The Indiana Jewish Historical Society (IJHS) was founded in 1972 to collect, preserve, and publish material dealing with the two centuries of Jewish life in Indiana. Whatever illuminated the Jewish experience in Indiana is of interest, concern, and value. It is our aim to gather and preserve the records of synagogues, temples, and societies, as well as personal papers, diaries, memories, governmental documents, newspapers and magazine articles, photographs, and even burial and cemetery records. We provide information and insight about the role played by individual Jews and Jewish communities in the creation of the diverse religious climate of Indiana. In August of 1999, the archive collection of the IJHS was permanently gifted to the Indiana Historical Society. The Indiana Jewish Historical Society Archive Collection at the Indiana Historical Society in Indianapolis, contains over seven thousand items. In addition to past records, the society is also interested in obtaining current records, for such records will be history for coming generations.

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.

Unique in the literature on Jewish camping, this book provides an in-depth study of a community-based, residential summer camp that serves Jewish children from primarily rural areas. Focused on Camp Ben Frankel (CBF), established in 1950 in southern Illinois, this book focuses on how a pluralist Jewish camp constructs meaningful experiences of Jewish “family” and Judaism for campers—and teaches them about Israel. Inspired by models of the earliest camps established for Jewish children in urban areas, CBF’s founders worked to create a camp that would appeal to the rural, often isolated Jewish families in its catchment area. Although seemingly on the periphery of American Jewish life, CBF staff and campers are revealed to be deeply entwined with national developments in Jewish culture and practice and, indeed, contributors to shaping them. This research highlights the importance of campers’ experiences of traditional elements of the Jewish “family” (an experience increasingly limited to time at camp), as well as the overarching importance of song. Over the years, Judaism becomes constructed as fun, welcoming, and easy for campers, while Israel is presented in ways that are meant to be appropriate for a community camp. In the camp’s earliest decades, Israel was framed by “traditional” Zionist discourse; later, as community priorities shifted, the cause of Russian Jews was the focus. Most recently, as Israeli politics have been increasingly viewed as potentially divisive, the camp has adopted an “Israel-lite” approach, focusing on Israel as the Biblical homeland of the Jewish people and a place home to Jews who are similar to American Jews. In sum, this study sheds light on how a small, rural, community camp contributes in significant ways to our understanding of American Jews, their Judaism, and their Zionism.

By supplying small entrepreneurs with necessary capital to start and expand their businesses, Jewish loan societies facilitated the rise up the economic ladder of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Jews. These collective institutions were an important feature of a cohesive ethnic economy in which Jewish factory owners hired Jewish workers, Jewish retailers bought goods from Jewish wholesalers, and Jewish shopkeepers relied on Jewish loan associations for funding. A Credit to Their Community is a sociohistorical study of Jewish credit organizations from the 1880s until the end of World War II. Upon their arrival in the United States during this critical period in American Jewish life, Eastern European Jewish immigrants established hundreds of loan societies in communities as diverse as Nashville, Tennessee; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Rock Island, Illinois; and Portland, Oregon. While there is ample discussion and documentation of the over-representation of Jewish immigrants in business, until now the question of how these immigrant entrepreneurs raised the necessary funds to start their enterprises has not been addressed. Based on primary historical documents, this book analyzes the emergence, growth, and subsequent decline of three types of Jewish loan associations in America: Hebrew free loan societies; remedial loan associations—philanthropic loan societies that charged relatively low interest fees; and credit cooperatives. The author addresses a number of issues related to the functioning of the Jewish credit organizations, including the activities of women's loan associations, debates about whether or not to open doors to non-Jewish borrowers, discussions about the merits and faults of implementing interest charges, the effects of the Great Depression on loan organizations, and the relations between free loan Societies and other Jewish organizations. While the primary focus is on Jews, the text also offers comparisons between Jewish loan societies and those of other enterprising groups such as the Japanese and Chinese. This study raises an important theoretical question in the field of ethnicity; namely, to what extent are ethnic institutions influenced by culture—cultural traits brought from countries of origin—and to what extent do they emerge as responses to the new context to which immigrants have arrived? In answering this question, Dr. Tenenbaum highlights the importance of both cultural and contextual factors for the emergence of Jewish loan associations.

Art, History, and the Historiography of Judaism in Roman Antiquity explores the complex interplay between visual culture, texts, and their interpretations, arguing for an open-ended and self-aware approach to understanding Jewish culture from the first century CE through the rise of Islam. The essays assembled here range from the “thick description” of Josephus’s portrayal of Bezalel son of Uri as a Roman architect through the inscriptions of the Dura Europos synagogue, Jewish reflections on Caligula in color, the polychromy of the Jerusalem temple, new-old approaches to the zodiac, and to the Christian destruction of ancient synagogues. Taken together, these essays suggest a humane approach to the history of the Jews in an age of deep and long-lasting transitions—both in antiquity, and in our own time. "Taken as a whole, Fine’s book exhibits the value of bridging disciplines. The historiographical segments integrated throughout this volume offer essential insights that will inform any student of Roman and late antiquity." Yael Wilfand, Hebrew University, Review of Biblical Literature, 2014.