Judaism Unbound Episode 409: American Jewish History’s History – Hasia Diner
Hasia Diner is the Director of the Goren-Goldstein Center for American Jewish History at New York University, and the award-winning author of over twenty books, many of which focus on the history of American-Jewish minority communities. She joins Lex Rofeberg and Dan Libenson for a conversation about questioning tradition, raising up long-quieted voices, and turning towards under-represented individuals instead of mainstream institutions when writing and re-writing the American Jewish historical narrative.
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[1] Get a sense of Hasia Diner’s (mega) impact on our knowledge and understanding of American Jewish history via this piece published by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency a few weeks ago: How Scholar Hasia Diner Exploded Myths and Changed the Field of Jewish History — a Symposium.
[2] Diner says that, sometime in early March, Jewish media outlets start to talk about the “Triangle Fire.” She’s referring to the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, New York’s deadliest industrial disaster, most of the victims of which were female Jewish and Italian immigrants. Read Diner’s thoughts on this event and its role in the American-Jewish self-imagination in this article published on the Jewish Women’s Archive blog.
[3] Lex shares that the first book he was assigned in his sophomore American History class was Diner’s Her Works Praise Her: A History of Jewish Women in America from Colonial Times to the Present. By the end of that semester, he’d switched his major from Math to Judaic Studies.
[4] Diner explains that Jewish history is more than “what Baron called the lachrymose view of Jewish suffering.” For more on Sal Baron, a 20th-century American Jewish historian, and his take on lachrymosity (basically weepiness), see this article from Columbia Magazine, Salo Wittmayer Baron: Demystifying Jewish History.
[5] Lex asks Diner about her foreword in the book, Feasting and Fasting: The History and Ethics of Jewish Food, a collection of essays that features a number of our past guests, whose thoughts you can listen to at:
Episode 159: Jonathan Safran Foer – Judaism Illuminated
Episode 171: Rachel B. Gross – Digesting Judaism
Episode 315: Elaine Goodfriend – Torah *Portions:* Eating Biblically
Episode 319: Jonathan Brumberg-Kraus – Culinary Midrash
[6] Diner talks about her love for upturning long-articulated narratives about historical moments, and mentions that she’s particularly proud of how she did so in her book, We Remember with Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence After the Holocaust, 1945-1962, which she wrote largely in response to Peter Novick’s The Holocaust in American Life.
[7] Diner shouts out Annelise Heinz’s Mahjong: A Chinese Game and the Making of Modern American Culture, as an example of history as studied from the perspective of everyday people, rather than institutions.
[8] Diner uses Open Hillel, an organization that has transitioned into Judaism On Our Own Terms (JOOOT), as an example of a subject that a historian might use in a well-rounded representation of contemporary American Jewish life. Check out our past episodes on JOOOT, formerly-known as Open Hillel.
Episode 126: Open Hillel - Rachel Sandalow Ash and Eva Ackerman
Episode 182: Judaism On Our Own Terms - Tal Frieden and August Kahn
Here is a complete list of Diner’s books as mentioned in this episode in order of appearance: Her Works Praise Her: A History of Jewish Women in America from Colonial Times to the Present, We Remember with Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence After the Holocaust, 1945-1962, The Roads Taken: The Great Jewish Migrations to the New World and The Peddlers who Forged the Way, Julius Rosenwald: Repairing the World
