Jewish Life in America, c1654-1954 is a fascinating primary source collection of materials about American Jews from the American Jewish Historical Society, New York. Completely searchable, the documents in this resource — letters, postcards, telegrams, notebooks, scrapbooks, minutes, reports, financial records, and other materials — provide a wide-ranging yet often intimate picture of the persons and organizations behind them.
Among the six organizational collections and twenty-four collections of personal papers that comprise Jewish Life in America, c1654-1954, are the Emma Lazarus Collection, named for the famed author of “The New Colossus” (a manuscript version is included in the database), and the Papers of the Industrial Removal Office (1899-1922), an organization responsible for assisting Jewish immigrants to assilimate into American culture and society.