1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Defining moments in the lives of thirteen Jewish Americans, August 11, 2005
This review is from: In the Promised Land: Lives of Jewish Americans (Hardcover)
When young readers look at the faces on the cover of "In the Promised Land: Lives of Jewish Americans," they should immediately recognize Steven Spielberg. Depending on how much they now about history and the news they might recognize Harry Houdini and Ruth Bader Ginsberg from the faces on the cover, and maybe Judith Resnick. But they will not recognize most of the faces any more than they will recognize most of the names of the thirteen distinguished Jewish Americans for whom author Doreen Rappaport and illustrators Cornelius Van Wright and Ying-Hwa Hu have picked for this book. For example, I recognize the name Jonas Salk, but I do not know his face the way I do Albert Einstein.
In his Author's Note at the beginning of the book Rappaport says that the first Jews who fled persecution and violence to come to the New World arrived on the "Sainte Catherine" when the ship landed in the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam in 1654. After the American Revolution there were about two thousand Jews living in the United States, while in the 1830s and 1840s more than 200,000 German Jews arrived. From the 1880s to the 1920s more than 2 million Jews from Eastern Europe fled anti-Semitic violence to make a new life in America. The common denominator of their experience was that each wave of Jewish immigrants found themselves barred from certain professions, schools, neighborhoods, and organizations. Sometimes there were actually laws barring them and sometimes they were unwritten codes reflecting such prejudices. But the stories told here are about those who broke through these barriers to become successful (Rappaport points out the Jewish women face the double exclusion of religion and sex).
Each two-page spread tells of one key scene in the lives of each of these thirteen people, whether it is Harry Houdini (Ehrich Weiss) plunging into the Mississippi River with his wrists manacles together or young law student Ruth Bader being barred from entering the Lamont Library on Harvard's campus. The other people young readers will meet in this book are Asser Levy, who wrote petitions against unfair treatment by the governor of New Amsterdam, Ernestine Rose, who demanded women should have the same rights as men and be given custody of their children if divorced, Solomon Nunes Carvalho, who took daguerreotype-types of the terrain when John Fremont was mapping out a railroad route through the Rocky Mountains, Jacob W. Davis, who created what we now know as Levis Strauss jeans, Lillian Wald, who started the Visiting Nurse Service in New York City's Lower East Side, Pauline Newman, who led a strike of garment workers in New York City when she was only 19, Lillian Copeland, a Olympic champion discus thrower, and Ira Hirschmann, who pleased for Turkey to accept "illegal" refugees fleeing Nazi Germany.
At the end of this 2005 publication young readers will find themselves on more familiar ground, with Salk inventing the polio vaccine, Ginsberg ending up on the U.S. Supreme Court, Resnick dying on the space shuttle "Challenger," and Spielberg creating E.T. In the back of "In the Promised Land," Rappaport explains about the research done to pick each pivotal event in the lives being told, while Van Wright and Hu talk about the difficulties of painting people for whom there are no known paintings or photographs. Selected Research Sources are provided where young students can find out more about these people in books or On-line. This particular trio has collaborated on a similar volume, "We are the Many: A Picture Book of American Indians," which teacher and students should find of interest as well.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A picturebook for grades 2-4, June 14, 2005
This review is from: In the Promised Land: Lives of Jewish Americans (Hardcover)
Here's a new approach to biography: a retelling of pivotal moments in the lives of notable Jewish Americans in In The Promised Land: Lives Of Jewish Americans, a picturebook for grades 2-4, embellished with drawings by Cornelius Van Wright and Ying-Hwa Hu. 'Notable' doesn't necessarily translate to 'famous', as these stories show: among the featured are frontier tailor Jacob W. Davis, who invented the durable overall design Levi Strauss came to sell, Harry Houdini, master of magic, and Asser Levy, who fought against unfair treatment of Jewish citizens in Amsterdam - in 1654. Thirteen extraordinary Jewish people are treated to one-page detailed biographical sketches.
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