Rachel Gordan | University of Florida (original) (raw)

Reviews by Rachel Gordan

The Jewish Metropolis, 2021

https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9781644694909-013/html

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American Literary History, 2020

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Review of Dianne Ashton's The Hanukkah Dilemma

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Review of Lila Corwin Berman's Metropolitan Jews: Politics, Race, and Religion in Postwar Detroit

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Jews, religion and American culture by Rachel Gordan

Association of Jewish Studies Review, 2021

In recent years, scholars have offered valuable critiques of American Jewish exceptionalism that ... more In recent years, scholars have offered valuable critiques of American Jewish exceptionalism that reveal the historical inaccuracy of an exceptionalist scholarly framework. However, as this essay explains, untethering Jewish studies scholarship completely from exceptionalism discourse may risk overlooking the prevalence of these beliefs and what they tell us about those who propagated them. Exceptionalism does not need to be historically accurate for it to warrant attention from scholars. Nor must scholars approve of exceptionalism, or deem it a positive, for it to be a worthy subject of study. Scholars may indeed view American Jewish exceptionalism as a fantasy that prevents believers from seeing the reality-in particular the problems-of their situation, but the fact that this fantasy had so many fervent espousers should make it a matter of interest. Examining the trail of American Jewish exceptionalist voices reveals the multiple ways these voices have been deployed.

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Religion and American Culture, 2021

This article examines the anti-antisemitism novels of the 1940s as an indication of the decade's ... more This article examines the anti-antisemitism novels of the 1940s as an indication of the decade's changing attitudes toward Jews, antisemitism, and religious pluralism, and so contributes to scholarly research on both social protest literature and mid-twentieth-century American religious culture. Recent scholarship has shown that American Jews responded to the Holocaust earlier than had previously been assumed. The anti-antisemitism novels of the 1940s were one of the popular culture arenas in which this response to the horrors of Nazi Germany occurred, as fiction proved an ideal genre for imagining and presenting possible solutions to the problem of antisemitism. These solutions often involved a change from a racial to a religious conception of Jews. Laura Z. Hobson's Gentleman's Agreement (1947) was the most culturally significant of this 1940s genre of anti-antisemitism novels (a subgenre of social protest literature), in part because of its foregrounding of non-Jewish responses to antisemitism. Archival research into the roots of Hobson's novel reveals that news of other female authors writing popular anti-antisemitism fiction encouraged Hobson, allowing Hobson to feel part of a movement of anti-antisemitism writers that would eventually extend to her readers, as demonstrated by readers’ letters. Although Will Herberg's Protestant, Catholic, Jew (1955) is frequently cited as the midcentury book that heralded a postwar shift toward religious pluralism, the anti-antisemitism novels of the 1940s reveal signs of this shift a decade earlier.

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Scholars of postwar American Jewish history have traditionally focused on highbrow texts in chart... more Scholars of postwar American Jewish history have traditionally focused on highbrow texts in charting the shifting ways that “Jews,” as a category, has been defined and characterized. Including postwar middlebrow publications in our analysis offers a more comprehensive picture of the changing discursive representation of Jews during the twentieth century. Despite the fact that Gentleman’s Agreement rarely receives more than a line or two of mention in scholarly accounts of postwar Jews, it is a text that ably demonstrates the power that popular novels wield in shaping cultural sensibilities. Hobson was not the only 1940s novelist to publish an anti-Semitism themed novel, and her connection to a larger body of such literature contributes to the value of Gentleman’s Agreement. The novel’s best-selling status (and its adaptation into an Academy Award-winning film) is what makes it exceptional among this genre. The making of Gentleman’s Agreement, with all of the debate and opposition it aroused, indicated tectonic shifts within publishing circles and the wider American culture about how to treat the topic of Jews and anti-Semitism.

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The Jewish Metropolis, 2021

https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9781644694909-013/html

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American Literary History, 2020

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Review of Dianne Ashton's The Hanukkah Dilemma

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Review of Lila Corwin Berman's Metropolitan Jews: Politics, Race, and Religion in Postwar Detroit

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Association of Jewish Studies Review, 2021

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Religion and American Culture, 2021

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In 1957, the sociologist Nathan Glazer’s book American Judaism w as published in the University o... more In 1957, the sociologist Nathan Glazer’s book American Judaism
w as published in the University of Chicago's History of American Civilization series, setting it alongside studies of American Protestantism and American Catholicism . T he inclusion o f the book reflected a shift in American perceptions of Ju d a ism , and Glazer reacted with surprise to this offer of a seat at the table of American postwar religions. As he wrote in the introduction, he found it incredible that “the Jewish group, which through most of the history of the United States has form ed an insignificant
percentage of the American people, has com e to be granted the status of a ‘most favored religion.’” He identified a central paradox of the cultural moment in which he was writing —that Judaism had rather suddenly gained popularity as a religion, even though according to him it fit awkwardly within that category. Unlike other religions, Glazer wrote, “Judaism is tied up organically with a specific people, indeed a nation." So strong was this association, he noted, that “the word Jew ’ in common usage refers ambiguously both to an adherent of the religion of Judaism
and to a member of the Jewish people.” Glazer’s study probed the implications of the midcentury shift from the idea of J e w s as a “race ” (with its strong associations with “people” and “nation") to a "religion.”

