Download or read book Half Jew written by Susan Jacoby and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2016-03-15 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since childhood, Susan Jacoby, the New York Times bestselling author of The Age of American Unreason, was sure that her father was keeping a secret. At age twenty, just before beginning her writing career as a reporter for the Washington Post, she learned the truth: Robert Jacoby, a Catholic convert with a Catholic wife, was also a Jew. In Half-Jew, Jacoby grapples with the hidden identity cloaked by the persona of a successful accountant and member of St. Thomas Aquinas Church in East Lansing, Michigan—and with the secrets and lies that had marked her family’s history for three generations on two continents. Beginning in 1849 when her great-grandfather arrived in America as a political refugee, Jacoby traces her lineage through the lives of her great-uncle Harold, the distinguished astronomer whose map of the constellations is etched on the ceiling of Grand Central Terminal; her uncle, the bridge champion Oswald Jacoby, her aunt Edith, also a Catholic convert and eventually a reformer within the church; and, of course her father himself. At the core of story is the psychic damage that accrues across generations when people conceal their true ethnic and religious origins. Featuring a new afterword, Half-Jew is a meticulously researched, emotionally poignant examination of the dark legacy of European and American anti-Semitism as well as a tender-hearted account of a daughter coming to understand her father, herself, and her family’s true legacy.

Download or read book Half Jew Searching for Identity written by D. M. Miller and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2017-02 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is a Half-Jew? Neither this nor that. Practically synonymous with confusion, Half-Jew is a term for people stuck in no-man's land, not quite fitting in with Gentiles nor universally accepted as Jews. Some say there is no such thing, denying many their legitimate heritage and innate pull toward the same culture, ancestry and religious equivalence as those with Jewish matrilineage. Those born of a Jewish father and non-Jewish mother are often lost, searching for a true identity. D.M. Miller makes a compelling case to prove the doubters wrong. In analyzing religious arguments, medical and genetic studies, history and ancestry, this intimate part-memoir tells the personal story of one woman determined to eradicate the stigma, unravel the misunderstandings and come to terms with what identity is or isn't through her unique perspective as a Half-Jew.

Download or read book The Half Jewish Book written by Daniel Klein and published by Villard Books. This book was released on 2000-09-19 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It's happening fast: The population of half-Jews in America is well on its way to surpassing the population of full Jews. And with this population shift has come a revolutionary transformation of what it means to be half-Jewish. Sure, some people say that you are either Jewish or not, that there's nothing in between--but the authors emphatically disagree. They say half-Jews are a unique subculture of people who draw from both sides of their heritage and synthesize their cultural halves into a remarkable new identity. The Half-Jewish Book celebrates this unique identity that until now has been ignored, maligned, and misunderstood. There's half-Jewish humor. Half-Jewish/half-Catholic Bill Maher: "I come from a mixed religious background--when I went to confession, I brought a lawyer with me." And there's half-Jewish beauty--Gwyneth Paltrow, Joan Collins, and Jane Seymour, just for starters. There are half-Jewish writers (Proust, Salinger), and half-Jewish characters in fiction by authors ranging from Philip Roth to Salman Rushdie. There's even that half-Jewish cartoon phenomenon Tommy Pickles, in Rugrats. There are half-Jewish politicians--Fiorello La Guar-dia, Barry Goldwater, Dianne Feinstein. And there are the extraordinary number of people, like General Wesley Clark, who discovered as adults that they were half-Jewish and then embraced their newfound double heritage. This book includes an eye-opening essay on half-Jewish identity and looks into the often misunderstood history of half-Jews in the Holocaust. There are original interviews with half-Jews, as well as holiday cards and menus, poetry and song lyrics, and paintings and photographs. Intelligent, exuberant, entertaining, and thought-provoking, The Half-Jewish Book is a fascinating celebration of a cultural mix that is far greater than the sum of its parts. The premise of The Half-Jewish Book is simple if somewhat controversial: Being half-Jewish is a quality unto itself, sui generis. Half-Jewishness is a cultural, intellectual, and aesthetic mix that is, in a variety of ways, greater than the sum of its parts. To take this position--and to revel in the celebration that follows from it--we stand in clear opposition to those who insist: "You are either Jewish or you are not; there's nothing in between." And we compound this blasphemy by suggesting that there is something unique, remarkable, and downright dazzling about the half-Jewish mind and the half-Jewish face, about the art and wit created by half-Jewish sensibilities, and in the ethical, literary, and political ideas produced from the half-Jewish perspective. Enough already about the "half-Jewish problem" as the tragic product of intermarriage. It is time to explore the unique and fascinating world of the half-Jew. --from the Introduction From the Hardcover edition.

