American Jewish History Research Articles

Protecting the Deli: Jewish Nostalgia and Social Justice in E. Lockhart's Whistle: A New Gotham City Hero

ABSTRACT: In this article, I analyze E. Lockhart's comic Whistle: A New Gotham City Hero (Burbank, CA: DC Comics, 2021) as a distinctively American Jewish text. I argue that Whistle draws upon nostalgia for an imagined Jewish past by creating an alternative present infused with the material culture of American Jewishness. In so doing, I show how the comic develops features of mainstream American Jewishness—such as eating at Jewish delis, holding a nostalgic attachment to American Jewish history, and working for social justice—in the construction of a superhero narrative. I explore how Whistle's visual depiction of Jewish food and space construct an authentically Jewish environment. Lastly, I suggest that, as a superhero comic book written for teenage readers, Whistle promotes nostalgia and the pursuit of social justice as components of American Jewishness.

A Unique People in a Unique Land: Essays on American Jewish History

A Unique People in a Unique Land: Essays on American Jewish History

"Like Salt in Water": Toward a History of Jewish Immigrants' Suicide in Urban America, 1890–1910

Abstract: During the early twentieth century, suicide among Jewish immigrants in the United States was hardly uncommon. The American Yiddish press regularly reported on suicide cases, and Jewish public figures acknowledged the phenomenon's frequency. Uncovering this forgotten chapter in American Jewish history and drawing on immigrants' letters, reports from the Yiddish press, burial records, and autobiographies, this article explores patterns of despair and self-violence among eastern European Jewish immigrants and their reflections in the American Jewish press, specifically in Yiddish. It traces expressions of immigrant suffering and identifies patterns of cultural failure to revisit the emotional and cultural dynamics of east European Jewish immigration to the United States in the age of mass migration. By focusing on marginal cases in American Jewish history, this article highlights a broad cultural spectrum of immigrant experiences.

"Like Salt in Water": Toward a History of Jewish Immigrants' Suicide in Urban America, 1890–1910

Abstract: During the early twentieth century, suicide among Jewish immigrants in the United States was hardly uncommon. The American Yiddish press regularly reported on suicide cases, and Jewish public figures acknowledged the phenomenon's frequency. Uncovering this forgotten chapter in American Jewish history and drawing on immigrants' letters, reports from the Yiddish press, burial records, and autobiographies, this article explores patterns of despair and self-violence among eastern European Jewish immigrants and their reflections in the American Jewish press, specifically in Yiddish. It traces expressions of immigrant suffering and identifies patterns of cultural failure to revisit the emotional and cultural dynamics of east European Jewish immigration to the United States in the age of mass migration. By focusing on marginal cases in American Jewish history, this article highlights a broad cultural spectrum of immigrant experiences.

Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical by Shaul Magid

Reviewed by: Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical by Shaul Magid Nancy Sinkoff Shaul Magid. Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2021. 296 pp. When Rabbi Meir Kahane (1932–1990) founded the militant Jewish Defense League (JDL) in 1968 as a response to the showdown between advocates of community control in New York City’s public schools, who were mostly Black—as were the students—and the union membership of the United Federation of Teachers, who were mostly white and Jewish, in the legendary Ocean Hill-Brownsville strike of that same year, the slogan “Never Again!” became the organization’s rallying cry. This call to arms, which directly invoked the destruction of European Jewry to galvanize American Jews to reject the communal politics that Kahane considered feckless, pathetic, and emasculating, was not merely symbolic. Rather, Kahane hoped, American Jewish activists would take one page out of the confrontational playbook of the Black Panthers and Young Lords and another out of the performative playbook of the Yippies and embrace a politics that expressed hadar (Jewish [End Page 231] pride) through physical toughness to defend Jews in their neighborhoods and to counteract the lure of assimilation, in short, to write a script for Jewish survival in urban America. In Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical, Shaul Magid seeks to restore Kahane and his ideas to the postwar American landscape, to explain his militancy, and, in so doing, to unsettle the narrative of American Jewish history that has been characterized by a preoccupation with the “cult of synthesis”—Jonathan Sarna’s phrase—the belief that the American Jewish experience has been a triumph of consensus between liberal American and Jewish values. Magid also wants to redress the misconception that American Jewish radicalism only lived among activists on the Left. In fact, it was postwar America that nurtured Kahane’s right-wing radicalism. Though Kahane was disavowed by most, but not all, American Jewish leaders before his immigration to Israel in 1971, and though his party, Kach, was ultimately barred from the Knesset, his views, argues Magid, have had a profound afterlife in contemporary Jewish life. (The fact that Otzmah Yehudit/Jewish Power, the heir apparent to Kach, won six seats in the 2022 Knesset elections, proves Magid’s point.) Meir Kahane is thus not only a cultural biography of Kahane, but also a cautionary exposé of his ideas’ lasting influence. A scholar of Jewish thought, Magid chose to narrate Kahane’s life by examining his somewhat unsystematic, even contradictory, ideas through six chapters, “Liberalism,” “Radicalism,” “Race and Racism,” “Communism,” “Zionism,” and “Militant Post-Zionist Apocalypticism.” In Magid’s analysis, their overarching consistency was Kahane’s critique of postwar American Jewish “liberalism,” and the book successfully roots Kahane’s preoccupations with Jewish survival in the American Diaspora and his program for transforming what he viewed as a doomed secular Zionist project in Israel as a response to this critique. Born in 1932, reared in an Orthodox home, and educated until he was thirteen at a Mir yeshiva, Kahane’s childhood was informed by the Holocaust consciousness that pervaded his Borough Park survivor neighborhood. Kahane studied law at New York University, worked as a journalist, founded a Jewish summer camp that taught martial arts, and, engaging with the issues that rocked American and Jewish society in the 1960s (civil rights and racial reckoning, anticommunism, Israel’s victory in 1967, the plight of Soviet Jewry, and urban decay), fashioned himself as an activist prophet against the American Jewish establishment. Kahane embraced violence as a necessary means to effect social change. “Every Jew a .22” was his brand (8) and he and his squad of disenfranchised street Jews reacted to the political crises of their day by creating citizens’ patrols to protect elderly, poor Jews on Brooklyn’s streets, threatening to meet a Black nationalist activist demanding reparations at Temple Emanu-El with lead pipes, disrupting performances of Soviet dancers, breaking into Jewish communal leadership meetings, and taking out hyperbolic ads critical of the Jewish establishment’s alleged failure to defend...

Wild Visionary: Maurice Sendak in Queer Jewish Context by Golan Moskowitz (review)

Reviewed by: Wild Visionary: Maurice Sendak in Queer Jewish Context by Golan Moskowitz Dainy Bernstein (bio) Wild Visionary: Maurice Sendak in Queer Jewish Context, by Golan Moskowitz. Stanford UP, 2021. In Wild Visionary, Golan Moskowitz reads Maurice Sendak's works through the Jewish and queer identities of the celebrated children's [End Page 224] author, making a convincing argument for these identities as essential to understanding Sendak's body of work. The book is organized both chronologically and thematically. Each chapter provides a comprehensive overview of one stage of Sendak's life, drawing from a variety of sources to piece together the narrative of the author's life. Since Sendak ordered all his papers destroyed upon his death, Moskowitz relies on newspaper and magazine profiles, published interviews, letters from Sendak surviving in the collections of those he wrote to, and interviews with those who knew Sendak. In addition to Sendak's personal life, each chapter delves into the social and cultural landscapes of the era, providing rich context within which Sendak's work can be understood. Throughout the book, Moskowitz traces queer history, American Jewish history, and the development of American children's literature. The first chapter, narrating Sendak's parents' histories as well as his own childhood, analyzes the effects of growing up in interwar Jewish Brooklyn on the author and artist's work. The chapter discusses the shifting models of childhood in early-twentieth-century America, as well as the shifting models of childhood in European Jewish culture, both of which provided the context for Sendak's upbringing as the child of European Jewish immigrants. The structure of the family and the child's sense of home and safety were affected as the American government and culture attempted to "loosen parent-child bonds in order to cultivate pliable citizens and consumers" (28), and Sendak's parents, like many immigrants, put their hopes for American success on their children. At the same time, relatives newly immigrating to America arrived and kept "Old World" Jewish sensibilities alive in the Sendak household. Moskowitz traces the effects of all these factors on Sendak's work, particularly his grappling with parental figures. The second chapter opens with Sendak's bar mitzvah at age thirteen against the backdrop of the Holocaust in Europe and his parents' worry over relatives and old friends as news of deaths came through via Jewish organizations. In many American Jewish homes, the specter of dead relatives affected the way family was perceived, and children were often viewed as both the continuation of a lost line and a reminder of all those children who did not survive. Moskowitz describes Sendak's tumultuous adolescence and his reconceptualization of the family unit. As his parents mourned dead relatives, their children were put into the position of comforting them, and Sendak's relationship with his brother and sister deepened to near-inappropriate levels. With his queerness becoming undeniable during this same period, Sendak's [End Page 225] ability to understand himself, platonic affection, and romantic affection became troubled. Later in life, Sendak would apologize "for his inability to understand boundaries between himself and those with whom he formed close relationships" (91). Moskowitz draws connections between this period of Sendak's life and his portrayal of sexualized parent-child and sibling relationships. The third chapter follows Sendak from Brooklyn to Manhattan as he begins his adult life and his career as an illustrator. Moskowitz begins with a deep dive into the postwar explosion of American children's literature and the vibrant culture of Jewish children's periodicals, contexts which shaped Sendak's early interaction with the world of publishing, especially as a Jewish artist illustrating Jewish children's books. Sendak became part of the queer Manhattan community, and his sphere grew to include both Jewish and queer friends and mentors who encouraged him to be more confident and embrace his own voice. Layering onto the previous chapters' discussions of Sendak's views of childhood emotion and parent-child relationships, Moskowitz argues here that "[t]hrough a focus on early childhood and his own coming of age, Sendak's creative vision increasingly blared and demanded dignity for queer truths that he could not always speak...

