Pioneer Jews

Contributions of the Jewish men and women who helped shape the American frontier.

With more than 400 photographs, extensive interviews with the descendants of pioneer Jewish Texan families, and reproductions of rare historical documents, Natalie Ornish’s Pioneer Jewish Texans quickly became a classic following its original release in 1989. This new Texas A&M University Press edition presents Ornish’s meticulous research and her fascinating historical vignettes for a new generation of readers and historians. She chronicles Jewish buccaneers with Jean Lafitte at Galveston; she tells of Jewish patriots who fought at the Alamo and at virtually every major engagement in the war for Texan independence; she traces the careers of immigrants with names like Marcus, Sanger, and Gordon, who arrived on the Texas frontier with little more than the packs on their backs and went on to build great mercantile empires. Cattle barons, wildcatters, diplomats, physicians, financiers, artists, and humanitarians are among the other notable Jewish pioneers and pathfinders described in this carefully researched and exhaustively documented book. Filling a substantial void in Texana and Texas history, the Texas A&M University Press edition of Natalie Ornish’s Pioneer Jewish Texans brings back into circulation this treasure trove of information on a rich and often overlooked vein of the multifaceted story of the Lone Star State.

Emphasis is on Jews in Manitoba.

We lived There Too is a vivid portrayal of the Jewish immigrants who went west to forge new and vibrant communities in every corner of the American Wilderness. Constructed out of a rich treasury of many hitherto unpublished dairies, memories and letters, together with contemporary newspaper articles, photographs and drawings, this real life saga is filled with dramatic reminiscences that display the humor and humanity of the Jewish tradition. We Lived There Too offers an extraordinary view of men and women in action and constitutes a new chapter in the story of the American frontier.

The image of the West looms large in the American imagination. Yet the history of American Jewry and particularly of American Jewish women—has been heavily weighted toward the East. Jewish Women Pioneering the Frontier Trail rectifies this omission as the first full book to trace the history and contributions of Jewish women in the American West. In many ways, the Jewish experience in the West was distinct. Given the still-forming social landscape, beginning with the 1848 Gold Rush, Jews were able to integrate more fully into local communities than they had in the East. Jewish women in the West took advantage of the unsettled nature of the region to “open new doors” for themselves in the public sphere in ways often not yet possible elsewhere in the country. Women were crucial to the survival of early communities, and made distinct contributions not only in shaping Jewish communal life but outside the Jewish community as well. Western Jewish women's level of involvement at the vanguard of social welfare and progressive reform, commerce, politics, and higher education and the professions is striking given their relatively small numbers. This engaging work—full of stories from the memoirs and records of Jewish pioneer women—illuminates the pivotal role these women played in settling America's Western frontier.

The Jews' Indian investigates the history of American Jewish relationships with Native Americans, both in the realm of cultural imagination and in face-to-face encounters. This book is the first history to analyze Jewish participation in, and Jews' grappling with the legacies of Native American history and the colonial project upon which America rests.

Winner of the 2020 Jordan Schnitzer Book Award in Social Science, Anthropology, and Folklore​ Honorable Mention, 2021 Saul Viener Book Prize​ The Jews’ Indian investigates the history of American Jewish relationships with Native Americans, both in the realm of cultural imagination and in face-to-face encounters. These two groups’ exchanges were numerous and diverse, proving at times harmonious when Jews’ and Natives people’s economic and social interests aligned, but discordant and fraught at other times. American Jews could be as exploitative of Native cultural, social, and political issues as other American settlers, and historian David Koffman argues that these interactions both unsettle and historicize the often triumphant consensus history of American Jewish life. Focusing on the ways Jewish class mobility and civic belonging were wrapped up in the dynamics of power and myth making that so severely impacted Native Americans, this books is provocative and timely, the first history to critically analyze Jewish participation in, and Jews’ grappling with the legacies of Native American history and the colonial project upon which America rests.