Jewish Studies

Understandings of Black-Jewish relations have been notable for the near consensus among scholars that the Yiddish press repeatedly condemned discrimination and prejudice against African Americans, and highlighted the similarities between the situation of Jews in Eastern Europe and Blacks in America. This book argues that this view covers just a sliver of the varied representations of Black women and men. East European Jewish culture during the immigration era was not uniformly supportive of Black Americans as those interpretations suggest.

Crude Creatures draws on a mixture of previously unexplored Yiddish press, theatre, and literature from Eastern Europe and the United States through 1929 to examine how Black Africans and African Americans were depicted. It charts a significant gap between the sincere condemnation of lynching, violence against Black Americans, and racial segregation on the one hand, and the ways in which Jewish authors, newspapers, playwrights, actors, and theater managers actually represented Black people on the other. While most East European Jews would not have seen a Black person before their arrival in America, they had already acquired preconceived imagery of Black people through rabbinic exegesis, pious advice, travel narratives (either original or adapted from other languages), folklore, scientific explorations, pulp literature, press reports, political rhetoric, and educational materials. Thus, Yiddish writers commonly described Black people as cannibals, oversexed, prone to violence, childlike, or just happy-go-lucky people.

Crude Creatures provides a critical revision, correcting the accepted rosy narrative of Black women and men’s portrayals in Yiddish culture, and highlighting what we can learn from these representations about how immigrant groups integrated their own cultures into American racial hierarchy and vocabulary.

This collection is an introductory historical survey and selective cultural analysis of the development, coalescence, and eventual waning of a diasporic civilization—that of the Jews of the early modern period (ca. 1391–1789) in Europe, the Ottoman Empire, and key nodes of the Iberian Empires in the Americas.

Each chapter explores key factors that shaped both distinctive early modern Jewish communities and a remarkably coalescent and far broader community-of-communities. The contributors engage and answer the following questions: What do historians mean by “early modernity,” and to what extent does the concept illuminate the history and culture(s) of Jews from the end of the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment? What were the general demographic contours of the Jewish diaspora over this period and how did they change? How did culture, politics, technology, economics, and gender shape diasporic Jewish communities across eastern and western Europe and the New World over the course of some 400 years? Ultimately, the work renders a portrait of coherence and diversity, continuity and discontinuity, in early modern Jewish life within and across temporal and geographic boundaries.

Early Modern Jewish Civilization is essential reading for all students of Jewish history and civilization and early modern history more broadly.

The very question of “what do Jews think about the goyim” has fascinated Jews and Gentiles, anti-Semites and philo-Semites alike. Much has been written about immigrant Jews in nineteenth- and twentieth-century New York City, but Gil Ribak’s critical look at the origins of Jewish liberalism in America provides a more complicated and nuanced picture of the Americanization process.

Gentile New York examines these newcomers’ evolving feelings toward non-Jews through four critical decades in the American Jewish experience. Ribak considers how they perceived Gentiles in general as well as such different groups as “Yankees” (a common term for WASPs in many Yiddish sources), Germans, Irish, Italians, Poles, and African Americans. As they discovered the complexity of America’s racial relations, the immigrants found themselves at odds with “white” American values or behavior and were drawn instead into cooperative relationships with other minorities. Sparked with many previously unknown anecdotes, quotations, and events, Ribak’s research relies on an impressive number of memoirs, autobiographies, novels, newspapers, and journals culled from both sides of the Atlantic.

Through a qualitative analysis and broad historical contextualization of personal interviews, The New Zionists shows how American Jewish “Millennials” who are not religiously orthodox approach Israel and Zionism as galvanizing solutions to the thinning of American Jewish identity, and (re)root themselves through “Israeliness”—an unselfconscious and largely secular expression of national kinship and solidarity, as well as of personal and communal purpose, that American Judaism scarcely provides.