Written by a sociologist and a journalist, The Death of an American Jewish Community: A Tragedy of Good Intentions recounts the death of a Boston community once home to 90,000 Jews residing among African-Americans and white ethnics. The frightening personal testimonies and blatant evidence of manipulated housing prices illustrate how inadequate government regulation of banks can contribute to ethnic conflict and lives destroyed. “There were no winners,” the authors warn. Hillel Levine and Lawrence Harmon believe that their findings may be true for American cities in general. Had we learned from what went wrong in Boston — blockbusting by a group of banks, federal programs promoting mortgages to people unable to afford them, real estate brokers seeking quick profits —, perhaps the 2008 nationwide real estate meltdown could have been anticipated. The lessons from this book are essential for students of ethnic relations and urban affairs. “This candid, disturbing, and highly readable book recounts how Boston’s working-class Jewish neighborhoods were transformed into economically devastated black ghettoes.” — The New Yorker “Bankers and real-estate brokers still shape the dynamics of daily life in our fragile urban neighborhoods. Levine and Harmon movingly capture the human side of this often destructive process in their story of redlining and blockbusting in Boston during the 1960s. But their book is more than history. It is a lesson about how to understand and improve our cities and neighborhoods, today and in the future.” — Raymond L. Flynn, Mayor of Boston, President, U.S. Conference of Mayors “Levine and Harmon are sympathetic to the goals of racial integration but are indignant over the brutality and unfairness that accompanied these orchestrations. Bankers and politicians are indicted here by elaborate court evidence and by supplementary research cited by the authors, who use their insiders’ passion (Harmon was born and raised in Dorchester) and professional expertise to forever preserve the corned-beef flavor of old Blue Hill Avenue. As much an elegiac memory book of old Jewish Boston as a searing indictment against her killers.” — Kirkus Reviews “Combines the rigor of good scholarship with the obsessive curiosity of good journalism” — J. Anthony Lukas, Author of Common Ground “What keeps a community alive? What are the social and historical forces that shape or stifle its aspirations? When does a community soar and when does it yield to resignation? These and other questions take on an urgency of their own in Hillel Levine and Lawrence Harmon’s perceptive, brilliant, and disturbing inquiry.” — Elie Wiesel, University Professor and Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities, Boston University “Levine and Harmon have written a prophetic indictment of the real estate speculation and elite indifference that, along with black crimes, destroyed Boston’s most vibrant Jewish neighborhoods. Have the courage to take their terrible journey; you will not return unchanged!” — Jim Sleeper, Author of The Closest of Strangers: Liberalism and the Politics of Race in New York “This engagingly written and brilliantly illuminating portrait of the destruction of a vibrant Jewish community radically revises our understanding of the process of neighborhood change. The authors also break new ground in portraying the critical role of social class in American life and the powerful, if unconscious, class bias of Jewish communal leaders.” — Charles E. Silberman, Author of A Certain People: American Jews and Their Lives Today

Winner of the 2021 National Jewish Book Award for Con­tem­po­rary Jew­ish Life and Prac­tice Finalist for the 2021 Kirkus Prize in Nonfiction A New York Times Notable Book of the Year A Wall Street Journal, Chicago Public Library, Publishers Weekly, and Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year A startling and profound exploration of how Jewish history is exploited to comfort the living. Renowned and beloved as a prizewinning novelist, Dara Horn has also been publishing penetrating essays since she was a teenager. Often asked by major publications to write on subjects related to Jewish culture—and increasingly in response to a recent wave of deadly antisemitic attacks—Horn was troubled to realize what all of these assignments had in common: she was being asked to write about dead Jews, never about living ones. In these essays, Horn reflects on subjects as far-flung as the international veneration of Anne Frank, the mythology that Jewish family names were changed at Ellis Island, the blockbuster traveling exhibition Auschwitz, the marketing of the Jewish history of Harbin, China, and the little-known life of the "righteous Gentile" Varian Fry. Throughout, she challenges us to confront the reasons why there might be so much fascination with Jewish deaths, and so little respect for Jewish lives unfolding in the present. Horn draws upon her travels, her research, and also her own family life—trying to explain Shakespeare’s Shylock to a curious ten-year-old, her anger when swastikas are drawn on desks in her children’s school, the profound perspective offered by traditional religious practice and study—to assert the vitality, complexity, and depth of Jewish life against an antisemitism that, far from being disarmed by the mantra of "Never forget," is on the rise. As Horn explores the (not so) shocking attacks on the American Jewish community in recent years, she reveals the subtler dehumanization built into the public piety that surrounds the Jewish past—making the radical argument that the benign reverence we give to past horrors is itself a profound affront to human dignity.

