Annie Polland

Daniel Soyer

Jeffrey S. Gurock

Howard B. Rock

Deborah Dash Moore

Part 2 of the three part series, Deborah Dash Moore, general editor.

New York Jews in the Age of Immigration, 1840-1920

Emerging Metropolis

Focuses on the children of Eastern European immigrants who settled in Manhattan, looking at the modified synagogues, philanthropic organizations, and other associations organized by second-generation Jews in New York

Second Generation New York Jews

At Home in America

Lila Corwin Berman

Beth S. Wenger

Leading scholars of American Jewish experience offer bold historical interpretations that reimagine American Jewish studies The Future of American Jewish Pasts boldly imagines the next chapters in the study of American Jewish life. Conceived during the COVID-19 pandemic and completed just before the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel and ensuing war, this innovative volume gathers leading scholars of American Jewish experience to ask what the future of the study of the American Jewish past holds. The contributors reconceive traditional approaches to American Jewish life and delve into underexplored topics to present a vision of a rich future for the field of American Jewish studies. Essays on antisemitism, Zionism, liberalism, immigration, feminism, family histories, and more stake out new sources, methods, and interpretations of histories and historiographies. To understand American Jewish life in its complexity and richness, these essays engage multiple disciplines, including history, ethnography, and literary studies. Many showcase comparative or theoretical approaches that illuminate new dimensions of American Jewish studies, and others offer personal reflections to reveal how scholars’ own life stories intersect with the questions that animate their scholarship. For students, scholars, and the general public, this interdisciplinary volume provides a tantalizing selection of the freshest approaches to understanding American Jewish life. Contributors: Lila Corwin Berman, Tobias Brinkmann, Ayelet Brinn, Alanna E. Cooper, Jessica Cooperman, Deborah Dash Moore, Hasia R. Diner, Kathryn Hellerstein, Markus Krah, Heather S. Nathans, Noam Pianko, Lana Dee Povitz, Riv-Ellen Prell, Kate Rosenblatt, Laurence Roth, Britt Tevis, JT Waldman, Amy Weiss, Beth S. Wenger.

The Future of American Jewish Pasts

B'nai B'rith has a history almost as diverse as the story of American Jewry itself. The oldest secular Jewish organization in the United States, it was founded in 1843. Thereafter, it followed in the footsteps of its immigrant founders, spreading into the cities, towns, and villages of America, eventually becoming the worldwide order it is today. What is more, B'nai B'rith's physical expansion was paralleled by the scope of its activities. It supports one of the most prominent American Jewish defense organizations, the Anti-Defamation League. Its Hillel Foundations constitute an international network of student activities on college campuses. It sponsors a broad array of learning programs through its Adult Jewish Education Commission. The B'nai B'rith Youth Organization serves the entire Jewish community. It conducts projects and programs in Israel of philanthropic and educational nature, helps finance several national Jewish hospitals and homes for the aged, and supervises an International Council to coordinate its overseas units and to take responsible action on issues relating to world Jewish affairs. And it is partnered in all these activities by B'nai B'rith Women, an independent organization. This is the saga of B'nai B'rith, recounted by Professor Deborah Dash Moore. To elucidate the diverse facets of this venerable, yet youthful, organization and to reveal their integral relationship to the history of the Jews in America, Professor Moore focuses on the moments of innovation that have influenced its development and direction, and on the outstanding individuals who have guided the Order's destiny.

B'nai B'rith and the Challenge of Ethnic Leadership

Explores changes among American Jews in their self-understanding during the last half of the twentieth century

American Jewish Identity Politics

Professor Deborah Dash Moore

Whether they came from Sioux Falls or the Bronx, over half a million Jews entered the U.S. armed forces during the Second World War. Uprooted from their working- and middle-class neighborhoods, they joined every branch of the military and saw action on all fronts. Deborah Dash Moore offers an unprecedented view of the struggles these GI Jews faced, having to battle not only the enemy but also the prejudices of their fellow soldiers. Through memoirs, oral histories, and letters, Moore charts the lives of fifteen young Jewish men as they faced military service and tried to make sense of its demands. From confronting pork chops to enduring front-line combat, from the temporary solace of Jewish worship to harrowing encounters with death camp survivors, we come to understand how these soldiers wrestled with what it meant to be an American and a Jew. Moore shows how military service in World War II transformed this generation of Jews, reshaping Jewish life in America and abroad. These men challenged perceptions of Jews as simply victims of the war, and encouraged Jews throughout the diaspora to fight for what was right. At the same time, service strengthened Jews' identification with American democratic ideals, even as it confirmed the importance of their Jewish identity. GI Jews is a powerful, intimate portrayal of the costs of a conflict that was at once physical, emotional, and spiritual, as well as its profound consequences for these hitherto overlooked members of the "greatest generation."

How World War II Changed a Generation

GI Jews

Marion A. Kaplan

"A Major Collection of Scholarship that Contains the most up-to-Date, Indeed Cutting-Edge Work on Gender and Jewish History by Several Generations of Top Scholars."---Atina Grossmann, the Cooper Union By Revealing the Importance of gender in interpreting the Jewish past, this collection of original essays highlights the profound influence that feminist scholarship has had on the study of Jewish history since the 1970s. Gender and Jewish History considers the impact of gender on Jewish religious practices and political behavior, educational accomplishments and communal structures, acculturation and choice of occupations. The book stimulates conversations on such topics as Jewish women's creativity and spirituality, violence against women, Jews' reactions to persecution in the Holocaust, and Judaism as lived religion and culture. Honoring Paula E. Hyman, one of the founders of Jewish gender studies, this volume shows gender to be an eye-opening entry into realms of Jewish history previously untouched by it.

