Publications

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A History of Jewish Connecticut

By Betty N. Hoffman

During the Revolutionary War, Sephardic Jews fled British-occupied New York to become the first Jewish families in Connecticut. This long Jewish history is explored in a collection of essays by historians and community members across the state, from colonial times and the role Jews played in the Civil War to memories of summer nights at Lebanon’s Grand Lake Lodge and Danbury’s Lake Waubeeka. Join Editor Betty N. Hoffman and company as they recount tales of Kid Kaplan, the Meriden Buzz Saw, who became boxing’s 1925 Featherweight Champion of the World; the Lender family, who “bagelized America”; and the graceful personal service of Marlow’s Department Store in Manchester to reveal a fascinating and intimate portrait of Jewish Connecticut.

Available for purchase for $26.58. Click on Add to Cart to purchase online or print the order form.

A Life of the Land: Connecticut's Jewish Farmers

By Mary M. Donohue and Briann G. Greenfield

This journal, the fourth in the Connecticut Jewish History Series, focuses on the lives of Jewish farmers in Connecticut and has been published by the Society with funding from the Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism. Co-edited by Mary M. Donohue, Architectural Historian Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism, and Briann G. Greenfield, Associate Professor of Public History at Central Connecticut State University, A Life of the Land: Connecticut's Jewish Farmers begins historically with the migration of Eastern European Jews through America's cities and then to the Connecticut countryside. Why Connecticut? How did these immigrants operate successful enterprises with little or no farming experience? Who and what helped support and sustain them? The story of the resilience and persverance of these Jewish farmers and how they impacted their communities is told through historical data, oral history interviews and unique photo essays.

Available for purchase at $31.85. Click on Add to Cart to purchase online or print the order form.

Remembering the Old Neighborhood: Stories from Hartford's North End

Edited by Joan Walden

Remembering the Old Neighborhood: Stories of Hartford’s North End, is the culmination of a two year project to collect and preserve both the essays and oral histories of those who grew up in the North End of Hartford. This neighborhood was a unique multi-cultural, multi-racial and multi-ethnic melting pot. Most of the participants have since moved away, but a few still reside in the same homes in which they grew up. Some of the narrators were in their 90s and remember trolley cars and deliveries by the ice man. Younger narrators shared stories of the riots that rocked the area in 1968 and changed it irrevocably. Their lives are represented in approximately 150 entries that deal with work, play, school, world events, family, and friendship.

Available for purchase at $31.85. Click on Add to Cart to purchase online or print the order form.

Jewish West Hartford

Written by Betty N. Hoffman

Hartford's Jewish population has undergone dramatic and dynamic transformations since the colonial era. Author Betty N. Hoffman bears witness to the key changes, including assimilation and suburbanization, while focusing on the Jewish-oriented institutions and civic associations that have come to anchor and define the community. Interlaced with poignant first-person recollections, Jewish West Hartford provides an engrossing chronicle that is both thoughtful and affectionate.

Contributors:
Betty N. Hoffman is Adjunct Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Central Connecticut State University, Adjunct Instructor of Anthropology and Social Science at Saint Joseph College, and Project Director of Witness to War: 1941-1945: The Soviet Jewish Experience at the Jewish Historical Society of Greater Hartford.

Available for purchase at $26.59. Click on Add to Cart to purchase online or print the order form.

Honoring the Past: Building the Future:
The History of the Jewish Federation of Greater Hartford

Written by Betty N. Hoffman

Since 1945, the Jewish Federation of Greater Hartford has been the central address of the Hartford Jewish community. Over the past half century, scores of volunteers have worked to raise and distribute more than $200,000,000 for humanitarian needs for Jews at home and abroad. Honoring the Past: Building the Future traces the Federation's history and highlights the people, events, and projects that have enhanced, built, and perpetuated Jewish communal life in Greater Hartford, in Israel, and around the world.

Contributors:
Betty N. Hoffman is Adjunct Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Central Connecticut State University, Adjunct Instructor of Anthropology and Social Science at Saint Joseph College, and Project Director of Witness to War: 1941-1945: The Soviet Jewish Experience at the Jewish Historical Society of Greater Hartford.

Available for purchase at $26.59. Click on Add to Cart to purchase online or print the order form.

Connecticut Jewish History: Volume 1, Number 1
Jews in Connecticut Politics

Editor: Lothar Kahn (1923-1990)
Managing Editor: Marsha Lotstein

The first issue of Connecticut Jewish History is devoted to the Jews in Connecticut politics on the national and state level. Our political leaders were first generation Americans. From moderate Republicans to liberal Republicans, from moderate Democrats to liberal Democrats, these public servants believed that their Jewishness was somehow linked to their concerns for justice. We are grateful to the late Abraham Ribicoff, the most prominent Jewish name in Connecticut politics, for an autobiographical sketch in which he describes how his Jewishness became part of his political experience. This issue also includes a fascinating, non-political portrait of a 19th century Hartford physician, Nathan Mayer, who was a major Hartford figure, noted not only as a surgeon in war and peace but also as a drama critic and popular after-dinner speaker.

Contributors:
David G. Dalin is former associate professor of American Jewish history at the University of Hartford.

Lothar Kahn (1923-1990) was professor emeritus at Central Connecticut State University. Kahn was a noted author of many articles and books, including Mirrors of the Jewish Mind, Insight and Action: The Life and Work of Lion Feuchtwanger and Between Two Worlds: A Cultural History of German-Jewish Writers.

