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Cosmopolitans: A Social and Cultural History of the Jews of the San Francisco Bay Area

Online ISBN:
9780520945029
Print ISBN:
9780520259133
Publisher:
University of California Press
Book

Cosmopolitans: A Social and Cultural History of the Jews of the San Francisco Bay Area

Published:
11 May 2009
Online ISBN:
9780520945029
Print ISBN:
9780520259133
Publisher:
University of California Press

Abstract

Levi Strauss, A.L. Gump, Yehudi Menuhin, Gertrude Stein, Adolph Sutro, Congresswoman Florence Prag Kahn—Jewish people have been so enmeshed in life in and around San Francisco that their story is a chronicle of the metropolis itself. Since the Gold Rush, Bay Area Jews have countered stereotypes, working as farmers and miners, boxers and mountaineers. They were Gold Rush pioneers, Gilded Age tycoons, and Progressive Era reformers. Told through an astonishing range of characters and events, this book illuminates many aspects of Jewish life in the area: the high profile of Jewish women, extraordinary achievements in the business world, the cultural creativity of the second generation, the bitter debate about the proper response to the Holocaust and Zionism, and much more. Focusing in rich detail on the first hundred years after the Gold Rush, the book also takes the story up to the present day, demonstrating how unusually strong affinities for the arts and for the struggle for social justice have characterized this community even as it has changed over time. This book, set in the uncommonly diverse Bay Area, is a truly unique chapter of the Jewish experience in America.

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