Jews and Booze : : Becoming American in the Age of Prohibition / / Marni Davis.

• VerfasserIn: Davis, Marni,
• Place / Publishing House: New York, NY : : New York University Press, , [2012]; ©2012
• Year of Publication: 2012
• Language: English
• Series: Goldstein-Goren Series in American Jewish History ; 2
• Physical Description: 1 online resource

Finalist, 2014 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature from the Jewish Book CouncilTraces American Jews’ complicated relationship to alcohol through the years leading up to and after prohibitionFrom 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

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Illustrations -- 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 Movement -- Part 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 -- Notes -- Index -- About the Author