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Study of a vital immigrant institution and the formation of American ethnic identity. Landsmanshaftn, associations of immigrants from the same hometown, became the most popular form of organization among Eastern European Jewish immigrants to the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Jewish Immigrant Associations and American Identity in New York, 1880–1939, by Daniel Soyer, holds an in-depth discussion on the importance of these hometown societies that provided members with valuable material benefits and served as arenas for formal and informal social interaction. In addition to discussing both continuity and transformation as features of the immigrant experience, this approach recognizes that ethnic identity is a socially constructed and malleable phenomenon. Soyer explores this process of construction by raising more specific questions about what immigrants themselves have meant by Americanization and how their hometown associations played an important part in the process.
In this book, Lee Shai Weissbach offers the first comprehensive portrait of small-town Jewish life in America. Exploring the history of communities of 100 to 1000 Jews, the book focuses on the years from the mid-nineteenth century to World War II. Weissbach examines the dynamics of 490 communities across the United States and reveals that smaller Jewish centers were not simply miniature versions of larger communities but were instead alternative kinds of communities in many respects. The book investigates topics ranging from migration patterns to occupational choices, from Jewish education and marriage strategies to congregational organization. The story of smaller Jewish communities attests to the richness and complexity of American Jewish history and also serves to remind us of the diversity of small-town society in times past.
YIVO, founded in 1925 in Wilno (Vilnius), is a center for scholarship on East European Jewish history, language, and culture. During the 1920s and early 1930s a network of YIVO affiliates was established across Europe and the Americas including one in New York, which became the institute's new home when YIVO was reestablished in 1940 by members of its board who had escaped from Nazi-occupied Europe. This is the first repository-level finding aid to the archives (over 1,400 collections) of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York. It includes a brief history of the institute and archives, descriptive entries on each collection, a detailed index of key words and subject headings, and information on the archive's basic services.
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