Stephen S. Wise and the Urban Frontier: American Jewish Life in New York and the Pacific Northwest at the Dawn of the 20th Century

The case of Stephen S. Wise provides a lens through which to examine American Jewry’s transformation at the dawn of the 20th century. Not only were New York City and Portland, Oregon – places Wise called home – two geographic poles of America’s urban frontier, they also highlight a spectrum of possibilities available to the New World’s fledgling Jewish community. Viewed in tandem, they illustrate American society’s raw, open, and pliable terrain as it emerged from a rural pre-industrial past. Moreover, by placing Wise in the context of the metropolitan growth that reshaped the Atlantic and Pacific frontiers in the late 19th century, we gain a better understanding of the relationship between the country’s dynamic environmental conditions and the phenomenon of Jewish immigrant absorption, acculturation, and Americanization.In withdrawing to the wilderness, Wise exposed himself to new possibilities for thinking about the place of Jews in American society and the future of American Judaism. He also honed the role of which he was to become a superlative exemplar – a 20th-century American rabbi at home in the worlds of religion and politics. Furthermore, his synthesis of liberal Judaism, American pluralism, Zionism, and Progressive-era notions of social justice anticipated the rise of a new American Jewish sensibility that would become normative in the 20th century

From the margins to the mainstream: Labor Zionism and American Jews, 1919-1945

This dissertation stakes a claim for the importance of Labor Zionism in the American Jewish context between 1919 and 1945. It argues that Labor Zionism, with its base in Palestine and satellite organization in the United States, had a profound impact on American Zionism and American Jews.The disjunction between Labor Zionism's relatively small size and disproportionate influence in the United States raises the question why, if the movement was so ideologically important, was it so institutionally and numerically weak? Its core groups were never more than half the size of other Zionist groups. Yet beginning in the middle 1930s, Labor Zionism played an increasingly important role in the development of American Zionism. This was due, in large measure, to Labor's ascendance in the Yishuv and the movement's concomitant rise to hegemony in the World Zionist Organization and Jewish Agency. As a result, the Labor Zionist movement in the United States profited considerably.During the interwar years American Labor Zionism became a hub of social, cultural and political activity. By the early 1940s it effectively defined American Jewry's emergent post-war agenda. This phenomenon derived from a lengthy process of discussion and debate in the American Zionist arena and the wider American Jewish community. It was influenced by developments in Palestine as well as the tragic situation of European Jewry. Zionists, non-Zionists and sympathetic Jews in the United States all gravitated to the Labor Zionist program of building the Jewish National Home. The Labor movement in Palestine commanded a vast socioeconomic infrastructure that made the establishment of the Jewish state possible. Finally, in 1943 organized American Jewry adopted a public policy that called for the creation of an independent Jewish commonwealth in Palestine.Thesis (Ph.D.)--Brandeis University, 1996.School code: 0021

1981-1982: Have You Anything to Declare?

From left: Victor Raider-Wexler as Frontignac and Kurt Knudson as DupontHave You Anything to Declare?Grayscal

1981-1982: Have You Anything to Declare?

Victor Raider-Wexler as FrontignacHave You Anything to Declare?Grayscal

1981-1982: Have You Anything to Declare?

From left: Victor Raider-Wexler as Frontignac and Kurt Knudson as DupontHave You Anything to Declare?Grayscal

1981-1982: Have You Anything to Declare?

Victor Raider-Wexler as FrontignacHave You Anything to Declare?Grayscal

1981-1982: Have You Anything to Declare?

From left: Victor Raider-Wexler as Frontignac and Kurt Knudson as DupontHave You Anything to Declare?Grayscal