ethnic studies – Jewish American identities

Jonathan Woocher’s 2012 essay, “Reinventing Jewish Education for the 21st Century,” o ered
a distillation of concepts and prescriptions he
had been incubating for the better part of a decade (Woocher, 2012a). At its core was a
vision of a learner-centered educational system where Jewish wisdom (i.e., Torah) becomes a resource for personal meaning-making. Those familiar with the trajectory of Woocher’s thinking were surely not surprised by his enthusiasm for prosumerism or his relative sanguinity about
the decline of legacy institutions. But they might have been caught o  guard by the virtual absence of any reference to a role for community and Jewish peoplehood in his proposed educational paradigm. For Woocher, Jewish community had been an animating concern that presaged his interest in communal dynamics, guided his work as the longtime executive director of the Jewish Education Service of North America ( JESNA), and grounded his e orts on behalf of Jewish continuity and renaissance. Was Woocher’s silence on community in “Reinventing Jewish Education” indicative of a radical rethinking of the bases of Jewish life?

בשנת 1980 הוציאה לאור המשוררת היהודייה ראשל ופרינסקי
ידיש ראשל וועפרינסקי( אסופה ממכתביו של בן זוגה, אהובה,
המשורר מאני לייב (שם העט של מנחם בראהינסקי). האסופה ראתה
אור בהוצאת י.ל. פרץ בתל אביב, ואולם, חייהם המסקרנים של
השניים התנהלו כחצי מאה מוקדם יותר, מעבר לאוקיאנוס, בלואר
איסט סייד בניו יורק. העיר ניו יורק בין שתי מלחמות עולם הייתה
מרכז של תקווה לכמיליון וחצי מהגרים יהודים ממזרח אירופה
שנהרו אל שעריה בכדי להגשים את הפנטזיה האמריקאית; להמשיך
ולחבוק את זהותם היהודית בגאווה ולהנות מרוח החירות המאפשרת
פרנסה ויצירה. במסגרת מציאות הניגודים שאפיינה את התושבים
בבנייני המגורים המשותפים, הטנמנטס, אנוסים היו המהגרים
לחוות צפיפות ודחק, עוני וחולי, ואולם, לצד אלו פרחה גם תרבות
בתי הקפה, ערבי שירה וחגיגת מילייֶה ספרותי תוסס. כזה היה
מרחב מערכת היחסים שנרקמה בין המשורר מאני לייב לאהובתו,
המשוררת ראשל ופרינסקי, משנטשו השניים את משפחותיהם
האחרות כדי לחיות את חייהם יחד. בחירתם המודעת ללכת אחר ציווי הלב והתשוקה כמו גם
התמודדותם עם המחיר אותו גבתה בחירה זו, יצוקים אל שירתם
ההופכת רוויה במוטיבים ומטאפורות של תשוקה ואהבה, פחד וחרדה.
יצירתם של השניים מתמקדת, לעיתים באופן כמעט דיאלוגי, בהגשת
אינטרפרטציות פואטיות לתחושותיהם ובתמלול הרגש המתעורר
בדרך התלאות המשותפת.
מאמר זה בוחן כיצד נסיבות חיים וחוויות רגשיות מתורגמות לשירה,
ובתוך כך הופכות תיעוד מציאות אמיתית ומורכבת ברובד מדומיין.
כתיבת שירה המתקיימת בתוך זוגיות העוברת תקופות של חולי (מאני
לייב סבל כמחצית מחייו ממחלת השחפת) עוני ומחסור מאפשרת
בחינה מחודשת של מקומו של רגש החרדה בתוך התמודדות יומיומית
אותנטית ואמיתית ובדרך תרגומה ליצירה המשקפת את רוח התקופה
________________________________________________________________
In 1980, the Jewish poet Rochelle Weprinski published a collection of letters that her lover, the poet Mani Leib (pen name of Menachem Brahinsky), wrote to her. The I.L. Peretz Publishing House issued the collection in Tel Aviv; however, the couple's intriguing lives had taken place half a century earlier, across the ocean, in New York's Lower East Side. At the turn of the 20th century, New York City was a center of hope for over one million Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. They followed their hearts to pursue the American dream, wishing to embrace their Jewish identity, on the one hand, and to enjoy the spirit of freedom that enabled livelihood and creativity, on the other.
A reality of contradictions characterized the lives of the tenements' residents. Jewish immigrants experienced overcrowding, poverty, and illness, alongside the flourishing of literary cafes, poetry evenings, and thriving secular culture. After leaving their families, Mani Leib and Rochelle Weprinski forged their romantic liaison in this enlightened milieu. Their deliberate choice to follow their hearts' desires and consequences were all cast into their poetry, which became saturated with motifs and metaphors dealing with fear and anxiety. Both poets penned their intimate feelings as poetic interpretations of their lives, transcribing the emotion that arose through shared hardship.
This article examines how life circumstances and emotional experiences were translated into poetry, forming significant documentation of Jewish American immigrants' crude reality. Rochelle Weprinski and Mani Leib experienced harsh circumstances; they both went through periods of illness (Mani Leib suffered from tuberculosis), poverty, and deprivation, even homelessness at times. Their creative writing, constituting a fascinating dialogue, allows for a re-examination of poetic representations of anxiety within the context of their zeitgeist.

