Book Description

"Only a century and a half has passed since the first contacts between a handful of Jews and the frontier outpost that eventually grew into the city of Buffalo; yet their subsequent relationship exemplifies every significant facet of Jewish life in America. The story begins with the attempt by the colorful Moredcai M. Noah to found his Jewish asylum, Ararat, in western New York, and it concludes with a description of a populous, self-aware, unified community striking out for the suburbs. The authors, themselves citizens of Buffalo, have succeeded in making their story alive, vibrant, panoramic. Perhaps this is due to the grandstand seat from which they have witnessed the energy and vision that have characterized the ultimate development of the community. It is also likely that their success in bringing the Buffalo Jewish story so vividly to life is a direct result of their method. For these professors chose to describe the community by describing the men and women who created it, against the background of the national and international socio-religious forces that shaped its growth. Its Geist is evoked by introducing the reader to the inner qualities of the people who shaped it. This history of the Jews of Buffalo thus differs substantially from virtually all similar accounts of other American-Jewish communities. More than any of the others it is written as a synthesis: between the American environment and the world-wide Jewish heritage of the successive waves of immigrants, among the various institutions as step by step they combined to create a sense of community, and, above all, among the leaders and personalities whom the book describes in considerable detail. From Ararat to Suburbia is filled with interesting and sharply-drawn vignettes Each of these pen portraits, emerging out of the subject's origin and New World status, lays bare his hopes, his strivings and his manner of expressing them. In one sense, of course, this is a success story. American-Jewish history altogether, and especially the history of its medium-sized communities, records the rapid advances made by individual men and women who thereupon displayed remarkable community consciousness and a characteristically Jewish sense of common destiny. The Jews of both Buffalo and the United States have been portrayed as largely the subjects, rather than the objects, of modern historical forces. This volume stresses the serious social, religious and cultural problems that Jews have had to face on the Niagara Frontier. Our authors make these clear, and Buffalo's experience forms a prototype for Jewish communities elsewhere. Hence, the treatment in this volume transcends provincial narrowness. It is not just another account of another American-Jewish community. It is the epic of the Jew in American civilization." --