Between History and Memory: Rethinking the American Jewish Past

The Haberman Institute for Jewish Studies

Speaker: Dr. Hasia Diner, Paul and Sylvia Steinberg Professor of American Jewish History at New York University Location: JCC of Greater Washington; Rockville, MD From the idea that the eighteenth century constituted a "sephardi era" in American Jewish history through the decades following World War II in which American Jews shunned talking about and memorializing the Holocaust, the history of the Jews of the United States has been laced throughout with myths which do not stand up to the test of historical evidence. This lecture examines a number of those ideas about the American Jewish past which have dominated popular memory. It juxtaposes them against the actual historical data and explores why such renditions of the past have held on so long and so tenaciously.

Also co-sponsored by Georgetown University Program for Jewish Civilization and the Jewish Historical Society of Greater Washington