Jewish Experience In America Research Articles

Jews on the Frontier: Religion and Mobility in Nineteenth-Century America by Shari Rabin

Reviewed by: Jews on the Frontier: Religion and Mobility in Nineteenth-Century America by Shari Rabin Joseph P. Slaughter (bio) Jews on the Frontier: Religion and Mobility in Nineteenth-Century America. By Shari Rabin. (New York: New York University Press, 2017. Pp. 208. Cloth, $37.00.) Seventeen-year-old telegraph worker Edward Rosewater struggled to hold down a job, roaming throughout the Midwest in search of reliable [End Page 377] employment. Although a Jew, Rosewater attended a smattering of Christian churches, including a Tennessee revival. Characters with shifting religious identities like Rosewater serve as a vehicle for Shari Rabin’s ambitious argument that the religious lives of nineteenth-century Americans demonstrate continuity with the much-discussed “nones” of the twenty-first century.1 Rabin argues that the fluid religious identity that characterized Jews like Rosewater prior to the Gilded Age was not exceptional, but rather the “default” setting for religiosity in America (3). Heartily embracing “mobilities” theory, which examines the influences of various phenomena on people’s movements, Rabin interprets the religious lives of her subjects who self-identify as “Israelites” in a subliminal recognition of their status as physical and spiritual wanderers (7). Challenging and insightful, Rabin’s work helps address a glaring hole in American religious history prior to the Gilded Age: the religious lives of Jewish Americans. Rabin’s opening chapter explains her concept of “unfettered mobility” which she argues distinguishes the Jewish experience in America (21). One of her key arguments is that the framework of European state regulation dictated the physical mobility of Jews in fundamentally different ways than in America, where such regulation was almost nonexistent. For example, while European governments classified Jews as a distinct race, American customs and census forms contained no such category. Functionally, Jews were “white” in America, and consequently, Jewish males were mobile out of choice in contrast to the forced mobility that characterized Jewish life in Europe. Rabin admits this mobility had its limitations, as many states and municipalities passed laws restricting mobile Jewish professions like peddling. Likewise, the proliferation of Sabbatarian laws in the nineteenth century forced Jews to work on their Sabbath day, while eschewing market activity on Sundays. The regulatory context of the American state and unfettered mobility hindered young Jewish migrants’ attempts to form families and follow halakhic rituals (those based on the totality of Jewish law, encompassing both the oral and written Torah). Instead, nineteenth-century Jewish migrants “embraced ideals like romantic love, the nurture of children, and sentimentalized death” in ways that could fulfill Jewish tradition, but [End Page 378] just as often competed with and refashioned halakhic norms regulating marriage, sex, divorce, circumcision, education, and death (59). For example, while halakhic law and European governments legislated against Jewish intermarriage, lack of such bureaucratic constraints and few Jewish women in America meant that intermarriage was more prevalent. An expectation of romantic love further complicated adherence to the older marriage norms. More ambitiously, Rabin argues that the situation of Jews on America’s frontier “fueled” the formation of Reform Judaism in response to a scarcity of traditional Jewish material culture: kosher foods, Torah scrolls, prayer books, and other tools of ritual such as shofar trumpets (80). Capitalism was slow to provide the goods necessarily to reliably practice Judaism. Defective Torah scrolls and inauthentic kosher were just two challenges faced by those who sought to live as “authentic” Jews. Consequently, reformers like Isaac Mayer Wise advocated for a pragmatic Judaism that accounted for the constraints of the American market and geography. If capitalism failed to support Jewish orthopraxy, Rabin argues instead that a combination of government and private innovation fostered a “mobile infrastructure” that forged bonds between erstwhile Jewish “strangers” (103–104). Railroads, the postal service, Jewish newspapers, Jewish fraternal organizations, itinerant rabbis, statistical data collection, and personal correspondence fostered bonds amid young, mobile American Jews. However, Rabin contends these innovations could also undermine this “imagined community” since the very nature of a mobile infrastructure worked against the unification of the Jewish community under a unified minhagim (Jewish rites and custom, including prayers and liturgy), particularly across the nation’s western regions. It was this attempt to form an imagined community of Judaism that...

