The Death of American Antisemitism

The Death of American Antisemitism PDF Author: Spencer Blakeslee
Publisher: Praeger
ISBN:
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
Contends that although anti-Jewish incidents do occur in the USA, anti-Jewish beliefs have almost disappeared from the American cultural scene in the last 50 years. The fact that Jewish advocacy organizations (JAOs) are still preoccupied with antisemitism signifies a continuing need for the real or imaginary presence of antisemitism for Jewish group survival. Describes, briefly, the history of antisemitism in the USA, focusing on the activities of the four main JAOs: the American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Congress, and the Jewish Community Relations Council. Examines three recent antisemitic incidents: the insertion by the Nation of Islam of antisemitic material into the touring Black/Jewish Historical Exhibit; the use of the book "The Secret Relationship between Blacks and Jews" in a course on Black history at Wellesley College; and an antisemitic speech delivered by Louis Farrakhan at the University of Massachusetts. Shows that the JAOs' campaigns against these manifestations were ineffective in that they failed to prevent antisemitism. Criticizes modern "civil Judaism" and the role of the campaign against antisemitism in it.

The Death of American Antisemitism

The Death of American Antisemitism PDF Author: Spencer Blakeslee
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313001553
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Book Description
Blakeslee examines the history and current status of Jews and antisemitism in the United States to reveal what we know of antisemitism and the ways in which this knowledge is seriously flawed. He explores the significant historical role antisemitism played in the formation of Jewish advocacy organizations and the subsequent success they enjoyed over several decades of publicly combating antisemitism. He then examines three specific incidents in the 1990s and the ways the advocacy organizations responded. Antisemitic attitudes and incidents in the United States have dropped steadily since the post World War II revelations about the Holocaust. While antisemitism has not disappeared entirely from the American scene, it has dwindled to the point where the Anti-Defamation League considers the average American not antisemitic. Blakeslee probes why, if this statement is accurate—and prevailing statistics suggest it is—prominent Jewish advocacy organizations continue to lavish so much attention and money on an issue of little actual significance. A provocative study for all sociologists, researchers, and concerned lay people involved with the heated debate over antisemitism, Jewish identity, assimilation, Black-Jewish relations, and organizational studies.

The Death of an American Jewish Community: A Tragedy of Good Intentions

The Death of an American Jewish Community: A Tragedy of Good Intentions PDF Author: Hillel Levine
Publisher: Plunkett Lake Press
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
Written by a sociologist and a journalist, The Death of an American Jewish Community: A Tragedy of Good Intentions recounts the death of a Boston community once home to 90,000 Jews residing among African-Americans and white ethnics. The frightening personal testimonies and blatant evidence of manipulated housing prices illustrate how inadequate government regulation of banks can contribute to ethnic conflict and lives destroyed. “There were no winners,” the authors warn. Hillel Levine and Lawrence Harmon believe that their findings may be true for American cities in general. Had we learned from what went wrong in Boston — blockbusting by a group of banks, federal programs promoting mortgages to people unable to afford them, real estate brokers seeking quick profits —, perhaps the 2008 nationwide real estate meltdown could have been anticipated. The lessons from this book are essential for students of ethnic relations and urban affairs. “This candid, disturbing, and highly readable book recounts how Boston’s working-class Jewish neighborhoods were transformed into economically devastated black ghettoes.” — The New Yorker “Bankers and real-estate brokers still shape the dynamics of daily life in our fragile urban neighborhoods. Levine and Harmon movingly capture the human side of this often destructive process in their story of redlining and blockbusting in Boston during the 1960s. But their book is more than history. It is a lesson about how to understand and improve our cities and neighborhoods, today and in the future.” — Raymond L. Flynn, Mayor of Boston, President, U.S. Conference of Mayors “Levine and Harmon are sympathetic to the goals of racial integration but are indignant over the brutality and unfairness that accompanied these orchestrations. Bankers and politicians are indicted here by elaborate court evidence and by supplementary research cited by the authors, who use their insiders’ passion (Harmon was born and raised in Dorchester) and professional expertise to forever preserve the corned-beef flavor of old Blue Hill Avenue. As much an elegiac memory book of old Jewish Boston as a searing indictment against her killers.” — Kirkus Reviews “Combines the rigor of good scholarship with the obsessive curiosity of good journalism” — J. Anthony Lukas, Author of Common Ground “What keeps a community alive? What are the social and historical forces that shape or stifle its aspirations? When does a community soar and when does it yield to resignation? These and other questions take on an urgency of their own in Hillel Levine and Lawrence Harmon’s perceptive, brilliant, and disturbing inquiry.” — Elie Wiesel, University Professor and Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities, Boston University “Levine and Harmon have written a prophetic indictment of the real estate speculation and elite indifference that, along with black crimes, destroyed Boston’s most vibrant Jewish neighborhoods. Have the courage to take their terrible journey; you will not return unchanged!” — Jim Sleeper, Author of The Closest of Strangers: Liberalism and the Politics of Race in New York “This engagingly written and brilliantly illuminating portrait of the destruction of a vibrant Jewish community radically revises our understanding of the process of neighborhood change. The authors also break new ground in portraying the critical role of social class in American life and the powerful, if unconscious, class bias of Jewish communal leaders.” — Charles E. Silberman, Author of A Certain People: American Jews and Their Lives Today

