Book Review of "Urban Origins of American Judaism by Deborah Dash Moore"

Abstract

Trends in the study of history have seen a recent turn toward urban history, both as a feature of particular geographical and ethnic fields, and also as a field of its own. Urban historians pay particular attention to things like the relationship of the built environment to people and the multiple layers of the social construction of space. Urban history has its own historiography and set of canonical theorists, such as Lewis Mumford, Henri Lefebvre, Peter Hall, and Saskia Sassen. Urban Origins of American Judaism occasionally flirts with this literature, but it never joins the crowd. Rather, it situates itself much more inside the bounds of the field of American Jewish history than the field of urban history.