Why American Historians Really Ignore American Jewish History

David Hollinger's article challenges some well-worn conceptual frameworks about the writing of American Jewish history, just as his previous works—including his landmark books of the middle of the 1990s, Post-Ethnic America (1995) and Science, Jews and Secular Culture (1996)—have done for twentieth century American cultural history. In these two books, Hollinger took to task some fundamental assumptions about American identity, modernity, and the engines of changes that historians have comfortably subscribed to. He wanted his readers to think differently about the origins and nature of modern America.

Mid-twentieth century America, he demonstrated ably in Science, Jews, and Secular Culture, became secular and liberal due in no small part to the efforts of Jewish intellectuals, scientists, and social scientists. Hollinger showed that these liberals, whom later generations dismissed as not particularly responsive to ethnic and racial differences, did battle with the deeply entrenched Christian gatekeepers who believed that modernism, secularism, and cosmopolitanism, particularly when articulated by Jews, threatened American values.¹ in Postethnic America, Hollinger called for a broad Intellectual reconceptualization of group identities in the United States, one that would transcend the regnant paradigm of multiculturalism, which tended, Hollinger argued, to reduce Americans to their placement in some "group" or another. He asserted that individuals were just that—individuals—and not cogs in a set of fixed ethnic categories.² Hollinger, with his graceful writing, deep research, and keen insights, boldly tackled some of the "sacred cows" that dominated the historical discourse of the last decade of the twentieth century. These two books, with their broad implications for the history of Jews in America, spoke to the interests of historians who write on American Jews perhaps more than any other works written by a nonspecialist in our field during those years.

In his current article, Hollinger has provided a probing analysis of the field of American Jewish history as it stands in relationship to the larger world of American historical scholarship. Responding to a piece commissioned by the Newsletter of the Organization of American Historians by Tony Michels and myself on the seeming invisibility of American Jewish historical works to Americanists, Hollinger located the sources of that invisibility—which he acknowledges to be an accurate statement as to the state of things—in both the way American and American Jewish history have been written.³

On the one hand, Hollinger, a fierce and unabashed critic of the multiculturalist moment, sees the invisibility of Jews in the U.S. field as a direct result of American historians' fixation—if I may use that word to paraphrase his description—on five groups, including four minorities—African Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanics, and Native Americans-and one dominant group, European Americans, sometimes denoted by the neologism, "Euro-Americans," with whom the minorities are seen to be in ongoing tension. This "pentagonal" framework through which American historians have come to understand the nature of American society and to designate which groups matter, Jews basically have no place. Because religion has no status in the multiculturalist rendition of American history, because European immigrants as the bearers of particular languages, cultural assumptions, and practices are dismissed as merely folks on the road to "whiteness," and because Jews in particular have often defied the expectations of what it meant to be European American, they have been shunted to the margins of analysis. as such, the vast monographic and interpretative work of scholars on American Jewish history that began to flourish in earnest in the 1970s has not made a dent on the broader American narrative.⁴ In what might seem like an historic irony, American Jewish history as a serious scholarly endeavor, rooted in the academy and not bound to a Jewish communal agenda, took off at precisely the moment when the larger scholarly enterprise began to galvanize around themes and concerns that cast attention away from Jews as historical subjects. Hollinger did not make the point, although he might have, that a slight exception to that general invisibility may be made for the attention given by some American historians to the work of Jewish labor activists...