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(1) "*In the 2010 edited collection Gender and Jewish History, for instance, only one of the twenty-one essays focuses on men and masculinity.* Because there is so little precedent, in that essay, Beth Wenger must make the case for the study of masculinity in American Jewish history." // This is rather startling, and this seems to provide supporting evidence of how odd and unequal Judaism is, regarding gender relations.
(2) "Jewish crime was different from non-Jewish crime, Jews implicitly argued, and such nonviolent masculinity was a good thing. Some, like Bingham, saw it as a result of cowardliness or weakness, while others saw it as a religious and ethical inclination. But everyone agreed that when Jewish men transgressed the law, they tended to do it in predictable ways. Jewish masculinity, even in its criminal moments, was not an aggressive, physically dominating masculinity." // !!!
(3) "This very fact induced Moses Mendelssohn at the beginning of the new era to declare that Judaism 'contained only truths dictated by reason and no dogmatic beliefs at all.' Jews had not needed theology because, unlike Christianity, Judaism did not demand faith in things that were counter to reason. Kohler was correct when he suggested that Jewish theology was marginal. When, in 1923 Samuel Cohon inherited Kohler's chair of Jewish theology at Hebrew Union College, vocal members of the school leadership sought to rename the position. Cohon recalled that 'proposals were urged to alter its name to something more euphonious' and that they ultimately needed 'to justify the place of theology in the curriculum of a rabbinical seminary.' It is no accident that Robert Goldy's The Emergence of Jewish Theology in America begins its account in the late 1940s." // The scapegoat ritual is counter to reason.
(4) "These same characteristics that allowed Kohler to claim Judaism as American also allowed him to portray Judaism as a masculine religion. Judaism was rational, and it had universalist goals. It was not overcome by emotionalism nor blinded by love, as Kohler would characterize Protestant Christianity. Judaism was not manly in the overt ways of promoting strong male bodies, as muscular Christianity was, but it relied on a masculinity indebted to Enlightenment male virtues of reason and universalism." //Traditionally, masculinity has not been rational.
(5) "Many of Kohler's philosophical forebears placed high value on the capacity of reason, and many also associated it with masculinity. This intellectual foundation fostered a philosophical system in which reason was implicitly gendered masculine, even when a philosopher did not make specific claims to that effect. In her classic philosophical study The Man of Reason, Genevieve Lloyd describes what she calls 'the maleness of our ideals of Reason.' She shows how Western philosophical traditions from the Greeks to the Enlightenment and beyond link the ideas of reason and rationality with masculinity, even when they purport to be gender neutral."
(6) "However, his [Gaebelein's] interpretation of the physical ailments threatened to a disobedient Israel implied something distinctive: as a result of the Jewish people's rejection of Jesus, Jewish men suffered 'nervous diseases,' which were normally considered afflictions of women. The prediction he read into the text was a medical one, and so he used the findings of medical doctors and anthropologists to buttress his theological interpretation: 'A leading Jewish specialist on nervous diseases declares that Jews are more subject to diseases of the nervous system than the other races among whom they dwell. Hysteria and neurasthenia appear to be the most frequent.' He went on to cite another scientist's work indicating that Jews were 'almost exclusively the inexhaustible source for the supply of hysterical males for the whole [European] Continent. This liability to nervous disorders is the result of the curse which rests upon the race, 'the trembling heart and the sorrow of mind' as mentioned in the above passage of Deuteronomy.' Using a complex definition of Jewishness that relied on both religion and medicine, Gaebelein suggested that Jews suffered for both hereditary and theological reasons."
(7) "For instance, of the thirty-six American missionaries to the Jews whom Albert Edward Thompson named in his 1902 book A Century of Jewish Missions, a t least twenty-one were Jewish men who converted to Christianity. (Women occupied only auxiliary roles, typically as helpers to their missionary husbands.) These newly Christian men proved immensely unpopular within Jewish communities - Isaac Mayer Wise once called them 'rascals without exception.' They wrote mostly for Christian audiences who were curious about Judaism of for potential donors to the cause of Christian missions to the Jews. They did, however, have the experience of living in - although often at the margins of - both Jewish and Christian communities."
(8) "Furthermore, missionary activity and the response to it drew attention from both Jewish and Christian communities and sometimes became the grounds for contest between the two. Many missions heeded Jewish objections to activities that Jews saw as bribery, trickery, and the targeting of children and largely ceased engaging in them. Earlier, nineteenth-century missions, as a stone in the show of American Jewry, had impelled Jewish communities to provide needed social, educational, and medical services for working-class Jews. But in the early twentieth century, missionary texts suggest that there were debates not only over social services and theology but also over cultural assumptions (and accusations) about the status of masculinity in Christianity and Judaism."
(9) "In his speeches and writings Goldman commented on circumcision, the fundamental bodily marker of male Jewishness. In his 1919 Judaism and its Traditions: The Conversion of a Hebrew Rabbi, he wrote, 'I could not explain to you the great meaning and benefit to man of circumcision. I may explain to any man privately, or by mail, if required.' By declining to discuss circumcision, he shrouded the practice and the Jewish male body in mystery, enhancing its 'otherness' for the assumed Christian reader. Despite the fact that the practice was becomibg widespread among non-Jews, Goldman framed it as having esoteric meaning. As a Jewish man, he had knowledge of circumcision's sexual 'meaning and benefit' that was unsuitable to be shared publicly or with women."
(10) "But the pain and the insult became too much when both boys began to beat him. 'Finally I burst into tears, for the Protestant joined the Catholic in belaboring the "Jew-boy."' The name 'Jew-boy' was insulting, but its language recalled another moment in Steiner's autobiographical writings that was not only bitter but also sweet."
(11) "Even though Freuder was on the margins of the Jewish community, his ideas about Jewish gentleness and the value of a decorous, rational, manly religion prevaded discussion about Judaism in America. Depsite their different social and religious locations, Freuder, Goldman, Cohn, and Steiner all painted similar portraits of Jewish masculinity: gentle, suffering, and averse to physical aggression. Although Freuder hoped that this version of masculinity would change as Jews became more religiously and culturally 'enlightened,' he nonetheless saw this gentle Jewish madculinity all around him. Goldman, Cohn, and Steiner saw it too, though they associated it with Christian theological reasons."
(12) "Grossman then turned the ideal of manliness from aggression and strength to one of genuine religious persuasion aimed at peace. He continued in explicitly gendered language: 'Would it not have been more manly and honorable for that conference of religious leaders to devise methods for converting their own people to the Christian faith, rather than, by such a resolution, to offend and insult their Jewish brethren?' The appropriately 'manly' action, he explained, would have been the nonviolent and candid recruitment (not 'luring') of 'their own people.' Grossman also linked proper manliness to Americanism; the ones violating American values were not 'inoffensive' Jews, but the overzealous Chrsitians who lured and slaughtered them."
(13) "On one hand, Hebrew-Christian missionaries imagined that gentleness, weakness, and even suffering were endemic to Jewish masculinity; a healthy, productive, self-sufficient male body was not a Jewish body. For them, Christianity was the rational and universal religion, and it was the religion of manliness. But on the other hand, Zionists, Jewish philanthropists, and acculturated Jews who romanticized Indians all claimed that Jews could and should embrace a masculinity of bodily health, productive work, self-sufficiency, and national religion."
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(14) Further Reading:
(a) A Missionary's Return to Judaism: The Truth about the Christian Missions to the Jews - Samuel Freuder
(b) Freud, Race and Gender - Sander Gilman
(c) Social Science and the Politics of Modern Jewish Identity - Mitchell Hart
(d) Occupation and Disease: How Social Factors Affect the Social Conception of Work-Related Disorders - Allard E. Dembe
(e) Evangelizing the Chosen People: Missions to Jews in America, 1880-2000 - Yaakov Ariel
(f) A Time for Gathering: The Second Migration, 1820-1880 - Hasia Diner
(g) Jewish Apostasy in the Modern World - ed. Todd Endelman
(h) The Heart of Whiteness: Normal Sexuality and Race in America 1880-1940 - Julian Carter
(i) Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race - Matthew Frye Jacobson
(j) Jewish Responses to Modernity: New Voices in America and Eastern Europe - Eli Lederhendler
(k) The Story of a Modern Missionary to an Ancient People - Leopold Cohn
(l) Daughters of the Shtetl: Life and Labor in the Immigrant Generation - Susan Glenn
(m) A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity - Daniel Boyarin
(n) White Women's Rights: The Racial Origin of Feminism in the United States - Louise Newman
(o) Each Mind a Kingdom: American Women, Sexual Purity, and the New Thought Movement - Beryl Satter
(p) Imagining the American Jewish Community - ed. Jack Wertheimer
(q) The Healthy Jew: The Symbiosis of Judaism and Modern Medicine - Mitchell Hart
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(15) "Even though only a small fraction of Jewish immigrants came through Galveston, the correspondence, the published materials, and press about the Galveston Movement paint a distinctive portrait of the ideal goal for Jewish immigrants in America. The Jewish immigrant, almost always assumed to be an adult man, would work productively, develop and able and healthy body, discard premodern religious superstition and piety, have a pioneering spirit, and even help tame the frontier through his settlement of the American West."
(16) "For the settlement of immigrants to be 'normal,' they should be located outside of the densely packed cities. When packed into cities, not only were they involved in 'vexing problems' but their vexing problems could also serve as fodder for magazine articles, such as the McClure's exposés, 'The Jewish Invasion of America' and 'The Great Jewish Invasion.' Jewish leaders worried that this kind of scandal-mongering journalism about urban immigrants made all Jews look bad. These acculturated Jews' concerns about the effects of city living reflected a wider non-Jewish interpretation of Jewish male bodies. After perusing an article on plants that entrap insects, Popular Science Monthly readers could learn about Jewish immigrants and their physical characteristics. In the article, Allan McLaughlin, a US Public Health official, wrote an otherwise sympathetic article arguing that the characteristic Jewish weakness and sickliness were the result of long-term persecution and city living. For McLaughlin, Jewish immigrants were not essentially inferior - they were model citizens when it came to education, for instance - but historical and social circumstances had conspired to make Jewish men generally poor physical specimens of manhood."
(17) "The Herald editorialist Oscar Leonard, acknowledging the 'crowding' problem in New York, asked, 'What is the remedy?' Zionists recommended colonizing Palestine, Leonard explained, but 'why not in the large state of Texas where the soil goes a begging for cultivators'? This fantasy of the undeveloped, waiting-to-be-tamed land of Texas mirrored similar rhetoric about Palestine. In some accounts, American land in the Southwest and West bordered on the Zionist image of 'a land without people for a people without land.' Jewish immigrant presence there would benefit both the Jews and the land."
(18) "The journalist C. H. Abbott also assumed that living in the West could and would transform the downtrodden Jews. He even connected the Galveston Movement to messianic or Zionist aspirations: the phrase, 'next year in Jerusalem,' formed a refrain in his article, and he wrote that 'only by the actual elevation of the race,' which he assumed the Galveston Movement was doing, 'may the Jews of the world ever be assembled again in Palestine.' While the Galveston Movement itself did not have explicitly Zionist or messianic goals, Abbott was certain that it was uplifting these Jewish 'pioneers' and 'pilgrims.' Abbott, like the acculturated Jews associated with JIIB and Galveston Movement, saw the West - and not the Eastern cities - as the ideal Americanizing environment to make better Jews." // Related to Governor Abbott? Is Abbott an occultist?
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After this one, I was struck by avolition, and I lay in bed, and fell asleep, for a while.
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(19) "Bressler had expected 325 'persons,' by which he meant men, but the boats had only brought 200 'persons' - and some of those 'persons' were women and children! Leaving aside the fact that Bressler seemed to think that 'persons' represents a category that can exclude women and children, this disagreement made plain the idea that the Galveston Movement had the cultivation of men as its object, both practically and ideologically."
(20) "Medical historians Howard Merkel and A. M. Stern have called 'poor physique' in Eastern European immigrant Jews 'a favorite "wastebasket" diagnosis of nativists in the early 1900s.' When medical authorities labeled immigrants as unproductive weaklings, it reinforced the specious conclusions of much of the race science of the day, as well as undermined Jewish claims to a masculinity consonant with bodily fitness and good citizenship."
