Download or read book Thinking Jewish Culture in America written by Ken Koltun-Fromm and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2013-12-11 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thinking Jewish Culture in America argues that Jewish thought extends our awareness and deepens the complexity of American Jewish culture. This volume stretches the disciplinary boundaries of Jewish thought so that it can productively engage expanding arenas of culture by drawing Jewish thought into the orbit of cultural studies. The eleven contributors to Thinking Jewish Cultures, together with Chancellor Arnold Eisen’s postscript, position Jewish thought within the dynamics and possibilities of contemporary Jewish culture. These diverse essays in Jewish thought re-imagine cultural space as a public and sometimes contested performance of Jewish identity, and they each seek to re-enliven that space with reflective accounts of cultural meaning. How do Jews imagine themselves as embodied actors in America? Do cultural obligations limit or expand notions of the self? How should we imagine Jewish thought as a cultural performance? What notions of peoplehood might sustain a vibrant Jewish collectivity in a globalized economy? How do programs in Jewish studies work within the academy? These and other questions engage both Jewish thought and culture, opening space for theoretical works to broaden the range of cultural studies, and to deepen our understanding of Jewish cultural dynamics. Thinking Jewish Culture is a work about Jewish cultural identity reflected through literature, visual arts, philosophy, and theology. But it is more than a mere reflection of cultural patterns and choices: the argument pursued throughout Thinking Jewish Culture is that reflective sources help produce the very cultural meanings and performances they purport to analyze.

Download or read book The Soul of Judaism written by Bruce D Haynes and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2018-08-14 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A glimpse into the diverse stories of Black Jews in the United States What makes a Jew? This book traces the history of Jews of African descent in America and the counter-narratives they have put forward as they stake their claims to Jewishness. The Soul of Judaism offers the first exploration of the full diversity of Black Jews, including bi-racial Jews of both matrilineal and patrilineal descent; adoptees; black converts to Judaism; and Black Hebrews and Israelites, who trace their Jewish roots to Africa and challenge the dominant western paradigm of Jews as white and of European descent. Blending historical analysis and oral history, Haynes showcases the lives of Black Jews within the Orthodox, Conservative, Reconstruction and Reform movements, as well as the religious approaches that push the boundaries of the common forms of Judaism we know today. He illuminates how in the quest to claim whiteness, American Jews of European descent gained the freedom to express their identity fluidly while African Americans have continued to be seen as a fixed racial group. This book demonstrates that racial ascription has been shaping Jewish selfhood for centuries. Pushing us to reassess the boundaries between race and ethnicity, it offers insight into how Black Jewish individuals strive to assert their dual identities and find acceptance within their respective communities. Putting to rest the simplistic notion that Jews are white and that Black Jews are therefore a contradiction, the volume argues that we can no longer pigeonhole Black Hebrews and Israelites as exotic, militant, and nationalistic sects outside the boundaries of mainstream Jewish thought and community life. The volume spurs us to consider the significance of the growing population of self-identified Black Jews and its implications for the future of American Jewry.

Download or read book Letters to an American Jewish Friend written by Hillel Halkin and published by . This book was released on 2013-11-01 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This passionate polemic addresses itself to the ultimate questions of Jewish destiny and proclaims the primacy of Israel as the locus of the Jewish future. Hillel Halkin is an American-born Jew who has cast his personal and historical lot with Israel. Corresponding with an imaginary “American Jewish friend” who upholds the possibility of a viable Jewish life outside Israel, Halkin forcefully argues his case: Jewish history and Israeli history are two lines in the process of converging; and any Jew who chooses, in the absence of extenuating circumstances, not to live in Israel is removing himself to the peripheries of the struggle for Jewish survival and away from the center of Jewish destiny.

Download or read book The Jewish American Paradox written by Robert H Mnookin and published by PublicAffairs. This book was released on 2018-11-27 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Who should count as Jewish in America? What should be the relationship of American Jews to Israel? Can the American Jewish community collectively sustain and pass on to the next generation a sufficient sense of Jewish identity? The situation of American Jews today is deeply paradoxical. Jews have achieved unprecedented integration, influence, and esteem in virtually every facet of American life. But this extraordinarily diverse community now also faces four critical and often divisive challenges: rampant intermarriage, weak religious observance, diminished cohesion in the face of waning anti-Semitism, and deeply conflicting views about Israel. Can the American Jewish community collectively sustain and pass on to the next generation a sufficient sense of Jewish identity in light of these challenges? Who should count as Jewish in America? What should be the relationship of American Jews to Israel? In this thoughtful and perceptive book, Robert H. Mnookin argues that the answers of the past no longer serve American Jews today. The book boldly promotes a radically inclusive American-Jewish community -- one where being Jewish can depend on personal choice and public self-identification, not simply birth or formal religious conversion. Instead of preventing intermarriage or ostracizing those critical of Israel, he envisions a community that embraces diversity and debate, and in so doing, preserves and strengthens the Jewish identity into the next generation and beyond.

