American Jewish Identity Research Articles

An Analysis of the Protagonist’s Behavior in <i>Herzog</i> from Yi-Fu Tuan’s Escapism

The novel <i>Herzog</i> by the American writer Saul Bellow has received wide attention since its publication in 1964. It centers around the protagonist Moses Herzog’s life after his second divorce, in which he is often in a state of uneasiness, going from place to place to avoid problems, writing unsent letters to express dissatisfaction, seeking comfort from others when in trouble, and losing himself in memories when frustrated. According to the Chinese-American humanistic geographer Yi-Fu Tuan’s escapism theory, the behavior is in fact escapism. What Herzog really wants to escape is society, others, and himself, and escaping from place to place or person to person, and creating material world and spiritual world, are the different ways of his escapism. And during the process of escape, with embarrassment, pains, impulse and constant self-introspection, he gradually gains strength, and evolves from negative escapism to positive escapism, temporarily achieving reconciliation with reality. There are many reasons for Herzog’s escapism, among which his American Jewish identity, the turmoil of the American society in 1960s, the decline of the intellectuals’ status and the rise of feminism at that time all play a key role. Herzog’s escapism is actually a product of his time, a process of reconstruction of relationship between male and female, and a seeking-existence journey of an intellectual with different ethnicity in American society, with positive escapism born out of negative one.

Ethno-Religious Engagement, Minority Experiences, and Strengthening American Jewish Identity

Despite the complexity of and threats to American Jewish identity, little is known regarding how it is strengthened in adulthood. The purpose of this quantitative descriptive study was to understand the types of activities and minority experiences that strengthen Jewish identity and how this may differ from those with higher religious and cultural identification. Participants included 546 Jewish adults from 39 states who completed a survey covering topics related to Jewish activities, minority experiences, belongingness, continuity, Jewish identity, and demographics. Results indicated that regardless of cultural or religious identification, there were many similarly endorsed activities and minority experiences, even negative ones, that strengthen Jewish identity among adults. Implications for multicultural counseling competency when working with American Jews and ethno-religious identity are discussed.

Between a Polish Shiksa and a Jewish Woman: Ambiguous Identities in Eva Mekler's Novels

Abstract Focusing on the close reading of Eva Mekler's two novels, Sunrise Shows Late (1997) and The Polish Woman (2007), set in Poland, Germany, and the United States, this article considers Mekler's constructs of Polish Jewish and Polish Jewish American identity that the author situates at the fraught intersection of gender, Polishness and Jewishness as she reflects on diasporic variations of the Polish Jewish American migration story. Mekler, a Jewish American writer born in Poland immediately after World War II, deploys the trope of passing as Polish or passing as Jewish and engages the second generation's memories of the Holocaust as she explores the effects of war trauma on her female characters. Permanently positioning her characters, some of whom come from secular assimilated Jewish families, between Polishness and Jewishness, she rejects any possibility that they could identify themselves simultaneously as Polish and Jewish. They may only exist within the troubled spaces of confrontation between their performance of hybrid identities and the Nazi racial laws, anti-Semitism, suspicion of passers, Jewish anti-Polishness, and Holocaust trauma.

Minority representation in the streaming era: An analysis of Jewish identity in competing subscription video on-demand platforms

This article considers how three competing subscription video on-demand services (SVODs) – Jewzy, ChaiFlicks, and IZZY – attract American Jewish subscribers via content selection, platform design, and marketing rhetoric. Although these three SVODs offer similar catalogs, they nonetheless foreground distinct elements of Jewish life, history, and practice. This process of commercial framing, the paper argues, creates unique brand identities for the three services that align with three different approaches to the construction of American Jewish identity. The article goes on to show that these SVODs offer an opportunity to revisit core assumptions embedded within Jewish screen studies and minority screen representation studies more broadly. Minority identity on screen is most often studied through the interpretation of key instances of minority representation. These SVODs instead emphasize the dynamics of interpellation, as they hail viewers by appealing to limited, pre-constructed concepts of cultural identity while offering entire platforms worth of representations.

