An overview of the history of American Jewry using primary sources from Latin America, the Caribbean, Canada, and the United States Jews Across the Americas is a groundbreaking sourcebook capturing the historical diversity and cultural breadth of American Jews across Latin America, the Caribbean, Canada, and the United States. Featuring primary documents as well as scholarly interpretations, Jews Across the Americas builds upon new developments in Jewish Studies, engaging with transnationalism, race, sexuality, and gender, and highlighting the lived experiences of those often left out of Jewish history. Jews Across the Americas features an impressively broad and far-reaching range of historical sources, including artifacts and objects that have not previously been featured as integral to Jewish history in the Western hemisphere. Entries teach readers how to understand everything from wills and advertisements to sermons, and how to interpret photographs, domestic architecture, and comics. Whether it’s a recipe from Brazil that blends Moroccan and Amazonian foodways, or a text about the first non-binary Jew to cross the Atlantic in the eighteenth century, each entry broadens our understanding of Jewish American history.

At the turn of the 20th century, Jews from North Africa and the Middle East were called Turcos ("Turks"), and they were seen as distinct from Ashkenazim, not even identified as Jews. Adriana M. Brodsky follows the history of Sephardim as they arrived in Argentina, created immigrant organizations, founded synagogues and cemeteries, and built strong ties with coreligionists around the country. She theorizes that fragmentation based on areas of origin gave way to the gradual construction of a single Sephardi identity, predicated both on Zionist identification (with the State of Israel) and "national" feelings (for Argentina), and that Sephardi Jews assumed leadership roles in national Jewish organizations once they integrated into the much larger Askenazi community. Rather than assume that Sephardi identity was fixed and unchanging, Brodsky highlights the strategic nature of this identity, constructed both from within the various Sephardi groups and from the outside, and reveals that Jewish identity must be understood as part of the process of becoming Argentine.

At the turn of the 20th century, Jews from North Africa and the Middle East were called Turcos ("Turks"), and they were seen as distinct from Ashkenazim, not even identified as Jews. Adriana M. Brodsky follows the history of Sephardim as they arrived in Argentina, created immigrant organizations, founded synagogues and cemeteries, and built strong ties with coreligionists around the country. She theorizes that fragmentation based on areas of origin gave way to the gradual construction of a single Sephardi identity, predicated both on Zionist identification (with the State of Israel) and "national" feelings (for Argentina), and that Sephardi Jews assumed leadership roles in national Jewish organizations once they integrated into the much larger Askenazi community. Rather than assume that Sephardi identity was fixed and unchanging, Brodsky highlights the strategic nature of this identity, constructed both from within the various Sephardi groups and from the outside, and reveals that Jewish identity must be understood as part of the process of becoming Argentine.

An overview of the history of American Jewry using primary sources from Latin America, the Caribbean, Canada, and the United States Jews Across the Americas is a groundbreaking sourcebook capturing the historical diversity and cultural breadth of American Jews across Latin America, the Caribbean, Canada, and the United States. Featuring primary documents as well as scholarly interpretations, Jews Across the Americas builds upon new developments in Jewish Studies, engaging with transnationalism, race, sexuality, and gender, and highlighting the lived experiences of those often left out of Jewish history. Jews Across the Americas features an impressively broad and far-reaching range of historical sources, including artifacts and objects that have not previously been featured as integral to Jewish history in the Western hemisphere. Entries teach readers how to understand everything from wills and advertisements to sermons, and how to interpret photographs, domestic architecture, and comics. Whether it’s a recipe from Brazil that blends Moroccan and Amazonian foodways, or a text about the first non-binary Jew to cross the Atlantic in the eighteenth century, each entry broadens our understanding of Jewish American history.