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.

The idea of brotherhood has been an important philosophical concept for understanding community, equality, and justice. In Gendering Modern Jewish Thought, Andrea Dara Cooper offers a gendered reading that challenges the key figures of the all-male fraternity of twentieth-century Jewish philosophy to open up to the feminine. Cooper offers a feminist lens, which when applied to thinkers such as Franz Rosenzweig and Emmanuel Levinas, reveals new ways of illuminating questions of relational ethics, embodiment, politics, and positionality. She shows that patriarchal kinship as models of erotic love, brotherhood, and paternity are not accidental in Jewish philosophy, but serve as norms that have excluded women and non-normative individuals. Gendering Modern Jewish Thought suggests these fraternal models do real damage and must be brought to account in more broadly humanistic frameworks. For Cooper, a more responsible and ethical reading of Jewish philosophy comes forward when it is opened to the voices of mothers, sisters, and daughters.

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.

This book, in its 114th year, provides insight into major trends in the North American Jewish communities, examining the recently completed Pew Report (A Portrait of Jewish American), gender in American Jewish life, national and Jewish communal affairs and the US and world Jewish population. It also acts as an important resource with lists of Jewish Institutions, Jewish periodicals and academic resources as well as Jewish honorees, obituaries and major recent events. It should prove useful to social scientists and historians of the American Jewish community, Jewish communal workers and the press, among others.

This is a book about the need for redemptive narratives to ward off despair and the dangers these same narratives create by raising expectations that are seldom fulfilled. The quasi-messianic expectations produced by the election of President Barack Obama in 2008, and their diminution, were stark reminders of an ongoing struggle between ideals and political realities. Redemptive Hope begins by tracing the tension between theistic thinkers, for whom hope is transcendental, and intellectuals, who have striven to link hopes for redemption to our intersubjective interactions with other human beings. Lerner argues that a vibrant democracy must draw on the best of both religious thought and secular liberal political philosophy. By bringing Richard Rorty’s pragmatism into conversation with early-twentieth-century Jewish thinkers, including Martin Buber and Ernst Bloch, Lerner begins the work of building bridges, while insisting on holding crucial differences in dialectical tension. Only such a dialogue, he argues, can prepare the foundations for modes of redemptive thought fit for the twenty-first century.

Jonathan Sarna's meticulously documented centennial history presents the personalities and the controversies, the struggles and the achievements behind a century of publishing by America's foremost publisher of Jewish books in English. Sarna's engaging blend of anecdote and analysis contextualizes the Jewish Publication Society within American Jewry's evolving social, political, and cultural history. He demonstrates that the society has been a major factor. Sarna recounts the inspired struggle of the Jewish Publication Society's founders, a group of genteel Philadelphia philanthropists including Cyrus Adler and Mayer Sulzberger, who believed fervently in the need to educate their immigrant coreligionists with Jewish books in the new vernacular. He also tells the story of Henrietta Szold, best known for her later achievements as the founder of Hadassah and Youth Aliyah. Szold worked doggedly for twenty-three years as the society's first editor until a shattered love for a JPS author became the catalyst that led her to Palestine and Zionist leadership. Here too are fascinating accounts of the long deliberations and intense work that produced the authoritative JPS Bible translations of 1917 and 1985, translations acceptable to all major branches of Judaism. Sarna also recounts the controversy surrounding the 1973 publication of The Jewish Catalog, a project developed by the bold JPS editor Chaim Potok. The Catalog, embodying the spirit of the Jewish counterculture, not only became the best-selling JPS book after the Bible, but it also showed that JPS could meet the challenge of a new generation as it moved toward its second century.

The postwar decades were not the “golden era” in which American Jews easily partook in the religious revival, liberal consensus, and suburban middle-class comfort. Rather it was a period marked by restlessness and insecurity born of the shock about the Holocaust and of the unprecedented opportunities in American society. American Jews responded to loss and opportunity by obsessively engaging with the East European past. The proliferation of religious texts on traditional spirituality, translations of Yiddish literature, historical essays , photographs and documents of shtetl culture, theatrical and musical events, culminating in the Broadway musical Fiddler on the Roof, illustrate the grip of this past on post-1945 American Jews. This study shows how American Jews reimagined their East European past to make it usable for their American present. By rewriting their East European history, they created a repertoire of images, stories, and ideas that have shaped American Jewry to this day.