Announcing the 2022 Richard J. Orsi “Best Article” Prize

Editorial| February 01 2023 Announcing the 2022 Richard J. Orsi “Best Article” Prize Mary Ann Irwin Mary Ann Irwin Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar California History (2023) 100 (1): 1–2. https://doi.org/10.1525/ch.2023.100.1.1 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Mary Ann Irwin; Announcing the 2022 Richard J. Orsi “Best Article” Prize. California History 1 February 2023; 100 (1): 1–2. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/ch.2023.100.1.1 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentCalifornia History Search It is with great pleasure that I announce the winner of our Richard J. Orsi prize for the best article published in California History in 2022. It was difficult to choose the best of the eleven peer-reviewed research articles we published in volume 99. Nonetheless, the committee unanimously selected Warren C. Wood, “S. An-Sky’s The Dybbuk and the Process of Jewish American Identity in 1920s San Francisco,” Vol. 99, No. 2, May (Summer) 2022, with each member agreeing that a very close second was Catherine Christensen Gwin, “The Selling of American Girls: Mexico’s White Slave Trade in the California Imaginary,” Vol. 99, No. 1, February (Spring) 2022.The committee’s report on the winning article notes:In this well-researched and fascinating case study of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century San Francisco’s small but vibrant Jewish community, Warren C. Wood shows how the 1928 staging of playwright S. An-Sky’s The Dybbuk helped heal... You do not currently have access to this content.

Liberal Grammar and the Construction of American Jewish Identity

Liberal Grammar and the Construction of American Jewish Identity

A Time to Gather: Archives and the Control of Jewish Culture

A Time to Gather: Archives and the Control of Jewish Culture

International Jewish Humanitarianism in the Age of the Great War by Jaclyn Granick

Reviewed by: International Jewish Humanitarianism in the Age of the Great War by Jaclyn Granick Jessica Cooperman Jaclyn Granick, International Jewish Humanitarianism in the Age of the Great War. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2021. 404 pp. Hardback $39.99. ISBN: 9781108495028 Jaclyn Granick's compelling new book, International Jewish Humanitarianism in the Age of the Great War, powerfully reminds its readers of the enormous impact of World War I, not only on the lives of millions of Jews across Europe and in Palestine, but on the philanthropic, social, and political structures of the Jewish world. Granick's book focuses on the devastating turmoil unleashed by World War I and examines the efforts of American Jews to stabilize and sustain the lives of Jews trapped in the "shatterzone" between the crumbling Russian, Austrian, German, and Ottoman empires. Through her thought-provoking exploration of the dynamics of Jewish humanitarian work, Granick offers reader a complex picture of American Jewish identity and its intertwined commitments to American Progressive ideals and diasporic Jewish community. The book is primarily an account of the work done by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) in Poland, Ukraine, Soviet Russia, and Palestine during and immediately following World War I. At numerous points, however, Granick considers how the goals and efforts of JDC intersected with and diverged from those of other American relief organizations, such as the American Red Cross and the American Relief Administration, and other Jewish organizations, including HIAS and Hadassah. Granick opens with an examination of how the JDC and its various partners maneuvered to send money and financial assistance to Jewish "war sufferers" during the period of American neutrality. She poignantly describes the immense challenge of moving funds to people in need in the midst of a global crisis—and the added complexities created by the United States's entry into the war in April 1917. As American policies made it increasingly difficult to send aid, JDC leaders found ways to partner with European Jewish organizations on both sides of the battle lines to bring money and life-saving resources to East European Jews in desperate need of help. In the chapters that follow, Granick thematically explores the staggering demands faced by the JDC during the chaotic years after the war. While civilian populations across Eastern Europe suffered through the devastation and destabilization the war left behind, Jews lived in particularly precarious circumstances, becoming, Granick argues, "the war's paradigmatic [End Page 249] refugees" (111). Antisemitism lead both to wide-scale popular violence and to neglect from newly formed national governments that saw Jews as a "foreign element." In Ukraine, for example, pogroms led to approximately 200,000 Jewish deaths between 1917–1920 (92), and widespread famine left hundreds of thousands of Jewish children and adults facing imminent starvation and almost totally dependent on the JDC and the American Relief Administration for food (105). Granick offers detailed accounts of the strategies that Jewish agencies adopted as they struggled to feed the hungry, house refugees and orphans, tend to the sick, educate children, and establish stable Jewish economic systems in Eastern Europe and Palestine. Many of the people behind this massive humanitarian effort are familiar figures in American Jewish history. As Granick describes, established leaders like Cyrus Adler, Judah Magnes, Louis Marshall, Jacob Schiff, and Felix Warburg, saw the establishment of the JDC as part of their widespread involvement in Jewish institutional life. Granick, however, also highlights the efforts of less well-lauded figures—particularly professional social workers like Boris Bogen, Jacob Billikopf, Frank Rosenblatt, and others—who led the JDC's strategic efforts and on-the-ground programs. And while the leadership of Jewish organizations remained dominated by men in the interwar period, Granick spotlights the work of women, like Harriet Lowenstein, who established the JDC's European headquarters in 1919, and Jesse Bogen, Boris's daughter, who accompanied her father in his travels and eventually led the JDC's efforts to promote the "financial adoption" of Jewish children in Europe by Jewish women in the United States (210). While meticulous details of the material, financial, and medical aid provided by the JDC and other agencies lie at the heart of Granick's...

