North American Jewish Studies

By examining Jewish experiences between the American Civil War and the African American Civil Rights Revolution, this book focuses on citizens who usually spent their daily lives in black and white “peoplehoods.”

This biographical history follows John R. Friedeberg Seeley’s iconoclastic career as a pre-eminent 1950s “Pop Sociologist.” Seeley was the author of Crestwood Heights, a seminal work of postwar social science. He was also a controversial leader of the postwar mental health movement, and a founding father of York University.

The book examines historical attempts by animal welfare groups, in Australia, Canada, England, Scotland, and the United States, to ban the Jewish method of slaughter (shechita). For the first time, the book studies these prosecutions, brought in the name of “humanity”, that reveal, an underlying, unrelenting, and inescapable antisemitism.

Sixteen senior scholars of American Jewish history—among the men and women whose work and advocacy have moved their discipline into the mainstream of academia—converse on the intellectual and personal roads they have traveled in becoming leaders in their areas of expertise. Through their thoughtful and candid recollections of the challenges they faced in becoming accepted academics, they retell the story of how the study of the Jews and Judaism in the United States rose from being long dismissed as an amateurish enterprise not worthy of serious consideration in the world of ideas to its position today as a respected field in communication with all humanities scholars. They also imagine and chart the direction the writing on American Jews will take in the coming era.

This volume takes a fresh view of the role representations of the past play in the construction of Jewish identity. Its central theme is that the study of how Jews construct the past can help in interpreting how they understand the nature of their Jewishness. The individual chapters illuminate the ways in which Jews responded to and made use of the past. If Jews’ choices of what to include, emphasize, omit, and invent in their representation of the past is a fundamental variable, then this volume contributes to the creation of a more nuanced approach to the construction of the histories of Jews and their thought.