Jews and American Public Life: Essays on American Jewish History and Politics by David G. Dalin. With a Foreword by Jonathan D. Sarna, (May 2022, ISBN 9781644698815, $139, 320pp, Hardback). North American Jewish Studies. Boston: Academic Studies Press

Jews and American Public Life: Essays on American Jewish History and Politics by David G. Dalin. With a Foreword by Jonathan D. Sarna, (May 2022, ISBN 9781644698815, $139, 320pp, Hardback). North American Jewish Studies. Boston: Academic Studies Press

Review: Boyle Heights: How a Los Angeles Neighborhood Became the Future of American Democracy, by George J. Sánchez

Nearly three decades after exploring the history of Los Angeles’ Boyle Heights neighborhood through the lens of twentieth-century Mexican migration and settlement, George J. Sánchez has invited us to revisit those same streets and their residents through the lenses of world history and U.S. immigration and civil rights history writ large. The result is a coherent, sweeping, dazzling array of new understandings: of the ways Los Angeles urban policies pushed multiple marginalized groups into a shared space; of how political and economic transformations around the globe intersected in one specific place through human relationships; and of how those relationships, in turn, shaped major social movements in ways we had not previously appreciated.The first half of the book, which spans the early nineteenth century through the 1950s, recovers and recasts the neighborhood’s multi-ethnic past. Popular accounts imagine a simple story of “ethnic succession,” from a predominantly Jewish to an entirely Mexican neighborhood. Indeed, a leading historian of L.A. Jewry had earlier concluded that, “[Jewish] Boyle Heights evoked little nostalgia upon its demise.”1 Sánchez convincingly argues the opposite as he recounts the specific dynamics of warmth and tensions in relationships amongst Boyle Heights’ Jewish, Mexican, Italian, Japanese, Russian, and Black residents—each in their own way refugees from violence and economic convulsion around the world. Through Sánchez’s eyes and exhaustive archival work, we come to understand Boyle Heights as a major center of Black community life; see Japanese American internment as a transformative experience in American Jewish history because it pushed Los Angeles’ Jewish residents and institutions to connect their struggle to others’; and appreciate the ways that Mexican and Jewish labor activists played formative roles in each other’s early political empowerment. Drawing on his 2004 article, Sánchez shows that the Jewish exodus from the neighborhood in the 1950s was shaped by the relentless forces of state-sponsored segregation yet was at once a site of internal community struggle about the nature of Jewish identity and its relationship to radical politics and to other neighboring communities.Sánchez’s work on the Civil Rights period and beyond revisits the highlights of Los Angeles Chicano history with an emphasis on the role of contingency and lived experience in a multi-racial city. We now see the East L.A. student walkouts of 1968 as inspired more by student leaders’ interest in the Watts Riots than Chicano nationalism. We learn, in detail for the first time, about daily life during this iconic neighborhood’s shift from majority Mexican American to majority undocumented immigrant, and how the former came to embrace the latter’s cause. And we gain a window into recent struggles over “gentefication” as college-educated Latinos faced rejection from some local activists when they returned to the neighborhood to start businesses.As an historian of the Mexican American past, I am grateful for this endlessly rich social history to inform ongoing struggles and give deeper meaning to present-day political coalitions. As the granddaughter of Beverly Millman, a Jewish American teen who moved to Boyle Heights with her parents in the early 1940s but joined her community’s “exodus” to other neighborhoods just a few years later, I am grateful for this chance to place my own family in America’s story anew. It is fitting that Sánchez, who has transformed the field of Chicano History through graduate mentorship, would now perfect its promise of offering usable pasts for both families and communities to construct more humane futures.

