Download or read book The Jews of the United States 1654 to 2000 written by Hasia R. Diner and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2006-05-30 with total page 476 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Annotation A history of Jews in American that is informed by the constant process of negotiation undertaken by ordinary Jews in their communities who wanted at one and the same time to be good Jews and full Americans.

Download or read book The Columbia History of Jews and Judaism in America written by Marc Lee Raphael and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2008-02-12 with total page 838 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first anthology in more than half a century to offer fresh insight into the history of Jews and Judaism in America. Beginning with six chronological survey essays, the collection builds with twelve topical essays focusing on a variety of important themes in the American Jewish and Judaic experience. The volume opens with early Jewish settlers (1654-1820), the expansion of Jewish life in America (1820-1901), the great wave of eastern European Jewish immigrants (1880-1924), the character of American Judaism between the two world wars, American Jewish life from the end of World War II to the Six-Day War, and the growth of Jews' influence and affluence. The second half of the book includes essays on the community of Orthodox Jews, the history of Jewish education in America, the rise of Jewish social clubs at the turn of the century, the history of southern and western Jewry, Jewish responses to Nazism and the Holocaust; feminism's confrontation with Judaism, and the eternal question of what defines American Jewish culture. The contributions of distinguished scholars seamlessly integrate recent scholarship. Endnotes provide the reader with access to the authors' research and sources. Comprehensive, original, and elegantly crafted, The Columbia History of Jews and Judaism in America not only introduces the student to this thrilling history but also provides new perspectives for the scholar. Contributors: Dianne Ashton (Rowan University), Mark K. Bauman (Atlanta Metropolitan College), Kimmy Caplan (Bar-Ilan University, Israel), Eli Faber (City University of New York), Eric L. Goldstein (University of Michigan), Jeffrey S. Gurock (Yeshiva University), Jenna Weissman Joselit (Princeton University), Melissa Klapper (Rowan University), Alan T. Levenson (Siegal College of Judaic Studies), Rafael Medoff (David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies), Pamela S. Nadell (American University), Riv-Ellen Prell (University of Minnesota), Linda S. Raphael (George Washington University), Jeffrey Shandler (Rutgers University), Michael E. Staub (City University of New York), William Toll (University of Oregon), Beth S. Wenger (University of Pennsylvania), Stephen J. Whitfield (Brandeis University)

Download or read book 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 642 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lewisohn's efforts would later bear fruit in the Jewish renewal movement of the next generation.

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 Jews in America written by Matthew B. Schwartz and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2019-08-08 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using a readable question-and-answer format, Jews in America: The First 500 Years presents the activities of Jews in America since the beginnings of European settlement. It tells something of the story of how Jews came to the “golden land” and what they have done here—men and women, scientists and athletes, soldiers and merchants, settlers and scholars. It is indeed a remarkable story.

Download or read book A Menorah for Athena written by Stephen Fredman and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2001-05 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first major Jewish poet in America and a key figure of the Objectivist movement, Charles Reznikoff was a crucial link between the generation of Pound and Williams, and the more radical modernists who followed in their wake. A Menorah for Athena, the first extended treatment of Reznikoff's work, appears at a time of renewed interest in his contribution to American poetry. Stephen Fredman illuminates the relationship of Jewish intellectuals to modernity through a close look at Reznikoff's life and writing. He shows that when we regard the Objectivists as modern Jewish poets, we can see more clearly their distinctiveness as modernists and the reasons for their profound impact upon later poets, such as Allen Ginsberg and Charles Bernstein. Fredman also argues that to understand Reznikoff's work more completely, we must see it in the context of early, nonsectarian attempts to make the study of Jewish culture a force in the construction of a more pluralistic society. According to Fredman, then, the indelible images in Reznikoff's poetry open a window onto the vexed but ultimately successful entry of Jewish immigrants and their children into the mainstream of American intellectual life.

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 555 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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. In fifteen engaging essays, Jonathan D. Sarna investigates the many facets of the Jewish-American encounter--what Jews have borrowed from their surroundings, what they have resisted, what they have synthesized, and what they have subverted. Part I surveys how Jews first worked to reconcile Judaism with the country's new democratic ethos and to reconcile their faith-based culture with local metropolitan cultures. Part II analyzes religio-cultural initiatives, many spearheaded by women, and the ongoing tensions between Jewish scholars (who pore over traditional Jewish sources) and activists (who are concerned with applying them). Part III appraises Jewish-Christian relations: "collisions" within the public square and over church-state separation. Originally written over the span of forty years, many of these essays are considered classics in the field, and several remain fixtures of American Jewish history syllabi. Others appeared in fairly obscure venues and will be discovered here anew. Together, these essays--newly updated for this volume--cull the finest thinking of one of American Jewry's finest historians.

