Abstract: <p>By Ofra Amihay</p>
Karen Grumberg’s Place and Ideology in Contemporary Hebrew Literature is a welcome addition to material culture analysis in general, and an imperative contribution to this trend within the study of Hebrew literature and culture in particular. Alongside studies of visual images, artifacts, and other components constructing the everyday—food, fashion, design, architecture—this is, to use an appropriate expression, a well-placed project. Grumberg’s chief inspiration is John Brinckerhoff Jackson’s notion of “vernacular landscape,” referring to marginal sites that are unshaped by official political regulation of space but nevertheless influence their surrounding culture immensely. Following this discussion ... <a href="http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_jewish_identities/v006/6.1.amihay.html">Read More</a> Keywords: Hebrew literature PubDate: 2013-03-27T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: <p>By Brett Krutzsch</p>
As American Jewish leaders continue to worry about assimilation and dwindling commitments to Jewish communities, Helene Meyers, professor of English at Southwestern University, explores the potential of American Jewish literature to serve as source material for imagining Jewish identity in ways that are not predicated on hegemonic notions of gender, sexuality, and race, suggesting that embracing non-normative ways of being will lead to a thriving Jewish future. Meyers engages in a close reading of novels, films, and plays from the late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first centuries to unearth how subversion, transgression, and alterity can lead to new and fruitful ways of being Jewish. The bulk of her work is divided ... <a href="http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_jewish_identities/v006/6.1.krutzsch.html">Read More</a> Keywords: American literature PubDate: 2013-03-27T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: <p>By Daniel S. Palmer</p>
Since World War II, architects of Jewish heritage have played a central role in the profession. Jews have overcome the field’s exclusive educational and patronage systems, and shaped architectural history: Louis I. Kahn has come to be seen as a savior of modern architecture partly because of his interest in Jewish mysticism; Daniel Libeskind’s meteoric rise is largely due to the complex ways he grapples with the legacy of the Holocaust; and Jewish museums and monuments, like James Ingo Freed’s United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and Peter Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe have been highly successful. An important chronicle of this phenomenon, Gavriel Rosenfeld’s Building After Auschwitz: ... <a href="http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_jewish_identities/v006/6.1.palmer.html">Read More</a> Keywords: Architecture, Modern PubDate: 2013-03-27T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: <p>By Barry Trachtenberg</p>
Other than experts in the field of Yiddish cultural studies, it is unlikely that most scholars of modern Jewish history today will have heard of Noah Prylucki (1882–1941). In the decades following World War I, however, Prylucki was among the most widely known and discussed Jewish political and cultural leaders in Poland. In his various capacities as attorney, folklorist, theater critic, politician, editor, philologist, and professor, he exerted an influence on Polish Jewry that was without parallel. As a significant new biographical study of Prylucki and the Folksparty movement of pre-World War II Poland by York University scholar Kalman (Keith) Weiser shows, the Autonomist ideals of the historian Simon Dubnow ... <a href="http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_jewish_identities/v006/6.1.trachtenberg.html">Read More</a> Keywords: Jews PubDate: 2013-03-27T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: <p>By Shira Kohn</p>
In this compelling study, Cornelia Wilhelm traces the history of the nineteenth-century fraternal order of B’nai B’rith and its female counterpart, the United Order of True Sisters (UOTS) and situates them in a broader framework that connects the founders’ mission to their self-awareness as German Jews in America. The narrative also elucidates the important connection between B’nai B’rith and the birth of Reform Judaism in both Germany and the United States. Other scholars have documented the formation and impressive expansion of B’nai B’rith during this period, but only in Wilhelm’s volume does its centrality within the Jewish communal landscape fully emerge. Indeed, she persuasively argues that her subjects ... <a href="http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_jewish_identities/v006/6.1.kohn.html">Read More</a> Keywords: Jews, German PubDate: 2013-03-27T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: <p>By Jenifer S. Cushman</p>