The Ruined House

The Ruined House PDF Author: Ruby Namdar
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062467506
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
“In The Ruined House a ‘small harmless modicum of vanity’ turns into an apocalyptic bonfire. Shot through with humor and mystery and insight, Ruby Namdar's wonderful first novel examines how the real and the unreal merge. It's a daring study of madness, masculinity, myth-making and the human fragility that emerges in the mix." —Colum McCann, National Book Award-winning author of Let the Great World Spin Winner of the Sapir Prize, Israel’s highest literary award Picking up the mantle of legendary authors such as Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, an exquisite literary talent makes his debut with a nuanced and provocative tale of materialism, tradition, faith, and the search for meaning in contemporary American life. Andrew P. Cohen, a professor of comparative culture at New York University, is at the zenith of his life. Adored by his classes and published in prestigious literary magazines, he is about to receive a coveted promotion—the crowning achievement of an enviable career. He is on excellent terms with Linda, his ex-wife, and his two grown children admire and adore him. His girlfriend, Ann Lee, a former student half his age, offers lively companionship. A man of elevated taste, education, and culture, he is a model of urbanity and success. But the manicured surface of his world begins to crack when he is visited by a series of strange and inexplicable visions involving an ancient religious ritual that will upend his comfortable life. Beautiful, mesmerizing, and unsettling, The Ruined House unfolds over the course of one year, as Andrew’s world unravels and he is forced to question all his beliefs. Ruby Namdar’s brilliant novel embraces the themes of the American Jewish literary canon as it captures the privilege and pedantry of New York intellectual life in the opening years of the twenty-first century.

People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present

People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present PDF Author: Dara Horn
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393531570
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Winner of the 2021 National Jewish Book Award for Con­tem­po­rary Jew­ish Life and Prac­tice Finalist for the 2021 Kirkus Prize in Nonfiction A New York Times Notable Book of the Year A Wall Street Journal, Chicago Public Library, Publishers Weekly, and Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year A startling and profound exploration of how Jewish history is exploited to comfort the living. Renowned and beloved as a prizewinning novelist, Dara Horn has also been publishing penetrating essays since she was a teenager. Often asked by major publications to write on subjects related to Jewish culture—and increasingly in response to a recent wave of deadly antisemitic attacks—Horn was troubled to realize what all of these assignments had in common: she was being asked to write about dead Jews, never about living ones. In these essays, Horn reflects on subjects as far-flung as the international veneration of Anne Frank, the mythology that Jewish family names were changed at Ellis Island, the blockbuster traveling exhibition Auschwitz, the marketing of the Jewish history of Harbin, China, and the little-known life of the "righteous Gentile" Varian Fry. Throughout, she challenges us to confront the reasons why there might be so much fascination with Jewish deaths, and so little respect for Jewish lives unfolding in the present. Horn draws upon her travels, her research, and also her own family life—trying to explain Shakespeare’s Shylock to a curious ten-year-old, her anger when swastikas are drawn on desks in her children’s school, the profound perspective offered by traditional religious practice and study—to assert the vitality, complexity, and depth of Jewish life against an antisemitism that, far from being disarmed by the mantra of "Never forget," is on the rise. As Horn explores the (not so) shocking attacks on the American Jewish community in recent years, she reveals the subtler dehumanization built into the public piety that surrounds the Jewish past—making the radical argument that the benign reverence we give to past horrors is itself a profound affront to human dignity.