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(21) Further reading:
(a) Galveston: Ellis Island of the West - Bernard Marinbach
(b) Dispersing the Ghetto: The Relocation of Jewish Immigrants Across America - Jack Glazier
(c) A Jew in the Public Arena: The Career of Israel Zangwill - Mari-Jane Rochelson
(d) Dreamer of the Ghetto: The Life and Works of Israel Zangwill - Joseph H. Udelson
(e) Land and Power: The Zionist Resort to Force, 1881-1948 - Anita Shapira
(f) Prostitution and Prejudice: The Jewish Fight Against White Slavery, 1870-1939 - Edward Bristow
(g) Unwelcome Strangers: East European Jews in Imperial Germany - Jack Wertheimer
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(22) "When most Americans in the early twentieth century wrote histories of the frontier, Indians often played the part of thr violent, savage antagonists. Courageous cowboys and pioneers needed to fight off Indian attacks to make the land safe. These narratives pitted the Americans against the Indians. But when American Jews wrote histories of their states and regions, they often portrayed Indians more sympathetically. In the years before the 'Wild Tribes' pamphlet, for instance, both Cohen and Dyer wrote histories that painted Indians as courageous, resourceful, and connected to the land. That is, they depicted Indians as inherently possessing many of the manly traits they valorized. Moreover, some of those histories also posited a connection between ancient Israel and the Indians - usually via the ten lost tribes. One of the appeals of this affinity was that, if Indians possessed desirable masculine qualities, and Jews and Indians shared a history, then by inference, Jews too could possess those qualities."
(23) "That Dyer, Cohen, and other twentieth-century acculturated Jews engaged little with actual Native Americans makes sense for several reasons. First, and most practically, Indian work and policy were largely Christian affairs. Protestant reformers and missionaries had dominated both early work with Indians and the US government's Bureau of Indian Affairs, although Catholics had gained footing by the early twentieth century. Civilizing Indians was seen as a Christian job. Second, the ideology underpining agricultural movements differed. American policy makers and reformers saw farming as a step toward civilization for Native Americans, while Jews imagined farming as a step that would reconnect them with their history and true natural potential. Emphasizing similarities between Jews and contemporary Native Americans might suggest that Jews too were in need of civilization, but agricultural communities and the Galveston Movement sought to prove exactly the opposite: that Jews already had the potential to be productive Americans. Third, an Indian-Israelite affinity provided narrative connections between historical civilizations, not contemporary Jews and Native Americans. The Indians of the past could be imagined as resourceful, masculine, and self-sufficient, but the Native Americans in the early twentieth century constituted a political problem in their failure to assimilate quickly and completely to American life. A Jewish quest to show long attachments to the land would be undone if it entailed a connection to a failure to become American. Acculturated Jews' broader ideologies about Americanization and immigration suggest that claiming a common ancestry with Indians allowed them to highlight themes of strong ties to the land, bravery, and resourcefulness. In this, they acted much like other whites who 'played Indian' in order to identify with and call attention to admirable traits they shared with Native Americans. It is no surprise that Philip Deloria's history of non-Indian Americans appropriating Indian culture includes examples that overwhelmingly feature menp and boys. Societies like the Order of the Red Men and even the Boy Scouts identified Indians with mastery of nature and a masculinity that had not been completely tamed by civilization. Cohen's histories of Texan Jews helped him establish both a brave and resourceful Jewish masculinity and an American Judaism. Adolphus Sterne, the pioneer statesman, at once rational and spiritual, put on tefflin in the forest. The 'little Jew' demonstrated that manliness required bravery and resourcefulness, but not physical size. Some of the Dyers fought and defeated the Indians, all the while demonstrating a masculinity quite like the Indians themselves. These histories suggested that Jewish masculinity was a brave, resourceful masculinity with ties to the American land. The next section shows examples of more explicit approaches that directly claim affinities between Israelites and Indians, especially in the realm of religion. While these acculturated Jews pulled the idea of brave and resourceful Indians close with one hand, they pushed away the idea of tribal Indians with the other."
(23) "But Dyer did not intend to align present-day Judaism and Indian customs too closely; rather he detailed ritual similarities while emphasizing historical contrasts. In case the modern reader might scoff at these specious Indian-Israelite comparisons, Dyer warned, 'Dear reader, do not smile at the belief of the savage, for it was that of your ancestors.' He offered examples from historical Jewish communities: *'Hebrews a few centuries ago had their synagogal names in Europe, which were kept secret, while trade and family names were common. Changing the name of a person seriously ill, so as to cheat the angel of death, was an illustration how the name was formerly unified with the body.'* Dyer discussed the Jewish tradition of adding a new name to a gravely ill person to mislead or thwart the angel of death, because an Indian tribe had a similar practice, he explained. *The Comanches, in this case, might be 'savage,' yet they shared beliefs and customs with Jews from 'a few centuries ago' - the naming tradition dated to the Middle Ages and had gained popularity in Kabbalistic circles.* These historical comparisons allowed Dyer not only to note the similarities between Indian customs and Israelite religion but also to emphasize the differences between an outdated, superstitious Judaism of 'centuries ago' and the rational, civilized Judaism of his day. By referring to Judaism's past commonality with Indian customs, he could demonstrate both a connection and argue for Judaism's comparative advancements." // T.S. Eliot -> Cats have three names. / Did Jews try to ritualistically swap places with another person to try to trick the angel of death? This seems very unethical, and I hope it didn't work, if so.
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(24) Further Reading:
(a) Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860 - Richard Slotkin
(b) Benderly Boys and American Jewish Education - Jonathan Krasner
(c) Retelling US Religious History, ed. Thomas Tweed
(d) Fraternal Organizations - Alvin J. Schmidt
(e) Jacksonian Jew: The Two Worlds of Mordecai Noah - Jonathan Sarna
(f) No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith - Fawn Brodie
(g) Members of the Tribe: Native Americans in the Jewish Imagination - Rachel Rubenstein
(h) Red, Black, and Jew: New Frontiers in Hebrew Literature - Stephen Katz
(i) United States Jewry 1776-1985 - Jacob Rader Marcus
(j) Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South - Bertram Wyatt-Brown
(k) The Chosen Folk: Jews on the Frontiers of Texas - Bryan Edward Stone
(l) Women, Culture, and Community: Religion and Reform in Galveston, 1880-1920 - Elizabeth Hayes Turner
(m) Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class - Eric Lott
(n) Going Native: Indians in the American Cultural Imagination - Shari Huhndorf
(o) Jewish Science: Divine Healing in Judaism, with Special Reference to the Jewish Scriptures and Prayer Book - Alfred Moses
(p) From Christian Science to Jewish Science: Spiritual Healing and American Jews - Ellen Umansky
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(25) "Rosen then used what looked like a Zionist idea - the idea that Jews became unhealthy because they lived in exile away from the land of Palestine - and instead made its center the land in general, rather than the particular land of Palestine. 'Nations have to be rooted in the soil to make a healthy growth. We Jews, as a nation, are uprooted. It is not so much the loss of our country, as the severing of our nation from the soil, that brought us centuries of misery.' Jews had suffered from their alienation from the soil, Rosen explained, and the solution to that alienation, its unhealthiness, and its stagnancy was reconnection to land in general, which included farming in the United States."
(26) "The self-preservation that Krauskopf, Palitz, and others in the agricultural movement promoted did not go unheard. Non-Jews also saw the agricultural movement as a way to improve Jewish men. Former president William Howard Taft and Progressive journalist Jacob Riis praised the movement for its noble goals of creating Jewish farmers and a Jewish farming culture,,. Robert Watchorn, the Ellis Island commissioner, congratulated the National Farm School on 'transforming [immigrants] from the cowering, hunted, persecuted subjects of an ignorant and cowardly dynsasty into the manly, upright citizens of a glorious Republic.' Watchorn, like many of the non-Jewish visitors and speakers at the NFS and HAS, reported seeing healthy men pursuing productive means of living. They praised the ability of these farm schools to transform weak, unhealthy, ignorant immigrant boys and men into manly Americans." // Was the dynasty in question that of the Romanovs?
(27) "The Judaism of these farm schools looked a lot like Reform Judaism. Halakhah was not a priority. For instance, bothe farm schools and many of the agricultural settlements kept pigs. When the student publication HAS Record quoted the director of 'Dairy and Swine Husbandry,' as saying, 'What you young man need is a big dose of Judaism,' it was being only a little tongue in cheek. Some Jews in the agricultural movement connected bodily improvement to religious enlightenment; their idea of civilized religion closely aligned with Reform Judaism an denigrated the benighted ways of 'superstitious' Hasidim or Orthodox Jews. Many immigrant Jews themselves, especially those involved in agricultural movements harbored antipathy toward traditional piety and religious institutions such as the cheder, or Jewish religious school, in favor of a rational, post-haskalah (Jewish enlightenment) Judaism and Jewish culture."
(28) "Other rabbis also connected the agricultural life to wholesome religious life. New York Reform Rabbi Maurice Harris argued that Christianity retained its adherents because, when Christians moved from rural atmospheres to the city, they brought their faith with them. His article in the Menorah journal claimed that the rural atmosphere and agricultural lifestyle were more conducive to religion: 'The strength of the Church lies in the fact that every year there comes from the country to the town reinforcements of young people bringing their fresh and simple faith acquired in the fields and vineyards of the land.' Although Jews had once been models of religious life, they had lost some of that connection when Eastern European governments pushed them to live in more urban, nonfarming environments. 'Therefore, perhaps the cruelest persecution of Russia against the Jews is the driving them from the country places and forcing them into the towns.' Harris lamented that 'Jews, who were once the patterns of believers and whose mission was to be the witnesses of God, contribut[ed] more than their proportion of skepticism to the unbelievers of the modern world.' A move back to agricultural pursuits would not only make Jews more healthy and productive but would also facilitate their return to religion."
(29) Further Reading:
(a) Ellen Eisenberg - Jewish Agricultural Communities in New Jersey
(b) Dona Brown - Back to the Land: The Enduring Dream of Self-Sufficiency in Modern America
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(30) "Mascilinity plays a starring role in the traditional story of European Zionism: the diaspora made Jews weak, hunched over, and passive, but Zionism would bring reconnection to the land and the regeneration of the strong male body. Even European Zionism's most famous visual images, such as the Galician Zionist E. M. Lilien's iconic paintings, promoted these themes. Strong male bodies and phallic images populate Zionist landscapes, whereas old, weak, frail religious scholars symbolize diaspora life. German Zionist Max Nordau famously called for a 'Muscle Jewry,' and claimed that diasporic Jewry was effeminate and degenerate."
(31) "The 1917 Balfour Declaration, in which Britain's foreign secretary Arthur Balfour wrote that 'His Majesty's government view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people,' buoyed Zionists when it gave state recognition to their goals. The declaration invigorated the American Zionist movement, but its number of adherents remained small."
(32) "The political arrangements of European states precluded Jews from remaining distinctively Jewish and fully participating in 'Society' because of the marriage of 'Church' and 'Society.' The United States, with its avowed separation of church and state, was exceptional, and it fostered 'good' religion - religion based on individual conscience and compatible with democracy - whereas European systems brought with them religious coercion and discrimination. America's political arrangement was good for the Jews, while Europe's marginalized them."
(33) "Although European and American Zionism shared many texts and ideals, they developed in different political, religious, and gendered contexts. Most European Zionists subscribed to the idea of shlilat hagalut, or the negation of the diaspora. In this formulation, diaspora life is inherently negative, and the only salvation of the Jewish people can come from a Jewish return to Palestine. As we have seen, however, very few American Zionists, however, thought in these terms, and shlilat hagalut never caught on in the United States. Furthermore, most American Zionists did not even think of the United States as galut. In part, because of this refusal to classify American Jewish life as exilic (and therefore negative), as the next section suggests, American Zionism never painted American Jews as effeminate. Instead, American Jews were masculine in their philanthropic and political efforts to support the cultivation of the land on behalf of other Jews."