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Ajs Review-the Journal of The Association for Jewish Studies, Apr 1, 2020

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The Journal of American History, Jun 1, 2020

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Studies in American Jewish Literature (1981-)

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History: Reviews of New Books, 2018

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Studies in American Jewish Literature (1981-)

Does The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel have antecedents in American Jewish literature? The Sherman-Pallad... more Does The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel have antecedents in American Jewish literature? The Sherman-Palladino creation has been compared with the work of comedians Joan Rivers and Jean Carroll, but novelist Herman Wouk’s 1955 character, Marjorie Morningstar, offers another compelling source of inspiration that sheds light on what makes Maisel true to her midcentury moment, and how the character is more of a twenty-first-century creation.

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Religion and American Culture, 2021

This article examines the anti-antisemitism novels of the 1940s as an indication of the decade&#3... more This article examines the anti-antisemitism novels of the 1940s as an indication of the decade's changing attitudes toward Jews, antisemitism, and religious pluralism, and so contributes to scholarly research on both social protest literature and mid-twentieth-century American religious culture. Recent scholarship has shown that American Jews responded to the Holocaust earlier than had previously been assumed. The anti-antisemitism novels of the 1940s were one of the popular culture arenas in which this response to the horrors of Nazi Germany occurred, as fiction proved an ideal genre for imagining and presenting possible solutions to the problem of antisemitism. These solutions often involved a change from a racial to a religious conception of Jews. Laura Z. Hobson's Gentleman's Agreement (1947) was the most culturally significant of this 1940s genre of anti-antisemitism novels (a subgenre of social protest literature), in part because of its foregrounding of non-Jewish...

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AJS Review, 2021

In recent years, scholars have offered valuable critiques of American Jewish exceptionalism that ... more In recent years, scholars have offered valuable critiques of American Jewish exceptionalism that reveal the historical inaccuracy of an exceptionalist scholarly framework. However, as this essay explains, untethering Jewish studies scholarship completely from exceptionalism discourse may risk overlooking the prevalence of these beliefs and what they tell us about those who propagated them. Exceptionalism does not need to be historically accurate for it to warrant attention from scholars. Nor must scholars approve of exceptionalism, or deem it a positive, for it to be a worthy subject of study. Scholars may indeed view American Jewish exceptionalism as a fantasy that prevents believers from seeing the reality—in particular the problems—of their situation, but the fact that this fantasy had so many fervent espousers should make it a matter of interest. Examining the trail of American Jewish exceptionalist voices reveals the multiple ways these voices have been deployed.

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American Jewish History, 2018

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Contemporary Jewry, 2016

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AJS Review, 2016

is a vanishingly small part of the latter. The difference between what was observed by Westerners... more is a vanishingly small part of the latter. The difference between what was observed by Westerners and what was experienced by Jews is also important for the people who are the subject of this book. After September 1, 1939, when Germany invaded Poland, about a quarter million Jews fled to eastern Poland. When the Soviet Union invaded Poland on September 17, 1939, these people found themselves under Soviet rule. When asked if they would take Soviet citizenship, most Jews declined since they expected to return to their lives in Poland after the war. In June 1940 about 60,000 Polish Jewish refugees from Nazi rule were deported to the gulag for declining Soviet documents. Polish Jews who were native to eastern Poland had already been deported to the gulag that February and April on other grounds. After the Soviet NKVD murdered over a thousand Jewish officers of the Polish army at Katyn and four other sites, their wives, children, and parents were deported to the gulag. All in all perhaps 85,000 Polish Jews were deported the gulag, chiefly to Kazakhstan and Siberia. At the end of the war, Jews who had been Polish citizens were unwelcome in the USSR. Stone is right that the Soviets and their Eastern European clients wanted more Jews in DP camps since this put pressure on the British to open Palestine to Jewish settlement, an objective of Soviet foreign policy. The “largest influx of Jews” to the DP camps, as Stone records, were “Polish returnees from Soviet exile” (180). It seems possible that more Jews in the DP camps had a Soviet experience of war than a German one. Stone catches an element of that Soviet story when he notes that, upon returning from the USSR to their prewar homes, Polish Jews were often met with violence. The particular sadness of this is that such people realized simultaneously that their family and friends had been killed and that they themselves were not welcome. Yet since their Soviet wartime experience is missing, a chapter of the Jewish history of liberation remains to be written.

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Choice Reviews Online, 2009

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Jewish Social Studies, 2014

Until the work of William Masters and Virginia Johnson, which explored the science of the individ... more Until the work of William Masters and Virginia Johnson, which explored the science of the individual’s sexual response, Alfred Kinsey’s work on sexual behavior in males and females, which described population behavior, was not only the landmark reference on sexology but also the source of tremendous and varied reaction among moral leaders in America. In spite of the common moral ground implied by the newly popular “Judeo-Christian tradition,” Jewish and Christian responses to Kinsey revealed fundamental differences in attitude. Christians felt generally threatened, whereas some Jews found much that affirmed their traditions. Substituting Nazi ideology’s stereotypes of the carnal Jew (a stereotype with an ancient tradition) with an image of the sexually inhibited Jewish male, Kinsey’s portrayal of the Jewish approach to sex was almost as damning as what it replaced. Yet rather than attack Kinsey, a few Modern Orthodox voices used the occasion of his popularity as an opportunity to champion a Jewish approach to sex that spoke as much to Cold War heteronormativity as it did to post-Holocaust desires for a vital Orthodox Judaism.

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Writing It! The Podcast About Academics & Writing

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