To the Golden Cities: Pursuing the American Jewish Dream in Miami and L.A. is an April 1994 book written by Deborah Dash Moore and published by The Free Press. It discusses the Jewish communities that formed in Los Angeles and Miami in the post-World War II period. Moore argued that the migration to new communities helped American Jews find their identities and that they "reinvented" themselves. [1]
Jenna Weissman Joselit of the New York University Department of Liberal Studies described Moore as "one of this generation's foremost historians of America's Jews". [2] At the time of publication Moore was Vassar College's American culture program director. [3]
Moore characterizes Jews who moved into newly established cities; which had a lack of established culture and tradition, mild climates, and lifestyles perceived as being casual; as "permanent tourists". [4] The references include monographs and interviews. [5]
Raymond A. Mohl of American Jewish History wrote that the oral history and archival research supporting the book serves as its "great strength". [6] Carol R. Glatt of the Veterans Affairs Medical Center Library, Philadelphia wrote that the book's documentation was "solid". [4]
The book covers the post-World War II period up until the early 1960s. [3]
Stephen J. Whitfield of Brandeis University stated that the book focuses more on similarities between Los Angeles and Miami rather than differences; he argued that "southern regionalists" may dispute the technique, but that "her approach is compelling when framed within Jewish history". [7]
Joselit wrote that Moore emphasizes that "the Jewish historical experience, from Minsk to Miami, is grounded less in the particularities of place-in the "style of the landscape"-than in its promise" and that "the sense of possibility" appears throughout the work. [8]
Moore stated that Jewish culture continued to thrive in Los Angeles and Miami even though some individuals decades earlier predicted it would evaporate, and therefore she argued that Jewish culture will continue to be intact. [9]
Glatt wrote that the book had a "fluid, readable style" and that "This seminal work will be widely read." [4]
Joselit wrote that much of the phenomena described in the book "have as much to do with postwar America more generally than with the specific geographical contours of Miami and Los Angeles". [10]
Mohl wrote that To the Golden Cities was overall "an excellent book, deeply researched and extremely readable", but he took issue with the book's central thesis that the new Jewish society formed in Miami and Los Angeles, arguing that it also could have formed in suburbs of older cities and that social and political movements divided Jews in the North, not only in the South. [11]
Eugene Patron of The Forward wrote that the book "for the most part [...] is an engaging exploration of what has been an untold story" although "an overload of details" sometimes "bogs down" the book. [3]
June Sochen of the Northeastern Illinois University Department of History wrote that "has done a fine job of synthesizing" its sources "to produce the first important analysis of this migration" and that the book "will be the foundation upon which future studies of the subject are built." [5]
Whitfield stated that the book was "the best social history of Miami Jewry" because To The Golden Cities "is also the only serious history of that community" and therefore giving this distinction would be "faint praise". [7] Whitfield praised the "clear and unobtrusive" design and prose and the research undertaken, but he argued that the phenomena happening in Miami and Los Angeles also happened in the north and that the events reflect broader Jewish history rather than specific histories of the U.S. Sunbelt. [12]
The Khazars were a semi-nomadic Turkic people that in the late 6th-century AD established a major commercial empire covering the southeastern section of modern European Russia, southern Ukraine, Crimea, and Kazakhstan. They created what for its duration was the most powerful polity to emerge from the break-up of the Western Turkic Khaganate. Astride a major artery of commerce between Eastern Europe and Southwestern Asia, Khazaria became one of the foremost trading empires of the early medieval world, commanding the western marches of the Silk Road and playing a key commercial role as a crossroad between China, the Middle East and Kievan Rus'. For some three centuries the Khazars dominated the vast area extending from the Volga-Don steppes to the eastern Crimea and the northern Caucasus.
Dennis Mark Prager is an American conservative radio talk show host and writer. He is the host of the nationally syndicated radio talk show The Dennis Prager Show. In 2009, he co-founded PragerU, which creates five-minute videos from an American conservative perspective.
There have been Jewish communities in the United States since colonial times. Early Jewish communities were primarily Sephardi, composed of immigrants from Brazil and merchants who settled in cities. Until the 1830s, the Jewish community of Charleston, South Carolina, was the largest in North America. In the late 1800s and the beginning of the 1900s, many Jewish immigrants arrived from Europe. For example, many German Jews arrived in the middle of the 19th century, established clothing stores in towns across the country, formed Reform synagogues, and were active in banking in New York. Immigration of Eastern Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazi Jews, in 1880–1914, brought a large, poor, traditional element to New York City. They were Orthodox or Conservative in religion. They founded the Zionist movement in the United States, and were active supporters of the Socialist party and labor unions. Economically, they concentrated in the garment industry.
