Pub Date : 2024-02-29DOI: 10.1353/ajh.2023.a920590
Ronald Gomes Casseres
<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span> <p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> A Tale of Two Jewish Cemeteries:<span>Preservation of Jewish Historic Heritage in the Caribbean</span> <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Ronald Gomes Casseres (bio) </li> </ul> <p>It has been 370 years since the first Jews settled in Curaçao. In the middle of the eighteenth century, the island's Jewish community was the largest in the Americas with some 1500 Jews.<sup>1</sup> In 1789, notwithstanding a decrease in the number of Jews due to emigration and based on more accurate census figures, Jews still represented 14% of the free population and 30% of the white population.<sup>2</sup> Unlike in other centers of Jewish life, however, over the course of these more than three and a half centuries, more than six thousand Jews were interred in just two cemeteries, the historic Beth Haim Bleinheim and the contemporary Beth Haim Berg Altena.<sup>3</sup> Study of the tombs concentrated in Curaçao's two Jewish burial sites thus provides a unique window onto the changing practices and customs of this Jewish community.</p> <p>Cemeteries tell us more than who lived, who died, and when they did so. A study of cemeteries, referred to as <em>bet ḥayim</em>s in Sephardic tradition, also tells us about how many of the interred lived their lives.<sup>4</sup> The sepulchral monuments and inscriptions of Curaçao's cemeteries provide a glimpse of Jewish life, including the religious and social practices of those <strong>[End Page 575]</strong> resting there. This article will show how burial and naming customs of the Jewish community evolved and to some extent became more secular in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.</p> <p>The historic Beth Haim Bleinheim, established in 1651, was the first Jewish cemetery in Curaçao. It lies in the former Joden Quartier, or Jewish quarter, where the first Jews settled and continued to live and own plantations well into the nineteenth century, located two miles from the capital and main city of the island, Willemstad. The establishment of a Reform <em>bet ḥayim</em> at Berg Altena two hundred years later in the outskirts of the city attests to the vehemence of the internal conflicts within this often contentious Jewish community. A third cemetery, also at Berg Altena, was founded in 1880, when Orthodox Jews moved to this neighborhood and wanted a new cemetery closer to where they resided. The two cemeteries at Berg Altena, the first part of a Reform community and the second an Orthodox community, were merged into one in the middle of the twentieth century.</p> <h2>BETH HAIM BLEINHEIM</h2> <p>Much has been written about the history of Curaçao's Jewish community and about the old cemetery, Beth Haim Bleinheim.<sup>5</sup> Isaac Emmanuel's <em>Precious Stones of the Jews of Curaçao</em> is the definitive study of the cemetery and the genealogy of Curaçao's Jews.<sup>6</sup> The book offers detailed descript
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Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1353/ajh.2023.a909916
Reviewed by: A Religious History of the American GI in World War II by G. Kurt Piehler Michael Snape (bio) A Religious History of the American GI in World War II. By G. Kurt Piehler. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2021. xv + 393 pp. A substantial body of literature exists on religion and the American service man and woman during World War II. Besides the voluminous (and surprisingly wide-ranging) official histories of Army, Navy, and Air Force chaplaincy published in the 1950s, '60s and '70s, more recent (and independent) studies of American military chaplaincy in the 1940s have also emerged. These include Alex Grobman's Rekindling the Flame: American Jewish Chaplains and the Survivors of European Jewry, 1944–48 (1993), Donald F. Crosby's Battlefield Chaplains: Catholic Priests in World War II (1994), Lyle W. Dorsett's Serving God and Country: U.S. Military Chaplains in World War II (2012), and Ronit Y. Stahl's Enlisting Faith: How the Military Chaplaincy Shaped Religion and State in Modern America (2017). The connections of specific religious groups, [End Page 502] and of American civil religion, with the armed forces have also been examined in books such as Anne C. Loveland's American Evangelicals and the U.S. Military 1942–1993, (1997), Deborah Dash Moore's GI Jews: How World War II Changed a Generation (2004), my own God and Uncle Sam: Religion and America's Armed Forces in World War II (2015), and Jonathan H. Ebel's G.I. Messiahs: Soldiering, War, and American Civil Religion (2015). Given this extensive historiography, it is surprising that a thorough literature review is missing from this book, one that enables the reader to distinguish the distinctiveness of its contribution from what is already known, and even well established. For example, on the cover it is claimed that the book "breaks new ground by recounting the armed forces' unprecedented efforts to meet the spiritual needs of the fifteen million men and women who served in World War II." However, this theme was the leitmotif of the chaplaincy histories published in the aftermath of the war and has been closely covered in subsequent studies. Similarly, the (qualified) triumph of the "tri-faith vision" of American religious life, especially when exemplified in America's armed forces, will come as no surprise to those acquainted with the existing literature. Even less will the findings of the post-war survey The American Soldier (1949), which demonstrated that prayer was an indispensable support to soldiers on the front line. However, as the founder of the Rutgers Oral History Archives and a diligent researcher among many other archives, Kurt G. Piehler has made a valuable contribution in extending and enhancing our understanding of the experience of minorities such as African Americans, Chinese Americans, Native Americans, women (especially members of the Women's Army Corps), and more marginal religious groups such as Christian Scientists. His discussion of the relationship b
