Focusing on the period from the 1820s to the 1920s, the book explores the factors that drew a significant Jewish population to the United States, highlighting the interplay of race, immigration, and economic development. It examines how America's search for white immigrants to bolster its economy and the importance placed on religion as a moral compass created a unique environment for Jewish immigrants. This convergence allowed Jews to experience opportunities and freedoms that were unavailable in their homelands, shaping their lives and contributions in America.
Manhattan's Lower East Side stands for Jewish experience in America. This is
an account of one of our famous neighborhoods and its power to shape identity.
It examines children's stories, novels, movies, museum exhibits, television
shows, summer-camp reenactments, walking tours, and photos hung on deli walls
far from Manhattan.
Traces Jewish participation in American history - from the communities that
sent formal letters of greeting to George Washington; to the three thousand
Jewish men who fought for the Confederacy and the ten thousand who fought in
the Union army; and, to the Jewish activists who devoted themselves... číst
celé
Finalist for the 2015 National Jewish Book Award--Celebrate 350 Award for American Jewish Studies Between the late 1700s and the 1920s, nearly one-third of the world's Jews emigrated to new lands. Crossing borders and often oceans, they followed paths paved by intrepid peddlers who preceded them. This book is the first to tell the remarkable story of the Jewish men who put packs on their backs and traveled forth, house to house, farm to farm, mining camp to mining camp, to sell their goods to peoples across the world. Persistent and resourceful, these peddlers propelled a mass migration of Jewish families out of central and eastern Europe, north Africa, and the Ottoman Empire to destinations as far-flung as the United States, Great Britain, South Africa, and Latin America. Hasia Diner tells the story of millions of discontented young Jewish men who sought opportunity abroad, leaving parents, wives, and sweethearts behind. Wherever they went, they learned unfamiliar languages and customs, endured loneliness, battled the elements, and proffered goods from the metropolis to people of the hinterlands. In the Irish Midlands, the Adirondacks of New York, the mining camps of New South Wales, and so many other places, these traveling men brought change--to themselves and the families who later followed, to the women whose homes and communities they entered, and ultimately to the geography of Jewish history.
"The reality of diaspora has shaped Jewish history, its demography, its economic relationships, and the politics which that impacted the lives of Jews with each other and with the non-Jews among whom they lived. Jews have moved around the globe since the beginning of their history, maintaining relationships with their former Jewish neighbors, who had chosen other destinations and at the same time forging relationships in their new homes with Jews from widely different places of origin"--