American Jewish leaders, many of German extraction, created the Industrial Removal Office (IRO) in 1901 in order to disperse unemployed Jewish immigrants from New York City to smaller Jewish communities throughout the United States. The IRO was designed to help refugees from persecution in the Pale of Russia find jobs and community support and, secondarily, to reduce the Manhattan ghettoes and minimize antisemitism. In twenty-one years, the IRO distributed seventy-nine thousand East European Jews to over fifteen hundred cities and towns, including Chino, California; Des Moines, Iowa; and Pensacola, Florida. Wherever they went, these twice-displaced immigrants wrote letters to the IRO's main office. Robert A. Rockaway has selected, and translated from Yiddish, letters that describe the immigrants' new surroundings, work conditions, and living situations, as well as letters that give voice to typical tensions between the immigrants and their benefactors. Rockaway introduces the letters with an essay on conditions in the Pale and on early American Jewish attempts to assist emigrants. A superb selection of some forty letters, bracketed by an illuminating introduction that supplies a coherent historical background and a sensitive epilogue that explores the mixed motives of the German-Jewish benefactors... Destined to become the standard reader on its subject, it will help shape the field of Jewish labor and social history for some time to come. ― SUNY New Paltz, The Journal of American History A fascinating collection. ― MSRRT Newsletter Enabling patrons as well as clients to speak, Words of the Uprooted helps enlarge our understanding of the Jewish immigration of a century ago and the Jewish institutional response to it. ― Book Reviews Rockaway offers excellent source material that is crucial to students of this period.... The immigrants' letters... offer poignant portraits of displaced immigrants, some of whom meet success but many of whom encounter serious obstacles. ― Labor History This thoughtfully assembled collection will be useful for students of American Jewish, German, and East European history. ― The Jewish Quarterly Review Words of the Uprooted does an excellent job of introducing readers to a quite remarkable institution and to the history of immigration and social reform that the Industrial Removal Office's experience speaks to. Rockaway sets the scene and tells the extremely important story of the interaction of settled German-American Jews with their Russian and Eastern European Jewish brethren. -- Thomas Dublin, author of Transforming Women's Work: New England Lives in the Industrial Revolution Robert A. Rockaway is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Jewish History, Tel-Aviv University. He is the author of one book in Hebrew and two in English, most recently But He Was Good to His Mother: The Lives and Crimes of Jewish Gangsters .