Religious Literacy Resource Guide: Jewish Communities in America

A Time for Healing chronicles a time of rapid economic and social progress. Yet this phenomenal success, explains Edward S. Shapiro, came at a cost. Shapiro takes seriously the potential threat to Jewish culture posed by assimilation and intermarriage--asking if the Jewish people, having already endured so much, will survive America's freedom and affluence as well.

This book represents the product of years of intensive research in an area of American historiography previously sadly neglected. In the 159 documents that comprise the study, the editor illustrates effectively many aspects of Jewish life -- social, economic, political, religious, legal, cultural and philanthropic -- from colonial times to the era of reconstruction. A considerable number of these sources are printed here for the first time. Mr. Schappes has also provided 170 pages of careful notations, including a wealth of biographic, bibliographic, and other pertinent data. Each of the documents is preceded by introductory comments which form the unifying frame for the whole and tie it together.

"Clearly the best exposition to date on the life of this significant editor of the nationalist period.... Sarna combines scholarly research with an unadorned writing style to produce a wonderfully readable account."—Journalism Quarterly. Jonathan D. Sarna is Joseph H. and Belle R. Braun Professor of American Jewish History at Brandeis University and chief historian of the National Museum of American Jewish History. He is author or editor of more than twenty books, including the acclaimed American Judaism: A History.

A curriculum source book designed to teach students to use original sources for developing historical theories. The editors provide a commentary to this collection of source materials.

Presenting a range of the liveliest, most informative writing on Jews in America from colonial times to the present, this revised and expanded edition of the popular reader contains nine new selections and continues to explore traditional areas as well as topics of current interest--such as Jewish women in American society and Jews in American popular culture. A headnote provides each essay's historical context and contemporary relevance, and extensively annotated bibliographies follow each section.

Spanning 350 years of Jewish experience in this country, A History of the Jews in America is an essential chronicle by the author of The Course of Modern Jewish History. With impressive scholarship and a riveting sense of detail, Howard M. Sachar tells the stories of Spanish marranos and Russian refugees, of aristocrats and threadbare social revolutionaries, of philanthropists and Hollywood moguls. At the same time, he elucidates the grand themes of the Jewish encounter with America, from the bigotry of a Christian majority to the tensions among Jews of different origins and beliefs, and from the struggle for acceptance to the ambivalence of assimilation.

In The Colonial American Jew, Jacob Rader Marcus tells of the distinctive and significant history of American Jews. His basic premise is that the Jews constitute a "people"-united by common institutions, traditions, beliefs, an inspiring past, and an unusually strong sense of kinship. Marcus traces Jewish life in the western world from 1492 when the first Jews came to America with Columbus. He sketches a history of settlements in South America and the Caribbean and follows the move of organized Jewry to New Amsterdam in North America and on to other communities in many of the fourteen colonies. After discussing the founding of these significant settlements, Marcus's approach becomes topical. He has included sections on the legal status and the economic development of the early settlers and on the social welfare and educational practices of the Jewish communities. In the final section he analyzes the Jews' integration into the larger American community.

In United States Jewry, 1776-1985, the dean of American Jewish historians, Jacob Rader Marcus, unfolds the history of Jewish immigration, segregation, and integration; of Jewry's cultural exclusiveness and assimilation; of its internal division and indivisible unity; and of its role in the making of America. Characterized by Marcus's impeccable scholarship, meticulous documentation, and readable style, this landmark four-volume set completes the history Marcus began in The Colonial American Jew, 1492-1776. Volume I focuses on the American revolution and the early national period, from 1776 to 1840. Marcus examines the role played by Jews in the revolution and discusses important historical and social themes such as politics, commerce, religion, Jewish and American culture, anti-Jewish prejudices, and the phenomenon of assimilation.

This volume represents an effort to describe the role played by Jews in the American Revolution and to delineate the impact of that struggle on colonial Jews.

First published in 1938, Jacob Rader Marcus's The Jews in The Medieval World has remained an indispensable resource for its comprehensive view of Jewish historical experience from late antiquity through the early modern period, viewed through primary source documents in English translation. In this new work based on Marcus's classic source book, Marc Saperstein has recast the volume's focus, now fully centered on Christian Europe, updated the work's organizational format, and added seventy-two new annotated sources. In his compelling introduction, Saperstein supplies a modern and thought-provoking discussion of the changing values that influence our understanding of history, analyzing issues surrounding periodization, organization, and inclusion. Through a vast range of documents written by Jews and Christians, including historical narratives, legal opinions, martyrologies, memoirs, polemics, epitaphs, advertisements, folktales, ethical and pedagogical writings, book prefaces and colophons, commentaries, and communal statutes, The Jews in Christian Europe allows the actors and witnesses of events to speak for themselves.

Long considered a noteworthy title on the Jewish role in early American history this book focuses on the Jewish community as a whole during the tumultuous years of the war, and on its effort to raise the concept of human rights and equality above restrictions based on race or religion.

