Jewish Studies Research Guide

In 1906, Atlanta's Central European Jewish leaders established a coordinating body for Jewish philanthropic endeavors known as the Federation of Jewish Charities. That modest undertaking has grown and blossomed over the course of a century into an institution that has helped make Atlanta Jewry one of the premier Jewish Communities in the United States. Includes many photos and a timeline of Atlanta's Jewish history. (Amazon)

Jews have long been a presence in the American South, first arriving in the late seventeenth century as part of exploratory voyages from Europe to the New World. Two of the nation's earliest Jewish communities were founded in Savannah in 1733 and Charleston in 1749. By 1800, more Jews lived in Charleston than in New York City. Today, Jews comprise less than one half of one percent of the southern population but provide critical sustenance and support for their communities. Nonetheless, southern Jews have perplexed scholars. For more than a century, historians have wrestled with various questions. Why study southern Jewish history? What is the southern Jewish experience? Is southern Jewish culture distinctive from that of other regions of the country, and if so, why? Jewish Roots in Southern Soil: A New History addresses these questions through the voices of a new generation of scholars of the Jewish South. Each of this book's thirteen chapters reflects a response with particular attention paid to new studies on women and gender; black/Jewish relations and the role of race, politics, and economic life; popular and material culture; and the changes wrought by industrialization and urbanization in the twentieth century. Essays address historical issues from the colonial era to the present and in every region of the South. Topics include assimilation and American Jewish identity, southern Jewish women writers, the Jewish Confederacy, Jewish peddlers, southern Jewish racial identity, black/Jewish relations, demographic change, the rise of American Reform Judaism, and Jews in southern literature.

A model of Jewish community history that will enlighten anyone interested in Baltimore and its past. Winner of the Southern Jewish Historical Society Book Prize by the Southern Jewish Historical Society; Finalist of the American Jewish Studies Book Award by the Jewish Book Council National Jewish Book Awards In 1938, Gustav Brunn and his family fled Nazi Germany and settled in Baltimore. Brunn found a job at McCormick's Spice Company but was fired after three days when, according to family legend, the manager discovered he was Jewish. He started his own successful business using a spice mill he brought over from Germany and developed a blend especially for the seafood purveyors across the street. Before long, his Old Bay spice blend would grace kitchen cabinets in virtually every home in Maryland. The Brunns sold the business in 1986. Four years later, Old Bay was again sold--to McCormick. In On Middle Ground, the first truly comprehensive history of Baltimore's Jewish community, Eric L. Goldstein and Deborah R. Weiner describe not only the formal institutions of Jewish life but also the everyday experiences of families like the Brunns and of a diverse Jewish population that included immigrants and natives, factory workers and department store owners, traditionalists and reformers. The story of Baltimore Jews--full of absorbing characters and marked by dramas of immigration, acculturation, and assimilation--is the story of American Jews in microcosm. But its contours also reflect the city's unique culture. Goldstein and Weiner argue that Baltimore's distinctive setting as both a border city and an immigrant port offered opportunities for advancement that made it a magnet for successive waves of Jewish settlers. The authors detail how the city began to attract enterprising merchants during the American Revolution, when it thrived as one of the few ports remaining free of British blockade. They trace Baltimore's meteoric rise as a commercial center, which drew Jewish newcomers who helped the upstart town surpass Philadelphia as the second-largest American city. They explore the important role of Jewish entrepreneurs as Baltimore became a commercial gateway to the South and later developed a thriving industrial scene. Readers learn how, in the twentieth century, the growth of suburbia and the redevelopment of downtown offered scope to civic leaders, business owners, and real estate developers. From symphony benefactor Joseph Meyerhoff to Governor Marvin Mandel and trailblazing state senator Rosalie Abrams, Jews joined the ranks of Baltimore's most influential cultural, philanthropic, and political leaders while working on the grassroots level to reshape a metro area confronted with the challenges of modern urban life. Accessibly written and enriched by more than 130 illustrations, On Middle Groundreveals that local Jewish life was profoundly shaped by Baltimore's "middleness"--its hybrid identity as a meeting point between North and South, a major industrial center with a legacy of slavery, and a large city with a small-town feel.

