Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
15
result(s) for
"Jews Employment United States History 20th century."
Sort by:
The 1970s
The 1970s looks at an iconic decade when the cultural left and economic right came to the fore in American society and the world at large. While many have seen the 1970s as simply a period of failures epitomized by Watergate, inflation, the oil crisis, global unrest, and disillusionment with military efforts in Vietnam, Thomas Borstelmann creates a new framework for understanding the period and its legacy. He demonstrates how the 1970s increased social inclusiveness and, at the same time, encouraged commitments to the free market and wariness of government. As a result, American culture and much of the rest of the world became more--and less--equal.
eBook
Eden in the Garden State: Jewish Politics in the Jersey Homesteads Planned Community, 1936–39
Considering the remarkable interest that the Jersey Homesteads garnered on a national level, the project has received relatively little scholarly attention.9 In this article, I examine the history of the Jersey Homesteads and, in particular, the social and political orientation of its residents during the operation of the triple cooperative between 1936 and 1939.10 To do so, I analyze textual and visual sources, many from the town's archive, including newspaper articles, a local newsletter, town planning documents, photographs, a mural, and a songbook. [...]I note the ways in which the nature of their progressive orientation diverged from those held by their stated allies; as the nation's working class looked toward the state and the union for security, the Jewish Homesteaders ascribed to alternative solutions that were simultaneously more radical and more localized. The New Dealers hoped to leverage social modernism's tools—rational town planning, practical and cost-effective design, and the harmonization of housing with nature—to provide an alternative to the blighted conditions of urban working-class life.12 Not all proponents of the New Deal's rural resettlement programs subscribed to this movement; in fact, a number of planned community architects were instead drawn to the projects by their romantic conceptions of the American pioneer family tradition. Per the planning documents, each plot would contain a three- or four-bedroom house surrounded by a yard and private garden to grow fruits and vegetables.
Journal Article
Toward an “Immigrant Turn” in Jewish Entrepreneurial History
First as a peddler, and then as \"a shopkeeper among the local farmers, black and white,\" as Hasia Diner has written, commerce offered Jewish peddlers like Schwartz's entry to southern life.2 But when Schwartz describes the local commercial district, we learn that Jews are not the only immigrant businessmen in Joshua's Lexington: An Irishman opened a tavern at the corner, And nights became festive With lively shouts and banjo tunes… Scholars who study southern Jewish history have recognized immigrant entrepreneurship—foreign-born residents who establish a business as a means of economic survival, often with the help of a network of common origin—as a crucial framework for both understanding regional processes of Jewish acculturation, and comparing the Jewish experience in the American South to other sites of Jewish settlement in the United States and elsewhere.7 As the scene set in I.J. Schwartz's poem suggests, however, immigrants from the eastern Mediterranean, the Ottoman Levant, and Asia also made a living in southern cities and towns, and integrated into their local economies, through petty commerce. While this essay will take each community's distinctive cultures and experiences into account—as must any sensitive comparison between ethnic groups—it will also suggest that if we look beyond the southern Jewish experience, expanding our analysis to other immigrant groups who came to the region at the same time, we might discern patterns that can be applied more widely. By 1900, the city was a regional leader in commercial development, connecting agricultural commodity wholesalers to rural producers, and distributing manufactured products to far-flung regional retailers from the eastern seaboard to the Mississippi River.
Journal Article
“Our Temples Are Deserted”: The Jewish Sabbath Observance Movement in New York, 1879–1930
Jews arrived in America in the nineteenth century already less committed to Orthodoxy than they had been in previous generations. The Haskalah, or Jewish enlightenment, the spread of Socialism, and the rise of Zionism all had an impact on Sabbath observance. Additionally, America's economic and cultural institutions, such as the six-day work week, made it extremely difficult for observant Jews to abstain from work on a Saturday. The Sabbath observance movement arose as a response to the low level of synagogue attendance, the decline in the number of families gathering for a Sabbath meal on Friday night, and Jewish men working and women shopping on Saturdays. Beginning in the 1870s, a series of Sabbath observance organizations were created, seeking to get Jewish employers to close their businesses and Jewish workers not to work on Saturdays. Key to their efforts was the establishment of employment bureaus to match Sabbath-observant employers with workers who were Sabbath-observant. Their success was quite limited. One after another the various Sabbath observance organizations failed for several reasons, including inadequate financial resources and a lack of enduring organizational strength, but mostly because of the emergence of the five-day work week and because the Jewish community was not committed to Sabbath observance.
Journal Article
The twilight of the middle class
InThe Twilight of the Middle Class, Andrew Hoberek challenges the commonly held notion that post-World War II American fiction eschewed the economic for the psychological or the spiritual. Reading works by Ayn Rand, Ralph Ellison, Saul Bellow, Phillip Roth, Flannery O'Connor, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, and others, he shows how both the form and content of postwar fiction responded to the transformation of the American middle class from small property owners to white-collar employees. In the process, he produces \"compelling new accounts of identity politics and postmodernism that will be of interest to anyone who reads or teaches contemporary fiction.
Hoberek argues that despite the financial gains and job security enjoyed by the postwar middle class, the transition to white-collar employment paved the way for its current precarious state in a country marked by increasingly deep class divisions. Postwar fiction provided the middle class with various imaginative substitutes for its former property-owning independence, substitutes that since then have not only allowed but abetted this class's downward mobility. To read this fiction in the light of the middle-class experience is thus not only to restore the severed connections between literary and economic \"history in the second half of the twentieth \"century, but to explore the roots of the contemporary crisis of the middle class.
eBook
PIONEERING WOMEN WRITERS AND THE DE-GHETTOISATION OF EARLY AMERICAN JEWISH FICTION
In an essay published inCommentaryin 1952, the writer Isaac Rosenfeld confessed that he had ‘long avoided’ Abraham Cahan’s 1917 classicThe Rise of David Levinsky, believing that the novel was another ‘badly-written account of immigrants and sweatshops’. Although Rosenfeld stood corrected by his reading of the novel and went on to offer a sympathetic re-evaluation of Cahan’smagnum opus, his complaint that the genre of ghetto fiction had become ‘intolerably stale’ resounded with other critics as well (1952: 131). Writing inThe Menorah Journaltwenty years earlier, novelist Albert Halper bitterly lamented the confined terrain of American Jewish
Book Chapter
THE MAKING OF AMERICAN JEWISH IDENTITIES IN POSTWAR AMERICAN FICTION
The second half of the twentieth century saw a flourishing of American Jewish fiction. Writers such as Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, Bernard Malamud and Philip Roth emerged in rapid succession and re-imagined the possibilities, not only for Jewish writing, but for literary expression in America. The years directly following the Second World War saw the publication of exceptional debut works of fiction from writers who would go on to influence generations of American novelists: Saul Bellow’sDangling Man, published in 1944; Norman Mailer’sThe Naked and the Dead, published in 1948 to stunningly enthusiastic reviews; Bernard Malamud’sThe Naturaland
Book Chapter
HISTORY ON A PERSONAL NOTE
In this essay I want to challenge two widely held assumptions: first, that the most important postwar American Jewish writers are male novelists; secondly, that the short story is a minor form, largely devoted to the representation of private revelations and domestic dramas. In an essay on ‘Jewish-American Fiction’ inA Companion to Twentieth-Century United States Fiction(2010), I proposed an alternative, feminocentric canon of American Jewish literature that foregrounded women writers and the short story, rather than focusing on male novelists such as Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud and Philip Roth. In this chapter, I develop this approach further, looking
Book Chapter