A Mortuary of Books: The Rescue of Jewish Culture after the Holocaust. By Elisabeth Gallas. Translated by Alex Skinner. Goldstein-Goren Series in American Jewish History. Edited by Hasia R. Diner. New York: New York University Press, 2019. Pp. x+406. $35.00.

2021 ◽  
Vol 93 (3) ◽  
pp. 689-691
Author(s):  
Hillary Hope Herzog
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Jewish History ◽  
New York University ◽  
Jewish Culture ◽  
American Jewish History ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
American Jewish

Judaism and Jewishness in Histories of American Jewry

2021 ◽  
pp. 253-260
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Jewish History ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Jews ◽  
American Jewish History ◽  
American Jewry ◽  
Key Points ◽  
Religious Dimensions ◽  
American Jewish

This chapter reviews five books on American Jewish history, written by Joyce Antler, Jessica Cooperman, Kirsten Fermaglich, Rachel Kranson, and Jack Wertheimer. Reading these books together is challenging because they present substantially different interpretations of American Jews. If no definitive single interpretation of 20th-century American Jewish history emerges from these five books, what can be learned about American Jews by reading them together? Two key points emerge. Judaism proves a highly contested arena of American Jewish life. Yet despite the importance of religion, this fractious domain involves only a small portion of American Jews. Cooperman, Kranson, and Wertheimer all explore limits that confound efforts to promote Judaism in the United States among ordinary Jews. By contrast, “Jewishness” opens a valuable window into the complexity of life among Jews in the United States. Fermaglich focuses on how New York Jews coped with rising discrimination that impeded their ambitions for social and economic mobility. In her exploration of Jewish women's politics, Antler illuminates varied components of Jewish identity only occasionally influenced by religious dimensions.

Book Reviews

Transfers ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 133-152 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tristan Josephson ◽  
Marcin B. Stanek ◽  
Tallie Ben Daniel ◽  
Jeremy Ash ◽  
Liz Millward ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Jewish History ◽  
Modern World ◽  
New York University ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
American Jewish History ◽  
Duke University ◽  
University Of Hawai'i ◽  
Trading Network

Tracking the Mobility of Carceral LogicsJennifer Turner and Kimberley Peters, eds., Carceral Mobilities: Interrogating Movement in Incarceration (New York: Routledge, 2017), 256 pp., 9 illustrations, $49.95 (paperback)An Exciting Invitation to Rethink Knowledge MobilitiesLudovic Tournès and Giles Scott-Smith, eds., Global Exchanges: Scholarships and Transnational Circulations in the Modern World (New York: Berghahn Books, 2018), 356 pp., 9 illustrations, $130 (hardback)Theorizing Mobilities between Disability Studies and PalestineJasbir Puar, Th e Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 296 pp., $26.95 (paperback)Beyond Borders: Mobility in Australia’s Northern Maritime NetworkJulia Martínez and Adrian Vickers, Th e Pearl Frontier: Indonesian Labor and Indigenous Encounters in Australia’s Northern Trading Network (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2015), 227 pp., $28 (paperback)Backpacking toward European IntegrationRichard Ivan Jobs, Backpack Ambassadors: How Youth Travel Integrated Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 352 pp., 32 illustrations, $35 (paperback)Recovering Mobility in American Jewish HistoryShari Rabin, Jews on the Frontier: Religion and Mobility in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: New York University Press, 2017), 208 pp., $40 (hardback)Which Mobilities? Critical Perspectives on Mobility, Norms, and KnowledgeMarcel Endres, Katharina Manderscheid, and Christophe Mincke, eds., Th e Mobilities Paradigm: Discourses and Ideologies (London: Routledge, 2016), 235 pp., £36.99 (paperback)What Makes a Trail?Robert Moor, On Trails: An Exploration (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016), 340 pp., $16 (paperback)Airports: Cathedrals of Unsustainable Dreams?Alain de Botton, A Week at the Airport: A Heathrow Diary (London: Profi le Books, 2009), 112 pp., £8.99 (paperback)

scholarly journals Le Yiddishland newyorkais: la mémoire enracinée (The Yiddishland New Yorker: the Ingrained Memory)

2015 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Annie Ousset-Krief
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Jewish History ◽  
Lower East Side ◽  
East Side ◽  
American Jews ◽  
New Yorker ◽  
American Jewish History ◽  
The Usa ◽  
American Jewish

More than two million Jews emigrated from Eastern Europe to the USA between 1880 and 1910. Most of them settled in New York City, in the immigrant district of the Lower East Side. As they were uprooted, they tried to recreate a new version of their shtetl, the villages in which most Jews had been forced to reside in Eastern Europe. The Lower East Side thus became their new Yiddishland, their home, where most institutions were modeled after the original ones. Though American Jews had already provided for most necessary institutions like synagogues or schools, what they had established did not match Russian Jews’ habits – besides the fact that Yiddish played a major part in their lives, and was totally ignored by most American Jews. Thus the new immigrants built their own synagogues, schools, and mutual benefit societies. Yiddish culture was vibrant, thanks to Yiddish theatre and the Yiddish press that flourished for decades. Today, though most Jews left the Lower East Side long ago, there remain a few synagogues and shops that have become the symbols of an everlasting Jewish identity, traces of a cherished past, marked by hardship but also the joy of having finally found freedom after centuries of persecution. The Lower East Side has become the place where part of American Jewish history took place, and as such, is a sacred place. Hasia Diner called it the ‘Jewish Plymouth Rock’, underlining the idea that it is the foundation of the American Jewish community, that combines both American and Jewish identities. Jewishness in Europe has been wiped out in many countries, and the descendants of these Russian immigrants can no longer turn to their ancestors’ European ‘home’. It is the Lower East Side that plays the part of the alte heime (the old country), and as such, makes up part of their identity. Memory and identity are deeply rooted in the ‘sacred geography’ of the Lower East Side.

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