From Europe to America

A History of American Jews with Commentary

by Janet Kerekes, PhD

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Synopsis

From Europe to America is a sweeping reflection on the history and identity of American Jews. The book challenges most premises that American Jews have come to consider as cornerstones of being Jewish in America today. Written with a personal and impassioned voice, Janet Kerekes argues that the great exodus of Jews from Russia was less a flight from persecution than a realization that the prospect of emancipation was going to be indefinitely on hold. Russian Jews remained confined and excluded, leaving emigration as their only path to emancipation.

Once in America, they turned their backs on two millennia of Jewish roots in Europe. This rupture produced a new Jewish identity, one built on myths, misinformation, and revisionism. The actual Jewish past in Russia, the full complement of reasons to leave, and why, in many cases Jews returned, were replaced with the tale of arrival as escape from endless pogroms and the fallacy that only America offered Jews opportunity; Europe had nothing to offer them. As Jewish life further evolved, social justice, multiculturalism, and the Holocaust often became stand-ins for tradition. Unlike celebratory immigrant sagas like Irving Howe's World of Our Fathers, or works that reduce Jewishness to trauma, From Europe to America shows how becoming a Jew in America hollowed out Jewish distinctiveness even as it promised emancipation at last.

Readers come away with a sobering portrait: a Judaism shaped by America's vision of itself; by the importation of German Reform, irrelevant in America as its chief aim was to secure emancipation; by Jews with an agenda; and by the steady substitution of myth, kitsch, and humor for religious and cultural continuity. What was lost when Jews transplanted themselves to America--ritual depth, cultural rootedness, communal norms, a shared destiny, and intellectual vibrancy--must be reckoned with.

About the Author

Janet Kerekes holds a PhD in European history from the University of Toronto. She is the author of Masked Ball at the White Cross Cafe: The Failure of Jewish Assimilation and Multiculturalism: Reflections, and has published on Jewish assimilation in Hungary and its broader European context. She has taught and led seminars at universities in Toronto and Budapest, and has spent more than two decades engaged with Jewish communities in Canada and Hungary through education, synagogue life, and historical projects. She brings a comparative, transatlantic lens to American Jewish history.