Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: The Jews of Harlem
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 11/8/1949
WEBSITE: http://jeffreygurock.com/
CITY: Bronx
STATE: NY
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://faculty.yu.edu/faculty/pages/Gurock-Jeffrey * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_S._Gurock * http://religiondispatches.org/author/jeffreygurock/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 79046887
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/n79046887
HEADING: Gurock, Jeffrey S., 1949-
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PERSONAL
Born November 8, 1949.
EDUCATION:Attended City College of New York.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Educator, editor, and writer. American Jewish History, associate editor, 1998-2002; Yeshiva University, New York, NY, Libby M. Klaperman Professor of Jewish History. Academic Council of the American Jewish Historical Society, former chair.
AWARDS:Saul Viener Prize, American Jewish Historical Society, 1998, for Modern Heretic and a Traditional Community; Everett Family Foundation Award, Jewish Book Council, 2012, for Jews in Gotham; distinguished alumni, City College of New York, 2015.
WRITINGS
Contributor to books, including American Rabbinate: A Century of Continuity and Change, 1883-1983, edited by Jacob Rader Marcus and Abraham Peck, Ktav, 1985; and Why Is America Different? American Jewry on Its 350th Anniversary, edited by Steven T. Katz, University Press of America, 2010.
SIDELIGHTS
Jeffrey S. Gurock is a professor of Jewish History at Yeshiva University, and he has also served as associate editor of American Jewish History. A prolific author and editor, Gurock has devoted his career to Jewish history, American Jewish history, and the Orthodox community. His chapters on related topics have in such books as American Rabbinate: A Century of Continuity and Change, 1883-1983 and Why Is America Different? American Jewry on Its 350th Anniversary. As an editor, Gurock has compiled such books as American Jewish History: The Colonial and Early National Periods, 1654-1840; Anti-Semitism in America; and Central European Jews in America, 1840-1880: Migration and Advancement.
For his first book as an author, Gurock published When Harlem Was Jewish, 1870-1930 in 1979. That volume was followed by American Jewish History: A Bibliographical Guide and Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith in 1983. From there, Gurock authored Men and Women of Yeshiva: Higher Education, Orthodoxy, and American Judaism in 1988 and American Jewish Orthodoxy in Historical Perspective in 1996. He then teamed with Jacob J. Schacter to write Modern Heretic and a Traditional Community: Mordecai M. Kaplan, Orthodoxy, and American Judaism. Other titles by Gurock include Orthodox Jews in America and Wide World of Central Synagogue.
Holocaust Averted
Notably, while Gurock is generally a straightforward historian, The Holocaust Averted: An Alternate History of American Jewry, 1938-1967 is a counterfactual history. Like speculative history in fiction, a counterfactual history imagines what might have been, or what could have been. Yet, unlike in fiction, the nonfiction approach delineates the research in support of given suppositions. Thus, Gurock imagines the events that could have taken place to prevent the Holocaust, as well as what might have happened afterward. As Renee Ghert-Zand reported in the Times of Israel, “the idea for The Holocaust Averted came to Gurock when he and his wife were visiting the old Jewish quarter of Krakow, Poland, six years ago. The fact that much Jewish culture was all around them, but that Jews were nowhere to be seen, struck a deep chord for Gurock. He started to wonder what Jewish life would have been like in present-day Krakow had the Holocaust not taken place and the Jews of the city been virtually wiped out.”
Gurock reports that prevention of the Holocaust would have taken root during the Munich conference in 1938. The author finds that the United Kingdom could have defied Germany, instead of capitulating. The country would have thus retained its territories in Czechoslovakia and jumped directly into war. France would have done the same, and this would have prevented Germany from invading Poland in 1939. This in turn would have prevented the Holocaust. From there, Gurock speculates that the number of American Jews would have been smaller, with European Jews no longer having a reason to migrate. Furthermore, while Gurock believes Israel would still have formed, he suggests that it would have done so in a far less contentious manner.
According to Times Higher Education correspondent Hasia R. Diner, “The problem with The Holocaust Averted, as with all works that hinge on ‘what if,’ is that the historian, the servant of evidence, has no obligation to construct an analysis that adheres to the facts. The historian as fabulist has no standard as to what might have been reasonable and what not.” Ghert-Zand was more positive, advising: “What Gurock demonstrates in his book is that World War II was a major turning point in American Jewish history, and that many positive things came out of it for American Jews as well as for US-Israel relations. Had key moments in the run-up to and during the course of the war played out differently, the Holocaust may not have happened. Gurock posits that instead, Jews in America would have had to ‘run for cover.’ They would have had to assume—and maintain—a low profile, never achieving the level of empowerment and agency that we associate with American Jews today.”
The Jews of Harlem
With The Jews of Harlem: The Rise, Decline, and Revival of a Jewish Community, Gurock returns to the subject he first visited in When Harlem Was Jewish, 1870-1930. Where the latter title discusses Jewish enclaves in turn-of-the-century Harlem, Gurock’s more recent effort focuses on shifts in the neighborhood over time. The Jews of Harlem begins by focusing on the Stone family, who moved in 1870 from the Lower East Side to Harlem, where the Jewish community would serve as a greater customer base for their clothing store. This established Jewish community grew over the course of several decades, but Gurock explains that more and more Harlem Jews began moving north into the Bronx by 1917. Yet Jews have been returning to the neighborhood in greater numbers since the early 2000s, and Gurock explains how this second wave is reestablishing the Harlem Jewish community.
