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The “transnational turn” has been a prevalent theme in recent historical writing. The field of Jewish history is particularly suited to transnational approaches, given the dynamic migration process that defined the modern period. Yet, until recently, most scholarship in American Jewish history has contended that Jewish life in the United States was wholly distinct from previous Jewish experiences. Because American Jews faced neither the protracted struggle for political emancipation nor the virulent political anti-Semitism that gripped parts of Europe, many historians have argued for an exceptionalist model of American Jewish history that emphasizes freedom, opportunity, and successful acculturation. In this anthology, the editors Christian Wiese and Cornelia Wilhelm set out to question the notion of American Jewish exceptionalism by examining European influences on Jewish life in the United States as well as the ongoing interactions that American Jews maintained with their European counterparts. In the opening essay, Wiese declares the volume's intent to examine “in which regard and for which reasons American Jews did, indeed, deviate from the patterns of their European past” (p. 2). Organized chronologically, the book's twenty-one essays treat questions of the distinctiveness of American Jewry from a range of perspectives, focusing on religious expressions, political and cultural identities, and social, intellectual, and economic life. The anthology begins with two introductory articles, one by Wiese and the other an essay by Susannah Heschel, about the imprint of Europe on American Jewish culture. The volume is then organized into four sections—on the colonial period, the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the mass-migration years, and the post-Holocaust era. Readers conversant with American Jewish historical scholarship will recognize familiar authors in this anthology, many of whom cover subjects that they have researched and written about for many years.
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