City of Promises: A History of the Jews of New York, 3-volume box set

by Howard B. Rock, Deborah Dash Moore, Jeffrey S. Gurock, Annie Polland, Daniel Soyer

Overview

Winner of the 2012 National Jewish Book Award, presented by the National Jewish Book Council


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: A History of the Jews of 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 B. Rock, chronicles the arrival of the first Jews to New York (then New Amsterdam) in 1654 and 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780814724880
Publisher:	New York University Press
Publication date:	09/10/2012
Series:	City of Promises , #3
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	1000
File size:	29 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Howard B. Rock (Author)
Howard B. Rock is Professor of History Emeritus at Florida International University. He is the 2012 runner-up for the Dixon Ryan Manuscript Award presented by the New York State Historical Association, for Haven of Liberty: New York Jews in the New World, 1654–1865. He is also the author or editor of five other books.

Deborah Dash Moore (Author)
Deborah Dash Moore is Frederick G. L. Huetwell Professor of History and Professor of Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. She is the author and editor of a number of books, including Vernacular Religion: Collected Essays of Leonard Norman Primiano (NYU, 2022), Jewish New York: The Remarkable Story of A City and A People (NYU, 2020), City of Promises: A History of the Jews of New York (NYU, 2012), and GI Jews: How World War II Changed a Generation (Harvard, 2006).

Jeffrey S. Gurock (Author)
Jeffrey S. Gurock is the Libby M. Klaperman Professor of Jewish history at Yeshiva University. He has written or edited 25 books, including Jews in Gotham, which in 2012 was honored as Winner, Everett Family Foundation Award, Jewish Book of the Year, Jewish Book Council.

Annie Polland (Author)
Annie Polland is Executive Director of the American Jewish Historical Society. She was previously Executive Vice President for Programs and Education at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, where she authored, Landmark of the Spirit: The Eldridge Street Synagogue.

Daniel Soyer (Author)
Daniel Soyer teaches history at Fordham University in the Bronx. He is the author of the prize-winning Jewish Immigrant Associations and American Identity in New York, 1880-1939, and co-editor and translator of My Future is in America: East European Jewish Immigrant Autobiographies.


Diana L. Linden (Author)
Diana L. Linden is author of Ben Shahn's New Deal Murals: Jewish Identity in the American Scene and co-editor of The Social and the Real: Political Art of the 1930s in the Western Hemisphere

Daniel Soyer teaches history at Fordham University in the Bronx. He is the author of the prize-winning Jewish Immigrant Associations and American Identity in New York, 1880-1939, and co-editor and translator of My Future is in America: East European Jewish Immigrant Autobiographies.

Table of Contents

Foreword by Deborah Dash Moore, General Editor General Editor’s Acknowledgments Authors’ Acknowledgments IntroductionNeighborhood Networks“Radical Reform”Moorish Manhattan Immigrant CitadelsCapital of the Jewish World ews at the Polls: Th e Rise of the Jewish Style in New York Politics Jews and New York Culture ConclusionVisual EssayNotes Bibliography Index About the AuthorsForeword by Deborah Dash Moore, General EditorGeneral Editor’s Acknowledgments Author’s Acknowledgments PrologueBuilding and Sustaining Common Ground Friends or IdeologuesDuring Catastrophe and Triumph Élan of a Jewish City Crises and Contention Amid Decline and Revival Renewed ActivismEpilogueVisual EssayDiana L. LindenNotesBibliographyIndex About the AuthorForeword by Deborah Dash Moore, General Editor General Editor’s Acknowledgments Author’s Acknowledgments Introduction A Dutch Beginning A Merchant Community A Synagogue Community The Jewish Community and the American RevolutionThe Jewish Community of Republican New YorkA Republican Faith New York’s Republican Rabbi and His CongregationBeyond the Synagogue in Antebellum New York Division, Display, Devotion, and DefenseTh e Challenge of Reform Politics, Race, and the Civil War ConclusionVisual EssayNotes Select Bibliography Index About the Author

Editorial Reviews

"This surprisingly accessible narrative by four historians covers 1654 to the present, exploring the early communal entities that accommodated later mass migration, as well as the 20th-century challenges posed by Zionism and by ethnic and racial changes in the city."