Download or read book Wrestling with Diversity written by Sanford Levinson and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2003-10-27 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIVA major legal scholar and author writes on how to honor sociiety’s desire to further diversity legally and ethically./div

Download or read book American Guy written by Saul Levmore and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2014 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This text examines American norms of masculinity and their role in the law, with essays from legal academics, literary scholars, and judges. Together, these papers reinvigorate the law-and-literature movement by bringing a range of methodological and disciplinary perspectives to bear on the complex interactions of masculinity with both law and literature - ultimately shedding light on all three.

Download or read book Anglophone Jewish Literature written by Axel Stähler and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2007-09-14 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: English has become the major language of contemporary Jewish literature. This book shows the transnational character of that literature and how traditional viewpoints need to be reassessed.

Download or read book Death of a Nation written by David W. Noble and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the 1940s, American thought experienced a cataclysmic paradigm shift. Before then, national ideology was shaped by American exceptionalism and bourgeois nationalism: elites saw themselves as the children of a homogeneous nation standing outside the history and culture of the Old World. This view repressed the cultures of those who did not fit the elite vision: people of color, Catholics, Jews, and immigrants. David W. Noble, a preeminent figure in American studies, inherited this ideology. However, like many who entered the field in the 1940s, he rejected the ideals of his intellectual predecessors and sought a new, multicultural, postnational scholarship. Throughout his career, Noble has examined this rupture in American intellectual life. In Death of a Nation, he presents the culmination of decades of thought in a sweeping treatise on the shaping of contemporary American studies and an eloquent summation of his distinguished career. Exploring the roots of American exceptionalism, Noble demonstrates that it was a doomed ideology. Capitalists who believed in a bounded nationalism also depended on a boundless, international marketplace. This contradiction was inherently unstable, and the belief in a unified national landscape exploded in World War II. The rupture provided an opening for alternative narratives as class, ethnicity, race, and region were reclaimed as part of the nation's history. Noble traces the effects of this shift among scholars and artists, and shows how even today they struggle to imagine an alternative post-national narrative and seek the meaning of local and national cultures in an increasingly transnational world. While Noble illustrates the challenges thatthe paradigm shift created, he also suggests solutions that will help scholars avoid romanticized and reductive approaches toward the study of American culture in the future.

Download or read book The Soul of the American University written by George M. Marsden and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1994 with total page 482 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores the decline in religious influence in American universities, discussing why this transformation has occurred.

Download or read book Constructing Corporate America written by Kenneth Lipartito and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2004-05-27 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why and how has the business corporation come to exert such a powerful influence on American society? The essays here take up this question, offering a fresh perspective on the ways in which the business corporation has assumed an enduring place in the modern capitalist economy, and how it has affected American society, culture and politics over the past two centuries. The authors challenge standard assumptions about the business corporation's emergence and performance in the United States over the past two centuries. Reviewing in depth the different theoretical and historiographical traditions that have treated the corporation, the volume seeks a new departure that can more fully explain this crucial institution of capitalism. Rejecting assertions that the corporation is dead, the essays show that in fact it has survived and even thrived down to the present in part because of the ways in which it has related to its social, political and cultural environmental. In doing so, the book breaks with older explanations ground in technology and economics, and treats the corporation for the first time as a fully social institution. Drawing on a variety of social theories and approaches, the essays help to point the way toward future studies of this powerful and enduring institution, offering a new periodization and a new set of question for scholars to explore. The range of essays engages the legal and political position of the corporation, the ways in which the corporation has been shaped by and shaped American culture, the controversies over corporate regulation and corporate power, and the efforts of minority and disadvantaged groups to gain access to the resources and opportunities that corporations control.

Download or read book The Temple of Culture written by Jonathan Freedman and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2000-02-24 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the beginning of modern intellectual history to the culture wars of the present day, the experience of assimilating Jews and the idiom of "culture" have been fundamentally intertwined with each other. Freedman's book begins by looking at images of the stereotypical Jew in the literary culture of nineteenth- and twentieth-century England and America, and then considers the efforts on the part of Jewish critics and intellectuals to counter this image in the public sphere. It explores the unexpected parallels and ironic reversals between a cultural dispensation that had ambivalent responses to Jews and Jews who became exponents of that very tradition.