Intro -- Contents -- Foreword -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- I. God -- 1. Mordecai M. Kaplan, The Future of the American Jew -- 2. Abraham Joshua Heschel, Man Is Not Alone -- 3. Hans Jonas, "The Concept of God After Auschwitz: A Jewish Voice" -- 4. Richard L. Rubenstein, After Auschwitz -- 5. Eliezer Berkovits, Faith After the Holocaust -- 6. Erich Fromm, You Shall Be as Gods -- 7. Marcia Falk, "Notes on Composing New Blessings: Toward a Feminist-Jewish Reconstruction of Prayer" -- 8. Edward L. Greenstein, "'To You Do I Call': A Critique of Impersonal Prayer" -- 9. Sandra B. Lubarsky, "Reconstructing Divine Power" -- 10. Rebecca Alpert, "Location, Location, Location: Toward a Theology of Prepositions" -- II. Revelation and Commandment -- 11. Marvin Fox, The Condition of Jewish Belief -- 12. Aharon Lichtenstein, The Condition of Jewish Belief -- 13. Will Herberg, Judaism and Modern Man -- 14. Jakob J. Petuchowski, "Revelation and the Modern Jew" -- 15. Joseph B. Soloveitchik, Halakhic Man -- 16. Benjamin H. Sommer, Revelation and Authority -- 17. Tamar Ross, Expanding the Palace of Torah -- 18. Eugene B. Borowitz, Renewing the Covenant -- 19. Susan Handelman, "'Crossing and Recrossing the Void'" -- 20. David Novak, "Is the Covenant a Bilateral Relationship?" -- 21. Rachel Adler, Engendering Judaism -- 22. Mara H. Benjamin, The Obligated Self -- III. Spirituality -- 23. Arnold Jacob Wolf, "Against Spirituality" -- 24. Joseph B. Soloveitchik, Halakhic Man -- 25. Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Sabbath -- 26. Arthur Green, Jewish Spirituality/Seek My Face, Speak My Name -- 27. Daniel C. Matt, God and the Big Bang -- 28. Zalman Schachter- Shalomi, Paradigm Shift -- 29. Marcia Prager, The Path of Blessing -- 30. Nancy Flam, "Healing the Spirit" -- 31. Arthur Waskow, Down- to-Earth Judaism -- 32. Sheila Weinberg, "Images of God: Closeness and Power".

This collection focuses on a variety of important themes in the American Jewish and Judaic experience. It opens with essays on early Jewish settlers (1654-1820), the expansion of Jewish life in America (1820-1901), the great wave of eastern European Jewish immigrants (1880-1924), the character of American Judaism between the two world wars, American Jewish life from the end of World War II to the Six-Day War, and the growth of Jews' influence and affluence. The second half of the volume includes essays on Orthodox Jews, the history of Jewish education in America, the rise of Jewish social clubs at the turn of the century, the history of southern and western Jewry, Jewish responses to Nazism and the Holocaust, feminism's confrontation with Judaism, and the eternal question of what defines American Jewish culture. Original and elegantly crafted, The Columbia History of Jews and Judaism in America not only introduces the student to a thrilling history, but also provides the scholar with new perspectives and insights.

American literary works written in the heyday of modernism between the 1890s and 1940s were playfully, painfully, and ambivalently engaged with language politics. The immigrant waves of the period fed into writers' aesthetic experimentation; their works, in turn, rewired ideas about national identity along with literary form. Accented America looks at the long history of English-Only Americanism-the political claim that U.S. citizens must speak a singular, shared American tongue-and traces its action in the language workshop that is literature. The broadly multi-ethnic set of writers brought into conversation here-including Gertrude Stein, Jean Toomer, Henry Roth, Nella Larsen, John Dos Passos, Lionel Trilling, Américo Paredes, and Carlos Bulosan-reflect the massive demographic shifts taking place during the interwar years. These authors share an acute awareness of linguistic standardization while also following the defamiliarizing sway produced by experimentation with invented and improper literary vernaculars. Rather than confirming the powerfully seductive subtext of monolingualism-that those who speak alike are ethically and politically likeminded-multilingual modernists compose literature that speaks to a country of synthetic syntaxes, singular hybrids, and enduring strangeness.