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Jeffrey S. Gurock, The Holocaust Averted: An Alternate History of American Jewry, 1938–1967 (New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press, 2015), 320 pp.

Spoiler alert: In Jeffrey Gurock’s new book, a work of counterfactual history, Chamberlain stands up to Hitler at Munich in 1938; Pearl Harbor is never attacked by Japan; German military elites successfully kill Hitler; the Holocaust is, indeed, averted. In this version of reality, the German leadership, facing significant early losses in the air and on the ground, focuses on rooting out dissent at home rather than systematically persecuting Jews. Poland is occupied, uncontested, by the Soviets, leaving millions of Jews under Stalin’s thumb but not (as in reality, of course) in Hitler’s clutches.

As magical, restorative, and nearly unconceivable it is for us, his audience, to read European Jewry back into existence, Gurock directs the reader’s attention elsewhere in this ambitious reimagining of twentieth-century history. The heart of Gurock’s “dystopian counterfactual vision” (272) is America from the thirties to the sixties. American domestic politics and popular opinion play a crucial role here: The United States remains isolationist while war rages in Europe on Roosevelt’s watch and then under the imagined presidency of Republican Robert Taft. With no war effort, there are no GI Jews and no propounding of a Judeo-Christian, culturally pluralistic ethos among American leaders. Meanwhile, a more confident Great Britain, cooling on a potential Arab alliance, leaves the gates to Palestine open to Jewish immigration. Without millions of Jewish lives hanging in the balance in Europe, American Jews are never jolted into action on the Palestine question. Emblematic of this counterfactual turn of events: At an emergency conference of American Jewish organizations at New York’s Biltmore Hotel in 1947 (got that?), attendees pledge their support for America’s neutral peace-keeping role in bloody Palestine and forswear assistance to Palestinian Jewry, pronouncing that, “in time, the promised national home for the Jewish people would become a reality…  [b]ut this long-anticipated event will occur only when the world community unites behind a plan that would not undermine the rights and privileges of existing non-Jewish groups” (160). The real Biltmore

Book Reviews

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Program (1942) and the American Jewish Conference that followed (1943), in which American Jewish leaders resolved to support Jewish statehood, flicker like ghosts in the reader’s peripheral vision.

European Jewry survives; Palestinian Jewry fights a victorious war in 1948, but without U.S. recognition or American Jewish support. Indeed, this is the crux of the matter for Gurock, which reveals his essentially monocausal understanding of American Jewish destiny. Without the unfolding Holocaust as spur, and without the opportunity to fight fascism and prove their mettle in the war effort, American Jews comprise a fearful, shadow community ever after. Increasingly alienated from global Jewry and a shared Jewish past, they are spiritually incurious—there’s no religious revival of any kind, no synagogue building boom—and they are cowed, collectively, by gentile distrust. In Gurock’s conjuring, Jewish leaders fall over themselves to assure a suspicious U.S. government that Israel means little to them—and lo, this comes to pass.

This book delivers frisson upon frisson as the world we know brushes past its fraternal twin. Aside from playing spot-the-historical-divergence, though, how does one approach a work of alternative history? Gurock suggests that the careful revisiting of verifiable roads-not-taken delivers maximal plausibility, and plausibility is the necessary condition for counterfactual historical work. As he writes in the prologue, “a writer cannot bring an unbridled imagination to implausible situations” (6). The author’s reliance on political, diplomatic, and military sources, in this light, is valid. It’s difficult to imagine The Holocaust Averted as alternative social history, composed of the counterfactual twists and turns in the lives of real, everyday Jews in mid-twentieth-century America, Europe, or Israel. Indeed, that isn’t history; it’s fiction (and sometimes excellent fiction—see Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America and Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life, to name two eminent, imaginative works that cover some of the same historical ground as Gurock). And yet, while Gurock-the-historian is rigorous and thoughtful in his revisiting of the historical record, the book draws equally upon his imaginative skills. This takes bravery. It also takes a lot of effort. The scenes in the book that read most like fiction show the most strain; at times, turning the pages of The Holocaust Averted is akin to slogging through lesser spy fiction. Still, Gurock’s murky counter-reality has a compelling Twilight-Zone-like chill, something we don’t usually get in a work of historical scholarship.  

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It has been a long time since I have read a work of history in which women are almost entirely absent. Perhaps this is inevitable given Gurock’s sensible focus on governmental and organizational leadership. Gurock plausibly conjures a counterfactual postwar Jewish world without the student movement, without the women’s movement, without countercultural or feminist Judaism—and without Hadassah, for that matter (that organization is never mentioned at all, even to lament counterfactually low membership numbers). It is a monochromatic landscape. In his account, American presidents defer outright to racist Dixiecrats, and Jews have no impetus to partner with African Americans in the quest for civil rights. (Needless to say, perhaps, there is no Black Power here either, a movement that, in reality, influenced the rhetoric and politics of American Jews profoundly.) What results, in Gurock’s hands, is a bimodal domestic scene, in which American Jews form a largely quiescent mass, exhorted by a few religious leaders and a handful of committed Zionists to map collective destiny more boldly, to no avail. His heroes are Conservative and modern Orthodox rabbis and a smattering of scholars of Jewish history and sociology who lament the sad state of American Jewish affairs and imagine how things might be different. Paradoxically, then, Gurock’s project is at once cutting-edge and conservative, a bold methodological step into the future and, in terms of actual content, a retreat to a historical universe in which elite white men shuffle papers and make pronouncements, when they are not shooting at each other.