Download or read book The Vanishing American Jew written by Alan M. Dershowitz and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 1998-09-08 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores the meaning of Jewishness in light of the increasing assimilation of America's Jews and suggests ways to preserve Jewish identity.

Download or read book Material Culture and Jewish Thought in America written by Ken Koltun-Fromm and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2010-04-21 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How Jews think about and work with objects is the subject of this fascinating study of the interplay between material culture and Jewish thought. Ken Koltun-Fromm draws from philosophy, cultural studies, literature, psychology, film, and photography to portray the vibrancy and richness of Jewish practice in America. His analyses of Mordecai Kaplan's obsession with journal writing, Joseph Soloveitchik's urban religion, Abraham Joshua Heschel's fascination with objects in The Sabbath, and material identity in the works of Anzia Yezierska, Cynthia Ozick, Bernard Malamud, and Philip Roth, as well as Jewish images on the covers of Lilith magazine and in the Jazz Singer films, offer a groundbreaking approach to an understanding of modern Jewish thought and its relation to American culture.

Download or read book In Search of American Jewish Culture written by Stephen J. Whitfield and published by UPNE. This book was released on 1999 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A leading cultural historian explores the complex interactions of Jewish and American cultures.

Download or read book The Americanization of the Jews written by Robert Seltzer and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 1995-02 with total page 492 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Assesses the current state of American Jewish life, drawing on the research and thinking of scholars from a variety of disciplines and diverse points of view.

Download or read book American Space Jewish Time written by Stephen J. Whitfield and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This is a delightful book, a small gem replete with insightful, provocative pieces about both American culture and Jewish life. I think that Stephen Whitfield is one of the most original essayists on these two topics. Few other scholars combine the density of his knowledge with the verve of his prose". -- Hasia R. Diner, New York University

Download or read book Saving Remnants written by Sara Bershtel and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1993-01-01 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Saving Remnants provides a series of honest and clear-minded portraits of young American Jews trying to confront what it means to be Jewish."--Irving Howe, author of World of Our Fathers "You don't have to be Jewish to be fascinated and challenged by this sensitive, profoundly intelligent book. Saving Remnants is about Jewishness, but it is also about all of us, searching for 'identity' on a menu that includes New Age epiphanies along with old-time religions and instant 'traditions.'"--Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Fear of Falling

Download or read book Nine American Jewish Thinkers written by Milton Konvitz and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-04-17 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The nine American Jews of whom Milton Konvitz writes are philosophers, jurists, or rabbis, widely known and readily accepted as American Jewish thinkers. Their work reflects all essential Jewish values. Each person in his own way has dedicated his work to the betterment of life and the advancement of human ideals. In this sense, their Jewishness is not defined by religion alone. Americanism permeated all they thought and all they did.Konvitz argues that in the complex modern world, secularists often serve God more handsomely than do members of synagogues or churches. For example, when the Supreme Court in 1954 (with Felix Frankfurter playing a key role behind the scenes) agreed to outlaw segregation of the races in public schools, was the Court's action secular or religious? When Congress passed the statute known as the Americans with Disabilities Act, requiring equal treatment of handicapped persons, was the action secular or religious? Is a minimum wage act secular or religious? Is Medicaid a secular or a religious act? Konvitz believes the distinction is not useful, or even possible.The book is divided into three parts, reflecting Konvitz's range of intellectual interests. The nine essays offer concise intellectual biographies of three American Jewish philosophers, three Supreme Court Justices, and three rabbis. The philosophers-Horace M. Kallen, Morris Raphael Cohen, and Sidney Hook-are world-renowned. The jurists-Louis D. Brandeis, Benjamin N. Cardozo, and Felix Frankfurter-hold prominent places in American legal history. And the three rabbis-Leo Jung, Robert Gordis, and Jacob Agus-are known wherever Jewish thought is studied. By treating with equal seriousness the lives and writings of both religious and secularist thinkers, the author intentionally minimizes the conventional antagonism and frequent conflict between religion and secularism.An unusual feature of the book is the fact that the author was a close friend of six of the persons whose lives and work are examined, allowing him a perceptive insight into their character and thought. Although the book is about serious subjects, its graceful style makes the contents easily accessible to lay persons as well as scholars and students of Judaica.

