MOORE, Deborah Dash 1946-

PERSONAL: Born August 6, 1946, in New York, NY; daughter of Martin (in business) and Irene (a professor; maiden name, Golden) Dash; married MacDonald Moore (in music business), June 15, 1967; children: Mordecai, Mikhael. Education: Brandeis University, B.A., 1967; Columbia University, M.A., 1968, Ph.D., 1975. Politics: Liberal. Religion: Jewish. Hobbies and other interests: "My major avocational concerns revolve around the problem of integrating a family and other womanly responsibilities with a professional career."

ADDRESSES: Home—620 Ft. Washington Ave., New York, NY 10041. Office—Department of Religion, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY 12601. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY, assistant professor, 1976-84, associate professor, 1984-88, chairman of department of religion, 1983-87, professor of religion, 1988—; director of program in American culture, 1992-95. Director of research, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, 1976—; Fulbright-Hays senior lecturer, department of American studies, Hebrew University, 1984-85; Skirball Visiting fellow, Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, 1996; visiting fellow, Center for Judaic Studies, University of Pennsylvania, 1996; Pew Visiting fellow, Institute for the Advanced Study of Religion, Yale University, 2001-02.

MEMBER: Association for Jewish Studies (member of board of governors, 1982-85; vice president for membership, 2000-03), American Jewish Historical Society (member of academic council, 1978—; member of executive committee, 1998-2001), American Academy of Jewish Research, American Historical Association, American Studies Association, Organization of American Historians, Urban History Association, Immigration History Society.

AWARDS, HONORS: National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship for college teachers, 1978-79; National Jewish Book Award Honor Book, 1994; Saul Viener Prize, 1994 and 1995, for best book in American Jewish History; Dartmouth Medal of American Library Association for best reference work, 1997; Outstanding Academic Book, Choice, 1998; D.H.L., Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, 2001.

WRITINGS:

At Home in America: Second Generation New York Jews, Columbia University Press (New York, NY), 1981.

B'nai B'rith and the Challenge of Ethnic Leadership, State University of New York Press (Albany, NY), 1981.

(Editor) East European Jews in Two Worlds: Studies from the YIVO Annual, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research (New York, NY), 1990.

(Editor, with Ronald Dotterer and Steven M. Cohen) Jewish Settlement and Community in the Modern Western World, Susquehanna University Press (Selinsgrove, PA), 1991.

To the Golden Cities: Pursuing the American Jewish Dream in Miami and L.A., Free Press (New York, NY), 1994.

When Jews Were GIs: How World War II Changed a Generation and Remade American Jewry (pamphlet), University of Michigan Press (Ann Arbor, MI), 1994.

(Editor, with Paula Hyman) Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, Routledge (New York, NY), 1997.

(Editor, with S. Ilan Troen) Divergent Jewish Cultures: Israel and America, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 2001.

(With Howard B. Rock) Cityscapes: A History of New York in Images, Columbia University Press (New York, NY), 2001.

General editor, with Paula Hyman, "The Modern Jewish Experience" series, Indiana University Press (Bloomington, IN), 1982—. Also author of pamphlet, Worshipping Together in Uniform: Christians and World War II, Swig Judaic Studies Program at the University of University of San Francisco (San Francisco, CA), 2001. Contributor of articles to scholarly journals, including Jewish Journal of Sociology and American Jewish History.

SIDELIGHTS: Deborah Dash Moore's book At Home in America: Second Generation New York Jews examines the Americanization of second-generation New York Jews during the period from 1920 to 1950. According to Moore, the children of the Eastern European Jewish immigrants who came to the country between 1880 and 1920 established the American Jewish prototype for an "ethnicity consonant with middle-class values." Focusing on housing patterns and key institutions, such as public schools and synagogue centers, the author explains how members of the second generation succeeded in creating an ethnic lifestyle that insured a continuance of Jewish identity.

Moore turned her attention to the next era in American Jewish life in To the Golden Cities: Pursuing the American Jewish Dream in Miami and L. A. In this book, she chronicled how the post-World War II economic boom triggered the second great wave of Jewish immigration—from the cold, well-established cities in the Northeast and the Midwest to the warm, expansive communities in the sunny climates of California and Florida. Following individual life stories, Moore identifies Miami as a suburb of New York City and illustrates how certain neighborhoods from the old cities recreated themselves in the sunbelt. Jews leaving behind their old haunts in Brooklyn, New York, even had the satisfaction of seeing the Brooklyn Dodgers relocate to Los Angeles. In both California and Florida, the new Jewish residents did face opposition, sometimes in as blatant a form as Ku Klux Klan bombings, at other times in more subtle forms of discrimination and exclusivity from the ruling WASP elite. Moore's research is painstaking; a writer for Kirkus Reviews pointed out that she "is careful to delineate the demographic, sociological, and religious factors that made Jewish Miami and L.A. distinct." To the Golden Cities is a "lively" and "lucid account," concluded the reviewer.

In Cityscapes: A History of New York in Images, Moore teamed with Howard B. Rock to present a pictorial history of Manhattan from its beginning in the seventeenth century, as a tiny settlement on the southern tip of the island, to the period just before the destruction of the World Trade Center, when towers covered virtually the entire island. Pictures and text work together like "a classy stop-motion film," wrote Donna Seaman in Booklist, providing a "fascinating, artistic, and, most importantly, humanistic chronicle."

Moore told CA: "I am concerned in my work to bring my competence as a historian to an understanding of contemporary situations affecting American Jews. While I rarely study the present, I must confess to a certain present-mindedness in my choice of subjects to study. I make an effort, also, to bridge the gap between the world of scholarship and the world of community without destroying the integrity of the former or the vitality of the latter."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

American Historical Review, December, 1981; February, 1983, review of B'nai B'rith and the Challenge of Ethnic Leadership, p. 197.

Booklist, December 1, 2001, Donna Seaman, review of Cityscapes: A History New York in Images, p. 626.

Choice, September, 1994, review of To the Golden Cities: Pursuing the American Jewish Dream in Miami and L.A., p. 196.

Commentary, July, 1981.

Journal of Church and State, winter, 1992, review of East European Jews in Two Worlds, p. 154.

Journal of Urban History, February, 1986, review of At Home in America: Second Generation New York Jews, p. 191; November, 1999, review of To the Golden Cities: Pursuing the American Jewish Dream in Miami and L.A., p. 98.

Kirkus Reviews, February 15, 1994, review of To the Golden Cities: Pursuing the American Jewish Dream in Miami and L.A., p. 206.

Library Journal, March 15, 1994, review of To the Golden Cities: Pursuing the American Jewish Dream in Miami and L.A., p. 89.

Publishers Weekly, February 16, 1990, review of East European Jews in Two Worlds: Studies from the YIVO Annual, p. 72; March 14, 1994, review of To the Golden Cities: Pursuing the American Jewish Dream in Miami and L.A., p. 57.

Religious Studies Review, April, 1995, review of To the Golden Cities: Pursuing the American Jewish Dream in Miami and L.A., p. 159.

Reviews in American History, December, 1995, review of To the Golden Cities: Pursuing the American Jewish Dream in Miami and L.A., p. 739.

Slavic Review, winter, 1994, review of East European Jews in Two Worlds: Studies from the YIVO Annual, p. 1124.

Times Literary Supplement, December 18, 1981; November 23, 1990, review of East European Jews in Two Worlds: Studies from the YIVO Annual, p. 1261.

University Press Book News, June, 1990, review of East European Jews in Two Worlds: Studies from the YIVO Annual, p. 7.