Discover & Discuss: Jewish American Heritage Month

Postwar Stories: How Books Made Judaism American
Gordan, Rachel (2024)

The period immediately following World War II was an era of dramatic transformation for Jews in America. At the start of the 1940s, President Roosevelt had to all but promise that if Americans entered the war, it would not be to save the Jews. By the end of the decade, antisemitism was in decline and Jews were moving toward general acceptance in American society. 

Drawing on several archives, magazine articles, and nearly-forgotten bestsellers, "Postwar Stories" examines how Jewish middlebrow literature helped to shape post-Holocaust American Jewish identity. For both Jews and non-Jews accustomed to antisemitic tropes and images, positive depictions of Jews had a normalizing effect. Maybe Jews were just like other Americans, after all. 

At the same time, anti-antisemitism novels and “Introduction to Judaism” literature helped to popularize the idea of Judaism as an American religion. In the process, these two genres contributed to a new form of Judaism--one that fit within the emerging myth of America as a Judeo-Christian nation, and yet displayed new confidence in revealing Judaism's divergences from Christianity. - Publisher's Description

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The Jews of Summer: Summer Camp and Jewish Culture in Postwar America
Fox, Sandra (2023)

In the decades directly following the Holocaust, American Jewish leaders anxiously debated how to preserve and produce what they considered authentic Jewish culture, fearful that growing affluence and suburbanization threatened the future of Jewish life. Many communal educators and rabbis contended that without educational interventions, Judaism as they understood it would disappear altogether. 

They pinned their hopes on residential summer camps for Jewish youth: institutions that sprang up across the U.S. in the postwar decades as places for children and teenagers to socialize, recreate, and experience Jewish culture. Adults' fears, hopes, and dreams about the Jewish future inflected every element of camp life, from the languages they taught to what was encouraged romantically and permitted sexually. But adult plans did not constitute everything that occurred at camp: children and teenagers also shaped these sleepaway camps to mirror their own desires and interests and decided whether to accept or resist the ideas and ideologies their camp leaders promoted. Focusing on the lived experience of campers and camp counselors, "The Jews of Summer" demonstrates how a cultural crisis birthed a rite of passage that remains a significant influence in American Jewish life. - Publisher's Description

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Kugels & Collards: Stories of Food, Family, and Tradition in Jewish South Carolina
Barnett, Rachel Gordin; Harvey, Lyssa Kligman; Sherrer, John M., III; Ferris, Marcie Cohen (2023)

Where people go, so goes their food. In "Kugels & Collards: Stories of Food, Family, and Tradition in Jewish South Carolina," Rachel Gordin Barnett and Lyssa Kligman Harvey celebrate the unique and diverse food history of Jewish South Carolina. They gather stories and recipes from diverse Jewish sources―Sephardic and Ashkenazi families who have been in the state for hundreds of years, descendants of Holocaust survivors, and more recent immigrants from Russia and Israel―and explore how cherished dishes were influenced by available ingredients and complemented by African American and regional culinary traditions. These stories are a vital part of the South's "Jewish geography" and foodways, stretching across state lines to shape southern culture. 

On the southern Jewish table, many cultures are savored. Extensively illustrated with original and archival photographs, "Kugels & Collards" collects includes more than eighty recipes from seventy contributors. Barnett and Harvey draw on family cookbooks and troves of personal recipes and highlight Jewish staples like kreplach dumplings and stuffed cabbage as well as adaptations of southern favorites such as peach cobbler, plus modern fusions like grits and lox casserole, and of course kugels and collards. "Kugels & Collards" invites readers into family homes, businesses, and community centers to share meals and memories. - Publisher's Description

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Golden Ages: Hasidic Singers and Cantorial Revival in the Digital Era
Lockwood, Jeremiah (2024)

