Considering American Jewish History

Hasia Diner and Tony Michels

Michels

Since the 1970s the field of American Jewish history, a specialty within both the study of American history and modern Jewish history, entered into a period of growth and achievement. As measured by the number and quality of books and articles, courses taught in major universities, graduate students pursuing doctoral work, and professorial chairs specially earmarked for this scholarly endeavor, American Jewish history can rightly be said to have achieved intellectual substance and professional legitimacy (1).

As an enterprise of inquiry, American Jewish history owed its origins to the late nineteenth century with the simultaneous rise of anti-Semitism in the United States and the mass migration of east European Jews. The founders of the American Jewish Historical Society in 1892, none of them professional historians, used history in large measure as one tool in their communal defense against charges of the Jews--foreignness. Writing in the field continued but altered in perspective into the middle of the twentieth century as those who wrote American Jewish history shifted from the defense of the Jewish people to a focus on the internal life of American Jewry, reflecting in part their concerns about the stability of Jewish life in the increasingly hospitable environment of post-World War II America.

By that time, a number of scholars, some congregational rabbis, some with training in history at the graduate level, began to contribute to the development of the literature. Unlike the earlier generation, they turned instead to the institutional growth and development of Jewish communities, authoring in the 1950s and 1960s a string of communal biographies, documenting the histories of the Jews of Rochester, Syracuse, Buffalo, Los Angeles, Cleveland, and the like (2).

Simultaneously a small number of prominent historians, particularly Oscar Handlin at Harvard and Salo Baron at Columbia, and their graduate students turned their attention to American Jews (3). They began producing their scholarship just as other subfields of Jewish history, as well as Jewish studies generally, showed signs of growth within the American academy and as the historical profession, long unfriendly to Jews, moved toward inclusion. Both developments encouraged the professionalization of American Jewish history. The strong push for ethnic diversity during the 1960s and 1970s further accelerated post-war stirrings into clearly discernible trends, making it possible for graduate students in American history to pursue topics with a decided tilt towards the study of Jews (4).

American Jewish history arrived as an academic field by the 1970s and 1980s. Over the past three to four decades, scholars have focused on several main areas of concern, including the cultural and religious reinvention of Jewish life in the United States, the ties which have bound American Jews to Jews around the world, particularly those in distress, the formation of Jewish community life in the United States, and the economic success of American Jewry, a group which in the main came as relatively impoverished immigrants and who, within a generation or two, found themselves firmly located in the middle and upper-middle classes.

In examining the aforementioned themes, most American Jewish historians have argued that a fruitful, often harmonious, interplay between Jews and the larger society shaped Jewish life in the United States from its beginning. The United States, with its absence of an established clergy, made it possible for ordinary Jewish women and men to create religious and cultural institutions according to their preferences (5). When they found themselves dissatisfied with the structures and practices inherited from the past, they created new ones, albeit often cloaked with the mantle of authenticity. Fashioning communities as they saw fit, American Jews regarded tradition and past models as guides, but not as absolute ones, as they went about creating the kinds of structures and rites suitable to their circumstances (6). Likewise, they partook of the economic bounty of American life since, despite their poverty, they had arrived with a set of occupational skills that fit the needs of the American economy. In the middle of the nineteenth century, for instance, young Jewish men filled a crucial commercial niche as peddlers. Fanning out across the continent, they brought goods to Americans. While from the end of the nineteenth into the early twentieth centuries, Jews long familiar with needle work, helped as workers and entrepreneurs to create the American clothing industry and its unions (7). American Jews used their increasing economic and political clout to work on behalf of Jews in other lands who found themselves in harm's way. Thus, according to the scholarly consensus, American conditions allowed Jews to create new forms of ethnic culture and community while integrating into the social, political, and cultural mainstream. Despite several dissenting perspectives in recent years, this idea of an American Jewish symbiosis, or "synthesis," being the more commonly used word, persists as the dominant theme in the historiography (8).

In exploring the theme of synthesis, American Jewish historians have utilized many of the insights and methods of the post-1960s "new social history." Their focus on local communities, everyday women and men, family structures, work, consumption, and material culture reflected the ways in which scholarly innovations in the U.S. field profoundly affected American Jewish historiography as it came of age. More recently American Jewish historians have turned their attention to the changing meanings that American Jews, or some subset of them, invested in their own history, communities, and place in American society. This cultural turn in their works reflects the interest in historical memory ascendant in the discipline as a whole (9).

Much of this work has, however, for the most part, not garnered the attention and interest of their Americanist colleagues. A large gap divides the scholarly works of American Jewish historians and the wider world of American history scholarship, with the latter having made little room for the former.

