scholarly journals The Exilic Imperative of American Jewry

Religions ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (12) ◽  
pp. 412
Author(s):  
Michael Alexander
Keyword(s):  
Ethnic Groups ◽  
Fantasy Literature ◽  
American Jews ◽  
Social Alienation ◽  
Jewish Identification ◽  
American Jewry ◽  
White Ethnic ◽  
The Creation ◽  
American Jewish

This article considers the existence of an exilic imperative in the historical and identity hermeneutics of American Jewry. Author considers cases of (1) American Jewish identification with racial outsiders, including the appropriation of historical, cultural, and religious forms; (2) the persistent creation of American Jewish ethnoburbs, unlike other white ethnic groups; and (3) the creation of exilic fantasy literature by American Jewish novelists. The author suggests that although American conditions do not justify interpretations of Jewish social alienation, American Jews have nevertheless applied traditional Jewish exilic hermeneutics to those American conditions.

Race and American Judaism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samira K. Mehta
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Racial Diversity ◽  
American Jews ◽  
Jewish Immigration ◽  
American Judaism ◽  
American Jewry ◽  
Civil Rights Movements ◽  
The Face ◽  
White Majority ◽  
American Jewish

Jews in America have had a complex relationship to race. At times, they have been described as a racial minority, whereas at other times, they have been able to assimilate into the white majority. Jewish status has largely depended on whether white Americans felt, in any given moment, socially secure. Jews have therefore fared better during times of economic prosperity. This social instability has strongly affected their relationship to African Americans. Jews, who have a strong sense of themselves as outsiders, have often identified with African American struggles but feared that overt solidarity would endanger their own status as white. Nevertheless, American Jews were disproportionately represented in the civil rights movements. Lastly, while American Jewish are predominantly Ashkenazi, which is to say of Central and Eastern European heritage, contemporary American Jewry is increasingly racially diverse, in part because of Jewish immigration from other parts of the world but also because of interfaith marriage, conversion, and adoption. This increased racial diversity has caused problems in the contemporary American Jewish community, but it is also changing the face of it.

The Cosmopolitan and the National

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael N. Barnett
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
The State ◽  
Jewish Question ◽  
American Jews ◽  
World War ◽  
American Jewry ◽  
Foreign Policies ◽  
The Creation ◽  
State Of Israel

This chapter covers the period between World War II and 1967. In many ways 1948 was a decisive moment in the foreign policies of American Jews. This is the year that two different solutions to the Jewish Problem and the Jewish Question took firm institutional shape—the State of Israel and the creation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. American Jews were involved in both developments. In retrospect, two elements stand out in this period. After decades of worrying about the tensions between nationalism and cosmopolitanism, they began to relax. It also is surprising how little the creation of Israel affected American Jewry, and that tepidness stems partly from the fact that American Jews had never been die-hard nationalists.

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.

Dance and Ethnicity

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony Shay ◽  
Barbara Sellers-Young
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Ethnic Groups ◽  
Identity Construction ◽  
Research Approach ◽  
Transnational Politics ◽  
Dance Studies ◽  
Ethnic Category ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Active Contributor

Ethnic groups have been defined as people who share a common ethos based on ancestry, nation, language and other identity markers. This volume brings scholars from across the globe that have incorporated perspectives from critical and cultural studies in an investigation of what it means to define oneself in an ethnic category and how this category is performed and represented as an ethnicity. The essays in this volume engage the four themes of identity construction, local and transnational politics, appropriation and related exotification, and resistance that are part of the ongoing discourse in the relationship between dance and ethnicity. Cumulatively, the essays in their research approach and methodology document the change that has taken place in dance studies from the ethnic as an easily identified category based on biology and geography to ethnicity as a fluid concept and dance as an active contributor to the creation and negotiation of it.

People of the Picture Book

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel B. Gross
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Picture Book ◽  
Religious Activity ◽  
Children's Books ◽  
Children’S Books ◽  
American Jews ◽  
Staff Members ◽  
American Jewish ◽  
Reading To Children ◽  
Jewish Families

Since 2005, a philanthropic organization, PJ Books, has set out to influence American Jews by reaching them in one of their most tender, intimate family moments: parents reading to children. The program uses children's books to influence Jewish families' values and practices. This chapter argues that PJ Library demonstrates the burden that American Jewish institutions place on popular culture to shape their communities. Though staff members deny that PJ Library is engaged in religious activity, the organization does, in fact, use children's books as a tool to shape American Jewish religion. It uses children's books to introduce families to or reinforce their connection with sacred rituals and Jewish customs. More broadly, PJ Library seeks to persuade American Jewish families to make Judaism an important part of their lives and to connect them, one illustrated book at a time, to networks that will help them do so.

What Kind of Job Is That for a Nice Jewish Boy?

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Kranson
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Upward Mobility ◽  
The Self ◽  
American Jews ◽  
New Models ◽  
Economic Position ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
American Jewish

In the 1950s and early 1960s, American Jews wrestled with new models of masculinity that their new economic position enabled. For many American Jewish novelists, intellectuals, and clergy of the 1950s and early 1960s, the communal pressure on Jewish men to become middle-class breadwinners betrayed older, more Jewishly-authentic, notions of appropriate masculinity. Their writing promoted alternative, Jewish masculine ideals such as the impoverished scholar and the self-sacrificing soldier, crafting a profoundly gendered critique of Jewish upward mobility.

Boundaries of Inclusion and Exclusion in Postwar America

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Danielle Battisti
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Ethnic Groups ◽  
Social Position ◽  
American Identity ◽  
The Political ◽  
World War ◽  
Postwar America ◽  
Immigration Laws ◽  
Italian American ◽  
White Ethnic

The introduction comments on the nature of campaigns to reform American immigration laws after World War II, Italian American identity, and the political and social position of white ethnic groups.

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