S. An-Sky’s The Dybbuk and the Process of Jewish American Identity in 1920s San Francisco

In October 1928, an amateur troupe at San Francisco’s Temple Emanu-El performed the most famous play of Yiddish theater, The Dybbuk by S. An-sky (or Ansky). This production, only the third English-language staging of the play in the United States, was a signal event in the evolution of Jewish American identity in California and across the West. The players were a mix of elite San Francisco Jews of Western European descent and recent immigrants from Eastern Europe steeped in Yiddishkait, an approach to Jewish life that sought to transform and fortify the commonplace language and culture of Eastern European Jewry into a growing range of artistic, literary, intellectual, and social movements. The director, Nachum Zemach, had worldwide renown as an artist in Yiddish theater. The backers of the production had intended to bring about a revitalization of Jewish life in the city and the unification of a Jewish community splintered along lines of class, regional origin, and religious practice. Instead, the performance of the play became a catalyst for legitimizing the ongoing process of creating and recreating American Jewish identity out of a variety of cultural, social, and religious practices.

Problematizing Familial Relationship: A Study of American Pastoral by Philip Roth

This study is an attempt to show the familial relationship and racial conflicts in Philip Roth’s novel, American Pastoral. The study mainly focuses on the treatment of family-relationship and racial conflicts. It intends to find out the way Roth has made an attempt to explore different facets of human relationship through this novel. Being a great artist with exceptional vision, Roth has harped upon some of the most important issues of human relationship. American society and Jewish identity always serve as the main subject matter of his writings. The prime concern of Philip Roth is to bring about reformation in American society in particular and the entire human relationship in general.

American Jews Face Israel in Philip Roth's Writing: Identity, Generation, Politics, and Language

The relationship with Israel is an increasingly complicated issue for diaspora Jews. Philip Roth's texts show a complex and critical positioning of American Jews towards Israel from as early as the 1960s. Analyzing Portnoy's Complaint (1969), The Counterlife (1986), and Operation Shylock (1994), I argue that Roth portrays a complex, critical, and often uncomfortable Jewish-American relationship with Zionism and Israel. His ongoing engagement is as urgent, even if less prominent, as is the constant re-debating of Jewish-American identities throughout Roth's oeuvre. This suggests that Israel is a constituent, if problematic, part of his negotiations of contemporary Jewish identities. Roth explores the role of Israel in the Jewish-American identity politics by way of generational positioning, the question of politics, power, and violence, expectations of diaspora loyalty, and, most prominently, the meaning of language as an identity marker as American English and Hebrew are set against each other.

The Rise and Fall of Jewish American Literature: Ethnic Studies and the Challenge of Identity by Benjamin Schreier

