TY - JOUR A1 - Krah, Markus T1 - Further foward thriugh the past BT - postwar American jews reconfigue the east European tradition in cultural terms JF - Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies N2 - From the 1940s well into the 1960s, a new sociocultural constellation let American Jews redefine their relationship to the religious tradition. This article analyzes the response of a religious elite of rabbis and intellectuals to this process, which was driven by various factors. Many American Jews were at least one generation away from traditional Judaism, which seemed out of place in postwar America. Liberal Judaism, with its narrow concept of religion, on the other hand, while fitting a larger social consensus, did not satiate many Jews' spiritual and identity needs. Sensing this deficit, rabbis and other religious thinkers explored broader concepts of Judaism. Religious journals that sprang up in the postwar decades served as vehicles for the attempt to understand Judaism in broader, cultural terms, while preserving a religious core. The article shows how in this search religious thinkers turned to the Eastern European past as a resource. As other groups similarly tried to mine this past for the sake of their present agendas, its reconstruction became a key process in the transformation of postwar American Judaism and its relationship to the tradition. Y1 - 2018 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1353/sho.2017.0027 SN - 0882-8539 SN - 1534-5165 VL - 35 SP - 111 EP - 131 PB - Purdue University Press CY - West Lafayette ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Krah, Markus T1 - Clinging to Borders and Boundaries? BT - The (Sorry) State of Transnational American Jewish Studies JF - American Jewish History Y1 - 2017 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1353/ajh.2017.0066 SN - 0164-0178 SN - 1086-3141 VL - 101 IS - 4 SP - 519 EP - 533 PB - Johns Hopkins Univ. Press CY - Baltimore ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Krah, Markus T1 - Further forward through the past BT - Postwar American jews reconfigure the East European tradition in cultural terms JF - Shofar : an interdisciplinary journal of Jewish studies N2 - From the 1940s well into the 1960s, a new sociocultural constellation let American Jews redefine their relationship to the religious tradition. This article analyzes the response of a religious elite of rabbis and intellectuals to this process, which was driven by various factors. Many American Jews were at least one generation away from traditional Judaism, which seemed out of place in postwar America. Liberal Judaism, with its narrow concept of religion, on the other hand, while fitting a larger social consensus, did not satiate many Jews' spiritual and identity needs. Sensing this deficit, rabbis and other religious thinkers explored broader concepts of Judaism. Religious journals that sprang up in the postwar decades served as vehicles for the attempt to understand Judaism in broader, cultural terms, while preserving a religious core. The article shows how in this search religious thinkers turned to the Eastern European past as a resource. As other groups similarly tried to mine this past for the sake of their present agendas, its reconstruction became a key process in the transformation of postwar American Judaism and its relationship to the tradition. Y1 - 2017 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1353/sho.2017.0027 SN - 0882-8539 SN - 0882-8539 VL - 35 IS - 4 SP - 111 EP - 131 PB - Purdue University Press CY - Ashland ER - TY - GEN A1 - Gallas, Elisabeth A1 - Hieke, Anton A1 - Jünger, David A1 - Kleinecke, Ulrike A1 - Krah, Markus T1 - Introduction: "Re-Framing American Jewish History and Thought: New Transnational Perspectives," Potsdam (Germany), July 20-22, 2016 T2 - American Jewish History N2 - In recent years, “transnationalism” has become a key concept for historians and other scholars in the humanities and social sciences. However, its overuse threatens to dilute what would otherwise be a distinct approach with promising heuristic potential. This danger seems especially pronounced when the notion of transnationalism is applied to Jewish history, which, paradoxically, most scholars would agree, is at its core transnational. Many studies have analyzed how Jewries in different times and places, from the biblical era to the present, have been shaped by people, ideas, texts, and institutions that migrated across state lines and between cultures. So what is new about transnationalism in Jewish Studies? What new insights does it offer? American Jewry offers an obvious arena to test transnationalism’s significance as an approach to historical research within Jewish studies. As a “nation of nations,” the United States is made up of a distinct and unique society, built on ideas of diversity and pluralism, and transcending old European concepts of nation and state. The transformative incorporation in American life of cultural, political, and social traditions brought from abroad is one feature of this distinctiveness. American Jewish history and culture, in particular, are best understood in the context of interaction with Jews in other places, both because of American Jews’ roots in and continued entanglement with Europe, and because of their differences from other Jews. These considerations guided the participants in a roundtable that formed a prologue to an international conference held July 20–22, 2016, at the School of Jewish Theology at the University of Potsdam and the Center for Jewish Studies Berlin-Brandenburg, Germany. The conference title, “Re-Framing American Jewish History and Thought: New Transnational Perspectives,” indicated the organizers’ conviction that the transnational approach does have the potential to shed fresh light on the American Jewish experience. The participants were asked to bring their experiences to the table, in an effort to clarify what transnationalism might mean for American Jewish Studies, and where it might yield new approaches and insights. The conference brought together some thirty scholars of various disciplines from Europe, Israel, and the United States. In addition to exploring a relatively new approach (at least, in the field of American Jewish Studies), the conference also served a second purpose: to further the interest in American Jewry as a subject of scholarly attention in countries outside the U.S., where the topic has been curiously neglected. The assumption underlying the conference was that a transnational perspective on American Jewry would bring to bear the particular interests and skills of scholars working outside the American academy, and thereby complement, rather than replicate, the ways American Jewish Studies have been pursued in North America itself. Y1 - 2017 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1353/ajh.2017.0065 SN - 0164-0178 SN - 1086-3141 VL - 101 IS - 4 SP - 517 EP - 518 PB - Johns Hopkins University Press CY - Baltimore ER -