Diaspora Jewish nationalism and identity in America, 1914--1967.

This dissertation examines diasporic definitions of Jewish nationalism formulated by four immigrant Jewish intellectuals who translated European conceptions of Jewish nationalism into an American intellectual and political context. During the first half of the twentieth century, Horace Kallen (1882--1974), Mordecai Kaplan (1881--1983), Hans Kohn (1891--1971), and Shimon Rawidowicz (1896--1957) invented novel vocabularies for negotiating the social, cultural, and political boundaries between Jews and general American society. This research traces the development of these conceptions, notions such as "cultural pluralism," "civilization," and "civic nationalism," through a close reading of published works and archival sources. These disparate notions of diaspora Jewish nationalism shared an attempt to re-imagine the fundamental categories of Jewish "otherness" in a world increasingly defined by the homogenous nation-state. Rehabilitating these formulations necessitates the reconsideration of a neglected aspect of Jewish nationalism that challenged the inherent connection between national identity and political citizenship.Scholars of Jewish and American history alike have much to learn by examining expressions of Jewish nationalism in America. These thinkers' embrace of America was far more contested than American Jewish historians generally acknowledge. While historians often illustrate the influence of intellectual acculturation, few trace the strategies by which Jewish thinkers attempted to alter the dominant political discourse. Jewish thinkers were far from passive adaptors of American intellectual currents. Working at the permeable semantic boundaries between categories of nationalism, ethnicity, religion, and race, Jewish intellectuals challenged many basic assumptions of American political life and played an integral role in the construction of the majority culture. In addition, this project reveals that these four thinkers' formulations prefigured many contemporary debates regarding ethnicity and multiculturalism. As more and more scholars puzzle over the factors that constitute transnational ethno-religious identities, as well as the nature of the relationship binding diaspora communities with their homelands, the pioneering work of these four thinkers will provide fruitful historical models for consideration.Thesis (Ph.D.)--Yale University, 2004.School code: 0265