Jewish-American Identity and Critical Intercultural Communication: Never Forget, Tikkun Olam, and Kindness to Strangers explores what it means to be Jewish on a personal, sociocultural, and global-political level. This book employs 50+ interviews with diverse Jewish voices to provide a history of Jewish migration to the US and to privilege voices that are not necessarily White and Eastern European/Ashkenazic. Sobre argues for a more inclusive form of intercultural theorizing that favors intersectionality and allyship over oppression Olympics (stereotypes between members of different nondominant groups) and colorism (within nondominant group discrimination). Such siloing of differences, and further competing about whose differences are the most egregious, minimizes critical intercultural coalition opportunities allowing for such groups as those who gave power to Trump and Netanyahu to connect while inclusive progressives engage in in-fighting and separatism. The author calls for transversal dialogic politics, racially and historically accurate school curriculum, intersectionality and more inclusive intercultural communication scholarship and practice as various means of working together against white nationalism and white supremacy in the US and the world. Scholars of religious studies, cultural anthropology, and intercultural communication will find this book of particular interest.
Miriam Shoshana Sobre is assistant professor of instruction at the University of Texas at San Antonio.
Table Of Contents Dedication Acknowledgements Introduction: The Point of the Exercise Section I: Jews and Jewish Life in US America Chapter 1: Definitions, History and Demographics of Jewish Americans Chapter 2: Rootless Cosmopolitans Find Roots: Socioeconomics, Education and Social Justice of Jewish Life in US America Chapter 3: Antisemitism, Zionism, Israel, and Acceptance: Jews in the US American 20th Century Through Today Section II: Theoretical Framework for the Study Chapter 4: Critical Intercultural Communication and Jewish American Life - A Framework for Analysis and Critique Chapter 5: Never Forget, Scattered People and Israel: Jews within a Postcolonial Context Section III: US American Jewish Voices and the Stories of Jewish American Identity Chapter 6: Laying the Groundwork for the Study Chapter 7: A Mosaic of Jewish Identity Chapter 8: Ashkenormativity and Critical Intercultural Communication Chapter 9: Strange Bedfellows: US American Jews and Israel Chapter 10: Never Forget and Never Again Glossary of Hebrew and Yiddish Terms Appendices References About the Author
