Jewish Communities on the Ohio River

Jewish Communities on the Ohio River PDF Author: Amy Hill Shevitz
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813172160
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
When westward expansion began in the early nineteenth century, the Jewish population of the United States was only 2,500. As Jewish immigration surged over the century between 1820 and 1920, Jews began to find homes in the Ohio River Valley. In Jewish Communities on the Ohio River, Amy Hill Shevitz chronicles the settlement and evolution of Jewish communities in small towns on both banks of the river—towns such as East Liverpool and Portsmouth, Ohio, Wheeling, West Virginia, and Madison, Indiana. Though not large, these communities influenced American culture and history by helping to develop the Ohio River Valley while transforming Judaism into an American way of life. The Jewish experience and the regional experience reflected and reinforced each other. Jews shared regional consciousness and pride with their Gentile neighbors. The antebellum Ohio River Valley's identity as a cradle of bourgeois America fit very well with the middle-class aspirations and achievements of German Jewish immigrants in particular. In these small towns, Jewish citizens created networks of businesses and families that were part of a distinctive middle-class culture. As a minority group with a vital role in each community, Ohio Valley Jews fostered religious pluralism as their contributions to local culture, economy, and civic life countered the antisemitic sentiments of the period. Jewish Communities on the Ohio River offers enlightening case studies of the associations between Jewish communities in the big cities of the region, especially Cincinnati and Pittsburgh, and the smaller river towns that shared an optimism about the Jewish future in America. Jews in these communities participated enthusiastically in ongoing dialogues concerning religious reform and unity, playing a crucial role in the development of American Judaism. The history of the Ohio River Valley includes the stories of German and East European Jewish immigrants in America, of the emergence of American Reform Judaism and the adaptation of tradition, and of small-town American Jewish culture. While relating specifically to the diversity of the Ohio River Valley, the stories of these towns illustrate themes that are central to the larger experience of Jews in America.

Jewish Communities on the Ohio River

Jewish Communities on the Ohio River PDF Author: Amy Hill Shevitz
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813172160
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 289

Get Book Here

Book Description
When westward expansion began in the early nineteenth century, the Jewish population of the United States was only 2,500. As Jewish immigration surged over the century between 1820 and 1920, Jews began to find homes in the Ohio River Valley. In Jewish Communities on the Ohio River, Amy Hill Shevitz chronicles the settlement and evolution of Jewish communities in small towns on both banks of the river—towns such as East Liverpool and Portsmouth, Ohio, Wheeling, West Virginia, and Madison, Indiana. Though not large, these communities influenced American culture and history by helping to develop the Ohio River Valley while transforming Judaism into an American way of life. The Jewish experience and the regional experience reflected and reinforced each other. Jews shared regional consciousness and pride with their Gentile neighbors. The antebellum Ohio River Valley's identity as a cradle of bourgeois America fit very well with the middle-class aspirations and achievements of German Jewish immigrants in particular. In these small towns, Jewish citizens created networks of businesses and families that were part of a distinctive middle-class culture. As a minority group with a vital role in each community, Ohio Valley Jews fostered religious pluralism as their contributions to local culture, economy, and civic life countered the antisemitic sentiments of the period. Jewish Communities on the Ohio River offers enlightening case studies of the associations between Jewish communities in the big cities of the region, especially Cincinnati and Pittsburgh, and the smaller river towns that shared an optimism about the Jewish future in America. Jews in these communities participated enthusiastically in ongoing dialogues concerning religious reform and unity, playing a crucial role in the development of American Judaism. The history of the Ohio River Valley includes the stories of German and East European Jewish immigrants in America, of the emergence of American Reform Judaism and the adaptation of tradition, and of small-town American Jewish culture. While relating specifically to the diversity of the Ohio River Valley, the stories of these towns illustrate themes that are central to the larger experience of Jews in America.