Online Jewish Book Council reviewer Edward Shapiro reported: “In a recent interview Gurock was asked to predict the future of Jews in Harlem. While Jews have returned to Harlem, he noted, ‘Judaism as a religion has been slow to come back to a community that once had hundreds of synagogues and educational and cultural institutions.’ The young ‘gentrifiers’ of Harlem, by and large, exhibit little interest in Judaism. Nevertheless, there are signs of a Jewish religious and cultural revival in Harlem with the establishment of the Harlem Minyan (2012), the Harlem Hebrew Language Academy Charter School (2013), and the Harlem Jewish Community Center (2016).” Praising the author’s insights in Publishers Weekly, a critic announced that The Jews of Harlem is “is a must-read for anyone interested in the history of American Judaism.” Rafael Madoff, writing on the Haaretz Web site, was also impressed, finding: “Harlem was fixed in the public imagination for so long as an impoverished, crime-ridden African-American enclave that the term ‘Jewish Harlem’ may still strike many people as an oxymoron. But Professor Jeffrey S. Gurock’s fascinating new book shows that Harlem was, not so long ago, home to a huge and influential Jewish community–and that a revival of sorts even may be in the offing.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, April, 1998, Mary Ellen Quinn, review of American Jewish History: A Bibliographical Guide, p. 1340.
Jewish Review of Books, fall, 2016, Jenna Weissman Joselit, review of The Jews of Harlem: The Rise, Decline, and Revival of a Jewish Community.
Library Journal, February 1, 1998, John A. Drobnicki, review of American Jewish History, p. 98; May 15, 2009, David B. Levy, review of Orthodox Jews in America, p. 77.
Publishers Weekly, July 2, 2012, review of Jews in Gotham: New York Jews in a Changing City, 1920-2010, p. 62; September 5, 2016, review of The Jews of Harlem, p. 69.
ONLINE
Haaretz, http://www.haaretz.com/ (November 13, 2016), Rafael Madoff, review of The Jews of Harlem.
Jeffrey Gurock Home Page, http://jeffreygurock.com (June 7, 2017).
Jewish Book Council Web site, http://www.jewishbookcouncil.org/ (June 7, 2017), Edward Shapiro, review of The Jews of Harlem.
Menorah Review, http://www.menorahreview.org/ (September 21, 2010), review of Orthodox Jews in America.
Religion Dispatches, http://religiondispatches.org/ (June 7, 2017), author profile.
Times Higher Education Online, https://www.timeshighereducation.com/ (May 14, 2015), Hasia R. Diner, review of The Holocaust Averted: An Alternate History of American Jewry, 1938-1967.
Times of Israel Online, http://www.timesofisrael.com/ (June 2, 2015), Renee Ghert-Zand, review of The Holocaust Averted.
Yeshiva University Web site, http://faculty.yu.edu/ (June 7, 2017), author profile.
Jeffrey Gurock
Jeffrey S. Gurock is Libby M. Klaperman Professor of Jewish History at Yeshiva University. A prize-winning author, he has written or edited fifteen books in American Jewish history. Gurock has served as chair of the Academic Council of the American Jewish Historical Society and as associate editor of American Jewish History. He lives with his family in the Riverdale section of the Bronx.
Jeffrey S. Gurock
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jeffrey S. Gurock is Libby M. Klaperman Professor of Jewish History at Yeshiva University. He has written over a dozen books in the field of American Jewish history and also served as associate editor to American Jewish History, the most important journal in that field, from 1982 to 2002. His work focuses on the American Orthodox community and the variations in Orthodox practice and ritual over the course of American Jewish history. His books include Orthodox Jews in America (Indiana University Press, 2009), a comprehensive social and cultural history of this group and its relations to other Jews and mainstream American society, and Jews in Gotham (New York University Press, 2012), which chronicles New York Jewry from 1920 to 2010.[1][2]
For its 135th annual gala in 2015, CCNY honored Dr. Gurock as one of its distinguished alumni
Welcome
Jeffrey S. Gurock is Libby M. Klaperman Professor of Jewish History at Yeshiva University. Gurock served from 1982-2002 as associate editor of AMERICAN JEWISH HISTORY, the leading academic journal in that field and was twice chair of the Academic Council of the American Jewish Historical Society. He is the author or editor of fifteen books. His works include A MODERN HERETIC AND A TRADITIONAL COMMUNITY: MORDECAI M. KAPLAN, ORTHODOXY AND AMERICAN JUDAISM (Columbia U. Press, 1997). In 1998, A MODERN HERETIC...was awarded the bi-annual Saul Viener Prize from the American Jewish Historical Society for the best book written in that field. Gurock's, ORTHODOX JEWS IN AMERICA (Indiana U. Press, 2009) was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award in the area of American Jewish Studies. His most recent study, JEWS IN GOTHAM:NEW YORK JEWS IN A CHANGING CITY, 1920-2010 (NYU Press, 2012) received the. Everett Family Foundation Award for the best non-fiction Jewish book of 2012 from the Jewish Book Council.
Contact Information:
Jeffrey S. Gurock, Ph.D.
Download Dr. Gurock's C.V. or as Adobe File
Libby M. Klaperman Professor of Jewish History
Yeshiva University
500 West 185th Street
New York, N.Y. 10033-3201
Tel: (212) 960-5251
Fax: (212) 960-0049
e-mail:gurock@yu.edu
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Print Marked Items
The Jews of Harlem: The Rise, Decline, and
Revival of a Jewish Community
Publishers Weekly.
263.36 (Sept. 5, 2016): p69.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Jews of Harlem: The Rise, Decline, and Revival of a Jewish Community
Jeffrey S. Gurock. New York Univ., $35 (320p)
ISBN 9781479801169
Gurock (Jews in Gotham), professor of Jewish history at Yeshiva University, comprehensively chronicles the shifting
fortunes of Harlem's oncebustling but now largely overlooked Jewish community. His story begins in 1870 as a
jewish family, the Stones, migrates from the Lower East Side to Harlem in search of a better consumer base for their
retail clothing business. The small group of Jews who began to settle in northern Manhattan proved to be the nucleus
for what became a substantial and diverse Jewish population over the next several decades. Gurock touches on every
aspect of Jewish lifeincluding politics, labor relations, religion, and interactions with gentile neighborsas he traces
the area's development. In 1917, many of the Harlem's Jews began moving further north into the Bronx, and soon the
exodus decimated the community. Far from being just a niche book, this wellwritten volume makes clear that the
Harlem Jewish community significantly influenced American Jewry as a whole. Gurock ends on a hopeful note, noting
how a new nucleus of committed Jews has formed in Harlem and begun to set up religious establishments there. This
is a mustread for anyone interested in the history of American Judaism. (Nov.)