Reading this book takes work, even with a helpful “what actually happened” section at the end of each chapter. If anything is suited to digital innovation, counterfactual history is. I can imagine that many readers would benefit from the opportunity to, for example, click through the text of an author’s counterfactual invention and follow a link to one or more scholarly renderings of the real historical record, as well as to primary documents. In the course of reading, it can be difficult to recall the rationale for this or that counterfactual turn of events; I’d guess that every reader of Gurock’s book will, at some point, be left scrambling for information elsewhere—in other books or online—to piece together the real historical narrative. I’d wager, too, that the process of negotiating the real and the make-believe is easier for those readers—i.e., Baby Boomers and the remnants of the Greatest Generation—for whom the material is viscerally familiar, the stuff of one’s own youth and formative years.

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And yet the book may be most valuable to contemporary undergraduates, for whom it could serve as a challenging, thought-provoking pedagogical exercise. For what better lesson can one impart, as a teacher, than the reality that history isn’t inevitable?

Emily Alice Katz is the author of Bringing Zion Home: Israel in American Jewish Culture, 1948–1967. She is affiliated with the Jewish studies program at Duke University.

Kimberly Marlowe Hartnett, Carolina Israelite: How Harry Golden Made Us Care about Jews, the South, and Civil Rights (Chapel Hill: Uni-versity of North Carolina Press, 2015), 359 pp.

From Chaim to Hyman to Herschel to Harry Lewis to Harry L. to Har-ry; from Goldhirsch to Goldenhurst to Goldhirst to Golden (138). Only in America could Harry Golden (1903–1981) assume so many names to match so many identities. Golden was a jailed felon for stock brokerage/bucket shop shenanigans, a petty swindler, an unlikely womanizer sepa-rated from his wife, a liquor-drinking cigar smoker, and a check kiter who refused to repay loans from his friends. He managed to resurrect his life as a pop culture icon and sage of Charlotte, North Carolina, through his very personal newspaper, Carolina Israelite, along with other publications; and by mingling with stars of journalism, television, literature, politics, and civil rights. He had trouble making a living until later in life when his books—appearing at a pace of one per year for more than fifteen years (often edited and even largely written by his son, Richard Goldhurst)—sold millions of copies and numerous speaking engagements afforded him a comfortable living. Perhaps his greatest gift was to humanize civil rights for African Americans through humorous, cutting satire. Derided as sim-plistic and overly optimistic, Golden nonetheless made racism and racists appear totally out of place and irrational.

Fittingly, Harry Golden now has a journalist/muse in Kimberly Marlowe Hartnett, and she is fully capable of telling his captivating and complex story in wonderful prose. As Hartnett indicates, Golden “said the things that many others thought and could not say at the time—and his speaking out made a difference” (263). In another of her apt

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characterizations, she notes that “humor, as it turns out, illuminates so thoroughly that few hiding places remain” (264).

Hartnett depicts Golden warts and all. She uses appropriate primary sources and places them in nuanced historical context through most of the relevant secondary works. For example, Hartnett ably discusses Golden’s mixed relationships with the local Jewish community, some Jewish intel-lectuals, and national Jewish organizations (particularly the Anti-Defama-tion League); and she somewhat juxtaposes these with his sincere friend-ships with ardent segregationists. By describing Golden as a marginal man who associated with the underdog, she is able to explain how he could empathize with the difficulties that segregationists encountered adjusting to changes they had to make, even as he castigated their position.

Another of the many qualities of this book is Hartnett’s insightful analy-sis of causation. She explores varieties of early and continuing influences on Golden, the reasons for his personal demons as well as his rise and decline, and the changing nature of the Civil Rights movement and his positions and roles in it, as well as other causes. Moreover, she details the strengths and weaknesses of Golden’s positions and those of his critics.

I was surprised to learn about Golden’s emphasis on the tremendous impact of racism on the health care of African Americans and his ques-tions about why the Civil Rights movement concentrated on inequality in education rather than on the extremely high mortality rates engendered by inadequate medical care. He rejected advocacy of social equality as im-practical given class differences. Golden’s activities at the Highlander Folk School proved to be pivotal for his rise to acceptance and respectability as a social critic.

In a minor quibble, Hartnett discusses Golden’s close friendships with white editors who worked in the South and took moderate and then pro-gressive stands in relation to black civil rights, but she could have devel-oped this somewhat more as a significant support group had she consulted Harold Martin’s 1973 biography, Ralph McGill: Reporter, and John T. Kneebone’s Southern Liberal Journalists and the Issue of Race, 1920–1944.

With his many errors and simplistic take on many issues, it is easy to dismiss Golden as an historian. Yet his A Little Girl Is Dead (1965) provided the historical context that made it a capable forerunner of Leonard Dinnerstein’s scholarly The Leo Frank Case (1968). His Forgotten Pioneers (1963) opens the story of Jewish peddlers now explored by Hasia

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Diner and others. Jewish Roots in the Carolinas: A Pattern of American Philo-Pietism (1955), Our Southern Landsman (1974), and several of his articles published in national Jewish periodicals including Midstream and Commentary stressed a South that welcomed its Jews seemingly more than other sections of the country. Yet the limited and provisional welcome led the Jews in the region toward acceptance of or at least acquiescence to Southern mores and a policy of avoiding controversial positions. According to Golden, Southern Jews generally failed to speak out on behalf of the black Civil Rights movement out of fear. Golden’s analysis served as the precursor to the distinctiveness school of Southern Jewish history and informed our understanding of the role of Southern Jews in relation to the Civil Rights movement for a generation.