"Golden Ages" is an ethnographic study of young singers in the contemporary Brooklyn Hasidic community who base their aesthetic explorations of the culturally intimate space of prayer on the gramophone-era cantorial golden age. Jeremiah Lockwood proposes a view of their work as a nonconforming social practice that calls upon the sounds and structures of Jewish sacred musical heritage to disrupt the aesthetics and power hierarchies of their conservative community, defying institutional authority and pushing at normative boundaries of sacred and secular. Beyond its role as a desirable art form, golden age cantorial music offers aspiring Hasidic singers a form of Jewish cultural productivity in which artistic excellence, maverick outsider status, and sacred authority are aligned. - Publisher's Description

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Tablets Shattered: The End of an American Jewish Century and the Future of Jewish Life
Leifer, Joshua (2024)

"Tablets Shattered" is Joshua Leifer’s lively and personal history of the fractured American Jewish present. Formed in the middle decades of the twentieth century, the settled-upon pillars of American Jewish self-definition (Americanism, Zionism, and liberalism) have begun to collapse. The binding trauma of Holocaust memory grows ever-more attenuated; soon there will be no living survivors. After two millennia of Jewish life defined by diasporic existence, the majority of the world’s Jews will live in a sovereign Jewish state by 2050. Against the backdrop of national political crises, resurgent global antisemitism, and the horrors of the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, Leifer provides an illuminating and meticulously reported map of contemporary Jewish life and a sober conjecture about its future. 

Leifer begins with the history of Jewish immigrants in America, starting with the arrival of his great-grandmother Bessie from a shtetl in Belarus and following each subsequent generation as it conformed to the prevailing codes of American Jewish life. He then reports on the state of today’s burning Jewish issues. We meet millennial Jewish racial justice organizers, Orthodox political activists, young liberal rabbis looking to “queer” the Torah through exegesis, Haredi men learning full-time at the world’s largest yeshiva, progressive anti-Zionists attempting to separate Judaism from nationalism, and right-wing Israeli public intellectuals beginning to imagine a future without American Jews. 

As it traverses today’s Jewish landscape through uncommon personal familiarity with the widest range of Jewish experience, "Tablets Shattered" also charts the universal quest to build enduring communities amid historical and political rupture. - Publisher's Description

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A Unique People in a Unique Land: Essays on American Jewish History
Edward S. Shapiroa (2022)

This book is a collection of two dozen essays published over the past four decades on American Jewish history and culture. They discuss the role that Jews have played in American culture, sports, politics, business, and religion, as well as the nature of American antisemitism. 

The essays argue that the Jewish experience in America has been unique and this uniqueness has encouraged Jews to define their Jewish identity in multiple ways. In no other country has Judaism and Jewishness taken on so many diverse forms. While America has not been the promised land for Jews, it has been a land of promise. Jews have prospered in America and become part of the social, cultural, political, and economic mainstream. But whether Judaism and Jewish identity have also prospered is another question. - Publisher's Description

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Tears of History: The Rise of Political Antisemitism in the United States
Birnbaum, Pierre; Santos Da Silva, Karen (2023)

For many Jews, for more than a century, the United States has seemed to be a safe haven. There has been antisemitic prejudice, but nothing on the scale of the discrimination, persecution, pogroms, and genocide witnessed in Europe. White American ethnic violence has assailed many targets, but Jews have rarely been among them. Observing what he took to be an American exception, the influential historian Salo Baron challenged the “lachrymose conception” of Jewish history as an unending flow of oppressions, and many have followed him in seeing American Jews as sheltered from violence. But in recent years a spate of antisemitic attacks has cast doubt on this rosy view. 