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"The Jews of Harlem: The Rise, Decline, and Revival of a Jewish Community." Publishers Weekly, 5 Sept. 2016, p. 69.
General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA463513599&it=r&asid=0c4c030512e74d86851cbff70dce129b.
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New York City's Jewish community
Publishers Weekly.
259.27 (July 2, 2012): p62.
COPYRIGHT 2012 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
A threevolume history
City of Promise: A History of the Jews of New York Edited with a foreword by Deborah Dash Moore, visual essays by
Diana L. Linden. New York Univ., $99 3volume boxed set (1,108p) ISBN 9780814717318
Vol. 1: Haven of Liberty: New York Jews in the New World, 16541865 by Howard B. Rock
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Vol. 2: Emerging Metropolis: New York Jews in the Age of Immigration, 18401920 by Annie Polland and Daniel
Soyer
Vol. 3: Jews in Gotham: New York Jews in a Changing City, 19202010 by Jeffrey S. Gurock
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
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 EmanuEl, establishing charities and
settlement houses, department stores like Macy's, banks, labor unions, and Jewishowned general newspapers like the
New York Times. Gurock describes how, in the interwar years, 90% of tuitionfree CCNY's enrollment was Jewish,
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with Nobel laureates and poliovaccine 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 blackJewish relations.
Art historian Linden trains her gaze on artifacts like a colonial circumcision clip, certificates of manumission of
Jewishowned 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. (Sept.)
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"New York City's Jewish community." Publishers Weekly, 2 July 2012, p. 62. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA297137213&it=r&asid=283a4a9312f5db782c2f193119596cff.
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Gurock, Jeffrey S. Orthodox Jews in America
David B. Levy
Library Journal.
134.9 (May 15, 2009): p77.
COPYRIGHT 2009 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution
permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
Gurock, Jeffrey S. Orthodox Jews in America. Indiana Univ. 2009. c.400p, photogs. index. ISBN 9780253352910.
$65; pap. ISBN 9780253220608. $24.95. REL
Although there are many good books on the history of Jews in America and a smaller subset that focuses on aspects of
Orthodox Judaism in contemporary times, no one, until now, has written an overview of how Orthodoxy in America
has evolved over the centuries from the first arrivals in the 17th century to the present. This broad overview by Gurock
(Libby M. Klaperman Professor of Jewish History, Yeshiva Univ.; Judaism's Encounter with American Sports) is
distinctive in examining how Orthodox Jews have coped with the personal, familial, and communal challenges of
religious freedom, economic opportunity, and social integration, as well as uncovering historical reactionary tensions
to alternative Jewish movements in multicultural and pluralistic America. Gurock raises penetrating questions about
the compatibility of modern culture with pious practices and sensitively explores the relationship of feminism to
traditional Orthodox Judaism. There are several excellent reference sources on Orthodox Jews in America, e.g., Rabbi
Moshe D. Sherman's outstanding Orthodox Judaism in America: A Biographical Dictionary and Sourcebook, to which
this is an accessible and illuminating companion; recommended not only for serious readers on the topic but for
general readers as well.David B. Levy, Touro Coll. Women's Seminary Lib., Brooklyn, NY
Levy, David B.
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Levy, David B. "Gurock, Jeffrey S. Orthodox Jews in America." Library Journal, 15 May 2009, p. 77. General
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American Jewish History
Mary Ellen Quinn
Booklist.
94.15 (Apr. 1998): p1340.
COPYRIGHT 1998 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
Jews have been in America since 1654, but serious study of American Jewish history did not begin until the 1950s.
This set is a compilation of 211 articles written over the past 40 years by professional historians. Sponsored by the
American Jewish Historical Society, the set includes articles chosen to relate the history of American Jews to that of
other Americans or to that of Jews all over the world.
The work is divided into eight parts that appear in 13 volumes. The parts can be purchased separately. Each has its own
table of contents, index, and preface. There is no comprehensive index for the entire set. A general introduction to the
series by editor Gurock appears at the beginning of each part. The editor's choice of articles shows the changes in
Jewish historiography. Early writers attempt to document Jewish achievements and contributions to American life and
their loyalty to the country, while modern scholars are not afraid to examine all aspects of American Jewish life,
including loyalty to the British during the Revolutionary War, antiSemitism, and the American response to the
Holocaust. The articles are written by established scholars such as Charles Liebman, Jacob Neusner, Cecil Roth, and
Jonathan Sarna, as well as graduate students.
The eight parts are grouped by theme: colonial and early national period, 16541840; Central European Jews in
America, 18401880; East European Jews in America, 18801920; American Jewish life, 19201990; history of
Judaism in America; transplantations, transformations, and reconciliations; antiSemitism in America; America,
American Jews, and the Holocaust; and American Zionism.
The material here is interesting because it examines Jewish history within the context of developing American society.
The articles deal with issues such as how the different denominations of Judaism adapted to American life while
preserving their identities, as well as specific historical events like General Grant's Order no. 11, issued in 1862, which
banished Jews from Unionoccupied southern territories. The coverage of this is complete, with discussions of the
background, the Jewish response, and how Grant's supporters and enemies used the event. The wide range of issues
discussed in the set includes antiSemitism among the suffragettes, Jewishblack relations, the role of synagogue
sisterhoods, and the political and cultural impact of Zionism.
American Jewish History is a unique source. Unlike general works, such as the Encyclopedia Judaica, it covers a
single area in depth. Judaica and academic libraries will want to add it to their collections. Large public libraries where
there is interest and synagogue libraries with sufficient funds may want to consider adding all or part of the set.
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Quinn, Mary Ellen. "American Jewish History." Booklist, Apr. 1998, p. 1340. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA20505236&it=r&asid=24afb1bc20fe86adaf6d42cef930065d.
Accessed 13 May 2017.
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American Jewish History, 13 vols
Mary Ellen Quinn
Booklist.
