American Jewry Transcending the European Experience?

American Jewry explores new transnational questions in Jewish history, analyzing the historical, cultural and social experience of American Jewry from 1654 to the present day, and evaluates the relationship between European and American Jewish history. Did the hopes of Jewish immigrants to establish an independent American Judaism in a free and pluralistic country come to fruition? How did Jews in America define their relationship to the 'Old World' of Europe, both before and after the Holocaust? What are the religious, political and cultural challenges for American Jews in the 21st century? Internationally renowned scholars come together in this volume to present new research on how immigration from Western and Eastern Europe established a new and distinctively American Jewish identity that went beyond the traditions of Europe, yet remained attached in many ways to its European origins.

Christian Wiese is the Director of the Centre for German-Jewish Studies at the University of Sussex, UK. His recent publications include Years of Persecution, Years of Extermination: Saul Friedlander and the Future of Holocaust Studies (co-editor, Continuum, 2010).

Cornelia Wilhelm is currently DAAD Professor in the Departments of History and Jewish Studies at Emory University, USA. She also teaches as Professor of Modern History at Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich, Germany, and has held visiting positions at Rutgers University, US, and Leopold-Franzens-University of Innsbruck, Austria. She is author of several volumes including German Jews in America: Bourgeois Civil Self-Awareness and Jewish Identity in the Orders B'nai B'rith and True Sisters, which was published in English translation in July 2011.

Introduction - Wiese and Wilhelm / Looking Back on American Jewish History - Diner / Part I / Colonial Identities / Trading Freedoms? Exploring Colonial Jewish Merchanthood between Europe and the Caribbean - Cohen / Early American Jewry and the Quest for Civil Equality - Faber / Part II / American Judaism and Civic Culture / Women's Changing Roles in Nineteenth-Century American and German Judaism - Goldman / The Independent Order of B'nai B'rith and the Shaping of an American Identity - Wilhelm / German Jews and the German-Speaking Civic Culture of Nineteenth-Century Ameica - Conzen / Part III / Finding a New Zion in America / Negotiating for a New Relationship between Judaism and Christianity in America 1865-1917 - Ariel / The Transition from German Wissenschaft des Judentums to American-Jewish Scholarship in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Wiese / Zionism in the Promised Land - Goren / The Myth of Europe in America's Judaism - Heschel / Part IV / New Roles and Identities / 'Shul with a Pool' Reconsidered - Kaufman / New York and the Beginning of the Russian Jewish Labor Movement - Michels / Reflections on the Study of Orthodoxy in America - Gurock / The Meaning of the Jewish Experience for American Culture - Whitfield / Part V / Challenges for American Jewry after the Holocaust / The Holocaust in American Culture - Shandler / American Jews and the Middle East Crisis - Staub / The American Jewish Effort to Rescue German and Soviet Jewry - Feingold / From Periphery to Center: American Jewry, Zion, and Jewish History after the Holocaust - Sarna / Conclusions - Wiese and Wilhelm / Bibliography / Index