Download or read book The Life and Work of Ludwig Lewisohn A touch of wildness written by Ralph Melnick and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 786 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An imposing literary figure in America and Europe during the first half of the twentieth century, Ludwig Lewisohn (1882-1955) struggled with feelings of alienation in Christian America that were gradually resolved by his developing Jewish identity, a process reflected in hundreds of works of fiction, literary analysis, and social criticism. A friend and associate of Sinclair Lewis, James Joyce, Thomas Mann, Paul Robeson, Edward G. Robinson, Theodore Dreiser, H. L. Mencken, Stephen Wise, Maurice Samuel, and a host of others, Lewisohn impacted the intellectual, cultural, religious, and political worlds of two continents. This first volume, chronicling his life until 1934, is followed by a second volume that portrays Lewisohn's last decades as an outspoken opponent of Nazi Germany, a leading promoter of Jewish rescue and resettlement in Palestine, a member of Brandeis University's first faculty, and one of the earliest voices advocating Jewish renewal in America. Born in Berlin, Lewisohn moved with his family in 1890 to South Carolina. Identified by others as a Jew, he remained an outsider throughout his youth. As a graduate student at Columbia University, warnings that a Jew could not secure a position teaching English forced him to abandon his studies. The Broken Snare (1908), Lewisohn's story of a young woman's acceptance of her deepest thoughts and desires, paralleled his own reaction to this isolation. Attacking the social mores of his age, the novel was judged as scandalous by critics. In time Lewisohn became a notable scholar and translator of German and French literature, teaching at Wisconsin and Ohio State. Following his mother's death in 1914, he began to explore the Jewish life he had rejected, and by 1920 became a Zionist committed to fighting assimilation. Accusatory and inflammatory, his memoir Up Stream (1922) struck at the very heart of American culture and society, and caused great controversy and lasting enmity. As strong emotional influences, the women in Lewisohn's life-his mother and four wives-helped to frame his life and work. Believing himself liberated by the woman he declared his "spiritual wife" while legally married to another, he proclaimed the artist's right to freedom in The Creative Life (1924), abandoned his editorship at The Nation, and fled to Europe. Lewisohn's fictionalized account of his failed marriage, The Case of Mr. Crump (1926), once again attacked the empty morality of this world and won Sigmund Freud's praise as the greatest psychological novel of the century. A creator of one of Paris's leading salons, Lewisohn ended his leisurely writer's life in 1934 to awaken America to the growing Nazi threat. Poised to face the unfinished marital battle at home, but anxious to engage in the coming struggle for Jewish survival and the future of Western civilization, he set sail, unsure of what lay ahead.

Download or read book The Life and Work of Ludwig Lewisohn written by Ralph Melnick and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2018-02-05 with total page 514 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An imposing literary figure in America and Europe during the first half of the twentieth century, Ludwig Lewisohn (1882-1955) struggled with feelings of alienation in Christian America that were gradually resolved by his developing Jewish identity, a process reflected in hundreds of works of fiction, literary analysis, and social criticism. Born in Berlin, Lewisohn moved with his family in 1890 to South Carolina. Identified by others as a Jew, he remained an outsider throughout his youth. Lewisohn became a notable scholar and translator of German and French literature, teaching at Wisconsin and Ohio State. Following his mother's death in 1914, he began to explore the Jewish life he had rejected, and by 1920 became a Zionist committed to fighting assimilation. Accusatory and inflammatory, his memoir Up Stream (1922) struck at the very heart of American culture and society, and caused great controversy and lasting enmity. As strong emotional influences, the women in Lewisohn's life—his mother and four wives—helped to frame his life and work. Believing himself liberated by the woman he declared his "spiritual wife" while legally married to another, he proclaimed the artist's right to freedom in The Creative Life (1924), abandoned his editorship at The Nation, and fled to Europe. Lewisohn's fictionalized account of his failed marriage, The Case of Mr. Crump (1926), once again attacked the empty morality of this world and won Sigmund Freud's praise as the greatest psychological novel of the century. A creator of one of Paris's leading salons, Lewisohn ended his leisurely writer's life in 1934 to awaken America to the growing Nazi threat. Poised to face the unfinished marital battle at home, but anxious to engage in the coming struggle for Jewish survival and the future of Western civilization, he set sail, unsure of what lay ahead.

