Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction: Jewish American literatures in the making
- 1 Beginnings and ends: the origins of Jewish American literary history
- 2 Imagining Judaism in America
- 3 Of crucibles and grandfathers: the East European immigrants
- 4 Coney Island, USA: America in the Yiddish literary imagination
- 5 Hebrew literature in America
- 6 Traces of the past: multilingual Jewish American writing
- 7 Accents of the future: Jewish American popular culture
- 8 Jewish American poetry
- 9 Jewish American writers on the Left
- 10 Jewish American renaissance
- 11 The Holocaust in the Jewish American literary imagination
- 12 Jewish American women writers and the race question
- 13 On contemporary literary theory and Jewish American poetics
- 14 Identity matters: contemporary Jewish American writing
- Index
- Series List
2 - Imagining Judaism in America
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 May 2006
- Frontmatter
- Introduction: Jewish American literatures in the making
- 1 Beginnings and ends: the origins of Jewish American literary history
- 2 Imagining Judaism in America
- 3 Of crucibles and grandfathers: the East European immigrants
- 4 Coney Island, USA: America in the Yiddish literary imagination
- 5 Hebrew literature in America
- 6 Traces of the past: multilingual Jewish American writing
- 7 Accents of the future: Jewish American popular culture
- 8 Jewish American poetry
- 9 Jewish American writers on the Left
- 10 Jewish American renaissance
- 11 The Holocaust in the Jewish American literary imagination
- 12 Jewish American women writers and the race question
- 13 On contemporary literary theory and Jewish American poetics
- 14 Identity matters: contemporary Jewish American writing
- Index
- Series List
Summary
America as a site of Jewish liberation has been one of the guiding myths of the modern Jewish imagination. Above all, America meant redemption from Europe, which symbolized both Judaism's subservience to Christianity and Jews' confinement within the strictures of Judaism. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Jewish thinkers spoke of America as the great hope for the future of Judaism because its democratic principles embodied the true moral essence of Judaism. American Judaism was the real Judaism, while Europe represented a Judaism distorted by centuries of persecution and economic discrimination. Protestant thinkers, well before the colonial period, had identified the New Land with the Bible, and themselves with Israel; as Herman Melville declared in White Jacket (1850), “We Americans are the peculiar, chosen people - the Israel of our time; we bear the ark of the liberties of the world” (Redburn, White Jacket, Moby Dick, 506). For Jewish thinkers, Protestantism could not stand alone in claiming a privileged place in America; Judaism, the original Israel, had to stand beside it as the religion informing the American democratic enterprise and bearing its own manifest destiny in the world. In an 1898 resolution, leaders of Reform Judaism in America declared that “America is our Zion...The mission of Judaism is spiritual, not political...to spread the truths of religion and humanity throughout the world” (Sarna, “Converts to Zionism,” 189).
Until well into the twentieth century, America was imaginatively constituted by Jewish thinkers through a set of projections drawn from Enlightenment ideals of tolerance, pluralism, and freedom of religion, all of which were identified as biblical ideals.
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- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to Jewish American Literature , pp. 31 - 49Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2003
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