In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Writing, and Rewriting, AmericanJewish History: Review Essay 93 WRITING, AND REWRITING, AMERICAN JEWISH HISTORY by Rafael Medoff Dr. Rafael Medoff is Visiting Scholar at the Melton Center for Jewish Studies, Ohio State University, and Marguerite R. Jacobs Memorial Post-Doctoral Fellow in American Jewish Studies, 1993-1994, at the American Jewish Archives . He has published in, among other journals, American Jewish History, Studies in Zionism, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Holocaust Studies Annual and Menorah Review, of which he is a contributing editor. TheJewish People in America, Henry 1. Feingold, General Editor. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. $29.95 each volume. Volume I: A Time for Planting: The First Migration, 1654-1820, by Eli Faber. 188 pp. Volume II: A Time for Gathering: The Second Migration, 1820-1880, by Hasia R. Diner. 313 pp. Volume III: A Time for Building: The Third Migration, 1880-1920, by Gerald Sorin. 306 pp. Volume IV: A Time for Searching: Entering the Mainstream, 19201945 , by Henry 1. Feingold. 338 pp. Volume V: A Time for Healing: AmericanJewry Since World War II, by Edward S. Shapiro. 313 pp. The writing of American Jewish history, once the province of ethnopietists searching for proof ofJewish contributions to America's birth and prosperity, has long since passed into the hands of a new generation of scholars who, during the 1960s and 1970s, undertook the task of scrutinizingAmericanJewish history in accordance with the same standards of critical scholarship that their peers employed in the (re)writing of general American history taking place at that time. The new generation of 94 SHOFAR Summer 1993 Vol. 11, No.4 American Jewish historians produced groundbreaking specialized studies on the lives ofJewish immigrants and their offspring, the relations between Jews and other American ethnic groups, and American policy towards Zionism and the Holocaust. The one hundredth anniversary, in 1992, of the founding of the American Jewish Historical Society provided an appropriate occasion for five leading American Jewish historians of the 1970s generation to synthesize the scholarship of recent decades into a definitive five-volume history of American Jewry. The final product is unquestionably an impressive accomplishment in its own right, but its value becomes all the more apparent when compared to the two other recent attempts at a comprehensive history of American Jewry, Arthur Hertzberg's The jews in Americal and Howard M. Sachar's A History of thejews in America.2 Among the most important contributions made by the five-volume jewish People in America series is the extent to which minorities within the Jewish community have been written back into American Jewish history. Women, OrthodoxJews, and-to a lesser extent-dissident Zionists make their long overdue appearance in these pages. It is reminiscent of, and every bit as valuable as, the efforts by young American historians to analyze history "from the bottom up," as Jesse Lemisch put it. If it was true, as Lemisch asserted in 1967, that with regard to America, "the history of the powerless, the inarticulate, the poor has not yet begun to be written because they have been treated no more fairly by historians than they have been treated by their contemporaries,"3 the same point might be made with regard to American Jewish history, for those whose absence from positions of political, social, and religious leadership in the community has contributed to their near-absence from many Jewish history books. Thejewish People in America series, however, reverses this unhappy trend, presenting the rise and evolution ofthe American Jewish community with a sophisticated sense of scholarship that challenges popular assumptions and is alert to the diversity of American Jewish behavior. This is evident from the very first volume, Eli Faber's A Time for Planting: The First Migration, 1654-1830, in which the stereotypical images of the earliest American Jews come in for some appropriately sober scrutiny. 'Arthur Hertzberg, The]ews in America: Four Centuries ofan U,;easy Encounter (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989). 'Howard M. Sachar, A History oftbe]ews in America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993). 3Jesse Lemisch, "The American Revolution Seen from the Bottom Up," in Towards a New Past: Dissenting Essays in American History (New York: Vintage Books, 1969), p. 29. Writing...

pdf