Jewish Studies Research Articles

Salvage Poetics: Post-Holocaust American Jewish Folk Ethnographies

Salvage Poetics: Post-Holocaust American Jewish Folk Ethnographies

No Better Home? Jews, Canada, and the Sense of Belonging ed. by David S. Koffman

Reviewed by: No Better Home? Jews, Canada, and the Sense of Belonging ed. by David S. Koffman Gerald Sorin (bio) No Better Home? Jews, Canada, and the Sense of Belonging. Edited by David S. Koffman. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2021. 314 pp. No Better Home? begins with an audacious question: "Has there ever been a better home for Jews than Canada?" The question, however, seems rhetorical, inviting only one answer: "No. There's never been a better home for the Jews." But David Koffman, the editor of this extraordinarily rich anthology, has asked more than a dozen top-ranking specialists in Canadian Jewish history to take the question seriously and to shape their answers in scholarly articles, essays, and personal memoirs. Koffman says he raised the question "because it has seldom been asked" (3). One might argue, however, that it is seldom asked because it can't be answered. What, after all, do we mean by such non-academic categories as "better" or "best," or even by the concept of "home?" Putting aside these epistemological problems, there remain enormous methodological barriers to answering the question. A responsible conclusion would require comparing the quality of Jewish life in Canada, not only to the US, which has been done several times before, but to Jewish life in more than one hundred other diasporas over many continents, over the course of many centuries. Canada, with 390,000 Jewish residents, is the fourth largest Jewish community in the world, trailing only Israel, the US, and France, but not by very much. This alone merits the attention of Jewish historians, anthropologists, and sociologists and explains why they established the now long-standing field of Canadian Jewish Studies. It is not clear to me, however, whether the book at issue here, as good as it is, muddies the waters or serves as a useful exploratory start to answering the question it raises. Morton Weinfeld wisely restricts his comparative essay to the Western liberal democracies of the past two hundred years. He examines a series of data points which reveal aspects of Jewish self-possession and religious and communal freedom in a multicultural Canadian society. Weinfeld is confident that within his circumscribed comparisons, Canada has been the best home for Jews over the past two centuries. In her chapter, however, historian Hasia Diner takes issue with Weinfeld. Canada, she writes, certainly offered a better home than the various other "homes" Jews left behind. But this does not mean that immigrants to Canada made the best choice, particularly in comparison to destination USA. Diner points to the fact that in the vast compendium of information consumed by East European Jews considering a new home, "Canada occupied a decidedly minor role" (35). But how does that claim address [End Page 314] the question about the quality of life Jews actually experienced in their new location? The essay fails to say. Kalman Weiser's chapter demonstrates that Jewish intellectuals, especially those who visited Montreal in the first half of the twentieth-century, envisioned the city as a "Vilna on the St. Lawrence." They had reasonable expectations that Montreal's Jewish culture might prove fertile ground for Yiddish and Yiddishkeit when sheltered from some of the assimilating forces Jews faced in the US Jews were the largest immigrant group in Montreal, and Yiddish did indeed remain the third most spoken language in the city into the early decades of the twentieth century. Other essays by historians Harold Troper, Ira Robinson, and Richard Menkis pay attention to positive transformations in Canadian Jewish life over time, including increased political and cultural influence and more assurance of Jewish continuity through the growth of Jewish day schools. The picture is mixed, however. Robinson describes the institutional and demographic shifts that reshaped the Canadian Jewish experience, particularly in Montreal after the Parti Quebecois gained influence in the 1970s. The pronounced nationalism expressed in French Canada's "Quiet Revolution" was alarming to Jews who thought their safe and stable home, as one group among other minority groups, might be threatened. For some Jews, the reemergence of a radical French nationalism prompted memories of Canada's restrictive immigration policy toward Jewish refugees during the Holocaust years. The...

