TOC: Transnational Traditions: New Perspectives on American Jewish History

Transnational Traditions: New Perspectives on American Jewish History

Edited by Ava F. Kahn and Adam D. Mendelsohn

Despite being the archetypal diasporic people, modern Jews have most often been studied as citizens and subjects of single nation states and empires—as American, Polish, Russian, or German Jews. This national approach is especially striking considering the renewed interest among scholars in global and transnational influences on the modern world. Editors Ava F. Kahn and Adam D. Mendelsohn offer a new approach in Transnational Traditions: New Perspectives on American Jewish History as contributors use transnational and comparative methodologies to place American Jewry into a broader context of cultural, commercial, and social exchange with Jews in Europe, the Middle East, Asia, Australia, New Zealand, and South America.

In examining patterns that cross national boundaries, contributors offer new ways of understanding the development of American Jewish life. The diverse chapters, written by leading scholars, reflect on episodes of continuity and contact between Jews in America and world Jewry over the past two centuries. Individual case studies cover a range of themes including migration, international trade, finance, cultural interchange, acculturation, and memory and commemoration. Overall, this volume will expose readers to the variety and complexity of transnational experiences and encounters within American Jewish history.

Table of Contents:

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Part I

An Anglophone Diaspora

1. The Sacrifices of the Isaacs: The Diffusion of New Models of Religious Leadership in the English-Speaking Jewish World in the Mid-Nineteenth Century

Adam D. Mendelsohn

2. Roaming the Rim: How Rabbis, Convicts, and Fortune Seekers Shaped Pacific Rim Jewry

Ava F. Kahn

3. Creating Transnational Connections: Australia and California

Suzanne D. Rutland

Part II

From Europe to America and Back Again

4. Currents and Currency: Jewish Immigrant “Bankers” and the Transnational Business of Mass Migration, 1873-1914

Rebecca Kobrin

5. A Taste of Freedom: American Yiddish Publications in Imperial Russia

Eric L. Goldstein

Part III

The Immigrant as Transnational

6. “German Jews”? Reassessing the History of Nineteenth-Century Jewish Immigrants in the United States

Tobias Brinkmann

7. The Gypsy in Them: Imagined Transnationalism amid New York City’s Little Rumania

Lara Rabinovitch

8. No American Goldene Medina: Harbin Jews between Russia, China, and Israel, 1899-2014

Jonathan Goldstein

Part IV

Creating New Homelands in Argentina, America, and Israel

9. Cultivating Jewish Farmers in the United States and Argentina

Ellen Eisenberg

10. Transforming Identities: Bene Israel Immigrants in Israel and the United States

Joan Roland

11.Transnational Aspirations: The Founding of American Kibbutzim, 1940, 1970s

Ava F. Kahn

For more about the book see: http://wsupress.wayne.edu/books/detail/transnational-traditions

TOC: Transnational Traditions: New Perspectives on American Jewish History

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