Kimberly Marlowe Hartnett has written a marvelous biography of a man with numerous and ambiguous American, Southern, and Jewish identities. Carolina Israelite: How Harry Golden Made Us Care about Jews, the South, and Civil Rights provides insights that go beyond the man to the supporters and foes of the Civil Rights movement, national politics and political figures, journalism and journalists, publishing and editors, the experiences of an immigrant family on New York’s Lower East Side, and the South and Southern Jews and gentiles. It is a page-turner well worth the attention of scholars and laypeople.

Mark K. Bauman retired early as professor of history at Atlanta Metropoli-

tan College. He is the author of biographies of Southern Methodist Bishop Warren A. Candler (recipient of the Jesse Lee Prize) and Rabbi Harry H. Epstein, as well as American Jewish Chronology and about fifty scholarly articles. He edited Quiet Voices: Southern Rabbis and Civil Rights; Dixie Diaspora: An Anthology on Southern Jewish History; and three special issues of American Jewish History. He serves as founding and current editor of Southern Jewish History. Most recently, he edited To Stand Aside or Stand Alone based on interviews conducted by the late Rabbi Allen Krause of Southern rabbis concerning their positions on the Civil Rights movement (forthcoming from University of Alabama Press).

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Samuel E. Karff, For This You Were Created: Memoir of an American Rabbi (Houston: Bright Sky Press, 2015), 399 pp.

A paraphrase of Numbers 12:7, “A servant of God who felt His pres-ence everywhere,” best summarizes the long and distinguished career of Rabbi Samuel E. Karff, who characterizes his decades-long service as a rabbi with the comment, “[We] not only teach Torah, we must strive to be Torah” (55). An excerpt from Karff’s essay, “A Jew at Harvard,” sum-marizes this career goal:

To be a rav is to offer some assurance to the dying and their survivors that a human life has not been lived in vain…. Our souls are nourished by our study and our teaching and our learning from those we have come to teach… [But] we continue to have moments of nagging uncertainty as well as those moments of blessed confirmation (57).

Karff chronicles the challenges of being a rav—periods of multitasking, the continuous pressure of meeting deadlines, and extended service that leaves a rabbi drained—all of which are countered by family and nur-turing study. In addition to his “day job,” Karff managed to pursue the cultivation of his intellect with the production of three volumes, The Soul of the Rav, Agada: The Language of Jewish Faith, and Permission to Believe. He also wrote a weekly column for the religion section of the Houston Chronicle for fifteen years and produced weekly early-Sunday-morning radio broadcasts of abbreviated sermons. As a humorous aside, Karff once received a note from a Catholic sister who, after listening to his program, reported that immediately following Sunday Mass she went to a “Jewish delicatessen and ordered bagels with lox and cream cheese” (210).

This memoir chronicles Karff’s family of origin, education (voted “most likely to succeed” in high school), service in the U.S. Armed Forces, marriage, child-rearing, dealing with depression and personal and family illness, congregational and professional leadership, civil rights struggles, Vietnam War protests, interfaith outreach (considered by congregants to be an important “Ambassador to the Gentiles”), teaching (students in his Hebrew Scriptures class at Notre Dame

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University affectionately “christened” him “Rabbi McKarffy”), service as president of the Central Conference of American Rabbis, Israel (“My personal mission has been to make Judaism a spiritually vibrant and important part of Jewish self-consciousness in this great land” [273]), and a twelve-year post-retirement career teaching spirituality in medicine at the University of Texas Health Science Center’s schools of medicine, nursing, dentistry, public health and biomedical research.

Karff’s career spans major changes in Reform Judaism, including the or-dination of the first woman rabbi, publication of a gender-sensitive prayer book, other gender issues, the emergence of congregational day schools, and the revival of mikveh rituals.

For This You Were Created (an allusion to Pirke Avot 2:8) is refreshingly supplemented with writing from sermons and addresses, representative of an era of thoroughly prepared public presentations, often with biblical foundation. Karff notes that fastidious sermon and lecture preparation, sadly, is fading in the current era of “entertainment” preaching, often off the top of a clergyperson’s head. It is also elevating to read this rabbi’s sys-tematic, well-formulated understanding of Reform Judaism and its newer iterations of post-Classical or neo-Reform that continue to transform Re-form, at the same time that “we are standing on the shoulders of those who went before us.” As Karff observes, “Post-classical Reform teaches us that freedom to discard rituals that became meaningless includes the freedom to reclaim those that, in our present frame of mind and spirit, can help us connect to our deeper selves, our community and God” (233). Such transformative freedom is demonstrated by his leadership in the es-tablishment of a congregational day school, one of the first such schools under the auspices of a temple.

This memoir would have benefited by editorial fact-checking. Two examples caught my eye: First, Rabbi Sally Priesand, the first woman rabbi, was ordained in 1972, not 1974. Second, Karff offers an inaccurate midrashic account that he cites from Shab 10a but, in fact, is found in Ruth Raba 6:4. This Midrash contrasts the actions of two men—one who climbs a tree and descends safely even though he is in violation of Shabbat law and disregards the mitzvah forbidding the taking of young birds in the presence of their mother “in order that you may live long in the land the LORD your God is giving you” (Ex 20:12 and Deut. 22:6–7). The second man, the focus of Karff’s attention, dies while climbing a tree

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after Shabbat and fulfilling the commandment to shoo the mother bird away that she not witness the taking of her young from the nest. Karff ignores the final stinging comment of this account uttered by apostate Elisha ben Abuya: “There is no justice and there is no judge.” Instead, Karff utilizes this Midrash as an opportunity to affirm a God who enables an individual to “discover the deepest meaning of our lives” (62); this subscribes to Martin Buber’s theology, “You need God in order to be, and God needs you for the very meaning of your life” (365). Karff interprets this as God’s “divine self-limitation.” This approach is further explained by Karff’s comment that “God limits the divine self in order to grant human creatures the dignity of real freedom, rather than be puppets on a divinely controlled string. God also limits his micromanaging of the universe by giving us dependable laws of nature.” This reviewer cannot imagine that the limited-God card can be of comfort to the parent of a child dying from an incurable disease.

