“Ana” is an 18-year-old twelfth grader who currently lives and attends school in South Texas. Her parents are Conservative Jews who immigrated from Omsk, Russia to San Fernando Valley, California in the mid-80s. Ana is the eldest of her siblings; she has two younger brothers aged 8 and 11. She speaks fluently in Russian with her parents and brothers. Ana has spent nearly her whole life in Southern California, where she attended an ethnically diverse high school that had a large Jewish population. From the age of 10, Ana had been a part of the youth group at her temple, where she established strong and close relationships with her Jewish identity and her Jewish mentors and friends. When she was 16, Ana’s family moved from the suburbs of San Fernando Valley to a small, rural town in Texas with a population of about 8,000. Ana now attends the town’s only high school of 630 students (80% Latino and 20% white), nearly all of whom are Catholic, with a few atheists and agnostics. The only religious institutions in the small town are three churches; there are no Jewish temples within a 70-mile range. In this paper, Ana’s life will be explored through Urie Bronfenbrenner’s theory of ecological systems. This theory …show more content…
This model provided a more than adequate illustration of Ana’s life and psychological developments. Instead of viewing her growth and development through stages which mainly focus on the individual self, the ecological systems theory described Ana’s life course within the context of multiple environmental layers and the components, people, and relationships within each layer. Everything from her achievement-oriented mindset and her strong identification with her Jewish culture to her distress at her move to Texas and eventual coming-to-terms with her new life were all influenced by the various systems in which Ana
The novel Bread Givers by Anzia Yezierska examines the roles and experiences of Jewish immigrants in America roughly after the years of WWI in New York City. The novel follows the journey of Sara, a young Jewish immigrant, and her family who comes to the country from Poland with different beliefs than those in the Smolinsky household and by much of the Jewish community that lived within the housing neighborhoods in the early 1900s. Through Sara’s passion for education, desire for freedom and appreciation for her culture, she embodies a personal meaning of it means to be an “American”.
Claireece Precious Jones is currently experiencing the adolescent stage of her development and is transitioning into adulthood. Her experience as a teenage mother, growing up in poverty, and history of abuse all have implications for the development of her identity, cognitive functioning, and biological factors. We will focus on Erikson’s Psychosocial Stage for Adolescents to gage the evolution of Precious’s growth, while addressing the person in environmental theory that also attributes to the biopsychosocial context in which a young person develops.
In order to obtain religious, social, political, and equality 23 million Jews immigrated to America during the years between 1880 and 1920 (Chametzky, 5). Anzia Yezierska wrote about her experiences as a poor immigrant in her fictional work becoming a voice of the Jewish people in the1920s. She struggled to obtain an education that allowed her to rise above her family’s poverty and gain a measure of autonomy. Rachel and Sara, the female protagonists, mirror the author’s life going from struggling immigrant to college graduate. Yezierska uses her own experiences to portray the Jewish immigrant experience with a woman’s perspective. She successfully gained a commercial following that allowed her to mediate the cultural differences between the mainstream culture and the Jewish people that helped resolve differences between the established Americans and these new immigrants for a time (Ebes...
I chose to write about Jewish-Americans after my mother, who was raised Christian, chose to identify herself as Jewish. In my reading I examined Jewish culture and how it is in American society. I looked at how Jewish-American culture has become a prominent component of American society. I looked at the historical forces that have shaped Jewish-American experience in the United States. I looked at demographics of where most Jewish-Americans live. I examined how Jewish-Americans have contributed to our culturally pluralistic society in the United States.
I remember the anxiety and excitement that I felt as I exited the plane with twenty other high school students, embarking on my summer teaching experience, wondering if I was fully prepared. The moment the busloads of children arrived, I attached myself to a group of kids and started singing and dancing with them. Despite my initial fears, we began to form a bond. My role changed from that of a teenager to that of a responsible counselor. Not only was I here to teach them about Judaism through classes and activities, but more importantly I was acting as a role model. For the majority of Ukrainian children, we were the first Americans they had ever met and, therefore, were watched vigilantly and constantly emulated. This humbling realization made me feel rather self-conscious at first. However, their desire to imitate also heightened the impact of that which we taught them. They wanted to learn. Although an immense language barrier lay between the campers and me, we managed to communicate through translators, hand signals, songs, and broken English and Russian.
Golden and Sarna. "The American Jewish Experience in the Twentieth Century: Antisemitism and Assimilation, The Twentieth Century, Divining America: Religion in American History, TeacherServe, National Humanities Center." The American Jewish Experience in the Twentieth Century: Antisemitism and Assimilation, The Twentieth Century, Divining America: Religion in American History, TeacherServe, National Humanities Center. N.p., n.d. Web. 20 May 2014.
Using person in environment lens with ecological theory. According to Rogers, the ecological theory is “a theory that explains human development by describing aspects of the individual, the environment, and the interaction between the two” (Rogers, 2013). Using the ecological theory, the first step is microsystem which he immediate environment, her home. What role does Gloria feel like she plays in her home? The mesosystem would include her environment and interactions with people. Look at her relationship with her family, church, and her close relationship with her sister Carmen. The exosystem will include Leo’s workplace, and community agencies that can help Gloria. With the macrosystem we will have cultural factors, religious influences, Latina culture, societal expectation, and the fear she has of laws regarding her husband possibly getting deported.
