Jews and booze : becoming American in the age of prohibition / Marni Davis.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Davis, Marni.

Series:

Goldstein-Goren series in American Jewish history.

The Goldstein-Goren series in American Jewish history

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Jews--Alcohol use--United States--Attitudes.

Jews.

Alcoholic beverage industry--United States--History--19th century.

Alcoholic beverage industry.

Alcoholic beverage industry--United States--History--20th century.

Alcohol--Law and legislation--United States.

Alcohol.

United States--Ethnic relations.

United States.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (273 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

New York : New York University Press, 2012.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Finalist, 2014 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature from the Jewish Book CouncilFrom 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.

Contents:

Setting up shop: Jews becoming Americans in the nineteenth-century alcohol trade

Do as we Israelites do: American Jews and the gilded-age temperance movement

Kosher wine and Jewish saloons: new Jewish immigrants enter the American alcohol trade

An "unscrupulous Jewish type of mind": Jewish alcohol entrepreneurs and their critics

Rabbis and other bootleggers: Jews as prohibition-era alcohol entrepreneurs

The law of the land is the law: Jews respond to the Volstead Act.

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

9780814783849

0814783848

9780814744093

0814744095

OCLC:

772593020