Hasia R. Diner | The Study of American Jewish History: in the Academy, in the Community | Polish American Studies, 65.1

The Study of American Jewish History: in the Academy, in the Community

by
Hasia R. Diner

As an enterprise the scholarly study of American Jewish history serves, metaphorically, two masters. On the one hand, it has thoroughly embedded itself into America's universities and into the professional domain of American history. Its practitioners see themselves as needing and wanting to conform to all the obligations of the academic world, particularly those which demand a degree of scholarly aloofness from the topic in order to see, as free as possible from personal biases, patterns at work in the past. Yet, at the same time, as a field of endeavor, it depends greatly on American Jewry's historical consciousness and on the beneficence of donors, on the interest of Jewish communal institutions, and as such on non-scholarly concerns.¹

This state of affairs has been productive in the sense that scholars of American Jewish history have access to both the benefits of the larger scholarly world and those particular to the ethnic communal context. Yet the reality that American Jewish historians do, and believe that they must, also engage with popular audiences has consequences. Each interaction with the lay public involves an expenditure of time and energy, and raises historians' own anxieties about the dilution of their scholarly rigor.

They truly respond to two sets of demands and face two sets of opportunities. They hold university positions, train a constantly growing number of graduate students, and have access to the most prestigious publishing houses for their books. At the same time, they also have a Jewish constituency which provides funding, audiences, and a range of other benefits for those who have decided to study the American Jewish past. They as well can be said to have the advantages of access to multiple sets of colleagues. They hope to speak to their Americanist peers, and do so, at the same time that they maintain dense and constant conversations with scholars of modern Jewish history in the United States, Israel, and Europe, making their work inherently international.

Logo of the American Jewish Historical Society.

From the point of view of other ethnic historical associations and ethnic historical projects, this no doubt would appear to be an ideal state. Well-funded, institutionally rich, and throbbing with scholarly activity, American Jewish history has since the 1980s entered into a period of fruitful growth, with a fine future ahead of it, as more and more students apply to graduate school to study it, making it possible to see the field as continuing to develop in years to come.

This condition, which may seem to be an almost embarrassment of riches has a history and did not represent the inevitable outcome of the field's founding and early years. The history of the field of American Jewish history offers a window into this present state of affairs, and also sheds some light on the dilemmas of in fact serving two purposes, one academic and university-based and one communal, that is, facing the American Jewish public.

The study of the American Jewish past came into being at the end of the nineteenth century. In the 1890s, in the United States and in Great Britain, the small Jewish communities and their well-off, acculturated elites faced two interrelated challenges. Increasing numbers of east European Jewish immigrants flooded both countries, not only numerically overwhelming the small resident Jewish populations, but increasingly these newcomers drew public attention to Jews, Judaism, and the linkages between Jewishness and foreignness. At the same time in both countries anti-Semitism emerged as a new and ugly fact of life, as a matter of rhetoric, and popular representation and policy. Infused with the tropes of scientific racism, the anti-Semitism of the 1890s questioned the moral and mental capabilities of the Jews and certainly questioned their fitness for citizenship. Exclusion of Jews in places of leisure and employment, for example, began to confront Jewish women and men, relatively unused to such practices in their heretofore liberal, tolerant nations. Both nations began to discuss the need to restrict immigration and for Jewish communal leaders, this meant that the Jews of the Czarist lands, suffering increased impoverishment and escalating violence, would have no places of refuge.

The study of American and British Jewish history emerged from this moment in time. The American Jewish Historical Society founded in 1892, by a group of Jewish communal notables, some of whom a decade later would establish the American Jewish Committee, a body constituted to defend Jewish rights at home and abroad, included no historians. These highly interested lay people saw history as a way to defend the Jews, both those already in America and those who would be immigrating in the decades to come.²

They had a particular point to make about Jews in America. Jews, they sought to prove, had been there from the beginning and had participated in every war, had contributed to every development which had made the nation great. Without the Jews, their articles implied, the United States could not have achieved its greatness. Beneath that statement lay a contemporary message. Do not think of Jews as foreigners outside of the national experience. Today's Jewish newcomers will also integrate and they too will enhance the United States.

