Winner of the 2009 National Jewish Book Award in American Jewish StudiesRecipient of the 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship in Humanities-Intellectual and Cultural HistoryIt has become an accepted truth: ...after World War II, American Jews chose to be silent about the mass murder of millions of their European brothers and sisters at the hands of the Nazis. In this compelling work, Hasia R. Diner shows the assumption of silence to be categorically false. Uncovering a rich and incredibly varied trove of remembrances - in song, literature, liturgy, public display, political activism, and hundreds of other forms - We Remember with Reverence and Love shows that publicly memorializing those who died in the Holocaust arose from a deep and powerful element of Jewish life in postwar America. Not only does she marshal enough evidence to dismantle the idea of American Jewish forgetfulness, she brings to life the moving and manifold ways that this widely diverse group paid tribute to the tragedy.Diner also offers a compelling new perspective on the 1960s and its potent legacy, by revealing how our typical understanding of the postwar years emerged from the cauldron of cultural divisions and campus battles a generation later. The student activists and new Jews of the 1960s who, in rebelling against the American Jewish world they had grown up in a world of remarkable affluence and broadening cultural possibilities created a flawed portrait of what their parents had, or rather, had not, done in the postwar years. This distorted legacy has been transformed by two generations of scholars, writers, rabbis, and Jewish community leaders into a taken-for-granted truth.
Since Peter Stuyvesant greeted with enmity the first group of Jews to arrive on the docks of New Amsterdam in 1654, Jews have entwined their fate and fortunes with that of the United States—a project ...marked by great struggle and great promise. What this interconnected destiny has meant for American Jews and how it has defined their experience among the world's Jews is fully chronicled in this work, a comprehensive and finely nuanced history of Jews in the United States from 1654 through the end of the past century. Hasia R. Diner traces Jewish participation in American history—from the communities that sent formal letters of greeting to George Washington; to the three thousand Jewish men who fought for the Confederacy and the ten thousand who fought in the Union army; to the Jewish activists who devoted themselves to the labor movement and the civil rights movement. Diner portrays this history as a constant process of negotiation, undertaken by ordinary Jews who wanted at one and the same time to be Jews and full Americans. Accordingly, Diner draws on both American and Jewish sources to explain the chronology of American Jewish history, the structure of its communal institutions, and the inner dynamism that propelled it. Her work documents the major developments of American Judaism—he economic, social, cultural, and political activities of the Jews who immigrated to and settled in America, as well as their descendants—and shows how these grew out of both a Jewish and an American context. She also demonstrates how the equally compelling urges to maintain Jewishness and to assimilate gave American Jewry the particular character that it retains to this day in all its subtlety and complexity.
American and Jewish historians have long shied away from the topic of Jews and business. Avoidance patterns grew in part from old, often negative stereotypes that linked Jews with money, and the ...perceived ease and regularity with which they found success with money, condemning Jews for their desires for wealth and their proclivities for turning a profit. A new, dauntless generation of historians, however, realizes that Jewish business has had and continues to have a profound impact on American culture and development, and patterns of immigrant Jewish exploration of business opportunities reflect internal, communal, Jewish-cultural structures and their relationship to the larger non-Jewish world. As such, they see the subject rightly as a vital and underexplored area of study. Doing Business in America: A Jewish History, edited by Hasia R. Diner, rises to the challenge of taking on the long-unspoken taboo subject, comprising leading scholars and exploring an array of key topics in this important and growing area of research.
Food mattered a great deal in Jewish history and in particular the reality that they adhered to a deeply embedded religious system which restricted what they could eat and with whom shaped their ...lives wherever they found themselves. Their relationship to food became complicated in two particular ways. Most Jews, for centuries, had made a living in itinerant trade, and they constantly had to deal with the need to procure for themselves ritually appropriate, that is, kosher food. So too food loomed large in the many migrations which defined their history, from the beginning of the Common Era and beyond. But the great Jewish migration of the long nineteenth century which brought about one-third of Europe's Jews to the new world, primarily to the United States, profoundly challenged their ability to obtain kosher food. In particular, the millions of Jewish men who as immigrants to new lands ventured out into the hinterlands as peddlers faced a food crisis. Wherever they went as peddlers they operated on a weekly basis and five nights out of seven had to sleep in their customers' homes, exposing them to the problem of what to eat. How they solved the dilemma between embracing the hospitality they found and the fact that none of their customers, all non-Jews, knew about kashrut, reflected much about their patterns of integration in their migration destination homes.
For much of the period of time when Kohler and his co-writer simon Wolf researched and wrote these two articles, which together ran up to more than 250 pages including hefty appendices of primary ...documents, the United states, because of its non-belligerent status and its geographic isolation suffered none of the disruption caused by the war. even after america's declaration of war and its soldiers went "over there," the atlantic provided americans with a safe space, removed from the ravages of the conflict. as such the Jews of the United states constituted the only sizable Jewish population in the world living in a land not marred by trenches, not in the path of armies on the move, not in danger of invasion. even england endured, from 1915 on, aerial bombing.
From the turn of the twentieth century through the 1940s and 1950s American Jews, particularly those who did not define themselves as religiously observant and obliged to maintain inherited, ...halakhically proscribed behaviors, engaged with and created new forms and formats which they understood to be Jewish, in both spirit and content.The scholars represented here consider such diverse media and matters as literature, theater, the Yiddish press, Yiddish radio, education and pedagogy, and the graphic arts.Spanning the ideological gamut from communists on the far left to the socialists and those who concerned themselves with the modernization of Judaism, these essays draw attention to the lack of a clear line between tradition and innovation.
This book tells the stories of three groups and their unique culinary dramas. Italian immigrants transformed the food of their upper classes and of sacred days into a generic "Italian" food. Irish ...immigrants diminished food as a marker of ethnicity. And East European Jews found that dietary restrictions jarred with America's boundless choices.