The eminent French scholar Pierre Birnbaum offers a timely reconsideration of the tear-stained pages of Jewish history and the persistence of antisemitism. He explores the promise of American tolerance as well as the darkest moments of American intolerance, such as the 1913 lynching of Leo Frank. Birnbaum engages deeply with Baron’s views about Jewish history and tracks the echoes of European antisemitic violence in American culture. He argues that a new and insidious form of antisemitic ideology has arisen, one that sees the state as an instrument of Jewish control―and threatens further bloodshed. Thoughtful and eloquent, "Tears of History" is an important reflection on the roots of antisemitic violence and hatred. - Publisher's Description

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The Polyphony of Jewish Culture
Harshav, Benjamin (2022)

This book is a coat of many colors. It is a collection of essays written in English by the distinguished Israeli literary and cultural critic, Benjamin Harshav, covering the whole span of Jewish culture. The essays combine a wide historical scope with meticulously detailed close analyses of the art of poetry. 

They discuss general aspects of Jewish history, such as the demographic situation of the Jews in Eastern Europe and the phenomenon of exuberant multilingualism, Nobel laureate S.Y. Agnon's "Only Yesterday," the religious/secular nexus in modern Israel, and Herman Kruk's diaries of the last days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania. We find here condensed yet subtle interpretations of modern Hebrew poems and a comprehensive essay on American poetry in the Yiddish language. Of special importance is the study of the changing formal systems of Hebrew verse from the Bible to the present. - Publisher's Description

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This Is Your Song Too: Phish and Contemporary Jewish Identity
Kroll-Zeldin, Oren; Werden-Greenfield, Ariella (2023)

Phish has a diehard fan base and a dedicated community of enthusiasts―called Phishheads―who follow the band around the country, some fans attending every show. What may be surprising is that a significant percentage of Phishheads are Jewish. 

Two members of the band―bassist Mike Gordon and drummer Jonathan Fishman―were raised in Jewish households, and Phish has been known to play Hebrew songs in concert. At live shows, many attendees, some wearing T-shirts emblazoned with “Phish” written in Hebrew letters, express feeling something special―even distinctly Jewish―during their performances. As this book shows, Phish is one avenue through which many Jews find cultural and spiritual fulfillment outside the confines of traditional and institutional Jewish life. In effect, Phish fandom and the live Phish experience act as a microcosm through which we see American Jewish religious and cultural life manifest in unique and unexpected spaces. 

Featuring an interview with Mike Gordon and a collection of fascinating photographs, This Is Your Song Too is an in-depth look at Jewishness in the Phish universe that also provides a deeper understanding of how spirituality, ritual, and identity function in the world of rock and roll. - Publisher's Description

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We Shall Build Anew: Stephen S. Wise, the Jewish Institute of Religion, and the Reinvention of American Liberal Judaism
Idelson, Shirley (2022)

In 1922, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, a leader of the Zionist movement, established the Jewish Institute of Religion (JIR), a nondenominational rabbinical seminary in New York City. Having already founded the thriving Free Synagogue movement and the American Jewish Congress, he intended to revolutionize American liberal Judaism. Wise believed mainstream American Jewish institutions had become outdated, and he championed a progressive Jewish nationalism that would fight alongside America’s leading proponents of social and economic justice. 

We Shall Build Anew tells the little-known story of how Wise changed the trajectory of American Judaism for the next century. Through JIR, he trained a new cadre of young rabbis who shared his outlook, charged them with invigorating and reshaping Jewish life, and launched them into positions of leadership across the country. While Wise earned the ire of many mainstream Jewish leaders through his disregard for denominational distinctions, JIR became home to faculty and students of widely divergent religious and political viewpoints. 

"We Shall Build Anew" is the first book dedicated exclusively to the history of the Jewish Institute of Religion. The story of Wise’s vision for American liberal Judaism is now more important than ever. As American Jewry becomes increasingly polarized around debates concerning religious doctrine as well as Zionism and Israel, the JIR model offers hope that progressives and conservatives, Zionists and non-Zionists, and Jews representing the full spectrum of religious life cannot only coexist but also work together in the name of a vibrant Judaism and a just and peaceful world. - Publisher's Description

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JEWels: Teasing Out the Poetry in Jewish Humor and Storytelling
Zeitlin, Steve (2023)

"JEWels" is the first of its kind: the living tradition of Jewish stories and jokes transformed into poems, recording and reflecting Jewish experience from ancient times through the present day. In this novel hybrid—jokes and stories boiled down to their essence in short poems—Jewish witticism is preserved side by side with evocative storytelling and deepened with running commentary and questions for discussion. 

