During the 1930s, the United States government founded the Jersey Homesteads community (now known as Roosevelt, New Jersey) to help a group of pioneering Jewish immigrants create a new and ambitious cooperative experiment. Two hundred urban garment worker families moved from New York City to rural New Jersey to develop an intentional community with a focus and reliance upon both agriculture and craft. The community worked to unite the Jewish cooperative agricultural movement with the New Deal priorities of back-to-the-land rural resettlement. Notably, the town also embraced modernist aesthetics through homes designed by Louis Kahn and Alfred Kastner, and a public mural by Ben Shahn depicting the community’s creation. 

This book tells the inspiring yet under-appreciated history of the town’s establishment, revealing its historical utopian commune precursors and detailing how such an unconventional project could only have been possible at its precise moment because of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s progressive New Deal government support. The Jersey Homesteads project brought together the forces of community, identity, and art as a unified force for betterment in the brave new world of New Deal America. It is a story about a specific time and place with significant lessons for our understanding of American modernism and Jewish identity during the 1930s and beyond. 

DANIEL S. PALMER is chief curator at the SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah, Georgia. He has previously held curatorial positions at the Public Art Fund, the Jewish Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. 

Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations
Introduction: Workers’ Aim
1. Back to the Land: The Origins of Jersey Homesteads
2. A Garden City: The Architecture of Jersey Homesteads
3. Masterpieces for the Masses: Ben Shahn and the Art of the Town’s Community Building
4. Picture Perfect: The FSA Documents and Disseminates Jersey Homesteads
5. The Home Front: FBI Surveillance and the Borough of Roosevelt After the New Deal
Epilogue: The Afterlives and Legacies of Jersey Homesteads
Notes
Index