Book Notes

American Jewish Life

Jewish Life in the American West, edited by Ava F. Kahn. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002. 144 pp. $22.50. ISBN 0-295-98275-6.

Between 1850 and the 1920s the Jewish population of the western United States grew from a number too small to count to an estimated 300,000 people. This book explores the birth of an American Jewish culture that had only tenuous roots in the East and reveals the contrast between the American image of Jews as eastern urbanites and the reality of the diversity of American Jewish life.

Jewish Polity and American Civil Society: Communal Agencies and Religious Move ments in the American Public Square, edited by Jonathan D. Sarna and Robert Licht. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002. 420 pp. $29.95. ISBN 0-7425-2122-2.

These ten essays examine the organizational history of Jewish religious and advocacy associations and discuss the role of state and local Jewish providers of welfare services and the institutional characteristics of the ultra-Orthodox renewal movements.

A Portion of the People: Three Hundred Years of Southern Jewish Life, edited by Theodore Rosengarten and Dale Rosengarten. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2002. 288 pp. $34.95. ISBN 1-57003-445-1.

In the year 1800 South Carolina was home to more Jews than any other place in North America. As old as the province of Carolina itself, the Jewish presence has been a vital element in the growth of South Carolina’s cities and towns, in the economy of slavery and post-slavery society, and in the creation of American Jewish religious identity. This book is the record of an exhibition of objects that reflect the people and circumstances that produced them.

Shalom Y’All: Images of Jewish Life in the American South, Bill Aron, photographs, Vicki Reikes Fox, text. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books, 2002. 164 pp. 137 b/w photographs. $24.95. ISBN 1-56512-3550-7.

Bill Aron’s 137 black-and-white photographs are paired with stories told by Jews about the experience of being Jewish in the South.

Ancient World and Archaeology

Across the Sabbath River: In Search of a Lost Tribe of Israel, by Hillel Halkin. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002. 394 pp. $28.00. ISBN 0-618-02998-2.

Hillel Halkin, a writer and translator intrigued by the legend that the lost tribes of Israel still exist, accompanied a Jerusalem rabbi to China, Thailand, and northeast India in search of traces of the biblical Israelites who disappeared in the eighth century B.C.E. The journey ended among a little-known ethnic group living along the India-Burma border. After several visits to this group Halkin became convinced that he had found what he had been looking for. This book is the account of his travels and experiences.

Ancestor of the West: Writing, Reasoning, and Religion in Mesopotamia, Elam, and Greece, by Jean Bottéro, Clarisse Herrenschmidt, and Jean-Pierre Vernant. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. 206 pp. $25.00. ISBN 0-226-06715-7.

Three French scholars explore the emergence of rationality and writing in the West and argue that the civilizations of Greece and the Bible were not freestanding but instead were built on logical and religious structures that had their origins much earlier in Mesopotamia.

The Archaeology of Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls, by Jodi Magness. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002. 238 pp. $26.00. ISBN 0-8028-4589-4.

In this book, meant to introduce general readers to this area of study, Jodi Magness provides an overview of the archaeology of Qumran and presents a new interpretation of this ancient community based on information found in the Dead Sea Scrolls and other contemporary documents.

Canaan and Israel in Antiquity: An Introduction, by K. L. Noll. New York and London: Sheffield Academic Press, 2001. 331 pp. $90.00 (c); $29.95 (p). ISBN 1-84127-318-X (c); 1-84127-258-2 (p).

This textbook surveys Palestine’s social, political, economic, religious, and ecological changes from Paleolithic to Roman eras. Designed for beginners with little knowledge of the ancient world, and with copious illustrations and charts, it explains how...