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Drawing on hitherto neglected archival materials, Zohar Segev sheds new light on the policy of the World Jewish Congress (WJC) during the Holocaust. Contrary to popular belief, he can show that there was an impressive system of previously unknown rescue efforts. Even more so, there is evidence for an alternative pattern for modern Jewish existence in the thinking and policy of the World Jewish Congress. WJC leaders supported the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine but did not see it as an end in itself. They strove to establish a Jewish state and to rehabilitate Diaspora Jewish life, two goals they saw as mutually complementary. The efforts of the WJC are put into the context of the serious difficulties facing the American Jewish community and its representative institutions during and after the war, as they tried to act as an ethnic minority within American society.
"This short intellectual biography reassesses one of the premier Jewish humanists of the mid-twentieth century, the Rumanian-born, English-educated, American belletrist Maurice Samuel. Although he spoke in a staccato Midlands accent, Samuel left Manchester, England in 1913, joined the American Army, served in military intelligence in World War I, and became a United States citizen. Samuel resettled his family in Palestine in 1929, then returned to the US, and spent his most creative years in New York City. A diaspora intellectual, or "rootless cosmopolitan," as Alan Levenson describes him, Samuel made an indelible mark on many features of contemporary Jewish thought and culture"--
"A deeply important book for anyone who cares about Israel." — President Bill Clinton Israel's next great crisis may come not with the Palestinians or Iran but with young American Jews A dramatic shift is taking place in Israel and America. In Israel, the deepening occupation of the West Bank is putting Israeli democracy at risk. In the United States, the refusal of major Jewish organizations to defend democracy in the Jewish state is alienating many young liberal Jews from Zionism itself. In the next generation, the liberal Zionist dream—the dream of a state that safeguards the Jewish people and cherishes democratic ideals—may die. In The Crisis of Zionism, Peter Beinart lays out in c...
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In the decades before the establishment of the State of Israel, striking images of Palestine circulated widely among Jewish Americans. These images visualized "the Orient" for American viewers, creating the possibility for Jewish Americans to understand themselves through imagining "Oriental" counterparts. In The Hebrew Orient, Jessica L. Carr shows how images of the Holy Land made Jewish Americans feel at home in the United States by imagining "the Orient" as heritage. Carr's analyses of periodicals from Hadassah and the Zionist Organization of America, art calendars from the National Federation of Temple Sisterhoods, the Jewish Encyclopedia, and the Jewish exhibit at the 1933 World's Fair are richly illustrated. What emerges is a new understanding of the place of Orientalism in American Zionism. Creating a narrative about their origins, Jewish Americans looked east to understand themselves as Westerners.