Communities Across the World
One people, lived out on three continents — from Baghdad and the Ethiopian highlands to New York, traced as connected worlds rather than isolated outposts.
Most maps of Jewish history stop at Europe. This Unit follows the Jewish people to the places the standard textbook leaves off: Iraq, where a community lived for more than two thousand five hundred years; the highlands of Ethiopia, cut off from the rest of the Jewish world for centuries; the Soviet Union, where three million people were kept from leaving; and the United States, now home to one of the two largest Jewish communities on earth.
These were not scattered, disconnected groups. They wrote to one another, traded with one another, and shared the same texts and calendar across thousands of miles. The point of this Unit is to show that single, connected world — and to give each of these communities the same careful treatment the curriculum already gives to other migrations and other peoples.
Topics in this Unit
These Topics follow Jewish communities across the wider map, beginning with Iraq, one of the oldest Jewish communities on earth; the Jewish world of North Africa; the ancient community of Iran; the near-total departure from the Middle East and North Africa; the long struggle of Soviet Jews to leave; nearly four centuries of Jewish life in America; the Ethiopian community airlifted to Israel within living memory; and the modern State of Israel, where many of these threads converge.
A Connected People
One people, lived out on three continents, as connected worlds rather than isolated outposts. This Topic opens the Unit: how Jewish communities took root from Baghdad to Casablanca to New York, what held them together across the distance, and why so many of them ended within a single lifetime.
Read the Topic →The Jews of Iraq
For more than 2,500 years, Iraq held one of the oldest and most influential Jewish communities on earth — the home of the great academies where the Talmud was made, and a modern urban world that ended in a single generation. This Topic tells both halves.
Read the Topic →The Jews of North Africa
From the cities of Morocco to the island of Djerba, Jewish communities lived across the Maghreb for more than two thousand years — close to a million people, with their own languages, music, and traditions like the Mimouna. Within a generation, almost all were gone.
Read the Topic →The Jews of Iran
One of the oldest Jewish communities on earth — more than 2,500 years in Persia, tied to the founding stories of both peoples. Most left after the 1979 revolution, but unlike almost every other ancient community of the region, it did not end: thousands remain today.
Read the Topic →The Departure from MENA
Across the Middle East and North Africa, from Iraq to Morocco, Jewish communities present for more than two thousand years were almost entirely gone within a single generation. Roughly 850,000 people were displaced. This Topic traces how, and why.
Read the Topic →Soviet Jewry
In the Soviet Union, roughly two and a half million Jews were forbidden from practicing their religion and, for decades, forbidden from leaving. The campaign to free them — "Let my people go" — became one of the major human-rights movements of the twentieth century.
Read the Topic →American Jewry
It began with twenty-three refugees stepping off a boat in New Amsterdam (today's New York) in 1654. Nearly four centuries later it is the second-largest Jewish community in the world. This Topic follows that arc at the depth the curriculum gives any major immigrant story.
Read the Topic →Ethiopian Jewry — Beta Israel
In the mountains of northern Ethiopia, a community called Beta Israel, "House of Israel," kept Jewish practice in near-isolation for centuries. In two dramatic airlifts in 1984 and 1991, tens of thousands were flown to Israel within living memory.
Read the Topic →The Modern State of Israel
Founded on May 14, 1948, Israel is now home to roughly half the world's Jews — the point where many of this Unit's community threads converge. This Topic lays out how the state was built, who lives there, and the life of the country, handled as history and civics, not as a position to argue.
Read the Topic →