(34) "The Maccabaean referred to immigrant Jews on the Lower East Side as 'them,' and 'they' needed care, though it seemed as though they were beginning to be able to provide it themselves. This paternalistic attitude - a combination of responsibility for other Jews and condescension - also informed the readers' attitude toward Eastern European Jews who remained in Eastern Europe and faced antisemitism, lack of economic opportunity, and other undesirable situations. The Maccabaean styled itself as a periodicial for cultured, educated American Jews."
(35) "Reporter Louis Lipsky was the first editor of the Maccabaean, and he passed the reins to the British-born and newly arrived immigrant Jacob de Haas in 1902. In 1914, Lipsky would leave his position as editor of The American Hebrew and return to edit the Maccabaean when he became secretary (and later president) of the FAZ. Even during his time away from editing, Lipsky contributed to the journal often. In Decembet 1907, he wrote, 'The Fesrival of Chanuka: A Talk With Jewish Boys and Girls,' in which he called Zionists 'the modern Maccabaeans.' Though it at first appeared to be an educational discussion for children, the article was actually a didactic piece that sought to reorient and reinvigorate the American Jewish community around the ideas of land, soil, and healthy bodies. Ultimately, the article suggested that Jewish manliness was actually about politics, not about physical transformation. Lipsky's ideal Jewish community did not center on building stronger bodies, but rather on creating a safe haven for all Jews. To do this, Jews had to reconnect with their peoplehood and history."
(36) "American Zionists also fashioned the category of galut into a novel shape: Palestine was Zion and Eastern Europe (or Europe more generally) was galut. Ut they rarely suggested the United States was exile. In March 1914, for example, the Maccabaean section, 'News and Views, in the lands of Goluth' included news briefs with the following headlines: 'Ministers Change: Antisemites Remain,' 'Echoes of the Beilis Trial,' 'Persecution of Jewish Artisans,' 'Jews Flee From Lodz,' '"Enlightened" Germany, Antisemitism Rampant,' '"Brave" Austria, Antisemitism among Austrian Officers,' '"Liberal" France, French Catholic Press Attack Jews,' 'And Roumania, the Struggle for Jewish Rights.' These 'lands of Goluth' never included the United States. This list of Jewish troubles abroad implied an especially Zionist form of American exceptionalism - that is, that exile was elsewhere."
(37) "The Maccabaean even celebrated Jews as exemplars of masculinity. When, in May 1914, the United States sent troops to Veracruz to intervene in the Mexican Revolution, the Maccabaean's first page began by extolling the manly virtues of Jews as American soldiers. Three of the seventeen Marines who died during the skirmish were Jewish, and Goldberg tied this to a history of Jews as brave volunteers for the American nation: 'This is in keeping with American tradition. The Jews of this country have always offered their lives in excess of their numbers.' Jews had always expressed their courage in support of the United States. This Veracruz military action, along with later wartime discussions, was one of the few times that the Maccabaean focused on the physical acts of bravery."
(38) Further Reading:
(a) Arthur Hertzberg - The Zionist Idea: A Historical Analysis and Reader
(b) Walter Laqueur - A History of Zionism: From the French Revolution to the Establishment of Israel
(c) Melvin Urofsky - American Zionism from Herzl to the Holocaust
(d) Kimmel - Manhood in America
(e) Bederman - Manliness and Civilization
(f) Kasson - Houdini, Tarzan, and the Perfect Man
(g) Marianne Sanua - Going Greek: Jewish College Fraternities in the United States *
(h) Dekel - Universal Jew
(i) Michael Berkovitz - Zionist Culture and West European Jewry Before the First World War
(j) Michael Stanislawski - Zionism and Fin-de-Siecle: Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism from Nordau to Jabotinsky
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(39) Further Reading:
(a) Regina Kunzel - Criminal Intimacies: Prison and the Uneven History of American Sexuality
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(40) "Bingham's characterization of Jews as soft criminals - and the Jewish community's agreement - is all the more remarkable given the reality: New York City had a number of violent Jewish criminals, some of whom were growing quite famous. Although the heyday of Jewish gangsters would not occur until a generation later, Jews in the early twentieth century were hurting, intimidating, and even murdering within the city limits."
(41) "Earlier that year, they had forced Pioggi to jump out a second-story window at gunpoint, motivated merely by schadenfreude and their own amusement. Despite these colorfully violent Jewish criminals, Bingham never mentioned Jewish gangsters, murderers, or those committing crimes of intimidation. They did not fit his characterization of the kind of criminals Jewish men might become."
(42) "As a friend of Moses Mendelsohn and an Enlightenment thinker in his own right, Dohm firmly believed in the potential for the betterment of the Jewish people, but improvement in their civic status depended on improvement of their occupations and physical bodies. Dohm's Enlightenment ideas about improving the civic status of the Jews echoed not only in the thoughts of antisemites in the subsequent centuries - such as Houston Stewart Chamberlain and Otto Weininger, both of whom claimed that Jews were inherently parasitic and degenerate rather than productive - but also in the words of Jews."
(43) "Historical constructions of Jews as phsyically degenerate and unproductive bosltered Bingham's point about Jewish difference. But he did not simply mimic European antisemitism in the manner of Chamberlain, nor did he indiscriminately spout anti-Jewish vitriol. Despite the actual presence of Jewish organized crime, Bingham did not suggest that Jews were responsible for murder, assault, or intimidation. He neither claimed nor suggested that Jews were inherently and indiscriminately predisposed to criminality. Rather, he claimed that a certain kind of Jewish degeneracy - physical weakness, lack of productive labor, and lack of assimilation - was linked to criminal activity that required no physical strength or bravery. Although Bingham thought all immigrant groups had criminal elements, he did not paint all groups with identical brushstrokes. *The American press, like Bingham, at times depicted Irish, Italians, and African Americans as particularly prone to criminal behavior, but it depicted Jews alone among them as simultaneously criminal, unaggressive, physically weak, and cowardly.* After announcing his Jewish crime statistics, Bingham fumed about the 'audacity' of Italian 'cold-blooded, premeditated' murders and kidnappings, and he retold at length the story of an Italian who 'had the courage to stand up against a gang of blackmailers.' The 'gentle art' of Jewish crime and lack of 'aggressiveness' and 'courage' of Jewish criminals stood in sharp contrast to the 'audacity' and 'courage' of Italian criminals. Bingham's explicit comparison shows that his assumptions about Jews were not merely reducible to their status as immigrants, working-class men, or non-native English speakers. Bingham was no fan of Italian criminals, but he did not suggest that they were weak or cowardly. Jewish criminality alone took the hue of cowardice, weakness, gentleness, and failure of manliness. Bingham hardly invented these stereotypes from whole cloth. Had he sought academic support for his arguments, he would not have needed to look far. In a 1903 study including an examination of 'crime along racial lines' in Boston, sociologist Frederick Bushee depicted the 'moral degeneration among Irish families on account of drink,' anger that led to violence like 'assaults' among Italians, a propensity for gambling among Chinese immigrants, and in general a 'very much greater criminality' both violent and nonviolent among African Americans, as well as other stereotypes of immigrants. *Bushee assumed that racial and ethnic groups had particular tendencies, as many anthropologists and sociologists of the time did; not all immigrants or racial groups were criminal in the same fashion. 'Serious assaults' were characteristic of Italians and African Americans, but he explained, 'the Jews do not commit serious assaults.'*"
(44) "The lack of association between Jews and alcoholism is especially interesting because anti-immigrant sentiment and nativism were widespread in the temperance movement. So it would have seemed natural, even expected, thay Jews would have been painted with the same brush as other immigrants when it came to alcohol. Yet, even though Jews were targets of anti-immigration rhetoric and political action, they were rarely accused of being alcoholics. *Jews were, however, often accused of selling booze, charges that were sometimes well-founded, given the realities of the liquor trade.* These accusations likewise reinforced ideas abour Jewish criminal craftiness or moral deficiency, but not masculine vices."
(45) "In addition to positing Judaism as the focal point of communal identity, these leaders thought that it was the answer to Bingham's charges in another sense: religion could combat juvenile delinquency and thereby future crime. The conversations about delinquency began before the Bingham affair, but they intensified in its wake. *As Jenna Weissman Joselit and Irving Howe have shown, the Jewish community, like Bingham, did not call attention to violent Jewish criminals. Howe claims this communal quietness came from a Jewish 'cultural style encouraging prudishness and self-censorship.' Joselit writes that the Jewish community attempted to keep 'social and psychological distance' from criminality because it disrupted their ability to see themselves - and project an image of themselves - as a more moral community.* When Bingham publicized his statistics, the Jewish communit was obligated to respond, she explains. Although these are compelling explanations, they do not account for the explosion of public discussion in the Jewish community about Jewish jubenile delinquency. Bringing juvenile delinquency to light was surely neither flattering, nor helpful for Jewish leaders who wanted to cultivate the image of a moral community and fend off non-Jewish criticism. Moreover, the Jewish communit had discussed juvenile delinquency publicly before the Bingham affair, when there was no major precipitating event to force discussion. Part of the reason that Jews confronted juvenile delinquency head-on while pushing Jewish gangsters into the communal closet concerns their conceptions of gender: Jewish juvenile delinquents fit with their assumptions about Jewish men, whereas gangsters did not. The juvenile delinquents committed petty theft and ran pickpocket scams. These were hardly Jewish values, but ir made sense to the Jewish community that when Jewish boys went astray, they might do such things. The acculturated Jewish community saw these boys' criminal activity as a Jewish communal problem, and they sought to remedy it with practical measures such as establishing settlement houses and care institutions and through ideological projects such as promoting religion. The violent Jewish criminals were another story. It was not that Jews denied the existence of Jewish gangsters. But they imagined them as individual criminals, as anomalies, rather than as a Jewish problem. Jewish men were not violent, they assumed. They did not do things like murder. So when individual Jews did such things, it was easy for other Jews to see them as outliers. And it was much easier for Jews to see gangsters as outliers than it was to change their view of Jewish masculinity. Thus the acculturated Jewish conversation about juvenile delinquency, when paired with the silence about Jewish gangsters, shows some of the power and durability of masculinity as a cultural force."
(46) Further reading:
(a) Albert Fried - The Jewish Gangster in America
(b) Khalil Muhammad - The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America
(c) Jenna Weissman Joselit - Our Gang: Jewish Crime and the New York Jewish Community, 1900-1940
(d) Edward Bristow - Prostitution and Prejudice: The Jewish Fight Against White Slavery, 1870-1939
(e) "Julia Richman's Methods of Teaching Jewish Ethics, likewise posed a question that unveiled similar assumptions: 'Suppose a child's father has committed a crime, exploited in the newspapers, or spread through gossip; embezzlement, forgery, perjury, arson, any form of law-breaking' (33). *All her hypothetical crimes for a Jewish father were nonviolent crimes.*"
(f) Joseph Gusfield - The Symbolic Crusade: Status Politics and the American Temperance Movement
(g) Marni Davis - Jews and Booze: Becoming American in the Age of Prohibition
(h) Ehud Manor - Louis Miller and Di Warheit ('The Truth'): Yiddishism, Zionism, and Socialism in New York, 1905-1915
(i) Beth Kaplan - Finding the Jewish Shakespeare: The Life and Legacy of Jacob Gordin
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(47) "The Frank trial, appeals, and subsequent lynching constituted a major public event. Jeffrey Melnick has called the case and the persecution of Frank 'a sacred text of American Jewish history.' It was certainly the most widely discussed Jewish criminal event of the early twentieth century. As such, it is a curcial moment for the historian to hear Americans air their assumptions about Jewishness. Jewish communities across the country expressed concern that the Frank case would plant or nurture ideas about Jewish men's criminality and deviant sexuality. There was so much concern that B'nai B'rith, in response, established the Anti-Defamation League, the national organization that has since worked to condemn negative public images of Jews. In an entirely different segment of the American population, the case helped launch the second incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan, which included some of Frank's lynchers among its leaders. For both the historical actors themselves and for historians, the Leo Frank case is therefore critical to thinking about public images of Jewish men in the era."
