Editor's Introduction

This issue opens with remarks by Deborah Dash Moore on the occasion of winning the American Jewish Historical Society's Lee Max Friedman Award. Named in memory of a past Society president, this prestigious award is presented for distinguished service in the field of American Jewish history. Moore, the Frederick G.L. Huetwell Professor in History at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where she also serves as director of the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies, is richly deserving of the award. The Society announced her selection in June, 2012, at the Biennial Scholars' Conference on American Jewish History, held at the Center for Jewish History in New York City.

Dr. Moore's remarks help us to appreciate the articles that follow. Tracing the transformation of our field over the past forty years, Moore points to the fact that in the past, courses in American Jewish history rarely found their way onto University rosters. Now, by contrast, they are widely available and doctoral programs on American Jewry are thriving. Scholars often enter our field from American or Jewish history, and bring those analytical currents and methodologies to enrich and enliven ours.

The three articles included in this issue exemplify some of the ways in which those crosscurrents can elicit provocative avenues for new research. Rebecca Kobrin opens the issue by explaining that there is much to be learned by examining the financial failures suffered by the country's Jews. "[B]usiness practices and economic strategies are rarely discussed in the annals of American Jewish history," she reminds us, and the exceptional success stories of such German Jewish financiers as Jacob Schiff (1847-1920) and Felix Warburg (1871-1937), both notable philanthropists, garner most of the ink. American Jewish history has rarely focused on financial failure. Indeed, it was the desire to promote the knowledge of Jews' successful contributions to American society in a time of rising antisemitism that, in part, propelled the founding of our own journal in 1893. For decades thereafter, many immigrants and their children recounted their own stories through the lens of American success, lending national validation to the stories they told about themselves. But, Kobrin shows us, just as our nation has learned a great deal about itself as the result of recent economic failures, studying the failures endured by early twentieth century immigrants provides a more realistic understanding of how Jews participated in, and were affected by, the American economy.

Sarah Imhoff brings together long-standing scholarly interest in the nature of Jewish-Christian relations, and contemporary scholarly investigations about masculinity. She uses Jews' encounters with American Christian evangelical missions in the Progressive Era to explore the different ways in which Jewish men reacted to the prevailing cultural tropes surrounding the nature of manliness. Imhoff finds multiple styles of masculinity in play among Jews who became involved with Christian missions, and also among early theorists in the social sciences. As Imhoff explains, very few Jews ever joined Christian missions, but her close look at those who did helps us to understand the subtleties of Jews' encounters with American culture in that important era.

Caroline Light shows us how a long-standing problem in gender relations among observant Jews "threatened to undermine the Jewish reputation for communal charity and self-sufficiency" that had stood as a matter of Jewish pride and responsibility since the establishment of early Jewish communities in colonial America. The "plight of the agunah"—the so-called "chained woman" who cannot legally remarry because her husband will not grant her a Jewish divorce—punishes religiously observant Jewish women for caring about Jewish law. Without a properly conducted Jewish divorce, such a woman cannot remarry under Jewish law. Husbands endure no similar constraints. Light explains that especially in the Jim Crow South, where gender codes reinforced racial codes, a Jewish man who deserted his wife and children left them "vulnerable to the prevailing white supremacist discourse that framed the distinctive dangers of the South." At the same time, his own action defied the idealization of white men as protectors of women, and thereby cast a shadow upon southern Jewry as a whole.

These articles are excellent...