Jewish Communities on the Ohio River

Jewish Communities on the Ohio River PDF Author: Amy Hill Shevitz
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813138434
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 395

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Book Description
“An engaging regional history with immense national significance . . . An excellent chronicle of the minority experience in small town America.” —Ava F. Kahn, author of Jewish Voices of the California Gold Rush In Jewish Communities on the Ohio River, Amy Hill Shevitz chronicles the settlement and development of small Jewish communities in towns along the river. In these small towns, Jewish citizens created networks of businesses and families that developed into a distinctive, nineteenth-century middle-class culture. As a minority group with a vital role in each community, Ohio Valley Jews fostered American religious pluralism as they constructed a regional identity. Their contributions to the culture and economy of the region countered the anti-Semitic sentiments of the period. Shevitz discusses the associations among the towns and the big cities of the region, especially Cincinnati and Pittsburgh. Also examined are Jewish communities’ relationships with, and dependence on, the Ohio River and rail networks. Jewish Communities on the Ohio River demonstrates how the circumstances of a specific region influenced the evolution of American Jewish life. “Far better composed and contextualized than most local histories of smaller Jewish communities now in print, Amy Shevitz’s book does a commendable job of detailing local developments in terms of the broader picture of both American Jewish history and Ohio Valley history.” —Lee Shai Weissbach, author of Jewish Life in Small-Town America: A History “Shevitz’s study provides both corroboration, and corrective, to the standard historiography of American Jewry . . . Shevitz provides a fascinating glimpse into the nature of small-town Jewish life, and the role Jews played in shaping their world.” —Ohio Valley Quarterly

Indigenous Prosperity and American Conquest

Indigenous Prosperity and American Conquest PDF Author: Susan Sleeper-Smith
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469640597
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 375

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Book Description
Indigenous Prosperity and American Conquest recovers the agrarian village world Indian women created in the lush lands of the Ohio Valley. Algonquian-speaking Indians living in a crescent of towns along the Wabash tributary of the Ohio were able to evade and survive the Iroquois onslaught of the seventeenth century, to absorb French traders and Indigenous refugees, to export peltry, and to harvest riparian, wetland, and terrestrial resources of every description and breathtaking richness. These prosperous Native communities frustrated French and British imperial designs, controlled the Ohio Valley, and confederated when faced with the challenge of American invasion. By the late eighteenth century, Montreal silversmiths were sending their best work to Wabash Indian villages, Ohio Indian women were setting the fashions for Indigenous clothing, and European visitors were marveling at the sturdy homes and generous hospitality of trading entrepots such as Miamitown. Confederacy, agrarian abundance, and nascent urbanity were, however, both too much and not enough. Kentucky settlers and American leaders—like George Washington and Henry Knox—coveted Indian lands and targeted the Indian women who worked them. Americans took women and children hostage to coerce male warriors to come to the treaty table to cede their homelands. Appalachian squatters, aspiring land barons, and ambitious generals invaded this settled agrarian world, burned crops, looted towns, and erased evidence of Ohio Indian achievement. This book restores the Ohio River valley as Native space.

American Jewry

American Jewry PDF Author: Eli Lederhendler
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521196086
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 357

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Book Description
In the United States, Jews have bridged minority and majority cultures - their history illustrates the diversity of the American experience.

Abraham Joshua Heschel

Abraham Joshua Heschel PDF Author: Julian E. Zelizer
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300262353
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 329

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Book Description
A biography of the rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who became a symbol of the marriage between religion and social justice “When I marched in Selma, I felt my legs were praying.” So said Polish-born American rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907–1972) of his involvement in the 1965 Selma civil rights march alongside Martin Luther King Jr. Heschel, who spoke with a fiery moralistic fervor, dedicated his career to the struggle to improve the human condition through faith. In this new biography, author Julian Zelizer tracks Heschel’s early years and foundational influences—his childhood in Warsaw and early education in Hasidism, his studies in late 1920s and early 1930s Berlin, and the fortuitous opportunity, which brought him to the United States and saved him from the Holocaust, to teach at Hebrew Union College and the Jewish Theological Seminary. This deep and complex portrait places Heschel at the crucial intersection between religion and progressive politics in mid-twentieth-century America. To this day Heschel remains a symbol of the fight to make progressive Jewish values relevant in the secular world.

