Material Culture And Jewish Thought In America

Author : Ken Koltun-Fromm
Publisher : Indiana University Press
ISBN 13 : 0253004160
Total Pages : 358 pages
Book Rating : 4.61/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Material Culture and Jewish Thought in America written by Ken Koltun-Fromm and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2010-04-21 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How Jews think about and work with objects is the subject of this fascinating study of the interplay between material culture and Jewish thought. Ken Koltun-Fromm draws from philosophy, cultural studies, literature, psychology, film, and photography to portray the vibrancy and richness of Jewish practice in America. His analyses of Mordecai Kaplan's obsession with journal writing, Joseph Soloveitchik's urban religion, Abraham Joshua Heschel's fascination with objects in The Sabbath, and material identity in the works of Anzia Yezierska, Cynthia Ozick, Bernard Malamud, and Philip Roth, as well as Jewish images on the covers of Lilith magazine and in the Jazz Singer films, offer a groundbreaking approach to an understanding of modern Jewish thought and its relation to American culture.

Author : Ken Koltun-Fromm
Publisher : Lexington Books
ISBN 13 : 0739174479
Total Pages : 347 pages
Book Rating : 4.70/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Thinking Jewish Culture in America written by Ken Koltun-Fromm and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2013-12-11 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thinking Jewish Culture in America argues that Jewish thought extends our awareness and deepens the complexity of American Jewish culture. This volume stretches the disciplinary boundaries of Jewish thought so that it can productively engage expanding arenas of culture by drawing Jewish thought into the orbit of cultural studies. The eleven contributors to Thinking Jewish Cultures, together with Chancellor Arnold Eisen’s postscript, position Jewish thought within the dynamics and possibilities of contemporary Jewish culture. These diverse essays in Jewish thought re-imagine cultural space as a public and sometimes contested performance of Jewish identity, and they each seek to re-enliven that space with reflective accounts of cultural meaning. How do Jews imagine themselves as embodied actors in America? Do cultural obligations limit or expand notions of the self? How should we imagine Jewish thought as a cultural performance? What notions of peoplehood might sustain a vibrant Jewish collectivity in a globalized economy? How do programs in Jewish studies work within the academy? These and other questions engage both Jewish thought and culture, opening space for theoretical works to broaden the range of cultural studies, and to deepen our understanding of Jewish cultural dynamics. Thinking Jewish Culture is a work about Jewish cultural identity reflected through literature, visual arts, philosophy, and theology. But it is more than a mere reflection of cultural patterns and choices: the argument pursued throughout Thinking Jewish Culture is that reflective sources help produce the very cultural meanings and performances they purport to analyze.

Author : Jack Wertheimer
Publisher : UPNE
ISBN 13 : 9781584656708
Total Pages : 364 pages
Book Rating : 4.00/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Imagining the American Jewish Community written by Jack Wertheimer and published by UPNE. This book was released on 2007 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A lively collection of sixteen essays on the many ways American Jews have imagined and constructed communities

Author : Emily Alice Katz
Publisher : State University of New York Press
ISBN 13 : 143845466X
Total Pages : 232 pages
Book Rating : 4.65/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Bringing Zion Home written by Emily Alice Katz and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2015-01-08 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bringing Zion Home examines the role of culture in the establishment of the "special relationship" between the United States and Israel in the immediate postwar decades. Many American Jews first encountered Israel through their roles as tastemakers, consumers, and cultural impresarios—that is, by writing and reading about Israel; dancing Israeli folk dances; promoting and purchasing Israeli goods; and presenting Israeli art and music. It was precisely by means of these cultural practices, argues Emily Alice Katz, that American Jews insisted on Israel's "natural" place in American culture, a phenomenon that continues to shape America's relationship with Israel today. Katz shows that American Jews' promotion and consumption of Israel in the cultural realm was bound up with multiple agendas, including the quest for Jewish authenticity in a postimmigrant milieu and the desire of upwardly mobile Jews to polish their status in American society. And, crucially, as influential cultural and political elites positioned "culture" as both an engine of American dominance and as a purveyor of peace in the Cold War, many of Israel's American Jewish impresarios proclaimed publicly that cultural patronage of and exchange with Israel advanced America's interests in the Middle East and helped spread the "American way" in the postwar world. Bringing Zion Home is the first book to shine a light squarely upon the role and importance of Israel in the arts, popular culture, and material culture of postwar America.

