A photo-illustrated booklet celebrating Jewish immigrant life in America

From the 1880s to 1920s, more than 2 million Jews immigrated to the United States. Most were fleeing poverty and persecution in Eastern Europe and the Russian Empire. As their numbers swelled, Jews in America built new identities and strong communities.

At the height of that migration, this French writer, a scholar of anti-Semitism, toured the eastern US to see how the refugees were doing. “I had already visited most of the Jewish quarters in Europe, Asia and Africa,” he explained. Now he wanted to explore the crowded, bustling Jewish neighborhoods of America. What he saw amazed him.