Yearning to Breathe Free

More about the book

The thematic essays in Yearning to Breathe Free each use a primary source--a book, newspaper, tract, or artwork--as an entry point into the era and as a means to introduce key themes, figures, and developments within the Gilded Age, across topics ranging from art, music, and literature down to politics, medicine, and religion. The essays highlight patterns and trends that in some cases anticipated what came later, and in others demonstrate how developments in the Gilded Age shaped Jewish life in the twentieth century. Collectively, they reveal the variety of ways in which the Gilded Age was a critical period in American Jewish history.