Synopses & Reviews
American Jewry explores new transnational questions in Jewish history, analyzing the historical, cultural and social experience of American Jewry from 1654 to the present day, and evaluates the relationship between European and American Jewish history. Did the hopes of Jewish immigrants to establish an independent American Judaism in a free and pluralistic country come to fruition? How did Jews in America define their relationship to the 'Old World' of Europe, both before and after the Holocaust? What are the religious, political and cultural challenges for American Jews in the twenty-first century? Internationally renowned scholars come together in this volume to present new research on how immigration from Western and Eastern Europe established a new and distinctively American Jewish identity that went beyond the traditions of Europe, yet remained attached in many ways to its European origins.
Synopsis
Explores transnational questions in American and European Jewish history.
Synopsis
Explores transnational questions in American and European Jewish history.
About the Author
Christian Wiese is the Director of the Centre for German-Jewish Studies at the University of Sussex, UK. His recent publications include Years of Persecution, Years of Extermination: Saul Friedlander and the Future of Holocaust Studies (co-editor, Continuum, 2010).
Cornelia Wilhelm is currently DAAD Professor in the Departments of History and Jewish Studies at Emory University, USA. She also teaches as Professor of Modern History at Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich, Germany, and has held visiting positions at Rutgers University, US, and Leopold-Franzens-University of Innsbruck, Austria. She is author of several volumes including German Jews in America: Bourgeois Civil Self-Awareness and Jewish Identity in the Orders B'nai B'rith and True Sisters, which was published in English translation in July 2011.
Table of Contents
Introduction: Wiese and Wilhelm
1. Looking Back on American Jewish History - Diner
Part I - Colonial Identities
2. Trading Freedoms? Exploring Colonial Jewish Merchanthood between Europe and the Caribbean - Cohen
3. Early American Jewry and the Quest for Civil Equality - Faber
Part II - American Judaism and Civic Culture
4. Women's Changing Roles in Nineteenth-Century American and German Judaism - Goldman
5. The Independent Order of B'nai B'rith and the Shaping of an American Identity - Wilhelm
6. German Jews and the German-Speaking Civic Culture of Nineteenth-Century America - Conzen
Part III - Finding a New Zion in America
7. Negotiating for a New Relationship between Judaism and Christianity in America 1865-1917 - Ariel 8. The Transition from German
Wissenschaft des Judentums to American-Jewish Scholarship in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Wiese
9. Zionism in the Promised Land - Goren
The Myth of Europe in America's Judaism - Heschel
10. Part IV - New Roles and Identities
11. 'Shul with a Pool' Reconsidered - Kaufman
12. New York and the Beginning of the Russian Jewish Labor Movement - Michels
13. Reflections on the Study of Orthodoxy in America - Gurock
14. The Meaning of the Jewish Experience for American Culture - Whitfield
Part V - Challenges for American Jewry after the Holocaust
15. The Holocaust in American Culture - Shandler
16. American Jews and the Middle East Crisis - Staub
17. The American Jewish Effort to Rescue German and Soviet Jewry - Feingold
18. From Periphery to Center: American Jewry, Zion, and Jewish History after the Holocaust - Sarna
Conclusions: Wiese and Wilhelm
Bibliography
Index