Perhaps this reflects the fact that while much of what American Jewish historians have written has reflected the paradigmatic shifts within the larger field of American history, they have parted company with their colleagues in several ways. For one, while the latter have devoted much attention to the history of discrimination endured by America's racial and ethnic minorities, American Jewish historians have quite dramatically avoided the subject of anti-Semitism (10). As a topic it has not only received relatively little attention, but most, although not all, American Jewish historians have actually sought to show how minimal anti-Jewish behavior existed, particularly at a political level. Secondly, American Jewish historians have focused relatively little attention on the state, its relationship to the Jews, and in the largest sense to political history (11). In addition, while much recent scholarship in American Jewish history has focused on women's history (12), far less has explored matters of gender, in terms of the relationships between Jewish men and women and the ways in which each represented and understood the other. Finally, with a few notable exceptions (13), the study of American Jewish history has steered clear of the history of race in America. It has paid little attention to American society's racial categories, how they affected Jews, and the role of Jews in America's racial discourse.

Most American Jewish historians have posited or presumed a kind of American exceptionalism, noting stark differences in the prevailing circumstance of the Jews in the United States versus those elsewhere in the modern world. They have stressed that American Jews never had to fight for their emancipation, defend themselves against government oppression, or endure recurring mob violence, let alone genocide. To the extent that historians have considered anti-Semitism, they have done so in connection with how Jews succeeded at overcoming discrimination, while they simultaneously expanded the scope of civil and political equality for other minorities (14). By stressing the positive outcomes of the Jews' quest for full acceptance, American Jewish historians have identified tolerance and pluralism as defining traits of American society. In this regard, American Jewish historians have set themselves apart from their Americanist colleagues who have for the last forty years labored assiduously to dismantle the idea that "the American experience" constituted a unique and relatively benign phenomenon. Despite the thrust of the larger field in that direction, American Jewish historians, in the main, have not yet revised their orientation toward exceptionalism.

American Jewish historians have rarely intervened in the U.S. field's major scholarly debates to argue their positions. They have indeed been more inclined to engage other modern Jewish historians, especially Europeanists, who have, until recently, mostly looked askance at American Jewish history. The contentiousness of important U.S. sub-fields, especially those pertaining to race, class, and gender, have also likely deterred American Jewish historians, who have wanted to gain acceptance from their colleagues, from entering into controversy. Whatever the reasons, American Jewish historians have by and large stood on the sidelines. Their own scholarly advances notwithstanding, American Jewish historians have exercised little influence on the direction of the U.S. field.

Even so, American Jewish historiography poses a quiet challenge to scholars working within the areas of race, class, and gender, who have been largely unable or unwilling to account for Jews, as a group, in their writings (15). As the scholarly literature reveals, the experiences of Jews in the U.S. confounds categories of oppression and resistance. They have, over the decades, experienced poverty and affluence, discrimination and acceptance, distinctiveness and assimilation, often at the same time. American Jewish historians have shown how an immigrant group, and its descendants who adhered to a distinctive religious and cultural outlook, went to great lengths to accommodate to America, yet sought to reform it substantially, even transform it entirely, which the radicals among them hoped to do. American Jewish liberalism, the position of the majority, persisted as these acculturating women and men articulated a set of beliefs that deviated from American norms. This played itself out in a number of key areas, such as race relations, in which the major Jewish organizations promoted civil and political equality for African Americans. It also manifested itself as American Jewish communal bodies, including religious ones, worked to secularize the larger society, in addition to supporting internationalism in foreign affairs, the growth of the welfare state and the legitimization of labor unions. Jews pursued liberal and social democratic agendas, which placed them on the left end of the American political spectrum, even as they sought integration into the mainstream (16).

Specialists in American Jewish history have produced a raft of books examining how Jews balanced tensions between their desire for acceptance and their efforts to achieve it on suitable terms. They have examined the multiple points of intersection between American Jews' inner communal lives and the larger American society, exploring the times, places, and mechanisms by which they lived and made sense of their two identities. They have studied how Jews balanced their American loyalties with their global responsibilities. How Jews did these, and the debates over them, may offer much to U.S. historians. 

Endnotes

1. For a statement on the state of the field at present, see, Hasia R. Diner, "American Jewish History," in The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Studies, Martin Goodman, ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 471-90.

2. Lloyd P. Gartner and Max Vorspan, History of the Jews of Los Angeles (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1970); Hyman Grinstein, The Rise of the Jewish Community of New York, 1654-1860 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1945).

3. Salo Baron, Steeled by Adversity: Essays and Addresses on American Jewish Life (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1971); Oscar Handlin, Adventure in Freedom: Three Hundred Years of Jewish Life in America (New York: McGraw Hill, 1954); Moses Rischin, The Promised City: New York Jews, 1870-1914 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962).

4. On anti-Semitism in the historical profession see, Leon Fink, Progressive Intellectuals and the Dilemmas of Democratic Commitment (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997); Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question," and the American Historic Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

5. Leon Jick, The Americanization of the Synagogue: 1820-1870 (Hanover, New Hampshire: University Press of New England, 1976); Alan Silverstein, Alternatives to Assimilation: The Response of Reform Judaism to American Culture (Hanover, New Hampshire: University Press of New England, 1994); Weisman Joselit, The Wonders of America: Reinventing Jewish Culture, 1880-1950 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1994); Jonathan Sarna, American Judaism (New Haven, Ct.: Yale University Press, 2004); Jeffrey Gurock, A Modern Heretic and a Traditional Community: Mordecai M. Kaplan, Orthodoxy and American Judaism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997).

