An accessible yet thoroughly detailed account of a time in American history that seems very much like our own. Dumenil (History/Occidental Coll.; Freemasonry and American Culture, 18801930, not reviewed) demonstrates in the course of this well-conceived book that a series of far-reaching social issues not only set the tone of the 1920s but also ``formed central motifs that have shaped the modern American temper.'' Foremost among those themes, in her view, was a rising general mistrust of a growing government bureaucracy; she quotes a range of contemporary opinions on the excessive power of federal law, including a US representative's argument against continuing the wartime program of daylight-savings time (``we might soon have laws passed attempting to regulate the volume of air a man should breathe, suspend the laws of gravity, or change the colors of the rainbow''); these give life to her observations on Americans' perennial suspicion of the state. In the 1920s, Dumenil argues, lobbyists for the first time became a powerful political force; large movie studios promoted their wares through national chains, undercutting the neighborhood theater and creating a mass market for mass-produced culture; and nativist political forces mobilized against immigration. Most significantly, women entered the workplace and demanded greater autonomy in determining their economic, social, political, and sexual future, although as Dumenil notes, ``the new women's liberation [was the domain of] white, relatively affluent women, and had relatively little meaning to poor women of color.'' The author is less interesting on the period's higher culture; her whirlwind tour of Hemingway, Dos Passos, Cummings, Eliot, Fitzgerald, Stein, and their peers is far too cursory to serve her argument. Nor does she give enough emphasis to WW I's role in setting the stage for the 1920s' revolt against late Victorian sensibilities. Still, a useful, circumstantial overview of a tumultuous era.
Pub Date: June 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-8090-6978-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1995
Bauer offers an eye-opening look into the following question: Could Jewish leaders in America, England, Palestine, and occupied Europe itself have ransomed significant numbers of their brethren? Bauer (Holocaust Studies/Hebrew Univ., Jerusalem; coauthor, A History of the Holocaust, 1982) examines carefully the motives of both Nazi figures (particularly SS head Heinrich Himmler) and various Jewish counterparts. His focus is on four ransom efforts: the Ha'avera (or ``transfer'') agreement by which considerable numbers of German Jews were permitted to emigrate to Palestine between 1933 and 1939 in exchange for large-scale purchases of German goods; the ``Europa Plan,'' advanced by Slovak Jewish leaders in 1943 to halt deporations to the death camps in exchange for a multimillion dollar payment; the famous ``Joel Brand affair'' of 1944, which was (inaccurately) said to have involved a proposed exchange of a million Jews, most in Hungary, for 10,000 trucks; and some far more modest, but also more successful, ransom efforts during the war's final months. After combing German, English, and Hebrew sources, Bauer concludes that Jewish leaders within and outside of occupied Europe achieved ``only partial and marginal successes'' in trying to rescue the ever-shrinking remnant of European Jewry. The Allies, bent on driving the Germans to an unconditional surrender, balked at cooperating with Jewish ransom efforts. For their part, the Nazis were ambivalent, at times committed to murdering every last European Jew, at times willing to make exceptions, particularly when it became clear that they would lose the war. Finally, some of the Jews who transmitted messages to and from the Nazis, and in rare cases dealt directly with them, were what Bauer terms ``shady underworld figures'' trusted neither by ``establishment'' Jewish leaders nor by the Allies. Bauer also looks at several key rescue efforts by non-Jews. Throughout this exemplary work of scholarship and clear historical narrative, Bauer's historical judgments are as balanced and fair-minded as his research is meticulous. A pathbreaking, superb contribution to Holocaust studies.
Pub Date: Nov. 16, 1994
ISBN: 0-300-05913-2
Page Count: 328
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
Caveat emptor: This is most definitely not ``the history'' of the Jews. It is, rather, a series of very free-flowing exercises in what the author refers to as ``historical sociology.'' Cantor (History, Sociology, Comparative Literature/New York Univ.; Inventing the Middle Ages, p. 106, etc.) is attempting a huge tripartite task: to write a history of the Jews, to provide a historiographical commentary of some major works on Jewish history, and to offer a cultural critique of modern Jewish life. For the complex saga of the Jews, this is an utterly unrealistic goal for a one-volume work, especially by someone who hasn't specialized in Jewish history. Perhaps the foremost problem here is the author's unsympathetic attitude toward Judaism and observant Jews and his lack of knowledge about them. Cantor dredges up the hoariest stereotypes, claiming for instance that in the late Middle Ages ``the rabbinate drugged itself into comfort with the narcotic of the Cabala, an otherworldly withdrawal into astrology and demonology.'' He also gets far too many facts wrong (he claims that the biblical heroine Esther was Mordechai's sister, when in fact she was his ``uncle's daughter''). Some major developments in Jewish history are scarcely mentioned, such as the origins and development of the Reform and Conservative movements. Cantor champions such Jewish thinkers as Freud, Wittgenstein, and LÇvi- Strauss, who played a key role in shaping the culture of modernity. He appears to have little familiarity with intellectual leaders within the Jewish community such as Franz Rosenzweig, Abraham Joshua Heschel, and Yosef Dov Soloveitchik. Thus he rather harshly- -and unjustly—critiques Jewish religious life for not responding sufficiently to the culture of modernity (although he never makes clear exactly what he means by this); yet non-Orthodox Jews have been so accommodating to modernity that, as Cantor acknowledges, traditional Jewish culture has become very attenuated. The lack of footnotes or other documentation is further evidence that this is an intellectually shoddy book. (32 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-06-016746-7
Page Count: 480
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1994
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