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The Myer & Rosaline Feinstein Center for American Jewish History
IN MAY 1990, Temple University created the Center for American Jewish History. Established to insure that American Jewish history continues as a subject of active research and documentation, the Feinstein Center is an academic unit of the Department of History in Temple's College of Liberal Arts.
MISSION
The Myer & Rosaline Feinstein Center for American Jewish History was created to promote the study of the Jewish experience in America. The Feinstein Center is dedicated to encouraging and nurturing a new generation of scholars to devote their talents and energies to research and teaching in this field.
The Feinstein Center, as part of its mandate to create electronic resources for the study of American Jewish History, has a searchable Database of American Jewish Historical Repositories. These Repositories may be archives, museums, libraries, synagogues, newspapers, communal organizations; in short, any source of original material that may be of value to the student of American Jewish History. The purpose of this directory is to provide scholars with leads about potential locations for research. By simply typing a keyword, (which may be a name, location, institution, or idea), the directory will return a list of repositories that contain sources relating to that keyword.
FEINSTEIN CENTER HAS A NEW DIRECTOR
Dr. Lila Corwin Berman is the Murray Friedman Professor and the Director of the Myer & Rosaline Feinstein Center for American Jewish History at Temple University. Dr. Berman holds a PhD in American Religious History from Yale University. Her first book, Speaking of Jews: Rabbis, Intellectuals, and the Creation of an American Public Identity, has recently been published by the University of California Press.
PAST ACCOMPLISHMENTS
- Named for the founding director of the Feinstein Center, Temple University created the Murray Friedman Professorship in American Jewish History in 2005. The Friedman Professor is appointed by the University president and guides the Feinstein Center in addition to his or her own research and teaching.
- To date, the Feinstein Center has awarded grants for more than twenty summer fellowships and two $5,000 prizes to university presses assisting in the publication of books stemming from awardees’ doctoral dissertations.
- Doctoral dissertation prize winners Beth Wenger and Karla Goldman had their books, New York Jews and the Great Depression: Uncertain Promise and Beyond the Synagogue Gallery: Finding a Place for Women in American Judaism, published to wide acclaim.
- Among the books published from Feinstein Center sponsored research are:
- Commentary in American Life
- The Neoconservative Revolution: Jewish Intellectuals and the Shaping of Public Policy
- Women and American Judaism
- Passover Revisited: Philadelphia’s Efforts to Aid Soviet Jews 1963-1998
- A Second Exodus: The American Movement to Free Soviet Jews
- Uneasy Allies? Evangelical and Jewish Relations
- Selected papers delivered at the Feinstein Center's Evangelical-Jewish Relations: Politics, Policy, and Theology conference were published in the Journal of Ecumenical Studies, Winter 2009 44(1) edition.
- Papers delivered at a 1998 conference with American University’s Jewish Studies Program on studies of American Jewish political conservatism have been collected in a special issue of American Jewish History, the official publication of the American Jewish Historical Society (June/July, 1999), edited by Dr. Friedman.
- The Feinstein Center’s oral history collection, housed within Temple University’s Urban Archives, contains 50 taped and transcribed interview memoirs of Jews who have been central to the growth and development of the Philadelphia Jewish community. The collection is described in our guide, Preserving the Voices.
- The Feinstein Center in cooperation with the Auerbach Central Agency for Jewish Education (ACAGE) and Jonathan Sarna, Brandeis University, has created a multimedia curriculum in American Jewish history for middle school students. The highly acclaimed curriculum consists of three student textbooks and three companion teaching guides and a companion classroom DVD resource along with a website at www.challengeandchange.temple.edu.
- The Feinstein Center initiated an ongoing dialogue among a diverse group of religious and civic organizations in Washington D.C. The group created and published In Good Faith, a document discussing the legal and constitutional issues surrounding government funding of faith-based social services. The widely popular publication is available on the Feinstein Center’s web site and is included in Sacred Places, Civic Purposes: Should Government Help Faith-Based Charity? (Brookings 2001).
TEMPLE UNIVERSITY'S OTHER JEWISH STUDIES PROGRAMS
The Jewish Studies Program offers students an interdisciplinary approach to the study of Jews, Jewishness, and Judaism, with courses in secular Jewish culture, Jewish religion, Jewish history, philosophy, languages and literatures.
The Center for Afro-Jewish Studies is a research and learning institution dedicated to scholarship on Afro-Jewish peoples and developing awareness of the historical, political, religious, and philosophical issues that arise from the convergence of the African and Jewish diasporas.
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MURRAY FRIEDMAN, Founder and Director of the Feinstein Center for American Jewish History, 1926-2005
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