AMERICAN JEWISH HISTORY最新文献

{"title":"Speaking Yiddish to Chickens: Holocaust Survivors on South Jersey Poultry Farms by Seth Stern (review)","authors":"Marjorie N. Feld","doi":"10.1353/ajh.2023.a926218","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ajh.2023.a926218","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Speaking Yiddish to Chickens: Holocaust Survivors on South Jersey Poultry Farms</em> by Seth Stern <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Marjorie N. Feld (bio) </li> </ul> <em>Speaking Yiddish to Chickens: Holocaust Survivors on South Jersey Poultry Farms</em>. By Seth Stern. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2023. x + 313 pp. <p><em>Speaking Yiddish to Chickens: Holocaust Survivors on South Jersey Poultry Farms</em> leads with an author's note by Seth Stern, a legal journalist <strong>[End Page 802]</strong> and editor at Bloomberg Industry Group, informing readers that his book began with a \"series of conversations that I had with my grandmother\" (ix). Stern's familial connection is central to this little-known chapter of American and American Jewish history, a period when Holocaust survivors—including his grandparents—settled in Vineland, New Jersey, and worked as poultry farmers striving to rebuild their lives in the United States. These were a few thousand of the 140,000 survivors who arrived in the United States after World War II, and they were known as Grine, \"a play on the Yiddish word for greenhorn\" (2).</p> <p>Based on oral histories and thorough archival research, Stern's book simultaneously captures individual lives and broader social currents. He tells the story of the Grine as but one chapter in the history of Jewish farming, which stretched back into the nineteenth century. It is the story, too, of Jewish philanthropic leaders who sought to demonstrate the potential social and economic contributions of Jewish immigrants by setting them up in an industry that required little startup capital. Poultry farming might help reduce the potential for xenophobia in crowded cities, these leaders thought, as \"every refugee placed on a farm was one less Jew who could be accused of taking an American's job\" (24).</p> <p>The story of the Grine intersects with the history of the transition from small-scale to industrial agriculture in the United States. Into the 1960s, these farmers boosted New Jersey's poultry industry, the \"top agricultural enterprise\" in the Garden State (166). The industry was gradually eclipsed by the large-scale farming and huge grocery stores that are the foundation of our (unsustainable) food system today.</p> <p>Finally, as the title suggests, this is also a story of Yiddish language and culture. \"Just as survivors in New York helped breathe new life into Yiddish theater,\" Stern writes, \"the Grine in Vineland helped revive Yiddish culture in an area\" where many had forgotten the language (156). There were, predictably, tensions with non-Jews and also with Jews who had lived in the U.S. for generations. Rural settlements such as the poultry farms in Vineland served as a refuge for survivors, \"a physical and emotional buffer that allowed them to avoid uncomfortable interac","PeriodicalId":43104,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN JEWISH HISTORY","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2024-05-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140932082","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Funny, You Don't Look Funny: Judaism and Humor from the Silent Generation to Millennials by Jennifer Caplan (review)","authors":"Rachel B. Gross","doi":"10.1353/ajh.2023.a926214","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ajh.2023.a926214","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Funny, You Don't Look Funny: Judaism and Humor from the Silent Generation to Millennials</em> by Jennifer Caplan <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Rachel B. Gross (bio) </li> </ul> <em>Funny, You Don't Look Funny: Judaism and Humor from the Silent Generation to Millennials</em>. By Jennifer Caplan. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2023. x + 175. <p>In <em>Funny, You Don't Look Funny</em>, Jennifer Caplan skillfully applies literary theorist Bill Brown's Thing theory to American Jewish satire. A Thing, in Brown's usage, is \"something broken, abandoned, or no longer useful,\" and Caplan traces how American Jewish writers and filmmakers represent Judaism and Jewishness as vital and meaningful, or as \"dead and dysfunctional\" (3). Without resorting to essentialism, Caplan draws a valuable distinction between humorists' treatment of Judaism, the religion of ritual and text, and Jews themselves. Her application of Thing theory in this way is a powerful new framework for analyzing American Jewish writers and creators that helps scholars—and hopefully American Jews themselves—move beyond tired Jewish communal conversations about pop culture, such as asking whether certain creators are \"good for the Jews\" or even how Jewish or how religious their creations are. Fundamentally, Caplan moves us away from declensionist views of American Jewish \"assimilation\" into a generic Protestant America. Instead, her analysis illuminates which aspects of American Jewish traditions and life humorists see as invigorative and which bear the brunt of their biting critiques.