American Jewry explores new transnational questions in Jewish history, analyzing the historical, cultural and social experience of American Jewry from 1654 to the present day, and evaluates the relationship between European and American Jewish history. Did the hopes of Jewish immigrants to establish an independent American Judaism in a free and pluralistic country come to fruition? How did Jews in America define their relationship to the 'Old World' of Europe, both before and after the Holocaust? What are the religious, political and cultural challenges for American Jews in the twenty-first century? Internationally renowned scholars come together in this volume to present new research on how immigration from Western and Eastern Europe established a new and distinctively American Jewish identity that went beyond the traditions of Europe, yet remained attached in many ways to its European origins.

Christian Wiese holds the Martin Buber Chair in Jewish Thought and Philosophy at the Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, Germany. His recent publications include Years of Persecution, Years of Extermination: Saul Friedlander and the Future of Holocaust Studies (co-editor, 2010).
Cornelia Wilhelm is DAAD Professor in the Departments of History and Jewish Studies at Emory University, USA. She also teaches as Professor of Modern History at Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich, Germany, and has held visiting positions at Rutgers University, US, and Leopold-Franzens-University of Innsbruck, Austria. She is author of several volumes including German Jews in America: Bourgeois Civil Self-Awareness and Jewish Identity in the Orders B'nai B'rith and True Sisters, which was published in English translation in July 2011.

List of Illustrations

Notes on Contributors
1 Europe in the Experience and Imagination of American Jewry: An Introduction
Christian Wiese, Goethe University, Germany
2 The Myth of Europe in America's Judaism
Susannah Heschel, Dartmouth College, USA
Part I: Colonial Identities: The Early Modern Period
3 Trading Freedoms? Exploring Colonial Jewish Merchanthood bBetween Europe and the Caribbean
Judah M. Cohen, Indiana University Bloomington, USA
4 Early American Mikva'ot: Ritual Baths as the Hope of Israel
Laura Arnold Leibman, Reed College, USA
5 Early American Jewry and the Quest for Civil Equality
Eli Faber, John Jay College, USA
Part II: Finding a "New Zion" in America's Civic Culture?
6 German Jews and the German-sSpeaking Civic Culture of Nineteenth-cCentury America
Kathleen Neils Conzen, University of Chicago, USA
7 Unequal Opportunities: The Independent Order B'nai B'rith in Nineteenth-cCentury Germany and in the United States
Cornelia Wilhelm, Emory University, USA
8 The Philadelphia Conference 1869 and German Reform: A Historical Moment in a Transnational Story of Proximity and Alienation
Christian Wiese
9 Beyond the Synagogue Gallery? Women's Changing Roles in Nineteenth-cCentury American and German Judaism
Karla Goldman, University of Michigan, USA
10 Something Old, Something New ... Something Blue: Negotiating for a New Relationship between Judaism and Christianity in America, 1865--1917
Yaakov Ariel, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, USA
11 Translating Wissenschaft: The Emergence and Self-eEmancipation of American Jewish Scholarship, 1860-1920
Christian Wiese
Part III: New Roles and Identities in an Age of Mass Migration
12 "Shul with a Pool" Reconsidered
David E. Kaufman, Hofstra University, USA
13 "Resisters and Accommodators" Revisited: Reflections on the Study of Orthodoxy in America
Jeffrey S. Gurock, Yeshiva University, USA
14 Exporting Yiddish Socialism: New York's Role in the Russian Jewish Workers' Movement
Tony Michels, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA
15 Zionism in the Promised Land
Arthur A. Goren, Columbia University, USA
16 "You Can't Recognize America": American Jewish Perceptions of Anti-Ssemitism as a Transnational Phenomenon after the First World War I
Gil Ribak, Oberlin College, USA
Part IV: Challenges for American Jewry after the Holocaust
17 From Periphery to Center: American Jewry, Zion, and Jewish History after the Holocaust
Jonathan D. Sarna, Brandeis University, USA
18 Can Less be More? The American Jewish Effort to "Rescue" German and Soviet Jewry
Henry Feingold, The Graduate Center, CUNY, USA
19 American Jews and the Middle East Crisis
Michael E. Staub, Baruch College, USA
20 The Meaning of the Jewish Experience for American Culture
Stephen J. Whitfield, Brandeis University, USA
21 Looking back on American Jewish History
Hasia R. Diner, New York University, USA
Index