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"In this fourth volume, [the author] notes that the decline of religiousness in the second and third generations of American Jews was balanced by the development of an activist political culture based an elaborate organizational life, an effective fund-raising apparatus, and Zionism, with its notion of Jewish peoplehood. That reshaping of American Jewish individual and communal identity in some measure accounts for the insufficient response to the plight of European Jews during the Holocaust. American Jewry's remarkable achievement in the private sphere overshadowed its weakness in the public one"--Series Editor's forword.
Jewish political power exists as a separate agency in the American polity, but before it can be determined whether it is inordinate, historian Henry L. Feingold declares that it first needs to be identified and defined. Jewish power is not associated with military armaments as with a sovereign state like Israel. Nor is it personal power. There are many influential Jews today who have raised huge sums for office seekers, but there are none whose use of financial resources was inordinate. With the exception of an abiding concern with the security of Israel, there are no overriding public policy concerns that differentiate Jewish voters from the informed, educated segment of the American electo...
American Jewish Political Culture and the Liberal Persuasion begins with the historical background of American Jewish politics before delving into old roots and then moving onto a thematic understanding of American Jewry’s political psyche. This exhaustive work answers the grand question of where American Jewish liberalism comes from and ultimately questions whether the communal motivations behind such behavior are strong enough to withstand twenty-first-century America.
Scholarly yet highly readable survey covers Old World origins; profiles of New World cultures of German and Eastern European Jews; the effects of changing political and economic climates; the rise of labor movement; and immigrant settlement on the Lower East Side settlement.
One of America's most prominent historians probes the haunting question of why the efforts of the American government and Jewish leaders were ineffective in halting or mitigating Berlin's genocidal policy during the Holocaust. Focusing on the role of the Roosevelt administration and American Jewish leadership, Henry L. Feingold anchors the American reaction to the Holocaust in the tension-ridden domestic environment of the depression to the international scene. In these essays, he argues that the constraints of the American political system in the 1930s and 40s and the extraordinary events of the time virtually made it impossible for the administration and American Jews to react differently.
This work examines Jewish power in America by examining five major instances beginning with the New Deal when the play of Jewish power, or power exercised by Jews, was evident.
A psycho-historical survey of the Holocaust, focusing on the behavior of both the German perpetrators and the victims. Regards the Holocaust as a historically unique mass destruction, in terms of its motivation (the Jews posed no physical challenge to Nazi rule), its methods (industrialized killing), its emotional aspect, as well as its totality. It can be conceptualized as a historical crisis which disrupted the apparent continuity of Western history and shattered Western thought and culture. Approaches the question why it was in Germany that the unparalleled genocide program against the Jews was implemented. Sees the answer in the formation of German culture since the 16th century, which m...
Assesses the current state of American Jewish life, drawing on the research and thinking of scholars from a variety of disciplines and diverse points of view.