Living the American Ethos
Commissioned to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the establishment of the American Jewish Archives and the 10th anniversary of Gary Zola as the AJA’s current executive director, “New Essays in American Jewish History” is testimony to the variety — and vitality — of scholarship in Jewish Studies.
A Quiet Man to Explosive Effect
A new book draws on trial transcripts, memoirs, interviews and recently released KGB documents to portray Harry Gold, the son of Jewish immigrants from Kiev, who was a spy and courier for the Soviet Union.
A Director’s Director
As Elia Kazan wrote in preparation for a book on his craft, a director should “avoid being a nice guy, a decent guy, a conforming guy.” He should show no shame when accused of being arrogant, and he should say what he thinks, no matter whom it might offend. After all, he’s not about “to guide a children’s summer camp.” More likely, he’s “related to a zoo-keeper.”
Skeletons in the Closet
Steve Luxenberg’s mother kept her institutionalized sister a secret until she died. In a new book, Luxenberg reveals a poignant tale of Depression-era Jewish immigrants and mental institutions in the 1930s and ’40s.
J’accuse America
Convicted in 1894 of selling secrets to Germany, French army captain Alfred Dreyfus, the only Jewish officer trainee on the General Staff, was sentenced to perpetual imprisonment in a fortified enclosure on Devil’s Island, a rocky formation near French Guyana. Six weeks before his exile began, as he cried out that he was innocent and a French patriot, Dreyfus was forced to participate in “the Judas parade,” marching around the courtyard while just outside, a huge mob screamed, “Death to the traitor, the dirty Jew.”
Einstein and Complex Analyses of Zionism
‘The Arabs have attacked us unexpectedly, wanted to destroy our settlement work, have murdered and plundered,” Chaim Weizmann wrote in 1929. Although until now, the Jews “have given everything” to Arab leaders who “want only one thing, to chase us into the Mediterranean,” he added, “we are now pressed from all sides to conclude a pact with them.” Weizmann vowed to accept nothing less than a society in Palestine, “as Jewish as England is English and America is American.”
Wunderkind Lost: Rosenfeld’s Passage From Home
Born in Chicago in 1918, Isaac Rosenfeld was a wunderkind. he wasn’t even 20 when he collaborated with his buddy Saul Bellow on “*Der Shir Hashirim fun *Mendel Pumshtock,” a brilliant parody of T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” In 1946, his semiautobiographical novel, “Passage From Home,” was hailed by Diana Trilling as “the fullest articulation of generational conflict between Jewish fathers and sons,” and as a work of “profound universal meanings.” Irving Howe praised “Passage” as “rich and warm” and “bright with intelligence…. The novel is not merely a promise, though it is certainly that; it is a fulfillment.”
Three Centuries of Bagels
‘A bagel has versatility,” Murray Lender, one of America’s great frozen-food entrepreneurs, proclaimed almost 40 years ago. “It’s a roll, a roll with personality. If you must be ethnic you can call it a Jewish English muffin with personality.… We don’t talk of bagels, lox (Nova Scotia salmon) and cream cheese. It limits them. Think of toasted bagels and jam, if you like.”
Securing a Father’s Place In American Social History
Throughout the 1930s, the home of Abraham and Henriette Epstein, at 389 Bleecker Street in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, was a salon where political reformers ate, drank and argued about how to provide social insurance for older Americans. More than half a century later, according to the Epsteins’ son Pierre, little remained in their house “to recall that glowing era, except the shredded and sagging sofa, the baby grand piano (no longer played, out of tune, and covered with letters and papers), the unsteady claw-footed desk (where Abe wrote and worked), and the books and papers on the overstuffed shelves, now carefully wrapped in plastic baggies.” Nor did anyone seem to remember that Abraham Epstein, the immigrant Jew from the Russian village of Lyuban, had popularized the phrase “social security” — and helped conceive and enact the legislation that laid the groundwork for the modern American welfare state.
Haven in the Hollows
Neither religion nor Yiddishkeit played a significant role in the life of young Harry Schwachter. A prosperous merchant in Williamson, W.Va., during the early 20th century, Schwachter ate fried apples and country-cured ham every Sunday morning. He “crashed the society set” by giving dancing lessons, and he appeared in amateur theatricals in an act called “Schwachter and Crank.” But, like more than a few others, Schwachter’s sense of Jewish identity received a big boost from a little persecution: In the mid-1920s, a friend heard him speak in his native Hungarian and “apologized,” because “I allus thought you was a damn Jew!” Hurt and stunned, Schwachter threw himself into a campaign to build a synagogue for Williamson’s 130 Jews. When the cornerstone was laid, he told the gentiles in the crowd that the temple proved that “we did not come for the purpose of filling our bags and baggage, but rather to live with you, work with you, and serve with you to the end of time. A handful of Jewish people have found a veritable haven in this community.”
