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A Poetics of the American Idea: The Jewish Writer and America

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

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Extract

The history of the Jews in America is to a considerable extent the history of an idea. It is the story of how Jewish history was transformed by the idea of America and how, in turn, Jewish writers, intellectuals, artists, and public figures helped to sustain and modernize this idea. While it altered the modern Jewish experience, Jewish thinkers often led in the effort to make the idea of America relevant to the needs of an urban, industrial, and even postindustrial age. The work of such writers and thinkers served to keep the American idea meaningful in a time of competing authoritarian and totalitarian ideologies.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1983

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References

NOTES

1. There are, of course, many other ways to relate the story of the Jews in America. For valuable one-volume histories of the Jews in America that include extensive bibliographies, see Dimont, Max I., The Jews in America: The Roots, History, and Destiny of American Jews (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1978)Google Scholar; Feldstein, Stanley, The Land That I Show You: Three Centuries of Jewish Life in America (New York: Doubleday, 1978)Google Scholar; and Handlin, Oscar, Adventure in Freedom: Three Hundred Years of Jewish Life in America (1954; rpt. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat, 1971)Google Scholar. For an economic history of the Jews in America, see Gross, Nacham, ed., Economic History of the Jews, which contains essays by Salo W. Baron, Arcadius Kahan, and others (New York: Schocken, 1975)Google Scholar, and the “Special Bicentennial Issue: American Jewish Business Enterprise,” American Jewish Historical Quarterly, 66, 09 1976Google Scholar. For an analysis of the current political situation of the Jews, see “Special Bicentennial Issue: Jews and American Liberalism: Studies in Political Behavior,” American Jewish Historical Quarterly, 66, 12 1976Google Scholar. For an outstanding survey of themes and subjects dealing with the Jewish-American experience, see Rosen, Gladys, ed., Jewish Life in America: Historical Perspectives (New York: KTAV, 1978)Google Scholar. Important studies of the Jewish immigrant experience and the relationship between the Jewish and American cultures, see Rischin, Moses, The Promised City: New York's Jews, 1870–1914 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1977)Google Scholar, and Howe, Irving, World of Our Fathers (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976)Google Scholar. For important studies of the sociology of the Jewish experience, see Glazer, Nathan, American Judaism, 2nd ed. (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1972)Google Scholar, and Sklare, Marshall, America's Jews (New York: Random House, 1971)Google Scholar. Blau, Joseph L., Judaism in America: From Curiosity to Faith (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1976)Google Scholar, concentrates on the history of Jewish religious thought in America. A valuable reference work on the history of Jews in America is Fishman, Priscilla, ed., The Jews of the United States (New York: Times Books, 1973).Google Scholar

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