Small Jewish Community Research Articles

The Iranian-Israeli conflict is one of the main threats to international security

The article analyzes a brief history of the relationship between two regional powers — Iran and Israel, the roots and causes of their confrontation, and the features of waging the so-called “hybrid war” between them at the present stage. The author pays attention to describing the situation of the relatively small Jewish community of Iran, the activation of all Tehran's proxy forces in the Middle East (Palestinian Hamas, Yemen's Ansar Allah, Lebanese Hezbollah, etc. anti-Israel groups in the region). Particular attention is paid to the fi rst ever direct military confrontation between Iran and Israel, which resulted in an exchange of missile and drone attacks in April 2024. Restraint in the actions of Israel's allies represented by Washington and other Western countries during the Iran-Israeli confl ict and the mutual disinterest of Tehran and Tel Aviv in inciting large-scale hostilities are noted. The author believes that the level of confrontation between Iran and Israel could be signifi cantly reduced if the IDF military operation in the Gaza Strip were stopped and peace negotiations on a Middle East settlement were resumed. The article provides a comparative analysis of the military potentials of Iran and Israel and examines possible scenarios for further developments in the region. The author believes that Tehran has become the greatest beneficiary of the latest aggravation of the situation in the Middle East. The process of recognition of the State of Israel, which had been outlined in previous years, was practically thwarted; Iran strengthened its authority as a fi ghter for a just solution to the Palestinian problem in the Arab and Muslim world, and noticeably weakened Israel’s position in the region and in the international arena. In conclusion, the author concludes that the Iran-Israeli confl ict represents one of the main threats to regional and international security. This is explained by a number of factors, the most important of which is the presence of nuclear missile weapons in Israel and a triad of means of delivering them to targets, as well as the fact that Iran is armed with ballistic and cruise missiles, long-range drones and can also create nuclear weapon. The Iran-Israeli confl ict presents an equation with many unknowns. The threshold of tension between these countries could be reduced by the cessation of Israel's military operation in the Gaza Strip, the resumption of peace negotiations on resolving the Palestinian problem in various formats, and a return to the nuclear deal with Iran (JCPOA) by Washington.

Bosnian Multiconfessionalism as a Foundation for Intercultural Dialogue

Abstract Muslim communities in the Balkans where the practice of Islam had been developed in the European context, can be used as an exemplification of the bridge between the Islamic East and the Christian West. Although for over 400 years Bosnia was under the Ottoman rule, Muslims became one of the many first Yugoslav, and then Bosnian communities, contributing to the dynamic, yet moderate area of ontological and axiological negotiations within the cultural borderland, sharing the living space with members of the Orthodox church, Catholics, a small Jewish community, and even Protestants. The history of the Muslim-Christian contacts in Bosnia involves both the examples of collisions, as well as encounters, initiated both by Christians, and by Muslims. This article analyzes the religious diversity (multiconfessionalism) in the historical and contemporary cultural and social context of Bosnia-Herzegovina, revealing its specificity, dynamics and (often unsuccessful) attempts to conceptualize it from the perspective of the Eurocentric discourse. The aim is not only to portray this religiously diverse makeup, but also to emphasize its potential for establishing ground for intercultural dialogue.