Lee Shai Weissbach (1947–2022)

Lee Shai Weissbach (1947–2022) Janice W. Fernheimer (bio) Lee Shai Weissbach, professor emeritus of history at the University of Louisville, passed away on September 29, 2022. Born in Haifa to an Egyptian-born father and a Virginian-born mother, he moved to Cincinnati at the age of five. After graduating from the University of Cincinnati with high honors (1969), he went on to pursue a PhD in history at Harvard. His dissertation formed the basis for his first book, Child Labor Reform in Nineteenth-Century France: Assuring the Future Harvest (Louisiana State University Press, 1989). Lee Shai joined the faculty of the University of Louisville in 1978 and spent his entire scholarly career there until his retirement in 2015. I had the honor and pleasure of meeting him in person when he agreed to be interviewed for the recently launched Jewish Kentucky Oral History Project. I was a little nervous to meet the scholar whom I had informally referred as the "father" of Jewish Kentucky studies, but his warmth and kindness immediately put me at ease. What touched me most at the time (as a new and first-time mom) was learning how his scholarly trajectory had shifted to fit the needs of his growing family. With two young children at home, he was unable to continue his travels to France, so he shifted his studies to Jewish life in the United States, with particular interest in his local surroundings; the research that grew out of this shift transformed the way we think about and tell the story of American Jews and Judaism.1 Lee Shai had profound impact on the way American Jewish history is both told and analyzed. The Synagogues of Kentucky: History and Architecture (University Press of Kentucky, 1995) and the field-transforming Jewish Life in Small Town America (Yale University Press, 2005) have become foundational texts for thinking about American Jews and their institutions beyond the major industrial cities of the Northeast and Midwest. He authored more than a dozen scholarly articles that engaged Jewish life in both France and the United States, often focusing on Jews in southern and non-urban (and thus under-studied) settings. Before his retirement, he published A Jewish Life on Three Continents (Stanford [End Page 409] University Press, 2013). In this deeply personal scholarly work, Lee Shai introduced, translated, and annotated his own grandfather's memoir. A transnational story of migration, global politics, and the upheavals of change in Jewish life at the turn of the century, the project reflected both his familial roots and his historical interests. During his long career at the University of Louisville, Lee Shai was a productive scholar and an active university citizen. He served as department chair twice, spearheaded the creation of an endowed chair in Judaic studies, and was associate dean of the College of Arts and Sciences from 2000–2003. Long-time friend and UofL colleague Tracy K'Meyer recalled Lee Shai to be "a warm, generous, and funny colleague, mentor, and friend. I will remember him most fondly for his pun-filled grammar tip sheet for students, which I still use in class; the truly bad jokes he shared at the department's annual winter potluck lunch; and his deep commitment to service to the profession, university, and community." Ranen Omer-Sherman, the scholar recruited to fill the endowed position in Judaic studies that Lee Shai created, recalls that his colleague enjoyed a "stellar reputation for his energy and enthusiasm for the historical profession, his eagerness to engage with colleagues no matter what their specialization, and his ability to make connections and forge intellectual ties across the boundaries of field and discipline. Indeed, for anyone active in the field of Jewish studies, he represents a truly exemplary model—even though that specialization is only a part of his accomplishments over a truly tireless and prolific career." Perhaps what most people will remember about Lee Shai is his mentschlichkeit. Long-time UofL colleague and professor of political science Jasmine Farrier praised Lee Shai for his willingness to mentor and collaborate across a wide variety of fields, as well as for his generosity with his time, advice, and good humor. Farrier also...

In Memoriam: Dr. Dianne Ashton

The Department of Philosophy and World Religions at Rowan University is deeply saddened to announce the passing of our esteemed colleague and dear friend Dr. Dianne Ashton, Professor Emerita of World Religions in 2022. After earning her Ph.D. from Temple University, Dr. Ashton joined Rowan’s faculty in 1989 and taught with distinction in the Department of Philosophy and World Religions until her retirement in 2021.Dr. Ashton became one of the eminent scholars of American Jewish history and Jewish women’s history. Her contributions included Hanukkah in America: A History, Rebecca Gratz: Women and Judaism in Antebellum America, and Four Centuries of Jewish Women’s Spirituality, along with dozens of scholarly articles, book reviews, and essays. Dr. Ashton served six years as the editor of the journal American Jewish History, the premier journal in the study of Jewish history in America. She was the first female editor in the 118-year history of the journal.In her influential book on Rebecca Gratz, Ashton uses hundreds of Gratz’s own letters in her research and examines the context behind her life. With the help of Gratz College president Zev Eleff, Dr. Ashton had plans to digitize and annotate about 500 of Rebecca Gratz’s letters. That project will move forward with support from Gratz College and Rowan University.Dr. Ashton wrote Jewish Life in Pennsylvania, which is one of the PHA’s Pennsylvania History Series books, published in 1998.

