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"Jewish American identity"
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Keeping the mystery alive : Jewish mysticism in Latin American cultural production
\"This book delves into creative renditions of key aspects of Jewish Mysticism in Latin American literature, film, and art from the perspective of literary and cultural studies. The overarching question is whether the authors presented question, or reproduce literally, traditional renditions of the Jewish mysticism, and how this aspect of their literature and visual art relates to the Latin American canon to which they belong\"-- Provided by publisher.
BOOK
Performing Identity on Social Media: Instagramming Jewishness on US University Campuses
This study examines how social media platforms function as arenas for identity construction among minority student groups. Social media fosters a culture of connectivity, openness, and positive affect, projecting images of belonging that often contrast with the challenges faced by marginalized communities in everyday campus life and their yearning for distinction and communal boundaries. Drawing on Butler’s framework, identity online is understood as performative, emerging through repeated acts and recognizable signs, rather than as a reflection of fixed essence. Against this backdrop, the study investigates the Instagram presence of Hillel centers in the United States. A semiotic analysis of over one thousand Instagram images, supported by informal conversations with students, staff, and social media managers, reveals a communicative repertoire we term Celebrating Identity. This repertoire integrates Jewishness, youthfulness, national belonging, and institutional affiliation to produce a diffuse and inclusive Jewish identity. While such representations foster community and affirm multiple affiliations, they also risk masking the vulnerabilities and tensions experienced by Jewish students amid campus unrest and antisemitism. Social media thus emerges as both a resource of empowerment and a fragile form of support for minority identity work in contemporary higher education.
Journal Article
\I'll Say a \Mi Sheberach\ for You\: Prayer, Healing and Identity Among Liberal American Jews
Modern American Judaism is often characterized by complex negotiations about practices, beliefs, affiliations and identities. This article uses ethnographic research on one ritual practice—the Mi Sheberach prayer for healing—to explore these processes of meaning-making and identity construction, through the lens of lived experience. While survey data tell us which practices, beliefs and affiliations are most commonly adopted by liberal American Jews, this ethnographic research examines why these choices are made, what they represent, and how they are integrated into the broader lifeworlds of this population. I demonstrate that prayers for healing are an inherently social process, inextricably linked to relationships with other people, the community, God, and tradition. Prayer means something different to each of the participants in this study, yet for all, the Mi Sheberach becomes one site, among many, through which relationships to Judaism and Jewishness are negotiated and constructed. Study participants choose, and maintain, those Jewish practices, like the Mi Sheberach, that resonate emotionally and/or spiritually and that fit within the larger context of their lifeworld—in this case, the search for meaning, comfort, strength and connection during times of illness and healing. Yet at the same time, an essential part of this resonance is the experience of community, connection and tradition. The individual's search for meaning is synthesized with the collectivist nature of Judaism, in an ongoing and continually evolving process of interpretive interaction between text, tradition and personal experience.
Journal Article
The Question of Identity in Gary Shteyngart's Little Failure
In my paper I want to deal with the question of identity and Gary Shteyngart’s last novel, Little Failure (2014). The novel is a memoir that deals with young Gary’s struggle as an individual of Russian Jewish origins trying to accommodate himself to the American way of life. America with its multicultural and multiethnic environment puts the immigrant Gary in a very sensitive position. He does not know how to deal with African Americans; shall he avoid them or run away? Shall he befriend Asian colleagues or not? Are Jewish friends more valuable than others? These are the questions that Gary Shteyngart has to answer and find his own voice. The protagonist of the novel under discussion tries to find his identity which is in continuous change. He tries to figure out in a world filled with cultural, racial and urban conflicts his own identity from the perspective of a former immigrant and as a member of a minority group. The task of my paper is to show how the question of identity has changed and what solution Shteyngart’s novel can offer for the protagonist in the process of identity formation.
Journal Article
Jewish Mad Men
It is easy to dismiss advertising as simply the background chatter of modern life, often annoying, sometimes hilarious, and ultimately meaningless. But Kerri P. Steinberg argues that a careful study of the history of advertising can reveal a wealth of insight into a culture. InJewish Mad Men, Steinberg looks specifically at how advertising helped shape the evolution of American Jewish life and culture over the past one hundred years.
Drawing on case studies of famous advertising campaigns-from Levy's Rye Bread (\"You don't have to be Jewish to love Levy's\") to Hebrew National hot dogs (\"We answer to a higher authority\")-Steinberg examines advertisements from the late nineteenth-century in New York, the center of advertising in the United States, to trace changes in Jewish life there and across the entire country. She looks at ads aimed at the immigrant population, at suburbanites in midcentury, and at hipster and post-denominational Jews today.
