HIST 358 American Jewish History

Course Description

This course will examine the ways persons identifying themselves as Jews hav created communities, faced political, cultural, social, and challenges and reinvented thier identies in the United States from the Colonial Era through the 1990s.

We will first examine the European context in the 17th & 18th centuries, when Jews were proscribed group everywhere and when only a handful of people traveled to the Americas. We will then examine how a new constitutional system in the United States that disestablished religions and gave all citizens equal rights created oportunities for Europe's social pariahs like the Jews. Jews emigrating from central Europe to the United States built new communities based on a new understanding of Judaism as a "religion" rather than a guide to all facets of living. Special attention will be placed on the settlement of Jews in the towns and cities of the American West. Ideological Reform in Judaism will be examined as a sacred response to unique changes in the status of Jews, female as well as male, who were escaping European political and social boundaries.

In America, however, 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 expression and effects of anti-Semitism differed significantly frm the Jewish experience with discrimination in most parts 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 the onset of the Depression. Here we will focus not only on how Jews settled into America (in cconjunction with other immigrants) but on the variety of political ideas like Socialism, trade unionism, and Zionism they brought with them. We will also examine the new ideologies of American Jewish life, especially Cultural Pluralism and the Conservative Movement, to explain how American-born Jews of East European background created new identies to explain their new status as Americanized Jews. We conlude this portion of the course by comparing the extraordinary Jewish social mobility and institutional creativity of the 1920s with the Depression and the rise of Nazism in the 1930s.

The third portion of the course will examine how American Jewry in the second half of the 20th century created a uniquely secure place in American politics and society while trying also to understand its role as the largest survivng Jewish community. Domestically we will examine the continuing patterns of social mobility, the effects of Jewish socialism on American political culture, and the accompanying tension between religious and secular identies. As guidelines to evolving American Jewish identity, we will examine two themes: (1) how the Holocaust has been memorialized to integrate Jews as a people into a new multi-cultural America, and (2) how the state of Israel continues to raise a unique challenge to the "authentic Jewishness" of a culturally and politically integrated American Jewry.

Course Policies

Writing Assignments - 80%
Class Participation - 20%

Required Texts

Books & a packet are available at UO Bookstore

920 O'Farrell Street, Harriet Lane Levy
A Bintel Brief, Isaac Metzger
The Wonders of America, Jenna Joselit
The Chosen, Chaim Potok
The Shawl, Cynthia Ozick

Course Schedule

March 18 - Final Essay Due 10:00 a.m.