AMERICAN JEWISH HISTORY最新文献

{"title":"A Tale of Two Jewish Cemeteries: Preservation of Jewish Historic Heritage in the Caribbean","authors":"Ronald Gomes Casseres","doi":"10.1353/ajh.2023.a920590","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ajh.2023.a920590","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 --> A Tale of Two Jewish Cemeteries:<span>Preservation of Jewish Historic Heritage in the Caribbean</span> <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Ronald Gomes Casseres (bio) </li> </ul> <p>It has been 370 years since the first Jews settled in Curaçao. In the middle of the eighteenth century, the island's Jewish community was the largest in the Americas with some 1500 Jews.<sup>1</sup> In 1789, notwithstanding a decrease in the number of Jews due to emigration and based on more accurate census figures, Jews still represented 14% of the free population and 30% of the white population.<sup>2</sup> Unlike in other centers of Jewish life, however, over the course of these more than three and a half centuries, more than six thousand Jews were interred in just two cemeteries, the historic Beth Haim Bleinheim and the contemporary Beth Haim Berg Altena.<sup>3</sup> Study of the tombs concentrated in Curaçao's two Jewish burial sites thus provides a unique window onto the changing practices and customs of this Jewish community.</p> <p>Cemeteries tell us more than who lived, who died, and when they did so. A study of cemeteries, referred to as <em>bet ḥayim</em>s in Sephardic tradition, also tells us about how many of the interred lived their lives.<sup>4</sup> The sepulchral monuments and inscriptions of Curaçao's cemeteries provide a glimpse of Jewish life, including the religious and social practices of those <strong>[End Page 575]</strong> resting there. This article will show how burial and naming customs of the Jewish community evolved and to some extent became more secular in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.</p> <p>The historic Beth Haim Bleinheim, established in 1651, was the first Jewish cemetery in Curaçao. It lies in the former Joden Quartier, or Jewish quarter, where the first Jews settled and continued to live and own plantations well into the nineteenth century, located two miles from the capital and main city of the island, Willemstad. The establishment of a Reform <em>bet ḥayim</em> at Berg Altena two hundred years later in the outskirts of the city attests to the vehemence of the internal conflicts within this often contentious Jewish community. A third cemetery, also at Berg Altena, was founded in 1880, when Orthodox Jews moved to this neighborhood and wanted a new cemetery closer to where they resided. The two cemeteries at Berg Altena, the first part of a Reform community and the second an Orthodox community, were merged into one in the middle of the twentieth century.</p> <h2>BETH HAIM BLEINHEIM</h2> <p>Much has been written about the history of Curaçao's Jewish community and about the old cemetery, Beth Haim Bleinheim.<sup>5</sup> Isaac Emmanuel's <em>Precious Stones of the Jews of Curaçao</em> is the definitive study of the cemetery and the genealogy of Curaçao's Jews.<sup>6</sup> The book offers detailed descript","PeriodicalId":43104,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN JEWISH HISTORY","volume":"51 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2024-02-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140003742","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.a909918","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ajh.2023.a909918","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43104,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN JEWISH HISTORY","volume":"10 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135156731","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":"A Religious History of the American GI in World War II by G. Kurt Piehler (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/ajh.2023.a909916","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ajh.2023.a909916","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: A Religious History of the American GI in World War II by G. Kurt Piehler Michael Snape (bio) A Religious History of the American GI in World War II. By G. Kurt Piehler. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2021. xv + 393 pp. A substantial body of literature exists on religion and the American service man and woman during World War II. Besides the voluminous (and surprisingly wide-ranging) official histories of Army, Navy, and Air Force chaplaincy published in the 1950s, '60s and '70s, more recent (and independent) studies of American military chaplaincy in the 1940s have also emerged. These include Alex Grobman's Rekindling the Flame: American Jewish Chaplains and the Survivors of European Jewry, 1944–48 (1993), Donald F. Crosby's Battlefield Chaplains: Catholic Priests in World War II (1994), Lyle W. Dorsett's Serving God and Country: U.S. Military Chaplains in World War II (2012), and Ronit Y. Stahl's Enlisting Faith: How the Military Chaplaincy Shaped Religion and State in Modern America (2017). The