Newly arrived in New York in 1882 from Tsarist Russia, the sixteen-year-old Bernard Weinstein discovered an America in which unionism, socialism, and anarchism were very much in the air. He found a home in the tenements of New York and for the next fifty years he devoted his life to the struggles of fellow Jewish workers. The Jewish Unions in America blends memoir and history to chronicle this time. It describes how Weinstein led countless strikes, held the unions together in the face of retaliation from the bosses, investigated sweatshops and factories with the aid of reformers, and faced down schisms by various factions, including Anarchists and Communists. He co-founded the United Hebrew Trades and wrote speeches, articles and books advancing the cause of the labor movement. From the pages of this book emerges a vivid picture of workers’ organizations at the beginning of the twentieth century and a capitalist system that bred exploitation, poverty, and inequality. Although workers’ rights have made great progress in the decades since, Weinstein’s descriptions of workers with jobs pitted against those without, and American workers against workers abroad, still carry echoes today. The Jewish Unions in America is a testament to the struggles of working people a hundred years ago. But it is also a reminder that workers must still battle to live decent lives in the free market. For the first time, Maurice Wolfthal’s readable translation makes Weinstein’s Yiddish text available to English readers. It is essential reading for students and scholars of labor history, Jewish history, and the history of American immigration.

Explores the full diversity of Black Jews, including bi-racial Jews of both matrilineal and patrilineal descent; adoptees; black converts to Judaism; and Black Hebrews and Israelites, who trace their Jewish roots to Africa and challenge the dominant western paradigm of Jews as white and of European descent. The book showcases the lives of Black Jews, demonstrating that racial ascription has been shaping Jewish selfhood for centuries. It reassesses the boundaries between race and ethnicity, offering insight into how ethnicity can be understood only in relation to racialization and the one-drop rule. Within this context, Black Jewish individuals strive to assert their dual identities and find acceptance within their communities. Putting to rest the notion that Jews are white and the Black Jews are therefore a contradiction, the volume argues that we cannot pigeonhole Black Hebrews and Israelites as exotic, militant, and nationalistic sects outside the boundaries of mainstream Jewish thought and community life. it spurs us to consider the significance of the growing population of self-identified Black Jews and its implications for the future of American Jewry.

In the nineteenth century, it was a common belief that Native Americans were the descendants of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel. Ethan Smith wrote on this topic, and in so doing, challenged the dismissal of the Indigenous Americans by European settlers. Smith used biblical scripture, similarities in the Hebrew and Native American languages and their name for God, and other points of evidence to prove the connection between Israel and the First Nations. From there he showed how the reunited Hebrew tribes would be restored to Zion before the end of the world. Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of Smith's book is that it is said to have influenced the Book of Mormon, which was published about seven years after later. As a child, Smith moved away from religion after his parents died but found his way back before he turned 20 and worked in the ministry until his death. Smith wrote several books while serving in the ministry in which he explored prophecies and baptism, among other subjects. But this book remains one of the most controversial of all his publications.

Jonathan D. Sarna's award-winning American Judaism is now available in an updated and revised edition that summarizes recent scholarship and takes into account important historical, cultural, and political developments in American Judaism over the past fifteen years. Praise for the first edition: "Sarna . . . has written the first systematic, comprehensive, and coherent history of Judaism in America; one so well executed, it is likely to set the standard for the next fifty years."--Jacob Neusner, Jerusalem Post "A masterful overview."--Jeffrey S. Gurock, American Historical Review "This book is destined to be the new classic of American Jewish history."--Norman H. Finkelstein, Jewish Book World Winner of the 2004 National Jewish Book Award/Jewish Book of the Year

"Jews and Gentiles in Early America offers a uniquely detailed picture of Jewish life from the mid-seventeenth century through the opening decades of the new republic." "Pencak approaches his topic from the perspective of early American, rather than strictly Jewish, history. Rich in colorful narrative and animated with scenes of early American life, Jews and Gentiles in Early America tells the story of the five communities - New York, Newport, Charleston, Savannah, and Philadelphia - where most of colonial America's small Jewish population lived."--BOOK JACKET.