</p> <p>In contrast to several other theorists of Jewish humor, Caplan rightfully refuses any one model of Jewish humor that transcends time and space. In order to do so, <em>Funny, You Don't Look Funny</em> is organized around generational groups of humorists. While Caplan acknowledges that defining a generation is, at best, a slippery task, this structure helps her trace change over time. She finds Silent Generation humorists (Woody Allen, Joseph Heller, Philip Roth, and Bernard Malamud) caustically disparaging of Jewish sacred texts and rituals while protecting the amorphous concept of \"Jewish peoplehood.\" Crucially, they have a profound understanding of the Judaism they Thingified; Caplan compellingly describes Allen and Heller's fiction as \"midrash for atheists.\" Their stories ridicule scripture, faith, and religious practice but, in focusing on \"the human stories behind the religious texts and traditions,\" they evince \"a desire to preserve, and even protect, the Jewish people\" (41). Like blasphemy, satire is not a lack of engagement but rather a certain kind of deep, if <strong>[End Page 793]</strong> ultimately dismissive, encounter with the object of its scorn. \"You cannot properly make something a Thing if you do not fully understand it,\" Caplan ","PeriodicalId":43104,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN JEWISH HISTORY","volume":"28 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2024-05-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140932083","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Contributors","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/ajh.2023.a926208","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ajh.2023.a926208","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> Contributors <!-- /html_title --></li> </ul> <p><strong>John M. Dixon</strong> is associate professor of history at the College of Staten Island and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. A historian of colonial New York and the Atlantic world, and a former fellow of New York University's Goldstein-Goren Center for American Jewish History, he is currently completing a history of Jews in the early modern Americas.</p> <p><strong>Eric Eisner</strong> is a PhD student in the Johns Hopkins University Department of History. He has a BA from the University of Pennsylvania, an MPhil in American History from the University of Cambridge, and a JD from Yale Law School. His work has appeared in the <em>Journal of Religious History, Southern Jewish History, Law and History Review</em>, and the <em>Yale Law Journal</em>.</p> <p><strong>David Austin Walsh</strong> is a postdoctoral associate at the Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism and a College Fellow at the University of Virginia. He is the author of <em>Taking America Back: The Conservative Movement and the Far Right</em>, which will be published in 2024 by Yale University Press.</p> <p><strong>Beth S. Wenger</strong> is Moritz and Josephine Berg Professor of History and associate dean for graduate studies in the School of Arts & Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of <em>History Lessons: The Creation of American Jewish Heritage</em> (Princeton University Press, 2010); <em>New York Jews and the Great Depression: Uncertain Promise</em>; and <em>The Jewish Americans: Three Centuries of Jewish Voices in America</em>. Wenger has worked on numerous public history projects, including museum exhibitions and documentary films.</p> <p><strong>Public History Review</strong></p> <p><strong>Rebecca Rossen</strong> is associate professor in the performance as public practice program in the department of theatre and dance at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of <em>Dancing Jewish: Jewish Identity in American Modern and Postmodern Dance</em> (Oxford University Press, 2014), which won the Oscar G. Brockett Prize for excellence in dance scholarship.