94.15 (Apr. 1998): p1340.
COPYRIGHT 1998 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
Jews have been in America since 1654, but serious study of American Jewish history did not begin until the 1950s.
This set is a compilation of 211 articles written over the past 40 years by professional historians. Sponsored by the
American Jewish Historical Society, the set includes articles chosen to relate the history of American Jews to that of
other Americans or to that of Jews all over the world.
The work is divided into eight parts that appear in 13 volumes. The parts can be purchased separately. Each has its own
table of contents, index, and preface. There is no comprehensive index for the entire set. A general introduction to the
series by editor Gurock appears at the beginning of each part. The editor's choice of articles shows the changes in
Jewish historiography. Early writers attempt to document Jewish achievements and contributions to American life and
their loyalty to the country, while modern scholars are not afraid to examine all aspects of American Jewish life,
including loyalty to the British during the Revolutionary War, antiSemitism, and the American response to the
Holocaust. The articles are written by established scholars such as Charles Liebman, Jacob Neusner, Cecil Roth, and
Jonathan Sarna, as well as graduate students.
The eight parts are grouped by theme: colonial and early national period, 16541840; Central European Jews in
America, 18401880; East European Jews in America, 18801920; American Jewish life, 19201990; history of
Judaism in America; transplantations, transformations, and reconciliations; antiSemitism in America; America,
American Jews, and the Holocaust; and American Zionism.
The material here is interesting because it examines Jewish history within the context of developing American society.
The articles deal with issues such as how the different denominations of Judaism adapted to American life while
preserving their identities, as well as specific historical events like General Grant's Order no. 11, issued in 1862, which
banished Jews from Unionoccupied southern territories. The coverage of this is complete, with discussions of the
background, the Jewish response, and how Grant's supporters and enemies used the event. The wide range of issues
discussed in the set includes antiSemitism among the suffragettes, Jewishblack relations, the role of synagogue
sisterhoods, and the political and cultural impact of Zionism.
American Jewish History is a unique source. Unlike general works, such as the Encyclopedia Judaica, it covers a
single area in depth. Judaica and academic libraries will want to add it to their collections. Large public libraries where
there is interest and synagogue libraries with sufficient funds may want to consider adding all or part of the set.
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Quinn, Mary Ellen. "American Jewish History, 13 vols." Booklist, Apr. 1998, p. 1340. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA20505245&it=r&asid=b15de57bc13607b4feb079342cc05aaa.
Accessed 13 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A20505245
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American Jewish History, 8 vols
John A. Drobnicki
Library Journal.
123.2 (Feb. 1, 1998): p98.
COPYRIGHT 1998 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution
permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
8 vols. Routledge. 1998. c.5825p. permanent paper. ed. by Jeffrey S. Gurock. illus. index. ISBN 0415919339. $995.
HIST
This eightvolume set contains 211 journal articles and book chapters on Jewish life in America, most written during
the last 50 years. Eaclivolume has its own index and is separately titled, e.g., Central European Jews in America 1840
1880 and AntiSemitism in America. Other volumes deal with American Zionism, the history of Judaism in the United
States, and American Jewry's reaction to the Holocaust. Each article contains its original photographs and illustrations,
page numbering (with separate pagination for the individual volume), and typeface. All articles (except one in the
reviewer's galley copy) identify the original source, and footnotes/endnotes/bibliographies and cross references have
not been modified; thus, readers are sometimes referred to an article "below" that is not included. This set is sponsored
by the American Jewish Historical Society, of which editor Gurock is chair, and nearly half of the articles originated
from one of the society's own journals. Thus, most Judaica collections as well as many large academic and public
libraries already own much of this material, although it would not be as easily accessible by subject. This expensive set
is recommended for libraries that want to dramatically upgrade their collection with one purchase. Most libraries
would want to purchase individual volumes to supplement part of their collections.
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Drobnicki, John A. "American Jewish History, 8 vols." Library Journal, 1 Feb. 1998, p. 98. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA20302385&it=r&asid=e5c3ca4c6c6524d12c5558682f088415.
Accessed 13 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A20302385
The Jews of Harlem
Jeffrey S. Gurock
10
New York University Press 2016
293 Pages $35.00
ISBN: 978-1-47980-1169
amazon indiebound
barnesandnoble
Review by Edward Shapiro
Jeffrey S. Gurock has had a long relationship with Harlem. His paternal grandparents, immigrants from Gomel in White Russia, arrived in America in 1905 and settled in Harlem. At that time Harlem contained the third largest Jewish community in the world, surpassed only by Warsaw and the Lower East Side of New York City, and was a stepping stone for Jews able to escape the slums. Gurock’s family moved during the early 1930s from Harlem to the Bronx, another step up the economic and social ladder, where he was born, raised, and still lives. He graduated from the City University of New York, the “Jewish Harvard,” and then went on to Columbia University for graduate work in American history.
At Columbia he fell under the influence of three prominent historians: the urban historian Kenneth S. Jackson, the social historian David Rothman, and the Jewish historian Naomi W. Cohen. One can see Harlem from the campus of Columbia, and tensions between blacks and Jews were rife during the 1960s when it came time for Gurock to choose a dissertation topic. And so it is not surprising that he chose to investigate the Harlem Jewish community during its heyday. He followed the advice of Jackson to focus not on Harlem elites, but to concentrate on the interaction between ordinary blacks and Jews, to write history “from the ground up” as it was described then. The dissertation, after suitable revision, became Gurock’s first book: When Harlem Was Jewish, 1870-1930 (Columbia University Press, 1979). This was the beginning of a career that would soon catapult him into the highest ranks of American Jewish historians. Since 1979, he has written or edited seventeen additional books and authored many scholarly articles on a diverse group of topics, including Jews in sports, the theologian Mordecai Kaplan, and Yeshiva University, his home institution, where he has a chair in American Jewish history. Gurock has become the most important and prolific contemporary historian of New York’s Jews and the unquestioned authority on the history of American Orthodoxy.
