence. Proclaiming the obsolescence of traditional aesthetic modes and calling for a rethinking of the methods and aims of literature, modernism allowed American Jews to take an active role in shaping American literature. Modernism and Jewish culture share a number of proclivities: the experience of exile; a focus on scholarship; an international awareness, particularly reflected in the knowledge of foreign languages; an interest in linguistic play; and a concern with the proper role of the aesthetic in social life. Jewish American modernists, like other minority groups, often had a double consciousness with reference to these terms, and one can observe slippages between the modernist and Jewish understandings of these in their work. Louis Zukofsky, for example, the protégé of Ezra Pound, includes excerpts of Yiddish lullabies, images from Abraham Goldfaden's play Shulamis, and Yehoash's poetry in his first Imagist work, "Poem Beginning 'The'" (1927). Zukofsky thus engages in the modernist technique of employing multilingualism to bring a taste of the strange and incomprehensible to poetry, with the twist that far from being a foreign language, that which he includes is actually his own first language, in snatches remembered from his childhood. In this way, Zukofsky uses the modernist attraction to the foreign to integrate the Jewish experience into mainstream American literature. Recent critical works often draw on a theme such as language or exile, shared between American Jews and modernist thought, to structure a deeper exploration of Jewish American modernism. Two of the most notable of these works focus on the development of a particularly Jewish American language. Stephen Fredman seeks to recast our understanding of the Objectivists as Jewish poets whose Jewish consciousness made a material difference to their modernist aesthetic. Hana Wirth-Nesher establishes that the Jewish aspect of an English-language work can often be traced to an echo of a Jewish language in the text, based on her innovative reading of the paradigmatic Jewish American modernist Henry Roth, among others. Two other writers focus on the question of exile, and on how Jewish American writers conceptualized homeland and Diaspora. Maeera Shreiber investigates the role of exile in giving rise to poetry and prayer, and demonstrates how Jewish American poetry sustains a sense of estrangement in the face of pressure to subsume alienation in allegiance to a homeland. Ranen [End Page 117] Omer-Sherman looks at Diaspora and Zionism in Jewish American poetry, and argues that this tension sheds important light on the development of a Jewish American aesthetic. Although the latter two writers do not concentrate specifically on modernism, their analyses of exile and poetry as particularly liberating forces owes much to modernist thought. Integrating their focus on communal and individual identity into the discussion of Jewish American modernism has the potential of yielding very fruitful results. Stephen Fredman's A Menorah for Athena (2001) argues compellingly for the importance of seeing Charles Reznikoff's work...

Reviewed by: The Star and the Stripes: A History of the Foreign Policies of American Jews by Michael Barnett Yael S. Aronoff (bio) The Star and the Stripes: A History of the Foreign Policies of American Jews. By Michael Barnett. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016. 368 pp. Michael Barnett offers a comprehensive, insightful, and well-written account of the way American Jews have positioned themselves vis-à-vis the wider world, shifting between internationalism, particularism, and cosmopolitanism over time. With thought-provoking insight, he traces the American Jewish community's fluctuations between a more tribally concerned outlook and a more cosmopolitan stance. While that cosmopolitanism partially derives, he argues, from prophetic Judaism, it in turn has "many of the elements that define what international relations scholars call liberal internationalism," emphasizing the state as the embodiment of "liberal values and actively promot[ing] the expansion of markets, democracy, and the rule of law around the world" (46). The author persuasively argues that the experience of being a minority in the United States and the influence of prophetic Judaism led to a broader concern for minority rights and civil rights. As over time American Jews began to fare better, they could turn their attention beyond their own community to engage with the similar plights of other minority groups around the world. This movement was particularly facilitated by the perception of world neglect which allowed the Holocaust: in this view the League of Nations had failed, the protection of minority rights worldwide had failed, and immigration had failed to provide a solution to the threat of antisemitism. This in turn led many American Jews to recognize the need for the creation of Israel. Barnett emphasizes identity politics and cultural explanations for foreign policy preferences. For example, the American Jewish community's growing affiliation with Israel coincided in some way with that of the U.S. government's, but for different reasons. In the run-up to the 1967 war, Jews felt that the UN and U.S. had abandoned Israel and, reliving in some sense the trauma of the Holocaust, feared Israel would be destroyed. Thus from 1966 to 1967 aid to Israel from American Jews grew sevenfold. The book also illuminates how American Jews shaped and influenced the UN Declaration of Human Rights but later felt more comfortable