(48) "The combination of Frank's gender (quiet demeanor, small and weak body) and his Jewishness may have made it easier to believe that he also deviated from sexual norms. In addition to insinuating Frank's deviance from normative American masculinity, some newspapers - particularly those convicted of Frank's guilt - suggested he was sexually abnormal. *Although in retrospect there is no evidence to support their claims, during and after the trial people accused Frank of everything from engaging in oral sex and homosexual acts to philandering and rape. The Atlanta Consitution reported that an unnamed employee said that Frank had 'indulged in familiarities' with his young women employees.* Three days later, the Constitution reported that a policeman announced that he had seen Frank take a 'young girl' to a 'desolate spot in the woods...for immoral purposes.' Later he recanted, explaining that the man he saw could not have been Frank. A Life journalist claimed, 'The prevalent opinion in Georgia was that Frank had had fair trials; that he was an habitual seducer of girls in his employ; [and] that he had undoubtedly murdered Mary Phagan.' Somehow Frank's (imagined) status as a 'habitual seducer' was not only a widely held opinion but was also relevant to the murder of the young woman. At first blush, one might think that the prosecutor's continuing insistence on discussing Frank's numerous sexual encounters and habit would paint an image of virility, the very stereotype of the masculine. But because his hypersexuality was oriented toward the young, it was cast as a misdirected and criminal sexual impulse. Of all the accusations, the charges of 'perversion' were the most damning. *A sympathetic observer from Atlanta told the Washington Post, 'Once persuade a jury that a man is a pervert, and it doesn't matter about the other charges.'"
(49) "During the trial itself, the prosecution also attempted to discover - or at least plant in the imagination of the jurors - Frank's abnormal sexual practices. *The Fulton County Court's solicitor-general and prosecuting attorney Hugh Dorsey suggested that Frank had made multiple, unwanted advances toward an office boy. The boy flatly denied it.* At another point, apropos of nothing, Dorsey asked an employee if he had heard of Frank 'kissing girls and playing with their nipples on their breasts.' He asked witnesses if Frank 'took girls in his lap at the factory,' walked unannounced into the women's dressing room, or tried to take a girl with him when the factory closed. They said they had not seen any such activity, but Dorsey continued to ask specific questions of each factory-employed witness about Frank's sexual practices. If Dorsey could prove that Frank approached many different boys and girls in the workplace, that epuld mean that Frank could neither properly direct nor contain his sexuality and that he pursued sexual activity in inappropriate settings and toward inappropriate persons - his young and subordinate non-Jewish employees. According to the picture Dorsey sought to paint, Frank's sexuality was excessive, misguided, and degenerate. *When it discussed the supposed objects of Frank's attention, the press consistently described them as 'boys' and 'girls,' which subtly suggested that Frank had a sexua desire for immature people and even children. The word 'girls' was common Southern parlance for young unmarried women as well as female children, but the word 'boys' was generally reserved for male children. When the press used the two together - rather than referring to 'girls' alone - the word choice strengthened the impression that Frank chose non-adults for his sexual exploits.* The attraction to children also reinforces a defective or even deficient sexuality: Frank, a Jewish man, was unable to express sexuality toward an appropriate person, that is, an adult Jewish woman. The fact that he had not fathered children could serve as further evidence of his failure to achieve proper manliness. *Although newspapers often merely implied the connection between Jewishness and sexually deviancy, the inflammatory but influential politician Tom Watson trumpeted the evils of the 'sodomite' Frank and his Jewishness.*"
(50) "On the other side, the prosecution and anti-Frank media often painted Frank's Jewishness as related to his guilt. Reports frequently included the words 'Jew' and 'Jewish,' and even the accounts that did not could still trade on other stereotypes and key words to reinforce his Jewishness. In his comparative study The Jew Accused, historian Albert Lindemann argues that antisemitism was not a major factor in the Leo Frank case, but this is because he tracked only the use of explicit terms: Jew, Jewish, Judaism. He therefore neglects the work of cultural code words such as 'intellectual,' 'nervous,' and 'rich,' which could allude to Frank's Jewishness without explicitly naming it." // These seem like relatively positive descriptive words, with the possible exception of 'nervous.' Why would "rich" or "intellectual,"
or even "nervous" be code words used to hint at a Jewish background?
(51) "*Even at the time of the time, journalists noticed the presence and influence of unsubstantiated rumors and code words. One Georgia journalist who wrote anonymously blamed Frank's conviction on a kind of whisper campaign*: 'The yellow-journal methods employed in reporting the pre-trial developments and the trial, together with endless word-of-mouth gossip concerning Frank and revolving around imaginary things which idle scandal said the 'papers couldn't print' caused the multitude in Atlanta and most of Georgia to become indelibly of the opinion that the young Jew was guilty.' The author suggested that the images, not fully painted by the press, were filled in by the readers, who created their own ideas of these 'unprintable' images of what Frank had done. These 'imaginary things' served to reinforce stereotypes, especially sexual, that already circulated in the American readers' cultural imaginary. The journalist's desire to remain anonymous also indicates how pervasive he or she felt these stereotypes were and how unpopular a defense of Frank on these grounds could be."
(52) "Frank was not always the sole target of sexual scrutiny: sometimes Jews as a group were targeted with him. Because Jewish communities and individuals from throughout the country donated money on Frank's behalf and called for political support for him, many non-Jews who thought he was guilty lashed out against all American Jews. Life indicted Jews in general along with Frank in particular when it stated, 'Jews from everywhere...swore his character wad good, whereas on his sexual side it seems to have been rotten.' *This logic insisted that either Jews are liars, or they are unable to discern 'rotten' sexual behavior from correct sexual behavior. More insidiously, it might even suggest that Jews secretly condone rotten sexual character and accept or cover for those who have it.* This connection between Frank and 'the Jews' as a whole allowed the public to tie not only Frank's money and defense to his Jewishness but also his 'perversion.'"
(53) "It also served as the occasion for Jews to organize a defense against social prejudice. If thise who thought Frank was guilty sometimes grouped Jews together, Frank's defenders did so even more. Many (accurately) perceived the presence of antisemitism, and some saw the case as evidence for need for an organization that woukd defend both individual Jews and the Jewish community against instances of prejudice. The fraternal organization B'nai B'rith, of which Frank was a member, created the Anti-Defamation League 'to preserve the good repute of Jews and Judaism.' *Alerting newspapers to the prejudicial reporting of Jewish criminality was one of the ADL's first projects. Why was a criminal's religion mentioned only when he was Jewish, the ADL asked? This practice needed to stop. Newspapers largely complied, quickly and quietly.*"
(54) "Jews do not get into bar brawls. They do not beat their wives. Jewish men are not physically aggressive or violent. Jews mught embezzle money or commit fraud, but not assault and certainly not murder. *These images of Jewish crime - some of which still resonate today - suggest the borders of Jewish masculinity: Jews and non-Jews agreed, despite evidence to the contrary, that aggression and violence were beyond the bounds of Jewishness.* In these conversations about crime and criminality, everyone, including the Jews, granted these conceptions of Jewish masculinity." // This is clearly the result of occult hoo hoo, and it is very bizarre.
(54) "Although at first, committing murder might seem incongruous with the image of a gentle, cowardly male Jewish criminal, the images and rhetoric of both Jews and non-Jews nevertheless might have sounded familiar to anyone who had paid attention to the Bingham affair. Frank's defenders portrayed him as a gentle family-focused man who was an active member of his Reform synagogue and on excellent terms with his rabbi. Those insisting on the guilt and punishment of the accused used images of cunning, calculating men who were small and weak, displayed abnormal male sexuality, and merely used violence as a means to an end. *Later, for Leopold and Loeb, this would take a particularly interesting twist: because they had confessed to the crime, their defense counsel Clarence Darrow used the idea of abnormality to argue for their decreased culpability. Precisely because they were unlike other people and other Jews, as the evidence of their sexual desires and practices would attest, they could not be held to the same standards of culpability, Darrow argued.*"
(55) Further reading:
(a) Matthew H. Bernstein - Screening a Lynching: The Leo Frank Case on Film and Television
(b) W. Fitzhugh Brundage - Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880-1930
(c) Leonard Dinnerstein - The Leo Frank Case
(d) Harry Golden - A Little Girl Is Dead
(e) David Mamet - The Old Religion
(f) Steve Oney - And the Dead Shall Rise: The Murder of Mary Phagan and the Lynching of Leo Frank
(g) Jeffrey Melnick - Black-Jewish Relations on Trial: Leo Frank and Jim Conley in the New South
(h) Jackson Lears - Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877-1920
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(56) "From the moment the body was discovered, the crime became a media sensation. As with the Bingham affair and Leo Frank case, American print media played a significant role in both shaping and reflecting public opinion. In addition, the transcript of the entire Leopold and Loeb sentencing hearing, *with the exception of one portion of the proceedings borrowed by Darrow, but never returned*, is still extant. // What are the content of that portion, and why didn't Darrow return it? / Read books on Clarence Darrow.
(57) "The Defender implicitly compared the media coverage of these Jewish criminals to those of black criminals. Newspapers rarely failed to point out when a perpetrator was 'a Negro,' but in this case, Leopold and Loeb's Jewishness often went without remark. The Defender was onto something when it observed this trend. But the Defender implied that it occurred because Jews consistently got a cultural pass where blacks did not. However, as the Bingham affair and Frank case showed, sometimes Americans did call attention to Jewishness and insist on its relationship to certain kinds of crime; though not to the extent that blacks had, Jews had been maligned as a distinctive criminal element in a racialized way in earier court cases and in the media. But that was not so in this case."
(58) "The fact that they would begin a description of Leopold with comments on his religion should be remarkable. And yet, it happened time and again during the hearing. Hulbert explained of Leopold: 'In his religious studies he was intensely interested in classification, as he was in other things too, and he finally found fault with God and as far as he was concerned abolished God because God makes mistakes....He then became an atheist....Leopold finally conceived life existing without any god and there being no God there is no right or wrong per se.' When the state's witness Dr. Church was asked about Leopold's beliefs and conduct, he said he could not comment, 'excepting as to his attitude on religion.'"
(59) "In the end, then, the Leopold and Loeb hearing could have seriously challenged some of the assumptions about American Jewish masculinity, but it did not. *Instead of taking the case as evidence that Jewish men could be violent, aggressive, and dominating, the media and public took it as evidence that Leopold and Loeb were not really Jewish.*"
(60) Daniel Boyarin, Daniel Itzkovitz, and Ann Pellegrini - Queer Theory and the Jewish Question
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(61) "Similarly, images of Jewish men's criminal vices tend away from violent interpersonal crime. People still assume that Jewish men are rarely alcoholics or perpetrators of domestic violence. The financial criminal Bernie Madoff is far more recognizably Jewish to both Jews and non-Jews than, say, David Berkowitz, better known as the 'Son of Sam' serial killer. When someone points out that Berkowitz was Jewish, another person usually pipes up and says, 'But he was adopted' or 'he said he worshiped the devil' or 'he converted to Christianity in prison,' all of which suggest that he was not really Jewish. Violent murder seems incongruous with Jewish masculinity, whereas the manipulation and cunning of a Ponzi scheme seem despicable but within the realm of possibility." // Domestic violence in Israel?
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(62) Further reading:
(a) Benjamin Maria Baader, Sharon Gillerman, and Paul Lerner - Jewish Masculinities: German Jews, Gender, and History
(b) Courtney Bender - The Post-Secular in Question: Religion in Contemporary Society
(c) Allard E. Dembe - Occupation and Disease: How Social Factors Affect the Social Conception of Work-Related Disorders
(d) Mitchell Hart - The Healthy Jew: The Symbiosis of Judaism and Modern Medicine
(e) Daniel Itzkowitz - Jews and Other Differences
(f) Marion Kaplan and Deborah Dash Moore - Gender and Jewish History **
(g) Albert S. Lindemann - The Jew Accused: Three Anti-Semitic Affairs (Dreyfus, Beilis, Frank)
(h) Eric Lott - Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class **
(i) Deborah Dash Moore - B'nai B'rith and the Challenge of Ethnic Leadership
(j) David Novak - Modern Judaism
(k) Robert Orsi - Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious World People Make and the Scholars Who Study Them
(l) Louise Newman - White Women's Rights: The Racial Origin of Feminism in the United States
(m) Stephen Prothero - American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon
(n) Paul Ritterband and Harold Wechsler - Jewish Learning in American Universities
(o) Marianne Sanua - Going Greek: Jewish College Fraternities in the United States
(p) Jack Wertheimer - Unwelcome Strangers: East European Jews in Imperial Germany
(q) Bryan Edward Stone - The Chosen Folks: Jews on the Frontiers of Texas
(2) "Jewish crime was different from non-Jewish crime, Jews implicitly argued, and such nonviolent masculinity was a good thing. Some, like Bingham, saw it as a result of cowardliness or weakness, while others saw it as a religious and ethical inclination. But everyone agreed that when Jewish men transgressed the law, they tended to do it in predictable ways. Jewish masculinity, even in its criminal moments, was not an aggressive, physically dominating masculinity." // !!!
