Скачать или смотреть The Jewish Middle Class in an Age of Social Justice

A webinar with JTS alum Dr. Nancy Sinkoff, Professor of Jewish Studies and History, Rutgers University.

Part of our series “Six Days Shall You Labor”: Perspectives on Work in Jewish Text and Tradition

Download the PowerPoint:
https://www.jtsa.edu/wp-content/uploa...

This session explores the historian Lucy S. Dawidowicz’s challenging essay, “The Business of American Jews: Notes on a Work in Progress” (1992), which called for a reassessment of Jewish economic social mobility as a positive value in Jewish life.

Today—in our moment of social justice reckoning—many Jews, particularly younger cohorts, express ambivalence about capitalism and the middle class, and the Jewish community’s “investment” in what they argue are systems of oppression and racism. The session begins with a survey of earlier critiques of Jews and their concentration in the middle class, and then focuses on Dawidowicz’s essay, which anticipated the current “economic turn” in American Jewish historiography, as a jumping off point for a discussion of what moral, social, and political challenges face the middle class Jewish community when that status is considered “privileged.”