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The field of American Jewish studies has recently trained its focus on the transnational dimensions of its subject, reflecting in more sustained ways than before about the theories and methods of this approach. Yet, much of the insight to be gained from seeing American Jewry as constitutively entangled in many ways with other Jewries has not yet been realized. Transnational American Jewish studies are still in their infancy.
This issue of PaRDeS presents current research on the multiple entanglements of American with Central European, especially German-speaking Jewries in the 19th and 20th centuries. The articles reflect the wide range of topics that can benefit from a transnational understanding of the American Jewish experience as shaped by its foreign entanglements.
Schools are a major context for academic and socio-emotional development, but
also an important acculturative context. This is notably the case in adolescence,
which is a critical period for the development of a social and ethnic identity, as
well as moral reasoning and intergroup attitudes. How schools approach cultural
diversity issues is therefore likely to affect these developmental and acculturative
processes and adaptation outcomes. In the present article, the manifestation
and effects of the most prominent approaches to cultural diversity, namely
those guided by a perspective of equality and inclusion, and those guided by
a perspective of cultural pluralism, are reviewed and compared in the context
of multi-ethnic schools. The aim is to explore when and how the potential of
cultural diversity can best flourish, enhancing the academic and socio-emotional
development of culturally diverse students.
A Secular Tradition
(2021)
This article focuses on the social philosopher Horace Kallen and the revisions he made to the concept of cultural pluralism that he first developed in the early 20th century, applying it to postwar America and the young State of Israel. It shows how he opposed the assumption that the United States’ social order was based on a “Judeo-Christian tradition.” By constructing pluralism as a civil religion and carving out space for secular self-understandings in midcentury America, Kallen attempted to preserve the integrity of his earlier political visions, developed during World War I, of pluralist societies in the United States and Palestine within an internationalist global order. While his perspective on the State of Israel was largely shaped by his American experiences, he revised his approach to politically functionalizing religious traditions as he tested his American understanding of a secular, pluralist society against the political theology effective in the State of Israel. The trajectory of Kallen’s thought points to fundamental questions about the compatibility of American and Israeli understandings of religion’s function in society and its relation to political belonging, especially in light of their transnational connection through American Jewish support for the recently established state.