EJJS and European Jewish Studies: A Note from the New Editors

EJJS and European Jewish Studies: A Note from the New Editors

The Jewish World of Alexander Hamilton by Andrew Porwancher

Reviewed by: The Jewish World of Alexander Hamilton by Andrew Porwancher Stanley Mirvis Andrew Porwancher, The Jewish World of Alexander Hamilton (Princeton Univ. Press, 2021). Pp. 272; 19 b/w photos. $27.95 cloth. I regularly speak in public about colonial American Jewish communities. It has become almost an inevitability that someone asks me the question: "is it true that Hamilton was Jewish?" My initial reaction, admittedly elitist, was to be dismissive. Would someone be asking me this question if not for the popularity of Lin-Manuel Miranda's Hamilton musical (which, in full disclosure, I have not seen)? I was aware that Hamilton was born and raised in the West Indies, and of a tradition that he had attended a Jewish school. But that was the full extent of my knowledge on the matter. Armed only with this sliver of information, I became increasingly puzzled by the question. How does one make the leap from Hamilton possibly having attended a Jewish school in Nevis—whatever that might have been—to becoming Jewish? My instinctual conclusion was that such a logic distortion could only be rooted in antisemitism. That is, as America's founding banker and first Secretary of the Treasury, Hamilton must have been a Jew. After all, nobody was trying to claim Jefferson, Madison, or Adams as Jewish. With this assumption I began to warn those asking the question about the potentially antisemitic overtones of what they were asking. After reading Andrew Porwancher's exciting new book The Jewish World of Alexander Hamilton, I now realize that there is much more to this question than I had previously assumed. I was astonished by how differently Porwancher approached the issue of Hamilton's Jewishness. Whereas for me, it was puzzling, even troubling, how much Jewishness people assigned to Hamilton, for Porwancher, the anti-Jewish bias rested in the extent to which previous Hamilton scholars had overlooked his Jewishness. Porwancher believes that generations of historians have been reluctant, even unwilling, to admit that there was a "Jewish"—so to speak—Founding Father. Porwancher has successfully made the case that there is much more substance to Hamilton's Jewishness than simplistic legends about his attendance at a Jewish school or antisemitic assumptions about Jewish predilections for finance. He makes an almost Freudian argument that Hamilton's exposure to Jews and Judaism in the Caribbean and especially his mother's likely affiliation with the Judaism of her first husband, was foundational in shaping the rest of his career. It was particularly informative for Hamilton's consistently favorable disposition toward Jews in debates over religious tolerance. Porwancher convincingly demonstrates that Hamilton was the strongest advocate for Jewish civil liberties and the most legitimately philosemitic of the Founding Fathers. The true value of the book, I believe, rests not in Porwancher's claim of Hamilton's own sense of Jewishness, the subject of the first two chapters, but rather in expertly situating Hamilton in the debates over religious tolerance. Hamilton is generally overlooked, compared to other Founding Fathers, in the historical discourse about the origins and ideologies of religious tolerance in America. For Porwancher, Hamilton's posture toward Jews is a powerful barometer of his dedication to true religious tolerance in the Early Republic. He demonstrates that, unlike every other Founding Father—except Washington—Hamilton was the only [End Page 578] one who didn't express some ambivalence about or even outright hostility toward Jews. Not only was Hamilton free of anti-Jewish stereotyping and bigotry, but he also maintained lifelong friendships and partnerships with Jews who were a crucial part of his New York law practice both before and after his government service. The Jewish World of Alexander Hamilton is an excellent Jewish communal history of the Early Republic, especially in New York City. Given their demographic paucity, Jews are often a footnote in studies of the early American experience. Jewish Studies, alternatively, sometimes treats Jews in isolation. Through the Hamiltonian lens, Porwancher has struck a good balance. He offers valuable profiles of well-known figures such as Haym Salomon and Gershom Mendes Seixas as well as lesser-known figures such as Isaac Moses and Moses Myers. His terrific discussion of state-constitutional...

