Ava Fran Kahn, Adam Mendelsohn, eds. Transnational Traditions: New Perspectives on American Jewish History. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2014. viii + 309 pp. $31.99 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8143-3861-2.

Reviewed by Riv-Ellen Prell (University of Minnesota)
Published on H-Judaic (August, 2015)
Commissioned by Matthew A. Kraus (University of Cincinnati)

Remapping American Jewish History as Transnational

Transnational history, one of the most significant recent trends in US historiography, denaturalizes the nation-state and focuses on flows, whether of people, capital, or goods across borders. A transnational study of immigration, for example, examines both the power of the state to control passage, as well as the fluidity of the identities and affiliations of those who immigrate.  

Jewish history is transnational at its core, but its American branch has been somewhat slow to embrace it. There are outstanding works in this vein from the late twentieth century, such as Matthew Fry Jacobson’s 1995 book, Special Sorrows: The Diasporic Imagination of Irish, Polish and Jewish Immigrants in the United States. Later works by Elie Lederhendler, Tony Michels, and Rebecca Kobrin provide outstanding models as well. However, Ava Kahn and Adam Mendelsohn’s Transnational Traditions offers the first edited collection to demonstrates how transnationalism illuminates some of the classic issues in American Jewish history, as well as those that have been overlooked, and offers methodological approaches to be emulated.

The editors’ introduction does an excellent job of laying out the stakes in “new perspectives in American Jewish history.” They provide their own useful historiography of Jewish transnational history and argue that historians must study practices that reveal patterns that cross national boundaries. They focus, as well, on people who can be thought of as transnationals (as opposed to immigrants) in order to understand what is distinctive about American Jewish experience, and how that experience may have influenced Jews beyond these borders.  

The book is organized around four sets of issues in transnational history. The eleven essays are all not only effective examples of transnational history, but each also makes an important contribution. The first section focuses on what the editors term “an Anglophone diaspora.” The essays do more than follow Jewish men’s and women’s peripatetic wanderings in the mid-nineteenth century to Australia, New Zealand, Hawaii, and the United States. They examine the flow of religious leaders, economic entrepreneurs, and commercial links. Adam Mendelsohn, Ava Kahn, and Suzanne Rutland are writing family histories within transnational ones. They examine the development of religious and economic change, ties built across continents and maintained, and ideas and traditions circulated and resisted. 

The book’s second section moves to the terrain of the Atlantic. Eric Goldstein and Rebecca Kobrin’s excellent essays in this section each demonstrate the importance of cultural and economic transnational ties. Eric Goldstein’s “A Taste of Freedom: American Yiddish Publications in Imperial Russia,” is a stunning contribution to the study of Yiddish culture and transnational history. He demonstrates that Yiddish print culture--newspapers, novels, and translations--in the United States in the nineteenth century was the main stage and not the sideshow of Yiddish cultural production. New York became the largest producer of Yiddish print materials in the world. The American Yiddish press not only lacked government censorship, but responded to the desires of its readers for romance, crime, folklore, and simplified Yiddish. Russian Yiddish cultural production, by contrast, faced government censorship and the hegemony of its cultural elites that shunned the tastes of its readers. These tables would be turned again as Yiddish lost ground as an American Jewish language, and Yiddish culture was allowed to flourish after 1905 in Russia. Yiddish print culture revealed that democratic free market forms were rooted in New York, and were ultimately eagerly embraced in Vilna and Warsaw as well.  

The book’s third section examines transnational identities as “murky, mutable, and multiple” (p. 141) in order to understand the structural factors, such as political and economic relationships as well as culture and self-representation, that provide analytical frames that illuminate them. Tobias Brinkmann’s “German Jews? Reassessing the History of Nineteenth-Century Jewish Immigrants in the United States” is another of the volume’s standout works. Brinkmann systematically deconstructs the concept “German Jew” in order to demonstrate the inadequacy of much of the historiography that purports to explain this group of immigrants. His discussion of how historians of German Jewry have misrepresented Germany as a unified nation would alone be a real contribution. However, he also unpacks the “layers” of German Jewishness, not so much as membership in a “political or geographic entity,” but as participation in a complex, contested, and fluid culture and social status shared by highly mobile immigrants who also embraced modern Judaism and Enlightenment ideals, among other realities (p. 160). He argues that the classic models of ethnicity and nation-state used to explain immigration fall short of grasping the experience of nineteenth-century immigrants from German lands.

The book’s final section, “Creating New Homelands,” looks at Argentina, America, and Israel as places where transnationals journeyed, often for ideological reasons, but took with them values and practices that inspired and grounded them. Sources of conflict were inevitable as social and political contexts created tensions. Ava Kahn’s discussion of the founding of American kibbutzim in the 1940s and 1970s is an original and important contribution as she analyzes the sources of American leftist Zionist communities, in contrast to other Israeli immigrants.  

The editors cite Ellen Eisenberg’s “Cultivating Jewish Farmers in Argentina and the United States” in particular as “path-breaking” (p. 209) because of her new approach to the history of immigrant Jewish agricultural settlements in Argentina and the United States, a story that is normally cast solely in terms of failure and occasional successes. Rather, what interests Eisenberg is the complex tale of transnationals. Eisenberg offers an analysis of these settlements that explains why they differed in the two countries. She advocates the study of “individuals,” which she argues focuses on why those who succeeded were not only ideologically committed to the importance of labor, but hailed from southern Russia where their backgrounds were related to agriculture. They were likely to persist in agriculture even when their settlements failed. Through demographic analysis, as well as a complex understanding of regionalism in the Pale of Settlement, and a rich description of the conflicts between settlers and sponsoring philanthropies, she provides a far more nuanced version of this history.

A number of threads run through the volume’s focus on transnational history. Eisenberg is not alone in focusing on “individuals.” Several of the essays analyze families and look at differences in the lives of siblings, cousins, or other relations in order to understand how transnationals negotiated the worlds they occupied differently. Structure, agency, ideas, occupations, and many other issues are all brought to bear on their experiences. It is this complex attention to both structure and family patterns that makes it all the more puzzling that gender is largely absent as a category of analysis from Transnational Traditions. Eisenberg’s farmers and settlers have no gender; neither do Goldstein’s readers nor Brinkmann’s immigrants, although Kahn’s kibbutzniks do. When families are described, gender plays no role analytically. This absence is particularly puzzling since historians of women have transformed the study of immigration, economy, labor, and religion through gender analysis, and women’s social movements was an early topic of transnational history. It is unclear why the essential scholarly work of transnationalism would lead to de-gendering Jews, and in doing that offer a partial and incomplete understanding of what the authors and editors of this otherwise fine volume seek--a more complex accounting of how structure rather than nation-states, circuits and flows rather than borders, and cultural relationships and fluid identities that crossed time and space in multiple directions shape our understanding of Jewish history.  

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Citation: Riv-Ellen Prell. Review of Kahn, Ava Fran; Mendelsohn, Adam, eds., Transnational Traditions: New Perspectives on American Jewish History. H-Judaic, H-Net Reviews. August, 2015.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=43967

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