Jick, professor of American Jewish Studies at Brandeis University, earned his Ph.D. in American and Jewish history from Columbia University and is also a Reform rabbi. In The Americanization of the Synagogue he argues that as Jewish immigrants from the German lands arrived, they founded their own synagogues rather than joining the congregations established in the colonial era.

The story of over 2 million Jewish immigrants in America in 4 decades beginning with the 1880's and how they tried to keep their Yiddish culture while making their way in the new society.

"Explores the changing means of American identity. It deals with the processes of assimilation, pluralism, and discrimination, as seen through the prism of the country's experience with immigrants."-- APA Journal

A controversial examination of the Jewish success story in American that questions notions of identity, assimilation, and ethnicity.

Has America been a place that has preserved and protected Jewish life? Is it a place in which a Jewish future is ensured? Samuel Heilman, long-time observer of American Jewish life, grapples with these questions by examining data gleaned from numerous sociological surveys. This book is part of a stocktaking that has been occurring among Jews as the century in which their residence in America was firmly established comes to an end. Grounded in empirical detail, it provides a concise yet analytic evaluation of the meaning of the many studies and surveys of the last four and a half decades. Taking a long view of American Jewry, it is one of very few books that build on specific sociological data but get beyond its detail. All those who want to know what it means and has meant to be an American Jew will find this volume of interest.

More than any other person of his time, Isaac Leeser 0806-1868) envisioned the development of a major center of Jewish culture and religious activity in the United States. He single-handedly provided American Jews with many of the basic religious texts, institutions, and conceptual tools they needed to construct the cultural foundation of what would later emerge as the largest Jewish community in the history of the Jewish people. In the first biography of Isaac Leeser, Lance Sussman makes extensive use of archival and primary sources to provide a thorough study of a man who has been largely ignored by traditional histories. Isaac Leeser and the Making of American Judaism also tells an important part of the story of Judaism's response to the challenge of political freedom and social acceptance in a new, modern society Judaism itself was transformed as it came to terms with America, and the key figure in this process was Isaac Leeser.

From the Foremost Archive of the American Jewish Experience, the First All-Encompassing Reference to Jewish Life in the United States, from 1654 to the Present This authoritative reference of nearly 900 entries covers all aspects of America's lively and influential Jewish culture--history, religion, rituals, family life, law, politics, business, education, music and the arts, sports, entertainment, books, language, science, and more. It is at once an indispensable resource, the perfect gift for every bar/ bat mitzah, graduation, and wedding, and a book that every Jew and many non-Jews will want close at hand. American Jewish Desk Reference brings together the events, personalities, themes and issues of contemporary Jewish life in the United States on a scope never attained before in a single volume. It's brimming with in-depth essays on significant topics and compelling biographies of hundreds of prominent American Jewish personalities. Their achievements and contributions to all walks of life are here, from Bella Abzug, Mortimer Adler, and Woody Allen, to Elie Wiesel, Henny Youngman, and Florenz Ziegfeld.

In this fascinating portrait of Jewish immigrant wage earners, Susan A. Glenn weaves together several strands of social history to show the emergence of an ethnic version of what early twentieth-century Americans called the "New Womanhood." She maintains that during an era when Americans perceived women as temporary workers interested ultimately in marriage and motherhood, these young Jewish women turned the garment industry upside down with a wave of militant strikes and shop-floor activism and helped build the two major clothing workers' unions.

The many thousands of Jews from German-speaking lands who came to the United States throughout the nineteenth century played a major part in laying the foundations of the Jewish community in America. In this volume of the Ellis Island Series, the fascinating story of this mass immigration of mostly poor, enterprising, young people is told in vivid detail. Drawing on rare letters, diaries, memoirs, period newspapers, journals, and other firsthand accounts, Barkai traces the process of family-oriented chain migration, resettlement, and acculturation, exploring as well the group's relations with the Jewish community in Germany and with German and Jewish immigrants in the New World. The narrative chronicles their experiences in the goldfields of California, on Indian reservations, and during the Civil War, in which German-Jewish soldiers in the Union and Confederate armies struggled against bigotry to assert their civil rights. "These engaging personal narratives are woven into an account of the formative role played by German-Jewish immigrants in establishing the institutional framework of the American-Jewish community. Their influential network of mutual aid and philanthropic organizations would be challenged, at the turn of the century, by the great mass migration of Jews from Eastern Europe. The author's presentation of the dramatic encounter between these two groups sheds new light not only on this critical period in American-Jewish history but also on the dynamics of cultural change in a pluralist society.