</p> <p><strong>Book Reviews</strong></p> <p><strong>Marjorie N. Feld</strong> is professor of history at Babson College, where she teaches courses on US labor and gender history, food justice, and sustainability. Her forthcoming book is titled <em>Threshold of Dissent: A History of American Jewish Critics of Zionism</em>. <strong>[End Page ix]</strong></p> <p><strong>David A. Gerber</strong> is professor emeritus at the University of Buffalo (SUNY). He is the author of, among other titles, <em>American Immigration: A Very Short Introduction</em> (Oxford University Press, 2011) and, with Alan Kraut, <em>Ethnic Historians and the Mainstream: Shaping America's Immigration Story</em> (Rutgers U","PeriodicalId":43104,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN JEWISH HISTORY","volume":"58 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2024-05-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140931994","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Remarks on the Friedman Medal","authors":"Beth S. Wenger","doi":"10.1353/ajh.2023.a926212","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ajh.2023.a926212","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> Remarks on the Friedman Medal <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Beth S. Wenger (bio) </li> </ul> <p><strong>2022 Lee Max Friedman Medal: Dr. Beth Wenger</strong></p> <p>The Lee Max Friedman Medal, established in memory of a past president of the American Jewish Historical Society, is awarded biennially to a scholar of American Jewish Studies for excellence in research and teaching, and for outstanding service to the field.</p> <p>Beth Wenger, the Moritz and Josephine Berg Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania, was the recipient of this award in 2022. Dr. Wenger ranks among the leading historians of American Jews; her outstanding scholarship is matched by her leadership in several influential initiatives designed to disseminate knowledge of American Jewish history to a broad public. In addition to important books and articles about American Jewish life during the Great Depression, Jewish women and gender, and the formation of American Jewish historical consciousness, Wenger was one of the founding historians who created the core exhibition at the Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History. She has also reached a considerable audience as author of <em>The Jewish Americans: Three Centuries of Jewish Voices in America</em>, the companion publication to the 2008 PBS documentary series.</p> <p>Wenger has displayed an almost peerless commitment to building and diversifying the field of American Jewish history. At her home academic institution, she served as the Jewish Studies Program's director for nearly a decade. She participated in the development of thematic fellowship years at Penn's Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies and at the University of Michigan's Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies. She has served as the chair of the Center for Jewish History's Academic Advisory Council, and as co-chair of the Jewish Women's Caucus of the Association for Jewish Studies. Finally, Wenger has contributed to the vitality of the American Jewish Historical Society, serving as the chair of its Academic Council from 2010-2014 and organizing two of its biennial conferences.</p> <p>Beth Wenger accepted the Friedman Medal at the 2022 Biennial Scholars Conference in American Jewish History, which was held that year at Tulane University in New Orleans. <em>American Jewish History</em> is please to print her remarks from that event. <strong>[End Page 781]</strong></p> <p>The following is a list of past awardees of the Lee Max Friedman Medal:</p> <table frame=\"void\" rules=\"none\"> <tr> <td align=\"left\">Bernard Wax</td> <td align=\"left\">1992</td> </tr> <tr> <td align=\"left\">Henry L. Feingold</td> <td align=\"left\">1994</td> </tr> <tr> <td align=\"left\">Moses Rischin</td> <td align=\"left\">1995</td> </tr> <tr> <td align=\"left\">Arthur Goren</td> <td align=\"left\">2000</td> </tr> <tr> <td align=\"left\">Jeffrey S. Gurock and ","PeriodicalId":43104,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN JEWISH HISTORY","volume":"12 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2024-05-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140932090","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Jews of Summer: Summer Camps and Jewish Culture in Postwar America by Sandra Fox (review)","authors":"David A. Gerber","doi":"10.1353/ajh.2023.a926215","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ajh.2023.a926215","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>The Jews of Summer: Summer Camps and Jewish Culture in Postwar America</em> by Sandra Fox <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> David A. Gerber (bio) </li> </ul> <em>The Jews of Summer: Summer Camps and Jewish Culture in Postwar America</em>. By Sandra Fox. