Changing political, social, and cultural circumstances have led German Jews in America to take on many different identities. These essays examine such varied topics as the relationship between German and Eastern European Jews in America, the development of the B'nai Brith, nineteenth-century Jewish community-building in Chicago, the role of German Jews in the building of modern American show business, and the correlation between date of emigration and language loss among Jews fleeing to America from Nazi Germany. Contributors include historians, theater and literature professors, a linguist,...

Wisconsin is one of the most linguistically rich places in North America. It has the greatest diversity of American Indian languages east of the Mississippi, including Ojibwe and Menominee from the Algonquian language family, Ho-Chunk from the Siouan family, and Oneida from the Iroquoian family. French place names dot the state's map. German, Norwegian, and Polish--the languages of immigrants in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries--are still spoken by tens of thousands of people, and the influx of new immigrants speaking Spanish, Hmong, and Somali continues to enrich the state's...