Full Description
Forging Modern Jewish Identities illuminates facets of modern Jewish identity through engagement with diverse historical moments, political and social currents and literature as an aspect of popular culture. This volume is distinctive, and it can be enjoyed by the general reader as well as having potential as a teaching tool, as the experience of Jewry in the United States, Britain, Central and Western Europe, Russia and the Soviet Union is addressed by experts in each of these fields. Its introduction places the volume within the burgeoning genre of anthologies that constitutes a significant - but little noticed - development in Jewish and ethnic-national historiography. Cutting across disciplinary and national boundaries, the articles highlight Jewry's encounter with modernity from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. While acknowledging the power of acculturation, each of the contributions details how Jews transformed themselves, individually and communally, while reshaping notions of Jewish community and what it means to be a Jew in the modern world.
Contents
Introduction - anthologizing Jews, Michael Berkowitz et al; revisiting the old world - American-Jewish tourists in inter-war Eastern Europe, Daniel Soyer; "our esteemed Christian contemporaries" - inter-faith dialogue in the "American Hebrew", 1885-1908, Lawrence Charap; acceptance and assimilation - Jews in 1950s American popular culture, Michelle Mart; going against the grain - two Jewish memoirs of war and anti-war, 1914-1918, Mark Levene; "morally depraved and abnormally criminal" - Jews and crime in London and New York, 1880-1940, Susan L. Tananbaum; Marcel Proust and the comedy of assimilation, Sam W. Bloom; Mikhail Zhvanetskii - the last Russian-Jewish joker, Alice Nakhimovsky; between two worlds - the dual identity of Russian-Jewish artists in the late 19th century, Musya Glants; between identities - the German-Jewish youth movement Blau-Weiss, 1912-26, Glenn R. Sharfman; assimilation and return in two generations of Czech-Jewish women - Berta Fanta and Else Fanta Bergmann, Miriam Dean-Otting; epiphanies - Hungarian-Jewish experiences and the Shoah, Peter Vardy; resisting fascism - the politics and literature of Italian Jews, 1922-45, Stanislao G. Pugliese.
