UMD Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/3
New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a given thesis/dissertation in DRUM.
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Item Mussar and Polemics in the Historiographical Trilogy of Rabbi Ya'akov Halevi Lifshitz(2015) Rose, Rachael Charlsie; Cooperman, Bernard D.; Manekin, Charles H.; Jewish Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This thesis explains how Zikhron Ya’akov by Rabbi Ya’akov Halevi Lifshitz (1838 -1921) represents not simply a memoir of a deceased Rabbi, but avant-garde counter-history as well as mussar literature. Defining Zikhron Ya’akov as a counter-history involves accepting that Lifshitz himself wrote extensively, but not as a demure marginal autobiographer recounting his story in a modest memoir. Rather, it involves accepting that Lifshitz wrote as a radical historiographer, attempting to focus on his own self and effectively identifying as a creator of a controversial new system of thinking. Writing under rapidly changing historical circumstances, Lifshitz neither writes a history, nor does he identify as a historian. As a polemicist and a rhetorical writer whose work is now classed in the complex system of mussar literature, Lifshitz creates a historiography for posterity linked closely with his own legacy. The translations included in the appendix help guide the reader through material covered by the thesis.Item EVANESCENT HAPPINESS: OTTOMAN JEWS ENCOUNTER MODERNITY, THE CASE OF LEA MITRANI AND JOSEPH NIEGO (1863-1923)(2010) Skarlatou, Amalia; Cooperman, Bernard D; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The thesis aims to be a collective biography of Joseph Niego and Lea Mitrani, two Ottoman Jews, whose lives would span a sixty-year period of profound changes for Ottoman Jewry. Born in Edirne, Joseph and Lea were educated in the schools of the Alliance Israélite Universelle. Subsequently, they were sent to Paris in order to be trained as teachers and be sent back to help "regenerate" "Oriental" Jews through a Western- style education. After their marriage, Joseph was appointed director of the agricultural school "Mikveh Israel," established by the Alliance in the outskirts of Jaffa, where the family would spend twelve years. Their time in an agricultural school and contact with Zionism and the Jewish pioneers in late nineteenth-century Palestine would define their lives as a married couple and as Jews in the vortex of modernization and nationalisms. While Joseph would thrive professionally, Lea would gradually lose control of her life.Item FROM SELLING RAGS TO WEARING RICHES: GERMAN JEWS' ECONOMIC PROGRESS IN THE FIRST HALF OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY(2010) Revzin, Naomi Tischler; Rozenblit, Marsha L.; Jewish Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study investigates how mainstream German Jews in the first half of the nineteenth century moved from the edges of society into the German economic middle class, as their marginal occupations, especially petty commerce and peddling, inadvertently positioned them to be at the forefront of German industrialization. The narratives of Jewish businessmen, combined with articles in two Jewish newspapers, indicate that Jewish entrepreneurs of that period continued to focus on commerce and were well positioned to take advantage of niche opportunities that the German gentile population overlooked. The study also showed how these Jewish businessmen publicly supported artisanry and the German guild system, as they simultaneously used their master certifications to start their own businesses. It reveals how Jewish businessmen's thinking changed, as they moved from marginal to mainstream and impacted the way they conducted business, as they moved from selling rags to wearing riches.Item Holding the Center: How One Jewish Day School Negotiates Differences in a Pluralistic Community(2010) Selis, Allen H.; Selden, Steven; Education Policy, and Leadership; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study centers on the experiences of students and religious study faculty in the high school division of "CDS," a successful Kindergarten through Twelfth grade Jewish day school that defines itself as a "community" institution. The school affirms a high-profile commitment to including "the widest spectrum of Jewish practice and belief" in its recruiting materials. While the student body comprises individuals who are diverse in their affiliations and beliefs, the school employs a religious studies faculty that overwhelmingly draws from the most theologically conservative subset of the larger community. Almost none of these instructors share the same orientation with respect to religious practice, beliefs or general cultural frames of reference as the students they educate. Nonetheless, the school's administrative leaders claim a high degree of success at creating an embracing community, where individual differences are honored and respected. The purpose of this study was to examine and critically evaluate this claim. By employing a range of classical ethnographic research strategies, including participant observation and individual interviews, this study explores the following question: How does a culturally heterogeneous group of religious studies faculty and students negotiate the challenge of communal participation in the high school division of one Jewish day school? While the results of field work were analyzed using a range of classical anthropological methods, this study makes special use of the communities of practice literature to create an interpretive schema for understanding the cultural life and experiences of this school community. Coding and analysis of field data suggest that a commitment to defer engagement around significant areas of ritual practice as well as the construction of a value system which reinforces the merits of coexistence create a loose framework for the notion of "community" at CDS. These findings expand an emerging literature on pluralism within Jewish institutions and suggest new interpretive tools for understanding the meaning of community within the growing field of pluralistic Jewish community day schools.Item Words to the Wives: The Jewish