with "humanitarianism" than "human rights." "American Jews did not abandon international human rights and the United Nations," [End Page 309] he argues, "it turned on them"—a sentiment substantiated by UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon's recent public admission that the United Nations unfairly and disproportionately condemns Israel (188). Along with its many strengths, one of the book's challenges is in the conception of the titular "Jewish foreign policy." Barnett defines Jewish foreign policy as "the attempt by Jewish individuals and institutions to mobilize and represent the Jewish community for the purpose of protecting Jewish interests and advancing a vision of global justice inspired by Jewish political and religious thought" (10). At times, though, the argument focuses more on the beliefs of individual American Jews, while the causal relation between those individual views and their institutional expression is less thoroughly worked out. Barnett claims that American Jews are more cosmopolitan but also that the American Jewish "establishment" is more tribal than are most American Jews (40). At times American Jews are treated as a monolithic bloc (although he admittedly does not include Orthodox Jews). More rigorous use of public opinion polls might have helped draw finer distinctions about foreign policy preferences. It remains unclear where most Jewish Americans are today on many pressing foreign policy questions. Are they more likely than other Americans—or more likely than other Democrats—to vote for increased foreign aid? For humanitarian intervention? The book's comparisons between American Jews and Israeli Jews are overly simplistic. Barnett repeatedly contrasts what he calls American Jews' outward-looking cosmopolitanism and Israeli Jews' inward-looking nationalism. However, he himself admits at times that these concepts are not mutually exclusive. Barnett's analysis of both Zionism and nationalism pay little attention to the complex history of Zionism, with its widely varied strains, and tends to associate "Jewish Israelis" as a whole...

Reviewed by: Reconstructing the Old Country: American Jewry in the Post-Holocaust Decades ed. by Eliyana R. Adler, Sheila E. Jelen Tamar Rabinowitz (bio) Reconstructing the Old Country: American Jewry in the Post-Holocaust Decades. Edited by Eliyana R. Adler and Sheila E. Jelen. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2017. 392 pp. In the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, American Jewry confronted the devastation of the once thriving European Jewish society while also facing its new, unexpected position as the world’s largest and most stable Jewish community. Reconstructing the Old Country: American Jewry in the Post-Holocaust Decades presents a “panoramic” view of how American Jewry’s encounters with the Holocaust defined its role within the global Jewish community, its place in postwar American society, while it also reshaped the contours of American Jewish culture. Reconstructing the Old Country builds on scholarship working to upend a dominant historical narrative that has presented postwar American Jews as reluctant or unprepared to face the horrors of the Nazi regime. American Jewry’s collective memory continues to fuel the notion that a culture of silence persisted around the Holocaust. Adler and Jelen note that scholarship on postwar American Jewry has often reaffirmed this culture of silence, as research on the mid-century American Jewish experience focuses on suburbanization, economic mobility, postwar consumerism, or Judaism’s absorption into a Judeo-Christian religious and political culture. In 2009, however, Hasia Diner’s We Remember With Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence After the Holocaust, 1945–1962 showcased the many ways in which the unspeakable tragedy was, in fact, spoken of, commemorated, and confronted by a growing and diverse American Jewish community. Reconstructing the Old Country expands on this narrative as it illustrates the myriad ways that American Jews waded through the challenges of mourning, commemoration, aiding survivors, remembering, and recreating images of the now lost alte haym. Far more than an account of memorial efforts and fundraising campaigns for victims—though these stories are there as well—the essays skillfully interrogate how postwar American Jews encountered the Holocaust through three themes: interactions with refugees, literary reimaginings of prewar Jewish Eastern Europe, and political activism. This interdisciplinary collection, including essays from historians, literary scholars, and ethnographers, illuminates the “profound tension in immediate post-war American Jewry, in which American Jews both over-identified [End Page 575] and under-identified with their Eastern European brethren” (9). When taken together, these essays show how postwar American Jewry constructed varied, intersecting narratives of both the Holocaust and the world it destroyed as they reckoned with their own Jewish identities. Reconstructing the Old Country tracks how American Jewry grappled with the Holocaust in both direct and subtle ways. Adler’s essay, for instance, explores a memorialization initiative that took shape around the Yizkor Bikhur. These books, created by local landsmandschaftn that had absorbed refugees into their societies, represent the impact of the encounters between earlier immigrants and new refugees in shaping American modes of memorialization. Adler shows how the integration of shtetl maps created by