Remarks on Friedman Medal

First, thank you. Thank you to my colleagues in the Academic Council who chose me for this award, and thanks to Beth for what she wrote and said. I am deeply honored. It means a great deal to me for I treasure your regard. Thank you to the American Jewish Historical Society for establishing the award and to its Board members who sustain the Society. We as academics exist in a unique partnership with the AJHS. In fact, this relationship has the potential to provide a model for other ethnic, religious, and historical organizations that seek to engage academics. Thank you to my family, my parents Irene and Martin Dash, my children Mordecai and Mikhael Moore and their spouses Lori Moore and Deborah Axt, my grandchildren Elijah Axt and Zoe Bella Moore and Rose Alexa Moore, and of course to my husband, MacDonald Moore. They came out for this event, symbolic of all the times that they have supported me in vital ways across the years. They add layers of insight and purpose to my scholarship. The dedications in my books represent a small gesture of gratitude and only hint at what they have given me.

I'm not usually given to personal reflections but this particular moment seems to call for it. I want to summon a concept with which I am associated in historical scholarship, namely, the idea of generations and consider its relevance for the field of American Jewish history itself. As I look around this room, I see generations of scholars, loosely grouped as senior, junior, graduate students. There is, however, another demarcation perhaps more relevant: those of us who entered American Jewish history before it existed as an academic field (that is, without ever taking a course in American Jewish history), those of us who entered the field when it was on a threshold of legitimacy and recognition, and those of us who are entering the field as an accepted, if contested, area of study. The past forty years have wrought such enormous changes in the study of American Jewish history that it may be worthwhile recalling briefly what it was like back in the 1970s when the field barely existed.

As we know, American Jewish history encompasses turf common to Jewish and United States histories. It looks to both the long strand of Jewish history stretching back several thousand years as well as the much shorter history of the United States, spanning several hundred years. This positioning suggests multiple paths that can bring a scholar to study American Jews. Many often enter the field through engagement with issues relevant to the history of the United States, such as immigration and assimilation, political radicalism and religious change, feminism and urban development, although some gravitate to questions of importance to Jewish history, such as Zionism and the Holocaust, Jewish politics and Yiddish culture. Standing on shared ground, however, means that those of us who created the field of American Jewish history had to convince a relatively wide range of interlocutors that we brought something useful, illuminating, even necessary to the scholarly table.

It wasn't an easy task. I recall in the 1970s a distinguished Jewish historian dismissing the history of Jews in the United States as mere journalism. Indeed, in comparison with the long narrative of European Jewish history, it was a short story. In those years very few scholars tried to study it. Perhaps equally significant, however, one could do American Jewish history, and do it just fine if one was a social historian as I am, without knowledge of classical Jewish sources (Talmud). Indeed, I might add that for a woman, those sources were virtually inaccessible in those years since they were taught almost exclusively in rabbinical seminaries that did not admit women.

Furthermore, this American Jewish history was unfolding all around us and since we lived in the United States we were all involved in making it. Our parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles remembered versions of a story of achievement and acceptance. But being "at home in America" is still often judged an unacceptably shallow "happy ending" to the weighty "Old...