Here at MyJewishLearning, we’re always looking for new ways to serve you better…See that? My first week here, and I’m already saying “we.” It’s been a flurry of activity here all week, and we (see? “we” again) have a bunch of new articles. I just thought I’d give them a shout-out and some excess verbiage here.
- The Eichmann Trial details the heroic capture and subsequent public trial of the “architect of the Holocaust,” and the only death sentence ever to be carried out by the State of Israel.
- Daniel Soyer lays out the foundations for Jewish Socialism in the United States, 1880-1920 as he expounds on the first huge wave of Russian and German Jewish migration and talks about how factory jobs led Jews to organize and start groups like the Arbeter-Ring and papers like the Jewish Daily Forward.
- The Jewish Socialist movement reaches its climax and heaves its dying sigh in Jewish Socialism in the United States, 1920-1948 as anti-Communist fervor peaks, the split between Socialists and Communists draws a wedge in the movement, and, let’s face it, some Jews start to get richer.
- The Fall of Communism elaborates on the rise of glastnost and the airlifting of hundreds of thousands of Russian Jews to Israel and America…and the culture that was left behind.
- Patrilineal Descent lays out the Reform Movement’s landmark 1983 decision to follow either the mother’s or father’s lineage when deciding whether a child needs to convert in order to be considered Jewish.
- David Ben Gurion – the late-first-wave Zionist settler (he arrived in Palestine in 1906) who became a workers’-rights activist and, eventually, prime minister of Israel. (Quick question: who has the more iconic hair: Ben Gurion or Einstein?)
- American Jews at the Turn of the Century finds the Children of Israel landing in the USA–taking part in the early-1900s agricultural and industrial settling, finding their niches and neighborhoods in urban centers, and establishing what would become the century’s three main Jewish denominations.
- American Jewish Life, 1980-2000 asks the question: once Jews are fully integrated into almost every aspect of the US life, now what? Shlomo Carlebach reaches out to a generation of spiritual seekers. The Lubavitcher Rebbe makes sure that Jews will have a helping hand nearly anywhere in the world. Joe Lieberman, an Orthodox Jew, becomes the first Jewish vice-presidential candidate. The Conservative movement ordains its first rabbi, and Blu Greenberg starts the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance.