“How Come Boys Get to Keep Their Noses?”: Women and Jewish American Identity in Contemporary Graphic Memoirs by Tahneer Oksman

Reviewed by: “How Come Boys Get to Keep Their Noses?”: Women and Jewish American Identity in Contemporary Graphic Memoirs by Tahneer Oksman Melissa Weininger (bio) “How Come Boys Get to Keep Their Noses?”: Women and Jewish American Identity in Contemporary Graphic Memoirs. By Tahneer Oksman. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. xiii + 274 pp. In the last two decades, the graphic narrative form has taken a central place in the American literary landscape. At the same time, graphic novels and memoirs by Jewish authors and with Jewish themes have also proliferated. Perhaps this is unsurprising, as the history of comics has been inextricably tied to the Jewish experience in America, from the wartime superheroes of Siegel, Shuster, and Eisner to MAD Magazine’s transgressive comedic sensibility. Since Art Spiegelman won the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for Maus, his graphic memoir about his father’s Holocaust experience, the graphic narrative form has also been particularly associated with Jewish history and culture. Likewise, scholarship on the Jewish graphic novel has also accelerated, and Samantha Baskind and Ranen Omer-Sherman’s 2010 The Jewish Graphic Novel collected a variety of contemporary scholarship on the form. However, less attention has been given to the place of women, as both authors and subjects. Tahneer Oksman’s “How Come Boys Get to Keep Their Noses?” is an important intervention in this scholarly landscape, focusing on the intersections between gender and Jewish identity in the graphic narrative format. Oksman explores intersectional identities in the autobiographical comics of several contemporary female Jewish artists. She classifies all of these authors as “postassimilated,” a term that is meant to describe the way that assimilation and its effects are no longer central to the work of these artists, although they may be influenced by or engage with the effects of assimilation (3). The theoretical framework Oksman builds in order to read the complex and dynamic representation of postassimilated Jewish-American-female identity in these comics is centered on a concept she calls “dis-affiliation,” which is not a static condition, but rather “a process” that “entails a complex negotiation” (2). [End Page 108] It is through the lens of “dis-affiliation” that Oksman examines questions of Jewish and gender identity in the graphic memoirs and diaries she analyzes. In particular, the notion of dis-affiliation is useful in understanding these intersectional identities as shifting rather than fixed, and existing synchronically. The medium of the comic, or “sequential art,” is particularly well-suited to visualizing these simultaneous, sometimes conflicting, identities, and Oksman skillfully points out the ways in which these works expose the impossibility of a homogeneous Jewish identity. The book’s chapters are structured around either individual artists or pairs of artists with thematically related works. Chapter 1 focuses on the work of Aline Kominsky Crumb, who is the only artist among those featured who belongs to an older generation that came of age in the late twentieth century. Because of Kominsky Crumb’s position as a predecessor to many of the other artists discussed in the book, this chapter also functions as a platform for introducing many of the larger themes that the younger women both make use of and rebel against. In particular Oksman focuses on the way Kominsky Crumb’s work plays with stereotypes of Jewish women and how visualizing those stereotypes exposes the constructed nature of identity itself. Her analysis here sets the stage nicely for subsequent chapters, which explore the variety of ways younger Jewish women artists use comics to exercise control over both their own self-representation and popular representations and expectations of them. The next two chapters continue to focus on the process of identity formation as expressed in the comics of three young artists, Vanessa Davis, Miss Lasko-Gross, and Lauren Weinstein. Chapter 2 is dedicated to the autobiographical and diaristic work of Davis, while Chapter 3 focuses on memoirs of adolescence by Lasko-Gross and Weinstein. In each of these, Oksman chronicles the way that the artists use Jewishness, sometimes metaphorically, to explore the relational nature of identity. That is, their comics visualize the ways that identity is contingent on community and the subject’s sense of herself as within or outside–and...

