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Looking for a good book on American Jews?
Jews have been in America for a long time. Christopher Columbus may have been
of Jewish descent. And his translator, Luis de Torres - the first one of the
crew to set foot on land in the New World, certainly was. Jews arrived in New
Amsterdam - later known as New York - in 1654. Most early American Jews were
Sephardim, including former Marranos (Jews practicing Judaism secretly due to
the Spanish Inquisition). By 1776, there were some 2,000 Jews in the 13
colonies. The first Ashkenazi congregation was founded in 1795.
Unlike Europe, the Jews of the United States never had to be emancipated -
while there has been anti-Semitism in America, it has never been official, and
Jews did not have to be elevated from a legally inferior status. Jews from
Germany began to come in the mid-1800s, and the large immigration of East
European Jews began in 1881.
In 1990,Jews in the U.S. numbered about 5.5 million, depending on how you count.
The just-released new Jewish population study of 2000 shows this number has
already decreased to 5.2 million. While American Jewry has come up
with new movements and approaches to Judaism, it has at the same time struggled
to maintain Jewish continuity in a society where you don't have to be
anything if you don't want to. Currently, we see Jewish cultural
flourishing side-by-side with assimilation.
With these dynamics, it's no surprise to see many fine books on American Jews
and American Judaism. We've assembled a number of them for you here.
A
History of the Jews in America
by Howard M. Sachar |
Alternatives to Assimilation: The Response of Reform Judaism to American
Culture, 1840-1930
by Alan Silverstein |
Ambiguous Relations: The American Jewish Community and Germany Since 1945
by Shlomo Shafir |
Henry Ford and the Jews
by Neil Baldwin |
America, Its Jews, and the Rise of Nazism
by Gulie Ne'eman Arad |
The Grandees: America's Sephardic Elite
by Stephen Birmingham |
Are We One?: Jewish Identity in the United States and Israel
by Jerold S. Auerbach |
Beyond Auschwitz: Post-Holocaust Jewish Thought in America
by Michael L. Morgan |
Beyond Survival and Philanthropy: American Jewry and Israel
by Allon Gal, Alfred Gottschalk |
The Jews in America
by Max I. Dimont |
Catskill Culture : A Mountain Rat's Memories of the Great Jewish Resort Area
by Phil Brown |
Class, Networks, and Identity
by Rhonda F. Levine |
Divergent Jewish Cultures: Israel and America
by Deborah Dash Moore, S. Ilan Troen |
The Presidents of the United States & the Jews
by David G. Dalin, Alfred J. Kolatch |
Evangelizing the Chosen People: Missions to the Jews in America, 1880-2000
(H. Eugene and Lillian Youngs Lehman Series)
by Yaakov S. Ariel |
Forgotten Victims: The Abandonment of Americans in Hitler's
Camps
by Mitchell G. Bard |
From New Zion to Old Zion: American Jewish Immigration and Settlement in
Palestine, 1917-1939 (America-Holy Land Monographs)
by Joseph B. Glass |
Going South: Jewish Women in the Civil Rights Movement
by Debra L. Schultz |
A Bibliography of Jewish Education in the United States
by Norman Drachler |
Her Works Praise Her: A History of Jewish Women in America from Colonial
Times to the Present
by Hasia R. Diner, Beryl Lieff Benderly |
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Homelands: Southern Jewish Identity in Durham and Chapel Hill, North
Carolina (Judaic Studies Series)
by Leonard Rogoff |
How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says About Race in America
by Karen Brodkin |
Irreconcilable Differences?: The Waning of the American Jewish Love Affair
With Israel (Brandeis Series in American Jewish History, Culture, and Life)
by Steven T. Rosenthal |
Jewish Baltimore: A Family Album
by Gilbert Sandler |
Jewish Immigrant Associations and American Identity in New York, 1880-1939
by Daniel Soyer |
Jewish Voices of the California Gold Rush: A Documentary History, 1849-1880
(American Jewish Civilization Series)
by Ava Fran Kahn |
Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia
by Paula E. Hyman, Deborah Dash Moore |
Jews in America: A Cartoon History
by David Gantz |
Jews in America: A Contemporary Reader (Brandeis Series in American Jewish
History, Culture, and Life)
by Roberta Rosenberg Farber, Chaim Isaac Waxman |
Jews, Slaves, and the Slave Trade: Setting the Record Straight (Reappraisals
in Jewish Social and Intellectual History Series)
by Eli Faber |
Judah P. Benjamin: The Jewish Confederate
by Eli N. Evans |
Lower East Side Memories
by Hasia R. Diner |
Quarantine!: East European Jewish Immigrants and the New York City Epidemics
of 1892
by Howard Markel |
Reel Jewish
by Joel Samberg |
Sephardic-American Voices: Two Hundred Years of a Literary Legacy (Brandies
Series in American Jewish History, Culture and Life)
by Diane Matza |
Shared Dreams: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Jewish Community
by Marc Schneier |
State of Israel, Diaspora, and Jewish Continuity: Essays on the 'Ever-Dying
People' (Tauber Institute for the Study of European Jewry Series, 26)
by Simon Rawidowicz, Benjamin C. I. Ravid, Michael A. Meyer |
Struggles in the Promised Land: Towards Towards a History of Black-Jewish
Relations in the United States
by Jack Salzman, Cornel West |
The Death of an American Jewish Community: A Tragedy of Good Intentions
by Hillel Levine |
The Fatal Embrace: Jews and the State
by Benjamin Ginsberg |
The First Jewish Catalog: A Do-It-Yourself Kit
by Richard Siegel, Michael Strassfield, Sharon Strassfeld |
The Girls: Jewish Women of Brownsville, Brooklyn, 1940-1995 (Suny Series on
Modern Jewish Literature and Culture)
by Carole Bell Ford |
A Homeland in the West : Utah Jews Remember
by Eileen Hallett Stone |
The Jewish Confederates (NS)
by Robert N. Rosen |
Black-Jewish Relations on Trial: Leo Frank and Jim Conley in the New South
by Jeffrey Paul Melnick |
The Jews of New Jersey: A Pictorial History
by Patricia M. Ard, Michael Aaron Rockland |
The Lower East Side Jews: An Immigrant Generation
by Ronald Sanders |
Envisioning Israel: The Changing Ideals and Images of North American Jews
(American Jewish Civilization Series)
by Allon Gal |
The Provincials: A Personal History of Jews in the South
by Eli N. Evans |
The Quiet Voices: Southern Rabbis and Black Civil Rights, 1880s to 1990s
(Judaic Studies Series)
by Mark K. Bauman, Berkley Kalin |
The Soviet Jewish Americans (Brandeis Series in American Jewish History,
Culture, and Life)
by Annelise Orleck, Elizabeth Cooke (Photographer) |
The Story of the Jewish Defense League
by Meir Kahane |
Tough Jews: Fathers, Sons, and Gangster Dreams
by Rich Cohen |
Troubled Memory: Anne Levy, the Holocaust, and David Duke's Louisiana
by Lawrence N. Powell |
What Price Prejudice?: Christian Antisemitism in America (Studies in Judaism
and Christianity)
by Frank E. Eakin |
Can't find it here? Try a search on Amazon.com:
American Jewry
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