The Annotated Passover Haggadah ed. by Zev Garber and Kenneth Hanson

Reviewed by: The Annotated Passover Haggadah ed. by Zev Garber and Kenneth Hanson Richard Libowitz The Annotated Passover Haggadah. Edited by Zev Garber and Kenneth Hanson. Denver, CO: GCRR Press (imprint of the Global Center for Religious Research), 2021. Pp. 365. $19.99, paper. For those of a certain age, their first Haggadah, the guide to conducting the Passover Seder, was a slender pamphlet bearing an advertisement for Maxwell House Coffee, testifying to the product's quality and its certification as being "Kosher for Passover." The story and rituals of Pesah were presented within but lacked explanation as to their origins or rationales. A multitude of more recent Haggadot have supplied those explanations, adding new materials, reflecting Hasidic, Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist, Secular, Feminist, Vegan (or other) viewpoints and blending interpretations, contemporary references, and modern additions with the ancient text, filtering the holiday observance through each group's particular lens. This is, after all, the purpose of the Haggadah, to explain Passover—but how is one to explain the Haggadah? The editors have created a volume combining the traditional contents of the Haggadah with both theological and secular insights into the text. Garber, Emeritus Professor and Chair of Jewish Studies and Philosophy at Los Angeles Valley College, has been a significant figure within the Jewish academic world for many decades, his hundreds of publications covering the waterfront of Jewish life and thought. Hanson, Coordinator of the Jewish Studies Program at the University of Central Florida, has written extensively on the Second Jewish Commonwealth, the historical Jesus, and Jewish Christianity. Their volume has its roots in a 2018 meeting of the National Association of Professors of Hebrew on "the connections or disconnections between the Jewish Seder and Christian Communion." The text is divided into two sections. Part One, written by the editors, presents some of the rules and traditions of the Seder from a "traditional standard [End Page 459] of Passover Halakha," while Part Two, Supplementary Readings that include historical and theological studies, interreligious investigations, artistic analyses, and personal testimony, takes up more than two-thirds of the volume. Peter Zaas launches the commentaries with a comparison of researchers to the traditional "four sons" of the Haggadah, asking what question(s) "a simple scholar" should ask pertaining to Eucharist and Seder. Garber discusses the inclusion of readings about the Holocaust during the seder, their significance for Jews and Christians, and appropriate understandings of traditional haggadic passages in light of the Shoah. These issues are also raised within other essays. My personal favorite within the collection is David Patterson's "Haggadah, Shoah, and the Exigency of the Holy." His depth of erudition and literary skill are matched by few scholars. His discussion of the analogy of darkness/light and forgetfulness/memory should be a topic for discussion at every seder table. Nathan Harpaz discusses "Sample Haggadot and Sedarim: Artists' Perception of the Last Supper and the Passover Seder." Since the acceptance of representational art came late in Jewish history, it should not be surprising that the primary topic of this essay is depictions of the Last Supper, the most famous being that painted by Leonardo DaVinci. It was not until the nineteenth century that Haggadot began to include illustrations, many of them patterned after "Last Supper" artworks. Harpaz details how various artistic trends have altered presentations of both events over time. Moving from visual arts to fiction, Susan Garber has adapted her short story, "Ziva: The Warrior of Light," for this volume. Her tale of the daughter of Aaron, whose soul moves through time and space, begins with the suffering in Egypt and rebellion in the Wilderness, before moving into supernatural fantasy or, perhaps, religious science fiction. As the one literary contribution to the volume, "Ziva" acts like a soulful sorbet, refreshing the palate after so many pages of academic and theological offerings. Four essays present aspects of Passover observance among differing regional and ideological communities. Yitzchak Kerem ("Romaniote and Judeo-Spanish (Ladino) Passover Haggadah: Excerpts and Related Customs"), well known for his scholarship pertaining to Greek Jewry, reviews some of the prayers, customs, songs, and foods of the different Judeo-Greek and Judeo-Spanish Sephardic communities in Greece, comparing them to...