Illuminated here are jewels from journeys, from the Old Country, from Torah, shaped by the Holocaust, in glimpses of Jewish American lives, in Jewish foods, in conversations with God, and on the meaning of life. Jewish comedians (Lenny Bruce, Jackie Mason) appear alongside writers and musicians (Elie Wiesel, Sholem Aleichem, Itzhak Perlman) and Hasidic rabbis (the Baal Shem Tov, Rabbi Nachman of Breslov), yet most of the tellers are ordinary Jews. In this cacophony of ongoing dialogue, storytellers, rabbis, poets, and scholars chime in with interpretations, quips, and related stories and life experiences. - Publisher's Description

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And You Shall Tell Your Son: Identity and Belonging As Shaped by the Jewish Holidays
(Itzik) Peleg, Yitzhak (2022)

In this volume, Bible Studies scholar Yitzhak (Itzik) Peleg offers an educational, values-based approach to the cycle of Jewish holidays―festivals and holy days―as found in the Jewish calendar. These special days play a dual role: they reflect a sense of identity with, and belonging to, the Jewish people, while simultaneously shaping that identity and sense of belonging. The biblical command “And you shall tell your son” (Exodus 13:8) is meant to ensure that children will become familiar with the history of their people via the experience of celebrating the holidays. It is the author’s claim, however, that this command must be preceded by another educational command: “And you shall listen to your son and your daughter.” 

The book examines the various Jewish holidays and ways in which they are celebrated, while focusing on three general topics: identity, belonging, memory. Throughout the generations, observance of the holidays has developed and changed, from time to time and place to place. These changes have enabled generations of Jews, in their various communities, to define their own Jewish identity and sense of belonging. - Publisher's Description

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The Architecture of Modern American Synagogues, 1950s-1960s
Geva, Anat (2023)

In the aftermath of World War II, the United States experienced a rapid expansion of church and synagogue construction as part of a larger “religious boom.” The synagogues built in that era illustrate how their designs pushed the envelope in aesthetics and construction. The design of the synagogues departed from traditional concepts, embraced modernism and innovations in building technology, and evolved beyond the formal/rational style of early 1950s modern architecture to more of an expressionistic design. The latter resulted in abstraction of architectural forms and details, and the inclusion of Jewish art in the new synagogues. 

"The Architecture of Modern American Synagogues, 1950s–1960s" introduces an architectural analysis of selected modern American synagogues and reveals how they express American Jewry’s resilience in continuing their physical and spiritual identity, while embracing modernism, American values, and landscape. In addition, the book contributes to the discourse on preserving the recent past (e.g., mid 20th century architecture). While most of the investigations on that topic deal with the “brick & mortar” challenges, this book introduces preservation issues as a function of changes in demographics, in faith rituals, in building codes, and in energy conservation.

As an introduction or a reexamination, "The Architecture of Modern American Synagogues, 1950s–1960s" offers a fresh perspective on an important moment in American Jewish society and culture as reflected in their houses of worship and adds to the literature on modern American sacred architecture. The book may appeal to Jewish congregations, architects, preservationists, scholars, and students in fields of studies such as architectural design, sacred architecture, American modern architecture and building technology, Post WWII religious and Jewish studies, and preservation and conservation. - Publisher's Description

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Phishing for Nazis: Conspiracies, Anonymous Communications and White Supermacy Networks on the Dark Web
Topor, Lev (2023)

"Phishing for Nazis" is an evidence-based, undercover study of neo-Nazi communities on anonymous communication platforms that helps to shine a light on the dark web. It unveils how hatred and conspiracies spread and thrive online and how white supremacy is becoming prominent as extremists find shelter in the online dank underbelly of society. 

