Presenting Jews: Jewishness and America, 1920--1960.

In America, Jews had to learn how to explain and present themselves to non-Jews in order to survive and thrive. This dissertation argues that Jewish acts of self-presentation from the 1920s through the early 1960s sculpted the way that Jews thought about being Jewish and being American. Jewish leaders, intellectuals, and institutions remodeled, often self-consciously, Jewishness and Americanness when they articulated what made a Jew a Jew, and what Judaism's relationship was to Christianity, democracy, and America. The people I examine---who traveled under the sponsorship of the Jewish Chautauqua Society to universities with little or no Jewish student body to deliver lectures about Jewish beliefs, history and culture, who engaged in missionary experiments, who used the tools of social science to make Jews, Judaism, and America knowable, and who wrestled with the ban on intermarriage---transformed what it meant to be a Jew and what it meant to be an American in relation to their historical moment, personal proclivities, and ideological positions. Theirs was not only a struggle toward assimilating into American life, a story now well rehearsed in the historiography of American Jews; it was also an effort to assimilate American life into a Jewish framework.Jewishness could not be explained without taking a stake in the core debates of American political life---most importantly the competing values of American unity and American diversity or pluralism. At different moments and in different circumstances, Jewish Chautauqua Society rabbis and leaders, the Reform rabbis who advocated a Jewish mission, Jewish social researchers, and Jewish commentators, including rabbis and sociologists, on intermarriage imagined their destiny merging into America's destiny, and imagined it as somehow distinct. Whether Jewishness would strengthen the unity of America or its diversity, Jewish leaders believed Jewishness itself could represent something essential about American national identity.In the eyes of the Jewish leaders I examine, Jewishness could serve as both a model of America and a model for America. As Jews presented themselves to America, they helped shape the emerging contours of American political and cultural life.Thesis (Ph.D.)--Yale University, 2004.School code: 0265

Diaspora Jewish nationalism and identity in America, 1914--1967.

This dissertation examines diasporic definitions of Jewish nationalism formulated by four immigrant Jewish intellectuals who translated European conceptions of Jewish nationalism into an American intellectual and political context. During the first half of the twentieth century, Horace Kallen (1882--1974), Mordecai Kaplan (1881--1983), Hans Kohn (1891--1971), and Shimon Rawidowicz (1896--1957) invented novel vocabularies for negotiating the social, cultural, and political boundaries between Jews and general American society. This research traces the development of these conceptions, notions such as "cultural pluralism," "civilization," and "civic nationalism," through a close reading of published works and archival sources. These disparate notions of diaspora Jewish nationalism shared an attempt to re-imagine the fundamental categories of Jewish "otherness" in a world increasingly defined by the homogenous nation-state. Rehabilitating these formulations necessitates the reconsideration of a neglected aspect of Jewish nationalism that challenged the inherent connection between national identity and political citizenship.Scholars of Jewish and American history alike have much to learn by examining expressions of Jewish nationalism in America. These thinkers' embrace of America was far more contested than American Jewish historians generally acknowledge. While historians often illustrate the influence of intellectual acculturation, few trace the strategies by which Jewish thinkers attempted to alter the dominant political discourse. Jewish thinkers were far from passive adaptors of American intellectual currents. Working at the permeable semantic boundaries between categories of nationalism, ethnicity, religion, and race, Jewish intellectuals challenged many basic assumptions of American political life and played an integral role in the construction of the majority culture. In addition, this project reveals that these four thinkers' formulations prefigured many contemporary debates regarding ethnicity and multiculturalism. As more and more scholars puzzle over the factors that constitute transnational ethno-religious identities, as well as the nature of the relationship binding diaspora communities with their homelands, the pioneering work of these four thinkers will provide fruitful historical models for consideration.Thesis (Ph.D.)--Yale University, 2004.School code: 0265

The transformation of Jewish identity in Vienna, 1918--1938.

This dissertation examines the ways in which literature, theater, politics and gender not only reflected but also actively shaped the identities of Viennese Jews after the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In response to more narrowly defined constructions of Jewish identity, it draws out the subtler patterns of association and socialization that characterized modern Jewish life, including matters of taste, cultural alignment and political membership. Study of these socio-cultural affiliations ultimately shows that for many Austrian authors, dramatists, and politicians---and for their broader audience---a Jewish background mattered a great deal in the process of negotiating and fashioning culture.The first chapter introduces the issues at stake during the insecure, uncertain and volatile years from 1918 to 1938 that profoundly affected all Austrians, but transformed the lives of Jewish Austrians in particular. It investigates the wide spectrum of Jewish responses to the postwar political and social crises as Jews were forced to renegotiate previously comfortable identities. The second chapter explores one such response through the involvement of socialist leader David Joseph Bach in the cultural policies of "Red Vienna," which reflected the emphasis on Bildung already popular among secular Central European Jews. In contrast to this enthusiasm for Bildung, journalist Else Feldmann's position as an impoverished Jewish woman allowed her to make visible the problems of interwar Socialism often glossed over by more idealistic, bourgeois party leaders. The third chapter considers authors Veza Canetti and Mela Hartwig, who likewise maintained critical distances to ideologies supported by many of their male counterparts, including socialism and psychoanalysis. Chapter four argues that new space in the Viennese public sphere allowed women including Eugenie Schwarzwald, Berta Zuckerkandl and Alice Schalek to flourish as journalists, educators, and organizers of social welfare systems, even as the parallel development of antisemitism and misogyny limited their success. The last chapter examines Jewish participation in both Yiddish theater and the baroque Catholic Salzburg Festival, illustrating how the Jewish responses to political and social changes in interwar Austria included both support for and rejection of traditional notions of Jewish and Austrian identities.Thesis (Ph.D.)--Yale University, 2004.School code: 0265