Jewish Ireland

Download or read book Jewish Ireland in the Age of Joyce written by Cormac Ó Gráda and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2016-06-28 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: James Joyce's Leopold Bloom--the atheistic Everyman of Ulysses, son of a Hungarian Jewish father and an Irish Protestant mother--may have turned the world's literary eyes on Dublin, but those who look to him for history should think again. He could hardly have been a product of the city's bona fide Jewish community, where intermarriage with outsiders was rare and piety was pronounced. In Jewish Ireland in the Age of Joyce, a leading economic historian tells the real story of how Jewish Ireland--and Dublin's Little Jerusalem in particular--made ends meet from the 1870s, when the first Lithuanian Jewish immigrants landed in Dublin, to the late 1940s, just before the community began its dramatic decline. In 1866--the year Bloom was born--Dublin's Jewish population hardly existed, and on the eve of World War I it numbered barely three thousand. But this small group of people quickly found an economic niche in an era of depression, and developed a surprisingly vibrant web of institutions. In a richly detailed, elegantly written blend of historical, economic, and demographic analysis, Cormac Ó Gráda examines the challenges this community faced. He asks how its patterns of child rearing, schooling, and cultural and religious behavior influenced its marital, fertility, and infant-mortality rates. He argues that the community's small size shaped its occupational profile and influenced its acculturation; it also compromised its viability in the long run. Jewish Ireland in the Age of Joyce presents a fascinating portrait of a group of people in an unlikely location who, though small in number, comprised Ireland's most resilient immigrant community until the Celtic Tiger's immigration surge of the 1990s.

Download or read book Irish Questions and Jewish Questions written by Aidan Beatty and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 2018-08-01 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Irish and the Jews are two of the classic outliers of modern Europe. Both struggled with their lack of formal political sovereignty in the nineteenth-century. Simultaneously European and not European, both endured a bifurcated status, perceived as racially inferior and yet also seen as a natural part of the European landscape. Both sought to deal with their subaltern status through nationalism; both had a tangled, ambiguous, and sometimes violent relationship with Britain and the British Empire; and both sought to revive ancient languages as part of their drive to create a new identity. The career of Irish politician Robert Briscoe and the travails of Leopold Bloom are just two examples of the delicate balancing of Irish and Jewish identities in the first half of the twentieth century. Irish Questions and Jewish Questions explores these shared histories, covering several centuries of the Jewish experience in Ireland, as well as events in Israel–Palestine and North America. The authors examine the leading figures of both national movements to reveal how each had an active interest in the successes, and failures, of the other. Bringing together leading and emerging scholars from the fields of Irish studies and Jewish studies, this volume captures the most recent scholarship on their comparative history with nuance and remarkable insight.

Download or read book Jews in Twentieth-century Ireland written by Dermot Keogh and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book analyzes the relationship between the Irish State and the Jewish community in the 1930s. The author assesses Ireland's humanitarian record during the Holocaust and finally traces the history of the Irish Jewish community from the 1950s to the 1990s.

Download or read book Shalom Ireland written by Ray Rivlin and published by Gill. This book was released on 2003 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Way We Were is an account of the social life of Irish Jews from the late 19th century to the modern day. Most of the story is concentrated in Dublin where almost 90 per cent of the entire Irish Jewish community settled. Until the late nineteenth century, there were only a tiny number of Jews in Ireland, most of them well established on the north side of Dublin. But then came the great influx of Jews into Britain and Ireland, most of them from the Russian Pale of Settlement in search of a better, freer and more tolerant life.

Download or read book The Colors of Zion written by George Bornstein and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2011-02 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A major reevaluation of relationships among Blacks, Jews, and Irish in the years between the Irish Famine and the end of World War II, The Colors of Zion argues that the cooperative efforts and sympathies among these three groups, each persecuted and subjugated in its own way, was much greater than often acknowledged today. For the Black, Jewish, and Irish writers, poets, musicians, and politicians at the center of this transatlantic study, a sense of shared wrongs inspired repeated outpourings of sympathy. If what they have to say now surprises us, it is because our current constructions of interracial and ethnic relations have overemphasized conflict and division. As George Bornstein says in his Introduction, he chooses “to let the principals speak for themselves.” While acknowledging past conflicts and tensions, Bornstein insists on recovering the “lost connections” through which these groups frequently defined their plights as well as their aspirations. In doing so, he examines a wide range of materials, including immigration laws, lynching, hostile race theorists, Nazis and Klansmen, discriminatory university practices, and Jewish publishing houses alongside popular plays like The Melting Pot and Abie’s Irish Rose, canonical novels like Ulysses and Daniel Deronda, music from slave spirituals to jazz, poetry, and early films such as The Jazz Singer. The models of brotherhood that extended beyond ethnocentrism a century ago, the author argues, might do so once again today, if only we bear them in mind. He also urges us to move beyond arbitrary and invidious categories of race and ethnicity.

Download or read book Nine Folds Make a Paper Swan written by Ruth Gilligan and published by Tin House Books. This book was released on 2017-01-24 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Three intertwining voices span the twentieth century to tell the unknown story of the Jews in Ireland. A heartbreaking portrait of what it means to belong, and how storytelling can redeem us all. At the start of the twentieth century, a young girl and her family emigrate from Lithuania in search of a better life in America, only to land on the Emerald Isle instead. In 1958, a mute Jewish boy locked away in a mental institution outside of Dublin forms an unlikely friendship with a man consumed by the story of the love he lost nearly two decades earlier. And in present-day London, an Irish journalist is forced to confront her conflicting notions of identity and family when her Jewish boyfriend asks her to make a true leap of faith. These three arcs, which span generations and intertwine in revelatory ways, come together to tell the haunting story of Ireland’s all-but-forgotten Jewish community. Ruth Gilligan’s beautiful and heartbreaking Nine Folds Make a Paper Swan explores the question of just how far we will go to understand who we really are, and to feel at home in the world.

Download or read book Jewish Ireland written by Ray Rivlin and published by The History Press. This book was released on 2011-06-01 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jewish Ireland: A Social History is an engaging and thoroughly researched panorama of Irish Jewry. Based on library and archival material, private memoirs and oral testimony, it traces Irish-Jewish life from the 1880s when Orthodox Russian Jews, forced to flee Tsarist persecution, began arriving in Ireland without any means of support, little secular education and no understanding of English. Overcoming poverty and antipathy, they established Jewish enclaves around the South Circular Road in Dublin and in townships and cities throughout Ireland, educated themselves from peddlers to professionals and entrepreneurs, took an active part in the Irish civil war and other major conflicts, engaged in national politics and sport and achieved acclaim in literature, art and music. This insightful and often humorous portrayal of a people underlines the contribution made to Ireland by its Jewish citizens and gives an invaluable understanding of the Jewish way of life to the wider community.