书评:第二次世界大战中美国GI的宗教史，作者:G. Kurt Piehler迈克尔·斯内普(传记)第二次世界大战中美国GI的宗教史。G. Kurt Piehler著。林肯:内布拉斯加大学出版社，2021年。大量的文献都是关于二战期间的宗教和美国军人的。除了20世纪50年代、60年代和70年代出版的大量(令人惊讶的广泛)陆军、海军和空军牧师的官方历史之外，最近(和独立)的关于20世纪40年代美国军事牧师的研究也出现了。其中包括亚历克斯·格罗斯曼的《重燃火焰:1944-48年的美国犹太牧师和欧洲犹太人的幸存者》(1993年)、唐纳德·f·克罗斯比的《战地牧师:二战中的天主教牧师》(1994年)、莱尔·w·多塞特的《服侍上帝和国家:二战中的美国军事牧师》(2012年)和罗尼特·y·斯塔尔的《入伍信仰:军事牧师如何塑造现代美国的宗教和国家》(2017年)。特定宗教团体和美国公民宗教与武装部队的联系也在安妮·c·拉夫兰的《美国福音派教徒和1942-1993年的美国军队》(1997)、黛博拉·达什·摩尔的《GI犹太人:第二次世界大战如何改变一代人》(2004)、我自己的上帝和山姆大叔:第二次世界大战中的宗教和美国武装部队》(2015)和乔纳森·h·埃贝尔的《GI弥赛亚:士兵、战争和美国公民宗教》(2015)等书中得到了研究。考虑到这一广泛的历史编纂，令人惊讶的是，这本书缺少一个彻底的文献综述，使读者能够区分它的贡献与已知的，甚至是公认的贡献的独特性。例如，在封面上宣称，这本书“通过叙述武装部队为满足第二次世界大战中服役的1500万男女的精神需求所做的前所未有的努力，开辟了新的领域。”然而，这一主题是战后出版的牧师历史的主题，并在随后的研究中得到了密切的关注。同样，美国宗教生活的“三信仰愿景”(有条件的)胜利，特别是在美国武装部队中得到体现时，对那些熟悉现有文献的人来说并不奇怪。战后调查《美国士兵》(1949)的结果更不值得关注，该调查表明，祈祷对前线士兵来说是不可或缺的支持。然而，作为罗格斯大学口述历史档案的创始人和许多其他档案的勤奋研究者，Kurt G. Piehler在扩展和加强我们对少数民族的理解方面做出了宝贵的贡献，这些少数民族包括非洲裔美国人、华人美国人、印第安人、妇女(特别是妇女军团的成员)和更边缘的宗教团体，如基督教科学。他对精神病学和教牧关怀之间关系的讨论也很广泛，很有启发性，就像他对美国非教会人士全国委员会的处理一样。然而，在更大的图景中存在一些障碍。一个问题是，主流好莱坞对这一代人的影响被低估了。在战争的准备阶段和战争初期，美国人接触到了诸如《第69次战斗》(1940年)和《约克中士》(1941年)等令人信服的对军人虔诚的唤起。1943年，《约克中士》仍然是美国军事基地收视率第三高的电影。此外，另一部奥斯卡获奖影片《米尼弗夫人》(1942)也是好莱坞最公然的亲英电影，它着重描写了英国大后方生活的宗教特征，这种描绘有一些实质内容，有助于巩固美国和英国之间新生的“特殊关系”。关于更广泛的媒体，同样值得怀疑的是，牧师是否像人们所说的那样，在战争中“相对低调”(315-16)。除了牧师出现在大银幕上，电视广播里也充斥着弗兰克·j·洛瑟的《赞美上帝，传递弹药》(1942)、宾·克罗斯比的《上帝的士兵》(1944)，每周还有200多部……
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Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1353/ajh.2023.a909917
Reviewed by: American Shtetl: The Making of Kiryas Joel, A Hasidic Village in Upstate New York by Nomi M. Stolzenberg and David N. Myers Motti Inbari (bio) American Shtetl: The Making of Kiryas Joel, A Hasidic Village in Upstate New York. By Nomi M. Stolzenberg and David N. Myers. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021. xiii- 477 pp. Kiryas Joel is a village in upstate New York, about sixty miles from New York City. Established in 1974, the community has since expanded dramatically to include almost 30,000 residents, who are exclusively Satmar Hasidim. Over the years, the community has gone through intensive legal battles with its neighbors, the town of Monroe, and each other, as the community of Hasidim splintered and sued each other over the use of the property and public goods. American Shtetl: The Making of Kiryas Joel, A Hasidic Village in Upstate New York is mainly focused on discussing the litigation concerning this enclave. Some of these legal battles tested the separation of state and church, since religious laws governed this community. Some of these battles even reached the Supreme Court. The Satmar Hasidic movement was established by Rabbi Yoel Teitelbaum, a Holocaust survivor from Hungary, who landed in New York in 1946 and recreated a Hasidic court there. Teitelbaum was known for his extreme piety and anti-Zionist views. His radicalism attracted a small group of followers, mostly Holocaust survivors, and over the years, with an influx of newcomers and high fertility rates, Satmar has become a significant Hasidic sect, similar in size to that of Chabad. The Satmar Hasidim initially settled in Williamsburg, New York. Hasidic society is a voluntary entity, and in theory, its members are free to join or leave the community as they please. The absence of physical boundaries weakens the status of the Haredi community and the authority of its rabbis, since their followers can leave at any point. Moreover, the city is full of distractions and temptations. Teitelbaum was disturbed by this situation and sought to regain some of the coercive authority that the rabbis had enjoyed in the shtetls of Eastern Europe. As his community grew, the problem became more pronounced. Then came the idea to build a shtetl on the outskirts of New York. In 1973, land was purchased in the city of Monroe, and Teitelbaum himself moved to Kiryas Joel. In order to establish their presence, develop their resources, and expand their community, the Satmar leadership used sophisticated tools, including political lobbying at all local government levels and the state courts. Stolzenberg and Myers note that although the vision of establishing an isolated Orthodox enclave to distance the community from the American lifestyle was specific to the Satmar community, these tools are "as American as apple pie" (9). Assertive political and judicial behavior by ultra-Orthodox Jews concerned with protecting their insular communities [End Page 505] is not unique to Satmar. Aguda