Reviewed by: The Rise and Fall of Jewish American Literature: Ethnic Studies and the Challenge of Identity by Benjamin Schreier Saul Noam Zaritt (bio) The Rise and Fall of Jewish American Literature: Ethnic Studies and the Challenge of Identity. By Benjamin Schreier. Philadelphia: University Pennsylvania Press, 2020. 228 pp. The Rise and Fall of Jewish American Literature begins with a startling claim: "Nothing testifies to the etiolation of the field of Jewish American literary study—my field—so much as the fact that so few people ever fight about anything" (1). The claim is startling because by traditional metrics—say, number of books and articles published per year—the field is healthy. Yet one of Schreier's central claims is that despite this activity, there has been little debate on the terms of Jewish American literary study. While in other fields there is repeated theorization of concepts like ethnicity and race, there is something of a silence around "Jewishness" in Jewish American literature. Schreier argues that the coherence of "Jewishness" is often taken for granted, observing how critics, from the postwar to the present, view Jewish American writing as directly reflecting a recognizable and legible Jewish population. This Schreier calls the field's "ethnological" foundation, in which a descriptive, ethnographic mode of literary study [End Page 99] precedes and precludes critical analysis. He identifies how critics circle around the idea of "breakthrough," in which a group of writers (Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, Grace Paley, and others) is seen as emerging out of immigrant origins to arrive in the American mainstream, becoming representative figures of Jewish American history. The Jewishness of these writers is taken as a given, their writing automatically cohering within a narrative of Jewish American arrival that often turns on ideas of model minorities and on the uninterrogated convergence of Ashkenazi Jewishness and whiteness. Schreier calls this "autoethnography" nationalist, "ancillary" to a normalized and self-evident "historical record of Jews in America" (9). This leads, for Schreier, to a dangerous insiderism, in which Jewish intellectuals labor in service of a closed cultural system rather than interrogate the grounds of discourse. Schreier demands instead a shift from "an analysis of Jews" to an analysis of "discourses about Jews" (10). In Chapter 1, Schreier tracks how "breakthrough" came to dominate the field, outlining the field's "ambivalent foundation" and contested relationship with multiculturalism (39). He notes how institutionalizing the mythologized success of Jewish American assimilation distanced the field from the critical approaches of ethnic studies; at the same time, the mainstreaming of Jewish difference threatened the cherished exceptionalism of Jewish culture. This resulted, paradoxically, in the ghettoization of Jewish American literary study at the moment of its "emergence." Chapter 2 extends this critique to the instrumentalization of Yiddish literature within this narrative: "The Yiddish literary past was repurposed … as that manifestation of Jewish cultural heritage that could become a nostalgic object of identification for American Jews, the consumption and capitalization of which promised the affective reproduction of Jewish American identity" (74). Concentrating on Irving Howe's anthologies, Schreier shows how Yiddish was ossified through "ideological capture" to support the idea of "breakthrough" (78). Chapter 3 considers the concept of ethnicity, analyzing Cynthia Ozick's criticism to show how Jewish ethnic identity became a "fulcrum on which the Jewish American literary field was able to consolidate" (161). The project of Jewish identity comes to "normalize an ethnologically representational historicism as the authoritative way of thinking about Jewish American writing" (124). Schreier maps this "history of Jewish American literary history" onto the work of a string of literary critics—Leslie Fiedler, Howe, Ruth Wisse, Ozick, and many others. His approach is stridently polemical, revealing how critics produced a normative Jewish population "whose history is the duty … of Jewish studies intellectuals to uncover, archive, and narrate" (170). From Ozick's trouble with multiculturalism to Wisse's [End Page 100] nationalism, Schreier takes a measure of joy in assaulting these thinkers, often leaving the topic of a given chapter well behind in order to pursue a line of critique. Schreier's text brims with aggression, repeatedly answering the challenge of the book's opening sentence. But what does this aggression ultimately do...

Reading Israel, Reading America: The Politics of Translation between Jews by Omri Asscher

