Jenna Weissman Joselit, the Charles E. Smith Professor of Judaic Studies and Professor of History at the George Washington University, is a distinguished historian of the American Jewish experience and a former columnist for the Forward.
Jenna Weissman Joselit
By Jenna Weissman Joselit
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Culture A Stroll Down Memory Lane
The past, it’s been said, is a foreign country whose sensibility and texture all too often elude the contemporary imagination. But for those of us willing to give history a try, there are any number of ways to embrace its pleasures and attend to its cautions. We can read about it, page through photo albums…
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Culture Giving Galveston Its Day in the Sun
Of all the current national issues that seem to vex us a lot, immigration is surely at or close to the top of the list. Some Americans extend a welcome hand to those who would like to call the United States their home; others turn their backs on them, and still others talk incessantly about…
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Culture Home for the Holidays… Or Not
I sometimes wonder what historians of the 22nd century might make of American Jewry of the 21st, especially when it comes to the ways in which the latter has chosen to mark the festival of Passover. Take, for instance, holiday-related advertisements, a wonderful source of social history. Where once ads for gefilte fish, horseradish and…
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Culture Bingo’s Sacred History
When it comes to raising money, we have all sorts of sophisticated devices at our disposal: market research, parlor meetings, silent auctions, lavish dinners with celebrated speakers and a “development” staff at the ready. Earlier generations had the Yom Kippur Appeal and bingo. A board game whose objective was to cover five numbers straight in…
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Culture A New Life for ‘Lifelong Learning’
American Jews are often taken to task for their sins, for their indulgent appetites, dwindling attendance at synagogue and the rising rate of intermarriages. But look again. Here, there and everywhere throughout the nation, American Jews are burying their noses in books and burning the midnight oil: Adult education or, as its current iteration would…
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Culture Museum Woe
The news that the Eldridge Street Synagogue, aka Khal Adas Jeshurun Anshe Lubz — once one of the most architecturally distinctive houses of worship on the Manhattan’s Lower East Side — has, at the conclusion of a 20-year-long restoration project, turned itself into the innocuous-sounding Museum at Eldridge Street, is cause for both celebration and…
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Culture Spinning Into the Spotlight
Breaking news! The humble, unassuming dreidel, the four-sided top associated with Hanukkah, has finally come of age: It’s become a stamp. Now I don’t know about you, but the sight of an official American postal stamp that features a thimble-sized dreidel accompanied by bold lettering that spells out the word HAN-UK-KAH lifts my spirits. Hanukkah,…
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Culture Trailblazing Book Reminds Us How Far We’ve Come
The 1950s cast a long shadow over contemporary America. Every week, or so it seems, we’re busy marking the 50th anniversary of one postwar phenomenon after another, from the birth of Levittown and the threat of Sputnik to the flowering of the civil rights movement. These bursts of historical consciousness are all to the good,…
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