Author : Sylvia Barack Fishman
Publisher : State University of New York Press
ISBN 13 : 0791492745
Total Pages : 268 pages
Book Rating : 4.41/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Jewish Life and American Culture written by Sylvia Barack Fishman and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jews in the United States are uniquely American in their connections to Jewish religion and ethnicity. Sylvia Barack Fishman in her groundbreaking book, Jewish Life and American Culture, shows that contemporary Jews have created a hybrid new form of Judaism, merging American values and behaviors with those from historical Jewish traditions. Fishman introduces a new concept called coalescence, an adaptation technique through which Jews merge American and Jewish elements. Analyzing the increasingly permeable boundaries in the ethnic identity construction of Jewish and non-Jewish Americans, she suggests that during the process of coalescence, Jews combine the texts of American and Jewish cultures, losing track of their dissonance and perceiving them as a unified Jewish whole. The author generates data from diverse sources in the social sciences and humanities, including the 1990 National Jewish Population Survey and other statistical studies, interviews and focus groups, popular and material culture, literature and film, to demonstrate the pervasiveness of coalescence. The book pays special attention to gender issues and the relationship of women to their Jewish and American identities. A blend of lively narrative and scholarly detail, this book includes useful tables, accessible figures and models, and fascinating illustrations which present the educational, occupational, and behavioral patterns of American Jews, organizational profiles, family formation, religious observance, and the impact of Jewish education.

Author : Shari Rabin
Publisher : NYU Press
ISBN 13 : 147983047X
Total Pages : 201 pages
Book Rating : 4.73/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Jews on the Frontier written by Shari Rabin and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2017-12-12 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Jews on the Frontier offers a religious history that begins in an unexpected place: on the road. Shari Rabin recounts the journey of Jewish people as they left Eastern cities and ventured into the American West and South during the nineteenth century. It brings to life the successes and obstacles of these travels, from the unprecedented economic opportunities to the anonymity and loneliness that complicated the many legal obligations of traditional Jewish life. Without government-supported communities or reliable authorities, where could one procure kosher meat? Alone in the American wilderness, how could one find nine co-religionists for a minyan (prayer quorum)? Without identity documents, how could one really know that someone was Jewish?"--[Site internet éditeur].

Author : Jonathan D. Sarna
Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 0300190395
Total Pages : 558 pages
Book Rating : 4.97/5 ( download)

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Download or read book American Judaism written by Jonathan D. Sarna and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2019-06-25 with total page 558 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jonathan D. Sarna's award-winning American Judaism is now available in an updated and revised edition that summarizes recent scholarship and takes into account important historical, cultural, and political developments in American Judaism over the past fifteen years. Praise for the first edition: "Sarna . . . has written the first systematic, comprehensive, and coherent history of Judaism in America; one so well executed, it is likely to set the standard for the next fifty years."--Jacob Neusner, Jerusalem Post "A masterful overview."--Jeffrey S. Gurock, American Historical Review "This book is destined to be the new classic of American Jewish history."--Norman H. Finkelstein, Jewish Book World Winner of the 2004 National Jewish Book Award/Jewish Book of the Year

Author : Jenna Weissman Joselit
Publisher : Macmillan
ISBN 13 : 9780805070026
Total Pages : 372 pages
Book Rating : 4.28/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Wonders of America written by Jenna Weissman Joselit and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2002-05 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The selective relish with which most American Jews affirm their identity -- consuming kosher delicacies once a year, extravagantly celebrating the bar mitzvahs of their sons and the weddings of their daughters -- has usually given rise to satire or consternation. The Wonders of America offers an alternative perspective, for this pioneering social history of Jewish culture highlights the cultural ingenuity and adaptive genius of American Jewish life. Drawing on advertisements, etiquette manuals, sermons, and surveys, Jenna Weissman Joselit constructs a lively and humorous account of how three generations of American Jews created their distinctive American culture. This provocative, enlightening study describes the forging of a rich and exuberant modern Jewish identity and makes it clear that it is not the theoretical debates of rabbis and scholars but the small choices of daily life that shape and sustain a culture

Author : Marcie Cohen Ferris
Publisher : UPNE
ISBN 13 : 9781584655893
Total Pages : 388 pages
Book Rating : 4.95/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Jewish Roots in Southern Soil written by Marcie Cohen Ferris and published by UPNE. This book was released on 2006 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A lively look at southern Jewish history and culture.

Author : Aaron Koller
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1107048354
Total Pages : 277 pages
Book Rating : 4.55/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Esther in Ancient Jewish Thought written by Aaron Koller and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-01-09 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book situates the book of Esther in the intellectual history of Ancient Judaism and provides a new understanding of its purpose.