Education
Ruth Gay attended Queens College in 1943 and received a master"s in library science from Columbia University in 1969.
( Winner of the National Jewish Book Award, a seminal wor...)
Winner of the National Jewish Book Award, a seminal work of history on immigrant Jewish life in early twentieth-century New York. Nearly three million Jews came to America from Eastern Europe between 1880 and the outbreak of World War I, filled with the hope of life in a new land. Within two generations, these newcomers settled and prospered in the densely populated Yiddish-speaking neighborhoods of New York City. Against this backdrop, Ruth Gay narrates their rarely told story―a unique and vibrant portrait of a people in their daily trials and rituals―bringing alive the vitality of the streets, markets, schools, synagogues, and tenement halls where a new version of America was invented in the 1920s and 1930s. An intimate, unforgettable account, Unfinished People is a singular act of expressing in words the richly textured lives of a resilient people. "A touching and funny evocation...marvelous in its detail.... This is history as day-to-day living―irrevocable and unforgotten."―Alfred Kazin
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0393322408/?tag=2022091-20
( This unique book provides a panoramic overview of a now...)
This unique book provides a panoramic overview of a now extinct culture: the 1500-year history of the Jews in Germany. Through texts, pictures, and contemporary accounts, it follows the German Jews from their first settlements on the Rhine in the fourth century to the destruction of the community in World War II. Using both voices and images of the past, the book reveals how the German Jews looked, how they lived, what they thought about, and what others thought of them. Ruth Gay's text, interwoven with passages from memoirs, letters, newspapers, and many other contemporary sources, shows how the German Jews organized their communities, created a new language (Yiddish), and built their special culture—all this under circumstances sometimes friendly, but often murderously hostile. The book explores the internal debates that agitated the community from medieval to modern times and analyzes how German Jewry emerged into the modern world. The earliest document in the book is a fourth-century decree by the Roman emperor Constantine permitting Jews to hold office in Cologne. Among the last are poignant letters from Betty Scholem in Berlin, writing during the Nazi years to her son Gershom in Palestine. In between are accounts of a ninth-century Jewish merchant appointed by Charlemagne to a diplomatic mission to Baghdad, a thirteenth-century Jewish minnesinger, a seventeenth-century pogrom in Frankfurt in which gentiles helped to save their Jewish neighbors, and the nineteenth-century innovation of department stores, palaces of consumerism. The book tells a story—moving, terrifying, and exhilarating—that must be remembered.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0300060521/?tag=2022091-20
(This volume tells the little-known story of why a quarter...)
This volume tells the little-known story of why a quarter of a million Jews, survivors of death camps and forced labour, sought refuge in Germany after World War II. Those who had ventured to return to Poland after liberation soon found that their homeland had become a new killing ground, where some 1500 Jews were murdered in pogroms between 1945 and 1947. Facing death at home, and with Palestine and the rest of the world largely closed to them, they looked for a place to be safe and found it in the shelter of the Allied Occupation Forces in Germany. By 1950 a little community of 20,000 Jews remained in Germany: 8000 native German Jews and 12,000 from Eastern Europe. Ruth Gay examines their contrasting lives in the two post-war Germanies. After the fall of Communism, the Jewish community was suddenly overwhelmed by tens of thousands of former Soviet Jews. Now there are some 100,000 Jews in Germany. The old, somewhat nostalgic life of the first post-war decades is being swept aside by radical forces from the "Lubavitcher" at one end to reform and feminism at the other. What started in 1945 as a "remnant" community has become a dynamic new centre of Jewish life.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0300092717/?tag=2022091-20
(This book provides a panoramic overview of a now extinct ...)
This book provides a panoramic overview of a now extinct culture: the 1500-year history of the Jews in Germany. Through texts, pictures and contemporary accounts, it follows the German Jews from their first settlements on the Rhine in the fourth century to the destruction of the community in World War II. Using both voices and images of the past the book reveals how the German Jews looked, how they lived, what they thought about, and what others thought of them. Ruth Gay's text, interwoven with passages from memoirs, letters, newspapers and other contemporary sources, shows how the German Jews organized their communities, created a new language (Yiddish), and built their special culture - all this under circumstances sometimes friendly but often hostile. The book explores the internal debates that agitated the community from medieval to modern times and analyzes how German Jewry emerged into the modern world. The earliest document in the book is a fourth-century decree by the Roman Emperor Constantine permitting Jews to hold office in Cologne. Among the last are letters from Betty Scholem in Berlin, writing during the Nazi years to her son in Gershom in Palestine. In between are accounts of a ninth-century Jewish merchant appointed by Charlemagne to a diplomatic mission to Baghdad, a 13th-century Jewish minnesinger, a 17th-century pogrom in Frankfurt in which gentiles helped to save their Jewish neighbours and the 19th-century innovation of department stores.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0300051557/?tag=2022091-20
Ruth Gay attended Queens College in 1943 and received a master"s in library science from Columbia University in 1969.
From 1948 to 1950 she was the editor of the JDC Review of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. She died in 2006.
(This volume tells the little-known story of why a quarter...)
( Winner of the National Jewish Book Award, a seminal wor...)
( This unique book provides a panoramic overview of a now...)
(This book provides a panoramic overview of a now extinct ...)
(Jews of Germany : A Historical Portrait by Ruth Gay. Yale...)