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Jewish American Literature since 1945: An Introduction (Baas Paperbacks Ser.)
by Stephen WadeFirst published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Jewish Americans (Our Cultural Heritage)
by Pam RosenbergA culture and tradition both ancient and modern, the stories and history of Jewish Americans go to the very heart of what it means to be an American. Students will learn about the struggles of the past and the faith of a people who made their way to America in the hopes of finding a better life.
Jewish Ann Arbor (Images of America)
by Richard Adler Ruth AdlerThe earliest Jewish settlers arrived in Michigan during the mid-18th century. Primarily traders associated with the burgeoning fur industry, few of these entrepreneurs remained permanently. During the early 1840s, the five Weilbrothers, farmers and tanners from Germany, became the first prominent Jewish settlers in Washtenaw County. By the end of that decade, a Jewish cemetery was established on what is now the site of the Horace Rackham Building on the University of Michigan campus. Though the Weil familyeventually moved west, the cemetery remained as a marker for what was then a miniscule Jewish presence. In the early 20th century, Osias Zwerdling and the Lansky family arrived. In addition to reestablishing a Jewish presence in Ann Arbor, they helped form what became Beth Israel Congregation. Growth of the Ann Arbor Jewish community coincided with the evolution of the university, as well as the city. By the end of the 20th century, a vibrant community representing all facets of Judaism had been established.
Jewish Antifascism and the False Promise of Settler Colonialism
by Max KaiserThis book takes a timely look at histories of radical Jewish movements, their modes of Holocaust memorialisation, and their relationships with broader anti-colonial and anti-racist struggles. Its primary focus is Australia, where Jewish antifascism was a major political and cultural force in Jewish communities in the 1940s and early 1950s. This cultural and intellectual history of Jewish antifascism utilises a transnational lens to provide an exploration of a Jewish antifascist ideology that took hold in the middle of the twentieth century across Jewish communities worldwide. It argues that Jewish antifascism offered an alternate path for Jewish politics that was foreclosed by mutually reinforcing ideologies of settler colonialism, both in Palestine and Australia.
Jewish Approaches to Hinduism: A History of Ideas from Judah Ha-Levi to Jacob Sapir (12th–19th centuries) (Routledge Studies in Religion)
by Richard G. MarksThis book explores past expressions of the Jewish interest in Hinduism in order to learn what Hinduism has meant to Jews living mainly in the 12th through the 19th centuries. India and Hinduism, though never at the center of Jewish thought, claim a place in its history, in the picture Jews held of the wider world, of other religions and other human beings. Each chapter focuses on a specific author or text and examines the literary context as well as the cultural context, within and outside Jewish society, that provided images and ideas about India and its religions. Overall the volume constructs a history of ideas that changed over time with different writers in different settings. It will be especially relevant to scholars interested in Jewish thought, comparative religion, interreligious dialogue, and intellectual history.
Jewish Autonomy in a Slave Society: Suriname in the Atlantic World, 1651-1825 (The Early Modern Americas)
by Aviva Ben-UrA fascinating portrait of Jewish life in Suriname from the 17th to 19th centuriesJewish Autonomy in a Slave Society explores the political and social history of the Jews of Suriname, a Dutch colony on the South American mainland just north of Brazil. Suriname was home to the most privileged Jewish community in the Americas where Jews, most of Iberian origin, enjoyed religious liberty, were judged by their own tribunal, could enter any trade, owned plantations and slaves, and even had a say in colonial governance.Aviva Ben-Ur sets the story of Suriname's Jews in the larger context of Atlantic slavery and colonialism and argues that, like other frontier settlements, they achieved and maintained their autonomy through continual negotiation with the colonial government. Drawing on sources in Dutch, English, French, Hebrew, Portuguese, and Spanish, Ben-Ur shows how, from their first permanent settlement in the 1660s to the abolition of their communal autonomy in 1825, Suriname Jews enjoyed virtually the same standing as the ruling white Protestants, with whom they interacted regularly. She also examines the nature of Jewish interactions with enslaved and free people of African descent in the colony. Jews admitted both groups into their community, and Ben-Ur illuminates the ways in which these converts and their descendants experienced Jewishness and autonomy. Lastly, she compares the Jewish settlement with other frontier communities in Suriname, most notably those of Indians and Maroons, to measure the success of their negotiations with the government for communal autonomy. The Jewish experience in Suriname was marked by unparalleled autonomy that nevertheless developed in one of the largest slave colonies in the New World.