The New York Times

"[The book's] thorough, encyclopedic approach and general eveneness and clarity make it invaluable to historians and other scholars and of significant interest and utility to genealogists researching early Jewish family trees."

AVOTAYNU

"This work will long remain an invaluable resource for students of Jewish history and the history of New York City."

Choice

"Finally a history of the Jews of New York. Emerging Metropolis demonstrates, with prodigious research and lucid prose, that New York played a crucial role in shaping the Jews, and that the Jews left an indelible stamp on America's great metropolis, New York. Soyer and Polland tell a complicated story that looks both into the inner live of New York's Jews—in all their complexity—and at the same time surveys the impact of the many other New Yorkers among whom the Jews lived. In doing so the authors show how this city created a Jewish experience that was truly sui generis while it simultaneously shaped modern Jewry around the world."

Hasia R. Diner

"Chronicling New York Jewish life during the era of mass migration, Emerging Metropolis provides a riveting account of the complex matrix of social organizations, economic activities, political movements, and cultural productions created by immigrant Jews. Polland and Soyer bring the citys spaces to life as they describe the invention of a multifaceted Jewish community that took shape within and helped to shape New Yorks diverse and polyglot urban culture."

Beth S. Wenger

"City of Promises is a comprehensive and ambitious work that contributes to the fields of urban and immigration studies as well as to Jewish history; it will be indispensable to scholars and students for years to come."

The Journal of American History - Hadassa Kosak

"In 1900, the Jewish population of New York was despised, impoverished, and ghettoized.A century later, it had become the most accomplished, the most prosperous, and the most successful ethnic group in the nation.This is the story of that journey and that achievement, and no one has told it with more authority and sensitivity than Jeffrey Gurock.And as they used to say on subway advertisement, you don't have to be Jewish to love this book."

The Encyclopedia of New York City - Kenneth T. Jackson

"This bold, well-researched and beautifully-illustrated history of New York's Jews (1654-1865) introduces the theme of republicanism into American Jewish history, and properly contextualizes Jews within the larger history of the metropolis. A remarkable accomplishment, Haven of Liberty will stand for years to come as the definitive history of New York City's early Jewish community."

Jonathan D. Sarna

"I now take the assemblage to be as much an intellectual statement as a commercial one, a way to house and contain the fluidity and variability of the history that resides within its aggregate 1,000 pages. It's an admission that what lies ahead is a whopping big yarn, a moveable feast of a story."

Jewish Review of Books

"Individually and collectively, the volumes inCity of Promisesmark a new high in American urban, ethnic, and religious history. They will stimulate readers to know more, even as they demonstrate their authors remarkable success at synthesizing what we do know. These are wonderful books, testaments to the best in American history. They deserve wide attention as reconstructions of a remarkable past and as models for many more like them."

The American Jewish Archives Journal

"Jeffrey Gurocks masterful and sensitively drawn survey offers a penetrating blend of distinguished scholarship and acute observation from someone who has lived the life and knows well its complexities and nuances. Drawing upon a wide range of opinions and shades of Jewishness, he has fashioned a vivid, richly detailed, and endlessly fascinating narrative about variegated Jewish life in the iconic diaspora metropolis. Balanced, engrossing, and learned. Read and enjoy!"

Thomas Kessner

"[U]nlike many multivolume publications, the narrative of City of Promises actually gets stronger as it moves along. The rich detail and fine writing is animated by the stories of individuals and families, neighborhoods and communities, grounded in prodigious research. The three volumes richly deserved selection by the 2012 National Jewish Book Award as Jewish Book of the Year. City of Promises will remain a compelling account of New York Jewish life for the next generation, and it sets a high standard against which histories of American ethnic groups can be measured in years to come."

Winterthur Portfolio