Many scholars have recently attempted to think critically about the archive, to conceive of it not simply as a neutral repository of information but also as governed by often indiscernible laws and intricate relations of desire and power. Certainly the scholarly products of detailed archival research are themselves the result of complicated archival negotiations, sortings, and withholdings. I wish to focus here on what I will call archival withholding—the attempt to disrupt the transmission function of the archive—in the context of the Western American Jewish archives that I work on; I will leave lingering the question of what, if anything, lends a Jewish, or “ethnic,” specificity to such withholding. The materials at issue—archives and cemeteries related to rural Jewish settlers in the American West in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century—might strike some as incongruous, since Jewish American settlement is generally associated with East Coast urban centers and not with smalltown agricultural America. But in fact the American West is littered with traces of Jewish settlements and (often short-lived) agricultural communities, and a considerable amount of work documents this topic. Just as there were ethnicities of all sorts in the rural American West—Chinese workers and African Americans have certainly been given deserved attention—so there were Jewish settlers.