სურამი ისრაელის ქართულენოვან მწერლობაში

Surami was one of the most important cities of Kartli in ancient times. In the distant past, there was an important trade-caravan route from east to west which is mentioned in the historical sources as far back as BC. The information can be found in the works of Greek historians and geographers of IV-III centuries. The small town of Surami was located in the very center of Georgia, which contributed to its multifaceted development. Such a favorable geographical location has always made this place very attractive. In the 18th century, Surami was inhabited by Georgians, Armenians and Jews. The Jews lived in the vicinity of the Surami fortress and pursued trade and handicrafts. In addition to economic, political, and demographic factors, the Jewish social factor must have had some influence on the urban development of Surami, especially during the period of globalization when the capitalist mode of production took on a perfect form. The agrarian sector, which was the basis of agriculture, was replaced by a trade-making relationship. The domestic market was expanding, both domestic and foreign trade was growing in which more or less all parts of Georgia would be involved. The gradually growing economic ties between the regions of Georgia put an end to the isolation. The class of merchants was growing and expanding. Along with trade, pawnbrokers started to lend money at interest. Surami Jews were actively involved in these processes. One of the contributing factors to the urbanization process is an increase of the urban population. The Surami Jews whose main occupation was trade gradually developed into the civic population. They had large families. They established close trading ties with neighboring countries and in this respect they found themselves in a somewhat advantageous situation in the region – Surami was a place where all kinds of deficit goods could be purchased. The number of the Jewish population in Surami was growing, thus contributing to the process of urbanization, which, with rare exceptions, took place in fairly peaceful conditions. Centuries of peaceful coexistence with Georgians have finally shaped the identity of Surami Jew who is symbolically an offspring of two nations: he speaks Georgian, wears Georgian clothes, follows certain Georgian traditions and at the same time strongly adheres to the Jewish religious way of life. It was such peaceful coexistence with Georgians that led to the sweet memories and strong nostalgia of Surami Jews after their return to Israel. Many of them are also successful in Israel in various fields. Some of them are creative. The source of inspiration for a large part of the intelligentsia is the longing for the Georgian reality, including Surami, which is realistically reflected in their works. For example, Izolda Krikheli, one of the representatives of Georgian émigré literature, immortalized the Jews living in Surami in the 20th century in her book "Surami: Dream and Reality" who together with the Georgian people endured the cruel events of this difficult period. She describes the reality impartially, introducing the reader with the Jews who were born in Surami and contributed to the reconstruction of Georgia with their dignified secular or religious activities. The book provides a brief overview of the history of Surami and the role Surami Jews played in it. The title of the book points to the special relationship between the two nations - the author lived in Surami and dreamed of Israel, now she is in Israel and dreams of Surami … The writings of Georgian Jews on the topic of Surami Jews tells us a lot about the lifestyle, occupation and history of the small Jewish community and their role in the urban development of Surami.

Jewish "Iron Rangers": Jewish Settlement on Minnesota's Iron Range

Jewish "Iron Rangers"Jewish Settlement on Minnesota's Iron Range Marilyn J. Chiat (bio) I. Introduction A small red brick building stands on the corner of 4th Avenue and 5th Street South in Virginia, Minnesota. On the day of its dedication, April 8, 1910, the front page of the local newspaper, The Virginia Enterprise, featured a photo of the building and an article describing it as a beautiful, well-built temple that cost approximately $10,000, a goodly sum for the time.1 Constructed for the town's small Jewish community, the temple was given the name B'nai (sons of) Abraham. Beautifully restored and rededicated in 2010, the building, now known as the B'nai Abraham Cultural Center and Museum, is used for a variety of community events and houses a permanent display of photographs, artifacts, and other material documenting the history of the Iron Range's once-vibrant Jewish community. The recipient of a Minnesota Preservation Award in 2019, B'nai Abraham is the only surviving visual evidence of the Range's Jewish settlers who, in the face of many challenges, were able to maintain their faith and its traditions, while adapting to life as "Iron Rangers." At one time the Range was home to over one thousand Jews who organized congregations in four towns: Chisholm, Eveleth, Hibbing, and Virginia. This essay traces the history of their founders who established homes and opened shops on the Range's developing main streets. It recounts the challenges facing them, including their interactions with their neighbors in what was and still is Minnesota's most diverse religious and ethnic region. The uncertain economy of the Range also had an impact on the Jewish community. As the demand for iron ore began to diminish in the 1950s, so too did the region's population. Many young people left to seek [End Page 1] their fortune elsewhere, including Robert Zimmerman, a.k.a. Bob Dylan, whose maternal great-grandparents, Lyba and Benjamin Edelstein, were among the Range's earliest settlers. The departure of members of Dylan's generation spelled doom for the Jewish community and its synagogues. By the 1980s only one synagogue survived, B'nai Abraham, and its doors closed a decade later. Jews no longer have a presence on the Range.2 Long before iron ore was discovered in northeastern Minnesota, the land was covered with a verdant forest of white pine and home to Native peoples living off its bounty. By the early nineteenth century, as the nation began to expand westward, cities like Chicago and St. Louis were developing, and lumber was needed for construction. Fifty years after timber cruisers first discovered the region's vast forest, the land was reduced to tree stumps, revealing the red earth that lay below its surface.3 Minnesota's pine forests were gone, but the region soon contributed a second natural resource to the building of America, iron ore. Geologists were aware of the region's lode, but it was not until the development of the modern blast furnace in the 1850s that iron could be economically transformed into steel. Soon after, speculators and explorers began to stake out claims for mining rights, first on the Vermillion Range, opening in 1882, and ten years later on the larger and more productive Mesabi Range. Laborers, skilled and unskilled, were needed. Among the first to arrive were experienced mine operators, often Scandinavians, and Cornish miners from the mines of Michigan. Recruiters in impoverished regions of eastern and southern Europe found a ready supply of unskilled laborers seeking a ticket to the "promised land." By 1910, the Range's total population was 77,655, representing twenty-five different ethnic and/or national groups, each carving out a place in the region, in hopes it would be their "bridge of gold" to a better life. Finns were the dominant nationality, then Slavs and Italians, and following them, Swedes, Norwegians, and a diversity of others including Jews.4 The Iron Range was representative of the nation's "mosaic" celebrated in a speech delivered by former Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey in 1972: "Some see the United States as a vast melting pot where our particular ethnic traditions...

