Guide for the Jewish Homemaker

Guide for the Jewish Homemaker PDF Author: Shonie B. Levi
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Jewish way of life
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description

Guide for the Jewish Homemaker

Guide for the Jewish Homemaker PDF Author: Shonie B. Levi
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Jewish way of life
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description


Across the Threshold

Across the Threshold PDF Author: Shonie B. Levi
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Jewish women
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Mishpachah

Mishpachah PDF Author: Leonard J. Greenspoon
Publisher: Purdue University Press
ISBN: 1612494692
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
Dictionary definitions of the term mishpachah are seemingly straightforward: "A Jewish family or social unit including close and distant relatives-sometimes also close friends." As accurate as such definitions are, they fail to capture the diversity and vitality of real, flesh-and-blood Jewish families. Families have been part of Jewish life for as long as there have been Jews. It is useful to recall that the family is the basic narrative building block of the stories in the biblical book of Genesis, which can be interpreted in the light of ancient literary traditions, archaeological discoveries, and rabbinic exegesis. Rabbinic literature also is filled with discussions about interactions, rancorous as well as amicable, between parents and among siblings. Sometimes harmony characterizes relations between the parent and the child; as often, alas, there is conflict. The rabbis, always aware of the realities of life, chide and advise as best they can. For the modern period, the changing roles of males and females in society at large have contributed to differing expectations as to their roles within the family. The relative increase in the number of adopted children, from both Jewish and non-Jewish backgrounds, and more recently, the shifting reality of assisted reproductive technologies and the possibility of cloning human embryos, all raise significant moral and theological questions that require serious consideration. Through the studies brought together in this volume, more than a dozen scholars look at the Jewish family in wide variety of social, historical, religious, and geographical contexts. In the process, they explore both diverse and common features in the past and present, and they chart possible courses for Jewish families in the future.

Bringing Zion Home

Bringing Zion Home PDF Author: Emily Alice Katz
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 1438454651
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
Demonstrates how American Jews used culture—art, dance, music, fashion, literature—to win the hearts and minds of postwar Americans to the cause of Israel. Bringing Zion Home examines the role of culture in the establishment of the “special relationship” between the United States and Israel in the immediate postwar decades. Many American Jews first encountered Israel through their roles as tastemakers, consumers, and cultural impresarios—that is, by writing and reading about Israel; dancing Israeli folk dances; promoting and purchasing Israeli goods; and presenting Israeli art and music. It was precisely by means of these cultural practices, argues Emily Alice Katz, that American Jews insisted on Israel’s “natural” place in American culture, a phenomenon that continues to shape America’s relationship with Israel today. Katz shows that American Jews’ promotion and consumption of Israel in the cultural realm was bound up with multiple agendas, including the quest for Jewish authenticity in a postimmigrant milieu and the desire of upwardly mobile Jews to polish their status in American society. And, crucially, as influential cultural and political elites positioned “culture” as both an engine of American dominance and as a purveyor of peace in the Cold War, many of Israel’s American Jewish impresarios proclaimed publicly that cultural patronage of and exchange with Israel advanced America’s interests in the Middle East and helped spread the “American way” in the postwar world. Bringing Zion Home is the first book to shine a light squarely upon the role and importance of Israel in the arts, popular culture, and material culture of postwar America.

Jewish on Their Own Terms

Jewish on Their Own Terms PDF Author: Jennifer A. Thompson
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 081356283X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 215

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Book Description
Over half of all American Jewish children are being raised by intermarried parents. This demographic group will have a tremendous impact on American Judaism as it is lived and practiced in the coming decades. To date, however, in both academic studies about Judaism and in the popular imagination, such children and their parents remain marginal. Jennifer A. Thompson takes a different approach. In Jewish on Their Own Terms, she tells the stories of intermarried couples, the rabbis and other Jewish educators who work with them, and the conflicting public conversations about intermarriage among American Jews. Thompson notes that in the dominant Jewish cultural narrative, intermarriage symbolizes individualism and assimilation. Talking about intermarriage allows American Jews to discuss their anxieties about remaining distinctively Jewish despite their success in assimilating into American culture. In contrast, Thompson uses ethnography to describe the compelling concerns of all of these parties and places their anxieties firmly within the context of American religious culture and morality. She explains how American and traditional Jewish gender roles converge to put non-Jewish women in charge of raising Jewish children. Interfaith couples are like other Americans in often harboring contradictory notions of individual autonomy, universal religious truths, and obligations to family and history. Focusing on the lived experiences of these families, Jewish on Their Own Terms provides a complex and insightful portrait of intermarried couples and the new forms of American Judaism that they are constructing.

