Authors: Eli Lederhendler
ISBN-13: 9780814750841, ISBN-10: 0814750842
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: New York University Press
Date Published: July 1994
Edition: (Non-applicable)
Eli Lederhendler is Senior Lecturer at the Institute of Contemporary Jewry of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is the author of The Road to Modern Jewish Politics, which won a National Jewish Book Award in 1990.
Facing the dizzying array of changes commonly referred to as modernity, Jews in 19th-century Eastern Europe and early 20th-century America reflected the crises and opportunities of the modern world most eloquently in their speech, culture, and literature. Relying on those spoken and written words as eyewitnesses, Eli Lederhendler illustrates how the self- perceptions of Jews evolved, both in the Old World and among immigrants to America. He focuses on a wide range of subjects to provide an overview of this clash between old and new and to reveal ways in which cultural conflicts were reconciled.
How, for instance, was messianic language adapted to serve nationalistic goals? What did America signify to Jewish thinkers at the turn of the century? What do Jewish user's guides to the New World tell us about Jewish secular culture and its perspective on sex, love, marriage, etiquette, and health? More generally, what do Jewish letters and literature tell us about how communities adapt to radically new environments?
Jewish Responses to Modernity highlights the manner in which codes and symbols are passed from one generation to the next, reinforcing a group's sense of self and helping to define its relations with other. The book clearly demonstrates the importance of language as a vehicle for minority-group self-expression in the past and in the present.
Introduction | 1 | |
1 | Language, Culture, and Politics | 9 |
2 | Interpreting Messianic Rhetoric in the Russian Haskalah and Early Zionism | 23 |
3 | The Making of a Maskil | 47 |
4 | Orthodox Jewish Opinion in Turn-of-the-Century Russia and Poland: A Documentary Study in Culture and Politics | 67 |
5 | America: A Vision in a Jewish Mirror | 104 |
6 | Guides for the Perplexed: Sex, Manners, and Mores for the Yiddish Reader in America | 140 |
7 | Against the Tide: The American Hebrew Yearbook, 1930-1949 | 159 |
8 | Afterword: The Politics of Cultural Transmission, the Legacy of Simon Dubnov, and Jewish Studies | 189 |
Notes | 190 | |
Index | 229 |