Jews and Booze: Becoming American in the Age of Prohibition by Marni Davis

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Jewish identity is the great theme of American Jewish historiography, and Marni Davis’s engrossing and well-written book belongs to this genre. It originated as a doctoral dissertation at Emory University under the direction of Eric Goldstein, whose own book, The Price of Whiteness, is a brilliant exploration of the theme of race and Jewish identity in the early twentieth century. Davis argues that Jewish participation in the alcohol business, a business disdained by much of the dominant Protestant population, “exacerbated the inherent and inevitable tensions” between the Jews’ efforts to blend into American culture and their efforts to stand apart from it.

Source: Jewish Book Council