"Phishing for Nazis" explains how online manifestations of hate radicalize people into taking “real-world” action, such as shooting sprees. Methodologically, this book is unique, as it incorporates undercover cyberethnography, a method frequently used by law enforcement and intelligence agencies, unlike traditional academic studies of racism or social behavior that rely on secondary sources or surveys. 

With a particular interest on how race issues translate online, the book presents the true phenomenon of racism without relying on political correctness or whitewashing. It contributes to the field of cyber communication, as it details why and how people communicate and manage entire communities without knowing one another. The book also contributes to public policy, regulators, and technology companies as they deal with the practice of online anonymity and extremism. - Publisher's Description

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A Promised Land: Jewish Patriots, the American Revolution, and the Birth of Religious Freedom
Jortner, Adam (2024)

Jews played a critical role both in winning the American Revolution--fighting for the Patriot cause from Bunker Hill to Yorktown--and in defining the republic that was created from it. As the most visible non-Christian religion, Judaism was central to the debate over religious freedom in America at a critical juncture. During the war every city with a synagogue fell to the British-with the exception of Philadelphia, birthplace to the Declaration of Independence and a core of resistance. Jewish patriots throughout the colonies flocked to the city, where they re-founded the local synagogue as a distinctively American organization. After the war, Jews began to press for full citizenship in the hope that liberty would apply to everyone, and that the limits to freedom imposed on Jews in the Old World would be removed in the New. 

As Adam Jortner shows in this eye-opening account, the decision to extend citizenship to all religions was not a twentieth-century phenomenon prompted by immigration and Supreme Court rulings, but a debate the Founding generation itself had had-unambiguously deciding against the idea of nation defined exclusively by Christianity. Instead, the Founders, Jewish patriots, and their allies, sought and achieved the broadest possible definition of religious liberty, and the separation of church and state. "A Promised Land" sheds new light on this key struggle in early America and the driving forces behind it. - Publisher's Description

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Jewish Women in Comics: Bodies and Borders
Bauer, Heike; Greenbaum, Andrea; Lightman, Sarah (2023)

In this groundbreaking collection of essays, interviews, and artwork, contributors draw upon a rich treasure trove of Jewish women’s comics to explore the representation of Jewish women’s bodies and bodily experience in pictorial narratives. Spanning national, cultural, and artistic borders, the essays shine a light on the significant contributions of Jewish women to comics. 

The volume features established figures including Emil Ferris, Amy Kurzweil, Miriam Libicki, Trina Robbins, Sharon Rudahl, and Ilana Zeffren, alongside works by artists translated for the first time into English, such as artist Rona Mor. Exploring topics of family, motherhood, miscarriages, queerness, gender and Judaism, illness, war, Haredi and Orthodox family life, and the lingering impact of the Holocaust, the contributors present unique, at times intensely personal, insights into how Jewishness intersects with other forms of identity and identification. In doing so, the volume deepens our understanding of Jewish women’s experiences. - Publisher's Description

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You'll Never Be Anyone Else
Clyne, Rachael (2023)

Rachael Clyne's "You'll Never Be Anyone Else" presents a direct and assured voice, demanding that we think carefully about what it takes to reconcile being different. She advises the reader to 'Stop drinking the poison / labelled "Hate me." / It's that simple. I didn't say easy.' 

Clyne also has an alter-ego "Girl Golem" reminiscent of a superhero, but based on the mythical man made from clay and spells to protect Jewish people from persecution. Through this empowering persona, Clyne opens up an exploration of Jewish and lesbian identity. Surveying attitudes in the present day and in the past, these poems explore migrant heritage, sexual identity, domestic violence and aging. 