6. Hasia Diner, A Time for Gathering: The Second Migration, 1820-1880 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992); Arthur Goren, New York Jews and the Quest for Community: The Kehilla Experiment, 1908-1922 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970); Jeffrey Gurock, When Harlem Was Jewish, 1870-1930 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979); Deborah Dash Moore, At Home in America: Second Generation New York Jews (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981); Daniel Soyer, Jewish Immigrant Association and American Identity in New York (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997); Beth Wenger, New York Jews and the Great Depression: Uncertain Promise (New Haven, Ct.: Yale University Press, 1996); Deborah Dash Moore, To the Golden Cities: Pursuing the American Jewish Dream in Miami and Los Angeles (New York: Free Press, 1994).

7. Diner, A Time for Gathering; Thomas Kessner, The Golden Door: Italian and Jewish Immigrant Mobility in New York City, 1880-1915 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977); Ewa Morawska, Insecure Prosperity: Small Town Jews in Industrial America, 1890-1940 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996); Ruth A. Markowitz, My Daughter, The Teacher: Jewish Teachers in the New York City Schools (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1993). On Jews and consumption, see Hasia Diner, Hungering for America: Italian, Irish, and Jewish Foodways in the Age of Migration (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002); Andrew Heinze, Adapting to Abundance: Jewish Immigrants, Mass Consumpiton and the Search for American Identity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990).

8. See, for example, Eric Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006); Eli Lederhendler, New York Jews and the Decline of Urban Ethnicity, 1950-1970 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2001); Tony Michels, A Fire in Their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005). These three authors have not put forward a shared critique, but have taken issue, to one extent or another, with the idea of an American Jewish symbiosis.

9. Hasia Diner, Lower East Side Memories. The Jewish Place In America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Riv-Ellen Prell, Fighting to Become Americans: Jews, Gender and the Anxiety of Assimilation (Boston: Beacon, 1999); Joyce Antler, You Never Call! You Never Write!: A History of the Jewish Mother (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).

10. Leonard Dinnerstein's Anti-Semitism in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994) is an exception.

11. Three exceptions are Richard D. Breitman and Alan M. Kraut, American Refugee Policy and European Jewry, 1933-1945 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987); Henry Feingold, The Politics of Rescue: The Roosevelt Administration and the Holocaust, 1938-1945 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1970); and Christopher Sterba, Good Americans: Italian and Jewish Immigrants During the First World War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).

12. Joyce Antler, The Journey Home: Jewish Women and the American Century (New York: Free Press, 1997); Susan Glenn, Daughters of the Shtetl: Life and Labor in the Immigrant Generation (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1991); Karla Goldman, Beyond the Synagogue Gallery: Finding a Place for Women in American Judaism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000); Mary McCune, "The Whole Wide World, Without Limits": International Relief, Gender Politics, and American Jewish Women, 1893-1930 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005); Diane Ashton, Rebecca Gratz: Women and Judaism in Antebellum America (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1997); Pamela Nadell, Women Who Would Be Rabbis: A History of Women's Ordination, 1889-1985 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998); Shuly Rubin Schwartz, The Rabbi's Wife: The Rebbetzin in American Jewish Life (New York: New York University Press, 2006) represent just some of the rich work on the history of Jewish women in America and hardly constitutes a complete list.

13. Hasia Diner, In the Almost Promised Land; American Jews and Blacks, 1915-1935 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992) (orig, 1977, Greenwood Press); Eric Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness; Cheryl Greenberg, Troubling the Waters: Black-Jewish Relations in the American Century (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006).

14. Mark Dollinger, Quest for Inclusion: Jews and Liberalism in Modern America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000); Stuart Svonkin, Jews Against Prejudice: American Jews and the Fight for Civil Liberties (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997).

15. While a considerable number of Americanists have occasionally written on Jewish individuals as part of larger studies, few have devoted sustained attention to them, engaged seriously with American Jewish historiography, or accorded significance to Jews as a group. Important exceptions include Paul Buhle, From the Lower East Side to Hollywood: Jews in American Popular Culture (London and New York: Verso, 2004); Susan Glenn, Daughters of the Shtetl; John Higham, Send These to Me: Jews and Other Immigrants in Urban America (New York: Atheneum, 1975); David A. Hollinger, Science, Jews, and Secular Culture: Studies in Mid-Twentieth-Century American Intellectual History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). 

16. Arthur A. Goren, "A 'Golden Decade' for American Jews: 1945-1955," in Studies in Contemporary Jewry vol. 8 (1992); Hasia Diner, The Jews of the United States, 1654-2000 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).