The Golden Land

The Golden Landis a museum-in-a-book that devotes a double-page spread--complete with removable letters, documents, and personal effects--to each of the successive waves of Jewish immigration to America, from the Germans and Eastern Europeans in the 19th and early 20th centuries to the refugees from the Nazis in the 1930s and ’40s to the Soviet Jews in the 1970s and '80s.America was the first nation where Jews were regarded as citizens from the very beginning, andThe Golden Landreveals how they converted opportunity to success in fields from commerce, medicine, and science to movies, music, and literature. The book includes facsimiles of George Washington’s letter to a community of Jews in Rhode Island, Emma Lazarus’s poem that was later inscribed on the base of the Statue of Liberty, Irving Berlin’s handwritten lyrics for “God Bless America,” a quiz challenging readers to guess the original names of American-Jewish show-business celebrities, and plenty of other materials to give readers a real feel for how America changed the Jews and how the Jews changed America.