American Jewish History articles from March 2000

American Jewish History archives from March 2000

ERRATA.
March 1, 2000... We regret that printer's erros appeared in the AJH 87.4 (December 1999) issue in the article by Amelia s. Holberg, titled "Berry Boop: Yiddish Film Star". Page 307, lines 5, 7, 14, 20, 25: "lvK" should read "[GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN...

Introduction.
March 1, 2000... Nearly two decades have passed since the last issue of American Jewish History devoted specifically to the topic of America's response to the Holocaust. In March 1979 and again in March 1981, this journal presented what turned out to be...

A Tragic "Fight in the Family": The New York Times, Reform Judaism and the Holocaust.
March 1, 2000... November 1942 was a critical month for American Jews. After several months of delay, the U.S. State Department had confirmed already published information that Germany was engaged in the systematic extermination of European Jews. Newspaper...

"A Calamity Almost Beyond Comprehension": Nazi Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust in the Thought of W. E. B. Du Bois.
March 1, 2000... African-Americans have reacted to Jews not only as neighbors in the American communal polity but as a fellow diaspora people. This has been true at least since the late nineteenth century, when Caribbean-born Edward Wilmot Blyden embraced...

Irving Howe and the Holocaust: Dilemmas of a Radical Jewish Intellectual.
March 1, 2000... How did Irving Howe, who was to become the most eminent Jewish public intellectual of the twentieth century, respond to the Holocaust? Did he bring his considerable powers of mind and capacity for imaginative sympathy to bear upon the news that...

"Our Leaders Cannot Be Moved": A Zionist Emissary's Reports on American Jewish Responses to the Holocaust in the Summer of 1943.
March 1, 2000... The late Leib Jaffe is best known as a tireless fund-raiser for the world Zionist movement, an editor of the Hebrew language daily Ha'aretz in its infancy, and a talented if not especially prolific poet. What is not generally known, however, is...

The Holocaust in American Life.(Review)
March 1, 2000... The Holocaust in American Life. By Peter Novick. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1999. 373 pp. In the beginning, Americans did not center the Holocaust in their consciousness. The annihilation of Europe's Jews under the swastika during...

The Americanization of the Holocaust.(Review)
March 1, 2000... The Americanization of the Holocaust. Edited by Hilene Flanzbaum. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. 261 pp. In the beginning, Americans did not center the Holocaust in their consciousness. The annihilation of Europe's Jews...

Selling the Holocaust: From Auschwitz to Schindler, How History is Bought, Packaged, and Sold.(Review)
March 1, 2000... Selling the Holocaust: From Auschwitz to Schindler, How History is Bought, Packaged, and Sold. By Tim Cole. New York: Routledge, 1999. 214 pp. In the beginning, Americans did not center the Holocaust in their consciousness. The...

Official Secrets: What the Nazis Planned, What the British and Americans Knew.(Review)
March 1, 2000... Official Secrets: What the Nazis Planned, What the British and Americans Knew. By Richard Breitman. New York: Hill and Wang, 1998. viii + 325 pp. The critical questions about the Holocaust witness role of the United States and Britain...

A Quiet American: The Secret War of Varian Fry.(Review)
March 1, 2000... A Quiet American: The Secret War of Varian Fry. By Andy Marino. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999. xi + 403 pp. The story of Varian Fry's remarkable rescue operations is not new. Fry himself recorded it, as did several survivors.(1) Yet,...

Troubled Memory: Anne Levy, the Holocaust, and David Duke's Louisiana.(Review)
March 1, 2000... Troubled Memory: Anne Levy, the Holocaust, and David Duke's Louisiana. By Lawrence N. Powell. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. xvii + 593 PP. All personal testimonies of the Holocaust rip the heart. They expose how...

Shake Heaven and Earth: Peter Bergson and the Struggle to Rescue the Jews of Europe.(Review)
March 1, 2000... Shake Heaven and Earth: Peter Bergson and the Struggle to Rescue the Jews of Europe. By Louis Rapoport. Jerusalem: Gefen Publishing, 1999. 277 pp. Louis Rapoport's Shake Heaven and Earth is a welcome addition to the thirty-year-old debate...

America Views the Holocaust, 1933-1945: A Brief Documentary History.(Review)
March 1, 2000... America Views the Holocaust, 1933-1945: A Brief Documentary History. By Robert H. Abzug. New York: Bedford/St. Martin's, 1999. 236 pp. Louis Rapoport's Shake Heaven and Earth is a welcome addition to the thirty-year-old debate over the...

While America Watches: Televising the Holocaust.(Review)
March 1, 2000... While America Watches: Televising the Holocaust. By Jeffrey Shandler. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. xviii + 316 pp. The Holocaust holds a unique place in the popular culture of the United States, and television, as Jeffrey...

