In drama and in musical comedy, in popular song and in symphonic music, in movies and in literature, Jews have contributed to American culture in the 20th century to a degree out of all proportion to their numbers. But does this vast creative output coalesce into something identifiable as an American Jewish culture? Stephen J. Whitfield answers this question with a resounding "yes!" Whitfield focuses on areas where the specifically Jewish contribution has been little explored. He surveys such fields as popular music, musical theater, and drama, focusing on key figures from Jerome Kern and the Gershwins to Stephen Sondheim and Jerome Robbins; Leonard Bernstein and Aaron Copland to Irving Berlin and Bob Dylan; Arthur Miller and Lillian Hellman to David Mamet and Wendy Wasserstein. At the same time, Whitfield tackles the complex issue of race and American Jewish culture, tracing the extensive interpenetrations of Jewish and African American music. He also offers a stunning examination of Jewish American representations of the Holocaust, focusing on stage and film adaptations of Anne Frank's Diary and on Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List. In a poignant, final chapter, Whitfield ponders the future of American Jewish culture after a century of assimilationist pressure and mainstream success. The distinctive culture that he has traced through the 20th century, Whitfield concludes, may finally become submerged and lost. Only a renewed emphasis on Judaism itself, he believes, offers the hope for American Jews to maintain the dual cultural identities that they have so long succeeded in nurturing --

Volume 1: Haven of Liberty chronicles the arrival of the first Jews to New York in 1654 and highlights the role of republicanism in shaping their identity and institutions. Rock follows the Jews of NewYork through the Dutch and British colonial eras, the American Revolution and early republic, and the antebellum years, ending with a path-breaking account of their outlook and behavior during the Civil War. Overcoming significant barriers, these courageous men and women laid the foundations for one of the world’s foremost Jewish cities.

Over 500 illustrations document the Jewish contribution to American politics, commerce, industry, finance, labor, and the arts and highlight this survey of daily life and great Jewish personalities

"Explores how American Jews leveraged the Black Power movement to strengthen American Jewish religious, ethnic, and cultural life"--Provided by the publisher.

Black Jews in Africa and the Americas tells the fascinating story of how the Ashanti, Tutsi, Igbo, Zulu, Beta Israel, Maasai, and many other African peoples came to think of themselves as descendants of the ancient tribes of Israel. Pursuing medieval and modern European race narratives over a millennium in which not only were Jews cast as black but black Africans were cast as Jews, Tudor Parfitt reveals a complex history of the interaction between religious and racial labels and their political uses. For centuries, colonialists, travelers, and missionaries, in an attempt to explain and understand the strange people they encountered on the colonial frontier, labeled an astonishing array of African tribes, languages, and cultures as Hebrew, Jewish, or Israelite. Africans themselves came to adopt these identities as their own, invoking their shared histories of oppression, imagined blood-lines, and common traditional practices as proof of a racial relationship to Jews. Beginning in the post-slavery era, contacts between black Jews in America and their counterparts in Africa created powerful and ever-growing networks of black Jews who struggled against racism and colonialism. A community whose claims are denied by many, black Jews have developed a strong sense of who they are as a unique people. In Parfitt’s telling, forces of prejudice and the desire for new racial, redemptive identities converge, illuminating Jewish and black history alike in novel and unexplored ways.

Esteemed American journalist David Rieff argues against our passion for the past. He looks at how memory serves nationalistic history every ANZAC Day and annual pilgrimage to Gallipoli, and how memory of past horrors inflame deep-seated ethnic hatreds, violence and wars.

According to the 1990 census, New York, for the first time in a century, had more foreign-born inhabitants than native-born residents. A city of continual immigration, New York's people have been documented by major artists and photographers from the earliest European settlers to the present. In this majestic illustrated history, with over 500 prints, paintings, and photographs, many never before published, we see the arrival of the first wave of Dutch and Anglo-Saxon settlers in the seventeenth century. We progress through Irish and German immigrations in the mid-nineteenth century, the immigration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries of vast numbers of Italians and Eastern European Jews as well as Greeks and Slavs, followed by African Americans moving from the South after World War I. Finally, as the twentieth century comes to a close, Caribbeans, Latinos, Africans, and Asians have become the dominant new New Yorkers. As he did with Harlem on My Mind, The Lower East Side, American Jewish Album, and The Italian Americans, Allon Schoener has brought together wonderful images as well as documentary accounts from diaries, letters, news articles, and other sources, giving us the rich history and texture of this great city.

Jews and the American Public Square is a study of how Jews have grappled with the presence of religion, both their own and others, in American public life. It surveys historical Jewish approaches to church-state relations and analyzes Jewish responses to the religion clauses of the First Amendment. The book also explores how the contemporary sociological and political characteristics of American Jews bear on their understanding of the public dimensions of American religion. In addition to a descriptive and analytic approach. the volume is also critical and polemical. Its contributors attack and defend prevailing views, raise critical questions about the political and intellectual positions favored by American Jews, and propose new syntheses. This book captures the current mood of the Jewish community: both committed to the separation of church and state and perplexed about its scope and application. It provides the necessary background for a principled reconsideration of the problem of religion in the public square.