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...

The Material Inventories of Millennial Jewish Lives: Affective Learning and Jewish Consumer Culture at the National Museum of American Jewish History Gift Shop

Down the street from the Liberty Bell and a block away from Independence Hall, Philadelphia’s National Museum of American Jewish History (NMAJH) offers tourists a Jewish take on America’s past. For Jewish visitors to NMAJH, the museum sets personal narratives in national contexts, embodied by objects that have animated Jewish life for centuries. Most research on encounters between visitors and religious objects in museums is situated within exhibit galleries. Yet this focus on the gallery can overlook the holistic visitor experience in the museum, and the ways that object lessons can also be conveyed outside of the exhibit space. This article draws upon an ethnographic study of 30 millennial generation Jewish visitors to NMAJH conducted in July 2019, and analyzes visitor responses to Jewish objects for sale in the museum store. It argues that the store stimulates affective learning experiences, prompted when visitors respond to merchandise with emotion, aspiration and nostalgia, contextualize these goods within the narratives of the core exhibit, and reflect upon objects for sale in relation to their own lives and livelihoods.

Is Superman Circumcised? The Complete Jewish History of the World's Greatest Hero by Roy Schwartz

Reviewed by: Is Superman Circumcised? The Complete Jewish History of the World's Greatest Hero by Roy Schwartz Matthew Brake (bio) Roy Schwartz, Is Superman Circumcised? The Complete Jewish History of the World's Greatest Hero. McFarland, 2021. x + 364 pp, $45.00. In Is Superman Circumcised? The Complete Jewish History of the World's Greatest Hero, Roy Schwartz sets out to demonstrate that despite the many Christian allegories portraying Superman as a Christ figure (made popular by the 1978 Superman movie), Superman is actually a Jewish character. Schwartz's work joins a growing body of scholarship dedicated to parsing out the Jewishness of the Man of Steel. Schwartz himself makes note of works like Danny Fingeroth's Disguised as Clark Kent: Jews, Comics, and the Creation of the Superhero (2007). While Schwartz does not mention it, one could suggest Martin Lund's 2016 book, Re-Constructing the Man of Steel: Superman 1938–1941, Jewish American History, and the Invention of the Jewish-Comics Connection, another text that examines Superman's supposed Jewishness (with a more critical eye toward the question). Schwartz offers three ways that his book uniquely contributes to this growing body of literature: "it examines the entirety of Superman's career, from 1938 to date, whereas others have limited themselves to his formative 'Golden Age,' ending around 1945, with a few ventures up to 1960. It also explores more deeply the Jewish parallels, including their theological, folkloric, historical and sociological meaning. And it's the first to focus exclusively on Superman" (5). One of the best ways to evaluate this book is to judge it by the criteria Schwartz lays out here. Starting with Schwartz's first point, the book is impressive in its breadth of material. Schwartz guides readers through Superman's origins and the early concepts from Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster that eventually led to Superman's debut in Action Comics #1. From there, he doesn't stop until events from Brian Michael Bendis's recent run on the character, including when Superman reveals his identity to the world. Schwartz also references the recent CW television show Superman & Lois, which debuted in 2020. In between, he discusses Superman's depiction in various comic book publishing "ages" (i.e., the Golden Age, the Silver Age, etc.) as well as the various serials, television shows, movies, and other transmedia adaptations of the character. While a book like this will end up leaving some things out, Schwartz follows through [End Page 89] on his promise to explore the entirety of Superman's existence, from the early ideas leading to his creation to works that have appeared within the last two years, all the while attempting to highlight the Jewishness of the character. I will address the exploration of Jewish parallels last, but to Schwartz's claim that this book is the first to focus exclusively on Superman, that's not quite accurate. Lund's (previously mentioned) text predates Schwartz's by five years, although Lund's does confine itself to Superman's early years. Also, Schwartz's book does focus on Superman overall, although at times in deviates into a discussion, more broadly, on the history of comics in general and on Jewish contributions to the creation and growth of the industry specifically. This is fine, and is done to provide context for the claim of Superman's Jewishness, but there are places where the text veers off course into one of these other directions so that Schwartz needs to throw in a sentence to remind us that the book is about Superman's Jewishness. I direct a majority of my critiques to Schwartz's claim that the book more deeply explores Superman's Jewish parallels than many other texts. To this point, Schwartz does need to be commended for the breadth of material he has assembled in this text. It is an interesting survey of comics history as well as the Jewish presence in the comic book industry throughout this history. Many scholars studying the history of the Man of Steel may also appreciate this text as a resource to find primary and secondary sources for their own research. There are places where Schwartz makes the...