While Six Million Died; a Chronicle of American Apathy

While Six Million Died; a Chronicle of American Apathy PDF Author: Arthur D. Morse
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)
Languages : en
Pages : 440

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Book Description
In January 1944 President Roosevelt was shown the startling conclusions of a secret memorandum. Its title: Acquiescence of this Government in the Murder of the Jews. The untold and shocking story behind this report--never before described in full-- exposes the appalling apathy and callousness of our Government, particularly the State Department, in the face of Nazi genocide. This report finally forced the President to take the first steps to rescue the Jews--but why had it taken so long to act? This book details, through documents, official papers and interviews with participants and research in archives in key world cities the true narrative of what was known, and the unconscionable delay of active response to the Nazi declaration that they "intended to destroy every Jew in Europe." How this challenge was met is the subject of this book. If genocide is to be prevented in the future, we must understand how it happened, not only in terms of the killers, but of the bystanders.

The Vanishing American Jew

The Vanishing American Jew PDF Author: Alan M. Dershowitz
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0684848988
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 420

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Book Description
Explores the meaning of Jewishness in light of the increasing assimilation of America's Jews and suggests ways to preserve Jewish identity.

The Plot Against America

The Plot Against America PDF Author: Philip Roth
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0547345313
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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Book Description
Philip Roth's bestselling alternate history—the chilling story of what happens to one family when America elects a charismatic, isolationist president—is soon to be an HBO limited series. In an extraordinary feat of narrative invention, Philip Roth imagines an alternate history where Franklin D. Roosevelt loses the 1940 presidential election to heroic aviator and rabid isolationist Charles A. Lindbergh. Shortly thereafter, Lindbergh negotiates a cordial “understanding” with Adolf Hitler, while the new government embarks on a program of folksy anti-Semitism. For one boy growing up in Newark, Lindbergh’s election is the first in a series of ruptures that threaten to destroy his small, safe corner of America–and with it, his mother, his father, and his older brother. "A terrific political novel . . . Sinister, vivid, dreamlike . . . creepily plausible. . . You turn the pages, astonished and frightened.” — The New York Times Book Review

The Unwanted

The Unwanted PDF Author: Michael Dobbs
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 1524733199
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
"The powerfully told story of a group of German Jews desperately seeking American visas to escape the Nazis, and an illuminating account of America's struggle with the refugee crisis caused by the rise of Hitler. Official tie-in to the U.S. Holocaust Museum multi-year exhibit"--

Anti-Semitism

Anti-Semitism PDF Author: F. Schweitzer
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 140397912X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 326

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Book Description
In this provocative book, Marvin Perry and Frederick M. Schweitzer analyze the lies, misperceptions, and myths about Jews and Judaism that anti-semites have propagated throughout the centuries. Beginning with antiquity, and continuing into the present day, the authors explore the irrational fabrications that have led to numerous acts of violence and hatred against Jews. The book examines ancient and medieval myths central to the history of anti-semitism: Jews as 'Christ-killers', instruments of Satan, and ritual murderers of Christian children. It also explores the scapegoating of Jews in the modern world as conspirators bent on world domination; extortionists who manufactured the Holocaust as a hoax designed to gain reparation payments from Germany; and the leaders of the slave trade that put Africa in chains. No other book has focused its attention exclusively on a thematic discussion of historic and contemporary anti-semitic myths, covering such an expansive scope of time, and allowing for such a painstaking level of exemplification. Anti-semitism is an essential book that will serve as a corrective to bigotry, stereotype, and historical distortion.

The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion

The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion PDF Author: Sergei Nilus
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781947844964
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 96

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Book Description
"The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" is almost certainly fiction, but its impact was not. Originating in Russia, it landed in the English-speaking world where it caused great consternation. Much is made of German anti-semitism, but there was fertile soil for "The Protocols" across Europe and even in America, thanks to Henry Ford and others.