American Jewish Studies Research Articles

American Jewish Studies: A Periodic Report of the Status of the Field

American Jewish Studies: A Periodic Report of the Status of the Field

American Jewish Studies: A Periodic Report of the Status of the Field

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. 84, No. 4) 1996 Related Articles: Continued 13. Berbrier, Mitchell W. Ethnicity in the making: cultural space and the ethnic/minority claims of the deaf, gays and white supremacists. Indiana U 14. Bor, Eyal. Four models of relations between Israel and the American Jewish community as defined by the Pollard affair. Baltimore Hebrew U 15. Broh, Dagobert. The history of the newspaper Aufbau, 1934–1948. Concordia U (Canada) 16. Diamond, Etan S. A sacred suburban subculture: the North American Orthodox Jewish community, 1950–1985. Carnegie-Mellon U 17. Feldman, Glenn A. The Ku Klux Klan in Alabama, 1915–1954. Auburn U 18. Forman, Seth. The unbearable whiteness of being Jewish: black Americans in the Jewish mind, 1945–1972. SUNY at Stony Brook 19. Greenberg, Joseph. Interfaith, intrafaith, and conversion marriages between Jews and non-Jews: the relationship of religiosity and cohesion to marital satisfaction. California School of Professional Psychology, Berkeley 20. Hyman, James. Abraham Heschel: alienation and the trope of meaning. Stanford U 21. Kimsey, John C. Ezra Pound and the rhetoric of heresy. U of Illinois at Chicago 22. Korson, Lise. Cycles of United States Middle East policy in three Republican administrations. NYU [End Page 173] 23. Laskin, Martin. An ethnographic study of an American Conservative synagogue: an examination of the social strategies employed by an institution and its members for the satisfaction of spiritual needs in a situation of religious pluralism. CUNY 24. Loschen, Christopher T. “A competent keyless citizen”: complex agency in . . . Philip Roth’s Operation Shylock. Brandeis U 25. Mayer, Susan L. The Jewish experience in nursing in America, 1881–1955. Columbia U 26. Milowitz, Steven M. Philip Roth considered: the concentrationary universe of the American writer. NYU 27. Moelis, Joan M. Writing selves: constructing American Jewish feminine literary identity (C. Ozick, G. Paley, E. M. Broner). U of Mass 28. Robinson, Gordon M. Persistent resistance to social change: the political struggle over the affirmative action strategy of proportional representation [Jewish neo-conservatives]. Michigan State U 29. Taylor, Charles L, III. Figurations of the family in fiction by . . . Philip Roth. U of Chicago Copyright © 1997 American Jewish Historical Society

American Jewish Studies: A Periodic Report of the Status of the Field

American Jewish Studies: A Periodic Report of the Status of the Field

American Jewish Studies: A Periodic Report of the Status of the Field

American Jewish Studies: A Periodic Report of the Status of the Field

American Jewish Studies: A Periodic Report of the Status of the Field

American Jewish Studies: A Periodic Report of the Status of the Field

Tropical Diaspora: The Jewish Experience in Cuba (review)

174 SHOFAR Summer 1996 Vol. 14, No.4 appears about AmericanJewish life today. In the shadow ofthe Holocaust, when a third of world Jewry was murdered, it is not surprising that survival has become central to the minds of scholars and communal leaders. But this preoccupation with questions about group survival and continuity results in a failure to explore different issues related to AmericanJewish life. Ifwe do not begin to ask other interesting questions, then I fear that the survival of contemporary American Jewish studies is seriously threatened. Shelly Tenenbaum Department of Sociology Clark University Tropical Diaspora: TheJewish Experience in Cuba, byRobert M. Levine. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1993. 398 pp. $34.95. In Tropical Diaspora, Robert Levine traces the arrival offive different groups of Jewish immigrants and refugees to Cuba-Ashkenazim, Sephardim, Americans up to the early twentieth century, Gennan refugees, and survivors of concentration camps during and after World War II-and their interactions with each other and with several sectors of Cuban society. In doing so, he not only provides "a chronicle of the experiences of Cuba's Jewish immigrants" (p. 8), but also fleshes out their lives in several relevant contexts-the Cuban social and political milieu, the climate shaping immigration policies in other Latin American countries, and the larger arena of international politics. Although the subject is difficult and Levine's sources problematic, the author's good sense prevails throughout the book. Tropical Diaspora is an original scholarly history of Jewish immigration to Cuba and an admiring portrait of the men and women who contributed to its writing. Writing about Jews in Cuba is ridden with dilemmas that a historian must sort out. If Sephardic and AshkenazicJews remained separate entities for almost all of their time in Cuba, is it appropriate to talk about a single Jewish community with particular needs and desires, attitudes and expectations? If Cuban society effectively embraced various ethnic minorities (including Jews), how correct is it to consider Jewish immigrants a readily identifiable group (integrated, to use Levine's word) and not simply part ofCuban society (assimilated)? IfCuban communists in the 1960s and 1970s were not antisemites, how did anti-Israeli sentiment spread so fast and penetrate so deep in the Cuba psyche? If institutional- Book Reviews 175 ized discrimination did not exist in Cuba, and Jews adjusted to circumstances with pragmatism, which actions (on the part ofJews and on the part of other Cubans) can we attribute to the "Jewish" component of any one situation and which ones to other group characteristics (such as class, culture, family, etc.)? In other words, how do we as readers, and Jews and non-Jews in Cuba as actors, "construct" Jews and others? What is the right combination of religion, ethnicity, national origins, cultural practices, and so on that permits discrimination, or prevents it? These 'are the predicaments Levine faces in this volume. The problem is compounded by the fact that a weighty-and essential -portion of Levine's sources is elderly Miami Jews and their offspring. They tell moving stories, which Levine reproduces with respect. But they are not always aware of the import of their tales, or at times of their historical insignificance. It is Levine, again, who must place this wealth of information in proper perspective within a larger framework. Fortunately, Levine is an accomplished historian, who not only knows how to evaluate and corroborate evidence but also has vast experience in the subject at hand. As a Latin Americanist, the author is careful to provide the reader with the information necessary to understand fairly complicated circumstances, ,such as social relations in Cuba during the 1950s or revolutionary attitudes and policies. His skilled hand has also uncovered rich primary material and made use of pertinent secondary sources about both Cuba in the twentieth century and Jewish immigration to other Latin American countries. Emotion-filled statements obtained from oral interviews, sober official reports bygovernment and international agencies, as well as sensationalistic and "objective" newspaper accounts form part of this engaging narrative. Levine's prior work with and on MiamiJews has served him well. The SS St. Louis incident is exemplary of Levine's attention to detail and evenhandedness. The luxury liner...

