American Jewish History articles from September 2001

American Jewish History archives from September 2001

"Accept the truth from whomsoever [sic] gives it": Jewish-Protestant dialogue, interfaith alliances, and pluralism, 1880-1910.
September 1, 2001... On the evening of 7 November 1901, Henry Potter, the Episcopal bishop of New York, entered that city's oldest synagogue, Shearith Israel, to address its Sisterhood. After an introduction from congregation leader H. Pereira Mendes, Potter took...

Shooting for a Jewish state: college basketball players and the 1947 U.S. fundraising campaign for the Jewish revolt against the British in Palestine.
September 1, 2001... Readers of Freedom, the newsletter of the New York-based Palestine Resistance Committee, found a rather unusual announcement buried at the bottom of the back page of the August 1947 issue: the committee had "recruited a basketball team that...

American Jewish studies: a periodic report of the status of the field.(Bibliography)
September 1, 2001... Recent Dissertations in American Jewish Studies (Continued from American Jewish History, Vol. 87, No. 4) 1999 23 Brown, Stephen Alan. When middle-class ambition met southern honor: a cultural history of the Leo Frank case. U...

Jazz Age Jews.
September 1, 2001... By Michael Alexander. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. 239 pp. Jazz Age Jews is an accessible and informative contribution to the ongoing dialogue about American Jewish acculturation in the early part of the twentieth century....

America, Its Jews, and the Rise of Nazism.
September 1, 2001... By Gulie Ne'eman Arad. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000. ix + 314 pp. The actions of American Jewish leaders during the Holocaust have been the subject of numerous scholarly inquiries since the 1970s. In these studies historians...

The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, 1450-1800.
September 1, 2001... Edited by Paolo Bernardini and Norman Fiering. European Expansion & Global Interaction, Vol. 2. New York: Berghahn Books, 2001. XV + 567 pp. The essays in this magnificent and much-needed volume stem from a 1997 conference at the John...

A Separate Circle: Jewish Life in Knoxville, Tennessee.
September 1, 2001... By Wendy Lowe Besmann. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2001. 206 pp. Having written for such publications as the New York Times and The Atlantic, Wendy Lowe Besmann now takes her place among the ranks of Jewish historians with...

Celluloid Soldiers: Warner Bros.'s Campaign against Nazism.
September 1, 2001... By Michael E. Birdwell. New York: New York University Press, 1999. xxi + 266 pp. Michael E. Birdwell's Celluloid Soldiers is a welcome addition to the literature on both American Jewish responses to Nazism and the history of Jews in the...

Postville: a Clash of Cultures in Heartland America.
September 1, 2001... By Stephen G. Bloom. New York: Harcourt Brace, 2000. xiv + 324 pp. In the minds of many Americans there can hardly be two cultures more different than those of small-town Iowa and Hasidic Brooklyn. However, the two contrasting worlds came...

The Jew Within: Self, Family, and Community in America.
September 1, 2001... By Steven M. Cohen and Arnold M. Eisen. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000. x + 243 pp. During the 1950s the concept of religion underwent a significant change in America. It became personalized, scripture more open to individual...

Contemporary Jewish American Writers and the Multicultural Dilemma: Return of the Exiled.
September 1, 2001... By Andrew Furman. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000. 214 pp. Scholars and publishers who established and now vigilantly control the multicultural literary canon err intellectually and culturally in their exclusion of Euro-ethnic...

When a Jew Dies: the Ethnography of a Bereaved Son.
September 1, 2001... By Samuel C. Heilman. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. 271 pp. When a Jew Dies is a beautifully written account of the traditional Jewish practices, that, from the moment a close relative dies, through the seven days after...

Saving Monticello: the Levy Family's Epic Quest to Rescue the House that Jefferson Built.
September 1, 2001... Saving Monticello: The Levy Family's Epic Quest to Rescue the House that Jefferson Built. By Marc Leepson. New York: Free Press, 2001. 303 pp. The Levy Family and Monticello, 1834-1923: Saving Thomas Jefferson's House. By Melvin I....

Class, Networks, and Identity: Replanting Jewish Lives from Nazi Germany to Rural New York.
September 1, 2001... By Rhonda F. Levine. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2001. 193 pp. The failure of Jewish social scientists and historians to document adequately the rural experience of Jews in America is a serious omission in the...

Black-Jewish Relations on Trial: Leo Frank and Jim Conley in the New South.
September 1, 2001... By Jeffrey Melnick. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000. ix + 165 pp. This book addresses two compelling issues for Jewish Americans--the Leo Frank case and the continuing interest in its outcome, and the evolution of...

Popular Culture and the Shaping of Holocaust Memory in America.
September 1, 2001... By Alan Mintz. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001. xiv + 208 pp. If I had to place myself into one of the two categories Alan Mintz posits in Popular Culture and the Shaping of Holocaust Memory in America, I would take the...

Homelands: Southern Jewish Identity in Durham and Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
September 1, 2001... By Leonard Rogoff. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2001. x + 398 pp. Homelands is everything that excellent local history should be--an appealing narrative of community building that includes colorful anecdotes, a wide array of...

The Jewish Confederates.
September 1, 2001... By Robert Rosen. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2000. xxv + 517 pp. More than fifty thousand books have reputedly been written about the American Civil War. When it comes to the role of Jews in the Civil War, however,...

Fiddler on the Move: Exploring the Klezmer World.
September 1, 2001... By Mark Slobin. In the American Musicspheres series, edited by Mark Slobin. Includes CD. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. 154 pp. Mark Slobin's Fiddler on the Move explores the klezmer revival of the last two decades as a protean...

Working with Class: Social Workers and the Politics of Middle-Class Identity.
September 1, 2001... By Daniel J. Walkowitz. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1999. xxvi + 413 pp. The goal of this study--to show changes in middle-class identity in the United States throughout the twentieth century--is carried out by...

New Deal Fat Cats: Business, Labor, and Campaign Finance in the 1936 Presidential Election.
September 1, 2001... By Michael J. Webber. Bronx, New York: Fordham University Press, 2000. xvi + 208 pp. In the presidential election of 1936, Franklin D. Roosevelt assembled an electoral coalition that largely structured American political life for a...

Jews in the Center: Conservative Synagogues and Their Members.
September 1, 2001... Edited by Jack Wertheimer. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2000. xii + 407 pp. The contemporary Conservative movement accounts for the largest number of synagogue affiliated Jews in the U.S. and remains vital and meaningful for...

In Search of Refuge: Jews and US Consuls in Nazi Germany 1933-1941.
September 1, 2001... By Bat-Ami Zucker. New York and London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2001. xi + 229 pp. Historians are divided as to the role of antisemitism in shaping American policy toward Jewish refugees from Nazism. David Wyman (Paper Walls, The Abandonment...

Letter to the editor.(Brief Article)(Letter to the Editor)
September 1, 2001... To the Editor: I am not surprised that Charles S. Liebman, in his review of Are We One?, would disagree with my analysis of Hebron Jews. And he is certainly entitled to his own favorite version of the encounter between Ben-Gurion and the...