A New Promised Land

An engaging 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 twenty-three Jews in the New World in 1654, through the development of the Orthodox, conservative, and Reform movements, to the ordination of Sally Priesand as the first woman rabbi in the United States. Hasia Diner supplies fascinating details about Jewish religious traditions, holidays, and sacred texts--bar and bat mitzvah celebrations and seder dinners, Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashana, the Talmud and the Torah. In addition, she relates the history of the Jewish religious, political, and intellectual institutions in the United States, from The Daily Forward newspaper and the synagogues in New York's Lower East Side to the Jewish Defense League and the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. Concise and clearly written, A New Promised Land tackles some of the biggest issues facing Jewish Americans today, including their increasingly complex relationship with Israel.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.