This JPS Guide chronicles the extraordinary history of American Jewry. Finkelstein tells the dramatic 350-year story of the people and events that shaped the lives of today's American Jews. Divided into six time periods, American Jewish History describes Jewish life from the time of the early settlers, to the period of massive immigration that flooded the cities, to the incredible growth of Jews in positions of influence in business, politics, and the arts. This is a story of a people who affected not only the lives of Jews in the U.S. today, but also the course of American history itself. There are over 70 black and white photographs, maps, and charts and more than 120 feature boxes and biographies throughout, as well as timelines, notes, a bibliography, and index. Finkelstein has made the saga of American Jewry much more than a compilation of historical facts. This is wonderfully stimulating journey--a worthwhile adventure for readers of all ages.

This compilation of essays, edited by a Palestinian writer and an Israeli journalist, constitutes a challenge to critically rethink the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Between the Lines presents a groundbreaking study that brings together insights from across the lines of conflict to put the latest chapter of Israeli apartheid and Palestinian resistance into context. Contributors include: Marwan Bargouti, Dr. Azmi Bishara, Dr. Sami Shalom Chetrit, Dr. Saleh Abdel Jawwad, Husam Khader, Eileen Kuttab, Dr. Yitzhak Laor, Dr. Adi Ophir, Dr. Ilan Pappe, Linda Tabar, Graham Usher and Dr. Jamal Zahalqa. "The destruction of a nation is not an everyday event in history. It is being carried out before our eyes, systematically and consciously, with cruelty and self-righteousness, and with the backing of the global superpower. These acute and informed essays develop a perspective on the background and unfolding of these events that is remote from anything likely to be heard in the West. They merit close attention and thoughtful consideration." --Noam Chomsky "This collection provides a lucid and critical analysis of the Israeli and American policies in the Middle East. The disastrous repercussions of this unholy alliance are presented in this collection through incisive and timely contributions. In the best tradition of [the journal] Between the Lines, readers will be rewarded by this collection that unmasks and exposes what the mainstream media refuses to report or admit." --Ilan Pappe, Israeli historian and author of A History of Modern Palestine Toufic Haddad is a Palestinian American activist who was formerly co-editor with Tikva Honig-Parnass of the Jerusalem-based magazine Between the Lines. Tikva Honig-Parnass is a Jewish Israeli active in radical anti-occupation movements.

From its founding in the late seventeenth century, Newark, New Jersey, was a vibrant and representative center of Jewish life in America. Geographically and culturally situated between New York City and its outlying suburbs, Newark afforded Jewish residents the advantages of a close-knit community along with the cultural abundance and social dynamism of urban life. In Newark, all of the representative stages of modern Jewish experience were enacted, from immigration and acculturation to upward mobility and community building. The Enduring Community is a lively and evocative social history of the Jewish presence in Newark as well as an examination of what Newark tells us about social assimilation, conflict and change. Grounded in documentary research, the volume makes extensive use of interviews and oral histories. The author traces the growth of the Jewish population in the pre-Revolutionary period to its settlement of German Jews in the 1840s and Eastern European Jews in the 1880s. Helmreich delineates areas of contention and cooperation between these groups and relates how an American identity was eventually forged within the larger ethnic mix of the city. Jewish population in politics, the establishment of Jewish schools, synagogues, labor unions, charities, and community groups are described together with cultural and recreational life. Despite the formal and emotional bonds that formed over a century, Jewish neighborhoods in Newark did not survive the postwar era. The trek to the suburbs, the erosion of Newark's tax base, and deteriorating services accelerated a movement outward that mirrored the demographic patterns of cities across America. By the time of the Newark riots in 1967, the Jewish presence was largely absent. This volume reclaims a lost history and gives personalized voice to the dreams, aspirations, and memories of a dispersed community. It demonstrates how former Newarkers built new Jewish communities in the surrounding suburbs, an area dubbed "MetroWest" by Jewish leaders. The Enduring Community is must reading for students of Jewish social history, sociologists, urban studies specialists, and readers interested in the history of New Jersey. The book includes archival photographs form the periods discussed.

