University of Oregon Department of History
History 358: American Jewish History [CRN:35442] Spring, 2007
Class Meetings : T Th 4-5:20 in 30 PAC
Instructor : William Toll Office : 340X McKenzie
Office Hours :T Th 2-3:00 PM & by appointment
email : bill_toll@yahoo.com Telephone : 541-346-4826
Introduction to course content
This course will examine how American Jews, originating largely in Central and Eastern Europe, have created Jewish ways of living that differ dramatically from any that have previously existed. America's unique political culture, with its emphasis on individualism and citizenship, has required Jews –and most other immigrants-- to respond to a civil status as equals and to a uniquely fluid social structure. We will pay particular attention to ideologies that have facilitated Jewish reinvention, especially 19 th century Reform, 20 th century Conservative Judaism, and Socialism as they were utilized by different groups of Jews to claim a stake as equals in America. We will also examine the fate of Zionism as it has been reinterpreted by American Jewish leaders.
The course will proceed chronologically, beginning with the European context in the 17th & 18th centuries. Jews, though living in a variety of settings from Holland to Poland and Russia with different communal rights and obligations in different places, were stigmatized and subject to the whims of the ruling class. We will then explain how Jews in very small numbers entered the Atlantic Trading World through Portuguese, Dutch and English colonial enterprises. We will focus on the American Revolution and the Constitution's 1 st Amendment, which for the first time disallowed the federal government from favoring or stigmatizing religious communities. In the 19 th century, America's expanding economy drew millions of persons, including hundreds of thousands of Jews, to the United States. Special attention will be placed on the settlement of Jews in the towns and cities of the American West, where the opportunity to redefine “self” and create community was greatest. From this new civil freedom and social mobility came a philosophy of Reform that turned Judaism into a “religion” that could rationalize Jewish survival in a secular culture. In America Jews also encountered a familiar set of demeaning stereotypes, which in the late 19th century came to be labeled “anti-Semitism.” We will examine how in America's expanding economy and multi-racial society, the familiar anti-Semitic stereotypes had very different consequences than in most parts of Europe.
The middle portion of the course will analyze the migration of about two million Jews from Eastern Europe, including the Ottoman Empire, to the United States between 1880 and World War I. We will examine how large groups of Jews, in conjunction with other east and south European immigrants, settled into dense industrial neighborhoods to create a Jewish proletariat. We will examine how Socialism and ILGWU trade unionism shaped the worldview of working class Jewish immigrants. We conclude this portion of the course by comparing the upsurge of xenophobia in the early 1920s with the extraordinary Jewish social mobility toward the end of the decade.
The third portion of the course will examine how American Jewry from the 1940s through the 1980s faced the crises of the Holocaust and the founding of a Jewish state (Israel) in the Middle East. Israel's survival has helped determine the political agenda of Jewish organizations, while having a limited impact on the daily lives of American Jews. We will compare the continuing effects of Jewish Socialism on political culture in New York city into the 1970s, with the emergence of the Jewish community in Los Angeles in the 1960s as the second largest in the world. Los Angeles Jewry has become the center of a new set of large Jewish communities in the southwest. This set of communities, including Phoenix, San Diego and Las Vegas, will provide a concrete focus for the study of issues related to assimilation, mobility, and the shift in influence among Jews from New York City to the western Sunbelt.
Readings:
Books & a packet are available at U. of Oregon Book Store
Harriet Lane Levy, 920 O'Farrell Street
David Von Drehle, Triangle, The Fire That Changed America
Chaim Potok, The Chosen
“Packet for History 358: American Jewish History”
Writing Assignments:(80%) Due dates are listed on the class schedule
The four essays will require students to use lectures and shorter assigned readings to write critically on the basic themes of (1) migration and the settlement of Jews into America's unique political culturere;, (2)contrast between invention of a secure new American Jewish identity and the American context for anti-Semitism, (3 the creation of a Jewish working class, and (4) the tension between American citizenship and Jewish peoplehood. The four essays are expected to be about five to eight pages in length and to be documented with references to the assigned readings. Memos that provide the specific questions on which your essays must focus will be provided about ten days before each paper is due.
Class Participation [ 10 % of grade]
This portion of the grade will be based on class participation, the willingness of the individual student to ask questions and generally participate in class discussions. Students can help themselves here by keeping up with the assigned readings and bringing questions from the readings to class,