Jewish Archives | What It Means to Be American

The Passion for Ojibwe Culture I Inherited from My Native-American Mom—and Austrian-Jewish Dad

Championing My Heritage Began with Their Half-True American Dream

By Anton Treuer
April 21, 2017

In my professional life, as a professor of the Ojibwe language and culture, I work to teach and revitalize the Ojibwe language, one of more than 500 tribal languages spoken here before Europeans arrived. I also travel frequently to run racial equity and cultural competency trainings.

My work is a passion and a calling. Sometimes it surprises people to hear that it grows out of an inheritance I received from both of my parents: my Native American mother, to be …

A Jewish Photographer’s Nearly Forgotten ‘Collaboration’ with Cheyenne Indians on the Santa Fe Trail

The Sole Surviving Image of the Perilous Journey Provides a Crucial Bridge to History

By Steve Rivo
January 27, 2017

On a cold day in late November 1853, in a place called Big Timbers, in what is today southeastern Colorado, a Jewish photographer named Solomon Nunes Carvalho hoisted his ten-pound daguerreotype camera onto a tripod and aimed his lens at a pair of Cheyenne Indians. At first glance, the resulting image, scratched and faded from years of neglect, seems unremarkable. But in fact it is probably the oldest existing photograph of Native Americans taken on location in the western United …

The Woman Who Built the Waldorf of the Catskills

Despite Her Humble Origins, Jennie Grossinger Learned to Play the Role of Hostess

By Stephen M. Silverman
October 22, 2015

Just as in Casablanca everybody came to Rick’s, so in the Catskill Mountains of New York everybody aspired to go to Jennie’s.

In its storied 1914-to-1986 existence, Jennie Grossinger’s family boarding house was called Longbrook House (the original name when the Galician Jews first started to rent out the spare bedrooms of their rundown farmhouse), Grossinger’s Terrace Hill House, Grossinger’s Catskill Resort Hotel (which built upon the original framework of the Terrace Hill House), and then finally, at the peak of …

Caught Between Gefilte Fish and Campbell’s Soup

I Loved My Jewish Mother’s Cooking, But I Also Longed for PB&Js and Mallomars

gefilte fish, food, Jewish food, Passover

By Hasia Diner
November 7, 2014

When I first gravitated toward writing about food and immigration to the United States as an ostensibly serious academic, colleagues asked me—and, frankly, I asked myself—the obvious question. Why food? Food perhaps lacked the gravitas and significance of subjects like political, labor or immigration history.

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