Notably the first large scale public history program sponsored by American Jews and the American Jewish Historical Society took place in 1905, to commemorate the 250th anniversary of Jewish settlement in North America. Ostensibly staged to recall the 1654 landing of a group of 23 Jews in the unfriendly environment of New Amsterdam where they had been met by Peter Stuyvesant who sought to expel them and bar Jews from dwelling in what would become New York, the celebration in actuality functioned in a deeply political context. That year and the two previous ones had witnessed bloody pogroms against Jews in Kishinev other places in the Ukraine and Bessarabia. The organizers of the 250th anniversary programs, including the one held in New York's Carnegie Hall featuring a speech by former President Grover Cleveland and words of solidarity from then President Theodore Roosevelt, had their eyes trained on the mass emigration from eastern Europe, the passage of the Aliens' Act in Great Britain, and their own deeply felt responsibility to labor to keep America's doors open to Jews fleeing eastern Europe.

Such use of history as group defense and apologia continued through the first decades of the twentieth century as Jewish communal leaders marshaled history and historical projects to prove the Jews' worthiness. By the middle of the century a new element entered into the practice of American Jewish history. By the 1950s the American Jewish Historical Society and the American Jewish Archives, founded in 1948, shifted the focus. By that point in time Jews could be said to have achieved a high level of integration into American society, and although barriers persisted into the 1960s, they fell one by one in the immediate postwar years. In 1945 the state of New York passed a civil rights act which benefited Jews, among others, and by 1947 opinion polls for the first time showed a steep decline in anti-Semitism in America. Young Jews had access to American higher education at a rate which exceeded that of nearly all other Americans, particularly as compared to the children and grandchildren of the other immigrants who had accompanied them to the United States in the decades from the 1870s through the 1920s.

Now, American Jewish history came to serve a second purpose. No longer fretful about the behavior and attitudes of their non-Jewish neighbors, Jewish leaders, communal organizations, and probably the rank-and-file of American Jewry began to articulate fears about the vitality of Judaism and Jewish culture in America. By the end of World War II a grim reality confronted them. The virtual disappearance of European Jewry at the hands of the Germans and their allies during the war meant that American Jewry constituted the only large and economically robust Jewish collectivity in the world. They contemplated with worry the idea that American Jews did not have the cultural and communal wherewithal to basically replace the slaughtered Jews of Europe as the producers of Jewish culture.

Their worries stemmed from some of the basic characteristics of post-World War II America, including the drop in anti-Jewish attitudes and the banning of many of those practices which had until recently excluded Jews, suburbanization, the increasingly hospitable climate of this "age of affluence" in which young Jews, in particular, saw themselves as not so very different than their white, middle class, neighbors. Rabbis, Jewish educators, and the staffs of many of the Jewish communal bodies turned to American Jewish history as one tool in their kit to try to instill a sense of distinctiveness and group pride in the face of integration.

Jews, they wanted to show, wherever the settled in the United States had built and sustained their communities, even as they experienced integration. In this vein, over the course of the 1950s and 1960s a slew of American Jewish communal biographies got written. In fact the American Jewish Committee, the American Jewish Historical Society, the Jewish Theological Seminary, and other communal organizations participated in shepherding these projects through to publication. The histories of the Jews of Rochester, Syracuse, Utica, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Milwaukee, and numerous other cities saw the light of day, written by either Jewish academics, specialists in other fields, with no particular training in either American history, urban history or Jewish history. In a few cases congregational rabbis, some with doctorates in history, also participated in chronicling the history of their community. Whoever the author, they took upon themselves this specific practice of history to foster the vitality of Jewish community life and make possible, they hoped, Jewish cultural retention.³

Indeed so much did the study of American Jewish history come to be defined as a crucial element of post-war American Jewish life that in 1948 the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, the rabbinical seminary of the Reform movement, inaugurated the American Jewish Archives and launched the journal of the same name. Under the guidance of Jacob Rader Marcus, trained as a medieval Jewish historian, the American Jewish Archive in particular took as its mission collecting the documents and stimulating research on the history of American Jewish communities in the midwest, the south, and the other hinterlands of New York, American Jewry's undisputed capital.

