Harmony & Dissonance

Harmony & Dissonance

Author: Sidney M. Bolkosky

Publisher: Wayne State University Press

Published: 1991

Total Pages: 560

ISBN-13: 9780814319338

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Analyzing one of the most vital and significant Jewish populations in the United States, Harmony and Dissonance chronicles the intellectual, cultural, and social history of the Jews of Detroit from 1914 to 1967. Sidney Bolkosky has drawn upon resources from religious and secular Jewish institutions in Detroit and supplemented them with information and interpretations from numerous oral testimonies to place this material in the context of the city of Detroit and its unique economic and social history. Thus the book includes discussions of the effects of Detroit events on the Jewish population, from Henry Ford's promise of a five dollar per day wage to the Detroit riots of 1943 and 1967. The author contends that the peculiar history of Detroit plays a determining role in the history of its Jews. Organized chronologically, Harmony and Dissonance examines the historically shifting dynamics among Jewish groups and individuals, addressing such controversial topics as assimilation, intermarriage, religious conflicts, anti-Semitism, and East European versus German Jewish identities. In pursuing the central thesis of the problematic search for Jewish identity, which runs throughout the book and ties the work together, the author has also explored the multifaceted nature of the Jewish population of Detroit, its landsmanshaften, German Jews, "establishment" organizations and their antagonists, cultural forces, and numerous Yiddish groups. This focus on identity is sharpened as the author perceives two events increasingly directing Jewish life and thought--the Holocaust and its aftermath and the founding of the state of Israel. How those events influenced the attitudes and behavior of Detroit's Jews contributes to what one Detroit patriarch called "the Detroit difference."


The Jews’ Indian

The Jews’ Indian

Author: David S. Koffman

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Published: 2019-02-08

Total Pages: 287

ISBN-13: 197880086X

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The Jews' Indian investigates the history of American Jewish relationships with Native Americans, both in the realm of cultural imagination and in face-to-face encounters. This book is the first history to analyze Jewish participation in, and Jews' grappling with the legacies of Native American history and the colonial project upon which America rests.


Judah L. Magnes

Judah L. Magnes

Author: Daniel P. Kotzin

Publisher: Syracuse University Press

Published: 2010-08-17

Total Pages: 496

ISBN-13: 0815651090

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Judah L. Magnes (1877-1948) was an American Reform rabbi, Jewish community leader, and active pacifist during World War I. In the 1920s he moved to British Mandatory Palestine, where he helped found and served as first chancellor of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Later, in the 1930s and 1940s, he emerged as the leading advocate for the binational plan for Palestine. In these varied roles, he actively participated in the major transformations in American Jewish life and the Zionist movement during the first half of the twentieth century. Kotzin tells the story of how Magnes, immersed in American Jewish life, Zionism, and Jewish life in Mandatory Palestine, rebelled against the dominant strains of all three. His tireless efforts ensured that Jewish public life was vibrant and diverse, and not controlled by any one faction within Jewry. Magnes brought American ideals to Palestine, and his unique conception of Zionism shaped Jewish public life in Palestine, influencing both the development of the Hebrew University and Zionist policy toward Arabs.


Judah Magnes

Judah Magnes

Author: David Barak-Gorodetsky

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 2021-11

Total Pages: 362

ISBN-13: 0827615167

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This comprehensive intellectual biography of Judah Magnes—the Reform rabbi, American Zionist leader, and inaugural Hebrew University chancellor—offers novel analysis of how theology and politics intertwined to drive Magnes’s writings and activism—especially his championing of a binational state—against all odds. Like a prophet unable to suppress his prophecy, Magnes could not resist a religious calling to take political action, whatever the cost. In Palestine no one understood his uniquely American pragmatism and insistence that a constitutional system was foundational for a just society. Jewish leaders regarded his prophetic politics as overly conciliatory and dangerous for negotiations. Magnes’s central European allies in striving for a binational Palestine, including Martin Buber, credited him with restoring their faith in politics, but they ultimately retreated from binationalism to welcome the new State of Israel. In candidly portraying the complex Magnes as he understood himself, David Barak-Gorodetsky elucidates why Magnes persevered, despite evident lack of Arab interest, to advocate binationalism with Truman in May 1948 at the ultimate price of Jewish sovereignty. Accompanying Magnes on his long-misunderstood journey, we gain a unique broader perspective: on early peacemaking efforts in Israel/Palestine, the American Jewish role in the history of the state, binationalism as political theology, an American view of binationalism, and the charged realities of Israel today.