When the Nazis Came to Skokie: Freedom for Speech We Hate.(Review)
March 1, 2000... When the Nazis Came to Skokie: Freedom for Speech We Hate. By Philippa Strum. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1999. xii+ 172 pp. Is freedom of speech, a fundamental liberty protected by the First Amendment, available to racists and...

Irving Howe: Socialist, Critic, Jew.(Review)
March 1, 2000... Irving Howe: Socialist, Critic, Jew. By Edward Alexander. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998. xx + 284 pp. To begin at the beginning--or just before it--the descriptive but confrontational title of this study of Irving Howe is just...

Rebecca Gratz: Women and Judaism in Antebellum America.(Review)
March 1, 2000... Rebecca Gratz: Women and Judaism in Antebellum America. By Dianne Ashton. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1997.329 pp. In her engaging biography of Rebecca Gratz (1781-1869), historian Dianne Ashton puts her extraordinary subject's...

Decade of Transition: Eisenhower, Kennedy, and the Origins of the American- Israeli Alliance.(Review)
March 1, 2000... Decade of Transition: Eisenhower, Kennedy, and the Origins of the American- Israeli Alliance. By Abraham Ben-Zvi. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. xii + 219 pp. According to Abraham Ben-Zvi, director of Tel Aviv University's...

How Jews Became White Folks and What that Says About Race in America.(Review)
March 1, 2000... This is an excellent book in many ways. It makes an extremely important contribution to the study of American Jewish history and beyond. Brodkin offers a highly developed analysis of how the category of Jews came to be equated with the category...

Blacks and Jews in Literary Conversation.(Review)
March 1, 2000... Blacks and Jews in Literary Conversation. By Emily Miller Budick. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 252 pp American Jewish writers, like Jews generally, have been preoccupied -- transfixed would perhaps be more accurate--by...

A Century of Commitment: One Hundred Years of the Rabbinical Assembly.(Review)
March 1, 2000... A Century of Commitment: One Hundred Years of the Rabbinical Assembly. Edited by Robert E. Fierstien. New York: The Rabbinical Assembly, 2000. xi+292 pp. The Rabbinical Assembly and the contributors to this account of its 100-year history...

A Second Exodus: The American Movement to Free Soviet Jews.(Review)
March 1, 2000... A Second Exodus: The American Movement to Free Soviet Jews. Edited by Murray Friedman and Albert D. Chernin. Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press/University Press of New England, 1999. vii + 265 pp. Murray Friedman and Albert Chernin have...

Dispersing the Ghetto: The Relocation of Jewish Immigrants Across America.(Review)
March 1, 2000... Dispersing the Ghetto: The Relocation of Jewish Immigrants Across America. By Jack Glazier. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998. x + 245 pp. Between its founding in 1901 and the end of its active life in 1918, the Industrial Removal...

Abraham Joshua Heschel: Prophetic Witness.(Review)
March 1, 2000... Abraham Joshua Heschel: Prophetic Witness. By Edward K. Kaplan and Samuel H. Dresner. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. x + 402 pp. All his life Abraham Joshua Heschel was something of an anomaly, never quite fitting into his...

Lubavitcher Women in America: Identity and Activism in the Postwar Era.(Review)
March 1, 2000... Lubavitcher Women in America: Identity and Activism in the Postwar Era. By Bonnie J. Morris. Albany: SUNY Press, 1998. x + 186 pp. Hasidism has long piqued the interest of Western Jewish scholars, beginning with the notable collection of...

Women Who Would Be Rabbis: A History of Women's Ordination, 1889-1985.(Review)
March 1, 2000... Women Who Would Be Rabbis: A History of Women's Ordination, 1889-1985. By Pamela S. Nadell. Boston: Beacon Press, 1998. xiii + 300pp. The idea of women rabbis is not a late twentieth century innovation. As Pamela S. Nadell demonstrates in...

Fighting to Become Americans: Jews, Gender, and the Anxiety of Assimilation.(Review)
March 1, 2000... Fighting to Become Americans: Jews, Gender, and the Anxiety of Assimilation. By Riv-Ellen Prell. Boston: Beacon Press, 1999. 319 pp. Researchers working with single Jews report that Jewish men and women articulate "toxic" feelings about...

Becoming American, Remaining Jewish: The Story of Wilmington, Delaware's First Jewish Community, 1879-1924.(Review)
March 1, 2000... Becoming American, Remaining Jewish: The Story of Wilmington, Delaware's First Jewish Community, 1879-1924. By Toni Young. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1999. 388 pp. Toni Young has written a comprehensive account of the Jews of...