Contributions of the Jewish men and women who helped shape the American frontier.

With more than 400 photographs, extensive interviews with the descendants of pioneer Jewish Texan families, and reproductions of rare historical documents, Natalie Ornish’s Pioneer Jewish Texans quickly became a classic following its original release in 1989. This new Texas A&M University Press edition presents Ornish’s meticulous research and her fascinating historical vignettes for a new generation of readers and historians. She chronicles Jewish buccaneers with Jean Lafitte at Galveston; she tells of Jewish patriots who fought at the Alamo and at virtually every major engagement in the war for Texan independence; she traces the careers of immigrants with names like Marcus, Sanger, and Gordon, who arrived on the Texas frontier with little more than the packs on their backs and went on to build great mercantile empires. Cattle barons, wildcatters, diplomats, physicians, financiers, artists, and humanitarians are among the other notable Jewish pioneers and pathfinders described in this carefully researched and exhaustively documented book. Filling a substantial void in Texana and Texas history, the Texas A&M University Press edition of Natalie Ornish’s Pioneer Jewish Texans brings back into circulation this treasure trove of information on a rich and often overlooked vein of the multifaceted story of the Lone Star State.

We lived There Too is a vivid portrayal of the Jewish immigrants who went west to forge new and vibrant communities in every corner of the American Wilderness. Constructed out of a rich treasury of many hitherto unpublished dairies, memories and letters, together with contemporary newspaper articles, photographs and drawings, this real life saga is filled with dramatic reminiscences that display the humor and humanity of the Jewish tradition. We Lived There Too offers an extraordinary view of men and women in action and constitutes a new chapter in the story of the American frontier.

The very name Deadwood conjures up vivid Wild West images: saloons with swinging doors, brazen dance-hall girls, buckskin-clad Calamity Jane roaming the streets with her erstwhile paramour, Wild Bill Hickok. The setting is the lawless Dakota Territory of 1876 at the start of the Black Hills gold rush, a stampede for the golden pay dirt. One would hardly expect to find a Jewish pioneer grocer named Jacob Goldberg in this scene, yet Deadwood's story is incomplete without Goldberg. And Goldberg's story is incomplete without either Calamity Jane or Wild Bill. Not just Goldberg, but Finkelstein (also known as Franklin), Stern (also known as Star), Jacobs, Schwarzwald, Colman, Hattenbach, and many other Jews joined the throngs. The Jews provided much more than overalls, chamberpots, and the chambers in which to put them. They also became the mayors, legislators, and civic leaders who helped bring sense and stability to this unruly expanse.

Western Jewish women's level of involvement at the vanguard of social welfare and progressive reform, commerce, politics, and higher education and the professions is striking given their relatively small numbers."--Jacket.

Winner of the 2020 Jordan Schnitzer Book Award in Social Science, Anthropology, and Folklore​ Honorable Mention, 2021 Saul Viener Book Prize​ The Jews’ Indian investigates the history of American Jewish relationships with Native Americans, both in the realm of cultural imagination and in face-to-face encounters. These two groups’ exchanges were numerous and diverse, proving at times harmonious when Jews’ and Natives people’s economic and social interests aligned, but discordant and fraught at other times. American Jews could be as exploitative of Native cultural, social, and political issues as other American settlers, and historian David Koffman argues that these interactions both unsettle and historicize the often triumphant consensus history of American Jewish life. Focusing on the ways Jewish class mobility and civic belonging were wrapped up in the dynamics of power and myth making that so severely impacted Native Americans, this books is provocative and timely, the first history to critically analyze Jewish participation in, and Jews’ grappling with the legacies of Native American history and the colonial project upon which America rests.

Published on the 350th anniversary of the first Jews to arrive in America, this comprehensive history of the Jews of Boston is now available in a revised and updated paperback edition. The stunning work combines illuminating essays by distinguished Jewish historians with 110 rare photographs to trace the community from its tentative beginnings in colonial Boston through its emergence in the twentieth century as one of the most influential and successful Jewish communities in America. The volume also presents fascinating information about Boston’s synagogues and Jewish neighborhoods as well as the evolution of Jewish culture in Boston and the United States.Praise for the previous edition:“The writing is engaging and lucid, and the superb, profuse illustrations enhance the text. While numerous community histories have been published, this volume is in a class by itself--and will set the standard for all future works of this kind.”—Library Journal“For those of us who grew up with anecdotes of what being a Jew was like in, say, the South End in 1910, or in Roxbury or Chelsea in 1920, this history, collected in one place for the first time, fills in the blanks. It gives us the context for our inherited folk tales.”—Alan Lupo, Boston Globe