This is a book about “political culture,” a concept which, according to Hadassa Kosak “encapsulates the cultural and social characteristics of a group and the way these traits are demonstrated through political action” (p. 5). Kosak's book describes the political culture developed by Jews who left the small towns (shtetls) of eastern Europe for the United States between 1880 and the Russian Revolution of 1905. Unaccustomed to large-scale wage labor in an urban, industrial economy, these often poorly educated newcomers had to develop new ways of dealing with the difficulties and injustices they encountered in a highly stratified, urban, capitalistic America. Kosak demonstrates how they did this. Her work is especially valuable because it focuses on late-nineteenth-century immigration, while most historians of East European Jewish immigration focus on the larger, more politically sophisticated post-1905 immigration. Her work is also valuable because of the breadth of its definition of what is “political.” It deals with the political life of women as well as men and with political activity in private as well as public spaces, including food riots and parades as well as strikes and unions.