This is an excellent book, based on extensive research. It makes a real contribution to the understanding of the Jewish immigrant experience in America, in its relation to leftist politics. I do not know of anything else in the field as good as this book.
David Gordon, author of Resurrecting Marx: The Analytical Marxists on Freedom, Exploitation, ... Read moreand Justice Verbeeten persuasively argues that the persistent left-liberal tradition among American Jews has served to affirm Jewish difference rather than, as most scholars and critics have maintained, to facilitate deracination. This is a fascinating and provocative
perhaps indispensable
study that has far-reaching implications not only for Jewish studies, but also for the history of political radicalism and the history of ethnicity and identity in the twentieth-century United States.
Leilah Danielson, author of American Gandhi: A.J. Muste and the History of Radicalism in the Twentieth Century David Verbeeten's study includes an assessment of the changing nature of American Jewish philanthropies, which is illuminating on more than one level. Verbeeten documents the political radicalization of Jewish philanthropies as their direction changed hand, from socially conservative German Jewish benefactors to politically more leftist but also more ethnically conscious Jews from Eastern Europe. For those who took over these institutions from a more conservative and better assimilated American Jewish community, there was no necessary conflict between political radicalism and ethnic loyalty. Indeed the two were seen by friends and admirers as eminently compatible. Verbeeten's study may have instructional value going well beyond the particular developments that he explores.
Paul Gottfried, author of Fascism: The Career of a Concept Show Less