Now, after a forty-year hiatus, he has returned to his first interest, to see what has happened to Harlem and its Jewish residents since 1930. One of the factors prompting Gurock to take a second look at the area has been the recent economic revival of New York City in general and of Harlem in particular. During the past couple of decades the city has experienced a startling turnabout from the dark days of the 1960s and 1970s when arson and abandonment had depleted the city’s housing stock and the crack cocaine epidemic had made some of the city’s neighborhoods virtually unlivable. By the 1970s, Harlem’s population had declined by more than 30%. Since then the city has experienced a near-miraculous recovery. Its population has increased, neighborhoods once considered slums have been gentrified, real estate prices have skyrocketed, its cultural institutions have become even more important, tourism has increased, its streets are safer, and its universities have become more attractive to out-of-state students. This has occurred despite the collapse of manufacturing in the city, most notably the garment industry.
Harlem has been a beneficiary of this renewal, and whites, including Jews, have moved back into the area, attracted by real estate prices lower than in other parts of Manhattan and by the area’s proximity via the subway system to midtown and Wall Street. Some blacks justifiably fear that the less affluent are being pushed out of Harlem, and that its future as the cultural capital of black America is endangered. Today, Gurock notes, “there are more whites than African Americans in Harlem,” and the largest group in Harlem are Latinos, primarily Puerto Ricans. (The same phenomenon of whites moving into black neighborhoods has also occurred in Brooklyn, and has resulted in the same complaints.)
Much of the rise and decline of Harlem’s Jewish community covers events and personalities discussed in When Harlem Was Jewish. At the turn of the twentieth century, Jews comprised the largest ethnic group in Harlem. By the 1920s, however, there were clear signs that the future of the Jewish community was bleak. This was due to many factors, including immigration legislation of the 1920s drastically limiting Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe, the migration of blacks from the South into Harlem after World War I, a boom in residential construction throughout the city, a decline in the number of the city’s neighborhoods restricting Jewish settlement, and Jewish upward economic mobility. Not predicted was the rapidity of this hollowing out of Harlem’s Jewish population. Between 1923 and 1925 it shrunk from 160,000 to 123,000, a decline of over twenty percent. Two years later Harlem had only 88,000 Jewish residents, and in 1930 less than six thousand. By then, Gurock writes, “the era of Jewish residential life in Harlem was well-nigh over.” Blacks occupied the apartments deserted by the Jews, and by 1930 there were 165,000 blacks living in Harlem, most of them poor.
The “revival” period is covered in the concluding sixty pages of The Jews of Harlem. This is the least satisfying part of the book because the presence of Jews in Harlem during the last eighty-five years has been sporadic and sparse. Thus Gurock devotes three pages to Al Jolson, who grew up in Washington, D.C. and whose only relationship to Harlem was as an entertainer. The Great Depression is barely discussed, and there is no mention at all of World War II, despite its important social impact.
Gurock believes approximately seven thousand Jews now reside in Harlem, largely in the same areas where the more affluent Jews lived a century ago. In a recent interview Gurock was asked to predict the future of Jews in Harlem. While Jews have returned to Harlem, he noted, “Judaism as a religion has been slow to come back to a community that once had hundreds of synagogues and educational and cultural institutions.” The young “gentrifiers” of Harlem, by and large, exhibit little interest in Judaism. Nevertheless, there are signs of a Jewish religious and cultural revival in Harlem with the establishment of the Harlem Minyan (2012), the Harlem Hebrew Language Academy Charter School (2013), and the Harlem Jewish Community Center (2016). “It’s only the beginning,” Gurock said. “Let’s see what happens.” The move of middle-class blacks and whites, including Jews, into Harlem and the displacement of poor blacks reminds us that New York City, and Harlem in particular, “is ultimately a work in progress.”
REVIEWS
Harlem on His Mind
By Jenna Weissman Joselit | Fall 2016
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The Jews of Harlem: The Rise, Decline, and Revival of a Jewish Community
by Jeffrey S. Gurock
NYU Press, 320 pp., $35
There is nothing quite like a controversial exhibition to draw a crowd, generate headlines, and foment anxiety. Harlem on My Mind: Cultural Capital of Black America, 1900–1968, the ambitious blockbuster of a show mounted by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 1969, accomplished all that—and then some. Ask any curator which exhibition has stood the test of time as a touchstone of cultural politics, a cautionary tale of what can go wrong, and the answer, invariably, is Harlem on My Mind.
Intended to “create an awareness that didn’t exist,” the exhibition drew on the latest technological innovations to bring Harlem to life. Seven hundred images of its residents going about their daily business, culled from the file cabinets of James Van Der Zee, a longtime Harlem photographer, were projected at a fast clip; an equal number of large-scale photographic murals—today de rigueur, back then an arresting novelty—hung on the walls. To heighten the effect of what Allon Schoener, the show’s curator, described as “electronic theater,” music was piped into the galleries, creating a “dynamic, pulsating environment.”
Cards and Dominos in the Smoking Room, the Hebrew Home for the Aged, Harlem, ca. late 1890s. (Courtesy of the The New York Public Library, Art and Picture Collection.)
Cards and Dominos in the Smoking Room, the Hebrew Home for the Aged, Harlem, ca. late 1890s. (Courtesy of The New York Public Library, Art and Picture Collection.)
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About the Author
Jenna Weissman Joselit is the Charles E. Smith Professor of Judaic Studies and Professor of History at The George Washington University. Her latest book, Set in Stone: America’s Embrace of the Ten Commandments (Oxford University Press), will be published next spring.
Harlem Jews: The Pioneers, the Runaways, the Returnees
By the 1920s, only a small remnant of Harlem’s Jews remained.
By Rafael Medoff Nov 13, 2016
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Exploring Harlem’s forgotten ‘Little Jerusalem’
Understanding America's ghettos starts with the first Jewish one
Book charts journey from African-American to Hebrew Israelite
“The Jews of Harlem: The Rise, Decline, and Revival of a Jewish Community,” by Jeffrey S. Gurock, New York University Press, 320 pp., $35.