The Jewish educational agenda of the interwar years was dominated by
two complementary and sometimes-competing values: integration and
survival. Two of the most popular Jewish children’s books of the 1930s
exemplified the balancing act that American Jews sought to perform
between the prevailing assimilationist ethos and their allegiance to
Jewish continuity. Sadie Rose Weilerstein’s The Adventures of K’tonton
(Women’s League of the United Synagogue, 1935) and Mamie Goldsmith Gamoran’s Hillel’s Happy Holidays (Union of American Hebrew
Congregations, 1939) offered their young readers accessible archetypes
of American Jewish acculturation. The first was written by a religiously
observant immigrant from Eastern Europe and intended for a first- and
second-generation audience residing primarily in ethnically homogenous
enclaves. The latter, penned by a thoroughly acculturated Reform Jew of
German extraction, appealed to a more Americanized, suburban readership. Yet despite the differences between the books and their respective
authors, both underscored the growing realization that the unprecedented
freedom that American Jews found on these shores could result in the
dissolution of their religious and ethnic distinctiveness.

This paper introduces the “boomerang effect,” the resurgence of substrate features that were previously on the wane. Among American Jews, Yiddish loanwords have waned and waxed over the past century, and in the domains of religion and popular culture, we currently see increased use of certain loanwords, including shul (‘synagogue’), leyn (‘chant Torah’), daven (‘pray’), and chutzpah (‘gall’). This paper offers evidence for this trend using data from a survey about language use, a corpus study of the American Jewish press from 1895 to the present, and analysis of media oriented toward young Jewish adults. These findings are discussed in light of changes in American society and in the Jewish community, as well as the notion of the “third-generation return.” (The attached document is the entire book, which is available for free from John Benjamins.)

Fully integrated with Indians, including Muslims, and never having faced any form of anti-Semitism ever in history, the Indian Jews are distinct from their European and American coreligionists in physiognomy and thought process. The Indian Jews are “Indians” and “Jews” concurrently and in fact the rare diaspora that did not face anti-Semitism at any time from their host community.
Spurred by a newspaper report stating that reported that only 20 people attended a Holocaust commemoration event held at Mumbai, this preliminary research from qualitative
interviews with members of the community in three Indian cities locates the relationship of the Indian Jewish people within the growing centrality of the Holocaust and Yom HaShoah
as markers of the Jewish identity and identity creation. Dwindling in numbers on account of
economic demand pull migration and mixed marriages, members of the diminishing
community are on the cusp of being left out of the ever increasing marker of Jewish identity
if they did not accept a practice they do not relate to. The Indian Jewish community could
well be the much needed “control group” of Jews who have lived and been accepted in
foreign lands, but on their own terms, the lack of which was lamented by Lang (2001)

All in the Family’s Archie Bunker was a mouthpiece for 1970s white working-class men. Theirs was an anxious decade. Peddling stereotypes, “othering” those unlike them, enabled this group to assert their threatened authority. Analyzed as popular media texts, the show’s many intersections with bigotry and anti-Semitism reveal unique insights into 1970s American life, especially the Jewish American experience. During the series’ decade-long run, Bunker gradually confronted and softened his prejudices. However, this was not the case among all “Archies,” a reality still visible in current times. Surveying the show’s racialist meditations against the backdrop of “tiki torchers” and Trumpism reminds viewers about the fraught nature of American identity, explaining why some Jews may elect to pass.