(3) "This very fact induced Moses Mendelssohn at the beginning of the new era to declare that Judaism 'contained only truths dictated by reason and no dogmatic beliefs at all.' Jews had not needed theology because, unlike Christianity, Judaism did not demand faith in things that were counter to reason. Kohler was correct when he suggested that Jewish theology was marginal. When, in 1923 Samuel Cohon inherited Kohler's chair of Jewish theology at Hebrew Union College, vocal members of the school leadership sought to rename the position. Cohon recalled that 'proposals were urged to alter its name to something more euphonious' and that they ultimately needed 'to justify the place of theology in the curriculum of a rabbinical seminary.' It is no accident that Robert Goldy's The Emergence of Jewish Theology in America begins its account in the late 1940s." // The scapegoat ritual is counter to reason.
(4) "These same characteristics that allowed Kohler to claim Judaism as American also allowed him to portray Judaism as a masculine religion. Judaism was rational, and it had universalist goals. It was not overcome by emotionalism nor blinded by love, as Kohler would characterize Protestant Christianity. Judaism was not manly in the overt ways of promoting strong male bodies, as muscular Christianity was, but it relied on a masculinity indebted to Enlightenment male virtues of reason and universalism." //Traditionally, masculinity has not been rational.
(5) "Many of Kohler's philosophical forebears placed high value on the capacity of reason, and many also associated it with masculinity. This intellectual foundation fostered a philosophical system in which reason was implicitly gendered masculine, even when a philosopher did not make specific claims to that effect. In her classic philosophical study The Man of Reason, Genevieve Lloyd describes what she calls 'the maleness of our ideals of Reason.' She shows how Western philosophical traditions from the Greeks to the Enlightenment and beyond link the ideas of reason and rationality with masculinity, even when they purport to be gender neutral."
(6) "However, his [Gaebelein's] interpretation of the physical ailments threatened to a disobedient Israel implied something distinctive: as a result of the Jewish people's rejection of Jesus, Jewish men suffered 'nervous diseases,' which were normally considered afflictions of women. The prediction he read into the text was a medical one, and so he used the findings of medical doctors and anthropologists to buttress his theological interpretation: 'A leading Jewish specialist on nervous diseases declares that Jews are more subject to diseases of the nervous system than the other races among whom they dwell. Hysteria and neurasthenia appear to be the most frequent.' He went on to cite another scientist's work indicating that Jews were 'almost exclusively the inexhaustible source for the supply of hysterical males for the whole [European] Continent. This liability to nervous disorders is the result of the curse which rests upon the race, 'the trembling heart and the sorrow of mind' as mentioned in the above passage of Deuteronomy.' Using a complex definition of Jewishness that relied on both religion and medicine, Gaebelein suggested that Jews suffered for both hereditary and theological reasons."
(7) "For instance, of the thirty-six American missionaries to the Jews whom Albert Edward Thompson named in his 1902 book A Century of Jewish Missions, a t least twenty-one were Jewish men who converted to Christianity. (Women occupied only auxiliary roles, typically as helpers to their missionary husbands.) These newly Christian men proved immensely unpopular within Jewish communities - Isaac Mayer Wise once called them 'rascals without exception.' They wrote mostly for Christian audiences who were curious about Judaism of for potential donors to the cause of Christian missions to the Jews. They did, however, have the experience of living in - although often at the margins of - both Jewish and Christian communities."
(8) "Furthermore, missionary activity and the response to it drew attention from both Jewish and Christian communities and sometimes became the grounds for contest between the two. Many missions heeded Jewish objections to activities that Jews saw as bribery, trickery, and the targeting of children and largely ceased engaging in them. Earlier, nineteenth-century missions, as a stone in the show of American Jewry, had impelled Jewish communities to provide needed social, educational, and medical services for working-class Jews. But in the early twentieth century, missionary texts suggest that there were debates not only over social services and theology but also over cultural assumptions (and accusations) about the status of masculinity in Christianity and Judaism."
(9) "In his speeches and writings Goldman commented on circumcision, the fundamental bodily marker of male Jewishness. In his 1919 Judaism and its Traditions: The Conversion of a Hebrew Rabbi, he wrote, 'I could not explain to you the great meaning and benefit to man of circumcision. I may explain to any man privately, or by mail, if required.' By declining to discuss circumcision, he shrouded the practice and the Jewish male body in mystery, enhancing its 'otherness' for the assumed Christian reader. Despite the fact that the practice was becomibg widespread among non-Jews, Goldman framed it as having esoteric meaning. As a Jewish man, he had knowledge of circumcision's sexual 'meaning and benefit' that was unsuitable to be shared publicly or with women."
(10) "But the pain and the insult became too much when both boys began to beat him. 'Finally I burst into tears, for the Protestant joined the Catholic in belaboring the "Jew-boy."' The name 'Jew-boy' was insulting, but its language recalled another moment in Steiner's autobiographical writings that was not only bitter but also sweet."
(11) "Even though Freuder was on the margins of the Jewish community, his ideas about Jewish gentleness and the value of a decorous, rational, manly religion prevaded discussion about Judaism in America. Depsite their different social and religious locations, Freuder, Goldman, Cohn, and Steiner all painted similar portraits of Jewish masculinity: gentle, suffering, and averse to physical aggression. Although Freuder hoped that this version of masculinity would change as Jews became more religiously and culturally 'enlightened,' he nonetheless saw this gentle Jewish madculinity all around him. Goldman, Cohn, and Steiner saw it too, though they associated it with Christian theological reasons."
(12) "Grossman then turned the ideal of manliness from aggression and strength to one of genuine religious persuasion aimed at peace. He continued in explicitly gendered language: 'Would it not have been more manly and honorable for that conference of religious leaders to devise methods for converting their own people to the Christian faith, rather than, by such a resolution, to offend and insult their Jewish brethren?' The appropriately 'manly' action, he explained, would have been the nonviolent and candid recruitment (not 'luring') of 'their own people.' Grossman also linked proper manliness to Americanism; the ones violating American values were not 'inoffensive' Jews, but the overzealous Chrsitians who lured and slaughtered them."
(13) "On one hand, Hebrew-Christian missionaries imagined that gentleness, weakness, and even suffering were endemic to Jewish masculinity; a healthy, productive, self-sufficient male body was not a Jewish body. For them, Christianity was the rational and universal religion, and it was the religion of manliness. But on the other hand, Zionists, Jewish philanthropists, and acculturated Jews who romanticized Indians all claimed that Jews could and should embrace a masculinity of bodily health, productive work, self-sufficiency, and national religion."
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(14) Further Reading:
(a) A Missionary's Return to Judaism: The Truth about the Christian Missions to the Jews - Samuel Freuder
(b) Freud, Race and Gender - Sander Gilman
(c) Social Science and the Politics of Modern Jewish Identity - Mitchell Hart
(d) Occupation and Disease: How Social Factors Affect the Social Conception of Work-Related Disorders - Allard E. Dembe
(e) Evangelizing the Chosen People: Missions to Jews in America, 1880-2000 - Yaakov Ariel
(f) A Time for Gathering: The Second Migration, 1820-1880 - Hasia Diner
(g) Jewish Apostasy in the Modern World - ed. Todd Endelman
(h) The Heart of Whiteness: Normal Sexuality and Race in America 1880-1940 - Julian Carter
(i) Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race - Matthew Frye Jacobson
(j) Jewish Responses to Modernity: New Voices in America and Eastern Europe - Eli Lederhendler
(k) The Story of a Modern Missionary to an Ancient People - Leopold Cohn
(l) Daughters of the Shtetl: Life and Labor in the Immigrant Generation - Susan Glenn
(m) A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity - Daniel Boyarin
(n) White Women's Rights: The Racial Origin of Feminism in the United States - Louise Newman
(o) Each Mind a Kingdom: American Women, Sexual Purity, and the New Thought Movement - Beryl Satter
(p) Imagining the American Jewish Community - ed. Jack Wertheimer
(q) The Healthy Jew: The Symbiosis of Judaism and Modern Medicine - Mitchell Hart
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(15) "Even though only a small fraction of Jewish immigrants came through Galveston, the correspondence, the published materials, and press about the Galveston Movement paint a distinctive portrait of the ideal goal for Jewish immigrants in America. The Jewish immigrant, almost always assumed to be an adult man, would work productively, develop and able and healthy body, discard premodern religious superstition and piety, have a pioneering spirit, and even help tame the frontier through his settlement of the American West."
(16) "For the settlement of immigrants to be 'normal,' they should be located outside of the densely packed cities. When packed into cities, not only were they involved in 'vexing problems' but their vexing problems could also serve as fodder for magazine articles, such as the McClure's exposés, 'The Jewish Invasion of America' and 'The Great Jewish Invasion.' Jewish leaders worried that this kind of scandal-mongering journalism about urban immigrants made all Jews look bad. These acculturated Jews' concerns about the effects of city living reflected a wider non-Jewish interpretation of Jewish male bodies. After perusing an article on plants that entrap insects, Popular Science Monthly readers could learn about Jewish immigrants and their physical characteristics. In the article, Allan McLaughlin, a US Public Health official, wrote an otherwise sympathetic article arguing that the characteristic Jewish weakness and sickliness were the result of long-term persecution and city living. For McLaughlin, Jewish immigrants were not essentially inferior - they were model citizens when it came to education, for instance - but historical and social circumstances had conspired to make Jewish men generally poor physical specimens of manhood."
(17) "The Herald editorialist Oscar Leonard, acknowledging the 'crowding' problem in New York, asked, 'What is the remedy?' Zionists recommended colonizing Palestine, Leonard explained, but 'why not in the large state of Texas where the soil goes a begging for cultivators'? This fantasy of the undeveloped, waiting-to-be-tamed land of Texas mirrored similar rhetoric about Palestine. In some accounts, American land in the Southwest and West bordered on the Zionist image of 'a land without people for a people without land.' Jewish immigrant presence there would benefit both the Jews and the land."
(18) "The journalist C. H. Abbott also assumed that living in the West could and would transform the downtrodden Jews. He even connected the Galveston Movement to messianic or Zionist aspirations: the phrase, 'next year in Jerusalem,' formed a refrain in his article, and he wrote that 'only by the actual elevation of the race,' which he assumed the Galveston Movement was doing, 'may the Jews of the world ever be assembled again in Palestine.' While the Galveston Movement itself did not have explicitly Zionist or messianic goals, Abbott was certain that it was uplifting these Jewish 'pioneers' and 'pilgrims.' Abbott, like the acculturated Jews associated with JIIB and Galveston Movement, saw the West - and not the Eastern cities - as the ideal Americanizing environment to make better Jews." // Related to Governor Abbott? Is Abbott an occultist?
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After this one, I was struck by avolition, and I lay in bed, and fell asleep, for a while.
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(19) "Bressler had expected 325 'persons,' by which he meant men, but the boats had only brought 200 'persons' - and some of those 'persons' were women and children! Leaving aside the fact that Bressler seemed to think that 'persons' represents a category that can exclude women and children, this disagreement made plain the idea that the Galveston Movement had the cultivation of men as its object, both practically and ideologically."
(20) "Medical historians Howard Merkel and A. M. Stern have called 'poor physique' in Eastern European immigrant Jews 'a favorite "wastebasket" diagnosis of nativists in the early 1900s.' When medical authorities labeled immigrants as unproductive weaklings, it reinforced the specious conclusions of much of the race science of the day, as well as undermined Jewish claims to a masculinity consonant with bodily fitness and good citizenship."