connections of specific religious groups, [End Page 502] and of American civil religion, with the armed forces have also been examined in books such as Anne C. Loveland's American Evangelicals and the U.S. Military 1942–1993, (1997), Deborah Dash Moore's GI Jews: How World War II Changed a Generation (2004), my own God and Uncle Sam: Religion and America's Armed Forces in World War II (2015), and Jonathan H. Ebel's G.I. Messiahs: Soldiering, War, and American Civil Religion (2015). Given this extensive historiography, it is surprising that a thorough literature review is missing from this book, one that enables the reader to distinguish the distinctiveness of its contribution from what is already known, and even well established. For example, on the cover it is claimed that the book \"breaks new ground by recounting the armed forces' unprecedented efforts to meet the spiritual needs of the fifteen million men and women who served in World War II.\" However, this theme was the leitmotif of the chaplaincy histories published in the aftermath of the war and has been closely covered in subsequent studies. Similarly, the (qualified) triumph of the \"tri-faith vision\" of American religious life, especially when exemplified in America's armed forces, will come as no surprise to those acquainted with the existing literature. Even less will the findings of the post-war survey The American Soldier (1949), which demonstrated that prayer was an indispensable support to soldiers on the front line. However, as the founder of the Rutgers Oral History Archives and a diligent researcher among many other archives, Kurt G. Piehler has made a valuable contribution in extending and enhancing our understanding of the experience of minorities such as African Americans, Chinese Americans, Native Americans, women (especially members of the Women's Army Corps), and more marginal religious groups such as Christian Scientists. His discussion of the relationship b","PeriodicalId":43104,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN JEWISH HISTORY","volume":"2 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135156148","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":"American Shtetl: The Making of Kiryas Joel, A Hasidic Village in Upstate New York by Nomi M. Stolzenberg and David N. Myers (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/ajh.2023.a909917","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ajh.2023.a909917","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: American Shtetl: The Making of Kiryas Joel, A Hasidic Village in Upstate New York by Nomi M. Stolzenberg and David N. Myers Motti Inbari (bio) American Shtetl: The Making of Kiryas Joel, A Hasidic Village in Upstate New York. By Nomi M. Stolzenberg and David N. Myers. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021. xiii- 477 pp. Kiryas Joel is a village in upstate New York, about sixty miles from New York City. Established in 1974, the community has since expanded dramatically to include almost 30,000 residents, who are exclusively Satmar Hasidim. Over the years, the community has gone through intensive legal battles with its neighbors, the town of Monroe, and each other, as the community of Hasidim splintered and sued each other over the use of the property and public goods. American Shtetl: The Making of Kiryas Joel, A Hasidic Village in Upstate New York is mainly focused on discussing the litigation concerning this enclave. Some of these legal battles tested the separation of state and church, since religious laws governed this community. Some of these battles even reached the Supreme Court. The Satmar Hasidic movement was established by Rabbi Yoel Teitelbaum, a Holocaust survivor from Hungary, who landed in New York in 1946 and recreated a Hasidic court there. Teitelbaum was known for his extreme piety and anti-Zionist views. His radicalism attracted a small group of followers, mostly Holocaust survivors, and over the years, with an influx of newcomers and high fertility rates, Satmar has become a significant Hasidic sect, similar in size to that of Chabad. The Satmar Hasidim initially settled in Williamsburg, New York. Hasidic society is a voluntary entity, and in theory, its members are free to join or leave the community as they please. The absence of physical boundaries weakens the status of the Haredi community and the authority of its rabbis, since their followers can leave at any point. Moreover, the city is full of distractions and temptations. Teitelbaum was disturbed by this situation and sought to regain some of the coercive authority that the rabbis had enjoyed in the shtetls of Eastern Europe. As his community grew, the problem became more pronounced. Then came the idea to build a shtetl on the outskirts of New York. In 1973, land was purchased in the city of Monroe, and Teitelbaum himself moved to Kiryas Joel. In order to establish their presence, develop their resources, and expand their community, the Satmar leadership used sophisticated tools, including political lobbying at all local government levels and the state courts. Stolzenberg and Myers note that although the vision of establishing