Reflecting on American Jewish History

I must confess that, in some thirty years of writing and teaching Jewish history, I have not thought seriously about the American Jewish experience, with the notable exception of some basic reading to prepare me to introduce the subject in my broad survey courses on modern Jewish history and thought. I was trained as a Jewish historian at Columbia University and the Hebrew University at a time when a clear bias existed, perpetuating the primary status of European Jewish history over American because of its grounding in Hebraic and rabbinic texts. Moreover, I was acutely aware of the relative indifference of my Israeli teachers to American culture, all of them students of Baer, Dinur, and Scholem, card-carrying members of the so-called "Jerusalem school."1