As fans of “The Civil War” or “Eyes on the Prize” know, when PBS airs a documentary, a book version can’t be far behind. As filmmaker David Grubin neared completion of “The Jewish Americans,” he turned to Beth Wenger to write the companion volume for the series.
That book is coming soon to a coffee table near you.
Airing on PBS this month, “The Jewish Americans” is a six-hour account of the Jewish saga in the New World, from colonial times to the present. With so much to cover, Grubin and Wenger knew they couldn’t fit it all in.
So Wenger didn’t even try.
“Nothing could cover 350 years of history,” she says. “I tried for diversity. I also tried for texts and individuals that conveyed what I thought were important moments, movements or aspects of Jewish American history.”
To do that, Wenger went back to the sources. The 388-page book, “The Jewish Americans,” contains not only her own scholarly essays to introduce each chapter, it is also peppered with first-person narratives, original letters, diary entries and interview transcripts with Jewish Americans, each opening a window on the past and all lavishly illustrated.
“I didn’t want to produce another one-volume survey of Jewish American history,” adds Wenger, who spoke at Saratoga’s Congregation Beth David in November. “I came up with the idea of focusing the book around first person voices and allowing people to see in their own words how different kinds of Jews expressed their Jewish identity.”
Many famous names and faces are included. Albert Einstein, Emma Lazarus, Sophie Tucker, Betty Friedan, Abraham Joshua Heschel and Ruth Bader Ginsburg all have dedicated sections.
Also represented are the almost famous and the hardly famous. Peddler Abraham Kohn wandered the villages of New England in the mid-19th century, keeping a diary of his travels. Wenger includes an excerpt.
Rebecca Samuel, who immigrated to Virginia in the 1790s, writes to her parents back in Germany of her sense of isolation as a Jew in the colonies. Wenger also includes a passage from the autobiography of Anna Freudenthal Solomon, a Polish immigrant who moved to the American Southwest in the 1870s to become a pioneer hotelier.
“Average readers will probably know less about the earlier periods of American Jewish history,” Wenger notes. “Some of the material from the colonial period might surprise people. It explodes some commonly held myths. For example, many people assume Jews came over and immediately acquired success and wealth. [The book] helps to have a fuller portrait of the American Jewish experience.”
Wenger’s book parallels the PBS documentary in many respects, but she also had the freedom to explore other directions. For example, she added a section on the Civil War that includes a letter written by a Jewish soldier describing how he and his soldiers celebrated Passover at the front.
A professor of Jewish studies at the University of Pennsylvania, Wenger grew up in a traditional Conservative home. As an undergrad at Wesleyan, the Atlanta native fell in love with U.S. history, particularly Jewish American history.
She went on to earn a master’s degree at the Jewish Theological Seminary and a doctorate at Yale. Wenger has written other books on the Jewish American experience, including one on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, once the epicenter of American Jewry.
Those books were more academic in nature. “The Jewish Americans” is Wenger’s first foray into the popular mainstream.
Although she has spent her career studying Jewish American history, Wenger remains excited by the subject. Working on the new book — and participating in the development of the PBS series — only fueled further insights.
“Three centuries ago when Jews came to colonial America, they were coming to the most remote outpost on the edge of the Jewish world,” she says. “But in a relatively short time, [America] became a center of Jewish culture, with a greater range of options for expressing Jewish identity than anywhere else in the world. This is not only a Jewish story, but an American story.”
“The Jewish Americans: Three Centuries of Jewish Voices in America” by Beth S. Wenger (388 pages, Doubleday, $40)