Jews and Booze: Becoming American in the Age of Prohibition (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780814720288)

Finalist, 2014 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature from the Jewish Book Council

Traces American Jews' complicated relationship to alcohol through the years leading up to and after prohibition

From kosher wine to their ties to the liquor trade in Europe, Jews have a longstanding historical relationship with alcohol. But once prohibition hit America, American Jews were forced to choose between abandoning their historical connection to alcohol and remaining outside the American mainstream.

In Jews and Booze, Marni Davis examines American Jews' long and complicated relationship to alcohol during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the years of the national prohibition movement's rise and fall. Bringing to bear an extensive range of archival materials, Davis offers a novel perspective on a previously unstudied area of American Jewish economic activity--the making and selling of liquor, wine, and beer--and reveals that alcohol commerce played a crucial role in Jewish immigrant acculturation and the growth of Jewish communities in the United States. But prohibition's triumph cast a pall on American Jews' history in the alcohol trade, forcing them to revise, clarify, and defend their communal and civic identities, both to their fellow Americans and to themselves.

Author: Marni Davis
ISBN-10: 0814720285
ISBN-13: 9780814720288
Publisher: New York University Press
Language: English
Published: 01/01/2012
Pages: 272
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.10lbs
Size: 9.10h x 6.40w x 0.90d
Award: Sami Rohr Prize - Finalist

Review Citation(s):
Kirkus Reviews 10/15/2011
Library Journal 11/15/2011 pg. 81
Publishers Weekly 11/14/2011 pg. 45
New York Times Book Review 01/29/2012 pg. 10
Choice 07/01/2012