reviews - Jewish Book Council

59 TH NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARDS
ISRAEL TODAY: LAND OF MANY NATIONS
(Hill and Wang)
RAQUELA: A WOMAN OF ISRAEL
(Coward, McCann & Geoghegan)
RESCUE: THE EXODUS OF THE ETHIOPIAN JEWS
(Atheneum)
WITNESS: ONE OF THE GREAT CORRESPONDENTS
OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY TELLS HER STORY
(Schocken Books)
Ruth Gruber is a true 20th century hero of the Jewish people. A gifted
writer and a woman of great courage and determination she
has devoted her life to rescuing her fellow Jews from oppression. Her
journey began with a series that she did for the New York Herald Tribune
about women under communism and fascism. It was her skill as a
young journalist that called her to the attention of the then Secretary
of the Interior, Harold Ickes. Gruber’s life defining moment came in
1944 when Mr. Ickes, impressed by her work, asked her to take on a
special and dangerous mission: secretly escorting a group of 1,000
refugees from Italy to America. Later, while in Jerusalem she learned of
a former American pleasure boat, renamed the Exodus, which had been
attempting to deliver 4,500 Jewish refugees. Her moving photographs
and stories of these events remain an important chronicle of Jewish history.
In her latest work, Witness: One of the Great Correspondents
of the Twentieth Century Tells Her Story,
Gruber writes about what she saw and shows us,
through her haunting and life-affirming photographs—taken
on each of her assignments—the
worlds, the people, the landscapes, the courage, the
hope, the life she witnessed up close and firsthand.
AMERICAN JEWISH STUDIES
Celebrate 350 Award
Winner:
WE REMEMBER WITH REVERENCE
AND LOVE: AMERICAN JEWS AND
THE MYTH OF SILENCE AFTER THE
HOLOCAUST, 1945–1962
Hasia R. Diner
New York University Press
In We Remember with Reverence and Love,
Hasia Diner singlehandedly topples a
central pillar in our understanding of
American Jewish behavior in the years following
the Holocaust. In a book that will
profoundly alter debate and discussion
about post-war American Jewry, Diner demonstrates that far from
sublimating the tragedy until the 1960’s as many previous historical
accounts would have us believe, in the years immediately following the
end of the war American Jews went to great lengths to mourn and
memorialize their fallen kin, succor struggling survivors, educate
themselves and the American public, and confront the perpetrators of
the tragedy. Diner convinces us that this was not a marginal phenomenon
within the American Jewish world. Jews and Jewish organizations
across the religious, social, and political spectrum engaged with
the Holocaust in a variety of meaningful ways. In compelling and pas-
6 Jewish Book World Spring 5770/2010
sionate prose, Diner reveals that memory of the Holocaust came to
infuse American Jewish life, present in its poetry and popular culture,
its polemics and internal debates, and in its post-war worldview and
programs of political action. The author marshals a vast quantity of
new and exhaustively gathered evidence from numerous untapped
sources—summer camp journals, archival records of landsmanschaftn
and sisterhood groups, sermons, and speeches—capturing
the voices of a generation that sought to
remember it with reverence and love. This monumental
volume shows incontrovertibly that our
understanding of American Jewish post-war response
to the Holocaust has not only been wrong, but
extraordinarily and unfairly so.
Finalists:
ORTHODOX JEWS IN AMERICA
Jeffrey S. Gurock
Indiana University Press
Agreat story teller, Professor Gurock
masterfully tells the tale of how Jews
in America fashioned an Orthodox lifestyle
that both mirrored and shaped their understanding
of themselves as American Jews.
What did it mean to be an Orthodox Jew
in America—as a young Jewish mother in a
small town without reliably kosher food, a
peddler traveling long distances by foot to
make it to synagogue for Yom Kippur, or a businessperson socializing
with Gentile colleagues? Weaving together personal narrative, anecdotes,
sermons, and social observations in this richly textured book,
Gurock paints a fascinating picture of the variety of Orthodox behavior,
belief, and aspirations. Readers will gain a deeper understanding of
how each generation of Orthodox Jews established institutions and
norms that they hoped would enable them to flourish in America while
ensuring Jewish survival. Gurock also demonstrates
how outside forces, such as feminism, compel Orthodox
Jews to constantly redefine and reimagine the
extent to which modern culture and religious life can
be compatible. Gurock’s work is an enormously valuable
contribution to the field by American Orthodoxy’s
preeminent historian.
JEWISH IMMIGRANTS AND AMERICAN CAPITALISM,
1880–1920: FROM CASTE TO CLASS
Eli Lederhendler
Cambridge University Press
Eli Lederhendler’s bracing scholarly study challenges much of what we
thought we knew about East European Jewish immigration to the
United States. Jews, Lederhendler argues, brought little in the way of
human capital with them from the Old World. Characteristics like Jews’
middle class affinities and left-liberal biases, that others trace back to Eastern
Europe, he shows to be “at the most, sets of acquired ideas that developed
among Jews in the United States after immigration.” For Lederhendler,
economics, rather than identity, culture, or politics propels the
story of Jewish immigration forward. By focusing on the economic discontinuities
between Eastern Europe and the United States, he sheds new light
on the uniqueness of the American Jewish experience as a whole.
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