City of Promises: A History of the Jews of New York

Abstract

Despite the vast literature and daunting demands of this monumental endeavor, five accomplished historians have produced the first-of-its-kind, three-volume comprehensive history of New York Jews. The project editor and authors recognize the city's unique diversity as well as its role in shaping a distinct Jewish experience. That experience took a powerful hold on the Jewish American imagination, and the Jewish community's political, economic, and cultural influence has become synonymous with the city. The primary focus of this richly detailed yet comprehensive historical survey is the making of New York City as a Jewish political capital and “a resource of Jewishness” for American Jews (p. xii). The study's guidelines were drawn by Deborah Dash Moore, an eminent historian of American Jewry, whose first book, At Home in America: Second Generation New York Jews (1981), acknowledged the unique intersection of Jews and the city. Moore has since published scholarship on a diverse array of subjects, including the history of B'nai B'rith, Jewish G.I.s, Jewish women, and the Jews of Miami and Los Angeles. She has focused on New York Jewry in studies of the city's Jewish neighborhoods and Cold War–era intra-Jewish conflict prompted by the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg case. Moore is thus an expert in American Jewish history and understands the centrality of New York in framing the history of the national Jewish American experience. Under her skilled editorship City of Promises traces the diverse expressions of communal dynamism emanating from successive immigrant and ethnic neighborhoods and the emergence of plural Jewish identities.