The American Jewish Experience

The American Jewish Experience
Author: Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion. Center for the Study of the American Jewish Experience
Publisher: Holmes & Meier Publishers
Total Pages: 332
Release: 1986
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780841909342

The immigration of German Jews in America in the first half of the 19th century

The immigration of German Jews in America in the first half of the 19th century
Author: Patricia Zimmermann
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
Total Pages: 16
Release: 2003-06-03
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 3638193071

Seminar paper from the year 2002 in the subject American Studies - Culture and Applied Geography, grade: 2,25, University of Heidelberg (Anglistisches Seminar), course: Landeskundeseminar: Being Jewish in the USA, language: English, abstract: About three percent of the population in the United States of today are Jews. Their home is America and they fell and act as Americans. Most of them are descendants of European emigrants who came to America in the mass migration in the first half of the 19th century. Today, scarcely anybody thinks about those days and even worse, many people hardly know anything about it. Well, it was not a long period of time in which the mass migration took place. It only covers about fifty years; yet, fifty important years. Those were the years, when the cornerstone of the Jewish history in America was laid. A history, different to Jewish histories in other countries. In the United States of America, Jews have never been discriminated nor persecuted. They had the same chances than every Gentile in America. This paper shows how the Jewish immigrants gained a foothold in America between the early years of the 19th century and the beginning of the Civil War. Jewish immigrants arrived in America without any money in their pockets. Yet, they had the hope to find a better life in this ‘golden country’. In the following it will be discussed how German Jews in America succeeded in business life and politics, and how they dealt with their religion in a country that did not put up any restrictions on them. This paper looks more on the general history. Although a history is always the history of people, it was avoided to tell the history of single persons because it would exceed the limit of this paper. Yet, sometimes the life of some people are given as examples.

How Jews Became Germans

How Jews Became Germans
Author: Deborah Sadie Hertz
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2007-01-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0300110944

When the Nazis came to power and created a racial state in the 1930s, an urgent priority was to identify Jews who had converted to Christianity over the preceding centuries. With the help of church officials, a vast system of conversion and intermarriage records was created in Berlin, the country’s premier Jewish city. Deborah Hertz’s discovery of these records, the Judenkartei, was the first step on a long research journey that has led to this compelling book. Hertz begins the book in 1645, when the records begin, and traces generations of German Jewish families for the next two centuries. The book analyzes the statistics and explores letters, diaries, and other materials to understand in a far more nuanced way than ever before why Jews did or did not convert to Protestantism. Focusing on the stories of individual Jews in Berlin, particularly the charismatic salon woman Rahel Levin Varnhagen and her husband, Karl, a writer and diplomat, Hertz humanizes the stories, sets them in the context of Berlin’s evolving society, and connects them to the broad sweep of European history.

Sundays at Sinai

Sundays at Sinai
Author: Tobias Brinkmann
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 382
Release: 2012-05-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 0226074560

First established 150 years ago, Chicago Sinai is one of America’s oldest Reform Jewish congregations. Its founders were upwardly mobile and civically committed men and women, founders and partners of banks and landmark businesses like Hart Schaffner & Marx, Sears & Roebuck, and the giant meatpacking firm Morris & Co. As explicitly modern Jews, Sinai’s members supported and led civic institutions and participated actively in Chicago politics. Perhaps most radically, their Sunday services, introduced in 1874 and still celebrated today, became a hallmark of the congregation. In Sundays at Sinai, Tobias Brinkmann brings modern Jewish history, immigration, urban history, and religious history together to trace the roots of radical Reform Judaism from across the Atlantic to this rapidly growing American metropolis. Brinkmann shines a light on the development of an urban reform congregation, illuminating Chicago Sinai’s practices and history, and its contribution to Christian-Jewish dialogue in the United States. Chronicling Chicago Sinai’s radical beginnings in antebellum Chicago to the present, Sundays at Sinai is the extraordinary story of a leading Jewish Reform congregation in one of America’s great cities.

From Haven To Home

From Haven To Home
Author: Michael Grunberger
Publisher: George Braziller Publishers
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2004-11-02
Genre: History
ISBN:

This year marks the 350th anniversary of the first Jewish settlement in America. From Haven to Home celebrates this important occasion by bringing together an eminent group of Judaic scholars who take stock of American Jewish life, from the arrival of the first small group in Manhattan in 1654 to the present. The contributors examine a wide range of topics, including the early history of the American Jewish community and the various significant phases of Jewish immigration, which saw the initial group of twenty-three burgeon into a thriving community of several million by the early twentieth century. Also addressed is the role of Jews in the Civil War and in World War II, anti-Semitism in America, the daily life and struggles of American Jewish women, and American Jews and politics. The essays are amply illustrated with items from the collection of the Library of Congress's Hebraic Section, among them the first Hebrew bible printed in America and the first Yiddish American cookbook, as well as selections of photographs, prints, diaries, maps, and sheet music. Central to the Jewish experience in America is that country's commitment to ideals of freedom, opportunity, religious liberty, equality, and pluralism. The continuity of the faith, in fact, depends on it. From Haven to Homethe story of Jews in Americais therefore also the story of America and American ideals. 100 color illustrations.