Harlem was fixed in the public imagination for so long as an impoverished, crime-ridden African-American enclave that the term “Jewish Harlem” may still strike many people as an oxymoron. But Professor Jeffrey S. Gurock’s fascinating new book shows that Harlem was, not so long ago, home to a huge and influential Jewish community – and that a revival of sorts even may be in the offing.
Helpfully putting a human face on a nearly 150-year-old story, Gurock traces Harlem’s first Jewish influx through the experiences of one representative Jewish couple, Israel and Emma Stone. Extreme congestion on the Lower East Side in the 1860s-‘70s began pushing some Jews uptown, to the area around 125th Street. The absence of efficient public transportation made commuting from Harlem to the Lower East Side impractical, so when Israel Stone was ready to open his first retail clothing store, he decided to situate it in that up-and-coming northern neighborhood, and settled his family there as well.
The cover of 'The Jews of Harlem'. NYU Press
The Stones may not have realized it, but they were following “a well-trod pattern” that reflected “the larger American Jewish narrative at the time.” Jewish peddlers roamed the American South and Midwest, serving outlying Jewish communities and helping to build those communities by opening stores there.
Much of what happened in Jewish Harlem’s formative period likewise mirrored trends in the broader American Jewish experience. Religious life was initiated from the ground up. The community’s first synagogue, Congregation Hand in Hand, at first had no rabbi; services were conducted by educated laypeople, in space rented from the Harlem Savings Bank. The decision by this nominally Orthodox congregation to have mixed-gender seating was “architecturally determined rather than theologically ordained,” Gurock notes. As the synagogue board minutes put it, they “did not send the women to the gallery for the reason that there was no gallery.” In the years to follow, the synagogue’s increased religious liberalization, such as the introduction of an organ, prompted not one but two breakaway congregations.
Gurock, arguably the finest historian of New York Jewry, ably mines federal census records to fill in gaps left by the dearth of Stone family correspondence. He discovers, for example, that at a certain point, the Stones had a live-in servant, an Irish immigrant named Mary Egan – a sure sign of the family’s economic rise, something that many Jews in Harlem were experiencing. (The records also reveal, at least implicitly, an apparent tragedy in the family: Gurock notes the absence from a later census of the family’s youngest daughter, indicating that she died before reaching the age of 11.)
116th Street today. Jewish Communal Register of NYC; Yeshiva University; N.Y. Public Library.
Socialists and synagogues
The first great population boom in Harlem was prompted, not surprisingly, by the opening, in 1879, of an elevated subway line connecting the area to midtown and southern Manhattan. Harlem increasingly became a much-coveted address for New York’s Jewish upper crust. Among the neighborhood’s many well-to-do Jewish residents were the Sulzbergers, the family that owned the New York Times, and Benjamin Peixotto, President Ulysses S. Grant’s ambassador to Romania.
The impending introduction of additional subway lines reaching Harlem in the 1890s spurred the massive construction of cheap tenement housing. This happened to coincide with the arrival of huge numbers of Eastern European Jews who were fleeing pogroms and discrimination. Now Russian and Polish Jews began moving into Harlem in significant numbers, diversifying the neighborhood’s ethnic and economic profile. By the turn of the century, Harlem Jewry numbered more than 75,000, and by 1917, Harlem was the second largest Jewish community in the United States, after the Lower East Side.
Grumbling about the ‘all rightniks’
Among the newest settlers were more than a few Jewish socialists, who were soon pamphleteering, delivering impassioned speeches on street corner soapboxes and grumbling loudly about the “all rightnik” Jews with their “fancy French doors” and “sinks with constant cold and hot water.” The more doctrinaire Jewish radicals set up a Socialist Sunday School, intending to imbue youngsters with Marxist ideas in the language of their new country – not in Yiddish, which they regarded as an unacceptable form of “Jewish separatism.” That did not sit well with many of the parents, who wanted their children to be reared in a milieu of Yiddish language and culture along with their socialism. The ideologues had no choice but to bend to reality.
Harlem’s Jewish socialist politicians, too, came to understand the importance of accommodating their constituents’ deep concern about limits on immigration. Jewish socialist congressional candidates in New York City, adhering to the party line, initially opposed unrestricted immigration, thus alienating many Jewish voters. A socialist, Meyer London, was finally elected to Congress from the Lower East Side in 1914, after tailoring his platform to appeal to Jewish concerns. Jewish socialists in Harlem tried to duplicate his success in 1916; their candidate, Morris Hillquit, who had previously opposed open immigration, changed his position and came within a whisker of victory.
Jeffrey Gurock: Students at the Uptown Talmud Torah, circa 1917 (The Jewish Communal Register of New York City, 1917-1918). Jewish Communal Register of NYC; Yeshiva University; N.Y. Public Library.
Harlem’s revival
By the 1920s, only a small remnant of Harlem’s Jews remained. Most interaction between blacks and Jews in Harlem thereafter involved Jewish department store owners who did not hire many African-Americans, and Jewish suburban housewives who hired black nannies and day laborers. Not surprisingly, such relationships fostered resentment in the black community. On the other hand, Gurock notes, there were Jewish activists in Harlem who fought against local segregation, and Harlem Jewish music hall owners whose establishments, such as the famous Apollo Theater, helped promote the careers of such legendary performers as Lionel Hampton, Louis Armstrong and the Rhythm Kings. “Jewish musical entrepreneurship was unquestionably a vehicle for African-American composers and artists to have their songs published and performed before audiences both within and without Harlem,” Gurock writes.
There were also famous Jewish entertainers, such as Sophie Tucker (who billed herself as “the last of the red hot mamas”), Al Jolson and George Gershwin, who got their start in the legendary Harlem nightclub scene of the 1920s-‘30s. But after the Harlem riots of 1935 – triggered by a police shooting of an African-American teenager – the phenomenon of “white fun seekers” who went “slumming” uptown came to an end. Many of the shopkeepers who were victimized by the rioters were Jews, but Gurock finds no evidence they were targeted because they were Jews.