American Jews or Jewish Americans are American citizens who are Jewish, whether by religion, ethnicity, culture, or nationality. Today the Jewish community in the United States consists primarily of Ashkenazi Jews, who descend from diaspora Jewish populations of Central and Eastern Europe and comprise about 90–95% of the American Jewish population.
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The First Roumanian-American Congregation, also known as Congregation Shaarey Shomayim, or the Roumanishe Shul, was an Orthodox Jewish congregation that, for over 100 years, occupied a historic building at 89–93 Rivington Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, New York.
Jewish-American organized crime initially emerged within the American Jewish community during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It has been referred to variously in media and popular culture as the Jewish Mob, Jewish Mafia, Kosher Mob, Kosher Mafia, and Kosher Nostra or Undzer Shtik. The last two of these terms are direct references to the Italian Cosa Nostra; the former is a play on the word for kosher, referring to Jewish dietary laws, while the latter is a direct translation of the Italian phrase Cosa Nostra into Yiddish, which was at the time the predominant language of the Jewish diaspora in the United States.
Gail Parent is an American television screenwriter, television producer, and author.
Deborah Dash Moore 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.
Doron Ben-Atar is an Israeli-born American historian and playwright. He is a professor of history at Fordham University in New York City.
An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood is a 1988 non-fiction book whose topic is the careers of several prominent Jewish film producers in the early years of Hollywood. Author Neal Gabler focuses on the psychological motivations of these film moguls, arguing that their background as Jewish immigrants shaped their careers and influenced the movies they made.
Stephen Wise Temple is a large Reform Jewish congregation in the Bel Air neighborhood of Los Angeles, California. Founded in 1964 by the late Rabbi Isaiah Zeldin, with 35 families, the congregation grew rapidly. At various times in its history it has been stated to be the largest, or one of the largest, Jewish congregations in the world, at one time having a membership of about 3,000 families, six rabbis, two cantors and two cantorial interns, and four schools on three campuses. As of 1994 it was the second-largest synagogue in the United States. The community was founded as the Stephen S. Wise Temple. In 2014 it was renamed the Stephen Wise Temple.
The following is a timeline of the history of the city of Miami in Miami-Dade County, Florida, United States.
The Khazar hypothesis of Ashkenazi ancestry, often called the Khazar myth by its critics, is a largely abandoned historical hypothesis. The hypothesis postulated that Ashkenazi Jews were primarily, or to a large extent, descended from Khazars, a multi-ethnic conglomerate of mostly Turkic peoples who formed a semi-nomadic khanate in and around the northern and central Caucasus and the Pontic–Caspian steppe. The hypothesis also postulated that after collapse of the Khazar empire, the Khazars fled to Eastern Europe and made up a large part of the Jews there. The hypothesis draws on some medieval sources such as the Khazar Correspondence, according to which at some point in the 8th–9th centuries, a small number of Khazars were said by Judah Halevi and Abraham ibn Daud to have converted to Rabbinic Judaism. The scope of the conversion within the Khazar Khanate remains uncertain, but the evidence used to tie the Ashkenazi communities to the Khazars is meager and subject to conflicting interpretations.
Jews in Los Angeles comprise approximately 17.5 percent of the city's population, and 7% of the county's population, making the Jewish community the largest in the world outside of New York City and Israel. As of 2015, over 700,000 Jews live in the County of Los Angeles, and 1.232 million Jews live in California overall. Jews have immigrated to Los Angeles since it was part of the Mexican state of Alta California, but most notably beginning at the end of the 19th century to the present day. The Jewish population rose from about 2,500 in 1900 to at least 700,000 in 2015. The large Jewish population has led to a significant impact on the culture of Los Angeles. The Jewish population of Los Angeles has seen a sharp increase in the past several decades, owing to internal migration of Jews from the East Coast, as well as immigration from Israel, France, the former Soviet Union, the UK, South Africa, and Latin America, and also due to the high birth rate of the Hasidic and Orthodox communities who comprise about 10% of the community's population.
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John Howard Moore was an American zoologist, philosopher, educator, humanitarian and socialist. He is considered to be an early, yet neglected, proponent of animal rights and ethical vegetarianism, and was a leading figure in the American humanitarian movement. Moore was a prolific writer, authoring numerous articles, books, essays, pamphlets on topics including animal rights, education, ethics, evolutionary biology, humanitarianism, socialism, temperance, utilitarianism and vegetarianism. He also lectured on many of these subjects and was widely regarded as a talented orator, earning the name the "silver tongue of Kansas" for his lectures on prohibition.
The New Ethics is a 1907 book by the American zoologist and philosopher J. Howard Moore, in which he advocates for a form of ethics, that he calls the New Ethics, which applies the principle of the Golden Rule—treat others as you would want to be treated yourself—to all sentient beings. It expands on the ideas espoused in his 1906 book, The Universal Kinship.