The Normalization of American Jewish History

Abstract

When I was a student some thirty-five years ago in one of the premier Ph.D. programs in Jewish history, at Columbia University, it was clear that American Jewish fell outside the parameters of the field. True, one could study Jews as part of American history, but the American Jewish experience was in no way integral to the study of Jewish history. For one thing, opting for residence in America meant abandoning Jewish languages; American Jews had demonstrated loyalty neither to Yiddish nor to Hebrew. For another, Jews in America, it was argued, had produced no great thinkers contributing to the enrichment of what was deemed to be an unbroken tradition of Jewish culture. The American Jewish community was also too new to assert a claim to lasting historical significance. Moreover, its historical scholarship was dominated by filio-pietistic writings that were designed to make Ameri can Jews feel good about themselves. All that has changed, particularly in the past twenty-five years or so. What I am calling the normalization of American Jewish history has been shaped by broad historical forces, by developments in the under standing of the Jewish experience, and by the production of a consider able body of first-rate scholarship in the field of American Jewish history. The recognition of American Jewry as the most powerful Jewish community in the world and a worthy counterpoint to Israeli Jewry undercut the claim that its carried little weight. After all, beginning at the latest during World War I, American Jewish institutions and individuals were responsible for worldwide Jewish philanthropy and for the design and implementation of Diaspora Jewish political strategy. Moreover, because of the Holocaust and the disruption caused by Soviet communism, there was no Jewish community that could compete with American Jewry in terms of the chronological span and continuity of its history. The emergence of American Jewish as a recognized subfield of modern Jewish also coincided with the broadening of Jewish historical scholarship, and of historical scholarship more generally, with the flourishing of social and cultural history. Scholars in modern Jewish increasingly focused not only on texts or other intellectual products but also on the processes of modernization, and the involve ment of Jewish institutions as well as individuals in those processes.