Dianne Ashton (1949–2022): American Jewish History and Lived Religion

Dianne Ashton (1949–2022): American Jewish History and Lived Religion

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...

From Left to Right: Lucy S. Dawidowicz, the New York Intellectuals, and the Politics of Jewish History by Nancy Sinkoff (review)

Reviewed by: From Left to Right: Lucy S. Dawidowicz, the New York Intellectuals, and the Politics of Jewish History by Nancy Sinkoff Kirsten Fermaglich Nancy Sinkoff. From Left to Right: Lucy S. Dawidowicz, the New York Intellectuals, and the Politics of Jewish History. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2020. 538 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009421000337 In From Left to Right: Lucy S. Dawidowicz, the New York Intellectuals, and the Politics of Jewish History, Nancy Sinkoff has done the important work of reclaiming Lucy Dawidowicz's significance as an American public intellectual in the years after World War II. Although few scholars have previously identified Dawidowicz as a member of the famed New York Jewish intellectuals, Sinkoff makes a compelling case for this categorization. Despite Dawidowicz's significance in helping to establish the intentionalist school of Holocaust thought, which argued for the primacy of Hitler's antisemitism in explaining the origins of the Holocaust, she has mostly been forgotten in books on New York Jewish intellectuals, and has similarly fallen off the map of American intellectual history, and of American Jewish history. By describing Dawidowicz's friendships with figures like Irving Howe and Norman Podhoretz, and by highlighting her [End Page 482] public prominence as an interpreter of the Holocaust and of eastern European Jewish culture, as well as expertise in Yiddish language and literature, Sinkoff reclaims Dawidowicz's significance in American Jewish and intellectual life. As the title of the book suggests, Dawidowicz moved politically from liberal to conservative over the course of her life, a trajectory that mirrored that of many other New York Jewish intellectuals. Born in 1915 in New York City to Jewish immigrants from Warsaw, Dawidowicz lived in Jewish neighborhoods in the Bronx, and attended high school and college in New York City. She was also deeply involved in the secular Yiddishist community of the Sholem Aleichem Folk Institute. Like other New York Jewish intellectuals, the left-wing politics of this environment shaped her early life as a member of the Young Communist League and National Student League. By 1938, however, like many on the Left, she had broken with the Soviet Union, and intensified her studies of Yiddish, accepting a fellowship as a graduate student at the YIVO in Vilna, and departing for research in Poland that same year. Those experiences became defining ones in shaping her identification with Polish Jews facing destruction. Dawidowicz barely escaped the Nazi occupation and felt deeply all her life the deaths of her friends and patrons in Poland. Immediately after the war, she worked with the YIVO and the Joint Distribution Committee, tracking down and collecting the Yiddish literary treasures scattered throughout Europe, as well as working with survivors in DP camps. In 1949, she began almost twenty years on the staff of the American Jewish Committee (AJC). During that time, Sinkoff shows, her politics moved steadily rightwards. Her reports on communism and the Soviet Union reflected her fervent anticommunism and anxieties about Jewish radicalism, while her work on religious minorities and Black-Jewish relationships in the United States reflected at first the standard liberal position of the AJC, but increasingly signaled dissent from strict separation of church and state, and discomfort with Black social and cultural differences from Jews. By the late 1960s, when she left the AJC, her politics had already turned inward to the history and well-being of the Jewish community and rightward away from the universal ideologies that marked Jewish liberalism. That preoccupation with eastern European Jewish history was the final and perhaps most significant chapter of her life, as described by Sinkoff. Dawidowicz published two major books that established her as an expert in eastern European Jewish history and the Holocaust—The Golden Tradition and Hitler's War against the Jews—and cemented her relationship with New York Jewish intellectuals, who at that moment were experiencing a similar political and intellectual turn towards Judaism, the Jewish community, and the Holocaust. Although she had planned on publishing a major book on the history of the American Jewish community towards the end of her life, she never completed it; it was her work on eastern European Jewry and the Holocaust that marked her professional and...