The year 1954 offers a good and useful moment in time to look at this particular use of American Jewish history. In that year the Jews of the United States celebrated the 300th anniversary of that 1654 landing in Manhattan which had, in 1905 been staged to tell Americans how much Jews had contributed to the rise of the nation. For sure the 1954 festivities, more elaborate, extensive, and widespread than anything held at the beginning of the century, addressed and involved non-Jewish notable Americans. President Eisenhower attended the grand banquet which heralded the beginnings of the Tercentenary year and other important non-Jewish political, civic, and religious leaders played their part.⁴

But in 1954 the message targeted Jews much more than non-Jews and targeted them more than the turn-of-the-century programs had. Pedagogic projects, speakers, publications, films, radio broadcasts, and numerous other endeavors all sought to show the Jews of the United States that Jewish life had been successfully transplanted to America. There it had taken root, germinated, and flowered in directions different than what had existed in European Jewry, but still products of the same deep source. The history of American Jewry, Tercentenary texts asserted, represented a continuation of the great chain of Jewish history, but one which represented a perfect fusion or synthesis between that great tradition and the beneficence of America.

The year 1954 represents a watershed year in the relationship between the public practice of American Jewish history and its scholarly manifestations in another way. That year Harvard historian Oscar Handlin published a landmark book, Adventures in Freedom.⁵ The author of the Pulitzer Prize winning The Uprooted and of Boston's Immigrants, the first Jew to receive tenure in Harvard's vaunted History Department, turned his attention in the 1954 book the history of the Jews of the United States. The title revealed the book's analytic frame, that life in America, for all its manifestations of anti-Semitism, for all of the scurrilous rhetoric, had been for Jews an experience sui generis in their long and tragic diasporic history.

One one level Handlin's publication of Adventures in Freedom stood as an anomaly in his lengthy and productive career as an American historian. Nearly everything he wrote, including the classic The Uprooted had nothing to do with Jews and the tone of that book, like that of Boston's Immigrants, expressed negativism and pessimism. They stressed conflict and the absence of synthesis. Yet he cast Adventures in Freedom in a decidedly positive tone which depicted as positive the meeting between America and the Jews. Likewise Handlin from the late 1940s contributed many lengthy pieces and small books to Jewish communal projects, writing for the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee, the American Jewish Historical Society, and other organizations, and using his considerable scholarly skills and reputation to further a series of Jewish tasks. His articles appeared in the American Jewish Yearbook, a publication of the American Jewish Committee, and in its monthly magazine, Commentary. Handlin researched and developed policy statements for American Jewish organizations on civil rights, immigration reform, and numerous other liberal causes of the mid-twentieth century.⁶

His career as such in this middle of the 1950s and beyond provides one way in which American Jewish historians balanced between the demands of the community and the demands of the scholarly world. Handlin in essence bifurcated himself, maintaining two separate selves, one the communally active Jew who employed his reputation and talents as an historian to write for the Jewish public and the leadership of the community, and the other, the American historian who, while he happened to be a Jew, only in one instance wrote scholarly works which took as their subject the experience of the Jews in the American context. As an American historian he presented himself devoid of his Jewish self, as it were, tackling a range of social and political matters with no reference to Jews in them.

Handlin's notable career offers one more important element in the professionalization of American Jewish history. He played a key role in articulating a desideratum that the study of American Jewish history needed scholars well trained in American history. Along with Columbia University's Salo Baron, the only professor of Jewish history in a general American university at mid-century, Handlin helped organize several conferences on the imperative of nurturing such a cadre of historians and he played his part in turn by supervising the dissertation of Moses Rischin, one of the first graduate students at Harvard to turn his attention to the American Jewish past. His dissertation became a now classic book, The Promised City,⁷ a study of east European Jewish immigrants to New York at the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. That Harvard University Press published Rischin's book attested to its excellence, to Handlin's influence and to the emerging professional status of the field.

