American Jewish History articles from December 2001

American Jewish History archives from December 2001

Introduction: the Jew as "other" in America.
December 1, 2001... Fifty years ago, historians of American Jewry portrayed the United States as a virtual utopia for Jews. While admitting to the existence of antisemitism, they downplayed its significance, explaining that it occurred infrequently and rarely...

Demonic images of the Jew in the nineteenth century United States.
December 1, 2001... Fifty years ago the historian Oscar Handlin published a seminal article in this journal entitled "American Views of the Jew at the Opening of the Twentieth Century." (1) The essay discussed the ways in which Americans perceived Jews during the...

The unstable other: locating the Jew in progressive-era American racial discourse.
December 1, 2001... "Every culture is haunted by its other," explains Jacques Derrida, suggesting, as theorists have before him, that the formation of national and cultural identities has always entailed the drawing of a line between those who belong and those who...

The absent presence: enduring images of Jews in United States military history.
December 1, 2001... In the December 1920 issue of The Menorah Journal, Nathan Isaacs launched a trenchant refutation of the image of the perilous and pernicious "International Jew" then circulating widely across America. Although this image had been gradually...

The other War: American Jews, Lyndon Johnson, and the Great Society.(war on poverty)
December 1, 2001... Just as President Lyndon Baines Johnson escalated US involvement in Vietnam, he declared another war on the home front: the War on Poverty. The hallmark of his Great Society social reform program, the War on Poverty strove to achieve what LBJ's...

Jews of Brooklyn.
December 1, 2001... Edited by Ilana Abramovitch and Sean Galvin. Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press/University Press of New England, 2002. 355 pp. The editors of Jews of Brooklyn set themselves a daunting task: "capturing the feeling of Jewish Brooklyn"...

Complex Identities: Jewish Consciousness and Modern Art.
December 1, 2001... Edited by Matthew Baigell and Milly Heyd. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001. xvii + 301 pp. The intersection of visual expression and Jewish experience has long been fraught with ambiguity and confounded by the most basic...

Henry Ford and the Jews: the Mass Production of Hate.
December 1, 2001... By Nell Baldwin. New York: Public Affairs, 2001. xii + 416 pp. During the 1920s, Henry Ford was the most famous American in the world. In the United States, he received more publicity in the press than anyone except the presidents, and no...

As We See Ourselves: Jewish Women in Nursing.
December 1, 2001... By Evelyn Rose Benson. Indianapolis: Center Nursing Publishing, 2001. xii + 196 pp. While doctors have traditionally been venerated in the American Jewish community, the same respect has not generally been accorded to nurses. Over the...

Cuban-Jewish Journeys: Searching for Identity, Home and History in Miami.
December 1, 2001... By Caroline Bettinger-Lopez. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2000. xli + 271 pp. More than one million Cubans, approximately 10 percent out of a population of eleven million, now live outside their country. Their exodus began...

Perceptions of Palestine: Their Influence on U.S. Middle East Policy.
December 1, 2001... By Kathleen Christison. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. ix + 370 pp. United States policy with regard to the Arab-Israel sector of the Middle East and hence with regard to the Palestinians has been a subject of great...

Hungering for America: Italian, Irish, and Jewish Foodways in the Age of Migration.
December 1, 2001... By Hasia R. Diner. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001. xvii + 292 pp. Drawing on a wide and rich array of sources, Hasia Diner's Hungering for America "explores how the memories of hunger and the realities of American plenty fused...

Catholics and Jews in Twentieth Century America.
December 1, 2001... By Egal Feldman. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001. xiii + 323 pp. Egal Feldman has taken a topic of enormous potential interest and produced a deeply disappointing book. This is partly because he knows very little...

Jewish Immigrant Entrepreneurship in New York and London, 1880-1914: Enterprise and Culture.(Book Review)
December 1, 2001... By Andrew Godley. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2001. xii + 187 pp. The focus of Andrew Godley's book is the link between culture and economic behavior. Specifically, it is the daunting phenomenon of Britain's failure to maintain its...

Louis Finkelstein and the Conservative Movement: Conflict and Growth.
December 1, 2001... By Michael B. Greenbaum. Binghamton, NY: Global Publications, 2001. xv + 308 pp. A central tension besets the institutional history of the Conservative movement in Judaism. For most of the past century the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS)...

The Seixas-Kursheedts and the Rise of Early American Jewry.(Book Review)
December 1, 2001... By Kenneth Libo and Abigail Kursheedt Hoffman. n.p.: Bloch Publishing and American Jewish Historical Society, 2001. xxiv + 101 pp. This rather small volume has an ambitious half title, the promise of which is, unfortunately, largely...

Women and American Judaism: Historical Perspectives.
December 1, 2001... Edited by Pamela S. Nadell and Jonathan D. Sarna. Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press/University Press of New England, 2001. xv + 322 pages. In this wide-ranging anthology, editors Pamela S. Nadell and Jonathan D. Sarna bring together...

Jewish Baby Boomers: A Communal Perspective.
December 1, 2001... By Chaim I. Waxman. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001. 221 pp. The task for Chaim I. Waxman in Jewish Baby Boomers: A Communal Perspective is to transmute anecdote on the first post-Holocaust generation of American Jews into...