Deborah Dash Moore

At home in America : second generation New York Jews

Focuses on the children of Eastern European immigrants who settled in Manhattan, looking at the modified synagogues, philanthropic organizations, and other associations organized by second-generation Jews in New York.

Defining American Jewish Ethnicity

The Child of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, American Jewish ethnicity grew from a complex synthesis of Jewish immigrant and American urban life. As the historian Timothy Smith observes, “That this nations ethnic groups, viewed structurally, were made in America by voluntary association of newcomers has long been evident.” Yet nineteenth-century German Jewish immigrants to the United States, who pioneered in developing ethnic Jewish fraternal associations, elaborated a religious definition of Jewish group identity. American Jewish ethnicity as an ideology and social reality defining Jewish group life in the United States emerged in the years preceding World War II, when a native-born generation of Jews came of age. These second-generation Jews were descendants of the massive Eastern European immigration of 1880–1920, which peaked in 1906. Seeking to become fully American, second-generation Jews climbed out of lower-class jobs and poor immigrant neighborhoods. Norman Podhoretz, who moved from a lower-class section of New York City to an upper-middle-class one, writes that “one of the longest journeys in the world is the journey from Brooklyn to Manhattan — or at least from certain neighborhoods in Brooklyn to certain parts of Manhattan.”

Judaism as a Gendered Civilization: The Legacy of Mordecai Kaplan's Magnum Opus

n his 1934 masterwork, Judaism as a Civilization, Mordecai M. Kaplan raises a question that challenges American Jews at the start of the twenty-first century. The issue of how to live in two civilizations, not as reluctant bystanders or as bitter critics of American society and culture but as deeply committed Americans and Jews able to embrace the best in both civilizations, lies at the heart of the enterprise of American Jews. Despite dramatic changes in the conditions of American Jewish life, Kaplan’s arguments and analyses continue to address contemporary concerns.1 His desire for Jews to develop a creative Judaism, a program that, in his words, “spells nothing less than a maximum of Jewishness,” and his recognition that such a program requires a “type of courage that is not deterred by uncharted regions,” still confronts Jews.2 Born in Lithuania in 1881, arriving in the United States with his family at the age of nine, Kaplan received the best education of both Jewish and American worlds. As Mel Scult’s definitive biography demonstrates, Kaplan’s education positioned him to understand and interpret the dilemmas facing his rapidly secularizing Jewish contemporaries in the United States.3 No less important, Kaplan wrote about Judaism implicitly as a gendered civilization, and he proposed I

Eli Lederhendler. New York Jews and the Decline of Urban Ethnicity, 1950–1970 . Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2001. xix, 275 pp.

The first thing a reader should know about this book is that it was written from Jerusalem. No Jewish city in history, certainly no diaspora city, can hope to compete with Jerusalem. Looking down from Jerusalem, New York looks decidedly grim. As Lederhendler notes with admirable brevity, the “events of May–June 1967 threw into relief the apparent gulf between Israelis (who could fend for themselves) and Jews (who could not)” (190). Diaspora condemns Jews to mere ethnic existence, to life as one group among others. In the 1960s New York Jews recognized “that Diaspora life had become existentially problematic” (190). They faced “cultural despair,” decline of community, and a loss of nerve that challenged their earlier, “utopian” optimism about urban life, its freedom, and its Jewish possibilities (87).

Michael Berkowitz. Jews and Photography in Britain. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015. 358 pp.

were Jewish) reacted against totalitarian calls to heroize and embody the new world order, rejecting political and/or humanitarian dictates in favor of American (bourgeois?) freedom and individualism. Although this subject has been thoroughly mined by art historians, including Baigell, he provides an inflection here that fits with his arguments’ trajectory. By the early 1940s, Baigell explains, Jewish artists needed to figure out how to reconcile their sense of moral obligation (tikkun olam) with politically inspired universalism. Subsequently, as Greenberg’s writings indicate, in light of the failure of socialism to prevent war and the Holocaust, many creative Jews in this country began experiencing an estrangement and alienation diametrically opposed to turn-of-the-century immigrants’ embrace of American ideals. Rather than socially useful, Jewish artists such as Gottlieb often felt socially irrelevant. Baigell cites exceptions, like Ben Shahn, who continued to express a more optimistic spiritual presence, but maintains that it would not be until the generation born in the 1930s and coming to maturity in the 1970s (a period of minimal antisemitism and great pride in Israel’s war successes) that Jewish American artists would begin to reexplore their heritage for significant subjects. This, he explains, is the subject for another book. Matthew Baigell’s Social Concern and Leftist Politics in Jewish American Art 1880–1940 compactly summarizes the political and artistic currents of this critical period, and, despite their limitations, the atypical visual examples he unearthed help to expand our understanding of how, particularly for so many East Coast Jewish artists, cultural and political imperatives in this era became inextricably intertwined. History buffs, students, and Jewish studies scholars will likely find it a useful reference and guide.

Jews Who Count: Putting Pew in Historical Perspective

Pew’s survey of Jewish Americans unleashed a flood of commentary from social scientists and journalists, rabbis and communal leaders. Most of them have taken a stand on the Jews who count, that is, the ones who matter. These American Jews, unsurprisingly, identify as Jews by religion. Jews who do not count, although they are counted in the survey, are Jews with “no religion.” What are we to make of these categories and implicit valuation of Jews who count vs. Jews who do not count? Reading the survey as an historian brings a different perspective, allowing for comparisons across long time periods and attention to both continuities and changes.

Jewish Girls Coming of Age in America, 1860–1920

Melissa R. Klapper?s Jewish Girls Coming of Age in America, 1860?1920 explores the identity of middleclass Jewish girls through use of a wide range of sources, including letters and diaries. This important contribution to the history of American Jews builds on previous work that has emphasized immigrants and working class families, the east coast, and urban centres. Klapper opens a window beyond ?sweatshop girls? (p. 3) and explores the history of adolescence, formal, alternative, and religious education, and social life from 1860?1920. In each of these venues, she analyzes the nature of Jewish girls? participation in ?American girl culture? (p. 4) and her subjects? identities?as young women and as Jews. As she notes, Jewish adolescents ?both recognized and were recognized for the role they played in maintaining a particular ethnic identity and religious culture while still aiming for integration into American society at large? (p. 3).

Pamela Nadell. Women Who Would Be Rabbis: A History of Women's Ordination, 1889–1985. Boston: Beacon Press, 1998. xiii, 300 pp.

Pamela Nadell begins her history of “women who would have, if they could have, become rabbis” (p. x) with an acknowledgment “that uncovering womens history remains a political enterprise” (p. 13). Surprised to discover so many predecessors to todays female rabbis, Nadell enthusiastically traces the repetitive and discouraging history of arguments and efforts by diverse women to enter the rabbinate.