Download or read book The Life and Work of Ludwig Lewisohn This dark and desperate age written by Ralph Melnick and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 642 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This second volume portrays Lewisohn's last decades as an outspoken opponent of Nazi Germany, a leading promoter of Jewish resettlement in Palestine, a member of Brandeis University's first faculty, and one of the earliest voices advocating Jewish renewal in America. Despite his activism, Lewisohn was no longer welcome in Zionist circles by 1948 as a result of his "unacceptable" opinions concerning British intransigence, organizational politics, and, particularly, Jewish cultural and religious decline. However, the invitation to join the newly established Brandeis University as its only full professor provided him with the opportunity he sought to contribute to the reshaping of American Jewry. Lewisohn's efforts would later bear fruit in the Jewish renewal movement of the next generation.

Download or read book Life and Work of Ludwig Lewisohn Volume II written by Ralph Melnick and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2018-02-05 with total page 685 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An imposing literary figure in America and Europe during the first half of the twentieth century, Ludwig Lewisohn (1882–1955) struggled with feelings of alienation in Christian America that were gradually resolved by his developing Jewish identity, a process reflected in hundreds of works of fiction, literary analysis, and social criticism. This second volume portrays Lewisohn's last decades as an outspoken opponent of Nazi Germany, a leading promoter of Jewish resettlement in Palestine, a member of Brandeis University's first faculty, and one of the earliest voices advocating Jewish renewal in America. Despite his activism, Lewisohn was no longer welcome in Zionist circles by 1948 as a result of his "unacceptable" opinions concerning British intransigence, organizational politics, and, particularly, Jewish cultural and religious decline. However, the invitation to join the newly established Brandeis University as its only full professor provided him with the opportunity he sought to contribute to the reshaping of American Jewry. Lewisohn's efforts would later bear fruit in the Jewish renewal movement of the next generation.

Download or read book Marrying Out written by Keren R. McGinity and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2014-09-01 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Captures the telling details and the idiosyncratic trajectory of interfaith relationships and marriages in America.” —The Forward When American Jewish men intermarry, goes the common assumption, they and their families are “lost” to the Jewish religion. In this provocative book, Keren R. McGinity shows that it is not necessarily so. She looks at intermarriage and parenthood through the eyes of a post-World War II cohort of Jewish men and discovers what intermarriage has meant to them and their families. She finds that these husbands strive to bring up their children as Jewish without losing their heritage. Marrying Out argues that the “gendered ethnicity” of intermarried Jewish men, growing out of their religious and cultural background, enables them to raise Jewish children. McGinity’s book is a major breakthrough in understanding Jewish men’s experiences as husbands and fathers, how Christian women navigate their roles and identities while married to them, and what needs to change for American Jewry to flourish. Marrying Out is a must read for Jewish men and all the women who love them. “An important analysis of this thorny issue . . . filled with vivid vignettes about intermarried couples.” —Jewish Book World

Download or read book Exiles on Main Street written by Julian Levinson and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2008-07-02 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How have Jews reshaped their identities as Jews in the face of the radical newness called America? Julian Levinson explores the ways in which exposure to American literary culture -- in particular the visionary tradition identified with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman -- led American Jewish writers to a new understanding of themselves as Jews. Discussing the lives and work of writers such as Emma Lazarus, Mary Antin, Ludwig Lewisohn, Waldo Frank, Anzia Yezierska, I. J. Schwartz, Alfred Kazin, and Irving Howe, Levinson concludes that their interaction with American culture led them to improvise new and meaningful ways of being Jewish. In contrast to the often expressed view that the diaspora experience leads to assimilation, Exiles on Main Street traces an arc of return to Jewish identification and describes a vital and creative Jewish American literary culture.