In spite of a lack of careful editorial copy editing, this rich account of Karff’s life and career offers younger colleagues—perhaps those at the start of their careers—the benefit of being able to view the lifetime of a rabbi whose career focuses on the challenges and rewards of being called to sa-cred work. Rabbi Karff puts all the exultation and anguish of his calling into sharp perspective.

Stephen S. Pearce, PhD, rabbi emeritus of Congregation Emanu-El of San Francisco, is author of Flash of Insight: Metaphor and Narrative in Therapy and coauthor, with Bishop William E. Swing and Father John P. Schlegel, of Building Wisdom’s House: A Book of Values for Our Time.

Lisa Moses Leff, The Archive Thief: The Man Who Salvaged French Jew-ish History in the Wake of the Holocaust (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), xii + 286 pp.

In March 1959, Zosa Szajkowski (1911–1978), the scholar of French Jewish history, wrote to Jacob Rader Marcus, founder of the American Jewish Archives, on behalf of “a friend” looking to sell three historical documents for $20 (around $165 in 2016 dollars). When Marcus offered $15, Szajkowski replied that his “friend” would accept it, but he asked

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that Marcus send the check “on my name.” Marcus happily obliged, and asked Szajkowski’s “friend” to pass along similar material if he had any.1 As Marcus would repeat only weeks later: “We are always in the market to buy, as long as the price is right.”2 In July of that year, Szajkowski sent Marcus another package. “These documents dont [sic] belong to me and I was asked for them $100,” he explained. This time, Marcus passed, leaving Szajkowski’s “friend” to peddle his wares elsewhere.3 “These documents dont [sic] belong to me”—these words could not have been truer. As Lisa Moses Leff details in The Archive Thief: The Man Who Salvaged French Jewish History in the Wake of the Holocaust, the documents, pamphlets, and pages trafficked by Szajkowski were the product of a decades-long career of theft in the archives.

In The Archive Thief, Leff traces Szajkowski’s career and exploits, from his fascination with books as a youth in Russian Poland to his final capture and suicide in New York. Following a brief biographical sketch and a consid-eration of Szajkowski’s blossoming career as a journalist and scholar in the 1930s as part of a circle of YIVO scholars in Paris led by Elias (Ilya) and Riva Tcherikower. Leff turns to the book’s primary subject: Beginning in 1940, after Szajkowski suffered a severe injury while serving in the French Foreign Legion, Szajkowski lived a double life, collecting historical material on the Jews of France both for his own research and also to provide materials to archives and libraries in the United States and, in later years, the state of Is-rael. Upon recovery, Szajkowski found himself in the south of France, where he secured manuscripts of the Jewish communities in Carpentras as well as research materials the Tcherikowers had left in Paris. Though he escaped to America, he reenlisted as a paratrooper in the American forces, enabling him to continue the fight against the Germans; it also allowed him to search for archives in Berlin at the war’s end. This early work may perhaps be con-strued as salvage, but at some point, it became outright theft. The book’s final chapters turn to his more explicitly criminal activities in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, leading to a dramatic denouement. When Szajkowski was caught red-handed in the Archives départementales in Strasbourg in 1961, he was allowed to flee after signing a confession but was convicted in absentia and effectively barred from returning to France. Nevertheless, he continued to steal. In 1978, Szajkowski was once again found stealing, this time from the archives of the New York Public Library. With his career totally ruined, he took his own life.

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The Archive Thief, for which Leff was awarded the 2016 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, makes an important contribution in introduc-ing the question of the history of archives within Jewish studies. a topic that deserves greater consideration. The academic study of archives is steeped in somewhat impenetrable theory and a now-sprawling secondary literature. Further, archives’ special interest to the scholars who make use of them comes at a risk of navel-gazing. That is not to say that archives are uninteresting outside the rarefied world of scholarship, but a recognition of an inherent possibility that the topic could lead to insider baseball. Leff has written a book that will appeal to a broad audience, through intense focus on a fascinating figure and by sidestepping (though not ignoring) the often jargon-filled landscape of academic archival studies. Using An-toinette Burton’s language of the “backstage of archives,” Leff leverages a shorthand that at once gestures at the theoretical literature and makes the simple yet profound point that understanding how the archives have been shaped is crucial for those who wish to comprehend how the discipline of Jewish history has evolved. Leff makes archives personable through the character of Szajkowski and his dramatic story—one of theft, salvage, and the true home of the sources of history. It is unfortunate, then, that Leff has buried her argument and shows much restraint, perhaps limited by the clandestine nature of the topic at hand, in making clear statements about the nature, scope, and motives for Szajkowski’s activities.