After many decades of deterioration, Harlem in recent years has begun to experience something of a revival. The gentrification of some neighborhoods has attracted an influx of middle-class African-Americans, funding from the federal government has accelerated new development and Bill Clinton set up his post-presidential offices on 125th Street, an important expression of confidence in the area’s rejuvenation.
As nearby Jewish neighborhoods have become crowded and expensive, small numbers of Jews have made their way to Harlem and a concerted effort is underway to attract the younger generation. In addition to Harlem’s Chabad House, there is an egalitarian prayer group known as the Harlem Minyan, which advertises that “breastfeeding is permitted and welcome.” Parents interested in Hebrew language and culture (in a non-religious atmosphere) will no doubt take an interest in the Harlem Hebrew Language Academy Charter School, now in its third year. The recent extension of the Manhattan eruv to encompass Harlem is likely to help attract young Orthodox families. While Gurock cautions that this is all very much “a work in progress,” one cannot help but imagine that the right combination of circumstances could indeed generate a substantial Jewish return to Harlem in our own time.
read more: http://www.haaretz.com/jewish/books/.premium-1.752941
The Holocaust Averted: An Alternate History of American Jewry, 1938-1967, by Jeffrey Gurock
A counterfactual imagining of a fateful meeting in Munich raises some interesting possibilities, says Hasia R. Diner, but is it history?
May 14, 2015
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Philip Roth did it and so did Quentin Tarantino. In his 2004 novel The Plot Against America, Roth projected an alternative past in which pro-Nazi sentiment gripped the US, catapulting Charles Lindbergh to the White House and American Jews to relocation camps. In his 2009 film Inglourious Basterds, Tarantino asked moviegoers to suspend everything they knew about actual events as he depicted the successful assassination of Adolf Hitler by a group of Jewish commandos.
If Roth and Tarantino could rewrite the past, why not allow the historian – in this case Yeshiva University scholar Jeffrey Gurock – to play with facts and offer, with many of the trappings of scholarship, an imagined history? This book’s conceit pivots on a “could have” or a “might have” as it recasts the events that transpired in Munich in September 1938. In the meeting that took place in the Bavarian city, with Hitler and Mussolini on one side and Britain’s Neville Chamberlain and France’s Édouard Daladier on the other, the fate of Czechoslovakia was decided. Chamberlain and Daladier agreed to Germany’s request to annex those areas of the newly cobbled together nation that contained substantial German populations. France and England hoped that giving Germany the Sudetenland, itself a recently coined term, would deter or delay the outbreak of a war like the one that ended in 1918, and with the consequences of which the continent still grappled.
The Munich conference, subsequently considered synonymous with appeasement and the unwillingness of democracies to challenge totalitarian bullies, has long served as a rallying cry in US politics and a justification for military action. But in The Holocaust Averted, the September 1938 gathering in Munich ended very differently. At Gurock’s Munich, Chamberlain refused to give in to fear of war or the recognition that the UK had few arms or men in uniform. He stood up to Hitler, and refused to hand over substantial chunks of Czechoslovakia to Germany, preferring to go into battle rather than embolden the dictator of Berlin. Britain and France eschewed “peace in our time” and immediately took up arms to fight Germany, a decision that, according to this history as fantasy, set an entire course of events in motion, starting with the “fact” that Germany did not invade Poland the following year, the 6 million Jews who perished in the Holocaust, whether by disease, starvation, gassing or bullets, instead lived, and from their lives, as opposed to their deaths, the rest of Jewish and world history took its shape. Gurock spins his fantasy well into the 1960s, on the premise that without Munich then no Holocaust and without the Holocaust all subsequent events would have been utterly different.
The problem with The Holocaust Averted, as with all works that hinge on “what if”, is that the historian, the servant of evidence, has no obligation to construct an analysis that adheres to the facts. The historian as fabulist has no standard as to what might have been reasonable and what not. The counter-historian need not be troubled by evidence, and so any scenario can be considered as plausible as any other. Roth and Tarantino had none of the obligations of a historian. They had licence. Gurock does not.
The Holocaust Averted: An Alternate History of American Jewry, 1938-1967
By Jeffrey Gurock
Rutgers University Press, 320pp, £29.95
ISBN 9780813572376 and 2390 (e-book)
Published 30 April 2015
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What if the Holocaust had never happened?In his new counterfactual history, Jeffrey S. Gurock shows how WWII had positive consequences for the Jews… of AmericaBY RENEE GHERT-ZAND June 2, 2015, 5:22 pm 41
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Dr. Jeffrey S. Gurock's 'The Holocaust Averted' is a counterfactual history. (Courtesy Yeshiva University)WRITERSRenee Ghert-Zand
Renee Ghert-Zand
Renee Ghert-Zand is a reporter and feature writer for The Times of Israel.
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‘Things could have been much worse had the cataclysm of the Holocaust not happened,” said Dr. Jeffrey S. Gurock recently over lunch at a Jerusalem café.
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A statement like this is hard to swallow if you don’t realize that his new book, “The Holocaust Averted: An Alternate History of American Jewry, 1938-1967,” deals with counterfactual history, a speculative exploration of what-ifs, and the author is in no way dismissive of the murder of six million Jews at the hands of the Nazis.
What Gurock demonstrates in his book is that World War II was a major turning point in American Jewish history, and that many positive things came out of it for American Jews as well as for US-Israel relations. Had key moments in the run-up to and during the course of the war played out differently, the Holocaust may not have happened. Gurock posits that instead, Jews in America would have had to “run for cover.” They would have had to assume—and maintain—a low profile, never achieving the level of empowerment and agency that we associate with American Jews today.
This is the first time that Gurock, a professor of Jewish history at Yeshiva University and author and editor of 14 books, including “Orthodox Jews in America” and “Jews in Gotham: New York Jews And Their Changing City,” has tried his hand at counterfactual history. “It is, at the very root, the idea of conjecturing on what did not happen, or what might have happened, in order to understand what did happen,” wrote Jeremy Black and Donald M. MacRaild in their study guide, “Studying History.”
