Imagining the American Jewish Community (Brandeis Series in American Jewish History, Culture & Life) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1584656700 ISBN 13: 9781584656708

Publisher: Brandeis University Press, 2007

Synopsis

Since their arrival on these shores over 350 years ago, American Jews who have wished to maintain a Jewish communal life have faced a set of novel challenges. Throughout their history in the U.S., Jews have been free to embrace or eschew communal involvement; to support or ignore Jewish institutions; to associate with other Jews or to distance themselves from coreligionists. The dispersal of Jews across so vast a country has also posed serious challenges to Jewish unity. For these and other reasons examined in this volume, the group existence of Jews in the U.S. has depended on a variety of creative efforts to develop and sustain communities in the face of powerful pressures to disperse and assimilate.This volume explores the multiple conceptions of community in the American Jewish imagination. Essays by leading scholars working in the fields of history, ethnography, material culture, literary criticism and Jewish thought uncover the underlying assumptions of those who continually re-defined the Jewish community from colonial times to the present day. Topics include the notion of "synagogue-community" in pre-revolutionary America, the role of commerce and business in nineteenth-century communal life, trans-nationalism and Jewish immigration, suburbanization, Jewish patriotism in wartime, sports and board games, Jewish literary classics, Jewish mothers, feminism, Yiddish schools, Jewish museums, and the communal possibilities of the internet.

About this title

About the Author

JACK WERTHEIMER is Professor of American Jewish History at the Jewish Theological Seminary, New York, and author of several books about American Judaism, including The American Synagogue: A Sanctuary Transformed (1995) and A People Divided: Judaism in Contemporary America (1999). Most recently, he is the editor of Family Matters: Jewish Education in an Age of Choice (2007).

Edition details

• Publisher: Brandeis University Press
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1584656700
• ISBN 13: 9781584656708
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 392
• Editor: Wertheimer Jack