MSU Sociology Professor Steve Gold wins Outstanding Academic Title award

December 7, 2021

MSU Sociology Professor Dr. Steven Gold's book Wandering Jews: Global Jewish Migration was selected by Choice as an Outstanding Academic Title. Choice is a publishing unit of the Association of College and Research Libraries, a division of the American Library Association.

In December of each year Choice publishes its list of Outstanding Academic Titles. This prestigious list reflects the best in scholarly titles, both print and digital, reviewed by Choice during the previous year and brings with it the extraordinary recognition of the academic library community. The list is quite selective, containing approximately ten percent of some 5,000 works reviewed annually in Choice.

 The reviewer for Choice marked the book as "Highly Recommended" and wrote: 

This collection contains seven essays on Jewish immigration by scholars from disciplines including history, sociology, and literature. Like earlier studies, the different chapters here explore both the experiences of Jewish immigrants and their impact on the communities they have joined in both the US and Europe. The contributors discuss these issues on novel terms. Some study immigrant groups that have not received extensive attention (e.g., Iranian and Latin American Jews); others define immigrant groups by their professional activities (e.g., academics and other highly skilled workers). Even those Jewish immigrants from more studied groups—post–WW II displaced persons and late-19th-century Eastern European immigrants to Germany—come under a different analytical lens. This eclectic combination of methods yields both an intriguing body of new information and an instructive view of the changing contours of Jewish migration studies. The book will serve students and instructors in search of new approaches to a subject that remains vibrant and relevant.

 

In addition to Wandering Jews, Gold is the author, co-author, editor, or co-editor of eight books including The Israeli Diaspora (Routledge/University of Washington Press 2002) which won the Thomas and Znaniecki Award from the ASA’s International Migration Section for the best book on international migration in 2003. His book Ethnic Economies, co-authored with Ivan Light of UCLA, has received 1496 Google Scholar citations.