Books in the Goldstein-Goren Series in American Jewish History series

Reveals how an almost forgotten festival became the most visible of American Jewish holidays.

Features an array of scholars of Jewish history, 1929 surveys the Jewish world in one year offering clear examples of the transnational connections which linked Jews to each other-from politics, diplomacy, and philanthropy to literature, culture, and the fate of Yiddish-regardless of where they lived.

A revealing look at how death and burial practices influence the livingDust to Dust offers a three-hundred-year history of Jewish life in New York, literally from the ground up. Taking Jewish cemeteries as its subject matter, it follows the ways that Jewish New Yorkers have planned for death and burial from their earliest arrival in New Amsterdam to the twentieth century.Allan Amanik charts a remarkable reciprocity among Jewish funerary provisions and the workings of family and communal life, tracing how financial and family concerns in death came to equal earlier priorities rooted in tradition and communal cohesion. At the same time, he shows how shifting emphases in death gave average Jewish families the ability to advocate for greater protections and entitlements such as widows' benefits and funeral insurance. Amanik ultimately concludes that planning for life's end helps to shape social systems in ways that often go unrecognized.

Honorable Mention, 2019 Saul Viener Book Prize, given by the American Jewish Historical SocietyA compelling story of how Judaism became integrated into mainstream American religion In 1956, the sociologist Will Herberg described the United States as a "triple-melting pot," a country in which "three religious communities - Protestant, Catholic, Jewish - are America." This description of an American society in which Judaism and Catholicism stood as equal partners to Protestantism begs explanation, as Protestantism had long been the dominant religious force in the U.S. How did Americans come to embrace Protestantism, Catholicism, and Judaism as "the three facets of American religion?"Historians have often turned to the experiences of World War II in order to explain this transformation. However, World War I's impact on changing conceptions of American religion is too often overlooked. This book argues that World War I programs designed to protect the moral welfare of American servicemen brought new ideas about religious pluralism into structures of the military. Jessica Cooperman shines a light on how Jewish organizations were able to convince both military and civilian leaders that Jewish organizations, alongside Christian ones, played a necessary role in the moral and spiritual welfare of America's fighting forces. This alone was significant, because acceptance within the military was useful in modeling acceptance in the larger society. The leaders of the newly formed Jewish Welfare Board, which became the military's exclusive Jewish partner in the effort to maintain moral welfare among soldiers, used the opportunities created by war to negotiate a new place for Judaism in American society. Using the previously unexplored archival collections of the JWB, as well as soldiers' letters, memoirs and War Department correspondence, Jessica Cooperman shows that the Board was able to exert strong control over expressions of Judaism within the military. By introducing young soldiers to what it saw as appropriately Americanized forms of Judaism and Jewish identity, the JWB hoped to prepare a generation of American Jewish men to assume positions of Jewish leadership while fitting comfortably into American society.This volume shows how, at this crucial turning point in world history, the JWB managed to use the policies and power of the U.S. government to advance its own agenda: to shape the future of American Judaism and to assert its place as a truly American religion.

Winner, 2019 Saul Viener Book Prize, given by the American Jewish Historical Society

