Download or read book Jewish Organizations Response to Communism and to Senator McCarthy written by Aviva Weingarten and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In February 1950, Senator Joseph McCarthy launched an anti-communist that lasted for more than four years. His attempts to unmask communists in the American administration and governmental agencies gave rise to actions that infringed on democratic procedure and civil liberties. As the Cold War grew, fear of communism at home and abroad meant that minorities were particularly under threat, as tensions and frustrations were channelled towards the handiest scapegoats. American Jewish organizations, who were having to come to terms with the Holocaust in Europe, were forced to contend with the real possibility of a serious anti-Semitic outburst at home. Jewish presence in the American Communist Party was conspicuous; although the overwhelming majority of Jewish Americans did not sympathise with its politics, there was concern that anti-communism would develop into anti-Semitism. McCarthy's anti-communist campaign endangered the very civil liberties that protected minorities, but criticism of McCarthy and his actions could be interpreted as support for communism. In order to convey the message that Jews were patriotic Americans concerned about both national security and civil liberties, Jewish organizations chose to present a united front, whilst also cooperating with non-sectarian American bodies. By doing so they professed an alternative anti-communism to the hardline McCarthy. This book sheds new light on McCarthy's attitudes to the Jews, to the Jewish organizations and to the Jewish individuals identified with communism.
Download or read book The FBI and Religion written by Sylvester A. Johnson and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2017-02-07 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Federal Bureau of Investigation has had a long and tortuous relationship with religion over almost the entirety of its existence. As early as 1917, the Bureau began to target religious communities and groups it believed were hotbeds of anti-American politics. Whether these religious communities were pacifist groups that opposed American wars, or religious groups that advocated for white supremacy or direct conflict with the FBI, the Bureau has infiltrated and surveilled religious communities that run the gamut of American religious life. The FBI and Religion recounts this fraught and fascinating history, focusing on key moments in the Bureau’s history. Starting from the beginnings of the FBI before World War I, moving through the Civil Rights Movement and the Cold War, up to 9/11 and today, this book tackles questions essential to understanding not only the history of law enforcement and religion, but also the future of religious liberty in America.
Download or read book Holocaust Memory and the Cold War written by Anna Koch and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2024-10-21 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Even before World War II had ended, survivors, historians, writers, and artists tried to make sense of the Holocaust. To do so, they relied on belief systems and narratives that, as the bloc confrontation intensified, were increasingly shaped by Cold War thinking. Foregrounding the Cold War's role in shaping Holocaust memory, this book highlights how the global conflict between East and West influenced research, legal proceedings, and collective as well as individual memories of the murder of European Jews. Contributions focusing on different parts of the world reveal commonalities, differences, and entanglements between Eastern and Western memories of the Holocaust. Examining Holocaust memory from various disciplinary perspectives, the authors highlight the many ways in which scholars, writers, artists, and survivors both countered and contributed to dominant narratives shaped by oppositional ideological stances. While such distinct ideological positions often mattered greatly, at other times a shared interest in bringing perpetrators to justice, commemorating victims, and providing testimony to the atrocities committed against Europe's Jews led to cooperation and exchange across the Iron Curtain.
Download or read book Jews and the Left written by P. Mendes and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-05-20 with total page 476 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The historical involvement of Jews in the political Left is well known, but far less attention has been paid to the political and ideological factors which attracted Jews to the Left. After the Holocaust and the creation of Israel many lost their faith in universalistic solutions, yet lingering links between Jews and the Left continue to exist.
Download or read book The Nazi Card written by Brian Johnson and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2017-01-25 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Cold War began almost immediately after the end of World War II and the defeat of the Nazis in Europe. As images of the Nazis’ atrocities became part of American culture’s common store, the evil of their old enemy, beyond the Nazis as a wartime opponent, became increasingly important. As America tried to describe the danger represented by the spread of Communism, it fell back on descriptions of Nazism to make the threat plain through comparison. At the heart of the tensions of that era lay the inconsistency of using one kind of evil to describe another. The book addresses this tension in regards to McCarthyism, campaigns to educate the public about Communism, attempts to raise support for wars in Asia, and the rhetoric of civil rights. Each of these political arenas is examined through their use of Nazi analogies in popular, political, and literary culture. The Nazi Card is an invaluable look at the way comparisons to Nazis are used in American culture, the history of those comparisons, and the repercussions of establishing a political definition of evil.