Reviewed by: Reading Israel, Reading America: The Politics of Translation between Jews by Omri Asscher Anthony Wexler Omri Asscher . Reading Israel, Reading America: The Politics of Translation between Jews . Stanford, CA : Stanford University Press , 2020 . 256 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009420000732 Although they often share geographic and linguistic origins, Jewish communities in Israel and America have come to be divided not only by language and location, but also by divergent conceptions of Jewishness. It would be easy to assume that the translation of literary works between these centers of Jewish life has helped bridge the gaps separating them, encouraging each to see itself as an organ of Klal Yisra'el . Omri Asscher's fascinating and original study on [End Page 226] literary translation tells a different story, however. He considers the translation of Hebrew works into English for American Jewish readers, and vice versa, from the 1940s through the 1980s, focusing specifically on the ways that translations of texts between Diaspora and homeland perform ideological work, exposing a "subterranean struggle" (175) between "rival siblings" (back cover) with different conceptions of Jewish life and culture. To this end, Asscher looks at the reception of literary works in and across both countries; sometimes, he points out significant instances of outright manipulation of translations. Two luminous examples at the start of the book introduce the scope and shape of Asscher's project. David Shahar's Hebrew novel His Majesty's Agent features an American Jewish character named Abie Driesel, an obvious parody of Elie Wiesel. In the English translation, however, Driesel's name was changed to Jules Levi, and passages that openly critique Wiesel and his brand of Jewishness were removed. The second example focuses on a 1971 review of Saul Bellow's Herzog in which the Israeli critic Alexander Barzel invites Sha'ul Bellow and his peers to "come home, to the nation's homeland" (2). These two moments show that the mediation of literary works for Jewish readers in both countries promoted and protected the ideals, values, and identities of the target culture—what Asscher describes as "a conversation of sorts, or negotiation of ideas, between two platforms of Jewish identity" (3). The first three chapters consider the absorption of Hebrew literature in American Jewish culture between the 1950s and the 1980s, a period during which Israel became a cornerstone of Jewish American identity. Asscher identifies trends in translation practices during these decades, including an effort to highlight connections between "Hebrew literature's national underpinnings and American historical myths," which helped American Jews preserve a distinct sense of a Jewish and American national identity (45). Starting in the 1960s, Israeli writers, including Aharon Megged, A. B. Yehoshua, and Amos Oz, began reflecting on the moral implications of the war of independence and the treatment of the Palestinian population. Asscher identifies two trends in the ways that American Jewish cultural agents responded to these critical accounts of the Israeli state. On the one hand, he argues that American cultural agents tended to describe them as "ethical expressions of moral opposition," labeling Israeli writers as the "dissenting voice of the humanistic Left in the country" (58). On the other hand, he argues that these agents sought to "soften" and "blur" (59) expressions of moral criticism in these works. Such censorship extended from the choice of texts for translation to the ways those texts were translated and interpreted in mainstream venues. The second chapter features a fascinating discussion of the ways that combat soldiers and Palestinian perspectives in these works were routinely modified or removed in translation, which, in turn, helped preserve Israel's moral image for American Jews. Asscher also considers how Jewish cultural agents in America responded to Israeli representations of Jewishness and Judaism that challenged Jewish American identity. He describes how Hebrew works that stressed the boundaries between Jews and non-Jews, that openly denigrated Christians, or that highlighted the presence of antisemitic persecution were altered to help protect the standing of the Jewish community in America. These chapters, then, [End Page 227] can help us better understand the ways that the translation process helped mitigate the tension between Zionism and morality, ensuring Israel's function as a source of collective...

Jewish Identity and Volunteerism: Motivational Drivers in a Small North Carolina Temple

The purpose of this research was to examine Jewish identity and its impact on volunteerism and driving motivation in a small reform Temple in North Carolina. This study assessed the Jewish identity of members of the Temple and their motivation to volunteer within this congregation. Following from the research on identity and volunteerism, the primary focus was the extent to which the congregants embrace a Jewish identity and the level to which they perceive that volunteering at the synagogue is an expression of that identity. A mixed-methods design was crafted with the initial data collection obtained through a quantitative survey: The American Jewish Identity Scales (AJIS). Qualitative data were then collected through one audio-recorded, semi-structured focus group consisting of 7 volunteers. While the quantitative results showed that identity did not appear to be the driving factor for volunteering, the qualitative summary uncovered other identity-based motivations to volunteer. These motivations stemmed from one’s own family as well as the perception of the Temple as an extension of family.

The Loss of Self and Identity Crisis in Jewish American Literature: The Case of Bernard Malamud’s The German Refugee

The search for identity and self-identity problems have been one of the pivotal themes for Jewish American authors. Prominent writers such as Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow and Philip Roth explore American Jewish identity and address the questions of assimilation, the hardship of immigrant life, challenges of cultural acceptance, and finding purpose in life. In particular they are concerned with the self-identification and alienation of American Jewry. The given paper examines the problems of personality crisis and loss of identity portrayed in Bernard Malamud’s story “The German Refugee”. The psychological aspects of the main character’s personality are investigated, an attempt is made to analyze the factors that determined the crisis, which ultimately led him to suicide. The author also touches upon the topic of the post-Holocaust consciousness in Jewish American literature. Despite the fact that Malamud did not address the Holocaust theme in his works directly, he, like many post-war American fiction writers, was deeply impacted by it. The importance of Malamud's writing for Holocaust literature lies in his realistic portrayal of how the Shoah continues to affect survivors, refugees and those Jews who were not physically affected by it.