"You're My First Jew:" University Student and Professor Experiences of Judaism in a Small Indiana City.

There has been a Jewish presence in Muncie, Indiana since before the city was incorporated in 1865. Most people, however, do not even know that the city has a synagogue or where it is located. This study contextualizes this small Jewish community within small-town America. For this study, we interviewed 12 Jewish individuals, including college students and faculty members at Ball State University, about their Jewish religion, identity, and experiences with antisemitism in this East-Central Indiana community. The interviews were transcribed and hand-coded for elements of Jewish life and identity, including the frequency of terms related to Jewish holidays, Christian dominance, and antisemitic interactions. These transcripts were also used to create a word corpus that was analyzed using a text analysis tool that calculates the frequency of dominant terms and their context. From this analysis, we determined that many Jewish college students and professors in Muncie experience Christian hegemony, not only because of public religious celebrations, feelings of difference, and Christian evangelization on campus and in public spaces, but also because many of the people interviewed revealed experiences of being someone’s “first Jew,” or the first Jewish person they have met.

Manuscripts from the Eastern Mediterranean Sea Islands: Information from Colophons of Hebrew Manuscripts from the Thirteenth-Sixteenth Centuries

The article examines the production of books in the islands in the eastern Mediterranean basin in the thirteenth-sixteenth centuries, based on the information contained in the colophons written by the manuscript copyists at the conclusion of their work. The copyists' mention - at times - of the place of the copying teaches of the deployment of the Jewish communities in this region. Books were produced even in the small Jewish communities on these islands, and not only in the relatively large community on Crete. Twenty-nine manuscripts have survived from these locations. This material teaches of the presence of the demand by an educated Jewish population for books in diverse fields, including philosophy, Bible commentary, homiletical literature, medicine, and Kabbalah. Thanks to the efforts of these copyists, classical Jewish writings were preserved for future generations. These works will continue to provide a fertile field of research for scholars, due to their contents and to their being the subject of scholarly research as manuscripts. The colophons that were written by copyists reveal the locations where they received the original texts to be. Someone who copied a book for his personal use, in contrast, did not feel the need to supply such information. Professional copyists were paid for their services; although this is not stated explicitly in the colophons presented in the article, but in many instances we hear of this. Some copyists had to make major efforts in order to obtain the source for their copying, and at times they traveled far and wide for this purpose. The article illustrates the existence of Jewish communities in the small islands around Greece, especially in the thirteenth-sixteenth centuries. Most of the books were copied for the scribe's own use, thereby teaching of the intellectual level of the book readership. The colophons are the "identity card" of the copyist, and also contain the name of the book and details about the author. Colophons virtually disappeared after the invention of the printing press, to be replaced by title pages in printed works.

