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Paperback Torn at the Roots: The Crisis of Jewish Liberalism in Postwar America Book

ISBN: 0231123752

ISBN13: 9780231123754

Torn at the Roots: The Crisis of Jewish Liberalism in Postwar America (Religion and American Culture)

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Book Overview

When Jewish neoconservatives burst upon the political scene, many people were surprised. Conventional wisdom held that Jews were uniformly liberal. This book explodes the myth of a monolithic liberal Judaism. Michael Staub tells the story of the many fierce battles that raged in postwar America over what the authentically Jewish position ought to be on issues ranging from desegregation to Zionism, from Vietnam to gender relations, sexuality, and family life. Throughout the three decades after 1945, Michael Staub shows, American Jews debated the ways in which the political commitments of Jewish individuals and groups could or should be shaped by their Jewishness. Staub shows that, contrary to conventional wisdom, the liberal position was never the obvious winner in the contest.

By the late 1960s left-wing Jews were often accused by their conservative counterparts of self-hatred or of being inadequately or improperly Jewish. They, in turn, insisted that right-wing Jews were deaf to the moral imperatives of both the Jewish prophetic tradition and Jewish historical experience, which obliged Jews to pursue social justice for the oppressed and the marginalized. Such declamations characterized disputes over a variety of topics: American anticommunism, activism on behalf of African American civil rights, imperatives of Jewish survival, Israel and Israeli-Palestinian relations, the 1960s counterculture, including the women's and gay and lesbian liberation movements, and the renaissance of Jewish ethnic pride and religious observance. Spanning these controversies, Staub presents not only a revelatory and clear-eyed prehistory of contemporary Jewish neoconservatism but also an important corrective to investigations of "identity politics" that have focused on interethnic contacts and conflicts while neglecting intraethnic ones.

Revising standard assumptions about the timing of Holocaust awareness in postwar America, Staub charts how central arguments over the Holocaust's purported lessons were to intra-Jewish political conflict already in the first two decades after World War II. Revisiting forgotten artifacts of the postwar years, such as Jewish marriage manuals, satiric radical Zionist cartoons, and the 1970s sitcom about an intermarried couple entitled Bridget Loves Bernie, and incidents such as the firing of a Columbia University rabbi for supporting anti-Vietnam war protesters and the efforts of the Miami Beach Hotel Owners Association to cancel an African Methodist Episcopal Church convention, Torn at the Roots sheds new light on an era we thought we knew well.

Customer Reviews

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When Bad Analogies happen to Good People, 3.6 stars

Michael Staub has presented a somewhat unusual book at divisions within American Jews from the fifties to the mid-seventies. His book does not possess a formal conclusion, but consists of eight chapters and an introduction. The first looks at the struggle between communists and anti-communists and how they argued over the Holocaust and American racism. The next two discuss the growing divisions within American over civil rights, and the fourth looks at divisions over the Vietnam war. The fifth looks again at civil rights, the sixth looks at the rise of Radical Zionism, the seventh looks at debates over family and sexuality and the eighth looks at the brief life of the pro-peace group Breira. Staub concentrates on especially Jewish movements: non-Jewish organs such as Partisan Review or The New York Review of Books get little or no mention. The participants are often theologians and members of explicitly Jewish groups. Novelists such as Bellow, Malamud, Mailer or Singer get no mention, while Philip Roth is mentioned only in passing. This appears to me as a mistake, since these writers obviously have a lot to say about Jewish-black and Jewish-feminist relationships, the topic of his book. Moreover they strike me as far more influential and important than the theological debates and the small groups such as Jews for Urban Justice, the Radical Jewish Union, the Jewish Liberation Project, or even The Jewish Defence League that Staub concentrates on.Notwithstanding these eccentricities, Staub has still produced an interesting book. Staub?s sympathies are clearly with those who tried to combine their Judaism with support for left-wing activism. He writes of those minority of Jews who were active supporters of civil rights who invoked traditions of ?prophetic Judaism? to emphasize justice for all humanity. He is sympathetic to those who seek to support a just peace via a two state solution in Palestine. He points out those Jews who sought to revive Judaism by supporting and incorporating the demands of feminists and homosexuals. He writes of those Radical Zionist groups who also strongly opposed the Vietnamese war and those groups who incorporated the style and arguments of the Black Panthers for Jewish purposes. (He prints a cartoon where a Black Panther is disgusted by one Jew?s lack of enthusiasm for Zionism.) He also discusses the widespread spread of Holocaust consciousness among Jewish spokespeople at the time. This is in fact a bit of a problem since the use of Holocaust tropes, such as the ?passivity? of the victims, the ?passivity? of the outside world, the ?treason? of the Judenrat and others by all sides against all sides does have the effect of making the participants look more than a little hysterical and paranoid. Staub produces enough bad Holocaust analogies to drive Peter Novick and Raoul Hilberg to despair. A reform rabbi in the seventies states Hitler will have won if Jewish couples do not have four children each by
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