STUDY QUESTIONS

David G. Roskies, "A Revolution Set in Stone" in The Jewish Search for a Usable Past (Bloomington, 1998): 120-145

1) Roskies asserts that "secular workers orders . . . offered a completely new form of Jewish affiliation." Do you agree? Or is it more accurate to describe the New World "socialist" variant of such things as funeral processions and burials as simply "less Jewish"?

2) According to the author, how was Sholem Aleichem turned into a "secular icon"?

3) How did Sholem Aleichem's presence, in turn, appear to recast the symbolic significance of the Mount Carmel Cemetery?

4) In what ways did the Jewish labor movement in America rewrite the individual biographies of its members?

5) What role did the New World environment play in the trend towards "funerals as pageants"? How might the needs of the Jewish socialist labor movement, specifically, have contributed to this trend?

6) What kind of impact did the Holocaust have on the memorial character of this "New World" Jewish cemetery? Did it entirely eclipse the cemetery's role in contributing to an alternative, secular, radical- or socialist-oriented Jewish identity?

7) Why does Roskies make reference to a "Yiddish revolution"? What role did language play in the development of a Jewish New World identity?

8) Why is the cemetery of major Hebrew writers, politicians, and national martyrs in Tel Aviv, as the author states, "largely ignored" there?

9) Taking the Jewish community of Park Forest and the lives represented by the Workingmen's Cemetery of Mount Carmel as examples, would you agree or disagree that modern American culture leads to a de-radicalization of Jewish "reinvention"? (See Roskies' concluding comment regarding the "radical reinvention of Jewish life.")