The first volume contains articles on a variety of areas including Jewish involvement in the War of Independence and in the American Revolution, the New York Jewish Community of the time and a look at the Dutch and English Jews of the period.

Early American libraries stood at the nexus of two transatlantic branches of commerce—the book trade and the slave trade. Slavery and the Making of Early American Libraries bridges the study of these trades by demonstrating how Americans' profits from slavery were reinvested in imported British books and providing evidence that the colonial book market was shaped, in part, by the demand of slave owners for metropolitan cultural capital. Drawing on recent scholarship that shows how participation in London cultural life was very expensive in the eighteenth century, as well as evidence that enslavers were therefore some of the few early Americans who could afford to import British cultural products, the volume merges the fields of the history of the book, Atlantic studies, and the study of race, arguing that the empire-wide circulation of British books was underwritten by the labour of the African diaspora. The volume is the first in early American and eighteenth-century British studies to fuse our growing understanding of the material culture of the transatlantic text with our awareness of slavery as an economic and philanthropic basis for the production and consumption of knowledge. In studying the American dissemination of works of British literature and political thought, it claims that Americans were seeking out the forms of citizenship, constitutional traditions, and rights that were the signature of that British identity. Even though they were purchasing the sovereignty of Anglo-Americans at the expense of African-Americans through these books, however, some colonials were also making the case for the abolition of slavery.

This volume contains articles on Jewish life from 1920 to the present. Its entries include studies of the economy and migration in postwar America, the impact of Holocaust survivors on American Society and the reaction to gender stereotypes within American Culture.

Origins (Bridgetown, 1793-1798) -- From Slave to Free (Bridgetown, 1801) -- From Christian to Jew (Suriname, 1811-12) -- The Tumultuous Island (Bridgetown, 1812-1817) -- Synagogue Seats (New York & Philadelphia, 1793-1818) -- The Material of Race (London, 1815-17) -- Voices of Rebellion (Bridgetown, 1818-24) -- A Woman Valor (New York, 1817-19) -- This Liberal City (Philadelphia, 1818-33) -- Feverish Love (New York, 1819-1830) -- When I am Gone (New York, Barbados, London, 1830-1847) -- Legacies (New York and Beyond, 1841-1860).

An overview of the history of American Jewry using primary sources from Latin America, the Caribbean, Canada, and the United States Jews Across the Americas is a groundbreaking sourcebook capturing the historical diversity and cultural breadth of American Jews across Latin America, the Caribbean, Canada, and the United States. Featuring primary documents as well as scholarly interpretations, Jews Across the Americas builds upon new developments in Jewish Studies, engaging with transnationalism, race, sexuality, and gender, and highlighting the lived experiences of those often left out of Jewish history. Jews Across the Americas features an impressively broad and far-reaching range of historical sources, including artifacts and objects that have not previously been featured as integral to Jewish history in the Western hemisphere. Entries teach readers how to understand everything from wills and advertisements to sermons, and how to interpret photographs, domestic architecture, and comics. Whether it’s a recipe from Brazil that blends Moroccan and Amazonian foodways, or a text about the first non-binary Jew to cross the Atlantic in the eighteenth century, each entry broadens our understanding of Jewish American history.

The Routledge Handbook of Material Religion places objects and bodies at the center of scholarly studies of religious life and practice. Propelling forward the study of material religion, the Handbook first reveals the deep philosophical roots of its key categories and then advances new critical analytics, such as queer materialities, inescapable material entanglements, and hyperobjects that explode the small-scale personal view on religions. The Handbook comprises thirty chapters, written by an international team of contributors who offer a global perspective of religious pasts and presents, divided into four thematic parts: Genealogies of Material Religion Materializing the Terms of the Study of Religion Entanglements, Entrapment, Escaping Hyperobjects, or How Ginormous Things Affect Religions In these four parts, the study of material religion is redirected towards systematic, critical interrogations of the imbrication of religious structures of power with racial, economic, political, and gendered forms of domination. From Spinoza’s political theology to African philosophies of ubuntu; from the queer materialities of Mesoamerican religion to the Satanic Temple of the United States; from Islamic love and sacrifice in human-animal entanglements to Shia militants’ attachment to weaponry; from epidemic cataclysm in Latin America to vast infrastructures and the gathering of millions in India’s Kumbh Mela, the study of material religion proves to be the study par excellence of the human condition. The Handbook is essential reading for students and researchers in religious studies, anthropology, history, and media studies, and will also be of interest to those in related fields such as archeology, sociology, and philosophy.

A cultural and architectural history of Judaism as it expanded and took root in the Atlantic world Jewish Sanctuary in the Atlantic World is a unique blend of cultural and architectural history that considers Jewish heritage as it expanded among the continents and islands linked by the Atlantic Ocean between the mid-fifteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Barry L. Stiefel achieves a powerful synthesis of material culture research and traditional historical research in his examination of the early modern Jewish diaspora in the New World. Through this generously illustrated work, Stiefel examines forty-six synagogues built in Europe, South America, the Caribbean Islands, colonial and antebellum North America, and Gibraltar to discover what liturgies, construction methods, and architectural styles were transported from the Old World to the New World. Some are famous—Touro in Newport, Rhode Island; Bevis Marks in London; and Mikve Israel in Curaçao—while others had short-lived congregations whose buildings were lost. The two great traditions of Judaism—Sephardic and Ashkenazic—found homes in the Atlantic World. Examining buildings and congregations that survive, Stiefel offers valuable insights on their connections and commonalities. If both the congregations and buildings are gone, the author re-creates them by using modern heritage preservation tools that have expanded the heuristic repertoire, tools from such diverse sources as architectural studies, archaeology, computer modeling and rendering, and geographic information systems. When combined these bring a richer understanding of the past than incomplete, uncertain traditional historical resources. Buildings figure as key indicators in Stiefel's analysis of Jewish life and social experience, while the author's immersion in the faith and practice of Judaism invigorates every aspect of his work.

This volume explores the background and circumstances that brought about a milestone relationship between George Washington and the Jews. President George Washington was the first head of a modern nation to openly acknowledge the Jews as full-fledged citizens of the land in which they had chosen to settle. His personal philosophy of religious tolerance can be summed up from an address made in 1790 to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island, where he said "May the Children of the Stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other inhabitants, while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid." Was it Washington's respect for the wisdom of the ancient Prophets or the participation of the patriotic Jews in the struggle for independence that motivated Washington to direct his most significant and profound statement on religious freedom at a Jewish audience? Fritz Hirschfeld is a documentary historian.

The author examines the relationships between immigration policy, observed immigration patterns, and cultural differences between the United States and immigrants’ source countries. The entirety of U.S. immigration history (1607-present) is reviewed through a recounting of related legislative acts and by examining data on immigrant inflows and cross-societal cultural distances.