From its founding in the late seventeenth century, Newark, New Jersey, was a vibrant and representative center of Jewish life in America. Geographically and culturally situated between New York City and its outlying suburbs, Newark afforded Jewish residents the advantages of a close-knit community along with the cultural abundance and social dynamism of urban life. In Newark, all of the representative stages of modern Jewish experience were enacted, from immigration and acculturation to upward mobility and community building. The Enduring Community is a lively and evocative social history of the Jewish presence in Newark as well as an examination of what Newark tells us about social assimilation, conflict and change. Grounded in documentary research, the volume makes extensive use of interviews and oral histories. The author traces the growth of the Jewish population in the pre-Revolutionary period to its settlement of German Jews in the 1840s and Eastern European Jews in the 1880s. Helmreich delineates areas of contention and cooperation between these groups and relates how an American identity was eventually forged within the larger ethnic mix of the city. Jewish population in politics, the establishment of Jewish schools, synagogues, labor unions, charities, and community groups are described together with cultural and recreational life. Despite the formal and emotional bonds that formed over a century, Jewish neighborhoods in Newark did not survive the postwar era. The trek to the suburbs, the erosion of Newark's tax base, and deteriorating services accelerated a movement outward that mirrored the demographic patterns of cities across America. By the time of the Newark riots in 1967, the Jewish presence was largely absent. This volume reclaims a lost history and gives personalized voice to the dreams, aspirations, and memories of a dispersed community. It demonstrates how former Newarkers built new Jewish communities in the surrounding suburbs, an area dubbed "MetroWest" by Jewish leaders. The Enduring Community is must reading for students of Jewish social history, sociologists, urban studies specialists, and readers interested in the history of New Jersey. The book includes archival photographs form the periods discussed.

This volume provides readers with a comprehensive introduction to the most important and interesting historical and contemporary facets of Judaism in America. Written by twenty-four leading scholars from the fields of religious studies, American history and literature, philosophy, art history, sociology, and musicology, the book adopts an inclusive perspective on Jewish religious experience. Three initial chapters cover the development of Judaism in America from 1654, when Sephardic Jews first landed in New Amsterdam, until today. Subsequent chapters include cutting-edge scholarship and original ideas while remaining accessible at an introductory level. A secondary goal of this volume is to help its readers better understand the more abstract term of 'religion' in a Jewish context. The Cambridge Companion to American Judaism will be of interest not only to scholars but also to all readers interested in social and intellectual trends in the modern world.

This is the true tale of two brothers, sons of a successful Jewish contractor, who along with an MIT graduate and a minister's daughter once competed for headlines with John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd and Bonnie and Clyde. The gang was led by the angry, violent, yet often charismatic Murton Millen, a small-time hoodlum and aspiring race-car driver. With his younger brother, Irv, and later joined by neighborhood buddy and MIT graduate Abe Faber, Murt launched a career of increasingly ambitious robberies. But it was only after his sudden marriage to the beautiful eighteen-year-old Norma Brighton that the gang escalated to murder. Their crime wave climaxed at a Needham, Massachusetts, bank on February 2, 1934, when Murt cut down two local police officers - Francis Haddock and Forbes McLeod - with a Thompson submachine gun stolen from state police. The killings, the dogged investigation by two clever detectives, and the record-setting trial with seventeen psychiatrists were national news. In Depression-era America this Boston saga of sex, ethnicity, and bloodshed made the trio and their "red-headed gun moll" infamous. Gorenstein's account explores the Millen, Faber, and Brighton families and introduces us to cops, psychiatrists, newspaper men and women, and ordinary citizens caught up in the extraordinary Tommy Gun Winter of 1934.

"Black Power, Jewish Politics expands with this revised edition that includes the controversial new preface, an additional chapter connecting the book's themes to the national reckoning on race, and a foreword by Jews of Color Initiative founder Ilana Kaufman that all reflect on Blacks, Jews, race, white supremacy, and the civil rights movement"--

Culling the finest thinking of renowned historian Jonathan D. Sarna, Coming to Terms with America examines how Jews have long “straddled two civilizations,” endeavoring to be both Jewish and American at once, from the American Revolution to today.