Mythologizing 1654

T H E JE W I S H Q UA R T E R LY R E V I E W, Vol. 94, No. 4 (Fall 2004) 583–594 N O T E S : ‘‘ T H E A M E R I C A N QU E S T I O N ’’ Mythologizing 1654 ARTHUR KIRON This essay is dedicated to my teacher Arthur Aryeh Goren, who opened my eyes to the politics and public culture of American Jews. WITHOUT MEANING TO sound like the grinch who stole Christmas, I would like to ask why and when the year 1654 became recognized as the founding date of American Jewish history? That this date has been widely accepted by contemporary Jewish and American institutions seems incontrovertible. In preparation for its national celebration in 2004, for example, the American Jewish Historical Society, the Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives, the U.S. Library of Congress, and the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration created an umbrella group and Web site—‘‘Commission for Commemorating 350 years of American Jewish History’’—to honor the occasion.1 These institutions planned a year-long series of national events, including exhibits at some of their home institutions, a traveling exhibit to ‘‘a select number of American communities,’’ as well as ‘‘an internet website,’’ ‘‘a series of public media productions,’’ ‘‘a series of educational initiatives, electronic and in print,’’ and a ‘‘scholars’ conference.’’ The Jewish Women ’s Archive, ‘‘a national, non-profit organization with a mission to uncover , chronicle and transmit the rich legacy of Jewish women and their contributions to our families and communities, to our people and to our world,’’ launched a redesigned Web site as a direct consequence of their ‘‘anticipating increased interest in American Jewish history resulting from the 350th anniversary of Jewish communal life in North America.’’2 ‘‘The Shearith Israel League of the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue’’ in New York City, which dates the founding of its congregation to the arrival of Jews to New Amsterdam in 1654, released a three-CD set of its Sephardic liturgical music. For these organizations as well as at Jewish 1. http://www.350th.org 2. http://www.jwa.org/350th The Jewish Quarterly Review (Fall 2004) Copyright 䉷 2004 Center for Advanced Judaic Studies. All rights reserved. 584 JQR 94:4 (2004) congregations and college campuses across the country, the anniversary constituted a national event. It is clear what we celebrate: the arrival in 1654 of a group of perhaps twenty-three Jews to Dutch New Amsterdam from eastern Brazil, which they had abandoned after the Portuguese Catholic reoccupation of that territory the same year.3 What is not as clear is why this event has come to stand for the origin of American Jewish history. Why this moment and not another? For Congregation Shearith Israel the connection makes sense: 1654 marks the beginning of their congregational history in New York City. By affirming 1654, they lay claim to being the first congregation in American Jewish history and simultaneously direct attention to the Sephardic identity of the first American Jewish pioneers.4 The committee planners, representing the ‘‘national Jewish community ,’’ declare the flight from persecution by the refugees from Brazil as a basic explanation and theme. This notion of America as an asylum for the oppressed (which has its own interesting history)5 is linked by them, in turn, to the ‘‘integral relationship between American freedom and Jewish continuity.’’ The committee moreover aspired to even higher ground: ‘‘the Jewish experience in America—with its commitment to the values of freedom, opportunity, religious liberty, equality and pluralism—is the story of America and American ideals as well.’’6 It is noteworthy that the word ‘‘America’’ was employed by the committee as a convenient synonym for the United States. Not that it is unusual to use the word ‘‘America’’ in this sense. But this usage does have the practical consequence of narrowing the scope of the celebration to the national experience of United States Jewry rather than enlarging it to embrace the multiple Jewish communities located throughout the Western Hemisphere. The Jewish story told about 1654 is identified with the national experience of the...