Honorable Mention, 2019 Saul Viener Book Prize, given by the American Jewish Historical SocietyA vivid history of the American Jewish merchants who concentrated in the nation''s most important economic sector In the nineteenth century, Jewish merchants created a thriving niche economy in the United States'' most important industry-cotton-positioning themselves at the forefront of expansion during the Reconstruction Era. Jewish success in the cotton industry was transformative for both Jewish communities and their development, and for the broader economic restructuring of the South. Cotton Capitalists analyzes this niche economy and reveals its origins. Michael R. Cohen argues that Jewish merchants'' status as a minority fueled their success by fostering ethnic networks of trust. Trust in the nineteenth century was the cornerstone of economic transactions, and this trust was largely fostered by ethnicity. Much as money flowed along ethnic lines between Anglo-American banks, Jewish merchants in the Gulf South used their own ethnic ties with other Jewish-owned firms in New York, as well as Jewish investors across the globe, to capitalize their businesses. They relied on these family connections to direct Northern credit and goods to the war-torn South, avoiding the constraints of the anti-Jewish prejudices which had previously denied them access to credit, allowing them to survive economic downturns. These American Jewish merchants reveal that ethnicity matters in the development of global capitalism. Ethnic minorities are and have frequently been at the forefront of entrepreneurship, finding innovative ways to expand narrow sectors of the economy. While this was certainly the case for Jews, it has also been true for other immigrant groups more broadly. The story of Jews in the American cotton trade is far more than the story of American Jewish success and integration-it is the story of the role of ethnicity in the development of global capitalism.

Finalist, Celebrate 350 Award in American Jewish StudiesTells the remarkable story of the Jewish moguls in Hollywood who established the first anti-Nazi Jewish resistance organization in the country in the 1930sIn April 1939, Warner Brothers studios released the first Hollywood film to confront the Nazi threat in the United States. Confessions of a Nazi Spy, starring Edward G. Robinson, told the story of German agents in New York City working to overthrow the U.S. government. The film alerted Americans to the dangers of Nazism at home and encouraged them to defend against it.Confessions of a Nazi Spy may have been the first cinematic shot fired by Hollywood against Nazis in America, but it by no means marked the political awakening of the film industry’s Jewish executives to the problem. Hollywood’s Spies tells the remarkable story of the Jewish moguls in Hollywood who paid private investigators to infiltrate Nazi groups operating in Los Angeles, establishing the first anti-Nazi Jewish resistance organization in the country—the Los Angeles Jewish Community Committee (LAJCC).Drawing on more than 15,000 pages of archival documents, Laura B. Rosenzweig offers a compelling narrative illuminating the role that Jewish Americans played in combating insurgent Nazism in the United States in the 1930s. Forced undercover by the anti-Semitic climate of the decade, the LAJCC partnered with organizations whose Americanism was unimpeachable, such as the American Legion, to channel information regarding seditious Nazi plots to Congress, the Justice Department, the FBI and the Los Angeles Police Department.Hollywood’s Spies corrects the decades-long belief that American Jews lacked the political organization and leadership to assert their political interests during this period in our history and reveals that the LAJCC was one of many covert "fact finding" operations funded by Jewish Americans designed to root out Nazism in the United States.

Comparing the history of Jewish participation within the clothing trade in the United States with that of Jews in the same business in England, this book demonstrates that differences within the garment industry on either side of the Atlantic contributed to a very real divergence in social and economic outcomes for Jews in each setting.

Offers a fascinating, comprehensive analysis of the roots, manifestations, and consequences of evangelical Christians' interest in the Jews

Features an array of scholars of Jewish history, 1929 surveys the Jewish world in one year offering clear examples of the transnational connections which linked Jews to each other-from politics, diplomacy, and philanthropy to literature, culture, and the fate of Yiddish-regardless of where they lived.

Investigates why immigrant Jewish women unionists appealed to an international force of coworkers

A major re-examination of postwar American Jewry that debunks the assumption of silence

Presents some of the most outstanding and hilarious examples of Jewish dialect humour drawn from the five books Milt Gross (1895-1953) published between 1926 and 1928 - "Nize Baby", "De Night in de Front from Chreesmas", "Hiawatta", "Dunt Esk", and "Famous Fimmales".

Explores the intertwined histories of Jews and the American Left through a rich variety of primary documents. Written in English and Yiddish, this title includes documents that reflect the entire spectrum of radical opinion, from anarchism to social democracy, Communism to socialist-Zionism.

Jews and Booze - Subtitle Becoming American in the Age of Prohibition

Analyzes the variable historical and cultural factors that account for the central role Jews have played in the struggles over obscenity and censorship in the modern United States.