Die Grabstätten meiner Väter: Die jüdischen Friedhöfe in Wien by Tim Corbett

Reviewed by: Die Grabstätten meiner Väter: Die jüdischen Friedhöfe in Wien by Tim Corbett Joseph W. Moser Tim Corbett, Die Grabstätten meiner Väter: Die jüdischen Friedhöfe in Wien. Vienna: Böhlau, 2021. 1041 pp. Vienna has a special relationship with its cemeteries, as immortalized in Wolfgang Ambros's 1975 pop song "Es lebe der Zentralfriedhof." This becomes even more significant in the case of Vienna's Jewish cemeteries, which are places of memory and reminders of a once vibrant and large Jewish community before the Holocaust, as well as markers of the Holocaust, and they illustrate the challenges of a diminishingly small Jewish community after 1945 that has struggled to take care of this heritage. Tim Corbett's meticulously researched and extensive volume on Vienna's Jewish cemeteries is more than just a study of the cemeteries, delving deep into the history of Viennese Jewry and thereby provides a history of Vienna's Israelitische Kultusgemeinde as well. The Jewish cemeteries are markers of Jewish identity and how this was and is constructed, specifically in the Viennese context. Across Central and Eastern Europe, the design of the headstone at a Jewish cemetery indicates a [End Page 158] lot about the level of religious observance and/or assimilation to the majority culture. Corbett starts his book with a reference to Arthur Schnitzler's Ehrengrab at the Zentralfriedhof's Tor 1. Corbett describes this space as a "sozial- und kulturhistorisch bedeutsamer Raum," (23) which indeed it is, and his first chapter focuses on Jewish spaces and cultures. Cemeteries are important to the Jewish faith, and Corbett situates this tradition within the Viennese context, also detailing the history of the Chewra Kadischa (sacred burial society). Probably one of the most fascinating historical Jewish sites in Vienna today is the cemetery in the Ninth District's Seegasse, which can only be accessed through the lobby of an old-age home, but whose history goes back to the second half of the sixteenth century and was closed in 1783. Corbett examines this in the third chapter of the book, drawing parallels to the Christian Sepulkralepigraphik on the headstones in Vienna's Stephansfreithof, some of which are still preserved in St. Stephen's Cathedral today. In the fourth chapter, Corbett examines the establishment of the Jewish Community as the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde, which was a long historical process starting with Emperor Joseph II's tolerance patents in the 1780s until the official founding of the Kultusgemeinde in 1890, a direct result of the Israelitengesetz (205). In this chapter, the author also examines the Jewish Währinger Friedhof, which still exists today, though a section of it was demolished by the Nazis. Today the Währinger Friedhof can only be visited with a rarely offered guided tour. This cemetery was marked by "Die Neomanie des 19. Jahrhunderts—Neoklassizismus, Neorenaissance, Neugotik" (219). Corbett compares this Jewish cemetery with the Christian St. Marxer Kommunalfriedhof, which existed roughly during the same time, from the 1780s to the closing in 1874, with the establishment of the Zentralfriedhof. The Zentralfriedhof was established in the 1860s, and more than three million people have been buried there since, thus about twice of the city's living population today. The founding of the first Jewish section at the Zentralfriedhof's Tor 1 provides at the subject for the fifth chapter. At Tor 1, a monumental Jewish ceremonial hall stood from 1879 until the destruction by the Nazis in 1938. This was the period in which Vienna's Jewish community grew the most. Indeed, the Jewish community was growing so quickly that the establishment of another section, Tor 4 at the southern end of the cemetery, became necessary by 1912, and Tor 4 was thus constructed during [End Page 159] World War I in 1917. Unlike Tor 1, the Kultusgemeinde gained the rights to run the Tor 4 section autonomously. The ceremony hall was completed in 1926, destroyed by the Nazis in 1938, and finally restored and rededicated in 1967; it is still in use today as Tor 4 is the currently active Jewish cemetery in Vienna. This is a complex history in itself, as Tor 1 remained active in...

The Thessaloniki Jewish pioneers in the Haifa waterfront, 1929–32

ABSTRACT This article traces the economic history of the small Jewish maritime community in its hometown of Thessaloniki during the 1920s and its new home of Haifa in the early 1930s. The Thessalonikians’ strong connection to port occupations made them an ideal pioneer in the Zionist scheme of creating a Jewish maritime presence in Mandatory Palestine. The Thessalonikians’ arrival in the Arab-dominated Haifa waterfront led to continuous conflict. The article examines the encounter between the Thessaloniki port culture and the Arab one in Haifa and its reflection in the core issue of the Jewish hold in the port of Haifa.

Biblical Rhetoric of Separatism and Universalism and Its Intolerant Consequences

The long history of the Jewish and Christian use of separatist rhetoric and universal ideals reveals their negative consequences. The Hebrew Bible’s rhetoric about Israel as a people separated from the Egyptians and Canaanites is connected to Israel’s purity practices in Leviticus 18 and 20. Later communities wielding greater political power, however, employed this same anti-Canaanite pollution rhetoric in their efforts to colonize many different parts of the world. Separatist rhetoric was used to protect small Jewish communities in the early Second Temple period. The Christian New Testament rejected many of these purity practices in order to makes its mission more inclusive and universal. However, its denigration of concerns for purification as typically “Jewish” fueled intolerance of Jews in the form of Christian anti-Semitism. The violent history of both separatist and universalist rhetoric provides a cautionary tale about the consequences of using cultural and religious comparisons for community formation.