Jewish Autonomy in a Slave Society: Suriname in the Atlantic World, 1651–1825 by Aviva Ben-Ur (review)

Reviewed by: Jewish Autonomy in a Slave Society: Suriname in the Atlantic World, 1651–1825 by Aviva Ben-Ur Stanley Mirvis Aviva Ben-Ur. Jewish Autonomy in a Slave Society: Suriname in the Atlantic World, 1651–1825. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020. 392 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009421000258 Jewish Autonomy in a Slave Society heralds the emancipation of the Caribbean experience from the margins of early American Jewish history. Aviva Ben-Ur is the leading voice in a chorus of scholars dedicated to contextualizing Jewish history within the methodological framework of Atlantic studies and "creating a paradigm for Jewish Atlantic history that combines comparison, connection, and localism" (255). She has more than succeeded in achieving this goal. Through a comprehensive investigation of archival sources, particularly the extensive Surinamese Jewish communal records at the National Archives of the Netherlands, Ben-Ur challenges some of the most canonical assumptions of Jewish history. These include religious tolerance as the primary motivation for early American migration, the Jewish desire for emancipation, and the Jewish trend to acculturate "upward." She demonstrates that these historiographic dogmas don't apply to Suriname. As much as it was entangled in the web of [End Page 461] the Atlantic world, Jewish life in Suriname was a singularity that defies categorization using traditional models. Jewish Autonomy in a Slave Society powerfully contributes to the legacy of Salo W. Baron's antilachrymose model of Jewish history. Ben-Ur reconsiders the ubiquity of premodern Jewish subalterity. In Suriname, Jews held an unparalleled degree of corporate autonomy and were empowered through their mastery over an enslaved majority. She further reminds us that by the end of the eighteenth century, Jews made up two-thirds of the non-African descendent population of Suriname. Among Ben-Ur's boldest antilachrymose rebukes is her challenge to the narrative of religious tolerance as the primary motivation behind Jewish migration. She attributes this persistent view to the skewed self-presentation of Suriname's Portuguese elites, like David Nassy, who portrayed themselves as belonging to a community of refugees empowered by the liberties of their colonial haven. They also sought to propagate an illusion of wealth (47). Ben-Ur demonstrates that Jews in Suriname were overwhelmingly poor, and it was poverty that brought them to the colony. Jewish Autonomy in a Slave Society is informed by a trend in early modern Portuguese diaspora studies to deemphasize a traditional bom Judesmo approach—highlighting nobility, wealth, and restraint—and instead focusing on indigent and itinerate social welfare recipients. Ben-Ur characterizes Jodensavanne as a paupers' town (54) in defiance of the more standard depiction of the town's wealth and privilege—which might have been the case for only a few Sabbath vacationers from surrounding plantations (61). Instead, she recalibrates the discussion to focus on the mechanics of the despachado system bringing poor Jews to the colony (116–17). Rather than a proto-Zionist promised land, Ben-Ur's Jodensavanne is a nonheroic site of violence, dislocation, and poverty (74). The book's title alludes to the elusive concept of Jewish self-rule, one of the colony's most conspicuous singularities. Ben-Ur finds the closest Jewish parallel in early modern Livorno as well as makes local comparisons to Suriname's Maroon and Indian populations. Autonomy, however, was not synonymous with liberty. Ben-Ur argues that autonomy cast a shadow of tyranny in the way it mandated Jewishness (93) and empowered elite Portuguese over the poor, Ashkenazim, and Jews of color (110). Autonomy was not what all of the Jews of the colony wanted. Jewish autonomy in Suriname translated into a codification of Portuguese ethnic supremacy (62–63). Ben-Ur reexamines some of Jewish history's most sacred ideals about emancipation, the process of acquiring legal parity with white Christians, which occurred in Suriname in 1825. Whereas emancipation is typically portrayed as a Jewish aspiration, in Suriname Jewish leaders swam against the tides of change by clinging to their corporate autonomy (227). Furthermore, Ben-Ur argues that Surinamese emancipation was only a "legal fiction" (254). Emancipation simply transformed the legal definitions of Surinamese Jews from an incorporated ethnic group to a religious community. Analyses of acculturation and emancipation go hand...

Transatlantic Russian Jewishness: Ideological Voyages of the Yiddish Daily Forverts in the First Half of the Twentieth Century by Gennady Estraikh (review)