Download or read book Jewish American Chronology written by Mark K. Bauman and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2011-06-07 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This comprehensive and analytical history of American Jews and Judaism from the Colonial Era to the present explores the impact of America on Jews and of Jews on America. Covering more than four centuries from the Colonial Era forward, Jewish American Chronology offers an introduction to the history of American Jews and Judaism, using individual examples, personality profiles, and illustrations to bring fundamental patterns and major themes to life. Arranged chronologically, the entries illustrate how a variety of different Jewish groups and individuals have adapted to America, both changing in accordance with time and place and retaining tradition and culture, even as they became thoroughly American. Readers will learn how Jews have created community and institutions, confronted anti-Semitism, and interacted among themselves and with other groups. They will read about immigration, migration, and socioeconomic mobility. And they will discover how Jews have filled critical economic niches, contributed disproportionately in a variety of endeavors, and changed over time and in reaction to circumstances. In this wide-ranging work, Jewish Americans are depicted in a balanced and accurate manner, describing Nobel Prize winners and standout economic success stories as well as those who achieved fame and notoriety in other ways.
Download or read book The Un Americans written by Joseph Litvak and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2009-11-25 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a bold rethinking of the Hollywood blacklist and McCarthyite America, Joseph Litvak reveals a political regime that did not end with the 1950s or even with the Cold War: a regime of compulsory sycophancy, in which the good citizen is an informer, ready to denounce anyone who will not play the part of the earnest, patriotic American. While many scholars have noted the anti-Semitism underlying the House Un-American Activities Committee’s (HUAC’s) anti-Communism, Litvak draws on the work of Theodor W. Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Alain Badiou, and Max Horkheimer to show how the committee conflated Jewishness with what he calls “comic cosmopolitanism,” an intolerably seductive happiness, centered in Hollywood and New York, in show business and intellectual circles. He maintains that HUAC took the comic irreverence of the “uncooperative” witnesses as a crime against an American identity based on self-repudiation and the willingness to “name names.” Litvak proposes that sycophancy was (and continues to be) the price exacted for assimilation into mainstream American culture, not just for Jews, but also for homosexuals, immigrants, and other groups deemed threatening to American rectitude. Litvak traces the outlines of comic cosmopolitanism in a series of performances in film and theater and before HUAC, performances by Jewish artists and intellectuals such as Zero Mostel, Judy Holliday, and Abraham Polonsky. At the same time, through an uncompromising analysis of work by informers including Jerome Robbins, Elia Kazan, and Budd Schulberg, he explains the triumph of a stoolpigeon culture that still thrives in the America of the early twenty-first century.
Download or read book Ethnicity and Beyond written by Eli Lederhendler and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-03-08 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Volume XXV of the distinguished annual Studies in Contemporary Jewry explores new understandings and approaches to Jewish "ethnicity." In current parlance regarding multicultural diversity, Jews are often considered to belong socially to the "majority," whereas "otherness" is reserved for "minorities." But these group labels and their meanings have changed over time. This volume analyzes how "ethnic," "ethnicity," and "identity" have been applied to Jews, past and present, individually and collectively. Most of the symposium papers on the ethnicity of Jewish people and the social groups they form draw heavily on the case of American Jews, while others offer wider geographical perspectives. Contributors address ex-Soviet Jews in Philadelphia, comparing them to a similar population in Tel Aviv; Communism and ethnicity; intermarriage and group blending; American Jewish dialogue; and German Jewish migration in the interwar decades. Leading academics, employing a variety of social scientific methods and historical paradigms, propose to enhance the clarity of definitions used to relate "ethnic identity" to the Jews. They point to ethnic experience in a variety of different social manifestations: language use in social context, marital behavior across generations, spatial and occupational differentiation in relation to other members of society, and new immigrant communities as sub-ethnic units within larger Jewish populations. They also ponder the relevance of individual experience and preference as compared to the weight of larger socializing factors. Taken as a whole, this work offers revisionist views on the utility of terms like "Jewish ethnicity" that were given wider scope by scholars in the 1960s, '70s, and '80s.