an isolated Orthodox enclave to distance the community from the American lifestyle was specific to the Satmar community, these tools are \"as American as apple pie\" (9). Assertive political and judicial behavior by ultra-Orthodox Jews concerned with protecting their insular communities [End Page 505] is not unique to Satmar. Aguda","PeriodicalId":43104,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN JEWISH HISTORY","volume":"23 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135156712","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":"This Was America 1865–1965: Unequal Citizens in the Segregated Republic by Gerd Korman (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/ajh.2023.a909920","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ajh.2023.a909920","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: This Was America 1865–1965: Unequal Citizens in the Segregated Republic by Gerd Korman Steven J. Diner (bio) Gerd Korman. This Was America 1865–1965: Unequal Citizens in the Segregated Republic. By Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2022. In this recently published book, Gerd Korman provides a rich narrative of the barriers faced by Jews and Blacks in the \"public square\" of American life from the Civil War to the 1960s civil rights movement. Korman, an emeritus professor at Cornell University, has written extensively about the impact of the Holocaust on Jews in Europe and America. In 2006, he published an autobiography, Nightmare's Fairy Tales, about his childhood years as a Jewish refugee in Europe during and after World War II. Korman focuses much of his narrative on what he calls \"ethnicking,\" the development of group peoplehood identities and how groups asserted these beginning in the 1960s. He devotes a great deal of attention to the study of the Holocaust and how it gets incorporated into the history of American Jews. He also asserts that no other ethnic groups had suffered as much oppression and persecution as Jews and Blacks. But I believe that this assertion is not supported by most scholarship on this subject. Notwithstanding this issue, the book is very well researched and written, and it addresses profoundly important questions in American history. Steven J. Diner Rutgers University-Newark Steven J. Diner Steven J. Diner is university professor at Rutgers University-Newark, where he served as chancellor from 2002 to 2011. His publications include A City and Its Universities: Public Policy in Chicago (The University of North Carolina Press, 1980); A Very Different Age: Americans of the Progressive Era (Hill and Wang, 1997); Universities and Their Cities (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017); and Unwelcome Guests: A History of Access to American Higher Education (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022) (coauthored with Harold Wechsler.) Copyright © 2023 The American Jewish Historical Society","PeriodicalId":43104,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN JEWISH HISTORY","volume":"16 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135156733","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":"Eden in the Garden State: Jewish Politics in the Jersey Homesteads Planned Community, 1936–39","authors":"Daniel L. Rosenblatt","doi":"10.1353/ajh.2023.a909912","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ajh.2023.a909912","url":null,"abstract":"Eden in the Garden State:Jewish Politics in the Jersey Homesteads Planned Community, 1936–391 Daniel L. Rosenblatt (bio) \"That's our corn!,\" one passenger shouted. \"Look there's our apples!Four hundred miles of apples!,\" another cheered. On the bus traveling from New York City to rural New Jersey were eight Jewish families, soon to be the first residents of the newly developed Jersey Homesteads cooperative.2 Their town, founded in 1936, was one of approximately one hundred planned communities created by New Deal agencies. Intended to alleviate the hardships caused by the Great Depression, the projects were founded on the premise of subsistence: if struggling Americans were offered employment in agriculture or industry along with a plot of tenable land for personal use, they could provide for themselves and their families.3 While most other planned communities supported white, native-born Americans, the New Jersey colony was unique in welcoming unemployed, foreign-born Jewish garment workers living in New York City.4 Between 1936 and 1939, approximately 120 families arrived at the Jersey Homesteads and set down roots in their new community. For most, the move was the second leg of a longer journey, having immigrated from Eastern Europe over a decade earlier; one resident described the town as \"a transposed Eastern European village or shtetl.