In sketching Szajkowski, Leff is careful to eschew terms of black and white. She proposes that in stealing files from French archives and selling them to self-defined Jewish ones, Szajkowski fundamentally transformed them: By bringing together these materials, which never would have been side by side in their natural habitat, Szajkowski removed the files from their French context and reconfigured them as a part of “Jewish” history. Szajkowski even created his own “archive” when he reorganized the files in his hotel room, blurring the lines between archivist and researcher (4, 12, 182–183). Leff also posits that Szajkowski catalyzed the field of French Jewish history, on the one hand making documents available to a bud-ding group of mid-twentieth-century scholars in the United States, and on the other hand motivating French archivists to catalog their holdings as a means to determine the damage done (3). She hints that removing files was Szajkowski’s way of making his research more efficient, only dis-tinctive from contemporary scholars’ methods in its ruthlessness (186).

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Indeed, when scholars visit archives and libraries, we “take” notes, and now photographs. And Leff suggests that Szajkowski carried forth into the postwar era the tradition of the zamlers, or collectors, popularized by Simon Dubnow and the interwar YIVO. But whereas YIVO’s Marek Web acknowledged in 1980, two years after Szajkowski’s final crime, that the research institute must shift away from their longtime policy of “active collecting” and “campaigning” for records among a network of zamlers, Szajkowski held fast to his role, just as he looked nostalgically to an era of Diaspora nationalism.4 In the end, though, Leff fails to tie all this to-gether, leaving the reader with a tantalizing trail of crumbs pointing the way to the bigger picture.

Leff only delves into Szajkowski’s life as an “archive thief ” in the book’s final fifty pages. Nevertheless, she grapples throughout with a fundamen-tal tension, captured in the book’s very title, of whether Szajkowski’s work was theft or salvage. At first, it appears that Leff draws a line between “acceptable” theft during World War II and its immediate aftermath and more clear-cut criminal acts in later years. But she intimates that it was more complex, hinting that when Szajkowski asked YIVO in 1940 for funds to purchase documents from a “local Jew,” he was already work-ing for personal gain (67). She notes that in postwar Berlin, Szajkowski was ripping pages from books and removing ownership stamps, later his signature (134). And she reveals that Szajkowski’s 1949 falling-out with Max Weinreich, director of YIVO in New York, was in part related to the disclosure that some of his wartime collecting had crossed an ethical line (144–145). Carefully placed questions bring the reader to consider when, precisely, Szajkowski began stealing, or at least compromising his moral compass. When he later cut pages from bound archival registers and pur-ported to represent his “friend” the document dealer, was he breaking bad, or following an already established pattern? Rather than painting him as either rescuer or thief, as he’s been understood by the archives that he either provided or pilfered, Leff argued in a 2012 article that Sza-jkowski was simultaneously rescuer and thief.5 In the book, this claim is a bit muddled. Perhaps the whole matter is meant to be a bit ambiguous, allowing the reader to come to her or his own conclusions. But in doing so, is the reader merely invited to once again try Szajkowski in absentia?

Szajkowski’s motives are also left ambiguous. Leff suggests that Sza-jkowski stole documents to keep them close at hand while writing and

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then sold them after he was done—the equivalent of research photogra-phy in a world before handheld cameras, or students who sell books at the end of the semester (186). Leff emphasizes that collecting documents constituted Szajkowski’s lifelong passion; she cites a young Szajkowski’s efforts to raise money to buy books in an impoverished Polish shtetl and his later letters to Elias Tcherikower on the topic of collecting in which he wrote, “I have to do it. I can’t do otherwise” (54; original emphasis). In this, she lends weight to the notion that they were “crimes of passion.” Szajkowski was motivated by a sense of moral duty, Leff explains: at first, that files left in Vichy France would be lost; later, that his efforts were part of restitution; and finally, that in stealing and selling documents, he was receiving what should be his just deserts, as scholars should have been, in his view, better supported financially. The financial motive, however, is unclear. In 1961, Szajkowski made $3,400 from selling documents (about $27,000 in 2016 dollars), truly a significant addition to his YIVO salary, which was around $5,500 in 1967 (equivalent to $39,000 in 2016) (187). But as Leff indicates, Szajkowski led a frugal lifestyle, and she suggests that his salary was more than sufficient to support a family of three, leading the reader to question why the lucrative but illicit business attracted him. Leff leaves us with a vague image of a life denied, that of the respected middle-class scholar, in part because he lacked a university affiliation and in part because he believed the Jewish world had abandoned scholarship and limited it as a path to social mobility. Leff thus indicates that Sza-jkowski was embittered by the transformations of postwar Jewish life and the decline of the ideals of Diaspora nationalism. But if anything, his thefts from French archives and subsequent sales in the United States and Israel, like his decision to publish his later research in English, Yiddish, and Hebrew—but not in French—indicate his gravitation away from France toward these new epicenters.

In the end, the singular focus on the character of Zosa Szajkowski comes at the expense of the other parties involved. Szajkowski may have been an archive thief, but his story is not isolated. It is part of a broader era of post-war reconstruction and transformation of the archives of Jewish history. Leff does consider the buyers, but she doesn’t get at the heart of the matter, which is that they were willing accomplices. even enablers as the exchange with Marcus demonstrates. The surreptitious nature of the whole affair and Szajkowski’s efforts to cover his tracks means that the drama with which

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Leff opens and closes the book, and which endows it with such potential and energy, casts a shadow over its remainder, where so much by defini-tion remains in the shadows. Ultimately, The Archive Thief is a profoundly interesting character study that presents an open invitation to continue exploring the “backstage” of the development of archives and their impact and meaning for the emergence of Jewish studies as an academic discipline.

