{"product_id":"jews-on-the-frontier-9781479835836","title":"Jews on the Frontier","description":"\u003cb\u003eBook Synopsis\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003eWinner, 2017 National Jewish Book Award in American Jewish Studies presented by the Jewish Book Council \u003cbr\u003eFinalist, 2017 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, presented by the Jewish Book Council\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAn engaging history of how Jews forged their own religious culture on the American frontier\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eJews on the Frontier\u003c\/i\u003e offers a religious history that begins in an unexpected place: on the road. Shari Rabin recounts the journey of Jewish people as they left Eastern cities and ventured into the American West and South during the nineteenth century. It brings to life the successes and obstacles of these travels, from the unprecedented economic opportunities to the anonymity and loneliness that complicated the many legal obligations of traditional Jewish life. Without government-supported communities or reliable authorities, where could one procure kosher meat? Alone in the American wilderness, how could one find nine co-religionists for a minyan (pr\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eTrade Review\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eRabin makes a compelling case here that the full arc of American Jewish history cannot ignore the young Jewish men who pursued their livelihoods by heading for the frontier. Their religious inconsistencies, creativities, and sense of empowerment as ordinary Jews may actually serve as a better template for thinking about how Judaism developed in America. * Annals of Iowa *\u003cbr\u003eRabins clarion call to reimagine the labels we use to describe ourselves, to embrace diasporism, and to resist centralized practices speaks to a generation that actively deconstructs patriarchal and heteronormative structures, thinks more globally, and operates outside the institutional framework. . . . Jews on the Frontieris a valuable read not only for scholars of American Jewish and American religious history, but change-minded activists and citizens as well. * Marginalia Review of Books *\u003cbr\u003eJews on the Frontier stands as a significant historiographical intervention in de-centering established institutions and denominations and the Protestant secular from the narratives of minority religions and religious communities. * Reading Religion *\u003cbr\u003eRabin convincingly describes frontier mobility as the motive force behind one of the most creative and constructive eras in American Judaism. * The Journal of Southern Religion *\u003cbr\u003eIn [an] enlightening study largely focusing on the preCivil War South and West, Rabinexamines the intertwining of Jews and mobility in the 19th-century US...Impressively documented, this intriguing exploration is appropriate for general libraries. * Choice *\u003cbr\u003eJews on the Frontier is a compelling account of the cultural and spiritual changes experienced by American Jews outside the main coastal cities and their large congregations before the large East-European emigration waves of the late Nineteenth-Century. * Civil War Book Review *\u003cbr\u003e\"Scholars of immigration have toiled for years on the question of how mobility affects nationalities and group identities alike. In Jews on the Frontier, Shari Rabin gives this framework an interesting twist by investigating mobility’s influence on religion. By relying on personal letters, published articles, and other first-hand testimonies, Rabin argues that the expanding United States created a uniquely American religion. * American Jewish Archives Journal *\u003cbr\u003eGenerating as many questions about the nineteenth century American Jewish experience as answers, Rabins study enables us to take its measure, to see Jewish life on its own terms: as a full-throttled, complex, lively culture all its own rather than a backdrop to the sea changes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. * American Historical Review *\u003cbr\u003eFor far too long, historians of American Jews have glossed over most of the nineteenth century, as preamble for the truer or more interesting histories of twentieth-century American Jewry. Rabin offers a deeply researched, beautifully rendered case for the centrality of the nineteenth century to how we understand American Judaism. By looking toward ethnographic models, material culture, and narrative techniques, she argues that the provisionality, the instability, and the mobility of nineteenth-century Judaism created new modes of Jewish life suitable to endure in the American environment. Following in the footsteps of Robert Orsi, Leigh Eric Schmidt, and Kathryn Lofton, who all expertly wed ethnography to deep historical inquiry, Rabin allows the reader to understand the human contours of Jewish life in motion. -- Lila Corwin Berman,Temple University\u003cbr\u003eJews on the Frontier is one of the most significant contributions in years to the study of nineteenth-century American Judaism with vast implications for students of American religion generally. An eye-opening and creative study of how mobility shaped distinctive patterns of religious life. -- Jonathan D. Sarna,author of American Judaism: A History\u003cbr\u003eRabin’s religious studies scholarship differs from the typical histories of both American Jews in particular and Jewish history more broadly… [her] scholarship attends to place and space, nature, and infrastructure, and it also analyzes national particulars without being fully bounded by them. * Journal of Religion *\u003cbr\u003eThe book can be read as a contribution to a number of fields ... Rabin has demonstrated convincingly the significance of mobility and thus space in the history of American Judaism and so has pointed the way for other scholars to do the same in the history of American religion more broadly. * American Religion *\u003cbr\u003eAmerican Judaism is often treated as a more recent phenomenon, with much of the scholarly focus going to the communities that emerged in the wake of the new immigration era in the 1880s through the 1920s, yet Jews have continuously resided in what would become the United States since 1654. \u003ci\u003eJews on the Frontier\u003c\/i\u003e breaks away from this traditional view to explore how Jews engaged with their Judaism while living outside of major Jewish communities.\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e\u003ci\u003eJews on the Frontier\u003c\/i\u003e is a compelling book about the process of Jews adapting to American life during the nineteenth century. [This book] serves to fill in chronological and geographical gaps in the current Jewish historical scholarship. * H-Borderlands *\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eJews on the Frontier\u003c\/i\u003e is a compelling book about the process of Jews adapting to American life during the nineteenth century...[It] serves to fill in chronological and geographical gaps in the current Jewish historical scholarship. -- H-Net Reviews * H-Net Reviews *\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"New York University Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":49409072857431,"sku":"9781479835836","price":20.89,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0817\/1739\/5799\/files\/9781479835836.jpg?v=1730505338","url":"https:\/\/bookcurl.com\/products\/jews-on-the-frontier-9781479835836","provider":"Book Curl","version":"1.0","type":"link"}