Glenn C. Altschuler

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J’accuse America

By Glenn C. Altschuler

Convicted in 1894 of selling secrets to Germany, French army captain Alfred Dreyfus, the only Jewish officer trainee on the General Staff, was sentenced to perpetual imprisonment in a fortified enclosure on Devil’s Island, a rocky formation near French Guyana. Six weeks before his exile began, as he cried out that he was innocent and a French patriot, Dreyfus was forced to participate in “the Judas parade,” marching around the courtyard while just outside, a huge mob screamed, “Death to the traitor, the dirty Jew.”Read More

Einstein and Complex Analyses of Zionism

By Glenn C. Altschuler

‘The Arabs have attacked us unexpectedly, wanted to destroy our settlement work, have murdered and plundered,” Chaim Weizmann wrote in 1929. Although until now, the Jews “have given everything” to Arab leaders who “want only one thing, to chase us into the Mediterranean,” he added, “we are now pressed from all sides to conclude a pact with them.” Weizmann vowed to accept nothing less than a society in Palestine, “as Jewish as England is English and America is American.”Read More

Wunderkind Lost: Rosenfeld’s Passage From Home

By Glenn C. Altschuler

Born in Chicago in 1918, Isaac Rosenfeld was a wunderkind. he wasn’t even 20 when he collaborated with his buddy Saul Bellow on “Der Shir Hashirim fun Mendel Pumshtock,” a brilliant parody of T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” In 1946, his semiautobiographical novel, “Passage From Home,” was hailed by Diana Trilling as “the fullest articulation of generational conflict between Jewish fathers and sons,” and as a work of “profound universal meanings.” Irving Howe praised “Passage” as “rich and warm” and “bright with intelligence…. The novel is not merely a promise, though it is certainly that; it is a fulfillment.”Read More

Three Centuries of Bagels

By Glenn C. Altschuler

‘A bagel has versatility,” Murray Lender, one of America’s great frozen-food entrepreneurs, proclaimed almost 40 years ago. “It’s a roll, a roll with personality. If you must be ethnic you can call it a Jewish English muffin with personality.… We don’t talk of bagels, lox (Nova Scotia salmon) and cream cheese. It limits them. Think of toasted bagels and jam, if you like.”Read More

Securing a Father’s Place In American Social History

By Glenn C. Altschuler

Throughout the 1930s, the home of Abraham and Henriette Epstein, at 389 Bleecker Street in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, was a salon where political reformers ate, drank and argued about how to provide social insurance for older Americans. More than half a century later, according to the Epsteins’ son Pierre, little remained in their house “to recall that glowing era, except the shredded and sagging sofa, the baby grand piano (no longer played, out of tune, and covered with letters and papers), the unsteady claw-footed desk (where Abe wrote and worked), and the books and papers on the overstuffed shelves, now carefully wrapped in plastic baggies.” Nor did anyone seem to remember that Abraham Epstein, the immigrant Jew from the Russian village of Lyuban, had popularized the phrase “social security” — and helped conceive and enact the legislation that laid the groundwork for the modern American welfare state.Read More


 

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