Word: jew
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...plays. Widowed by a beer brawl and left with two children, one illegitimate, Norma Rae is trapped in a one-industry, two-bit, sexist little town. She marries a muscle-bound teddy-bear, but she only comes to value herself through a friendship with a New York Jew labor organizer. There's no sex, no racial problems, and pretty simple politics--it sounds like "Gidget goes to Harlan County"--but thanks to some good acting and direction, it is much more effective than feminist self-discovery movies in the vein of An Unmarried Woman or One Sins the Other Doesn...
...some of his readers, what appeared to Levenson to be a universal problem of the individual's relation to his past, became instead merely Levenson's problem as a Jew in America, cut off from his own culture and roots. In discussing one Chinese attempt to reconcile present with past, Angus McDonald complained that "the synthesis that the Chinese had found in the thought of Mao... was beyond him [Levenson] as a Jew in exile." The limits of the Jewish experience (limiting the comparisons that Levenson could make from within his own culture), McDonald held, prevented Levenson from responding...
Levenson's own experience as a Jew was crucial to his life and work. In the introduction of what was to have been his retirement book on Judaism, Levenson proudly reaffirmed his commitment to a Judaism with links to the past that McDonald believed cut him off from the present. To be a Jew in America was for Levenson a choice of standards from which to view not only his own time and culture but any other--"To choose well in life is nothing less than to choose life itself...
...Levenson's conscious choice of life as a Jew was essential to his ability to analyze any other choice. Other histories, other problems became important not because they all blended into one pseudo-historical stew, but because the people living them faced comparable, not identical, choices...
...defining their relations to their pasts and the worlds around them. Levenson publicly stated his opposition to American involvement in Vietnam from 1965 on. But he was moved more by the larger question, which persists in China still as it did in his own choices to live as a Jew, an intellectual and an American: is there a happy medium between a feckless cosmopolitanism (hampered by the "fact that the cosmos was somebody else's"); and a terrifying isolation that cut off both the foreign and the past...