Most of the synagogues are gone; a temple has been converted into a Baptist church. There is little indication to the passerby that the southern New Jersey’s Salem and Cumberland counties once contained active Jewish colonies—the largest and most successful in fact, of the settlement experiments undertaken by Russian-Jewish immigrants in America during the late nineteenth century. Ellen Eisenberg’s work focuses on the transformation of these colonies over a period of four decades, from agrarian, communal colonies to private mixed industrial-agricultural communities. The colonies grew out of the same “back to the land” sentiment that led to the development of the first modern Jewish agricultural settlements in Palestine. Founded in 1882, the settlements survived for over thirty years. The community of Alliance’s population alone grew to nearly 1000 by 1908.Originally established as socialistic agrarian settlements by young idealists from the Russian Jewish Am Olam movement, the colonies eventually became dependent on industrial employment, based on private ownership. The early independent, ideological settlers ultimately clashed with the financial sponsors and the migrants they recruited, who did not share the settlers’ communitarian and agrarian goals.

This annotated bibliography documents Jews' significant contributions to American agriculture as farmers, ranchers, scientists and teachers. Works cited include periodicals, books, newspapers, government publications, theses and dissertations, and other miscellaneous sources. The work is indexed by title and subject.

Most of the roughly 140,000 Holocaust survivors who came to the United States in the first decade after World War II settled in big cities such as New York. But a few thousand chose an alternative way of life on American farms. More of these accidental farmers wound up raising chickens in southern New Jersey than anywhere else. Speaking Yiddish to Chickens is the first book to chronicle this little-known chapter in American Jewish history when these mostly Eastern European refugees – including the author’s grandparents - found an unlikely refuge and gateway to new lives in the US on poultry farms. They gravitated to a section of south Jersey anchored by Vineland, a small rural city where previous waves of Jewish immigrants had built a rich network of cultural and religious institutions. This book relies on interviews with dozens of these refugee farmers and their children, as well as oral histories and archival records to tell how they learned to farm while coping with unimaginable grief. They built small synagogues within walking distance of their farms and hosted Yiddish cultural events more frequently found on the Lower East Side than perhaps anywhere else in rural America at the time. Like refugees today, they embraced their new American identities and enriched the community where they settled, working hard in unfamiliar jobs for often meager returns. Within a decade, falling egg prices and the rise of industrial-scale agriculture in the South would drive almost all of these novice poultry farmers out of business, many into bankruptcy. Some hated every minute here; others would remember their time on south Jersey farms as their best years in America. They enjoyed a quieter way of life and more space for themselves and their children than in the crowded New York City apartments where so many displaced persons settled. This is their remarkable story of loss, renewal, and perseverance in the most unexpected of settings. Author Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/YiddishtoChickens)

From the Shakers to the Branch Davidians, America's communal utopians have captured the popular imagination. Seventeen original essays here demonstrate the relevance of such groups to the mainstream of American social, religious, and economic life. The contributors examine the beliefs and practices of the most prominent utopian communities founded before 1965, including the long-overlooked Catholic monastic communities and Jewish agricultural colonies. Also featured are the Ephrata Baptists, Moravians, Shakers, Harmonists, Hutterites, Inspirationists of Amana, Mormons, Owenites, Fourierists, Icarians, Janssonists, Theosophists, Cyrus Teed's Koreshans, and Father Divine's Peace Mission. Based on a new conceptual framework known as developmental communalism, the book examines these utopian movements throughout the course of their development--before, during, and after their communal period. Each chapter includes a brief chronology, giving basic information about the group discussed. An appendix presents the most complete list of American utopian communities ever published. The contributors are Jonathan G. Andelson, Karl J. R. Arndt, Pearl W. Bartelt, Priscilla J. Brewer, Donald F. Durnbaugh, Lawrence Foster, Carl J. Guarneri, Robert V. Hine, Gertrude E. Huntington, James E. Landing, Dean L. May, Lawrence J. McCrank, J. Gordon Melton, Donald E. Pitzer, Robert P. Sutton, Jon Wagner, and Robert S. Weisbrot.

From 1963 to 1965 roughly 6,000 families moved into Rochdale Village, at the time the world's largest housing cooperative, in southeastern Queens, New York. The moderate-income cooperative attracted families from a diverse background, white and black, to what was a predominantly black neighborhood. In its early years, Rochdale was widely hailed as one of the few successful large-scale efforts to create an integrated community in New York City or, for that matter, anywhere in the United States.Rochdale was built by the United Housing Foundation. Its president, Abraham Kazan, had been the major builder of low-cost cooperative housing in New York City for decades. His partner in many of these ventures was Robert Moses. Their work together was a marriage of opposites: Kazan's utopian-anarchist strain of social idealism with its roots in the early twentieth century Jewish labor movement combined with Moses's hardheaded, no-nonsense pragmatism.Peter Eisenstadt recounts the history of Rochdale Village's first years, from the controversies over its planning, to the civil rights demonstrations at its construction site in 1963, through the late 1970s, tracing the rise and fall of integration in the cooperative. (Today, although Rochdale is no longer integrated, it remains a successful and vibrant cooperative that is a testament to the ideals of its founders and the hard work of its residents.) Rochdale's problems were a microcosm of those of the city as a whole—troubled schools, rising levels of crime, fallout from the disastrous teachers' strike of 1968, and generally heightened racial tensions. By the end of the 1970s few white families remained.Drawing on exhaustive archival research, extensive interviews with the planners and residents, and his own childhood experiences growing up in Rochdale Village, Eisenstadt offers an insightful and engaging look at what it was like to live in Rochdale and explores the community's place in the postwar history of America's cities and in the still unfinished quests for racial equality and affordable urban housing.

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Alan J. Karcher takes a critical look at how and why the boundary lines of New Jersey's 566 municipalities were drawn, pointing to the irrationality of these excessive divisions.