Derek J. Penslar
- Published in print:
- 2001
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780520225909
- eISBN:
- 9780520925847
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520225909.003.0005
- Subject:
- History, European Modern History
This chapter talks about Jewish social policy, particularly that produced by the simultaneous intertwining of the institutional-administrative and socioeconomic aspects of Jewish society, and ...
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This chapter talks about Jewish social policy, particularly that produced by the simultaneous intertwining of the institutional-administrative and socioeconomic aspects of Jewish society, and engendered by modern social policy parallel to the melding of state and civil society. Even where and when liberalism enjoyed its greatest hegemony in Europe, the nineteenth-century Jewish community as a legal entity had never dissolved, and the provision of charity had remained one of the community's most important functions in the eyes of the host society. The purview of Jewish philanthropy widened considerably in the late 1860s. A fresh wave of crisis galvanized Jewish public opinion, stimulated wide-ranging philanthropic activity, and promoted international Jewish solidarity through concerted action on behalf of one's oppressed brethren. The sense of common fate transcended national boundaries. Despite rivalries between states and between Jews living in those states, expressions of international Jewish brotherhood were frequent and sincere.Less
This chapter talks about Jewish social policy, particularly that produced by the simultaneous intertwining of the institutional-administrative and socioeconomic aspects of Jewish society, and engendered by modern social policy parallel to the melding of state and civil society. Even where and when liberalism enjoyed its greatest hegemony in Europe, the nineteenth-century Jewish community as a legal entity had never dissolved, and the provision of charity had remained one of the community's most important functions in the eyes of the host society. The purview of Jewish philanthropy widened considerably in the late 1860s. A fresh wave of crisis galvanized Jewish public opinion, stimulated wide-ranging philanthropic activity, and promoted international Jewish solidarity through concerted action on behalf of one's oppressed brethren. The sense of common fate transcended national boundaries. Despite rivalries between states and between Jews living in those states, expressions of international Jewish brotherhood were frequent and sincere.
Kerri P. Steinberg
- Published in print:
- 2002
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780520228641
- eISBN:
- 9780520926899
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520228641.003.0012
- Subject:
- Religion, Judaism
This chapter focuses on the reluctance of mainstream Jewish philanthropies to allow for the reality of Jewish diversity. It contrasts the univocal conception of Jewish identity that informs the work ...
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This chapter focuses on the reluctance of mainstream Jewish philanthropies to allow for the reality of Jewish diversity. It contrasts the univocal conception of Jewish identity that informs the work of the Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), the overseas arm of the United Jewish Appeal (UJA), with the emphasis on diversity of the New Israel Fund (NIF). It scrutinizes the photographs that appear in the 1995 annual reports of these funds. These photos, with their different portrayals of donors, philanthropic officers, and recipients, present the contrasting conceptions of identity.Less
This chapter focuses on the reluctance of mainstream Jewish philanthropies to allow for the reality of Jewish diversity. It contrasts the univocal conception of Jewish identity that informs the work of the Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), the overseas arm of the United Jewish Appeal (UJA), with the emphasis on diversity of the New Israel Fund (NIF). It scrutinizes the photographs that appear in the 1995 annual reports of these funds. These photos, with their different portrayals of donors, philanthropic officers, and recipients, present the contrasting conceptions of identity.
Derek J. Penslar
- Published in print:
- 2001
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780520225909
- eISBN:
- 9780520925847
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520225909.003.0003
- Subject:
- History, European Modern History
This chapter talks about Jewish philanthropy, which is an arena of clashing approaches to the study of the Jewish past. These approaches are called “essentialist,” “contextualist,” and “comparative.” ...
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This chapter talks about Jewish philanthropy, which is an arena of clashing approaches to the study of the Jewish past. These approaches are called “essentialist,” “contextualist,” and “comparative.” The modernization of Jewish philanthropy, like the modernization of Jewish economic perceptions, may have its roots in many lands across a broad swath of time, but it was most clearly adumbrated by the western Sephardim. It was the result of many factors: the economic dislocation of large segments of Ashkezanic Jewry, which brought them under the care of relatively prosperous Sephardim; changes in sensibility among the Sephardim about poverty, labor, and charity; and finally, the vast and tenuous nature of the Sephardic diaspora, which encouraged the development of a Jewish identity defined more by economic and philanthropic activity than by halakhic discourse and ritual observance.Less
This chapter talks about Jewish philanthropy, which is an arena of clashing approaches to the study of the Jewish past. These approaches are called “essentialist,” “contextualist,” and “comparative.” The modernization of Jewish philanthropy, like the modernization of Jewish economic perceptions, may have its roots in many lands across a broad swath of time, but it was most clearly adumbrated by the western Sephardim. It was the result of many factors: the economic dislocation of large segments of Ashkezanic Jewry, which brought them under the care of relatively prosperous Sephardim; changes in sensibility among the Sephardim about poverty, labor, and charity; and finally, the vast and tenuous nature of the Sephardic diaspora, which encouraged the development of a Jewish identity defined more by economic and philanthropic activity than by halakhic discourse and ritual observance.
Susan R. Holman
- Published in print:
- 2001
- Published Online:
- November 2003
- ISBN:
- 9780195139129
- eISBN:
- 9780199834310
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/0195139127.003.0002
- Subject:
- Religion, Early Christian Studies
This chapter provides a broad overview of the poor in the early Christian world, and especially considers their relationship to the liturgies (Greek “leitourgia”) of religious and civic practice. It ...