What does it mean to be Jewish or Muslim, or even Christian? What does an understanding of the history that intertwines faith and culture matter to how we live within those religious labels? The Red Tent and Stranger to History, while both using a different perspective, explores the connection between history, culture, and faith traditions, and how we must look at the past to understand our own present and future. Religious experience is distinctly different for women than it is for men, which is evident in Diamant’s portrayal of the silent roles females played in pre-Jewish culture. In contrast, Taseer discusses an experience from a uniquely male view, though both ask the same question: Why do the histories matter?
Anzia Yezierska’s novel and semi-autobiographical book, Bread Givers is a fantastic look into the lives of the Smolinsky’s, a family of Polish-Jewish immigrants living in New York. The story follows Reb Smolinsky, the father of four daughters and a man who does not work but instead studies and preaches the word of the Torah, Shennah, the mother of four daughters named Bessie, Mashah, Fania, and Sara. The book is narrated by the youngest daughter Sara Smolinsky, whose point of view offers insight into the struggles of being an immigrant family, weighed down by the burdens of poverty, in addition to the every day occurrences within a family’s household, such as watching your older sisters grow up and marry, your parents fighting with each other and criticizing you, as well as countless other events that are commonly experienced in the journey that is life and growing up.
If one were to ask a New York resident in the 1950’s how many people he or she would expect to be living in New York sixty years from now, he would most likely not say 20 million. Among those 20 million, it is even more unfathomable that an estimated 1.7 million Jews reside within New York City, making New York home to over a quarter of the Jews living in America today . Amongst those Jews however, how many of them consider themselves religious? Seeing that only an estimated 10 percent of Jews today classify themselves as observant, how and when did this substantial dispersion occur? The period post World War II in America presents the many different factors and pressures for Jews arriving in America during this time. Although many Jews believed America would be the best place to preserve and rebuild Jewish presence in the world, the democracy and economic opportunity resulted in adverse effects on many Jews. The rate of acculturation and assimilation for many of these Jews proved to be too strong, causing an emergence of two types of Jews during this time period. Pressures including the shift to suburbanization, secular education into professional careers, covert discrimination in the labor market and the compelling American culture, ultimately caused the emergence of the passive and often embarrassed ‘American Jew’; the active ‘Jewish American’ or distinctly ‘Jewish’ citizen, avertedly, makes Judaism an engaging active component of who and what they are amidst this new American culture.
Macrosystem. The macrosystem is the outer most shell of the model that shapes the exosystem. These broad forces include culture, values, structures, institutions that create the environment in which the exosystem operates.
Discerning the spatial patterns of biodiversity and understanding their ultimate (why) and proximate (how) causes is very dear to biogeography and is one of the key concepts of Macro ecology. Some places on earth contain more species as compared to others. All species occurring at a given space and time either originated (speciated) there or dispersed and arrived from another place and settled there. Biogeographers try to understand the past and current distributions of species by incorporating historical, evolutionary and ecological factors. Earlier biogeographers or the ‘naturalists’ in their sacred quest to serve ‘the creator’, travelled to various parts of the world and imparted valuable knowledge about the diverse patterns and processes of nature. Linnaeus (1743), on the one hand, hypothesized that early Earth was filled with water except for it’s highest mountain top i.e., Mount Ararat which was known to be the site of paradise and as the sea level dropped the exposed land was colonized by plants and animals that migrated down from high elevational zones of Mount Ararat whereas Willdenow (1805) hypothesized that within each geographical region of the earth, plants and animals were first placed and later survived the great flood on many mountain ranges (Lomolino,2001). Von Humboldt and Darwin in the South American Andes and Wallace Southeast Asian islands noticed the decreasing trend in elevational species richness patterns (McCain and Grytnes, 2010). Later work done by Grinnell (1917), Whittaker (1952), Terborgh (1977, 1985) on elevational species richness became accepted and set a established pattern for all species for more than two decades (McCain and Grytnes, 2010). However current researches on elevational gradients are...
Urie Bronfenbrenner (1917-2005) was born in Russia in 1917 and moved to America at a very young age. He became a psychologist in 1938 and received a doctorate in Developmental Psychology in 1942. In 1948 he accepted a position in Human development, Family studies and Psychology at Cornell University where he remained for the rest of his professional career. Bronfenbrenner spent most of his professional life in a department that contains three different fields. He was not satisfied with what he believed was a fragmented approach to the study of human development, each one with its separate level of analysis (child, society, family, culture, economics and so forth) (Danner, 2009) In response, he developed an ecological system model, listed in his 1979 book The Ecology of Human Development, in which Bronfenbrenner (1979, p.3) states ‘The ecological environment is con...
Waxman, Chiam . "It's All Relative: The Contemporary Orthodox Jewish Family in America | Institute for Jewish Ideas and Ideals." The Institute for Jewish Ideas and Ideals. N.p., n.d. Web. 15 Mar. 2011. .
Betty Neuman created the system model from concepts influenced by “de Chardin’s philosophical beliefs about the wholeness of life; Marxist philosophic views of the oneness of man and nature; Gestalt and field theories of the interaction between person and environment; general system theory of the nature of living open systems; Emery’s and Lazarus’ views of systems; Selye’s conceptualization of stress; and Caplan’s articulation of levels of prevention” (Fawcett, 2001).