Menus on dis­play at the Ellis Island muse­um spec­i­fy that in addi­tion to boiled beef and stewed prunes, the kitchen served her­ring to the ​“Hebrews” detained there. Don­ald Weber would no doubt find great sig­nif­i­cance in these doc­u­ments. Her­ring may seem like a curi­ous through-line for an aca­d­e­m­ic book, but it appears again and again in Haunt­ed in the New World. Mount Holyoke pro­fes­sor Weber exam­ines the Jew­ish expe­ri­ence of Amer­i­can­iza­tion through close read­ings of fic­tion, film and radio. While each chap­ter stands alone, sev­er­al ideas con­nect the essays. Food is a recur­ring theme, whether David Levinsky’s embar­rass­ment at his old-world tastes in Abra­ham Cahan’s 1917 nov­el The Rise of David Levin­sky or Mol­ly Gold­berg sav­ing the day with her tsimmes in a 1955 episode of the sit­com The Gold­bergs. Indeed, food and table man­ners neat­ly sym­bol­ize the divide between ​“green­horn” par­ents and accul­tur­at­ed chil­dren — and recon­nect the sec­ond gen­er­a­tion to their Jew­ish roots. After reject­ing her eth­nic her­itage to fit in with gen­teel soci­ety, Anzia Yezierska’s char­ac­ter Adele in Arro­gant Beg­gar (1927) rec­on­ciles her new and old selves by open­ing a restau­rant on the Low­er East Side. Ter­ror­ized by the rough streets of the same neigh­bor­hood, Hen­ry Roth’s David com­forts him­self with thoughts of his mother’s dairy din­ner in Call It Sleep (1934). Of course Weber address­es many oth­er ideas in the process of ana­lyz­ing the psy­cho­log­i­cal ​“affects” of Jews who are engaged in the hard work of becom­ing Amer­i­can. Although writ­ten for an aca­d­e­m­ic audi­ence, the book is high­ly read­able, espe­cial­ly the final chap­ter in which the author recalls his family’s rela­tion­ship to the writ­ten and visu­al texts that he has dis­cussed previously.