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\”The Golden Land: The Story of Jewish Immigration to America\” by Rabbi Joseph Telushkin (Harmony Books, $29.95).

Rabbi Joseph Telushkin begins this clever, coffee-table tome by noting that only three days after Spain\’s pious rulers, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, expelled their 200,000 Jewish subjects in 1492 for no reason other than their stubborn insistence on worshipping God, Columbus set sail for India. However, Columbus and his three ships and crew (90 members, five of whom were Marannos, or secret Jews) arrived in the New World, part of which, the United States, \”would come to house the largest, most prosperous and most successful Jewish community in Diaspora history.\”