My Future Is in America
My Future Is in America

Author: Jocelyn Cohen

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2008-04-05

Total Pages: 341

ISBN-13: 0814716954

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In 1942, YIVO held a contest for the best autobiography by a Jewish immigrant on the theme “Why I Left the Old Country and What I Have Accomplished in America.” Chosen from over two hundred entries, and translated from Yiddish, the nine life stories in My Future Is in America provide a compelling portrait of American Jewish life in the immigrant generation at the turn of the twentieth century. The writers arrived in America in every decade from the 1890s to the 1920s. They include manual workers, shopkeepers, housewives, communal activists, and professionals who came from all parts of Eastern Europe and ushered in a new era in American Jewish history. In their own words, the immigrant writers convey the complexities of the transition between the Old and New Worlds. An Introduction places the writings in historical and literary context, and annotations explain historical and cultural allusions made by the writers. This unique volume introduces readers to the complex world of Yiddish-speaking immigrants while at the same time elucidating important themes and topics of interest to those in immigration studies, ethnic studies, labor history, and literary studies. Published in conjunction with the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.

Memoirs of a Jewish Extremist
Memoirs of a Jewish Extremist

Author: Yossi Klein Halevi

Publisher: Little Brown GBR

Published: 1995

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 9780316498609

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"When Yossi Klein Halevi was a boy, his father told him stories - not fairy tales, but stories of his own harsh past, of living in a tiny hole in the ground to hide from the Nazis, of the nightmarish experience of the Jewish people. He grew up, his father's stories grew within him, and Halevi found himself identifying more and more with the persecution and suffering of his people. Even as a boy, he wanted justice, retribution, and action." "By the sixth grade, Halevi was learning how to handle a gun, handing out leaflets, joining right-wing movements. Soon he was swept away by the extremist rabbi Meir Kahane and was on the front lines of every protest, hoping to see his face and raised fist on the television news reports. At the climax of his activism, he led an unprecedented demonstration in Moscow to force the world to free Soviet Jews. But then Halevi began questioning the basic premises of his life, repudiating rage as a worldview, and trying to free himself from the bitter accounts of history. He wished for a life that embraced a world different from his father's." "In Memoirs of a Jewish Extremist, Halevi looks back on his youth with wry affection, reflecting on who he was - and why - and seeing his hotheaded and passionate fellow activists from the perspective of time."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

American Judaism
American Judaism

Author: Jonathan D. Sarna

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2019-06-25

Total Pages: 558

ISBN-13: 0300190395

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Jonathan D. Sarna's award-winning American Judaism is now available in an updated and revised edition that summarizes recent scholarship and takes into account important historical, cultural, and political developments in American Judaism over the past fifteen years. Praise for the first edition: "Sarna . . . has written the first systematic, comprehensive, and coherent history of Judaism in America; one so well executed, it is likely to set the standard for the next fifty years."--Jacob Neusner, Jerusalem Post "A masterful overview."--Jeffrey S. Gurock, American Historical Review "This book is destined to be the new classic of American Jewish history."--Norman H. Finkelstein, Jewish Book World Winner of the 2004 National Jewish Book Award/Jewish Book of the Year

Jacob H. Schiff
Jacob H. Schiff

Author: Naomi Wiener Cohen

Publisher: UPNE

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 344

ISBN-13: 9780874519488

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The first full-scale biography of a major Jewish leader and financier.

Jews in American Politics
Jews in American Politics

Author: Louis Sandy Maisel

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 388

ISBN-13: 9780742528802

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Joseph Lieberman's Vice Presidential nomination and Presidential candidacy are neither the first nor last words on signal Jewish achievements in American politics. Jews have played an important role in American government since the early 1800s at least, and in view of the 2004 election, there is no political office outside the reach of Jewish American citizens. For the first time, Jews in American Politics: Essays brings together a complete picture of the past, present, and future of Jewish political participation. Perfect for students and scholars alike, this monumental work includes thoughtful and original chapters by leading journalists, scholars, and practitioners. Topics range from Jewish leadership and identity; to Jews in Congress, on the Supreme Court, and in presidential administrations; and on to Jewish influence in the media, the lobbies, and in other arenas in which American government operates powerfully, if informally. In addition to the thematically unified essays, Jews in American Politics: Essays concludes with an invaluable roster of Jews in key governmental positions from Ambassadorships and Cabinet posts to federal judges, state governors, and mayors of major cities. Both analytical and anecdotal, the essays in Jews in American Politics offer deep insight into serious questions about the dilemmas that Jews in public service face, as well as humorous sidelights and authoritative reference materials never before collected in one source. The story of the rich tradition of Jewish participation in American political life provides an indispensable resource for any serious follower of American politics, especially in election year 2004.

