Tikvah
Editors’ Pick

August 24, 2026

The History of American Jewish Publishing

From the Bay Psalm Book to the first truly American Haggadah.

The first known mention of the New World in a Jewish book appeared in a Hebrew work on geography and astronomy in 1586, and the Massachusetts colonists’ 1640 Bay Psalm Book contains the first instance of Hebrew letters being printed on American soil. But it was not until much later that Jewish publishing came to America, as Daniel Lispon explains:

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