Jason Lustig is a doctoral candidate at the UCLA department of history specializing in modern Jewish history and the history of historiography. His dissertation, titled “‘A Time to Gather’: A History of Jewish Archives in the Twentieth Century,” is a transnational study of the development of Jewish archives in Germany, the United States, and Palestine/Israel. He has been a research fellow at the American Jewish Archives, the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, and the Leo Baeck Institute.

Notes1Zosa Szajkowski to Jacob Rader Marcus, 18 March 1959, Marcus to Szajkowski, 24 March 1959, Szajkowski to Marcus, 2 April 1959, Marcus to Szajkowski, 6 April 1959, MS-687, 98/3, American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati, OH.2Jacob Rader Marcus to Zosa Szajkowski, 13 May 1959, MS-687, 98/3, AJA, Cincinnati, OH.3Zosa Szajkowski to Jacob Rader Marcus, 17 July 1959, Marcus to Szajkowski, 21 July 1959, MS-687 98/3, AJA, Cincinnati, OH.4Marek Web, “The YIVO Archives: 55 Years of Collecting,” 1 October 1980, YIVO RG 100, New York.5Lisa Leff, “Rescue or Theft? Zosa Szajkowski and the Salvaging of French Jewish History after World War II,” Jewish Social Studies 18, no. 2 (Winter 2012): 1–39.

Adam D. Mendelsohn, ed., By Dawn’s Early Light: Jewish Contributions to American Culture from the Nation’s Founding to the Civil War (Princeton: Princeton University Library, 2016), 330 pp.

Recently, we have witnessed renewed interest in the late eighteenth and nineteenth century Jewish experience in the United States. Important monographs by Tobias Brinkmann, Adam Mendelsohn, and Cornelia Wilhelm have contributed to the field’s knowledge of this pivotal period in American Jewish history. In particular, Mendelsohn’s book on Jewish immigrant socioeconomics and America’s garment industry won the 2014 National Jewish Book Award in American Jewish Studies and

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was a finalist for the prestigious Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature in 2016. More recently, Mendelsohn edited By Dawn’s Early Light, a catalog and assortment of essays based on the extraordinary collection of Leonard Milberg.

The volume is remarkable for its content and esthetic components. Thirteen scholars utilized the Milberg collection, recently exhibited at the Princeton University Art Museum. Stretching, chronologically speaking, from the early republic to the Civil War, each of the essays emphasizes an area in which Jews contributed to or were influenced by American cul-ture. Some of the chapters are truly groundbreaking. For example, Dale Rosengarten’s lengthy portrait of Southern Jewish artists Solomon Nunes Carvalho and Theodore Moïse offers much insight into the role of culture and religion—both Judaism and Christianity—in shaping the destinies of two very talented men. Likewise, Judah Cohen’s essay on the cantor-ate and the migration of Jewish music to the New World should provoke scholars and students of the field to think more seriously about the role of song in the synagogue and in American Judaism. Finally, Jonathan Sarna’s concluding chapter reminds us that while most of the pages in this volume describe the role of Jews as agents of culture, there are also ample examples of Jews who functioned as “subversives,” women and men who challenged the dominant American culture (missionary activity, for instance).

Other chapters offer helpful summaries of important areas of Jewish cultural life—medicine, print culture, and politics, for example—or en-gage topics such as immigration and women’s cultural activities. All of these essays can serve as useful introductions to uninitiated readers on Jewish culture in this 1776–1865 period and advance our knowledge by drawing upon previously unknown materials or by reinterpreting under-studied sources. Take Shari Rabin’s chapter on the Jewish press, partic-ularly in Philadelphia and Cincinnati. Isaac Leeser’s Occident and Isaac Mayer Wise’s Israelite are well-known newspapers; the editors, too, are oft-discussed Jewish leaders in many history books and articles. Rabin’s very accessible chapter fulfills its mission of explaining how newspapers contributed to the construction of Jewish culture in the United States. Beginners in the field, with her able help, gain a sturdy foothold on the subject. Yet advanced and familiar readers will also be excited by the au-thor’s use of primary sources to throw new light on the Jewish press’s role in communicating a variety of economic and religious concerns.

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There is probably room to quibble about some overlap in the essays. For instance, the journalist, playwright, and politician Mordecai Noah appears in a number of these essays; each time, his basic biographical data and accomplishments are repeated. Still, this is a minor complaint and perhaps a necessary difficulty, owing to Noah’s and other Jews’ remarkably dynamic personalities and contributions to American culture.

The second half of the catalog includes an inventory of almost two hundred items (from the Milberg collection and a good number from other institutions that lent materials to the Princeton exhibit). The items are divided into themes such as “Caribbean Connections,” “Visual Arts,” “Theatre,” “Music,” Science & Medicine,” and “People & Places.” No doubt, the most eye-catching aspect of the catalog is the images. The tome features seventy-five high-resolution color images. Some, such as portraits of Rebecca Gratz, Morris Raphall, and Isaac Mayer Wise, are well known. Others, particularly the numerous paintings of Carvalho and Moïse, are both breathtakingly presented and rather unfamiliar to students of American Jewish history. Altogether, the visual presentation of By Dawn’s Early Light coupled with quality essays render this work an impressive and unique contribution to the attention-grabbing field of late-eighteenth and nineteenth-century American Jewish history.

Zev Eleff is chief academic officer of Hebrew Theological College in Skokie, Illinois. His most recent book is Who Rules the Synagogue (Oxford, 2016), a monograph that engages the subject of religious authority in nineteenth-century American Judaism.

Richard Menkis and Harold Troper, More Than Just Games: Canada and the 1936 Olympics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015), 320 pp.

