LILA CORWIN BERMAN. Speaking of Jew. Rabbia, IntellectuaL·, and Creation of an American Public ation of an American Public Identity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009. Pp. xii + 266.BETH S. WENGER, History LAMO/U: The Creation of American Jew'uh Heritage. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010. Pp. xiv + 282.IT IS A GREAT PLEASURE to read historical works by historians who excel at their craft, who can construct nuanced historical narrative that is both assertive and careful. History is not there to discover but to recovered, and that constructive process requires sifting through of mounds of primary sources, and essential selection of evidencechoices that dramatize, assert, or legitimate claims that our storyteller seeks to make transparent. Recovering those sources presumes that historian knows what to look for, where to find it, and then what to do with material once located. I do not pretend to fully comprehend historian's craft, but I still recognize and appreciate judgments each must make to recover source as historical one and then to draw it within meaningful narrative.What both Beth Wenger and Lila Corwin Berman do for their readers is to showcase historian's craft in its most reflective form. By this I mean that Wenger and Berman are self-conscious of historical construction; they each weave tale stitched together by choices they willingly reveal and justify- I find this refreshing and mature, for they confront their readers with sources that, in my reading, do not fully support their narrative constariais of American Jewish history. They both strenuously defend their interpretive work, and they each are skillful in culling historical sources. But they also help their readers to learn how to read those sources and so empower them to argue back. The stories each tells are compelling, and so too their decisions about how to best read historical record. Being attuned to those choices enables readers to better assess what is most persuasive, and perhaps what is still missing, in two transformative works in American Jewish history.Beth Wenger's History Leeone: The Creation of American Jewiah Heritage (henceforth HL) and Lila Corwin Berman's Speaking of Jew. Rabbia, IntellectuaL·, and Creation of an American Public Identity (henceforth SJ) share number of themes that subtend American Jewish experience. Both emphasize Jewish concerns about survival, about belonging and ethnic identity, about stigma of Jewishness in America, and anxieties provoked by idealized visions of America. Yet even with this common set of issues, their differences are more apparent, and one can sense this in subtitles to their works. Wenger seeks to recover renditions of from late nineteenth through mid-twentieth century, and she appropriates term to thematize various modes by which Jewish Americans made sense of their experiences. To Wenger, heritage production offers a clear window into selective and creative process of American Jewish self-definition and reveals the meanings that Jews assigned to their still evolving encounter with America as well as their expectations for Jewish life in United States (HL, 19). Unlike many of her peers who distinguish heritage from history, Wenger understands this to tenuous dualism, and she is more comfortable thinking of heritage as broader category that need not be measured by standards of professional history (HL, 20). Her focus is squarely on popular narratives, and Wenger brilliantly recovers how these texts foster sense of belonging and continuity with American nation. To sure, as her subtitle suggests, these narratives create that sense of belonging and continuity, but in doing so they also have something to teach us- and so clever title of book, Hittory LeBerman's Speaking of Jew, on other hand, focuses on elite texts from rabbis and Jewish lay leaders, and sociological discourse they adopt to explain American Jewish identity to non-Jewish public. …