Jews on the Frontier: Religion and Mobility in Nineteetn-Century America

Review of: "Jews on the Frontier: Religion and Mobility in Nineteetn-Century America" by Shari Rabi

Peddlers and Modern Jewish Migration

A lecture by Dr. Hasia R. Diner, Professor of American Jewish History, New York University.https://digitalcommons.fairfield.edu/bennettcenter-posters/1295/thumbnail.jp

"A Sort of Rathmines Version of a Dior Design": Maeve Brennan, Self-Fashioning, and the Uses of Style

This article explores the politics of style in the writing of Maeve Brennan. Brennan's concern with style, subjectivity and power is strikingly visible in her short stories and ‘Talk of the Town’ essays for the New Yorker. While in some of her short stories published in the New Yorker in the 1950s, Brennan seems to offer an extended critique of dandyism, elsewhere in her writing self-fashioning takes on an altogether more positive value and is steeped in the political as well as literary commitments of her work. The article argues that Brennan's interest in the politics of style, both personally and in her writing, is informed by the different strategies she deployed as an Irish woman writer establishing her place amongst a New York literary elite in the mid twentieth century.This work began as a conversation with Neil Sammells about Irish women's writing and self-fashioning, and his encouragement and insightful responses to ideas in development were invaluable to the progress of the research. I am also very grateful to Maureen O'Connor and Caitríona Clear, whose work on the Irish woman writer and dandyism, and women and magazine culture, lays an all-important foundation for the arguments developed here. Archival research for the article was made possible by a Fulbright Scholarship in the Humanities (September 2012—January 2013), and I am most grateful to my host institution, Fordham University in New York. I would like to thank the literary estate of Maeve Brennan for kind permission to cite from Maeve Brennan's letters and unpublished material held in the Special Collections at the University of Delaware and the Manuscripts and Archives Division of the New York Public Library. The work was completed with the assistance of a Moore Institute Visiting Fellowship to the National University of Ireland, Galway in 2015, which provided a valuable opportunity to present work in progress as part of the seminar series hosted by the Centre for Irish Studies. Finally, I am grateful to the anonymous peer reviewers and editors at Women: A Cultural Review for their thorough and expert responses to the article

Doing Business in America: A Jewish History

American and Jewish historians have long shied away from the topic of Jews and business. Avoidance patterns grew in part from old, often negative stereotypes that linked Jews with money, and the perceived ease and regularity with which they found success with money, condemning Jews for their desires for wealth and their proclivities for turning a profit. A new, dauntless generation of historians, however, realizes that Jewish business has had and continues to have a profound impact on American culture and development, and patterns of immigrant Jewish exploration of business opportunities reflect internal, communal, Jewish-cultural structures and their relationship to the larger non-Jewish world. As such, they see the subject rightly as a vital and underexplored area of study. Doing Business in America: A Jewish History, edited by Hasia R. Diner, rises to the challenge of taking on the long-unspoken taboo subject, comprising leading scholars and exploring an array of key topics in this important and growing area of research.https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/purduepress_previews/1019/thumbnail.jp

Wandering Jews: Peddlers, Immigrants, and the Discovery of “New Worlds”

In the great century of Jewish migration, from the end of the eighteenth century into the 1920s, when over four million Jews left central and eastern Europe and headed for new lands, the humble, ubiquitous and despised occupation of peddling served as the vehicle which propelled them outward. Jews had peddled for centuries in Europe, as well as in the Muslim lands of the Ottoman Empire and in North Africa and it had a deep and complicated history as a pillar of Jewish economic life in these pre-migration settings. But its very nature played a crucial role in the ways in which Jews experienced their migration, encounter, and eventual settlement in the places to which they went. This paper looks at the connection between Jewish peddling and the great migration of the long nineteenth century when the locus of Jewish life shifted to the “new world,” the world opened up through European colonization and settlement