Download or read book Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition written by Kevin B. MacDonald and published by Amazon. This book was released on 2019 with total page 587 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition argues that ethnic influences are important for understanding the West. The prehistoric invasion of the Indo-Europeans had a transformative influence on Western Europe, inaugurating a prolonged period of what is labeled "aristocratic individualism" resulting from variants of Indo-European genetic and cultural influence. However, beginning in the seventeenth century and gradually becoming dominant was a new culture labeled "egalitarian individualism" which was influenced by preexisting egalitarian tendencies of northwest Europeans. Egalitarian individualism ushered in the modern world but may well carry the seeds of its own destruction."--Back cover.
Download or read book She Persisted Clara Lemlich written by Deborah Heiligman and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2021-09-28 with total page 81 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inspired by the #1 New York Times bestseller She Persisted by Chelsea Clinton and Alexandra Boiger, a chapter book series about women who stood up, spoke up and rose up against the odds--including Clara Lemlich! In this chapter book biography by award-winning author Deborah Heiligman, readers learn about the amazing life of Clara Lemlich--and how she persisted. Clara Lemlich immigrated to New York to escape danger in Ukraine, where she was born. She started working in clothing factories on the Lower East Side, only to realize that workers were being treated unfairly. So she stood up for the rights of workers, especially girls and women--and she won, changing the way factory workers were treated in America forever! Complete with an introduction from Chelsea Clinton, black-and-white illustrations throughout, and a list of ways that readers can follow in Clara Lemlich's footsteps and make a difference! A perfect choice for kids who love learning and teachers who want to bring inspiring women into their curriculum. And don’t miss out on the rest of the books in the She Persisted series, featuring so many more women who persisted, including Nellie Bly, Sonia Sotomayor, and more! Praise for She Persisted: Clara Lemlich: "Intentionally and successfully inspiring." --Kirkus Reviews "An important addition to the biography section of any library." --School Library Journal
Download or read book Demagogue written by Larry Tye and published by Houghton Mifflin. This book was released on 2020 with total page 629 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The definitive biography of the most dangerous demagogue in American history, based on first-ever review of his personal and professional papers, medical and military records, and recently unsealed transcripts of his closed-door Congressional hearings In the long history of American demagogues, from Huey Long to Donald Trump, never has one man caused so much damage in such a short time as Senator Joseph McCarthy. We still use "McCarthyism" to stand for outrageous charges of guilt by association, a weapon of polarizing slander. From 1950 to 1954, McCarthy destroyed many careers and even entire lives, whipping the nation into a frenzy of paranoia, accusation, loyalty oaths, and terror. When the public finally turned on him, he came crashing down, dying of alcoholism in 1957. Only now, through bestselling author Larry Tye's exclusive look at the senator's records, can the full story be told. Demagogue is a masterful portrait of a human being capable of immense evil, yet beguiling charm. McCarthy was a tireless worker and a genuine war hero. His ambitions knew few limits. Neither did his socializing, his drinking, nor his gambling. When he finally made it to the Senate, he flailed around in search of an agenda and angered many with his sharp elbows and lack of integrity. Finally, after three years, he hit upon anti-communism. By recklessly charging treason against everyone from George Marshall to much of the State Department, he became the most influential and controversial man in America. His chaotic, meteoric rise is a gripping and terrifying object lesson for us all. Yet his equally sudden fall from fame offers reason for hope that, given the rope, most American demagogues eventually hang themselves.
Download or read book Israel s Moment written by Jeffrey Herf and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-02-03 with total page 519 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new account of support for and opposition to Zionist aspirations in Palestine in the United States and Europe from 1945 to 1949.
