The Pastoral Ideal in Portugal: From Literature to Touristic Practices

In My Back Yard is a documentary film that explores the changing landscape of the Mount Dennis neighbourhood in Toronto. This change is represented by the 54-acre Kodak site that is being transformed into the second largest transportation hub in the Greater Toronto Area. The film employs a series of visual strategies and retells recent observations related to the impact of this massive infrastructure project on the people, the land and the urban wildlife. Local residents, politicians and community leader were consulted. Their interviews are combined with dioramas, archival photographs and time-lapse photography to express the multi-facetted list of community concerns. This support paper attempts to define and analyse these struggles within the context of Leo Marx’s 1964 work The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. This paper proposes that Marx’s concept of the “middle landscape” helps to define the current struggle in Mount Dennis.

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The Empire of Our Religion

Jews on the Frontier ◽

10.18574/nyu/9781479830473.003.0007 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Shari Rabin

Keyword(s):

Jewish Identity ◽

Jewish Life ◽

Institutional Development ◽

Religious Change ◽

Reform Judaism ◽

American Continent ◽

American Imperialism ◽

Jewish Thought ◽

American Judaism ◽

Pastoral Ideal

Amidst unfettered mobility, Jewish leaders like Isaac Mayer Wise and Isaac Leeser attempted not only an institutional overhaul of American Judaism, but also an ideological one. Jewish leaders engaged in popular geography and new forms of theological reflection, drawing on Jewish thought and the ideologies of American imperialism. They both critiqued the settings of American Jewish life, even advocating for agricultural colonies, but also developed a Jewish pastoral ideal. In this mode, they developed novel understandings of Jewish identity, Jewish institutions, and religious change. The internalized “Jewish heart” and the powerful “empire of our religion” both became widespread metaphors for explaining how and why Judaism would flourish anywhere. They were used by a broad swath of Jewish leaders, as was the concept of “progress,” although those allied with Wise’s Reform Judaism and with Leeser’s traditionalism soon developed competing understandings of how religious change should happen and of whether Judaism should be fully mobile or merely portable. In spite of these divides, they helped establish an underlying confidence that Judaism could and should prevail throughout the American continent through institutional development and individual identities.

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