earlier immigrants reimagined the shtetl in which “presence of non-Jews was virtually erased and the chaotic nature of the layout was emphasized.” Thus, in reconstituting the physical sites of Eastern European Jewish life, the Yizkor Bikhur “provided at least on paper, a way to return” (80). This project of reimagining the old world rippled throughout American Jewish life, often in more indirect ways, as well. In Gennady Estraikh’s essay, he situates Jewish encounters with the Holocaust within the broader narrative of postwar suburbanization and religious revival when he notes that the “Holocaust was a major factor driving American Jews to turn to religion by joining synagogues” (122). Similarly, the book’s third section details how the Holocaust informed the ways in which American Jewry adapted to and integrated contemporary American culture. While suburban Jewish women, like their non-Jewish counterparts, increasingly participated in organizations within suburban religious institutions, Jewish women’s mobilization in synagogue sisterhoods, argues Rachel Deblinger in her essay, operated around efforts to send aid to survivors overseas. These campaigns not only fueled synagogue participation but also publicized the stories of survivors and afforded Jewish women...

Israeli Historiography on American Jewry Gur Alroey (bio) On Rosh Hashanah Eve in 1969, a three-volume set on the history of the Jewish people from biblical times to the mid-twentieth century was published in Israel. In the foreword, the editor, Haim Hillel Ben-Sasson, wrote that “the work offered here to readers is the joint enterprise of a number of historians. Despite the differences in their fundamental historical outlooks and research approaches, the different sections merge into a continuous view of the history of Israel from the beginnings to the present day.”1 For a generation, these volumes were the most important textbooks on the subject for Israeli universities and high schools. They sketched the lineaments of the long history of the Jewish people, highlighted key events and processes in its life, and served as a roadmap for understanding the annals of the Jews in different periods and on different continents. The volume on the modern age was written by Samuel Ettinger of the Hebrew University, one of the country’s leading historians at the time. It begins with the Jews’ migrations and economic activity in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and concludes with the establishment of the State of Israel and the challenges it faced in its first two decades. The focus is Europe, Western and Eastern; only a few pages are dedicated to the Jews of the United States. In his immensely influential book, Ettinger almost totally ignored the largest Jewish community in the world. In this he faithfully reflected the attitude of Israeli academia and historians about American Jewry. These attitudes were deep-rooted decades before Ettinger. The historian and bibliographer Getzel Kressel noted that Israeli research into the Jews of the United States was sparse and inadequate. It was difficult to say that in the recent talk about American Jewry, and even more so in journalistic writing, one can find some background knowledge—even limited—about this Diaspora community.… Our widespread ignorance about everything associated with American Jewry and its history … is unforgivable, [End Page 501] given that that community has played such a decisive role in these decisive years for us, such that we must not ignore it.2 Kressel’s article was written to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the American Jewish Historical Society and the appearance of the fortieth volume of its publication series. Kressel called Hebrew readers’ attention to the fact that the AJHS had been founded in 1892 to conduct basic and methodical research into the history of the Jews of the United States. He noted that the manifesto issued by its founding convention in the late nineteenth century resulted in the collection of many documents that made it possible for historians to study American Jewry thoroughly and intensively. As for the publication series, he wrote that its volumes were rich and extensive and shed “new light on the previously unknown episode that is the emergence of the largest Jewish community of our time. The scholarly meticulousness that typifies the hundreds of studies and articles that have been published in its dozens of volumes provides solid support for any scholar or historian who deals with this story.”3 Kressel was aware of American Jewry’s importance for the new state and for Israeli society, and emphasized the need to study this important Jewish community. He added that one reason for Israelis’ unfamiliarity with the history of American Jews was the absence of accessible scholarly literature in Hebrew for readers living in Israel: There is no doubt that the fault rests with publishers, both public and private, who have taken pains to offer us volumes about every corner of the world, from India to Ethiopia—and only American Jewry has remained beyond the pale. Consequently the vast and abundant literature created in America about the history of the Jews on the American continent in general and the United States in particular is a closed book for our reading public.4 In the present article I examine Israeli historiography’s treatment of American Jewry, and try to understand why Israeli historians, born and educated in Israel, hardly studied the American Jewish community until the 1990s and early years...

