Spanning 350 years of Jewish experience in this country, A History of the Jews in America is an essential chronicle by the author of The Course of Modern Jewish History.With impressive scholarship and a riveting sense of detail, Howard M. Sachar tells the stories of Spanish marranos and Russian refugees, of aristocrats and threadbare social revolutionaries, of philanthropists and Hollywood moguls. At the same time, he elucidates the grand themes of the Jewish encounter with America, from the bigotry of a Christian majority to the tensions among Jews of different origins and beliefs, and from the struggle for acceptance to the ambivalence of assimilation.

Traces four hundred years of Jewish history from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century, and discusses the anti-Semitism facing European Jews, the Jews of czarist Russia, their struggle for civil rights in the 1830s and 1840s, Jewish life in America, the effects of World War One and the Holocaust of World War Two, and much more.

Portrays the hopes of Jews for acceptance on equal terms in European society in the countries that emerged from or were affected by World War I. In all the cases described, great expectations gave way to lost illusions, as antisemitism played a role in the establishment of fascist societies. Stresses the failure of postwar minority treaties to guarantee rights for Jews. Discusses the situation in Ukraine (particularly as reflected in the 1927 trial in Paris of Shalom Schwarzbard for the murder of Petlyura), Poland, Romania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Austria (especially Vienna), Germany (especially Berlin), and France. Devotes much attention to leftist Jews, whom antisemites tended to identify with the Bolshevik threat, and to Jews in European culture, whom antisemites saw as dominating their countries. Among the figures featured are: Bela Kun, Lucien Wolf, Sigmund Freud, Rosa Luxemburg, Walther Rathenau, and Leon Blum. A number of these Jews were assassinated, victims of rightist antisemitism.