\"5 From thousands [End Page 423] of applicants, these families had been chosen based upon characteristics including needlework skill, membership and good standing in the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU), and demonstrated interest in the cooperative lifestyle.6 Upon renting a home in the community, each family paid a $1 annual membership fee to the cooperative system and could thereby participate in the management of a collectivized garment factory, farm, and consumer store. The town's businesses ultimately struggled to turn a profit. Its garment factory overestimated demand, its orchard failed to deliver marketable produce, and few residents were qualified for agricultural work. After a third season of losses, the town's triple cooperative dissolved in 1939. But many Homesteaders remained in their new community, typically commuting to nearby towns or New York City for work. They continued to rent their homes from the federal government until 1946, when eighty-five of the town's original families purchased them for approximately $4,200 each.7 Such a bold experiment did not go unnoticed. Hundreds of articles in both the local and national press detailed the progress of the short-lived cooperative; some expressed curiosity about the project, and others were immensely critical. Intrigued by this news coverage, thousands of Americans arrived at the town on weekends simply to observe its residents.8 The experiment in cooperative living also captured the eye of many of the nation's top artists. Working under contract with the federal government, muralist Ben Shahn, Farm Security Administration (FSA","PeriodicalId":43104,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN JEWISH HISTORY","volume":"147 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135156161","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":"\"Living on a Sort of Island\": Jewish Refugee Farmers in the American South, 1938–46","authors":"Andrew Sperling","doi":"10.1353/ajh.2023.a909913","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ajh.2023.a909913","url":null,"abstract":"\"Living on a Sort of Island\":Jewish Refugee Farmers in the American South, 1938–461 Andrew Sperling (bio) In May 1939, German-Jewish merchant David Loeb sent a letter from his temporary residence in New York requesting the opportunity to live and work on a farm in rural North Carolina. \"My family,\" he said, \"as well as myself, we should very much like to go on a farm.\"2 Unlike the majority of Jewish refugee farmers in the Nazi era, Loeb had prior experience in a rural environment, having worked on his uncle's cattle farm in his youth. He, his wife Helen, and their two children, Manfred and Walter, fled Bremen, Germany several months earlier and found refuge at the Manumit School in Pawling, New York. The Manumit School, a socialist boarding house, housed refugees for a brief time but was only a transitory place for the family as they searched for permanent settlement. They might have continued on to dense cities, where refugees often worked menial jobs in households, restaurants, and shops, but such employment seemed unfulfilling for middle-class professionals.3 A subset of refugees, the Loebs among them, embraced Jewish agrarianism in a region where such work promised to be formidable but rewarding. David Loeb could think of no better path toward becoming a prosperous American citizen than by rekindling his passion for the outdoors. In his letter, he emphasized the value of a diligent farm family, noting that his wife and oldest son were strong, healthy, and willing to work alongside him. Shortly thereafter, Dr. Alvin Johnson, the letter's recipient, invited the Loebs to work on the Van Eeden Settlement in rural Burgaw, North Carolina. Johnson was a Danish American economist [End Page 445] and humanitarian who had previously co-founded the progressive New School for Social Research, a private research university, in 1919. When the Nazis rose to power, Johnson recruited persecuted European scholars to study in New York as part of the New School's \"University in Exile,\" saving their lives in the process. In 1933, the program rescued at least seven Jewish refugees and their families, but Johnson acknowledged that many more needed saving. Having observed \"a growing hostility to refugees\" in his country, he wondered what could be done to help Jews while also curbing antisemitic attitudes among Americans. Farming was the optimal solution. Johnson imagined that it would give Jews an opportunity to practice the romanticized \"art of living off the soil,\" preventing a \"ghetto psychology\" from developing among immigrants in overcrowded cities. Most importantly, it would change perceptions people had about Jews.4 In 1939, Johnson purchased a modest one hundred acres of farmland in Burgaw from Wilmington businessman Hugh MacRae, a leader in prior initiatives to resettle Dutch immigrant families in agrarian colonies. The Dutch settlers, arriving in 1909, grappled with drainage issues that diminished their prospects. Thirty years later, Johnson reasoned that p","PeriodicalId":43104,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN JEWISH HISTORY","volume":"48 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135158198","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":"A \"Jewish Marshall Plan\": The American Jewish Presence in Post-Holocaust France by Laura Hobson-Faure (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/ajh.2023.a909915","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ajh.2023.a909915","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: A \"Jewish Marshall Plan\": The American Jewish Presence in Post-Holocaust France by Laura Hobson-Faure Sara Halpern (bio) A \"Jewish Marshall Plan\": The American Jewish Presence in Post-Holocaust France. By Laura Hobson-Faure. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2022. xix + 336 pp. Laura Hobson-Faure activates French Jewish voices in A \"Jewish Mar-shall Plan\": The American Jewish Presence in Post-Holocaust France to study American and French Jewish visions of French Jewry after the Holocaust and their results. The chapters show how the two sides tackled the aftereffects of occupation absent French state support in loose chronological order: liberation, material relief, reconstruction of surviving charities, resurgence of political organizations, and professionalization of social work in France. Through the \"bottom up\" approach and oral histories and archival materials in France, Israel, and the United States, Hobson-Faure contends that France serves as an ideal case study for analyzing American Jews' reconstruction efforts in Jewish Europe. She argues that French Jewry was far from a passive actor in the rehabilitation of their community. They negotiated with American Jewish leaders, understanding that their differences were grounded in culture, values, and war experiences. Both could agree that France offered hope, with high survival rates and the influx of thousands of Eastern European Jews seeking to resettle or embark for new destinations. Thus France could justify taking a big slice of the budget of American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC). Moreover, American and French (and other European) Jews grappled with the shift of financial, political, and social gravity from Europe to the United States. In their discussions with American Jews, French Jews attempted to have their needs and desires met on their own terms. However, as Hobson-Faure consistently shows, they often recognized that conceding to dollars and organizational infrastructures and methods was necessary to achieve self-sufficiency. Given American Jews' humanitarian and political participation at a time of the United States's increased influence in global affairs, Hobson-Faure seeks to situate A Jewish Marshall Plan within the historiographies of US interventionism and empire-building. Through an analysis of the \"circulation of knowledge and cultural transfers,\" she presents a more complex narrative than merely one of American cultural imperialism (13). In contrast to the real Marshall Plan, which was designed to counter [End Page 497] Soviet influence in Europe, Hobson-Faure contends that this Jewish version aimed to deepen transatlantic Jewish solidarity in the name of rebuilding Jewish Europe after the Holocaust. This vantage point throws relief on a massive literature treating Germany as a temporary site and Israel as a permanent solution for post-Holocaust Jewish life in that part of the world. It highlights the necessity of viewing Europe as still viabl","PeriodicalId":43104,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN JEWISH HISTORY","volume":"198 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135157067","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 Lives of Jessie Sampter: Queer, Disabled, Zionist by Sarah Imhoff (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/ajh.2023.a909919","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ajh.2023.a909919","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: The Lives of Jessie Sampter: Queer, Disabled, Zionist by Sarah Imhoff Hannah Zaves Greene (bio) The Lives of Jessie Sampter: Queer, Disabled, Zionist. By Sarah Imhoff. Durham: Duke University Press, 2022. ix + 272 pp. It is by now all too familiar to declare that academia is the life of the mind. But—as Sarah Imhoff would have us learn from her magisterial monograph, The Lives of Jessie Sampter: Queer, Disabled, Zionist—it is the life of the body, too. Both our historical subjects and we ourselves as scholars inescapably have bodies, and those bodies are critical to how we exist in the world as actors and thinkers alike. When we neglect to attend to those bodies, or embodied selves, the histories we write are necessarily incomplete. In warm, dynamic prose, Imhoff records her practice of embodied scholarship, explaining that \"bodies, senses, and feelings are important sources of knowledge\" (3). As she elucidates, drawing on paradigms [End Page 499] emerging from disability studies, \"it is a privilege to be able to ignore your body, a privilege to pretend that your autonomous thoughts and carefully planned actions are where the real (historical and philosophical) action is at\" (9). Though Imhoff's meticulously researched biography of Jessie Sampter engages thoroughly with the textual, from poetry to prose, enabling Sampter's own voice to shine through—even when maladroit or lackluster—it extends beyond that. From the garden to the kibbutz, from paper-cutting to trekking across India, from Spinoza to the Nation, Imhoff immerses herself in the many