Magical American Jew: The Enigma of Difference in Contemporary Jewish American Short Fiction and Film

Magical American Jew: The Enigma of Difference in Contemporary Jewish American Short Fiction and Film

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

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

Like a Dark Rabbi: Modern Poetry and the Jewish Literary Imagination by Norman Finkelstein

Reviewed by: Like a Dark Rabbi: Modern Poetry and the Jewish Literary Imagination by Norman Finkelstein Maeera Y. Shreiber (bio) Like a Dark Rabbi: Modern Poetry and the Jewish Literary Imagination Norman Finkelstein Hebrew Union College Press, 2019. 275 pp. $35.95 paperback. In 1991, poet-critic Allen Grossman initiated a new chapter in the study of Jewish poetry when he declared that, according to Jewish thought, the sacred and the poetic are fundamentally at odds with one another. Norman Finkelstein was among the first to really consider Grossman's intentionally provocative claim in a thoroughgoing way: first in Not One of Them in Place: Modern Poetry and Jewish American Identity (2001); then in numerous essays probing the question of midrashic poetics, the tension and relation between the secular and the sacred in experimental verse; and, most recently, in a wonderful piece "On the Poetics of a Jewish God" (co-written with poet Michael Heller). This latter piece deftly negotiates Gershom Sholem, Israeli poet Chaim Bialik, and contemporary scholar of religious thought Steven Wasserstrom—to craft an account of a poetics animated by a dynamic relation to the sacred. This account is fully realized in Finkelstein's latest book, Like a Dark Rabbi: Modern Poetry and the Jewish Literary Imagination. This gathering of essays, some of which are expanded versions of earlier pieces while others are wholly new pieces written expressly for this occasion, is, as the author puts it, "an expression of devotion"(xv)—a dedicated and learned disciple's account of a rich and multi-faceted aesthetic as well as a spiritually-inflected enterprise. Finkelstein sets up some of the terms informing these essays in the opening chapter, focusing upon the "Two Shapiros" (1)—Karl and Harvey, both of whose names are now all but lost to history. Indeed, one of the gifts Finkelstein offers is the opportunity to discover new or overlooked voices. I was happy to spend a bit of time with Harvey Shapiro, whose "brilliantly understated style…epitomizes the endlessly paradoxical questions and answers that secular Jewish life provokes" (14). After working through some of the ways secularity animates Jewish verse, Finkelstein turns to consider the status of authentically Jewish languages in the making of Jewish American poems. For a long while, Jewish poets writing in English were seen as distinctly disadvantaged, not having access to the cultural, conceptual and spiritual resources inherent in Yiddish or Hebrew. But drawing upon the work of scholars such as Sander Gilman, Finkelstein proposes another mode of approach, noting how Yiddish, for example, functions as a "ghost" (18) or "hidden" (18) language informing not only the work of poet Jerome Rothenberg but also Finkelstein's own "post vernacular" (19) lyrics. This [End Page 162] move is but one instance of what makes the book appealing, as Finkelstein brings both a scholarly investment to the subject and an ongoing creative sensibility. Like a Dark Rabbi should appeal to a range of readers. Experts in the field will appreciate Finkelstein's carefully argued and attentive close readings; his discussion of Allen Grossman's ambitious poem "The Piano Player Explains Himself," a stunning but difficult example of this poet's prophetic reach, is a beautiful instance of Finkelstein's skill. Other chapters—such as the lively account of Charles Reznikoff, an important figure in twentiethcentury Jewish American writing—are well-suited to the non-professional who wants to learn more about the important role poetry plays in a literary field that often overlooks the genre altogether. In addition to working with well-known figures, Finkelstein works hard to expand the canon of Jewish American poetry, calling attention to poets whose names do not typically come to mind when the subject is Jewish poetics. Even more importantly, Finkelstein makes a concerted effort to expand the list to include two women poets whose works are only now beginning to garner the attention they deserve. His discussion of Chana Bloch showcases a poet who is able to name her doubt quite frankly without redemptively claiming it as part of a diasporic identity—and without ever backing away from her conviction in the deep wisdom to be gleaned from Jewish texts. Counterbalancing Bloch's sharp-edged...

