San Antonio College Library

"Over the last century, American Jews married outside their religion at increasing rates. By closely examining the intersection of intermarriage and gender across the twentieth century, Keren R. McGinity describes the lives of Jewish women who intermarried while placing their decisions in historical context. The first comprehensive history of these intermarried women, Still Jewish is a multigenerational study combining in-depth personal interviews...

The American Jewish community is more influential than ever before. Who are these Jews? Do they speak with one voice? How have they become so rich and powerful? What do their non-Jewish neighbors think about them? American rabbi Dan Cohn-Sherbok and his wife, Lavinia, spent four months in a typical midwestern city finding the answers to these questions. Through more than one hundred engaging interviews, individuals from a broad spectrum of Jewish...

Despite pockets of discrimination, almost every occupation and position in American society is open to American Jews, compared to the situation in the 1930s when widespread and virulent antisemitism caused Jews to hide their identity. Although many Jews fear this change because of increasing assimilation, evidence shows that it also offers opportunities for a cultural and religious revival. Black antisemitism is presented as the exception to this...

This new cultural history of Jewish life and identity in the United States after World War II focuses on the process of upward mobility. Rachel Kranson challenges the common notion that most American Jews unambivalently celebrated their generally strong growth in economic status and social acceptance during the booming postwar era. In fact, a significant number of Jewish religious, artistic, and intellectual leaders worried about the ascent of large...

A Measure of Memory explores the importance of storytelling in articulating the vicissitudes of individual and communal identity in twentieth-century American Jewish fiction. Focusing primarily on the short story and on major figures such as Sholom Aleichem, Delmore Schwartz, Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud, J. D. Salinger, and Art Spiegelman, Victoria Aarons examines the characteristically self-reflexive narratives of Jewish literature, ranging from...