Armed Jews in the Americas ed. by Raanan Rein and David M.K. Sheinin

Abstract

Reviewed by: Armed Jews in the Americas ed. by Raanan Rein and David M.K. Sheinin Aaron Welt (bio) Armed Jews in the Americas. Edited by Raanan Rein and David M.K. Sheinin. Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2021. xii + 251 pp. America is a society awash in guns. As of 2018, there were 1.2 firearms for every citizen in the United States. With the Constitution's Second Amendment granting a fundamental right, if a highly contested one, to "bear Arms," America has long fostered a gun culture. Though no nation comes close to the US in gun ownership (including ones currently in military conflict or recovering from war), Uruguay and Canada are also [End Page 320] in the top ten list of most armed nations. Other Western Hemisphere countries have low levels of gun ownership, but suffer from high rates of gun violence, such as El Salvador, Venezuela, Guatemala, and Colombia. Countless people in the Americas carry arms, and many wonder what effect the preponderance of guns has had on the culture and politics of those nations. Armed Jews in the Americas, an edited collection of essays from scholars of diasporic Jewish history, attempts to place Jews in this panorama of weapons and violence. A premise of this book is that the relationship of Jews in the Americas to either being armed or (for reasons not fully explored) deciding not to be armed has had a salient impact on the Jewish integration into various societies of the Western Hemisphere. The volume showcases an eclectic and compelling mosaic of armed Jews and the political and cultural debates they elicited. By the end of Armed Jews in the Americas, the reader has gained a rich exploration of Jewish soldiers, police officers, revolutionaries, gangsters, militia members, and weapon-makers, and what their stories tell us about the time and place in which they lived. Several chapters shed new light on Canadian and Argentinian Jewish history and how the perceptions of Jews with guns in those countries served as a reliable indicator of the health of liberal multiculturalism in North and South America. In the opening pages of Armed Jews in the Americas, the editors claim that "this book demystifies the links between Jews [in the Western Hemisphere] and their weapons" (1). This goal is not fully achieved, which is understandable. The chapters of this book do not collectively illustrate that popular ideas of Jews and deadly weapons animated considerable anxieties in the Americas, certainly not when compared to imaginations of, say, Jews and finance, the mass media and popular entertainment, leftist politics (a topic that is intelligently examined in this book), immigration policy, or academia. The vignettes of individual Jews or small groups of Jews with weapons in the myriad settings that Armed Jews in the Americas covers only serve to further mystify the interlinkages between Jews and guns, particularly when considering American Jews. It remains unexplained why, despite the page-turning stories that make up this collection, the vast majority of American Jews, the largest Jewish population in the Western Hemisphere, have historically abstained from gun culture. This underlying reality tells us why armed Jews require demystification in the first place. Individually, each chapter succeeds in bringing to life the experience of an armed Jewish person in the Americas and the political, cultural, and social issues their stories reveal. David Sheinin provides an insightful exploration of armed Canadian Jews by way of the political and law [End Page 321] enforcement career of Phil Givens, Toronto's mayor and top cop over the 1960s and 1970s. The product of Toronto's Jewish immigrant milieu, Givens earned a reputation as a reliable liberal during his time as mayor. But a decade later, with Toronto undergoing its version of late twentieth century urban crisis, Police Commissioner Givens emerged as a prominent face for "tough-on-crime" politics in Canada, a politics that, Sheinin skillfully shows, came up wanting in meeting the challenge of crime in a modern city facing decreasing resources and increasing racial diversity. Another triumph of Armed Jews in the Americas is its findings on the diasporic Jews who enlisted with armed political movements abroad. The several dozen Canadian Jews who joined the...