In secular Jewish American music, the 1950s through 1970s are often viewed by scholars and musicians as a period of discontinuity.  Building on Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s (2002) call for a greater understanding of music from this time, I show that the work of second generation klezmorim, the children of immigrant klezmorim, maintained the traditional characteristics of their predecessors and foreshadowed the creative innovations of the klezmer revitalization beginning in the late 1970s.  Drawing from recordings of select second generation klezmorim- Ray and Sammy Musiker, Sidney Beckerman, and Marty Levitt- and from interviews with Pete Sokolow, Dave Levitt, Margot Leverett, and other contemporary klezmorim, I will present the repertoire of the selected performers that demonstrates the trends in mid-century Jewish instrumental music. The mid-century klezmorim did not merely preserve a waning tradition, they primed the scene for the changes to follow, through the continued development of the bulgar genre, incorporation of popular American dance styles, more rapidly changing and complex harmonic progressions, and increased use chromaticism and the major scale. These klezmorim inhabited an audiotopia, a social space and time of musical contradiction, where the seemingly opposite binaries of Jewish cultural tradition and American popular culture, religious and profane, English and Yiddish coexisted.  Their careers, repertoire, and musical advancements are evidence of the shifting sensibilities in Jewish music and the increasing fluidity of Jewish American identity throughout the twentieth century.

In the opening scene of Nella Larsen's 1928 novel Quicksand, the protagonist Helga Crane contemplates ways of escaping the stifling life she has been leading as a teacher in the black southern educational institution Naxos. Her sudden decision to leave in the middle of the semester means that she will need money, so she decides to ask her maternal uncle, Peter, for a sum that would allow her to begin a new life in Chicago. Although she prefers not to approach her "contemptuous" white relative, she tells herself that a beggar "cannot expect to
choose" (7). This passage marks the first in which the topos of the beggar emerges in the text, and Helga clearly identifies with the image. But Helga does not even get the chance to solicit money from her uncle. When she arrives at her relative's house, she is greeted by her uncle's new wife, who categorically refuses to acknowledge Helga as Peter's niece. Humiliated, denied recognition, Helga flees from this woman "who so plainly wished dissociate herself from the outrage of [Helga's] very existence" (29)....

Jewish English writing uses multiple combinations of the Hebrew and English alphabets. This paper demonstrates those uses, giving examples from rabbinic literature, Yiddish and Ladino newspapers, handwritten notes, pedagogical materials, organizations' and restaurants' logos, and regalia advertising sports teams, universities, and political candidates. The analysis demonstrates that hybrid combinations of Hebrew and English writing serve four functions: 1) Translanguaging: Enabling people who have access to (elements of) English and a traditionally Hebrew-script language (Yiddish, Ladino, Modern Hebrew, Textual Hebrew, Textual Jewish Aramaic) to represent both languages in the same text; 2) Symbolism: Highlighting English-speaking Jews' Jewish and other identities simultaneously; 3) Code: Communicating coded messages to other Jews; and 4) Pedagogy: Teaching Hebrew decoding to English speakers or teaching English to readers of Yiddish or Ladino. Digraphic texts are bivalent, seen as part of multiple languages simultaneously.

During the immediate years after World War I American Jewish commentators from across the spectrum had begun viewing anti-Jewish enmity as an interrelated phenomenon that straddled the Atlantic. On the one hand, they often blamed the growing antisemitism in America on immigrant groups like Poles and Germans. On the other, they also saw the simultaneous rise of anti-Jewish hatred in Europe as linked to the circulation of American anti-Jewish literature by Ford and his ilk. Moreover, as antisemitism in America coincided with the fact that American troops fought alongside the White forces in Russia and Polish Americans were involved in anti-Jewish atrocities, Jewish observers increasingly cast Americans as part of a larger, antagonistic Gentile world.

This article appears in Christian Wiese and Cornelia Wilhelm (eds.), "American Jewry: Transcending the European Experience? "

Scholars of material culture are not the only people in Jewish studies ardently studying the body and everyday life as a site of meaning. Whether they have lauded interest in the body as "the new Jewish cultural studies," or decried it as a symptom of "voguish, post-modern skepticism," many scholars have noted that Jewish studies took a corporeal turn starting in the 1990s. Scholars' interest in the body has influenced how historians approach evidence by encouraging an analysis of the body—not the book—as the primary site of Jewish identity. In recent years, the conferences and publications of the American Jewish Historical Society have broadened scholars' vision of history to include interdisciplinary approaches to historical evidence as well as analyses of literature, music, and the arts. This special issue of American Jewish History adds to those recent conversations in American Jewish studies by showcasing the methods used for understanding material culture and by further broadening the scope of the types of objects that might be considered essential for understanding changes in American Jewish life.