作者:Nomi M. Stolzenberg和David N. Myers Motti Inbari(传记)美国shtetel: Kiryas Joel的制作，纽约北部的一个哈西德派村庄。作者:诺米·m·斯托尔岑伯格和大卫·n·迈尔斯。普林斯顿:普林斯顿大学出版社，2021。Kiryas Joel是纽约州北部的一个村庄，距离纽约市大约60英里。该社区成立于1974年，自那以后迅速扩大到包括近3万居民，他们都是萨特马尔·哈西德姆。多年来，哈西德社区与邻居、门罗镇以及彼此之间进行了激烈的法律斗争，因为哈西德社区分裂并就财产和公共物品的使用相互起诉。美国Shtetl: Kiryas Joel，一个位于纽约州北部的哈西德派村庄的形成主要集中在讨论关于这个飞地的诉讼。其中一些法律斗争考验了政教分离，因为宗教法律管辖着这个社区。其中一些纠纷甚至闹到了最高法院。萨特玛哈西德派运动是由来自匈牙利的大屠杀幸存者约尔·泰特尔鲍姆(Yoel Teitelbaum)拉比创立的，他于1946年抵达纽约，在那里重建了一个哈西德派法庭。泰特尔鲍姆以他的极端虔诚和反犹太复国主义观点而闻名。他的激进主义吸引了一小群追随者，其中大部分是大屠杀幸存者。多年来，随着新移民的涌入和高生育率，萨特马尔已经成为一个重要的哈西德派，规模与查巴德教派相似。萨特玛·哈西德派最初定居在纽约的威廉斯堡。哈西德派社会是一个自愿的实体，理论上，它的成员可以自由地加入或离开社区。没有实际边界削弱了哈瑞迪社区的地位和拉比的权威，因为他们的追随者可以随时离开。此外，这个城市充满了分心和诱惑。泰特尔鲍姆对这种情况感到不安，并试图重新获得拉比们在东欧犹太人定居点所享有的一些强制性权威。随着他所在社区的壮大，这个问题变得更加明显。然后就有了在纽约郊区建一个定居点的想法。1973年，在门罗市买了一块地，泰特尔鲍姆自己搬到了基里亚斯·乔尔。为了建立他们的存在，开发他们的资源，扩大他们的社区，萨特玛领导人使用了复杂的工具，包括在各级地方政府和州法院进行政治游说。Stolzenberg和Myers注意到，尽管建立一个孤立的东正教飞地，将社区与美国生活方式隔离开来的愿景是Satmar社区所特有的，但这些工具“就像苹果派一样美国”(9)。极端正统派犹太人为保护他们孤立的社区而采取的自信的政治和司法行为并非Satmar独有。欧洲极端正统派犹太人的政治运动Agudat Yisrael早在1912年就开始活跃，二战前在波兰议会中就有代表。在以色列，极端正统派犹太人在政治体系中非常活跃。随着基里亚斯·乔尔的成长，门罗的居民显然对他们的新邻居不满意，他们穿着不同，说意第绪语，与他人保持距离，而且非常贫穷，在斯托尔曾伯格和迈尔斯写作的时候，超过90%的人口都在享受医疗补助。由于Kiryas Joel的人口迅速增长，几乎完全是由于其哈西德派人口的高出生率造成的，村政府采取了各种兼并努力来扩大其面积，使周围社区的大多数居民感到沮丧。这些地区的许多居民认为，高密度的住宅-商业村的扩张威胁到周边郊区社区的生活质量。因此，他们起诉阻止Kiryas Joel的扩张，并取得了一些成功。另一场斗争是关于公立学校系统的使用，以及为有特殊需要的儿童提供资源和校车的使用。法院必须决定基里亚斯·乔尔在什么条件下可以使用这些资源……
{"title":"American Shtetl: The Making of Kiryas Joel, A Hasidic Village in Upstate New York by Nomi M. Stolzenberg and David N. Myers (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/ajh.2023.a909917","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ajh.2023.a909917","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: American Shtetl: The Making of Kiryas Joel, A Hasidic Village in Upstate New York by Nomi M. Stolzenberg and David N. Myers Motti Inbari (bio) American Shtetl: The Making of Kiryas Joel, A Hasidic Village in Upstate New York. By Nomi M. Stolzenberg and David N. Myers. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021. xiii- 477 pp. Kiryas Joel is a village in upstate New York, about sixty miles from New York City. Established in 1974, the community has since expanded dramatically to include almost 30,000 residents, who are exclusively Satmar Hasidim. Over the years, the community has gone through intensive legal battles with its neighbors, the town of Monroe, and each other, as the community of Hasidim splintered and sued each other over the use of the property and public goods. American Shtetl: The Making of Kiryas Joel, A Hasidic Village in Upstate New York is mainly focused on discussing the litigation concerning this enclave. Some of these legal battles tested the separation of state and church, since religious laws governed this community. Some of these battles even reached the Supreme Court. The Satmar Hasidic movement was established by Rabbi Yoel Teitelbaum, a Holocaust survivor from Hungary, who landed in New York in 1946 and recreated a Hasidic court there. Teitelbaum was known for his extreme piety and anti-Zionist views. His radicalism attracted a small group of followers, mostly Holocaust survivors, and over the years, with an influx of newcomers and high fertility rates, Satmar has become a significant Hasidic sect, similar in size to that of Chabad. The Satmar Hasidim initially settled in Williamsburg, New York. Hasidic society is a voluntary entity, and in theory, its members are free to join or leave the community as they please. The absence of physical boundaries weakens the status of the Haredi community and the authority of its rabbis, since their followers can leave at any point. Moreover, the city is full of distractions and temptations. Teitelbaum was disturbed by this situation and sought to regain some of the coercive authority that the rabbis had enjoyed in the shtetls of Eastern Europe. As his community grew, the problem became more pronounced. Then came the idea to build a shtetl on the outskirts of New York. In 1973, land was purchased in the city of Monroe, and Teitelbaum himself moved to Kiryas Joel. In order to establish their presence, develop their resources, and expand their community, the Satmar leadership used sophisticated tools, including political lobbying at all local government levels and the state courts. Stolzenberg and Myers note that although the vision of establishing an isolated Orthodox enclave to distance the community from the American lifestyle was specific to the Satmar community, these tools are \"as American as apple pie\" (9). Assertive political and judicial behavior by ultra-Orthodox Jews concerned with protecting their insular communities [End Page 505] is not unique to Satmar. Aguda","PeriodicalId":43104,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN JEWISH HISTORY","volume":"23 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135156712","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1353/ajh.2023.a909912
Daniel L. Rosenblatt
Eden in the Garden State:Jewish Politics in the Jersey Homesteads Planned Community, 1936–391 Daniel L. Rosenblatt (bio) "That's our corn!," one passenger shouted. "Look there's our apples!Four hundred miles of apples!," another cheered. On the bus traveling from New York City to rural New Jersey were eight Jewish families, soon to be the first residents of the newly developed Jersey Homesteads cooperative.2 Their town, founded in 1936, was one of approximately one hundred planned communities created by New Deal agencies. Intended to alleviate the hardships caused by the Great Depression, the projects were founded on the premise of subsistence: if struggling Americans were offered employment in agriculture or industry along with a plot of tenable land for personal use, they could provide for themselves and their families.3 While most other planned communities supported white, native-born Americans, the New Jersey colony was unique in welcoming unemployed, foreign-born Jewish garment workers living in New York City.4 Between 1936 and 1939, approximately 120 families arrived at the Jersey Homesteads and set down roots in their new community. For most, the move was