Authors: Deborah Dash Moore (Editor), S. Ilan Troen
ISBN-13: 9780300084269, ISBN-10: 0300084269
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Yale University Press
Date Published: October 2001
Edition: New Edition
Two creative centers of Jewish life rose to prominence in the twentieth century, one in Israel and the other in the United States. Although Israeli and American Jews share kinship and history drawn from their Eastern European roots, they have developed divergent cultures from their common origins, often seeming more like distant cousins than close relatives. This book explores why this is so, examining how two communities that constitute eighty percent of the world s Jewish population have created separate identities and cultures. Using examples from literature, art, history, and politics, leading Israeli and American scholars focus on the political, social, and memory cultures of their two communities, considering in particular the American Jewish challenge to diaspora consciousness and the Israeli struggle to forge a secular, national Jewish identity. At the same time, they seek to understand how a sense of mutual responsibility and fate animates American and Israeli Jews who reside in distant places, speak different languages, and live within different political and social worlds.
Author Biography: Deborah Dash Moore is professor of religion at Vassar College. S. Ilan Troen is Sam and Anna Lopin Professor of Modern History at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.
This volume represents the cutting edge of modern Jewish cultural studies. Fresh, lively, and substantial.
Preface | ||
Introduction | 1 | |
I | Establishing New Identities | |
1 | The Construction of a Secular Jewish Identity: European and American Influences in Israeli Education | 27 |
2 | Producing the Future: The Impresario Culture of American Zionism before 1948 | 53 |
3 | Moroccan Jews and the Shaping of Israel's Sacred Geography | 72 |
4 | Identity, Ritual, and Pilgrimage: The Meetings of the Israel Exploration Society | 87 |
5 | Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Clothing, Identity, and the Modern Jewish Experience | 107 |
6 | Sculpting an American Jewish Hero: The Monuments, Myths, and Legends of Haym Salomon | 123 |
II | Contested Identities | |
7 | Imagining Europe: The Popular Arts of American Jewish Ethnography | 155 |
8 | The Shoah as Israel's Political Trope | 192 |
9 | "I Am Other": The Holocaust Survivor's Point of View in Yehudit Hendel's Short Story "They Are Others" | 217 |
10 | "A Drastically Bifurcated Legacy:" Homeland and Jewish Identity in Contemporary Jewish American Literature | 238 |
11 | The Impact of Statehood on the Hebrow Literary Imagination: Haim Hazaz and the Zionist Narrative | 256 |
III | Political Cultures | |
12 | Becoming Ethnic, Becoming American: Different Patterns and Configurations of the Assimilation of Eastern European Jews, 1890-1940 | 277 |
13 | Strangers No Longer: Jews and Postwar American Political Culture | 304 |
14 | Changing Places, Changing Cultures: Divergent Jewish Political Cultures | 319 |
Epilogue: On Living in Two Cultures | 333 | |
Index | 351 |