Jewish Backgrounds of the New Testament
by Jr. J. Julius ScottThis survey of intertestamental Judaism illuminates the customs and controversies that provide essential background for understanding the New Testament. Scott opens a door into the Jewish world and literature leading up to the development of Christianity. He also offers an accessible overview of the data through helpful charts, maps, and diagrams incorporated throughout the text to engage his readers.
Jewish Bible Translations: Personalities, Passions, Politics, Progress
by Leonard GreenspoonJewish Bible Translations is the first book to examine Jewish Bible translations from the third century BCE to our day. It is an overdue corrective of an important story that has been regularly omitted or downgraded in other histories of Bible translation. Examining a wide range of translations over twenty-four centuries, Leonard Greenspoon delves into the historical, cultural, linguistic, and religious contexts of versions in eleven languages: Arabic, Aramaic, English, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Russian, Spanish, and Yiddish. He profiles many Jewish translators, among them Buber, Hirsch, Kaplan, Leeser, Luzzatto, Mendelssohn, Orlinsky, and Saadiah Gaon, framing their aspirations within the Jewish and larger milieus in which they worked. Greenspoon differentiates their principles, styles, and techniques—for example, their choice to emphasize either literal reflections of the Hebrew or distinctive elements of the vernacular language—and their underlying rationales. As he highlights distinctive features of Jewish Bible translations, he offers new insights regarding their shared characteristics and their limits. Additionally, Greenspoon shows how profoundly Jewish translators and interpreters influenced the style and diction of the King James Bible. Accessible and authoritative for all from beginners to scholars, Jewish Bible Translations enables readers to make their own informed evaluations of individual translations and to holistically assess Bible translation within Judaism.
Jewish Bioethics
by Yechiel Michael BarilanThis book presents the discourse in Jewish law and rabbinic literature on bioethical issues, highlighting practical problems in their socio-historical contexts. Yechiel Michael Barilan discusses end-of-life care, abortion, infertility treatments, the brain death debate, and the organ market. Barilan also presents the theology and spirituality of Jewish medical law, the communal responsibility for healthcare, and the charitable sick-care societies that flourished in the Jewish communities until the beginning of the twentieth century.
Jewish Blood: Reality and metaphor in history, religion and culture (Routledge Jewish Studies Series)
by Mitchell B. HartThis book deals with the Jewish engagement with blood: animal and human, real and metaphorical. Concentrating on the meaning or significance of blood in Judaism, the book moves this highly controversial subject away from its traditional focus, exploring how Jews themselves engage with blood and its role in Jewish identity, ritual and culture. With contributions from leading scholars in the field, the book brings together a wide range of perspectives and covers communities in ancient Israel, Europe and America, as well as all major eras of Jewish history: biblical, Talmudic, medieval and modern. Providing historical, religious and cultural examples ranging from the "Blood Libel" through to the poetry of Uri Zvi Greenberg, this volume explores the deep continuities in thought and practice related to blood. Moreover, it examines the continuities and discontinuities between Jewish and Christian ideas and practices related to blood, many of which extend into the modern, contemporary period. The chapters look at not only the Jewish and Christian interaction, but the interaction between Jews and the individual national communities to which they belong, including the complex appropriation and rejection of European ideas and images undertaken by some Zionists, and then by the State of Israel. This broad-ranging and multidisciplinary work will be of interest to students of Jewish Studies, History and Religion.
