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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.
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.
During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many Jews from Central and Eastern Europe arrived in New York City, where they did not only find a new home, but far away from their shtetl origin, the new members of the American society also began to politically radicalize. There has been a discussion in the literature related to the field, where, how, and why the Jewish population radicalized. This study analyses two waves of radicalization: one related to the American environment that is responsible for the described process at the end of the 19th century; one, related to the developments in Eastern Europe during the early decades of the 20th century. For both radicalization processes this book compares the reasons, elements, and aims of those who join radical movements to show that there is a transatlantic perspective that links both processes to each other.
This collection explores the different ways that intellectuals, scholars and institutions have sought to make history Jewish. While practitioners of Jewish history often assume that “the Jews” are a well-defined ethno-national unit with a distinct, continuous history, this volume questions many of the assumptions that underlie and ultimately help construct Jewish history. Starting with a number of articles on the Jews of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Poland and Hungary, continuing with several studies of Jewish encounters with the advent of nationalism and antisemitism, and concluding with a set of essays on Jewish history and politics in twentieth-century eastern Europe, pre-state Palestine and North America, the volume discusses the different methodological, research and narrative strategies involved in transforming past events into part of the larger canon of Jewish history.
This book tells the saga of the Yiddish-language general encyclopedia Algemeyne entsiklopedye (1932-1966) and the editors who continued to publish it even as they were sent into repeated exile and their world was utterly transformed by the Holocaust. It is not a story only about destruction and trauma, but also one of tenacity and continuity, as the encyclopedia's compilers strove to preserve the heritage of Yiddish culture, to document its near-total extermination in the Holocaust, and to chart its path into the future.
The sea and maritime spaces have long been neglected in the field of Jewish studies despite their relevance in the context of Jewish religious texts and historical narratives. The images of Noah’s arche, king Salomon’s maritime activities or the miracle of the parting of the Red Sea immediately come into mind, however, only illustrate a few aspects of Jewish maritime activities. Consequently, the relations of Jews and the sea has to be seen in a much broader spatial and temporal framework in order to understand the overall importance of maritime spaces in Jewish history and culture. Almost sixty years after Samuel Tolkowsky’s pivotal study on maritime Jewish history and culture and the...
The diverse forms and structures of graphic narratives discussed in this volume by a range of international scholars demonstrate the ways in which Jewish women's graphic narratives reach into the past by way of stories and histories, both individual and collective, that provide a touchstone for the shape of identity.
Winner, 2020 JDC-Herbert Katzki Award for Writing Based on Archival Material, given by the Jewish Book Council The astonishing story of the efforts of scholars and activists to rescue Jewish cultural treasures after the Holocaust In March 1946 the American Military Government for Germany established the Offenbach Archival Depot near Frankfurt to store, identify, and restore the huge quantities of Nazi-looted books, archival material, and ritual objects that Army members had found hidden in German caches. These items bore testimony to the cultural genocide that accompanied the Nazis’ systematic acts of mass murder. The depot built a short-lived lieu de memoire—a “mortuary of books,” a...
Investigates traditionalist struggles about Zionism and the emergence of national-religious Judaism and ultra-Orthodox in the early twentieth century.
The American Jewish Year Book, now in its 118th year, is the annual record of the North American Jewish communities and provides insight into their major trends. The first two chapters of Part I include a special forum on "Contemporary American Jewry: Grounds for Optimism or Pessimism?" with assessments from more than 20 experts in the field. The third chapter examines antisemitism in Contemporary America. Chapters on “The Domestic Arena” and “The International Arena” analyze the year’s events as they affect American Jewish communal and political affairs. Three chapters analyze the demography and geography of the US, Canada, and world Jewish populations. Part II provides lists of J...