Download or read book Half Life written by Laurel Snyder and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2006-03-23 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written by authors born into the so-called “dilemma of intermarriage,” the stories in Half/Life explore the experience of being raised in a half-Jewish home. Though each essay is distinct, and the experiences are vastly different, each describes growing up without a streamlined identity, unsure of community or religious direction. From Jenny Traig, whose experiences led her to extreme devotion in the form of religious-obsessive compulsion (scrupulosity) to Thisbe Nissen, who finally felt Jewish after discovering a rosary in her boyfriend’s sock drawer, these authors examine the complicated relationships they felt with the Jewish community and the world at large. By turns tragic and funny, religious and heartbreaking, angry and surprisingly familiar, Half/Life represents the altogether diverse memories and reflections of a handful of men and women who have spent a lifetime grappling with how to define themselves, or not. Resulting from that struggle is a complex exploration, and some truly brilliant prose.

Download or read book The Jewolic written by Ritch Gaiti and published by CreateSpace. This book was released on 2013-10 with total page 78 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Conundrums of a Half-Jew – a humorous romp through religious ambivalence. Polish/Jewish mom; Italian/Catholic dad. I was a religious mutt — a matzo brie pizza; a blintz marinara; a bagel and lox trapped inside a spaghetti and meatballs body. I needed an identity.I could have become: a) A Jew, invoking the very popular, and all-inclusive, 'if your mother is a Jew' rule; b) A Catholic, ignoring the above-mentioned rule; or, c) A half Jew/half Cath, Jewolic, straddling both religions, favoring the one that was most advantageous at the time.I straddled for most of my youth. I was a Jew Catholic, or Cath Jew, or half and half, or half-Cath, or half-Jew, or Jewolic, depending upon whom I was trying to impress or what I was attempting to avoid. My Gram tried to convince me that I was a Jew by virtue of the 'mother of the Jew rule'. I remained solidly unconvinced and ambivalent. “But why isn't the rule: if your father was Catholic, you are too?” I always challenged the 'mother of the Jew rule' when I had an urgent need to irk. “Because you are a Jew,” she said, a cigarette dangled from her lips and smoke meandered up through her glasses.“How can you be so sure?”“Because, you are a schmuck and only Jews can be schmucks.” She had embroidered the very same saying onto a pillow, which she threatened to give to me for my birthday. She opened the clasp on her purse and snapped it shut, signaling the official end of the conversation. That was my conundrum. This is my story.

Download or read book Daniel Half Human written by David Chotjewitz and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2004-10-12 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1933 Germany, Daniel Kraushaar is horrified to discover that his mother is Jewish. Daniel realizes he is half-Jewish--and half-human in Aryan eyes. Daniel keeps this secret to himself. But when his friends join the Hitler Youth, it carries fateful consequences for Daniel's family.

Download or read book The Half Jewish Book written by Daniel M. Klein and published by Villard Books. This book was released on 2000 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Studies the growing population of half-Jewish individuals in America, exploring the subculture's unique identity, attributes, and physical characteristics, and profiles half-Jewish Hollywood celebrities.

Download or read book Roads Taken written by Hasia R. Diner and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2015-01-01 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between the late 1700s and the 1920s, nearly one-third of the world’s Jews emigrated to new lands. Crossing borders and often oceans, they followed paths paved by intrepid peddlers who preceded them. This book is the first to tell the remarkable story of the Jewish men who put packs on their backs and traveled forth, house to house, farm to farm, mining camp to mining camp, to sell their goods to peoples across the world. Persistent and resourceful, these peddlers propelled a mass migration of Jewish families out of central and eastern Europe, north Africa, and the Ottoman Empire to destinations as far-flung as the United States, Great Britain, South Africa, and Latin America. Hasia Diner tells the story of millions of discontented young Jewish men who sought opportunity abroad, leaving parents, wives, and sweethearts behind. Wherever they went, they learned unfamiliar languages and customs, endured loneliness, battled the elements, and proffered goods from the metropolis to people of the hinterlands. In the Irish Midlands, the Adirondacks of New York, the mining camps of New South Wales, and so many other places, these traveling men brought change—to themselves and the families who later followed, to the women whose homes and communities they entered, and ultimately to the geography of Jewish history.

