Known as Newark's "Jewish Frontier," Weequahic was home to 35,000 Jewish residents from the 1930s to the 1960s. Homes built on farm lots, known as Lyons Farms, attracted the city's upwardly mobile Jewish families. Weequahic High School still remains at the heart of the community, drawing generations of alumni for annual reunions and events. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Philip Roth, a Weequahic High School graduate, found inspiration in the community, documenting its intricacies in his work. The high school still houses a mural, The Enlightenment of Man, painted by New Deal painter Michael Lenson. This mural is regarded as one of the most important pieces of public art in the state. Jews of Weequahic captures the life of this vibrant community that has become one of Newark's legendary neighborhoods.

Jewish settlers began arriving in Morris County as far back as the Civil War. These early Jews settled in Morristown, a market town; Dover, a mining town located on the Morris Canal; and the farming towns of Pine Brook and Mount Freedom. When each of these communities had 10 adult males, the minimum number for religious services, they established Hebrew schools, synagogues, and congregational cemeteries and made Morris County their home. Morristown and Dover Jews were prosperous merchants with heavily populated Jewish business districts located on Speedwell Avenue and Blackwell Street. Stories of live chickens hanging in the kosher butcher's window and fish swimming in glass pools reflect this bygone era. Nearby Pine Brook and Mount Freedom Jews, not able to make a living as farmers, opened summer boarding houses and grew thriving full-service kosher hotels that rivaled New York's Catskill resorts.

Jews have called New Jersey home since the late seventeenth century, and they currently make up almost 6 percent of the states residents. Yet, until now, no book has paid tribute to the richness of Jewish heritage in the Garden State. The Jews of New Jersey: A Pictorial History redresses this lack with a lively narrative and hundreds of archival and family photographsmany rarethat bring this history to life. Patricia Ard and Michael Rockland focus on representative Jewish communities throughout the state, paying particular attention to the extraordinary stories of ordinary people. Through the joys and struggles of homemakers, storekeepers, factory workers, athletes, children, farmers, activists, religious leaders, and Holocaust survivors, the authors tell the stories of how these communities have evolved, thrived, and changed. They note the difficulties posed by intermarriage and assimilation and, at the same time, depict a burgeoning revival of Jewish orthodoxy and traditions. The Jews of New Jersey will please both the historian and general reader. Its heartwarming stories and pictures truly make the point that it is through the joys, triumphs, and defeats of everyday people that history is made.

Filled with practical advice as well as history, Blu Greenberg's book is a comprehensive guide to the joys and complexities of running a modern Jewish home. How to Run a Traditional Jewish Household is a modern, comprehensive guide covering virtually every aspect of Jewish home life. It provides practical advice on how to manage a Jewish home in the traditional way and offers fascinating accounts of the history behind the tradition. In a warm, personal style, Blu Greenberg shows that, contrary to popular belief, the home, and not the synagogue, is the most important institution in Jewish life. Divided into three large sections—"The Jewish Way," "Special Stages of Life," and "Celebration and Remembering"—this book educates the uninitiated and reminds the already observant Jew of how Judaism approaches daily life. Topics include prayer, dress, holidays, food preparation, marriage, birth, death, parenthood, and many others. This description of the modern-yet-traditional Jewish household will earn special regard among the many American Jews who are re-exploring their ties to Jewish tradition. Such Jews will find this book a flexible guide that provides a knowledge of the requirements of traditional Judaism without advocating immediate and complete compliance. How to Run a Traditional Jewish Household will also appeal to observant Jews, providing them with helpful tips on how to manage their homes and special insights into the most minute details and procedures in a traditional household. Herself a traditional Jew, Blu Greenberg is nevertheless quite sympathetic to feminist views on the role of women in Jewish observance. How to Run a Traditional Jewish Household therefore speaks intimately to women who are struggling to reconcile their identities as modern women with their commitments to traditional Judaism.

Something unique happened when Jews immigrated to Paterson in the early 20th century. Instead of sewing shirtwaists and schmattahs in sweatshops, they came as skilled weavers from the Russian Polish textile centers of Lodz and Bialystok. They brought strong notions of social justice and living righteously; ideas that came alive during the 1913 Industrial Workers of the World silk strike then animated the social life in their Jewish neighborhoods. They raised families, became Americans, and reluctantly moved when the economic base collapsed. Despite this, Paterson Jews defend the aging, gritty city as a wonderful place, and they never left it spiritually or emotionally. Former and current residents recall the Hamilton Avenue bagel bakery, Purity Cooperative rye bread, candy stores, delicatessens, the YMHA, bar mitzvah coaches, rabbis, the baby doctor, pediatricians, schoolteachers, and even the synagogue shammes. They remember and honor the past as a bridge between the present and the future. Jews of Paterson is more than just nostalgia it is the remarkable story of how a particular group built a community and made it into a special place."