Making Americans
Making Americans

Author: Andrea Most

Publisher: Belknap Press

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13:

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From 1925 to 1951--three chaotic decades of depression, war, and social upheaval--Jewish writers brought to the musical stage a powerfully appealing vision of America fashioned through song and dance. It was an optimistic, meritocratic, selectively inclusive America in which Jews could at once lose and find themselves--assimilation enacted onstage and off, as Andrea Most shows. This book examines two interwoven narratives crucial to an understanding of twentieth-century American culture: the stories of Jewish acculturation and of the development of the American musical. Here we delve into the work of the most influential artists of the genre during the years surrounding World War II--Irving Berlin, Eddie Cantor, Dorothy and Herbert Fields, George and Ira Gershwin, Oscar Hammerstein, Lorenz Hart, and Richard Rodgers--and encounter new interpretations of classics such as The Jazz Singer, Whoopee, Girl Crazy, Babes in Arms, Oklahoma!, Annie Get Your Gun, South Pacific, and The King and I. Most's analysis reveals how these brilliant composers, librettists, and performers transformed the experience of New York Jews into the grand, even sacred acts of being American. Read in the context of memoirs, correspondence, production designs, photographs, and newspaper clippings, the Broadway musical clearly emerges as a form by which Jewish artists negotiated their entrance into secular American society. In this book we see how the communities these musicals invented and the anthems they popularized constructed a vision of America that fostered self-understanding as the nation became a global power.

A Mortuary of Books
A Mortuary of Books

Author: Elisabeth Gallas

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2019-04-30

Total Pages: 544

ISBN-13: 147980987X

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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,” as the later renowned historian Lucy Dawidowicz called it—with over three million books of Jewish origin coming from nineteen different European countries awaiting restitution. A Mortuary of Books tells the miraculous story of the many Jewish organizations and individuals who, after the war, sought to recover this looted cultural property and return the millions of treasured objects to their rightful owners. Some of the most outstanding Jewish intellectuals of the twentieth century, including Dawidowicz, Hannah Arendt, Salo W. Baron, and Gershom Scholem, were involved in this herculean effort. This led to the creation of Jewish Cultural Reconstruction Inc., an international body that acted as the Jewish trustee for heirless property in the American Zone and transferred hundreds of thousands of objects from the Depot to the new centers of Jewish life after the Holocaust. The commitment of these individuals to the restitution of cultural property revealed the importance of cultural objects as symbols of the enduring legacy of those who could not be saved. It also fostered Jewish culture and scholarly life in the postwar world.

Louis Marshall and the Rise of Jewish Ethnicity in America
Louis Marshall and the Rise of Jewish Ethnicity in America

Author: Matthew Silver

Publisher: Syracuse University Press

Published: 2013-02-21

Total Pages: 666

ISBN-13: 0815651988

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A milestone in modern Jewish history and American ethnic history, the sweeping influence of Louis Marshall’s career through the 1920s is unprecedented. A tireless advocate for and leader of an array of notable American Jewish organizations and institutions, Marshall also spearheaded civil rights campaigns for other ethnic groups, blazing the trail for the NAACP, Native American groups, and environmental protection causes in the early twentieth century. No comprehensive biography has been published that does justice to Marshall’s richly diverse life as an impassioned defender of Jewish communal interests and as a prominent attorney who reportedly argued more cases before the Supreme Court than any other attorney of his era. Silver eloquently fills that gap, tracing Marshall’s career in detail to reveal how Jewish subgroups of Eastern European immigrants and established Central European elites interacted in New York City and elsewhere to fuse distinctive communal perspectives on specific Jewish issues and broad American affairs. Through the chronicle of Marshall’s life, Silver sheds light on immigration policies, Jewish organizational and social history, environmental activism, and minority politics during World War I, and he bears witness to the rise of American Jewish ethnicity in pre-Holocaust America.

Black White and Jewish
Black White and Jewish

Author: Rebecca Walker

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2002-01-08

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 1573229075

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The Civil Rights movement brought author Alice Walker and lawyer Mel Leventhal together, and in 1969 their daughter, Rebecca, was born. Some saw this unusual copper-colored girl as an outrage or an oddity; others viewed her as a symbol of harmony, a triumph of love over hate. But after her parents divorced, leaving her a lonely only child ferrying between two worlds that only seemed to grow further apart, Rebecca was no longer sure what she represented. In this book, Rebecca Leventhal Walker attempts to define herself as a soul instead of a symbol—and offers a new look at the challenge of personal identity, in a story at once strikingly unique and truly universal.