Finalist, 2019 PROSE Award in Biography, given by the Association of American PublishersFifty years after the start of the women's liberation movement, a book that at last illuminates the profound impact Jewishness and second-wave feminism had on each otherJewish women were undeniably instrumental in shaping the women's liberation movement of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. Yet historians and participants themselves have overlooked their contributions as Jews. This ...

In You Never Call, You Never Write, Joyce Antler provides an illuminating and often amusing history of one of the best-known figures in popular culture--the Jewish Mother. Whether drawn as self-sacrificing or manipulative, in countless films, novels, radio and television programs, stand-up comedy, and psychological and historical studies, she appears as a colossal figure, intensely involved in the lives of her children. Antler traces the odyssey of this compelling personality thro...

Joseph Lieberman's Vice Presidential nomination and Presidential candidacy are neither the first nor last words on signal Jewish achievements in American politics. Jews have played an important role in American government since the early 1800s at least, and in view of the 2004 election, there is no political office outside the reach of Jewish American citizens.For the first time, Jews in American Politics: Essays brings together a complete picture of the past, present, and...

A unique, positive collection of essays profiles a number of forgotten female Jewish leaders who played key roles in various American social and political movements, from suffrage and birth control to civil rights and fair labor practices.

Given the extensive body of Holocaust literature, it may be surprising to note that there is a distinct gap of reflection, analysis, and qualification in the area of sexual violence. The subject of sexual violence during the Holocaust, in particular, the sexual violation of Jewish women, is a subject that has been largely repressed and silenced. Thus, this thesis is an attempt to not only rectify the omission of sexual violence from Holocaust history, but to bring a level of analysis to th...

Winner of the 2014 Jordan Schnitzer Book Award presented by the Association for Jewish StudiesJews have played an integral role in the history of obscenity in America. For most of the 20th century, Jewish entrepreneurs and editors led the charge against obscenity laws. Jewish lawyers battled literary censorship even when their non-Jewish counterparts refused to do so, and they won court decisions in favor of texts including Ulysses, A Howl, La...

The history of the Jewish community in Canada says as much about the development of the nation as it does about the Jewish people. Spurred on by upheavals in Eastern Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many Jews emigrated to the Dominion of Canada, which was then considered little more than a British satellite state. Over the ensuing decades, as the Canadian Jewish identity was forged, Canada itself underwent the transformative experience of separating itself from ...

Jews in the American Labor Movement is a concise but complete summary of how Jews have influenced, and been influenced by, the Labor Movement in America. From the early beginnings on the Lower East Side, to Hollywood, to present day labor and race issues, Jews have been at the center of the power struggles that working people face. This short retelling looks at aspects of Secular Jewish culture and traditional Jewish beliefs, and how those have inspired workers in America to organize and d...

American Night, the final volume of an unprecedented trilogy, brings Alan Wald’s multigenerational history of Communist writers to a poignant climax. Using new research to explore the intimate lives of novelists, poets, and critics during the Cold War, Wald reveals a radical community longing for the rebirth of the social vision of the 1930s and struggling with a loss of moral certainty as the Communist worldview was being called into question. The resulting literature, Wald shows...

The second of three volumes by Alan Wald that track the political and personal lives of several generations of U.S. left-wing writers, Trinity of Passion carries forward the chronicle launched in Exiles from a Future Time: The Forging of the Mid-Twentieth-Century Literary Left. In this volume Wald delves into literary, emotional, and ideological trajectories of radical cultural workers in the era when the International Brigades fought in the Spanish Civil War (1936–39) an...

For more than two hundred years, Jews have played important roles in the development of American literature. The Cambridge Companion to Jewish American Literature addresses a wide array of themes and approaches to the distinct yet multifaceted body of Jewish American literature. Essays examine writing from the 1700s to major contemporary writers such as Saul Bellow and Philip Roth. Topics covered include literary history, immigration and acculturation, Yiddish and Hebrew literature, popula...

Most Holocaust scholars and survivors contend that the event was so catastrophic and unprecedented that it defies authentic representation in feature films. Yet it is precisely the extremity of "the Final Solution" and the issues it raised that have fueled the cinematic imagination since the end of World War II. Recognizing that movies reach a greater audience than eyewitness, historical, or literary accounts, Lawrence Baron argues that they mirror changing public perceptions of the Holoca...