"You'll Never Be Anyone Else" offers a unique story of survival and empowerment told in spite of experiences of violence and prejudice - this from a poet who has spent a lifetime learning self-acceptance and as a psychotherapist helping others to do similar. Treating even dark subjects with playful wit and colorful imagery, Clyne is a distinctive new voice with a powerful message about self-acceptance. - Publisher's Description

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Landmark of the Spirit: The Eldridge Street Synagogue
Polland, Annie (2008)

New York City’s magnificent Eldridge Street Synagogue was built in 1887 in response to the great wave of Jewish immigrants who fled persecution in eastern Europe. Finding their way to the Lower East Side, the new arrivals formed a vibrant Jewish community that flourished from the 1850s until the 1940s. Their synagogue served not only as a place of worship but also as a singularly important center in the development of American Judaism. 

A near ruin in the 1980s that was recently reopened after a massive twenty-year restoration, the Eldridge Street Synagogue has been named a National Historic Landmark. But as Bill Moyers tells us in his foreword, the synagogue is also “a landmark of the spirit, . . . the spirit of a new nation committed to the old idea of liberty.” 

Annie Polland uses elements of the building’s architecture—the façade, the benches, the grooves worn into the sanctuary floor—as points of departure to discuss themes, people, and trends at various moments in the synagogue’s history, particularly during its heyday from 1887 until the 1930s. Exploring the synagogue’s rich archives, the author shines new light on the religious life of immigrant Jews, introduces various rabbis, cantors and congregants, and analyzes the significance of this special building in the context of the larger American-Jewish experience. - Publisher's Description

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Kaufmann's: The Family that Built Pittsburgh's Famed Department Store
Pitz, Marylynne; Schneiderman, Laura Malt (2022)

In 1868, Jacob Kaufmann, the nineteen-year-old son of a German farmer, stepped off a ship onto the shores of New York. His brother Isaac soon followed, and together they joined an immigrant community of German Jews selling sewing items to the coal miners and mill workers of western Pennsylvania. After opening merchant tailor shops in Pittsburgh’s North and South sides, the Kaufmann brothers caught the wave of a new type of merchandising—the department store—and launched what would become their retail dynasty with a downtown storefront at Fifth Avenue and Smithfield Street. In just two decades, Jacob and his brothers had ascended Pittsburgh’s economic and social ladder, rising from hardscrabble salesmen into Gilded Age multimillionaires. Generous and powerful philanthropists, the Kaufmanns left an indelible mark on the city and western Pennsylvania. 

From Edgar and Liliane’s famous residence, the Frank Lloyd Wright masterpiece called Fallingwater, to the Kaufmann clock, a historic landmark that inspired the expression “meet me under the clock,” to countless fond memories for residents and shoppers, the Kaufmann family made important contributions to art, architecture, and culture. Far less known are the personal tragedies and fateful ambitions that forever shaped this family, their business, and the place they called home. "Kaufmann’s" recounts the story of one of Pittsburgh’s most beloved department stores, pulling back the curtain to reveal the hardships, triumphs, and complicated legacy of the prominent family behind its success. - Publisher's Description

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Routledge Handbook of Jewish Ritual and Practice
Leaman, Oliver (2023)

Ritual and practice are some of the most defining features of religion, linked with its central beliefs. Discussing the wide range of Jewish ritual and practice, this volume provides a contemporary guide to this significant aspect of religious life and experience. 

Drawing on a wide range of disciplines, this volume describes not only what takes place, but the reasons behind this and the implications both the theory and practice have for our understanding of Judaism. Organized in terms of texts, periods, practices, languages and relationships with the other, the book includes accounts of prayer, food, history, synagogues and the various legal and ideological debates that exist within Judaism with the focus on how they influence practice. Coming at a time of renewed interest in the role of the body in religion, this book aims to bring the theoretical and scriptural issues which arise in this area of Jewish life and culture up to date. 

This volume is aimed at students and researchers working in Jewish studies specifically, and religious studies in general. Designed to be helpful to those on courses in relevant areas, especially in the United States, this book includes substantial bibliographical material. - Publisher's Description

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