In More Than Just Games, Richard Menkis and Harold Troper offer a close study of Canada’s involvement in the international controversy and debate concerning the Hitler regime’s hosting of the Olympic games in 1936. Their work is a well-researched, well-written, and thoroughly balanced account of the efforts of those who sought to promote or prevent Canadian participation in Nazi Olympics, and it is a welcome addition to the growing scholarship focusing on individual nations and their internal debates regarding participation.

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The authors do a fine job of surveying the historical circumstances concerning the granting of the games to Germany in 1931 and the initial reluctance of Hitler and the Nazis to abide by that decision when they came to power in January 1933. As is well known, Hitler’s ambivalence to sport in any form was overcome by Goebbels and others desirous to seize the global propaganda opportunity that hosting the Olympics provided to the regime. Once Hitler threw his support behind the games, the regime had to deliver on its promise of creating the most lavish and successful Olympic competitions to date, while at the same time fully extending policies to exclude German opponents of the regime from the German sporting establishment. As the authors point out, there lay the rub—for Nazi policies of prejudice, persecution, and exclusion contradicted the rules of the Olympic movement designed to foster equality of competition for all and the promotion of universal fraternity and peace through athletic competition (19). The hypocrisy of Hitler and his regime gave the opportunity for opponents to seize the initiative and argue for either the relocation of the games or a boycott if they remained in Germany.

Menkis and Troper then turn their attention to a detailed discussion of how these global issues played out in Canada. They describe the fis-sures and faults in Canadian society that in no small measure shaped the debate concerning Canadian participation in the games, contend-ing that, “the Canadian playing field remained through the 1930s frac-tured by class, regional, ethnic, racial, linguistic, religious, and gender cleavages” (22). It is through such a fractured lens that the authors then examine the response of Canadian Jews to Canadian participation in the games.

Canadian Jews rapidly became aware of the devastating effects on German Jews of Hitler’s assumption of power. Canadian Jewish leaders immediately launched efforts to dissuade Canadian Olympic officials from sanctioning participation in the games in Berlin. Overcoming di-visions among Jewish groups and organizations based on class and poli-tics, Canadian Jewish leaders forged alliances that vigorously sought to persuade Canadians of the true nature of the Nazi regime and the hypocrisy of allowing them to host Olympic competitions. This is one of the strongest sections of the book. Menkis and Troper introduce the reader to a number of figures whose energy and efforts in the attempt to boycott the games, despite their tragic failure, proved laudable.

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Chief among these were Rabbi Maurice Eisendrath and journalist Mat-thew Halton. Eisendrath, hired to lead the Holy Blossom Temple of To-ronto in 1929, became perhaps the most prominent and indefatigable leader of the Canadian boycott movement. Having visited Germany in 1933 and 1935, he witnessed the horrors of Nazism first hand and argued that a boycott of the games would reveal the regime’s true character, undo its propagandistic aims, and break the spell with which it had entranced too many in Germany and around the world. Eisendrath also sought to build coalitions among the Canadian Jewish Congress, the Young Men’s Hebrew Association, Jewish labor groups, Christian churches, and others opposed to fascism.

Halton, European correspondent for the Toronto Daily Star, had no in-terest whatsoever in sports but, after interviewing Eisendrath in 1933, be-came fully aware of the dangers of Nazism. As others became swept up in the hype concerning the games, Halton continued to trumpet that, “Be-hind a Nazi facade of sportsmanship,… Germany was a predatory state, ‘a nation on the march and actually seeking trouble’” (196). Despite the ef-forts of Eisendrath, Halton, and many others, nationalism and patriotism prevailed, the boycott movement failed to gain official or popular support in Canada, and the Olympics went on.

After detailing the failure of the boycott movement, Menkis and Troper provide an excellent account of the preparations for the games. They are especially strong in their examination of the economic difficulties con-fronted by the athletes and the Canadian Olympic Committee as they tried to finance Canadian athletes’ participation in the games. Mired in the Depression and with scant government funding for the Canadian Olympic Committee, most athletes had to find their own sponsors for their trip. The stories of the athletes’ travails are compelling and dem-onstrate how, far from wanting to boycott the games, Canadian citizens reached deep in their pockets to gladly support the athletes who so much wanted to do Canada proud in Garmisch and Berlin.

Finally, the authors offer an outstanding examination of the experience of Canadian athletes and teams in both the Winter and Summer Olym-pics. They earn special praise for their treatment of the often-neglected Winter Olympics. As Menkis and Troper point out, the Winter Olympics truly were a rehearsal for the more anticipated Summer Olympics in Ber-lin, and failure in Garmisch could have given support to those still seeking

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a boycott. The Nazi propaganda machine proved up to the challenge, and the facilities and conduct of the Winter Olympics won plaudits around the globe, thus heightening, rather than dampening, anticipation of the Summer Olympics.

Menkis and Troper move from strength to strength. Their exemplary research, well-written narrative, and solid argument throughout leave in no doubt the validity of their thesis: “In the end, no argument could shake the determination of supporters of the Olympics from ensuring that young Canadians, decked out in crimson blazers and carrying the Canadian ensign flag, would march into the Winter Olympic Stadium in Garmisch-Partenkirchen in February 1936, and into the Summer Olym-pic Stadium in Berlin six months later” (xiii).

Chris Mack is associate professor of modern European history at the State University of New York at Oswego.

Peter Adam Nash, The Life and Times of Moses Jacob Ezekiel: American Sculptor, Arcadian Knight (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2014), xiiii + 165 pp.

