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City of Promises: A History of the Jews of New York #2

Emerging Metropolis: New York Jews in the Age of Immigration, 1840-1920

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" Finalist for the JDC-Herbert Katzi Award for a Book Based on Archival Research, National Jewish Book Council


 
Emerging Metropolis tells the story of New York’s emergence as the greatest Jewish city of all time. It explores the Central European and East European Jews’ encounter with New York City, tracing immigrants’ economic, social, religious, political, and cultural adaptation between 1840 and 1920. This meticulously researched volume shows how Jews wove their ambitions and aspirations—for freedom, security, andmaterial prosperity—into the very fabric and physical landscape of the city.
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396 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2012

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About the author

Deborah Dash Moore

37 books7 followers
Deborah Dash Moore (born 1946, in New York City) is the former Director of the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies and a Frederick G.L. Huetwell Professor of History and Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Moore taught for many years at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York. While there she served intermittently as head of Religious Studies and helped found a program in Jewish Studies. At Vassar, Deborah Dash Moore wrote and co-edited numerous books, articles and collections. She was a highly regarded educator and classroom professor in addition to her scholarship.

Her first book, At Home in America: Second Generation New York Jews (1981), explores how the children of immigrants created an ethnic world that blended elements of Jewish and American culture into a vibrant urban society. To the Golden Cities: Pursuing the American Jewish Dream in Miami and L. A. (1994) follows those big city Jews who chose to move to new homes after World War II and examines the type of communities and politics that flourished in these rapidly growing centers.

Issues of leadership, authority and accomplishment have also engaged her attention, first in B'nai B'rith and the Challenge of Ethnic Leadership (1981), and more recently in the award-winning two-volume Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia (1997), which she edited with Paula Hyman.

Her 2004 book, GI Jews: How World War II Changed a Generation, charts the lives of fifteen young Jewish men as they faced military service and tried to make sense of its demands, simultaneously wrestling with what it meant to be an American and a Jew. GI Jews, a Washington Post Best Book of the Year, is a powerful, intimate portrayal of the costs of a conflict that was at once physical, emotional, and spiritual.

In 2008, Moore published American Jewish Identity Politics (University of Michigan), a collection of essays by such notable Jewish studies scholars as Hasia Diner, Jonathan Sarna, and Paula Hyman.

In 2011, her book Gender & Jewish History (Indiana University Press), written with co-editor Marion Kaplan in honor of historian Paula Hyman, was awarded the National Jewish Book Award in the category of Anthologies and Collections.

In September 2012, NYU Press published a three-volume series edited by Moore, City of Promises: A History of the Jews of New York. This history was selected for the National Jewish Book Award.

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227 reviews
March 17, 2023
This is a good book about how the Jews in NYC went from small minority to a quarter of the city’s population. The most interesting portion is about politics and labor strife. It’s fascinating how the Socialist Party in the 1900s and 1910s openly campaigned and elected members of Congress. New York in late 19th and early 20th centuries was a major manufacturing center and Jews played a central role as workers and factory owners. I also enjoyed reading about the interesting personalities of the period like the revolutionary Emma Goldman, the author Emma Lazarus and the journalist and writer Abraham Cahan. When you read the history, you also realize that the Lower East Side, as cemented in our imagination as it is, was really what we call a transitional neighborhood. Thought provoking and interesting.
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