Remarks on Friedman medal.

Moore, Deborah Dash

First, thank you. Thank you to my colleagues in the Academic Council who chose me for this award, and thanks to Beth for what she wrote and said. I am deeply honored. It means a great deal to me for I treasure your regard. Thank you to the American Jewish Historical Society for establishing the award and to its Board members who sustain the Society. We as academics exist in a unique partnership with the AJHS. In fact, this relationship has the potential to provide a model for other ethnic, religious, and historical organizations that seek to engage academics. Thank you to my family, my parents Irene and Martin Dash, my children Mordecai and Mikhael Moore and their spouses Lori Moore and Deborah Axt, my grandchildren Elijah Axt and Zoe Bella Moore and Rose Alexa Moore, and of course to my husband, MacDonald Moore. They came out for this event, symbolic of all the times that they have supported me in vital ways across the years. They add layers of insight and purpose to my scholarship. The dedications in my books represent a small gesture of gratitude and only hint at what they have given me.

I'm not usually given to personal reflections but this particular moment seems to call for it. I want to summon a concept with which I am associated in historical scholarship, namely, the idea of generations and consider its relevance for the field of American Jewish history itself. As I look around this room, I see generations of scholars, loosely grouped as senior, junior, graduate students. There is, however, another demarcation perhaps more relevant: those of us who entered American Jewish history before it existed as an academic field (that is, without ever taking a course in American Jewish history), those of us who entered the field when it was on a threshold of legitimacy and recognition, and those of us who are entering the field as an accepted, if contested, area of study. The past forty years have wrought such enormous changes in the study of American Jewish history that it may be worthwhile recalling briefly what it was like back in the 1970s when the field barely existed.

As we know, American Jewish history encompasses turf common to Jewish and United States histories. It looks to both the long strand of Jewish history stretching back several thousand years as well as the much shorter history of the United States, spanning several hundred years. This positioning suggests multiple paths that can bring a scholar to study American Jews. Many often enter the field through engagement with issues relevant to the history of the United States, such as immigration and assimilation, political radicalism and religious change, feminism and urban development, although some gravitate to questions of importance to Jewish history, such as Zionism and the Holocaust, Jewish politics and Yiddish culture. Standing on shared ground, however, means that those of us who created the field of American Jewish history had to convince a relatively wide range of interlocutors that we brought something useful, illuminating, even necessary to the scholarly table.

It wasn't an easy task. I recall in the 1970s a distinguished Jewish historian dismissing the history of Jews in the United States as mere journalism. Indeed, in comparison with the long narrative of European Jewish history, it was a short story. In those years very few scholars tried to study it. Perhaps equally significant, however, one could do American Jewish history, and do it just fine if one was a social historian as I am, without knowledge of classical Jewish sources (Talmud). Indeed, I might add that for a woman, those sources were virtually inaccessible in those years since they were taught almost exclusively in rabbinical seminaries that did not admit women.

Furthermore, this American Jewish history was unfolding all around us and since we lived in the United States we were all involved in making it. Our parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles remembered versions of a story of achievement and acceptance. But being "at home in America" is still often judged an unacceptably shallow "happy ending" to the weighty "Old World" chronicle of suffering redeemed by exemplary agency. Histories, Jewish and otherwise, have habitually privileged masculine, national themes. As for secular quotidian life--cultural and social--historians seldom gave it serious attention. Our attempts to write the history of American Jews requires attention to these dimensions as well as to the layered structures of Jewish communities, including interactions with surrounding non-Jewish societies. American Jews have done without a formal communal structure; instead they've supported a hodgepodge of often competing voluntary organizations, religious, philanthropic, social, political. As young historians we made a start at sorting this out. And we needed forums like the AJHS where our efforts could find support and criticism.

When I decided to become an American Jewish historian not only were there several influential predecessors--Moses Rischin, Naomi Cohen, and Arthur Goren among them--but there was also the overwhelming fact of the size and vitality of American Jews. Dismissing the history of 5 million or so Jews as the realm of journalism did not make sense to a social historian. Personally, I looked backward at grandparents who grew up speaking English. I decided the solution was to eschew the intellectual and cultural realm to focus on the lived reality of American Jews. When I tackled New York Jews for my dissertation and first book, I was conscious of studying a group of Jews much larger than the numbers of Jews who lived in western European nation states. My roughly two million New Yorkers in the interwar years outnumbered English, French, German, Hungarian, Austrian, or Italian Jews.