The book concludes by relating how survivors rebuilt their lives - often very successfully - in the New World."--BOOK JACKET.

#1 bestseller and soon to be motion picture, Newark Minutemen has bridged generations. The epic based-on-true story of forbidden love and unholy heroism is set against the backdrop of an America ripped apart by the Great Depression and on the brink of war. Newark, NJ, 1938. Millions are out of work and robbed of dignity. A shadow Hitler-Nazi party called the German-American Bund that is led by an American Fuhrer threatens to swallow democracy. In this dangerous time of star-spangled fascism, a romance forms between the Jewish boxer, Yael and the daughter of the enemy, Krista. But 1930s America pulls them apart as Krista’s people want Yael’s dead. Then Yael is recruited by the mob to go undercover for the FBI against her people and bring down the German-American Bund. Author Leslie K. Barry captures an authentic and brave portrait of a lost America searching for identity, preserving legacy and saving its soul. It is a heartbreaking novel that crosses generations as it honors the fragility of freedom.

""Well researched, readable, and very interesting"" --Choice ""Nazis in Newark is a model local history that reaches well beyond the border of Essex County, New Jersey, to the national and international arenas. By recounting so many sides of the complicated encounter between Nazis and Jews in Newark, Warren Grover has fashioned a world of street politics, boycotts, Nazi louts and Jewish bruisers that is as compelling and telling in its detail as any grand tome on the supposed failures and successes of American Jewish resistence to the Holocaust... I recommend Nazis in Newark. I intend to use it as a cornerstone of my teaching for some time to come."" --Professor Michael Alexander The Jewish Quarterly Review ""Very few people today realize that the U.S. mainland was the scene of battles against the Nazis. Warren Grover has produced an outstanding work on this subject. The writing is incisive, the ideas are both original and insightful and the thesis masterfully developed and executed. Must reading for anyone interested in American history and ethnic studies."" --William B. Helmreich, CUNY Graduate Center and author of The Enduring Community ""Thanks to tenacious research and deft story-telling, Warren Grover has put the politics of extremism in one city in the shadow of Fascism, Nazism and Communism, and has thus illuminated the terrible dilemmas of the 1930s. His book also compels the reader to consider an historical anomaly: champions of the Third Reich come across as victims whose civil liberties were infringed, and the gangs of Newark responsible for these violations tended to be Jewish. Such ironies make Nazis in Newark worth the interest of anyone intrigued by ethnic conflict and politcal violence in urban America."" --Stephen Whitfield, Max Richter Professor of American Civilization, Brandeis University ""In this fast-paced, thorough study of anti-Nazism in Newark, scholar Warren Grover tells th

Winner of the 2021 National Jewish Book Award for Con­tem­po­rary Jew­ish Life and Prac­tice Finalist for the 2021 Kirkus Prize in Nonfiction A New York Times Notable Book of the Year A Wall Street Journal, Chicago Public Library, Publishers Weekly, and Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year A startling and profound exploration of how Jewish history is exploited to comfort the living. Renowned and beloved as a prizewinning novelist, Dara Horn has also been publishing penetrating essays since she was a teenager. Often asked by major publications to write on subjects related to Jewish culture—and increasingly in response to a recent wave of deadly antisemitic attacks—Horn was troubled to realize what all of these assignments had in common: she was being asked to write about dead Jews, never about living ones. In these essays, Horn reflects on subjects as far-flung as the international veneration of Anne Frank, the mythology that Jewish family names were changed at Ellis Island, the blockbuster traveling exhibition Auschwitz, the marketing of the Jewish history of Harbin, China, and the little-known life of the "righteous Gentile" Varian Fry. Throughout, she challenges us to confront the reasons why there might be so much fascination with Jewish deaths, and so little respect for Jewish lives unfolding in the present. Horn draws upon her travels, her research, and also her own family life—trying to explain Shakespeare’s Shylock to a curious ten-year-old, her anger when swastikas are drawn on desks in her children’s school, the profound perspective offered by traditional religious practice and study—to assert the vitality, complexity, and depth of Jewish life against an antisemitism that, far from being disarmed by the mantra of "Never forget," is on the rise. As Horn explores the (not so) shocking attacks on the American Jewish community in recent years, she reveals the subtler dehumanization built into the public piety that surrounds the Jewish past—making the radical argument that the benign reverence we give to past horrors is itself a profound affront to human dignity.