“A Link in the Great American Chain”

Ira Robinson is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Jewish Studies in the Department of Religions and Cultures at Concordia University, where he taught for 42 years. Robinson has written, edited, and translated nineteen books, as well as over seventy articles. He served as the Chair of the Department of Religion and Director of the Concordia University Institute for Canadian Jewish Studies. He is past president of the Canadian Society for Jewish Studies, the Association for Canadian Jewish Studies, and the Jewish Public Library of Montreal. He is the 2013 winner of the Louis Rosenberg Canadian Jewish Studies Distinguished Service Award from the Association for Canadian Jewish Studies.

“[T]his deeper dive into this community gives us a picture of not just Orthodox Judaism, but American Judaism as a whole.”— Andrew Lillien, AJL News & Reviews“The Cleveland Orthodox community is privileged that Professor Ira Robinson brought his abundant talents as a researcher, comfortable with multiple Jewish languages, and willing to wade through dusty archival documents and synagogue records that were ignored by others to bring to life the development over a century of an intriguing Jewish group. In focusing on a mid-size Jewish community—whose story is very different from that of Orthodoxy’s New York epicenter—the field of American Jewish history is privileged by an outstanding work that broadens the geographical scope of our discipline. Scholars will embrace his important labors. General audiences will find that his accessible prose makes for enjoyable reading.”— Jeffrey Gurock, Libby M. Klaperman Professor of Jewish History, Yeshiva University

• IntroductionAbbreviations1. The Evolution of Jewish Orthodoxy in Cleveland to 1941 2. The Evolution of the Orthodox Jewish Community in Cleveland, Ohio, 1941 to the Present 3. Hasid and Maskil: The Hasidic Tales of a Cleveland Yiddish Journalist 4. A “Jewish Monkey Trial”: The Cleveland Jewish Center and the Emerging Borderline between Orthodox and Conservative Judaism in 1920s North America 5. The New Haven Yeshiva, 1923–1937: An Experiment in American Jewish Education 6. “The Second Destruction of Cleveland Orthodox Synagogues”: Rabbi Israel Porath and Cleveland Jewry at the Crossroads, 1945 Index