Moses Rischin – författare

Rischin paints a vivid picture of Jewish life in New York at the turn of the century. Here are the old neighborhoods and crowded tenements, the Rester Street markets, the sweatshops, the birth of Yiddish theatre in America, and the founding of important Jewish newspapers and labor movements. The book describes, too, the city's response to this great influx of immigrants—a response that marked the beginning of a new concept of social responsibility.

First published in 1902, and illustrated by Jacob Epstein, this evocation of the spiritual and cultural life of Yiddish New York remains fresh and relevant, and an invaluable commentary on one aspect of the formation of modern America.To an extent unequaled by any outsider before him, Hutchins Hapgood, a descendant of generations of New England Yankees, succeeded in penetrating the inner life of an American immigrant community. Hapgood did not set out to reform and cleanse the ghetto. His aim was to understand and interpret it, to find and know its poets, scholars, dramatists, actors, and artists, as well as its merchants and businessmen. He presents real people, individually identified and described, working out their destiny as part of a vital Jewish world. The sensibility and intentions of this book, as the editor points out, “anticipated a period of unexampled American artistic and intellectual gusto and creativity.” Moses Rischin’s discerning and affectionate introduction places Hapgood’s neglected classic squarely in the mainstream of American cultural development.

This is the first study to examine the career of one of the most prominent American Zionists. Intellectually brilliant, socially and religiously committed, Judah Magnes was an inspiring speaker, reformer, and organizer. Sixteen leading American and Israeli scholars here focus their critical attention on the social, cultural, political, and theological themes central to Magnes' life.Contributors chronicle Magnes' life from his birth in California in 1877 to his death in 1948-the year of the founding of the State of Israel, focusing successively on his youth and education, his seminal years on New York's Lower East Side, his place among the pioneers of American Zionism, his role as a founder of the first Hebrew University, and his relentless efforts to unite Arabs and Jews. Magnes was deeply committed to a Jewish renaissance, but did not see the prospering of Israel in isolation from its Arab peoples. In this insistence he was constant, and often unique. It is particularly in retrospect that we now realize the importance of Magnes' insistence that the Arab problem must be solved in order to establish a viable Israeli state. Both through the range of his involvements and the integrity of his quest, Magnes has left his mark on Jewish history. The contributors to this volume, who include two of the most diligent scholars of the man and of his times-Paul Mendes-Flohr and Arthur Goren-help illuminate the life, work, and legacy of Judah L. Magnes.