Download or read book Science Democracy and the American University written by Andrew Jewett and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-10-29 with total page 415 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A reinterpretation of the secularization of American culture, focusing on the political views of natural and social scientists from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Download or read book Jews and the Law written by Ari Mermelstein and published by Quid Pro Books. This book was released on 2014-06-10 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jews are a people of law, and law defines who the Jewish people are and what they believe. This anthology engages with the growing complexity of what it is to be Jewish — and, more problematically, what it means to be at once Jewish and participate in secular legal systems as lawyers, judges, legal thinkers, civil rights advocates, and teachers. The essays in this book trace the history and chart the sociology of the Jewish legal profession over time, revealing new stories and dimensions of this significant aspect of the American Jewish experience and at the same time exploring the impact of Jewish lawyers and law firms on American legal practice. “This superb collection reveals what an older focus on assimilation obscured. Jewish lawyers wanted to ‘make it,’ but they also wanted to make law and the legal profession different and better. These fascinating essays show how, despite considerable obstacles, they succeeded.” — Daniel R. Ernst Professor of Law, Georgetown University Law Center Author of Tocqueville’s Nightmare: The Administrative State Emerges in America, 1900-1940 “This fascinating collection of essays by distinguished scholars illuminates the distinctive and intricate relationship between Jews and law. Exploring the various roles of Jewish lawyers in the United States, Germany, and Israel, they reveal how the practice of law has variously expressed, reinforced, or muted Jewish identity as lawyers demonstrated their commitments to the public interest, social justice, Jewish tradition, or personal ambition. Any student of law, lawyers, or Jewish values will be engaged by the questions asked and answered.” — Jerold S. Auerbach Professor Emeritus of History, Wellesley College Author of Unequal Justice and Rabbis and Lawyers

Download or read book Antisemitism in America written by Leonard Dinnerstein and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1995-11-02 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is antisemitism on the rise in America? Did the "hymietown" comment by Jesse Jackson and the Crown Heights riot signal a resurgence of antisemitism among blacks? The surprising answer to both questions, according to Leonard Dinnerstein, is no--Jews have never been more at home in America. But what we are seeing today, he writes, are the well-publicized results of a long tradition of prejudice, suspicion, and hatred against Jews--the direct product of the Christian teachings underlying so much of America's national heritage. In Antisemitism in America, Leonard Dinnerstein provides a landmark work--the first comprehensive history of prejudice against Jews in the United States, from colonial times to the present. His richly documented book traces American antisemitism from its roots in the dawn of the Christian era and arrival of the first European settlers, to its peak during World War II and its present day permutations--with separate chapters on antisemititsm in the South and among African-Americans, showing that prejudice among both whites and blacks flowed from the same stream of Southern evangelical Christianity. He shows, for example, that non-Christians were excluded from voting (in Rhode Island until 1842, North Carolina until 1868, and in New Hampshire until 1877), and demonstrates how the Civil War brought a new wave of antisemitism as both sides assumed that Jews supported with the enemy. We see how the decades that followed marked the emergence of a full-fledged antisemitic society, as Christian Americans excluded Jews from their social circles, and how antisemetic fervor climbed higher after the turn of the century, accelerated by eugenicists, fear of Bolshevism, the publications of Henry Ford, and the Depression. Dinnerstein goes on to explain that just before our entry into World War II, antisemitism reached a climax, as Father Coughlin attacked Jews over the airwaves (with the support of much of the Catholic clergy) and Charles Lindbergh delivered an openly antisemitic speech to an isolationist meeting. After the war, Dinnerstein tells us, with fresh economic opportunities and increased activities by civil rights advocates, antisemititsm went into sharp decline--though it frequently appeared in shockingly high places, including statements by Nixon and his Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. "It must also be emphasized," Dinnerstein writes, "that in no Christian country has antisemitism been weaker than it has been in the United States," with its traditions of tolerance, diversity, and a secular national government. This book, however, reveals in disturbing detail the resilience, and vehemence, of this ugly prejudice. Penetrating, authoritative, and frequently alarming, this is the definitive account of a plague that refuses to go away.