Editor's Introduction

American Jewish History has long featured the work of younger scholars, not only as a means of encouraging new talent, but also as a way of bringing fresh, challenging ideas to our readers from the pens of those best versed in the most recent trends of historical analysis and interpretation. This tradition has continued in the last few volumes, with innovative studies by Daniel Kurt Ackermann, Lila Corwin Berman, Adam Mendelsohn, Devin Naar, and Annie Polland, among others. The inclusion of three articles by up-and-coming scholars in the current number, then, is not so unusual as to merit the designation "special issue," but it does provide us with an opportunity to take notice of where the field of American Jewish history is heading.

Reflecting on the articles presented here by Marni Davis, Gil Ribak, and Libby Garland, one is struck by the way in which young scholars in the field today are questioning received narratives about Jews and their encounters with American life. In her study of Jewish responses to the American temperance movement, Davis reverses our linear, progressive understanding of Jewish integration into American society, demonstrating how Jews' role as alcohol entrepreneurs and their alignment with liberal antiprohibition forces helped them achieve success and acculturation during the nineteenth century, only to become festering public-relations problems for them after the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment in 1919. Gil Ribak's study of the 1906 New York City school riots also upends the conventional portrait of smooth, successful Jewish integration. Challenging the notion of a Jewish "love affair" with public education, he shows that Jews from eastern Europe often brought with them negative images of non-Jews that prevented their full embrace of the public school system for years after their arrival in the United States. Finally, Libby Garland's account of illegal Jewish immigration to the United States during the interwar years revises the standard periodization of American Jewish history, which usually defines 1924 as the end of the immigrant era. By casting her gaze on the arrivals of the "post-quota" period, Garland recovers a time when Jewish immigrants were understood as part of a criminal element threatening the well-being of the nation, hardly consistent with the "narrative of the good immigrant" that prevails today in Jewish historical consciousness.

If these articles offer a more tumultuous portrait of Jewish adaptation to America than do previous accounts, they also demonstrate how the rising generation of American Jewish historians is increasingly integrating its work into the larger field of American history. It is natural for the authors, for example, to situate the experience of immigrant Jews within the broader landscape of American political culture, gender norms, and ethnic and racial relations. Their articles seek to understand not only the interior life of Jewish organizations and communities, but also where Jews stood in relation to the non-Jewish world around them. Each of the articles also pushes beyond the American environment to engage with themes in the field of modern Jewish history, in Davis' and Garland's case by locating their subjects within transnational Jewish economic and migratory patterns, and in Ribak's case by putting the issue of Jewish-gentile relations at the center of his analysis. Based on the evidence of these three contributions, younger scholars are not only writing more complex and nuanced histories than their predecessors, but are addressing a greater number of audiences as well.