Communalist History and Beyond: What is the Potential of American Jewish History?

David Hollinger's rich, thought-provoking essay provides a welcome opportunity to discuss the domain of American Jewish history. Which historical subjects fall within the field's boundaries? Or, instead of defining parameters, should those who traditionally define themselves as American Jewish historians adopt a more open-ended approach that would include as historical subjects anyone of Jewish background or origins regardless of whether they affiliated with Jewish organizations, participated in Jewish causes, or took an interest in things Jewish? Specialists in American Jewish history have rarely engaged such questions, at least not in print.¹ Hollinger's essay thus invites us to consider the conceptual underpinnings of American Jewish history and possible directions for the field.

Hollinger describes the dominant approach to American Jewish history as "communalist," by which he means, "an emphasis on the history of communal Jewry, including the organizations and institutions that proclaim Jewishness, and the activities of individuals who identify themselves as Jewish and/or are so identified by non-Jews with the implication it somehow matters." For historians working in a communalist mode, the concept of "the Jewish people" frames their research. They tend to focus more on the internal world of Jews than on their involvement in wider realms of American society, culture, and politics. In part, this reflects academic training, but one may identify a personal dimension, as well. The overwhelming majority of American Jewish historians are themselves Jews who were raised within one segment or another of the organized Jewish community, including, notably, Zionist organizations of a liberal-left political persuasion.² (By contrast, few, if any, red-diaper babies have gone into American Jewish history as a full-time, professional pursuit, though many have played leading roles in the fields of labor history, women's history, and African American history.) This is not to suggest too close a relationship between familial upbringing and historiographic viewpoint. American Jewish scholarship in recent decades has not, in the main, reflected Zionist ideologies, in keeping with the overall shift away from nationalist perspectives in modern Jewish historiography.³ The field's scholarly thrust has been toward demonstrating the vibrancy and viability of the American Jewish community against critics, Zionists among them, who have predicted the gradual disappearance of Jews into American society.⁴ Even so, formative influences and organizational affiliations help to explain the overall predisposition among American Jewish historians toward a communalist outlook.

Hollinger's designation strikes me as accurate in its general outlines, but I would add a qualification. While most American Jewish historians have written from a communalist viewpoint, few have articulated what could be called a communalist scholarly agenda. Certainly, nobody has attempted to impose or police boundaries. On the contrary, specialists have steadily expanded the contours of American Jewish history by exploring the elasticity of Jewish culture, the porousness of Jewish community,

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and the flexibility of Jewish identity.⁵ Accordingly, few American Jewish historians have attempted to uncover "what is original and therefore autochthonous in Jewish culture, as against what is borrowed, assimilated, and alien," to quote the passage by Amos Funkenstein cited by Hollinger. And I doubt anybody would disagree with Funkenstein's insight that "even the self-assertion of Jewish culture as distinct and different is [inevitably] articulated in the language of the surrounding culture." American Jewish history, as a field, probably could not thrive without recognition of the historical contingency and cultural fluidity of the people it studies. With these comments in mind, one may distinguish between two streams within American Jewish historiography. One consists of outspoken communalists, who study the past with the stated purpose of bolstering Jewish identity and group continuity.⁶ The other stream, which represents the majority, includes those who focus on questions, themes, and topics centered on the Jewish people and its historical development, but express no commitment to communalist history per se. Such "soft" communalists, who may very well reject the communalist label altogether, tend to construe the parameters of American Jewish history broadly.

Communalist history, however...