Jewish Blues: A History of a Color in Judaism (Jewish Culture and Contexts)
by Gadi SagivJewish Blues presents a broad cultural, social, and intellectual history of the color blue in Jewish life between the sixteenth and twenty-first centuries. Bridging diverse domains such as religious law, mysticism, eschatology, as well as clothing and literature, this book contends that, by way of a protracted process, the color blue has constituted a means through which Jews have understood themselves.In ancient Jewish texts, the term for blue, tekhelet, denotes a dye that serves Jewish ritual purposes. Since medieval times, however, Jews gradually ceased to use tekhelet in their ritual life. In the nineteenth century, however, interest in restoring ancient dyes increased among European scholars. In the Jewish case, rabbis and scientists attempted to reproduce the ancient tekhelet dye. The resulting dyes were gradually accepted in the ritual life of many Orthodox Jews. In addition to being a dye playing a role in Jewish ritual, blue features prominently in the Jewish mystical tradition, in Jewish magic and popular custom, and in Jewish eschatology. Blue is also representative of the Zionist movement, and it is the only chromatic color in the national flag of the State of Israel.Through the study of the changing roles and meanings attributed to the color blue in Judaism, Jewish Blues sheds new light on the power of a visual symbol in shaping the imagination of Jews throughout history. The use of the color blue continues to reflect pressing issues for Jews in our present era, as it has become a symbol of Jewish modernity.
Jewish Buenos Aires, 1890-1939: In Search of an Identity
by Dr Victor A MirelmanVictor Mirelman, in his study of the greatest concentration of Latin American Jewry, examines the changing facade of the Argentinean Jewish community from the beginning of mass Jewish immigration in 1890 to its decline in 1930. During this period, Jews arrived from Russia, Poland, Romania, Syria, Turkey and Morocco Each group founded its own synagogues. mutual help organizations. hospitals. cultural associations. and newspapers of particular vitality was the Yiddish press and the Yiddish theatre. Jewish immigrants were also especially active politically, particularly in the Socialist Party and in the workers' unions. <P><P> Based on research in the Argentine archives. Jewish Buenos Aires, 1890-1930 describes the immigration and settlement process. studies the first generation of Argentine-born Jews. and provides an understanding of assimilation and acculturation. Mirelman discusses the religious life of the community differentiating between the Ashkenazim and the various Sephardic groups and devotes chapters to Zionism, to Jewish culture in Yiddish. Hebrew. and Spanish. to education; and to social action Issues that created conflict and friction are analyzed in detail.
Jewish Cattle Traders in the German Countryside, 1919–1939: Economic Trust and Antisemitic Violence
by Stefanie FischerJewish Cattle Traders in the German Countryside, 1919–1939, explores the social and economic networks in which this group operated and the informal but durable bonds between Jewish cattle traders and farmers that not even incessant Nazi attacks could break.Stefanie Fischer combines approaches from social history, economic history, and sociology to challenge the longstanding cliché of the shady Jewish cattle dealer. By focusing on trust and social connections rather than analyzing economic trends, Fischer exposes the myriad inconsistencies that riddled the process of expelling the Jews from Germany.Jewish Cattle Traders in the German Countryside, 1919–1939, examines the complexities of relations between Jews and non-Jews who were engaged in economic and social exchange. In the process, Fischer challenges previous understandings of everyday life under Nazi rule and discovers new ways in which Jewish agency acted as a critical force throughout the exclusionary processes that took place in Hitler's Germany.
Jewish Chicago: A Pictorial History (Images of America)
by Irving CutlerFor many years Chicago had the third largest Jewishpopulation of any city in the world. Through the medium of historic photographs, this book captures the remarkable evolution of the Jewish people of Chicago, from their immigrant beginnings in the 1840s to their present-day communities. It is a story of the cultural, religious, economic, and everyday life of Chicago's Jews. These pages bring to life the people, events, neighborhoods, and institutions that helped shape and transform today's Jewish community. The photos and maps, culled from the author's and other collections, paint a vivid and informative picture of Chicago Jewry. In addition to recalling the early immigrant German and later Eastern European Jews, this book delves into Jewish neighborhoods including the West Side, South Side, North Side, suburban communities, and Maxwell Street, a neighborhood which produced such prominent Jews as musician Benny Goodman, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg, Admiral Hyman Rickover, community organizer Saul Alinsky, and CBS founder William Paley. Chicago Jews have also made contributions to the city and the nation in the arts,commerce and industry, government service, entertainment, and labor, including seven Nobel prize winners. The images show Jews as peddlers and sweatshop workers as well as successful business entrepreneurs and professionals.
