Marni Davis examines American Jews’ complicated relationship to alcohol during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the years of the national prohibition movement’s rise and fall. Davis offers a novel perspective on a previously unstudied area of American Jewish economic activity: the making and selling of liquor, wine, and beer. Alcohol commerce played a crucial role in Jewish immigrant acculturation and the growth of Jewish communities in the United States. But prohibition’s triumph cast a pall on American Jews’ history in the alcohol trade, forcing them to revise, clarify, and defend their communal and civic identities -- both to their fellow Americans and to themselves.