One more word is in order before moving on to the professionalization of the sub-discipline of American Jewish history and the way it stands mid-way between the academy and the community. In 1960s, at the time that Rischin's book appeared and at the earliest stage of the flourishing of American Jewish history, the field occupied a somewhat marginal place in the larger study of Jewish history. Those who engaged in the study of Jewish history, whether in the scholarly realm or the communal, regarded the European Jewish past most important, and American Jewish history as a fairly minor sideshow. They thought this way for two reasons, both of which placed America and its Jews decidedly on the sidelines of significance. When either scholarly and community audiences considered Jewish history they focused first and foremost on the history of suffering and persecution. Not surprising in the decades surrounding the rise of Nazism and the perpetration of the vast slaughter of European Jewry, this "lachrymose" view of Jewish history, the phrase coined by Baron, meant that America, with relatively mild history of anti-Semitism and its absence of persecution, particularly of state origins, mattered little. Similarly, a long tradition in Jewish scholarship valorized the study of Jewish ideas, the tradition of rabbinic commentary, and the emergence of great intellectual breakthroughs. In this historical paradigm the United States again had little to offer. The migration to American had involved some of the least learned of European Jewry, and their activities in the United States as peddlers, garment workers, labor organizers, and community builders offered little in terms of furthering the cannon of "real" Judaic knowledge.

Those who, from Rischin onward until the 1990s, study American Jewish history tended to be viewed as a bit softer as scholars, less dependent on acquiring multiple languages to do their research. They seemed to be treating subjects somehow, less important than victimization and the creation of the scholarly canon. But whatever scholars of European Jewish history may have thought of the enterprise of American Jewish history, it took off in earnest in the late 1960s and 1970s as discrimination against Jews in the American academy melted, as Jewish studies itself began to enter into American universities, and as those institutions of higher learning transformed and opened themselves up to a variety of ethnic projects. Starting in the early 1970s graduate students in American history programs, scattered throughout the country, although Columbia University produced the lion's share of them, started producing dissertations which focused on aspects of American Jewish past. They looked at Jewish community formation and Jewish interactions with other Americans, both in and outside of the political sphere. Many of these dissertations then became books, which in turn served as the first building blocks of a genuinely scholarly literature on the subject. These works, their authors hoped, would perform several tasks at one and the same time. They expected to show European Jewish historians that American Jews had a past too, one worthy of study and to demonstrate to their Americanist colleagues that the presence of Jews had made a difference to America as it developed over time. In an age when social history dominated the profession and when social historians sought to identify more and more groups whose experiences could complicate the master narrative of American history, American Jewish historians found themselves in the right moment in time to start creating their body of literature.⁸

By the 1980s American Jewish history as a field can be said to have come into its own as measured by the volume of books, articles, and doctoral dissertations it produced, and continues to produce.⁹ It entered into a fruitful period, which continues apace into the early twenty-first century in terms of the number of students applying to the best graduate schools to study this and the prestige of the publishers under whose aegis their books come out.¹⁰

By the late 1980s so many academicians engaged in the study of American Jewish history struck out from the American Jewish Historical Society and created a separate unit within it. Through this Academic Council, American Jewish historians have for almost two decades held a biennial conference, the Scholars Conference in American Jewish History, which attracts dozens of panelists from around the country and from abroad. As of 2007 the Academic Council has a membership of 142, all professors, archivists, and professional librarians who focus exclusively or primarily on American Jewish history in their work.¹¹ In addition, a growing number of scholars of European Jewish history, a scholarly cadre long disdainful of American Jewish history, treating its as a minor intellectual stepchild of the weightier parent body, have now decided to write in American Jewish history themselves, and to add it to their repertoire of academic interests.