For much of Jewish history, vast numbers of Jews did not have even one land wherein they could feel secure as Jews and know that they belonged. Most of the American Jews telling their stories here have been fortunate to have not only one such place, but two.

The Shoah is an historical event that leaves its marks on Jewish memory and thought to this day. Broadly speaking, there are two lessons of the Shoah: a particularistic one-relevant to Jews only-and a universalistic lesson, for all peoples. This article examines how the memory of the Shoah and these lessons contribute to the formation of Jewish identity. Works considering the Shoah of three metal bands with prominent Jewish members will be used: one Israeli-Jewish band-Salem; and two multireligious American bands-Anthrax and Disturbed. I will start by analysing songs about the Shoah and continue with a broader look at their entire catalogues and interviews. The ideas expressed will be understood on the background of theories considering Jewish identity and metal music and culture. This qualitative research is therefore grounded in the methodology of the history of ideas. My main findings are: (1) Most metal songs about the Shoah were written by a band with prominent Jewish members. (2) It indeed functions as a living memory affecting Jewish identity-that is, values and sociopolitical beliefs. (3) All the songs analysed create engagement by arousing an emotional response in listeners. (4) While Jewish identity is clearly manifested in Salem and Disturbed's

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

After 1948, several upheavals—the creation of the State of Israel, decolonization and Arab nationalism—forced the vast majority of Jews from the Middle East, North Africa and the former Ottoman Empire to leave their lands of origin. While most of these Sephardic Jews went to Israel, and a substantial minority—especially those from the former French colonies in North Africa—resettled in France and Canada, a small number made their way to the United States. While Sephardim still comprise only a small fraction of an overwhelmingly Ashkenazic American Jewish population, their numbers have increased considerably in the post-World War II era.

The American Friends of the Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU), a non-profit organization created in New York City in 1947 to garner funds for the AIU’s then extensive network of schools in the Arab world, provides a window into the evolution of Sephardic integration, identity and self-representation in the post-World War II United States. While it was primarily a fundraising group, the Friends also functioned as a vehicle for Sephardic expression and community building in the United States, as well as a space where Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jews worked together—and were sometimes at odds with one another. As such, a study of the Friends—the personal histories and perspectives of the people who founded and maintained it, the tactics it used in its attempts to solicit funds, as well as the reasons for its limited success and its ultimate demise—is a particularly interesting vantage point from which to explore the evolution of both Ashkenazic-Sephardic relations and each groups’ perceptions of each other in the United States over the past 60 years.

Scholarship on immigration to the United States in the postwar era has emphasized the diversity of geographical, religious, cultural and class backgrounds of the “new new immigrants.” This diversity, combined with a shift in American popular culture and government policy away from assimilation and toward multiculturalism, argue sociologists Rubén G. Rumbaut, Alejandro Portes and others, has splintered the notion of what it means to “become American.” Rather than integrating into an undifferentiated “America society,” post-World War II immigrants have experienced “segmented integration” into any number of particular American subcultures.

In a similar vein, rather than using terms such as “Jewish culture” or “Jewish diaspora” in the singular, scholars such as Moshe Rosman and David Biale have used these terms in the plural, thus drawing our attention to the range of Jewish experiences in a wide variety of historical contexts. This focus on diversity has been particularly important within the field of Sephardic studies, as scholars such as Jonathan Ray and Aviva Ben-Ur have pointed out that “Jewish” has often been equated with “Ashkenazic” among contemporary historians. They have suggested that the Sephardim have functioned as a “subethnic” group in the contemporary Jewish world. As a “minority within a minority,” American Jews of Sephardic origins have thus faced not only the challenge of integration into American life in general, but also that of integration into an overwhelmingly Ashkenazic Jewish mainstream community.

The story of the American Friends of the AIU is a story of competing and overlapping identities. On the one hand, the Sephardic Jews who were the driving force behind the organization saw the group as an opportunity to forge a new network of Sephardic Jews in the United States and, in so doing, to educate both American society as a whole and American Jews in particular, about the history, culture, and material needs of Jews in the Arab world and the former Ottoman empire. On the other hand, these individuals naturally sought out connections with members of the larger American Jewish community as they integrated into American society and moved up the economic ladder. As we shall see, this “push and pull” of post-World War II Sephardim toward the American Jewish majority shaped the motives of Sephardim who joined the Friends, as well as relations between Sephardim and Ashkenazim within the organization.