the second leg of a longer journey, having immigrated from Eastern Europe over a decade earlier; one resident described the town as "a transposed Eastern European village or shtetl."5 From thousands [End Page 423] of applicants, these families had been chosen based upon characteristics including needlework skill, membership and good standing in the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU), and demonstrated interest in the cooperative lifestyle.6 Upon renting a home in the community, each family paid a $1 annual membership fee to the cooperative system and could thereby participate in the management of a collectivized garment factory, farm, and consumer store. The town's businesses ultimately struggled to turn a profit. Its garment factory overestimated demand, its orchard failed to deliver marketable produce, and few residents were qualified for agricultural work. After a third season of losses, the town's triple cooperative dissolved in 1939. But many Homesteaders remained in their new community, typically commuting to nearby towns or New York City for work. They continued to rent their homes from the federal government until 1946, when eighty-five of the town's original families purchased them for approximately $4,200 each.7 Such a bold experiment did not go unnoticed. Hundreds of articles in both the local and national press detailed the progress of the short-lived cooperative; some expressed curiosity about the project, and others were immensely critical. Intrigued by this news coverage, thousands of Americans arrived at the town on weekends simply to observe its residents.8 The experiment in cooperative living also captured the eye of many of the nation's top artists. Working under contract with the federal government, muralist Ben Shahn, Farm Security Administration (FSA
{"title":"Eden in the Garden State: Jewish Politics in the Jersey Homesteads Planned Community, 1936–39","authors":"Daniel L. Rosenblatt","doi":"10.1353/ajh.2023.a909912","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ajh.2023.a909912","url":null,"abstract":"Eden in the Garden State:Jewish Politics in the Jersey Homesteads Planned Community, 1936–391 Daniel L. Rosenblatt (bio) \"That's our corn!,\" one passenger shouted. \"Look there's our apples!Four hundred miles of apples!,\" another cheered. On the bus traveling from New York City to rural New Jersey were eight Jewish families, soon to be the first residents of the newly developed Jersey Homesteads cooperative.2 Their town, founded in 1936, was one of approximately one hundred planned communities created by New Deal agencies. Intended to alleviate the hardships caused by the Great Depression, the projects were founded on the premise of subsistence: if struggling Americans were offered employment in agriculture or industry along with a plot of tenable land for personal use, they could provide for themselves and their families.3 While most other planned communities supported white, native-born Americans, the New Jersey colony was unique in welcoming unemployed, foreign-born Jewish garment workers living in New York City.4 Between 1936 and 1939, approximately 120 families arrived at the Jersey Homesteads and set down roots in their new community. For most, the move was the second leg of a longer journey, having immigrated from Eastern Europe over a decade earlier; one resident described the town as \"a transposed Eastern European village or shtetl.\"5 From thousands [End Page 423] of applicants, these families had been chosen based upon characteristics including needlework skill, membership and good standing in the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU), and demonstrated interest in the cooperative lifestyle.6 Upon renting a home in the community, each family paid a $1 annual membership fee to the cooperative system and could thereby participate in the management of a collectivized garment factory, farm, and consumer store. The town's businesses ultimately struggled to turn a profit. Its garment factory overestimated demand, its orchard failed to deliver marketable produce, and few residents were qualified for agricultural work. After a third season of losses, the town's triple cooperative dissolved in 1939. But many Homesteaders remained in their new community, typically commuting to nearby towns or New York City for work. They continued to rent their homes from the federal government until 1946, when eighty-five of the town's original families purchased them for approximately $4,200 each.7 Such a bold experiment did not go unnoticed. Hundreds of articles in both the local and national press detailed the progress of the short-lived cooperative; some expressed curiosity about the project, and others were immensely critical. Intrigued by this news coverage, thousands of Americans arrived at the town on weekends simply to observe its residents.8 The experiment in cooperative living also captured the eye of many of the nation's top artists. Working under contract with the federal government, muralist Ben Shahn, Farm Security Administration (FSA","PeriodicalId":43104,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN JEWISH HISTORY","volume":"147 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135156161","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1353/ajh.2023.a909913
Andrew Sperling