This turn of events has certainly encouraged American Jewish historians in their work. Yet while all these developments have taken place, as the number of scholars grows and the field blossoms, many of its practitioners who sit in history departments, feel a degree of marginality from their Americanist colleagues. As those who teach American Jewish history in universities see it, their peers who study other aspects of American history, do not consider Jewish history particularly important or relevant to the departmental mission. American Jewish historians basically read the same journals and books, rely upon the same scholarly paradigms, engage with the same themes, and employ the same idioms, as other historians. Yet from the vantage point of the Jewish historians, they occupy a quite marginal status within their departments and the profession. By and large—and it would require systematic collection of data to prove the point definitively—most American Jewish historians do not feel utterly integrated into the practice of American history, not from their side but from what they perceive to be the attitudes and prejudices of the profession as a whole.

To chronicle the gap between how American Jewish historians see themselves and their work and the impact of that work on the larger practice of American history involves negative evidence. There have been, for example, nearly no articles on the topic of American Jewish history, by any of its practitioners in the Journal of American History or the American Historical Review. No American Jewish historian has been elected to office in the Organization of American Historians or sat on any of its committees. When the Organization of American Historians put together a roster of distinguished historians to lecture to public audiences on American history in its many manifestations, it included no American Jewish historians. The American Historical Association has never issued a pamphlet on the study and teaching of Jewish history, American or otherwise, in it excellent series of publications on the state of the art of various historical subjects. Most papers on American Jewish history appear at the annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians or the American Historical Association on what might be viewed as "ghetto" panels, that is, panels dedicated to some aspect or another of American Jewish history and rarely on thematic panels which look at a variety of subjects, built around a common problem. The list could go on, but the basic sense, whether accurate or not, American Jewish history, despite the richness of its development and the gravitas of its work, plays a very minor role in the field of American history.

If the scholars of American Jewish history find their relationship to other Americanists less than full and satisfying, they maintain at the same time, a complicated and extensive set of interactions with the larger non-scholarly Jewish public. These historians do not consider their relationship with the Jewish community a particular priority in their selection of topics, deriving as they do the impetus for their work from the academic world and its scholarly concerns. But the community has profoundly made itself felt and as such provided American Jewish historians with their second master, a master which provides much to them as scholars, but which in turn asked much of them.

The rise of Jewish studies in American universities indeed cannot be disentangled from the workings of Jewish communal life in America. Jewish studies came to the American university not by way of student protest, as Black studies did, or by the work of Jewish faculty who organized themselves to show administrators that a subject exist, like women's studies had. Rather Jewish studies entered the "halls of ivy" from the outside as Jewish donors, variously representing foundations, individuals, or organized Jewish communal bodies, offered universities funding to make courses on Jewish history, literature, and thought available to students. To some degree their largess reflected a worry that as universities started offering Black studies, Chicano studies, Asian American studies, and the like, Jews would be left out of the increasingly ethnicized campus. Only they, as a group, would have no department or program to represent their experience in the curriculum. Jewish studies in the general American university emerged as an innovation of the 1970s and a solution to the problem of Jewish academic invisibility.

Probably though, and this subject deserves a full length study, the increasing fear of Jewish communal leaders, that the American Jewish youngsters who received decreasing levels of Jewish education before college, would drift away from communal involvement once they became young adults. Fears of intermarriage, a major topic in Jewish publications, sermons, and the reports of Jewish organizations from the 1980s onward, propelled a quest of "continuity," the launching of numerous projects to forestall a mass defection from Judaism and Jewish life. While many who participated in this conversation did so in hyperbolic and gloom-and-doom terms, they did cast about for various ways to engage with Jewish youth.

The lavish funding of Jewish studies on campuses across the country represented one such approach. In addition on university campuses, public and private, including a number under Catholic auspices, with few Jewish students, local Jewish philanthropists have also endowed chairs in Jewish studies as a way to reach out the overwhelming non-Jewish majority and teach them something about Judaism and Jewish culture. In the last half decade or so, donors have offered handsome sums to various American universities, usually through Jewish studies departments, to showcase the teaching of Israel. In an era of intense debate, on and off campus, about the Middle East and Israel, donors have hoped that chairs and programs in Israel studies, would provide a balance to what they see as a tilt among academics towards the Arab position.

