Members of the Tribe: Native America in the Jewish Imagination

Acknowledgments

f vii f Acknowledgments This project began as a dissertation in the Department of English and American Literature and Language at Harvard University, and I thank those who saw it into and through its first incarnation: teachers Lawrence Buell, Marcus Moseley, David Roskies, and Marc Shell and mentors and advisors Sacvan Bercovitch, Elisa New, Werner Sollors, and Ruth Wisse. I also thank members of the American literature graduate student colloquium for their careful and generous responses to early chapters. I am deeply grateful to colleagues who read and responded to the project in its later phases and who gave so very generously of their time and advice: Jonathan Freedman, Daniel Itzkovitz, Olga Litvak, Alyssa Quint, Lise Sanders, Marita Sturken, Alan Trachtenberg, Donald Weber, and my readers and editors at Wayne State University Press, whose careful, insightful comments were invaluable. For the past six years, I have had the good fortune to teach at Hampshire College, and I am grateful to students and colleagues here for their insights, interest, and support. I thank my colleagues in the Schools of Humanities, Arts, and Cultural Studies, and in Social Science, especially Aaron Berman, Michele Hardesty, Alan Hodder, L. Brown Kennedy, Karen Koehler, Rebecca Miller, Lise Sanders, Eric Schocket (still sorely missed), Susan Tracy, James Wald, as well as the organizers and participants in our faculty seminars in which I have had the opportunity to present and talk about my work. I would like to thank students and research assistants Debra Caplan, Kari Collins, and Evan Silberman. I would also like to thank my Five College colleagues in CISA: Center for Crossroads in the Study of the Americas, where I first presented my viii f acknowledgments work as a new fellow several years ago. For their attention and interest in my work and for so many enormously helpful conversations, I thank colleagues in the wider academic community: Aviva Ben-Ur, David Biale, Jules Chametzky, Judith Friedlander, Janet Hadda, Daniel Horowitz, Stephen Katz, Rebecca Kobrin, Arnold Krupat, Jack Kugelmass, Julian Levinson, Ezra Mendelsohn, Alan Mintz, Yaron Peleg (he may not remember, but a casual comment from him at a conference was what started everything), Gabriella Safran, Jonathan Schorsch, Jeffrey Shandler, David Shneer, Eliza Slavet, Eric Sundquist, and Hana Wirth-Nesher. This list could go on, and I apologize if I have neglected to mention everyone by name. An earlier version of chapter 3 appeared in American Quarterly, and an earlier version of chapter 4 appeared in Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies. In addition, a number of institutions have provided support, materials, and resources for my research. The Mellon Foundation, Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, and National Foundation for Jewish Culture all provided support for the project in its dissertation phase. I am grateful to Widener and Houghton libraries, the New York Public Library, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, the American Jewish Historical Society, the Jewish National and University Library in Jerusalem, the libraries of the Five Colleges, and the National Yiddish Book Center, where I gathered materials for this work. I am grateful for the generous support of the Littauer Foundation and Hampshire College’s faculty development grants in preparing the manuscript for publication. I am also grateful to the Jeremiah Kaplan Family Foundation and the Posen Foundation for the Study of Secular Jewish History and Culture for supporting Jewish studies at Hampshire and thus offering me an intellectual home. And finally, I would like to thank my family, especially Dannah Rubinstein, an ideal travel companion and field researcher, and my parents, Boris and Halina Rubinstein, aunt Annette Rubinstein and uncle Alexis Arroyo, for information on our family history. Most important, I am indebted beyond words to Justin Cammy, my partner in all things, for our beautiful family and for unstinting love, advice, and guidance. ...