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(21) Further reading:
(a) Galveston: Ellis Island of the West - Bernard Marinbach
(b) Dispersing the Ghetto: The Relocation of Jewish Immigrants Across America - Jack Glazier
(c) A Jew in the Public Arena: The Career of Israel Zangwill - Mari-Jane Rochelson
(d) Dreamer of the Ghetto: The Life and Works of Israel Zangwill - Joseph H. Udelson
(e) Land and Power: The Zionist Resort to Force, 1881-1948 - Anita Shapira
(f) Prostitution and Prejudice: The Jewish Fight Against White Slavery, 1870-1939 - Edward Bristow
(g) Unwelcome Strangers: East European Jews in Imperial Germany - Jack Wertheimer
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(22) "When most Americans in the early twentieth century wrote histories of the frontier, Indians often played the part of thr violent, savage antagonists. Courageous cowboys and pioneers needed to fight off Indian attacks to make the land safe. These narratives pitted the Americans against the Indians. But when American Jews wrote histories of their states and regions, they often portrayed Indians more sympathetically. In the years before the 'Wild Tribes' pamphlet, for instance, both Cohen and Dyer wrote histories that painted Indians as courageous, resourceful, and connected to the land. That is, they depicted Indians as inherently possessing many of the manly traits they valorized. Moreover, some of those histories also posited a connection between ancient Israel and the Indians - usually via the ten lost tribes. One of the appeals of this affinity was that, if Indians possessed desirable masculine qualities, and Jews and Indians shared a history, then by inference, Jews too could possess those qualities."
(23) "That Dyer, Cohen, and other twentieth-century acculturated Jews engaged little with actual Native Americans makes sense for several reasons. First, and most practically, Indian work and policy were largely Christian affairs. Protestant reformers and missionaries had dominated both early work with Indians and the US government's Bureau of Indian Affairs, although Catholics had gained footing by the early twentieth century. Civilizing Indians was seen as a Christian job. Second, the ideology underpining agricultural movements differed. American policy makers and reformers saw farming as a step toward civilization for Native Americans, while Jews imagined farming as a step that would reconnect them with their history and true natural potential. Emphasizing similarities between Jews and contemporary Native Americans might suggest that Jews too were in need of civilization, but agricultural communities and the Galveston Movement sought to prove exactly the opposite: that Jews already had the potential to be productive Americans. Third, an Indian-Israelite affinity provided narrative connections between historical civilizations, not contemporary Jews and Native Americans. The Indians of the past could be imagined as resourceful, masculine, and self-sufficient, but the Native Americans in the early twentieth century constituted a political problem in their failure to assimilate quickly and completely to American life. A Jewish quest to show long attachments to the land would be undone if it entailed a connection to a failure to become American. Acculturated Jews' broader ideologies about Americanization and immigration suggest that claiming a common ancestry with Indians allowed them to highlight themes of strong ties to the land, bravery, and resourcefulness. In this, they acted much like other whites who 'played Indian' in order to identify with and call attention to admirable traits they shared with Native Americans. It is no surprise that Philip Deloria's history of non-Indian Americans appropriating Indian culture includes examples that overwhelmingly feature menp and boys. Societies like the Order of the Red Men and even the Boy Scouts identified Indians with mastery of nature and a masculinity that had not been completely tamed by civilization. Cohen's histories of Texan Jews helped him establish both a brave and resourceful Jewish masculinity and an American Judaism. Adolphus Sterne, the pioneer statesman, at once rational and spiritual, put on tefflin in the forest. The 'little Jew' demonstrated that manliness required bravery and resourcefulness, but not physical size. Some of the Dyers fought and defeated the Indians, all the while demonstrating a masculinity quite like the Indians themselves. These histories suggested that Jewish masculinity was a brave, resourceful masculinity with ties to the American land. The next section shows examples of more explicit approaches that directly claim affinities between Israelites and Indians, especially in the realm of religion. While these acculturated Jews pulled the idea of brave and resourceful Indians close with one hand, they pushed away the idea of tribal Indians with the other."
(23) "But Dyer did not intend to align present-day Judaism and Indian customs too closely; rather he detailed ritual similarities while emphasizing historical contrasts. In case the modern reader might scoff at these specious Indian-Israelite comparisons, Dyer warned, 'Dear reader, do not smile at the belief of the savage, for it was that of your ancestors.' He offered examples from historical Jewish communities: *'Hebrews a few centuries ago had their synagogal names in Europe, which were kept secret, while trade and family names were common. Changing the name of a person seriously ill, so as to cheat the angel of death, was an illustration how the name was formerly unified with the body.'* Dyer discussed the Jewish tradition of adding a new name to a gravely ill person to mislead or thwart the angel of death, because an Indian tribe had a similar practice, he explained. *The Comanches, in this case, might be 'savage,' yet they shared beliefs and customs with Jews from 'a few centuries ago' - the naming tradition dated to the Middle Ages and had gained popularity in Kabbalistic circles.* These historical comparisons allowed Dyer not only to note the similarities between Indian customs and Israelite religion but also to emphasize the differences between an outdated, superstitious Judaism of 'centuries ago' and the rational, civilized Judaism of his day. By referring to Judaism's past commonality with Indian customs, he could demonstrate both a connection and argue for Judaism's comparative advancements." // T.S. Eliot -> Cats have three names. / Did Jews try to ritualistically swap places with another person to try to trick the angel of death? This seems very unethical, and I hope it didn't work, if so.
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(24) Further Reading:
(a) Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860 - Richard Slotkin
(b) Benderly Boys and American Jewish Education - Jonathan Krasner
(c) Retelling US Religious History, ed. Thomas Tweed
(d) Fraternal Organizations - Alvin J. Schmidt
(e) Jacksonian Jew: The Two Worlds of Mordecai Noah - Jonathan Sarna
(f) No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith - Fawn Brodie
(g) Members of the Tribe: Native Americans in the Jewish Imagination - Rachel Rubenstein
(h) Red, Black, and Jew: New Frontiers in Hebrew Literature - Stephen Katz
(i) United States Jewry 1776-1985 - Jacob Rader Marcus
(j) Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South - Bertram Wyatt-Brown
(k) The Chosen Folk: Jews on the Frontiers of Texas - Bryan Edward Stone
(l) Women, Culture, and Community: Religion and Reform in Galveston, 1880-1920 - Elizabeth Hayes Turner
(m) Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class - Eric Lott
(n) Going Native: Indians in the American Cultural Imagination - Shari Huhndorf
(o) Jewish Science: Divine Healing in Judaism, with Special Reference to the Jewish Scriptures and Prayer Book - Alfred Moses
(p) From Christian Science to Jewish Science: Spiritual Healing and American Jews - Ellen Umansky
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(25) "Rosen then used what looked like a Zionist idea - the idea that Jews became unhealthy because they lived in exile away from the land of Palestine - and instead made its center the land in general, rather than the particular land of Palestine. 'Nations have to be rooted in the soil to make a healthy growth. We Jews, as a nation, are uprooted. It is not so much the loss of our country, as the severing of our nation from the soil, that brought us centuries of misery.' Jews had suffered from their alienation from the soil, Rosen explained, and the solution to that alienation, its unhealthiness, and its stagnancy was reconnection to land in general, which included farming in the United States."
(26) "The self-preservation that Krauskopf, Palitz, and others in the agricultural movement promoted did not go unheard. Non-Jews also saw the agricultural movement as a way to improve Jewish men. Former president William Howard Taft and Progressive journalist Jacob Riis praised the movement for its noble goals of creating Jewish farmers and a Jewish farming culture,,. Robert Watchorn, the Ellis Island commissioner, congratulated the National Farm School on 'transforming [immigrants] from the cowering, hunted, persecuted subjects of an ignorant and cowardly dynsasty into the manly, upright citizens of a glorious Republic.' Watchorn, like many of the non-Jewish visitors and speakers at the NFS and HAS, reported seeing healthy men pursuing productive means of living. They praised the ability of these farm schools to transform weak, unhealthy, ignorant immigrant boys and men into manly Americans." // Was the dynasty in question that of the Romanovs?
(27) "The Judaism of these farm schools looked a lot like Reform Judaism. Halakhah was not a priority. For instance, bothe farm schools and many of the agricultural settlements kept pigs. When the student publication HAS Record quoted the director of 'Dairy and Swine Husbandry,' as saying, 'What you young man need is a big dose of Judaism,' it was being only a little tongue in cheek. Some Jews in the agricultural movement connected bodily improvement to religious enlightenment; their idea of civilized religion closely aligned with Reform Judaism an denigrated the benighted ways of 'superstitious' Hasidim or Orthodox Jews. Many immigrant Jews themselves, especially those involved in agricultural movements harbored antipathy toward traditional piety and religious institutions such as the cheder, or Jewish religious school, in favor of a rational, post-haskalah (Jewish enlightenment) Judaism and Jewish culture."
(28) "Other rabbis also connected the agricultural life to wholesome religious life. New York Reform Rabbi Maurice Harris argued that Christianity retained its adherents because, when Christians moved from rural atmospheres to the city, they brought their faith with them. His article in the Menorah journal claimed that the rural atmosphere and agricultural lifestyle were more conducive to religion: 'The strength of the Church lies in the fact that every year there comes from the country to the town reinforcements of young people bringing their fresh and simple faith acquired in the fields and vineyards of the land.' Although Jews had once been models of religious life, they had lost some of that connection when Eastern European governments pushed them to live in more urban, nonfarming environments. 'Therefore, perhaps the cruelest persecution of Russia against the Jews is the driving them from the country places and forcing them into the towns.' Harris lamented that 'Jews, who were once the patterns of believers and whose mission was to be the witnesses of God, contribut[ed] more than their proportion of skepticism to the unbelievers of the modern world.' A move back to agricultural pursuits would not only make Jews more healthy and productive but would also facilitate their return to religion."
(29) Further Reading:
(a) Ellen Eisenberg - Jewish Agricultural Communities in New Jersey
(b) Dona Brown - Back to the Land: The Enduring Dream of Self-Sufficiency in Modern America
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(30) "Mascilinity plays a starring role in the traditional story of European Zionism: the diaspora made Jews weak, hunched over, and passive, but Zionism would bring reconnection to the land and the regeneration of the strong male body. Even European Zionism's most famous visual images, such as the Galician Zionist E. M. Lilien's iconic paintings, promoted these themes. Strong male bodies and phallic images populate Zionist landscapes, whereas old, weak, frail religious scholars symbolize diaspora life. German Zionist Max Nordau famously called for a 'Muscle Jewry,' and claimed that diasporic Jewry was effeminate and degenerate."
(31) "The 1917 Balfour Declaration, in which Britain's foreign secretary Arthur Balfour wrote that 'His Majesty's government view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people,' buoyed Zionists when it gave state recognition to their goals. The declaration invigorated the American Zionist movement, but its number of adherents remained small."
(32) "The political arrangements of European states precluded Jews from remaining distinctively Jewish and fully participating in 'Society' because of the marriage of 'Church' and 'Society.' The United States, with its avowed separation of church and state, was exceptional, and it fostered 'good' religion - religion based on individual conscience and compatible with democracy - whereas European systems brought with them religious coercion and discrimination. America's political arrangement was good for the Jews, while Europe's marginalized them."
(33) "Although European and American Zionism shared many texts and ideals, they developed in different political, religious, and gendered contexts. Most European Zionists subscribed to the idea of shlilat hagalut, or the negation of the diaspora. In this formulation, diaspora life is inherently negative, and the only salvation of the Jewish people can come from a Jewish return to Palestine. As we have seen, however, very few American Zionists, however, thought in these terms, and shlilat hagalut never caught on in the United States. Furthermore, most American Zionists did not even think of the United States as galut. In part, because of this refusal to classify American Jewish life as exilic (and therefore negative), as the next section suggests, American Zionism never painted American Jews as effeminate. Instead, American Jews were masculine in their philanthropic and political efforts to support the cultivation of the land on behalf of other Jews."
(34) "The Maccabaean referred to immigrant Jews on the Lower East Side as 'them,' and 'they' needed care, though it seemed as though they were beginning to be able to provide it themselves. This paternalistic attitude - a combination of responsibility for other Jews and condescension - also informed the readers' attitude toward Eastern European Jews who remained in Eastern Europe and faced antisemitism, lack of economic opportunity, and other undesirable situations. The Maccabaean styled itself as a periodicial for cultured, educated American Jews."
