To learn more about Jewish American Heritage Month please visit American Jewish Committee, the global advocacy organization for the Jewish people's website dedicated to the celebration of America’s rich Jewish heritage at AJC.org/JewishAmericanHeritageMonth.
Please find additional resources:
National Jewish American Heritage Month Website - JewishAmericanHeritage.org
Each May, hundreds of organizations around the U.S. join together to help Americans of all backgrounds discover, explore, and celebrate the vibrant and varied American Jewish experience from the dawn of our nation to the present day. Please check out the numerous resources here.
Museums
There are many Jewish museums and museums with Jewish content in America. Below, we have listed a few that specifically focus on the American Jewish experience.
Located in Los Angeles, the Skirball is home to one of the world’s largest collections of Jewish ceremonial art, ritual objects, and material culture. The collections include 25,000 pieces, ranging from the ancient to the contemporary, which together reflect Jewish life in many different eras and parts of the world.
The Tenement Museum showcases the enduring stories and strength of what it means to be American. They share histories of the immigrant and migrant experiences, including the Jewish immigrant experience, through guided tours of two tenement buildings on Orchard Street and the surrounding neighborhood on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Visitors can take building tours of the recreated homes of former residents between the 1860s and the 1980s as well as walking tours of the neighborhood they lived in.
Located in New York City, the Jewish Museum is an art museum committed to illuminating the complexity and vibrancy of Jewish culture for a global audience. The Jewish Museum was the first institution of its kind in the United States and is one of the oldest Jewish museums in the world. It maintains a unique collection of nearly 30,000 works of art, ceremonial objects, and media reflecting the global Jewish experience over more than 4,000 years.
From April 25 until July 28, 2024, the Jewish Museum will host an exhibit entitled “Frederick Kiesler: Vision Machines,” which will examine experimental design practice of Frederick John Kiesler (1890-1965) through the activities of his Laboratory for Design Correlation at Columbia University from the late 1930s to the early 1940s.
Located in Baltimore, the Jewish Museum of Maryland allows visitors a unique view into historic Jewish life in Maryland. The museum’s facilities include two historic synagogues, one on each side of the museum building.
Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience
Located in New Orleans, the Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience explores the many ways that Jews in the American South influenced and were influenced by the distinct cultural heritage of theirhome in the American South.
Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History
Established in 1976, the Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History is the only museum in the nation dedicated exclusively to exploring and interpreting the American Jewish experience. Located on Independence Mall in Philadelphia, the Museum presents educational programs and experiences that preserve, explore, and celebrate the history of Jews in America in order to inspire in people of all backgrounds a greater appreciation for the richness of the American Jewish experience.
Archives, and Library Collections
American Jewish Committee’s William E. Wiener Oral History Library
Created in the 1970s, the AJC’s William E. Wiener Oral History Collection which now resides at the New York Public Library is one of the largest ethnic collections of oral histories in the United States. Over 6,000 hours of taped interviews and more than 150,000 pages of transcripts make up this unique collection. Aiming to record various aspects of the twentieth century American Jewish experience, AJC’s oral history staff and volunteers conducted interviews with Jews from all walks of life and spheres of thought and action. Within the collection are sub-groupings such as American Jewish Women of Achievement, American Jews in Sports, Soviet Jewish Emigres in America, American Jews of Sephardic Origin, Holocaust Survivors, and the Louis G. Cowan Collection. In 1990, the American Jewish Committee donated the William E. Wiener Oral History Library to the Dorot Jewish Division of the New York Public Library, where it has served the research needs of students, historians, journalists, and filmmakers.
Center for Jewish History
The Center for Jewish History in New York City illuminates Jewish history, culture, and heritage. The Center provides a collaborative home for five partner organizations: American Jewish Historical Society (AJHS), American Sephardi Federation, Leo Baeck Institute, Yeshiva University Museum, and YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. Of particular interest for Jewish American Heritage Month is the collection of the AJHS, which contains over 30 million documents and 50,000 books, photographs, art, and artifacts that reflect the history of the Jewish presence in the United States from 1654 to the present.
Generation to Generation: Family Stories Drawn from the Rauh Jewish Archives
Generation to Generation tells the stories of families who have donated papers to the Rauh Jewish Archives. Jews began settling in this region of Western Pennsylvania in the 1840s. They made their homes there, established communities and helped build the region.
Jewish Theological Seminary Special Collections Online
The Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS), a preeminent institution of Jewish higher education, has a storied library which preserves and makes accessible to students and scholars throughout the world the greatest collection of Judaica in the Western Hemisphere.
The Jewish Women’s Archive is a national organization dedicated to collecting and promoting the extraordinary stories of Jewish women. JWA explores the past as a framework for understanding the issues important to women today; inspires young people with remarkable role models; and uses Jewish women’s stories to excite people to see themselves as agents of change. For JAHM, the JWA honors the legacy and contributions of American Jewish women Check this website
J-Press: Jewish Newspapers Online by the National Library of Israel
This site contains a collection of Jewish newspapers published in various countries, languages, and time periods. They display digital versions of each paper, making it possible to view the papers in their original layout. Full-text search is also available for all content published over the course of each newspaper’s publication.