The Girls

The Girls PDF Author: Carole Bell Ford
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438403003
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
This book tells the stories of the Jewish women who came of age in Brownsville, Brooklyn, in the 1940s and 1950s. Through in-depth interviews with more than forty women, Carole Bell Ford explores the choices these women made and the boundaries within which they made them, offering fresh insights into the culture and values of Jewish women in the postwar period. Not content to remain in the past, The Girls is also a story of women who live in the present, who lead fulfilling lives even as they struggle to adjust to changes in American society that conflict with their own values and that have profoundly affected the lives of their children and grandchildren.

Religion, Food, and Eating in North America

Religion, Food, and Eating in North America PDF Author: Benjamin E. Zeller
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 023153731X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 373

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Book Description
The way in which religious people eat reflects not only their understanding of food and religious practice but also their conception of society and their place within it. This anthology considers theological foodways, identity foodways, negotiated foodways, and activist foodways in the United States, Canada, and the Caribbean. Original essays explore the role of food and eating in defining theologies and belief structures, creating personal and collective identities, establishing and challenging boundaries and borders, and helping to negotiate issues of community, religion, race, and nationality. Contributors consider food practices and beliefs among Christians, Jews, Muslims, and Buddhists, as well as members of new religious movements, Afro-Caribbean religions, interfaith families, and individuals who consider food itself a religion. They traverse a range of geographic regions, from the Southern Appalachian Mountains to North America's urban centers, and span historical periods from the colonial era to the present. These essays contain a variety of methodological and theoretical perspectives, emphasizing the embeddedness of food and eating practices within specific religions and the embeddedness of religion within society and culture. The volume makes an excellent resource for scholars hoping to add greater depth to their research and for instructors seeking a thematically rich, vivid, and relevant tool for the classroom.

Jews and the American Soul

Jews and the American Soul PDF Author: Andrew R. Heinze
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691227918
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 458

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Book Description
What do Joyce Brothers and Sigmund Freud, Rabbi Harold Kushner and philosopher Martin Buber have in common? They belong to a group of pivotal and highly influential Jewish thinkers who altered the face of modern America in ways few people recognize. So argues Andrew Heinze, who reveals in rich and unprecedented detail the extent to which Jewish values, often in tense interaction with an established Christian consensus, shaped the country's psychological and spiritual vocabulary. Jews and the American Soul is the first book to recognize the central role Jews and Jewish values have played in shaping American ideas of the inner life. It overturns the widely shared assumption that modern ideas of human nature derived simply from the nation's Protestant heritage. Heinze marshals a rich array of evidence to show how individuals ranging from Erich Fromm to Ann Landers changed the way Americans think about mind and soul. The book shows us the many ways that Jewish thinkers influenced everything from the human potential movement and pop psychology to secular spirituality. It also provides fascinating new interpretations of Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler, and Western views of the psyche; the clash among Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish moral sensibilities in America; the origins and evolution of America's psychological and therapeutic culture; the role of Jewish women as American public moralists, and more. A must-read for anyone interested in the contribution of Jews and Jewish culture to modern America.

Jews at Home

Jews at Home PDF Author: Simon J. Bronner
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 1786949865
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 351

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Book Description
A multifaceted exploration of what makes a home 'Jewish', materially and emotionally, and of what it takes to make Jews feel 'at home' in their environment.

The Rabbi’s Wife

The Rabbi’s Wife PDF Author: Shuly Rubin Schwartz
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0814786901
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 327

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Book Description
2006 National Jewish Book Award, Modern Jewish Thought Long the object of curiosity, admiration, and gossip, rabbis' wives have rarely been viewed seriously as American Jewish religious and communal leaders. We know a great deal about the important role played by rabbis in building American Jewish life in this country, but not much about the role that their wives played. The Rabbi’s Wife redresses that imbalance by highlighting the unique contributions of rebbetzins to the development of American Jewry. Tracing the careers of rebbetzins from the beginning of the twentieth century until the present, Shuly Rubin Schwartz chronicles the evolution of the role from a few individual rabbis' wives who emerged as leaders to a cohort who worked together on behalf of American Judaism. The Rabbi’s Wife reveals the ways these women succeeded in both building crucial leadership roles for themselves and becoming an important force in shaping Jewish life in America.