AMERICAN JEWRY AND THE RE‐INVENTION OF THE EAST EUROPEAN JEWISH PAST. By MarkusKrah. New Perspectives in Modern Jewish History 9. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2018. Pp. xiii + 289, plates. $103.99.

2020 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 422-423
Keyword(s):  
Jewish History ◽  
East European ◽  
American Jewry ◽  
Modern Jewish History ◽  
European Jewish

Jacob Jay Lindenthal, Abi Gezunt: Explorations into the Role of Health and the American Jewish Dream. Brighton, Mass.: Academic Studies Press, 2017. xxix + 187 pp; together with The Lindex: A Companion to Abi Gezunt. xi + 341 pp.

2020 ◽  
pp. 307-309
Keyword(s):  
Decisive Role ◽  
Good Health ◽  
Jewish Law ◽  
Behavioral Patterns ◽  
American Jews ◽  
East European ◽  
American Jewry ◽  
Crucial Effect ◽  
Jewish Immigrants ◽  
European Jewish

Is there a causal relationship between the remarkable economic success and rapid upward mobility of American Jews and behavioral patterns on their part that promoted health and the prevention of disease? Jacob Jay Lindenthal offers what he terms “a conjectural analysis” (p. xiii) to suggest such a causality, and he supports his argument with an impressive array of medical sources that scholars of American Jewry have rarely utilized. Lindenthal maintains that Jewish “values, beliefs, traditions, attitudes, and behavioral patterns” have all had a crucial effect on Jewish health (p. xv). He highlights such cultural factors among the Jews as awareness of and concern for health; an emphasis on cleanliness as mandated by Jewish law (halakhah); a cohesive family life; the promotion of education; specific childrearing practices (among them, circumcision, breastfeeding, and maintaining longer time intervals between births); a low rate of alcoholism; and communal charitable institutions and solidarity as playing a decisive role in keeping East European Jewish immigrants in America in relative good health. As he notes, Jewish immigrants in early 20...

Rethinking European Jewish History

2008 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Jewish History ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Jewish Women ◽  
American Jewry ◽  
Political Boundaries ◽  
History Of ◽  
European Jewish ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Impact

Europe has changed greatly in the last century. The political boundaries between nations and states, along with the very concepts of 'nation' and 'boundary', have changed significantly, and the self-consciousness of ethnic minorities has likewise evolved in new directions. All these developments have affected how the Jews of Europe perceive themselves, and they help to shape the prism through which historians view the Jewish past. This volume looks at the Jewish past in the spirit of this reassessment. Part I reconsiders the basic parameters of the subject as well as some of its fundamental concepts, suggesting new assumptions and perspectives from which to conduct future studies of European Jewish history. Topics covered here include periodization and the definition of geographical borders, antisemitism, gender and the history of Jewish women, and notions of assimilation. Part II is devoted to articulating the meaning of 'modernity' in the history of European Jewry and demarcating key stages in its crystallization. Chapters reflect on the defining characteristics of a distinct early modern period in European Jewish history, the Reformation and the Jews, and the fundamental features of the Jewish experience in modern times. Parts III and IV present two scholarly conversations as case studies for the application of the critical and programmatic categories considered thus far: the complex web of relationships between Jews, Christians, and Jewish converts to Christianity in fifteenth-century Spain; and the impact of American Jewry on Jewish life in Europe in the twentieth-century, at a time when the dominant trend was one of migration from Europe to the Americas.

Regina Renz Społeczeństwo małomiasteczkowe w województwie kieleckim 1918–1939

1998 ◽  
pp. 345-348
Author(s):  
Samuel D. Kassow
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Framework ◽  
Jewish History ◽  
Small Town ◽  
Small Body ◽  
East European ◽  
Historical Literature ◽  
European Jewish ◽  
Introductory Discussion

