Divergent Jewish Cultures: Israel and America

Abstract

Divergent Jewish Cultures, edited by Deborah Dash Moore and S. Ilan Troen, is the product of a series of seminars and a conference held at the University of Pennsylvania with papers given by Israeli and American scholars. The book examines how the two great centers of contemporary Jewry, despite common national and religious origins, have developed distinct and often contradictory cultures. The fifteen contributors examine subjects ranging from the development of cults of saints among Moroccan immigrants to Israel, to the glorification of the American Jewish financier Haym Salomon, to the cultural implications of Mad Magazine's satire of the 1964 musical Fiddler on the Roof. In the hands of less gifted editors, that diversity of subject matter might have resulted in the lack of focus that often plagues books that are the product of such wide-ranging collaboration. But the editors have produced a work of remarkable intellectual cohesion by grouping the essays into three thematic sections: 1, “Establishing New Identities”; 2, “Contested Identities”; and 3, “Political Cultures.”