Wayne
o
Louis Finkelman
Special to the Jewish News
W
ayne State University Press
has quite a robust list of
high-quality works on Jewish
legends, Jewish anthropology and folk-
lore, Jewish dance and American Jewish
history. A consortium of community
businessmen provided much of the
funding and the drive to transform the
State`
University-Press ,helped launch
a
,
,
et a'f] e . accidemic Jewish Studies." •
press, founded in 1941, from a hobby
among WSU professors to a professional
enterprise.
According to WSU Press Director Jane
Hoehner, businessmen Leonard Simons,
Charles Feinberg and Reuben Riding
kept prodding the university to reorga-
nize the press on a professional basis,
with a regular paid staff and budget.
They pushed to hire the first director,
Harold Basilius. Many of the business-
men, Jewish themselves, encouraged the
press to publish Judaica. WSU Press is
housed in the Leonard Simons Building,
named in honor of one of those early
supporters.
Over the years, Eugene Driker, in his
role as a member of the WSU Board
of Governors, joined in the support of
WSU Press. Provosts Ronald Brown and
Guy Stern, Professors Jacob Lassner,
Martin Herman, Max Kapustin and oth-
•
,- _
Folk dancing during the 1947 Dalia
Festival, featuring energetic movement
in various circles of the hora, from
Embodying Hebrew Culture by Nina S.
Spiegel (Wayne State University Press,
June 2013)
ers in the university or on the board
helped the WSU Press establish its
Judaica on page 14
'Members Of The Tribe'
WSU Press title examines relationship between Jews and Native Americans.
Louis Finkelman
Special to the Jewish News
I
n the mid-1970s, in a crowded
theater in Western Michigan, the
audience watches the new hit film,
Blazing Saddles. On screen, a party of
braves rides up on the fearful black fam-
ily in their covered wagon, and the chief,
played by Mel Brooks himself, calls off
the attack.
"Luz em gayn (Let them go)," he
declares in Yiddish. A Jewish woman in
the audience roars with laughter, and
then, suddenly self-conscious, realizes
that no one else is laughing.
A voice from the back of the theater
explains, "That woman understands
Indian."
In life as in art:
In 1911, the last survivor of the
Yahi people came out of the forests of
California and met the frightening whites,
just like those whites who had killed the
rest of his tribe. No one else in the world
understood his language. White men
eventually brought him to the University
of California at Berkeley, where he lived
with professors of anthropologists and
linguistics. They arranged for him to meet
the one man in the world who could best
learn the Yahi language, the man who
probably knew more American languages
than any other individual, the man who
wrote the book demonstrating that all
American languages fall into six families
— Professor Edward Sapir.
Edward Sapir's native language was
Yiddish.
That man understood Indian.
Jews have been fas-
cinated by the Native
American peoples ever
since the Old World
"discovered" the
indigenous population
of North America.
A young scholar
Rachel
at Harvard, Rachel
Rubinstein
Rubinstein, wrote her
doctoral dissertation on the long history
of that fascination. Now an associate pro-
fessor of American Literature and Jewish
Studies at Hampshire College in Amherst,
Mass., Rubinstein reworked that material
into her book, Members of
the Tribe: Native America
in the Jewish Imagination,
now published by Wayne
State University Press in
Detroit.
Her story begins in 1650,
when an Amsterdam rabbi
named Menassah ben
Israel dedicated his own
book, The Hope of Israel,
to Oliver Cromwell and the
British parliament, appeal-
ing for them to allow Jews
to return to England. Jews,
the rabbi noted, live everywhere else,
perhaps even at the ends of the Earth in
America, where the 10 lost tribes of Israel
might somehow have become the native
peoples.
Some highlights of Members of the
Tribe:
• In the early 19th century, Mordecai
Noah wrote popular plays in which
Jews and Native Americans join with
American patriots against
the English. In the 1820s,
Noah, a journalist, inves-
tor and politician, hatched
an even more theatrical
idea, establishing a Jewish
colony on Grand Island
in the Niagara River. He
invited Native Americans
to join their Jewish broth-
ers in this Ararat, demon-
strating that they belong
to the 10 tribes of Israel.
• Salomon Nunes
de Carvalho, in his
1856 account, Incidents of Travel and
Adventure in the Far West, describes
his travel among the Native Americans
as an artist and photographer, without
explicitly mentioning that he is Jewish. He
Members on page 15
12
September 12 • 2013