Jewish American Heritage Month is a month dedicated to celebrating the contributions Jewish Americans have made to America since they first arrived in New Amsterdam in 1654. According to the Library of Congress:
“On April 20, 2006, President George W. Bush proclaimed that May would be Jewish American Heritage Month. The announcement was the crowning achievement in an effort by the Jewish Museum of Florida and South Florida Jewish community leaders that resulted in resolutions introduced by Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida and Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania urging the president to proclaim a month that would recognize the more than 350-year history of Jewish contributions to American culture. The resolutions passed unanimously, first in the House of Representatives in December 2005 and later in the Senate in February 2006.”
Programming Librarian Rhonda Rosen has pulled together a small collection of e-books that may be of interest to LMU students, faculty, and staff interested in learning more about Jewish Americans’ contributions to our national culture, government, history, arts, and more! Our e-books can be accessed with a MyLMU login. Please watch our e-book video tutorial for more information.
You Should See Yourself: Jewish Identity in Postmodern American Culture
The past few decades have seen a remarkable surge in Jewish influences on American culture. Entertainers and artists such as Jerry Seinfeld, Adam Sandler, Allegra Goodman, and Tony Kushner have heralded new waves of television, film, literature, and theater; a major klezmer revival is under way; bagels are now as commonplace as pizza; and kabbalah has become as cool as crystals. Does this broad range of cultural expression accurately reflect what it means to be Jewish in America today? You Should See Yourself brings together fourteen new essays by leading scholars.
Jewhooing the Sixties: American Celebrity and Jewish Identity; Sandy Koufax, Lenny Bruce, Bob Dylan, and Barbra Streisand
A lively look at four major Jewish celebrities of early 1960s America, who together made their mark on both American culture and Jewish identity.
How Come Boys Get to Keep Their Noses? Women and Jewish American Identity in Contemporary Graphic Memoirs
American comics reflect the distinct sensibilities and experiences of the Jewish American men who played an outsized role in creating them, but what about the contributions of Jewish women? Focusing on the visionary work of seven contemporary female Jewish cartoonists, Tahneer Oksman draws a remarkable connection between innovations in modes of graphic storytelling and the unstable, contradictory, and ambiguous figurations of the Jewish self in the postmodern era. Oksman isolates the dynamic Jewishness that connects each frame in the autobiographical comics of Aline Kominsky Crumb, Vanessa Davis, Miss Lasko-Gross, Lauren Weinstein, Sarah Glidden, Miriam Libicki, and Liana Finck. Rooted in a conception of identity based as much on rebellion as identification and belonging, these artists’ representations of Jewishness take shape in the spaces between how we see ourselves and how others see us. They experiment with different representations and affiliations without forgetting that identity ties the self to others. Stemming from Kominsky Crumb’s iconic 1989 comic “Nose Job,” in which her alter ego refuses to assimilate through cosmetic surgery, Oksman’s study is an arresting exploration of invention in the face of the pressure to disappear.
Speaking of Jews: Rabbis, Intellectuals, and the Creation of an American Public Identity
Lila Corwin Berman asks why, over the course of the twentieth century, American Jews became increasingly fascinated, even obsessed, with explaining themselves to their non-Jewish neighbors. What she discovers is that language itself became a crucial tool for Jewish group survival and integration into American life. Berman investigates a wide range of sources–radio and television broadcasts, bestselling books, sociological studies, debates about Jewish marriage and intermarriage, Jewish missionary work, and more.
Jews and Booze: Becoming American in the Age of Prohibition
At the turn of the century, American Jews and prohibitionists viewed one another with growing suspicion. Jews believed that all Americans had the right to sell and consume alcohol, while prohibitionists insisted that alcohol commerce and consumption posed a threat to the nation’s morality and security. The two groups possessed incompatible visions of what it meant to be a productive and patriotic Americanoand in 1920, when the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution made alcohol commerce illegal, Jews discovered that anti-Semitic sentiments had mixed with anti-alcohol ideology.
For more information, additional resources, or help accessing these e-books, please contact us.