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2023. xii + 285pp. <p>Informed by personal experience as a camper and extensive research at all levels on the subject of Jewish summer camps, Sandra Fox has written an engaging book on the classic era of away-from-home Jewish summer camping that combines skillful analysis and intense examination of the post-World War II American Jewish experience. The context juxtaposes major threads in postwar Jewish and general American history: the effort to derive meaning from the Holocaust; the birth and ongoing difficulties surrounding the state of Israel; assimilation, growing secularism, and intermarriage; and participation in and unprecedented access to opportunity and consumer culture. Youth cultures founded upon mass entertainments, pop music, and clothing and personal grooming styles are an essential part of the story. Fox makes extensive use of social science, whether conceived within the Jewish communal or the academic worlds, to understand both the functions of camping for children and adolescents and the efforts of adults to bend the camping experience toward group social, political, and cultural ends. Readers will not be surprised to learn that in the light of theories of play and the ever-urgent <strong>[End Page 795]</strong> nature of Jewish group experience, play has been conceived not only as fun, but seriously purposeful. Camp directors and communal leaders sought to use the summer months to make young Jews more intensely Jewish amid the problematic circumstances of the postwar American diaspora. With two months, usually, in contrast to the week or two of Christian bible camps, Jewish camping seemed to be saying the entire summer was needed to achieve the purposes of salvage, reconstitution, reformation and celebration.</p> <p>Fox focuses on four types of postwar Jewish camps, coming from distinctive cultural and ideological directions. Descended from the liberationist passions conceived in nineteenth century Europe, Zionist camps had a prewar history but took on an especially vigorous existence after 1948. They fostered intense identification with Israel through furthering Hebrew language learning, loyalty to the Jewish homeland, and a muscular pioneering ethos. Yiddish culture camps, also with prewar origins in varieties of Jewish leftism and the culture of Eastern European Yiddishkeit, entered the postwar era with a special sense of urgency because of the destruction of their Old World demographic, political, and institutional foundations. Neither the ideologically inspired Zionist nor Yiddish camps were ","PeriodicalId":43104,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN JEWISH HISTORY","volume":"43 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2024-05-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140932081","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Most Generous, Disinterested, and Philanthropic Motives: Race and the 1826 Maryland Jew Bill","authors":"Eric Eisner","doi":"10.1353/ajh.2023.a926211","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ajh.2023.a926211","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> The Most Generous, Disinterested, and Philanthropic Motives:<span>Race and the 1826 Maryland Jew Bill<sup>1</sup></span> <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Eric Eisner (bio) </li> </ul> <p>In the early nineteenth century, the Jewish elite in Baltimore grew increasingly frustrated with the official religious discrimination that hindered their political and civic advancement, and the political elite of the state increasingly came to view this species of discrimination as out of step with the spirit of the times. J. W. D. Worthington informed the 1824 session of the Maryland House of Delegates that when Samuel Etting, the son of Solomon Etting, a wealthy Baltimore Jew, wanted to study law, his father, \"with pain in his heart and tears in his eyes, told him that he could not.\"<sup>2</sup> The <em>Baltimore Patriot</em> reported that a volunteer corps of riflemen elected Benjamin Cohen to be its captain. Cohen could not accept, and the militia company agreed to have no captain and to be commanded by a lieutenant instead.<sup>3</sup> Thomas Jefferson appointed Solomon's brother, Reuben Etting, to serve as the United States marshal for the State of Maryland.<sup>4</sup> But Reuben Etting was not eligible to be a lawyer, a captain in the state militia, a city councilman, or a member of a jury. He was Jewish, and Maryland did not allow Jews to hold government office or positions of public trust.<sup>5</sup> Worthington, in his speech to the Maryland legislature, asked in indignation, \"Is not this an outrage on the age?