Download or read book The Impact of the Presidency of Donald Trump on American Jewry and Israel written by Steven F. Windmueller and published by Purdue University Press. This book was released on 2021-12-15 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Trump presidency has resulted in a fundamentally disruptive moment in this nation’s political culture. Not only were there different policy options and directions, but the cultural artifacts of politics changed because of how this president dramatically challenged the existing norms of political behavior and action. As we have shifted from a period of American liberalism to a time of political populism, deep fissures are dividing Americans in general and Jews in particular. The Impact of the Presidency of Donald Trump on American Jewry and Israel unpacks President Donald Trump’s distinctive and unique relationship with the American Jewish community and the State of Israel. Addressing the various dimensions of his personal and political connections with Jews and Israel, this publication is designed to provide an assessment of how the Trump presidency has influenced and altered American Jewish political behavior. Writers from different backgrounds and political orientations bring a broad range of perspectives designed to examine various aspects of this presidency, including Trump’s particular impact on Israel-US relations, his special connection with Orthodox Jews, and his complex and uneven relationship with Jewish Republicans. For liberal American Jews, these four years represented a fundamental revolution, overturning and challenging much that a generation of activists had fought to achieve and protect. For Trump’s supporters, it afforded them an opportunity to advance their priorities, while joining the forty-fifth president in changing the American political landscape. The “Trump effect” will extend well beyond his four-year tenure, creating an environment that has fomented the politics of hate and exposed a deeply embedded presence of anti-Semitism. How Americans understand this moment in time and the ways society will adapt can be reflected through the prism of the Jewish encounter with Trumpism that this volume seeks to explore.
Download or read book Witch Hunt in Hollywood written by Michael Freedland and published by Quarto Publishing Group USA. This book was released on 2014-07-10 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How political paranoia shaped cinema for a decade: “One of the most readable and damning accounts of that period.” —The Guardian This is the story of how the politicians took Tinseltown to task in the late 1940s and 1950s. As the Cold War with the Soviet Union began in earnest, the search for “Reds under the bed,” later led by Senator Joseph McCarthy, was felt most keenly in Hollywood, where the investigations were carried out under the full glare of the spotlights. Painstakingly researched and drawing on numerous exclusive interviews, this book charts the generation of actors who found their livelihood ruined by being blacklisted and the writers forced to hire “fronts” to continue to work; it reveals how Arthur Miller was offered the chance to have his hearing dropped in return for a photo opportunity with Marilyn Monroe; and how Kirk Douglas’s naming of Dalton Trumbo as the writer of Spartacus signaled the end of this extraordinary era. Witch Hunt in Hollywood is the definitive account of how political paranoia shaped cinema for a decade.
Download or read book Jewish Culture and History written by and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 744 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Jewish Radicals written by Tony Michels and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2012-07-09 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2013 New York Book Show Award in Scholarly/Professional Cover Design Jewish Radicals explores the intertwined histories of Jews and the American Left through a rich variety of primary documents. Written in English and Yiddish, these documents reflect the entire spectrum of radical opinion, from anarchism to social democracy, Communism to socialist-Zionism. Rank-and-file activists, organizational leaders, intellectuals, and commentators, from within the Jewish community and beyond, all have their say. Their stories crisscross the Atlantic, spanning from the United States to Europe and British-ruled Palestine. The documents illuminate in fascinating detail the efforts of large numbers of Jews to refashion themselves as they confronted major problems of the twentieth century: poverty, anti-semitism, the meaning of American national identity, war, and totalitarianism. In this comprehensive sourcebook, the story of Jewish radicals over seven decades is told for the first time in their own words.
Download or read book The Future of Judaism in America written by Jerome A. Chanes and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-04-19 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the state of the American Jewish world in the early 21st century, after decades of accelerating change that has transformed it and all other religious groups in the United States. It reveals a community in an unparalleled state of flux grappling with a society in which religious identity is more and more considered an individual choice, rather than an inheritance, and where fewer adults feel impelled to identify with any religious tradition at all. In chapters written by leading experts, the book examines the community’s evolving demographics, the direction of the principal denominational movements, contemporary religious trends, interactions with other American religious communities and engagements in the country’s secular politics. This text uniquely covers all these aspects of Judaism in America making it appealing to students and researchers in such fields as the sociology of religion, Judaism, and American history.