ways Sampter lived her own life and others refracted it. Crucial to that life were Sampter's experiences of childhood polio and her father's untimely death. Each experience taught Sampter about loss, whether loss of a dearly beloved parent or loss of normative physical function. Not only did polio permanently shape Sampter's body and bodily encounters, it also remained inseparable from her philosophical, religious, and political outlooks. Sampter found that her experiences of chronic pain and impairment turned her increasingly toward questions of mortality and theodicy. Evoking the Latin root religio that means \"to bind together,\" Sampter gradually developed into what Imhoff refers to as a \"religious recombiner\" (42). Without calling her deeply felt Jewishness into question, Sampter lived a vibrant religious and spiritual life that drew from a variety of faiths and traditions, similar to many of her American contemporaries, Jewish and otherwise. Using Sampter as a model, Imhoff calls for us to reconsider the way we conceptualize American religion away from notions of diversity and pluralism that divide religion into discrete analytic boxes and toward a more fluid, integrated understanding of religion as an evolving, intertwining, cohesive process. This theme of recombination animates not only Sampter's many lives, but The Lives of Jessie Sampter itself. Rather than structuring her book chronol","PeriodicalId":43104,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN JEWISH HISTORY","volume":"17 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135157049","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":"\"Suppose the Mother Were Jewish\": Leo Pfeffer, the American Jewish Congress, and the Problem of Religious Protection Law","authors":"Susan A. Glenn","doi":"10.1353/ajh.2023.a909914","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ajh.2023.a909914","url":null,"abstract":"\"Suppose the Mother Were Jewish\":Leo Pfeffer, the American Jewish Congress, and the Problem of Religious Protection Law1 Susan A. Glenn (bio) When the Executive Committee of the National Community Relations Advisory Council met in New York City in January 1956 to discuss issues of concern to the Jewish community, a heated debate erupted over the adoption of children born to women of one religious group by couples from a different religious group. Rabbi Israel Klavan, who represented the Orthodox Rabbinical Council, declared that any attempt to formulate a \"Jewish position\" would have to consider \"the well-established principle of Jewish law that one who is born a Jew remains a Jew throughout his life.\" Constitutional law expert Leo Pfeffer (1909–1993), the American Jewish Congress's most formidable church-state litigator, replied that, \"having been an Orthodox Jew throughout his life,\" he understood the importance of \"the principle\" that \"a child born of a Jewish mother is, under traditional Jewish law, a Jew.\" However, cautioned Pfeffer, \"the constitutional government of the United States, under which we all live, and under which our rights to observe and practice our respective religions are protected, is a secular government, without interest or concern for the religious laws to which its citizens may choose to adhere.\" It must be remembered, he added, that \"the security of the Jewish group in its free practice of the Jewish faith rests upon the maintenance of this unconcern or indifference of government toward religion.\"2 This heated exchange was a continuing salvo in the American Jewish Congress's controversial mid-century campaign to challenge the constitutionality of laws and judicial practices that made it difficult and sometimes impossible for couples to adopt children born to mothers [End Page 467] whose religion differed from theirs. Pfeffer, whose personal devotion to Judaism was \"intense and unshakable,\"3 played a leading role in this campaign to loosen the grip of religious restrictions on adoption—a campaign, his Jewish critics charged, that would make it possible for Christians to adopt \"Jewish-born\" children. In the 1950s Pfeffer earned a reputation as what one political scientist called the \"dominant individual force in managing the flow of church-state litigation\" and the figure responsible for turning the American Jewish Congress into the nation's \"unrivaled organizational force\" in bringing First Amendment cases \"up the judicial ladder to the Supreme Court.\"4 Another scholar described Pfeffer as the dominant force in the \"entire universe\" of church-state litigation, noting that he \"advised, planned, rehearsed, helped, and argued more church-state cases than any other attorney of his generation.\"5 The scholarship on Leo Pfeffer focuses on his constitutional challenges to religion in the public schools, state aid to parochial schools, tax exemptions for churches and synagogues, and discriminatory Sunday closing laws. In this ar","PeriodicalId":43104,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN JEWISH HISTORY","volume":"24 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135158190","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}