| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Jews of the United States, 1654 to 2000. By Hasia R. Diner. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. x, 437 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0520-22773-5.)
The 350th anniversary of the American Jewish community (1654–2004), like the 300th before it, has occasioned a small boom in scholarship concerning American Jewish history and life. In addition to monographs, articles, and museum exhibitions, we now have this full-scale history of the American Jewish community by Hasia R. Diner, one of the field's most senior and prolific scholars.	1
Diner's wide-ranging synthesis attempts to cover social, political, economic, cultural, and religious history from the colonial era to the present—a tall order. She knows the secondary history well, carefully incorporates the experiences of women into her text, and displays little patience with filiopietism or apologetics. She does not shrink, for example, from discussing Jewish slaveholding. She also observes, repeatedly, that Jews benefited in America on account of their skin color, in stark contrast to African Americans. While her insistence that "Jews did not have to 'become white'" (p. 165) is an oversimplification, as is her claim that Jews "no longer bore the burden of being the stigmatized group, whom others reviled and oppressed" (p. 25), the fact that Jews found their white skin to be an asset in America is clearly beyond question. Indeed, she might have gone further, as David Brion Davis did, to show how modernity actually advantaged Jews while disadvantaging African Americans.	. . .

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