Download or read book American Jewish Political Culture and the Liberal Persuasion written by Henry L. Feingold and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 2014-01-22 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American Jewish Political Culture and the Liberal Persuasion begins with the historical background of American Jewish politics before delving into old roots and then moving onto a thematic understanding of American Jewry’s political psyche. This exhaustive work answers the grand question of where American Jewish liberalism comes from and ultimately questions whether the communal motivations behind such behavior are strong enough to withstand twenty-first-century America.

Download or read book Torn at the Roots written by Michael E. Staub and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this fascinating history of the genesis of the backlash against Jewish liberalism, Staub recounts the history American Jews who advocated Palestinian statehood, showing how ideology has split the Jewish community.

Download or read book The Foundations of American Jewish Liberalism written by Kenneth D. Wald and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-17 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shows how American Jews developed a liberal political culture that has influenced their political priorities from the founding to today.

Download or read book The Star and the Stripes written by Michael N. Barnett and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2018-07-10 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An incisive account of the foreign policy beliefs of American Jews from the nineteenth century to the present How do American Jews envision their role in the world? Are they tribal—a people whose obligations extend solely to their own? Or are they prophetic—a light unto nations, working to repair the world? The Star and the Stripes is an original, provocative interpretation of the effects of these worldviews on the foreign policy beliefs of American Jews since the nineteenth century. Michael Barnett argues that it all begins with the political identity of American Jews. As Jews, they are committed to their people's survival. As Americans, they identify with, and believe their survival depends on, the American principles of liberalism, religious freedom, and pluralism. This identity and search for inclusion form a political theology of prophetic Judaism that emphasizes the historic mission of Jews to help create a world of peace and justice. The political theology of prophetic Judaism accounts for two enduring features of the foreign policy beliefs of American Jews. They exhibit a cosmopolitan sensibility, advocating on behalf of human rights, humanitarianism, and international law and organizations. They also are suspicious of nationalism—including their own. Contrary to the conventional wisdom that American Jews are natural-born Jewish nationalists, Barnett charts a long history of ambivalence; this ambivalence connects their early rejection of Zionism with the current debate regarding their attachment to Israel. And, Barnett contends, this growing ambivalence also explains the rising popularity of humanitarian and social justice movements among American Jews. Rooted in the understanding of how history shapes a political community's sense of the world, The Star and the Stripes is a bold reading of the past, present, and possible future foreign policies of American Jews.

Download or read book The Politics of American Jews written by Herbert F. Weisberg and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2019-08-01 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jewish voting is distinctive and paradoxical. Stereotypes about the voting habits of American Jews include that they vote at unusually high levels, that they’re liberal, that they vote for Democratic candidates without regard to their self-interest, and that Israel is their most important issue. Not only are all of those claims wrong, but they obscure aspects of Jews’ voting behavior that are much more interesting. The Politics of American Jews uncovers new perspectives on Jews’ political choices by analyzing the unprecedented amount of survey data that is now available, including surveys that permit contrasting the voting of Jews with that of comparable non-Jews. The data suggest several mysteries about Jewish voting. While more Jews are Democrats than are liberals, there has not been a previous exploration of why more politically conservative Jews are not Republicans. A fresh picture of Jews’ political behaviors shows that Jews are no longer politically monolithic. They vote on the basis of their self-interest and their values, but not all Jews share the same self-interest or the same values. While most Jews have incorporated being Democratic and liberal into their political DNA, growing divisions in their ranks suggest a mutation could occur.

Download or read book Jews Liberalism Antisemitism written by Abigail Green and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-12-05 with total page 429 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “This is a timely contribution to some of the most pressing debates facing scholars of Jewish Studies today. It forces us to re-think standard approaches to both antisemitism and liberalism. Its geographic scope offers a model for how scholars can “provincialize” Europe and engage in a transnational approach to Jewish history. The book crackles with intellectual energy; it is truly a pleasure to read.”- Jessica M. Marglin, University of Southern California, USA Green and Levis Sullam have assembled a collection of original, and provocative essays that, in illuminating the historic relationship between Jews and liberalism, transform our understanding of liberalism itself. - Derek Penslar, Harvard University, USA “This book offers a strikingly new account of Liberalism’s relationship to Jews. Previous scholarship stressed that Liberalism had to overcome its abivalence in order to achieve a principled stand on granting Jews rights and equality. This volume asserts, through multiple examples, that Liberalism excluded many groups, including Jews, so that the exclusion of Jews was indeed integral to Liberalism and constitutive for it. This is an important volume, with a challenging argument for the present moment.”- David Sorkin, Yale University, USA The emancipatory promise of liberalism – and its exclusionary qualities – shaped the fate of Jews in many parts of the world during the age of empire. Yet historians have mostly understood the relationship between Jews, liberalism and antisemitism as a European story, defined by the collapse of liberalism and the Holocaust. This volume challenges that perspective by taking a global approach. It takes account of recent historical work that explores issues of race, discrimination and hybrid identities in colonial and postcolonial settings, but which has done so without taking much account of Jews. Individual essays explore how liberalism, citizenship, nationality, gender, religion, race functioned differently in European Jewish heartlands, in the Mediterranean peripheries of Spain and the Ottoman empire, and in the North American Atlantic world.

