BY
PENNY WOLIN
Diaspora is a Greek word meaning “the spread of Jews throughout the world.” I came to realize that Wyoming was considered the fringe of that Diaspora when I left my home state in search of adulthood. Everywhere I went, East Coast or West, people would say, “Jews? There are no Jews in Wyoming.” What am I, chopped liver? How could anyone think this? I was born and raised in Cheyenne’s thriving Jewish community. There was never a question that community ownership of multiple torahs, celebration of the Jewish High Holy Days, a ritual mikveh, sanctified burial ground and fierce pride in our observance was anything out of the ordinary. It is good to be a Jew from Wyoming.
All texts and photographs © 2022 Penny Wolin
“It’s coming to a wilderness and making a life. You need an ethic, you need a code, you need a way of devising your survival that going to retain integrity and pay respect to the source of all bless. That’s what coming to Wyoming as a Jew is about.”
PRAISE
“Wolin has created a universal homage to the challenges a minority must make in order to maintain its religious and ethnic identity. This is definitely a unique and important contribution to our understanding of Jewish life in the United States. Highly recommended for collections concentrating in Judaica and the minority experience in America.”
“The Jews of Wyoming: Fringe of the Diaspora by Penny Diane Wolin tells the more complex story of adaptation and evolution. Wolin, a documentary photographer who has made a living for the last two decades photographing celebrities, spent 15 years putting together this triumphant epic of the 150 year history of Jews in the Cowboy State”
“With the eye of an artist, the mind of a social historian, and — above all — a big heart, Penny Wolin has accomplished something unique in ‘The Jews of Wyoming.’ Her book is, at once, startling and illuminating, eye-opening and endearing, a worthy and wonderful addition to the literature of the Diaspora and the Jewish experience in America.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Penny Wolin is the author of three photographic monographs. Her photographs are held in such collections as the Smithsonian American Art Museum; she is the recipient of two grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities; she was a contract photographer with LIFE Magazine; studied photography at ArtCenter College of Design; film at the American Film Institute and visual anthropology at UCLA. She currently resides in the great city of Los Angeles and a small farm in the Redwoods of Northern California.