Neglected Areas of American Jewish History at the Feinstein Center for American Jewish History

Abstract

The Feinstein Center for American Jewish History was created twelve years ago at Temple University in Philadelphia. Working with consor tiums of scholars as well as with individual researchers, the Center seeks to identify and to fill vacuums in the field of American Jewish history. The Feinstein Center began by emphasizing the Philadelphia story. As thousands of Jewish immigrants poured into the country at the beginning of the twentieth century and seemed likely to disappear into the melting pot, an unusually talented group of Philadelphians, including Judge Mayer Sulzberger, Rabbi Sabato Morais of Congregation Mikveh Israel, and scholar Cyrus Adler, joined with a number of prominent New York Jews to create several of the major institutions upon which modern American Jewish life would subsequently be built. They included, among others, the American Jewish Committee, the rejuvenated Jewish Publica tion Society, and the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. The Center convened a conference of scholars to explore the role of the Philadelphia group, and later published their papers under the title When Philadelphia Was the Capital of Jewish America (1993) [ed. Murray Friedman-Ed.]. A vacuum exists at times because of a subject's newness. This was the case with the Soviet Jewry movement, which in the late-twentieth century succeeded in assisting more than a million and a half Jews to emigrate, primarily to Israel but also to the United States. The Feinstein Center focused attention on the movement in a conference of activists and scholars in New York City that yielded another collection of papers, A Second Exodus: The American Movement to Free Soviet Jews (1999) [ed. Albert D. Chernin and Murray Friedman-Ed.]. A subsequent volume by Andrew Harrison, Passover Revisited (2000), focused on efforts in Philadelphia to assist Soviet Jews between 1963 and 1998. The Center has also commissioned Professor Henry Feingold to write what it hopes will be the definitive history of one of the great exoduses of the entire Jewish historical experience.