You may have to register before you can download all our books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
In August, 1929, Arabs in Palestine rose up in bloody riots against Jews. More than 130 Jews were killed, among them eight young American students. American Jews, hampered by the postwar mood of disillusionment and isolationism and by the vicious anti-Semitic attacks of the 1920s, failed to mount an effective campaign to influence either the government or public opinion. In addition, the community itself was hopelessly divided. Rival factions, some led by men who frequently sacrificed issue for ego, could not counter the anti-Zionist case. In The Year After the Riots, Naomi W. Cohen makes the first in-depth study of American responses to the riots and reveals the isolation and weaknesses of American Jewry. Official noninvolvement, anti-Semitism, and Jewish disunity are presented as an ominous prologue to the Hitler era."
Race in the United States has long been associated with heredity and inequality while ethnicity has been linked to language and culture. In the Shadow of Race recovers the history of this entrenched distinction and the divisive politics it engenders. Victoria Hattam locates the origins of ethnicity in the New York Zionist movement of the early 1900s. In a major revision of widely held assumptions, she argues that Jewish activists identified as ethnics not as a means of assimilating and becoming white, but rather as a way of defending immigrant difference as distinct from race—rooted in culture rather than body and blood. Eventually, Hattam shows, the Immigration and Naturalization Service ...
The first comprehensive history of American Jewish philanthropy and its influence on democracy and capitalism For years, American Jewish philanthropy has been celebrated as the proudest product of Jewish endeavors in the United States, its virtues extending from the local to the global, the Jewish to the non-Jewish, and modest donations to vast endowments. Yet, as Lila Corwin Berman illuminates in The American Jewish Philanthropic Complex, the history of American Jewish philanthropy reveals the far more complicated reality of changing and uneasy relationships among philanthropy, democracy, and capitalism. With a fresh eye and lucid prose, and relying on previously untapped sources, Berman sh...
If you are researching your German family history, this book is a must-read. The book should help you answer the questions, why did our German ancestors immigrate; when did they leave; how did they get here; where did they settle? It includes descriptions of many aspects of German history that affected immigration to America, and the material should give you vital insights into your ancestors' immigration. Remember that each immigrant has a unique story, and it is our challenge to dig out as many details of their immigration saga as we can when doing our family history research. I am sure this book will help point the way to many exciting stories about your family history. The stories will help your ancestors come alive. Our immigrant ancestors are the foundation of our roots in the United States. Our lives would be much different if they did not endure the challenges of emigration from Germany. Do not underestimate their contributions. They played a critical role in factories and farms in the United States. Their lives were building blocks in the growth of their new country.
Moshe Davis was a preeminent scholar of contemporary Jewish history and the rounding head of the Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. A recognized leader in the field of bicultural American/Jewish studies, he was a mentor to educators and academics in both Israel and North America and an active colleague of American Christian scholars involved in interfaith study and dialogue. These wide-ranging essays, many of them presented at a colloquium that Professor Davis had planned but did not live to attend, honor him by exploring the theme of Zion as an integral part of American spiritual history and as a site of interfaith discourse. Not only do these essays stre...
A detailed biography of the powerful political attorney Simon Wolf (1836-1923), who exerted unparalleled influence over American presidents and other leaders and numerous constituencies. This study reveals why his many achievements brought him no lasting fame.
This book focuses on the first Supreme Court case to grant Jewish Americans race-based civil rights and highlights the complexity of White-perceived Jewish racialization in the United States. In 1982, vandals defaced Shaare Tefila Congregation in Silver Spring, Maryland, with Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazi images and slogans. Because no religion-based statutes applied to the desecration, the synagogue’s lawyers were required to utilize race-based statutes. In her close study of what became the 1987 case Shaare Tefila Congregation v. Cobb, Annalise Glauz-Todrank offers a nuanced analysis of the ways in which the members of the congregation, their lawyers, and the vandals’ lawyers used the conc...
AUTHENTIC STORY IN THE LORE OF THE AMERICAN SENATE—THE SAGA OF “THE FOUR,” WHO DOMINATED THAT BODY AROUND THE TURN OF THE CENTURY. Spooner was a brilliant orator who rose from a career as a railroad road solicitor to a political role here defined in the sub title, as “Defender of Presidents.” He had represented powerful interests before the Wisconsin legislature and in Washington and early story includes documented records of the rise of great railroad and lumber combines. The shift of public favor from the fabulous tycoons in the era of the muckrakers posed little threat to the short, powerful, prudent man who knew both politics and law. After a term in the Senate (1885-1888), he ...
In Forgetting Fathers, David Marshall weaves together the stories of his grandfather and great-grandfather with his own quest to solve the mystery of his family's past. Beginning as a search for his lost family name, Marshall attempts to understand the origins of his grandfather, who spent part of his childhood in the Hebrew Orphan Asylum of the City of New York. He also reconstructs the life and death of his great-grandfather, a Russian immigrant tailor who died at age thirty-six in a private sanitarium dedicated to the treatment of mental and nervous diseases. The narrative becomes a detective story that reflects on our ambivalence about origins, the relation between history and mourning, and the compulsion to search for life stories. Forgetting Fathers combines historical accounts based on records, reports, and public documents with autobiographical reflections and speculations. Included throughout are photographs, newspaper clippings, and facsimiles of original documents that provide a sense of both the texture of the times and the fabric of archival and genealogical research.