Jews arrived to the bustling town of Springfield shortly after its founding in 1838, only five years after the birth of the state of Missouri. The first Jews to live in Springfield were Victor and Bertha Sommers with her brother Ferdinand Bakrow. They opened Victor Sommers & Co., a dry goods store in 1860. The Jewish community grew as merchants brought their families, tying Springfield to other towns along the Mississippi River through marriages. The first congregation was founded in 1893 by the German Reform Jews. In 1918, the Eastern European Jews founded their Orthodox congregation. In the 1940s, the two merged. Unlike other small Jewish communities that have slowly perished because of their children's migration to larger Jewish communities where they could use their education, this Jewish community in the Ozarks continues to thrive because of the universities and hospitals in the region.

"The Ozark Mountains reach into Missouri, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Kansas, forming a region with great natural beauty and a distinctive cultural and historical landscape. This comprehensive volume, a fully updated edition of a beloved classic, reaches into history, anthropology, economics, and geography to explore the complex relationships between the Ozarks' people and land through times of profound change. Drawing on more than thirty years of research, field observations, and interviews, Rafferty examines this subject matter through a range of topics: the settlement patterns and material cultures of Native Americans, French, Scotch-Irish, Germans, Italians, African Americans, Hispanics, and Asians in the region; population growth; the guerrilla warfare and battles of the Civil War; the cultural transformations wrought by railroads, roads, mass media, and modern communication systems; the discovery, development, and decline of the great mining districts; the various forms of agriculture and the felling of the region's vast forests; and the built landscape, from log cabins to Victorian mansions to strip malls. This new edition also explores the new and potent forces which have reshaped the region over the last twenty years: tourism and the growing service industry, suburbanization, rapid population growth and retirement living, and agribusiness. Lavishly illustrated with historic and contemporary photographs, maps, and charts."--Publisher's description.

Between the world wars, America embraced an image of the Ozarks as a remote land of hills and hollers. The popular imagination stereotyped Ozarkers as ridge runners, hillbillies, and pioneers—a cast of colorful throwbacks hostile to change. But the real Ozarks reflected a more complex reality. Brooks Blevins tells the cultural history of the Ozarks as a regional variation of an American story. As he shows, the experiences of the Ozarkers have not diverged from the currents of mainstream life as sharply or consistently as the mythmakers would have it. If much of the region seemed to trail behind by a generation, the time lag was rooted more in poverty and geographic barriers than a conscious rejection of the modern world and its progressive spirit. In fact, the minority who clung to the old days seemed exotic largely because their anachronistic ways clashed against the backdrop of the evolving region around them. Blevins explores how these people’s disproportionate influence affected the creation of the idea of the Ozarks, and reveals the truer idea that exists at the intersection of myth and reality. The conclusion to the acclaimed trilogy, The History of the Ozarks, Volume 3: The Ozarkers offers an authoritative appraisal of the modern Ozarks and its people.

Creating Community expands the written histories of Springfield that have long overlooked this minority in the local community. It also adds to the growing study of small Jewish communities around the United States. Springfield is both Southern and Midwestern in flavor and this is reflected in the Jewish community's development that has examples of both. Jews have been part of the economic development of the town since the 1860s. Since then, they have also been involved in fraternal and social organizations, politics, and education. This is not a complete history, but its purpose is not to be encyclopedic, rather it is to exemplify how this minority group were part of the growth the Queen City of the Ozarks.

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.

In fifteenth century Greece, an extraordinary friendship develops between Miguel, a refugee from post-Inquisition Spain, and David, the son of a wealthy Greek fabric merchant, despite the concerns of both Greek and Spanish Jews that the other group is not truly Jewish.

Presents the story of the author's journeys across America to attend the most distinctive b'nai mitzvah he could find in order to reveal how the bar and the bat mitzvah have become a distinctively American rite of passage.