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164 SHOFAR Winter 1997 Vol. 15, No.2 The,Wonders ofAmerica: Reinventing]ewish Culture, 1880-1950, by Jenna WeissmanJoselit. New York: Hill and Wang, 1994. 349 pp. $23.00. While cultural studies have for some time now been the vanguard of scholarship in other fields of history, such new and creative explorations of the Jewish past are just emerging in modern Jewish historiography. Jenna Weissman Joselit, who previously reclaimed from the American Jewish past its criminals, Orthodox, camps, and homes-the latter two in landmark museum exhibits-has now written a major book about the shaping of American Jewish bourgeois culture. Reading not only the customary texts of historians-memoirs, sermons, the Anglo-Jewish and Yiddish presses-she has also pored over games, dolls, and toys; clothes, furniture, and kiddush cups; soup cans and soap labels-to produce an innovative construction of the encounter between Judaism and America in the years 1880-1950. In seven tightly organized chapters, she moves from the kissing business of courtship and marriage to the joys of parenting (largely mothering), to b'nai mitzvah and confirmations, the red-letter Jewish days in the lives of these families. Along the way she stops to ponder what made their homes, their stomachs, and their celebrations Jewish, before concluding with how this emerging bourgeoisie bade farewell to those departing this world for the next. The book's strengths lie in its richly nuanced portrait of American Jewish domestic culture, the author's graceful prose, and the evocative photographs and advertisements illustrating her discourse. Surely, this work should resonate among a much broader audience than the academic world if for nothing more than its tracing the cliche of the overbearing Jewish mother to social science literature. Moreover, observers of today's American Jewish life are sure to be struck, as I was, by contemporary counterpoints. In the era Joselit explores, the construction of a sukkah "clashed head-on with the realities of modern life" (p. 243). But readers ofcurrentAmericanJews with their sukkah-building kits and rabbis' railing against children "sukkah-hopping" for candy will appreciate the fluidity of this culture-in-the-making. This same fluidity, however, also makes for the book's flaw, insufficient attention to the chronological shifts in this evolving culture. Joselit's theme and time period are broad. Thus, while we do learn that only after World War I did gift-giving become a major part of Chanukah celebrations, we are also told that a generation ,after the 1920s "vinually all" Jews attending a Sabbath service "were women" (p. 253). Yet the evidence supporting this, a turn-of-the-century report from National Council of Jewish Women President Hannah Solomon, as well as the author's own Book'Reviews 165 work on interwar New York Onhodox Jews, suggests the need for qualification. Future historians can and will surely refine these chronological contours of the parameters of American Jewish culture. Despite this, what remains the wonder of !be Wonders ofAmerica is its path-breaking vision and sweep. Joselit's understanding of American Jews and the panicular expressions of their culture is keen. She observes them buying bar mitzvah suits as well as prayer shawls, making pilgrimages to Jewish museums, and crafting a "new geography of kashruth" (p. 174) that made Chinese restaurants a mainstay of the Jewish diet. And she perceives the dissonance between that which the elite custodians of communal culture, the rabbis, want and what the folk do. In ignoring sermons to come to the synagogue on the Sabbath while buying electric menorahs and pastrami,Jews, awash in the freedom ofAmerica, eloquently proclaimed their cultural priorities. An imaginative and gifted historian, Joselit fathomed this. The result lies here in her eloquent and imaginative ponrait of the invention-although she calls it a reinvention-ofAmerican Jewish culture. Pamela S. Nadell American University A Diving Rock on the Hudson, by Henry Roth. New York: St. Manin's Press, 1995. 416.pp. $23.95. Many readers ofnovels have thought ofwriting them; some have tried. A few have tried for years. But very few have tried for 60 years, and none after having written a great first novel, except Henry Roth, who died in October of last year...

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