Gender and Jewish History

Zvi Gitelman

Todd M. Endelman

The eighth volume in a landmark series, this anthology of Jewish culture and civilization encompasses the period between the world wars An anthology of Jewish culture between the world wars, the editors' selections convey the variety, breadth, and depth of Jewish creativity in those tempestuous decades. Despite--or perhaps because of--external threats, Jews fought vigorously over religion, politics, migration, and their own relation to the state and to one another. The texts, translated from many languages, span a wide range of politics, culture, literature, and art. This collection examines what was simultaneously a tense and innovative period in modern Jewish history.

Crisis and Creativity Between World Wars, 1918-1939

The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, Volume 8

David Lobenstine

Black-and-white photographs and drawings from various eras depict the history, culture, and changes of New York City.

A History of New York in Images

Cityscapes

Nurith Gertz

Presents an encyclopedia of Jewish culture from 1973 to 2005, including secular and religious examples from the visual arts, literature, and popular culture.

1973-2005

The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization

Elisheva Carlebach

A landmark project to collect, translate, and transmit primary material from a momentous period in Jewish culture and civilization, this volume covers what Elisheva Carlebach describes as a period "in which every aspect of Jewish life underwent the most profound changes to have occurred since antiquity." Organized by genre, this extensive yet accessible volume surveys Jewish cultural production and intellectual innovation during these dramatic years, particularly in literature, the visual and performing arts, and intellectual culture. The wide-ranging collection includes a diverse selection of sources created by Jews around the world, translated from a dozen languages. Representing a tumultuous time of changing borders, demographic shifts, and significant Jewish migration, this anthology explores the range of approaches of Jews, from welcoming to resistant, to the intertwining ideals of enlightenment and emancipation, "the very foundation of the Jewish experience in this period."

The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, Volume 6

The first great modern migration of the Jewish people, from the Old World to America, has been often and expertly chronicled, but until now the second great wave of Jewish migration has been overlooked. After World War II, spurred by a postwar economic boom, American Jews sought new beginnings in the nation's South and West. There, they shaped a new, postwar style of American Judaism for the second half of the twentieth century. Today these sun-soaked, entrepreneurial communities contribute greatly to the American Jewish landscape. In this book, the vibrant Jewish culture of Los Angeles and Miami comes to life through Moore's skillful weaving of individual voices, dreams, and accomplishments.

Pursuing the American Jewish Dream in Miami and L.A.

To the Golden Cities

S. Ilan Troen

Two creative centers of Jewish life rose to prominence in the twentieth century, one in Israel and the other in the United States. Although Israeli and American Jews share kinship and history drawn from their Eastern European roots, they have developed divergent cultures from their common origins, often seeming more like distant cousins than close relatives. This book explores why this is so, examining how two communities that constitute eighty percent of the world’s Jewish population have created separate identities and cultures. Using examples from literature, art, history, and politics, leading Israeli and American scholars focus on the political, social, and memory cultures of their two communities, considering in particular the American Jewish challenge to diaspora consciousness and the Israeli struggle to forge a secular, national Jewish identity. At the same time, they seek to understand how a sense of mutual responsibility and fate animates American and Israeli Jews who reside in distant places, speak different languages, and live within different political and social worlds.

Israel and America

Divergent Jewish Cultures

Winner of the 2012 National Jewish Book Award, presented by the National Jewish Book Council New York Jews, so visible and integral to the culture, economy and politics of America’s greatest city, has eluded the grasp of historians for decades. Surprisingly, no comprehensive history of New York Jews has ever been written. City of Promises: A History of the Jews of New York, a three volume set of original research, pioneers a path-breaking interpretation of a Jewish urban community at once the largest in Jewish history and most important in the modern world. Volume I, Haven of Liberty, by historian Howard B. Rock, chronicles the arrival of the first Jews to New York (then New Amsterdam) in 1654 and highlights their political and economic challenges. Overcoming significant barriers, colonial and republican Jews in New York laid the foundations for the development of a thriving community. Volume II, Emerging Metropolis, written by Annie Polland and Daniel Soyer, describes New York’s transformation into a Jewish city. Focusing on the urban Jewish built environment—its tenements and banks, synagogues and shops, department stores and settlement houses—it conveys the extraordinary complexity of Jewish immigrant society. Volume III, Jews in Gotham, by historian Jeffrey S. Gurock, highlights neighborhood life as the city’s distinctive feature. New York retained its preeminence as the capital of American Jews because of deep roots in local worlds that supported vigorous political, religious, and economic diversity. Each volume includes a “visual essay” by art historian Diana Linden interpreting aspects of life for New York’s Jews from their arrival until today. These illustrated sections, many in color, illuminate Jewish material culture and feature reproductions of early colonial portraits, art, architecture, as well as everyday culture and community. Overseen by noted scholar Deborah Dash Moore, City of Promises offers the largest Jewish city in the world, in the United States, and in Jewish history its first comprehensive account.

Deborah Dash Moore

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