“My research coincided with the evolution of our community’s building project; we are preparing to open the first synagogue in Central Idaho, which is a really exciting milestone for our community,” he said.

Goldstein’s interest in this subject is rooted in his own personal history. He spent winters and summers in Sun Valley as a kid, attending Sun Valley Community School camps and working at Perry’s.

One afternoon while researching he found an 1884 article on a Yom Kippur service in Hailey, “My eyes popped out of my head,” he said.

“I was really excited about that article, because I thought, there’s got to be a bigger story here if there were enough Jews for services,” he said.

The story, it turned out, is that Jewish merchants and miners came to the area to make their fortune along with hundreds of thousands of other westward-moving Americans. The Friedmans, Leopolds, and Werthheimers, among other families, became cornerstones of the community, serving as business and municipal leaders. Goldstein describes the area at this time as more tolerant than one might expect.

“In Germany, [Jewish] families’ economic and social opportunities were limited by their religion,” he said. “But they experienced a profound change in status when they emigrated to the United States, and particularly when they showed up in Idaho, a rural frontier where, as long as you were white, identity hardly mattered and men were judged not by their background by by their ability to make money.”

The area’s Jewish community has thinned in accordance with the population at large and did not reach healthy levels again until the Sun Valley Resort was established and winter sports enthusiasts moved to Blaine County from metropolitan centers across the country. That culminated in 1983 when the Wood River Jewish Community was formalized, creating the first official Jewish organization in the Valley.

While writing this talk, Goldstein worked a full-time job at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York City. However, researching the history of Jews in the area became the main focus of his free time. He used skills honed as a student at Georgetown University, where he published a research paper on the history of Jews at the famously Catholic institution.

The generally unexplored subject matter made research difficult at some points.

“One of the benefits of few people looking at this story is there is a lot of amazing history that’s sort of just waiting to be discovered. I visited archives in person around the state. I went to the Idaho State Archives in Boise and the Blaine County Historical Museum in Hailey and looked for Jewish history there, and then also went to Jewish archives and looked for Idaho history,” he said.

Goldstein had to employ some clever methods to find what he was looking for. He said that the research process isn’t linear—instead, there are dry spells, and periods where he would strike gold and find a heap of useful information.

One particularly notable nugget he found is a personal ad published in “Israelite” in 1873, which reads:

“A young co-religionist, doing a large business in the wilds of Idaho, would like to form the acquaintance of some young lady, and therefore politely requests correspondence.”

This excerpt elicited a laugh from the crowd.

Another piece of research that was of particular interest to the audience was the story of Moses Alexander, the first practicing Jewish man to become governor of any U.S. state when he was elected governor of Idaho in 1914.

However, Goldstein was careful not to take the complex history of a community and oversimplify it.

“One of the challenging things about history is that it’s often been told as a heroic tale of individual men—and it’s always men,” he said. “Often, the story of a community is [distilled down to] the story of the four men who led it. There’s a virtue to that approach, and individual stories are interesting, but it really obscures the fact that communities have so many people who weren’t mentioned or weren’t a part of the way the history was written.”

Goldstein said he wanted to avoid this in his retelling, instead emphasizing shared community stories.

The results have been rewarding, he said.

“I have had so many people come up to me and say, ‘Wow, I didn’t know this story, and this made me really proud to be a Jew in Idaho,’” he said.

The value in this research goes beyond fun facts, though, and not just for the Jewish members of the community.

“I hope that this instills curiosity in non-Jews and that it sparks conversations among people of all backgrounds about Idaho’s history. There might be an impression that Jews are outsiders, but Jews have been a part of the fabric of this place for a long time,” he said. “I hope that the Jewish story can pique interest in the other diverse histories of the region, which really deserved to be told as well.”