About Deborah Dash Moore

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 of several books, including GI Jews: How World War II Changed a Generation.

Jewish New York: The Remarkable Story of a City and a People

The definitive history of Jews in New York and how they transformed the city. Jewish New York reveals the multifaceted world of one of the city’s most important ethnic and religious groups.

Jewish immigrants changed New York. They built its clothing industry and constructed huge swaths of apartment buildings. New York Jews helped to make the city the center of the nation’s publishing industry and shaped popular culture in music, theater, and the arts. With a strong sense of social justice, a dedication to civil rights and civil liberties, and a belief in the duty of government to provide social welfare for all its citizens, New York Jews influenced the city, state, and nation with a new wave of social activism.

In turn, New York transformed Judaism and stimulated religious pluralism, Jewish denominationalism, and contemporary feminism. The city’s neighborhoods hosted unbelievably diverse types of Jews, from Communists to Hasidim. Jewish New York not only describes Jews’ many positive influences on New York but also exposes their struggles with poverty and anti-Semitism. These injustices reinforced an exemplary commitment to remaking New York into a model multiethnic, multiracial, and multireligious world city.

Based on the acclaimed multi-volume set City of Promises: A History of the Jews of New York winner of the National Jewish Book Council 2012 Everett Family Foundation Jewish Book of the Year Award, Jewish New York spans three centuries, tracing the earliest arrival of Jews in New Amsterdam to the recent immigration of Jews from the former Soviet Union.

More about THE POSEN LIBRARY OF JEWISH CULTURE AND CIVILIZATION

The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization consists of The Posen Digital Library (PDL), available at posenlibrary.com, and the 10-volume print anthology of Jewish culture published by Yale University Press. The Posen Library is a collection curated by leading Jewish Studies scholars offering unprecedented access to thousands of primary sources reflecting Jewish creativity, diversity, and culture worldwide, spanning biblical times to the twenty-first century. Many of these original sources are works translated into English for the first time.

The Posen Digital Library (PDL) currently includes 2,400 primary sources—including paintings, drawings, photographs, sculpture, fiction, poetry, literature, cartoons, prayer book passages, first-person accounts, and so much more. As each print volume of The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization anthology is released, the entire collection will ultimately grow to more than 6,500 sources, approximately 90 percent of which will be available to a worldwide audience through the PDL.

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