Sephardic Jews who became involved with the Friends represented a particular stratum within the modern Sephardic—and Sephardic American—world.

היכן מצוי הסיפור הקדום בו יותר ובו העלילה לפיה יהודים הרגו גוי בשל הפולחן שלהם בחג הפסח? בתלמוד הבבלי. מאמר זה משווה בין שני סיפורים יהודיים הרחוקים זה מזה בזמן ובמרחב - האחד מן התלמוד הבבלי והשני מאסופת סיפורים קצרים מיהדות אנגליה בעשור האחרון. שני הסיפורים עוסקים בשבירת גבולותיה של הקבוצה היהודית בליל חג הפסח, כאשר לא-יהודי 'חודר' לטקסיה הפנימיים של הקבוצה. שני הטקסטים נקראים במאמר זה כהמחזות של האיסור המקראי 'וכל ערל לא יוכל בו' וכדוגמאות למגוון מנגנוני הבניית זהות יהודית: השימוש במעגל השנה ובחג הפסח כאמצעי לציון הזהות היהודית, עיצוב המרחב , העיסוק במזון, תפיסת השפה המשותפת ליהודים מרוחקים זה מזה המונגדת לזיקת היהודים אל גוים החסרים שפה זו, ועוד . המאמר מצביע גם על מעמדו המכונן של הטקסט המקראי במהלך זה, וגם על חלקו של התלמוד הבבלי בעיצוב דפוסי סיפר יהודיים בזמננו, אף בחברות יהודיות שאינן רואות בו עוד קאנון נורמטיבי.

In March of this year, I traveled with over 30 Orthodox Jewish community leaders on the Am Echad mission to Israel. Our delegation met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, President Ruby Rivlin, and Cabinet and Knesset members to give voice to the Orthodox community’s viewpoints. We argued that the strongest base of support for
Israel currently comes from Orthodox Jews in America, who feel a sense of responsibility toward their brethren in their ancestral homeland. Many on the liberal end of the Jewish spectrum, in contrast, feel compelled by party politics to support the Palestinians and vocally criticize Israel.

A fundamental part of the experience of immigrants to the United States has been the tension between incorporating into a new country while maintaining one's cultural roots. In this article, the author describes the experience of Jewish Americans in Maine, where climate, culture, and remoteness from larger Jewish populations contributed to a unique process of Americanization compared with Jewish populations in more urban areas of the country. After successfully "making it " over the course of two centuries, Jewish Mainers face a new set of challenges and opportunities.

This article proposes an interpretative study of Daren Aronofsky and Ari Handel's film Noah (2014). Our main assertion is that the film attempts to present a contemporary interpretation of the biblical flood story by incorporating values and urgent issues of the 21st century Western society, such as environmentalism, fundamentalism and eco-feminism. The paper details various traditions that serve as inspirations to the filmmakers in the re-telling of the flood myth, and elaborates on the midrashic traditions that were intertwined – or else omitted – in the process of creating the innovative cinematic midrash. It also points to the psychologization of God in the film and its theological implications.

I write about Jewish Weequahic, Newark's storied Jewish community, as someone who grew up there, albeit a generation or so later than Roth, and as ancient historian interested in the tenacity and meaning of Jewish identity in urban settings.

W latach 80. XIX w. rozpoczęła się wielka emigracja Żydów z Europy Środkowej i Wschodniej. Z samego Imperium Rosyjskiego, wówczas państwa z największą liczbą ludności żydowskiej na świecie, do 1914 r. wyemigrowało 2 mln Żydów, spośród których 1,56 mln osiedliło się w Stanach Zjednoczonych. Kraj ten, przeżywający w tym okresie szybki rozwój gospodarczy, stał się swoistą „ziemią obiecaną” dla mieszkańców europejskich sztetli. Liberalna amerykańska polityka migracyjna trwała do 1924 r., kiedy napływ nowych emigrantów został drastycznie ograniczony. Efektem tego exodusu było powstanie prężnych wspólnot żydowskich, z których największe znaczenie miał Nowy Jork.
Wraz z napływem milionów żydowskich emigrantów zaczęły powstawać ziomkostwa, zwane z jidysz landsmanszaftami. Organizacje te skupiały ludzi pochodzących z jednej miejscowości, co wynikało z tego, że u Żydów tożsamości lokalne dominowały nad poczuciem przynależności do szerszej wspólnoty etnicznej. Celem działania landsmanszaftów była przede wszystkim wzajemna pomoc i dążenie do zachowania tożsamości w Nowym Świecie. W ciągu krótkiego czasu powstały tysiące ziomkostw, w których działały setki tysięcy członków, a rola, jaką odegrały w historii jest nie do przecenienia.

