The Jews’ Indian delves at the history of Jewish-Native American interactions, both in the arena of cultural imagination and in real-life meetings. The interactions between these two groups were numerous and varied, proving to be harmonic at times when Jews and Native Americans shared economic and social objectives, but discordant and contentious at other times. American Jews may be just as exploitative of Native American cultural, social, and political issues as other American settlers, according to historian David Koffman, and these contacts both unsettle and historicize the often successful conventional history of American Jewish life. The first history to critically analyze Jewish participation in, and Jews’ grappling with, the legacies of Native American history and the colonial project upon which America rests, this book is provocative and timely, focusing on the ways in which Jewish class mobility and civic belonging were wrapped up in the dynamics of power and myth-making that so severely impacted Native Americans.