Available for purchase at $21.27. Click on Add to Cart to purchase online or print the order form.

Connecticut Jewish History: Volume 2, Number 1
1843-1943: One Hundred Years of Jewish Congregations in Connecticut:
An Architectural Survey

Editor: John Sutherland
Managing Editor: Marsha Lotstein

No institution has been more important in the history and development of the Jewish community in Connecticut than the synagogue. The petition by Hartford Jews to the legislature in 1843 to amend the State Constitution to permit the public worship of Jews, followed by the prompt enactment of an enabling public act, set in motion the beginning of synagogue building which contributed to the growth of the Jewish community as well as to the architecture of the state. This edition of Connecticut Jewish History is devoted to the history and architectural significance of 46 historic synagogue buildings throughout the state of Connecticut. The complete survey with research notes and photographs of each building is on file at the Jewish Historical Society of Greater Hartford and may be consulted by interested researchers. This important edition of the Jewish Historical Society's journal serves as a permanent record of many sites that have changed or disappeared, or are in danger of doing so in the future.

Contributors:
Jeffrey H. Kaimowitz received his Ph.D. in Classics from the University of Cincinnati. He has taught at Miami University of Ohio and has worked in the Special Collections Department at the New York Public Library. Currently Dr. Kaimowitz is curator of the Watkinson Library at Trinity College, Hartford.

David F. Ransom, Architectural Historian, is the author of several books and articles, including George Keller, Architect, a "Biographical Dictionary of Hartford Architects," and is co-editor of Structures and Styles: Guided Tours of Hartford Architecture.

Available for purchase at $21.27. Click on Add to Cart to purchase online or print the order form.

Connecticut Jewish History: Volume 3, Number 1
Witness to War 1941-45: The Soviet Jewish Experience

Guest Editor: Bruce M. Stave
Writer and Interview Editor: Betty N. Hoffman
Managing Editor: Marsha Lotstein

This issue of Connecticut Jewish History is devoted entirely to the testimonies of immigrants from the former Soviet Union to the Greater Hartford area. They speak compellingly about their involvement in the four-year battle to defeat Nazi Germany, about courage, patriotism, compassion, and endurance in the face of catastrophe. These survivors speak of their involvement as members of the armed services; as military medical personnel; as partisans in the Jewish resistance; as survivors of ghettos, camps and/or hiding; as refugees and evacuees in remote parts of the USSR. They also convey the powerful identification with the Soviet Union felt by many Jews during this era and their dilemma when fellow citizens treated them as outsiders. This issue includes a brief overview of World War II in the Soviet Union allowing the readers to set these true stories into the historical context.

Contributors:
Bruce M. Stave is Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of History and Director of the Center for Oral History at the University of Connecticut. Author and editor of ten books, Professor Stave's latest book, co-authored with Michele Palmer, is Witness to Nuremberg, an oral history of those who participated in the war crimes trials at the end of World War II.

Betty N. Hoffman is author of Jewish Hearts: A Study of Dynamic Ethnicity in the United States and Soviet Union. She has conducted research in the Soviet Jewish community of Greater Hartford since 1988. Currently Dr. Hoffman is an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Central Connecticut State University.

Available for purchase at $21.27. Click on Add to Cart to purchase online or print the order form.

Making A Life, Building A Community:
A History of the Jews of Hartford

Written by David G. Dalin and Jonathan Rosenbaum

Making a Life, Building a Community places Hartford within the larger contexts of American social, urban, ethnic, and Jewish history by comparing its unique experience to those of New England and other American Jewish communities. Drawing extensively on primary sources such as synagogue minute books, newspapers, family memoirs, and an important new collection of oral histories, the authors skillfully document internal divisions and issues of communal cohesiveness. This careful study will be illuminating for anyone interested in American social or ethnic history and the immigrant experience.

Contributors:
David G. Dalin was associate professor of American Jewish history at the University of Hartford.

Jonathan Rosenbaum was the Maurice Greenberg Professor of Judaic Studies at the University of Hartford and Director of its Greenberg Center.

Available for purchase at $37.22. Click on Add to Cart to purchase online or print the order form.

Jewish Hearts: A Study of Dynamic Ethnicity in the United States and the Soviet Union

Written by Betty N. Hoffman

This ethnographic study compares and contrasts the changing ethnic identity of those Russian Jews who settled in Hartford, Connecticut between 1881 and 1930 with that of the Soviet Jews who remained in Russia after the Revolution, became Soviet citizens, and emigrated after 1975. Although both groups were labeled "Jews," their internal definitions of what constituted being Jewish and their personal experiences were radically different. Using both archival and contemporary oral histories and interviews of immigrants currently living in Greater Hartford, Betty N. Hoffman traces the stories of real people whose lives and choices are affected by both their ethnic identity and the larger movements around them as they made new homes in the United States.

Contributors:
Betty N. Hoffman is Adjunct Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Central Connecticut State University, Adjunct Instructor of Anthropology and Social Science at Saint Joseph College, and Project Director of Witness to War: 1941-1945: The Soviet Jewish Experience at the Jewish Historical Society of Greater Hartford.

Available for purchase at $29.78. Click on Add to Cart to purchase online or print the order form.