Search Results

American Jews’ enduring commitment to urbanism played a central role in their postwar moves from cities to suburbs. The contradiction in this statement is obvious: why would American Jews move to the suburbs if they cared so passionately about cities? Taking its cue from historians and social critics who have long looked toward Detroit to understand twentieth-century urban transformations, Metropolitan Jews tells the story of how Jews left the city by retaining a deep and often troubling sense of their fundamental urbanism that they carried with them well into the suburbs. It brings to light the unexamined yet deeply consequential vantage point of predominantly liberal and middle-class American Jews, whose metropolitan journeys challenge reigning explanations of white flight, urban disinvestment, and the rise of suburban conservatism in postwar American history. Between World II and the era of urban crises in the 1960s and 1970s, American Jews fashioned a new kind of urbanism, a metropolitan urbanism, evidenced in their political, cultural, spiritual, and economic lives. With close attention to Jewish neighborhood space and activism, housing policy and economics, urban real estate markets, tensions and alliances between Jews and blacks in the city, shifting terms of public urban power, and Jewish spiritual life and architecture, Metropolitan Jews transforms how we understand the postwar American city and the crucial role that Jews played in shaping it.

Following the journey of an Anglican missionary across Indigenous land, this book examines how contests over the mediation of stories—via photography, maps, printing presses, and radio—lucidly reveal the spiritual politics of colonial settlement. A city builder who bargained away Indigenous land to make way for the railroad, Archbishop Frederick Du Vernet (1860-1924) knew that he lived on the territory of Ts’msyen, Nisga’a, and Haida nations who had never ceded their land to the onrush of Canadian settlers. He condemned the devastating effects on Indigenous families of the residential schools run by his church while still serving that church in part through attending to settlers through “White Work.” At the same time, Du Vernet came to a “late style” embrace of psychic research—with a special focus on telepathy—as the path to understand the soul and to bring about social and political harmony. Testifying to the power of what he called radio mind, with evidence from the apostle Paul and the philosopher Henri Bergson, Du Vernet found a way to explain the world that he, his church, and his country made. Through Du Vernet’s imaginative experiment, we see how agents of colonialism built metaphysical traditions on land they claimed to have conquered. Expanding approaches to religion and media studies to ask how sovereignty is made through stories, this book shows how the spiritual invention of colonial nations takes place at the same time that Indigenous peoples—including Indigenous Christians—resist colonial dispossession through stories and spirits of their own.