Moore taught for many years at
Vassar College in
Poughkeepsie, New York. While there she served intermittently as head of Religious Studies and helped found a program in
Jewish Studies. At Vassar, Deborah Dash Moore wrote and co-edited numerous books, articles and collections. She was a highly regarded educator and classroom professor in addition to her scholarship. Her first book,
At Home in America: Second Generation New York Jews (1981), explores how the children of immigrants created an ethnic world that blended elements of Jewish and American culture into a vibrant urban society.
To the Golden Cities: Pursuing the American Jewish Dream in Miami and L. A. (1994) follows those big city Jews who chose to move to new homes after World War II and examines the type of communities and politics that flourished in these rapidly growing centers. Issues of leadership, authority and accomplishment have also engaged her attention, first in ''B'nai B'rith and the Challenge of Ethnic Leadership
(1981), and more recently in the award-winning two-volume Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia'' (1997), which she edited with
Paula Hyman. Her 2004 book,
GI Jews: How World War II Changed a Generation, charts the lives of fifteen young Jewish men as they faced military service and tried to make sense of its demands, simultaneously wrestling with what it meant to be an American and a Jew. GI Jews,
The Washington Post Best Book of the Year, portrays the costs of a conflict that was at once physical, emotional, and spiritual. In 2008, Moore published
American Jewish Identity Politics (
University of Michigan Press), a collection of essays by such notable Jewish studies scholars as
Hasia Diner,
Jonathan Sarna, and Paula Hyman. In 2011, her book
Gender & Jewish History (
Indiana University Press), written with co-editor
Marion Kaplan in honor of historian
Paula Hyman, was awarded the National Jewish Book Award in the category of Anthologies and Collections. In September 2012,
NYU Press published a three-volume series edited by Moore, City of Promises: A History of the Jews of New York. This history was selected for the National Jewish Book Award. In 2017,
NYU Press published Jewish New York: The Remarkable Story of a City and a People, based on the 2012 three-volume series. In spring 2016, Moore was named Editor-in-Chief of the
Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, a ten-volume anthology of Jewish literature, artwork, and artifacts published by
Yale University Press. Moore was the co-editor, with
Nurith Gertz, of Volume 10 of the
Posen Library, which covered the period from 1973 to 2005. Moore's book Walkers in the City: Jewish Street Photographers of Midcentury New York was published in 2023 by Three Hills, a trade imprint of
Cornell University Press. This book received the
National Jewish Book Award in the category of American Jewish Studies. ==Awards and honors==