Sundays at Sinai

Sundays at Sinai PDF Author: Tobias Brinkmann
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226074560
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 382

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Book Description
First established 150 years ago, Chicago Sinai is one of America’s oldest Reform Jewish congregations. Its founders were upwardly mobile and civically committed men and women, founders and partners of banks and landmark businesses like Hart Schaffner & Marx, Sears & Roebuck, and the giant meatpacking firm Morris & Co. As explicitly modern Jews, Sinai’s members supported and led civic institutions and participated actively in Chicago politics. Perhaps most radically, their Sunday services, introduced in 1874 and still celebrated today, became a hallmark of the congregation. In Sundays at Sinai, Tobias Brinkmann brings modern Jewish history, immigration, urban history, and religious history together to trace the roots of radical Reform Judaism from across the Atlantic to this rapidly growing American metropolis. Brinkmann shines a light on the development of an urban reform congregation, illuminating Chicago Sinai’s practices and history, and its contribution to Christian-Jewish dialogue in the United States. Chronicling Chicago Sinai’s radical beginnings in antebellum Chicago to the present, Sundays at Sinai is the extraordinary story of a leading Jewish Reform congregation in one of America’s great cities.

Arab and Jewish Women in Kentucky

Arab and Jewish Women in Kentucky PDF Author: Nora Rose Moosnick
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813136210
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
Outwardly it would appear that Arab and Jewish immigrants comprise two distinct groups with differing cultural backgrounds and an adversarial relationship. Yet, as immigrants who have settled in communities at a distance from metropolitan areas, both must negotiate complex identities. Growing up in Kentucky as the granddaughter of Jewish immigrants, Nora Rose Moosnick observed this traditionally mismatched pairing firsthand, finding that, Arab and Jewish immigrants have been brought together by their shared otherness and shared fears. Even more intriguing to Moosnick was the key role played by immigrant women of both cultures in family businesses -- a similarity which brings the two groups close together as they try to balance the demands of integration into American society. In Arab and Jewish Women in Kentucky: Stories of Audacity and Accomodation, Moosnick reveals how Jewish and Arab women have navigated the intersection of tradition, assimilation, and Kentucky's cultural landscape. The stories of ten women's experiences as immigrants or the children of immigrants join around common themes of public service to their communities, intergenerational relationships, running small businesses, and the difficulties of juggling family and work. Together, their compelling narratives challenge misconceptions and overcome the invisibility of Arabs and Jews in out of the way places in America.

Jewish Life in Small-Town America

Jewish Life in Small-Town America PDF Author: Lee Shai Weissbach
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300127650
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 446

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Book Description
In this book, Lee Shai Weissbach offers the first comprehensive portrait of small-town Jewish life in America. Exploring the history of communities of 100 to 1000 Jews, the book focuses on the years from the mid-nineteenth century to World War II. Weissbach examines the dynamics of 490 communities across the United States and reveals that smaller Jewish centers were not simply miniature versions of larger communities but were instead alternative kinds of communities in many respects. The book investigates topics ranging from migration patterns to occupational choices, from Jewish education and marriage strategies to congregational organization. The story of smaller Jewish communities attests to the richness and complexity of American Jewish history and also serves to remind us of the diversity of small-town society in times past.

A Time for Gathering

A Time for Gathering PDF Author: Hasia R. Diner
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801851216
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 358

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Book Description
Diner describes this "second wave" of Jewish migration and challenges many long-held assumptions--particularly the belief that the immigrants' Judaism erodes in the middle class comfort of Victorian America.

When General Grant Expelled the Jews

When General Grant Expelled the Jews PDF Author: Jonathan D. Sarna
Publisher: Schocken
ISBN: 0805212337
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
On December 17, 1862, just weeks before Abraham Lincoln announced the Emancipation Proclamation, General Grant issued what remains the most notorious anti-Jewish order by a government official in American history. His attempt to eliminate black marketeers by targeting for expulsion all Jews "as a class" from portions of Kentucky, Tennessee, and Mississippi unleashed a firestorm of controversy that made newspaper headlines and terrified and enraged the approximately 150,000 Jews then living in the United States, who feared the importation of European anti-Semitism onto American soil. Although the order was quickly rescinded by a horrified Abraham Lincoln, the scandal came back to haunt Grant when he ran for president in 1868. Never before had Jews become an issue in a presidential contest and never before had they been confronted so publicly with the question of how to balance their "American" and "Jewish" interests. Award-winning historian Jonathan D. Sarna gives us the first complete account of this little-known episode—including Grant's subsequent apology, his groundbreaking appointment of Jews to prominent positions in his administration, and his unprecedented visit to the land of Israel. Sarna sheds new light on one of our most enigmatic presidents, on the Jews of his day, and on the ongoing debate between ethnic loyalty and national loyalty that continues to roil American political and social discourse. (With black-and-white illustrations throughout.)