In Search of American Jewish Culture PDF Download

Author: Stephen J. Whitfield
Publisher: UPNE
ISBN: 9781584651710
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description
A leading cultural historian explores the complex interactions of Jewish and American cultures.

Author: Emily Alice Katz
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 143845466X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
Demonstrates how American Jews used culture—art, dance, music, fashion, literature—to win the hearts and minds of postwar Americans to the cause of Israel. Bringing Zion Home examines the role of culture in the establishment of the “special relationship” between the United States and Israel in the immediate postwar decades. Many American Jews first encountered Israel through their roles as tastemakers, consumers, and cultural impresarios—that is, by writing and reading about Israel; dancing Israeli folk dances; promoting and purchasing Israeli goods; and presenting Israeli art and music. It was precisely by means of these cultural practices, argues Emily Alice Katz, that American Jews insisted on Israel’s “natural” place in American culture, a phenomenon that continues to shape America’s relationship with Israel today. Katz shows that American Jews’ promotion and consumption of Israel in the cultural realm was bound up with multiple agendas, including the quest for Jewish authenticity in a postimmigrant milieu and the desire of upwardly mobile Jews to polish their status in American society. And, crucially, as influential cultural and political elites positioned “culture” as both an engine of American dominance and as a purveyor of peace in the Cold War, many of Israel’s American Jewish impresarios proclaimed publicly that cultural patronage of and exchange with Israel advanced America’s interests in the Middle East and helped spread the “American way” in the postwar world. Bringing Zion Home is the first book to shine a light squarely upon the role and importance of Israel in the arts, popular culture, and material culture of postwar America. Emily Alice Katz teaches history at the University of California, Irvine.

Author: Jenna Weissman Joselit
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780805070026
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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Book Description
The selective relish with which most American Jews affirm their identity -- consuming kosher delicacies once a year, extravagantly celebrating the bar mitzvahs of their sons and the weddings of their daughters -- has usually given rise to satire or consternation. The Wonders of America offers an alternative perspective, for this pioneering social history of Jewish culture highlights the cultural ingenuity and adaptive genius of American Jewish life. Drawing on advertisements, etiquette manuals, sermons, and surveys, Jenna Weissman Joselit constructs a lively and humorous account of how three generations of American Jews created their distinctive American culture. This provocative, enlightening study describes the forging of a rich and exuberant modern Jewish identity and makes it clear that it is not the theoretical debates of rabbis and scholars but the small choices of daily life that shape and sustain a culture

Author: Sylvia Barack Fishman
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 0791492745
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
Illustrates how some Jews have created a new, hybrid form of Judaism, merging American values and behaviors with those from historical Jewish traditions.

Author: Ava Fran Kahn
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description
The first full-length presentation of Jewish life, history, and culture in California from the Gold Rush to the twenty-first century.

Author: Marshall Sklare
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description

Author: Jonathan D. Sarna
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 0827615507
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 470

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Book Description
Published to mark the 100th anniversary of The Jewish Publication Society, Jonathan Sarna’s engaging blend of anecdote and analysis presents the personalities and the controversies, the struggles and the achievements behind a century of publishing by the oldest English-language publisher of Jewish books in the world. Includes black and white photographs and extensive listings of JPS officers and editors, governing boards, and authors, translators, and illustrators, up to 1988.

Author: Beth S. Wenger
Publisher: Doubleday Books
ISBN: 0385521391
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
Recounts the story of Jews in America, from the mid-seventeenth century to the present day, examining the contributions of the Jewish people to American culture, politics, and society.

Author: Deborah Dash Moore
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674893054
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description
The first great modern migration of the Jewish people, from the Old World to America, has been often and expertly chronicled, but until now the second great wave of Jewish migration has been overlooked. After World War II, spurred by a postwar economic boom, American Jews sought new beginnings in the nation's South and West. There, they shaped a new, postwar style of American Judaism for the second half of the twentieth century. Today these sun-soaked, entrepreneurial communities contribute greatly to the American Jewish landscape. In this book, the vibrant Jewish culture of Los Angeles and Miami comes to life through Moore's skillful weaving of individual voices, dreams, and accomplishments.

Author: Jonathan D. Sarna
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 0827615116
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 429

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Book Description
Culling the finest thinking of renowned historian Jonathan D. Sarna, Coming to Terms with America examines how Jews have long “straddled two civilizations,” endeavoring to be both Jewish and American at once, from the American Revolution to today.