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At a time when secularism is put forward as the answer to religious fundamentalism and violence, Secularisms offers a powerful, multivoiced critique of the narrative equating secularism with modernity, reason, freedom, peace, and progress. Bringing together essays by scholars based in religious studies, gender and sexuality studies, history, science studies, anthropology, and political science, this volume challenges the binary conception of “conservative” religion versus “progressive” secularism. With essays addressing secularism in India, Iran, Turkey, Great Britain, China, and the United States, this collection crucially complicates the dominant narrative by showing that secularis...
After the Nazi seizure of power on January 30, 1933, over 250 German rabbis, rabbinical scholars, and students for the rabbinate fled to the United States. The Last Generation of the German Rabbinate follows their lives and careers over decades in America. Although culturally uprooted, the group's professional lives and intellectual leadership, particularly those of the younger members of this group, left a considerable mark intellectually, socially, and theologically on American Judaism and on American Jewish congregational and organizational life in the postwar world. Meticulously researched and representing the only systematic analysis of prosopographical data in a digital humanities database, The Last Generation of the German Rabbinate reveals the trials of those who had lost so much and celebrates the legacy they made for themselves in America.
First Published in 1996. Volume 8 in the 8-volume series titled American Cities: A Collection of Essays. This series brings together more than 200 scholarly articles pertaining to the history and development of urban life in the United States during the past two centuries. Volume 8 discusses several institutions that are uniquely urban: voluntary associations, vigilance committees, and organized police forces. These articles attempt to consider race and ethnicity class, gender, and the various experiences of different groups of Americans.
The postwar decades were not the “golden era” in which American Jews easily partook in the religious revival, liberal consensus, and suburban middle-class comfort. Rather it was a period marked by restlessness and insecurity born of the shock about the Holocaust and of the unprecedented opportunities in American society. American Jews responded to loss and opportunity by obsessively engaging with the East European past. The proliferation of religious texts on traditional spirituality, translations of Yiddish literature, historical essays , photographs and documents of shtetl culture, theatrical and musical events, culminating in the Broadway musical Fiddler on the Roof, illustrate the grip of this past on post-1945 American Jews. This study shows how American Jews reimagined their East European past to make it usable for their American present. By rewriting their East European history, they created a repertoire of images, stories, and ideas that have shaped American Jewry to this day.
This is the first study to examine the career of one of the most prominent American Zionists. Intellectually brilliant, socially and religiously committed, Judah Magnes was an inspiring speaker, reformer, and organizer. Sixteen leading American and Israeli scholars here focus their critical attention on the social, cultural, political, and theological themes central to Magnes' life. Contributors chronicle Magnes' life from his birth in California in 1877 to his death in 1948—the year of the founding of the State of Israel, focusing successively on his youth and education, his seminal years on New York's Lower East Side, his place among the pioneers of American Zionism, his role as a founde...
Mordecai Kaplan, the founder of the Reconstructionist movement, was the most influential and controversial radical Jewish thinker in the twentieth century. This book examines the intellectual influences that moved Kaplan from Orthodoxy and analyzes the combination of personal, strategic, and career reasons that kept Kaplan close to Orthodox Jews, posing a question crucial to the understanding of any religion: Can an established religious group learn from a heretic who has rejected its most fundamental beliefs?
Revised version of the author's thesis (Ph.D.)--Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C., 2009, titled: The question of the "cessation of prophecy" in ancient Judaism.
Since the 1960s the relationship between Blacks and Jews has been a contentious one. While others have attempted to explain or repair the break-up of the Jewish alliance on civil rights, Seth Forman here sets out to determine what Jewish thinking on the subject of Black Americans reveals about Jewish identity in the U.S. Why did American Jews get involved in Black causes in the first place? What did they have to gain from it? And what does that tell us about American Jews? In an extremely provocative analysis, Forman argues that the commitment of American Jews to liberalism, and their historic definition of themselves as victims, has caused them to behave in ways that were defined as good fo...