Download or read book To be Suddenly White written by Steven J. Belluscio and published by University of Missouri Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To Be Suddenly White explores the troubled relationship between literary passing and literary realism, the dominant aesthetic motivation behind the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century ethnic texts considered in this study. Steven J. Belluscio uses the passing narrative to provide insight into how the representation of ethnic and racial subjectivity served, in part, to counter dominant narratives of difference. To Be Suddenly White offers new readings of traditional passing narratives from the African American literary tradition, such as James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, Nella Larsen's Passing, and George Schuyler's Black No More. It is also the first full-length work to consider a number of Jewish American and Italian American prose texts, such as Mary Antin's The Promised Land, Anzia Yezierska's Bread Givers, and Guido d'Agostino's Olives on the Apple Tree, as racial passing narratives in their own right. Belluscio also demonstrates the contradictions that result from the passing narrative's exploration of racial subjectivity, racial difference, and race itself. When they are seen in comparison, ideological differences begin to emerge between African American passing narratives and "white ethnic" (Jewish American and Italian American) passing narratives. According to Belluscio, the former are more likely to engage in a direct critique of ideas of race, while the latter have a tendency to become more simplistic acculturation narratives in which a character moves from a position of ethnic difference to one of full American identity. The desire "to be suddenly white" serves as a continual point of reference for Belluscio, enabling him to analyze how writers, even when overtly aware of the problematic nature of race (especially African American writers), are also aware of the conditions it creates, the transformations it provokes, and the consequences of both. Byexamining the content and context of these works, Belluscio elucidates their engagement with discourses of racial and ethnic differences, assimilation, passing, and identity, an approach that has profound implications for the understanding of American literary history.

Download or read book The Literary Mafia written by Josh Lambert and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2022-07-26 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An investigation into the transformation of publishing in the United States from a field in which Jews were systematically excluded to one in which they became ubiquitous "Readers with an interest in the industry will find plenty of insights."--Publishers Weekly "From the very first page, this book is funnier and more gripping than a book on publishing has any right to be. Anyone interested in America's intellectual or Jewish history must read this, and anyone looking for an engrossing story should."--Emily Tamkin, author of Bad Jews In the 1960s and 1970s, complaints about a "Jewish literary mafia" were everywhere. Although a conspiracy of Jews colluding to control publishing in the United States never actually existed, such accusations reflected a genuine transformation from an industry notorious for excluding Jews to one in which they arguably had become the most influential figures. Josh Lambert examines the dynamics between Jewish editors and Jewish writers; how Jewish women exposed the misogyny they faced from publishers; and how children of literary parents have struggled with and benefited from their inheritances. Drawing on interviews and tens of thousands of pages of letters and manuscripts, The Literary Mafia offers striking new discoveries about celebrated figures such as Lionel Trilling and Gordon Lish, and neglected fiction by writers including Ivan Gold, Ann Birstein, and Trudy Gertler. In the end, we learn how the success of one minority group has lessons for all who would like to see American literature become more equitable.

Download or read book The Spingarn Brothers written by Katherine Reynolds Chaddock and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2023-02-07 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An absorbing account of how two Jewish brothers devoted themselves to the struggle for racial equality in the United States. In the late nineteenth century, Joel and Arthur Spingarn grew up in New York City as brothers with very different personalities, interests, and professional goals. Joel was impetuous and high-spirited; Arthur was reasoned and studious. Yet together they would become essential leaders in the struggle for racial justice and equality, serving as presidents of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, exposing inequities, overseeing key court cases, and lobbying presidents from Theodore Roosevelt to John F. Kennedy. In The Spingarn Brothers, Katherine Reynolds Chaddock sheds new light on the story of these fascinating brothers and explores how their Jewish heritage and experience as second-generation immigrants led to their fight for racial equality. Upon graduating from Columbia University, Arthur joined a top Manhattan law practice, while Joel became a professor of comparative literature. The two soon witnessed growing racial injustices in the city and joined the NAACP in 1909, its founding year. Arthur began to aim his legal practice toward issues of discrimination, while Joel founded the NAACP's New York City branch. Drawing from personal letters, journals, and archives, Chaddock uncovers some of the motivations and influences that guided the Spingarns. Both brothers served in World War I, married, and pursued numerous interests that ranged from running for Congress to collecting rare books and manuscripts by Black authors around the world. In this dual biography, Chaddock illustrates how the Spingarn brothers' unique personalities, Jewish heritage, and family history shaped their personal and professional lives into an ongoing fight for racial justice.

