New Books in Jewish Studies

The history of Jews in the United States is often told as if they
immigrated, gained citizenship, and almost immediately achieved full
legal rights. Yet this story fundamentally misses how citizenship rights
worked for Jews and countless others who arrived on American shores. In
Who Is American? Belonging and the Question of Jewish Citizenship, Lila
Corwin Berman draws on case law, statutes, and debates to argue that
both the laws of American citizenship and Jews’ position in them changed
repeatedly across the twentieth century. Courts, policymakers, and the
public persistently asked what it meant to be Jewish under the law. Were
Jews a race, a nationality, a religion—or some combination of each? The
answer carried profound legal consequences. Not only did it determine
Jews’ citizenship status, but it also affected the rights they could
exercise. Just as significantly, the meaning of the categories under law
changed over time, affecting Jews’ self-understanding, their political
ideals, and their relationships to other groups of Americans.Who Is American? tells a history that resonates powerfully with
today’s high-stakes battles over citizenship and rights. As Berman
concludes, citizenship law has always been better at posing questions
about the terms of belonging than at providing any ultimate resolution.
The tangled story of Jewish citizenship demonstrates the limits of law
and explains why the United States continues to fall into new and,
often, unsettling debates about who is American.

Lila Corwin Berman is the Paul and Sylvia Steinberg Professor of
American Jewish History at New York University, where she directs the
Goldstein-Goren Center for American Jewish History. She is author of The American Jewish Philanthropic Complex: The History of a Multibillion-Dollar Institution (Princeton) and Metropolitan Jews: Politics, Race, and Religion in Postwar Detroit.

Geraldine Gudefin is a modern Jewish historian researching Jewish
migrations, family life, and legal pluralism. She is currently a
Visiting Scholar at the Centre for Asian Legal Studies at the National
University of Singapore, and is completing a book titled An Impossible Divorce? East European Jews and the Limits of Legal Pluralism in France, 1900-1939.

Mentioned in this episode:

Linda Bosniak, The Citizen and the Alien: Dilemmas of Contemporary Membership (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006).

Lila Corwin Berman, The American Jewish Philanthropic Complex: The History of a Multibillion Dollar Institution
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020).

William E.
Forbath, “Constitutionalism, Human Rights, and the Genealogy of Jewish
American Liberalism,” in James Loeffler and Moria Paz, eds., The Law of Strangers: Jewish Lawyers and International Law in the Twentieth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 118-140.

Ian Haney López, White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race (New York: New York University Press, 2006).

Will Herberg, Protestant—Catholic—Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).

Benjamin Lawrance and Jacqueline Stevens, eds., Citizenship in Question: Evidentiary Birthright and Statelessness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017).

David Sorkin, Jewish Emancipation: A History Across Five Centuries (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019).

Posen Library Jewish Studies Curriculum Initiative: https://www.posenlibrary.com/Jewish-Studies-Curriculum

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Molly
Crabapple joins Michael Stauch to discuss the history of the Jewish
Labor Bund, the subject of her new book, Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund (Random House, 2026). Once the most influential Jewish political force in Eastern
Europe, the Bund was secular, socialist, and uncompromisingly
anti-Zionist. The Bundists fought for dignity and equality, not in an
imagined homeland in Palestine but “here where we live.” In the first
popular history of the Bund, Crabapple re-creates their extraordinary
world through dramatic portraits of insurgent poets and antireligious
rebels, clandestine revolutionaries
and lovers on the barricades. The Bundists live deeply within this
violent, volatile, and somehow hopeful period, as their stories
interweave with the Russian Revolution and the Holocaust. The Bund’s
rise and fall raises the vital question: What can we learn from a
movement that, for all its toughness, imagination, and moral clarity,
was largely destroyed?

