Jews in the American Historical Profession (8-4-21)

That Noble Dream: The ‘Objectivity Question’ and the American Historical Profession, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=138784
The Holocaust in American Life by Peter Novick, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=75654
Harry Levin. Portrait of a Scholar as Young Man, https://lukeford.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/kwg6tc1590003947.pdf
Enlarging America: The Cultural Work of Jewish Literary Scholars, 1930-1990, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=136100
Jews In The American Academy, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=135502

Peter Novick writes: * Selig Perlman, a professor of economics at Wisconsin, is said to have regularly summoned Jewish graduate students in history to his office and warned them, in a deep Yiddish accent, that “History belongs to the Anglo-Saxons. You belong in economics or sociology.” The academic patrons of Jewish graduate students often despaired of finding them jobs.

* With minor exceptions (Parsons in the one camp, Pollack in the other), those critical of the Populists were Jews and from the Northeast; those defending them were gentiles, and from the South or Midwest. This feature of the controversy was well known to the participants and many contemporary observers, but was usually mentioned only obliquely, if at all. It tacitly raised issues of perspectivism and universalism which, for the moment, the profession preferred not to discuss openly.

In the early 1960s Carl Bridenbaugh outraged a good many historians with his AHA presidential address. In what was universally taken to be a reference to Jews, who were for the first time becoming a significant presence in the profession, Bridenbaugh deplored the fact that whereas once American historians had shared a common culture, and rural upbringing, the background of the present generation would “make it impossible for them to communicate to and reconstruct the past for future generations.” They suffered from an “environmental deficiency”: being “urban-bred” they lacked the “understanding . . . vouchsafed to historians who were raised in the countryside or in the small town.” They were “products of lower middle-class or foreign origins, and their emotions not infrequently get in the way of historical reconstructions. They find themselves in a very real sense outsiders on our past and feel themselves shut out. This is certainly not their fault, but it is true.”

* None, so far as I can tell, ever advanced what seems to me the most compelling reason why a group of the background of Hofstadter, Bell, Lipset, and their friends should have taken such a uniformly and exaggeratedly bleak view of the Populists: they were all only one generation removed from the Eastern European shtetl, where insurgent gentile peasants spelled pogrom.

* Michael Walzer, Professor Emeritus at Princeton University’s Institute for Advanced Study, explains why anti-immigrant populism is more a European problem than an American one. “There is one decisive moment in American history — he says — which is not much written about, but which is very important and it sets up a contrast with Europe. That moment is the moment when the Anglo-American settlers, who thought that they were establishing an Anglo-American State, allowed themselves to become a minority in what they thought was their country. That happened in the course of the Nineteenth century, with a lot of resistance, resentment, nativist movements, hostility to immigrants, but it happened. And, instead of America becoming an Anglo-American nation-state, America became what Horace Kallen called ‘nation of nationalities’ without a majority nation and with an ongoing immigration. That moment is not going to be repeated in Europe.” https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=135940

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