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This chapter provides a broad overview of the poor in the early Christian world, and especially considers their relationship to the liturgies (Greek “leitourgia”) of religious and civic practice. It explores examples from Graeco‐Roman euergetism, the Roman food schemes of annona (the grain dole) and alimenta, Jewish philanthropy, including soup kitchens, and early Christian texts about charity ranging from the New Testament to the sixth century. It concludes that early Christian responses to help the poor drew heavily from the general cultural concept of liturgy in late antiquity.Less
This chapter provides a broad overview of the poor in the early Christian world, and especially considers their relationship to the liturgies (Greek “leitourgia”) of religious and civic practice. It explores examples from Graeco‐Roman euergetism, the Roman food schemes of annona (the grain dole) and alimenta, Jewish philanthropy, including soup kitchens, and early Christian texts about charity ranging from the New Testament to the sixth century. It concludes that early Christian responses to help the poor drew heavily from the general cultural concept of liturgy in late antiquity.
Matthias B. Lehmann
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- May 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780804789653
- eISBN:
- 9780804792462
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9780804789653.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Jewish Studies
Emissaries from the Holy Land tells the story of a philanthropic network that was overseen by the Jewish community leadership in the Ottoman capital city of Istanbul between the 1720s and the 1820s ...
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Emissaries from the Holy Land tells the story of a philanthropic network that was overseen by the Jewish community leadership in the Ottoman capital city of Istanbul between the 1720s and the 1820s in support of the impoverished Jews of Palestine. Putting the notion of Jewish solidarity, Jewish unity, and the enduring centrality of the Holy Land for the Jewish world to the test, the community leadership in Palestine and their allies in Istanbul dispatched rabbinic emissaries on fundraising missions everywhere from the shores of the Mediterranean to the port cities of the Atlantic seaboard, from the Caribbean to India. This book explores how this eighteenth-century philanthropic network was organized and how relations of trust and solidarity were built across vast geographic differences. It looks at how the emissaries and their supporters understood the relationship between the Jewish diaspora and the Land of Israel, and it shows how cross-cultural encounters and competing claims for financial support involving Sephardic, Ashkenazi, and North African emissaries and communities contributed to the transformation of Jewish identity in the eighteenth century.Less
Emissaries from the Holy Land tells the story of a philanthropic network that was overseen by the Jewish community leadership in the Ottoman capital city of Istanbul between the 1720s and the 1820s in support of the impoverished Jews of Palestine. Putting the notion of Jewish solidarity, Jewish unity, and the enduring centrality of the Holy Land for the Jewish world to the test, the community leadership in Palestine and their allies in Istanbul dispatched rabbinic emissaries on fundraising missions everywhere from the shores of the Mediterranean to the port cities of the Atlantic seaboard, from the Caribbean to India. This book explores how this eighteenth-century philanthropic network was organized and how relations of trust and solidarity were built across vast geographic differences. It looks at how the emissaries and their supporters understood the relationship between the Jewish diaspora and the Land of Israel, and it shows how cross-cultural encounters and competing claims for financial support involving Sephardic, Ashkenazi, and North African emissaries and communities contributed to the transformation of Jewish identity in the eighteenth century.
lila corwin berman
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780226247830
- eISBN:
- 9780226247977
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226247977.003.0008
- Subject:
- History, American History: 20th Century
By the early decades of the twenty-first century, Jews in Detroit were arguably more invested in urbanism than they had been for many years. Millennial Jewish Detroit activists reinvented the ...
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By the early decades of the twenty-first century, Jews in Detroit were arguably more invested in urbanism than they had been for many years. Millennial Jewish Detroit activists reinvented the geography of the city, in effect shrinking a city that earlier Jews had helped to extend. Furthermore, millennial activists wed the space of city to their visions of American and Jewish success, as many had before them. These activists helped create an entrepreneurial hotbed in the city, where new ideas, whatever they might be, could attract the power and capital of investors. The activists all believed that cities more than other kinds of places fostered creativity and experimentation, and that gains, in some form, would best be made from entering at the ground floor of urban revitalization and reinvention in Detroit. In this most recent chapter of Jewish urbanism in Detroit, the city remained a generator of contradictory impulses—to love, to redeem, to exploit, to disdain, to remake, to be more Jewish, to be less Jewish—for the Jews in its midst. The circuitous pathways of Jews’ urban journeys generated the character of modern Jewish life in the United States, as Jews oriented and re-oriented themselves to ever-changing city spaces.Less
By the early decades of the twenty-first century, Jews in Detroit were arguably more invested in urbanism than they had been for many years. Millennial Jewish Detroit activists reinvented the geography of the city, in effect shrinking a city that earlier Jews had helped to extend. Furthermore, millennial activists wed the space of city to their visions of American and Jewish success, as many had before them. These activists helped create an entrepreneurial hotbed in the city, where new ideas, whatever they might be, could attract the power and capital of investors. The activists all believed that cities more than other kinds of places fostered creativity and experimentation, and that gains, in some form, would best be made from entering at the ground floor of urban revitalization and reinvention in Detroit. In this most recent chapter of Jewish urbanism in Detroit, the city remained a generator of contradictory impulses—to love, to redeem, to exploit, to disdain, to remake, to be more Jewish, to be less Jewish—for the Jews in its midst. The circuitous pathways of Jews’ urban journeys generated the character of modern Jewish life in the United States, as Jews oriented and re-oriented themselves to ever-changing city spaces.
