This engaging book describes what has happened to Jews in America - and what Jews have helped make happen to America - from colonial times to the present.
Showing how the American Jewish community today is a composite structure, built up by many successive waves of immigration, the account begins in 1654 with the first immigration of Jews (twenty-three in number). It then follows each major group - Sephardic Jews, German Jews, East European Jews - from their homes in the Old World to their establishment in the New.
Their adaptation to American circumstances, thwir relations with non-Jews and with one another, and their impact on American life are retraced and illustrated. A special chapter, on a period to close to be well known, tells of the victims of Hitler, both the German refugees of the 1930's and the postwar survivors of the concentration camps.