Initially it was easier to justify the study of American Jews to colleagues specializing in social, urban, and ethnic history. But by the late 1980s religion had become a real sticking point. I recall one historian who asked me after I gave a paper on Jewish migration to Los Angeles (the subject of my third book) why anyone should care about Jewish congregations. Synagogues were parochial institutions and irrelevant to American urban history. At the time I responded by drawing an analogy between the role of synagogues with that of black churches in the great migrations of African Americans to northern and mid-western cities. But I recognized that I also needed to answer this question from the perspective of Jewish history. How could one write an urban history of American Jews without paying attention to one of the key forms of collective Jewish expression? Jews had been forming congregations for centuries and they exemplified a vital part of their self-understanding. For Jews a critical aspect of their religious practice involved establishing congregations, although only a minority affiliated with them in the United States. Religion mattered, even in the heyday of race, class, and gender.

It helped that I taught in a Religion department at Vassar College for many decades. During those years I lived largely apart from historians, except at conferences and with my colleagues in Jewish history, especially Paula Hyman. Paula and I co-edited a book series at Indiana University Press on the Modern Jewish Experience where books on American Jewish history stood on an equal plane with those on European Jewish history. My academic home in a religion department influenced my perspectives on American Jewish history and heightened my appreciation for how new fields emerge. Religious studies possessed roots in theological and biblical studies, yet it really was a new field in the 1970s and 1980s. And in those years the study of religion in America was struggling to receive recognition as more than sociology of religion. That recognition came in the 1990s, around the time that American Jewish history also acquired its firm standing. Undoubtedly politics played a role; so did Humanities funding from the Federal government and from private foundations (notably Pew and Lilly).

Indeed, politics continue to matter. The rise of feminism and the inclusion of women in affirmative action programs exerted a significant impact on my career. When Paula and I decided to do the historical encyclopedia of American Jewish women--a project supported by and under the auspices of the AJHS--we realized that we were going to have to produce new knowledge, not summarize an existing body of knowledge as was typical for encyclopedias. It was a pioneering project, whose impact built over time. Although Paula broke far more glass ceilings than I did, I was the first woman hired in the Religion department at Vassar in 1976; I think at the time they felt lucky to have scored a coup, getting a woman and a Jew (even though I wasn't the first Jew hired). I also benefited from the rise of political interest in ethnicity since in the 1970s Jews figured as an ethnic group. These political initiatives helped to support the Max Weinreich Center for Advanced Jewish Studies at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, where I taught my first courses on American Jewish history at the graduate level. I should note that Gerry Sorin's presence in my class indicated to me that American Jewish history could attract talented and successful American historians ready to retool to help establish a new field.

When I came to Michigan as Director of the Jean and Samuel Frankel Center for Judaic Studies I realized personally that a small revolution had occurred. My field of American Jewish history commanded sufficient respect to be accepted as one of the reputable areas of Jewish history. It's a heady feeling to realize how far we have come despite the challenges that remain. The decision to focus this conference on the theme of "Beyond Boundaries" speaks to the diverse possibilities of studying American Jews. We've got a sufficiently robust field that we're eager to welcome writers and journalists, filmmakers and artists. I've even decided to dip my toes into studying culture, though most (but not all) of the Jewish photographers who grab my interest these days remain as ignorant of Talmud as most of the other American Jews I've studied. And when I look at the generations who will make the history of American Jews in the 21st century--my children and grandchildren--and write that history--my students and colleagues--I am excited about what we will come to understand of a rich and complex past. There is so much to learn.

Studying the American Jewish past can change our comprehension of religion and politics, economic behavior and migration, social change and cultural production. I had the good fortune to decide to become an American Jewish historian--a decision that owes much to Mac and his interests--and I thank you all for this recognition.