Lower East Side Memories: A Jewish Place in America

Manhattan's Lower East Side stands for Jewish experience in America. With the possible exception of African-Americans and Harlem, no ethnic group has been so thoroughly understood and imagined through a particular chunk of space. Despite the fact that most American Jews have never set foot there - and many come from families that did not immigrate through New York much less reside on Hester or Delancey Streets - the Lower East Side was the place where life pulsated, bread tasted better, relationships were richer, tradition thrived, and passions flared. This was not always so. During the years now fondly recalled (1880-1930), the neighbourhood was only occasionally called the Lower East Side. Though largely populated by Jews from eastern Europe, it was not ethnically or even religiously homogenous. The tenements, grinding poverty, sweatshops, and packs of roaming children were considered the stuff of social work, not nostalgia and romance. To learn when and why this dark warren of pushcart-lined streets became an icon, the author follows a wide trail of high and popular culture. She examines children's stories, novels, movies, museum exhibits, television shows, summer-camp re-enactments, walking tours, consumer catalogues, and photos hung on deli walls far from Manhattan. The author finds that it was after World War II that the Lower East Side was enshrined as the place through which Jews passed from European oppression to the promised land of America. The space became sacred at a time when Jews were simultaneously absorbing the enormity of the Holocaust and finding acceptance and opportunity in an increasingly liberal United States. Particularly after 1960, the Lower East Side gave often secularised and suburban Jews a biblical, yet distinctly American story about who they were and how they got here. Displaying the author's own fondness for the Lower East Side of story books, combined with a commitment to historical truth, this book is an insightful account of one of America's most famous neighbourhoods and its power to shape identity.

Tradition Transformed: The Jewish Experience in America

Tradition Transformed: The Jewish Experience in America

American Jewish desk reference: the ultimate one-volume reference to the Jewish experience in America

American Jewish desk reference: the ultimate one-volume reference to the Jewish experience in America

Tradition Transformed: The Jewish Experience in America (review)

Tradition Transformed: The Jewish Experience in America (review)

Tradition Transformed: The Jewish Experience in America.

Tradition Transformed: The Jewish Experience in America.

A Synthesis for the New American Jewish Historiography

A Synthesis for the New American Jewish Historiography Jeffrey S. Gurock (bio) Gerald Sorin. Tradition Transformed: The Jewish Experience in America. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. xv + 294 pp. Figures, tables, bibliographical essay, and index. $40.00 (cloth); $14.95 (paper). As this century draws to a close, American Jewish historians find themselves reconsidering the basic themes, and reconfiguring the fundamental structure, of their discipline. For example, the periodization of that group’s experience in this country that was once so neatly sub-divided among Sephardic, German, and East European eras is now dated and obsolete. A new historiography speaks of a century of international migration (from roughly 1820–1920) that brought Jews to these shores from Western, Central and Eastern Europe and the Ottoman Empire even as they were part of an even larger Jewish mass relocation from towns and villages to cities within the Old World. Thus, scholars for the most part have begun to avoid designating the mid-nineteenth century as an uniquely German period. Our sense is now that Jews from a variety of Central and East European lands arrived between 1820–1880. Maybe a better way of identifying those newcomers would be to call them Jews from German-speaking lands. But even that classification might not be sufficiently broad. During these same decades, Yiddish-speaking Polish Jews, Hungarians, and even Jews from the Russian Empire were finding their way to the United States. Moreover, we now recognize that Jews from German-speaking lands continued to settle here after the 1880s, long after their emancipation in the Fatherlands. Their particular saga used to be overlooked by historians who focused so much on those who fled the Russian pogroms of the same era. Implicit in this new understanding is that political considerations—specifically the Central European Jews’ frustrations over the slowness of emancipation—was but one relatively minor factor in their opting for America. Contemporary scholarship has also begun to assess the migration, settlement, and acculturation patterns of American Jewry during the most recent fifty years. We now speak of a new epoch opening after 1945 as Jewish residential stagnation in East Coast and rust-belt inner cities ended while [End Page 385] third and fourth generation communities found their destinies manifested both in local suburbias and in sun-belt communities across the nation. It is presently being shown how this massive internal American migration is, in so many ways, as significant as the earlier foreign waves once were in shaping the character and determining the destiny of this particular ethnic community. Concomitantly, scholars who are still deepening our appreciation of the most intensive period of East European migration to America (1880–1920 still remains the most studied four decades in American Jewish history) continue to address new themes and are looking at different types of settlements. Today, when we speak of the history of the Jews’ economic progress, the focus is not so much on how these new Americans struggled to make their livings and how they organized to promote themselves as a laboring mass. Rather, attention increasingly is paid to how first generation Jews and their youngsters spent their hard earned incomes and what the conspicuousness of their consumption says about their social and cultural transformation. Meanwhile, other scholars are balancing the regnant New York-centric focus of this period’s history with perspectives from other larger cities and America’s small town Jewry. Of course, balance is also being sought in integrating the role and contribution of Jewish women both within and without the metropolis and as breadwinners, homemakers, and consumers. If these new appreciations of how American Jewish history can be understood and taught were not enough, other researchers have been refashioning the religious history of that community. Jewish denominational history used to be told from the point of view of an elite of reconcilers—rabbis primarily—who worked to adjust Judaism to the influences of the American environment. More often than not, that interest informed biographies of Conservative and Reform rabbis. Today’s revised historiography takes into account not only those who readily and visibly objected to changing the practices and teachings of that faith in America. It also...