Egypt's indigenous Jewish population comprised Arabic-speaking Rabbanite and Karaite Jews, some of whom had been in the country since the early Islamic era. Jews expelled from Spain in 1492 took refuge in Egypt, and their numbers were augmented in the mid-nineteenth century by Sephardic immigrants. Originally welcomed elsewhere in the Ottoman Empire, these Spanish Jews came to Egypt seeking economic opportunity in the era of Suez Canal construction and the cotton boom. The late nineteenth century brought Ashkenazi Jews fleeing persecution in Eastern Europe. The different groups formed a heterogeneous community of cosmopolitan hybrids, which was both an element of strength and a factor in its eventual demise. The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry examines the history of the Egyptian Jewish community after 1948, focusing on three major areas: the life of the majority of the community, which remained in Egypt from the1948 Arab-Israeli War until the aftermath of the 1956 Suez/Sinai War; the dispersion and reestablishment of Egyptian Jewish communities in the United states, France, and Israel; and contested memories of Jewish life in Egypt since President Anwar al-Sadat's visit to Jerusalem in 1977. Beinin argues that the experiences of Egyptian Jews cannot be adequately accounted for by either Egyptian nationalist or Zionist narratives. Fusing history, ethnography, literary analysis, and autobiography, Joel Beinin conducts an interdisciplinary investigation into identity, dispersion, and the retrieval of identity that is relevant for anyone interested in Egypt, the Jewish diaspora, or the formation of cultures and identities.

Examines the political aspects of the rescue of Ethiopian Jewry in the 1980s-90s, focusing on the factors at work in the U.S. and in Israel. In the 1970s, Israel was reluctant to accept Ethiopian refugees, but changed its policy due to a large extent to a group of Jewish activists in the U.S. who prodded Israel to take action. The American Association for Ethiopian Jews (AAEJ) was founded in 1974 and became the principal American organization advocating on behalf of the Beta Israel. Relates the suffering of Ethiopian Jews, which is attributed to a combination of discrimination, hostility on the part of local Christians, and the Jews being caught in a crossfire between the government and the rebels. Jews were persecuted for attempting to flee the country in order to reach Israel. Ch. 10 (177-188), "The Holocaust Analogy", discusses how the AAEJ compared the situation of Jews in Ethiopia with that of Jews facing the Holocaust in order to stir Israel and America to action.

Discusses the generous proposal of the Dominican government to the Jewish refugees from Germany and Austria to settle in Sosúa against the background of the reluctance of most American countries to take in Jewish refugees. Notes that the USA not only put up "paper walls" in the way of Jewish refugees eager to enter the country, but from April-May 1940 (when the war broke out in Europe) tried to impede Jewish immigration into the Dominican Republic.

This volume is a documented history of the Jewish people in North America from the late 16th century. It chronicles the evolving domestic, religious and political experiences of Jews in the American colonies and later the United States.

These strikingly lucid and accessible essays, ranging over nearly a century of Jewish communal life, examine the ways in which immigrant Jews grappled with issues of group survival in an open and accepting American society. Ten case studies focus on Jewish strategies for maintaining a collective identity while participating fully in American society and public life. Readers will find that these essays provide a fresh, provocative, and compelling look at the fundamental question facing American Jewry at the end of the 20th century, as at its start: how to assure Jewish survival in the benign conditions of American freedom.

The past two decades have witnessed a remarkable renaissance in the academic study of the history of the Jews in Great Britain and of their impact upon British history. In this volume Professor Geoffrey Alderman presents essays that reflect the richness of this renaissance, penned by a new generation of British and American scholars who are uninhibited by the considerations of communal image and public obligation that once exercised a powerful influence on Anglo-Jewish historiography. History does not have lessons, says Alderman, but it may provide signposts, and he adds that in the case of the essays presented here "I believe there is one signpost that we would all do well to ponder: in multicultural Britain hard-working immigrants may be welcome, or they may be feared -- or both. They are destined to remain not quite British, and, for better or worse, they are destined to bequeath this otherness to the generations that follow them."

This book brings together an inter-disciplinary group of Palestinian, Israeli, American, British and Irish scholars who theorise 'the question of Palestine'. Critically committed to supporting the Palestinian quest for self determination, they present new theoretical ways of thinking about Palestine. These include the 'Palestinization' of ethnic and racial conflicts, the theorization of Palestine as camp, ghetto and prison, the tourist/activist gaze, the role of gendered resistance, the centrality of the memory of the 1948 Nakba (catastrophe) to the contemporary understanding of the conflict, and the historic roots of the contemporary discourse on Palestine. The book offers a novel examination of how the Palestinian experience of being governed under what Giorgio Agamben names a 'state of exception' may be theorised as paradigmatic for new forms of global governance. An indispensable read for any serious scholar.

How have American Zionists maintained the delicate balance between their Americanism and their Zionism? How did they, as Americans, support the principle of democracy and at the same time, as Jews, support the creation of a Jewish homeland despite the pre-1948 Arab majority in Palestine? Looking at America-Holy Land relations during the years prior to the establishment of the state of Israel, Medoff explores this crucial question of American Jewish identity. Using original, previously unpublished archival material, this study presents an engaging account of a dilemma that is still very much an issue in today's political climate.