Reviewed by: Transatlantic Russian Jewishness: Ideological Voyages of the Yiddish Daily Forverts in the First Half of the Twentieth Century by Gennady Estraikh Tobias Brinkmann Gennady Estraikh. Transatlantic Russian Jewishness: Ideological Voyages of the Yiddish Daily Forverts in the First Half of the Twentieth Century. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2020. 346 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009421000313 Within a few years after its founding in 1897, the Yiddish daily Forverts (Forward) emerged as America's largest Jewish daily newspaper. In 1910, the [End Page 477] paper's circulation crossed the 100,000 threshold, increasing further to over 250,000 during the 1920s. Yiddish papers in different parts of the world reprinted Forverts articles, greatly enhancing its influence. The Forverts's rise owed much to the vision of its editor and cofounder Abraham Cahan, who arrived in New York in 1882 as an immigrant from Lithuania. He designed the Forverts as an indispensable companion for its readers. The paper provided many services, ranging from Cahan's famous advice column, the Bintel Brief, to English classes and vaccinations. Cahan was an overbearing editor who did not tolerate dissent in the paper's newsroom. Yet he managed to attract and retain talented writers and scholars. Other leftist Yiddish papers frequently attacked Cahan as a capitalist for his moderate socialist views. He also faced much criticism for his lacking enthusiasm for the Zionist cause. Yet through the Forverts, Cahan and his contributors influenced Jewish public opinion well beyond America's shores during the first half of the twentieth century. In the late 1920s, after Congress passed restrictive immigration laws, the paper's readership began to drop. In later decades suburbanization and the passing of the immigrant generation contributed to the decline of Yiddish publishing. In 1983 the Forverts switched to a weekly format and added an English section. An overarching study of the history of the Forverts remains a lacuna. A superficially researched biography of Cahan by Seth Lipsky (The Rise of Abraham Cahan [New York: Schocken, 2013]) leaves many gaps and is marred by the author's political views. Only parts of Cahan's five-volume memoir, Bleter fun meyn lebn (Pages of my life), published during the late 1920s, are available in (a flawed) translation. In most surveys of American Jewish history, Cahan and the Forverts feature in the chapters covering the period before 1914. Cahan is better known for his English-language literary works than for his achievements as innovative media entrepreneur and influential political voice. This background explains why Gennady Estraikh's well-researched study of the ideological journeys of the Forverts and its main contributors between 1914 and the 1950s fills a gap. The formative earlier period from the 1880s to the 1920s has been covered by Tony Michels in his 2009 study A Fire in Their Hearts about Yiddish socialists in New York. Readers benefit from Estraikh's detailed knowledge of the complex and fluctuating scenes of different socialist, Bundist, and Zionist groups in and beyond the United States during the first half of the twentieth century. The study draws on the coverage of the Forverts and several other papers as well as extensive archival research. The eight chronologically organized chapters examine different issues that dominated the paper's coverage. One chapter deals with the paper's language policy. Earlier than others, Cahan understood that Yiddish would have to yield to English. In the early 1920s, he instructed his authors to use a simpler colloquial Yiddish. This move illustrates Cahan's pragmatism and willingness to revisit ideological positions. He derided Yiddishists who criticized this move as "impractical people" (99). Estraikh notes that at home Cahan and his wife preferred to speak Russian, a language he associated with Bildung. Cahan also showed flexibility in plotting the paper's political course, albeit without sacrificing his commitment to socialism. Estraikh devotes much attention [End Page 478] to the Forverts coverage of the Soviet Union. One of several intriguing episodes presented in this study involves Leon Trotsky's brief dalliance with the Forverts in early 1917. Following a loud shouting match in Cahan's office over the paper's support of the American war effort, a furious Trotsky walked out. In the same...

A Mortuary of Books: The Rescue of Jewish Culture after the Holocaust. By Elisabeth Gallas. Translated by Alex Skinner. Goldstein-Goren Series in American Jewish History. Edited by Hasia R. Diner. New York: New York University Press, 2019. Pp. x+406. $35.00.

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsA Mortuary of Books: The Rescue of Jewish Culture after the Holocaust. By Elisabeth Gallas. Translated by Alex Skinner. Goldstein-Goren Series in American Jewish History. Edited by Hasia R. Diner. New York: New York University Press, 2019. Pp. x+406. $35.00.Hillary Hope HerzogHillary Hope HerzogUniversity of Kentucky Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Modern History Volume 93, Number 3September 2021 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/715328 Views: 42Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Jews and sexuality in the Americas, 1519–1880

AbstractThis essay explores how Jewish understandings of sexual purity changed in the Americas, where Catholic and Protestant understandings of sex, reproduction, and embodiment were at the heart of European colonialism. It begins in colonial New Spain and ends in the nineteenth‐century United States, exploring both normative and transgressive forms of Jewish sexuality. Showing how understandings of Jewish purity developed—and expanded—in early America sheds new light on the history of colonialism and sex, showing how multiple systems of purity competed and overlapped across the Atlantic world. It also helpfully reorients American Jewish history away from “waves of migration” toward sites of power: the newly created courts, Jewish communal institutions, and domestic spaces where bodies and relationships were regulated.