City of Promises

Winner of the 2012 National Jewish Book Award, presented by the National Jewish Book Council

New York Jews, so visible and integral to the culture, economy and politics of America’s greatest city, has eluded the grasp of historians for decades. Surprisingly, no comprehensive history of New York Jews has ever been written. City of Promises: A History of the Jews of New York, a three volume set of original research, pioneers a path-breaking interpretation of a Jewish urban community at once the largest in Jewish history and most important in the modern world.

Volume I, Haven of Liberty, by historian Howard B. Rock, chronicles the arrival of the first Jews to New York (then New Amsterdam) in 1654 and highlights their political and economic challenges. Overcoming significant barriers, colonial and republican Jews in New York laid the foundations for the development of a thriving community.

Volume II, Emerging Metropolis, written by Annie Polland and Daniel Soyer, describes New York’s transformation into a Jewish city. Focusing on the urban Jewish built environment—its tenements and banks, synagogues and shops, department stores and settlement houses—it conveys the extraordinary complexity of Jewish immigrant society.

Volume III, Jews in Gotham, by historian Jeffrey S. Gurock, highlights neighborhood life as the city’s distinctive feature. New York retained its preeminence as the capital of American Jews because of deep roots in local worlds that supported vigorous political, religious, and economic diversity.

Each volume includes a “visual essay” by art historian Diana Linden interpreting aspects of life for New York’s Jews from their arrival until today. These illustrated sections, many in color, illuminate Jewish material culture and feature reproductions of early colonial portraits, art, architecture, as well as everyday culture and community.

Overseen by noted scholar Deborah Dash Moore, City of Promises offers the largest Jewish city in the world, in the United States, and in Jewish history its first comprehensive account.

Howard B. Rock (Author)
Howard B. Rock is Professor of History Emeritus at Florida International University. He is the 2012 runner-up for the Dixon Ryan Manuscript Award presented by the New York State Historical Association, for Haven of Liberty: New York Jews in the New World, 1654–1865. He is also the author or editor of five other books.
Deborah Dash Moore (Author)
Deborah Dash Moore is Frederick G. L. Huetwell Professor of History and Professor of Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. She is the author and editor of a number of books, including Vernacular Religion: Collected Essays of Leonard Norman Primiano (NYU, 2022), Jewish New York: The Remarkable Story of A City and A People (NYU, 2020), City of Promises: A History of the Jews of New York (NYU, 2012), and GI Jews: How World War II Changed a Generation (Harvard, 2006).
Jeffrey S. Gurock (Author)
Jeffrey S. Gurock is the Libby M. Klaperman Professor of Jewish history at Yeshiva University. He has written or edited 25 books, including Jews in Gotham, which in 2012 was honored as Winner, Everett Family Foundation Award, Jewish Book of the Year, Jewish Book Council.
Annie Polland (Author)
Annie Polland is Executive Director of the American Jewish Historical Society. She was previously Executive Vice President for Programs and Education at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, where she authored, Landmark of the Spirit: The Eldridge Street Synagogue.
Daniel Soyer (Author)
Daniel Soyer teaches history at Fordham University in the Bronx. He is the author of the prize-winning Jewish Immigrant Associations and American Identity in New York, 1880-1939, and co-editor and translator of My Future is in America: East European Jewish Immigrant Autobiographies.

Diana L. Linden (Author)
Diana L. Linden is author of Ben Shahn's New Deal Murals: Jewish Identity in the American Scene and co-editor of The Social and the Real: Political Art of the 1930s in the Western Hemisphere