"Living on a Sort of Island":Jewish Refugee Farmers in the American South, 1938–461 Andrew Sperling (bio) In May 1939, German-Jewish merchant David Loeb sent a letter from his temporary residence in New York requesting the opportunity to live and work on a farm in rural North Carolina. "My family," he said, "as well as myself, we should very much like to go on a farm."2 Unlike the majority of Jewish refugee farmers in the Nazi era, Loeb had prior experience in a rural environment, having worked on his uncle's cattle farm in his youth. He, his wife Helen, and their two children, Manfred and Walter, fled Bremen, Germany several months earlier and found refuge at the Manumit School in Pawling, New York. The Manumit School, a socialist boarding house, housed refugees for a brief time but was only a transitory place for the family as they searched for permanent settlement. They might have continued on to dense cities, where refugees often worked menial jobs in households, restaurants, and shops, but such employment seemed unfulfilling for middle-class professionals.3 A subset of refugees, the Loebs among them, embraced Jewish agrarianism in a region where such work promised to be formidable but rewarding. David Loeb could think of no better path toward becoming a prosperous American citizen than by rekindling his passion for the outdoors. In his letter, he emphasized the value of a diligent farm family, noting that his wife and oldest son were strong, healthy, and willing to work alongside him. Shortly thereafter, Dr. Alvin Johnson, the letter's recipient, invited the Loebs to work on the Van Eeden Settlement in rural Burgaw, North Carolina. Johnson was a Danish American economist [End Page 445] and humanitarian who had previously co-founded the progressive New School for Social Research, a private research university, in 1919. When the Nazis rose to power, Johnson recruited persecuted European scholars to study in New York as part of the New School's "University in Exile," saving their lives in the process. In 1933, the program rescued at least seven Jewish refugees and their families, but Johnson acknowledged that many more needed saving. Having observed "a growing hostility to refugees" in his country, he wondered what could be done to help Jews while also curbing antisemitic attitudes among Americans. Farming was the optimal solution. Johnson imagined that it would give Jews an opportunity to practice the romanticized "art of living off the soil," preventing a "ghetto psychology" from developing among immigrants in overcrowded cities. Most importantly, it would change perceptions people had about Jews.4 In 1939, Johnson purchased a modest one hundred acres of farmland in Burgaw from Wilmington businessman Hugh MacRae, a leader in prior initiatives to resettle Dutch immigrant families in agrarian colonies. The Dutch settlers, arriving in 1909, grappled with drainage issues that diminished their prospects. Thirty years later, Johnson reasoned that p
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Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1353/ajh.2023.a909915
Reviewed by: A "Jewish Marshall Plan": The American Jewish Presence in Post-Holocaust France by Laura Hobson-Faure Sara Halpern (bio) A "Jewish Marshall Plan": The American Jewish Presence in Post-Holocaust France. By Laura Hobson-Faure. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2022. xix + 336 pp. Laura Hobson-Faure activates French Jewish voices in A "Jewish Mar-shall Plan": The American Jewish Presence in Post-Holocaust France to study American and French Jewish visions of French Jewry after the Holocaust and their results. The chapters show how the two sides tackled the aftereffects of occupation absent French state support in loose chronological order: liberation, material relief, reconstruction of surviving charities, resurgence of political organizations, and professionalization of social work in France. Through the "bottom up" approach and oral histories and archival materials in France, Israel, and the United States, Hobson-Faure contends that France serves as an ideal case study for analyzing American Jews' reconstruction efforts in Jewish Europe. She argues that French Jewry was far from a passive actor in the rehabilitation of their community. They negotiated with American Jewish leaders, understanding that their differences were grounded in culture, values, and war experiences. Both could agree that France offered hope, with high survival rates and the influx of thousands of Eastern European Jews seeking to resettle or embark for new destinations. Thus France could justify taking a big slice of the budget of American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC). Moreover, American and French (and other European) Jews grappled with the shift of financial, political, and social gravity from Europe to the United States. In their discussions with American Jews, French Jews attempted to have their needs and desires met on their own terms. However, as Hobson-Faure consistently shows, they often recognized that conceding to dollars and organizational infrastructures and methods was necessary to achieve self-sufficiency. Given American Jews' humanitarian and political participation at a time of the United States's increased influence in global affairs, Hobson-Faure seeks to situate A Jewish Marshall Plan within the historiographies of US interventionism and empire-building. Through an analysis of the "circulation of knowledge and cultural transfers," she presents a more complex narrative than merely one of American cultural imperialism (13). In contrast to the real Marshall Plan, which was designed to counter [End Page 497] Soviet influence in Europe, Hobson-Faure contends that this Jewish version aimed to deepen transatlantic Jewish solidarity in the name of rebuilding Jewish Europe after the Holocaust. This vantage point throws relief on a massive literature treating Germany as a temporary site and Israel as a permanent solution for post-Holocaust Jewish life in that part of the world. It highlights the necessity of viewing Europe as still viabl
