The Federations Step Forward

Although its history as a Jewish community extends back to 1654, Jewish America was to all intents and purposes a colony of European Jewry until the nineteenth century, and was a dependency even longer. The combination of events and self-organization transformed it to be the dominant Jewish community for much of the twentieth century and the dominant diaspora community still. The federation movement became the keystone to that self-organization early, before it was recognized as such.