Responding to Theodor Adorno’s condemnation of poetry after Auschwitz, Elizabeth Baer urges readers to consider “the viability of imaginative works about the Shoah” (2) in The Golem Redux. But Baer’s work is no gauntlet thrown glibly down to Holocaust scholars, rather she traces the figure of the golem from its first mention in the Psalms to sixteenth-century Prague tales surrounding Rabbi Loew, and on to early twentieth-century versions, in order to support her reading of the golem in post-Holocaust works as a “tribute to Jewish imagination and imaginative literature.” (3) The role of the post-Holocaust golem, she asserts, is “to affirm the viability and authority of the imagination, of story, and of creativity.” ... <a href="http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_jewish_identities/v006/6.1.cushman.html">Read More</a> PubDate: 2013-03-27T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: <p>By Lila Corwin Berman</p>
Listen to him lecture, read any of his prodigious writings, or simply share a meal with him, and you will realize that Jonathan Sarna’s range of knowledge about American Jewish history is breathtakingly broad. Yet over the course of his career, he has also dedicated himself to a very particular and often marginalized facet of American Jewish history: the nineteenth century, prior to the massive wave of Eastern European Jewish immigrants. Sarna’s most recent book, When General Grant Expelled the Jews, echoes his first monograph, Jacksonian Jews: The Two Worlds of Mordecai Noah (1981), in its insistence that readers have a great deal to learn from the experience of Jews in the nineteenth century. A ... <a href="http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_jewish_identities/v006/6.1.berman.html">Read More</a> Keywords: United States PubDate: 2013-03-27T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: <p>By Cary Nathenson</p>
In the mid-1940s, a little girl on the South Side of Chicago really, really wanted a Christmas tree. This commonplace request was complicated by just one thing: the girl, like most of her neighbors, was Jewish. The temper tantrum must have been ferocious, because the girl somehow got her mother to give in. A tree was procured and smuggled down the alley into the apartment, lest the neighbors get wind of the shande. The girl enjoyed her Christmas tree, alongside her Hanukkah menorah, until one day she developed a fever, and the tree was hastily stuffed into a closet before the pediatrician, Dr. Rosen-bloom, arrived. The stress of this secret Christmas was ultimately too much bother, so this would be my ... <a href="http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_jewish_identities/v006/6.1.nathenson.html">Read More</a> Keywords: Judaism PubDate: 2013-03-27T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: <p>By Judy Baumel-Schwartz</p>
There is a story of a Hassidic sect whose members would bend their knees at a point during the Simchat Torh hakafot.1 When asked about the custom, younger members explained that it was of Kabbalistic origin and done for generations in “Der alter Heim,” (“the old home,” e.g. Europe). Hearing this, an elderly Hassid shook his head. “The young, they talk such foolishness. Our last Rebbe in Poland was very tall and our shteibl had a low beam on one side,” he recalled. “When the Rebbe reached the beam during the hakufes (hakafot) he would bend his knees to pass underneath.” After the war, one of the hassidim who found refuge in America remembered the Rebbe’s action, but didn’t recall the reason, so today an entire sect ... <a href="http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_jewish_identities/v006/6.1.baumel-schwartz.html">Read More</a> Keywords: Jewish women PubDate: 2013-03-27T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: <p>By Tali Tadmor-Shimony</p>
This poem appeared in the Israel Reader for the Fourth Grade. The reader was a basic textbook for students, from first grade onwards, designed for teaching literature and language. The poem embodies the Zionist motif of bringing the Diaspora Jew to the Promised Land, based on an exiled people’s eternal connection to its original birthplace, one of the most widely-accepted axioms in Jewish life. The Reader for the Fourth Grade editors did not include this poem due to literary or academic considerations. It is not a gripping literary work. Rather, it was chosen for its ideological message. The relationship between Jews everywhere and the Land of Israel is an indisputable premise of Jewish-Israeli discourse. This ... <a href="http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_jewish_identities/v006/6.1.tadmor-shimony.html">Read More</a> Keywords: Education and state PubDate: 2013-03-27T00:00:00-05:00
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