This well-intentioned book tells the story of Moses Jacob Ezekiel (1844–1917), an unfairly forgotten American sculptor and the first American Jewish artist to earn international acclaim. Born in Richmond, Virginia, into a Sephardic Jewish family, Ezekiel was one of fourteen children and a second-generation American. He was the first Jew to attend the Virginia Military Institute (VMI), and he served as a cadet in the Confederate Army during the American Civil War, fighting in the Battle of New Market.

As a boy Ezekiel had experimented with drawing and painting before he began sculpting at age thirteen, but when he graduated from VMI he began to study medicine; he felt a career in art was impossible and that medicine would provide financial security. Meanwhile, his childhood interest in art nagged at him. Ezekiel dropped out of the Medical College of Virginia after a year, but not before he took several anatomy classes, which doubtless influenced his later study of the human figure as a professional sculptor.

Following a stint living in Cincinnati, Ezekiel—eager for larger education—went to Europe to study at the Academy of Arts in Berlin.

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His training there, from 1869 to 1871, shaped his academic style—a propensity for allegory and historical subject matter—and his belief in the central role of the human figure, faithfully rendered, in his art. Ezekiel later moved to Rome, where he was surrounded by ancient and Renaissance sculpture, particularly by Michelangelo, which only reinforced his classicizing tendencies.

After five years in Berlin, Ezekiel became a permanent expatriate, living in Rome for the next forty-three years of his life. His studio in the ruins of the Baths of Diocletian became a fashionable gathering place for artisans of all persuasions, as well as for royalty and politicians; John D. Rock-efeller, Franz Liszt, and the Queen Mother were among his many visitors. At the same time, Ezekiel remained devoted to America and its ideals. He never surrendered his American citizenship, and his will specified that his body be returned to the United States upon his death. Ezekiel was buried with full military honors beneath the 32 ½-foot Confederate memorial that he designed for Arlington National Cemetery.

In this first book-length discussion of Ezekiel, Nash relays the artist’s intriguing life, relying heavily on his detailed, posthumously published memoirs. While well organized and written in passable prose, Nash’s book poses some problems. Nash states at the outset that he operates from two premises: First, Ezekiel’s commitment to what he understood as a time-less, neoclassical style suffused with storytelling narratives—coupled with his choice to remain in Rome rather than Paris, with its growing avant-garde art scene—stagnated the sculptor’s development, in some eyes, and as such his work has since been regarded as outmoded; this accounts for his scholarly neglect. Second, Nash draws a connection between Ezekiel’s Sephardic Jewish roots and his American upbringing. To that end, Nash argues that the cultured, intellectually minded cosmopolitan that Ezekiel was to become as an expatriate in Europe was “internalized”—that is, it somehow corresponds with his medieval Spanish heritage.

Nash’s first contention is entirely correct. Ezekiel was a very fine sculp-tor, mastering the European academic style in which he was trained. But in the age of contemporaries such as the celebrated sculptor Rodin and other rising modernist artists in France, Ezekiel’s work has surely been viewed as passé. This is not a particularly original observation even as it is important to state; throughout the history of art, artists who retained older styles amid rapidly changing fashions are indeed often marginalized.

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Nash’s second argument seems a bit farfetched, considering the Jewish expulsion from Spain took place in 1492 and, of course, Ezekiel never personally knew that heritage, which was also centuries removed from that of his parents and grandparents.

As a whole, Nash broadly and ably places Ezekiel within the context of his peripatetic life. Readers learn, for example, about Portuguese Jewry from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries, Victorian collecting hab-its, and antisemitism in Europe during Ezekiel’s generation. Frequently, Nash heavily relies on long quotes from other scholars who have writ-ten about the periods he connects to Ezekiel—historical information that could just as easily been paraphrased and footnoted. Very often, quotes are not introduced, leaving readers unsure if sources are current or from Eze-kiel’s era. Readers are forced to look at the footnotes, which on occasion do not correspond with the text. (The book could use some copyediting.) Nash successfully adds color to Ezekiel’s story when describing his travels in Europe, although here he could have pared down excessive quotations from the artist’s memoir (to name but one example: forty-seven lines are transcribed on pages 62–63). Nevertheless, the memoir serves as the vital document of Ezekiel’s life and worldview, and his world is best brought to life when Nash uses it to inform his own writing.

Nash’s most jarring omission is a lack of discussion about Ezekiel’s sculptures and, consequently, a lack of sufficient reproductions in the book. Only three reproductions of artworks are provided, along with sev-en photographs of Ezekiel, his studio, and his tools. Any book about an artist benefits greatly from visual analyses and extensive examination of style, form, content, and—especially in the case of Ezekiel—use of alle-gory, among other concerns related to an artist’s entire oeuvre. Save some cursory mentions of Ezekiel’s copious output and a discussion about the logistics surrounding his B’nai B’rith commission for a centennial sculp-ture dedicated to religious liberty—titled Religious Liberty, which appears prominently in relief on the sculpture’s pedestal—readers are mostly left in the dark.

The remarkable life and times of Moses Jacob Ezekiel, crossing continents and in acquaintance with some of the most vibrant and consequential figures of his age, makes for a fascinating tale, one worthy of Alexander Hamilton-like attention. Despite its flaws, Nash’s book offers an initial attempt to bring its subject to greater and well-deserved attention.

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Samantha Baskind is professor of art history at Cleveland State University and editor of the Pennsylvania State University’s book series, Dimyonot: Jews and the Cultural Imagination. She is the author or editor of five books, most re-cently Jewish Artists and the Bible in Twentieth-Century America (2014).