Download or read book Fair Labor Lawyer written by Marlene Trestman and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2016-03-01 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through a life that spanned every decade of the twentieth century, Supreme Court advocate Bessie Margolin shaped modern American labor policy while creating a place for female lawyers in the nation's highest courts. Despite her beginnings in an orphanage and her rare position as a southern, Jewish woman pursuing a legal profession, Margolin became an important and influential Supreme Court advocate. In this comprehensive biography, Marlene Trestman reveals the forces that propelled and the obstacles that impeded Margolin's remarkable journey, illuminating the life of this trailblazing woman. Raised in the Jewish Orphans' Home in New Orleans, Margolin received an extraordinary education at the Isidore Newman Manual Training School. Both institutions stressed that good citizenship, hard work, and respect for authority could help people achieve economic security and improve their social status. Adopting these values, Margolin used her intellect and ambition, along with her femininity and considerable southern charm, to win the respect of her classmates, colleagues, bosses, and judges -- almost all of whom were men. In her career she worked with some of the most brilliant legal professionals in America. A graduate of Tulane and Yale Law Schools, Margolin launched her career in the early 1930s, when only 2 percent of America's attorneys were female, and far fewer were Jewish and from the South. According to Trestman, Margolin worked hard to be treated as "one of the boys." For the sake of her career, she eschewed marriage -- but not romance -- and valued collegial relationships, never shying from a late-night brief-writing session or a poker game. But her personal relationships never eclipsed her numerous professional accomplishments, among them defending the constitutionality of the New Deal's Tennessee Valley Authority, drafting rules establishing the American military tribunals for Nazi war crimes in Nuremberg, and, on behalf of the Labor Department, shepherding through the courts the child labor, minimum wage, and overtime protections of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. A founding member of that National Organization for Women, Margolin culminated her government service as a champion of the Equal Pay Act, arguing and winning the first appeals. Margolin's passion for her work and focus on meticulous preparation resulted in an outstanding record in appellate advocacy, both in number of cases and rate of success. By prevailing in 21 of her 24 Supreme Court arguments Margolin shares the elite company of only a few dozen women and men who attained such high standing as Supreme Court advocates.

Download or read book Our Exodus written by Matthew Mark Silver and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite the dramatic circumstances of its founding, Israel did not inspire sustained, impassioned public discussion among Jews and non-Jews in the United States until Leon Uris's popular novel Exodus was released in 1958. Uris's novel popularized the complicated story of Israel's founding and, in the process, boosted the morale of post-Holocaust Jewry and disseminated in popular culture positive images of Jewish heroism. Our Exodus: Leon Uris and the Americanization of Israel's Founding Story examines the phenomenon of Exodus and its largely unrecognized influence on post-World War II understandings of Israel's beginnings in America and around the world. Author M. M. Silver's extensive archival research helps clarify the relevance of Uris's own biography in the creation of Exodus. He situates the novel's enormous popularity in the context of postwar America, and particularly Jewish American culture of the 1950s and early 1960s. In telling the story of the making of and the response to Exodus, first as a book and then as a film, Silver shows how the representation of historical events in Exodus reflected needs, expectations, and aspirations of Jewish identity and culture in the post-Holocaust world. He argues that while Uris's novel simplified some facts and distorted others, it provided an astonishingly ample amount of information about Jewish history and popularized a persuasive and cogent (though debatable) Zionist interpretation of modern Jewish history. Silver also argues that Exodus is at the core of an evolving argument about the essential compatibility between the Jewish state and American democracy that continues to this day. Readers interested in Israel studies, Jewish history, and American popular culture will appreciate Silver's unique analysis.

Download or read book Renaissance in Charleston written by James M. Hutchisson and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The essays tell how these and other individuals faced the tensions and contradictions of their time and place. While some traced their lineage back to the city's first families, others were relative newcomers. Some broke new ground racially and sexually as well as artistically; others perpetuated the myths of the Old South. Some were censured at home but praised in New York, London, and Paris. The essays also underscore the significance and growth of such cultural institutions as the Poetry Society of South Carolina, the Charleston Museum, and the Gibbes Art Gallery."--BOOK JACKET.

Download or read book Encyclopedia of Modern Jewish Culture written by Glenda Abramson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004-03 with total page 1011 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Companion to Jewish Culture - From the Eighteenth Century to the Present was first published in 1989. It is a single-volume encyclopedia containing biographical and topic entries ranging from 200 to 1000 word each.

Download or read book The Journal of Jewish Studies written by and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 856 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book American Jewish History written by and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Prooftexts written by and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book America History and Life written by and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides historical coverage of the United States and Canada from prehistory to the present. Includes information abstracted from over 2,000 journals published worldwide.