This chapter studies Regina Renz's Small-Town Society in the Kielce Province and Krzysztof Urbański's The Jews of Kielce. Renz begins her study of small-town society in the Kielce region with a very useful introductory discussion of the sociological and historical literature devoted to the problems of defining a miasteczko and formulating a proper conceptual framework for their study. She ignores, however, the small body of literature devoted to the issue of the shtetl. Urbański's monograph on the Jews of Kielce suffers from the same problem: the author apparently does not read Yiddish or Hebrew and could not avail himself of such useful sources at the Kieltser tsaytung or the two memorial books that have appeared on Kielce. In many places, the author's unfamiliarity with east European Jewish history undercuts the authority of his assertions.

scholarly journals Back to the Post-Communist Motherlands

2020 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 52-64
Author(s):  
Israel Bartal
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Jewish History ◽  
Academic Career ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Historical Research ◽  
Eastern European ◽  
East European ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
European Jewish

This article presents some of the personal observations of a veteran Israeli scholar whose long-years' encounters with the 'real' as well as the 'imagined' eastern Europe have shaped his historical research. As an Israeli-born historian of Polish-Ukrainian origin, (the so-called 'second generation') he claims to share an ambivalent attitude towards his countries of origin with other fellow- historians. Jewish emigrants from eastern Europe have been until very late in the modern era members of an old ethno-religious group. One ethnos out of many in a diverse multi-ethnic environment, whose demographic core survived and flourished for centuries in the old places. Several decades of social, economic, and political upheavals exposed the Jewish population to drastic changes. These changes lead several intellectuals who left their home countries to look back at what have happened as both involved actors, and distant observers. Israeli historians of east European origin found themselves confronted with a crucial question: in what way the past in the Old Country connected (if at all) to the history of Israel. Following some 40 years of academic career in the field of eastern European Jewish history, it is claimed that until the collapse of the Soviet Union, the image of eastern Europe that runs through the Israeli historical research has been shaped in large part by members of the different generations of emigrants, outside of eastern Europe. The renewed direct contact after 1989 caused a dramatic change: within a few years, Israeli historians were examining archives and libraries throughout eastern Europe. After seven decades of isolation between the Israeli historian and the primary sources necessary to his/her research in the archives, the new wave of documents was celebrated in Israeli Universities. Yet far more influential was the revolution prompted in 1989 on the historical perspective from which Israeli historians could now examine the Jewish past. What happened in 1989 has seemed, to some Israeli historians, a breaking point marking the end of the eastern European period in the course of Jewish history. The article concludes with some thoughts on a new historical (Israeli) perspective. A one that fits a time when hundreds of thousands of immigrants from what was the largest eastern-European Jewish collective in the world inhabit a remote Middle Eastern nation-state.  

Book Reviews

2001 ◽  
pp. 381-383
Keyword(s):  
Jewish History ◽  
East European ◽  
History Of ◽  
Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi ◽  
Jewish Philosophy ◽  
European Jewish ◽  
Shed Light

This chapter briefly reviews a volume of essays, entitled Jewish History and Jewish Memory: Essays in Honor of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi. It provides thumbnail descriptions of some of the articles that shed light on the history of central and east European Jewry from the eleventh to the twentieth centuries. This history is briefly explored through four sections. Along with several other essays that deal with central and east European Jewish themes, the volume contains articles on Sephardi Jewry, Jewish philosophy, and mysticism. It begins and ends with appreciations of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, whose ‘catholicity of knowledge’ it multifariously and impressively echoes.

Rethinking Jewishness in Networked Publics: The Case of Post-Communist Hungary

2019 ◽  
pp. 261-278
Author(s):  
Anna Manchin
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Population ◽  
Political Change ◽  
Jewish History ◽  
Political Freedom ◽  
European City ◽  
Jewish Communities ◽  
Central European ◽  
East European ◽  
European Jewish ◽  
Networked Publics

This chapter cites scholars that viewed the fall of communism in 1989 as a potential turning point for east European Jewish communities. It explains how political freedom promised new possibilities for organizing religious and secular Jewish life and for representing individual Jewish identities and communities. It also describes what form political change could take that will lead to a new flourishing of Jewish religion and culture. The chapter talks about Hungary's Hungarian-born Jewish population in Budapest that represents the largest community in any central European city and was thought to hold great potential for community building. It discusses how Jews were partaking in new manifestations of cultural ethnicity, such as an interest in Jewish history.

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