“America’s Jewish Question”
Lila Corwin Berman
Professor, Department of History
Murray Friedman Chair of American Jewish History
Director, Feinstein Center for Amerian Jewish History
Temple University
DESCRIPTION:
There is no Jewish Question in the United States: such is a foundational claim of American Jewish history. In this country, the claim goes, Jews gained legal recognition as individuals and, thus, became liberal subjects like any other, unencumbered by state-based concerns about their group status. Yet for as foundational as the assertion, its substance remains more a matter of faith than fact. In practice, over the course of their history, American Jews occupied legal, political, economic, and cultural categories that chafed against the model of the individual liberal subject. In this talk, Berman illuminates why American Jews and their historians have disavowed an American Jewish Question, and what we learn from recovering the history of its particular American invocations.
BIO:
Lila Corwin Berman is Professor of History at Temple University, where she holds the Murray Friedman Chair of American Jewish History and directs the Feinstein Center for American Jewish History. She is author of Speaking of Jews: Rabbis, Intellectuals, and the Creation of an American Public Identity (California, 2009) and Metropolitan Jews: Politics, Race, and Religion in Postwar Detroit (Chicago, 2015), and she is completing a book called “The American Jewish Philanthropic Complex: The History of a Multi-Billion Dollar Institution.” Her articles have appeared in many publications, including the American Historical Review, Journal of American History, AJS Review, Jewish Social Studies, American Jewish History, Religion and American Culture, the Washington Post, and the Forward. Berman received her Ph.D. from Yale, where she worked with Paula Hyman and Jon Butler.
Thursday, October 24 * 5:00PM
Comparative Literature Library
Bingham Hall, 8th Floor * 300 College Street* New Haven, CT
Reception to follow