Download or read book Coming to Terms with America written by Jonathan D. Sarna and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2021-09 with total page 429 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Culling the finest thinking of renowned historian Jonathan D. Sarna, Coming to Terms with America examines how Jews have long “straddled two civilizations,” endeavoring to be both Jewish and American at once, from the American Revolution to today.

Download or read book Thinking in Jewish written by Jonathan Boyarin and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1996-08-15 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How does one "think" in Jewish? What does it mean to speak in English of Yiddish as Jewish, as a certain intermediary generation of immigrants and children of immigrants from Jewish Eastern Europe has done? A fascination with this question prompted Jonathan Boyarin, one of America's most original thinkers in critical theory and Jewish ethnography, to offer the unexpected Jewish perspective on the vexed issue of identity politics presented here. Boyarin's essays explore the ways in which a Jewish—or, more particularly, Yiddish—idiom complicates the question of identity. Ranging from explorations of a Lower East Side synagogue to Fichte's and Derrida's contrasting notions of the relation between the Jews and the idea of Europe, from the Lubavitch Hasidim to accounts of self-making by Judith Butler and Charles Taylor, Thinking in Jewish will be indispensable reading for students of critical theory, cultural studies, and Jewish studies.

Download or read book Beyond the Synagogue written by Rachel B. Gross and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2022 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The American Jewish Philanthropic Complex written by Lila Corwin Berman and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2022-08-30 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first comprehensive history of American Jewish philanthropy and its influence on democracy and capitalism For years, American Jewish philanthropy has been celebrated as the proudest product of Jewish endeavors in the United States, its virtues extending from the local to the global, the Jewish to the non-Jewish, and modest donations to vast endowments. Yet, as Lila Corwin Berman illuminates in The American Jewish Philanthropic Complex, the history of American Jewish philanthropy reveals the far more complicated reality of changing and uneasy relationships among philanthropy, democracy, and capitalism. With a fresh eye and lucid prose, and relying on previously untapped sources, Berman shows that from its nineteenth-century roots to its apex in the late twentieth century, the American Jewish philanthropic complex tied Jewish institutions to the American state. The government’s regulatory efforts—most importantly, tax policies—situated philanthropy at the core of its experiments to maintain the public good without trammeling on the private freedoms of individuals. Jewish philanthropic institutions and leaders gained financial strength, political influence, and state protections within this framework. However, over time, the vast inequalities in resource distribution that marked American state policy became inseparable from philanthropic practice. By the turn of the millennium, Jewish philanthropic institutions reflected the state’s growing investment in capitalism against democratic interests. But well before that, Jewish philanthropy had already entered into a tight relationship with the governing forces of American life, reinforcing and even transforming the nation’s laws and policies. The American Jewish Philanthropic Complex uncovers how capitalism and private interests came to command authority over the public good, in Jewish life and beyond.

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 Jewish in America written by Sara Blair and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Jewish culture in America is creating a genuinely new archive---a powerful admixture of texts old and new, Jewish and gentile, sacred and secular, on which our writers and critics offer creative commentary and to which they make compelling response. Shaped in the American crucible of race and ethnicity, pushed and pulled by the American traditions of ahistorical and individualist thinking, empowered by a powerful sacramental and hermeneutic tradition yet challenged by that tradition's stunning variety of inflections, impelled to furious response by world crisis, these writers testify not only to the anguishing and joyous complexity of being Jewish in America, but the creative energies such multiplicity generates." -From the Introduction This rare and original work of cultural studies offers uncommon and engaging perspectives-as well as provocative and humorous insights-on what it means to be Jewish in America. Jewish in America features poetry, art, essays, and stories from an impressive and respected list of contributors, including among others Stephen Greenblatt, Richard Kostelanetz, Jacqueline Osherow, Robert Pinsky, Sharon Pomerantz, Nancy Reisman, Grace Schulman, Louis Simpson, Alisa Solomon, and Stephen J. Whitfield. In addition to pieces by some of the country's leading writers, the book features a stunning gallery of original photographs that transport the viewer from the crowded Coney Island beaches of the 1940s to the landscapes of Oaxaca, Mexico in the 1990s.