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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The Schmooze Home for the Holidays
Crossposted From Under the Fig Tree “There’s more?!” exclaimed a colleague rather incredulously upon learning that I was going to be out of the office for the third time in as many weeks because of the chagim, the Jewish holidays. She didn’t know the half of it. Though they make a hash of my schedule…
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The Schmooze High Holy Days vs. Fashion Week
Crossposted From Under the Fig Tree It so happened this year that Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, coincided with New York’s Fashion Week, prompting some eagle-eyed observers to trumpet the possibility of a showdown between the “shofar and the shows,” a clash between the “Goddess of Fashion” and the God of the patriarchs and…
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Culture Feeling the Spirit at Long Island’s Oldest Jewish Congregation
Now and again, I find myself in a synagogue that really tugs at my heart. The last time that happened was six years ago, when I first came upon the Sixth & I Historic Synagogue, in downtown Washington, D.C., or, to use its original name, Congregation Adas Israel. This time, the synagogue that caught my…
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Culture Chanel, Amanda, Joey and The Return of the Jewish American Princess
Stereotypes, canards, stock figures — the whole sorry business of labeling people wholesale rather than piecemeal — die hard. Just when you think they have gone away, into a historian’s drawer, they resurface, assuming a new lease on life. Neighborhoods come and go, people come and go, governments rise and fall, fashions wax and wane,…
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Culture Revolution and Evolution of the American Cantor
It should come as no surprise to anyone who reads the Forward that American Jewish life is awash in change, much of it far-reaching and monumental. Most of us can catalog those changes in a flash: intermarriage, the waning support of traditional Jewish charities, an increasingly contested relationship with Israel. But there are other, equally…
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The Schmooze Brick by Brick
Crossposted From Under the Fig Tree Late one evening, unable to sleep, I was channel surfing when I happened on a documentary about Hudson River bricks. Lest you think, as I did at first, that the subject would put me to sleep in no time at all, I found myself utterly engrossed — and wide…
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Culture The Enduring Jewish Traditions of Philanthropy and Collecting
Most people, if asked to define what the modernization of the Jews entailed, would no doubt refer to the ways in which they took to urban life, made much of higher education, prospered economically, and exchanged Yiddish and Ladino for English (or French or German). They’d be right to think so. But if I had…
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The Schmooze Down the Rabbit Hole of Academia
Crossposted From Under the Fig Tree By now, I don’t suppose there are many people in the world who would liken the groves of academe to an earthly paradise. Too much has been written of late about tensions between faculty and university administrators, student ennui and diminishing resources, to hold up the academic enterprise as…
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