Jews of the American West

Jews of the American West
Author: Moses Rischin
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
Total Pages: 236
Release: 1991
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780814321713

In a series of nine original essays, the editors and other leading American historians bring dramatically new perspectives to bear on our understanding of the West, its Jews, and other Americans, both old and new. Whether comparing the history of the Jews of the West with the Jewish experience in the older regions of the country or bringing attention to the uniquely local aspects of the western experience, the contributors to this landmark volume perceive the West as an increasingly important and vital presence in the nation's history. The agrarians of Utah's Clarion and the cureseekers of Denver, no less than the boomers of Tucson, have been representative Americans, Jews, and westerners. Essays on the role of intermarriage, the shared encounter of immigrants and migrants, and the response to the founding of the State of Israel by western pioneer families, tell us much about the interaction of the West with our American world nation.

Jewish Life in the American West

Jewish Life in the American West
Author: Ava Fran Kahn
Publisher: Heyday
Total Pages: 143
Release: 2004-02
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781890771775

Puts aside many stereotypes and examines the less-told story of the migration of Jews to Californiaand the West from the mid-19th century to the 1920's

Jewish Life in the American West

Jewish Life in the American West
Author: Ava Fran Kahn
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Total Pages: 143
Release: 2002
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780295982755

Examines the history of Jewish life in the American West from the mid-nineteenth to the twentieth century, combining historical narrative with essays, photographs, mini-biographies, contemporary descriptions, diary entries, letters, maps, and more.

A History of the Jews in America

A History of the Jews in America
Author: Howard M. Sachar
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 1072
Release: 2013-07-24
Genre: History
ISBN: 0804150524

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.

Jewish Women Pioneering the Frontier Trail

Jewish Women Pioneering the Frontier Trail
Author: Jeanne E. Abrams
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2006
Genre: History
ISBN: 0814707203

Western Jewish women's level of involvement at the vanguard of social welfare and progressive reform, commerce, politics, and higher education and the professions is striking given their relatively small numbers."--Jacket.

The Wonders of America

The Wonders of America
Author: Jenna Weissman Joselit
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 372
Release: 2002-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780805070026

The selective relish with which most American Jews affirm their identity -- consuming kosher delicacies once a year, extravagantly celebrating the bar mitzvahs of their sons and the weddings of their daughters -- has usually given rise to satire or consternation. The Wonders of America offers an alternative perspective, for this pioneering social history of Jewish culture highlights the cultural ingenuity and adaptive genius of American Jewish life. Drawing on advertisements, etiquette manuals, sermons, and surveys, Jenna Weissman Joselit constructs a lively and humorous account of how three generations of American Jews created their distinctive American culture. This provocative, enlightening study describes the forging of a rich and exuberant modern Jewish identity and makes it clear that it is not the theoretical debates of rabbis and scholars but the small choices of daily life that shape and sustain a culture

Jews on the Frontier

Jews on the Frontier
Author: Shari Rabin
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 201
Release: 2017-12-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 147983047X

"Jews on the Frontier offers a religious history that begins in an unexpected place: on the road. Shari Rabin recounts the journey of Jewish people as they left Eastern cities and ventured into the American West and South during the nineteenth century. It brings to life the successes and obstacles of these travels, from the unprecedented economic opportunities to the anonymity and loneliness that complicated the many legal obligations of traditional Jewish life. Without government-supported communities or reliable authorities, where could one procure kosher meat? Alone in the American wilderness, how could one find nine co-religionists for a minyan (prayer quorum)? Without identity documents, how could one really know that someone was Jewish?"--[Site internet éditeur].

The Jewish Community of West Philadelphia

The Jewish Community of West Philadelphia
Author: Allen Meyers
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
Total Pages: 132
Release: 2001
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780738508542

The Jewish community of Philadelphia west of the Schuylkill River is a composite of seven distinct neighborhoods surrounding West Philadelphia proper. These include Fortieth and Girard, Parkside, Wynnefield, Overbrook Park, Wynnefield Heights, Southwest Philly, and Island Road. A gathering of seventy-five thousand Jewish people in West Philadelphia during the twentieth century qualified the area known as "a city within a city" as a second settlement area. Excellent public transportation included the famed Market Street Elevated. The West Philadelphia Jews flourished and supported dozens of synagogues and bakeries, and more than one hundred kosher butcher shops at the neighborhood's height from the 1930s through the 1950s. Newly arrived immigrants embraced traditional Jewish values, which led them to encourage their offspring to acquire a secondary education in their own neighborhoods as a way of achieving assimilation into the community at large. The Jewish Community of West Philadelphia portrays Jewish life throughout West Philadelphia in the mid-twentieth century. The book captures rare, nearly forgotten images with photographs gleaned from the community at large.

The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, 1450-1800

The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, 1450-1800
Author: Paolo Bernardini
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 600
Release: 2001
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781571814302

Jews and Judaism played a significant role in the history of the expansion of Europe to the west as well as in the history of the economic, social, and religious development of the New World. They played an important role in the discovery, colonization, and eventually exploitation of the resources of the New World. Alone among the European peoples who came to the Americas in the colonial period, Jews were dispersed throughout the hemisphere; indeed, they were the only cohesive European ethnic or religious group that lived under both Catholic and Protestant regimes, which makes their study particularly fruitful from a comparative perspective. As distinguished from other religious or ethnic minorities, the Jewish struggle was not only against an overpowering and fierce nature but also against the political regimes that ruled over the various colonies of the Americas and often looked unfavorably upon the establishment and tleration of Jewish communities in their own territory. Jews managed to survive and occasionally to flourish against all odds, and their history in the Americas is one of the more fascinating chapters in the early modern history of European expansion.