Word: jewish
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...modern American Jew has supported a minor industry built on the ABs. He warms to his past either as romantic folklore or the wellsprings of neurosis. Fiddler on the Roof and Portnoy's Complaint can be immensely entertaining, but they hardly represent the range and depth of Jewish traditions...
...Lower East Side of Manhatttan was the staging ground for the Jewish dispersion into America. It was also the center of a unique and conflicting culture. The embers of an ancient piety awaiting deliverance by the Messiah flickered alongside the political activists who led the fights for higher wages and better working conditions. Frictions between the old and the new were aired daily in the Yiddish newspapers. Most notable was the Forward, whose editor, Abraham Cahan, became the Solomon of assimilation. Allowing your son to play baseball, he assured one parent, would not necessarily turn him into "a wild American...
...aside for anarchists who gather on Yom Kippur to dance, eat and sing La Marseillaise "and other hymns against Satan." Gangster Arnold Rothstein makes it all the way from Hester Street to F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby as the underworld character Meyer Wolfsheim. Outside New York, Jewish peddlers roam the South, and Jewish farmers plow as far away as Oregon. There are even Jewish cowboys of a sort. Writing home from Kansas, one incipient blazing saddler complains that his gun is too heavy...
...Howe demonstrates with anecdote and analysis, the mainstream of early Jewish-American life converged in its institutions. The Educational Alliance, for example, fed the newcomers' legendary hunger for learning with classes and standing-room-only lectures...
Spilled Contempt. Howe has less affection for such latter-day Jewish comedians as Buddy Hackett, Jack...