Jews and Booze: Becoming American in the Age of Prohibition(Goldstein-Goren Series in American Jewish History)

Finalist, 2014 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature from the Jewish Book Council Traces American Jews' complicated relationship to alcohol through the years leading up to and after prohibition From kosher wine to their ties to the liquor trade in Europe, Jews have a longstanding historical relationship with alcohol. But once prohibition hit America, American Jews were forced to choose between abandoning their historical connection to alcohol and remaining outside the American mainstream. In Jews and Booze, Marni Davis examines American Jews' long and complicated relationship to alcohol during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the years of the national prohibition movement's rise and fall. Bringing to bear an extensive range of archival materials, Davis offers a novel perspective on a previously unstudied area of American Jewish economic activity—the making and selling of liquor, wine, and beer—and reveals that alcohol commerce played a crucial role in Jewish immigrant acculturation and the growth of Jewish communities in the United States. But prohibition's triumph cast a pall on American Jews' history in the alcohol trade, forcing them to revise, clarify, and defend their communal and civic identities, both to their fellow Americans and to themselves.

Table of Contents:
List of Figures Acknowledgments Introduction Part I: Alcohol and Acculturation 1. Setting Up Shop: Jews Becoming Americans in the Nineteenth-Century Alcohol Trade 2. "Do As We Israelites Do": American Jews and the Gilded-Age Temperance MovementPart II: Alcohol and Anti-Semitism 3. Kosher Wine and Jewish Saloons: New Jewish Immigrants Enter the American Alcohol Trade 4. An "Unscrupulous Jewish Type of Mind": Jewish Alcohol Entrepreneurs and Their Critics Part III: Jews and the Prohibition Era 5. Rabbis and Other Bootleggers: Jews as Prohibition-Era Alcohol Entrepreneurs 6. "The Law of the Land is the Law": Jews Respond to the Volstead Act Conclusion Index About the Author

About the Author :
Marni Davis is Assistant Professor of History at Georgia State University.

Review :
"... a provocative study of Jews' complicated relationship to alcohol and Prohibition in American history."-Publishers Weekly "In her debut, Davis suggests that anti-Semitism and Prohibition were parallel expressions of political disquiet during the turn of the last century...A fascinating, nuanced social history."-Kirkus "A pioneering study of Jews and the American trade in alcohol from entrepreneurial 19th century immigrants through 20th century battles over prohibition. Lively, well-researched, and comprehensive, this will long stand as the definitive study of Jews, booze, and evolving American taboos."-Jonathan D. Sarna, author of American Judaism: A History "Imaginatively conceived, fiercely researched, beautifully written, Jews and Booze is welcome news indeed. A very talented and promising historian has shown how a contentious slice of the American Jewish past can remain important to today's readers - and has made a particular conflict between Protestant moralism and ethnic habits her own." -Stephen J. Whitfield, author of In Search of American Jewish Culture "In this groundbreaking study, Davis deftly blends social and cultural history to uncover the important role American Jews played in the liquor trade, and the hostilities they elicited. In recovering this nearly forgotten past, Jews and Booze provides a prism through which to view the difficulties of Americanization." -Tony Michels, author of A Fire in Their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York