Fall 2005

History 358 American Jewish History

Course Description

Introduction to course content

This course will examine how persons identifying themselves as Jews in the United States have continually reinvented the meaning of being Jewish in response to the unique opportunities and demands of the American political culture. Much of the focus will be on patterns of immigration, and on techniques of community building in response to crises like war and depression that all Americans faced. We will pay particular attention to several ideologies, especially Reform and Conservative Judaism and Socialism/trade unionism as they were used by different groups of Jews at different times to claim a stake in American society.

We will first examine the European context in the 17th & 18th centuries, when Jews, though living in a variety of settings, were uniformly stigmatized. We will pay particular attention to the American Revolution, which fundamentally separated state from church, and gave religious minorities equal standing in federal law. In the 19th century, the expanding economy drew millions of Europeans, 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 capacity to redefine self and community was greatest. 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 played very different political and social roles than they had played and were to play in most parts of Europe.

The middle portion of the course will analyze the migration of about two million Jews from Eastern Europe to the United States and the emergence of their children as American citizens between 1880 and World War II. We will examine how large groups of Jews settled into America in conjunction with other east European immigrants, and how political ideas especially Socialism and trade unionism affected their communal organization and what they came to expect from government. We conclude this portion of the course by comparing the upsurge of xenophobia of 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 1930s through the 1980s has faced the crisis of the Holocaust, the founding of a Jewish state (Israel) in the Middle East, while guiding a younger generation through an era of extraordinary cultural assimilation. Politically we will compare the continuing effects of Jewish socialism on American political culture (especially as seen in New York), with the powerful relationship that has developed between American Jewry and the Jewish state of Israel. Sociologically, we will examine the continuing patterns of economic mobility and the accompanying tension between religious and secular Jewish identities. The emergence of the Jewish community in Los Angeles as the second largest in the world will provide a concrete focus for the study of issues related to assimilation and mobility

Readings

Books & a packet are available at U. of Oregon Book Store

Paula Hyman, Gender & Assimilation in Modern Jewish History
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 immigration, assimilation the reinvention of Jewish identity that are the focus of the course. 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.

a) The first assignment [20% of grade] will be based on the readings & lectures for the first two weeks of the class, The purpose of this essay is to have students reflect on the ways that Jews –women as well as men-- reexamined their sense of what it meant to be a Jew (personally and politically) as they became citizens of the United States rather than subjects of particular European kingdoms.

b) The second assignment [20% of grade] will be based on class lectures, on chapters in Hyman’s Gender & Assimilation in Modern Jewish History, and on Levy, 920 O’Farrell Street, It will require you to compare the way young women came to understand themselves as Jews of the late 19th century Pacific West with the way Jews understood their status and identity in 19th century Europe.

c) The third assignment [30% of grade] will be based on class lectures, on Von Drehle, Triangle: The Fire That Changed America, on the chapter on Hyman, Gender & Asssmilation in Modern Jewish History. The assignment is intended to explore the complex social and political context of the emigra-tion of millions of East European Jews to America.

d) The fourth assignment [20% of grade] will use Chaim Potok’s novel, The Chosen, to explore the reaction of American Jews to the Holocaust and to the founding of Israel as a “Jewish state,” and will also ask you to estimate how well the rabbis who are the focus of the novel prepared their sons for leadership in the American Jewish world of the 1960s and 1970s. [N.B.-You will note that this assignment will be due during the last week of class –the week prior to final examinations. This constitutes due notice that the assignment meets the criteria for work that can fall due during the week prior to final examinations.] You will also note that there is no final examination for this course.

Class Participation [10% of grade]

Each student’s grade will also be based on participation in class. Students are very much encouraged to ask questions at every class session. My evaluation of student participation will be based on your daily contributions to the class.

History 358: American Jewish History, [CRN:13360] Fall, 2005

MWF, 9- 9:50, 175 Lillis
Class Schedule & Assigned Readings