The Jews for Urban Justice is an organization of radical individuals living in the Washington, D.C. area. One of the most striking characteristics of this group is its inability to avoid conflicts with the established Jewish community of Washington. My thesis investigates this phenomenon from the analytical observations of Will Herberg in Protestant, Catholic, Jew. Herberg, writing in the 1950's, indicates that each generation of Jews within North America, changes in its approach to Judaism from preceeding generations. The first generation abandoned Judaism in favor of acceptance by Christian America; the approach of the second generation was secularism, but it "showed the impress of the religion they were abandoning." (Herberg, p.185). The third generation, more secure in its Judaism and Americanness than either of the preceeding two, endeavoured to return to Judaism as a basic tenent of North American life. The fourth generation, including the Jews for Urban Justice, are even more secure in their Americanness, and strive to return even further to more basic principles of Judaism, than other generations. It is at this point that the conflict between JUJ (fourth generation) and the Washington Jewish community (third generation) becomes irreconcilable. / Arts, Faculty of / Anthropology, Department of / Graduate

This thesis is a cultural study of Jewishness in network sitcom television. Sources for the study included: historical film analysis, sociological studies on stereotyping and Jewish culture. The thesis studies how past forms of Jewishness impacted the current depictions of Jewishness on the television sitcom. After an introduction discussing Jewishness in general, the second chapter studies Jewishness in Vaudeville and early Hollywood film. The third chapter studies Jewishness in the first 40 years of network sitcom television. The fourth chapter studies Jewishness in the network sitcoms of the 1990s. The conclusions of the study focus on the state of Jewishness on network sitcom television at present, and ask what must be done within the industry to maintain a viable Jewish identity on network sitcom television in the future.

Bibliography: p. 230-244. / This study was conducted through systematic participant-observation from July 1994 to December 1996. Basic socio-demographic data were recorded and revealed considerable ·heterogeneity within the population. Formal and informal interviews, three focus group interviews and (selected) informants' diaries provided additional material. The study examines the construction of identity in diaspora and explores the relationships of individuals to places, groups and nation-states. Jews are shown to be the most salient local social category and language, cultural style and a sense of transience are shown to be the most significant boundary markers. The migrants' sharpest differentiation from local Jews is manifested in attitudes towards, and practice of, religion. Whether a partner is South African or Israeli was shown to be the single most important factor influencing patterns of interaction. Most studies treat Israelis abroad as immigrants while noting their insistence on transiency. Such studies also emphasize ambivalence and discomfort. In a South Africa still deeply divided by race and class, the migrants' status as middle-class whites greatly facilitates their integration. Their strong and self-confident identification as Israeli and their ongoing connectedness to Israeli society underlines distinctiveness. The combination of engagement with the local while maintaining distinctiveness, as well as past familiarity with multicultural and multilingual reality is utilized to negotiate the present, and results in a lived reality of 'comfortable contradiction' in the present. This condition accommodates multi-locality, multiple identifications and allegiances, and a simultaneous sense of both permanence and transience. The migrants' conflation of ethnic-religious and 'national' dimensions of identification (Jewishness and Israeliness), born in a particular societal context, leads, paradoxically, to distinguishing between membership of a nation and citizenship of a state. This distinction, it is argued, together with the migrants' middle-class status, further facilitates the comfortable contradiction of their transmigrant position. It is argued that while their instrumental engagement with diaspora and their understanding of responsible citizenship resembles past patterns of Jewish migration and adaptation, the absence of specifically Israeli (ethnic) communal structures suggests a departure from past patterns. The migrants' confidence in a sovereign independent nation-state and in their own identity, removes the sense of vulnerability that permeates most diaspora Jewish communities. These processes enable the migrants to live as 'normalized' Jews in a post-Zionist, post-modern, globalized world characterized by increasing electronic connectedness, mobility and hybridity. The ways in which the migrants in this study have negotiated and defined their place in the world suggests that a strong national identity is compatible with a cosmopolitan orientation to multicultural reality.

