Robert Rockaway's study begins with the arrival of the first Jews in Detroit, when the city was a remote frontier outpost. He chronicles the immigration of the German Jews beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, followed by the influx of Jews from Eastern Europe. His narrative concludes on the eve of World War I, by which time the community had developed its basic social structure. It had survived the turbulent years of immigration and the process of Americanization, and had succeeded in establishing several congregations, charitable organizations, and social and cultural foundations. Rockaway relates the story of Detroit's Jews to the larger context of American ethnicity and immigration. He compares the Jewish economic and social evolution with that of other Detroit ethnic groups and of other American Jewish communities. Thus, the arrival of the German Jews is presented as part of the broader wave of immigration from Germany, where Jews were suffering increasingly restrictive social and economic sanctions. Upon their arrival in Detroit, the German Jews quickly established themselves and moved into the mainstream of the city's life. Transitions for the Eastern European Jews were not as easy. They were divided among themselves due to ethnic differences, disagreements about rituals, as well as personal idiosyncracies. In addition, class, cultural, and religious differences separated the German Jews from the Eastern Europeans. Many, victims of pogroms, arrived destitute and, consequently, put great strains on the established Jewish community as it tried to support the new immigrants. The large number of new Jewish immigrants also stirred anti-Semitic feelings in the city, making assimilation more difficult. During the period under study, Detroit's Jews suffered almost total exclusion in the social sphere, despite significant gains in the economic and civic arenas. Detroit's social elite remained almost totally Anglo-Saxon and Protestant. Nevertheless, through work and unflagging determination, they rose to solid economic status. At the same time, they maintained their identity while participating in Detroit's civic, political, and cultural life.

Robert Rockaway's study begins with the arrival of the first Jews in Detroit, when the city was a remote frontier outpost. He chronicles the immigration of the German Jews beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, followed by the influx of Jews from Eastern Europe. His narrative concludes on the eve of World War I, by which time the community had developed its basic social structure. It had survived the turbulent years of immigration and the process of Americanization, and had succeeded in establishing several congregations, charitable organizations, and social and cultural foundations. Rockaway relates the story of Detroit's Jews to the larger context of American ethnicity and immigration. He compares the Jewish economic and social evolution with that of other Detroit ethnic groups and of other American Jewish communities. Thus, the arrival of the German Jews is presented as part of the broader wave of immigration from Germany, where Jews were suffering increasingly restrictive social and economic sanctions. Upon their arrival in Detroit, the German Jews quickly established themselves and moved into the mainstream of the city's life. Transitions for the Eastern European Jews were not as easy. They were divided among themselves due to ethnic differences, disagreements about rituals, as well as personal idiosyncracies. In addition, class, cultural, and religious differences separated the German Jews from the Eastern Europeans. Many, victims of pogroms, arrived destitute and, consequently, put great strains on the established Jewish community as it tried to support the new immigrants. The large number of new Jewish immigrants also stirred anti-Semitic feelings in the city, making assimilation more difficult. During the period under study, Detroit's Jews suffered almost total exclusion in the social sphere, despite significant gains in the economic and civic arenas. Detroit's social elite remained almost totally Anglo-Saxon and Protestant. Nevertheless, through work and unflagging determination, they rose to solid economic status. At the same time, they maintained their identity while participating in Detroit's civic, political, and cultural life.

In this provocative urban history, Lila Corwin Berman considers the role that Detroit s Jews have played in the city s well-known narratives of migration and decline. Like other Detroiters in the 1960s and 1970s, Jews left the city for the suburbs in large numbers. But Berman makes the case that they nevertheless constituted themselves as urban people, and she shows how complex spatial and political relationships existed within the greater metropolitan region. By insisting on the existence and influence of a metropolitan consciousness, Berman reveals the complexity and contingency of what did and didn t change as regions expanded in the postwar era."

A celebrated Israeli author explores the roots of the divide between religion and secularism in Israel today, and offers a path to bridging the divide "A thoughtful social, political, and philosophical examination of Judaism. . . . A cogent consideration of the place of religion in the modern world."--Kirkus Reviews Zionism began as a movement full of contradictions, between a pull to the past and a desire to forge a new future. Israel has become a place of fragmentation, between those who sanctify religious tradition and those who wish to escape its grasp. Now, a new middle ground is emerging between religious and secular Jews who want to engage with their heritage--without being restricted by it or losing it completely. In this incisive book, acclaimed author Micah Goodman explores Israeli Judaism and the conflict between religion and secularism, one of the major causes of political polarization throughout the world. Revisiting traditional religious sources and seminal works of secularism, he reveals that each contains an openness to learn from the other's messages. Goodman challenges both orthodoxies, proposing a new approach to bridge the divide between religion and secularism and pave a path toward healing a society torn asunder by extremism.

After the end of World War II, Americans across the United States began a mass migration from the urban centers to suburbia. Entire neighborhoods transplanted themselves. The Jewish Community of Metro Detroit: 1945 "2005 provides a pictorial history of the Detroit Jewish community's transition from the city to the suburbs outside of Detroit. For the Jewish communities, life in the Detroit suburbs has been focused on family within a pluralism that embraces the spectrum of experience from the most religiously devout to the ethnically secular. Holidays, bar and bat mitzvahs, weddings, and funerals have marked the passage of time. Issues of social justice, homeland, and religion have divided and brought people together. The architecture of the structures the Detroit Jewish community has erected, such as Temple Beth El designed by architect Minoru Yamasaki, testifies to the community's presence.

From bestselling author David Nasaw, a sweeping new history of the one million refugees left behind in Germany after WWII In May 1945, after German forces surrendered to the Allied powers, millions of concentration camp survivors, POWs, slave laborers, political prisoners, and Nazi collaborators were left behind in Germany, a nation in ruins. British and American soldiers attempted to repatriate the refugees, but more than a million displaced persons remained in Germany: Jews, Poles, Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, and other Eastern Europeans who refused to go home or had no homes to return to. Most would eventually be resettled in lands suffering from postwar labor shortages, but no nation, including the United States, was willing to accept more than a handful of the 200,000 to 250,000 Jewish men, women, and children who remained trapped in Germany. When in June, 1948, the United States Congress passed legislation permitting the immigration of displaced persons, visas were granted to sizable numbers of war criminals and Nazi collaborators, but denied to 90% of the Jewish displaced persons. A masterwork from acclaimed historian David Nasaw, The Last Million tells the gripping but until now hidden story of postwar displacement and statelessness and of the Last Million, as they crossed from a broken past into an unknowable future, carrying with them their wounds, their fears, their hope, and their secrets. Here for the first time, Nasaw illuminates their incredible history and shows us how it is our history as well.