Auf die Tour! Jüdinnen und Juden in Singspielhalle, Kabarett und Varieté: Zwischen Habsburgermonarchie und Amerika by Susanne Korbel

Reviewed by: Auf die Tour! Jüdinnen und Juden in Singspielhalle, Kabarett und Varieté: Zwischen Habsburgermonarchie und Amerika by Susanne Korbel Steven Cerf Susanne Korbel, Auf die Tour! Jüdinnen und Juden in Singspielhalle, Kabarett und Varieté: Zwischen Habsburgermonarchie und Amerika. Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 2021. 270 pp. The high-spirited, three-part title of this important study is telling. Susanne Korbel aptly views this revised form of her Jewish Studies doctoral dissertation from Graz University as part of a complement to the intense, decades-long scholarship of Viennese turn-of-the-twentieth-century high literary culture. Because of her clearly argued thesis and her focus on the mobility of the traveling Jewish women and men vaudevillians between Vienna, Budapest, and New York City, Korbel firmly underscores the stark differences between centripetal turn-of-the-twentieth-century Viennese “high art” and its centrifugal “popular art” counterpart. The first of the study’s five chapters begins with Korbel’s emphasis on the ever-increasing access to the mobility of railway transportation from Eastern Europe to Vienna and Budapest during the five decades prior to World War I—which contributed to the two million Eastern European Jews settling in the western urban centers of the Habsburg monarchy. She immediately points to the personalized stories about this increasingly accessible railway travel and their capacity to provide shared material for an ever-increasing number of Jewish vaudevillian performers and for their ever-growing numbers of coreligionist audience members—who increasingly had the free time and [End Page 188] spending money to dedicate to entertainment. This ever-increasing Jewish visibility, both on the stage and in the audience, also led, as a consequence, to further interaction between Jews and non-Jews. The ten-page conclusion of this first chapter clearly details the recent scholarly cultural studies research in which Korbel anchors her research. The second and third chapters follow logically in dealing with the respective neighborhoods of Vienna, Budapest, and New York in which the Jewish newcomers from the East were settling and examines the striking cultural similarities of the ever-growing numbers there of popular cultural venues such as music halls, cabarets, and small theaters. The increasing traveling troupes, as a consequence, found ever-burgeoning numbers of welcoming coreligionist audiences in these new cultural venues in such predominantly Jewish-populated areas as the Leopoldstadt, the Elisabethstadt in Budapest, and the Lower East Side in New York (which were often located in close proximity to synagogues). And the multi-linguistic makeup of these newly arrived audiences would invariably be drawn by a typical two-to-three-hour program of selections often offered in at least two different languages— Yiddish from the East and the predominant language spoken in that city. Instead of only performing to exclusively sectarian audiences, Korbel convincingly argues, using facts and figures, that these vaudeville revues often brought together audiences of diverse ethnic backgrounds—thus serving as a socially integrating force. The study’s meatiest portion, Chapter 4, comprising over one-third of the book, deals with the actual mobility of performers “hitting the road.” Beginning with her discussion of the variety-trade press and its array of advertisements for the ever-increasing number of artistic management agencies, modes of transportation, and the accommodation locations for performers— including the listing of the actual vaudevillian performances, Korbel sees the leading publication in this area as the Internationale Artisten Revue, founded in 1894. And she views the power of this variety trade paper and many others circulating in the field as reflecting the doubling number of vaudevillian performances in Vienna and in Budapest and the quadrupling of them in New York by the turn of the century. The second half of this chapter deals with the key participants of turn-of-the-century Yiddish-language vaudeville and their gender-related roles: women were increasingly replacing the earlier female impersonators, gender-bending roles were beginning to come into vogue, the scurrilous anti-Semitic [End Page 189] rumors linking vaudeville theater to prostitution were being debunked, and, alas, some of the Jewish performers found their tragic end in the Holocaust. Korbel wisely traces the assertive role of the vaudevillian solo soubrette, in part, to the actively...