Published on the 350th anniversary of the first Jews to arrive in America, this comprehensive history of the Jews of Boston is now available in a revised and updated paperback edition. The stunning work combines illuminating essays by distinguished Jewish historians with 110 rare photographs to trace the community from its tentative beginnings in colonial Boston through its emergence in the twentieth century as one of the most influential and successful Jewish communities in America. The volume also presents fascinating information about Boston's synagogues and Jewish neighborhoods as well as the evolution of Jewish culture in Boston and the United States. Praise for the previous edition: "The writing is engaging and lucid, and the superb, profuse illustrations enhance the text. While numerous community histories have been published, this volume is in a class by itself--and will set the standard for all future works of this kind."--Library Journal "For those of us who grew up with anecdotes of what being a Jew was like in, say, the South End in 1910, or in Roxbury or Chelsea in 1920, this history, collected in one place for the first time, fills in the blanks. It gives us the context for our inherited folk tales."--Alan Lupo, Boston Globe Published in collaboration with the Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Boston

Manhattan's Lower East Side stands for Jewish experience in America. With the possible exception of African-Americans and Harlem, no ethnic group has been so thoroughly understood and imagined through a particular chunk of space. Despite the fact that most American Jews have never set foot there--and many come from families that did not immigrate through New York much less reside on Hester or Delancey Street--the Lower East Side is firm in their collective memory. Whether they have been there or not, people reminisce about the Lower East Side as the place where life pulsated, bread tasted better, relationships were richer, tradition thrived, and passions flared. This was not always so. During the years now fondly recalled (1880-1930), the neighborhood was only occasionally called the Lower East Side. Though largely populated by Jews from Eastern Europe, it was not ethnically or even religiously homogenous. The tenements, grinding poverty, sweatshops, and packs of roaming children were considered the stuff of social work, not nostalgia and romance. To learn when and why this dark warren of pushcart-lined streets became an icon, Hasia Diner follows a wide trail of high and popular culture. She examines children's stories, novels, movies, museum exhibits, television shows, summer-camp reenactments, walking tours, consumer catalogues, and photos hung on deli walls far from Manhattan. Diner finds that it was after World War II when the Lower East Side was enshrined as the place through which Jews passed from European oppression to the promised land of America. The space became sacred at a time when Jews were simultaneously absorbing the enormity of the Holocaust and finding acceptance and opportunity in an increasingly liberal United States. Particularly after 1960, the Lower East Side gave often secularized and suburban Jews a biblical, yet distinctly American story about who they were and how they got here. Displaying the author's own fondness for the Lower East Side of story books, combined with a commitment to historical truth, Lower East Side Memories is an insightful account of one of our most famous neighborhoods and its power to shape identity.

Jewish Identities in the American West fills a significant gap in racial identity scholarship.   Since the onset of New Western History in the 1980s, the complexity of race and ethnicity as it developed in the American West has increasingly been recognized by scholars and the wider public alike. Ethnic studies scholars have developed new perspectives on racial formation in the West that complicate older notions that often relied on binary descriptions, such as Black/white racialization. In the past few decades, these studies have relied on relational approaches that focus on how race is constructed, by both examining interactions with the white dominant group, and by exploring the multiple connections with other racial/ethnic groups in society. Historians are discovering new stories of racial construction, and revising older accounts, to integrate these new perspectives into the formation of racial and ethnic identities. This collection of essays on Jews in the American West advances this field in multiple ways. With essays that cover the period from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, these authors present a collective portrait of change over time that allows us to view the shifting nature of Jewish identity in the West, as well as the evolving frameworks for racial construction. Thorough and thought-provoking, Jewish Identities in the American West takes readers on a journey of racial and ethnic identity in the American West.

The story of one of Savannah's first and most prominent Jewish families, the son who died on the battlefield, and the house that remembers it all. Gratz Cohen's ghost seemed to haunt the apartment as its new owner worked to bring it back to life. As the work progressed, Jason Friedman became obsessed with understanding who the Cohens were, and how their story fit into existing narratives about the Jewish South and the Civil War. Liberty Street: A Savannah Family, Its Golden Boy, and the Civil War is a family saga wrapped in a memoir of Friedman's own southern Jewish upbringing and return home, and the way an old house became a portal to another world. The Cohens are well-known among those versed in southern Jewish history, but sensing that there was more to their story than had yet been told, Friedman set out to learn as much as he could about the family and their world. Friedman provides a nuanced look at what it meant to be a wealthy Jewish family before and during the Civil War, and paints a portrait of a sensitive young man tormented by conflicting pulls of love and duty. Delving into the lives of an extraordinary Southern Jewish family, Liberty Street meditates on the uses of memory and the ways our understanding of the past influences how we live today.