The universities on their part had much to gain from this largess. Jewish studies provided much needed resources and particularly in state universities which received declining amounts of support from legislatures, donations in the millions from philanthropists willing to endow Jewish studies became, as the colloquialism goes, a "cash cow." Universities also saw the entry of endowed Jewish studies programs to their campus as a way to upgrade the applicant pool. Whether rightly or wrongly, schools across the country worked on the assumption that more Jewish students on campus would help raise their academic standing, and that would consequently attract even more support from Jewish donors.

The academic study of Jewish topics, American Jewish history among them, as such became a potential weapon in a war for the Jewish future on the one side, and in the quest for higher rankings and increased financial resources, on the other. This meant, for the Jewish historians who worked in American universities, the development of a somewhat complicated relationship with the donors and by extension with the communities. While only in the rarest cases have donors attempted to exert any kind of influence on the content of the work being done by the beneficiaries of their gifts, or indeed which professors should teach the courses, sit on the endowed chairs, and the like, for the scholars, an unstated expectations exists that they would maintain some kind of relationship with the community. Whether being asked to speak to community audiences, write something for a local Jewish newspaper, help in working on a local Jewish museum exhibition, teach an adult Jewish education course, or consult with a local community project, Jewish studies scholars, and American Jewish historians in particular, find themselves called upon to participate on the community level and to engage with popular audiences.

For sure, they can refuse to participate, but given the degree to which they hold positions that would not exist but for the bounty of the community, they live with a clear sense that turning their backs on the community would be less than graceful. These invitations to lecture, consult, and write for lay audiences come quite often with handsome remuneration, often beyond what other historians might receive from more general community sources and those honoraria surely function as rewards or lures to seduce American Jewish historians, and others, to turn to the public.

The emergence of Jewish studies in American universities has been viewed by local Jewish community members as a new source of learning and communal programming, as an additional source of adult Jewish education, existing in part to supplement the courses and lectures at synagogues, Jewish community centers, and the like. Conferences, for example, called by Jewish studies departments, on a vast array of historical, literary, and philosophic subjects, tend to bring out sizable community audiences. The organizers of the conference conceptualize themes around intellectually meaningful issues, invite scholars on the basis of the academic quality of their work, and structure the proceedings along conventional scholarly lines. But, when they look out at those seated in front of them, they will see, as likely as not, not other scholars—although some definitely show up—but interested members of the Jewish community. Jewish studies conferences in the main serve the participant scholars who surely learn from each other, but take place to benefit also the laity who come out in large numbers to such programs. No one has assessed the ways in which such a skewed balance between scholarly presenters with their academic agendas, and lay audiences eager to soak up something about Jewish culture and history impacts upon the intellectual rigor of the proceedings. But, whatever the impact, scholars participating understand fully that their jobs and the resources at their command depend in large measure upon the interest and support of those "ordinary" Jewish women and men who embrace Jewish learning, but by necessity at a level different than that of academics.

While this kind of engagement encompasses nearly all academics in Jewish studies departments, scholars of American Jewish history, have felt this particularly sharply. After all, the local community in which they work is an American one, and the women and men who make up the Jewish population of their town or city, live out their Jewish lives in an American context. The demand for and interest in American topics seems to be nearly insatiable. American Jewish historians can be said to have, in greater or lesser degree depending upon the size of the community in which they find themselves, almost second careers as speakers at synagogues, including as weekend length "scholars-in-residence" at congregations, as organizers of adult Jewish education programs in community centers and other Jewish venues, consultants to federations (the overarching Jewish fundraising and allocations bodies), planners of Jewish museums and oral history projects, and other kinds of endeavors, all of which take time but simultaneously bring with them remuneration and audiences.