Tradition Transformed: The Jewish Experience in America.

Tradition Transformed: The Jewish Experience in America.

Tradition transformed: the Jewish experience in America

Throughout American history, from the colonial era to the present, Jews have found America generally hospitable. Yet even in this relatively receptive country, which essentially replaced Israel as the promised land, there have been vexing questions for Jews-questions about the costs of freedom and mobility, especially with regard to the erosion of Jewish tradition and distinctiveness. In this one-volume history of the Jewish experience in America, Gerald Sorin argues that, from colonial times to the present, acculturation and not assimilation has best described the experience of Jewish Americans. American Jews, Sorin explains, have maintained their unique ethnic characteristics yet have become part of mainstream, middle-class American life. Sorin also shows how the large migration of Jews from Russia and Eastern Europe in the late nineteenth century made a lasting impact on how other Americans imagine, understand, and relate to Jewish Americans and their cultural contributions today. Drawing together all aspects of American Jewish history, this concise volume deals with the transformation of a people, their religion, their move into trade and commerce, their political commitments domestically and internationally (especially after the Holocaust), and their contributions to education and culture.

"And Prairie Dogs Weren't Kosher": Jewish Women in the Upper Midwest Since 1855

This book has its origins in an exhibition, Unpacking on the Prairie: Jewish Women in the Upper Midwest, which was organised by the Jewish Historical Society of the Upper Midwest and the Minnesota Historical Society and opened in October 1996. Research for the exhibition highlighted many first-person accounts and photographs from a phase of Jewish settlement in America that had been sparsely documented. Linking the personal and the historical, Linda Mack Schloff integrates oral accounts, diaries, letters, and autobiographies with original research and interpretation to present the little-known story of the Jewish experience in America's heartland. 'And Prairie Dogs Weren't Kosher' uses the voices of four generations of Jewish women who settled in Minnesota, the Dakotas, Iowa, and Wisconsin to show how they transported and transformed their cultural and religious life in a region inhabited by few Jews.

Defending the Faith: Nineteenth-Century American Jewish Writers on Christianity and Jesus (review)

