The monumental Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups is the most authoritative single source available on the history, culture, and distinctive characteristics of ethnic groups in the United States. The Dimensions of Ethnicity series is designed to make this landmark scholarship available to everyone in a series of handy paperbound student editions. Selections in this series will include outstanding articles that illuminate the social dynamics of a pluralistic nation or masterfully summarize the experience of key groups. Written by the best-qualified scholars in each field, Dimensions of Ethnicity titles reflect the complex interplay between assimilation and pluralism that is a central theme of the American experience.

Arthur Goren’s lucid discussion of how the United States gradually acquired the largest Jewish population in the world is accompanied by an analysis of the struggle to survive as a communal entity.

Since 1967, more than 60,000 Jewish-Americans have settled in the territories captured by the State of Israel during the Six Day War. Comprising 15 percent of the settler population today, these immigrants have established major communities, transformed domestic politics and international relations, and committed shocking acts of terrorism. They demand attention in both Israel and the United States, but little is known about who they are and why they chose to leave America to live at the center of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

In this deeply researched, engaging work, Sara Yael Hirschhorn unsettles stereotypes, showing that the 1960s generation who moved to the occupied territories were not messianic zealots or right-wing extremists but idealists engaged in liberal causes. They did not abandon their progressive heritage when they crossed the Green Line. Rather, they saw a historic opportunity to create new communities to serve as a beacon—a “city on a hilltop”—to Jews across the globe. This pioneering vision was realized in their ventures at Yamit in the Sinai and Efrat and Tekoa in the West Bank. Later, the movement mobilized the rhetoric of civil rights to rebrand itself, especially in the wake of the 1994 Hebron massacre perpetrated by Baruch Goldstein, one of their own.

On the fiftieth anniversary of the 1967 war, Hirschhorn illuminates the changing face of the settlements and the clash between liberal values and political realities at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Essays illustrating the American Jewish experience during World War I.
 
An Equal Share of Freedom sheds new light on several important and interrelated dimensions of American, Jewish, and world history in the World War I era. Paying close attention to the Balfour Declaration as a hub around which to explore the period’s unfolding and turbulent social, cultural, and political developments, this collection of essays covers a diverse range of topics including Jewish doughboys, Zionist women authors, and political elites such as Golda Meir and Woodrow Wilson. The volume demonstrates the complex nature of Jewish ethnonational consciousness in the American setting and the impact of Zionism on US wartime and postwar activity.

The essays in this volume overturn timeworn assumptions that have long shaped the fields of American history and modern Jewish history. Taken as a whole, they demonstrate the war’s profound impact on American Jewish life and the transformation of American Jewry’s relationship with wider American society. These essays also illustrate the centrality of Zionism to the American Jewish experience and the extent to which American Jewry’s national consciousness and the future direction of the Zionist project were forged in the crucible of the Great War. An Equal Share of Freedom is the first volume in the Jacob Rader Marcus Series on the American Jewish Experience.  In this series, Raider, Segev, and Zola highlight the myriad possibilities for expanding and deepening scholarly understanding of American Jews and the shared history of American society and the Jewish people in the twentieth century, starting with a look at World War I.