Nothing demonstrated this more clearly than the hundreds of programs around the country held in 2004 and 2005 dedicated to celebrating the 350th anniversary of American Jewish settlement. From one end of the country to another, and with some spots overseas, American Jewish historians experienced a long banner year as they delivered their "350th" talks to multiple community audiences, interested in basically the subject of how to account for the uniqueness of the American Jewish experience. In a decade when mounting Jewish concern focused on the reemergence of anti-Semitism in Europe, particularly in France, and the linked demonization of Israel, the American Jewish polity in essence wanted to know why none of this seemed to be cropping up in the United States. These 350th programs whether in the form of lectures, symposia, films, radio, and television programs, provided American Jewish historian with more opportunities to share something about the contours of the American Jewish past than they ever had before. These programs, despite their time consuming nature, provided American Jewish historians with audiences that I venture to say would thrill any academic, in terms of size and interest level.

In addition, scholars of American Jewish history can expect that local and national Jewish newspapers and magazines will review their books, bringing these scholarly works wider attention than most conventional books in American history get. The publishers of their books, for their part recognize that these publications function as attractive venues for advertising. Nearly all Jewish communities hold an annual Jewish book fair every November as part of a national project in existence for decades, Jewish Book Month. Scholars of American Jewish history, just like novelists, journalists, compilers of Jewish cookbooks, and other authors of books on Jewish themes, make the Book Month circuit hosted by far-flung communities. These talks further expand the readership for books with Jewish themes, including those written from within the context of the academy.

In all of this, from the endowed chairs through the well-attended and nicely funded conferences, from the named centers, programs and departments to the fairly robust sales of books and the attention in the Jewish press to academic works, American Jewish historians confront a public engaged with them. They have a lay audience which sees them as partners in telling the narrative of their own past, as custodians of the community's memory.

Despite the excitement of having such audiences and the real rewards that come from them, such a cozy relationship can at times seem too close. At times, audiences want a particular version of that past, and they make it very clear that what the scholarly lecture or the academic book has laid out, jars with their idea of what happened and why. Audience members, usually among the most Jewishly committed individuals in a local community, come to the lecture or conference with deep passions about the American Jewish past and with their already fixed ideas about those developments, why they took place, and what they meant. Since the laity has not received scholarly training and has not donned the mantle of objectivity, however problematic the nature of that construct as a goal or as a reality, they tend to see history as a matter of praising heroes and blaming villains. They want the past to have played itself out in a particular way and can become quite outspoken when the visiting lecturer, for example, points out that certain developments or phenomena appear quite different when subjected to empirical analysis.

The community audiences by definition function from a very particularistic perspective. While it would be unfair to describe their interests as insular, they come to the lecture, participate in the oral history project, or read the books because they see themselves as actors in the history being retold. They employ the pronoun "we," even if talking about Jews in the America in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries. To them American Jewish history serves to confirm identity and shore up communal solidarity.

The historian, on the other hand, has a stake in maintaining a degree of distance, in fact, hopes to chip away at romantic and nostalgic ideas about the past. The historian opts for the pronoun "they" when talking or writing about the women and men they study. After all, historical scholarship maintains that the details and developments in the past must be seen as contingent on circumstances no longer operative and in existence. Therefore "we" cannot work. In addition most American Jewish historians, trained in American history, constantly have their eyes trained on the larger American narrative and on the experiences of other immigrant, ethnic, and religious groups in the United States, whose histories served as both points of convergence with those of Jews and whose activities played a not insignificant role in shaping the circumstances which Jews faced. The historians' training in essence takes them away from particularism.

The scholars who comes to the community setting as such have to walk a fine line between sharing with the audiences their best understanding of historical matters, based not on comfortably familiar narratives but on historically accurate data, and at the same time providing a popular audience with a meaningful experience. Scholars of American Jewish history engage in a balancing act where they negotiate the "we" of the laity's perspective and the "they" orientation which professionalism demands of them.

What price strings come attached to this efflorescence of public interest in American Jewish history? To what degree do American Jewish historians see themselves as beneficiaries of communal interest or its hostages? Answering this question would no doubt vary from historian to historian, but in the largest sense, I predict that most would concur that they have a responsibility to serve that master, to show up, participate, give it their time, but not to give the Jewish public the stories that make it feel good, just because they conform to expectations.

