Review - American Jewish Archives

Book Reviews 241
cultural, ethnic, and national identity. No study of any national
group can omit its literary oeuvre, all the more so in the case of the
Jews. At a time when Hebrew and Yiddish literature were divided
primarily over the issues of national identity for the Jews, the place of
Jews in Europe and the United States, and their regard for 'Eretz Yisra'el,
it was Yiddish literature that became the domain of most proponents
of extraterritorialism anti- and non-Zionist sentiment. Though
a justifiable medium for illustrating the aspiration of Jews who chose
to remain in Europe, or even those reestablishing themselves in the
American diaspora, Yiddish literature is not the proper resource for
an examination or illustration of Jewish national feelings. So while Jacobson
selected to demonstrate the pro-Zionist (or proponents of what
he terms "Yiddish nationalism" [IO~I]) sentiments of some Yiddish writers
- among them Liessen, Rosenfeld - against non-Zionists such as
Mendele Makher [sic]Sforim, Peretz, Cahan, and Kobrin and concludes
that "Overall the relationship of Yiddish literature to Jewish nationalism
was deeply mixed(xxo), he pays but scant attention to that of Hebrew
literature and its overwhelmingly unequivocal stand on the
subject (94-95).
This reader would have been interested in seeing the contextualization
of the Hebrew language as a more central component in a
study that measures the national impulses still pervading Jewish immigrant,
and post immigrant, life in the United States. While the author
is correct in his assertion that the Yiddish press was the largest
conduit bringing information to immigrant Jews, with a readership
certainly exceeding the number of subscriptions by far, its numbers
should have been noted not for 1898 (Yiddishes tageblatt) but for the
post-1900 years, when the numbers of Jews in the United States ballooned
from an estimated million in 1900 to 4.5 million by 1925. In
short, the study misses the Jewish population it should have examined.
By overlooking the Hebrew component-press, culture clubs, theater,
journals, literature, religion, and so forth-the study effectively
neutralizes the images of Zionism and Jewish nationalism that have
followed Jewish immigrants from their east European lands of the diaspora
to their new-found diaspora. Hebrew publications, for instance,
though fewer than those in Yiddish, had the support of a few thousand
active readers, and one can only guess at how many listeners