(35) "Reporter Louis Lipsky was the first editor of the Maccabaean, and he passed the reins to the British-born and newly arrived immigrant Jacob de Haas in 1902. In 1914, Lipsky would leave his position as editor of The American Hebrew and return to edit the Maccabaean when he became secretary (and later president) of the FAZ. Even during his time away from editing, Lipsky contributed to the journal often. In Decembet 1907, he wrote, 'The Fesrival of Chanuka: A Talk With Jewish Boys and Girls,' in which he called Zionists 'the modern Maccabaeans.' Though it at first appeared to be an educational discussion for children, the article was actually a didactic piece that sought to reorient and reinvigorate the American Jewish community around the ideas of land, soil, and healthy bodies. Ultimately, the article suggested that Jewish manliness was actually about politics, not about physical transformation. Lipsky's ideal Jewish community did not center on building stronger bodies, but rather on creating a safe haven for all Jews. To do this, Jews had to reconnect with their peoplehood and history."
(36) "American Zionists also fashioned the category of galut into a novel shape: Palestine was Zion and Eastern Europe (or Europe more generally) was galut. Ut they rarely suggested the United States was exile. In March 1914, for example, the Maccabaean section, 'News and Views, in the lands of Goluth' included news briefs with the following headlines: 'Ministers Change: Antisemites Remain,' 'Echoes of the Beilis Trial,' 'Persecution of Jewish Artisans,' 'Jews Flee From Lodz,' '"Enlightened" Germany, Antisemitism Rampant,' '"Brave" Austria, Antisemitism among Austrian Officers,' '"Liberal" France, French Catholic Press Attack Jews,' 'And Roumania, the Struggle for Jewish Rights.' These 'lands of Goluth' never included the United States. This list of Jewish troubles abroad implied an especially Zionist form of American exceptionalism - that is, that exile was elsewhere."
(37) "The Maccabaean even celebrated Jews as exemplars of masculinity. When, in May 1914, the United States sent troops to Veracruz to intervene in the Mexican Revolution, the Maccabaean's first page began by extolling the manly virtues of Jews as American soldiers. Three of the seventeen Marines who died during the skirmish were Jewish, and Goldberg tied this to a history of Jews as brave volunteers for the American nation: 'This is in keeping with American tradition. The Jews of this country have always offered their lives in excess of their numbers.' Jews had always expressed their courage in support of the United States. This Veracruz military action, along with later wartime discussions, was one of the few times that the Maccabaean focused on the physical acts of bravery."
(38) Further Reading:
(a) Arthur Hertzberg - The Zionist Idea: A Historical Analysis and Reader
(b) Walter Laqueur - A History of Zionism: From the French Revolution to the Establishment of Israel
(c) Melvin Urofsky - American Zionism from Herzl to the Holocaust
(d) Kimmel - Manhood in America
(e) Bederman - Manliness and Civilization
(f) Kasson - Houdini, Tarzan, and the Perfect Man
(g) Marianne Sanua - Going Greek: Jewish College Fraternities in the United States *
(h) Dekel - Universal Jew
(i) Michael Berkovitz - Zionist Culture and West European Jewry Before the First World War
(j) Michael Stanislawski - Zionism and Fin-de-Siecle: Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism from Nordau to Jabotinsky
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(39) Further Reading:
(a) Regina Kunzel - Criminal Intimacies: Prison and the Uneven History of American Sexuality
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(40) "Bingham's characterization of Jews as soft criminals - and the Jewish community's agreement - is all the more remarkable given the reality: New York City had a number of violent Jewish criminals, some of whom were growing quite famous. Although the heyday of Jewish gangsters would not occur until a generation later, Jews in the early twentieth century were hurting, intimidating, and even murdering within the city limits."
(41) "Earlier that year, they had forced Pioggi to jump out a second-story window at gunpoint, motivated merely by schadenfreude and their own amusement. Despite these colorfully violent Jewish criminals, Bingham never mentioned Jewish gangsters, murderers, or those committing crimes of intimidation. They did not fit his characterization of the kind of criminals Jewish men might become."
(42) "As a friend of Moses Mendelsohn and an Enlightenment thinker in his own right, Dohm firmly believed in the potential for the betterment of the Jewish people, but improvement in their civic status depended on improvement of their occupations and physical bodies. Dohm's Enlightenment ideas about improving the civic status of the Jews echoed not only in the thoughts of antisemites in the subsequent centuries - such as Houston Stewart Chamberlain and Otto Weininger, both of whom claimed that Jews were inherently parasitic and degenerate rather than productive - but also in the words of Jews."
(43) "Historical constructions of Jews as phsyically degenerate and unproductive bosltered Bingham's point about Jewish difference. But he did not simply mimic European antisemitism in the manner of Chamberlain, nor did he indiscriminately spout anti-Jewish vitriol. Despite the actual presence of Jewish organized crime, Bingham did not suggest that Jews were responsible for murder, assault, or intimidation. He neither claimed nor suggested that Jews were inherently and indiscriminately predisposed to criminality. Rather, he claimed that a certain kind of Jewish degeneracy - physical weakness, lack of productive labor, and lack of assimilation - was linked to criminal activity that required no physical strength or bravery. Although Bingham thought all immigrant groups had criminal elements, he did not paint all groups with identical brushstrokes. *The American press, like Bingham, at times depicted Irish, Italians, and African Americans as particularly prone to criminal behavior, but it depicted Jews alone among them as simultaneously criminal, unaggressive, physically weak, and cowardly.* After announcing his Jewish crime statistics, Bingham fumed about the 'audacity' of Italian 'cold-blooded, premeditated' murders and kidnappings, and he retold at length the story of an Italian who 'had the courage to stand up against a gang of blackmailers.' The 'gentle art' of Jewish crime and lack of 'aggressiveness' and 'courage' of Jewish criminals stood in sharp contrast to the 'audacity' and 'courage' of Italian criminals. Bingham's explicit comparison shows that his assumptions about Jews were not merely reducible to their status as immigrants, working-class men, or non-native English speakers. Bingham was no fan of Italian criminals, but he did not suggest that they were weak or cowardly. Jewish criminality alone took the hue of cowardice, weakness, gentleness, and failure of manliness. Bingham hardly invented these stereotypes from whole cloth. Had he sought academic support for his arguments, he would not have needed to look far. In a 1903 study including an examination of 'crime along racial lines' in Boston, sociologist Frederick Bushee depicted the 'moral degeneration among Irish families on account of drink,' anger that led to violence like 'assaults' among Italians, a propensity for gambling among Chinese immigrants, and in general a 'very much greater criminality' both violent and nonviolent among African Americans, as well as other stereotypes of immigrants. *Bushee assumed that racial and ethnic groups had particular tendencies, as many anthropologists and sociologists of the time did; not all immigrants or racial groups were criminal in the same fashion. 'Serious assaults' were characteristic of Italians and African Americans, but he explained, 'the Jews do not commit serious assaults.'*"
(44) "The lack of association between Jews and alcoholism is especially interesting because anti-immigrant sentiment and nativism were widespread in the temperance movement. So it would have seemed natural, even expected, thay Jews would have been painted with the same brush as other immigrants when it came to alcohol. Yet, even though Jews were targets of anti-immigration rhetoric and political action, they were rarely accused of being alcoholics. *Jews were, however, often accused of selling booze, charges that were sometimes well-founded, given the realities of the liquor trade.* These accusations likewise reinforced ideas abour Jewish criminal craftiness or moral deficiency, but not masculine vices."
(45) "In addition to positing Judaism as the focal point of communal identity, these leaders thought that it was the answer to Bingham's charges in another sense: religion could combat juvenile delinquency and thereby future crime. The conversations about delinquency began before the Bingham affair, but they intensified in its wake. *As Jenna Weissman Joselit and Irving Howe have shown, the Jewish community, like Bingham, did not call attention to violent Jewish criminals. Howe claims this communal quietness came from a Jewish 'cultural style encouraging prudishness and self-censorship.' Joselit writes that the Jewish community attempted to keep 'social and psychological distance' from criminality because it disrupted their ability to see themselves - and project an image of themselves - as a more moral community.* When Bingham publicized his statistics, the Jewish communit was obligated to respond, she explains. Although these are compelling explanations, they do not account for the explosion of public discussion in the Jewish community about Jewish jubenile delinquency. Bringing juvenile delinquency to light was surely neither flattering, nor helpful for Jewish leaders who wanted to cultivate the image of a moral community and fend off non-Jewish criticism. Moreover, the Jewish communit had discussed juvenile delinquency publicly before the Bingham affair, when there was no major precipitating event to force discussion. Part of the reason that Jews confronted juvenile delinquency head-on while pushing Jewish gangsters into the communal closet concerns their conceptions of gender: Jewish juvenile delinquents fit with their assumptions about Jewish men, whereas gangsters did not. The juvenile delinquents committed petty theft and ran pickpocket scams. These were hardly Jewish values, but ir made sense to the Jewish community that when Jewish boys went astray, they might do such things. The acculturated Jewish community saw these boys' criminal activity as a Jewish communal problem, and they sought to remedy it with practical measures such as establishing settlement houses and care institutions and through ideological projects such as promoting religion. The violent Jewish criminals were another story. It was not that Jews denied the existence of Jewish gangsters. But they imagined them as individual criminals, as anomalies, rather than as a Jewish problem. Jewish men were not violent, they assumed. They did not do things like murder. So when individual Jews did such things, it was easy for other Jews to see them as outliers. And it was much easier for Jews to see gangsters as outliers than it was to change their view of Jewish masculinity. Thus the acculturated Jewish conversation about juvenile delinquency, when paired with the silence about Jewish gangsters, shows some of the power and durability of masculinity as a cultural force."
(46) Further reading:
(a) Albert Fried - The Jewish Gangster in America
(b) Khalil Muhammad - The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America
(c) Jenna Weissman Joselit - Our Gang: Jewish Crime and the New York Jewish Community, 1900-1940
(d) Edward Bristow - Prostitution and Prejudice: The Jewish Fight Against White Slavery, 1870-1939
(e) "Julia Richman's Methods of Teaching Jewish Ethics, likewise posed a question that unveiled similar assumptions: 'Suppose a child's father has committed a crime, exploited in the newspapers, or spread through gossip; embezzlement, forgery, perjury, arson, any form of law-breaking' (33). *All her hypothetical crimes for a Jewish father were nonviolent crimes.*"
(f) Joseph Gusfield - The Symbolic Crusade: Status Politics and the American Temperance Movement
(g) Marni Davis - Jews and Booze: Becoming American in the Age of Prohibition
(h) Ehud Manor - Louis Miller and Di Warheit ('The Truth'): Yiddishism, Zionism, and Socialism in New York, 1905-1915
(i) Beth Kaplan - Finding the Jewish Shakespeare: The Life and Legacy of Jacob Gordin
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(47) "The Frank trial, appeals, and subsequent lynching constituted a major public event. Jeffrey Melnick has called the case and the persecution of Frank 'a sacred text of American Jewish history.' It was certainly the most widely discussed Jewish criminal event of the early twentieth century. As such, it is a curcial moment for the historian to hear Americans air their assumptions about Jewishness. Jewish communities across the country expressed concern that the Frank case would plant or nurture ideas about Jewish men's criminality and deviant sexuality. There was so much concern that B'nai B'rith, in response, established the Anti-Defamation League, the national organization that has since worked to condemn negative public images of Jews. In an entirely different segment of the American population, the case helped launch the second incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan, which included some of Frank's lynchers among its leaders. For both the historical actors themselves and for historians, the Leo Frank case is therefore critical to thinking about public images of Jewish men in the era."