{"title":"A \"Jewish Marshall Plan\": The American Jewish Presence in Post-Holocaust France by Laura Hobson-Faure (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/ajh.2023.a909915","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ajh.2023.a909915","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: A \"Jewish Marshall Plan\": The American Jewish Presence in Post-Holocaust France by Laura Hobson-Faure Sara Halpern (bio) A \"Jewish Marshall Plan\": The American Jewish Presence in Post-Holocaust France. By Laura Hobson-Faure. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2022. xix + 336 pp. Laura Hobson-Faure activates French Jewish voices in A \"Jewish Mar-shall Plan\": The American Jewish Presence in Post-Holocaust France to study American and French Jewish visions of French Jewry after the Holocaust and their results. The chapters show how the two sides tackled the aftereffects of occupation absent French state support in loose chronological order: liberation, material relief, reconstruction of surviving charities, resurgence of political organizations, and professionalization of social work in France. Through the \"bottom up\" approach and oral histories and archival materials in France, Israel, and the United States, Hobson-Faure contends that France serves as an ideal case study for analyzing American Jews' reconstruction efforts in Jewish Europe. She argues that French Jewry was far from a passive actor in the rehabilitation of their community. They negotiated with American Jewish leaders, understanding that their differences were grounded in culture, values, and war experiences. Both could agree that France offered hope, with high survival rates and the influx of thousands of Eastern European Jews seeking to resettle or embark for new destinations. Thus France could justify taking a big slice of the budget of American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC). Moreover, American and French (and other European) Jews grappled with the shift of financial, political, and social gravity from Europe to the United States. In their discussions with American Jews, French Jews attempted to have their needs and desires met on their own terms. However, as Hobson-Faure consistently shows, they often recognized that conceding to dollars and organizational infrastructures and methods was necessary to achieve self-sufficiency. Given American Jews' humanitarian and political participation at a time of the United States's increased influence in global affairs, Hobson-Faure seeks to situate A Jewish Marshall Plan within the historiographies of US interventionism and empire-building. Through an analysis of the \"circulation of knowledge and cultural transfers,\" she presents a more complex narrative than merely one of American cultural imperialism (13). In contrast to the real Marshall Plan, which was designed to counter [End Page 497] Soviet influence in Europe, Hobson-Faure contends that this Jewish version aimed to deepen transatlantic Jewish solidarity in the name of rebuilding Jewish Europe after the Holocaust. This vantage point throws relief on a massive literature treating Germany as a temporary site and Israel as a permanent solution for post-Holocaust Jewish life in that part of the world. It highlights the necessity of viewing Europe as still viabl","PeriodicalId":43104,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN JEWISH HISTORY","volume":"198 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135157067","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1353/ajh.2023.a909919
Reviewed by: The Lives of Jessie Sampter: Queer, Disabled, Zionist by Sarah Imhoff Hannah Zaves Greene (bio) The Lives of Jessie Sampter: Queer, Disabled, Zionist. By Sarah Imhoff. Durham: Duke University Press, 2022. ix + 272 pp. It is by now all too familiar to declare that academia is the life of the mind. But—as Sarah Imhoff would have us learn from her magisterial monograph, The Lives of Jessie Sampter: Queer, Disabled, Zionist—it is the life of the body, too. Both our historical subjects and we ourselves as scholars inescapably have bodies, and those bodies are critical to how we exist in the world as actors and thinkers alike. When we neglect to attend to those bodies, or embodied selves, the histories we write are necessarily incomplete. In warm, dynamic prose, Imhoff records her practice of embodied scholarship, explaining that "bodies, senses, and feelings are important sources of knowledge" (3). As she elucidates, drawing on paradigms [End Page 499] emerging from disability studies, "it is a privilege to be able to ignore your body, a privilege to pretend that your autonomous thoughts and carefully planned actions are where the real (historical and philosophical) action is at" (9). Though Imhoff's meticulously researched biography of Jessie Sampter engages thoroughly with the textual, from poetry to prose, enabling Sampter's own voice to shine through—even when maladroit or lackluster—it extends beyond that. From the garden to the kibbutz, from paper-cutting to trekking across India, from Spinoza to the Nation, Imhoff immerses herself in the many ways Sampter lived her own life and others refracted it. Crucial to that life were Sampter's experiences of childhood polio and her father's untimely death. Each experience taught Sampter about loss, whether loss of a dearly beloved parent or loss of normative