History Lessons
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€38.99
A01=Beth S. Wenger
Abolitionism
Abraham Cahan
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America's Promise
American Dream
American exceptionalism
American Jewish Committee
American Jewish Historical Society
American Jews
American patriotism
Americans
Archivist
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Category1=Non-Fiction
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Central Europe
Christopher Columbus
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Courtesy
Culture of the United States
David Lowenthal
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Dutch West India Company
Eastern Europe
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Germans
Haym Salomon
Hebrews
Historian
Historical fiction
Illustration
Immigration to the United States
Isaac Mayer Wise
Jewish culture
Jewish education
Jewish emancipation
Jewish history
Jewish identity
Jewish left
Jewish literature
Jews
Jonathan Sarna
Judaism
Language_English
Lecture
Librarian
Literature
Louis Marshall
Military service
Mordecai Kaplan
Nazism
New Israel
Newspaper
Notion (ancient city)
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Patriotism
Persecution
Peter Stuyvesant
Pilgrim Fathers
Politics
Popular history
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Princeton University Press
Proclamation
Prussia
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Rabbi
Reform Judaism
Religion in the United States
Religious persecution
Rhetoric
Sholem Aleichem
softlaunch
Suggestion
Sunday school
Superiority (short story)
University of Pennsylvania
World war
World War I
World War II
Yiddish
Zionism
Product details
- ISBN 9780691156149
- Weight: 397g
- Dimensions: 146 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 02 Sep 2012
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
- Language: English
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Most American Jews today will probably tell you that Judaism is inherently democratic and that Jewish and American cultures share the same core beliefs and values. But in fact, Jewish tradition and American culture did not converge seamlessly. Rather, it was American Jews themselves who consciously created this idea of an American Jewish heritage and cemented it in the popular imagination during the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. History Lessons is the first book to examine how Jews in the United States collectively wove themselves into the narratives of the nation, and came to view the American Jewish experience as a unique chapter in Jewish history. Beth Wenger shows how American Jews celebrated civic holidays like Thanksgiving and the Fourth of July in synagogues and Jewish community organizations, and how they sought to commemorate Jewish cultural contributions and patriotism, often tracing their roots to the nation's founding. She looks at Jewish children's literature used to teach lessons about American Jewish heritage and values, which portrayed--and sometimes embellished--the accomplishments of heroic figures in American Jewish history.
Wenger also traces how Jews often disagreed about how properly to represent these figures, focusing on the struggle over the legacy of the Jewish Revolutionary hero Haym Salomon. History Lessons demonstrates how American Jews fashioned a collective heritage that fused their Jewish past with their American present and future.
Beth S. Wenger is professor of history and director of the Jewish Studies Program at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of The Jewish Americans: Three Centuries of Jewish Voices in America and New York Jews and the Great Depression: Uncertain Promise.