(48) "The combination of Frank's gender (quiet demeanor, small and weak body) and his Jewishness may have made it easier to believe that he also deviated from sexual norms. In addition to insinuating Frank's deviance from normative American masculinity, some newspapers - particularly those convicted of Frank's guilt - suggested he was sexually abnormal. *Although in retrospect there is no evidence to support their claims, during and after the trial people accused Frank of everything from engaging in oral sex and homosexual acts to philandering and rape. The Atlanta Consitution reported that an unnamed employee said that Frank had 'indulged in familiarities' with his young women employees.* Three days later, the Constitution reported that a policeman announced that he had seen Frank take a 'young girl' to a 'desolate spot in the woods...for immoral purposes.' Later he recanted, explaining that the man he saw could not have been Frank. A Life journalist claimed, 'The prevalent opinion in Georgia was that Frank had had fair trials; that he was an habitual seducer of girls in his employ; [and] that he had undoubtedly murdered Mary Phagan.' Somehow Frank's (imagined) status as a 'habitual seducer' was not only a widely held opinion but was also relevant to the murder of the young woman. At first blush, one might think that the prosecutor's continuing insistence on discussing Frank's numerous sexual encounters and habit would paint an image of virility, the very stereotype of the masculine. But because his hypersexuality was oriented toward the young, it was cast as a misdirected and criminal sexual impulse. Of all the accusations, the charges of 'perversion' were the most damning. *A sympathetic observer from Atlanta told the Washington Post, 'Once persuade a jury that a man is a pervert, and it doesn't matter about the other charges.'"
(49) "During the trial itself, the prosecution also attempted to discover - or at least plant in the imagination of the jurors - Frank's abnormal sexual practices. *The Fulton County Court's solicitor-general and prosecuting attorney Hugh Dorsey suggested that Frank had made multiple, unwanted advances toward an office boy. The boy flatly denied it.* At another point, apropos of nothing, Dorsey asked an employee if he had heard of Frank 'kissing girls and playing with their nipples on their breasts.' He asked witnesses if Frank 'took girls in his lap at the factory,' walked unannounced into the women's dressing room, or tried to take a girl with him when the factory closed. They said they had not seen any such activity, but Dorsey continued to ask specific questions of each factory-employed witness about Frank's sexual practices. If Dorsey could prove that Frank approached many different boys and girls in the workplace, that epuld mean that Frank could neither properly direct nor contain his sexuality and that he pursued sexual activity in inappropriate settings and toward inappropriate persons - his young and subordinate non-Jewish employees. According to the picture Dorsey sought to paint, Frank's sexuality was excessive, misguided, and degenerate. *When it discussed the supposed objects of Frank's attention, the press consistently described them as 'boys' and 'girls,' which subtly suggested that Frank had a sexua desire for immature people and even children. The word 'girls' was common Southern parlance for young unmarried women as well as female children, but the word 'boys' was generally reserved for male children. When the press used the two together - rather than referring to 'girls' alone - the word choice strengthened the impression that Frank chose non-adults for his sexual exploits.* The attraction to children also reinforces a defective or even deficient sexuality: Frank, a Jewish man, was unable to express sexuality toward an appropriate person, that is, an adult Jewish woman. The fact that he had not fathered children could serve as further evidence of his failure to achieve proper manliness. *Although newspapers often merely implied the connection between Jewishness and sexually deviancy, the inflammatory but influential politician Tom Watson trumpeted the evils of the 'sodomite' Frank and his Jewishness.*"
(50) "On the other side, the prosecution and anti-Frank media often painted Frank's Jewishness as related to his guilt. Reports frequently included the words 'Jew' and 'Jewish,' and even the accounts that did not could still trade on other stereotypes and key words to reinforce his Jewishness. In his comparative study The Jew Accused, historian Albert Lindemann argues that antisemitism was not a major factor in the Leo Frank case, but this is because he tracked only the use of explicit terms: Jew, Jewish, Judaism. He therefore neglects the work of cultural code words such as 'intellectual,' 'nervous,' and 'rich,' which could allude to Frank's Jewishness without explicitly naming it." // These seem like relatively positive descriptive words, with the possible exception of 'nervous.' Why would "rich" or "intellectual,"
or even "nervous" be code words used to hint at a Jewish background?
(51) "*Even at the time of the time, journalists noticed the presence and influence of unsubstantiated rumors and code words. One Georgia journalist who wrote anonymously blamed Frank's conviction on a kind of whisper campaign*: 'The yellow-journal methods employed in reporting the pre-trial developments and the trial, together with endless word-of-mouth gossip concerning Frank and revolving around imaginary things which idle scandal said the 'papers couldn't print' caused the multitude in Atlanta and most of Georgia to become indelibly of the opinion that the young Jew was guilty.' The author suggested that the images, not fully painted by the press, were filled in by the readers, who created their own ideas of these 'unprintable' images of what Frank had done. These 'imaginary things' served to reinforce stereotypes, especially sexual, that already circulated in the American readers' cultural imaginary. The journalist's desire to remain anonymous also indicates how pervasive he or she felt these stereotypes were and how unpopular a defense of Frank on these grounds could be."
(52) "Frank was not always the sole target of sexual scrutiny: sometimes Jews as a group were targeted with him. Because Jewish communities and individuals from throughout the country donated money on Frank's behalf and called for political support for him, many non-Jews who thought he was guilty lashed out against all American Jews. Life indicted Jews in general along with Frank in particular when it stated, 'Jews from everywhere...swore his character wad good, whereas on his sexual side it seems to have been rotten.' *This logic insisted that either Jews are liars, or they are unable to discern 'rotten' sexual behavior from correct sexual behavior. More insidiously, it might even suggest that Jews secretly condone rotten sexual character and accept or cover for those who have it.* This connection between Frank and 'the Jews' as a whole allowed the public to tie not only Frank's money and defense to his Jewishness but also his 'perversion.'"
(53) "It also served as the occasion for Jews to organize a defense against social prejudice. If thise who thought Frank was guilty sometimes grouped Jews together, Frank's defenders did so even more. Many (accurately) perceived the presence of antisemitism, and some saw the case as evidence for need for an organization that woukd defend both individual Jews and the Jewish community against instances of prejudice. The fraternal organization B'nai B'rith, of which Frank was a member, created the Anti-Defamation League 'to preserve the good repute of Jews and Judaism.' *Alerting newspapers to the prejudicial reporting of Jewish criminality was one of the ADL's first projects. Why was a criminal's religion mentioned only when he was Jewish, the ADL asked? This practice needed to stop. Newspapers largely complied, quickly and quietly.*"
(54) "Jews do not get into bar brawls. They do not beat their wives. Jewish men are not physically aggressive or violent. Jews mught embezzle money or commit fraud, but not assault and certainly not murder. *These images of Jewish crime - some of which still resonate today - suggest the borders of Jewish masculinity: Jews and non-Jews agreed, despite evidence to the contrary, that aggression and violence were beyond the bounds of Jewishness.* In these conversations about crime and criminality, everyone, including the Jews, granted these conceptions of Jewish masculinity." // This is clearly the result of occult hoo hoo, and it is very bizarre.
(54) "Although at first, committing murder might seem incongruous with the image of a gentle, cowardly male Jewish criminal, the images and rhetoric of both Jews and non-Jews nevertheless might have sounded familiar to anyone who had paid attention to the Bingham affair. Frank's defenders portrayed him as a gentle family-focused man who was an active member of his Reform synagogue and on excellent terms with his rabbi. Those insisting on the guilt and punishment of the accused used images of cunning, calculating men who were small and weak, displayed abnormal male sexuality, and merely used violence as a means to an end. *Later, for Leopold and Loeb, this would take a particularly interesting twist: because they had confessed to the crime, their defense counsel Clarence Darrow used the idea of abnormality to argue for their decreased culpability. Precisely because they were unlike other people and other Jews, as the evidence of their sexual desires and practices would attest, they could not be held to the same standards of culpability, Darrow argued.*"
(55) Further reading:
(a) Matthew H. Bernstein - Screening a Lynching: The Leo Frank Case on Film and Television
(b) W. Fitzhugh Brundage - Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880-1930
(c) Leonard Dinnerstein - The Leo Frank Case
(d) Harry Golden - A Little Girl Is Dead
(e) David Mamet - The Old Religion
(f) Steve Oney - And the Dead Shall Rise: The Murder of Mary Phagan and the Lynching of Leo Frank
(g) Jeffrey Melnick - Black-Jewish Relations on Trial: Leo Frank and Jim Conley in the New South
(h) Jackson Lears - Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877-1920
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(56) "From the moment the body was discovered, the crime became a media sensation. As with the Bingham affair and Leo Frank case, American print media played a significant role in both shaping and reflecting public opinion. In addition, the transcript of the entire Leopold and Loeb sentencing hearing, *with the exception of one portion of the proceedings borrowed by Darrow, but never returned*, is still extant. // What are the content of that portion, and why didn't Darrow return it? / Read books on Clarence Darrow.
(57) "The Defender implicitly compared the media coverage of these Jewish criminals to those of black criminals. Newspapers rarely failed to point out when a perpetrator was 'a Negro,' but in this case, Leopold and Loeb's Jewishness often went without remark. The Defender was onto something when it observed this trend. But the Defender implied that it occurred because Jews consistently got a cultural pass where blacks did not. However, as the Bingham affair and Frank case showed, sometimes Americans did call attention to Jewishness and insist on its relationship to certain kinds of crime; though not to the extent that blacks had, Jews had been maligned as a distinctive criminal element in a racialized way in earier court cases and in the media. But that was not so in this case."
(58) "The fact that they would begin a description of Leopold with comments on his religion should be remarkable. And yet, it happened time and again during the hearing. Hulbert explained of Leopold: 'In his religious studies he was intensely interested in classification, as he was in other things too, and he finally found fault with God and as far as he was concerned abolished God because God makes mistakes....He then became an atheist....Leopold finally conceived life existing without any god and there being no God there is no right or wrong per se.' When the state's witness Dr. Church was asked about Leopold's beliefs and conduct, he said he could not comment, 'excepting as to his attitude on religion.'"
(59) "In the end, then, the Leopold and Loeb hearing could have seriously challenged some of the assumptions about American Jewish masculinity, but it did not. *Instead of taking the case as evidence that Jewish men could be violent, aggressive, and dominating, the media and public took it as evidence that Leopold and Loeb were not really Jewish.*"
(60) Daniel Boyarin, Daniel Itzkovitz, and Ann Pellegrini - Queer Theory and the Jewish Question
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(61) "Similarly, images of Jewish men's criminal vices tend away from violent interpersonal crime. People still assume that Jewish men are rarely alcoholics or perpetrators of domestic violence. The financial criminal Bernie Madoff is far more recognizably Jewish to both Jews and non-Jews than, say, David Berkowitz, better known as the 'Son of Sam' serial killer. When someone points out that Berkowitz was Jewish, another person usually pipes up and says, 'But he was adopted' or 'he said he worshiped the devil' or 'he converted to Christianity in prison,' all of which suggest that he was not really Jewish. Violent murder seems incongruous with Jewish masculinity, whereas the manipulation and cunning of a Ponzi scheme seem despicable but within the realm of possibility." // Domestic violence in Israel?
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(62) Further reading:
(a) Benjamin Maria Baader, Sharon Gillerman, and Paul Lerner - Jewish Masculinities: German Jews, Gender, and History
(b) Courtney Bender - The Post-Secular in Question: Religion in Contemporary Society
(c) Allard E. Dembe - Occupation and Disease: How Social Factors Affect the Social Conception of Work-Related Disorders
(d) Mitchell Hart - The Healthy Jew: The Symbiosis of Judaism and Modern Medicine
(e) Daniel Itzkowitz - Jews and Other Differences
(f) Marion Kaplan and Deborah Dash Moore - Gender and Jewish History **
(g) Albert S. Lindemann - The Jew Accused: Three Anti-Semitic Affairs (Dreyfus, Beilis, Frank)
(h) Eric Lott - Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class **
(i) Deborah Dash Moore - B'nai B'rith and the Challenge of Ethnic Leadership
(j) David Novak - Modern Judaism
(k) Robert Orsi - Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious World People Make and the Scholars Who Study Them
(l) Louise Newman - White Women's Rights: The Racial Origin of Feminism in the United States
(m) Stephen Prothero - American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon
(n) Paul Ritterband and Harold Wechsler - Jewish Learning in American Universities
(o) Marianne Sanua - Going Greek: Jewish College Fraternities in the United States
(p) Jack Wertheimer - Unwelcome Strangers: East European Jews in Imperial Germany
(q) Bryan Edward Stone - The Chosen Folks: Jews on the Frontiers of Texas
