How America Met the Jews by Hasia R. Diner (review)

With incidents of antisemitism on the rise in the United States, the question of American exceptionalism has dramatically shifted from an esoteric scholarly debate to a widespread public conversation. Hasia Diner's insightful book How America Met the Jews offers a nuanced opportunity to consider the past, present, and future of American exceptionalism. In pursuing the topic of the relationship between America and the Jews, she contributes to a long tradition of American Jewish historians who view American Jewish history as fundamentally different from other Jewish experiences across time and space. However, Diner takes this as a baseline assumption in order to tackle another question: What factors created a sui generis experience for Jews in the United States? Her analysis of this question differs from other historiographical accounts of American Jewish exceptionalism. Celebratory narratives of American Jewish exceptionalism explain Jews' relative success in America by looking at the ways in which Jews adapted to their new environment in unique ways that leveraged their experiences in Europe, strong sense of solidarity, and recognition that they could not return to Europe and therefore needed to invest in their new homeland.

Diner turns the focus of historical analysis away from the immigrant Jews themselves and toward American social, political, religious, and economic trends. Historians, Diner argues, must examine the factors in American history that enabled Jews to reach a level of integration and acceptance never achieved in Europe. Each chapter in the book traces one of five key factors that Diner argued shaped how America met the Jews. First, the centrality of immigration in United States history normalized the Jewish experience as one of many different ethnic immigrant groups. Second, Jews fell largely on privileged side of the American color line dividing citizens perceived as white from non-white citizens. Third, the pluralistic American religious landscape made a place for Jews along with other Christian denominations. Fourth, American consumerism created a tremendous opportunity for Jewish immigrants arriving in the United States with experience in trade and commerce (without the negative stigma that followed Jews for these roles in Europe). Fifth, the American two-party system created a political structure that never embraced negative attitude about Jews as an issue distinguishing political platforms.

By looking at broader American processes, Diner suggests a fascinating irony about American Jewish exceptionalism. Jews encountered an exceptional situation in the United States precisely because Jews were unexceptional from the perspective of the state and society. Even when Jews did face discrimination as outsiders, the state's embrace of Jews as unexceptional, especially in contrast to other ethnic, religious, and racial groups, ensured that Jews remained much higher on the relative hierarchy of disenfranchised communities.

Diner takes advantage of her esteemed position as a leading scholar in both American Jewish and American history to challenge the dichotomy between American Jewish historians who tend to focus specifically on Jews and their institutions as actors within the American context and American historians who rarely view Jews as subjects inherently relevant to understanding broader phenomena in American history. In this book, Diner provides a hybrid model for how one might integrate both fields by enriching American history through America's engagement with Jewish immigrants.

The hybrid model of interpreting American Jewish history through the analytical lens of America offers a nuanced way to address one potential tension generated by differing views of exceptionalism in the fields of American and American Jewish history. While American Jewish historians remain committed to a narrative of exceptionalism, American historians, influenced by recent comparative work, generally argue against American exceptionalism. Diner clarifies that different attitudes toward exceptionalism are not mutually exclusive. The fact that American Jews had an exceptional experience does not erase the non-exceptional nature of American nationalism, racism, and colonialism. This book provides a vocabulary for differentiating between American and American Jewish exceptionalisms and paves the way for scholars to integrate Jews into American history as a group whose exceptionalism may even help understand American history as part of a global history...