Download or read book The Age of American Unreason written by Susan Jacoby and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2009-02-01 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A scathing indictment of American modern-day culture examines the current disdain for logic and evidence fostered by the mass media, religious fundamentalism, poor public education, a lack of fair-minded intellectuals, and a lazy, credulous public, condemning our addiction to infotainment, from TV to the Web, and assessing its repercussions for the country as a whole. Reprint. 75,000 first printing.

Download or read book Genius Anxiety written by Norman Lebrecht and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2019-12-03 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This lively chronicle of the years 1847­–1947—the century when the Jewish people changed how we see the world—is “[a] thrilling and tragic history…especially good on the ironies and chain-reaction intimacies that make a people and a past” (The Wall Street Journal). In a hundred-year period, a handful of men and women changed the world. Many of them are well known—Marx, Freud, Proust, Einstein, Kafka. Others have vanished from collective memory despite their enduring importance in our daily lives. Without Karl Landsteiner, for instance, there would be no blood transfusions or major surgery. Without Paul Ehrlich, no chemotherapy. Without Siegfried Marcus, no motor car. Without Rosalind Franklin, genetic science would look very different. Without Fritz Haber, there would not be enough food to sustain life on earth. What do these visionaries have in common? They all had Jewish origins. They all had a gift for thinking in wholly original, even earth-shattering ways. In 1847, the Jewish people made up less than 0.25% of the world’s population, and yet they saw what others could not. How? Why? Norman Lebrecht has devoted half of his life to pondering and researching the mindset of the Jewish intellectuals, writers, scientists, and thinkers who turned the tides of history and shaped the world today as we know it. In Genius & Anxiety, Lebrecht begins with the Communist Manifesto in 1847 and ends in 1947, when Israel was founded. This robust, magnificent, beautifully designed volume is “an urgent and moving history” (The Spectator, UK) and a celebration of Jewish genius and contribution.

Download or read book How I Stopped Being a Jew written by Shlomo Sand and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2014-10-07 with total page 113 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shlomo Sand was born in 1946, in a displaced person’s camp in Austria, to Jewish parents; the family later migrated to Palestine. As a young man, Sand came to question his Jewish identity, even that of a “secular Jew.” With this meditative and thoughtful mixture of essay and personal recollection, he articulates the problems at the center of modern Jewish identity. How I Stopped Being a Jew discusses the negative effects of the Israeli exploitation of the “chosen people” myth and its “holocaust industry.” Sand criticizes the fact that, in the current context, what “Jewish” means is, above all, not being Arab and reflects on the possibility of a secular, non-exclusive Israeli identity, beyond the legends of Zionism.

Download or read book The Chosen Few written by Maristella Botticini and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Maristella Botticini and Zvi Eckstein show that, contrary to previous explanations, this transformation was driven not by anti-Jewish persecution and legal restrictions, but rather by changes within Judaism itself after 70 CE--most importantly, the rise of a new norm that required every Jewish male to read and study the Torah and to send his sons to school. Over the next six centuries, those Jews who found the norms of Judaism too costly to obey converted to other religions, making world Jewry shrink. Later, when urbanization and commercial expansion in the newly established Muslim Caliphates increased the demand for occupations in which literacy was an advantage, the Jews found themselves literate in a world of almost universal illiteracy. From then forward, almost all Jews entered crafts and trade, and many of them began moving in search of business opportunities, creating a worldwide Diaspora in the process.

Download or read book The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion written by Sergei Nilus and published by . This book was released on 2019-02-26 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" is almost certainly fiction, but its impact was not. Originating in Russia, it landed in the English-speaking world where it caused great consternation. Much is made of German anti-semitism, but there was fertile soil for "The Protocols" across Europe and even in America, thanks to Henry Ford and others.