American Jewish Studies: A Periodic Report of the Status of the Field Marc Lee Raphael Recent Dissertations in American Jewish Studies (Continued from American Jewish History, Vol. 85, No. 2) Related Articles: Continued 1996 31. Kadden, Daniel. American Jewish advocacy: the dynamics of organizational structure and resources. Brown U 32. Stier, Oren B. The propriety of Holocaust memory: cultural representations and commemorative responses. U of California, Santa Barbara 1997 1. Barany, Deborah K. Is it wrong to go to school on Yom Kippur? Jewish children’s understanding of Jewish experience. Stanford U 2. Benjamin, Alan F. Ethnic identities and classifying practices among Jews of Curacao. U of North Carolina, Chapel Hill 3. Bialystok, Franklin. Delayed impact: the Holocaust and the Canadian Jewish community, 1945–1985. York U (Canada) 4. Blecher, Mari S. Sacred and secular texts: interpretive communities and the teaching of literature. Stanford U 5. Block, Dobra S. Virtue out of necessity: a study of Jewish philanthropy in the United States, 1890–1918. U of Penn 6. Chmiel, Mark J. If the world remains silent: a political reading of Elie Wiesel as a public intellectual in the United States. Graduate Theological Union 7. Creighton, Jane M. The bordering nation: problems of American identity in selected novels . . . [Henry Roth, Anzia Yezierska]. Rice [End Page 107] 8. Davis-Kram, Harriet. No more a stranger and alone. Trade union, socialist and feminist activism: a route to becoming American (Rose Schneiderman, Pauline Newman). CUNY 9. Domina, Lynn M. Ain’t I an American: women’s autobiographical narratives and the construction of national identity [Rachel Calof, Mary Antin, etc.]. SUNY at Stony Brook 10. Eidelman, Jay M. “In the wilds of America”: the early republican origins of American Judaism, 1790–1830. Yale U 11. Fine, Joyce L. Negotiating the move: how American Jews decide to make aliya, a narrative analysis. Adelphi U 12. Foulkes, Julia L. Dancing America: modern dance and cultural nationalism, 1925–1950 [Jewish women]. U of Mass 13. Goffman, Ethan E. Imag(in)ing each other: black and Jewish literary representations. Indiana U 14. Greenberg, Mark I. Creating ethnic, class and southern identity in nineteenth century America: the Jews of Savannah, Georgia, 1830–1880. U of Florida 15. Holcomb, J. David. The nexus of freedom of religion and separation of church and state in the thought of Leo Pfeffer. Baylor U 16. Horn, Tamara. To grandmother’s house we go: modern grandmother archetypes in works by . . . [Tillie] Olsen. U of Alabama 17. Kolker, Carol A. Migrants and memories: family, work, and community among blacks, eastern European Jews, and native-born whites in an early twentieth century neighborhood of Washington, D.C. The George Washington U 18. Linden, Diana L. The New Deal murals of Ben Shahn: the intersection of Jewish identity, social reform, and government patronage. CUNY 19. Lowry, Paul T. The Truman administration policy in Palestine, November 1947-December 1952. U of Minn 20. Pappas, Andrea. Mark Rothko and the politics of Jewish identity, 1939–1945. U of Southern California [End Page 108] 21. Pritchett, Wendell E. From one ghetto to another: blacks, Jews and public housing in Brownsville, Brooklyn, 1945–1970. U of Penn 22. Samuels, Laura G. Affirming community identity: educational change as a rite of passage. U of Cincinnati 23. Schultz, Bella E. Strategies for religio-ethnic survival: a history of Jewish education in Kansas City, 1870–1996. U of Missouri-Kansas City 24. Segal, Josylyn C. Shades of community and conflict: biracial adults of African-American and Jewish-American heritages. The Wright Institute 25. Sentilles, Renee M. Performing Menken: Adah Isaacs Menken’s American odyssey. The College of William and Mary 26. Solomon, Susan G. Secular and spiritual humanism: Louis I. Kahn’s work for the Jewish community in the 1950s and 1960s. U of Penn 27. Smith, Robin L. Professional and faith development in women religious leaders. The Claremont Graduate U 28. Storey, Ann E. The identical synthronos trinity: representation, ritual and power in the Spanish Americas. U of Washington 29. Tallen, Louise E. A return and a beginning: baalot teshuvah within Lubavitch Chasidism. U of California, Los Angeles Copyright © 1998 American Jewish Historical Society

A Hundred Acres of America: The Geography of Jewish American Literary History