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This thesis examines the evidence for Jewish communities in Asia Minor from the third century BCE through to the third century CE and beyond. The study begins with a discussion of the founding of the Jewish communities in Asia Minor, the nature of Roman support for these communities, and their religious concerns as they are revealed by the literary sources available to us. Chapters 2 to 4 present and analyse the evidence for five particular communities - those at Sardis, Priene, Acmonia, Eumeneia and Apamea. The evidence from archaeology, inscriptions, numismatics and literary sources is discussed in an attempt to draw together the material into a coherent account of the nature of Jewish communal life in these cities. Chapters 5 to 9 are thematic studies. The prominence accorded to women in some Jewish communities and in the cities of Asia Minor is discussed in Chapter 5. In Chapter 6 the use of the title(^a)'T'taro? for Yahweh and for pagan deities is analysed, along with the supposed link between Jewish communities and Sabazios. The existence of a number of "God-worshippers" in the synagogues of Asia Minor is discussed in Chapter 7. Chapter 8 discusses the provision of water sources in the synagogues of Asia Minor and relates this to Jewish purity concerns. Chapter 9 addresses the issue of Jewish communities and local and Roman citizenship and discusses the evidence which suggests that in some places Jewish communities were well integrated into city life.Concluding remarks draw out some of the implications of this study for our view of Diaspora Jewish communities. It seems clear that in Asia Minor Jewish communities were involved in and a part of the cities in which they lived whilst also retaining their identity as Jews. We can also recognise a significant diversity of Jewish life in Asia Minor, with local factors providing a strong formative influence on these communities. Yet they all saw themselves as worthy and legitimate heirs of Old Testament faith.I confirm that no part of the material offered has previously been submitted by me for a degree in this or in any other University.

The thesis is the record of the first systematic attempt to collect ballads in the British Sephardic communities (in London and Manchester). Sixty-one ballad texts and fragments were collected between 1981 and 1988. The majority were collected (with their tunes) directly from informants, and represent the traditions of Salonica, Istanbul, Izmir, Tetuan, and Arcila, a town from which few ballads have been collected hitherto. The remainder, ten texts, have been edited from two family manuscript collections, and represent the traditions of Izmir and Tetuan. Although the total number of texts is not high, the number of themes represented (fifty-six) is considerable, and includes a number of rarities. A further nineteen texts, collected for me by my Arcila informant from his mother, resident in Israel, are included in an appendix. An account of the history of the Sephardic community in Britain is included, as are full details of the organization of the project. Of the ballads collected, seven were selected for detailed study: El robo de Dina, El paso del Mar Raja, Don Bueso y su hermana, La mala suegra, Rico Franco, Silvana, La princesa y el segador. These deal with crucial moments in the life of a nation (El paso del Mar Raja), the individual, or the family. While the emphasis in these studies is on the Judeo-Spanish tradition, the ballads are also studied, as is necessary, in the context of the ballad as a whole. Among the topics discussed are the incorporation of Jewish legendary material, and the question of the avoidance of violent or scabrous material in Judea-Spanish tradition. A further point, which transcends the Judeo-Spanish Romancero, is discussed: whether, in view of the fact that the majority of the singers now are women, a "woman's voice" can be recognized in the ballad.

This dissertation traces the evolution of a formalist literary strategy through the twentieth century in both Yiddish and English, through literary and historical analyses of poets and poetic groups from the turn of the century until the 1980s. It begins by exploring the ways in which the Yiddish poet Yehoash built on the contemporary interest in the primitive as he developed his aesthetics in the 1900s, then turns to the modernist poetic group In zikh (the Introspectivists) and their efforts to explore primitive states of consciousness in individual subjectivity. In the third chapter, the project turns to Louis Zukofsky's inclusion of Yehoash's Yiddish translations of Japanese poetry in his own English epic, written in dialogue with Ezra Pound. It concludes with an examination of the Language poets of the 1970s, particularly Charles Bernstein's experimental verse, which explores the way that language shapes consciousness through the use of critical and linguistic discourse. Each of these poets or poetic groups uses experimental poetry as a lens through which to peer at the intersections of language and consciousness, and each explicitly identifies Yiddish (whether as symbol or reality) as an essential component of their poetic technique.

<p>This dissertation examines the history of Jews in Iraq from 1951 to 1973 and their associations in diaspora thereafter. Iraqi Jews trace their community back 2500 years to the Babylonian exile and Jews played prominent roles in modern Iraqi politics, society, and culture until 1950-1951, when most Iraqi Jews left following a period of anti-Jewish hostility. The history of the remaining Jewish community after 1951 is an important case study of Jews in the Middle East (sometimes referred to as Sephardi or Mizrahi Jews) during a period when many such communities faced violence and displacement amidst the Arab-Israeli conflict. Their history also provides unique insights into changes in Iraq’s political culture under the various revolutionary regimes that followed the 1958 revolution. This dissertation shows that Jews in Iraq after 1951 successfully re-established a communal and social presence until the Israeli victory in the Six Day War of June 1967 prompted renewed anti-Jewish hostility. However, this dissertation argues that it was the Ba’th Party coup in July 1968 that led to the depopulation of the remaining Jewish community as the party manipulated anti-Israeli sentiment in its effort to consolidate power in Iraq, unleashing a deadly campaign of terror on innocent Jews.</p>