Staging Proto-Zionism. Jewish Quarter of Zemun, Serbia: Historical Evidence, Structure, Meaning

Zemun is an old Central European town on the right bank of the Danube River, today one of the boroughs of Belgrade, the capital of Serbia. There has been a small Jewish community in Zemun dating back to the mid-18th century. Some of the Jews who lived in Zemun in the 19th century contributed to the emergence of Zionism. This paper presents new archival information about Zemun’s Jewish quarter including an analysis of the Zemun synagogue as well as various hermeneutic explanations of its urban and architectural development. Previous analyses of this area of Zemun have focused on external and morphological characteristics of its religious architecture but failed to explain its conceptual, historical, socio-political and religious context. This paper will cover these new elements as well as establish a basis for understanding this part of the old urban core of Zemun in relation to the significant personalities who lived there and the important ideas they developed.

Jewish life in the British-Jewish periphery: an examination of North Wales Jewry

ABSTRACT This article examines the history of North Wales’ five small Jewish communities, as well as Jewish individuals who lived in the region beyond these centres. It explores how Jewish life developed and functioned in this part of the United Kingdom, and, in doing so, adds complexity and diversity to British-Jewish historiography, a field that has long oversimplified the British-Jewish experience in its focus on major Jewish centres, those in England especially. It also draws our attention to the relationship between the British-Jewish periphery and centre, and stresses that studying the former can augment our historical understanding of the latter.

TÜRKİYENİN BİLİNMEYEN DOĞU YAHUDİLERİNİN TARİHSEL GEÇMİŞLERİNE GENEL BİR BAKIŞ

Since ancient times Mesopotamia and Anatolia were a home for the Jews. During the Roman and Byzantine period there were small Jewish communities known as Karaite and Romaniot in Anatolia. After the foundation of the Ottoman Empire they continued to survive. Afterwards Ashkenazim Jewish communities from central and Eastern Europe began to immigrate to the Ottoman Empire in the fifteenth century. With the deportation of Jews from Spain, Anatolia became new home of Sephardim. As a result of flow of these immigrations, Sephardim became the dominant Jewish community among other Jewish groups. Thus, Jews were scattered in different parts of the Ottoman Empire. The majority of the Jews in the Empire were concentrated in the western regions, especially in Istanbul, Izmir, and Bursa and Edirne provinces. They made important contributions to the development of the Empire’s trade and industry. There were also considerable Jewish communities who lived in the eastern part of the country in provinces such as Gaziantep, Urfa, Siverek, Diyarbakir, Cermik, Mardin, Nusaybin, Cizre, Baskale and Van. As it is seen by meaning eastern Jews it is referred to Eastern part of first Ottoman later Turkey. This study aims to explore the history of Jews, who once lived in the eastern part of Ottoman Empire and later Turkey. The scarcity of sources indicates that Jews from these regions were received little scholarly attention. Through this study it is expected to make them more visible and to open new research areas for researchers. In addition to written sources it is also benefited from data collected through ethnographic interviews from an anthropological fieldwork conducted by the author in Israel in 2011. Currently, no Jews live or inhabit in the east and southeast of Turkey; therefore, one of the goals of this research is to reveal the existence of a community once had a way of life, beliefs, cultured in a multicultural and multireligious environment of the east.

Bosnian multiconfessionalism as a foundation for intercultural dialogue

Muslim communities in the Balkans where the practice of Islam had been developed in the European context, can be used as an exemplification of the bridge between the Islamic East and the Christian West. Although for over 400 years Bosnia was under the Ottoman rule, Muslims became one of the many first Yugoslav, and then Bosnian communities, contributing to the dynamic, yet moderate area of ontological and axiological negotiations within the cultural borderland, sharing the living space with members of the Orthodox church, Catholics, a small Jewish community, and even Protestants. The history of the Muslim-Christian contacts in Bosnia involves both the examples of collisions, as well as encounters, initiated both by Christians, and by Muslims. This article analyzes the religious diversity (multiconfessionalism) in the historical and contemporary cultural and social context of Bosnia-Herzegovina, revealing its specificity, dynamics and (often unsuccessful) attempts to conceptualize it from the perspective of the Eurocentric discourse. The aim is not only to portray this religiously diverse makeup, but also to emphasize its potential for establishing ground for intercultural dialogue.

