Bringing Zion Home

Demonstrates how American Jews used culture—art, dance, music, fashion, literature—to win the hearts and minds of postwar Americans to the cause of Israel. Bringing Zion Home examines the role of culture in the establishment of the “special relationship” between the United States and Israel in the immediate postwar decades. Many American Jews first encountered Israel through their roles as tastemakers, consumers, and cultural impresarios—that is, by writing and reading about Israel; dancing Israeli folk dances; promoting and purchasing Israeli goods; and presenting Israeli art and music. It was precisely by means of these cultural practices, argues Emily Alice Katz, that American Jews insisted on Israel’s “natural” place in American culture, a phenomenon that continues to shape America’s relationship with Israel today. Katz shows that American Jews’ promotion and consumption of Israel in the cultural realm was bound up with multiple agendas, including the quest for Jewish authenticity in a postimmigrant milieu and the desire of upwardly mobile Jews to polish their status in American society. And, crucially, as influential cultural and political elites positioned “culture” as both an engine of American dominance and as a purveyor of peace in the Cold War, many of Israel’s American Jewish impresarios proclaimed publicly that cultural patronage of and exchange with Israel advanced America’s interests in the Middle East and helped spread the “American way” in the postwar world. Bringing Zion Home is the first book to shine a light squarely upon the role and importance of Israel in the arts, popular culture, and material culture of postwar America.

Demonstrates how American Jews used culture—art, dance, music, fashion, literature—to win the hearts and minds of postwar Americans to the cause of Israel. Bringing Zion Home examines the role of culture in the establishment of the “special relationship” between the United States and Israel in the immediate postwar decades. Many American Jews first encountered Israel through their roles as tastemakers, consumers, and cultural impresarios—that is, by writing and reading about Israel; dancing Israeli folk dances; promoting and purchasing Israeli goods; and presenting Israeli art and music. It was precisely by means of these cultural practices, argues Emily Alice Katz, that American Jews insisted on Israel’s “natural” place in American culture, a phenomenon that continues to shape America’s relationship with Israel today. Katz shows that American Jews’ promotion and consumption of Israel in the cultural realm was bound up with multiple agendas, including the quest for Jewish authenticity in a postimmigrant milieu and the desire of upwardly mobile Jews to polish their status in American society. And, crucially, as influential cultural and political elites positioned “culture” as both an engine of American dominance and as a purveyor of peace in the Cold War, many of Israel’s American Jewish impresarios proclaimed publicly that cultural patronage of and exchange with Israel advanced America’s interests in the Middle East and helped spread the “American way” in the postwar world. Bringing Zion Home is the first book to shine a light squarely upon the role and importance of Israel in the arts, popular culture, and material culture of postwar America. Emily Alice Katz teaches history at the University of California, Irvine.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1869.

For twentieth-century Jewish immigrants and their children attempting to gain full access to American society, performative masculinity was a tool of acculturation. However, as scholar Miriam Eve Mora demonstrates, this performance is consistently challenged by American mainstream society that holds Jewish men outside of the American ideal of masculinity. Depicted as weak, effeminate, cowardly, gentle, bookish, or conflict-averse, Jewish men have been ascribed these qualities by outside forces, but some have also intentionally subscribed themselves to masculinities at odds with the American mainstream. Carrying a Big Schtick dissects notions of Jewish masculinity and its perception and practice in America in the twentieth century through the lenses of immigration and cultural history. Tracing Jewish masculinity through major themes and events including both World Wars, the Holocaust, American Zionism, Israeli statehood, and the Six-Day War, this work establishes that the struggle of this process can shed light on the changing dynamics in religious, social, and economic American Jewish life.

Realizing how little control we have over our lives can make us fearful and anxious--or it can lead to greater intimacy with God, a richer prayer life, and a joyful eternal perspective. Seasons of grief, pain, and loss of control are inevitable. Despite our best efforts and steadfast faith, reality rarely matches our expectations. In an unpredictable and broken world, how do we cling to a foundation that provides purpose for today and hope for the future? In their new book, Beyond Our Control, Michael and Lauren McAfee show us how trusting God brings greater contentment than the illusion of control. With deep and abiding faith, the McAfees draw on their experiences with adoption, infertility, illness, and loss to help readers navigate unexpected circumstances. Offering biblical insights and their powerful story of pain and providence, Michael and Lauren know that no matter what happens--to their family, work, or ministry--everything is as it should be because God is in control, and he is good. The McAfees help us: recognize the illusion of control and how it leads to greater anxiety; understand why glorifying God is the richest expectation we can have for our lives; realize that Jesus' pain on the cross brings hope and healing to the pain we experience now; practice the profoundly comforting spiritual discipline of lament, which makes room for us to process grief; and use times of loss to make more room for God's work of growing and sanctifying us. If you struggle to embrace the life you have rather than the life you wanted, this book invites you to find a deeper peace in God than you could have imagined.

A collection of fifteen articles by colleagues and former students of Professor Willis of Abilene Christian University. The papers deal with the topic of worship from a variety of perspectives and, in different connections, with the life and thought of ancient Israel. These include the participation of foreigners in the worship of ancient Israel, the prophetic critique of the cult, the tradition of the construction of the Jerusalem temple, women and prayer in the Deutero-canonical literature, various ethical aspects of worship and the value placed on the internal dynamics of worship offered to God, the Psalms and ancient Near Eastern mourning customs, and some of the implications of the Old Testament tradition regarding worship for contemporary communities of faith. A select bibliography of Willis's writings is also included.

Examines the changing meanings Americans invested in their country's intensifying relationship with Israel from the 1950s to the 1980s.