Conflicts Between Jews and Christians and Within the Jewish Community in America

A generation ago the wisdom of the profession was that minority groups should not study their own history. In many cases-among them the history of American Jewry-such courses of study were regarded as unimportant, and in any case, it was felt that members of these groups could not be objective scholars about the enclaves to which they belonged. Not long after Irish-American historians wrote about the Irish-American experience in this country, and African-American historians explored their own past, JewishAmerican historians began to examine their people's life in America. Jews in Christian America and A People Divided are products of the proliferating and now professionally respected field of American Jewish studies. A felicitous and accurate capsulization of Jews in Christian America is Jerold Auerbach's dust jacket comment that the book is an analysis of the enduring tension between religious identity and civic obligation. Beginning in colonial times and ending in the 1960s, Naomi W. Cohen investigates an important phase of the quest of the Jews to be equal citizens of America. She focuses on federal, state, and local legislation and adjudication on church-state issues that concerned Jewish-Gentile relationships, and traces the movement from toleration to equality of Jewish aspirations and actions. Since the formation of the republic, Jews pursued two strategies to gain total acceptance. In the nineteenth century they sought government neutrality toward all sects, and in the twentieth they worked for a separation of religion and state. Although these were dominant trends, they were not uniformly pursued by Jews. Differences within the Jewish community over accommodation versus confrontation, assimilationism versus distinctiveness, and orthodoxy versus

Writing, and Rewriting, American Jewish History

Dr. Rafael Medoff is Visiting Scholar at the Melton Center for Jewish Studies, Ohio State University, and Marguerite R. Jacobs Memorial Post-Doctoral Fellow in American Jewish Studies, 1993-1994, at the American Jewish Archives. He has published in, among other journals, American Jewish History, Studies in Zionism, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Holocaust Studies Annual and Menorah Review, of which he is a contributing editor.

NEEDED: A PARADIGM SHIFT IN JEWISH EDUCATION

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsBernard ReismanDr. Bernard Reisman is Professor, American Jewish Studies and Director of the Hornstein Program in Jewish Communal Service, Brandeis University

Latin American Jewish studies: an annotated guide to the literature

Foreword Preface Bibliographic References Monographs, Dissertations, and Articles, 1970-1986 Serial Publications in U.S. Libraries Author Index to Part I Title Index to Part II Subject Index to Part II

Putting Women into American Jewish History

According to the September 1978 issue of American Jewish History, sixty-one courses in American Jewish Studies are currently offered in colleges and universities throughout the country; at least a third of them are introductory history surveys.[1] I teach one of these surveys, The American Jewish Experience, crosslisted in Judaic Studies and History at the State University of New York at Buffalo. This paper will summarize my experience in putting women into that course. My motivation to teach a nonsexist survey course on American Jewish history was threefold. First, as an historian my commitment to the new social history made the effort imperative; a history course that omits half the population supposedly being studied is clearly inaccurate and inadequate. Second, as a Jew I am concerned that American Jewish women are being kept ignorant of the wide range of political, economic, social, and cultural activities of their predecessors and are therefore deprived of a rich source of role models. Finally, as a feminist, I am committed to improving the status of women in Jewish life as in every other aspect of life. Unless Jewish students have a realistic knowledge of the ideological and structural factors that have determined the status of American Jewish women in the past, they will be unable to respond affirmatively and effectively to the need for change in the present and the future.