Mixing Musics: Turkish Jewry and the Urban Landscape of a Sacred Song

Mixing Musics: Turkish Jewry and the Urban Landscape of a Sacred Song

Le passé juif de l’Algérie et l’enjeu des archives

In the climax of the Algerian war of independence (1954-1962) a variety of international parties, including officials in France, Algeria, and Israel, fought to gain control over documentation of and about a small Jewish community in the Algerian Sahara. This essay considers why decolonization radically changed the fate of the papers of a community long fetishized as marginal by social scientists, policy makers, and the demographic bulk of North African Jewry. To do so, it looks back to a history of colonial law that segmented southern Algerian Jewry off from Jews of the north and explores the fierce archival battle, a component of the Algerian war of independence, over who would control the documents of Algeria’s past. Finally, this article reaches into the present day, probing how documents of the North African and Middle Eastern past continue to be used to serve various, conflicting nationalist agendas. All told, this research teaches that when it comes to studying Algerian Jewish history, the historian inevitably bumps up against an active and highly politicized, multi-party contest over the sources of the Jewish past — one laced through with the complex history of Jews’ relationship to the colonial and postcolonial order, and, indeed, power itself.

From the End to the Beginning: Archiving the History of a Small Jewish Community

From the End to the Beginning: Archiving the History of a Small Jewish Community

Jewish Dating or Niche-making?

In this article I am approaching the topic of Jewish dating among the young Russian-speaking Jews who live in Berlin. Using the analytical concept of space and applying grounded theory, I am presenting data I collected in 2010 using the methods of ethnographic interviews and participant observation. The article is organised around three main questions. Firstly, I am interested in the motivation of my interviewees, who are generally children of inter-ethnic and inter-religious couples, to find a solely Jewish partner. Secondly, I am asking for existing strategies applied within a relatively small Jewish community of around thirty to fifty thousand in Berlin in order to find a Jewish partner. Thirdly, I am looking for the concrete spaces and places used or constructed for the purpose of finding a Jewish girlfriend or boyfriend. Beside these empirical results, I am introducing the theoretical idea of Jewish niches, which is discussed against the background of 'Jewish space' as promulgated by Diana Pinto.

THE CURRENT SYRIAN POPULAR VIEW OF THE JEWS

The remaining small Jewish communities of Syria run the risk of disappearing completely due to the marginalization suffered as a consequence of the political situation since 1948. The Eli Cohen affair (1965,) the Six-­Day War (1967,) and the Yom Kippur War (1973) made the Baathist authorities of the country consider definitively the Syrian Jews as suspected Zionists or Zionist sympathizers. Nevertheless, in Syrian popular perceptions, the view of the Jews and Judaism did not always coincide with the ideology and propaganda emanating from the regime. In fact it is very interesting to note how good memories of times past, about an erstwhile coexistence with members of the Jewish community, still survive among many Syrians, both Muslims and Christians, belonging to the so-­called “urban middle class.” This paper evaluates some examples, in the forms of anecdotes, popular sayings and proverbs, dealing with the Jews, and popularized in Syrian colloquialisms, in order to reveal some of the popular views of Judaism and Jews within Syrian society.

The Encounter between Jews and America in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era

The period after 1870 through the middle of the 1920s, the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, coincided with the mass migration of Jews to the United States. Nearly three million Jews, primarily from eastern Europe, overwhelmed the numerically small Jewish community already resident in America. Of the Jews who left Europe in those years, approximately 85 percent opted for the United States, a society that took some of its basic characteristics from the particular developments of this transitional historical period. This essay focuses on five aspects of Gilded Age and Progressive Era America and their impact on the Jews. These features of American society both stimulated the mass migration and made possible a relatively harmonious, although complicated, integration. Those forces included the broader contours of immigration, the nation's obsession with race, its vast industrial and economic expansion, its valorization of religion, and its two-party system in which neither the Democrats or the Republicans had any stake in demonizing the growing number of Jewish voters.

The detonation of the Holocaust in 1941: a tale of two books

The detonation of the Holocaust in 1941: a tale of two books