A Piece of a Torah Scroll in my Basement

The Association for Canadian Jewish Studies encourages research on the Canadian Jewish experience through the disciplines of political science, sociology, economics, geography, history, demography, education, religion, linguistics, literature, architecture, performing and fine arts, among others.

Review: Jeffrey S. Gurock, ed. Conversations with Colleagues: On Becoming an American Jewish Historian.

The Association for Canadian Jewish Studies encourages research on the Canadian Jewish experience through the disciplines of political science, sociology, economics, geography, history, demography, education, religion, linguistics, literature, architecture, performing and fine arts, among others.

Front Matter

The Association for Canadian Jewish Studies encourages research on the Canadian Jewish experience through the disciplines of political science, sociology, economics, geography, history, demography, education, religion, linguistics, literature, architecture, performing and fine arts, among others.

Table of Contents

The Association for Canadian Jewish Studies encourages research on the Canadian Jewish experience through the disciplines of political science, sociology, economics, geography, history, demography, education, religion, linguistics, literature, architecture, performing and fine arts, among others.

Review: Kenneth B. Moss, An Unchosen People: Jewish Political Reckoning in Interwar Poland.

The Association for Canadian Jewish Studies encourages research on the Canadian Jewish experience through the disciplines of political science, sociology, economics, geography, history, demography, education, religion, linguistics, literature, architecture, performing and fine arts, among others.

On The Importance of Basement Archives for Canadian Jewish Studies

The Association for Canadian Jewish Studies encourages research on the Canadian Jewish experience through the disciplines of political science, sociology, economics, geography, history, demography, education, religion, linguistics, literature, architecture, performing and fine arts, among others.

I Sing and I Pray: Samy Elmaghribi’s Sonic Reflection on Music and Religion

The Association for Canadian Jewish Studies encourages research on the Canadian Jewish experience through the disciplines of political science, sociology, economics, geography, history, demography, education, religion, linguistics, literature, architecture, performing and fine arts, among others.

My Paternal Grandparents’ German China

The Association for Canadian Jewish Studies encourages research on the Canadian Jewish experience through the disciplines of political science, sociology, economics, geography, history, demography, education, religion, linguistics, literature, architecture, performing and fine arts, among others.

It’s the Real Thing: The Enduring Legacy of the North and Coca-Cola in the Kokotow family

The Association for Canadian Jewish Studies encourages research on the Canadian Jewish experience through the disciplines of political science, sociology, economics, geography, history, demography, education, religion, linguistics, literature, architecture, performing and fine arts, among others.

Review: Ian Morrison. Moments of Crisis: Religion and National Identity in Québec

The Association for Canadian Jewish Studies encourages research on the Canadian Jewish experience through the disciplines of political science, sociology, economics, geography, history, demography, education, religion, linguistics, literature, architecture, performing and fine arts, among others.

Reflections

The Association for Canadian Jewish Studies encourages research on the Canadian Jewish experience through the disciplines of political science, sociology, economics, geography, history, demography, education, religion, linguistics, literature, architecture, performing and fine arts, among others.

Foreword

The Association for Canadian Jewish Studies encourages research on the Canadian Jewish experience through the disciplines of political science, sociology, economics, geography, history, demography, education, religion, linguistics, literature, architecture, performing and fine arts, among others.

Canadian Jewish Heritage Material Repositories / Liste de référence de tous les dépôts du patrimoine juif du Canada

The Association for Canadian Jewish Studies encourages research on the Canadian Jewish experience through the disciplines of political science, sociology, economics, geography, history, demography, education, religion, linguistics, literature, architecture, performing and fine arts, among others.

Review: Ilan Stavans and Josh Lambert, eds. How Yiddish Changed America and How America Changed Yiddish

The Association for Canadian Jewish Studies encourages research on the Canadian Jewish experience through the disciplines of political science, sociology, economics, geography, history, demography, education, religion, linguistics, literature, architecture, performing and fine arts, among others.