Jewish-American History on the Web, http://www.jewish-history.com. Created and maintained by Leah M. Berkowitz and the Jewish-American History Documentation Foundation. Reviewed Feb. 6-12, 2008

Abstract

This Web site is a bit like my grandmother's bookshelf: it is strange and idiosyncratic and peculiar, and it presents the valuable and the questionable, the antique and the facsimile with equal attention. This is its strength and its weakness. Jewish-American History on the Web is the creation of Leah M. Berkowitz, a computer programmer and American Jewish history buff who has devoted a great deal of time and energy to its construction and maintenance. Berkowitz has done an outstanding job of collecting some rare nineteenth-century primary documents, digitizing them, and making them available online. Perhaps the site's most valuable contribution is its inclusion of the full text of the Occident, one of the two largest American Jewish newspapers of the mid-nineteenth century. If the site were limited to only this primary document, it would be invaluable to scholars and students as a powerful and important source of information...