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At which moments and in which ways did Jews play a central role in the development of American capitalism? Many popular writers address the intersection of Jews and capitalism, but few scholars, perhaps fearing this question's anti-Semitic overtones, have pondered it openly.Chosen Capitalrepresents the first historical collection devoted to this question in its analysis of the ways in which Jews in North America shaped andwere shapedby America's particular system of capitalism. Jews fundamentally molded aspects of the economy during the century when American capital was being redefined by industrialization, war, migration, and the emergence of the United States as a superpower.Surveying such diverse topics as Jews' participation in the real estate industry, the liquor industry, and the scrap metal industry, as well as Jewish political groups and unions bent on reforming American capital, such as the American Labor Party and the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union, contributors to this volume provide a new prism through which to view the Jewish encounter with America. The volume also lays bare how American capitalism reshaped Judaism itself by encouraging the mass manufacturing and distribution of foods like matzah and the transformation of synagogue cantors into recording stars. These essays force us to rethink not only the role Jews played in American economic development but also how capitalism has shaped Jewish life and Judaism over the course of the twentieth century. Contributors: Marni Davis, Georgia State University Phyllis Dillon, independent documentary producer, textile conservator, museum curator Andrew Dolkart, Columbia University Andrew Godley, Henley Business School, University of Reading Jonathan Karp, executive director, American Jewish Historical Society Daniel Katz, Empire State College, State University of New York Ira Katznelson, Columbia University David S. Koffman, New York University Eli Lederhendler, Hebrew University, Jerusalem Jonathan Z. S. Pollack, University of Wisconsin-Madison Jonathan D. Sarma, Brandeis University Jeffrey Shandler, Rutgers University Daniel Soyer, Fordham University

The Shape of the Signifieris a critique of recent theory--primarily literary but also cultural and political. Bringing together previously unconnected strands of Michaels's thought--from \"Against Theory\" toOur America--it anatomizes what's fundamentally at stake when we think of literature in terms of the experience of the reader rather than the intention of the author, and when we substitute the question of who people are for the question of what they believe. With signature virtuosity, Michaels shows how the replacement of ideological difference (we believe different things) with identitarian difference (we speak different languages, we have different bodies and different histories) organizes the thinking of writers from Richard Rorty to Octavia Butler to Samuel Huntington to Kathy Acker. He then examines how this shift produces the narrative logic of texts ranging from Toni Morrison'sBelovedto Michael Hardt and Toni Negri'sEmpire. As with everything Michaels writes,The Shape of the Signifieris sure to leave controversy and debate in its wake.

Antisemitism has been found on both the extreme left and right among political elites. However, at the mass public level, limited research suggests right-wing antisemitism, but not much left-wing antisemitism. This paper challenges that research, at least for the U.S., offering an alternative theory. The theory argues that the lowest levels of antisemitism will be found among mainstream liberals and conservatives. Ideological moderates will exhibit higher rates of antisemitism, while those lacking an ideological orientation will show still higher antisemitic rates. Extremists of the right and left may be more antisemitic than mainstream conservatives and liberals, but the inability of standard ideological self-placement questions to distinguish extreme ideologues from the very conservative/liberal makes it difficult to test the extremism hypothesis. Numerous items measuring attitudes towards Jews in the U.S. across five major surveys finds overwhelming support for the mainstream philosemitism theory. The conclusion puts the findings into perspective and offers suggestions regarding future research.

Arnold Rich (1893–1968) was an acclaimed pathologist and the first Jewish department chair at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. In his landmark text, The Pathogenesis of Tuberculosis , Rich continued to advance the concept of racial susceptibility to tuberculosis a decade after mainstream medicine recognized that environmental factors fueled the disease. While Rich fits into the historical narrative that embedded categories of race facilitated scientific racism, two characteristics unique to Rich help to explain why he persisted. First were the scientific origins of his theories. While racial theorists sought to prove racial difference through science, Rich used racial difference to prove his outlying theories of tuberculosis immunology. Second was his identity as a prewar Jewish person when America’s focus on a racial binary pressured Jewish Americans to assimilate into white culture. Rich’s life and research exemplify how examining scientific racism through an individual complicates and expands our understanding of how race is constructed in the United States.

