City of Promises
A History of the Jews of New York, 3-volume box set
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- $104.99
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- $104.99
Publisher Description
Vol. I, Haven of Liberty, 2012 Runner-Up for the Dixon Ryan Manuscript Award presented by the New York Historical Association Best Nonfiction Book of 2012 presented by Kirkus New York Jews, so visible and integral to the culture, economy and politics of America’s greatest city, has eluded the grasp of historians for decades. Surprisingly, no comprehensive history of New York Jews has ever been written. City of Promises: The History of the Jews in New York, a three volume set of original research, pioneers a path-breaking interpretation of a Jewish urban community at once the largest in Jewish history and most important in the modern world.
Volume I, Haven of Liberty, by historian Howard Rock, chronicles the arrival of the first Jews to New York (then New Amsterdam) in 1654and highlights their political and economic challenges. Overcoming significant barriers, colonial and republican Jews in New York laid the foundations for the development of a thriving community.
Volume II, Emerging Metropolis, written by Annie Polland and Daniel Soyer, describes New York’s transformation into a Jewish city. Focusing on the urban Jewish built environment—its tenements and banks, synagogues and shops, department stores and settlement houses—it conveys the extraordinary complexity of Jewish immigrant society.
Volume III, Jews in Gotham, by historian Jeffrey S.Gurock, highlights neighborhood life as the city’s distinctive feature. New York retained its preeminence as the capital of American Jews because of deep roots in local worlds that supported vigorous political, religious, and economic diversity.
Each volume includes a “visual essay” by art historian Diana Linden interpreting aspects of life for New York’s Jews from their arrival until today. These illustrated sections, many in color, illuminate Jewish material culture and feature reproductions of early colonial portraits, art, architecture, as well as everyday culture and community.
Overseen by noted scholar Deborah Dash Moore, City of Promises offers the largest Jewish city in the world, in the United States, and in Jewish history its first comprehensive account.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The full saga of Jewish New York, from the first small band of refugees to a population of two million, from a community ostracized in the colonial city to one that has produced leading intellectuals, social activists, financiers, and more, appears here edited by a leading scholar of the subject and narrated by four historians. Florida International University historian Rock relates how 23 Dutch Jews fled Brazil after it fell to Portugal and the Inquisition. They landed in New Amsterdam, where they were hostilely received. But later, New York, as a British colony and then one of the original 13 states, was first to extend citizenship to its Jewish residents, and Jews adopted the ideals of the American Revolution, participating with enthusiasm in politics. New York was the pivotal point in many aspects of American Jewish history, such as the contest between Reform and Orthodox Jewry in the 1850s, and in antebellum New York Jews became financial and industrial leaders as well as theatrical and musical impresarios, founded the secular fraternal organization B nai Brith, and built Jews Hospital (today s Mt. Sinai). While many Jewish leaders openly supported the Southern cause in the 1850s, Jews served with distinction in the Union army, and the Jewish garment industry received a big boost with wartime s demand for uniforms. Polland, of the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, and Soyer, of Fordham University, pick up the tale in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as Eastern European immigrants flooded the city. Jews left their mark on New York with a vibrant Yiddish culture, building synagogues like the striking MoorishTemple Emanu-El, establishing charities and settlement houses, department stores like Macy s, banks, labor unions , and Jewish-owned general newspapers like the New York Times. Gurock describes how, in the interwar years, 90% of tuition-free CCNY s enrollment was Jewish, with Nobel laureates and polio-vaccine pioneer Jonas Salk among alums. New York Jews were at the center of national Jewish organizational life, rallying support for European Jews during the Holocaust, and later for Zionism, and for Soviet Jews. Feminist leaders based in New York galvanized the nation while a 1968 battle over control of public schools was a turning point in black-Jewish relations. Art historian Linden trains her gaze on artifacts like a colonial circumcision clip, certificates of manumission of Jewish-owned slaves, and boxing gloves worn by Jewish champ Benny Leonard. Although multiple authors impede a cohesive voice and too many years of history are ambitiously stuffed into too few pages, this is overall a highly valuable and vastly immersing study of how New York came to be considered a Jewish city.