Download or read book The Half Jew and the Synagogue written by Evelyn Wilcock and published by . This book was released on 1990 with total page 31 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Half Jew written by Robert Beauvais and published by . This book was released on 1980 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Hitler s Jewish Soldiers written by Bryan Mark Rigg and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 536 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On the murderous road to "racial purity" Hitler encountered unexpected detours, largely due to his own crazed views and inconsistent policies regarding Jewish identity. After centuries of Jewish assimilation and intermarriage in German society, he discovered that eliminating Jews from the rest of the population was more difficult than he'd anticipated. As Bryan Rigg shows in this provocative new study, nowhere was that heinous process more fraught with contradiction and confusion than in the German military. Contrary to conventional views, Rigg reveals that a startlingly large number of German military men were classified by the Nazis as Jews or "partial-Jews" (Mischlinge), in the wake of racial laws first enacted in the mid-1930s. Rigg demonstrates that the actual number was much higher than previously thought-perhaps as many as 150,000 men, including decorated veterans and high-ranking officers, even generals and admirals. As Rigg fully documents for the first time, a great many of these men did not even consider themselves Jewish and had embraced the military as a way of life and as devoted patriots eager to serve a revived German nation. In turn, they had been embraced by the Wehrmacht, which prior to Hitler had given little thought to the "race" of these men but which was now forced to look deeply into the ancestry of its soldiers. The process of investigation and removal, however, was marred by a highly inconsistent application of Nazi law. Numerous "exemptions" were made in order to allow a soldier to stay within the ranks or to spare a soldier's parent, spouse, or other relative from incarceration or far worse. (Hitler's own signature can be found on many of these "exemption" orders.) But as the war dragged on, Nazi politics came to trump military logic, even in the face of the Wehrmacht's growing manpower needs, closing legal loopholes and making it virtually impossible for these soldiers to escape the fate of millions of other victims of the Third Reich. Based on a deep and wide-ranging research in archival and secondary sources, as well as extensive interviews with more than four hundred Mischlinge and their relatives, Rigg's study breaks truly new ground in a crowded field and shows from yet another angle the extremely flawed, dishonest, demeaning, and tragic essence of Hitler's rule.

Download or read book Portrait of American Jews written by Samuel C. Heilman and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2011-07-01 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Has America been a place that has preserved and protected Jewish life? Is it a place in which a Jewish future is ensured? Samuel Heilman, long-time observer of American Jewish life, grapples with these questions from a sociologist’s perspective. He argues that the same conditions that have allowed Jews to live in relative security since the 1950s have also presented them with a greater challenge than did the adversity and upheaval of earlier years. The second half of the twentieth century has been a time when American Jews have experienced a minimum of prejudice and almost all domains of life have been accessible to them, but it has also been a time of assimilation, of swelling rates of intermarriage, and of large numbers ignoring their Jewishness completely. Jews have no trouble building synagogues, but they have all sorts of trouble filling them. The quality of Jewish education is perhaps higher than ever before, and the output of Jewish scholarship is overwhelming in its scope and quality, but most American Jews receive a minimum of religious education and can neither read nor comprehend the great corpus of Jewish literature in its Hebrew (or Aramaic) original. This is a time in America when there is no shame in being a Jew, and yet fewer American Jews seem to know what being a Jew means. How did this come to be? What does it portend for the Jewish future? This book endeavors to answer these questions by examining data gleaned from numerous sociological surveys. Heilman first discusses the decade of the fifties and the American Jewish quest for normalcy and mobility. He then details the polarization of American Jewry into active and passive elements in the sixties and seventies. Finally he looks at the eighties and nineties and the issues of Jewish survival and identity and the question of a Jewish future in America. He also considers generational variation, residential and marital patterns, institutional development (especially with regard to Jewish education), and Jewish political power and influence. This book is part of a stocktaking that has been occurring among Jews as the century in which their residence in America was firmly established comes to an end. Grounded in empirical detail, it provides a concise yet analytic evaluation of the meaning of the many studies and surveys of the last four and a half decades. Taking a long view of American Jewry, it is one of very few books that build on specific sociological data but get beyond its detail. All those who want to know what it means and has meant to be an American Jew will find this volume of interest.