A New Promised Land ─ A History of Jews in America

On September 19, 1934, baseball star Hank Greenberg refused to play for his team, the Detroit Tigers. Instead he chose to observe the Jewish holiday Yom Kippur. On that day he put his identity as a Jew over the most American of sports, and the Tiger fans rallied around his decision. Greenberg's story is just one of many in this chronicle of Jewish life in the United States. A New Promised Land reconstructs the multifaceted background and very American adaptations of this religious group, from the arrival of Jews in the New World in 1654 to the ordination of Sally Priesand as the first woman rabbi in the United States. Hasia R. Diner provides intriguing details about Jewish religious traditions, holidays, and sacred texts - including bar and bat mitzvah celebrations and seder dinners, Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashana, the Talmud and the Torah. She also describes the development of American Jewish religious, political, and intellectual institutions - from the Daily Forward newspaper and the synagogues on New York City's Lower East Side to the Jewish Defense League and the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. A New Promised Land tackles the most significant issues facing American Jews today, including intermarriage and their increasingly complex relationship with Israel.

Hasia R. Diner is the Paul S. and Sylvia Steinberg Professor of American Jewish History at New York University.