Jewish Stories One Generation Tells Another

Jewish Stories One Generation Tells Another

Author: Peninnah Schram

Publisher: Jason Aronson, Incorporated

Published: 1996-05-01

Total Pages: 545

ISBN-13: 1461629217

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Peninnah Schram, widely regarded as one of the great Jewish storytellers of our generation, has collected and retold sixty-four delightful Jewish folktales to create Jewish Stories One Generation Tells Another. Ms. Schram, who believes that stories form "the link between the generations," helps forge that link with this book, ensuring that these stories will continue to live and breathe in the modern world. The life force animating these tales is almost tangible. The printed words seem to vibrate, as if the author possessed the voices of various tellers and lent their lilting tones and ripe inflections to the printed page. Furthermore, the laughter, sobs, and delighted cries of countless listeners also echo in these pages. Schram, who has written a thoughtful, informative introduction for each story, demonstrates on every page her belief that the stories "connect to our lives." And when the lifelike characters woven into Schram's magic tapestry suffer or enjoy the fates they most deserve, we rejoice, secure in their storybook world?a world where justice, however incomprehensible, is always done, and where we attain happiness by living in accordance with Jewish law and in harmony with the world's natural order. Jewish Stories One Generation Tells Another abounds in a gentle wisdom that presses itself upon our complex and often self-contradictory lives, infusing us with patience, tolerance, and hope. We identify with the kings and princes, fools and beggars, heroes and leaders, villains and witches of yesteryear because, though our lives are vastly different from theirs, we share their moral choices and experience their dilemmas. Schram joins Jewish storytellers throughout the ages, linking past to present and preserving an invaluable legacy for generations yet unborn.


In Search of the Holy Grail

In Search of the Holy Grail

Author: Veronica Ortenberg

Publisher: A&C Black

Published: 2006-01-01

Total Pages: 374

ISBN-13: 9781852853839

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This book surveys the influence of the middle ages, and of medieval attitudes and values, on later periods and on the modern world. Many artistic, political and literary movements have drawn inspiration and sought their roots in the thousand years between 500 and 1500 AD. Medieval Christianity, and its rich legacy, has been the essential background to European culture as a whole.Gothic architecture and chivalry were two keys to Romanticism, while nationalists, including the Nazis, looked back to the middle ages to find emerging signs of national character. In literature few myths have been as durable or popular as those of King Arthur, stretching from the Dark Ages to Hollywood. In Search of the Holy Grail is a vivid account of how later ages learnt about and interpreted the middle ages.


Cosmopolitans

Cosmopolitans

Author: Fred Rosenbaum

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2009-11-05

Total Pages: 493

ISBN-13: 0520945026

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Levi Strauss, A.L. Gump, Yehudi Menuhin, Gertrude Stein, Adolph Sutro, Congresswoman Florence Prag Kahn--Jewish people have been so enmeshed in life in and around San Francisco that their story is a chronicle of the metropolis itself. Since the Gold Rush, Bay Area Jews have countered stereotypes, working as farmers and miners, boxers and mountaineers. They were Gold Rush pioneers, Gilded Age tycoons, and Progressive Era reformers. Told through an astonishing range of characters and events, Cosmopolitans illuminates many aspects of Jewish life in the area: the high profile of Jewish women, extraordinary achievements in the business world, the cultural creativity of the second generation, the bitter debate about the proper response to the Holocaust and Zionism, and much more. Focusing in rich detail on the first hundred years after the Gold Rush, the book also takes the story up to the present day, demonstrating how unusually strong affinities for the arts and for the struggle for social justice have characterized this community even as it has changed over time. Cosmopolitans, set in the uncommonly diverse Bay Area, is a truly unique chapter of the Jewish experience in America.


The Music Libel Against the Jews

The Music Libel Against the Jews

Author: Ruth HaCohen

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2012-01-17

Total Pages: 572

ISBN-13: 0300177992

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This deeply imaginative and wide-ranging book shows how, since the first centuries of the Christian era, gentiles have associated Jews with noise. Ruth HaCohen focuses her study on a "musical libel"--a variation on the Passion story that recurs in various forms and cultures in which an innocent Christian boy is killed by a Jew in order to silence his "harmonious musicality." In paying close attention to how and where this libel surfaces, HaCohen covers a wide swath of western cultural history, showing how entrenched aesthetic-theological assumptions have persistently defined European culture and its internal moral and political orientations.Ruth HaCohen combines in her comprehensive analysis the perspectives of musicology, literary criticism, philosophy, psychology, and anthropology, tracing the tensions between Jewish "noise" and idealized Christian "harmony" and their artistic manifestations from the high Middle Ages through Nazi Germany and beyond. She concludes her book with a passionate and moving argument for humanizing contemporary soundspaces.