Vol. 10, No.3 Spring 1992 131 Jewishness is a goal for which he has striven: "Whatever regrets I may feel, I cannot deny that I have wanted this, worked for it. From childhood on, I dreamed a world without ethnic or religious divisions, though I knew that this meant a world without J~ws" (p. 179). The end of Fiedler's Jewish "blood consciousness," it is clear, is the end of the Jews elevated to a principle of high idealism. This is a notion that found few followers even in the heyday of the Jewish romance with leftist ideology; today, in the eclipse of Marxism, it seems not only antiquated but perverse. Nevertheless, the idea is not altogether idiosyncratic to Fiedler, and readers interested in following its sad course will learn much from Fiedler on the Roof Those interested in other, more positive aspects of American Jewish literary consciousness would do well to look elsewhere. Alvin H. Rosenfeld Jewish Studies Program Indiana University Defending the Faith: Nineteenth-Century American Jewish Writers on Christianity and Jesus, by George L. Berlin. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989.. 207 pp. $19.95. George Berlin, professor at Baltimore Hebrew University, has written a very valuable book on the Jewish experience in America during the nineteenth century. He has compiled a great deal of information into his text which gives the reader a rather fine summary of the intellectual and social issues affecting Jewish life during this period. Berlin does this by examining the writings of a number of the major Jewish figures of the time, while setting their ideas within the context of the religious history of America. Although I was familiar with this period, Berlin opened my eyes to themes and ideas I had not seen before, and I found his examination of the period very useful. Oddly enough, although he concentrates on the nineteenth century, I found a good deal of this material useful in understanding the current state of Jewish-Christian relations in contemporary America. Berlin clearly shows how the American promise of religious freedom for all people was constantly threatened by the attempt of Protestant churches and leaders to make America a "Christian nation." More than one 132 SHOFAR attempt was made to change the Constitution to say just that. Jews were thus placed in the strange position of seeing America as a great hope for Jews fleeing from European antisemitism, while at the same time fending off the religious imperialism of the Protestant establishment and the ebb and flow of anti-Jewish movements in American political life. Berlin is able to show that a good deal·ofJewish literature attempted to show how Jews were good Americans and how Judaism was good for America. The dual problem for Jews was the combination of missionary zeal with patriotic fervor. .:e. Berlin's chapter on Christian missionary efforts among the Jews in the nineteenth century introduced me to a number of obscure and littleknown groups and people. He discusses a number of debates which were carried out in religious newspapers in the early part of the century in which Jews defended themselves from missionary attempts to convert them. He deals at length with Solomon Henry Jackson, editor of the first American Jewish newspaper, The jew, which began publishing in 1823. Jackson was aggressive in his anti-missionary campaign which consisted of three elements: "1) a defense ofJews and Judaism against the misrepresentation of the missionary and of Israel's Advocate (a missionary paper); 2) an attack on both the' motives and methods of the American Society for Meliorating the Conditions of the Jews; and 3) a polemical attack on Christianity." Jackson made good use of the American principles of freedom of speech and conscience in encouragingJews to resist all efforts to convert them to Christianity. Berlin sees Jackson as the first great defender ofJews in America. Berlin's next two chapters deal with two different approaches used by Jewish writers to defend Judaism. The one view emphasizes the differences between Judaism and Christianity, and this position stressed the need for Jews to remain faithful to the Orthodox tradition. Berlin points to Isaac Lesser as the pivotal figure of this...

The East European Jewish Experience in America

The East European Jewish Experience in America

Hanukah bush: The Jewish experience in America

As in the other homes on the street, we put up our tree around Christmas time. We decorated it with lights and ornaments that we had made at school. The whole house was transformed by its presence and the smell of evergreen. We placed the tree by the front window. During the day, the sun made the ornaments sparkle. Lit up at night, our tree became one of the parade of decorations ornamenting our street, part of our family's contribution to the holiday spirit in our suburban neighborhood. Christmas and usually arrived about the same time of year, so we used the tree throughout the eight days of Hanukah. At night we lit the candles of the menorah and the lights of the tree, sang songs celebrating the great victory of the Maccabees over the Greeks, and exchanged presents which we took from their place at the base of the tree. and the tree went together, so we called it our Hanukah bush.

Reviews

Georges Dumezil: From Myth to Fiction: The Saga of Hadingus, translated (from the French) by Derek Coltman.Georges Dumezil: The Destiny of a King, trans. Alf Hiltebeitel.Derek Wilson: A Tudor Tapestry: Men, Women and Society in Reformation England.John Tonkin: The Church and Secular Order in Reformation Thought.Geoffrey Moorhouse: The Missionaries.Abraham J. Karp (ed.): The Jewish Experience in America: Selected Studies from the Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society. New York, K'TAV, 1969.James Grant: Perspective of a Century: a Volume for the Centenary of Trinity College, Melbourne, 1872‐1972.Sydney E. Ahlstrom: A Religious History of the American People.

The Jewish Experience in America. 5 vols. Vol. 1, The Colonial Period; vol. 2, The Early Republic; vol. 3, The Emerging Community; vol. 4, The Era of Immigration; vol. 5, At Home in America. Edited by Abraham J. Karp.

The Jewish Experience in America. 5 vols. Vol. 1, The Colonial Period; vol. 2, The Early Republic; vol. 3, The Emerging Community; vol. 4, The Era of Immigration; vol. 5, At Home in America. Edited by Abraham J. Karp.

Book Review: The Jewish Experience in America

Book Review: The Jewish Experience in America

The Jewish Experience in America.

The Jewish Experience in America.

The Jewish Experience in America: Selected Studies from The Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society

The Jewish Experience in America: Selected Studies from The Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society