Download or read book A Shadow over Palestine written by Keith P. Feldman and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2015-04-15 with total page 405 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner, Best Book in Humanities and Cultural Studies (Literary Studies), Association for Asian American Studies Upon signing the first U.S. arms agreement with Israel in 1962, John F. Kennedy assured Golda Meir that the United States had “a special relationship with Israel in the Middle East,” comparable only to that of the United States with Britain. After more than five decades such a statement might seem incontrovertible—and yet its meaning has been fiercely contested from the start. A Shadow over Palestine brings a new, deeply informed, and transnational perspective to the decades and the cultural forces that have shaped sharply differing ideas of Israel’s standing with the United States—right up to the violent divisions of today. Focusing on the period from 1960 to 1985, author Keith P. Feldman reveals the centrality of Israel and Palestine in postwar U.S. imperial culture. Some representations of the region were used to manufacture “commonsense” racial ideologies underwriting the conviction that liberal democracy must coexist with racialized conditions of segregation, border policing, poverty, and the repression of dissent. Others animated vital critiques of these conditions, often forging robust if historically obscured border-crossing alternatives. In this rich cultural history of the period, Feldman deftly analyzes how artists, intellectuals, and organizations—from the United Nations, the Black Panther Party, and the Association of Arab American University Graduates to James Baldwin, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Edward Said, and June Jordan—linked the unfulfilled promise of liberal democracy in the United States with the perpetuation of settler democracy in Israel and the possibility of Palestine’s decolonization. In one of his last essays, published in 2003, Edward Said wrote, “In America, Palestine and Israel are regarded as local, not foreign policy, matters.” A Shadow over Palestine maps this jagged terrain on which this came to be, amid a wealth of robust alternatives, and the undeterred violence at home and abroad unleashed as a result of this special relationship.

Download or read book Left in the Center written by Daniel Soyer and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2022-01-15 with total page 430 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Daniel Soyer's history of the Liberal Party of New York State, Left in the Center, shows the surprising relationship between Democratic Socialism and mainstream American politics. Beginning in 1944 and lasting until 2002, the Liberal Party offered voters an ideological seal of approval and played the role of strategic kingmaker in the electoral politics of New York State. The party helped elect presidents, governors, senators, and mayors, and its platform reflected its founders' social democratic principles. In practical politics, the Liberal Party's power resided in its capacity to steer votes to preferred Democrats or Republicans with a reasonable chance of victory. This uneasy balance between principle and pragmatism, which ultimately proved impossible to maintain, is at the heart of the dramatic political story presented in Left in the Center. The Liberal Party, the longest-lived of New York's small parties, began as a means for anti-Communist social democrats to have an impact on the politics and policy of New York City, Albany, and Washington, DC. It provided a political voice for labor activists, independent liberals, and pragmatic social democrats. Although the party devolved into what some saw as a cynical patronage machine, it remained a model for third-party power and for New York's influential Conservative and, later, the Working Families parties. With an active period ranging from the successful senatorial career of Jacob Javits to the mayoralties of John Lindsay and Rudy Giuliani, the Liberal Party effectively shaped the politics and policy of New York. The practical gains and political cost of that complicated trade-off is at the heart of Left in the Center.

Download or read book American Jewry written by Christian Wiese and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2016-11-03 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American Jewry explores new transnational questions in Jewish history, analyzing the historical, cultural and social experience of American Jewry from 1654 to the present day, and evaluates the relationship between European and American Jewish history. Did the hopes of Jewish immigrants to establish an independent American Judaism in a free and pluralistic country come to fruition? How did Jews in America define their relationship to the 'Old World' of Europe, both before and after the Holocaust? What are the religious, political and cultural challenges for American Jews in the twenty-first century? Internationally renowned scholars come together in this volume to present new research on how immigration from Western and Eastern Europe established a new and distinctively American Jewish identity that went beyond the traditions of Europe, yet remained attached in many ways to its European origins.

