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The Jews of Chicago: From Shtetl to Suburb. By Irving Cutler. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996. xiv, 316 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-25202185-1.)
This coffee-table book embodies the strengths and weaknesses of local ethnic group history as a genre. Irving Cutler's work depicts in paintings, photographs, and maps the cultural and geographic changes in Chicago's Jewish population from the 1840s to the present. He lists the founding dates and leaders of hundreds of Jewish cultural, educational, religious, and social welfare institutions. Cutler's book is the first comprehensive chronicle of Chicago's Jews published since 1924. It may be seventy more years before another historian produces a successor work to Cutler's.
That would be a...