The writing of American Jewish history, once the province of ethnopietists searching for proof of Jewish contributions to America's birth and prosperity, has long since passed into the hands of a new generation of scholars who, during the 1960s and 1970s, undertook the task of scrutinizing American Jewish history in accordance with the same standards of critical scholarship that their peers employed in the (re)writing of general American history taking place at that time. The new generation of American Jewish historians produced groundbreaking specialized studies on the lives of Jewish immigrants and their offspring, the relations between Jews and other American ethnic groups, and American policy towards Zionism and the Holocaust. The one hundredth anniversary, in 1992, of the founding of the American Jewish Historical Society provided an appropriate occasion for five leading American Jewish historians of the 1970s generation to synthesize the scholarship of recent decades into a definitive five-volume history of American Jewry. The final product is unquestionably an impressive accomplishment in its own right, but its value becomes all the more apparent when compared to the two other recent attempts at a comprehensive history of American Jewry, Arthur Hertzberg's The Jews in America and Howard M. Sachar's A History of the Jews in America. Among the most important contributions made by the five-volume Jewish People in America series is the extent to which minorities within the Jewish community have been written back into American Jewish history. Women, Orthodox Jews, and—to a lesser extent—dissident Zionists make their long overdue appearance in these pages. It is reminiscent of, and every bit as valuable as, the efforts by young American historians to analyze history "from the bottom up," as Jesse Lemisch put it.

Between 1820 and 1880, European Jews arrived in the United States in ever greater numbers. While later Jewish immigrants would criticize their "rush" to assimilation, the Jews of this period created the institutions that continue to shape Jewish life in America. In "A Time for Gathering," Hasia Diner describes this "second wave" of Jewish migration.

Is antisemitism on the rise in America? Did the "hymietown" comment by Jesse Jackson and the Crown Heights riot signal a resurgence of antisemitism among blacks? The surprising answer to both questions, according to Leonard Dinnerstein, is no--Jews have never been more at home in America. But what we are seeing today, he writes, are the well-publicized results of a long tradition of prejudice, suspicion, and hatred against Jews--the direct product of the Christian teachings underlying so much of America's national heritage. In Antisemitism in America, Dinnerstein provides a landmark work--the first comprehensive history of prejudice against Jews in the United States, ranging from its foundations in European culture to the present day. "It must also be emphasized," Dinnerstein writes, “that in no Christian country has antisemitism been weaker than it has been in the United States," with its traditions of tolerance, diversity, and a secular national government. This book, however, reveals in disturbing detail the resilience, and vehemence, of this ugly prejudice. Penetrating, authoritative, and frequently alarming, this is the definitive account of a plague that refuses to go away.

In the autumn of 1654, twenty-three Jews aboard the bark Sainte Catherine landed at the town of New Amsterdam to establish the first permanent Jewish settlement in North America. In A Time for Planting, Eli Faber recounts these earliest days of Jewish life in America, as Jews from Lisbon to Amsterdam to London extended the wanderings of their centuries-old diaspora.

In "A Time for Searching," Henry Feingold chronicles the turbulent period between 1920 and 1945--when Jews were poised to enter the mainstream of American life--and explores issues that would preoccupy America's Jewish community for the rest of the century. Despite the specter of anti-semitism, signs of success and acceptance were everywhere.

This volume contains fourteen papers, all but one published for the first time, each reliably informative with new materials about the subject under discussion.

This brilliant analysis of American Judaism in the last half of the 20th century won the 1993-94 National Jewish Book Award for the best book on contemporary Jewry and also was named an Outstanding Book of 1993 by Choice. Jack Wertheimer examines how fundamental changes in American society have affected Jewish religious and communal life, paying special attention to contradictions and schisms that threaten the integrity of American Jewish practices and beliefs. A People Divided remains an essential primer for anyone interested in the ongoing debate about what constitutes Jewishness and who is a Jew.

When studying the 1930s, historians of American Jewry have focused their scholarly attention almost exclusively on American responses to the enormity of Nazi atrocities, leaving the Depression experiences of Jewish-Americans virtually unexplored. Beth Wenger’s book New York Jews and the Great Depression makes great strides towards filling this gap in our understanding of Jewish life during the tumultuous decade of the thirties. Weaving together oral histories, communal records, memoirs, novels, and newspaper reports into a rich narrative, Wenger provides a model for how to write social history that highlights the intersection of ethnicity, class, and gender. The analysis is smart, the prose lively, and the physical product strikingly elegant.

In 1880 a young Hungarian rabbi named Moses Weinberger arrived in New York City. Seven years later, he described—and deplored—a world turned upside down, where "people walk on their heads." In what has become a classic example of Jewish immigrant protest literature, Weinberger urges American Jews to defend their faith more forthrightly. Jonathan Sarna's translation beautifully captures the essence of Weinberger's lively, often bitingly satiric prose; and his introduction provides context for the work, outlining the process that transformed immigrant Orthodoxy into Orthodoxy with an American flavor.

How did the vast number of Jewish immigrants from different regions of Eastern Europe form their American ethnic identity? To answer this question this book examines how Jewish immigrant hometown associations transformed old-world communal ties into vehicles for integration into American society. Focusing on New York this study explores the organizations' full range of activities, and aims to show how the newcomers exercised a high degree of agency in their growing identification with American society. The book suggests that many immigrants cultivated their own identification with American society to a far greater extent than is usually recognized.

This revealing biography of Isaac Harby sheds much light on the beginnings of Reform Judaism and the economic and cultural rise and fall of Charleston during this period.