American Passage

American Passage
Author: Vincent J. Cannato
Publisher: Harper Collins
Total Pages: 501
Release: 2009-06-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 0060742739

For most of New York's early history, Ellis Island had been an obscure little island that barely held itself above high tide. Today the small island stands alongside Plymouth Rock in our nation's founding mythology as the place where many of our ancestors first touched American soil. Ellis Island's heyday—from 1892 to 1924—coincided with one of the greatest mass movements of individuals the world has ever seen, with some twelve million immigrants inspected at its gates. In American Passage, Vincent J. Cannato masterfully illuminates the story of Ellis Island from the days when it hosted pirate hangings witnessed by thousands of New Yorkers in the nineteenth century to the turn of the twentieth century when massive migrations sparked fierce debate and hopeful new immigrants often encountered corruption, harsh conditions, and political scheming. American Passage captures a time and a place unparalleled in American immigration and history, and articulates the dramatic and bittersweet accounts of the immigrants, officials, interpreters, and social reformers who all play an important role in Ellis Island's chronicle. Cannato traces the politics, prejudices, and ideologies that surrounded the great immigration debate, to the shift from immigration to detention of aliens during World War II and the Cold War, all the way to the rebirth of the island as a national monument. Long after Ellis Island ceased to be the nation's preeminent immigrant inspection station, the debates that once swirled around it are still relevant to Americans a century later. In this sweeping, often heart-wrenching epic, Cannato reveals that the history of Ellis Island is ultimately the story of what it means to be an American.

An Unpromising Land

An Unpromising Land
Author: Gur Alroey
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 302
Release: 2014-06-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 0804790876

The Jewish migration at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries was one of the dramatic events that changed the Jewish people in modern times. Millions of Jews sought to escape the distressful conditions of their lives in Eastern Europe and find a better future for themselves and their families overseas. The vast majority of the Jewish migrants went to the United States, and others, in smaller numbers, reached Argentina, Canada, Australia, and South Africa. From the beginning of the twentieth century until the First World War, about 35,000 Jews reached Palestine. Because of this difference in scale and because of the place the land of Israel possesses in Jewish thought, historians and social scientists have tended to apply different criteria to immigration, stressing the uniqueness of Jewish immigration to Palestine and the importance of the Zionist ideology as a central factor in that immigration. This book questions this assumption, and presents a more complex picture both of the causes of immigration to Palestine and of the mass of immigrants who reached the port of Jaffa in the years 1904–1914.

Jews in Minnesota

Jews in Minnesota
Author: Hyman Berman
Publisher: Minnesota Historical Society Press
Total Pages: 135
Release: 2009-07-24
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0873517385

Although never more than a small percentage of the Minnesota's population, Jews have made a remarkable contribution to the state in business, politics, and education.

The Jews in America

The Jews in America
Author: Max I. Dimont
Publisher: Open Road Media
Total Pages: 312
Release: 2014-06-10
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1497626994

“A wondrous tale of American Judaism” from the Colonial Era to the twentiethcentury, by the acclaimed author of Jews, God, and History (Kirkus Reviews). Beginning with the Sephardim who first reached the shores of America in the 1600s, this fascinating book by historian Max Dimont traces the journey of the Jews in the United States. It follows the various waves of immigration that brought people and families from Germany, Russia, and beyond; recounts the cultural achievements of those who escaped oppression in their native lands; and discusses the movement away from Orthodoxy and the attitudes of American Jews—both religious and secular—toward Israel. From the author of Jews, God, and History, which has sold more than one million copies and was called “unquestionably the best popular history of the Jews written in the English language” by the LosAngeles Times, this is a compelling account by an author who was himself an immigrant, raised in Helsinki, Finland, before arriving at Ellis Island in 1929 and going on to serve in army intelligence in World War II.

"Our Crowd"

Author: Stephen Birmingham
Publisher: Open Road Media
Total Pages: 396
Release: 2015-12-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1504026284

The #1 New York Times bestseller that traces the rise of the Guggenheims, the Goldmans, and other families from immigrant poverty to social prominence. They immigrated to America from Germany in the nineteenth century with names like Loeb, Sachs, Seligman, Lehman, Guggenheim, and Goldman. From tenements on the Lower East Side to Park Avenue mansions, this handful of Jewish families turned small businesses into imposing enterprises and amassed spectacular fortunes. But despite possessing breathtaking wealth that rivaled the Astors and Rockefellers, they were barred by the gentile establishment from the lofty realm of “the 400,” a register of New York’s most elite, because of their religion and humble backgrounds. In response, they created their own elite “100,” a privileged society as opulent and exclusive as the one that had refused them entry. “Our Crowd” is the fascinating story of this rarefied society. Based on letters, documents, diary entries, and intimate personal remembrances of family lore by members of these most illustrious clans, it is an engrossing portrait of upper-class Jewish life over two centuries; a riveting story of the bankers, brokers, financiers, philanthropists, and business tycoons who started with nothing and turned their family names into American institutions.