Ironically historians of American Jewish history went into their work not because a popular audience existed for their endeavors, but because they hoped to function within the academy, in history departments in conversation with other Americanists. Yet the largest group of constituents who consume their works, beyond the circle of other professional scholars of American Jewish history, have been made up of not others in American history, but from the large Jewish public hungry for learning and willing to support such work. American Jewish historians have benefited from this hunger but yet still hope to win the respect of their colleagues for the rigor of their scholarship. They yearn for approval from the other master.

NOTES

¹ For a more complete statement on the history and current situation of American Jewish historical studies see, Hasia R. Diner, "American Jewish History," in Martin Goodman, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 471–490.

² Jeffrey Gurock, "From Publications to American Jewish History: The Journal of the American Jewish Historical Society and the Writing of American Jewish History," American Jewish History, Vol. 81, No. 2 (1993–1994), 155–270.

³ Among many of this genre see Morris Gutstein, A Priceless Heritage: The Epic Growth of Nineteenth Century Chicago Jewry (New York: Bloch Publishing, 1953); Charles Reznikoff and Uriah Z. Engelman, The Jews of Charleston: A History of an American Jewish Community (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1950); Selig Adler and Thomas E. Connolly, From Ararat to Suburbia: The History of the Jewish Community of Buffalo (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1960); Louis J. Swichkow and Lloyd P. Gartner, The History of the Jews of Milwaukee (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1963); Stuart E. Rosenberg, The Jewish Community in Rochester, 1843–1925 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1954); Solomon J. Kohn, The Jewish Community of Utica, New York, 1847–1948 (New York: American Jewish Historical Society, 1959); Hyman Grinstein, The Rise of the Jewish Community of New York, 1654–1860 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America).

⁴ For a discussion of the Tercentenary and the performance of American Jewish history, see, Arthur Goren, The Politics and Public Culture of American Jews (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999).

⁵ Oscar Handlin, Adventures in Freedom (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1954).

⁶ Oscar Handlin, "New Paths in American Jewish History: Afterthoughts of a Conference," Commentary (April, 1949), 388–394.

⁷ Moses Rischin, The Promised City: New York's Jews, 1870–1914 (Cambridge: Harvard University Pess, 1962).

⁸ Leonard Dinnerstein, The Leo Frank Case (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968); Arthur Goren, New York Jews and the Quest for Community: The Kehila Experiment (New York: Columbia Univesity Press, 1970); Jeffrey Gurock, When Harlem Was Jewish (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979); Hasia R. Diner, In the Almost Promised Land: American Jews and Blacks, 1915–1935 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1977).

⁹ It would be nearly impossible to cite here the many books published since the 1980s in American Jewish history. Just three of the most recent worthy of mention include, Daniel Soyer, Jewish Immigrant Associations and American Identity in New York, 1880–1939 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997); Tony Michel, A Fire in their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005); Cheryl Greenberg, Troubling the Waters: Black-Jewish Relations in the American Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006); Eric Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006). Indeed by the late 1980s so much new and intellectually solid work had come out that Johns Hopkins University Press in conjunction with the American Jewish Historical Society issued a five-volume series, The Jewish People in America. Volumes in that series include, Eli Faber, A Time for Planting: The First Migration, 1654–1820; Hasia R. Diner, A Time for Gathering: The Second Migration, 1820–1880; Gerald Sorin, A Time for Building: The Third Migration, 1880–1920; Henry Feingold, A Time For Searching, Entering the Mainstream: 1920–1945; Edward Shapiro, A Time for Healing: American Jewry Since World War II.

¹⁰ Two one volume histories of American Jewry appeared in 2005, the year of the 350th anniversary of Jewish settlement in North America. See, Hasia R. Diner, The Jews of the United States, 1654–2000 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Jonathan Sarna, American Judaism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005).

¹¹ The American Jewish Historical Society continues to have a lay orientation as well. It maintains a mailing list of something between 16,000–18,000 individuals. It stages major exhibitions at its home in the Center for Jewish History, which opened in 2000.

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The Study of American Jewish History: in the Academy, in the Community

byHasia R. Diner

NOTES

by
Hasia R. Diner