Press, Immigrant Women, and Identity Construction, 1924-1925(2009) Shapiro, Shelby Alan; Kelly, R. Gordon; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines how six publications sought to construct Jewish- American identities for Eastern European Jewish immigrant women between 1895 and 1925, beginning in 1895 with the world's first Jewish women's magazine, American Jewess (1895 - 1899), followed by a women's magazine in Yiddish, Di froyen-velt (1913 -1914), and ending with an another Yiddish women's magazine, Der idisher froyen zhurnal (1922-1923). Between 1914 and 1916, three mass circulation Yiddish daily newspapers, Dos yidishes tageblatt, Forverts, and Der tog, started printing women's pages. This study ends in 1925, after Congress passed legislation restricting immigration in 1924. These publications present a variety of viewpoints and identities, that were political, religious and class-based. The three magazines, all in the same genre, held different attitudes on everything from religion to suffrage. The three daily newspapers represented fundamentally different ideologies. Forverts was socialist. Der tog was nationalist-Zionist, and Dos yidishes tageblatt, the oldest publication examined, represented a conservative, traditionally religious viewpoint and supported Zionism. This study examines religious and political ideologies, celebrating religious and civic holidays, attitudes towards women working and learning, Jewish education, women's suffrage and exercising citizenship, as well as women in the public and private spheres of both the Jewish and American worlds. The central question asked is how those involved with these publications endeavored to create particular Jewish-American identities. Not being a reader- response study, I make no assumptions as to these publications' actual influence. The press represented only one institution involved in acculturation. Issues subsumed under the central question include how producers of these publications perceived Americanization and saw Jews in America; and what changes these journals advocated regarding religious practices, gender roles, and citizenship. "Acculturation" implies negotiation in the process of identity formation, as a blending of Old and New World customs, lifestyles, mores, economic and social conditions occurred. This dissertation takes a social constructionist view of ethnicity and identity formation. Based on translations relevant pieces from all issues of the publications under review, this study points to the diversity present on the American "Jewish Street" from 1895 to 1925.Item Hechos de orillas: Nuevas expresiones de la identidad judeo-argentina contemporanea(2007-04-13) Ran, Amalia; Sosnowski, Saul; Spanish Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The search of the Jewish immigrants for a consolidated identity, social and cultural integration, and recognition within the "official" History of Argentina is narrated through a web of personal stories and family genealogies that disclose the struggles with the collective memories in order to create a new "text": the story of the Jewish Argentineans. After more than a century of Jewish presence in Argentina, what is the importance of these stories for the current identification of these individuals? What is the significance of "being a Jew" -a descendant of immigrants, the other for many generations-, and of "being Argentinean" -a citizen with full political rights and a social actor? This dissertation focuses on novels created in Argentina, Spain, France, United States and Israel by descendants of Jewish immigrants to Argentina and by those born in that country. It examines the current shifting trends in defining the personal and collective identity of Jewish Argentineans in Argentina and its Diaspora. I assess the relevance of geographical spaces, national boundaries, languages and gender for the personal identification with the "imagined community" of the argentinidad and propose different ways to resolve the identity crisis of these individuals whose personal stories had been excluded from the canonical History documented by the state. I argue that the nostalgic return to the migrant past, the revision of symbolic national patrimonies and the redefinition of the collective identity enable new self expressions, and analyze the significance of these discourses through three different perspectives: first, I examine the impact of the distance created by the passing of time. The novels use the "Wandering Jew" as a literary resort in order to dialogue with past events and present an alternative version of it. Second, I evaluate the relevance of geographical distances and linguistic gaps in the formation of the national, cultural and personal identities, upon the nostalgic return to the past, and a sense of dislocation associated with this act. Finally, I examine the importance of biographical elements, such as gender, class and generational differences, for the Jewish and Argentinean identification at the beginning of the XXI century.Item Our Little Country: National Identities of Alsatian Jewry Between the Two World Wars(2006-05-07) Schachter, Ruth Beryl; Rozenblit, Marsha; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This thesis looks at the Jewish community of Alsace and Lorraine between 1918 and 1940 and its attitudes towards France and Germany. The paper argues that while Jews living in Alsace and Lorraine by and large expressed political loyalty to France, they nevertheless expressed a unique cultural identity that resulted from their particular position of living in a contested borderland. The Jews of Alsace and Lorraine spoke both French and German in their daily lives, remained religiously and culturally conservative, and welcomed in refugees from Eastern Europe and Nazi Germany during the interwar period without concern about social or political repercussions. Alsatian Jews clearly manifested pro-French political tendencies, however unlike their fellow Jews in France, Jews in Alsace and Lorraine remained distanced from the ideological connotations of being French citizens. Thus, this thesis illustrates how political loyalty, and religious and cultural identities manifested themselves differently depending on specific locations.