Download or read book Jews and the American Religious Landscape written by Uzi Rebhun and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2016-09-06 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jews and the American Religious Landscape explores major complementary facets of American Judaism and Jewish life through a comprehensive analysis of contemporary demographic and sociological data. Focusing on the most important aspects of social development—geographic location, socioeconomic stratification, family dynamics, group identification, and political orientation—the volume adds empirical value to questions concerning the strengths of Jews as a religious and cultural group in America and the strategies they have developed to integrate successfully into a Christian society. With advanced analyses of data gathered by the Pew Research Center, Jews and the American Religious Landscape shows that Jews, like other religious and ethnic minorities, strongly identify with their religion and culture. Yet their particular religiosity, along with such factors as population dispersion, professional networks, and education, have created different outcomes in various contexts. Living under the influence of a Christian majority and a liberal political system has also cultivated a distinct ethos of solidarity and egalitarianism, enabling Judaism to absorb new patterns in ways that mirror its integration into American life. Rich in information thoughtfully construed, this book presents a remarkable portrait of what it means to be an American Jew today.

Download or read book Meir Kahane written by Shaul Magid and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2023-08-08 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The life and politics of an American Jewish activist who preached radical and violent means to Jewish survival Meir Kahane came of age amid the radical politics of the counterculture, becoming a militant voice of protest against Jewish liberalism. Kahane founded the Jewish Defense League in 1968, declaring that Jews must protect themselves by any means necessary. He immigrated to Israel in 1971, where he founded KACH, an ultranationalist and racist political party. He would die by assassination in 1990. Shaul Magid provides an in-depth look at this controversial figure, showing how the postwar American experience shaped his life and political thought. Magid sheds new light on Kahane’s radical political views, his critique of liberalism, and his use of the “grammar of race” as a tool to promote Jewish pride. He discusses Kahane’s theory of violence as a mechanism to assure Jewish safety, and traces how his Zionism evolved from a fervent support of Israel to a belief that the Zionist project had failed. Magid examines how tradition and classical Jewish texts profoundly influenced Kahane’s thought later in life, and argues that Kahane’s enduring legacy lies not in his Israeli career but in the challenge he posed to the liberalism and assimilatory project of the postwar American Jewish establishment. This incisive book shows how Kahane was a quintessentially American figure, one who adopted the radicalism of the militant Left as a tenet of Jewish survival.

Download or read book Quest for Inclusion written by Marc Dollinger and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-05-11 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For over sixty years, Jews have ranked as the most liberal white ethnic group in American politics, figuring prominently in social reform campaigns ranging from the New Deal to the civil rights movement. Today many continue to defy stereotypes that link voting patterns to wealth. What explains this political behavior? Historians have attributed it mainly to religious beliefs, but Marc Dollinger discovered that this explanation fails to account for the entire American Jewish political experience. In this, the first synthetic treatment of Jewish liberalism and U.S. public policy from the 1930s to the mid-1970s, Dollinger identifies the drive for a more tolerant, pluralistic, and egalitarian nation with Jewish desires for inclusion in the larger non-Jewish society. The politics of acculturation, the process by which Jews championed unpopular social causes to ease their adaptation to American life, established them as the guardians of liberal America. But, according to Dollinger, it also erected barriers to Jewish liberal success. Faced with a conflict between liberal politics and their own acculturation, Jews almost always chose the latter. Few Jewish leaders, for example, condemned the wartime internment of Japanese Americans, and most southern Jews refused to join their northern co-religionists in public civil rights protests. When liberals advocated race-based affirmative action programs and busing to desegregate public schools, most Jews dissented. In chronicling the successes, limits, and failures of Jewish liberalism, Dollinger offers a nuanced yet wide-ranging political history, one intended for liberal activists, conservatives curious about the creation of neo-conservatism, and anyone interested in Jewish communal life.

Download or read book American Jewish Year Book 2019 written by Arnold Dashefsky and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-07-02 with total page 840 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Part I of each volume will feature 5-7 major review chapters, including 2-3 long chapters reviewing topics of major concern to the American Jewish community written by top experts on each topic, review chapters on "National Affairs" and "Jewish Communal Affairs" and articles on the Jewish population of the United States and the World Jewish Population. Future major review chapters will include such topics as Jewish Education in America, American Jewish Philanthropy, Israel/Diaspora Relations, American Jewish Demography, American Jewish History, LGBT Issues in American Jewry, American Jews and National Elections, Orthodox Judaism in the US, Conservative Judaism in the US, Reform Judaism in the US, Jewish Involvement in the Labor Movement, Perspectives in American Jewish Sociology, Recent Trends in American Judaism, Impact of Feminism on American Jewish Life, American Jewish Museums, Anti-Semitism in America, and Inter-Religious Dialogue in America. Part II-V of each volume will continue the tradition of listing Jewish Federations, national Jewish organizations, Jewish periodicals, and obituaries. But to this list are added lists of Jewish Community Centers, Jewish Camps, Jewish Museums, Holocaust Museums, and Jewish honorees (both those honored through awards by Jewish organizations and by receiving honors, such as Presidential Medals of Freedom and Academy Awards, from the secular world). We expand the Year Book tradition of bringing academic research to the Jewish communal world by adding lists of academic journals, articles in academic journals on Jewish topics, Jewish websites, and books on American and Canadian Jews. Finally, we add a list of major events in the North American Jewish Community.

