Howard Reed owns a small piece of American-Jewish history. Family lore has it that his maternal grandmother, Rebecca Steiner, was the first woman to graduate from Philadelphia College of Pharmacy -- itself the first such institution in North America -- circa 1900. Now Reed, a retired postal clerk, is writing his own chapter in his people's history as the National...

SPEAKING VOLUMES When I was a child, there was no locale in this city that represented White Anglo-Saxon Protestant privilege more than Rittenhouse Square. The staid-looking buildings that surrounded the park back then, along with the lovely booths, fountains, sculptures and pathways that marked the leafy interior, seemed to whisper to a young Jewish boy like me: "This terrain is...