“I’m going out on a limb in a way, but people won’t saw it off,” said Gurock. “I’m emphasizing turning points in history, and I am using primary sources and important secondary sources.”
Cover of "The Holocaust Averted" by Jeffrey S. Gurock. (Courtesy of Rutgers University Press)
Cover of “The Holocaust Averted” by Jeffrey S. Gurock. (Courtesy of Rutgers University Press)
Gurock is not the only Jewish historian pursuing counterfactual history. Gavriel D. Rosenfeld, a professor at Fairfield University, whose specialization is the history and memory of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, administers the Counterfactual History Review blog and is editing a forthcoming book titled “What Ifs of Jewish History.” In addition, several counterfactual history panels were offered at the Association for Jewish Studies Conference in Boston in December 2013.
The idea for “The Holocaust Averted” came to Gurock when he and his wife were visiting the old Jewish quarter of Krakow, Poland, six years ago. The fact that much Jewish culture was all around them, but that Jews were nowhere to be seen, struck a deep chord for Gurock. He started to wonder what Jewish life would have been like in present-day Krakow had the Holocaust not taken place and the Jews of the city been virtually wiped out.
When the author came across an article by a WWII military scholar about how the remilitarization of Germany gained crucial strength between 1938 and 1939, he realized that had Germany gone to war a year earlier than it actually had, things might have turned out differently for European Jewry—and consequently also for Jews in America and what was then Mandatory Palestine.
Accordingly, Gurock’s alternate WWII history starts with British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain refusing to appease Germany’s Hitler in Munich in September 1938. In this alternate scenario, Germany ends up starting the war in Europe a year earlier, with its forces facing stiff opposition from the Czechs.
Gurock, relying on historical sources, presents many other key WWII events as taking place differently than they really did. For instance, an account of a meeting of Japanese leaders shows that some of them were firmly opposed to bombing Pearl Harbor. The author has these voices prevailing, and offers readers a striking image of American sailors sunning themselves on the deck of the USS Arizona on December 7, 1941.
From left to right: Chamberlain, Daladier, Hitler, Mussolini, and Ciano pictured before signing the Munich Agreement, which gave the Sudetenland to Germany. (photo credit: German Federal Archives / Wikipedia)
From left to right: Chamberlain, Daladier, Hitler, Mussolini, and Ciano pictured before signing the Munich Agreement, which gave the Sudetenland to Germany. (photo credit: German Federal Archives / Wikipedia)
In “The Holocaust Averted,” Hitler is assassinated and Franklin D. Roosevelt does not serve a third term as US president and is succeeded by the staunch non-interventionist Robert A. Taft. The Jews of Germany suffer under Nazism, but with Hitler’s army suffering major defeats, the horrors of the Holocaust never come about and European Jewish communities stay intact. With the Jews of Europe relatively safe, American Jews never become enthusiastic about Zionism. Without American Jews having served in the US military during WWII (since in Gurock’s alternate history the US never enters the war), they never fully enter American society and stay on the margins due to social anti-Semitism carried over from earlier decades of the 20th century.
Dr. Shalom Salomon Wald, author of the recently published “Rise and Decline of Civilizations: Lessons for the Jewish People” told The Times of Israel he believes doing counterfactual history like this is worthwhile, but with limits. Wald’s book, while not focused on speculative history, does has a chapter on the impact of fortune and chance events on history.
When asked what he thought the Jewish world would be like today had the Holocaust not happened, Wald answered that he was quite sure the State of Israel would not have been created. (In Gurock’s book, Israel exists, but it is less powerful and less allied to the US as is in reality).
“There would be no State of Israel, only a strong Jewish community in the Land of Israel,” Wald said. “I’m a Zionist, so it is not easy for me to say that.”
Dr. Shalom Salomon Wald (Barry Geltman/JPPI)
Dr. Shalom Salomon Wald (Barry Geltman/JPPI)
According to Wald, in the absence of the Holocaust, there would have been only about 100,000 Jewish refugees after WWII. The Bundists would have been the strongest faction among the Jews, but the Zionists would have still pushed for a Jewish state, which Wald said might have been established eventually. He also posited that there would be more anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe today than there actually is, and that the global distribution of Jews (which he estimates would have reached 28-32 million by now) would have been much different from what it is today, with Spanish possibly being spoken by the majority of Jews.
While historians look back in history to understand what happened (or in the case of counterfactual history, what did not, or could have, happened) Gurock said the ultimate purpose of “The Holocaust Averted” is to get American Jews to think about their present and future.
“The book teaches important lessons about the post-war and contemporary Jewish condition. It emphasizes what WWII meant for Jewish empowerment and Jewish activism,” he said.
“No matter what anyone may think about [US President] Obama’s relations with Israel, there has never been an explicitly anti-Zionist US president. We’ve never faced the challenge of supporting Israel as outsiders in America,” he added.
The America presented in Gurock’s alternate history is a non-pluralistic one. It’s an America in which the price of acceptance is to give up one’s Jewishness.
“The challenge for American Jews now is not the survival of Jews, but rather the survival of Judaism,” Gurock said 70 years after the end of the Holocaust.
“In real life, you have a choice of affirming your Jewishness in an America that accepts you, or of discarding it.”
Orthodox Jews in America by Jeffrey S. Gurock
Bloomington: Indiana University Press
The author has penned the first social history of Orthodox Jews in America from the first arrivals in the 17th century to the present. He examines how Orthodox men and women have coped with the personal, familial, and communal challenges of religious freedom, economic opportunity, and social integration. His riveting narrative depicts lifestyles of Orthodox Jews and uncovers the historical tensions that have pitted the pious against the majority of their co-religionists who have disregarded Orthodox teachings and practice. Exploring Orthodox reactions to alternative Jewish religious movements that have flourished in a pluralistic America, he illuminates controversies about the compatibility of modern culture with a truly pious life, thus providing a nuanced view of the most intriguing present-day intra-Orthodox struggle – the relationship of feminism to traditional faith.