Several prominent works—Maristella Botticini and Zvi Eckstein's The Chosen Few: How Education Shaped Jewish History, 70–1492 (2012), Yuri Slezkine's The Jewish Century (2004), not to mention more popular titles like Amy Chua's The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (2011)—have lined up in the \"cultural\" camp, favoring Jewish propensities and proclivities over other explanations for the distinct economic experience of Jews.1 This is the approach that I (in Cotton Capitalists: American Jewish Entrepreneurship in the Reconstruction Era [2017]) and Adam Mendelsohn (in The Rag Race: How Jews Sewed Their Way to Success in America and the British Empire [2016]) engaged and disagreed with. Greek merchants in Egypt's cotton industry, for example, demonstrate strikingly similar patterns of trust and ethnic solidarity to Jewish merchants in the American cotton industry.3 How are Jews different? [...]by drawing from both the middleman-minority and new institutional economic theories, and then integrating the Jewish experience into the study of other ethnic and religious minorities, I believe that we can reconceptualize our understanding of the ways in which Jews shaped, and were shaped by, the environments in which they lived. By failing to explore consumption, we not only miss a golden opportunity to understand gender, but also the economic—and broader—relationship between Jews, African-Americans, and the larger society.

Touching on issues of power, authority, and domination,Manhuntstakes an in-depth look at the hunting of humans in the West, from ancient Sparta, through the Middle Ages, to the modern practices of chasing undocumented migrants. Incorporating historical events and philosophical reflection, Grégoire Chamayou examines the systematic and organized search for individuals and small groups on the run because they have defied authority, committed crimes, seemed dangerous simply for existing, or been categorized as subhuman or dispensable. Chamayou begins in ancient Greece, where young Spartans hunted and killed Helots (Sparta's serfs) as an initiation rite, and where Aristotle and other philosophers helped to justify raids to capture and enslave foreigners by creating the concept of natural slaves. He discusses the hunt for heretics in the Middle Ages; New World natives in the early modern period; vagrants, Jews, criminals, and runaway slaves in other eras; and illegal immigrants today. Exploring evolving ideas about the human and the subhuman, what we owe to enemies and people on the margins of society, and the supposed legitimacy of domination, Chamayou shows that the hunting of humans should not be treated ahistorically, and that manhunting has varied as widely in its justifications and aims as in its practices. He investigates the psychology of manhunting, noting that many people, from bounty hunters to Balzac, have written about the thrill of hunting when the prey is equally intelligent and cunning. An unconventional history on an unconventional subject,Manhuntsis an in-depth consideration of the dynamics of an age-old form of violence.

Jewish dance critic Ann Barzel recorded companies in Chicago with her wind-up camera from a downstage theater wing or the stage's edge.2 Her film of the Tel Aviv-based Inbal Yemenite Dance Group (Inbal Dance Theater) in March 1958 shows this powerhouse company under the artistic direction of Sara Levi-Tanai.3 The dancers lead swooping kicks into hovering jumps that land in deep, spongy pliés, initiate rhythmic foot patterns with petite sweeping ankle kicks, and embellish them with polycentric hip isolations and measured claps. [...]their performances provided a glimpse into the biblical past.6 This ideology suppressed contemporary Yemenite Jewry under a dominant Ashkenazi heritage. By endorsing the modern dance and ethnic dance labels, critics positioned themselves as cultural arbiters.17 Cold War-era divisions into self and other defined struggles of East versus West, communism versus capitalism, non-white and off-white versus white, and Soviet versus American, so these labels, and who applied them, mattered. [...]through accounts of American Jewish social experiences I suggest that American Jews' interactions with Inbal engendered their feelings of being part of a global Jewish community even as they marked the distance between their divergent Jewish experiences.

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.

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.