Jenna Weissman Joselit – författare

When Cecil B. DeMille's epic, The Ten Commandments, came out in 1956, lines of people crowded into theaters across America to admire the movie's spectacular special effects. Thanks to DeMille, the commandments now had fans as well as adherents. But the country's fascination with the Ten Commandments goes well beyond the colossal scenes of this Hollywood classic. In this vividly rendered narrative, Jenna Weissman Joselit situates the Ten Commandments within the fabric of American history. Her subjects range from the 1860 tale of the amateur who claimed to have discovered ancient holy stones inside a burial mound in Ohio to the San Francisco congregation of Sherith Israel, which commissioned a luminous piece of stained glass depicting Moses in Yosemite for its sanctuary; from the Kansas politician Charles Walter, who in the late nineteenth century proposed codifying each commandment into state law, to the radio commentator Laura Schlessinger, who popularized the Ten Commandments as a psychotherapeutic tool in the 1990s.At once text and object, celestial and earthbound, Judaic and Christian, the Ten Commandments were not just a theological imperative in the New World; they also provoked heated discussions around key issues such as national identity, inclusion, and pluralism. In a country as diverse and heterogeneous as the United States, the Ten Commandments offered common ground and held out the promise of order and stability, becoming the lodestar of American identity. While archaeologists, theologians, and devotees across the world still wonder what became of the tablets that Moses received on Mount Sinai, Weissman Joselit offers a surprising answer: they landed in the United States.

The Ten Commandments need no introduction. In fact, we probably think we know all there is to know about these divine dos and don'ts. But as this imaginative and vivid account reveals, there is a lot more to this ancient biblical code than Moses and Mount Sinai. Situating the Ten Commandments within the context of modern America, prominent historian and engaging story-teller Jenna Weissman Joselit takes the reader from Indian burial mounds in 19th-century Ohio to the sand dunes of 1920s California and into the civic squares of the 1950s to reveal the centrality of the Ten Commandments to the nation's identity.Rich in incident and story and inhabited by a lively cast of characters whose ranks include forgers and filmmakers, architects and archaeologists, ordinary citizens and politicians, this book compels us to take another look at the Ten Commandments and see them afresh. Through a series of deftly-rendered vignettes, this compelling account recasts the cultural impact of the Ten Commandments in American society not as a legal code or theological imperative, but as a physical, material, and visual phenomenon. We come away with the understanding that they are not cast in stone but a fertile repository of American history.

American religious history IS the history of immigration, from the first settlers in the 'Promised Land' to today's arrivals from every corner of the globe. Immigration and American Relgion in American Life series (Jon Butler and Harry S. Stout, general editors), examines the immigrant experience and the changes that arrivlas in the New World felt in their lives - and in the meaning of religion.

Our Gang provides a fascinating historical portrait of the Jewish criminal world from the era of mass immigration through Prohibition and beyond. Jenna Weissman Joselit traces the origins, nature, patterns, location, and impact of Jewish crime from the early years, when it was inextricably bound up with the East Side community as a whole, with criminals living among the more or less law-abiding citizens they preyed upon, to the post-World War I period and the gradual assimilation and absorption of Jewish crime into the mainstream of the American underworld.Parallel with this theme is a broader one: the New York Jewish community's reaction to Jewish crime, evolving from disbelief to denial to concern and the establishment of a network of correctional and preventive agencies, and finally—as the nature of Jewish crime changed, and as the community itself felt a growing sense of security—a sort of acceptance.

In this first interpretive historical account of the American Orthodox Jewish experience, Jenna Weissman Joselit investigates the ways in which pious Jews reconciled the requirements of religious tradition with the freedoms of interwar America. Through its focus on representative American Jewish institutions such as the synagogue and the rabbinate and on the sacred ritual life of Orthodox women, New York's Jewish Jews reveals how a self-consciously modern, American, and decidedly middle class Orthodoxy evolved before 1945.