Eastern European Jewish American Narratives, 1890–1930: Struggles for Recognition by Dana Mihăilescu

Reviewed by: Eastern European Jewish American Narratives, 1890–1930: Struggles for Recognition by Dana Mihăilescu Markus Krah (bio) Eastern European Jewish American Narratives, 1890–1930: Struggles for Recognition. By Dana Mihăilescu. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2018. xxi + 249 pp. The transformation, adaptation, acculturation, and, if you will, Americanization of immigrants from the eastern parts of Europe around the turn of the twentieth century has been crucial to the ways in which American Jews understood and presented themselves as individuals and as a group in their American and Jewish contexts. The existing studies of these complex processes leave room for new perspectives, so Dana Mihăilescu's book is a welcome addition. Mihăilescu, a professor of English/American Studies at the University of Bucharest, takes an innovative approach by connecting literary, philosophical, and historical perspectives on the topic. Analyzing the work of six writers who came to the US from Russia and Romania, she argues that immigration caused "the need to re-imagine the subject's ethical agency in a new regime of state, showing how the dilemmas associated with eastern European Jewish American identity represent a critical element in fashioning modern subjectivity" (xi). This re-configuration involves a shift from a "fixed-type of identity in autocratic eastern European societies to contingent, fluid identity in democratic United States." Moreover, immigrants transitioned from "double ethical standards" and a focus on self-preservation and survival (eastern Europe) to an "emphasis on ethical responsibility for the ethnic/generational/human other via critical resistance to limitations of norms in a democracy" (xi). Mihăilescu comes to this original thesis by analyzing the novels, memoirs, and essays written by the six writers who form the source base [End Page 469] for her study: Mary Antin, Abraham Cahan, Anzia Yezierka, Konrad Bercovici, M. E. Ravage, and Maurice Samuel. By recuperating the voices of Romanian Jewish immigrants through the three latter authors, she aims to complete the picture of the eastern European Jewish experience of America. To the body of their work she applies the theories of philosophers Judith Butler, Axel Honneth, and Emmanuel Levinas. Butler's notion of vulnerability, Levinas's encounter with and responsibility for the other, and Honneth's concept of "recognition" in the face of moral injury are the main ingredients of the "new sense of ethical agency characterizing Jewish identity in America" (xvii). This philosophical framework in which Mihăilescu situates eastern European Jewish immigrant identities runs as a thread throughout the book and is woven into sections sketching the historical background of the immigration experience. These considerations make up the first part of the study, preceding the analysis proper of the writings of the six authors. The analysis follows several leitmotifs which Mihăilescu traces from eastern Europe to the US in the writings of the immigrant authors. In her brief concluding chapter, she doubles down on her thesis by stating that the "awakening to the other […] marks the positive refashioning of Jewishness in America in the early twentieth century" (231). Surprisingly, however, she states that this identity reconfiguration through the experience of responsibility for the other was not unique to immigrants to the US but also characteristic of Jews who remained in Europe and engaged the other in various ways (232). A review by a historian cannot do justice to the philosophical analysis Mihăilescu performs on her literary sources, but it does need to point out problematic aspects of the study, which is premised on questionable assumptions about the history of eastern European Jewish immigration to the US and makes claims about this experience based on the analysis of its sources. Bracketing the larger issue of a unified "eastern European" background to these immigrant experiences, Mihăilescu's thesis of the shifting identity of immigrants rests on reductive and over-simplified dichotomies and concepts, such as the opposition between "Orthodox" and "Progressives" in Eastern Europe (for which the shtetl serves as a pars pro toto) and the US (62). She stresses the differences between western and eastern European Jews by quoting Simon Dubnow and Nathan Glazer (59). She uses writings by her six authors to illustrate or prove problematically large claims about the development of different...