Jewish Childhood in Kraków: A Microhistory of the Holocaust
by Joanna SliwaWinner of the 2020 Ernst Fraenkel Prize from the Wiener Holocaust Library Jewish Childhood in Kraków is the first book to tell the history of Kraków in the second World War through the lens of Jewish children’s experiences. Here, children assume center stage as historical actors whose recollections and experiences deserve to be told, analyzed, and treated seriously. Sliwa scours archives to tell their story, gleaning evidence from the records of the German authorities, Polish neighbors, Jewish community and family, and the children themselves to explore the Holocaust in German-occupied Poland and in Kraków in particular. A microhistory of a place, a people, and daily life, this book plumbs the decisions and behaviors of ordinary people in extraordinary times. Offering a window onto human relations and ethnic tensions in times of rampant violence, Jewish Childhood in Kraków is an effort both to understand the past and to reflect on the position of young people during humanitarian crises.
Jewish Childhood in the Roman World
by Hagith SivanThis is the first full treatment of Jewish childhood in the Roman world. <P><P>It follows minors into the spaces where they lived, learned, played, slept, and died and examines the actions and interaction of children with other children, with close-kin adults, and with strangers, both inside and outside the home. A wide range of sources are used, from the rabbinic rules to the surviving painted representations of children from synagogues, and due attention is paid to broader theoretical issues and approaches. <P>Hagith Sivan concludes with four beautifully reconstructed 'autobiographies' of specific children, from a boy living and dying in a desert cave during the Bar-Kokhba revolt to an Alexandrian girl forced to leave her home and wander through the Mediterranean in search of a respite from persecution. The book tackles the major questions of the relationship between Jewish childhood and Jewish identity which remain important to this day.<P> The first full treatment of Jewish childhood in the Roman world, of interest to historians, sociologists, childhood experts, disabilities experts, and to scholars of antiquity, the Middle Ages and modernity interested in comparative data.<P> Explores the complex relationship between Jewish childhood and Jewish identity.<P> Brings its often overlooked subjects to life, especially through four reconstructed 'autobiographies' of specific children.
Jewish Choices, Jewish Voices: Body (Volume #1)
by Elliot N. Dorff Louis E. NewmanThis new JPS ethics series deals with some of the most critical moral issues of our time. Each volume in this series presents traditional and contemporary sources on specific topics, followed by hypothetical cases and study questions to provoke discussion. Supplementing these are brief essays written by a diverse group- political figures and journalists, business professionals and authors, scholars and artists, young voices and old, traditional believers and iconoclasts. These voices from the Jewish tradition and today's Jewish community give us new questions and perspectives to think about and encourage us to consider our moral choices in a new light. Jewish Choices Jewish Voices: Body What are our obligations and rights to our own bodies? What does Judaism say about tattoos? Piercings? About our obligations to exercise and eat properly? What about smoking? Alcohol? Recreational drugs? Who owns our organs? If resources are limited, whose body comes first and how do we decide? Why do so many young Jews suffer from eating disorders?
Jewish Christianity: The Making of the Christianity-Judaism Divide (The Anchor Yale Bible Reference Library)
by Matt Jackson-McCabeA fresh exploration of the category Jewish Christianity, from its invention in the Enlightenment to contemporary debates For hundreds of years, historians have been asking fundamental questions about the separation of Christianity from Judaism in antiquity. Matt Jackson-McCabe argues provocatively that the concept “Jewish Christianity,” which has been central to scholarly reconstructions, represents an enduring legacy of Christian apologetics. Freethinkers of the English Enlightenment created this category as a means of isolating a distinctly Christian religion from what otherwise appeared to be the Jewish culture of Jesus and the apostles. Tracing the development of this patently modern concept of a Jewish Christianity from its origins to early twenty-first-century scholarship, Jackson-McCabe shows how a category that began as a way to reimagine the apologetic notion of an authoritative “original Christianity” continues to cause problems in the contemporary study of Jewish and Christian antiquity. He draws on promising new approaches to Christianity and Judaism as socially constructed terms of identity to argue that historians would do better to leave the concept of Jewish Christianity behind.