physical function. Not only did polio permanently shape Sampter's body and bodily encounters, it also remained inseparable from her philosophical, religious, and political outlooks. Sampter found that her experiences of chronic pain and impairment turned her increasingly toward questions of mortality and theodicy. Evoking the Latin root religio that means "to bind together," Sampter gradually developed into what Imhoff refers to as a "religious recombiner" (42). Without calling her deeply felt Jewishness into question, Sampter lived a vibrant religious and spiritual life that drew from a variety of faiths and traditions, similar to many of her American contemporaries, Jewish and otherwise. Using Sampter as a model, Imhoff calls for us to reconsider the way we conceptualize American religion away from notions of diversity and pluralism that divide religion into discrete analytic boxes and toward a more fluid, integrated understanding of religion as an evolving, intertwining, cohesive process. This theme of recombination animates not only Sampter's many lives, but The Lives of Jessie Sampter itself. Rather than structuring her book chronol
{"title":"The Lives of Jessie Sampter: Queer, Disabled, Zionist by Sarah Imhoff (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/ajh.2023.a909919","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ajh.2023.a909919","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: The Lives of Jessie Sampter: Queer, Disabled, Zionist by Sarah Imhoff Hannah Zaves Greene (bio) The Lives of Jessie Sampter: Queer, Disabled, Zionist. By Sarah Imhoff. Durham: Duke University Press, 2022. ix + 272 pp. It is by now all too familiar to declare that academia is the life of the mind. But—as Sarah Imhoff would have us learn from her magisterial monograph, The Lives of Jessie Sampter: Queer, Disabled, Zionist—it is the life of the body, too. Both our historical subjects and we ourselves as scholars inescapably have bodies, and those bodies are critical to how we exist in the world as actors and thinkers alike. When we neglect to attend to those bodies, or embodied selves, the histories we write are necessarily incomplete. In warm, dynamic prose, Imhoff records her practice of embodied scholarship, explaining that \"bodies, senses, and feelings are important sources of knowledge\" (3). As she elucidates, drawing on paradigms [End Page 499] emerging from disability studies, \"it is a privilege to be able to ignore your body, a privilege to pretend that your autonomous thoughts and carefully planned actions are where the real (historical and philosophical) action is at\" (9). Though Imhoff's meticulously researched biography of Jessie Sampter engages thoroughly with the textual, from poetry to prose, enabling Sampter's own voice to shine through—even when maladroit or lackluster—it extends beyond that. From the garden to the kibbutz, from paper-cutting to trekking across India, from Spinoza to the Nation, Imhoff immerses herself in the many ways Sampter lived her own life and others refracted it. Crucial to that life were Sampter's experiences of childhood polio and her father's untimely death. Each experience taught Sampter about loss, whether loss of a dearly beloved parent or loss of normative physical function. Not only did polio permanently shape Sampter's body and bodily encounters, it also remained inseparable from her philosophical, religious, and political outlooks. Sampter found that her experiences of chronic pain and impairment turned her increasingly toward questions of mortality and theodicy. Evoking the Latin root religio that means \"to bind together,\" Sampter gradually developed into what Imhoff refers to as a \"religious recombiner\" (42). Without calling her deeply felt Jewishness into question, Sampter lived a vibrant religious and spiritual life that drew from a variety of faiths and traditions, similar to many of her American contemporaries, Jewish and otherwise. Using Sampter as a model, Imhoff calls for us to reconsider the way we conceptualize American religion away from notions of diversity and pluralism that divide religion into discrete analytic boxes and toward a more fluid, integrated understanding of religion as an evolving, intertwining, cohesive process. This theme of recombination animates not only Sampter's many lives, but The Lives of Jessie Sampter itself. Rather than structuring her book chronol","PeriodicalId":43104,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN JEWISH HISTORY","volume":"17 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135157049","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1353/ajh.2023.a909914
Susan A. Glenn
"Suppose the Mother Were Jewish":Leo Pfeffer, the American Jewish Congress, and the Problem of Religious Protection Law1 Susan A. Glenn (bio) When the Executive Committee of the National Community Relations Advisory Council met in New York City in January 1956 to discuss issues of concern to the Jewish community, a heated debate erupted over the adoption of children born to women of one religious group by couples from a different religious group. Rabbi Israel Klavan, who represented the Orthodox Rabbinical Council, declared that any attempt to formulate a "Jewish position" would have to consider "the well-established principle of Jewish law that one who is born a Jew remains a Jew throughout his life." Constitutional law expert Leo Pfeffer (1909–1993), the American Jewish Congress's most formidable church-state litigator, replied that, "having been an Orthodox Jew throughout his life," he understood the importance of "the principle" that "a child born of a Jewish mother is, under traditional Jewish law, a Jew." However, cautioned Pfeffer, "the constitutional government of the United States, under which we all live, and under which our rights to observe and practice our respective religions are protected, is a secular government, without interest or concern for the religious laws to which its citizens may choose to adhere." It must be remembered, he added, that "the security of the Jewish group in its free practice of the Jewish faith rests upon the maintenance of this unconcern or indifference of government toward religion."2 This heated exchange was a continuing salvo in the American Jewish Congress's controversial mid-century campaign to challenge the constitutionality of laws and judicial practices that made it difficult and sometimes impossible for couples to adopt children born to mothers [End Page 467] whose religion differed from theirs. Pfeffer, whose personal devotion to Judaism was "intense and unshakable,"3 played a leading role in this campaign to loosen the grip of religious restrictions on adoption—a campaign, his Jewish critics charged, that would make it possible for Christians to adopt "Jewish-born" children. In the 1950s Pfeffer earned a reputation as what one political scientist called the "dominant individual force in managing the flow of church-state litigation" and the figure responsible for turning the American Jewish Congress into the nation's "unrivaled organizational force" in bringing First Amendment cases "up the judicial ladder to the Supreme Court."4 Another scholar described Pfeffer as the dominant force in the "entire universe" of church-state litigation, noting that he "advised, planned, rehearsed, helped, and argued more church-state cases than any other attorney of his generation."5 The scholarship on Leo Pfeffer focuses on his constitutional challenges to religion in the public schools, state aid to parochial schools, tax exemptions for churches and synagogues, and discriminatory Sunday closing laws. In this ar
{"title":"\"Suppose the Mother Were Jewish\": Leo Pfeffer, the American Jewish Congress, and the Problem of Religious Protection Law","authors":"Susan A. Glenn","doi":"10.1353/ajh.2023.a909914","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ajh.2023.a909914","url":null,"abstract":"\"Suppose the Mother Were Jewish\":Leo Pfeffer, the American Jewish Congress, and the Problem of Religious Protection Law1 Susan A. Glenn (bio) When the Executive Committee of the National Community Relations Advisory Council met in New York City in January 1956 to discuss issues of concern to the Jewish community, a heated debate erupted over the adoption of children born to women of one religious group by couples from a different religious group. Rabbi Israel Klavan, who represented the Orthodox Rabbinical Council, declared that any attempt to formulate a \"Jewish position\" would have to consider \"the well-established principle of Jewish law that one who is born a Jew remains a Jew throughout his life.\" Constitutional law expert Leo Pfeffer (1909–1993), the American Jewish Congress's most formidable church-state litigator, replied that, \"having been an Orthodox Jew throughout his life,\" he understood the importance of \"the principle\" that \"a child born of a Jewish mother is, under traditional Jewish law, a Jew.\" However, cautioned Pfeffer, \"the constitutional government of the United States, under which we all live, and under which our rights to observe and practice our respective religions are protected, is a secular government, without interest or concern for the religious laws to which its citizens may choose to adhere.\" It must be remembered, he added, that \"the security of the Jewish group in its free practice of the Jewish faith rests upon the maintenance of this unconcern or indifference of government toward religion.\"2 This heated exchange was a continuing salvo in the American Jewish Congress's controversial mid-century campaign to challenge the constitutionality of laws and judicial practices that made it difficult and sometimes impossible for couples to adopt children born to mothers [End Page 467] whose religion differed from theirs. Pfeffer, whose personal devotion to Judaism was \"intense and unshakable,\"3 played a leading role in this campaign to loosen the grip of religious restrictions on adoption—a campaign, his Jewish critics charged, that would make it possible for Christians to adopt \"Jewish-born\" children. In the 1950s Pfeffer earned a reputation as what one political scientist called the \"dominant individual force in managing the flow of church-state litigation\" and the figure responsible for turning the American Jewish Congress into the nation's \"unrivaled organizational force\" in bringing First Amendment cases \"up the judicial ladder to the Supreme Court.\"4 Another scholar described Pfeffer as the dominant force in the \"entire universe\" of church-state litigation, noting that he \"advised, planned, rehearsed, helped, and argued more church-state cases than any other attorney of his generation.\"5 The scholarship on Leo Pfeffer focuses on his constitutional challenges to religion in the public schools, state aid to parochial schools, tax exemptions for churches and synagogues, and discriminatory Sunday closing laws. In this ar","PeriodicalId":43104,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN JEWISH HISTORY","volume":"24 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135158190","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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