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Sephardic lews in America: A Diasporic History. By Aviva Ben-Ur. (New York: New York University Press, 2009. x, 321 pp. $35.00, isbn 978-6-8147-9982-6.)
Orthodox Jews in America. By Jeffrey S. Gurock. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009. xii, 381 pp. Cloth, $65.00, isbn'978-0253-35291-0. Paper. $24.95, isbn 978-0-25322060-8.)
Jeffrey S. Gurock and Aviva Ben-Ur have provided in their respective books, one on the history of Orthodox Jews in the United States and the other on the history of Sephardim in America, overarching synthetic works that attempt to fulfill two goals. Each author seeks to tell the history ol a particular segment of American Jewry over the course of a lengthy span of time. Each sets out to provide a broad sweep of American Jewish history through the lens of a particular segment of the larger population. Both also hope to fill a glaring gap in the literature, an absence that they considered to be analytically significant and reflective of the biases held by most of the scholars who have heretofore written that history.
Gurock's history of Orthodoxy in America begins in the middle of the seventeenth century, a time when to be a Jew in America, or, indeed, anywhere, meant to conform to Jewish law and to view that law as divine in origin and unchangeable. Gurock righdy notes that despite the fact that historically more Jews in America could be, depending on the definition, labeled Orthodox, historians have given them short shrift and have narrated the history of American Judaism as a seemingly inexorable march toward religious reform and the diminution of ritual observance. In...