In addition to discussing campaigns for everything from Manischewitz wine to matzoh,Jewish Mad Menalso portrays the legendary Jewish figures in advertising-like Albert Lasker and Bill Bernbach-and lesser known \"Mad Men\" like Joseph Jacobs, whose pioneering agency created the brilliantly successful Maxwell House Coffee Haggadah. Throughout, Steinberg uses the lens of advertising to illuminate the Jewish trajectory from outsider to insider, and the related arc of immigration, acculturation, upward mobility, and suburbanization.
Anchored in the illustrations, photographs, jingles, and taglines of advertising,Jewish Mad Menfeatures a dozen color advertisements and many black-and-white images. Lively and insightful, this book offers a unique look at both advertising and Jewish life in the United States.
eBook
Telling Tales of Difference: Portrayals of Immigrant Identity in Cahan’s, Cohen’s, and Yezierska’s “Landscapes” of Otherness and Contrast
This article seeks to explore the intricate correlations between space, identity, and belonging in “landscapes” of difference. The genre of immigrant literature offers excellent terrain for probing the complexity of identity-related matters because of its profound concern with human, spatial, and sociocultural difference. In examining three Jewish-American narratives—Abraham Cahan’s Yekl (1896), Rose Cohen’s Out of the Shadow (1918), and Anzia Yezierska’s Hungry Hearts (1920)—which share as their primary setting the Jewish immigrant ghetto on New York’s Lower East Side as it existed between the 1880s and the 1920s, the article illuminates various instances that demonstrate that people’s perception of others and themselves—their sense of identity and belonging—is closely linked to their identification with their immediate surroundings. More importantly, these instances provide meaningful insights into the everyday realities of immigrant life, particularly as regards its emotional side. At the center of interest are everyday “landscapes” of difference: the ghetto’s street environs, its tenement homes, and work environments in sweatshops and factories. “Landscape” is understood spatially, figuratively, and textually, for a discourse on difference and Otherness naturally entails a rhetoric of contrast and comparison.
Journal Article
Hybrid Judaism
American Jewish identity has changed significantly over the course of the past half century. During this time, Irving Greenberg developed a unique theology that anticipated David Hollinger's notion of postethnicity and represents a compelling understanding of contemporary American Jewish identity. Greenberg's covenantal theology and image of God idea combine into what Kleinberg refers to as Hybrid Judaism. Central to Greenberg's theology is recognition of the transformative power of encounter in an open society, heavily influenced by his own encounters across Jewish denominational boundaries and through his participation in the Christian-Jewish dialogue movement. Presented here for the first time, Greenberg’s theology of Hybrid Judaism has great relevance for our understanding of American Jewish identity in the twenty-first century.
eBook
Distancing from Israel: Evidence on Jews of No Religion
Both the Cohen-Kelman paper and the Sasson—Kadushin—Saxe paper acknowledge the importance of Jews of no religion, but both ignore a data source that could help resolve the disagreement between them, namely, the American Jewish Identity Survey (AJIS) 2001. This survey contains information about the attachment to Israel of both Jews by religion and Jews of no religion. AJIS 2001 shows that Jews of no religion are significantly less attached to Israel than Jews by religion. The share of American Jews who profess no religion has continued to grow. Strengthening the bonds between secular Jews and Israel is key to arresting the overall trend of distancing.
Journal Article
Beyond Attachment: Widening the Analytic Focus about the American Jewish Relationship to Israel
In this article, I briefly review the competing claims of the two sets of authors (Cohen and Kelman versus the Sasson team), noting their points of convergence and divergence. Second, for all of their differences, implicit in their analyses I detect an under-explicated conception of the relationship between Jews in America and Israel, one that warrants a fresh exploration going forward, leading me to call for much-needed exploratory research about these questions. Finally I situate the discussion about needed future research in terms of the how we ought to envision the relationship between \"town and gown\" in creating knowledge about and for the Jewish communal-organizational world.
Journal Article
Debating anti-Semitism: Ernestine Rose vs. Horace Seaver in the Boston Investigator, 1863-1864
Jewish women have struggled to develop identities that allow them to meet the needs of their various communities and remain true to themselves. Ernestine Rose has been described as having disavowed her Jewish heritage; yet, she is included as \"the Jewish woman's rights advocate.\"; This analysis focuses on an 1863-1864 debate with editor Horace Seaver about anti-Semitism and the Jews published in the Boston Investigator. This single encounter is rhetorically significant, because it illustrates the subtle, non-institutional character of anti-Semitism among mid-nineteenth century liberal intellectuals. It also illustrates that Rose's Jewish identity was neither elusive nor conflicted, but a basis for her advocacy of human rights which has historic as well as contemporary relevance for the understanding identity development.
Journal Article