Reviewed by: Dust to Dust: A History of Jewish Burial in New York by Allan Amanik Heather S. Nathans (bio) Dust to Dust: A History of Jewish Burial in New York allan amanik New York University Press, 2019 272 pp. "How best to organize the dead," Allan Amanik queries in the first chapter of Dust to Dust: A History of Jewish Burial in New York (16). Questions of organization, based on geography, law, money, politics, family, and faith, thread through Amanik's richly researched study and inform his nuanced exploration of the development of Jewish burial practices and traditions in New York from the time of the earliest Jewish settlement to the turn of the twenty-first century. As Amanik argues, studying the abiding quest for control of cemeteries and rituals for the dead or dying can offer significant insights into the challenge so many struggling Jewish communities faced in establishing or maintaining control against the pressures of a predominantly Gentile American culture. Amanik divides the study into five chapters, plus an introduction, a conclusion, and an epilogue. As he notes in chapter 1, "A dedicated Jewish graveyard not only represented the first communal and public space that Jews created in North America but counted among several legal, social, and religious privileges that paved the way for long-term settlement in the colony" (19). Amanik uses the struggle to establish the first Jewish burial ground to wrestle with the dream of permanent settlement in the young Dutch colony. He describes the reluctance of the Christian Dutch rulers to grant the 1655 petition of three Sephardic Jewish merchants to purchase land for a graveyard, even though no Jews had yet died in New Amsterdam. As Amanik astutely observes, the Dutch leaders denied the petition, "likely hoping to discourage permanent settlement" (19). But despite the efforts of the Dutch and then the British authorities, Jewish families began to establish themselves in New York City, and the controversy over burial practices shifted to reflect internal debates within the Jewish community. Those ranged from disputes over family burial versus chronological burial (many early congregations maintained that burials should be organized by date of death, rather than family name), to how or whether to bury the Christian spouses of those who had married outside the Jewish community, but who had not converted to Christianity. Additionally, synagogues faced hard financial realities in trying to maintain their activities among [End Page 895] comparatively small populations, and as Amanik notes, burial practices and the access to sanctioned burial spaces provided leverage for synagogue leaders to shore up their scanty resources by requiring that regular dues be paid (or be paid retroactively at the time of a loved one's death) in order to provide access to these all-important sites. Chapter 2 focuses on the ways in which death rituals and funerals helped to shape a new system of "grassroots Jewish burial societies" that pushed back against the authority of synagogue leaders and the community's wealthiest families (46). If the burial regulations of the colonial and early national era had defined who was "inside" and who was "outside" centers of power in Jewish New York, the rising fraternal organizations demonstrated that Jewish citizens were willing to establish their own structures based on "collectivism and mutual regard" (49). Perhaps not surprisingly, these emerging organizations mirrored the national rhetoric as it shifted toward a more sentimental concept of citizenship. While American Jewish communities might have gotten a later start in creating burial societies than some of their European or colonial counterparts, their post-Revolutionary activity shaped them into "transitional institutions" (55). As Amanik argues, the increasing schisms among late eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century synagogues decentralized the synagogue's collective influence just as fraternal organizations began to demonstrate that they could offer more effective (and less restrictive) opportunities for Jewish philanthropy and community. In chapter 3, Amanik focuses on the "Rural Cemetery Movement," as a watershed moment in the history of Jewish American burial practices. The movement marked a trend toward establishing cemeteries outside of crowded city centers and making them resemble lavishly landscaped gardens. Moreover, in a reversal of earlier policy, the new Jewish cemeteries traded on being...

