The Jews of the United States form the largest concentration of Diaspora Jewry: a body as diverse as it is creative, one that has passed “from the margins to influence” — as the subtitle of Françoise Ouzan’s book, whose article opens this issue of PLURIELLES, puts it.
A way of placing in perspective the exceptional destiny of a population settled in the United States for more than two hundred and fifty years. It was this passage from past to present that we wished to undertake, evoking the mutations and recompositions of this Judaism, its shadows and its lights.
We did not wish to compile an encyclopedia, but rather to offer a living approach to the currents that animate “American Jews.”
The bulk of Jewish immigration took place from the end of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth. And so the traces of their European origin long marked American Jews, shaping their memory and their imagination; but these traces are also, and above all, present in their relationship to the Yiddish language, of which the United States was an important hearth.
The “Rosh Hashanah Letters” of Sholem Aleichem — whom America always fascinated, with much ambivalence, and where, moreover, he died — open the historical section of the dossier. These letters, with a quite particular humor, illustrate well the process of integration into American society, in particular through the (of course deliberate) presence of numerous English terms within the Yiddish, a linguistic cocktail practiced by immigrants of every origin. Describing the same movement that, sometimes within a single generation, leads from the immigrant tailor’s sweatshop to the office of the psychoanalyst or the university professor, the Forverts — a Yiddish daily founded in 1897 by Abe Cahan, whose fascinating life, devoted to the service of the Jewish laboring masses, is evoked by Carole Ksiazenicer-Matheron — belatedly became a weekly, the Forward, in English; a Yiddish supplement nevertheless survives in it.
America also fascinated the father of psychoanalysis, and Hélène Oppenheim-Gluckman recounts the journey he undertook to help implant psychoanalysis in America.
A darker face of the Jewish presence in the United States, recounted by the historian Jacques Solé: the prostitution of Jewish women, “imported” from the European shtetls at the beginning of the twentieth century on the deceptive promise of lifting them out of the misery that was the lot of the Jewish masses in Eastern Europe, particularly in Russia and Poland. One might mention in the same vein the Jewish gangsterism that flourished in New York at that period.
The modes of expression of, and belonging to, Judaism have evolved over time, and today affiliations and denominations are varied. This is what is illustrated by Stephen Berkovitz’s contribution on the one hand, and by the articles of Nicole Lapierre and Lewis Gordon on the other: Jewish identity itself has become complex and manifold.
The same holds for the political expressions of Jews in the United States. Celia Belin’s article on “J Street versus AIPAC” shows us the beginnings of an inflection in the positions of American Jews on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
We are also publishing, at the end of this issue, the JCall appeal (a Jewish Call for Reason, www.jcall.eu), an appeal launched by European Jews that nearly 8,000 people have signed.
Culture — literature as much as cinema or music — bears witness to the vitality of this American Judaism. Thus are studied the English-language work of Cynthia Ozick, to which Rachel Ertel devotes an article; the Yiddish works of Lamed Shapiro, analyzed by Daniel Oppenheim — that Yiddish which still survives in unexpected fashion in certain parts of the United States, such as the Texas evoked by Alan Astro. The article devoted to Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus by Guido Furci testifies to the social integration of Jews in the United States. The image of the Jew has entered American television series, as Nathalie Azoulai shows us apropos of Mad Men. Finally, cinema — through the work of James Gray, studied by Anissia Bouillot — allows another approach to the Jewish presence in the United States, to its incredible creativity, notably in music, both formerly on Broadway and more recently with the birth of the Radical Jewish Culture movement, studied by Mathias Dreyfuss and Raphaël Sigal, who were the curators of the exhibition of the same name held in Paris at the Musée d’art et d’histoire du judaïsme.
The diversity of this Judaism is likewise recounted to us in three testimonies: the autobiographical one of Henri Lewi, and those of Alan Sandomir and Marc Marder, in interviews conducted by Nadine Vasseur.
This issue closes with two studies: one, on “The Conservative International and Israel,” by Philippe Velilla, who had given us in the previous issue of Plurielles a study on “Obama, the Jews, and Israel” — worth rereading to round out our dossier.
Finally, a tribute is paid by Rachel Ertel to the great Yiddish-language poet Avrom Sutzkever, who passed away a year ago.
Happy reading!