New Essays in American Jewish History: Commemorating the Sixtieth Anniversary of the Founding of the American Jewish Archives (review)

The twenty-three essays in this volume were commissioned to celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of the American Jewish Archives (AJA) and the ten-year tenure of Gary P. Zola as the AJA’s executive director and editor of American Jewish Archives Journal. The AJA was founded in 1947 by the late Jacob R. Marcus, a scholar of great insight, energy, and vision. Marcus, as Kevin Proffitt’s essay “Jacob Rader Marcus and the Archive He Built” shows, was convinced that in the wake of the Holocaust, American Jews must assume responsibility for Jewish cultural and intellectual life and that an archive of American Jewish history was necessary to fulfill this sacred task. The AJA soon became, along with the American Jewish Historical Society, the major repository of manuscripts in American Jewish history. In 1948 the AJA began publishing American Jewish Archives Review, one of the two major journals in the field.

The essays are clearly written, well-researched, and copiously annotated. They are original, although in a few cases they recycle arguments which have appeared in earlier publications. The essays are nicely balanced chronologically, geographically, and topically. Paul Finkelman’s “‘A Land That Needs People for Its Increase:’ How the Jews won the Right to Remain in New Netherland” is a brilliant revisionist account of the beginnings of Jewish settlement on mainland North America in the 1650s. Jonathan D. Sarna’s “The Democratization of American Judaism” shows how the American Revolution released forces in the eighteenth century that challenged Jewish communal authority and undermined practices that ran counter to “freedom” and the “rights of the people.” William Pencak’s “Jonas Phillips Levy: A Jewish Naval Captain in the Early Republic” explores the career of a member of the prominent nineteenth-century Levy family which acquired Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s home in Virginia. Hasia Diner’s essay “The Postwar Pursuit of American Jewish History and the Memory of the Holocaust” notes the great influence of the Holocaust in stimulating the historical consciousness of America’s Jews and in the founding of the AJA.

The volume’s geographical scope ranges widely. There are two essays on the Jews of Suriname (Aviva Ben-Ur and Rachel Frankel’s “Architecture of Autonomy: The Blessing and Peace Synagogue of Suriname” and Natalie Zemon Davis’s “David Nassy’s ‘Furlough’ and the Slave Mattheus”), one on the Jews of the West (William Toll’s “Creating Cultural Space: Jews and Judaism at a Public University in the 1920s”), and another on the Jews of the South (Mark K. Bauman’s “Beyond the Parochial Image of Southern Jewry: Studies in National and International Leadership and Interactive Mechanisms”). Bauman’s provocative account of southern Jewry challenges the widespread notion that southern Jews were sui generis, exhibiting social and religious traits different from those of Jews in other parts of the country.

The remaining essays are topically diverse. There are essays on Zi-onism (Allon Gal’s “The United States in Abba Hillel Silver’s World View” and Shuly Rubin Schwartz’s “Henrietta Szold: The Making of an Icon”), biblical scholarship (Leonard Greenspoon’s “When Harry Met Max”), and Yiddish culture (Rakhmiel Peltz’s “Telling the American Story: Yiddish and the Narratives of Children of Immigrants”). The volume is also balanced between essays that tell the stories of individuals (Samuel Haber’s “Robert King Merton, his Science and the Promise of the Enlightenment”) and those which examine more abstract matters (Dianne Ashton’s “Modern Maccabees: Remaking Hanukkah in Nineteenth Century America”). Readers interested in the place of Jews in American culture will find Pamela S. Nadell’s essay on the Barbra Streisand movie Yentl (“Yentl: From Yeshiva Boy to Syndrome”), whose eponymous hero is “the archetypical victim of patriarchal bias,” to be particularly valuable (483).

The AJA is located on the Cincinnati campus of the...