Since Peter Stuyvesant greeted with enmity the first group of Jews to
arrive on the docks of New Amsterdam in 1654, Jews have entwined their
fate and fortunes with that of the United States-a project marked by
great struggle and great promise. What this interconnected destiny has
meant for American Jews and how it has defined their experience among
the world's Jews is fully chronicled in this work, a comprehensive and
finely nuanced history of Jews in the United States from 1654 through
the end of the past century. Hasia R. Diner traces Jewish participation
in American history-from the communities that sent formal letters of
greeting to George Washington; to the three thousand Jewish men who
fought for the Confederacy and the ten thousand who fought in the Union
army; to the Jewish activists who devoted themselves to the labor
movement and the civil rights movement.
Diner portrays this history as a constant process of negotiation,
undertaken by ordinary Jews who wanted at one and the same time to be
Jews and full Americans. Accordingly, Diner draws on both American and
Jewish sources to explain the chronology of American Jewish history, the
structure of its communal institutions, and the inner dynamism that
propelled it. Her work documents the major developments of American
Judaism-he economic, social, cultural, and political activities of the
Jews who immigrated to and settled in America, as well as their
descendants-and shows how these grew out of both a Jewish and an
American context. She also demonstrates how the equally compelling urges
to maintain Jewishness and to assimilate gave American Jewry the
particular character that it retains to this day in all its subtlety and
complexity.