Highlights include:

Crabapple’s personal connection to the Bund through her great-grandfather, Sam Rothbort;

How the Bund built a vibrant youth counterculture amid harsh anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe;

The significance of “Hereness” to the Bund’s politics and how it
distinguished the group from Zionist groups advocating the colonization
of Palestine;

A discussion of “theory-pilled nerds” and how Crabapple’s activism and
journalism since Occupy Wall Street shaped her insights into the inner
life of the Bund;

The future of anti-Zionism in the context of Israel’s ongoing destruction of Palestine.

Molly Crabapple is an artist and writer based in New York. She is the author of two books, Drawing Blood and Brothers of the Gun
(with Marwan Hisham), which was longlisted for a National Book Award.
She was a 2020 New America Fellow and her reportage is the winner of the
Bernhard Labor Journalism Award, and has been published in The New York Times, New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, Vanity Fair, The Guardian, Rolling Stone, The New Yorker,
and elsewhere. Her animations have won two Emmys and an Edward R.
Murrow Award. Her art is in the permanent collections of the Museum of
Modern Art.

Michael Stauch is an associate professor of history at the University of Toledo and the author of Wildcat of the Streets: Detroit in the Age of Community Policing, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2025.
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Only a few Westerns contain explicitly Jewish stories or themes, and very rarely do Old West tales involve identifiably Jewish
characters. Yet Jewish contributors have shaped the Western—once
Hollywood's most popular genre—ever since the silent era, both onscreen
and offscreen, and some filmmakers have sought to infuse the genre with a
distinctly Jewish sensibility. In Chai Noon: Jews and the Cinematic Wild West (University of Wisconsin Press, 2025), Friedmann
engages with larger themes of Jewish identity in popular film,
including depictions of race, ethnicity, and foreignness. He also
identifies similar concerns within the invention and creation of the
imaginary West writ large in American culture. The juxtapositions prove
to be both unexpected and intuitively understandable.
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Max Weinreich spent the entirety of his adult life building YIVO and the field of Yiddish Studies. A 'convert' to the cause of Yiddishism in his adolescence, he pursued a doctorate in German philology in Weimar Germany with the explicit goal of returning to Eastern Europe to contribute to the project of building a modern, secular Yiddish culture. His study visits to Yale University and Vienna in the early 1930s proved transformational in broadening and revising his understanding of the role of the social sciences in Jewish life as a tool for strengthening Jews' psychological and material resources. The destruction of the traditional Yiddish heartland in Eastern Europe and his experiences leading YIVO in post-WWII New York City added yet another dimension to Weinreich's conception of the importance of both Yiddish and Jewish Studies for the future of American and world Jewry. Would Max Weinreich recognize Yiddish studies today?

Moderated by Kalman Weiser and featuring Naomi Seidman, Kenneth Moss, and Jeffrey Shandler, this panel will examine Weinreich's evolving understanding of the meaning of Yidishe visnshaft (Yiddish studies) and the role of Yiddish in Jewish life throughout his career.

This panel discussion originally took place on June 15, 2023.
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Gentiles often appeared in the news sections of the London Yiddish press, and sometimes they also appeared in the regular “feuilleton” section in character sketches and fiction, stories and scenes from immigrant East-End Jewish life. Many of these portrayals were humorous local scenarios and imagined tales. This talk will look at a broad section of how and where Gentile characters appear and their relationship to the Jewish immigrant.

Gentiles fix cars and do physical chores for the hapless immigrant. The wily immigrant hoodwinks the Gentile recruiting officers during the First World War. The stern Gentile gatekeeper of British government politics, refuses access to the naïve immigrant wanting to help. The paternalistic English police officer gives directions to parts of London never before visited by an East-End immigrant. A proud fascist blackshirt is confused when he sees his respected Jewish neighbors in a strident communist counter-demonstration. Yet the word goy is also used by Jews describing each other: skipping the bus fare, not sharing their Yiddish newspaper, or being rude to their neighbor.

This lecture originally took place on January 26, 2023.
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