The question of how religious and political languages interacted in the pulpit of the American Revolution has engaged scholars in literature, religion, intellectual history, symbolic anthropology, and American studies for over a generation. Drawing on recent work in ritual studies and the history of the sermon in colonial America, Weber enters the debate over the contexts of the mobilizing agency of revolutionary discourse through analysis of manuscript sermons, diaries, and letters of both evangelical and rationalist orators. By recreating the mental worlds of five individual ministers, this book dramatizes the rhetorical struggle of the clergy to make narrative sense out of the social and political upheaval around them and describes how patriot ministers eased their congregations through the bewildering passage from dependence to independence. In the process, it highlights the continuities in preaching modes from Awakening to Revolution as it reveals how the changing forms of ministerial discourse anticipate the eventual displacement of the evangelical clergy to the margins of social and communicative power by the end of the century.

Rhetoric and History in Revolutionary New England

History

Weber, Donald

Americas

Oxford University Press

"Haunted in the New World is a superb, insightful, and acutely intelligent piece of work. It makes a real contribution to the understanding of ethnicity in general and Jewish American culture in particular." ―Morris Dickstein
In 1916 Abraham Cahan, editor of the Jewish daily The Forward, warned his Yiddish-speaking readers of the potential psychic dangers associated with their New World situation. "You will not be able to erase the old home from your heart," he cautioned his immigrant readers, transplanted from the shtetls and cities of Eastern Europe to exhilarating, if bewildering, multicultural New York. Building on Cahan’s deeply personal reflection, Haunted in the New World maps the affective landscape of modern Jewish American culture.
Drawing on scholarship in a range of disciplines, including the sociology of manners, the study of the role of foodways in the formation of ethnic identity, the psychoanalysis of shame and self-hatred, and the role of memory for those unsettled by the experience of migration, Donald Weber traces the impact of the tension between nostalgia for the world left behind and the desire to blend into American culture, as evidenced in a number of key texts in the canon of Jewish American expression. These range from early immigrant fiction and cinema, through the novels of Anzia Yezierska and Henry Roth, to Hollywood’s representation of Jews in The Jazz Singer and Gentleman’s Agreement, to Saul Bellow, Gertrude Berg (Molly Goldberg), and the comedians Milton Berle and Mickey Katz. Setting an array of figures and works in creative dialogue, Haunted in the New World offers a genealogy of those core emotions―shame and self-hatred, nostalgic longing and the impulse to forget―that organized much of 20th-century Jewish American expressive culture and transformed American culture at the same time.

Haunted in the New World: Jewish American Culture from Cahan to The Goldbergs (Jewish Literature and Culture)

Humor & Entertainment

Movies

Indiana University Press

After a lone trip to Chernobyl in 2005, Donald Weber returned to the abandoned site of the nuclear disaster and spent the next six years in Russia and Ukraine photographing the ruins of the unstoppable storm we call history. Traveling and living with ordinary people who had endured much, and survived everything. Weber began to see the modern state as a primitive and bloody sacrifical rite of unnamed power. 
INTERROGATIONS is the result of his personal quest to uncover the hidden meaning of the bloody 20th century. In dialogue with writer Larry Frolick - whose own ancestors had been decimated in the final months of WW II - Weber insistently and provocatively addresses his questions both to the living survivors and to the ghosts of the State's innumerable victims, resurrecting their final hours by taking their point of view, and performing a kind of incantatory meditation over their private encounters with power.
The policeman, working girls, thugs, dissidents and hustlers who inhabit these pages are all orphans of a secret history; the outline of our collective fate takes shape in Weber's epic work, expanding our awareness of what it means to be an actor in today's dark opera.

Interrogations

Arts & Photography

Photography & Video

Schilt Pub

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Books by Weber, Donald