Brook Farm, Oneida, Amana, and Nauvoo are familiar names in American history. Far less familiar are New Odessa, Bethlehem-Jehudah, Cotopaxi, and Alliance—the Brook Farms and Oneidas of the Jewish people in North America.

The wealthy, westernized leaders of late nineteenth-century American Jewry and a member of the immigrating Russian Jews shared an eagerness to "repeal" the lengthy socioeconomic history in which European Jews were confined to petty commerce and denied agricultural experience. A small group of immigrant Jews chose to ignore urbanization and industrialization, defy the depression afflicting agriculture in the late 1800s, and devote themselves to experiments in collective farming in America.