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Winner of the National Jewish Book Award Photographs, index.
- Sales Rank: #1617252 in Books
- Published on: 1996-04-30
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.00" h x 1.08" w x 6.00" l,
- Binding: Paperback
- 368 pages
From Publishers Weekly
A treasure trove of wondrous, forgotten lore, this vibrant social history explores how three generations of American Jews improvised on traditions to fashion a singular culture that redefined Jewish identity. Joselit (Our Gang) maintains that American Jews, in deciding what was culturally meaningful and worth preserving in Jewish observance and ritual, largely followed their own counsel, relying as much on American notions of personal happiness, privacy and consumerism as on Jewish tradition. The resulting "Jewishness," he says, was a malleable construct rooted in a domesticity that made few demands on its adherents yet called forth exuberant, short-lived displays of Jewish identification at key moments in the life cycle-birth, adolescence, marriage, death. Joselit, who teaches in Princeton's religion department, draws on a vast array of materials-parenting manuals, advertisements, cookbooks, sermons, Yiddish etiquette manuals, school primers, etc.
to show how American Jews fused the sacred and the vernacular. Photos.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Joselit (Our Gang: Jewish Crime and the New York Jewish Community, 1900-1940, 1983) provides a marvelously entertaining, enlightening, and insightful view into the development of the social mores and customs of American Jewry. While she paints the American Jewish social landscape in broad brushstrokes, she also supplies myriad details based on meticulous scholarship. Joselit deftly describes how the Jewish immigrants adapted and modified age-old traditions, emphasizing those aspects of the past that seemed to meld with the perceived needs of the new environment. She even traces the development of the culinary locus of contemporary American Jewry; it is fascinating to learn that the conspicuous consumption evident at weddings and the quintessential American bar mitzvah had their genesis at the turn of the century. With both humor and affection, Joselit portrays the Americanization of Jewish culture. Highly recommended for all social history and Judaica collections.
Carol R. Glatt, VA Medical Ctr. Lib., Philadelphia
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
During the first half of this century, Judaism and Jewish culture in the U.S. underwent profound transformations. Although some may bemoan that orthodoxy gave way to assimilation, social historian Joselit shows how vivid the Jewish community actually was. Joselit draws on a true treasure-trove of Yiddish press clippings, guidebooks, invitations, and a host of other sources to describe rituals and home life in the U.S. during her target period. Tracing the evolution of bar and bat mitzvah celebrations, she describes how the ceremonies became such festive events in this country. Elsewhere, poignantly illustrating turn-of-the-century family values, she presents a clip from the Jewish Daily Forward that displays a photographic "Gallery of Missing Husbands." Using some very funny examples, she also describes how ethnic customs were adopted by American commercialism; in a chapter on how Jews and the food industry observed dietary laws, she quotes an advertisement for kosher vegetable shortening that reads: "The Hebrew Race has been waiting 4,000 years for Crisco." They just don't write ad copy like that anymore. Aaron Cohen
Most helpful customer reviews
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Oy Vey! - My Yiddishkeit Childhood Re-lived in Brooklyn 60 years Ago!
By M. Wernick
Ms. Joselit accurately described my experience growing up in a Brooklyn Jewish family during the 1950's and '60's. I was only able to get through the first two chapters because it brought so much of my childhood back - everything I loved about it and everything that should have sent me to a psychiatrist's couch. Her writings brought me much greater understanding of my family and myself as links in a long historical chain. I will continue to read the remainder and then re-read the entire book. The author is to be commended for capturing the essence of the people.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
Matzoh, challah and tshatshke, oh my!
By L. Arnold
Perhaps one of the biggest strengths of Joselit's book is her ability to give a voice to the late 19th and early 20th-centry Jewish Americans, allowing them to (in a way) defend themselves and their choices. These anecdotes, quotes and articles taken from popular media at the time give the reader a "man on the ground" perspective, rather than a scholarly or even rabbinical perspective. By using examples from material culture, Joselit is able to observe the everyday Judaism, the mixing of the sacred with the profane, and the outcome of the tensions naturally found therein. Her use of illustrations, photographs, recipes and other items also serves to help the reader take a closer look into Jewish American culture, while serving as perfect examples for the Americanization and the "domesticated Jewishness" that were present at the time (5). The one complaint to be had with the book is the format of the footnotes, which are often difficult to navigate, but do little to detract from the narrative itself. Overall, The Wonders of America provides the reader with a great compendium of the Jewish American experience in the 1850s-1950s, while being an enjoyable and enlightening read for anyone interested in the topic.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
an entertaining guide to how Americans reinvented Judaism
By Michael Lewyn
..showing how some behaviors that some Americans might think of as longstanding tradition were really just improvisations by American Jews, or magnification of minor customs into major events. For example, in Eastern European the Bar Mitzvah was, according to one immigrant, "no ceremony at all" - but in America it became a major life-cycle event as early as the 1880s. And the common custom of listing the names of deceased loved ones on a bronze tablet is almost entirely new, dating from the 1920s.
Other rituals declined and then rose from the dead again: Chanukah was neglected in the 19th century; as early as 1884, one rabbi wrote: "The customary candles disappear more and more from Jewish homes." Christmas trees became more common until in the 1920s, savvy Jewish marketers reinvented Chanukah as a large-scale gift-giving holiday. And as a result, by the late 20th century even some relatively secular households (like mine) ignored Christmas and made a production out of Chanukah.
Shabbat observance, though still not as widespread as one might hope, appears to have rebounded slightly from the alleged "good old days"- in 1950, only 2 percent of American Jews attended a Shabbat service of any kind, a figure that I suspect is even lower than today's status quo.
And innovation sometimes came from unlikely quarters: bat mitzvahs began in Conservative, and even Orthodox, synagogues rather than in Reform Judaism (which preferred confirmation).
Other attempts at innovation thankfully failed- for example, some synagogues' attempts to water down Shavuot by turning it into a Jewish Mothers' Day.
Another interesting feature of this book is that it shows how early American Jews came to differ from other groups. As early as the 1890s, for example, American Jews had half the infant mortality rate of Italians or Czechs. Jews were also fussier eaters- a 1930s survey showed that 42% of Jewish 2-5 years olds refused two or more of a group of foods offered, as opposed to 18% of Polish-American children. (Make of that what you will).
One moral of the book: the more things change the more they remain the same. In 1893, Rabbi Maurice Harris of Chicago asked, "Can a minority move among a majority without being absorbed by it? . . . our distinctive characteristics are going, one by one; we are becoming more and more like our neighbors." Words that could be said just as easily in 2004.
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