As I have shown, throughout his essays, Gordon establishes a narrative of the past in the Diaspora

The history of Jews in host cities often depict a story of success or of failure when it comes to relations between the Jews and the Christians in Europe. Historian Jonathan Elukin, author of Living Together, Living Apart, presents the integration as a success process with rare, and special cases, of failure. On the other side of the spectrum is historian Raymond P. Scheindlin. Scheindlin’s novel, A Short History of the Jewish People, presents many cases of integration between the Christians and Jews that led to massacres and brutal endings for the Jewish community. There are many monumental events that take place during the long span of time that oversees European Jewish history, and both historians study and evaluate the events, however, they do so through different lenses.

Over the course of history, the Jewish culture has endured many cultural hardships. When Nationalism began to rise in Europe, the treatment of Jews became harsh. Amos Elon describes this transition for Jews in his novel The Pity of it All. “For all their irony and skepticism, the Jews of Germany never ceased in their effort to merge German and Jewish identity...their overriding desire was to be complete Germans.” (Elon, 8). The major concerns in Jewish history throughout the ages have been assimilation and acculturation. Acculturation and assimilation are two very important concepts that describe the cultural effects on both minorities and majorities. While these concepts are very similar, there are slight differences between

“The experience of the Jewish families in the United States over the last century has been one of acculturation and accommodation to the norms and the values of the American society.” (“Jewish American Family” 2). At the same time, Anti-Semitism in America reached its peak during the interwar period between the 1940s and 1960s. The self-hating Jew appeared as a phenomenon of the Depression and the 1940s. At that time, almost all of the Jewish American writers simply presented realistic portrayals of their fellow immigrants or their parents’ generation. Later, some other Americans, partial to Anti-Semitism, found confirmation of negative stereotypes in the new Jewish American Literature. Indeed, some parent-hating or self-hating Jewish American writers of the second or the third generation consciously reinforced negative stereotypes with satire and a selective realism. Philip Roth, whose portrayal of the tensions between these figures borders on self-hatred and an almost Anti-Semitic view of the Jewish family in America, is a great example of this phenomenon. In his book, Portnoy’s Complaint, Roth touched on the assimilation experiences of American Jews, their relationship to Israeli Jews, and his experience as inherent in being the son of a Jewish family which led him to be self-hating Jew to escape from the harsh reality.

They had kindred attributes growing up and they had differences in the end. Zionist cogitators in the introduction had radical conceptions of where or how the Jewish state or the Jewish “problem” should be handled. In the cessation, however, was to get a cumulated congress to establish, a Jewish congress. Yet, to understand how Hess, Herzl and Nordau came to the same perspective about assimilation is to understand where they originate from. They still had different circumstances growing up and even when they became anti-assimilation, it transpired at different times of their life. No two Zionist thinker’s life growing up was identically the same, yet they still converged to have the same

Jews Without Money is based on its author’s own childhood, Michael Gold. It re-creates the Jewish immigrant Lower East Side in Manhattan in which he lived, and it provides insight into the life of first- and second-generation Jewish Americans around the turn of the twentieth century. Gold does a wonderful job at putting the reader right in the middle of the sights, smells and sounds of people who may be materially poor, but very rich emotionally. The book paints for the most part a bleak picture of Jewish immigrant life in America, a picture that will remain bleak, the book’s ending implies, until the workers’ revolution occurs. In this paper I will discuss few issues that come up in the book and in the documents that

In this reflection paper I will be reflecting on the Jewish Americans making America their home and Americans response to the Holocaust. I will first address how the Jewish Americans emigrated from other nations into the United States. Once they got here what they had to do to become Americans but also keeping their Jewish identity visible. I will then talk about the Americans Response to the Holocaust and supply information about Jews in the Holocaust also including my thoughts on the Holocaust by ending in my conclusion. The reason for immigrating to America is the endless opportunities and immense freedom.

What does Cahill want you to think when reading this book? Perhaps he wants you to empathize with the Jews and see how their life style set the pathway for the next religions to come. After reading this monograph it is quick to assume that Cahill is pushing his own views on to the reader. The books intentions are up to the readers interpretations. This paper will further analyze Cahills connotations and how readers could analyze this book with their own expectations.

