The Future of American Jewish Pasts
Description
Leading scholars of American Jewish experience offer bold historical interpretations that reimagine American Jewish studies
The Future of American Jewish Pasts boldly imagines the next chapters in the study of American Jewish life. Conceived during the COVID-19 pandemic and completed just before the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel and ensuing war, this innovative volume gathers leading scholars of American Jewish experience to ask what the future of the study of the American Jewish past holds.
The contributors reconceive traditional approaches to American Jewish life and delve into underexplored topics to present a vision of a rich future for the field of American Jewish studies. Essays on antisemitism, Zionism, liberalism, immigration, feminism, family histories, and more stake out new sources, methods, and interpretations of histories and historiographies. To understand American Jewish life in its complexity and richness, these essays engage multiple disciplines, including history, ethnography, and literary studies. Many showcase comparative or theoretical approaches that illuminate new dimensions of American Jewish studies, and others offer personal reflections to reveal how scholars' own life stories intersect with the questions that animate their scholarship. For students, scholars, and the general public, this interdisciplinary volume provides a tantalizing selection of the freshest approaches to understanding American Jewish life.
Contributors: Lila Corwin Berman, Tobias Brinkmann, Ayelet Brinn, Alanna E. Cooper, Jessica Cooperman, Deborah Dash Moore, Hasia R. Diner, Kathryn Hellerstein, Markus Krah, Heather S. Nathans, Noam Pianko, Lana Dee Povitz, Riv-Ellen Prell, Kate Rosenblatt, Laurence Roth, Britt Tevis, JT Waldman, Amy Weiss, Beth S. Wenger.
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Persons
Lila Corwin Berman is Paul and Sylvia Steinberg Professor of American Jewish History, New York University.
Deborah Dash Moore is Jonathan Freedman Distinguished University Professor of History and Professor of Judaic Studies, University of Michigan.
Beth S. Wenger is Moritz and Josephine Berg Professor of History and Associate Dean for Graduate Studies, University of Pennsylvania.
Content
- Cover
- Series page
- Title page
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Introduction On Contexts and Questions
- Prologue Re-narrations of American Jewish Life
- Part I. Politics of Americanization
- Chapter 1. Americanization Politics and the Yiddish Press
- Chapter 2. American Zionism and Racial Justice: New Perspectives from the Past
- Chapter 3. Rethinking American Jewish Liberalism: Jewish Communists and Jewish Life, 1946-56
- Part II. Absences and Assumptions
- Chapter 4. American Jewish History as Told by the Irish, 1870-1930
- Chapter 5. Protestant Theology and the Goals of Jewish-Christian Relations
- Chapter 6. On the Importance of Coalitional Feminism to American Jewish History
- Part III. Texts and Contexts
- Chapter 7. Catching the Hebrew Accent: Performing Race in American Jewish Culture
- Chapter 8. Schocken Books: The Story of a Jewish Publisher and American Race Consciousness
- Chapter 9. Retelling Jewish American Literature Through Women Writers
- Part IV. Material Meanings
- Chapter 10. Jewish Lightning: The Enduring Figure of the Jewish Arsonist
- Chapter 11. Hooked to a Family Story: Mundane Objects and Holocaust Representation
- Chapter 12. Taking Leave While Holding Fast: Jewish Congregations and Their Buildings in Twenty-First- Century America
- Chapter 13. "Can I Ask You a Question?"
- List of Contributors
- Index
- Acknowledgments