Yitz Greenberg and Modern Orthodoxy: The Road Not Taken ed. by Adam S. Ferziger, Miri Freud-Kandel and Steve Bayme

Reviewed by: Yitz Greenberg and Modern Orthodoxy: The Road Not Taken ed. by Adam S. Ferziger, Miri Freud-Kandel and Steve Bayme Lance J. Sussman (bio) Yitz Greenberg and Modern Orthodoxy: The Road Not Taken. Adam S. Ferziger, Miri Freud-Kandel, and Steve Bayme eds. Boston: Borderlines, 2019. viii + 300 pp. Yitz Greenberg and Modern Orthodoxy: The Road Not Taken is the most recent book, both academic and popular, on the Greenbergs, Blu and Rabbi Dr. Irving, a scholarly and activist married couple who have profoundly impacted American Judaism for over half a century. The growing list of titles about one or the other of the Greenbergs includes Steven T. Katz and Stephen Bayme's edited collection Continuity and Change: A Festschrift in Honor of Irving Greenberg's 75th Birthday (2011); Darren Kleinberg's Hybrid Judaism: Irving Greenberg, Encounter, and the Changing Nature of American Jewish Identity (2016); and Devorah Zlochower's edited collection You Arose, A Mother in Israel, A Festschrift in Honor of Blu Greenberg (2017). Moreover, both have been the subject of numerous articles in a wide variety of academic and intellectual publications despite the fact, as Greenberg himself states, "Modern Orthodoxy has not taken the road I advocated" (7). Hence the Robert Frost-alluding subtitle of this anthology of scholarly articles. Essentially, Yitz Greenberg and Modern Orthodoxy is the published record of a 2014 conference attended by "sixteen scholars around the globe gathered at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies in the bucolic Yarnton Manor in the Oxfordshire countryside, for the first (now annual) Oxford Summer Institute on Modern and Contemporary Judaism" (1). The book includes twelve articles from the 2014 conference as well as an insightful autobiographical "Retrospective View" by Greenberg. The contributors, some of whom previously contributed to the 2011 festschrift, represent a broad spectrum of scholars, including historians, philosophers, and sociologists. [End Page 636] This new study of Greenberg is divided into two parts: "Law and Theology," which mostly focuses on his thought, and "Past and Present," which expands to include a variety of studies on Modern Orthodoxy in general. The editors' forward succinctly explains that "the current volume offers readers the opportunity to examine in-depth the trenchant and candid efforts of one of the most thoughtful and earnest voices to emerge from within American Orthodoxy to address the theological and moral concerns that characterize our times" (5). Greenberg's opening autobiographical statement, one of several he has shared throughout his long career, is helpful to a scholarly assessment of his self-understanding at the beginning of the third decade of the twenty-first century. Organized chronologically, it also provides a taxonomy of many the leading issues he has confronted over the decades including, in part, "Growing up in Modern Orthodoxy," "Rabbi Soloveitchik's Influence," "The Holocaust Transforms My Thinking," "The 1960s and Their Impact," "Recoil from the '60s and the Rise of Ultra-Orthodoxy," "Working for CLAL Yisrael as a Modern Orthodox Jew; Losing Ground in Modern Orthodoxy," and "The Decline and Rebirth of (Post) Modern Orthodoxy." The fork in the road in Greenberg's life clearly came in the 1960s and was profoundly conditioned both by the general upheavals of that decade as well as, in academic religious circles, a particular interest in theology that later faded from mainstream American religious discourse. In her insightful contribution to the anthology, Sylvia Barak Fishman places special emphasis on the now well-known April 28, 1966, interview in The Commentator, the Yeshiva University student newspaper, written by Hillel Goldberg and entitled, "Orthodoxy, YU, Viet Nam & Sex" as a turning point in Greenberg's career. However, Greenberg himself points to a 1965 exchange with a Reform theologian, Rabbi Jakob Petuchowski, about the place of women in Jewish law as having "crystallized my nascent pluralism" (18). The 1966 Commentator interview also gave rise to a lengthy response to Greenberg by Rabbi Dr. Aharon Lichtenstein which is analyzed in the book's final chapter, "'The Road Not Taken' and 'The One Less Traveled': The Greenberg-Lichtenstein Exchange and Contemporary Orthodoxy" by Adam S. Ferziger, one of the book's three editors and author of Beyond Sectarianism: The Realignment of American Orthodox Judaism (2015). Correctly...