Syllabi

 

AMERICAN JEWISH HISTORY

Prof. Hasia Diner

NYU

Spring 2007

 

This course takes as its subject the history of the Jewish people in America. It explores the social, political, economic, religious, and cultural development of Jewish life in America from the middle of the seventeenth century through the present.  will set that history into the larger contexts of American history and modern Jewish history, asking how the Jewish experience did or did not differ from that of others in America and from that other Jews in other places. Central to the course will be the fact that the America, both before and after national independence, was a place characterized by religious, ethnic, and racial diversity and we will explore how Jews fit into that reality. We will focus much attention on the fact that Jews chose to migrate to the United States and that they sought ways to identify with their new home. At the same time they saw themselves as part of a worldwide people and behaved accordingly.

  

CLASS SCHEDULE

 

[Hasia Diner, The Jews of the United States  will serve as our textbook; some section of it will be read each week.]

 

Introduction to the course; basic themes: European legacies.

 

European Legacies/American Beginnings

            Diner, Chapter 1

            Eli Faber, Jews, Slaves and the Slave Trade

  

Jews in Early America

              Diner, Chapter 2

                   

The Beginnings of Mass Migration

          Diner, Chapter 3

         

A Nineteenth Century American Jewish Synthesis     

           Alan Silverstein, Alternatives to Assimilation  Chapters 1 and 2

 

 Integration and Distinctiveness: Negotiations

             Harriet Lane Levy, 920 O’Farrell Street 

 

The Age of the Great Jewish Migration

          

  

The Immigrants and their New American Jewish Home

           Robert Rockaway, Words of the Uprooted

 

The Worlds of the Jewish Immigrants

              Anzia Yezierska, The Bread Givers

  

Building American Jewish Communities

                Diner, Chapters 4 and 5, Silverstein, Chapters 3-6

 

 The 1920’s and the 1930’s: An Era of American Anti-Semitism

                Neil Baldwin, Henry Ford and the Jews;

                         [in addition: Sorin, 9-10]

 

The Holocaust, World War II  and American Jews

                      Diner, Chapter 6

                      Deborah Lipstadt, Beyond Belief

             

       

  Post-World War Two and America’s Jews

                    Raymond Mohl, South of the South

                     Diner, Chapter 7

                                     

  The 1960s and Beyond: A Revolution in American Jewish Life

                  Diner, Chapter 8

                  Pamela Nadel, The Woman Who Would Be Rabbi