Vividly tells the story of the migration of many thousands of German Jews-mostly poor, enterprising young people-to the US during the nineteenth century. Avraham Barkai draws on rare letters, diaries, memoirs, newspapers, journals, and other firsthand accounts as he chronicles the immigrants' experiences in towns and cities across the country, in the goldfields of California, on Indian reservations, on the battlefields of the Civil War, weaving their experiences into an account of the formative role they played in establishing the institutional framework of the American Jewish community. He also shows the significant impact on them as their influential networks were dramatically challenged at the turn of the century by the mass migration of Jews from Eastern Europe.