Ever since, Palestinians have had to adapt to new places and cultures in order to survive, which makes it more difficult for them to preserve their own. Said presents several examples of transculturation throughout the essay. For instance, the use of the Mercedes, even though Said describes it in negative terms, the use of the Mercedes has come in handy for Palestinians. Enduring one disaster after another, Palestinian identity is arduous to preserve in exile. It is a struggle of having no country. Our country is a big part of who we are. As we are born, we are destined to become a part of it. It becomes part of our identity. Things that we grew up with meant something to us. We usually treasure things that became part of our lives. Even unconsciously, we take hold of it. Home brings us memories, memories that we want to hold on up to our last breath.

Internal Jewish anxieties and struggles also made assimilation impossible. Lewisohn’s second reason explaining Jews cannot assimilate is because of their ancestral past. Jews “are a people” and “cannot shake off the impress of experience of seventy generations.” This Jewish past prevents Jews from assimilating because they cannot stop being Jewish, and even if one tries to forget or deny their Jewishness his past makes it impossible. The past is so imbedded “in his essential character. . . as well as of all his actions he remains a Jew.”6 Howe, like Lewisohn, also acknowledges the internal difficulties of assimilation. He writes that New York City at this time was “the embodiment of that alien world which every Jewish boy raised in a Jewish immigrant home had been taught, whether he realized it or not, to look upon with suspicion.”7 Since Jews were “cut. . . off from official society” they formed “from immigrant Jewish families. . . a genuine community.”8 This mutual suspicion between Jews and the outside world caused many Jews to withdraw further into their own segregated communities, making the possibility for larger social acceptance and assimilation impossible.

There was a sense of community rather than a religious longing and yearning to return to Palestine. Reform Jews were considered to be more of a social gain than a religious cult, some even saw the Reform movement as bringing Judaism ‘up to date’. It is difficult to determine the type of Judaism represented in Falsettoland as no explicit references are made, however, throughout the course of this paper, the use of features of both traditional Orthodox Judaism and Reform Judaism suggest that Falsettoland depicts a hybrid of the two. Judaism in America began growing in the 1830s when the Jews of Germany began to arrive on American soil. An important factor in the Jewish immigration is that these Jews were either Reform Jews or were secular Jews who had, for whatever reason, dropped Judaism altogether.

With the passage at hand, Dr. Ella Shohat discusses about the case of being an Arab Jew, a historical paradox, as one of many social elisions. Unlike the idea of intersectionality, binarism leaves “little place for complex identities” (Shohat, 2). As an American, Jew, and Arab, she speaks of the disparities amidst a war involving all three cultural topographies. Albeit she speaks from a subjective standpoint, she does not mention the issue of racial hygiene, class, geographic divisions, and gender. Passages from Guenter Lewy, Melissa Wright, and Philippe Bourgois will be used to discuss the way in which different positionalities might affect the analysis of “Dislocated Identities.”

Thousands of years pass and its the 18th century--the Enlightenment period has again brought up the question of the Jews. The creation of parlements, depending on where they were created, debated the status of Jews (Aliens or Citizens) as well as what type of rights should they have.

In the opening paragraph of his book Diaspora: Jews amidst Greeks and Romans, Erich Gruen claims, “the Jews of classical antiquity dwelled predominantly in the diaspora. Palestine may have been the cradle of their culture, but most Jews lived elsewhere – Syria, Egypt, and Mesopotamia, in Asia Minor, the Aegean, and Greece, even in Rome and Italy. The Jewish experience was largely a diaspora experience.” Similarly, Justo L. Gonzalez affirms, “Hispanics in this country (i.e., the United States) are a people in exile.”

During the second half of the 19th century a wave of Jews, fleeing from their home countries in Eastern Europe, immigrated to the United States looking for a better quality of life and pursuing not being persecuted for their religion. In Abraham Cahan’s book “The Rise of David Lewinsky” the main character is one of these Jewish people who immigrated from Antomir, Russia, to America in order to succeed. This essay will demonstrate how in order to rise in America David Levinsky had to change the way he practiced Judaism, from being an orthodox and becoming a conservative focusing on the events where he is a “greenhorn no more.” Abraham Cahan had two insights that helped him understand the process of fitting in society. The first insight was

During the 1800’s, the Jewish population of Poland faced a lot of anti-Semitism. According to Polish Immigrants, “some Poles and other non-Jewish ethnic groups came to believe that Jews were “taking over” banks, lands, and other important resources. By the 1880’s, the poison of anti-Semitism had