Jewish Citizenship in France: The Temptation of Being Among One's Own
by Chantal Bordes-BenayounThe Jews of France have been liberated for over two centuries; they have been considered free citizens and equal to their compatriots. What purpose, then, does it serve to study their citizenship today? Until World War II, French Jews called themselves ""Israelites;"" they were deeply patriotic and had found a place for themselves in France's ""community of citizens."" However outbursts of anti-Semitism during that period reminded them that their new status prevented neither hate nor rejection; they had to persevere in the struggle for citizenship equity.France has not been spared from recent movements demanding recognition of particular identities in the public space. Ethnicity in French political life has become increasingly obvious, in spite of the constant assertion of ""republican values."" Questions about immigration, nationality, and integration are constantly in the forefront of public life. Though, in France, the existence of ethnic and religious communities is not legally recognized, certain groups are designated as separate, often creating conflicts among them.
Jewish Comedy: A Serious History
by Jeremy DauberFinalist for the National Jewish Book Award A rich account of Jewish humor: its nature, its development, and its vital role throughout history. In a major work of scholarship both erudite and very funny, Columbia professor Jeremy Dauber traces the origins of Jewish comedy and its development from biblical times to the age of Twitter. Organizing the product of Jews’ comic imagination over continents and centuries into what he calls the seven strands of Jewish comedy—including the satirical, the witty, and the vulgar—he traces the ways Jewish comedy has mirrored, and sometimes even shaped, the course of Jewish history. Persecution, cultural assimilation, religious revival, diaspora, Zionism—all of these, and more, were grist for the Jewish comic mill; and Dauber’s book takes readers on the tour of the funny side of some very serious business. (And vice versa.) In a work of dazzling scope, readers will encounter comic masterpieces here that range from Talmudic rabbi jokes to medieval skits, Yiddish satires and Borscht Belt routines to scenes from Seinfeld and Broad City, and the book of Esther to Adam Sandler’s “Hanukkah Song.” Dauber also explores the rise and fall of popular comic archetypes such as the Jewish mother, the Jewish American Princess, and the schlemiel, the schlimazel, and the schmuck, and the classic works of such masters of Jewish comedy as Sholem Aleichem, Isaac Babel, Franz Kafka, the Marx Brothers, Woody Allen, Joan Rivers, Philip Roth, Mel Brooks, Sarah Silverman, Jon Stewart, and Larry David, among many others. Jewish comedy, as Dauber writes, is serious business. And precisely what it is, how it developed, and how its various strands weave together and in conversation with the Jewish story: that’s Jewish Comedy.
Jewish Communities in Modern Asia: Their Rise, Demise and Resurgence
by Rotem KownerJewish settlement in Asia, beyond the Middle East, is largely a modern phenomenon. Imperial expansion and adventurism by Great Britain and Russia were the chief motors that initially drove Jewish settlers to move eastwards, in the nineteenth century, combined as this was with the rise of port cities and general development of the global economy. The new immigrants soon become centrally involved, in ways quite disproportionate to their numbers, in Asian commerce. Their role and centrality finished with the outbreak of World War II, the chaos that resulted from the fighting, and the consequent collapse of Western imperialism. This unique, ground-breaking book charts their rise and fall while pointing to signs of these communities' post-war resurgence and revival. Fourteen chapters by many of the most prominent authorities in the field, from a range of perspectives, explore questions of identity, society, and culture across several Asian locales. It is essential reading for scholars of Asian Studies and Jewish Studies.
