Speaking of Jews : Rabbis, Intellectuals, and the Creation of an American Public Identity.
Title:
Speaking of Jews : Rabbis, Intellectuals, and the Creation of an American Public Identity.
Author:
Berman, Lila Corwin.
ISBN:
9780520943704
Personal Author:
Edition:
1st ed.
Physical Description:
1 online resource (281 pages)
Contents:
Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Presenting Jews to America -- 1. Spiritual Missions after the Great War: The Reform Movement and the Jewish Chautauqua Society -- 2. The Ghetto and Beyond: The Rising Authority of American Jewish Social Science in Interwar America -- 3. The Sacred and Sociological Dilemma of Jewish Intermarriage -- 4. Serving the Public Good and Serving God in 1940s America -- 5. Constructing an Ethnic America: Oscar Handlin, Nathan Glazer, and Post-World War II Social Research -- 6. What Is a Jew? Missionaries, Outreach, and the Cold War Ethnic Challenge -- 7. A Jewish Marilyn Monroe and the Civil-Rights-Era Crisis in Jewish Self-Presentation -- Conclusion: Speaking of Jews -- Notes -- Selected Bibliography -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Y -- Z.
Abstract:
Lila Corwin Berman asks why, over the course of the twentieth century, American Jews became increasingly fascinated, even obsessed, with explaining themselves to their non-Jewish neighbors. What she discovers is that language itself became a crucial tool for Jewish group survival and integration into American life. Berman investigates a wide range of sources-radio and television broadcasts, bestselling books, sociological studies, debates about Jewish marriage and intermarriage, Jewish missionary work, and more-to reveal how rabbis, intellectuals, and others created a seemingly endless array of explanations about why Jews were indispensable to American life. Even as the content of these explanations developed and shifted over time, the very project of self-explanation would become a core element of Jewishness in the twentieth century.
Local Note:
Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, 2017. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries.
Genre:
Electronic Access:
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