Peddlers, Merchants, and Junk Dealers Jewish Life in Small-Town Vermont

"Nelson's work is a revelation - and about far more than Jewish life in small-town Vermont. This work illuminates the work lives, family lives, religious experiences and gender arrangements of non-urban Jews everywhere. It speaks to the history of religious and ethnic minorities broadly, and to immigration and economic and social mobility in the 19th and 20th centuries. These are tales told with engagement and compassion, attentiveness and even love. This is a well researched and beautifully written study that scholars and teachers will use for years." - Felicia Kornbluh, author of A Woman's Life Is a Human Life

"Peggy Nelson's Peddlers, Merchants, and Junk-Dealers is an insightful and painstakingly researched study of a Jewish American story we need to know better and a Vermont story that is hardly known at all. Nelson combines genealogy, sociology, and ethnography to create a lively portrait and a compelling narrative." - Michael Hoberman, author of Imagining Early Jews

"Through its richly detailed account of specific people and local features, this vivid case study captures dynamics that played out in small towns across North America." - David M. Freidenreich, Pulver Family Professor of Jewish Studies, Colby College

"Sharply focused but broadly resonant, Peddlers, Merchants and Junk Dealers supersedes the common "pack-peddler to professional" narrative of rural Jewry, and offers the fine-grained insight of a sociologist into the complexities of this understudied sector of American Jewish life. It shows us sociology making history." - Robert S. Schine, author of Jewish Thought Adrift: Max Wiener 1882-1950