An overview of recent and current debates around the issues of 'Jewish continuity' and 'Jewish identity' in the contemporary diaspora.

The paper was presented to a public seminar at the Australian Centre For Jewish Civilization, Monash University, Australia: February, 2010

The article focuses on the mayoralty race in New York City in 1917. Whereas several scholars have explained the electoral outcome of that campaign as the peak of Jewish immigrants' support for the Socialist Party (SP), this article shows a different picture. The height of the SP’s electoral success among Jewish voters in 1917 had little to do with socialism per se, and was mostly related to the party’s unequivocal anti-war position. The many socialists who joined pro-war organizations (and the independent stance taken by Socialist Congressman Meyer London) on the one hand; and the support Socialist candidate Morris Hillquit received among the usually anti-radical Orthodox Jews on the other, illustrate that the main dividing lines in the 1917 mayoralty campaign did not revolve around socioeconomic issues, but around the question of war and the ensuing draft. Both the Socialists (including Hillquit himself) and their opponents recognized  this, and ran their campaigns accordingly.

This study provides insight into two less well understood aspects of the identities of American Jews.  First, it portrays a more multifaceted view of the varieties of Jewishness that currently exist, moving our understanding beyond denomination or mere "affiliation." Second, it examines the factors that influence Jewish identity formation over the life course through age 50, and introduces the notion of the journey as a needed conception beyond a static identity. The study included in-depth interviews (n=87), a series of  six focus groups, and a statistically representative survey of American-born Jews (n=1500) , conducted between 1996-1998 in the Greater NYC area.

This article offers a survey of major trends in twentieth-century American humor, from Yiddish vaudeville recordings in the era of mass immigration to Sarah Silverman at the beginning of the twenty-first century. It focuses primarily on the role of language, specifically Yiddish and its interaction with American English, as an index of Jewish-American marginality. The incorporation of Yiddish terms into so much of twentieth-century Jewish-American humor is a strategy for maintaining a sense of ethnic and ethical difference from "non-hyphenated" American culture, while the success of this humor becomes at the same time a crucial means of integrating Jewish culture and sensibilities into the American mainstream.

This article discusses the connection between the postwar Black-Jewish cooperation in popular music and American ethnic politics through the case study of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller-the successful duo R&B songwriters of the 1950s and early 1960s. These Jewish songwriters and music producers carried out some important historical work collaborating with Afro-American performers. The article discusses Leiber & Stoller's contribution to postwar multiculturalism through a specific blend of elitist-humanism that relates to the politics of American Jews in the music industry as having much more subversive sensibilities than the academic discourse used to portray.

"Slaves Were We? Racism, Jews, and American Privilege" is an effort at understanding the role of Yiddish in the self-perception of Jews during their assimilation, and resistance to assimilation, as white people in the United States. Drawing on James Baldwin's (mis-titled, but not by him!) 1967 essay "Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They Are Anti-White," it seeks to advocate alternatives to understanding Jews as whites in American society, while cautioning against the complacencies of self-perception that have contributed to complicity with American racism.

The study takes a situated and material approach to texts and writing practices and examines writing ethnographically as it transpires and displayed in museums. The ethnography highlights the richness and sociality embodied in writing practices as well as the ideological, communal, and ritualistic functions that writing and texts serve in cultural institutions.
Specifically, I offer a comparative study of visitor books and similar writing platforms in two Jewish heritage museums in the United States. Extended ethnographic observations of visitors’ writing activities are augmented by analysis of visitors’ texts, which, following Bakhtin, are understood in terms of their addressivity structures or whom they are addressed to. The study shows how visitors’ texts amount to collective contributions that are part of museums’ heritage display, and that visitors become rhetors when their mode of heritage consumption is the production of texts.