And Prairie Dogs Weren’t Kosher: Jewish Women in the Upper Midwest Since 1855

This book has its origins in an exhibition, Unpacking on the Prairie: Jewish Women in the Upper Midwest, which was organised by the Jewish Historical Society of the Upper Midwest and the Minnesota Historical Society and opened in October 1996. Research for the exhibition highlighted many first-person accounts and photographs from a phase of Jewish settlement in America that had been sparsely documented. Linking the personal and the historical, Linda Mack Schloff integrates oral accounts, diaries, letters, and autobiographies with original research and interpretation to present the little-known story of the Jewish experience in America’s heartland. ‘And Prairie Dogs Weren’t Kosher’ uses the voices of four generations of Jewish women who settled in Minnesota, the Dakotas, Iowa, and Wisconsin to show how they transported and transformed their cultural and religious life in a region inhabited by few Jews.