Download or read book Assimilated Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto 1940 1943 written by Katarzyna Person and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 2014-06-30 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jews in Nazi-occupied Warsaw during the 1940s were under increasing threat as they were stripped of their rights and forced to live in a guarded ghetto away from the non-Jewish Polish population. Within the ghettos, a small but distinct group existed: the assimilated, acculturated, and baptized Jews. Unwilling to integrate into the Jewish community and unable to merge with the Polish one, they formed a group of their own, remaining in a state of suspension throughout the interwar period. In 1940, with the closure of the Jewish residential quarter in Warsaw, their identity was chosen for them. Person looks at what it meant for assimilated Jews to leave their prewar neighborhoods, understood as both a physical environment and a mixed Polish Jewish cultural community, and to enter a new, Jewish neighborhood. She reveals the diversity of this group and how its members’ identity shaped their involvement in and contribution to ghetto life. In the first English-language study of this small but influential group, Person illuminates the important role of the acculturated and assimilated Jews in the history and memory of the Warsaw Ghetto.

Download or read book Horace Kallen Confronts America written by Matthew J. Kaufman and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 2019-07-03 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During his more than fifty-year writing career, American Jewish philosopher Horace Kallen (1882–1974) incorporated a deep focus on science into his pragmatic philosophy of life. He exemplified the hope among Jews that science would pave the way to full and equal integration. In this intellectual biography, Kaufman explores Kallen’s life and illuminates how American scientific culture inspired not only Kallen’s thought but also that of an entire generation. Kaufman reveals the ways in which Kallen shaped the direction of discussions on race, ethnicity, modernism, and secularism that influenced the American Jewish community. An ardent secularist, Kallen was also a serious religious thinker whose Jewish identity, as unique and idiosyncratic as it was, exemplifies the modern responsiveness to the moral ideal of “authenticity.” Kaufman shows how one man’s quest for authenticity contributed to a gradual shift in Jewish self-perception in America and how, in turn, his struggle led to America’s embrace of Kallen’s well-known term “cultural pluralism.”

Download or read book Of Men Monsters and Mazel written by Marcel Tenenbaum and published by Xlibris Corporation. This book was released on 2016-09-09 with total page 389 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Marcel Tenenbaum is a child survivor of the Holocaust and lived through the German occupation of Belgium between May 1940 and September 1944. After completing grade 1, he went into hiding in 1942 when the Nazis started deporting Jews to the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland. His parents were denounced to the Nazis in 1944. He arrived at the Malines gathering camp seventy-two hours after the last train for Auschwitz departed from Belgium. He was a prisoner for one month and was liberated by British and Canadian troops. He and his parents emigrated from Belgium in 1951 and settled in Montral, Canada.

Download or read book The Downfall of Abba Hillel Silver and the Foundation of Israel written by Ofer Shiff and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 2014-05-27 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In early February 1949, American Jewry’s most popular and powerful leader, Abba Hillel Silver (1893–1963), had summarily resigned from all his official positions within the Zionist movement and had left New York for Cleveland, returning to his post as a Reform rabbi. During the second half of the 1940s, Silver was the most outspoken proponent of the founding of a sovereign Jewish state. He was the most instrumental American Jewish leader in the political struggle that led to the foundation of the State of Israel. Paradoxically, this historic victory also heralded Silver’s personal defeat. Soon after Israel’s declaration of independence, Silver and many of his American Zionist colleagues were relegated to the sidelines of the Zionist movement. Almost overnight, the influential leader—one who had been admired and feared by supporters and opponents—was stripped of his power within both the Zionist and the American Jewish arenas. Shiff’s book discerns the various aspects of the striking turnabout in Silver’s political fate, describing the personal tragic story of a leader who was defeated by his own victory and the much broader intra-Zionist battle that erupted in full force immediately after the founding of Israel. Drawing extensively on Silver’s own archival material, Shiff presents an enlightening portrait of a critical episode in Jewish history. This book is highly relevant for anyone who attempts to understand the complex homeland–diaspora relations between Israel and American Jewry.