Jewish Communities of Greater Stamford, The (Images of America)
by Linda Baulsir Irwin MillerThe Jewish Communities of Greater Stamford presents a broad historical view of the Jewish people of Stamford, Darien, Greenwich, and New Canaan, Connecticut, and Pound Ridge, New York. The book goes back to the era just prior to the American Revolution, when lone Jewish families settled among the Connecticut Yankees to engage in trade, manufacturing, and commerce.The earliest settlers-such as Nehemiah Marks, who was living and doing business in Stamford as early as 1720-opened stores and other commercial enterprises. By the mid-1800s, city dwellers began coming to the region for summer vacations. After 1880, settlers arrived via the peddlers' routes and, after accumulating a little capital, stayed to open shops and establish themselves socially and politically. The greatest influx came in the 1890s and early 1900s, when many Jews arrived from the Pale of Settlements, eastern and central Europe, Lithuania, Poland, Russia, Romania, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Jewish Communities of the Five Towns and the Rockaways (Images of America)
by The Jewish Heritage Society of the Five TownsThe Five Towns--comprising the villages of Cedarhurst and Lawrence and the communities of Woodmere, Hewlett, and Inwood--is an area nestled on the South Shore of Long Island next to the easternmost part of Queens, known as Far Rockaway. Originally popular as a Jewish summer vacation spot near the Atlantic Ocean, the Five Towns and the Far Rockaway area grew to become a thriving, year-round Jewish metropolis, with thousands of families and scores of synagogues and Jewish educational institutions. A center for shopping and kosher restaurants, the Five Towns area has become one of the most popular locations for young, married Jewish couples. Jewish influence has expanded greatly in local government and education. The rich history of the early years of Jewish growth and development in the Five Towns and Rockaways lends a deeper understanding of this phenomenal change of demographics and influence that has occurred over the last few decades.
Jewish Communities on the Ohio River: A History (Ohio River Valley Series)
by Amy Hill Shevitz&“An engaging regional history with immense national significance . . . An excellent chronicle of the minority experience in small town America.&” —Ava F. Kahn, author of Jewish Voices of the California Gold Rush In Jewish Communities on the Ohio River, Amy Hill Shevitz chronicles the settlement and development of small Jewish communities in towns along the river. In these small towns, Jewish citizens created networks of businesses and families that developed into a distinctive, nineteenth-century middle-class culture. As a minority group with a vital role in each community, Ohio Valley Jews fostered American religious pluralism as they constructed a regional identity. Their contributions to the culture and economy of the region countered the anti-Semitic sentiments of the period. Shevitz discusses the associations among the towns and the big cities of the region, especially Cincinnati and Pittsburgh. Also examined are Jewish communities&’ relationships with, and dependence on, the Ohio River and rail networks. Jewish Communities on the Ohio River demonstrates how the circumstances of a specific region influenced the evolution of American Jewish life. &“Far better composed and contextualized than most local histories of smaller Jewish communities now in print, Amy Shevitz&’s book does a commendable job of detailing local developments in terms of the broader picture of both American Jewish history and Ohio Valley history.&” —Lee Shai Weissbach, author of Jewish Life in Small-Town America: A History &“Shevitz&’s study provides both corroboration, and corrective, to the standard historiography of American Jewry . . . Shevitz provides a fascinating glimpse into the nature of small-town Jewish life, and the role Jews played in shaping their world.&” —Ohio Valley Quarterly
Jewish Community Around North Broad Street, The (Images of America)
by Allen MeyersThe cradle of Jewish life in Philadelphia began with the establishment of the first synagogue, Mikveh Israel, in 1740. With the influx of many German Jews in the 1840s, the community expanded above Spring Garden Street into the Northern Liberties neighborhood. Urban settlement of Philadelphia's Jewish population during the last quarter of the nineteenth century shifted to North Broad Street when the economy improved for the city's residents after the Civil War. North Broad Street soon boasted two elegantly designed synagogues and the newly relocated Jewish Hospital from West Philadelphia.The Jewish Community around North Broad Street weaves the tale of the Jewish community in this part of Philadelphia through a collection of rare and stunning images. The construction of the North Broad Street subway in the 1920s and the row house Jewish community known as Logan are parts of this story. The development of business districts led to a more cohesive north and northwest Jewish community that allowed for satellite Jewish enclaves to flourish, complete with their own synagogues, bakeries, kosher meat markets, and hundreds of other shops that served the general population. In the 1950s, new neighborhoods, such as Mount Airy and West Oak Lane, alleviated an acute housing shortage at a time when 110,000 Jews lived in north-central and northwest Philadelphia.