the American Jewish Community, by Jack Wertheimer. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England/Brandeis University Press, 2007. 333 pp. 29.95. To some, book titles with the verb imagining serve as cautionary signs that the pages ahead detour from reality, and instead navigate the world of fantasy. the American Jewish differs in this regard in its skillful interweaving of vision and fact. The result is an illuminating volume on what has been and what might become the shape of American Jewish community. As an edited collection of revised papers from the the American Jewish March 2004 JTS conference, this book contains sixteen essays by leading scholars. Its four sections, Reappraisals in American Jewish History, Community on Display, Women as Agents of Communal Reconfiguration, and Community and Culture, present portraits of American Jewry that challenge existing paradigms in the field and examine the diversity of a community that has found itself duly inflected by changes in American culture throughout its history. Imagining also conveys a sense of individualism and freedom that is central to a volume that takes voluntarism as a touchstone for American religious culture. The United States' voluntaristic ethos has consistently fostered innovative communal arrangements, throughout Jews' 350-plus years in this country, both inside traditional Jewish institutional frameworks, and far outside their doors. Indeed, Beyond the Synagogue might well serve as another subtitle for this volume as the chapters take us to sites as wide ranging as marketplaces, sports arenas, board games, the internet, and the pages of American Jewish literature, to locate American Jewish community. Holly Snyder's chapter argues that the synagogue was not quite the core of social and religious existence for Jews in the colonial period that is claimed by the regnant historiography. The creative adaptability that has defined American Jewry since its beginning and which Jonathan Sarna has connected to the periodic revitalizarion of Judaism can be found in this early period of American Jewish history, too, Snyder demonstrates, if scholars accept the fractured nature of early American Jewry. Photographers, memoirists, and novelists have perhaps best portrayed the integral role of the marketplace in creating Jewish community, but Hasia Diner's essay, Buying and Selling reminds readers of the extent to which commercial transactions marked a site as Jewish, creating community in the process. With the burgeoning of Jewish museums and exhibits in the past half-century, it is no surprise that the museum makes an appearance in this volume, but the rich history that Jenna Weissman Joselit details in her lively prose of curators' efforts to represent and provoke Jewish community is one of the many delightful discoveries in this book. …

Few topics have been as sensitive in the American Jewish community as the seemingly large number of Jews in such radical or revolutionary groups as the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA). The reason is not hard to fathom. For many years antisemites of all varieties have linked Jews with Bolshevism or communism. Shortly after the Russian Revolution, a Brooklyn magazine entitled the Anti-Bolshevist charged that the Bolshevik was “a Jew who uses socialism, anarchy and internationalism for the sole purpose of getting possession of the Christians’ wealth and to exploit the Christian toiler. The Russian government is a government of the Jews, by Jews and for the Jews.” In the same period American diplomats routinely described the Russian Revolution as a Jewish plot, noting that Karl Marx was Jewish – albeit baptized – and that such prominent leaders of the revolution as Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev were Jews. Invariably and incorrectly Lenin was tossed in as well. Bad enough that so many Russian Jews were Communists, but far worse for American Jews that so many revolutionaries seeking to overthrow the democratic government of the United States had Jewish origins. To many Americans radicalism was a foreign import – Andrew Carnegie once labeled radicals as “a parcel of foreign cranks whose communistic ideas were the natural outgrowth of unjust laws of their native land.” That so many American Jews had family origins in the old Russian Empire meant that the identification of Jews with Russian Communism called into question their own patriotism. Even the Communist Party was sensitive about its image as a Jewish-dominated organization. A study I conducted many years ago showed that Jews took considerably longer to work their way up the Party ladder to the Central Committee than non-Jews because the Party was anxious to present a less “Jewish” face to the country. In 1929 the New York Young Communist League boasted of the advances it had made, noting that “the results are also good in national composition, the majority of the new recruits being young Americans and not Jewish.” At times, other groups in the CPUSA complained about an outsized Jewish presence.