A Travel Guide to the Jewish Caribbean and South America is a tremendous work encompassing history, culture, and modern travel to some of the most important sites in these places. This is a practical, anecdotal, and adventurous journey including kosher restaurants, cafes, synagogues, and museums, plus cultural and heritage sites. Though many understand American Jewish history as beginning with the East European mass immigration of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Jews in the Americas planted roots as early as 1654, when twenty-three Jews fleeing the Inquisition arrived in New Amsterdam. While the European roots of American Jews are often explored, less discussed are the still-vibrant Jewish communities throughout the Caribbean and Latin America. Explored here are the oldest surviving synagogue in the Western Hemisphere, Mikve Israel in Curaçao; the largest Jewish community in the Caribbean, in Puerto Rico; the three synagogues in Havana, Cuba; the Israeli cafe in Cuzco, Peru, near the historic Inca site, Machu Picchu; and other Jewish sites from Buenos Aires to Mexico City. Also included are general travel information and tips.

This book is an odyssey to discover exotic Jewish communities around the world––a road map of travel and adventure set in such locals as Russia (including Siberia), Tahiti, Vietnam, Myanmar, India, Cuba, Morocco, Algeria, and Israel.

American Jewry explores new transnational questions in Jewish history, analyzing the historical, cultural and social experience of American Jewry from 1654 to the present day, and evaluates the relationship between European and American Jewish history. Did the hopes of Jewish immigrants to establish an independent American Judaism in a free and pluralistic country come to fruition? How did Jews in America define their relationship to the 'Old World' of Europe, both before and after the Holocaust? What are the religious, political and cultural challenges for American Jews in the twenty-first century? Internationally renowned scholars come together in this volume to present new research on how immigration from Western and Eastern Europe established a new and distinctively American Jewish identity that went beyond the traditions of Europe, yet remained attached in many ways to its European origins.

Latin American Jewish Studies Association Best Edited Volume This volume explores the local specificities and global forces that shaped Jewish experiences in the Americas across five centuries. Featuring a range of case studies by scholars from the United States, Brazil, Europe, and Israel, it explores the culturally, religiously, and politically diverse lives of Jewish minorities in the Western Hemisphere. The chapters are organized chronologically and trace four global forces: the western expansion of early modern European empires, Jewish networks across and beyond empires, migration, and Jewish activism and participation in international ideological movements. The volume weaves together into one narrative the histories of communities and individuals separated by time and space, such as the descendants of Portuguese converts, Moroccan immigrants to Brazil, and U.S.-based creators of Yiddish movies. Through its transnational focus and close attention paid to local circumstances, this volume offers new insights into the multicultural pasts of the Americas’ Jewish populations and of the different regions that make up North, Central, and South America. Contributors: Lenny A. Ureña Valerio | Elisa Kriza | Raanan Rein | Adriana M. Brodsky | Lucas de Mattos Moura Fernandes | Katalin Franciska Rac | Zachary M Baker | Neil Weijer | Hilit Surowitz-Israel | Isabel Rosa Gritti | Tamar Herzog | Jose C Moya | Sandra McGee Deutsch | Dana Rabin Publication of this work made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.