Rauh Jewish History Program & Archives
The Rauh Jewish History Program & Archives was founded in 1989 to collect, preserve, and make accessible the documentary history of Jews and Jewish communities of Western Pennsylvania. The Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives
The Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives (AJA), located on the historic Cincinnati campus of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, was established in 1947 by renowned historian, Dr. Jacob Rader Marcus to collect, preserve, and make available for research materials on the history of Jews and Jewish communities in the Western Hemisphere, including data of a political, economic, social, cultural, and religious nature.
The National Center for Jewish Film
The National Center for Jewish Film is a unique, independent nonprofit motion picture archive, distributor, resource center and exhibitor. NCJF's ongoing mission is the collection, preservation and exhibition of films with artistic and educational value relevant to the Jewish experience and the dissemination of these materials to the widest possible audience. NCJF exclusively owns the largest collection of Jewish content film in the world, outside of Israel. The Center's 15,000 reels of feature films, documentaries, newsreels, home movies and institutional films date from 1903 to the present.
Government Resources
Jewish American Heritage Month
The Library of Congress, National Archives and Records Administration, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Gallery of Art, National Park Service and United States Holocaust Memorial Museum join in paying tribute to the generations of Jewish Americans who helped form the fabric of American history, culture and society.
Featured exhibit: “Here to Stay: The Legacy of George and Ira Gershwin.” Experience the glamor and sophistication of the 1920s and 1930s in this permanent tribute to brothers George and Ira Gershwin, who helped provide a musical background to the period. The exhibition contains a wealth of materials that provide insight into their careers and personalities, including manuscript and printed music, lyric sheets and librettos, personal and business correspondence, photographs, paintings and drawings, all from the Library’s Gershwin Collection, the world’s preeminent resource for materials about the Gershwins.
This online exhibit for JAHM highlights the Jewish contributions to American culture, history, military, science, government, and more.
The National Register of Historic Places created this online exhibit for JAHM that showcases historic properties listed in the National Register and National Park units commemorating the events and people that help illustrate Jewish Americans' contributions to American history.
Online Resources
Jewish Americans in 2020: Understanding the American Jewish community
This PEW study of the American Jewish community provides an in-depth picture of the demographics, practices, culture, and beliefs of American Jews.
The Jewish Americans
In 2004, as part of the sesquicentennial of Jewish life in America, PBS created a documentary mini-series called “The Jewish Americans.” This website contains clips from the series as well as other resources and lesson plans on American Jewish heritage and history.
The Jewish Food Society is a non-profit organization that works to preserve, celebrate, and revitalize Jewish culinary heritage from around the world in order to provide a deeper connection to Jewish life. Founded in 2017, Jewish Food Society even has an archive that houses hundreds of tested family recipes and the stories behind them.
Unpacked for Educators curated a selection of videos, articles, and additional educational resources for JAHM to teach students about the significant contributions of American Jewry to the cultural, political, and economic landscape of the country. In partnership with AJC, they also included helpful resources for Jewish advocacy in America.
Books
American Booksellers Association
To celebrate JAHM, Susan Kusel, author of The Passover Guest, librarian, and bookseller, curated a list of titles from Jewish authors and about Jewish culture.
American Judaism: A History by Jonathan Sarna
Winner of the 2004 National Jewish Book Award/Jewish Book of the Year. Professor Jonathan Sarna describes the social, cultural, and historic factors which have shaped today’s vibrant Jewish American community. Drawing on his own encyclopedic knowledge of Jewish life in America, American Judaism provides readers not only a well crafted and eminently readable history but an insightful retrospective.
America's Jewish Women: A History from Colonial Times to Today by Pam Nadell
Winner of the 2019 Everett Family Foundation Book of the Year Award from the Jewish Book Council. Professor Pamela S. Nadell weaves together the complex story of Jewish women in America—from colonial-era matriarch Grace Nathan and her great-granddaughter, poet Emma Lazarus, to Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Recounting how Jewish women have been at the forefront of social, economic, and political causes for centuries, Nadell shows them fighting for suffrage, labor unions, civil rights, feminism, and religious rights—shaping a distinctly Jewish American identity.
Bad Jews: A History of American Jewish Politics and Identities by Emily Tamkin
In Bad Jews, Emily Tamkin examines the last 100 years of American Jewish politics, culture, identities, and arguments. Drawing on over 150 interviews, she tracks the evolution of Jewishness throughout American history, and explores many of the evolving and conflicting Jewish positions on assimilation; race; Zionism and Israel; affluence and poverty, philanthropy, finance, politics; and social justice. From this complex and nuanced history, Tamkin pinpoints perhaps the one truth about American Jewish identity: It is always changing.