\"<sup>6</sup></p> <p>American states redrew the boundaries of political participation in the early nineteenth century. Before independence, most colonies restricted the right to vote and hold office to Christian men who owned <strong>[End Page 757]</strong> property. The limited egalitarian spirit of the early republic swept away most religious restrictions on suffrage and weakened or eliminated many property requirements, but, as the nineteenth century dawned, property qualifications remained common, and several states continued to impose religious tests for public office. An ideology of White male citizenship advanced the new proposition that race and gender should be the sole determinants of political rights—a change that that politically empowered poor White men and religious minorities at the expense of free Black men with property. Throughout the antebellum period, conservative forces that defended the religious test and the property qualification proved increasingly powerless to stem the tide as the foundations of political rights shifted. The controversies over the property qualification, free Black rights, and the religious test collided dramatically in Maryland, particularly in the years-long and bitterly fought contest over a piece of legislation that supporters and opponents alike referred to as the \"Jew Bill.\"<s","PeriodicalId":43104,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN JEWISH HISTORY","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2024-05-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140932399","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Rethinking American Jewish Emancipation: New Views on George Washington's Newport Letter","authors":"John M. Dixon","doi":"10.1353/ajh.2023.a926210","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ajh.2023.a926210","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> Rethinking American Jewish Emancipation:<span>New Views on George Washington's Newport Letter<sup>1</sup></span> <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> John M. Dixon (bio) </li> </ul> <p>The idea that Jews overcame civil and political disabilities to achieve full citizenship status in the early United States is a central organizing principle of American Jewish historiography. Convention holds that North American Jews progressed steadily toward legal equality after first arriving in New Netherland in 1654. They incrementally earned de facto and de jure civil rights in Dutch, English, and British North America by lobbying authorities on both sides of the Atlantic, fighting court cases, and through their everyday practices. These rights allowed residency, a range of occupations, open religious worship, property ownership, and legal status in courts as witnesses and plaintiffs. Still, many colonial North American Jews were prohibited from holding public office and voting.<sup>2</sup> Political equality therefore arrived in North America only after the Revolution, with the federal Constitution of 1787, ratification of the Bill of Rights in 1791, and various constitutional developments at the state level delivering full citizenship to most Jewish adult men in the United States by the 1830s. In standard American Jewish historiography, this achievement of civil and political rights functions as a major teleological outcome of the pre-1840 period.<sup>3</sup></p> <p>A well-established sequence of primary sources undergirds this conventional narrative of American Jewish emancipation.<sup>4</sup> Starting with <strong>[End Page 731]</strong> mid–seventeenth-century documents such as the 1655 petition of Amsterdam Jewish leaders to the Dutch West India Company that prevented an expulsion of Jews from New Netherland and a successful 1657 Jewish request for burgher rights in New Amsterdam, the sequence runs through New York's 1777 state constitution to Maryland's 1826 \"Jew Bill,\" or \"Act to extend to the sect of people professing the Jewish religion, the same rights and privileges enjoyed by Christians.\"<sup>5</sup> President George Washington's 1790 letter to the Jews of Newport, Rhode Island stands out as the major highlight of the series and firmly attaches the history of American Jewish emancipation to that of the United States. A quotable founding-era declaration of religious freedom and Jewish inclusion, it contains what is surely the most famous sentence in early American Jewish history: \"For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.\"<sup>6</sup></p> <p>After going unquestioned for decades, this traditional understanding of ","PeriodicalId":43104,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN JEWISH HISTORY","volume":"62 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2024-05-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140932089","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Zelda Popkin: The Life and Times of an American Jewish Woman Writer by Jeremy D. Popkin (review)","authors":"Jessica Kirzane","doi":"10.1353/ajh.2023.a926216","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ajh.2023.a926216","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Zelda Popkin: The Life and Times of an American Jewish Woman Writer</em> by Jeremy D. Popkin <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Jessica Kirzane (bio) </li> </ul> <em>Zelda Popkin: The Life and Times of an American Jewish Woman Writer</em>. By Jeremy D. Popkin. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2023. xx + 277 pp. <p>Zelda Popkin is an author whose writing should be recognized as having major significance for American Jewish literary studies, gender studies, and beyond. As her biographer Jeremy D. Popkin explains, her writing was groundbreaking for its attention to major events in twentieth-century Jewish life, combining her early journalistic experience with her role as a popular middlebrow novelist, and is further distinguished by its dogged insistence on centering women's perspectives—especially those that corresponded closely to the experiences of the author herself.</p> <p>Popkin's biography offers descriptions of several of Zelda Popkin's novels as well as archival evidence that describes a broader context for the author herself, including her approach to work and to parenting. Her mid-century detective novels featuring female protagonist Mary Carner showcased a woman's ingenuity early in the inception of the popular genre. Her World War II novel <em>The Journey Home</em> (1945) was a bestseller significant for exploring the experiences not only of combat veterans but also of civilian women. Her <em>Small Victory</em> (1947) was a very early depiction of European Holocaust survivors in DP camps, and she continued to engage with the subject of the Holocaust and Jewish and life more broadly. Her novel <em>Quiet Street</em> (1951), a very early novel about the creation of the State of Israel, was an assessment of Jewish characters not as the romanticized, exotic figures of Leon Uris's <em>Exodus</em>, but as everyday men and women who exhibited courage and toughness both in fighting and in everyday life during extraordinary circumstances. Her novel <em>Herman Had Two Daughters</em> (1968) a multigenerational saga of American Jewish life, depicted Jewish women as independent individuals and was singular in its critique of American Jewish institutions and their relationship to philanthropy.</p> <p>Jeremy D. Popkin demonstrates that Zelda Popkin's writing and work covered a wide swath of American Jewish history and illustrates with particularity and intimacy some of the trends that writers of broader histories have explained on a large-scale level, such as changing roles of women in the workplace and domestic life and American Jewish perspectives on the Holocaust and Israel. Additionally, scholars working in the field of Jewish organizational life will find much to explore in his descriptions of the professional lives of Zelda and her husband Louis Popkin as public relations professionals wor","PeriodicalId":43104,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN JEWISH HISTORY","volume":"156 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2024-05-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140932080","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"100 Years of Sephardic Los Angeles (review)","authors":"Ellen Eisenberg","doi":"10.1353/ajh.2023.a920594","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ajh.2023.a920594","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>100 Years of Sephardic Los Angeles</em> <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Ellen Eisenberg (bio) </li> </ul> <em>100 Years of Sephardic Los Angeles</em>, A Project of the UCLA Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies ( 2020), sephardiclosangeles.org. <p>Showcasing \"the vibrancy of Sephardic culture in the City of Angels, and…its astonishing diversity, past and present,\" the two dozen essays featured in <em>100 Years of Sephardic Los Angeles</em> disrupt traditional tropes of American Jewish history. Those who associate Sephardim principally with colonial America will discover recent waves of Sephardic immigrants: early twentieth-century Ottomans; postwar refugees from the Balkans, Greece, and Italy; and late twentieth-century Middle Easterners and North Africans. The project also disrupts New York–centric tropes by demonstrating Los Angeles's significance as a Jewish immigrant center and pushing back on the \"Ashkenazi story\" to \"rewrite the Jewish history of Los Angeles.\"</p> <p>Co-curators Sarah Abrevaya Stein and Caroline Luce define \"Sephardic\" broadly on the \"Welcome\" page to include not only descendants of Spanish Jews scattered by the 1492 expulsion, but also natives of North Africa and the Middle East. Prioritizing personal and familial over institutional stories, the essays reveal how these communities \"worked and relaxed, socialized and served their city, prayed and performed, came to understand themselves as Jews, and as Angelenos.\" The project asks how \"these two cultural forces—one Jewish, Mediterranean and Middle Eastern and the other the global crossroads of Southern California—shaped one another.