Integrating Local Jewish Historical Societies and Public History

Jewish Historical Societies and Public History INTEGRATING LOCAL JEWISH HISTORICAL SOCIETIES AND PUBLIC HISTORY by Joel Gereboff Joel Gereboff is Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Co-Director of the Jewish Studies Program at Arizona State University. His areas of research include discourse analysis of rabbinic texts and constructions of Jewish identity, especially in America. 53 "To exist as a collectivity people must share memories, they must have some sense of a collective past."l This observation, by Siep Stuurman, expresses succinctly the important recognition by recent scholarship of the role that "representations of the past" play in the history of groupS.2 Different collectivities employ diverse social practices, a variety of media, and alternative types of institutions as devices and contexts for ongoing formulations of accounts about their pasts, and derivatively, about their present identities. From the earliest period of American history, and especially during the last thirty years, one of the institutions that has sought to playa crucial role in shapingAmerican society has been the local historical society. Though geographical considerations were initially the only overt criteria for establishing such organizations, for the past one hundred years other factors, such as ethnicity, race, and gender, have determined the formation of even more narrowly defined local agencies. Uke other ethnic groups, Jews, for more than a century, have chartered 'Siep Stuurman, "In the Long Run We Shall All Be Dead: Contingency, Structure and Memory in History," in Mieke Bal and Inge Boer, eds., The Point of Theory: Practices of Cultural Analyses (New York: Continuum, 1994), p. 125. 21n the section on collective memory I list a number ofworks that explore this issue. The term "representations of the past" appears in Elizabeth Tonkin, Narrating Our Pasts: The Social Construction of Oral History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 54 SHOFAR Spring 1995 Vol. 13, No.3 national and local historical societies. There is, however, presently little research on such groups. Moreover, these organizations appear, at the moment, to be quite marginal to the activities of the American Jewish community. This paper seeks to alter both of these facts. It offers an interdisciplinary model for the use of local Jewish historical societies as sources and resources for American Jewish history. This envisioned plan integrates local Jewish historical societies and what is known as "public history. " Four types of research contribute to the formulation of this model: 1) postmodernist and poststructuralist writings, 2) analyses of local and ethnic historical societies, 3) critical works on the history, methods, and roles of museums, and 4) studies that utilize the concept of "collective memory" to decipher the ways in which representations of the past contribute to the formation and ongoing life of various groups and societies. When combined, these four ever-growing bodies of research underscore the important role historical societies can play in advancing the understanding of American Jewish history. Or, as I put matters above, I intend to indicate how these institutions can serve both as sources and resources for American Jewish history. I first will explain what I mean by these two terms, source and resource, and then indicate how each of the four types of writings helps me define why and how these institutions can playa significant role in research on American Jews. Sources and Resources Local historical societies can serve as a source for history in two ways: 1) in a most obvious sense, they have preserved various sorts of primary data, especially documents, that can be used in pursuing projects on the history of American Jews; 2) perhaps less generally thought of, their own institutional histories, when carefully described and analyzed, can also add important insights relevant to reconstructing the history ofAmericanJews. By tracing the factors that shaped the formation and various activities of such entities, we can learn, for example, more about the political and social forces at play in various Jewish locales, the significanceJews assigned to Jewish history in developing their own identities, which past events, whether imagined or real, the leaders and consumers of these institutions saw as important, and finally, the contribution their activities have made to the history of their communities. In serving as sources forJewish history, local]ewish historical societies largely playa passive...