Among the millions of Jews who immigrated to America in the early twentieth century, there were the few for whom Hebrew culture was an important ideal. Reaching a critical mass around World War I, these American Hebraists attempted to establish a vital Hebrew culture in America. They founded journals and wrote Hebrew poetry, fiction, and essays, largely about the American Jewish experience, and they succeeded in putting a Hebraist stamp upon most of the Jewish education that took place between the two world wars. Hebrew in America is the first book to fully explore the Jewish attachment to Hebrew in twentieth-century North America. Fifteen leading scholars in Judaic studies write about the legacy of American Hebraism and the claims it continues to make upon the soul of the American Jewish community. While they might commonly lament the eclipse of Hebrew in America, they speak with many different voices when it comes to the analysis of problems and the prospects for change. Several writers look backward to the impact of the Hebrew movement in America on literature and education. Others consider the implications of Hebrew's arrival on the college campus. Another emphasis of the book is the relationship between language and culture in the case of Hebrew from anthropological, educational, and linguistic perspectives. And finally, several essays assess the role of Hebrew in the development of Jewish leadership in America as regards the relationship with the classic past and with contemporary Israel.

In the decades before the establishment of the State of Israel, striking images of Palestine circulated widely among Jewish Americans. These images visualized "the Orient" for American viewers, creating the possibility for Jewish Americans to understand themselves through imagining "Oriental" counterparts. In The Hebrew Orient, Jessica L. Carr shows how images of the Holy Land made Jewish Americans feel at home in the United States by imagining "the Orient" as heritage. Carr's analyses of periodicals from Hadassah and the Zionist Organization of America, art calendars from the National Federation of Temple Sisterhoods, the Jewish Encyclopedia, and the Jewish exhibit at the 1933 World's Fair are richly illustrated. What emerges is a new understanding of the place of Orientalism in American Zionism. Creating a narrative about their origins, Jewish Americans looked east to understand themselves as Westerners.

Over the last one hundred years, the story of Jews in the United States has been, by and large, one of successful and enthusiastic Americanization. Hundreds of thousands of Jews began the twentieth century as new arrivals in a foreign land yet soon became shapers and definers of American culture itself. One of the clearest expressions of this transformation has been the quick linguistic march of immigrant Jews and their children from Yiddish to English. In this book, Michael Weingrad presents a counter history of American Jewish culture, one that tells the story of literature written by a group whose core identity was neither American nor Jewish American. These writers were ardently and nationalistically Jewish and, despite adopting a new country, their linguistic and cultural allegiance was to the Hebrew language. Producing poetry, short fiction, novels, essays, and journals, these writers sought to express a Jewish cultural nationalism through literature. Weingrad explores Hebrew literature in the United States from the emergence of a group of writers connected with the Hebraist movement in the early twentieth century to the present. Radically expanding and challenging our conceptions of American and Jewish identities in literature, the author offers wide-ranging cultural analyses and thoughtful readings of key works. American Hebrew Literature restores a lost piece of the canvas of Hebrew literature and Jewish culture in the twentieth century and invites readers to reimagine Jewish American writers of our own time.

Winner of the 2020 Jordan Schnitzer Book Award in Social Science, Anthropology, and Folklore​ Honorable Mention, 2021 Saul Viener Book Prize​ The Jews’ Indian investigates the history of American Jewish relationships with Native Americans, both in the realm of cultural imagination and in face-to-face encounters. These two groups’ exchanges were numerous and diverse, proving at times harmonious when Jews’ and Natives people’s economic and social interests aligned, but discordant and fraught at other times. American Jews could be as exploitative of Native cultural, social, and political issues as other American settlers, and historian David Koffman argues that these interactions both unsettle and historicize the often triumphant consensus history of American Jewish life. Focusing on the ways Jewish class mobility and civic belonging were wrapped up in the dynamics of power and myth making that so severely impacted Native Americans, this books is provocative and timely, the first history to critically analyze Jewish participation in, and Jews’ grappling with the legacies of Native American history and the colonial project upon which America rests.