\" The co-curators encourage \"meandering\" through essays organized under seven overlapping themes: \"Journeys,\" \"Landscapes,\" \"Leisure,\" \"Style,\" \"Sounds,\" \"Practices,\" and \"Foundations.\" Thus, one might find Saba Soomekh's \"To Be an Iranian Jewish Bride,\" directly from the home page or through the \"Journeys,\" \"Practices,\" or \"Styles\" pages.</p> <p>Written by historians, linguists, anthropologists, ethnomusicologists, curators, and artists, as well as scholars of literature, religion, and, of course, Jewish and Sephardic studies, the essays range widely. Some combine scholarly expertise with personal connection. For example, Simone Salmon's \"Emily Sene's Sephardic Mixtape\" allows visitors to hear music from informal outdoor gatherings led by Salmon's great grandfather, Isaac Sene, and recorded by his wife, Emily, between the 1940s and the 1970s. Through these recordings, supplemented by more recent videos <strong>[End Page 689]</strong> of the author's Ladino ensemble, Salmon traces the journeys of people and music from Turkey to Cuba to New York to Los Angeles. Similarly, Regine Basha's \"Life of the Party\" draws on family traditions—and home movies—to construct \"a narrative archive of Iraqi Jewry ","PeriodicalId":43104,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN JEWISH HISTORY","volume":"12 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2024-02-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140003556","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The (Mis)representation of Sephardic Jews in American Jewish Historiography","authors":"Devin E. Naar","doi":"10.1353/ajh.2023.a920588","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ajh.2023.a920588","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> The (Mis)representation of Sephardic Jews in American Jewish Historiography <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Devin E. Naar (bio) </li> </ul> <p>Nearly seventy years ago, in 1954, a landmark American Jewish Historical Society (AJHS) conference commemorated the tricentennial of Jewish presence in North America. In his opening address, \"The Writing of American Jewish History,\" Salo Wittmayer Baron, who was the first professor of Jewish history at a US university (Columbia) and was then serving as AJHS's president, advanced a new vision for the field. Scholars, argued Baron, must move beyond apologetics and filiopietism to professionalize American Jewish history. To achieve this goal, Baron urged \"thorough investigation\" of sources in the main American Jewish languages among which he included not only Hebrew, Yiddish, and German, but also Spanish—a language of those colonial-era Jews whose arrival in 1654 the conference celebrated—and Ladino, the language of the majority of the Jews from the Ottoman Empire who arrived in the United States in the early twentieth century. Only through engagement with primary sources, he argued, would \"wiping out the memory of entire segments of American Jews\" be averted.<sup>1</sup></p> <p>By invoking both Spanish and Ladino, Baron alluded to a seeming paradox at the center of the field of Jewish history, including American Jewish history. Certain groups identified today as \"Sephardic Jews\"—medieval Spanish Jews as well as Spanish and Portuguese Jews and their descendants who migrated to Western Europe and the Americas in the early modern period (Western Sephardim)—have resided at the center of Jewish studies. In contrast, others often identified today as \"Sephardic Jews\"—Jews from the Ottoman Empire who spoke Ladino (Eastern <strong>[End Page 519]</strong> Sephardim), as well as other Jews from Muslim societies and other non-Ashkenazi Jews sometimes classified as Sephardim—have resided at the margins.<sup>2</sup> Sarah Abrevaya Stein refers to this dynamic as one that pits the \"Sephardic mystique\" against the \"Sephardic mistake,\" the latter imagining Jewish life since the seventeenth century in the Ottoman Empire and other Muslim societies as \"monolithic, static, tangential to the larger Jewish world, and of little interest to the scholar of Jewish history.\"<sup>3</sup></p> <p>A vast literature has developed around the allure and mystique of the first group of Sephardim that traces back to the founding of Jewish studies as an organized discipline during the nineteenth century in German-speaking lands.<sup>4</sup> To prove their worthiness, to combat antisemitism and claims that Jews were not European but merely the continent's internal \"Oriental,\" and to justify Jews' claims for civil and political rights, practitioners of <em>Wissenschaft des Judentums</em> elevated the Jews of medieval Spain—figur","PeriodicalId":43104,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN JEWISH HISTORY","volume":"2018 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2024-02-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140003856","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}