Thomas C. Hubka is professor emeritus in the Department of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. In 2006 he received the Vernacular Architecture Forum’s Henry Glassie Award in recognition of his lifetime of achievement. His most recent book is How the Working-Class Home Became Modern, 1900–1940.
Hubka's book exhibits a fine blend of scholarship, accessibility, and panache. In fact, Hubka's is the only book in the field of Jewish architecture that attempts to contextualize a building with such specificity and with such a broad sense of the way it belongs in its immediate and more extensive cultural surroundings. It is unique in using architecture to fill in details of the relatively undiscovered country of pre-Hasidic Eastern Europe. The extrapolations it invites are essential to understanding the period and place, making Hubka's thesis a force to be reckoned with. -- Marc M. Epstein, associate professor, Religion and Jewish studies, Vassar College Thomas Hubka has found an extraordinary new gateway back into a lost Jewish past. Through the meticulous analysis of a single wooden synagogue, he opens before us the nearly undocumented pre-Hasidic popular culture of Eastern European Jews. -- Michael Steinlauf, associate professor of history, Gratz College